Typeface Design, a Simplish Guide
A few weeks ago I wrote an article on why you should be creating your own fonts, I went over some of the benefits of building a style, influencing others, and making a few bucks in the process. What I'm realizing I didn't do was actually explain how to make one.
Type design is one of those things that can feel a bit daunting, creating a cohesive alphabet from scratch seems near impossible at first, and to be honest it can be challenging and requires a lot of finesse and visual instinct. But there is a pretty simple formula to get you started.
Inspiration: This is huge, its the basis for how the font is going to look and feel. I love the old lettering that you see in books or on the side of buildings. Take some time, see what's around you, look at your favorite fonts, take what you like, leave what you don’t. Make something that you want to use.
Starting: You don't need to have good handwriting, be a great drawer, or even that artistic to create one. Admittedly I have awful handwriting, it's not pretty and usually illegible to others. Think about type design as a mix of art, design, and math, where you lack in one you can make up for in another.
Keep In Mind: This is your typeface, it can be as wild or tame as you like. A good start for me is deciding on one or two unique features to use throughout. In Ocotillo I decided the “E’s” base should jut up and out dramatically, you see this repeated to varying degrees through the rest of the typeface. Not every letter needs to have maximum flair, it's often better to let some lay back and a few accent characters to drive a cohesive, but not heavy-handed feel. If you want to think about it musically we can call these the "hook" letters.
The First Letters: The most common misconception is you’ll need to draft everything out, while you can go this route, there's a much simpler way. If you look at a generic alphabet you'll notice similarities in the way letters are built. Take a look at your keyboard, an “F” becomes an “E” pretty easily doesn't it? All that's required is starting with a few basic forms, thoughts differ, but I like to start with “A, E, I, O”. You can build most of the alphabet by breaking and building off these shapes. Once you get these done, scan them into illustrator, you can cut them up, copy and paste the forms to save you the time of redrawing. I’ve heard this process described as finding a few Dinosaur bones, then building the full skeleton based on how you think everything else fits together.
The Last Letters: After you've made everything you can with the originals, you'll be left with some of the trickier letters. “Z, X, J”, and the dreaded “S” all have unique shapes to them. This is where having a strong eye comes into play, being able to get a close match to the others is key, from there you can play and tweak until things feel right. This is one of the more time-consuming parts of the process. If you're having trouble, start with the letter from an existing typeface, copy its basic shape, then redrawn your new letter over the top with your fonts characteristics.
Cleaning up: I like having things in Illustrator by this point with everything vectorized. You can move points, or simply use your brush to add and subtract areas. If you have an unmanageable amount of points, use the simplify tool to let you shape things easier. Image trace is your best friend. With all of my typefaces, I like a natural edge look, that offers a bit of imperfection. These are the steps I use to get that look. Gaussian blur, rasterize, image trace. Tweak the setting until you get something that feels is right.
Program: From here it's just dragging the letters over to create the functional font. I like fontself. Its an illustrator plug-in, so you can just drag and drop things right over. It’s also pretty reasonably priced if I remember it was only about $25 with a student ID, $50 regular price. This will let you adjust the space between letters through kerning, and ultimately save your new font file. You could go with one of the free programs like calligrapher, but just don't. Trust me on this, I love free stuff as well but the headache you'll save yourself is worth the $25.
Testing: Have fun with it, write things out and see how each letter looks in a group, no typeface is complete without seeing how aesthetically pleasing every swearword you know is. undoubtedly you'll have to go back in and adjust. Share them with friends, get their opinions. No one says no to free fonts, most designers are born with a hoarder like sickness for these things. The beauty of digital fonts is that it costs nothing to duplicate, they do no good sitting on your hard drive, get them out in the world.
If you found any of this helpful and decide to have a go at it, I'd love to see (maybe use) what you make. Tag me @jamescoffmandesign or shoot over a message with a couple of pictures. If you're on the fence about it, consider this your permission to try, crash and burn, then rise from the ashes with your new font.