How to make a font

How to Make a Font: 10+ Typography and Font Tutorials for Beginners

Fonts, typefaces, characters, glyphs – there’s a lot to learn when it comes to typography! To get you started, here are some of the top font & typography tutorials for beginners.

Typography can add personality to any creative project. Whether it’s a personal website, a professional presentation, or marketing material for a brand, learning how to make your message stand out from the screen (or the page) is essential.

Good design is all in the details, and finding a font that fits can take your project to the next level. By understanding the basic elements of typography, you’ll be able to confidently combine typefaces for maximum effect, avoid making common mistakes and even craft your very own custom font.

What Font and Typography Trends are Popular in 2022?

With so much online and offline content competing for an audience, it’s never been more important for typography to turn heads. This year’s font trends are dominated by handwritten, calligraphy styles – which is all part of a push to embrace an authentic aesthetic. In addition, the trend for no-frills fonts has served up a dose of retro nostalgia. And as people spend more and more time on mobile, ​​rounded sans serifs are proving to be a welcoming and UX-friendly choice compared with serif styles.

Why Use Font and Typography Tutorials?

When it comes to hand lettering – or any other typography or font trend, for that matter – Tuts+ is here to offer a helping hand. Head to our free online learning hub to find a range of tutorials and tools you need. To get you started, here are the top font and typography tutorials to give beginners a boost.

10+ Top Typography and Font Tutorials for Beginners

If working with typography has got you asking, what the font? Tap into all the latest typography trends, tips and tricks with the help these handy tutorials. Covering everything from understanding the basics to making a font, you’ll soon be a whizz with your words.

How to make your own font.

Over a decade ago my aunt told me there’s a service that converts your handwriting into a type-able font 🤯. Back then it required printing out a form, filling out multiples of each letter by hand, snail-mailing it out, and waiting for god-knows-how-long. Now you can do it all in a day for free. Whether your motivations are personal or professional there are really powerful tools out there to help you create your very own font with minimal effort. Here’s what you might need for varying desired outcomes:

You’ll learn how designing 4 good letters will get you 90% of the way towards a professional font. What you’re about to read isn’t a science as much as categories and exercises to produce a good font. Everyone’s process will vary greatly, and what works well for me could in fact be detrimental to you. Read ahead with your habits, skill-set, and bandwidth in mind. I’ve broken my experience down into 6 categories:

1. Sketching (LCPX)

First realize that there are three basic shapes of font characters: [R]ectangular (EFHILT), [C]ircular (CGOQS), and [T]riangular (AVWXZ). All letters and numbers are constructed from these basic shapes and some by combinations of them ( [R+T]: KMNY, [R+C]: BDJPU, [R+T+C]: R). The importance of noticing this is that if we design one letter from each basic shape [R, T, C] then we have the back bone to create the remaining letters in that shape before advancing to the shape combinations. Second, determine what type of font you want to make. If you are simply looking to digitize your handwriting, I’ve written a paragraph below about that. If you are going to design a professional digital font, the bulk of this post is for you my friend.

If your goal is a handwritten font I suggest writing standards (like a chalkboard). Using a black pen or heavy pencil, write each letter (and number) of the alphabet over and over without erasing. Write 10–15 “A’s” in down in a column, then 10–15 “B’s” and so on through Z’s and 9’s and any punctuation you would like to include. If you’d like to use measured guides to keep things even, draw your guides almost invisibly and make sure to use a very lightly colored pencil (like yellow or pink). This will make transferring it to the computer much easier. Writing your font in standards will give you a stock pile of letters to select from as well as refine your work through replication and playfulness. (see image)

If your goal is to make a digital font, sketch for ideas but not for perfection. Sketching is a medium best suited for generating free form ideas. Switching to a computer early on saves time and headaches. Don’t sketch your entire alphabet on paper perfectly! Don’t do it, because you’ll spend all that time over again on the computer. Instead, pursue the feeling and character of your font on paper, or sketch small elements like serifs, ascenders, curves or angles. When you find yourself excited to move a couple ideas forward break from the page and move to the screen. You can always hop between the screen and the page as often as you need but remember that you’re making a digital font and computers are awesome. Copying an element digitally takes a fragment of a second, redrawing or tracing an element by hand could take an hour. Remember, there are 52 letters in a font (upper and lowercase), 10 numbers, and 30+ units of punctuation. Work smarter not harder. Exercise: Time to sketch some letters: “L”, “C”, “P”, and “X”. Draw some basic guidelines: your cap-height and median ( x-height), to explore letterform height ratio and how high to place your crossbars. Then start with an uppercase “L”, drawing it a few times across your guidelines. Each time changing one or two elements (thickness, lengths, serifs) to see what you like and don’t like. Now do the same for an uppercase “C”, “P”, and “X” — try to recreate these new letter using elements you liked from your first lessons learned. Pay attention to angles, curves, and thicknesses that you like, taking note and applying those to the next sketches. Hone in on consistent patterns, these will make up the characteristics of your font ecosystem. You will be using these specific letters replicate more quickly and create a design fingerprint across your font. Once you have these 4 letters that you ( at least sort of) like it’s time to digitize 🚀.

2. Digitizing (5 min per letter, total 20 min)

Get your sketches onto to your computer and into Sketch (or Illustrator) as simply as possible. Take a picture on your phone and airdrop, text, or email to yourself. The quality just needs to be good enough see the edges as lines not a blocky pixel staircase.

Exercise: Tracing. I like to use single lines to create my letters and adjust the line’s thickness to match my sketch rather than tracing the letters outlines with the pen tool. The reason? Consistent letter thickness and simple adjustments to the angles and curves when we replicate and refine. The goal of digitizing your font is to get its basic shapes into a vector format that can be scaled, duplicated, manipulated, and rotated without losing any consistency, quality, or resolution. Try and keep the different limbs of the characters separate for now. Using the uppercase “P” as an example: create the stem and shoulder separately and keep them as independent shapes for now.

What about letters that have varying widths in their limbs? Excellent question, here’s a good hack:

A quick reminder, you’ll be re-using these building blocks as much as possible as starting points for other letters. Think of this Digitizing step as “digital play-doh:” empowering you to create cookie cutter clones, piece building blocks together, and change each slightly as you wish. Looking closely at any font you’ll realize that groups of letters behave very similarly. You want to capitalize on and exploit these similarities to your advantage. Visually speaking a “W” might better be named “double-v” not “double-u”. All fonts are different, but all fonts individually are consistent. Remember that you’re creating a visual ecosystem. Ok, now that you have you 4 letters quickly digitized it’s time to move on to Replicating 🤖.

3. Replicating (1 hour per case)

This is the fun part. The reason why “L”, “C”, “P”, and “X” are so important, is that with those 4 shapes you can get 22 letters just by leveraging the design you’ve already made. Here are a few things to keep in mind while replicating:

There’s value to seeing your letters evolve into an alphabet, you’re “A” might evolve after your make your “R” or “V”, but you’ll never know that if you spend all day perfecting your “A”. Just by getting through the alphabet quickly you’ll notice which letters are solid and which need more attention. Try to avoid getting caught up perfecting a single letter, and instead try and move your font forward collectively in waves. Below I’ve made some GIFs showing my replications in real time for each letter. I’ve color coded all unique limbs so you can really see how a few elements can scale into an entire alphabet. I wish I had used guidelines in my replicating process, it would have saved me a lot of time in the refinements step. This shouldn’t be prescriptive for your process but hopefully thought provoking on how to design a cohesive font that self-referenced and iteratively evolves towards awesomeness!

Replicating an “L”

You can leverage the basic limbs of your “L” to create 5 more consistent letters in under a minute. Like a time bandit you’ll steal back hours of your design day!

Replicating an “X”

This step has two parts. To start, clone your “X” to create your “N, Y, & K”. You’ll also need elements from your “L”. We’ll worry about uniting the various limbs and final treatments in the next section. The goal here is to get rough shapes down for each letters using consistent angles.

Next, convert your X into a V (adjusting the angles slightly) and use those new angles to make: V, W, A, M, & Z. Time to make that “double-V” we talked about.

Replicating your “C”

The target here is replicating your “C” into a “G”, “Q”, “O”, & “D”. Borrowing angles and stems from your X and L. In this variation I’ve flipped the “C” to reflect it on a diagonal axis to complete the “O” and “Q” as well as the bowl for the “D”.

Replicating your “P”

Use the bowl and stem from your “P” to quickly make a rough “B” and grab a diagonal from either your “X” or “V” to complete your “R”.

Take deep breath and a step back. 23 letters down, only 3 more to go to close out the uppercase. “S”, “J”, & “U”. Generally speaking your “S” will need to be constructed with entirely new lines. However keeping in mind what you learned from replicating and building your initial “P”. I’d suggest drawing a single line for your “S” and duplicating for line width variation, or simply keep a single line for a consistent thickness — your font, your call.

To get my “J” I borrowed part of the curvature from my “C” and rotated it 20˚ to match the stem.

Of all the characters I designed the “U” gave me the most trouble. I probably spent an hour on it alone. What I learned was I was trying too hard to solely compose it from existing limbs and was failing by over complicating it (as seen on the far left). But I tried a few options out that ultimately led to a simpler letter that worked well alongside the rest of the alphabet. But I’ll get more into that in the next section on being playful. 🙂

4. Playing

Remember you’re building a font ecosystem. Playing is an exercise to strengthen your font. I was only able to conclude the “U” after placing it next to other letters and seeing how it looked when spelling out words, it made it clear what I needed to get to in terms of width, weight variation, angles, and balance. The “U” reminded me I was designing a font and not just a single letter. I encourage you to constantly be playful throughout your font design process. I also suggest having a “playpen” so to speak, for all your playful variations to live. This could be a separate artboard or page. That way you can keep things organized and create a bit of a mood board as you play while retaining some structure and cleanliness to where you’re actually building your font.

In this section you’re going to want to have each letter as its own group. I prefer to have my alphabet spelled out in a single row and copy the source letter and pasting a clone in the playpen to experiment and explore with, while preserving a source-file for each letter. A fallback in case you change an angle or line and want to revert back to the original. Keep your source letters in a row and clone them down for variations. Last thing to do before you start playing is group and name each letter together (i.e. group all limbs that comprise your “A” and name the layer “A”), and make sure they’re all the same color.

Basic ideas for being playful:

How to Create Your Own Font

In this article, we’ll be talking about fonts! Have you ever tried making one? Even if you haven’t ever thought about this, you might get inspired after reading my story.

I’ll tell you how I decided to try my hand at font design, how I prepared to create my very first font, and why you should try and make your own font too! The process is really challenging and calming at the same time. You will learn so many new things while digging through a new creative field.

If you’re not going to create a font yourself but you need one for your designs, then feel free to jump right to the Bananito Font Duo page on GraphicRiver and get it there!

Or pick your own favourite font from these epic lists:

We can’t help but notice a vast variety of fonts surrounding us in our everyday life. Any product you pick up in the shop, any website you look through on the internet, and any advertisement banner you stumble upon in the street will usually contain at least one word or phrase typed with a heavy sans-serif font or a playful handwritten script typeface.

Fonts can be of any kind, depending on the purpose of the design. They can be geometrically perfect or curvy with bouncing letters. A font can even be something apart from letters, such as a symbols font with icons or doodles instead of letters.

An example of a Symbols Font with doodles instead of letters

Looking at all this feast of typefaces around me, I noticed hand-written display fonts and whimsy script fonts becoming more and more trendy, making any design look fresh and unique. You can easily spot such fonts on GraphicRiver, for example, or check out the following articles about stunning handwritten and cursive fonts:

30 Best Handwritten Fonts

30+ Best Stylish Cursive Fonts

I became really inspired by the idea of trying something new after working as an illustrator for many years. So why not channel my passion for drawing… into drawing letters?

How I Created My First Font

After reading several books about typography and studying the theory of font design, I moved on to practicing my calligraphy skill. At this point, the endless drills began. I printed tons of practicing sheets and practiced those upstrokes and downstrokes whenever I had a free minute. I can’t help but notice how calming this process is. Apart from making your hand firm, it helps you to focus and get rid of the unwanted thoughts, just the same as if you were meditating.

Digital version of the calligraphy practice sheets. Making drills on an iPad.

As I became more acquainted with the typography, calligraphy and lettering world, I finally decided to make an actual typeface, one you could install on your PC and use in programs like Adobe CC, Affinity Designer and Corel Draw for designing or Microsoft Office and Pages for typing and formatting documents.

This is what differentiates a font from a set of vector letters or alphabet—you can just install it like any usual font that you download from the web, and work with it in any software instead of constructing a word from single letters in a graphic program.

To start off, I decided to create a font duo consisting of a simple uppercase display font and a set of doodle symbols for decoration. Such a font duo is great for making fancy designs in a few clicks as you already have everything you need included. Apart from that, such a playful hand-drawn font goes perfectly with other serif or sans serif fonts if you need a heading and a subheading.

And this is how the Bananito Font Duo was born!

After the font went online, it was handpicked for a promotional email newsletter and also got included in a big font bundle.

Example of how the Bananito Font Duo can be used

Inspired by the first results, I decided to continue developing my skills in this field and try something more sophisticated: a script font.

Script fonts look really elegant when involved in a design. Here is an inspiring article about stylish cursive fonts:

30+ Best Stylish Cursive Fonts

Here is a quick tip if you’re thinking of creating a font but don’t know how to start. Yes, the amount of work to be done may scare you away, but only if everything is disorganized and done in a chaotic order.

Start with a simple font, and don’t try to add all the bells and whistles in your very first typeface if you’re not sure whether you’ll have enough strength and motivation to finish it. In any case, it is better to try and make at least one simple font than to give up in the middle of making a more complex one.

Designing a bouncy script textured font. First steps.

So let me tell you about the process of how I designed and created the Bananito Font Duo, from scratch to finish.

How to Create a Symbols Font

How to Draw Out the Letters

To start with, we need to draw all the letters. I was going to make only the uppercase version of the font, so I needed to depict the 26 letters of the English alphabet. The style of your font is fully optional and depends on many factors. While thinking up a new font, try to keep in mind that it should be:

It doesn’t have to look like your own handwriting, but it certainly can if you want it to (besides, handwritten fonts are one of the hot trends).

If you prefer a brush pen and paper, go for it! You may also prefer to use a pencil as it is easy to correct with the help of the eraser. When you’ve finished drawing out all the letters on paper, go on and scan it or use your phone to make a photo.

It’s better to draw everything in one take, without postponing the work for the following day as the letters might look a bit different. I noticed that my hand behaves differently each time I draw—sometimes it feels more tired and firm, and another day it’s easier to make light, swirly lines. In fact, it will be much easier to draw all letters in a consistent style if we draw them all one by one. And don’t forget about the figures and punctuation marks! Sometimes people need them for designing as well, so why not add them to our typeface?

Take a look at Calligraphr (formerly known as MyScriptFont.com), where you can find a very useful template containing all the glyphs for our future font. Just print it out and use it as a guide, or import into your programs if you’re working digitally.

By the way, a few words about working digitally. At first, I started practicing calligraphy on paper. However, later on, I moved to drawing everything on iPad, using the Apple Pencil and the Procreate app. You can find some really great brushes for lettering and calligraphy, or even make your own as I did. I spent a few hours playing with settings and textures until I created a perfect brush that behaved like a real brush-pen, making the whole process smoother and faster.

There are some advantages in drawing letters digitally, such as the opportunity to undo and edit anything, change the scale and colors of the elements, and transfer the completed image into your computer just in one click.

However, the option of drawing digitally is not for everyone: there are many people who enjoy drawing on paper because it gives you a pleasant tactile feeling of the real paper texture and more control over the strokes. On the contrary, the glass of the digital screen might feel too slick and slippery for drawing, and the strokes of the digital pen are not so precise as those of the real brush pen. However, drawing digitally may turn out to be much easier because of the automatic smoothing of the lines, so that you don’t have those wobbly, shaky strokes.

Drawing letters on iPad using the grid

How to Transfer Your Drawing Onto the Computer

Once you are happy with your hand-drawn letters, it’s time to open them in Adobe Illustrator and use the Image Trace function to turn them into nice clean vectors!

Your Image Trace settings may be different from mine, depending on the thickness and size of the letters and on the brightness and contrast of your letters if you’re drawing on paper. I usually keep the Threshold somewhere between 120 and 170 if I want the letters to be more or less detailed. I also set the Paths and Corners to 75%, leaving all other options as default.

Once you’ve finished, click the Expand button in the control panel on top to turn the letters into curves. Remember to delete the white background by clicking it with the Magic Wand Tool (Y).

It may require some time to clean up the letters after tracing, making the lines smoother and getting rid of the unneeded elements and stray points.

As soon as we’re happy with the result, we can place each symbol in its own cell and prepare for export.

The rest of the process depends on the software you’ll be using for making fonts. It may be either FontLab or, for example, Glyphs.

If you’re a Windows user, I would suggest trying out FontLab, a very powerful program for creating fonts! This set of tutorials will be very useful for creating your first font from zero up to the very end:

I prefer using Glyphs. However, it is only for macOS, and that is its only drawback so far. The program itself is very easy and fun to use with its user-friendly interface and descriptive guides and tutorials. So if you’re a Mac user, try its free 30-day trial and go for it.

The Glyphs interface

If you’re not sure whether you want to study new software and create more fonts in future, you can try something simpler for starters. For example, Calligraphr, which I mentioned earlier in the article, is a great chance to check how your font functions. Just follow the comprehensive instructions on the website and create your font quickly and easily!

This is my favorite moment, when the font is finally tested and exported and it goes live! Now you can use it in your own designs, creating banners, flyers and whimsy postcards much faster and easier than if you were combining the letters into words one by one.

Also, here are a couple of descriptive and comprehensive step-by-step tutorials about creating a font from scratch up to the very end. Check them out!

How to Create a Font in Adobe Illustrator

How to Create a Font Using Fontself and FontForge

Why You Should Try to Create Your Own Font

Still hesitating whether you should go for it or not? Here is a list of reasons that come to mind instantly after I’ve decided to dive into such an engrossing process as font making.

To Sell or Not to Sell?

Another point of creating fonts that’s worth being mentioned here is the opportunity to make some money. Although there are many free fonts, you can still sell a good-quality font.

Once you’ve spent enough time learning and finally created an outstanding product, try uploading it to the Fonts section of GraphicRiver and promote it by making a presentation in your portfolio. Hand-drawn and script fonts are top trends in modern design—you can find them almost anywhere in product design, package design, clothing, advertisement, and in the interior design of shops and cafes. What’s more, such fonts make a product unique, whereas free fonts tend to become overused among designers.

On the other hand, competition among font designers is rising and more great free fonts are appearing, so people don’t have to spend a lot of money to make a stylish poster or flyer. Apart from that, making a free font has its own advantages too:

To sum up these two points, you can actually make a difference between a font that you give out for free and one that you sell. A free font might not have all the features like ligatures, letter alternatives, enhanced punctuation, webfont or multilingual support. All these features may be added to the full version of the font.

The last but not the least thing to mention here is licensing. If you want to make fonts to sell, you should definitely study all the types of licenses and the differences between them in order to know how the price varies and for what purposes people might need your font.

Although most online markets have descriptive FAQs about all types of licenses or even have the relevant type of license already selected for you, knowing this information for yourself is very important anyway. Some of your customers may have questions or doubts whether they can use your font or not, and in that case, you’ll be able to resolve any question without hesitation.

Give It a Try!

And that’s it! I hope you’ve found out some new interesting information about creating fonts and gathered enough inspiration to try it out yourself! It’s not as difficult or scary as it might seem, in fact. Just remember that you can start with something simple, gradually moving to something more complicated step by step. If you find this process bringing you joy and relaxation, you won’t be able to stop, that’s for sure.

And remember that if you liked the Bananito Font Duo which is mentioned in this article and you want to use it in your designs, you can get it right from GraphicRiver just in a few clicks.

How to Create Custom Fonts: 7 Steps and 3 Case Studies

Designers love to hate some fonts. We’re introducing a simple process and seven easy steps that can quickly transform a typeface into something better and can turn a font into a beautiful logotype.

Let’s face it; there are typefaces that we designers love to hate. Actually, the word “hate” might not be strong enough. Scourge? Curse? Plague? Excrement? I’ve heard each used to insult the inanimate letters, numbers, and symbols we use to communicate ideas, and I totally get it. I’ve seen (and committed) type crimes so bad that even the most outlandish office bulletin would be embarrassed.

But what if I told you that the most reviled typefaces of our generation could actually be a brand designer’s best friend? What if I showed you how to turn lackluster letterforms into luscious logotypes that clients will love (and pay good money for)? Would you be willing to radically change the way you look at type and open yourself to an infinitely expanding universe of creative options? Ready to make your own font?

If so, keep reading, because I’m about to introduce a simple process that you can use to immediately transform any typeface for the better to create a font. And, to show how effective the process is, I’ll demonstrate each step using three typefaces that are passionately despised by designers everywhere.

First up, Jokerman, a wacky collection of clown-like characters usually found on birthday banners and “whimsical” business cards.

Next, we have Papyrus, painstakingly copied from the walls of King Tut’s tomb and the preferred choice of coffee shop menus, serious artists, and James Cameron.

Finally, a cool and unshakably casual typographic outlaw in no need of an introduction—the one, the only, Comic Sans.

From this unlikely grouping, I’ll teach you to see treasure where others cry “trash!” and create custom logotypes of the highest caliber.

A Simple and Reliable Process

Let’s go on a journey from hideous typeface to stunning logotype and learn how to make a font. We’ll start with something bad, end with something good, and follow the same seven steps each and every time. What are the seven steps? I’ll discuss the details in a bit, but first, a few notes about the tools you’ll need for this sort of work.

Recommended Setup

Visual designers have access to a plethora of new and affordable design tools. Touchscreen devices and advanced styluses like the Apple pencil make capturing ideas and moving to a digital workflow easier than ever. Experiment freely, and hold on to whatever works for you. That said, I prefer a tried and true approach with trusty tools from Adobe and Wacom:

Jokerman — From Crass to Classy

Jokerman is the Jim Carrey of typefaces: never subtle, loud at every angle, yet strangely appealing to the masses. It’s ridiculous and over the top and exactly the kind of typeface that this tutorial was made for. Wacky typefaces like Jokerman are jam-packed with curious design elements but lack the restraint required for a tasteful logotype. As designers, we need to exercise good judgement, and that often means forgoing details for the sake of clearer communication.

It’s a simple seven-step process that takes us from undesirable typeface to high-end logotype. There is some simple drawing involved, but if you can write your name and trace a picture, you’ve got all the skill you’ll need to learn how to make your own font. Let’s begin.

1. Review Typeface

In Photoshop, choose a typeface (in this case, Jokerman), type the business name you need for your logotype, and quickly examine each letter to get a feel for design possibilities like scale, proportion, letter weight, etc.

2. Ideate

Using your Wacom tablet, make a loose sketch of your logotype. No need to be exact here. Just sketch something quick and easy to serve as a skeleton for your design.

3. Distort Typeface

Using your selected typeface, scale, stretch, skew, and squish each letter over the top of your ideation sketch. No need to make things perfect on this step. You’ll refine it later on, so just keep going.

4. Correction Sketch

Now, make a quick sketch over the top of your distorted letters. This is where you begin to improve the shortcomings of the original typeface and add your own design details.

5. Refinement Sketch

This is the last phase of sketching and refinement in Photoshop. Clean up anything that isn’t working, and fill your letters in so you can get a better idea of form and the relationship of spaces between letters.

6. Vector Trace

Drop your refinement sketch into Illustrator, break out the pen tool, and carefully click your way to beautiful bezier curves.

7. Finishing Touches

Once you’ve finished vector tracing, add visual impact with thoughtful details like colors, shadows, highlights, outlines, etc.

Papyrus — A Subtle Transformation

Confession: I like Papyrus, and I don’t care who knows. Seriously, not all typefaces that we designers enjoy bashing are actually that bad. Overused? Maybe. Kitschy? OK, yeah. But just because a typeface makes someone feel like her amature design document has dignity doesn’t mean it’s bad. And that’s how I feel about Papyrus. It’s like the dress shirt I bought at Old Navy: It fits well and makes me presentable for special occasions.

That said, my dress shirt doesn’t have intentionally frayed edges. So, let’s see if we can keep the nice parts of Papyrus’ letterforms while making the overall look and feel a bit more contemporary.

1. Review Typeface

Again, we start in Photoshop. Select your typeface (Papyrus), and enter the logotype name. Take a look at each letter, making notes of potential design details.

2. Ideate

Break out your Wacom tablet and quickly sketch some composition ideas. Don’t overthink this step. It’s like doodling your name in a notebook.

3. Distort Typeface

Just like we did for Jokerman, scale, stretch, skew, and squish each letter over the top of the ideation sketch you created. It’s gonna get messy, but don’t worry!

4. Correction Sketch

Of all the steps, this may feel like the most daunting, but don’t stress it.

You’re not building from scratch. You’re using the structure of the original typeface while adding your own improvements as you go.

This sketch can be super awful and ugly. The beauty of layers in Photoshop is the ability to take multiple passes, with each coming closer to your true design intentions.

5. Refinement Sketch

This is our last step in Photoshop. Be honest with yourself about parts of your design that aren’t working. It also helps to color your letters so you can see how they look next to one another and uncover any irregularities in form.

6. Vector Trace

Place the refinement sketch inside Illustrator and begin your vector trace with the pen tool.

7. Finishing Touches

With your vector trace complete, bring your logotype to life by adding details like colors, shadows, highlights, and outlines.

Comic Sans — Like Ironing a Wrinkly Shirt

I refuse to ridicule Comic Sans. Sure, it shows up at inappropriate times, looking a little disheveled like it just woke from a nap. But, it met a design brief and may just be the most well known typeface in the world.

From a purely aesthetic point of view, there’s not much to like about Comic Sans. It’s dumpy, frumpy, and the little kinks and knobs in the letters are quite distracting. Still, it has some interesting quirks that could work well for a logotype, and its general perception as the worst typeface of all time makes it the perfect challenge for our seven step refinement technique.

This time through, I’ll focus less on mechanics and give you a bit more insight into my creative thought process at each step.

1. Review Typeface

For this step, think of yourself as the parent of an awkward adolescent boy. There’s no denying that he’s a gangly looking goofball, but you’re able to see past all that to a day when he’ll be a strapping, well-rounded young man.

2. Ideate

Ideation is the time to release your risk-taking artistic side. You can ruthlessly edit yourself later, but for now, take chances.

When I was reviewing Comic Sans, I noticed a sort of bouncy playfulness that I tried to incorporate into my ideation sketches.

3. Distort Typeface

Maybe you’re like me…somewhat obsessive about organizing layers and utilizing non-destructive editing techniques in Photoshop. Don’t be like that for this step!

Type your word, rasterize the font, and distort the heck out of those letters.

4. Correction Sketch

Like I said, Comic Sans’ little irregularities are maddening, so for this step, I focused on straightening lines and smoothing curves.

5. Refinement Sketch

For the longest time, I went directly from the Correction Sketch step in Photoshop to Vector Trace in Illustrator. But, once I saw my vector letters filled in for the first time, they always looked a little weird.

This refinement step is a great way to make sure your letters are well spaced. After all, the shapes formed between letters are equally as important as the letters themselves.

6. Vector Trace

It can be easy to shut your brain off when using the pen tool. You start pointing, clicking, and dragging handles and stop looking for ways to improve your design.

Don’t do that! When you sketch by hand, you’re constantly making split-second decisions and corrections. You should use the pen tool in a similar fashion.

7. Finishing Touches

I was pleased with the way the vector trace turned out, so I opted to go with a simple block shadow and a few interior accent lines.

Ideally, your letterforms will be able to stand on their own without any embellishment. Finishing Touches are meant to make your design pop, but you should guard against adding too many special effects.

The Opportunity of Unwanted Things

We designers are wise to stay plugged into the trends, tools, and modes of thought existing in our profession. We learn and grow as a community, and if a large segment of our field views something poorly, we should seek to understand why.

However, we should also resist the urge to reject design practices outright, especially at the whim of popular opinion. When we run up against something that’s viewed as bad, like using Jokerman, it’s good to learn why other designers feel this way, but it’s shortsighted to toss a potentially valuable resource into the trash heap.

Instead, keep as much as you can on file in your mind. Take mental notes, make observations, categorize things you like and dislike, and store a diverse selection of opinions from other designers.

You never know, one day you may do the unthinkable and risk design community ridicule by using Comic sans as the foundation for your client’s beautiful new logotype.

How to Create a Font Using Fontself and FontForge

If you’re a designer or illustrator who’s more comfortable creating glyphs in Adobe Illustrator, this tutorial is right up your alley! This tutorial is part two of two. Check out part one if you haven’t already! We’ve planned out our letter set, gone over ways to refine the font design, and prepared files for use in a font-making program, all from the comfort of Adobe Illustrator.

In this tutorial we’ll explore two fantastic methods of creating a custom font with our vector letterforms. The first will use Fontself, a paid Adobe Illustrator extension, and the second will use FontForge, an open-source font-creation program.

This tutorial should easily prepare you to create simple and fun fonts that can be sold as digital assets on Envato Market. Check out the market’s font category for inspiration for your personal designs.

1. Install the Script

Step 1

If you’re working with Fontself, you’ll need to install the script. Once you’ve purchased and downloaded it, you’ll find a zip folder with instructions for installation. My instructions involved going to File > Script > Other Scripts in order to load the script. Once you see the message below, restart Adobe Illustrator and your extension will have been installed.

Step 2

Under Windows > Extensions, you’ll be able to open the Fontself Maker panel. This panel allows us to create a simple font without leaving Adobe Illustrator.

2. Define Your Glyph Set

Step 1

Since we’ve already prepared our character set in the previous tutorial, you can simply open your Adobe Illustrator document that has your original vector objects if it’s not open already, and we can begin adding glyphs to our font.

Simply select each object, type the letter or character you want it to represent, and hit Create Glyph in the Fontself Maker panel.

Step 2

One by one, add all of your glyphs to your font. For characters that have more than one object, make sure they’re Grouped (Control-G) together so they remain a part of the glyph. Notice in the image below how without my selected lowercase j being grouped, it was missing its dot.

Step 3

You can check out your font in action in the Live Preview section of the Fontself Maker panel. Right below this preview are two buttons that control the spacing between letters. Play around with this spacing as you see fit. Will your letters butt against each other or have a large amount of space around each character? It’s entirely up to you. Below are two examples of spacing within the font I made.

Step 4

But wait, there’s more! All of my glyphs are currently floating above the baseline. While that works for most of them, characters with descenders, like lowercase j, g, y, p, and q, can all be dragged below the baseline manually within the panel. You can also move around any letterform or punctuation character as you see fit.

3. Save Your New Font

Step 1

When you’re satisfied with your font, hit Export in the Fontself Maker panel, give it a unique name, and hit OK.

Step 2

Navigate to your saved font file and Install it on your machine.

Step 3

Test your new font out within your document in Adobe Illustrator. If there are portions of the font that you don’t like, you can edit characters, delete or replace them in the Font Maker panel, save over the font file, and reinstall the font itself.

Have fun with your creation and experiment with characters and spacing.

4. Import Characters Into FontForge

Step 1

If you’d like an open-source alternative or more control over your font creation, you may wish to import your characters into FontForge. Open the program and hit New in order to create a new font.

Step 2

Double-click on one of the glyphs and a new window will open where you can import, draw, or edit vector characters.

Step 3

Go to File > Import and navigate to your SVG files created in the first part of this tutorial set and import the corresponding glyph.

Step 4

As you edit your character, be mindful of the lines that denote width (boundaries marked one and two below), the baseline, cap height, and descender line.

Step 5

Aside from moving the bars that denote width, I’ll also be making sure that the bottom of characters like lowercase y, as seen below, hang below the baseline.

Step 6

Open each glyph, import each of your SVG files in turn, and edit the boundaries of your character as needed until your entire font set is ready to go. FontForge allows you to create and upload all of the characters on your keyboard as well as special characters, so you can create large and even complex font sets as you see fit.

5. Save Your New Font

Step 1

Before you export your font file, you’ll want to input some file information. Go to Element > Font Info (Control- Shift-F) to enter your unique font and font family names as well as copyright information.

Step 2

When you’re satisfied with your font, go to File > Generate Fonts in order to save your font as a TTF file (or the font file extension of your choice). Navigate to your saved font file, install it, and use it as you would any other.

Great Job, You’re Really Done This Time!

Now you have two simplified ways of creating custom fonts! Share your creations in the comment section below, or consider uploading your content to the font section of Envato Market where you can sell your fresh-made font.