Tag: Draw Your Own Fonts

Fontself

drawing a typeface

The Fontself font creation program enables you to draw and scan a font or to draw each letter on the iPad as a vector image.

my first fontself font

What I’d like to do is draw the font on paper and then convert it to a vector font, as bitmap fonts are rather limited compared to regular fonts.

bitmap font creation

So far, I either end up with a bitmap font or an error message informing me that my particular version of vector image isn’t acceptable to Fontself.

vectorised image
Vectorised photograph, reduced to 26 colours in Adobe Illustrator for iPad

I’m sure that I’ll work it out and in the process I’m learning a bit about Adobe Illustrator, such as how to vectorise an image using ‘vectorize’ on the iPad version or ‘Image Trace’ on the Mac.

Link

Fontself

Adobe Illustrator

TypeTool

Hand=drawn fontInspired by Tony Seddon’s book, Draw Your Own Fonts, I’ve just succeeded in drawing, scanning and digitising – using Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and a program called TypeTool – five sample characters which I’ve added to my computer as a TrueType font.

Draw Your Own Fonts

Draw Your Own FontsIt will be useful to have my own hand-lettered font when I draw a comic strip or a picture map for a walks booklet but I’m going to try something a bit more ambitious too. Seddon encourages you to have fun in the process and to see a font as a series of illustrations with a theme running through them.

The illustrators and designers who provided the fonts for the book took as their starting points subjects like  knitting, earthworms, buildings, spaghetti and origami. Their spontaneous approach soon got me thinking up  ideas of my own, for instance, the capitals above are based on a character from a story, a disturbed visionary character . . . but – for the character that I have in mind – I need to make the typeface look more willowy and windblown.

First Hand

Hand-writing fontHere’s my first effort at a complete hand-drawn font, put together from some hastily drawn letters, but at least creating those 26 capitals and 26 lower case letters has enabled me to get thoroughly familiar with the basic process.

Strangely enough it was the full stop that I had most difficulty digitising!

Links

Draw Your Own Fonts by Tony Seddon

TypeTool by FontLab, a fairly simple program for digitising fonts.