How I Created My Own Font in a Weekend
And Published it on GitHub for your pleasure

https://github.com/aswinmohanme/Plexta-FreeFont
Ever since I have been using a Computer, fonts have always fascinated me. The aesthetic of the type was too important, and like all I would spend hours scouring through font lists to select the best fonts that look good.
But then I grew up, and with that my tastes for fonts. I now had a library of standard safe fonts that I used for everything, I lost my creative font selecting thing if you will.
And it was at the same time that I started learning After Effects, which has a super cool plug-in called Plexus, which makes the network like structure as shown on the font. I instantly fell in love with it, the nodes and network fascinated me. The way lines connected and the way everything looked together.
But that died out too.
Fast forward to the present, I was looking through my old hard-drive files and found a previous render of the letter A that I did in After Effects with the plug-in. This struck me, why not make it into a font and give it away, so everyone can fall in love with Network and Nodes.
Turns out Type is Hard and Boring
So I got my working shoes on and turned to Google, How to create a Font ? and Google said, It’s easy if you got a year and a half.
It crushed me, I knew creating a font was going to be hard, but I never expected it to be this hard.
These are the steps in a typical font making journey.
- First determine the dimensions ( a bunch of words like kerning which I did not understand ) of the font.
- Draw the Character
- Scan and Vectorize it.
- Layout everything and make sure everything fits together
- Repeat for the remaining 1024 characters
- Convert everything into a usable font format.
Whew that was a handful, and I didn’t want to spend months working on a single typeface, cause there is something that siphons 12 Hours of my day.
It was also the time when I was learning Processing the creative coding environment, and got introduced to HYPE, an awesome library for Processing that makes the whole of life easier.
With Processing my Work flow was
- Create a Processing Script that takes a letter, Plexifies it and returns an SVG
- Repeat for all letters requires
The Scripting Process
The hardest part was the script which needed about 3 hours to code up and and additional 6 hours of fine tuning.
The Script takes a letter from the Roboto Font family and plots around 800 points randomly inside the letter, and then connects everything using triangles.
Then it spits out an SVG file.
And Boom that’s how to create an entire Font in any style you want in a weekend.
But there is more work to do too, I have to make it into a ttf font, but since it is open source, I was thinking is anyone could give me a hand with that.
If you loved it, feel free to hit that like button. Cheers
