Say it to my Typeface
I’ve always had an interest in typography, but more importantly hand drawn typography, I’m talking pre Seb Lester and the endless brush script typographers on Instagram at the moment. Don’t get me wrong I love a good Helvetica or a crisp Times New Roman but the individuality you get from drawing typography was too much of an appeal to me. So for the last year I have been trying to put pen to paper as much as I can, if I’m lucky it is probably a couple of hours a week.
To help track my progress and get feedback on my work I setup a Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram account. Since setting the accounts up a year or so ago I have gained a decent following and the general feedback has been positive…..mostly :)
It was on my twitter account that one of the founders of Fontself got in touch with me asking had I tried there plugin. I had looked at creating my own font in the past but all the software I had looked at just didn’t appeal to me. My problems mostly were with the time it would take me to create a font. All I wanted to do was take my vector fonts that I had created and just magically copy/ paste them into my font book and VOILA… I had my very own font. Thats when Franz from Fontself approached me and offered me the exact plugin I was looking for — drag your very own vector font into the Fontself plugin and VOILA… you had your font. I couldn’t believe it and I didn’t. Franz offered me a full refund if I wasn’t convinced after using the plugin. How could I say no. Fast forward 10 days later and 4 of my very own fonts produced. It was safe to say the plugin did exactly what Franz said it would do and I was blown away and I wasn’t the only person to be impressed by Fontself…
Don’t take my word for it, let me show you guys how EASY it is to create your very own font :) Trust me by the end of this article you will be able to produce your very own font.
(Side note: Fontself only works on Adobe CC)
I must say it is difficult to create anything without inspiration, I find inspiration for fonts in my surroundings from my commute to work, my run at lunch or when I’m lying in bed. Of course I find inspiration from the google and books but it’s important to step away from the obvious sources and just open yourself up.
It is important to have a good work space to work from, I’m lucky that I have an awesome space with a inspirational view at home.
Once you have settled on a theme for your font the next phase is to put pen to paper. Enjoy this stage and let your hands go wild, don’t restrict yourself here. The looser you are and the more you let your imagination run wild the better the outcome will be.
Once you have honed in on your font style we now need to figure out if your font will include both upper and lowercase letters? Will there be numbers? What about symbols? Really think about how much you want to include in your font. It’s ok if you want your font to just have lowercase letters and nothing else. Don’t feel like you need to include everything on your first attempt…I certainly didn’t :)
Ok so we have decided what will be included in our font, what now? Let’s get our font sketches onto our computer. For this we will use a scanner, most of us will have a scanner. If you don’t then you might get away at taking a photo of your sketch, just make sure it’s a high quality photo. You also want to be scanning your sketches in at 600dpi at greyscale, if you can go higher than 600dpi then even better.
Now go ahead and open your scanned image in Photoshop.
We only want to use Photoshop to adjust our image, so to do this click Image on the top Nav, then click adjustments and finally curves.
The goal here is to achieve a strong contrast between the background and your sketch. Just keep playing around until your happy.
Now save out your new type sketch.
Open up your newly adjusted sketch in Illustrator.
We now want to trace our sketch. To do this click on Window and then Image trace. There are no perfect settings here, it is important to keep playing around-just like adjusting the image in photoshop. Make sure you tick the Ignore white box.
Now we make the magic happen or we open Fontself :)
All you do now is simply drag your freshly traced vectors and drag to the Fontself plugin… it’s that simple, seriously.
You can now test our your amazing new font within the Fontself window. Seriously how cool is this…
At this point we can install the font locally on our computer and test within Illustrator.
You can now export your font as an OpenType® font and share it with your friends or even sell online.
The good guys at Fontself have given me a small discount for you guys
Visit: https://gumroad.com/a/162280563 and use code:drawn2type for 20% off .
If you guys have any questions regarding this article or Fontself then please get in touch, I would be happy to help :)
Also feel free to subscribe to my email listing where I send all subscribers a new font every month…