FONT CREATION (free/trial) SOFTWARE REVIEW
Iâm trying to boost my skills (and portfolio) by attempting to make some fonts.
Having been a little magpie collector/hoarder of fonts since about 1995, I thought it was high time I attempted to make a couple of my own⊠when I have succeeded in doing this, I will let you know!
The purpose of this blog entry is to give any newbies out there a bit of a heads up: If you have photoshop and you donât know how to use the pen tool - LEARN. FAST. Everything I have tried so far (aside from fontstruct - which Iâll get to in a sec) relies on knowing how to deal with bezier curves. (Those  little handles that stick out and make the line go bendy if you move it). I made vectors of my font in Photoshop hoping it would be just a simple cut n paste jobby into little boxes for each letter on some programme⊠HAHAHAHA yeah that was naiive.
1. Fontstruct - Itâs free, itâs kinda like a cross between Lego and Tetris. I didnât really have the patience to stick around and faff with it to be honest - The font I designed was based on big circular shapes and trying to get them to curve around without looking âblobblyâ was a nightmare. Plus side itâs free, you donât have to download anything - all you need to do is sign up.
2. Font Forge - Again free - opensource softwareâŠ. It looks quite good from what Iâve seen in other peopleâs blogs and reviews⊠onto the iMac I went (itâs mac compatible btw, just incase you missed that)⊠downloaded it⊠Iâll be darned if I know how to install the thing. I clicked the âinstallâ icon and it did nothing. The âinstructionsâ on how to install were really confusing and about 6 pages long and I frankly couldnât be arsed to sit around for six years trying to figure it out when I want the thing done by the end of the day.
3.  Font Constructor (Mac Only)Free, looks⊠interesting⊠Far from self-explanatory - again didnât want to have to spend hours figuring it out or redrawing it from scratch when Iâve already got the vectors made. You can get it in the App store I think.
4. Glyps - again a Mac one (I tried a few in windows too on the laptop) available for a free trial⊠havenât really used it - again would have to draw the thing from scratch which I didnât want to do⊠looked alright though.
4. Font Creator - You do have to pay for this although you can get a free 30 day trialâŠ. Perfect - lets you basically copy nâpaste your image/vector - has a decent autotraceâŠ.. pretty straight forward to use⊠until you get to the part where youâve spent hours uploading and resizing everything and want to press âsaveâ. Only THEN does it bother to tell you that saving is not supported in the trail version. Apologies in advance for this outburst, but: WHAT THE HELL??!?! Yeah sure give us the free trial to draw pretty shapes but donât let us see if it actually produces a working font. God forbid someone might actually want to use the font they made to.. type things with. Instant uninstall accompanied by much swearing.
5. Last resort this evening - apparently you can draw stuff in CorelDRAW and export it as a ttf .. though how Adobeâs inferior little brother manages to be able to do this yet Photoshop canât is beyond me.
