#font making

Join us on July 18th to learn how to design your own font!

I wanna share the Scratch and Molly fonts I made!

So I went down a rabbit hole this weekend. I couldn’t find a font I liked, and the one I did like had vague user agreement. So I ended up making 6 fonts for myself xD

They only have capital letters since I prefer to read that due to my dyslexia.

The 6 fonts in their glory! Which is your favorite?

Yes: Create a classification/call up system. I created a logographic font for Kamakawi (in fact, my icon is one of the glyphs), and despite the fact that I feel like I could do a better job now, I think I did a pretty decent job with the design of the glyphs and the system. The one thing I absolutely did NOT do well is design a useable font. Since, at the time, you could only really access the characters you could type using lower case, upper case, alt, and alt + upper case (as well as the numbers), you only had access to ≈100 characters for a font. Furthermore, characters would be in random places. To expand the number of characters I could access, I made italic, bold, and bold+italic versions of the Kamakawi font that didn't actually italicize or bold the font at all: They brought up different character sets.

So, take, for example, the keystroke <l> (that's an ell). By typing it in various combinations, you could get all the following:

Regular (lower case): syllabic glyph for [la]

Regular (upper case): syllabic glyph for [lo]

Regular (alt): the agentive infix [-li-]

Regular (alt + upper case): the causative suffix [-le]

Italic (lower case): glyph for [eli] "to love"

Italic (upper case): glyph for [peka] "land"

Italic (alt): glyph for [poi] "scarcity"

Italic (alt + upper case): glyph for [elu] "long"

Bold (lower case): glyph for [kilika] "lobster"

Bold (upper case): glyph for [kala] "to speak"

Bold (alt): glyph for [tiki] "lava"

Bold (alt + upper case): glyph for [noe] "leaf"

Bold Italic (lower case): glyph for [maʔa] "to learn"

Bold Italic (upper case): glyph for [tama] "leg"

Bold Italic (alt): glyph for [halaʔi] "life"

Bold Italic (alt + upper case): glyph for [ite] "shortness of breath"

And it took me, like, 15 minutes to find all these, because that's how hard it is to manage this "system" which isn't a system at all.

For High Valyrian, I created a much simpler system. It goes like this:

Type #

Type a word in English

Type another #

Then the font automatically returns the glyph you need.

Now, I have to program every word in there as a contextual ligature, but my GOD is it worth it. Plus I have a full list detailing each glyph, what words it's used for, what words can be used to call it up in the font, etc. This is the organization system that Kamakawi desperately needed, but I had no idea how to do it.

The random letter generator eventually came up with "SY" and I found a delightful book by Abbey Sy, Hand Lettering A to Z: a world of creative ideas for drawing and designing alphabets. I happen to have a font making program that hitherto-fore had only been used for making an ocarina tab font, so I thought why not try it for a real font?

I admit the book itself wasn't much help to what I was doing. It was about traditional media like ink pens and watercolor, and if you want to do some lettering on paper it's a brilliant resource. It did have some good universal tips like making sure your size is consistent and thinking about coherent design and all that. It was also very helpful in providing a wide variety of font styles to be inspired by.

SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK: If you want to be inspired to make your own font it's great. Again, the meat of the book is traditional paper media, so whether that's helpful to you is something you would know.

ART PROJECT:

Ok, here is what I was most looking forward to. I ended up having so much fun making the first typeface that I made a second, bonus one. The first is all animal shapes with each letter starting with the name of the animal it was shaped like.

and the second font. As you can see I need to work on the S, which was inspired by those diamondy line Ss that were popular with schoolkids.

IT’S A WORKING FONT!