How to create your font style or characters

How to create your font style or characters

1Determine if you want to create your font digitally or traditionally. For those who can digitally create a font, typically you will have a stylus pen with your mouse pad and can draw the digital letters freehand using the stylus. If you are relying on traditional methods, use good paper and a black marker. Just as illustrated below

 2

Draw out your font on a white piece of paper if you are designing it traditionally. Start with the traditional alphabet, but don't be afraid to throw some graphic characters in there as well. Additionally, be sure to add punctuation characters and accent characters.

3

Scan your work in at least a 200 dots per inch (dpi) setting. After the scanned image is made, clean up dirt and dust, if any.

4

Use a vector graphic editor to turn your image into a vector image. Then use a font editor to copy in vector data.

Read about both vector graphics and raster graphics.

·         Simply put, a raster image is stored in terms of a list of pixels in a grid and what color they are. If a person were to describe a raster image to another person, it would be like handing somebody a piece of grid paper and saying, "Color the first square white. Now color the second square light blue," and so on.

·         An svg is also an xml file, and it is possible to see the code by opening the image file with a text editor.

·         For a raster image, making the image bigger just makes those squares bigger. If you zoom in far enough on a raster image (such a bitmap or JPEG), you will see pixels (short for picture elements) the little squares that make up the image.

You can use Adobe Illustration Software to turn your graphic into vector image as illustration below:

5

Try kerning to make the font uniquely your own. Kerning is the adjusting of your spacing between the characters to make them proportional as well as aesthetically pleasing.

6

Export your typeface that was created. Some companies charge you to create and export your font, while others will let you do it for free. Try FontStruct which is one site that will let you create your fonts for free. They give you TrueType fonts that you can easily use with either a Mac or a Windows application. Or YourFonts only charges a small fee to make a font. You only have to pay if you are happy with the font, and they offer a free preview.

7

Install your font onto your computer. Most computers allow you to do this through the fonts folder on your computer's control panel. Some computers will allow you to simply drag and drop your font file into the font folder. Other computers and operating systems require you to take the additional step of actually installing the font.

8

Watch online tutorials if you still have questions or concerns about how to construct your own font. Examples include "How to Create your own TrueType Font for Free" and "How to Create Your Own Fonts for Free".

Source: http://www.wikihow.com/Create-a-Font