Making a typeface

I had some spare time today, so I had a little browse on the Internet at programs used to make typefaces. Immediately, I came across the program 'Fontographer', so I downloaded the demo as I have been interested to see what is involved in making a typeface. Obviously, as I have no experience in doing this, I wasn't really thinking at this point of the actual outcome of the typeface,  but the process involved- little did I realise how time consuming it was!

First of all, I quickly filled out a Font Creation Sheet with the Lower and Upper case alphabet, and numbers from 0-9. This was then scanned in to the computer and opened in PS.

Click on images for a closer look

The characters were then copied in to 'Fontographer' and then you had to choose the 'Auto trace' option where the tighter you set a curve fit, the more points will be placed on your glyph. By having more points, the tracing will more closely resemble the original image.

This process is quite time consuming and you can also play around with editing the points to create different shapes for your typeface. Once you have created all the glyphs you want in your typeface, your sheet should look something like the image below (annoyingly, I had created the whole alphabet but the demo version of the program only saved a certain number of glyphs.)

 When this has been done, you can generate a font file into an Open Type TT/ Windows True Type (.ttf) file, so you can generate a typeface that can be installed and used in other programs!

As I mentioned earlier, the program is only a demo version, so the maximum number of glyphs it would let you generate was only 20 characters, which was slightly annoying as I did not notice this when creating the entire alphabet. Also, the company have used watermarks over the letters when exporting it as a font, so this is the reason for the white marks on the images. However, I wasn't looking to create a brilliant typeface in the first instance, and I feel I have learned a lot from this process for future reference.