How to make your own fonts

I recently completed my first font, lucky lady. I'm not going to release it for sale since it's my freshman effort, but I was surprised by how easy (and inexpensive) it was to give font making a go.  Here's how I did it.

Online tutorials are magical

On one of my long tangled internet journeys I stumbled upon this great tutorial by Tyler Finck.  It goes over the basic features of Glyphs Mini, a program available for Mac users in the app store.  Glyphs Mini offers a free 30 day trial, so there was no barrier to downloading it and giving it a whirl.

Tyler's tutorial covered all the questions I had.  After a few watches while using the program along side the video, I felt jazzed up about creating a font to call my own.

Start with inspiration

Like most of my endeavors, my design journey started at my local free book store (see: libraries).  I checked out "An Elegant Hand" by William E. Henning, since I knew I wanted to make something like an engravers script.  I found myself drawn to samples from Joseph Galterio and George Gaskell among others.

I had also always wanted a font similar to Burgess that worked well in programs like Word or Pages. Those types of programs don't necessarily support the contextual alternates and ligatures that make pro fonts so pretty, which has always struck me as a shame.

I love books like An Elegant Hand that are compendiums of older out of print journals.  Buying originals of items like these is very costly, and although many journals can be found in PDF form scattered across the internet, nothing beats a real book.  The free bookstore wins again!

Hunker down for the long haul

I decided to create my font in illustrator, because Illustrator in my jam.  You can also create your font directly in Glyphs Mini. 

** It may be worth noting I taught my self to use Illustrator this same way almost ten years ago.  I got the Adobe "Classroom in a book" from the library, a free 30 day trial, and went to town.  You can learn almost any technical skill this way, completely for free. **

Anyway!  Grab some coffee and find a comfy spot. I didn't find creating a font hard, but it was time consuming.  Since I'm part-crazy, I decided to start with a complex script font, which I don't recommend, because at times I thought my eyes were going to fall out from staring so hard at my screen. My next font will be decidedly simpler. 

You've got nothing to loose

This project met all of my requirements for trying something new:

1. It has to be free to try, and less than $100 to finish.

2. After trying it, I still wanted to learn more. (In the end, I paid $44.99 for Glyphs Mini.)

3. It was enjoyable.  While some might suffer through their font to get to the end product, I enjoyed the process. It was calming in its own complicated way. 

I don't think I'm going to become a full-time type designer anytime soon, but I don't think this is the last font I'll make.  So what type of font should I design next?  What type of font are you going to make?  I can't wait to see it!