FONT CREATION (free/trial) SOFTWARE REVIEW
I’m 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 don’t know how to use the pen tool - LEARN. FAST. Everything I have tried so far (aside from fontstruct - which I’ll 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 - It’s free, it’s kinda like a cross between Lego and Tetris. I didn’t 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 ‘blobbly’ was a nightmare. Plus side it’s free, you don’t have to download anything - all you need to do is sign up.
2. Font Forge - Again free - opensource software…. It looks quite good from what I’ve seen in other people’s blogs and reviews… onto the iMac I went (it’s mac compatible btw, just incase you missed that)… downloaded it… I’ll be darned if I know how to install the thing. I clicked the ‘install’ icon and it did nothing. The ‘instructions’ on how to install were really confusing and about 6 pages long and I frankly couldn’t 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 didn’t want to have to spend hours figuring it out or redrawing it from scratch when I’ve 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… haven’t really used it - again would have to draw the thing from scratch which I didn’t want to do… looked alright though.
4. Font Creator - You do have to pay for this although you can get a free 30 day trial…. Perfect - lets you basically copy n’paste your image/vector - has a decent autotrace….. pretty straight forward to use… until you get to the part where you’ve spent hours uploading and resizing everything and want to press ‘save’. 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 don’t 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 Adobe’s inferior little brother manages to be able to do this yet Photoshop can’t is beyond me.
