How does a person learn to create fonts?

Question

I've become a member of myfonts.com, and I've noticed that people can sell their own fonts on there. How do you learn to make fonts and is it fun?

Answer 1

If you will seriously dive in, the best answer would be to practice drawing them by hand at first, while reading about calligraphy and typography. It is nothing that will take you a week, but years (if you want to do good fonts, that is). Get yourself some calligraphic pens, rulers, pencils and an eraser. And practice, practice, practice. Enter the Typophile forums: there are lots of experts participating in those.

For turning them to digital, you should ideally have a scanner and the software CorelDraw (for basic, non-pair-kerned fonts), or if you want to go pro, get FontLab (not cheap). Basically, you must import your sketches and trace them with vector drawing tools, or you can draw them from scratch using vector outlines. CorelDraw documentation on creating TT or T1 fonts is rather poor (though it is not difficult to export your drawings to the actual font file). FontLab has got a big manual, and it will take you a while to get it, but gives you a lot more control. Or you can combine both: with Corel you create the outlines for the font, export it, and inside FontLab you make the subtle spacing details and naming. Corel does not support the creation of OpenType fonts, but FL can convert TT or T1 to OpenType.

Creating a pro font is a time-consuming task, that in my opinion has some fun parts and others that are not that funny but rather dealing with some little technicalities.

Answer 2

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