Do You Draw Your Text or Type It With a Font Digital Art

Ever fancied yourself every bit a typographer? Give font-making a shot past designing a typeface using Adobe Illustrator.

Graphic designers can become obsessed with fonts. Subsequently all, it's our task! Nosotros work with fonts on a daily basis, we can identify them in the wild ("Is Trader Joe's using Phosphorus on a bit bag!?"), and we've accumulated mental lists of go-to's and favorites. If this describes yous, so y'all've probably considered designing your own typeface before, as well. Font cosmos is a long and tedious process, only typing in a font you designed can be incredibly rewarding! If the thought excites y'all, read on!

Adobe Illustrator tin't consign a font file on its ain, merely its vector-based programming allows for you lot to export .svg files—which near font creation software will take. Basically, that merely means that you tin can use Illustrator to create typeface characters if you don't want to learn a whole new software just to make fonts, especially if you're already familiar with how Illustrator works. (Dislocated? Don't worry! We will larn more nearly vectors and font programs later in this tutorial.)

Ane last reminder before we begin! It's important to note that you're not only learning how to make a "font," you're also making a typeface. What'south the divergence? A typeface is a whole group of text styles you lot tin use, oft referred to as the "font family unit." Arial, Helvetica, and Times New Roman are typefaces because you tin use multiple styles (Regular, italic, bold, bold italic…). A font is just one of those text styles. Technically, Arial Bold is a font, but Arial is a typeface. For this tutorial, of course, you'll most likely be making a typeface that simply includes i font. (Unless you go fancy and pattern multiple weights or italic versions!)

How to Make Your Own Font

Determine what type of font (or typeface) you lot'd similar to make.
The two nigh basic typeface classifications are serif and sans serif. The "serif" category contains any typeface with pocket-size "feet" on the cease of messages. Times New Roman, Georgia, and Cambria are serif fonts. Sans serif, on the other hand, has no feet. Arial, Helvetica, Calibri, and Comic Sans are sans serif typefaces.
Can you lot tell which one is the serif and which is sans?
Afterward that, the classifications get far more complicated. You can create display typefaces, script typefaces, retro typefaces—check out font sites like Adobe Typekit or Dafont to see all of the different categories and get inspired.
You tin exist inspired by your favorite aesthetic to make a typeface that goes with it! Into sci fi movies? Try making a futuristic font. Dearest wearing vintage apparel? Go for something groovy!

Create your document and set up guides.
Adobe Illustrator is the all-time program to utilize for font cosmos because you need to work with vectors. Photoshop and InDesign store information in pixels, which means that any prototype has the opportunity to lose quality when scaled downwardly or become pixelated when scaled up. Vectors, on the other hand, shop information in a series of geometric shapes and points. You can resize a vector to any size and it will never lose quality—which is how fonts are built, too!
In Illustrator, create a new document. You're going to need a ton of artboards, but they can exist pretty small. I use the dimensions 350 ten 350 px because information technology imports easily into Font Forge, my favorite font creation software, but you tin can employ any foursquare-shaped size. (Just keep in heed that the file will load faster if the artboards are smaller.)

Create 1 artboard for every character you will need to create. If y'all want to design but uppercase letters, you will merely demand 26 artboards. For both upper and lowercase, use 52. Withal, for a bones set of letters and numbers and common punctuation symbols, create eighty artboards. (This will be a long process!) You'll need more than if you lot want to create accented letters, special characters, or a full set up of symbols; most typefaces you lot find on Google Docs or Adobe Typekit have around 1,500 characters.
The full range of characters in a font is known equally the character gear up.
Once you have your artboards and dimensions set, click "ok" and create your certificate.

Draw the characters.
There are a lot of options for how to go well-nigh this! Y'all can first by drawing rectangles and circles and using the pathfinder tool to create customized shapes for each letter. Y'all can use the pen tool to describe complex letterforms. I similar to use the brush tool to "draw" a letter of the alphabet in a handwriting manner. All of the artboards I used to create my latest font, Trackpad Sans.
Draw one character on each artboard. Call back that you tin copy-and-paste similar characters. (A lowercase d and b are frequently the same, but flipped. An exclamation point can be your lowercase "i," upside down.) Pay attending to letterforms that look similar—you might want to differentiate your lowercase "L" and uppercase "I" to go along them from looking exactly the same; your zero and uppercase "O" as well. Names of the different guides for letterforms
I frequently find it helpful to drag "guides" onto the artboards to human action as the baseline and cap. You lot tin can detect a full tutorial for creating your own guides here.

Export equally .svg files.
Finished your letterforms? Congratulations! The hardest part is over—this process sometimes takes font-makers months or fifty-fifty years. Go to File > Export for Screens. Make sure you have all of your artboards selected and choose ".svg" as the output file type. No need to resize the boards—this file blazon retains the vector class, so they tin be enlarged or shrunk later without losing quality. Press "consign artboards".

Use your font creation software to compress information technology into a .ttf or .otf file.
At that place are many different options for font creation software! Experience gratis to scan the web. Personally, I recommend ane called Font Forge. The interface is a bit outdated and it'southward non the nearly user-friendly, but its website has endless pages of thorough instructions online that will walk y'all through the process. In this way, information technology's really like shooting fish in a barrel for beginners to troubleshoot! (And, meliorate yet, Font Forge is gratuitous to download and employ.)
Near programs will let you to import your letterforms into a minor file for each alphabetic character, customizing the spacing and placement of each.

Export your typeface as a .ttf or .otf file—and so utilize it yourself!
At the end of the process, export your typeface design in one of the two common file types—.ttf or .otf. Once this file is created, anyone tin can install your font you made on their computer.
Demand instructions for downloading? On a mac, double-click whatever typeface file to open Font Book. Merely click "install." If you have Windows 10, yous can do the same affair, just for more thorough instructions, click hither for a full list of ways to install fonts on a PC.

The kickoff time you lot open a new file and beginning typing in your own font is a keen feeling! The process of typeface cosmos is long and difficult, but y'all should be proud. Not anybody tin can say they've designed their own font. Congratulations!

(Of form, there'due south no need to design new fonts if you're simply looking for a quick swap. Check out Adobe Typekit for downloadable typefaces that you can import directly into your creative deject programs.)