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HomePosts Tagged "font making" (Page 2)

font making Tag

Courses, Fonts, Hand Lettering, Typography

Ok, friends! Today is *the* day. My newest online course, Learn Font Making, is now open for enrollment (for one week only!).

When I started learning how to create hand lettered fonts, I definitely had the impression it was some super secret skill. I searched tirelessly for helpful tutorials that weren’t filled with a ton of ‘expert font making’ language I couldn’t understand. It was really hard to piece together little things I learned here and there, and I was still left with a lot of unanswered questions. Once I figured out the process, I knew I had to share it in a way anyone could learn. So! That’s what this class is: all step-by-step, beginner friendly with no confusion and as straightforward as possible.

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Fonts, Hand Lettering, Tutorials, Typography

When I first got into font making, hearing “customized (or coded) font features” made me question if I really knew what they were. I went digging away and an entire new world of font customization opened up in front of me. I knew OTFs were better than TTFs, but I had no idea how powerful OTFs really could be. If you’re unfamiliar with terms like stylistic and contextual alternates or discretionary and standard ligatures, we’re talking about em all this week!

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Fonts, Freebies, Hand Lettering, Resources, Roundups, Typography

If you love lettering and are ready to take things up a notch, converting your lettering into a font is a great next step! Not only will you experience typing with YOUR letters for the first time (nothing like it!), you can also sell your font(s) for some extra side hustle cash. But where do you begin? There are different types of software, plugins, automators..the whole process can seem overwhelming. I know it was for me, which is why I put together this clickable font making resources list with the exact software and tools I use to create and sell hand lettered fonts. You can grab it below and also read more about the process. If you’re looking for a full step-by-step course on how to create *and* sell hand lettered fonts, be sure to visit my course here!

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Fonts, Hand Lettering, Typography

Happy Thursday! This week was a big week as I finally completed and released the Espresso Roast font trio. As you can imagine, a trio of fonts that all work together and pair stylistically is not a quick accomplishment. This was my first time creating a font trio, so I wanted to post a little about my process to help any aspiring font makers out there 🙂 Here’s a peek inside, along with a font previewer, so you can play with Espresso Roast directly in the post!

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Hand Drawn, Illustrator, Tutorials

Ok, you guys. This one’s a game changer for real. No kidding, my workflow for editing vectors in Illustrator has been at least cut in half by now using my iPad with the app AstroPad. If you’ve seen this tutorial, or this one using the standard method of Wacom/mouse for edits/revisions, you’re going to love this one. You can also find a list of my top 5 affordable Wacom tablets here if you are interested in using that type of device. If you’ve checked our my Intro to iPad Lettering class, this will take things even further if you’re familiar with Illustrator – you can use this same method with Photoshop, but I find myself using it wayyyy more with Illustrator, so I’m focusing this video there. I spent some serious edit time on this so you could get the full effect of what’s happening on my computer vs. how I’m using the iPad – I walk you through basic edits of a design element and then show you how I used the iPad when I worked on my most recent font, Hawthorne Script. I’m not affiliated with AstroPad in any way, just really excited about how much time I’m about to get back in the future 🙂 See it all below!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Typography

Happy Friday! I’m so excited to announce the conclusion of the Font Project this week! It’s been a great 6 weeks learning how to really take a font from some doodled letters on paper, to typing on screen. I know I still have a ways to go with learning the ins and outs of Glyphs Mini (as with any kind of software), but it’s a challenge I’m looking forward to take on. I have a few final tips I wanted to share from this week’s work, and I also want to announce that my new font has a name and it’s available for download! Read on for it all!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Illustrator, Typography

Happy Friday and welcome to Week 5 of the Every-Tuesday Font Project! I can’t believe next week is our last week! This past week was such a HUGE week of learning for me. Taking your letters from Illustrator and putting them into Glyphs Mini is definitely not as simple as copy/paste – but it isn’t hard, I promise! Just a *little* tedious. You shall see 😉 Below I have a full video on how I set up Glyphs Mini and how I set up my Illustrator file to bring everything in at the right sizes and finished the video off with kerning in Glyphs Mini and exporting the font, then typing with it in Illustrator. As tedious as this week was with a learning curve and just the steps in general, it was so incredibly satisfying. Read on to see these letters become a font!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Illustrator, Typography

Welcome to week #4 of the Every-Tuesday Font Project! See the previous 3 weeks here. This past week was spent vectorizing the lowercase portion of the alphabet in Illustrator in the same manner the uppercase was vectorized last week. Since the uppercase portion has a pretty smooth/clean aesthetic compared to the original live trace, I worked to maintain that same cleanliness with similar weight contrasts throughout the lowercase. One of the biggest lessons this week was that creating consistency throughout the lowercase is definitely more challenging than with the uppercase. There are far more details in the lowercase letterforms that you don’t really realize until you get into it. For example: the weight contrasts and curvature of the ‘c’ should be the same as in the lowercase ‘o’ should be the same in the lowercase ‘e’, etc. This created quite a few differences in the original drawn letters to the cleaned versions, but when placed together to form simple words, the font really started to come to life! The personality I had intended is coming through and it has me really excited about getting this into Glyphs Mini. As with last week, I took a bunch of timelapse videos of my Illustrator work where you can see me pulling portions of other letterforms to define new ones. Read on to see it all!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Illustrator, Typography

Welcome to week #3 of the Every-Tuesday Font Project! See Week 1 here and Week 2 here. This past week was spent vectorizing the uppercase portion of the alphabet in Illustrator, which was created last week. I followed the same methods of vectorizing + cleaning paths as seen in this tutorial and this one. I found my pen tool and occasionally using my Wacom tablet to be the most helpful when it came to cleaning up lines (here are my Wacom recommendations if interested), but anyone handy with a mouse could do a very similar job. I tweaked my initial live trace slightly (exact settings I used are below) to create rougher outlines to start with, which gave me more room to decide how ‘hand drawn’ each letter could feel. Read on for more of my process and some time lapse videos!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Typography

Welcome to week #2 of the Every-Tuesday Font Project! This past week was spent drawing letters out…a lot. My font is inspired by the free font, Amatic, whose hand drawn quality and character I really like, but wish it had a lowercase and a bit of a stronger presence structure-wise.

I started out with a .25mm Micron using the 2nd font guide sheet which had a taller x-height. I really liked how things were looking, but decided to go with my medium waterbrush filled with speedball super black since it naturally gave my letters some nice varied line weights which will give the font more character overall. I played around with applying different levels of pressure on my downstrokes with the waterbrush and liked a lighter pressure best since it makes the letters more readable (and small counters wouldn’t risk being accidentally filled in with extra ink from the pressure). Process shots from the last week below!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Typography

This is a big post for me. Like, bucket-list big. No kidding, Spence has heard me talk about creating my own font every week (if not every day!) for over a year.

If you’ve ever been here before, you know my love for type is pretty intense and I know I have some fonts in me waiting to get out. Maybe that’s you, too. On the chance that it is, I’ve decided to create a weekly post for the next 6 weeks for us to hold each other accountable and really do it – really create our own handmade fonts! I’ve never made a font before, so we are definitely in this together 🙂

Every week on Friday, I’ll share the progress I’ve made, resources I’ve used and tips/tricks I’ve learned. I’ll keep posting process shots over on Instagram with the tag #etfontproject and I’ll share the steps I plan to make for the next week’s font project post. At the end of this, we’ll have our own handmade fonts we can share with each other or sell online.

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