entry
Fooling around with fontforge

Back to the past...

This is an attempt to remember the approach of creating my first typeface years ago. I didn't know a lot about typography but had even more ambition.

The goal

Fooling around with type was always something on my bucket list. I'm impressed of what you can do with layouts given enough skill, some fonts as a base and tools like InDesign or affinity publisher.

Reading on typography, I decided to design something myself and quickly rediscovered Fontforge that I had read about previously. Fontforge was and is not an easy to use program. Lots of functions are burried within menus, dialogues and behind arcane names. But it's free to use, can generate impressive fonts and has enough online help to get started.

Starting with some variations of the letter n (as suggested), "designing" an entire font did appear tricky. Thus I quickly decided to start with a handwritten base. Handwriting didn't need a lot of design work – compared to geometrically designing all letters of an alphabet. Immagine the amount of work, that you have to put into a typeface like Frutiger, Open Sans or Verdana.

Process & Learnings

To digitize your handwriting, you first need to create some sample-text. Getting "correct" sample text was harder than I thought. The letters of my handwriting tend to change shape depending on their place on the page, the letters they are next to or connected to the, the pen I use, the amount of text written, my mood among other things.

It turns out, my handwriting is full of ligatures

Also some of the letters are just not really readable, if I don't concentrate. If I concentrate and take it slow, the letter does not look like my handwriting - only my hand seems to know what my real handwriting looks like.

After experimenting a bit, I decided to approach this more systematically. Rules to a piece of paper are a usable base for similar sized letters. I started writing out the alphabet in upper case and lower case. I then proceeded with some text to make sure, that the individual letters at least looked similar to the way I normally write.

I started up fontforge and followed the basic tutorial to create a font. Turns out, that an entire font has a lot of letters and other glyphs - way more than what I thought to be the case and I had to fill here and there. Following the grid of glyphs, I started to add additional things to my base-document.

It helps if you do a lot of math - else you probably don't use all the signs in your daily repertoire - hence you'd not have your own style for some of the glyphs. I at least had to (re)invent at least some sings that I rarely used before (most of the different brackets, #, * and so on).

After taking a picture and importing everything into affinity designer, I copied the pictures of the individual letters into fontforge and traced all of them individually. The tools in fontforge are not that easy to use or maybe, I'm just spoilt with tools from graphical design software.

Next learnings: some letters were to big, the letters didn't all have the same line-weight (a soft-tip-pen does not give identical line-weights, also errors while tracing), ascenders and descenders were to big on single letters and didn't look pleasing in combination.

Furthermore I learnt about kerning and sidebearings. We space and "kern" automatically when writing by hand, but a computer sometimes has to be told when to move two letters nearer to each other.

The result

After some iterations, I considered the typeface to be good enough - or even better, considering the fact that I only intended to try out fontforge before starting seriously.

In the end, the typeface has more than 150 letters or signs and can apparently be used in a multitude of languages (if I can trust font squirrel). The typeface is currently not used in this page (as too much type tends to be tricky and handwriting is rather hard to read, but who knows, in the future...). Obviously, the typeface has some issues, but I like the outcome, especially the little sun-character, that I use now and then in digital products.

The following paragraph shows the outcome with some "cupcake ipsum" text:

Do it yourself!

It's great to have your handwriting digitized and you can learn a lot in the process.

There are a lot of approaches that are way simpler than what I did with fontforge. Give it a go.

Update 2023-03-24

With the move to glyphs, I decided to update this typeface. I have been changing some metrics (mainly decenders) of certain glyphs like j and g. Furthermore I have been adjusting sidebearings and kerning. The type specimen above shows the updated typeface.

It's come to the point, where I feel like using it on the page.

Circle time

Icons & Ligatures - Creating an icon font