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Becoming
a Font-a-holic... and Loving It
Article by Don
Herion
The Logic of Building Your Own
Font
Today there are a number of programs that make designing a new type
face or altering an existing one fast, fun and relatively painless. When I say
relatively painless, I'm talking your basic root canal, 'Is it safe?,' kind of
painless. Macromedia Fontographer ($339), FontLabs' ScanFont ($360) and High-Logic's
Font Creator Program (Shareware - $50) are three of the better programs for becoming
a fontaholic. For this article, I decided to use High-Logic's program. It's capable,
user friendly and yes, I confess, it's shareware.
| |
| Screenshot of High-Logic's Font Creator Program |
Building
a Font
There are two ways to build a new type face. The first is to build
it from the ground up. The second, and easier method (which is the one I'm taking),
is to find an existing font that is close in look and feel to the one you have
in mind and change it. Building a font from the ground up can be very rewarding,
but also incredibly time consuming. A typical font style is more than the 26 characters
of the alphabet. You have upper and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation, symbols
and more. All told a typical type font could have over 100 individual characters.
It is not necessary to create unique characters for all 100. But you will probably
wish to design them for your uppercase, lowercase, and numbers. That comes to
over 60.
