The Complete Font Design Process in 5 Steps

Abraham

Fonts are one of the most common and misunderstood tools of the digital world. Everyone uses them, and most people are familiar with a handful of the classics like Times New Roman and Arial. But few people ever think about where they come from—let alone the fact that someone had to sit down and craft each of those letters. And there is a reason for this: the trick of good font design is that they are meant to be useful in a variety of contexts, which means they should not draw attention to themselves and distract from the message. At the same time, type design can be an excellent creative endeavor. It provides an opportunity to put your own signature on every word that you write. And modern software makes creating your own font more accessible than ever before. Of course, that’s not to say it’s easy… Illustration of a designer creating a typeface Font design in progress, by OrangeCrush Type design can be a time-consuming practice, given that you are creating an entire alphabet along with different stylings such as bold, thin, or italics.

There is also a great deal of subtlety involved and it can be hard for the untrained font designer to see the differences between typefaces, nevermind to create their own variation. There are also many technical considerations to take into account, such as correct sizing and spacing. To guide you past these hurdles, we’re going to walk you through the full step-by-step font design process. How fonts work — Type design essentially involves going from your own handcrafted drawings of an entire alphabet to the background remove service development of a font file. Installing this font file onto any computer will then add your typeface to that computer’s font library, making it accessible through any application that uses fonts, such as Microsoft Word and Adobe’s Creative Cloud. You can also license the font file through a site like Creative Market and earn a passive income when anyone purchases and downloads it. In order to better understand how all of this works, let’s briefly get some basic concepts out of the way.



We’ll start with how fonts fit into the many descriptors for designed letters. You’ll notice the terms “font” and “typeface” are often mistaken for synonyms. Hand-lettered postcard An example of hand-lettering. Design by Mky Typography: The art of arranging and styling type. Typeface: The unique design of the letters in an alphabet. Font: The software file that contains a particular typeface. Calligraphy: Artful handwriting and inscriptions, usually practiced with analogue tools in the moment. Hand-lettering: Illustrative renderings of letters and words, often on a poster or signage. Let’s talk about font file formats. The main two that you’ll hear about are Open Type Font (OTF) and True Type Font (TTF). TTF was developed first by Apple and Microsoft in the 80s as a way for both computers and printers to read fonts easily. OTF was developed later by Microsoft and Adobe to extend these features. While TTF is still in circulation, OTF provides more storage, and it supports many more types of characters.