How to Make a Font - Font Design Full Process

hey everyone Gary Simon of course zetro today we're gonna step away from coding stuff and into the world of design and I'm gonna show you how to create your very own font alright so this is something I I tackled four years ago on the channel and it was a really popular video in fact it might be one of my most popular videos if not the most and it's right here how to design a custom font the letter R I used Adobe Illustrator to show people how to design a letter R however I did not show you are those people back then how to actually export it and make it a font file that could be installed and used on other people's computers so obviously that's something that's really important so the font that we're going to create is actually right here this oMG bomb and I'm gonna show you how to use Adobe Illustrator to design all the letters and all that stuff I'm also this is one caveat that a lot of you are not going to like it does require using another piece of software that will actually take the paths you know all the letters that we create and it converts them to a font that can be used and it does cost a little bit of money but fortunately I'm you know back several years ago when this didn't exist all the other font creation programs out there we're really expensive and not very user-friendly and this is the opposite of that fortunately so let me just show you the name of the software and really it's a plug-in is font self at font self calm now I should say this disclaimer if they're not paying me for this they have no affiliate program dammit so I can't make money when one of you guys buys it but I just I recently purchased and it's very easy to use so here's the way this works and in the pricing it's 49 bucks I for illustrator CC or it's 49 bucks for Photoshop CC if you want to work in there I'm using the illustrator CC version and I'm trying to sell me stuff and I there's there's a bundle where you can get both for 79 bucks no choose whatever you wish but for this tutorial I'm gonna be using illustrator for designing the actual fonts okay oh but real quick before we begin make sure you check out my site course cetera com where you're gonna find a bunch of courses on modern design and development a lot are free and others you can access for the cost of buying me like a six pack each month that's it now also it probably wouldn't hurt to subscribe here on YouTube and be sure to make sure the notifications are turned on alright let's get back to it alright so let's go ahead and step into it so after you purchased it and installed it I'm not going to call it cover install installation it's very easy to have a guide for it we'll go ahead into adobe illustrator so what we want to do is if I go to window extensions you will see fonts elf maker 2.2.1 it's showing up on my other monitor there we go alright so what we want to do is and this little menu will see that we have a font template so we're gonna open that up now this is really useful it has all the guides that you would want to use and need for the development of your font alright so these if you go to window and layers make sure that's checked on you'll see the different layers they have for the guides and the characters we can toggle them on and off although you want to keep the guides that's for sure also the characters you can toggle this off and also if i zoom up a little bit more holding the Alt key in the scroll wheel we'll see we also do have vertical line separations so we we have a good idea there's a nice area for each letter to be designed alright so first it would make sense though before we continue to describe what's happening with these these are these guides right here so in here we have this locked I'm going to unlock it guides layer and you'll see just a bunch of duplicates and this is for all the guides that span with this document or the to the document and the very first one is the descender alright so the descender is this one if you can see i'm toggling it on and off it's showing up and up and off right there up and on on and off like a me doc so the descender now this is the portion of a letter that extends below the baseline of a font so like a lowercase Q or J the portion that comes down so that it would reach a maximum depth of right at this line right here and this is usually just for the lowercase letters down here next we have the baseline all right so the baseline is just the line with a letter s' it very simple we also have the x height all right so this x height right here this is the height that lower case letters reach based on the letter X thus x height very simple we also have cap height and this is just a height of a capital letter all right and then also finally we have the ascender and this is the height reached from lowercase letters I whose portions extend beyond the x height and you can see how this all plays out if you just look at some of these letters you'll understand you know kind of the purpose of each line all right so let's get started I'm gonna start with the very most simple basic letter which is an O all right so it's simple ellipse that's all it is although even this one in the in the example isn't a perfect ellipse so you're not really you know the the the sky's the limit in terms of creativity and what you want to do so I'm gonna go ahead and just left click hold and choose the ellipse tool right here now notice it says your artwork here that's kind of important you just want to click this and then any of your paths will go inside of this artwork layer so I'm just gonna start in and you're gonna notice you know as we reuse this one of the things that's gonna be very important is alignment and these little eye these pink / purple alignment guides will help us quite a bit so I just want to make sure that we're in the center of this box although we can easily move things around after we created so it's not necessary that everything's centered perfectly from the beginning so I want to create a letter oh and you know for I these uppercase characters the only guides that we really need to concern ourselves with is the baseline and the cap height and that's this one that's the cap height and this is the baseline so there's the only two that we really need to worry about so I'm just going to left-click and drag and while doing so I'm holding the shift and Alt key alright so I'm just coming up in the size we don't have to get it perfect right away it's not a big deal and there we go so by default I have a stroke that's been applied there's also a fill we do not want to fill so just come up here and just choose none for that all right and for the stroke we have to ask ourselves because when it comes to you know they fought that's very you know a very good and well desired well-constructed font you want to make sure consistency is key and I mean consistency in a multiple multiple areas one of those areas would be the thickness of the characters and the different lines that make up your characters so the thickness that I'm going to choose or trying to go for is more on the bold side so for when it comes to stroke I'm just going to bump this up to around three all right so now one of the goals here is to try to get as close as possible to the top of the letter in the bottom to this base line and cap height up here so one of the things that'll make it easier is when we have a closed path like this or it's and there's no open areas we can click on stroke and then we can also click on one of these so aligned stroke to inside alright so now it's aligned it to the inside and I can just I hold shift and all and scale this up and get it to reach as close as possible to the bottom on top of that grid or the the yeah the guideline all right so that's a very obviously very simple letter o although it's very effective usually simpler is better alright so we're going to keep on going here and by the way we're going to open this up and we're going to name this one by double-clicking the name from the lips to just a capital o and this will come in handy when we go to actually use font self to create the font for us so let's go ahead and now we are going to make it a little bit more unique but for now I'm just going to create the basic shapes for each of the letters we're going to do here so the next one let's do em and right away what I want to do before I do that is we're going to take our rectangle tool and I'm just gonna left click and drag the width of our oh right here the height doesn't matter but the width as long as it matches and we're at the same size we're good to go so I'm going to come back over here and I'm gonna put this we're just gonna start right here although after we're done we'll Center up and we'll make sure absolutely certain that it's centered and by the way we could just get rid or hide these characters we don't need them for now so let me go ahead and actually for it before I do that I hit ctrl C ctrl F just move this over just so we're roughly in the same section and then I what we can do is for the characters we'll just oh there we go hide it alright so now we want this to reach this cap height we'll take both of them holding shift there we go and by the way when I'm moving around if you're unfamiliar the spacebar lets you just click and drag the canvas around and then I'm also using alt in the scroll wheel quite a bit alright so now let's create the basic shape of an M and again a lot of this you know it's completely subjective so here's my take on it's just to create a basic capital M control C control F will replicate it and if we come down here we'll see that it turns into a little rotation type of icon so I'm going to click and drag it and hold shift and that'll get us to 45 degrees while we're turning so now I want to bring it just so the top of it is reaching that top and you'll have a little guide notifier that little purple thing that comes across and I'm going to get real close and make sure we get matched up here on these points as close as possible all right so I'm going to just drag this in just a little bit and then control C and control F will duplicate it right click we're going to transform reflect and you'll see this we want vertical and then hit OK next we'll just take this and let me show you by the way it may be a quicker way of doing this instead of having reconstructed that what we can do is take both of these and control C control F right click transform reflect and then do the same thing then we can just move this over wherever we think we want it to go so we'll say you don't obviously at one point like for instance if we wanted to make it real wide then that's going to throw off the other letters for instance - oh this has a certain width and if it's this far in terms of the width it's going to really throw off the consistency of the letters so I can take this control C control F get it centered up here and then I'll have a good idea of where I should be putting these different paths all right so now I just delete this one this copy drag this in drag this one in and there we go all right so control one by the way just gets you to 100% view so I'm gonna zoom back up here and we'll say that's good now mind you at this point we do have a bunch of different rectangles we will eventually take all these and combine them and merge them using the Pathfinder into a single shape all right so that's our M but one problem is is it's not centered up between these these these vertical lines here so we'll take all of them and then I'm just going to move them holding shift to make sure it stays on the horizontal point that it needs to and we want to make sure that it ends up centered as much as possible now usually it would give me some indication that I'm in the center and I think I am based on the width from here and here but I didn't really see a grid line I've I mean a one of the alignment lines showing up but we'll check that in the future okay so going on we have our o m and now let's try the B all right so I'm just going to take this right here this path and then just copy it because we already need we already know that that's the width we're using so ctrl c ctrl f all right so this is the height of our B that we're going to be using and if we bring back the characters real quick we'll kind of see you know what a basic B looks like we can obviously do our own thing if we wish let me go ahead and hide that all right so a B is a little bit more tricky you know first we had that very simple oh just an ellipse we have the M a little bit more complex than yo we add some shapes to manipulate and work around but again still fairly easy but Abby's a little bit more difficult so it's all just a matter of a muscle memory and figuring out how to create solid letters here so that really relies in understanding those tools as well so a B if you look at it bringing this back you know it's not an ellipse a at the side is obviously like a half circle but then it just comes out or a certain point or per ship or ssin of it comes out into a straight line so the best way to replicate that would be through a rounded rectangle so we have this rounded rectangle tool we're not going to use it just yet though because I want to take this control C control F all right so I held shift just to get it at a percent vertical line and also generally when it comes to capital B's I'm they're not in the center usually this part is smaller than the lower version that's we're kind of just how we're used to seeing it so I'm gonna push this up just a little bit all right so then I'm going to take our rounded rectangle tool and again remember our stroke is three points so that's consistent and I'm just going to drag out roughly to the very bottom right here all right so at this point I kind of just realized we don't even need this this rectangle I'm just gonna hide it for now and now let's go ahead and not copy this so ctrl c ctrl f pull it down now what we can do is take it hold shift and scale it right to that base line now this obviously looks horrendous but don't worry we're gonna make some adjustments that will make it look a lot better so let's go ahead and hide this one behind here alright so the first thing we want to do is let's see where we're okay we're pretty much even there is we're going to click on this and we'll see when we select it we have this little in the property section for transform we have this little more options you could see these are the corner radiuses alright so make sure they're not linked we only want to change that the top left to zero and by the way this is kind of cool as well I like this little teardrop effect that could be something that's a unique treatment to a font to make it unique but I gonna change the we're going to go from a more traditional approach so I'm going to change this to zero as well all right and then do the same thing here so this is zero and this is zero all right we're getting there now let's take these in these little live icons where you can control how much been there is and so we've taken both of them in and now it's a much more I would say better looking consistent looking B alright so let's see how fat it is or how much width it actually has income in comparison to the other ones that we have so we have our o the O is if we get this centered up right there I'm going to simply take this and take the opacity down just so we can get an idea of how much width we have or if we need to extend this at all alright so what we could do is just take this one extend it out a little bit extend that out all right and that looks pretty good right there I just realized I didn't move that either there we go all right great so now I can go ahead and delete that and that's our B for now all right so we have B om and B so really I'm created enough for the letter for the word pom let's see what else that we can work in here so let's try doing the letter G so as you're defining you're probably finding there's certain tools and tips and techniques that your you're gonna need to know on that are handy to know in order to manipulate these letters how you wish so ctrl c ctrl F bring that over to G alright so now let's create a G out of this ellipse right here alright so this is going to rely on using just I you know the Pathfinder a bit and really experimenting with how we want this to be structured so this is this is a G ours isn't going to really look very much like that so here's that one way we can approach this so we could take the pen tool and change this here to a white fill we don't want a stroke all right and we're just going to come off and try to find the center there it is left click hold shift and then we'll do the same thing well let's come out here first do the same thing hold shift so we've basically created a 45-degree angle pie right here alright so looking at this this looks like it's almost closed up too much but let's go ahead and just keep on with the theme real quick I'm gonna take just this path right here I think it you'll see you control F move it over and I'm going to hold shift we're gonna get this lined up make sure it's coming in we don't want to stick out here on the side maybe come here to the center now that actually doesn't look bad now of course you can't export the font with this big white thing hanging right here so how do you fix that well that's where you use the Pathfinder and it's allows you to really manipulate and work with your paths and cut them up as needed so if you go to window Pathfinder it's shown up on my other monitor there we go we can take we can use different shape modes and Pathfinder modes these options here based on what we want to do so we want to cut this path out of this path right here but to do that we want to transform this from a stroke into an outline or to a path so we go to object path and outline stroke so now it's outlined we can no longer I modify the stroke it's already baked into the path itself so now we take these two paths by holding shift you see that both selected this top ones way up here and this ones down here and then we choose minus front tonight now this is oops now that's no longer something that we can modify now it's it's actually empty here all right so that looks pretty good for now so I'm just looking at this and trying to figure out if there's anything that I want to change or address let's do a lower case just for the fun of it real quick so the lower case this is do this one right here ctrl C by the way we can go ahead and outline the stroke ctrl c ctrl f we're gonna move that down now this time oh wait that was stupid I'm gonna back up you don't want to convert this I'm in yet because we need to make an adjustment and we want to mean that stroke with because if I baked that in by converting it to an outline and I scaled it down it would then become maybe like a two point so we don't want to do that so I'm going to just control C control F get that Center now we're going to scale this down until it just meets this X height and then make sure it's centered up alright okay so I just wanted to do one of those lowercase letters just because I just to show you how it'll work in the end so now let's go ahead and I want to take I everything and get them into their appropriate layers just for now and then we'll go ahead and apply some type of unique treatment we could just use it as it is exactly you know make it a real simple type of font usually those are the most popular but let's try to do something a little bit more extra and some type of unique consistent thing across the letters so to do that before we do that rather let's take everything that is a stroke right now and I'm and get it all converted to outlines outline stroke this here is an O this here is also a no but we're going to change this to a lowercase oops there we go all right the that's ready to go we have our M we want to merge these shape so we use the Pathfinder as well so we'll we'll go ahead and take actually before we we merge the shapes I want to apply that treatment to them so right now I'm just looking for anything that's a stroke so these two I believe our strokes still so I'm gonna select both of them object path outline stroke okay so we still have a lot of separate paths composing of these I some of the letters but that's I'm not gonna worry about that now so now let's go ahead and apply some type of really eeeek treatment to this type all right so one thing I was thinking about is you know on certain 45-degree angled lines perhaps the ones that are going in this direction from left to right I'm cutting out adjacent I I guess you could save letterforms so what I'm talking about is if I take this control C control F and I hold shift and just move it up right to around where it begins and then make this white where we got here I'll make this white here and as I say there's a stroke there well this might this might be strokes actually yeah they are you have to fix that real quick I'm just gonna take all of them we don't want him to be strokes we want them to be just to be filled all right so now make sure extends beyond just a little bit and we have to consider do we want it to be this thick of you know negative space going in there I on one hand you you do want it to be thick because you want these to be visible when they're small like they're real small font sizes but you also don't want them to be too thin if they're too thick though then it might make it hard to see what the letter is so you want good readable readability as well so I'm just going to come down a little bit all right so I think that's good you can still see that this is M and it also looks pretty interesting especially when the rest of them have this a treatment applied so once we have this ready I'm going to create a copy so ctrl c ctrl ephram's going to move this over and that way I can reuse it again so now I'm going to take just this letter this eye portion cuz that's the only part that's cutting into it and this by holding shift and then I can just do - front all right so good to go on that letter okay so let's do this where it would make sense to the rest of the letters so I'm going to come over here drag this guy over here alright so where would it make sense to do this here well first let's I copy this so I have two copies one here and here I'm gonna bring the size of this down just a bit and we're going to create more of like a instead of just a square appearance kind of like this jagged slanted 45-degree angle appearance right here so you want to make sure you get up here that it's actually going to create a point right there alright so once we do that just take these two and - front nothing there now all right so let's also take this and let's see what did i do previous to this with the G I'm just looking here yeah same thing alright so what we'll do is take this move this in line with this section let's bring it up on top all right that looks cool take this and that oh it's create a copy before I forget take this and that in minus front awesome so now let's keep on doing that stick with this theme here all right so now I for the B let's see here one thing I want to do is I made this mistake in the first attempt before I recorded this video just to see what it's gonna do I don't like that fact that this brick here this edge doesn't meet this point so the only way we can fix that first let me just move this over to where that would occur right there and that looks pretty close moving right there it's just to move that in and then we could just take this top and this is one of those areas where I wish I didn't convert it to outlines because it's it's no longer a stroke but we can still solve this issue first I'm going to take this right here and I'm going to lock it temporarily so we can't select it then I'm going to take the direct selection tool make sure it's the white one here and I'm gonna move well I'll lock that one as well and I'm going to select everything on this side this is going to select just all of the anchor points then I can move this into place where it looks like it needs to be alright so let me move this over just a bit and I'm looking at the edge of that white portion it's gonna cut out so it just makes it looks like this flows down naturally like that alright cool so I now I'm going to unlock both of those and then I'm going to take this control C control F and we're going to put this one over here and we'll work with that in a bit alright so then we're going to take our anchor point and with the direct selection tool and just move this up move this one up here and move this one right here perfect all right so now with that in place I can take this and this and minus front now the reason that that didn't work is because I forgot we have this shape beneath it so what do we do now well what's this back up take both of these and we'll merge them three unite and then we'll take this one and this one and - run awesome now let's do the same thing here and here and - front now okay when you do that I noticed a little issue yeah you don't want these to intersect because it'll create this little jagged point so what we can do is just move this ever so slightly and you'll find the area where it looks yeah that's pretty much perfect right there so we'll take this this and - front and there we go how cool is that all right so we got Oh me and did I really do that again yeah I didn't get my backup piece right here control C control F we'll do that again - Friant all right we're gonna do this one more time so that's why I cared let's get this drug over here damnit got a zoom up so I'm not rotating it instead of moving it we're gonna do it with our oh as well might be a better way of Tim in this G's okay so coming down here let's just do it right here on this side in these guys sometimes that the guys are guides guides are activated it'll throw you off when you're trying to move these and getting into place that looks pretty good right there all right take these and - front now four will say just just to save time we'll say it's just the uppercase letters that have these a treat these treatments and not the lower case you could do whatever you want obviously alright so now we have all of our different paths let's get them on you know one single path as they need to be so this one is already a B and it's on something that's not named correct so you went this will be capital B we'll go to our G take this and unite oops unite rather all right and this is capital G and then we'll come out take all these shapes unite them this is an M now when it comes to paths that are that have you know that aren't connected like there's actually a clear separation you'll see it turns it into a group where you have two paths and that's fine it'll still work this oh rename that to a capital L oops there's the lowercase damn caps-lock all right and then this down here is just the small oh I think we already have that taken care of make sure this is centered one last thing you want to do is just make make sure everything's centered up where it needs to be I believe this one is I'm going to make sure they're reaching the top you didn't accidentally move them around unnecessarily yep that's good so as you can see I mean dealing with all of the letters uppercase lowercase these special characters down here I mean there's a lot of work that is put into these these fonts as you can see all right I think I like this and now the fun part what is this right here okay let's just get rid of that and this rectangle that was hidden alright so now we're ready to use font self to get this actually working so what we're gonna do is we're gonna come up here to a window and then our extensions and font self alright so with it open I you want to just take one of the letters now it's do if you had all a twosie like uppercase you could just run this but what we're gonna do is just do this individually you're gonna take like for instance the capital o and just drag it over here now there's some type of issue with my screencast recording software or something where it's not allowing me or font self itself it's not allowing me to drag this on top if you do this yourself however you should be able to do it it's also made me have to do with my multi-monitor setup it only works when i drag it over to my other monitor but when you do this it'll have you just break down here it will have an option for you to this drop you know the single character into there so that's what I'm going to do unfortunately I just can't show it on screen it's kind of ridiculous it says any character and you have to make sure by the way that you have it selected and then just to drag it and then it's going to work and then there we go we have the letter O and this is the cool part where we have a live preview of it so this is the font of course it's just a standard text at this point but if you put a capital o you'll have your oh so Oh exciting alright so and then we can just keep on doing this for the rest of them so we select the B drag it of course it's not gonna work for me you have to bring it over and hide it from you guys for some strange damn reason and then there we go we have our OB or B Oh body odor awesome and we'll keep on doing this of course for the rest of these and I see if we can do with multi just as a yep so you can select them all at once and just get it done in one single swoop alright so one of the interesting things here that we found is that the M in o and G are completely off and that's likely because I chose to import an upper case with a lower case alright so what we can do is go ahead and trash I let's see here the M delete gif or glyph rather and then just import this by itself and hide it from everybody and there we go alright so now we can just use this however we want to make a bunch of words or whatever like OMG bomb awesome okay so now once you have all your letters and they're ready to go here I mean this is so simple export name the font like my cool font I'll just call this I oMG bomb and maybe I'll do that oMG bomb well hit okay it's gonna ask where to save this originally I named it slasher and we'll just I'm just going to say this here save it now we can just I open the exported font all right now of course it's gonna fill it in with just you know random text here and then now we can install it just as we would any other font and now if I get a new document up let's close this close that out new everything's showing up off my other monitor I usually work on that one just yeah a thousand points by 700 points will work fine and then we'll use the type tool scale this up come up here to our character panel OMG oh there it is in there we go let's even do this real quick so now we can I use this however II would however that however we would any other font you know we can change it make it different colors come down here and make it real small to see how it works in terms of being small and it still looks pretty good to me I would use this font and there we go awesome stuff and so of course if you you know I you would always want to save this original documents a Tiki you can make edits as you need to and keep on going alright guys hopefully I know that was quite lengthy hopefully you found a lot of use in that I definitely check out you know font self for if you obviously have an interest in making fonts I know you know the people's entire profession or professions are based on creating fonts and typefaces and so it's no easy skill to learn but definitely very fun you can make money doing it if you get good enough by selling fonts and even offering them for free you just have to be creative with that but yeah I'll talk to you guys soon with more tutorials see you later

Channel: DesignCourse

Views: 195,752

Keywords: how to make a font, make a font, create a font, how to create a font, how to design a font, design a font, font designer, fontself, fontself tutorial, font design tutorial, otf font, otf font tutorial, guide, adobe illustrator font design, illustrator font tutorial

Id: tYKsALqR-pk

Length: 42min 19sec (2539 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 19 2018