Design your own font (tutorial)

Have you ever wanted to turn your own handwriting into a font? You could use it for electronic journaling, digital scrapbooking, spruce up your own blog, and, well, basically anything that you use a regular handwriting font for. Or, you could doodle instead to create your own doodle font. Get creative!

It's relatively inexpensive, easy, and fun. If you use fontifier.com, it's just $9. Their instructions are very easy to follow, but I wish they gave a few tips. I created my first font about 4 years ago, and just recently, I went back for a second shot at it.

You'll need a printer, a scanner, your favorite pen, a thick-tipped pen (like a Sharpie), lined paper (optional), and a photo editing software (optional). 

Here's how you do it.

1. Print out their template on one letter sized sheet of paper.
2. Place the template on top of a sheet of lined paper to help you keep your letters straight. If it's too hard to see the lined paper through the template, try placing a sheet of blank paper under the lined paper to help the lines show up.
   
3. Pick out your favorite pen. Using your best handwriting, try your hardest to fill each letter's space with letters that are the same size, centered, and using the "pips" as the baseline. My first font turned out small (see the example towards the end of the post). If you are using a photo editing software (even Microsoft Paint would work for this), focus more on the handwriting and less on making it perfectly aligned.
   
4. Take a Sharpie or other medium tipped marker and trace your original letters.
   
5. Scan the template back to your computer, saving it as a GIF, JPEG, PNG, or TIFF.
6. If not using a photo editing software, skip to number 8. Open your completed template in your photo editing software. Go through each letter to recenter and trim away flaws.
   
7. Save your new file as a GIF, JPEG, PNG, or TIFF.  
8. Upload your completed template to http://www.fontifier.com/submit.html. Name your font and preview before buying. If there's a letter that you don't like, go back to your template and edit it.
   
9. Pay by credit card or PayPal, download to your computer, and install the font.
   
10. Test your font and share with others, if you desire!

Here are how my fonts turned out.

The first was just my favorite pen (not traced by a Sharpie). I should have printed my letters out bigger and filled the rectangle more. You can see how much space there is between the letters (especially after the capital T) and how small the font turned out compared to a regular font. At this size, the thin weight is good, but when it's enlarged, it's too puny.

The second one is the one that turned out with this tutorial. You can see how the font size greatly improved, and the weight is good for more applications, though it is still wide.

Experiment and have some fun! 

Here's where I sometimes link up!