Designing a useful font takes skill, time and requires you to not loose site of your “goal”. If you always wanted to learn how to create a font, then this is the article that’ll help you do just that. Below we’ve gathered several excellent resources that will help you create your own quality font for use in various projects of your choice. Wouldn’t it be great to have the skill required to create a custom font for your clients? Find out how!

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So You Want to Create a Font. Part 1

So you’re a brilliant designer, a master calligrapher, and you’ve learned all about serifs, side-bearings, and kerning. Now you want to create your own font. (What! You haven’t learned all about serifs, side-bearings, and kerning? Well, make sure you read all of the articles on iLT before you embark on font creation! You’ll need all of the knowledge you can get if you plan on being successful! And if you’re not a brilliant designer or a master calligrapher, well, don’t worry—you can still create some beautiful fonts with a little hard work, a lot of knowledge, and a little inspiration.) Here’s Part 2

How to: Make a Hand-Drawn Font

Before I start, let me say that this is by no means the only way to make a hand drawn font. Ever since I began giving away fonts, I’ve had many requests for me to write a tutorial on my font making process, so here it is. This is how I do it, and depending on your responses, I can go deeper into a FontLab Studio tutorial. This tutorial, however, is designed to reveal my process from start to finish. A lot of you may not have FontLab Studio, so you may need to adapt the second half of the tutorial to whatever font software you may have access to. Here we go.

How to Create Your Own Fonts and Edit TrueType Fonts

Wouldn’t it be neat if you could create your own TrueType fonts, name them whatever you want, and actually use them in your programs like Word, Photoshop, etc? I usually don’t write about software that isn’t free, but there’s some really cool software out there that you can use to not only create your own Windows fonts, but also to edit the fonts that are currently on your system!

Creating a Pixel Font From Scratch

We’ll start with some maths first. Fonts are designed in the abstract “FUnit” measurement. FUnits make up the also abstract “Em-Square”. The number of FUnits in an Em-Square is a value you choose when creating a font.

Creating a Font Part 1 and 2

This follows on from my original post detailing the original sketches and tracing in illustrator. Now I have the capital letters for this font set up I need to calculate the cap height, x-height, ascender and descender. As I am only doing the caps for this release that makes life a bit easier but I will still calculate the other heights for when I finish the rest of the font collection.

Create Your Own Font Using FontStruct

Built using a slick Flash-based interface, FontStruct is a perfect example of “social software” done right — a kind of Threadless for typographers. The font construction tool is intuitive and fun to use, and the gallery allows users to share their fonts, comment on other people’s fonts, and download people’s creations.

Creating a Custom Font for Business Cards

If you have the know-how, creating a custom font for business cards can contribute to the overall uniqueness of a company’s first impression, and thus help convert more sales. Creating a custom font isn’t that difficult if you have the right resources, but first it’s important to make sure you really want to use a custom font.

How to Design A Font: {Part 1} Get Inspired!

You always want to be trend setting in the design community, what’s the point of creating the same thing someone else has already? It’s very important to be designing something that nobody has seen before, that has your own style. What I’ve learned is that by looking at amazing work it motivates me to make something equally as amazing. I love checking up on some of my favorite designer’s latest pieces. I would HIGHLY recommend that if you haven’t already gotten hooked up into a social bookmarking site, do it now!

If you’re looking to effectively design one of the most influencing and creative areas of your web site, you need to know a few key points. The header of your web site helps the visitors connect and understand the information that you are trying to provide. If your websites header was not designed to optimize the flow of all information contained between your web site, then the entire layout would seem unbalanced. You headers design is extremely important, this is why we’ve outlined a few points on how to design a quality header.

A Strong Header Must Standout

Your header must display a type of contrast between itself and the rest of the content. It needs to contain certain color combination’s and schemes that reassure the viewer the difference between where the header is located and where the content displayed.

Maintain Consistency

When you’re designing your header you must keep in mind the importance of maintaining consistency between the sites overall theme, elements, content, and footer. If you add a certain degree of creativity to your sidebar, make sure you add a similar amount of creativity to your header as well. It will keep the balance between your design. If you’re able to add these characteristics to your header than you will have the ability to capture your audiences attention from the beginning.

Use Attractive Colors

It’s usually better to try and use warm colors (depending on the design, of course). Those types of colors work like gears to try and stimulate your mind in order to captivate the viewer. Warm colors are the most active and they encourage certain emotions aggressively.

Light, Colors and Additional’s

In the previous point we covered the use of warm colors, now were going to touch on the importance of using light, and additional colors to your advantage by effectively knowing how to combine them. If your header contains at least one or two colors that don’t mesh well, then this will offset the viewer and cause a negative imbalance. There are also a great deal of headers that don’t seem to convey the right user of light within their design. This can also be a detrimental factor in the succession of your design.

Size, Position, and Alignment

The width and height or your header for the most part depends on the size of your layout. At any rate, you shouldn’t use a header that’s too large or too small. An effective header contains a good balance between the size, position, and alignment. Another good point to remember is to not design or use a header that can take up half the page, this is a waste of space, and will end up driving viewers away. Your header should always be aligned within the center of your sites layout, with the exception of any typography used. This will help maintain a well represented and professional design.

Examples:

Pally Giraffe

Go Glamping

The Octonauts

Phizz

Carton Blanc

Mail Chimp

Digimuarai

Tony Geer

Branded 07

Paramore Redd

Dr. Martian

Web.Burza

Marchand De Trucs

New Era Cap Talk

Chris Hortsch

Campaign Monitor

Enrichmint

Wishlister

Cleverful

Holds Worth Design

Octwelve

Kirdan

Icon Dock

R0man

Toucouler

Cogitatur

Biola University

Cow & Monkey

Made in Space

The Amazing Idea Machine