Yesterday, I was talking about how to choose the appropriate font for your webcomic.  Today, we're going to go one farther.  I'm going to sucker you show you how to create your own font.  Everybody go yay!

Okay, now that you're done going yay, I want you to head over to the following site: Fonstruct.  Fontstruct is a modular font creator that will let you fashion your own fonts.  I know plenty of typographers who started out making their fonts with Fonstruct.  Heck, I even use it to make design fonts on occasion.  And it's a great way to get your feet wet when jumping into the wide world of fonts.

But for those of you who want to go farther, I can certainly understand that.  After all, although I make fonts myself, when we first developed our initial project Hana Road Fruit Party I always thought I'd be using a Blambot font; I'd specifically selected Tokyo Robot for the way it looked.  

However since that time and the development of Claude & Monet, I felt a personal note of pride in my own font craftsmanship.  I wanted something with the feel of Tokyo Robot, but something that was distinctly mine.  So back in May I started work on a new font, something that would fit the need.  Thus, say hello to our own font, Megami Sans.

The kerning, hinting and other major values there are comparable to Tokyo Robot, but it looks distinctively different.  How did I do that?  Well, it take a lot to get correctly.  By this stage, I'm going to assume you've gotten familiar enough with Fonstruct and making your own fonts to be able to do this.  Well, the first step is hand drawing them.

You'll note that at this stage, it looks more like my natural hand printing than it does a comic font, much less Tokyo Robot.  Well, that's fine, because from this point, we upload the scan into a vector program.  You're probably famliiar with the most ubiquitous of them, Adobe Illustrator, but for those of you who can't afford it (and presumably aren't pirating a copy – shame on you if you are!), there are less costly alternatives, such as Corel Draw, the open-source software Inkscape, or the web application Aviary Raven.  In either case, you'll be importing it and tweaking the points to fit closer to what you're looking for, or in this case, what I was looking for:

You'll note that in the screen above, I've imported the hand drawing into Illustrator, putting it on a layer against a layer containing the equivalent glyph (A) from Tokyo Robot.  This allows me to get a closer feel for the font, as I'll be stretching my glyph into the same general shape, adding points as I go.  Points are what makes the vector's shape, adding more points gives me the chance to shape it a little closer to ideal.

Now, you can see the differences between the two when I put the Megami Sans A overlaid against the Tokyo Robot A.  They're close, but there are subtle differences.

Once that's done, I then import everything into a dedicated typography program.  While there are dozens of them out there from FontLab to Fontgrapher to free ones like Fontforge and Microsoft VOLT, my particluar choice is a program called High Logic Font Creator.  I found it to be the most intuitive for me; your mileage, of course, may vary.  In any case, I imported the glyph into High Logic and from there, added the rest.

And that's how it's done, folks.  

Oh, and one last thing, something I forgot to mention yesterday: as you collect more and more fonts, you don't want to keep them all in one basket, or else you'll slow down your system. You'll want what is called a font manager.  Again, there are tons of them out there (my personal preference is one called DiskFont), though for a starter I strongly recommend the freeware AMPSoft Font Viewer. 

Well, that's that for now.  Over the next couple of days I'm going to move away from actual production and into other areas that you should think about, such as copyright, controversy, inspiration and countering burnout.

Tomorrow: Day 19 – Copyright or Kopyright (or, From Pirate to Freebooter)