Designing my own font

Published February 08, 2008
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Over the next couple of days I'm planning on making a font out of own handwriting, so I'll have something that's uniquely mine. I'm aiming for a sort of fun, cartoony font that I can use in both games and in comics.

Currently all I've done is the lowercase alphabet in Inkscape; I'm planning on importing it into FontForge once I'm done. Here's what the typeface looks like at the moment:





It's done in paths in Inkscape, so it's pretty easy to play around with things like the weight (thickness of the lines, boldness) and the width of the font. I'm debating between a more standard width or something condensed. Or possibly both; once it's done it should be pretty easy to make variants.

It still needs some clean up; the "w" and "m" don't look that right, and I'm not too happy with the "s". There's a bunch of small adjustments required for many of the other letters too.

Still, I'd love some feedback on how legible you think the font is before I move on to the capitals.
0 likes 5 comments

Comments

Gaiiden
the letters start getting a bit too close together in the smallest font size you show, but other than that it's perfectly legible to me. Reminds me of Comic San MS
February 08, 2008 09:52 AM
paulecoyote
Another great entry, always look forward to reading your blog. Yeah, that font looks great.
February 08, 2008 10:09 AM
Trapper Zoid
Quote:Original post by Gaiiden
the letters start getting a bit too close together in the smallest font size you show, but other than that it's perfectly legible to me. Reminds me of Comic San MS

The font at the moment is just in Inkscape, so I haven't yet played around with the kerning in FontForge. I expect I'll need to post more examples to get more eyes to check it when I get to that point.

I'm using Comic Sans and the Mac equivalent Chalkboard as one of the inspirations, along with the fonts used in the Paper Mario series, Secret of Mana and a few other game related fonts I found samples of on the internet.
February 08, 2008 04:15 PM
johnhattan
Looks quite nice. Wouldn't mind using it in a Flash project, although I tend to use the super-bold stuff in my games (Boulder, Arial Black, Vera Sans Bold) because my games tend to be pretty light on text.
February 08, 2008 09:03 PM
Trapper Zoid
Quote:Original post by johnhattan
Looks quite nice. Wouldn't mind using it in a Flash project, although I tend to use the super-bold stuff in my games (Boulder, Arial Black, Vera Sans Bold) because my games tend to be pretty light on text.

That's one of the applications I'm aiming for, although another prime motivator is as a comic font. Most webcomics these days either use Comic Sans (which is now completely overused) or one of the Blambot fonts, which while excellent are also in danger of becoming over-exposed.
February 09, 2008 01:19 AM
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