After reading in the New Yorker about the great type designer Matthew Carter, and then stumbling across James Kochalka’s personal font, I decided to make a font of my own. It’s a real pain in the ass to letter comics, and I’m always wanting to make revisions after I’ve inked, so if I had my own font, I could simply make the speech bubbles and type the text in after I’ve scanned, finished the layout, etc. Supposedly, you should be able to draw your letters in a vector-based program, then copy them to a font creation program, and voila you’ve got a font. No problemo…if you’ve got the cash for the program. Right now, I’m looking around for a bootleg copy of Fontographer, the program used by the pros (list $300). In the meantime, I’m learnin’ about serifs and glyphs and all other kinds of crap about typography. Here’s a great list of links about font creation, and there’s also this cool Typography wiki at Typophile.com
if you have virtual pc, i have macromedia fontographer 4 for windows
i’m about to go spend 60 bucks for a font–well, once i get my computer fixed. i spilled coffee on it last night and it melted down—to make matters worse, i was 8.5 pages into a 10 page final paper. ouch.
john
drain-no coffee around the laptop! you know better.
good eye ’bout the font. yeah, it works…although the amount of time it took me to make the stupid thing, i might as well hand-letter. i mean, it still looks like a font, right? even if it is my handwriting…