7 Free Tools for Creating Your Own Fonts

The Fontography Series is supported by join.me, the easiest way to have an online meeting. join.me lets you instantly share your screen with anyone, for free. Use it to collaborate, demo, show off — the possibilities are endless. Try it today. Though there are plenty of fonts out there for you to choose from (and many are even free), you may have the desire to create your very own custom font. Software for designing your own fonts (often called font editors) can be expensive, with FontLab Studio, one of the industry's standards, fetching over $600. What's great is there are several free font editors out there that you can use to create your own fonts. With these tools, don't expect to create high quality professional fonts right from the start — it will take time and practice, just like with any endeavor. Though there are many free font editors out there, we focused on those that are still actively maintained and those that we can comfortably recommend. What font editor do you use?

Getting Carried Away with Balloon Lettering « Previous Next » If there are balloons near by, you’ve probably had or will be having some fun. I love balloons! So in this tutorial I will cover the process of creating some illustrative shiny balloon lettering. You will also learn how to create rounded, semi-transparent, bubble letters that will make up the basis of the balloon lettering. Starting with analog sketches has always been a part of my process, its not completely necessary but I think its extremely important not to neglect actual drawing. I always like to start with a few quick sketches. I also like to explore the highlights with sketches, so that you can really understand how they work and will look. Once you have a good feel for how to draw the shape and highlights of the letters jump right into Illustrator and start developing the letters with the Pen Tool. Try to keep each letter to its simplest form, one shape if possible. I just wanted to have a bit of fun with this, so this is the full set of letter shapes.

Create a Variety of 3D Lettering Effects for Poster Design In this tutorial I will showcase three different approaches for creating simple 3D lettering effects in the context of poster design. Onward and upward we go! Introduction I will start off by drawing the letter-forms for the three words "ONWARD," "AND" and "UPWARD." From there I will show three ways to create simple, yet interesting 3D effects. 3D is the latest craze (See: nearly every movie that has come out in the last two years) but my interests are in 3-Dimensional lettering that has old school, subtle, simple, imperfect, more humanistic qualities. Drawing inspiration from vintage poster lettering, and overall aesthetics, everything will be wrapped together to create the full poster design. Drawing Lettering As always, good lettering starts with a sketch. Step 1a This sketch is very rough and is basically there to reference when actually creating the lines in Adobe Illustrator (AI). Step 1b Open a new document in AI and paste in the sketch. Step 2 Step 3a Step 3b Step 3c Step 4a Step 4b Step 4c

Crimson, Eleven, Delight, Petrichor