Web Design Fonts

Becoming a Font-a-holic... and Loving It

In a previous article, 'Let Go My Logo,' we explained the importance of never using a standard font. The last thing a company wants is to see their font being used by a competitor. It's the equivalent of a woman going to a party in a new designer dress and looking across the room and seeing another woman in the same outfit. The best way to avoid this calamity (with a font, not the dress) is to create your own font. You can of course edit your company name and/or tag line in a program like Adobe Illustrator, but that can be too limiting. If you create your own font, you can use it for logos, taglines, buttons on your Web site, reports, or anywhere else you may need it. Not only that, it's sort of cool to have a font called - Acme Bold - or whatever your company name might be.

The Logic of Building Your Own Font
Today there are a number of programs that make designing a new type face or altering an existing one fast, fun and relatively painless. When we say relatively painless, we're talking your basic root canal, 'Is it safe?,' kind of painless. Macromedia Fontographer ($339), FontLabs' ScanFont ($360) and

Building a Font
There are two ways to build a new type face. The first is to build it from the ground up. The second, and easier method (which is the one we're taking), is to find an existing font that is close in look and feel to the one you have in mind and change it. Building a font from the ground up can be very rewarding, but also incredibly time consuming. A typical font style is more than the 26 characters of the alphabet. You have upper and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation, symbols and more. All told a typical type font could have over 100 individual characters. It is not necessary to create unique characters for all 100. But you will probably wish to design them for your uppercase, lowercase, and numbers. That comes to over 60.

Kerning
As you create your font, do not forget the importance of kerning. Kerning is the spacing between individual characters. Good kerning separates professional type from the amateurish. The best way to manage your kerning is with 'kerning pairs.' Font Creator Program will take pairs of characters and allow you to manipulate the spacing between them. For example you can bring the 'A' and 'V' closer than 'V' and 'W.' You want your characters tight but not touching.

As you can probably guess, this is not a fast process. Creating a professional type font takes time and patience. Once you are satisfied, you can generate your new font and start your favorite graphics program.