About a year ago I thought it would be awesome if I could create a font with my own hand writing. I didn’t know if this was even possible because I had no idea how fonts were even made. I did a bunch of google research and realised it is possible! I tried to find some tutorials that would outline the process in a simple way, with software I can use (an afford) but there weren’t many out there so I kind of put the idea to the side for a while. Recently I found a great tutorial on Skillshare so I gave it a shot!
The process it pretty easy to follow however it’s quite tedious and a lot of work. For my first attempt I only created an uppercase alphabet with some punctuation. I didn’t really know what style of lettering I wanted to do, I knew eventually I’d like to have a more elegant calligraphy lettering but also knew that wouldn’t be the most simple to start with. So I just started drawing some letters and found a style I really liked.
The first step is drawing out the letters with pencil on graph paper so they are all the same size. You’ll then want to use a blank piece of white paper or tracing paper over top so you get a clean alphabet to scan. After scanning all of those in you need to use Photoshop adjust the brightness so the black and white have a good amount of contrast (this will make the vectorizing process easier) then cut out each letter and one at a time bring them into Illustrator to make vector shapes.
Once they are in Illustrator you will need to lay them out in order and so they are all on the same baseline and have the same height. There are a few other steps you will have to do before importing them into the Glyphs App.
The Glyphs App is where the magic happens. This is the part that is quite tedious. Bring in letter by letter and than adjusting the kerning etc, it’s a lot of work! It’s definitely worth it once you’re done. You can purchase this font, Witch Baby on Creative Market for $5.00.
When I was finished I realised my font is similar to the American Horror Story type.
