From the course: Font Management Essential Training

Websites for creating fonts

From the course: Font Management Essential Training

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Websites for creating fonts

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- [Instructor] If you've ever wanted to create your own font you might have been discouraged by the cost or complexity of some font creation applications. But there are some simple options that you can use online if you don't need to jump in right away creating a professional quality font. There are several websites offering free or low cost font creation tools that are fairly easy to learn and use. So let's take a look at a few. The first font creation website we'll look at is this one, FontStruct. FontStruct is a free tool sponsored by the makers of Glyphs, which is a desktop application for creating fonts on the Mac. Here at FontStruct you can create bitmap fonts in a little grid of geometrical shapes like squares, circles, triangles, and so on. And when you're done, you can download your font in TrueType format. And you can also check out the gallery of fonts that others have created and download them for free. Another online tool you can use to create a simple bitmap font is BitFontMaker2. You just select a character to work on, and click and drag to fill in the little squares. When you're done, you can download your font in TrueType format. Another fun way to create your own font is to use a site that allows you to draw characters on a template, and upload it for conversion to a font. One site like this is YourFonts.com. Here you can get a template, print it out, and then draw all the characters in your own handwriting. Then you scan and upload the template for it to be converted into an OpenType font that you can download for $10. Another similar site is this one, Calligraphr.com. Here you can create a simple font based on your writing for free, or you can upgrade to more advanced features like custom letter spacing, ligatures, and larger glyph sets for a small monthly fee. There are also sites where you can upload vector graphics to build fonts. One that I showed in an earlier movie is this one, Glyphter.com. This site is free for basic font creation, or you can upgrade to premium for $5 a month. And a similar site is this one, IcoMoon.io. FontArk.net offers free online font creation with vector tools. And lastly, Prototypo.io is a really interesting site where you can create fonts by adjusting a number of parameters to reshape the glyphs. So you can customize all the details of the letter shapes very quickly. And you can work on the fonts as a whole, or tweak individual glyphs. And when you're done, you can export your fonts to OpenType format. There's a showcase of fonts that other users have made. And the basic version of Prototypo is free, but if you want to move to the professional level features, it's currently $100 a year. So as you can see, there are lots of sites where you can create your own custom fonts using different methods. With some of these free or low cost online services, you might not end up with a professional quality font, but you might be able to create something to fit a specific need, or just have some fun making a font for your own personal use.

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