Currently the moment making and selling font is now become one of source of passive income and I think it's a great skill to have. In the process of making your own font, I think you need to learn the basics of typography spacing and also just awareness of letter construction.
There are some ways we range from free to cheap to quite expensive but I just want to show you there's a range of waiting get started and make your advance first up.
1. Fonstruct.com
Fonstruct.com is a free web-based software it's based on a grid layout and you're given a tons of bricks that you can use have different styles like stars and circles. You can use it within your font design, once you're done you can then either share it online or you can download it and use it on your own computer so it's a really good way to get started.
2. Font drafts
Font drafts is a free app for the iPhone and the iPad. In font drafts you just have some simple tools adjustable size pen and an eraser. It has some helpful guides for straight lines and for curves to draw each character out, once you finish you can then preview it just the spacing just the leading. unfortunately this to export it you have to pay $1,99 which is not a problem but you can only export it as PNG pitches so you can't actually choose export it as a font itself you have to use another app for that which is a shame because it'd be great if you could just exported you have a ready-to-use font that's my only downside to this so this is more of an idea generation app rather than actually a complete font package to produce font.
3. Calligraphr
with calligraphr, you print off some sheets use a pen to fill out each of the characters scan into the computer or take a photo of it upload it to the web page and automatically gets transferred into a font you can download this font if you want to, but if you want any extended options of spacing and leading and extra characters than that when you have to pay for this service.
4. iPhone Maker
iPhone maker this is another app which is available for both the iPad and for Windows tablets I thought make it cost $7,99 but with you get more extensive range of options so you have a larger character set so you're looking at Latin you can little Greek Cyrillic other than having a free hand tool you have the Bezier tool so you can get redefined curves and straight in it so a bit like illustrator you can also export as TrueType files, so this is a package that actually produces a font at the end that you can use, you can export from there install it onto your iPad or your windows or onto your desktop computer.
5. Fonts Shelf
Font self is an extension for both Photoshop and illustrator what you do with this is you create your letters in Photoshop and Illustrator open up the panel grab all your letters for say the upper case drag them into the extension and it will automatically generate a font from those letters then you can do the same with dragging and dropping the lowercase letters and then adding in all the extra characters that you want to include in your font.
6. Glyphs app
Glyphs app is the software used personally to create all my fonts. The reason why I use it is just because it's easy to use has an extensive array of options I actually find easier to do all my letters in here than I do in Illustrator because the beta codes are really well done it comes in two sizes that's right word it has a glyphs mini which is about $40 and glyphs the main app which is about $225 pounds both of them come with a 30-day trial. The difference between the two is just one has more options than the other. I started off with the mini version till I earned some money from my font design and then I bought the bigger version as there's stuff in there that can really save you time if you were doing this regularly. You can export in a range of options especially web fonts which is really handy to have as well unfortunately for this app it's Mac only so if you're a PC user then you all need to get something from font lab.
7. Font Lab
Font Lab has a variety of application available ranging from free to $650 frontmatter studio at the top they just have a differ in amount of options you have when you're creating your font. So if you're a PC user then I would recommend grabbing that I haven't really used it that much but it's what half the type designers either use something from Font Lab or Glyphs that depending on the system your ring or your preference
There's my list guys hope you found that useful if there's any resources I've missed then please leave them in the comment section below. I encourage you just to get started make your own font, just give it to your friends or family or share on the internet and maybe it can become a new source of your passive income for you as font designer.
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