Twenty Minutes

So there’s a new font-making product out there: Fontself Maker. It’s a plugin for Illustrator that allows you to drag an entire alphabet straight into the interface and export an OTF font.

Fontself Maker doesn’t have kerning or some other features (yet), so I still threw this into Type 3.2 for a little refinement, adding in the most basic kerning pairs.

STILL! From drawing the letters (Pentel pocket brush pen on cardstock) to saving the gently kerned OTF, this took around 20 minutes or so. This will be a great timesaver for all future fonts — importing SVGs or tracing JPGs into a font creation program is a time-consuming part of the process.

This is a very limited font — you can see above all of the characters I drew to put in.  (The period, comma, and quotation marks all did multiple-duty to create things like the colon and semicolon too.) But if you have a use for it, please feel free to grab it and use it!

(As usual with my freebies, this one can be used for personal and commercial products galore!)

UPDATE: I had a request to add in a few specific accented characters, so I went ahead and added in over 200 of them. And I also saved it out to TTF format, in addition to the original OTF format. It’s still fast work — I took maybe another 20 minutes to do this fresh stuff. (Don’t worry, I won’t be renaming this font Forty Minutes.)