It ain’t pretty.
Today I made a font using a neat web tool called FontStruct. FontStruct is a flash-based web tool for creating and sharing custom fonts. The twist is that you must assemble the fonts from pre-made shapes (squares, circles, triangles, etc.) laid out on a grid.
Another major drawback of such a simple process is that the kerning looks like crap. You can only set the spacing between letters in a very general sense. AT and AN get kerned identically, so the A in PATRICK looks like it’s hanging out by itself.
To test it out I made a simple font on a 4×3 grid. With this size it’s hard to make smooth curves or fine elements and the point size on my desktop doesn’t correspond to the font at all. Such a small grid was fast and I was able to crank out a result very quickly.
While I won’t be winning any design award with this one, I had so much fun making the capital letters that I went ahead and finished it out. Looking back I need to fix the height of the i, j, k and t. Also the Ss’s don’t look right. But who cares, you don’t play Mozart at your first piano lesson, and you don’t learn by not playing.
The best part is that I can download my font and use it on my computer. How cool is that?
Next time I’ll be a bit more ambitious, italic printing maybe?