What is Reddit's opinion of Fontself Maker for Illustrator & Photoshop?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

There is an extension for Illustrator/Photoshop called Fontself Maker. https://www.fontself.com/

Or you can use free trial apps if you're only making one font. Here's a helpful tutorial https://www.hellobrio.com/blog/font-tutorial

Fontself - it's an Illustrator plugin that let's you literally drag and drop letterforms over and it pretty much does all the hard work for you. It's really an amazing piece of work, that they're still adding features too, that the community ask for.

You can get a 10% discount with this referral link if you're interested.

You need software that can compile those vectors into font formats. Fontself is a great AI plugin and is really easy to use, but there are also some stand alone softwares that have more feature, and in some cases, easier to use because they're made specifically for type design. Prices for those standalone ones can appear expensive if you've never done something like it before so I'd say go for something small first and see if you end up wanting to pursue it further from there.

I totally get that the full version of glyphs might be too expensive if you're a student but if it's your first font you might not even need the full version.

If you specifically want Glyphs, Glyphs Mini will probably get you a long way and it's significantly cheaper (49€) than the full version. They also offer 50% discount on the full version for students which would take the price down to 149€.

There's also free alternatives like FontForge. Or cheaper alternatives like Fontself which is a plugin for Illustrator for font creation (they also have a plugin for photoshop). Fontself also offers up to 40% student discounts (it's usually priced 39$ for the illustrator plugin).

I really think Fontself might be what you, and a lot of people who come on this sub, are looking for. For anyone not hellbent on selling their font, it's the quickest way to get to a working font.

You can use the online font creator Glyphrstudio.com, which allows you to upload your own letters/glyphs to create your font, as long as the letters and glyphs are clear images and preferably black and white so that the program better replicates each letter.

The best results (are not cheap nor expensive) would be to use Fontself with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. You can replicate each letter with great and easy precision, and is probably the easiest to use in the way of giving you full control over your font.

The reason I would recommend using Fontself with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, is because Glyphrstudio.com exports Web Fonts which mean that the kerning values (the spaces in between the letters) do not show up on Microsoft Word, which will be difficult if you plan to use this font to write documents. In fact, most free online font creators do not allow your exported font to retain kerning values unless you purchase the full version. Fontself and Illustrator with Photoshop (apart from having 7 day trial periods) do in fact cost, but not as much as most font creators.

I'd also recommend, if you're creating a font based on someone's handwriting, that you look into Copyright Law and Fair Use. If your font is only for personal use, then that's completely fine. But if you plan to upload it online somewhere then definitely look into Copyright Law as well as the differences between Commercial Use and Personal Use (but if you're just creating this for yourself, then skip this part.)

What tools have you tried so far?

I use a combination of different applications. For the actual font creation, I use a plugin for Illustrator and Photoshop called FontSelf. It makes the creation process pretty smooth. It also has lots of advanced options for kerning and such.

I tried a couple of free tools like BirdFont and Calligraphr but I use Illustrator and Photoshop regularly so FontSelf just fit into my workflow.

If you use either, give it a look - https://www.fontself.com/store

Not a professional type designer, other than for wordmarks, but it's a very big hobby of mine. I use Adobe Illustrator and this plugin https://www.fontself.com/. You just drag-and-drop glyphs, or really any compound path, into it and can make typable font files pretty easily.

There are several solutions with varying degrees of difficulty, from teaching yourself to use a type design program (depending if you use a PC or a mac, and your budget) to hiring a type designer. But probably an much easier way would be using a solution like Fontself (Illustrator extension) or Calligraphr (disclaimer: I haven't tested it). The results would definitely be less polished than with a professional designer, but for a font that you can install and type with on your computer, I think it would work.

If you're invested in Illustrator, you might look into https://www.fontself.com/. It's an Illustrator (and Photoshop) plugin for making fonts. Relatively cheap, decently featured and in pretty active development.

If she has Adobe Creative Cloud, get FontSelf. A very simple way to create a font from vectors or images/sketches. There is a Photoshop/Illustrator template available (search on the support pages). It makes a font! You miss many features with quality typography, or good typographic tools, but you make a font.

That, and Sketch (for UI mockups) is still kind of an exclusive, though there're more competitors out now than there were when it was new.

I haven't tested it against making a full-on font, but for dabbling or icon fonts, the Fontself add-on for Illustrator is a cross-platform option that's coming along nicely.

u/TheCuone posted an example of Russian architecture and engineering type in r/typography a couple of days ago. I thought it was a great, almost art deco inspired typeface and I really wanted to create an English version.

I used Fontself and it made things go a lot faster than I would have thought.

I've been a designer for a number of years, but I've never actually specifically pushed out a useable typeface before. This is specifically for display and not for body copy. I can just imagine the eye strain.

I'm sure there are going to be some issues, but let me know what you think!

It was my brother who figured it out, and he used illustrator + FontSelf! It's pretty expensive, but not that hard to use as you can import .pngs as custom font symbols, and then attach them to a specific command (for example, if we write "WOUND1" with the font we get the little heart you can see on Dark Dealings).

It depends a lot on how much you are modifying the font post import. If you don’t need to do any post-import work, fontself will do the job just fine.

If post import work is necessary, then you’ll be charging hourly. Or if significant work is necessary, then I’d probably include a license fee (since you’re becoming a co-designer).

I have had really good results with Fontself. It's easy to use, allows you to set kerning, tracking, cap height, and make different variations of the font (regular, bold, italic, etc) in a pretty simple manner. If you're using Illustrator, this is a go to.

https://www.fontself.com/

Hope this helps you out!

Also not an expert, but played around with Fontself a while back and found that to be super useful. Goes without saying that it's not as fully featured as dedicated font creation software, but gives you the basics right there in Illustrator. https://www.fontself.com/

Having not completed many fonts in lots of applications ;-) the easiest way is FontSelf. A plugin for Illustrator or Photoshop that creates fonts and offers basic kerning and ligature tools.

If you have access to Adobe even a trial would work. You can trace images using Adobe illustrator, then you could use a tool like fontself font maker.

There's a plug-in for illustrator or you could go the Illustrator > Font Forge route (which should work with other applications like Inkscape or Affinity Designer).

I also found a web based editor, which also has a desktop version.

Have you discovered FontSelf? https://www.fontself.com/ It’s an illustrator plugin that turns any vector shape into a font. While it can’t help you with the technicalities of the actual drawing the characters it will simplify the output.

I'll second the Glyphs recommendation (I use it for my own typefaces). That said, if you want something simpler and something that works in Adobe CC, take a look at Fontself

Fontself - it's an Illustrator plugin that let's you literally drag and drop letterforms over directly inside Illustrator and it pretty much does all the hard work for you. It's really an amazing piece of work, that they're still adding features too, that the community ask for.

You can get a 10% discount with this referral link if you're interested.