In General Jul 16, 200815
Font Resources: Create, Organize, Identify, and Test
Who doesn’t love fonts! Collecting them is easy, storing them takes minimal space, and most of them are free. But when your collection becomes rather large, do you have the proper resources to organize and test them? Have you ever ran across a website with a beautiful font that you wanted to identify? Or have you ever wanted to create your own font for the sake of tinkering? Well in this article we link a bunch of font resource websites to help answer the above questions.
This is a guest post by Omar the Radwan.
Online Font Making Tools
Fontstruct
A couple of months ago fontshop released an online font making tool called ‘fontstruct’. This FREE flash based site allows anyone to try their hand at the art of font making. Not only is it basic enough for any beginner to pick up, but it also features more complex options for those familiar with type. When finished, you are able to download your newly built font directly to your computer, and also have the option to add it to the ‘fontstruct’ database.
BitFontMaker
Although a couple of years old and still version 0.1, BitFontMaker is an online font making tool that allows you to create Bit Fonts. It isn’t as complex as ‘Fontstruct’ but is very simple to use.
Font Creation Tutorials
Chank – How To Make Your Own Fonts
My First Font – How To Make Your Own Font
Iconian
Online Type Testers and Font Identifier
TypeTester
A great tool for comparing web fonts side by side.
FontTester
WhatTheFont
Font Organizer and Installer
The Font Thing
Windows doesn’t handle the mass storage of fonts very well, so most designers only keep the basics installed. ‘The Font Thing’ allows you to not only custom test each font that is located on your computer, but it will handle the installing and uninstalling of these fonts to keep your system from lagging. This software is FREEWARE, very handy, and is packed with useful features.
Font Making Software
High Logic
High-Logic offers great font creation software at a very reasonable price. FontCreator is their flagship program that allows you to create a Truetype font by importing and vectorize character images or by directly drawing the shapes individually. Just like most feature-packed software, there is a slight learning curve, but the overall options included in this program are well worth the time spent to learn it.
High-Logic has just released a new Script-to-Font style program called ‘Scanahand’. It’s
interface is extremely easy to use as it only requires 3 steps.
1. Print the template page and draw each character using a pen or marker.
2. Scan the finalized paper into ‘Scanahand’.
3. Export your new finalized font and save it to your computer.
Free trials of both can be downloaded from their website.
15 Comments
Jul 16, 2008
Hey, great list of resources. I use the font organizer called Font Explorer, it’s only for Mac users I believe.
- Greg
Jul 16, 2008
I use mostly Type1 fonts. Font organizers that only handle TrueType are therefore useless to me. I’ve used Extensis Suitcase till now, but recently I came across the freeware font organizer FontExplorer from Linotype. I’m going to give it a try.
http://www.linotype.com/3321/freedownloadpc.html
Jul 16, 2008
Great collection Omar, nice one. I’ll certainly be taking a closer look at these links.
Jul 17, 2008
I’m going to be checking out FontCreator definitely. I’ve been wanting to design my own font for awhile now and can’t find any good, current font-making software. Hopefully FC will be the answer.
Thanks for this list!
Jul 18, 2008
I liked fontstruct. i checked them and they are great. thanks.
Jul 22, 2008
Yeah, I like FontExplorerX too, but they’ve taken down the beta version, and I’ve been waiting it’s “imminent release” for about a year now…
Aug 27, 2008
I’m been using a freeware one for long time and I think that it’s a very good option. you can browse both installed and non installed fonts.
-> AMP Font viewer (current version 3.82)
you can download it from:
http://www.ampsoft.net/
It has a temporary font installation until the font viewer is closed. This option is my favourite one! and it is very easy to use…
Sep 4, 2008
I really like your post!…
Great list!
Ovi Dogar
AbsoluteCovers.com
Dec 1, 2008
nice resource , i like some of the new style of fonts, i used on my blog and admired also thx…
Dec 1, 2008
Thanks for these I absolutely love bitfontmaker, anyone who hasn’t yet should check it out
Dec 3, 2008
Personally saying, i had never seen this much big list this before. Many thanks.
Apr 9, 2009
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Aug 28, 2009
would like to suggest http://www.clickforwebdesign.com/ for this category
Oct 28, 2009
helios eclipse..
really luv it wht u’ve been doing rite now..
luking 4ward wit the latez update..
keep it up~
Dec 14, 2009
[...] Font Resources: Create, Organize, Identify, and Test [...]
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