In General Jul 16, 20087

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.