Amaze Your Friends!

…AND SAVE YOURSELF A CRAPLOAD OF WORK!…”what?”  You say?
Here’s how:

Create a font to replace your hand-inked font that takes forever to do!

I’ve always lettered my cartoon work with a unique hand-drawn font and I’ve really become accustomed to it but, it’s a real pain and not near as fun as drawing the actual cartoon. It was becoming a drag.

Here’s an example:
So I went out looking for a good FREE font creating software. What I found after much research was Birdfont. You can get the free version, but for 5 bucks you can get upgrades and stuff…so I opted to blow 5 bucks.

Now that I had the thing, I started creating the font by using Photoshop, Illustrator and Birdfont.

Initially, I drew my letters by hand, as usual but I drawed them real big-like.
Then, I scanned ’em in at a nice, high resolution.  You can see how rough they look even when drawing them this large:

So how to clean them up and make them nice and neat? Illustrator’s “Live Trace” Feature! I save the lettering file as a psd and open it in illustrator. Then, I tweak the settings in Live Trace to simplify any small wiggles and imperfections. I set this up years ago when doing work for Lisa Frank (yes…I went there..I’m a whore.)

and here they are, vectorized:

Now, I created another file in which to drop the single letters and save the file as an svg
This can easily be imported into Birdfont!
So, this is what Birdfont looks like:
You simply click on a letter, enter its editor and import your vector! Here’s what that looks like.
See how it’s all points and curves? You can tweak these. (you can also draw in birdfont using their tools but it’s pretty tough).

See the box around the letters, you move those bars to determine baseling, kerning etc. Now…do this over and over…until you have all your uppercase, lowercase and any symbols you might use.
In the end, you fill out the Font info in the settings and export the file to create a truetype font! Simple. I don’t know about Macs but in Winders, you simply right, click and Install the font.
Here’s what I ended up with. On the left, is a hand-lettered example and on the right, it’s the font.
Look at those old, hand drawn letters:
Now, you can really tweak things…type single letters and skew them. add a stroke, color..you name it!

I’m writing this in somewhat of a hurry…it’s cold down here in the studio! If you’ve got specific questions, send them my way!
Cheers!!