custom fonts

Greetings one and all.

Fonts…you either love them, pretend to love them…or despise them from the bottom of your heart.

The number of times I have muttered under my breath when I can’t find a cool font to fit a design or themes cannot be counted easily.
Now this problem has undoubtedly spread to our Springleap designers. It happens more often than I’d like to admit, but designs are easily destroyed by a poor choice of font. The truth is that there are thousands of really cool custom fonts out there on the net, however we urge our designers to move past the point of having to rely on other creatives for font fodder.
No sir, it’s time to transform yourself into a badass font making maestro.

Many of you will be familiar with Fontstudio and Fontlab software…which is great if you can afford it ;)
However there is more to simply going into one of these programs adding nodes and shifting to make custom fonts. There is a whole world of inspiration out there to get ideas for maddeningly radical fonts.
Now I have attached a video, for your viewing enjoyment, which really gave my creative juices a good kick in the bum. What this quick Youtube clip is all about is taking an arbitrary medium, in their case M&M’s and using them to create new and interesting custom fonts.

This video may come across as slightly simple, but just think about the weird and wonderful fonts you could create if you used anything from twigs to paperclips. First off this video is not deeply explanatory. It shows you the basics of what their process is and then how they upload them to a font making program (They used Fontlab). However from a design perspective for our t-shirt competitions there is no real reason to have the software, because you are not adding a full “alphabet” of fonts, rather you are making a custom font that you need to compliment your design.

Just take the first section of the video to heart. Get creative people!
When you are trying to take your design game to the next level and wanting to be better than the average designer, you need to go out of your way to be original.

Take a look at the video and let me know what you think. If you have any good suggestions for people trying to create better custom fonts, share your guru tips.

We are one big family here, by raising the game of your brothers and sisters…you in turn get motivated to do better.

Peace out everyone.

Duncs.

!!