5 Steps To Create A Custom Fonts

8 min readJul 25, 2023

With rich ready-to-use packages like Google Fonts, it might seem like creating a custom font is not a struggle anymore. You have thousands of fonts to choose from — something surely fit your vision. Right?

Actually, it’s not entirely the case. For one thing, these fonts lack a distinctive style. To make package typefaces more universal, designers avoid bold creative experiments.

In other words, your hands are tied even if you’ll try really hard to stand out from the competition.

Some brands need custom fonts more than others do. If you position yourself as a creative brand or promise to offer a personalized experience, customized elements should be used throughout your branding materials.

Who needs custom fonts?

Let’s see where developing a customized font is not a luxury but a must. If your company works in any of these fields, you should seriously consider investing in a unique font.

Handmade products. If your brand delivers a custom handmade experience in products, it makes sense to follow the same purpose in your brand design. You can incorporate the signatures from your products into the design. For instance, artists who work in a cartoonish style can bring the same element into their logo.
Premium products. After you are above the price tag, there are certain standards to hold on to. Now you are expected to deliver experiences that can’t be obtained elsewhere. Text styling is also a part of a premium experience.
Design and artwork. If you are in the field, making a distinctive touch for your business shouldn’t take too long.

Media companies and printed editorials should pay attention to custom fonts as well.

Where to create a custom font?

If you are a beginner in making custom fonts, it’s best to start with simple tools with ready-to-go templates. Sure, professional software is definitely more functional, but it’s full of unnecessary technical specifications.

Four must-download tools for fun tool creation

PaintFont: free software for turning to handwrite into a digital package. The tool offers a ready-to-use template, ready for filling out.
FontStruct: this tool turns geometric figures into letter curves and shapes. It’s a fast way to switch between edgy official letters and less formal curved lines.
Fontself: the software is compatible with Adobe Suite (Illustrator and Photoshop) and is used to transform on-paper writing into a digital script.
Metaflop: this one is based on the scientific approach to font creation. You need to open the editing panel and edit the letter’s spacing and width by adjusting specific parameters and previewing the result.

The best thing is that these tools work for italic handwritten scripts and official typefaces. It’s really handy if you need to create multiple interfaces regularly.

To use your custom font on the webpage, you need to convert the OTF and TTF file into a Webfont. CreativeFabrica, is a free online font generator tool that converts your OTF or TTF files into the useable Webfont fast.

How To Create A Custom Font?

Having the tools is only part of the process, not even the crucial one. The success of a custom font design stems from a strong creative vision. If you know exactly what you’d like to achieve at the end and save these expectations briefly, the entire project gets twice as fast.

Step #1 — Creating a vision

Making a custom font from scratch is an impossible mission. Finding the right approach to letter alignment, shaping, and spacing without references is hard even for experienced designers. This is why the first step of the process is to do your research.

Notice how BBC follows a unique vision throughout all their projects

Analyzing competitors

Don’t worry. It’s not about stealing good ideas from others. At this stage, you are testing the waters, analyzing the solutions that you like or not. Before you start analyzing, prepare the evaluation criteria — uniqueness, readability, official or informal tone — this depends on the industry.

After you’ve gone through dozens of your customers’ websites, make a detailed analysis that summarizes your research. Save five best options for future reference.

Create a mood board

To come up with a truly creative solution, don’t limit yourself by sticking purely to your field. Instead, look for fan arts, quotes, Pinterest, and explore designers’ portfolios on Behance.

At this point, you want to amass various influences. The more versatile is your reference list, the more sources you’ll have for inspiration.

Exploring movies and TV shows is a great idea. Star Jedi — Star Wars style font is a great example of an iconic typeface recognized by millions of people. Incorporating the features of the movies and TV shows your audience likes allows you to speak their language.

Iconic fonts are created by best international designers — there is much to learn

After completing the material collection, it’s time to unify your vision in the single bigger picture. Create a mood board with the best fonts, color pallets, and pictures that reflect your brand’s spirit and purpose.

An example of a detailed mood board

Step #2 — Create A Detailed Brief

If you cooperate with designers and developers, you must communicate your thoughts to colleagues. If you need to present the vision to colleagues, having a clear brief is an essential requirement.

The best way to get ahead of crucial detail is by asking the right questions. We made a list of essential concerns that must be cleared before execution.

What kind of application will a font have? (main brand’s font for web projects only, specifically for printed materials and others)
What are the required sizes?
Do your team members and audience prefer Serif or Sans Serif (the A/B testing defines this)?
What aspects do you don’t want to incorporate in your font — based on your analysis and mood board?

Make a detailed file with answers to these questions and share the document with all project participants.

Step #3 — Paper Comes First

While software seems to make things easier, it’s a wrong intuition. With handwriting, you have endless correction possibilities and much higher flexibility.

Software is used to transfer your creation to the digital format and refine technical details — edges, curves, lines. Using a pen or pencil saves you a lot of time and is cheaper in the long run.

Must-known tips for font creation

Don’t spend time on the entire character set; you must understand the key font features. Do ‘control characters’ first — these are characters that represent the main typeface’s characteristics — like ‘H, ‘y’, ‘n,’ or ‘o’.
Keep track of height lines and baselines. You’ll need to ensure that these characteristics are even throughout your work.
Avoid moving your hand on paper. When you need to go up, down, left, or right, slide the paper instead. This way, lines will be smoother and straighter.
Make separate variations of the same control characters — don’t just stop on one design.
As soon as you have at least five characters fully refined, discuss the progress with your team. Making more is no use if the result doesn’t satisfy colleagues.

Step #4 — It’s Time Actually To Start Designing

Whenever possible, avoid starting from scratch. You want to make the process as efficient as possible each step of the way, reducing the amount of manual work. Make sure your tool allows uploading paper drawings or ready-to-edit templates from computer storage.

Translate handwritten control characters by uploading the scanned image.
Include other symbols in the font — letters, numbers, and additional characters.
Start editing each character individually and put them together to check the evenness of the height lines and alignment.

You can start with bold, just like Youtube did

To speed up the process, your first goal should be to get a solid grasp of the terminology. We collected all must-know terms — although be ready to expand this list upon your working process.

Glyph — a single character in a font;
Baseline — the line under all characters where they ‘stand’ or ‘sit’;
Ascender height — a defined height shared by all characters;
Descender depth — the length of the strokes that go down on letters like ‘y’ and ‘p’;
Stem — a vertical stroke where the upper elements are positioned (take a look at the T letter);
Bowl — the rounded part in letters o, d, or b.

These essentials should be enough to get you by, although this is only the starting line of all there is to learn about font terminology. There is no need to worry. This knowledge will come naturally as you get better at font creation.

The basics of letter anatomy

Step #5 — Edit Characters As A United Set

Getting caught up in editing an individual letter is a common beginner’s mistake. You want to refine every single character so much that you end up forgetting the technical specifics for symbols that were done before. As a result, letters end up looking fine one by one but put together, and it’s a disaster.

To avoid this pessimistic scenario, test your characters together after each new addition. Whenever you finish a letter, combine it in words with those done before.

Essential testing hacks for a character set

Check kerning and spacing by combining your font with the ones on the mood board;
Change text sizes after creating a new letter;
Test your work in all target mediums — print letters out, publish the text on the website, send an email with an attachment, performed in your font.

The last and final step

All that’s left now is uploading the text on your website. You must download a plugin that makes the typeface accessible from all browsers and devices. For WordPress, it’s Use Any Font — a fast and simple plugin for font integration. For Drupal, we recommend CKEditor, with similar functionality.

Finally, it’s time to show your creation to the audience. The easiest way to get feedback is to start targeted advertising on Google Adwords- You need two campaigns — one with the old font and another with the old one.

To get clear results, build pop-ups asking users directly about the font. You don’t have to keep this practice regularly — the first week is usually enough to understand the dynamics.

At the end of the day, it’s worth it.

Fair enough, creating a custom font is quite a hustle. Still, unique brand typefaces differentiate between a premium and average user experience.

A great experience of a wholesome premium branding

Don’t forget that it’s a long-term investment — the font will work for your business at least for 5–6 years, up till the next rebranding. Some brands use their fonts for decades, and the creative work has repaid the invested time and resources a dozen times.