Designing a Font

Foobar Sans Serif

Foobar is a font that I designed in 2002 using CorelDRAW (version 8!) and scans of my own handwriting. It contains about 100 glyphs—each vectorized by hand—including all ASCII symbols, punctuation, and upper and lower case letters (even though I usually write in all caps).

It took about three weeks (off and on) to finish. I took a pretty haphazard approach to designing the font, but it turned out looking surprisingly consistent. Here's what I did:

  1. Using a quality felt-tip pen and a sheet of lined notebook paper, I wrote the alphabet several times, upper and lowercase seperately. The idea was to make the font as faithful to my handwriting as possible, so I wasn't too deliberate about my lettering.
  2. I scanned the sheet at a high resolution (400 dpi). The file size was hefty, but managable.
  3. I set up a CorelDRAW document with a different page for each glyph, referencing Windows' Character Map for the ordering. Putting a glyph on each page made it a lot easier to navigate the document. I set the page size to 72 points by 72 points.
  4. I opened the scanned image in PHOTO-PAINT, found my favorite version of the glyph I wanted to vectorize, selected it, copied it, and pasted it into the appropriate page in the CorelDRAW document. To make the weighting as consitent as possible, I tried to make the size of the selections uniform by making sure that each selection was as tall as a line of notebook paper. I then used a uniform vertical scaling in CorelDRAW to fit it to the 72 point page. I also made a circle object the width of the average pen stroke, which I could drag over each letter to eyeball the correct weight. Selecting the glyph of a percent sign from the bitmap.

    Selecting the glyph in PHOTO-PAINT.

    Sketching around the glyph with straight lines.

    Forming the outline in CorelDRAW.

  5. Using the bezier tool, I outlined the letter, putting nodes where necessary and eventually forming a closed object. If a letter had more than one part (say, the inside and outside lines of the letter O or the dot and the line of the lowercase letter i), I combined them.
  6. Using the node tool, I selected all of the nodes of the object and hit "Convert to Curves."
  7. From there it was just a matter of "bending" each segment to trace the outline of the image underneath. After shaping each segment, I selected the node adjacent to the last segment shaped and selected "Smooth" (unless it was a sharp corner). This should prevent visible "kinks" in the letterforms when the font is scaled radically.

  8. Tracing the outline to the bitmap.

    The finished glyph.

  9. I used "Auto Reduce" to get rid of the extra nodes.
  10. I deleted the bitmap, and moved the glyph to the proper place vertically on the page (this usually had to be tweaked later, due to the height discrepancies in my handwriting). I lined up each glyph a consistent distance from the left-hand side of the page.
  11. Using the "Export" command, I exported as a True Type file. The dialog will let you export one glyph at a time. I used the black line on the right to set the character width.
  12. To test the font, I had to go into the font folder, delete the latest version of Foobar, and re-install it. CorelDRAW works well for testing the font; it lets you re-install fonts on the fly, which makes tweaking a little easier.

The resuting font looked like this:

Later on I tweaked a bunch of kerning pairs to make the font look less mechanical and more hand-drawn.