The idea of creating a font had never crossed my mind before. It always seemed like an impossible feat that would require too much effort. So why did I make it after all?
The story of how it all started takes place in my parents’ house. I was chilling on the couch, flipping through channels on the TV when I noticed an old Soviet clock that my parents had since we first moved in.
But this time I observed the typography on the clock face. It was squarish and bold with sharp edges. It had a retro yet modern feel to it that I loved. I took some pictures and spent an hour searching the internet to see if there was anything similar but I came up empty-handed.
Then I remembered one of my favorite graphic designers Aaron Draplin and how he created his font. He stumbled upon an old industrial warehouse with a font he had never seen before and searched the internet for something similar but found nothing.
So what did he do? He decided to recreate the font in his own way and used it exclusively for himself for 10 years until Lost Type remade the typeface fully and called it DDC Hardware.
“I acted on something that was dead and made it new”
— Aaron Draplin.
Aaron James Draplin: Things That Don’t Have a Thing to Do with Graphic Design
So I thought to myself, how hard could it be to create a whole font with just the numbers? I took a picture of every number and imported it to adobe illustrator, then I created a grid system where every letter and number had their own restrictions like the line weight, box guidelines, and roundness.
Here is how the grid worked before rounding the corners
I had made great progress in creating a whole alphabet using only number references. But then I hit a roadblock — I had all the vector files for the letters and numbers, but I didn’t know how to compile them into a font.
Font creation process
I watched some YouTube tutorials and found them too difficult to follow. As a result, I felt unmotivated and gave up on my project for some time.
Two weeks had passed and I remembered my unfinished typeface project, determined to finish it I opened up some articles and YouTube videos once more.
I downloaded FontForge, an Open Source font editor software that is free for everybody, and imported all letters, numbers, and special characters, fixed their kerning, letter spacing and it was finally done, my project is finally reaching its end.
My font in FontForge
Now I needed to create a pleasantly looking presentation for my typeface on Behance and import it to some font website where everyone could download it for free.
But wait, let’s go back a bit, before the creation of this typeface, let’s look back at my design portfolio, my Behance page, and how it looked. Well, it was filled with mediocre work that had at most 50 views each and I wasn’t feeling too great about that. I thought that this project will be my magnum opus and had big hopes for it.
Okay, back to the project, I finished everything up, I posted my typeface on Behance and made it free and on the first day I got 120 views on my project and it felt nice, but not what I expected. The next day I get a message from the Pixel Surplus Behance page and they want to represent this font with me and make it downloadable on their site, so of course, I agreed.
We posted this font as collaborators and it went straight to their Behance page with 80.7k followers. It got almost 600 views on the first day and around 400 views on the next day.
Those numbers don’t really mean to me today, but 2 years ago, as a novice designer, these numbers felt like I was finally getting some good recognition.
As of today, my typeface project has 2.7k views on Behance and is my second most viewed work that I made.
So what did I learn from all of this?
Here is a mini list of some stuff that I learned in my typeface journey.
Anyone can create a typeface with just enough motivation
Giving away stuff for free can you give you good recognition
Old stuff can be recycled and reused.
Don’t give up on your ongoing projects.
All in all this project gave me a huge motivation boost and made me a better designer after all.
Thank you for reading my article and have a nice day.
Written by Konstantinas Ladauskas