Créer une police d'écriture

Le parcours que j'ai suivi pour créer une simple police d'écriture à partir d'un morceau de papier

La police Naaron

LA POLICE NAARON

All the characters of the NAARON font.

Survolez moi

Ce post est fait de trucs comme ça,
survolez chaque images pour voir leur contenu.
Sheet of paper with a draft of each later of the alphabet and how they would look in the Naaron font.

First font draft

This is the first and only draft of what soon after will become the “Naaron” font.
It was written by my friend Finn, for a web comic they’re making called “Naaron” (check it out HERE).
The font is intended to mimic ancient runic languages, foreign and seamingly unreadable, while still being legible once you get used to it.
I wanted to see if i could make an entire font by myself with no knowledge of how to make one, and started with this piece of paper, as it has all the fundamental stuff i would need in order to make a font (ie : the alphabet).
FontForge editor with the letter "S" being edited.

starting with fontforge

After i made the first letters of the alphabet, i booted up FontForge and was immediately confused (shocker i know), so instead of looking around idly for an unknown amount of time, i started searching some tutorials on YouTube.
It took me about 30 minutes of video watching and a couple of hours to get my head around how FontForge worked, which wouldn’t be possible without watching this fantastic video playlist (higly recommend !).

Links to all the stuff i used

Créer une police de caractères s'est avéré plus facile que je ne le pensais, et aussi plus rapide ! Dessiner tout l'alphabet + quelques caractères de ponctuation EST la partie la plus longue, même si définir l'espacement entre chaque caractère sur l'axe Y et l'axe X était long, ça avait surtout l'air long parce que c'est ennuyeux, et dessiner ne l'est pas.

L'apprentissage de FontForge a été plus rapide ce que je croyait en voyant l'interface surchargée et archaïque, même si j'ai eu beaucoup de mal à comprendre le fonctionnement de certaines choses (ex : créer une nouvelle ligature, copier des caractères en MAJUSCULE dans leurs caractères en minuscule correspondant), c'était quand même relativement gérable.

The program Inkscape with the letter N inverted in the style of the Naaron font.

getting started

This being the first time i actually make a font, i needed to know what to use to make one.
Fortunately, there isn’t a million software used for font making, so i quickly settled on FontForge.
But before going into FontForge, i needed to draw each glyphs in Inkscape, so i drew the whole alphabet for 3 to 4 days based on a set of rules i made for the design of all the letters.
The rules were made in order to make the font look cohesive like “no outer edges can exceed the letter size” or “the inner radius will always be 150px and the outer radius 250px”.
Grid containing each character of the Naaron font.

wrapping up


The spacing of each characters was definitely the most time consuming part of the process and the least fun part of it, because you basically need to eyeball most of it based on how “alright” it feels to you.
I also created some ligatures (combination of two letters into one for readability or style reason) for L and O, as well as C and O, because the O could perfectly sit on the pointy edge of the C and the L.
I went through a lot of redesign for each of the characters, for a lot of reasons (the inner radius was wrong, something was slightly off by a few pixels, etc.), i thought it was a pretty nice process and i had a lot of fun !

Créer une police de caractères s'est avéré plus facile que je ne le pensais, et aussi plus rapide ! Dessiner tout l'alphabet + quelques caractères de ponctuation EST la partie la plus longue, même si définir l'espacement entre chaque caractère sur l'axe Y et l'axe X était long, ça avait surtout l'air long parce que c'est ennuyeux, et dessiner ne l'est pas.

L'apprentissage de FontForge a été plus rapide ce que je croyait en voyant l'interface surchargée et archaïque, même si j'ai eu beaucoup de mal à comprendre le fonctionnement de certaines choses (ex : créer une nouvelle ligature, copier des caractères en MAJUSCULE dans leurs caractères en minuscule correspondant), c'était quand même relativement gérable.

First font draft

This is the first draft of what soon after will become the “Naaron” font.
It was written by my friend Finn, for a web comic they’re making called “Naaron” (check it out HERE).
The font is intended to mimic ancient runic languages, foreign and seamingly unreadable, while still being legible once you get used to it.
I wanted to see if i could make an entire font by myself with no knowledge of how to make one, and started with this piece of paper, as it has all the fundamental stuff i would need in order to make a font (ie : the alphabet).

getting started

This being the first time i actually make a font, i needed to know what to use to make one.
Fortunately, there isn’t a million software used for font making, so i quickly settled on FontForge.
But before going into FontForge, i needed to draw each glyphs in Inkscape, so i drew the whole alphabet for 3 to 4 days based on a set of rules i made for the design of all the letters.
The rules were made in order to make the font look cohesive like “no outer edges can exceed the letter size” or “the inner radius will always be 150px and the outer radius 250px”.

starting with fontforge

After i made the first letters of the alphabet, i booted up FontForge and was immediately confused (shocker i know), so instead of looking around idly for an unknown amount of time, i started searching some tutorials on YouTube.
It took me about 30 minutes of video watching and a couple of hours to get my head around how FontForge worked, which wouldn’t be possible without watching this absolutely excellent youtube playlist about fontforge (higly recommend !).

wrapping up

The spacing of each characters was definitely the most time consuming part of the process and the least fun part of it, because you basically need to eyeball most of it based on how “alright” it feels to you.
I also created some ligatures (combination of two letters into one for readability or style reason) for L and O, as well as C and O, because the O could perfectly sit on the pointy edge of the C and the L.
I went through a lot of redesign for each of the characters, for a lot of reasons (the inner radius was wrong, something was slightly off by a few pixels, etc.), i thought it was a pretty nice process and i had a lot of fun !

Links to all the stuff i used

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