How many people here recreate fonts?

[Notarealsignguy]

Unless it's wordy, it's usually faster to recreate the font than it is to scour the internet for it. Plus, who wants a million fonts loaded on their computer that are once and done?

 

[Gino]

Long time ago, back in the late 80's, gerber allowed you to correct or tweak their fonts. It was a very good tool. As you got into it, you could create whole new fonts, too.

I got ANAgraph about a year later and that also allowed you to manipulate their fonts and create new ones. I became friends with a guy who actually made the majority of ANAgraph fonts and he showed me how easy it was. That was then and now, it's now. Don't really need to do it anymore.

 

[Bobby H]

Do ya reckon a supremely intelligent machine would give a hoot about typefaces as far as matching for font accuracy?

If the machine is smart enough to develop creative, right-side-of-brain thoughts it might develop its own sense of visual taste and decide which fonts are attractive and useful.

Yes, creating fonts for the digital world is a whole new wheelhouse, that's why I scratched my head at the question. How many sign design peeps take that kind of time? .... very few.... if any. you'd have a better chance for a one-off with our old school original hand lettering painters than our new fangled digital crowd.

Very often hand-drawn or hand-painted lettering can still look more natural after being vectorized than some stock fonts. But it does require some traditional letterhead skill and talent to hand draw/paint the source letters in the first place.

The Fontself plugins for Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop are arguably the most user friendly (and affordable) tools for creating fonts. The Illustrator plugin is $39. Or you can get both Illustrator and Photoshop plugins for $59. The pro-level apps like FontLab Studio or Glyphs are harder to use but can do a lot more. A type designer needs to know how to write scripts in Python to get the most out of those applications.

Unless it's wordy, it's usually faster to recreate the font than it is to scour the internet for it. Plus, who wants a million fonts loaded on their computer that are once and done?

You don't have to install them all. With a font manager, such as the one included with CorelDRAW, you can just point it to a certain folder and then turn it off when it isn't needed.

 

[JBurton]

If the machine is smart enough to develop creative, right-side-of-brain thoughts it might develop its own sense of visual taste and decide which fonts are attractive and useful.

See, I'd figure the computer is going to be locked in logic, and the most beautiful thing in the world, logically speaking, is order. Order thrives off uniformity, and nothing is more uniform than Courier, where, as any kid who's had to type a paper will tell you, each character from a w to a . takes up one unit of line space.
But yeah, if indeed the robots start developing right side thought processes, I fear for us lowly hoomans.

 

[damonCA21]

See, I'd figure the computer is going to be locked in logic, and the most beautiful thing in the world, logically speaking, is order. Order thrives off uniformity, and nothing is more uniform than Courier, where, as any kid who's had to type a paper will tell you, each character from a w to a . takes up one unit of line space.
But yeah, if indeed the robots start developing right side thought processes, I fear for us lowly hoomans.

I reckon the AI will do everything in comic sans or brush script just to mess with us and show us who is in control !

 

[WildWestDesigns]

I know we get lots of posts on here asking for a particular font, which can obviously save a lot of time, but curious about how many of us recreate fonts for logos?
I know we can use AI based scanning and conversion etc.. but these normally aren't very good with fonts.

I would have thought that being able to do this is pretty much a basic of signmaking graphics

A lot of my work tends to be doing this, and if a font can't be found then I always just recreate it from scratch as a vector. It seems this is a bit of a dying art though as not many people can do it?

I know we can use AI based scanning and conversion etc.. but these normally aren't very good with fonts depending on the source image

Recreating from a logo was almost a daily occurrence. Most of the time it was from a thumbnail quality jpg, although even if it was good vector quality, still had to recreate it for embroidery. The best program that I have actually found for this, even if I was was going for just vector in the end is actually embroidery digitizing software compared to what Ai/Draw offered (ever notice that embroidery digitizers also offered vectorization as well, most do the same thing that I do when it comes to the tools for recreating). Just helluva expensive if just using it for that alone however. Just the best tool that I had for that job when it would come about.

Now, if we are talking about for a keyboard font, I have done that a couple of times, broke out the Ames and did it that way, brought that into font forge and created it. Now this was just for comic work, not for logo etc work, just for my comics and illustrated stories. So this is maybe a handful of times at most for creating fonts. I have done far more converting for embroidery fonts (actual keyboard fonts, if they use the term alphabets, even interchangeably with "fonts", they typically aren't true keyboard fonts, especially if only getting DST versions, but I digress), but that wasn't generating a TTF/OTF though, that was very specific to one piece of software and not installed system wide.