My first typeface design: meet the Schleuning Hill family.
I’ve always had a bit of a phobia of typeface design—the precision and detailed vector manipulation required, and the mountain of work involved in spacing and kerning all made it seem like a lot of labor for a relatively small pay-off. I get many emails every week hocking hundreds of different typefaces and font families for $1 or for free—it’s not the most enticing prospect to jump into such a large pond.
One software developer, Fontself, has created a remarkable plug-in that makes the process of designing typefaces a whole lot more approachable. Fontself Maker is an extension for Illustrator and or Photoshop that allows you to import your original glyphs (in vector or raster formats) and quickly organize and align them. They include a built-in template that makes aligning and scaling your glyphs a breeze, and the recent addition of nearly magical automatic kerning and spacing capabilities takes hours of tedium out of the process. Fontself Catapult allows one to publish, download, and host their typeface as a webfont. With the added abilities to make color and svg fonts, the one-time price tag of $49 for the Illustrator plug-in or $79 for both Illustrator and Photoshop plug-ins is almost as astounding as the software itself.
The original manuscripts from which I derived the font.
Schleuning Hill in Fontself’s handy template.
When I discovered Fontself, I had just come back from a trip to Portland, Oregon, where I’d purchased a brush pen and some notebooks. I used them to create a font family of two typefaces based on my own handwriting. I named it for the designers of the original carpet in the Portland International Airport, which inexplicably became an ironic icon of graphic design—especially when it was controversially removed and replaced with a new design in 2013.
I’m not sure how much type design I’ll be doing in the near term, but I’m certainly glad to have Fontself in my arsenal should I need to design a custom typeface for my clients’ brands or websites in the future.
Download the font, free.
If you would like to use Schleuning Hill in your work, just enter your name and email address below for the download link. (I respect your privacy, and promise I won’t sell your information or send you a ton of emails.) I’d love to see what you did with it! Feel free to drop me a line to show me how you used the Schleuning Hill family.
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If you would like to try Fontself for yourself, you can get 10% off your purchase by clicking the button below: