How to make a font in 9 hours

Ray Larabie
Ray Larabie Posts: 1,431
edited February 2017 in Technique and Theory
YouTube: How to make a font in 9 hours
Link courtesy of @fontbullshit on Twitter. Don't eat while watching of you might spit food all over your keyboard when he gets to ð. That may or may not have just happened to me. Enjoy!
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Comments

  • Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian
    Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian Posts: 2,044
    To repeat my comment there:
    Nine hours is way too long for that crap.
  • Paul Miller
    Paul Miller Posts: 273
    Hmm ... perhaps I'm just slow.

  • Bhikkhu Pesala
    Bhikkhu Pesala Posts: 210
    Well, he does call himself Fontbullshit. 

    It's very easy to find fault with someone who is creating their first font. Maybe you have been doing it for a decade or longer. It's not nearly as easy to design a good font as many think so in my opinion he did OK to finish it in nine hours. His video is a lot better than any that I ever made, and it may be helpful to others so why carp about the quality of the font? 

    I created my first original font about ten years ago, and I am still not satisfied. I have no intention of asking for a critique from you guys. I know it's not of professional standards, but it is usable. 

    How long does it take to create a font?
  • Adam Jagosz
    Adam Jagosz Posts: 689
    edited February 2017
    @Bhikkhu Pesala
    His fault is not in the design or his will to share it, but I think rather in his attitude to the font folk. Quoting the video description,
    Yes, fonts take time to make. No they don't take a month, not really. Although, people who make them want you to think they do.
    I don't think I need to expand on what that implies.

    Btw fontbullshit is a Twitter user who posted a link to the video, not any entity identified with the video poster who identifies as "Bewilder Entertainment".
  • Khaled Hosny
    Khaled Hosny Posts: 289
    I made a font in couple of nights and have barely touched it since then, and it is my second most popular font. I also made a font 9 years ago that I’m not very satisfied about and keep working on it still. But there is much more bullshit flying around from “professional” type designers than from this guy, and yes 8,500$ a year to “license” a font is beyond ridiculous, if his claim is true.
  • Christian Thalmann
    Christian Thalmann Posts: 1,983
    Khaled Hosny said:
    I made a font in couple of nights and have barely touched it since then, and it is my second most popular font.
    I made Volantene Script in my spare time during one week and thought that was pretty quick... It's my most downloaded MyFonts offering, but presumably because it's free. :grimace:

    I don't doubt that a type designer can make a popular (not necessarily good) font in 9 hours — but that doesn't count the bajillion hours of training that led to the necessary competence.
  • Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian
    Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian Posts: 2,044
    > it is my second most popular font.

    Yet more evidence that popularity is bullshit.

    > there is much more bullshit flying around from “professional” type designers than from this guy

    Type designers produce some bullshit and some truth. This guy has produced only bullshit.

    > that doesn't count the bajillion hours of training that led to the necessary competence.

    Something that as a rule bullshitters –and those who cherry-pick the bullshit– fail to mention.
  • Khaled Hosny
    Khaled Hosny Posts: 289
    I had zero training in type design or graphic design before I started designing typefaces. I, literally, just opened a font editor and started drawing them.
  • Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian
    Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian Posts: 2,044
    edited February 2017
    Same here. My first "editor" was byte code. The thing is, after 34 years I'm still figuring it out. But fingering bullshit, I was born with.
  • Kristof Bastiaensen
    Kristof Bastiaensen Posts: 20
    Well, I can imagine a full unicode font is much more expensive than a font only for the english language.
  • Jens Kutilek
    Jens Kutilek Posts: 361
    edited February 2017
    The video reminded me of my own first steps in a font editor about 20 years ago. But back then it wasn’t so easy to record everything and make a fool of yourself in front of the whole world.

    Publishing video tutorials on Youtube may be a culture we don’t understand. I know when my nephew was  10, he looked up anything he wanted to do with an application in video tutorials, even "how to install a font in inkscape" and "how to scale an image in gimp". People on Youtube thank others for their cool tutorials, so there may be a pressure (attention economy)  to do your own tutorials when you move inside this scene.
  • Jens Kutilek
    Jens Kutilek Posts: 361
    It took me under 9 hours each to make a lot of fonts, but I didn’t have to design them at the same time ;)
  • Paul Miller
    Paul Miller Posts: 273
    My first font, 'Kelvinch' took about two years of spare time to create, I'm not satisfied with it and I'm working on a new version.

    I had no experience of font design before I started Kelvinch but I had used many different types of CAD system mainly for PCB design for many years.

    I think the first 50% of the work takes a short time, the next 25% takes double that time, the next 10% takes double again and so on until it never gets really finished but gets very close to being finished.

    It is a law of diminishing returns depending on how close to being perfect you want and how much time your'e willing to put in.

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,186
    I can design and build you a 'house' in nine hours. I am neither an architect nor a builder.
  • Craig Eliason
    Craig Eliason Posts: 1,436
    Or Asymtote Fonts.
  • Christian Thalmann
    Christian Thalmann Posts: 1,983
    Khaled Hosny said:
    I had zero training in type design or graphic design before I started designing typefaces. I, literally, just opened a font editor and started drawing them.
    Me too, but I am rightfully ashamed of those early creations now. :flushed:
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,207
    I don’t really keep track of how long particular glyphs take to design and draw, but I do recall that each of these took what seemed like a whole day. The manicule was the result of a lot of research and drawing; while I had great difficulty resolving the components of the superellipse ampersand, which I had also tried in different shapes (e.g. closed loop at the top, and no diagonal), there being three or four developed alternates that were discarded. 
  • Maurice Meilleur
    Maurice Meilleur Posts: 58
    edited February 2017
    Gotta launch a foundry called Zeno's Paradox...  ;-)
    You mean: launch two, and give the slower one a head start? :)

  • Martin Silvertant
    Martin Silvertant Posts: 166
    Crisis was also created in a single day.


  • Christian Thalmann
    Christian Thalmann Posts: 1,983
    edited February 2017
    Martin Silvertant said:
    Crisis was also created in a single day.
    Good effort — and yet, it would no doubt have been significantly better after even just two days. (The spacing of /ur/, for instance...)
  • Martin Silvertant
    Martin Silvertant Posts: 166
    I agree. I don't really see the point in insisting on a typeface being finished in a day, anyway. It's not even a great marketing play. But nevertheless, I was impressed by the work he got done in one day.
  • Simon Cozens
    Simon Cozens Posts: 740
    Martin Silvertant said:
    Crisis was also created in a single day.

    It took him twelve years to create a font in a day.

  • Nick Cooke
    Nick Cooke Posts: 200
    Martin Silvertant said:
    I agree. I don't really see the point in insisting on a typeface being finished in a day, anyway. It's not even a great marketing play. But nevertheless, I was impressed by the work he got done in one day.
    Fast and sloppy isn't impressive.
  • Andreas Stötzner
    Andreas Stötzner Posts: 792
    Please don’t take Crisis too seriously. It was an experimental gag, more or less.
    Surprisingly enough, when used for some headlines and short text, it works rather well, despite some quirks. The spacing issue is atually not that bad as the image suggests, but thanks for pointing me at that, I’ll review this.


  • Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian
    Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian Posts: 2,044
    >  I am rightfully ashamed of those early creations now.

    I'm ashamed of things in my second outline font, on which I spent about 800 hours.

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