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Though there are plenty of fonts out there for you to choose from (and many are even free), you may have the desire to create your very own custom font. Perhaps you want to design your own unique font for your company’s logo, or you may have a specific font design in mind and, after looking at hundreds of fonts, you’ve concluded that you’d have to make your own lettering to get exactly what you want.
Software for designing your own fonts (often called font editors) can be expensive, with FontLab Studio, one of the industry’s standards, fetching over $600. Though professional font foundries — which make a business designing and selling fonts — would be happy paying this high sticker price, the cost is prohibitively high for those of us who want to build simple fonts.
What’s great is there are several free font editors out there that you can use to create your own fonts. Below, you’ll discover seven of the best free tools for designing fonts.
With these tools, don’t expect to create high quality professional fonts right from the start — it will take time and practice, just like with any endeavor. But, if you’re simply looking to create a custom font or would like to try your hand at a fun, fulfilling and creative activity like font design, these tools will certainly help you get the job done.
1. FontStruct
FontStruct is a free online font editor, which means you can create your own fonts directly in a web browser, without having to install special software on your computer.
Once you’re happy with your work, you can save and download it as a TrueType font file (.ttf), install it in your computer and use it in any Windows and/or Mac application (e.g. Microsoft Office products, Photoshop and so on). You can even use it as a custom web font for your site.
Click here to view this gallery.
Though there are many free font editors out there, we focused on those that are still actively maintained and those that we can comfortably recommend. But if you’re the adventurous type, do check out other free font editing software and projects such as GNU Font Editor, DoubleType, Horus, Bitmap Font Editor, and Bitmap Font Editor.
What font editor do you use? Let us know in the comments below.
Series supported by join.me
The Fontography Series is supported by join.me, the easiest way to have an online meeting. Named one of Time magazine’s best websites of 2011, join.me lets you share your screen so you can instantly get together, collaborate, demo, show off, and more. Plus, it’s totally free. How will you use it? Check it out today.
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