I haven't made my own font yet, but in a typography class with Ed Benguiat we chatted about it. What I vaguely remember is (after some caveats about the value of computers) came something of a recommendation for Fontographer. The other thing he recommended doing was picking a font you liked, blowing it up, and tracing all the characters to get a feel for it. And, then modeling your project off of that work. Kind of a crawl before you walk approach. He also said it took a long time to develop a good typeface. :)

Have fun!

I just finished my very first, most special font ever (Plinky? Plinky!), in a typography class. We used Fontographer, which (I believe) just came out with an updated version for mac osx. We were using the version with classic. My instructor, Anton Marc, seemed to prefer Fontographer to other programs out there. There are, of course, other options, like these listed at cnet. If I remember correctly, my instructor also mentioned that TypeTool is another good option.

Creating a font is very difficult, but very rewarding if you like that sort of work. Highly detail-oriented and kind of repetitive.

The process we used was handlettering, then scanning, then importing into Fontographer. We then tweaked the imported letters obsessively. Of course, if you prefer you can generate the letterforms by computer, and never touch a pen to paper.

I guess my tips would be to research typefaces and typography first, if you're not familiar with it already. Also, draw, draw, draw. Handlettering is not only fun, but useful.

my, my. ed benguiat.

yup--fontographer---it's really hard to make a wholly new font that's legible and useful and not just a derivation of another, tho.

show us Plinky, unc!

(oh, do they still publish U&lc? that was really important to us, fontwise, when i was in school)

There's always room for another crappy free display font, so have at it! (j/k)

But really, a display face of some sort is going to be much easier to handle. Building a readable face for setting continuous text ... that's something you'll want some experience first.

I made a bunch of figlet fonts back in the day. Does that count?

I tried my hand at it years ago. Unfortunately my work got lost in hard drive crash back in the day. I keep meaning to start again, but have yet to do it. I agree, it is a lot of detail work - not just tweaking shapes, but metrics and kerning. That said, it's certainly a worthwhile endeavor.

I'm fond of Fontographer as well. The more sensible option for starters probably would be Typetool.

that's cool, eamon--it's a language? pixels?

I tried once, to make a half-bracketed-serif font in Fontographer; similar to Caslon with flat top curved fillets, but only on one side. I did it as an experiment to discover how much repetitive obsessive tweaking I could enjoy.

I got as far as the lower case s, which stumped me completely, and finally gave up when I realized that the experiment was over.

amberglow: figlet is the interpreter and typesetter. You just create plaintext files containing header information and then the letters in a particular order. More information can be found at the Figlet Home Page.