How to Design a Decorative Alphabet
Pretty writing has been prized since the beginning of written history with each previous typeface adopted, adjusted and "modernized" by the next generation or artist. Creating your own decorative alphabet gives you the opportunity to make the perfect font for your needs--whether it's entirely from the ground up--or by choosing the elements you like best from other alphabets--and making them fit together. Here is how to design your very own decorative alphabet.
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Instructions
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Decide the primary use of your alphabet. If you're interested in creating a font that needs to be legible in small sizes, use clearer, open starting shapes compared to a more artistic style that would work better for large-size titles or monogram-like applications.
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Choose your basic letterforms to work with. These are the building blocks of your letters, the basic shapes that you will decorate in and around. What to consider here is line thickness, curve styles, all upper case or a mix of upper and lower, and whether to use serifs or not.
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Determine the theme of your font. Are you trying for a retro look, something fun, a highly themed cartoon look or a more formal, elegant style? If you're stuck for a theme, doodle around with a single letter until something clicks for you.
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Mark off top, bottom and midlines on a sheet of paper to determine the height of your letter sketches. Using these measurements for each letter will help ensure a uniform size to your alphabet.
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Start with a very common letter like an A, M or R and create the overall look of the alphabet in this one letter, before moving on to the rest of the alphabet. It may seem logical to lay them all out in front of you and add each change to each letter as you decide it, but doing it this way may result in a less cohesive design than one where each letter is crafted individually.
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Try out your letters in a few words or combinations to see how they look together before committing them to ink or pixels. If you find that there are too many details getting in the way, start pairing down elements in the test letters and then apply it to the rest of the alphabet.
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Trace over the pencil designs in ink to create a complete exemplar of your alphabet. If all you need it for is an example to be used in art, calligraphy or other manual means, here's where you can stop.
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Scan your final designs and open them in a vector-based design program if your desire is to use the typeface digitally either as a font or "alphas" like the digital scrapbookers use. Using the scanned images as a guide, create vector versions of each letter (and number and symbol if applicable) and save each file separately.
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Submit your letters, either hand-drawn on a submission form or through digital files, according to the font-mapper's guidelines. This step is only necessary if you want a font created from your alphabet, but is usually an inexpensive step to take.
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Tips & Warnings
Serifs are the little flags that hang off the ends of some letters and lines.
Computer fonts should also include numbers, punctuation and symbols for a complete set to be mapped for the keyboard.
Vector graphics use mathematical equations for their line compared to raster graphics which are built from pixels. The smooth line of vector art do not pixelate when resized, and so make a better format for fonts.
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Comments
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nice article
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Michael Skinner
May 24, 2009
you are very creative. interesting article
