I know, a bit boring, but I'm trying to learn how to create fonts (it's where the future lies), and I'm discovering it's a very bewildering new world. And decent books that can take me from novice to some semblance of understanding what the hell Kerning and Unicode and all sorts of other things are all about?

Using Fontlab Studio on Mac. Having great fun, using Illustrator for the actual design bit, then cutting and pasting straight into the glyph window. By tonight I may have my very first proper font!

Any help greatly appreciated.

(Toddles off to contemplate how to emulate Eric Gill….)

The Graphic language of Neville Brody books are the bible really on this front. He's a bit good at this lark.

I'm presently trying to kern a publication using the typeface from hell. The kerning pairs are all over the shop!!!

Are you going to let us see when you've finished.

I bloody love designing fonts. I've done some awful ones!!! 🙂

Are you going to let us see when you've finished.

No you'll be cruel and unkind and upset me. 🙁

Neville Brody you say? The name rings a bell. I'll check him out. Thanks.

What I'm really after though is a 'how to' like the Dummies Guide series. I have a PDF manual for FL Studio but I could really do with something I can sit down and read over a cup of tea, or have open next to me while I'm doing stuff.

I've done some awful ones!!!

You've shown the forum where to find them too 🙂

Books about actually designing fonts – hmm.. Well there's the FontLab user manual, which is free, though Fontlab isnt. There's also Learn FontLab Fast by Leslie Cabarga – prob a great starter. There's also FontForge which is free, it's more powerfull but learning curve is steeper – it also has a user manual, but it's a toughie. Oh and The Unicode Standard – monster brick of a book but essentially to own. Trawling through typeface specimens is a great source, especially ones from the days of pre-digital printing.
The Elements of Typographic Style – by Robert Bringhurst is a pretty good read, looking at history, tradition etc. It's often called the typographers Bible and it's often peoples first 'proper' book on type.
Oh there's Eye magazine. Plus i bet if you look at the Uni of Reading's website they have a book list or something. http://www.typefacedesign.org
There's a pretty good list here too;
http://www.as8.it/edu/typography.html

THanks BluePalomino, that's very helpful. I'll check some of that lot out.
I thought Fontlab was tough; FontForge looks terrifying! 😯

Just a small amount of Googling reveals just how scary and complex typography is. The Unicode system; seems to be an international coding system for fonts, bit like Pantone or Hex codes for colours, no?

I'm primarily interested simply in being able to create unique fonts that can be part of a brand identity, rather than fonts that are universally accepted! So, limited use and part of a trademark more than something that's freely available. So basically, fonts that can be used as part of a corporate identity, rather than a simple communicative device. Bit like the New Johnston used by London Transport. Something that the viewer readily associates with a particular product.

Bit more like this really:

What a wonderful bit of branding. Simple and easily recognisable. And evocative of the service provided. Why did they ever change it? The newer ones were shit by comparison, don't you think?

Elfinsafety – happy to have advise further, anytime. I use Fontlab and Fontforge. You will soon realise that making the glyphs directly in Fontlab is better than illustrator. Oh and check out something called 'Spiro paths', that is part of FontForge 😉

Thanks BP. I'm going to have a look for that Fontlab book.

I'm used to Illustrator, and find it good to mess about in. I can then simply cut and paste an Illustrator path straight into Fontlab. Little bit tedious as it's one character at a time, but works ok. I'll have a go with me tablet and the glyph creator soon.

Just out of interest, how many hours would you charge for creating a font, say 80 characters? Upper case, lower case, numbers, punctuation marks etc. An hour per character? More? Less? Bearing in mind sketching, creating/refining, then converting to the glyph and then the finished font.

It's like Graphic Design Elfin – the big boys & girls can charge lots more than the startups. As a rule though – when you start up you cant charge by the *real hour* as you'll be charging £100,000's 🙂 heheh, fonts can take a loooong time, months to sometimes years. It's not just each character you need to design, it's the spacing, kerning, and how the whole thing works together. Designing the characters is maybe 10-20% of the whole process. I'd say a good baseline rule for you would be, graphic design hourly rates for 300 hours work. If it takes you 800 hours then hopefully you are still in profit 😉
read this-> http://typophile.com/node/68060

deadlydarcy – If only everybody just listened to me and used Helvetica for everything 😀

Elfin. As has been pointed out; designing a font well is incredibly difficult. It takes loads of tweaking.

Have a look at 'An End to Print' by David Carson too. Great creative use of type

Here's a couple from my bookshelves:
Type and Layout: are you communicating or just making pretty shapes by Colin Wheildon, The Worsley Press.
Stop Stealing Sheep & find out how type works by Erik Spiekermann and E. M. Ginger, Peachpit Press
But I am more a journal layout man/font user than a font designer.

Oh i forgot – 'Designing Type' by Karen Cheng. Is probably a good, unsnobbish, first book on the design process of a typeface. Add that to Learn FontLab Fast by Leslie Cabarga and you are good to get going.

Thanks so much for all your help and advice.

TBH, I just tend to 'dive in' to something I find interesting. That's how I got into design actually, no formal training at all, and little more background other than photography. My interest came from the angle of the power of visual media which I explored while I was at Uni. I'm fascinated by how shapes and symbols convey meaning. My own design philosophy is definitely 'less is more'- conveying as much meaning as possibly through the simplest design possible. My interest in designing fonts came from fiddling with bits of text used with logos. I love the way something like the old BT logo is part of the text too. The font I'm working on now is just something I'm doing to try and learn about font design; I wish I was getting paid for it!!!!! It's fun though, and always good to learn new stuff. I started out just doing one word, the name, then I thought 'how about a whole font like this?'

I woke up this morning knowing that I now need to add upper case characters (was originally only going to be lower case). Bugger. 😀

The bit I'm looking forward to is once I've created a TT font, installed it on my Mac, and can then just type away with my own little characters appearing in words! Ooh!

The next step is to then get others to start using it as well, then surely Global Domination awaits.

I woke up this morning knowing that I now need to add upper case characters (was originally only going to be lower case). Bugger.

erm… yeh… and all the punctuation marks, and other characters ?¶@³²€¾?[½, and stuff for other European languages, all those ðøßæ????þ??âéù?'s, oh and small caps, and ligatures… Only if you want global domination of course.

Binners

At least you can't spell a letter incorrectly

😉

(Although I could see a character set looking something like this…. abcedfghijlmnopqrstuvwxyz)

erm… yeh… and all the punctuation marks, and other characters ?¶@³²€¾?[½, and stuff for other European languages, all those ðøßæ????þ??âéù?'s, oh and small caps, and ligatures…

(Cries) 😥