- Hey, designers.
Exciting news, if you haven't heard it already,
but I have designed my own font.
It is called Grayscale.
It's a handwritten sans-serif font,
and it's available now in my store at charlimarie.com/font.
So go check it out and see if you like it.
But in this video, I wanna walk you through the process
for making this font.
I wanna tell you what it was like to create a font,
to get one designed, 'cause I know it's something
that a lot of designers think about doing.
It's definitely something that I had on my mind
for a long time before I made it.
And I also wanna tell you about some of the decisions
that I made when it came to marketing and selling the font.
So if you've been thinking about making a font yourself,
this video will give you an overview of the process
and a couple of pointers of what to expect along the way.
Let's get into it.
(upbeat music)
When I first started thinking about wanting to make a font,
one of the first things that I did was enroll in a course
called Learn Font Making,
which is by Teela from Every Tuesday.
She's a font designer herself,
and I knew that she would be a great person to learn from.
So she opens up enrollment for this course
a couple of times a year, I think.
And I enrolled embarrassingly back in 2017.
So it took me a long time to get around
to actually completing my font and getting it out for sale.
But I am really happy that I invested in her course.
I just wanted to shout that out.
If you're looking for a tutorial
for exactly how to make a font
and something to follow along with
to get all the steps right,
then highly, highly recommend this course.
It's a very involved process, as I learned.
Way too much for me to go into in this video,
I'm just gonna give you an overview.
So yeah, if you're looking to learn,
want something to follow along with,
there'll be a link to that in the description.
So the first active step in making my font
was to decide on what the letter forms should look like.
What kind of font did I want to make?
To decide this, I just started sketching in Procreate,
writing out different phrases and different styles,
seeing what felt right, seeing what I liked,
and what I thought I personally would use.
In the end, I decided on this really blocky sans-serif,
written with a marker pen,
kind of based on my own handwriting,
but a much, much neater version of my own handwriting.
And I decided on this because I thought it looked cool
and like something that I would use,
but also because for a first font
I thought tackling a sans-serif might be a little easier
than working with a script,
where I'd have to get all the letters, like,
linking up and things like that.
That seemed way more complex.
And so I thought that starting with the sans-serif
would be a good idea for the first go.
Even once I decided on the style though,
there was still the process of writing the letters out
over and over again to get the shapes that I wanted.
But finally, when I had one of each character
written how I wanted, how I liked,
I brought it all into Illustrator as a JPEG
and ran an image trace on it.
But if you have ever used Illustrator
and image trace before,
you'll know that it doesn't produce great vectors,
and I wanted this font to be something
that I'm really proud of.
And so I was definitely not content to just leave it at that
when it came to the vectorizing.
I think this was the stage that I spent the longest on
in the whole font making process was the vectorizing part.
'Cause then I took those image trace letter forms
and I set about perfecting them.
I set about getting every single point
exactly where I wanted, lining up all the letters in a row,
making sure that the baseline, the X height,
whatever it was all sitting where I thought felt good,
because I still wanted that handmade feel to it though.
How I went about refining was actually using an app
called Astropad on my iPad,
which basically turns the iPad into a drawing tablet.
So I could be using my Apple Pencil
to draw the vectors in Illustrator.
And that kept a lot of the handmade feel to it,
which I really liked.
And I just found it easier to do, as well,
to be rounding off things with the Apple Pencil,
rather than with the touch pad.
Once I had all the letter forms,
I followed Teela's instructions of how to set up
an Illustrator file to get them into their best shape,
to copy into the font-making app,
and the app that I used to actually turn these letter forms
into a font is called Glyphs.
I had never used this software before,
but it was what Teela recommended and uses in the course
and walks you through it,
and so I wanted to just use the same one.
It's not a very cheap piece of software, I will say that.
They do have a free trial,
and I managed to get the bulk of my font making done
during that trial.
So kind of by the time I came to the end of that trial,
I knew that this was something I wanted to do more of
and I liked making fonts,
and so I was happy to invest in the software.
This stage is really interesting for me
because it's honestly been a while
since I used a brand new piece of design software,
one that I knew nothing about.
I switched to Figma a couple of years ago,
but that wasn't a very steep learning curve for me
coming over from Sketch.
There was a few quirks,
but in general it was a pretty similar concept.
So it was easy to get used to.
This was a brand new style of designing things for me,
like brand new tools and everything.
I'm definitely still not an expert in it.
So I was glad that I had the course to walk me through it.
But basically how it works is you create a new file
in Glyphs, and there's a space for every letter
of your font.
Then you copy the vector from Illustrator over to Glyphs
and set about refining it in there,
because sometimes a few points do need to be tweaked.
But you get each letter into its space,
and then you've got to stop thinking about
the letters individually
and start thinking about how they come together.
This stage of the process, the kerning, the letter spacing,
I think this is what separates a free font from a paid font.
There's a lot of free handwritten fonts out there,
especially, but they can often feel
like they're a free font.
Like they just feel like they're a little bit lower quality,
than ones you actually pay money for.
And I think it's probably because the creators
of those free fonts aren't spending the time
to kern everything and think about the space
in between each letter so specifically,
'cause it does take a lot of time.
And after having invested all my time in this,
I know there is no way that I would give my font
away for free, because it was so much work.
But it was a really important part of the process is spacing
because it has a huge impact on the overall quality
of your font.
If people can just type with it and it looks good,
the spacing feels right
without them having to adjust anything
because you've already done the work for that.
Teela gave a really great formula for figuring out
the spacing, though, to start with
so that I had a starting point,
and that was to start with an H and an O
and figure out the spacing between these.
Then those spacing of the H spacing, the O spacing,
becomes kind of like your baseline for the rest of the font.
So every new letter form that you put in
and that you're starting to work out the spacing of,
you think, should I use the H or the O for this?
Take a D for example.
The left-hand side of it has a straight line,
just like the H has straight edges,
so you might put an H worth of spacing on the left.
And then the other side of the D has a curve,
kind of like the O, right?
So you might put the O worth of spacing on the right.
And the way Glyphs works is instead of typing a number,
you could just type H in this spacing field,
and it would put the same amount of spacing in there.
So if I wanted to change my H spacing,
it would change it across the whole font.
Works like a variable law or a component tool,
whatever reference makes sense to you.
So I went through my whole font typing things
like O minus five, H plus 10, into the spacing
and using Meet The Ipsums,
which is the website that offers up
a bunch of different Lorem ipsum style text,
coffee ipsum, cupcake ipsum, fun things like that,
copying those in and just looking really closely at words
that are formed with my font together and how they work.
And at this stage, I'm doing all of this within Glyphs,
so I haven't exported it as an actual font
on my computer yet.
This part of the process took a long time, too.
It all took a long time, but I kind of feel like,
I don't know, once I got the letter forms refined
and perfected in Illustrator,
I guess I just expected it was gonna be really quick
from there on out,
but there was still so much to go, as I learned.
So I spent a lot of time refining this
to get it all feeling right.
Then when it was finally done, I exported it from Glyphs
and did some more testing in Figma and Photoshop
and Pages, applications where I thought
my font might be used.
And I ended up then going back and making some more tweaks
and exporting, like, five different versions of the font
in the end.
How you never name something final,
because you're always gonna find something.
Anyway, once the font was done,
the next step was to create promotion imagery for it,
'cause people need to see your font in use, right?
To know what it's gonna look like.
They need to see more
than just the name of the font typed out.
It's good to mock up your font on a few different types
of use cases.
You want some physical products,
some quote layout sort of thing,
just some different ways to show it in use
so that people see its range.
I used a site called Graphic Burger
to find some free mock-up files that I then put my font into
and really happy with how all those turned out.
There's lots of options for getting your font up for sale.
I knew that the main place I wanted to sell my font though,
was in my own store on my own website.
I just think it's always good to be as close
to your customer as you can
with less third paries getting in the way.
I think it's better for the relationship
between you and your customer,
but also then you're probably paying less transaction fees
and stuff like that.
So I built my own store using Webflow E-commerce
on my website and got it up for sale.
Webflow have like a digital download feature now
that I was able to make use of.
And I've got a separate video that's gonna come
all about the store build specifically,
if you wanna hear about the details of that, so stay tuned.
I decided to sell two different versions of my font,
two different licenses.
The first was is a standard license,
which was just download the font,
use it however much you want for your own personal use.
And then the second one was an extended license.
That covered commercial use
or anything that you might end up selling
or making money with.
But with that version, I also included the web font
and I decided to make something extra special
to try and make this extended license
a really, really valuable offer for my buyers.
I included a pack of vectors as well, that matched the font,
because something that I often do
when I'm doing some graphic design is match icons,
shapes, whatever, swatches to the font that I'm using.
So I thought it'd be fun to provide some that match
that were done with the same pen as the font was
so that they tied together really nicely
and people can be creative with my font
more easily, I guess.
So that was all included in the extended license.
And there's a few cases not covered
by that extended license.
Like if you wanted to use a font in an app
or like a place that makes user-generated content
where the font would need to be on a server, in an EPUB.
I just wrote sort of in the licensing information
that people can get in touch with me
if they wanna find out more about that,
because I feel like it's not gonna be super common
that that happens, so I might as well not bother
having it on the website as an option.
But definitely do your research with licensing
and think about it really hard
what you wanna do for your font,
because it is up to you how you choose to license it
if you're selling it through your own store.
So yeah, spend a bit of time on that.
So, the main place that I always direct people to
to buy my font would be on my own store.
But a another place that I really wanted my font
to be for sale was on Creative Market
because that's where I personally go
to look for fonts a lot of the time.
And I wanted my font to appear in searches there
for anyone out there like me
who's searching for our handwritten sans-serif font,
I want them to be able to find mine.
I wanted that to be an option.
But because on Creative Market,
you have less control over the licensing.
And obviously they're getting
a big chunk of the sales as well.
So I wanted to make sure when I launched, though,
that I launched on my own store first and foremost,
because I figured that my audience,
like people who already knew me and were excited about
supporting my work could buy from there.
And that Creative Market is more for new people.
It's more of a way for people to discover me
and discover my fonts,
even if they haven't ever seen a YouTube video
or follow me on social media or anything like that.
To price my font was another conundrum.
This was just another thing
that was really difficult for me.
In the end, I settled on selling the standard license
for $12, which was something that Teela recommended
as the lower end of a range for a font
to start there for your first font,
which I thought made sense,
because obviously I'm only gonna get better
at making fonts from here on out.
And then the extended license I'm selling for $26.
So it's a little more than double
the cost of the standard license,
but you get so much more for it.
So I felt like that was gonna be a really good value pack.
I just did my research and looked at what other fonts
were selling for, and I felt like my prices
sort of sat at the mid-lower end of that scale.
I really didn't wanna come in and undercut
because I feel like that would devalue fonts as a whole.
And that's just not necessary.
I wanted to be where the market was at.
Once I had my storefront ready,
I had my licensing figured out, my prices set,
everything all set up, ready to go, it was time to launch.
I started my launch by sharing it with my patrons first
over on Patreon.
They've been huge supporters for me,
a lot of them for a very long time.
And I always wanna give them a little something extra value
whenever I'm launching something.
So what I did for my patrons was actually just give them
the vector pack file that I'd made for free
and said that if they wanted to purchase
the standard license of the font,
I would upgrade them to the extended one for free
so they could use it for commercial projects
or whatever they needed there.
Then I sent out an email to my email list.
So, I've got about 22,000 people on there,
but a lot of them aren't very active.
I really need to do a clean out of it.
But yeah, I sent out an email, I tested two subject lines,
and a new font to add to your collection
was the winning one.
So most people got that as a subject line on the email.
And in the email, I told a little bit of a story
about how I like to collect fonts
and why I wanted to make my own one,
and then told them a bit about my font, about Grayscale,
and encouraged them to go on over
and check it out and purchase it if they liked it.
I had created images for myself to use on social media
as well, like one specifically sized for Twitter,
Instagram stories, et cetera.
So I posted those too, did some tweets,
did some Instagram posts,
talked on Instagram stories a little bit
about making the font and why I wanted to do it.
This was all trying to, like, drum up attention, I guess,
and drum up interest in the font.
I think it went well, this first launch of mine.
I didn't do any sort of discount
or special for buying in the first 24 hours,
and a font isn't really something that you need urgently,
you know, to purchase urgently.
So there wasn't any reason for people to purchase
on the launch day versus, like, right now, for example,
but I was pleased with how many people
have purchased so far.
The font's been up for sale for about five days now,
and I've sold 45 copies, which is really exciting.
And what's even more exciting to me is that most people
have opted for that extended license.
I think it's only six people
have bought the standard license.
Everyone else has gone for the extended one.
And so that tells me
that that was a really good value product
that most people are choosing it, you know?
So that means that I made a little over $1,000
with this launch so far, which is really exciting,
considering the time that I spent on making the font.
At the end of the week, I sent out another email,
but I sent this one just to people who clicked on the link
in the first email,
but didn't actually make a purchase of the font.
This is really easy to do within ConvertKit,
which is the email marketing software company
that I work for,
but also obviously use for my own email marketing.
And with that, I really just wanted to get their feedback.
I wanted to learn why they didn't purchase.
If there was a reason,
if there was something that I could do differently
next time, and a lot of people replied
and said it was because of price.
Things are tough right now with coronavirus,
which I totally understand.
People are not in a position just to be buying a font.
Like, a font is a bit of a luxury for them at the moment.
There was good feedback, though, as well
about people wanting to see some more example imagery.
Like, people wanted to make sure they saw my font
laid out in a paragraph.
So if you're making your own, think about that,
'cause that's something I didn't do.
And now I'm gonna add that into my store
because it's something people are wondering about.
People also wondered about all of the, like,
multi-language characters too,
'cause I had an example on my first image,
I'll put it on screen right now,
of, like, one of each type of accent,
but I didn't put every single letter that had that accent.
I figured it would be obvious, learned that it wasn't,
because I had a lot of people asking,
do you have this, like, Swedish A with the thingy on top?
And so then I updated my imagery to include
literally every single character that the font has.
So that was a learning for me to make sure I do that
'cause fair enough, people wanna know.
All in all,
I just have a really new-found appreciation for fonts.
I've always been an avid fan of fonts
and always loved collecting them,
but now that I understand the work
that goes into actually making one and the sheer detail,
like, I have looked up so close at every single point
in Grayscale, every single point of those vectors.
And I just have a new-found respect for all of the designers
of my favorite fonts and the ones that I use all the time.
I hope you found this interesting to hear about.
I know this is a long video
and I didn't even go into that much detail,
but that's just how involved font making is.
Like, it's a big process, it's a big project,
and I'm really proud that I finished this one
and I haven't been put off.
I'm already excited to start working on the next one.
I think I do wanna tackle a script front next
'cause they are my personal favorite type of font to buy.
I just love a good script font.
And so I wanna try and make my own.
We'll see how that goes.
I will say, because I don't want you to be put off,
and I know I mentioned that I started this process in 2017.
I took a break from making this font for several years,
'cause I had other things going on, you know,
other projects to focus on.
But when this lockdown hit here in Spain
and I couldn't really go anywhere
or do anything on the weekends, I really had nothing to do
but finally act on this font idea that I had.
So yeah, I've done the bulk of the work of it
in the past few months, if that helps you to know.
Right, thank you for watching.
If you haven't already,
head on over to charlimarie.com/font
and check out Grayscale.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
And maybe you wanna add it to your collection. I don't know.
Thanks for your support.
If you've got any questions about the font-making process
that I didn't cover in this video in enough detail,
then please feel free to ask them in the comments
and I'll answer you down there.
All right, have a good week. I'll see you next time.
Bye.
(upbeat music)