How To Make Custom Fonts in Adobe Illustrator with Fontself

Overview

Nick Quintero demonstrates how to turn a hand-drawn-style alphabet into an installable font using Adobe Illustrator and the Fontself Maker extension. The tutorial was requested by artist Jeremy Biggers.

Design Process

• Choose a reference or draw from scratch. Nick uses an old, hand-drawn U.S. Post Office sign as a loose guide to letter size and shape, while leaving room to reinterpret it.
• Build letters from basic forms. He explores shapes with a letter-and-grid resource, then creates characters from simple forms in Illustrator. He starts with foundational letters and reuses shapes where possible—for example, adapting an O into a C or using H-like forms to construct other letters.
• Refine the alphabet. He adjusts the letterforms, adds numbers and punctuation, and focuses on uppercase characters. For this font, he duplicates the uppercase letters as lowercase rather than designing a separate lowercase set.
• Prepare characters for Fontself.
  • Place the glyphs on a single line.
  • Group or combine the parts of each character.
  • Align letters consistently along their baselines, with exceptions for characters such as Q that extend beyond the baseline.
  • Position punctuation and other symbols appropriately.
• Import and assign glyphs. In Fontself Maker, he imports uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation. He batch-imports the remaining symbols, correcting assignments if Fontself reports a character as blank or misreads the layout.
• Check and adjust spacing. The Advanced preview helps identify alignment issues and missing characters. Nick recommends using Fontself’s Smart function to set spacing and kerning as a starting point; individual glyphs and settings can still be edited manually.
• Name and export the font. He names the font “USPO vintage” and saves it. The resulting file can be installed, shared, or sold.

Main Takeaway

Fontself lets Nick spend more time designing letterforms and less time adjusting kerning and spacing, while still allowing detailed manual edits afterward.

Creators and Contributors

• Nick Quintero: Demonstrates the process.
• Jeremy Biggers: Requested the tutorial.