How to make your own font

What making a font actually involves

A font isn’t a picture of the alphabet. It’s a file full of outlines, plus the spacing around each letter, the kerning between awkward pairs, and the tables that tell your apps how to set it all in a line. A basic Latin font has well over a hundred glyphs: capitals, lowercase, numbers, punctuation, accents.

Drawn from nothing, that’s months of work before you get to see a single sentence. Starting from a working typeface skips the months. The character set, the spacing and the file structure are already done, and you spend your time on the part that makes it yours: the shape.

That’s how Letterhead works. Every letter is built from the same set of controls, so when you make the stems heavier, every stem in every glyph gets heavier together. The font stays consistent while you push it somewhere new.

Create a font online in eight steps

1. Open the editor and sign up

   Go to the editor. There’s nothing to install. You’ll need to sign up with an email address so your font is saved to your account and you can download it.

2. Pick a typeface to start from

   Free gives you Letterhead Sans, a neutral grotesk, and Letterhead Serif, an old style serif. Paid plans add Letterhead Antique, Letterhead Condensed and Letterhead Editorial. Pick the one closest to where you want to end up. A loud poster face is easier to reach from Condensed than from a book serif.

3. Push the sliders, or grab the letters

   Weight, width, slant, contrast, roundness and serifs each have a slider. You can also drag the letters on the big preview itself: up for weight, sideways for width. Move several things a lot rather than one thing a little. That’s where fonts start to look like nobody else’s.

4. Hit Shuffle when you’re stuck

   Shuffle throws the controls somewhere new. Most results are a starting point, not a finished font. Keep the one that surprises you and tune it by hand from there. The Free plan includes a few shuffles.

5. Check every glyph

   The Glyphs tab shows the whole character set. Look at the letters that break first: lowercase g and a, capital R and S, the numbers, the question mark. On a paid plan, the Specimen tab sets your font from 96 pixels down to 12, with running text, so you can see how it reads as a paragraph.

6. See it in use

   The In use tab (paid) puts your font on a tee, a poster, a hang tag and a shopfront. A font that looks great on the canvas can fall apart on a sign. This is the fastest way to find out before anyone else does.

7. Fix the spacing with kerning

   Kerning adjusts the gap between specific pairs, like AV, To and LT, where the default spacing leaves a hole. On a paid plan you can tune pairs by hand or let Auto-Kern set them from the letter shapes, then fix the few it gets wrong.

8. Name it and download

   Give the family a name and download. Free downloads an OTF for personal, noncommercial use. Paid plans add TTF and WOFF2 and the right to sell your font. Every export carries “Made with Letterhead.” in its file info.

The download only unlocks once it’s your design

Letterhead sells its own typefaces ready made in the shop. So the editor only downloads fonts that have moved far enough from those styles to count as your own design. A meter in the editor fills as you change things. If it’s still close to where you started, the download asks you to keep going.

Nudging one slider won’t fill it. Changing weight, width, contrast and serifs together will. If you just want one of our fonts as it is, buy it in the shop instead. Letterhead Editorial is free there.

How to design your own font that doesn’t look like a default

Decide what it’s for. A font for a band tee and a font for a restaurant menu want opposite things. The tee can be tight, heavy and strange, because it’s read at a glance from across a room. The menu has to survive small sizes and long lists. Write the job down before you touch a slider.

Test words, not the alphabet. An A to Z line hides problems. Type the actual words the font will set: the brand name, the headline, a price. Spacing problems show up in real words straight away.

Go further than feels safe, then come back. Push weight or contrast to the edge to see what the design does there, then pull back to where it works. Small, careful moves tend to land on something that looks like every other sans.

Look at it small. Thin hairlines and tight counters vanish at 12 pixels. If the font will ever be used small, check it small.

A font maker for beginners, and what it doesn’t do

Anyone can be a type designer here, because you’re making design decisions, not plotting curves point by point. That’s also the limit. You won’t draw a custom ampersand or trace your handwriting. You shape a whole typeface as a system, and it stays clean and consistent because of that.

Most people who want “their own font” want a face that looks like their brand, their zine or their merch, and nobody else’s. That’s what this is built for. Hobbyists use it to make something for a single project. People who sell type use it to build families faster than drawing from zero.

What you can do with your font

• Free: an OTF for personal, noncommercial use. Birthday invites, your own notes, trying it out.
• One Custom Font ($29 once): one font family with every typeface and tool, in OTF, TTF and WOFF2, yours to use commercially and to sell.
• Pro ($12 a month or $96 a year): unlimited fonts to sell, and new tools as they land.
• Founding ($149 once): Pro for as long as Letterhead runs. First 149 people only.

Planning to sell it? How to sell a font you made covers the files, the license, pricing and where to list it.

Fonts made from Letterhead Editorial are the exception: Editorial is based on Spectral by Production Type, so what you make from it stays under the SIL Open Font License. Free to use and share, including commercially, but you can’t sell the files on their own. The font licenses guide covers what that means in practice.

Not sure which file to install, or what to put on your website? Read OTF vs TTF vs WOFF2. It also covers installing on Mac and Windows.