Every modern typophile–or at least most of them we are sure–sees the absolute multiplicty of digital fonts available for design these days, and eventually wonders what it would be like to actually ‘roll thier own’ and perhaps even sell them to the world.

Designorati:Typography understands. We’ve been thinking about this for an awful long time ourselves.

Announcing a New Series

In this spirit, Designorati:Typography begins a new series today, one we . call Type From The Inside Out. This series, in four major stages, aims to give our readers an idea of the tools to use, what they’ll go through in using them, the design process, to an eventual attempt at online marketing.

Three Stages

We’re going through four stages on our way to typographical orbit:

• Stage One: The Tools. The tools we’re considering for use are the most popular and available, from [1] FontLab, on two levels of price and two targets: [2] TypeTool, FontLab’s entry level solution, a font editor and creator, priced at $99; and thier top-of -the-range Latin solution, [3] FontLab Studio, a full-service professional tool available for $649. We’ll be delving into them, taking an uncompromising look at what they do, how usuable they are, what they can provide you. TypeTool’s review will be posted later today, and the review of FontLab Studio will be released in two weeks’ time.
• Stage Two: Selecting the Tool. With two tools for use, we’ll take a moment and evaluate what we have and where we want to go and go with the tool that is most likely to take us there.
• Stage Three: Designing the Font. This part is a bit open-ended. We’ll go back to the drawing board, grab our paper, pencils, pens, sketchbooks, and Sherpas, and build a font from the ground up. From inspriations to sketches to transferring to digital, we’ll see what it takes to get our vision into a font file.
• Stage Four: Marketing. The logical end of producing a font, if one doesn’t wish to keep it to themselves, is to make it accesssable. The last phase of this series will document the culmination of our development process via marketing our font. We’ll investigate selling it ourselves versus selling it to a foundry, and see what works best.

Along the way we see many opportunities for learning; particularly the enlightenment of typophiles by way of how-to opportunities, which we fully intend to do for both applications, whichever one we do the main design in.

The way ahead looks exciting. We hope you’ll tag along!