Graffiti artists are creating some of the most exciting new letter-forms and artistic glyphs today. If you've got your own style, turning it into a font will let you take your art on-line. It's not quite as simple as just tagging a piece of wall but, with some effort, you can be showing your style to the world with your own graffiti font.
Instructions
1. Design your letterforms. Write out each of your characters separately. There are a couple things you should keep in mind. A complete font needs more than just the letters A-Z. Think about how you want to handle upper versus lower case letters. And don't forget punctuation characters, accents, things like that. If you launch Microsoft Word and select "Insert Symbol" you can take a look at all the characters that are included in existing fonts. You'll notice there is a lot more there than just the stuff you see on your keyboard. You don't necessarily have to include all these special characters in your font, but they are there for a reason.Another thing to think about is ligatures. These are connections between letters that let one letter flow into another. They're a big part of the graffiti style, but they usually depend on specific combinations of letters and that makes them tricky to include in a font. Consider including variations on the same letter to allow users of your font to include cool ligatures when they work, or let the letters stand alone when they don't.
2. Scan your letters. Here's where you move your art from physical to virtual. You'll want to scan the letters at a reasonable resolution, but that's mainly to make things easier in the conversion process. Since you're going to be making a scalable font, the resolution at which you scan your artwork isn't the resolution at which your font is later going to print. If you set the resolution too low, you could lose some of the finer detail work, but going up to 1200 DPI or more probably isn't going to help you in the end. You can scan your letters individually, or scan a whole sheet at once and separate them later in your graphics program.
3. Convert the scans to outlines. When you scan your letters, they'll show up as bitmap-type graphic images. They're not really letters yet--they're pictures of letters. You'll need to convert them into postscript outlines. Adobe Illustrator is probably the best choice for this if you have access to it. Illustrator's Live Trace feature is designed to do precisely this. Once you've converted your letters, you'll see them as outlines studded with little adjustment handles. Check to make sure you like how the software has laid out the vectors. This is also an opportunity to tweak the shapes if you're not quite happy with how you drew a particular curve.
4. Load your outlines into a font. Once you've got your letters turned into postscript outlines, and you're satisfied with how they look, you're ready to turn them into a font. For this you'll need a font creation and editing program. The standard is Fontographer, but there are several other options. Whatever program you choose will let you specify which outline represents which character. It's sort of like copying and pasting the right graphics into the right boxes, although you can also tweak fine settings here, like stroke weights and rotation angles, until the letter looks exactly like you want it to. When you're done, just turn the program loose and it will convert your outlines into a usable font.
5. Test your font. The final step is to open up a word processor or graphics program and try out your font to see how it works. Check all the characters, combinations, see how they look in bold and italic. Try out everything you can think of and look for things that don't look right. If you find any, go back to the font software, or maybe even to the original graphics program, and adjust until it's right. When you're done, you'll have a working font that represents your own individual style, ready for use on the web or in print projects.
