Fontographer
So it seems I may now be a typographer. Okay maybe that's going to far. But after successfully (at least in my opinion) creating two families of type I'm pretty much an expert.
This was a lot of fun. Initially spurred by a quirk of writing a book with some friends, I decided that I would make typefaces out of their handwriting (to give the book a journaled feel). After I got theirs out of the way (ie my test subjects) I moved on to my own. This became a more daunting and time-consuming task than I thought I set out on. I normally write in all caps but I didn't think this would translate or read well in book form. So I ended up using uppers and lowers. This wasn't good enough. In my writing there is often emphasis added. That meant I needed either italics or bold. I went with italics, but then decided that I liked that almost more than regular. So I might use that face in the book. Which would mean I still needed an emphasis, so bold and bold italic followed. By this time though, I really wanted my real handwriting, so I ended up doing all four faces in small caps as well. All-in-all it turned out really well, and it's super fun to type and it show up looking like my handwriting.
The time thing I mentioned earlier was an interesting thing to keep track of. Here's a few ways I measured my time investment in this project:
• TV (that I watched in a small corner of my computer screen): 3 seasons of Breaking Bad + 1 season of Sherlock, Luthor and Shameless
• Olympics: 34 gold, 22 silver and 25 bronze medals for team amuricah (U-S-A! U-S-A!)
• Kering pairs (two glyphs manually spaced): 34,486
• Glyphs: 845