Workflow Tip: Illustrator to Fontlab

Sat, Mar 22, 2008

Illustrator, Tutorials


Tutorial: Creating fonts in Illustrator and Fontlab – Part 1 from Go Media on Vimeo

This video is a brief introduction into how to prepare a font you design in Adobe Illustrator for Fontlab. Fontlab is the program of choice for building and managing fonts. There are a few steps that you need to do to prepare your illustrations to work within Fontlab but I tried to show you the most basic way to work in Fontlab.

Later on I will be creating far more extensive videos that will teach you much more that you can do within Fontlab. At Go Media we are going to start sharing video tutorials of how we do some cool tricks and tips on how to work better in creative software.

I have never done a video tutorial before so your feedback is greatly appreciated! Please let me know what you think and how I can improve!

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This post was written by:

katie - who has written 8 posts on GoMediaZine.

I'm a graphic designer here at Go Media with a passion for typography, learning, photography, reading, knitting, and playing music. Check out some of my personal projects here.

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  • Ted
    WOW!!!!!!!!! That was a geat Tut! It is very useful!

    Thank You!!! =]
  • Mary
    Hello guys,

    I have a question: Why does it say the tutorial was created by Jeff if it was actually created by Katie?

    Thanks you
  • Good tutorial, have a question about the initial size of the document? Is there a specific size the document should start out as when creating fonts? Thanks!
  • Another great tutorial! Been wanting to learn how to do this for a while, thanks gomedia
  • ps i love the new video based tutorials, keep em coming!
  • I would say that if you make the font about 900 points in width that would be best. Rule of thumb is the larger you create the font the less it will be messed up when you bring it into fontlab.
  • That was cool. Ta.
  • thx alot for a great tutorial :)!
    now im just having problems exporting my fonts.. i dont have a clue on how to get the to accuatly work out side of font lab.. would be great if someone created a video on that topic :)
    but thx alot Katie :)!
  • Some while ago I wrote about the same thing, how to use Illustrator to draw fonts for FontLab. See it at http://font.is/?p=48

    It is not enough to set the Rulers of Illustrator to Points. You also need to make a fine point grid. If you use that description there is no danger of distortion while copy and pasting between Illustrator and FontLab and you can copy/paste (Paste in Front when you paste from FontLab into AI) both ways as you like and the glyphs will always fit.
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