Keep these eight important factors in mind before letting people access your next custom typeface.
Fine tune your typefaces with this checklist
Whether you're making a new piece of kinetic typography or putting the finishing touches to a dynamic responsive typography set, there are a few criteria to tick-off before your font is ready to be unleashed onto the world. We've put together this checklist it eight important factors to ensure your typeface takes off.
01. Multiple weights and styles
All fonts come with regular and bold versions, but you can expand your font's appeal further by also including multiple weights beyond those basic options.
02. Glyphs
With obvious exceptions such as symbol fonts, all fonts should have complete glyph sets including accented letters and characters such as straight and curly quotes, currency signs and punctuation symbols.
03. Alternate characters
Your fonts should ideally have features that allow them to be adapted in different ways, including ligatures, stylistic alternates, small caps and so on.
04. Spacing
The spacing between your letters should be neither too small, nor too large, both of which will make text difficult to read. play around with your design to ensure that you find the best, most proportionate spacing possible.
05. Functionality
No matter how beautiful your fonts are, no one will be interested unless they install properly in all common contexts: on both mac os X and Windows, in font menus in adobe and microsoft software, and so on.
06. Multiple file types
Make sure you include a variety of file types, such as eps, ai, ttF, and otF, to ensure as many people as possible will be able to use your fonts.
07. Naming
Ensure that the name you give your font is original and won't be confused with others.
08. Originality
Run a check through MyFonts to discover whether your font is too close in appearance to any existing ones.
Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World, T3.com and Tech Radar. He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects.
