Instead of worrying about kerning tables, nodes, and technical encoding, you simply draw your letter, drag it into the Fontself panel, and repeat. The plugin handles the heavy lifting, generating .otf and .woff files ready for installation or web use.
: Compatible with Adobe Illustrator CC 2015.3 and newer on both Mac and PC.
This is both its genius and its Achilles’ heel. By leveraging Illustrator’s pen tool, Fontself allows designers to use muscle memory they already possess. A brand designer can sketch a bespoke logotype, convert it to a font in five minutes, and use that same font for a headline across a pitch deck. The friction of exporting paths, importing into a separate app, and re-exporting is eliminated. This immediacy fosters a feedback loop: draw, test, kern, adjust—all within a single environment. fontself maker for illustrator
Check out this guide to see the drag-and-drop process in action:
Exports standard OpenType (.otf) and OpenType-SVG color fonts. Instead of worrying about kerning tables, nodes, and
Yet, a counter-argument exists. Fontself has also created a new category of “type designers” who would never have entered the field otherwise. A lettering artist who loathes coding can now sell their work. A teacher can have their students create a class font. A non-profit can quickly generate a custom script for a campaign. The tool lowers the barrier to entry so dramatically that it expands the pool of people thinking about letterforms, even if superficially. Historically, every democratization of a craft (from photography to desktop publishing) is met with cries of doom, followed by a new equilibrium where amateur work saturates the low end and professional work ascends to even higher complexity.
Enter .
: Lacks advanced features for creating large type families (like italic guide adjustments) and is limited to exporting .otf files. Pricing and Compatibility