review of sonoguerilla:

Fat Otto: Provided that you did not modify an existing font, (which I don't think you did), this is well rendered and economical in vector nodes. It's not terribly different from a lot of other modern sans serifs, but the technical aspects are very impressive. It would have been nice if you had allowed embedding. For fonts that are free for personal use, you should include a read me.

Helvedding: The renderring is not as clean as for Fat Otto, but this is arguably a better font. As you have told me it is inspired by Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch, I compared the two, and yours is sufficiently different to not in any way be considered a clone. Once again, allowing embedding and including a read me would be appreciated. You have done a good job of updating an ancient style. You might gain some additional inspiration from the work of Dieter Steffmann. I believe all of his fonts are free.

~bito

Review of Pi Luo's fonts (from newest):

Lemons Can Fly: Unremarkable, and somewhat of a disappointment, when compared to your earlier work.

Rocketship Town: Not bad, but I get the impression that you modified an existing font to make this. If would be better if it had some punctuation.

White Tie Affair: This is eye-catching, but the spacing/kerning seems to be off on the (lower case?), I. Again, some basic punctuation would improve this significantly, but it doesn't necessarily need accented characters.

Valerie Hand: Not terribly different from a thousand other 'naive' hand printed fonts, but you get a bonus point for the extended character set. This one would probably look a lot better in a document or in a graphic than it does on the dafont character set page, but it doesn't scream out "install me!"

University High: This is one of the better eroded fonts, and I like it a lot. The right spacing on the lower case i looks to be off. Once again, some punctuation would have been nice.

Make Juice: This one is eye catching. It would make for a good logo font for a Metal band.

Gothical: A winner. One of your best.

Infected: This one had a run at #1 on the top fonts page, and not without merit. I made one of the 12 comments already on the font's page.

Celeste Hand: Not terribly different from a ton of amateurish stuff on deviantArt.

Gordon Heights: This isn't bad, but it looks like a hand drawn version of an existing font with minor variations. I'm not good at font identification, but it does look familiar.

James Han: This one is one of your best. I could see it having a lot of practical uses. The extended character set is most appeciated, Two thumbs up.

Northwood High: the W,X,Y, and Z in lower case and caps don't seem to have received the full treatment, but I could see more than a few people wanting to purchase a license for this one. It could work great in movie or TV credits.

Clarisse: Me likeum.

Black Casper: One of the more interesting ransom note fonts I've seen. Props.

Alien Strawberry: For some reason I like this one, but I don't know why.

Asian Girl: I guess this was your first font, and it shows.

Overall impression: I know that you are much younger than almost all of the dafont designers, but to your credit, I have judged your work as a peer, rather than as an apprentice. If you are modifying existing fonts to make your own, you should stop doing that, as you no longer need to do so. Your original designs are your best ones, not including the hand printed stuff, which you shouldn't be doing anymore at this point. You can make better use of your time.

~bito

@sonoguerilla: Your friend's homepage is awesome. He/she should make some dingbat fonts.

Re: FixCystNeon: This is the DOS Command Prompt font, and the Notepad font in Windows prior to Windows 2000. It was always a system-only font which could not be used in other applications, and it couldn't be printed, (ie: a page typed in Notepad with Windows '95, '98 or ME would appear as a different font if printed). If you are using a Windows computer, Go to Start > Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt to see it in use as a system font. If you are using a MAC, I don't know if you have access to DOS.

I used this source graphic:



Each glyph in the above graphic is contained within a 12x8 pixel matrix, which includes the ascenders, descenders, and the spacing.

I increased each graphic by twenty-five times, then hollowed out the center, so there is an eight pixel black border, with at least nine pixels of white in the interior. It was designed really big so that the black outline would be thin and uniform at small point s sizes, and there would still be some white in the center, at least down to eight points, (which is about 20-24 points size for a standard font). I used MS Paint to make the glyphs, and ScanFont 3.13 to make the
font.

Sample of a FixCystNeon source graphic, prior to conversion to monochrome:



There is a smaller, solid weight of this font available on dafont, Green Screen by James Shields:

http://www.dafont.com/search.php?psize=m&q=green+screen

so I won't be making a small solid weight version, but I hope to do a smaller white text on black background version of the full 255 character set, if I can solve the problem of white slivers between glyphs. The graphic on the download page won't look correct on a monitor that does not have a 4:3 aspect ratio. On wide screen LCD monitors, slivers of white will appear within the panagram. There are a lot of specific instructions on how to use the font within the read me.

For the Obey series, I took colour 'Obey' graphics that I found on the Internet, cropped them, if necessary, and adjusted the sizes to a uniform 280 pixel height, with variable widths. I then converted the colour graphics to monochrome, pixel by pixel, and also edited many of them extensively within ScanFont. The source graphics for the series, in monochrome bitmap, are available on my homepage, or through this direct link:

http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~luc/Obey-Graphics.zip

Thanks for the comments.

~bito

You are what you eat, Jason, and you're a dick. From the looks of your picture, you do a lot of eating.

vinz, I use Winrar for all of my archives, both creating and opening. more than half of the .zips I download here are corrupted. In each case, it appears that less than 100% of the .zip was received when the download completed. In several cases, the 'corrupted' .zip will show only one or two files enclosed, but a full copy will contain more files. It isn't the .zip itself that is corrupted, only the downloaded .zip. Under those circumstances, it doesn't matter which unzipping tool is used. An incomplete archive is always an unopenable garbage file.

Did you open the .zip file first, and extract the font? That's step 1. If you can't open the .zip, try deleting your download, and downloading the .zip again. A lot of people have been having problems with corrupted downloads. As far as I can tell, the problem is that the .zip does not download 100%. More specifically, it appears that the corrupted .zips seem to download some, but not all of the files inside. This seems to apply in multiple browsers, and no one is sure yet why this is happening. The problem has come up only in the past couple of months.

If you're looking for one here on dafont, ChicagoGirl, try clicking the link on the main page for Calligraphy. The results won't all be useful, but the ones that are useful will probably be in there.

@sonoguerilla: 10,000 downloads is probably a bad Sunday for Billy Argel.

Probably the best way to receive comments is to comment on other people's fonts first, but that's not a sure thing, either. See this thread:

http://www.dafont.com/forum/read/492/look-at-each-others-fonts

Shame on you for wasting our time, Miss Murder! His e-mail address IS IN THE READ ME!!!

mynameisjack, I use MS Paint to make my source graphics in monochrome bitmap format, and I use ScanFont 3.13 to make the fonts. Unfortunately, FontLab is no longer selling ScanFont 3.13, but it's not too difficult to find a copy online, if you know where to look. I'm in a small minority, making fonts with this software combination, but it isn't essential to have several expensive graphics programs installed to make fonts.

Studio5 is a difficult program to use for someone new to creating fonts. FontCreator is the least expensive option if you're buying software. For the type of fonts that I make, ScanFont is the only viable option. The latest version of ScanFont, (5), is a plugin for Studio5, so you would need both apps to make it work.

mynameisjack, you can use photoshop to make the images for your font, but you need a font making program to create the font file. The size of images used for the font is determined by the designer, but they must all have a uniform height. Depending on which font making program you use, the source graphics may be imported into the font at actual size, or the font making program may reduce their size to fit a glyph window.

The image file format will depend on which font making program you plan to use. Monochrome bitmaps are good choices, or .eps files or other vector images. Some fontmaking software will allow you to import colour images, but quality may be compromised, as the images within the font will always be black and white.

~bito

We're all assuming that he extracted the font from the .zip before trying to install it.

Floorplans Demo by David Nalle, Scriptorium fonts:

http://sharebee.com/89b3b853

Ah, the wonders of babelfish translation.

Actually, emmalicious77, the majority of Graphic Designers ARE self-employed. They find their own clients, and charge the client an amount that is agreeable to both sides. If the designer needs to use commercial fonts, he/she will usually purchase the fonts, and include the cost of the fonts in the amount that the client will have to pay. The designer then keeps the fonts. Although the self-employed designer can't count on things like a regular paycheck, company benefits, taxes deducted at source, etc., they do have many advantages as well, such as being able to work from home, being able to deduct the cost of some puchases from their income because they are business expenses, etc. One very big reason why a graphic designer would want to be self-employed is ownership of artistic creativity. If you are an employee of a company, and you create something of artistic value, in most cases, it would belong to the company, not to you.

If someone is a graphic design student, they usually wouldn't need to pay for 'free for personal use' fonts while studying, UNLESS they use the fonts for commercial use prior to graduation, (ie: they're doing 'professional' jobs part-time or occaisionally while they complete their courses). If the student is using a font for a school assignment, where they would receive a grade for their work, rather than money, that would be considered 'personal use' by most designers, but you should read the license or read me file with the particular font to be sure.

The distinction between a 'commercial font' and a 'free for personal use' font usually relates to how the font is acquired, and the ways you are allowed to use it after acquisition. For most commercial fonts, you are buying a license to use the font for commercial purposes, in addition to buying the font file itself. There may be additional conditions, like the number of computers on which you can install the font, whether or not you have the right to modify the font in any way, etc. Those rights are usually connected to the font itself, so by buying the font, you don't acquire the right to sell it, or to give it away to other people.

With 'free for personal use' fonts, you have an obligation to compensate the designer or rights holder, if you are going to use their font for commercial purposes, ie: if you are going to make some money by using their font, they want you to give some of that money to them.

In most cases, the cost of a commercial font is much higher than the cost to purchase a license to use a 'free for personal use' font. You're also likely to see a noticeable difference in the quality, as well. Most commercial font designers are professionals, and their commercial fonts are going to be professionally made and technically precise. Most 'free for personal use' designers are amateurs or semi-professional font makers, and you'll expect to see some technical errors in many of their fonts, usually in terms of degradation of the quality at lower point sizes.

The demo versions of FontLab products are somewhat less user friendly. They distort every other glyph.

koeiekat owns stock in High-Logic, which is why he's always shilling their software

This is useful for testing the relative lengths of descenders. In MS Word, type the character set that you want to check, without any spaces, and include the @ symbol and the period, with the @ preceding the period, the period appearing at least four symbols later, and at least three characters following the period. This will create a hyperlink, because the format of the text is xxx@xxx.xxx, which conforms to e-mail address format in html. The blue line for the hyperlink, (if you click the link, it would open MS Outlook, for most people), will coincide with the lowest descender. It also lets you judge the descender length relative to the baseline, and it will show how much some characters may be raised above the base.

Try downloading the .zip file again. There have been a lot of problems with corrupted download zips here. If you can't open the .zip, delete it, and try downloading it again. Sometimes it takes several attempts. This is a recent problem that has affected many people, and the reason why is still unknown.