@ d[esign]: To put graphics in your post, do the following:

1) Type [ img ], but don't have any spaces between the brackets and the letters. I have to type it this way for the text to display properly in the forum post. The img can be in upper or lower case, and these are the square brackets between the P and the backslash on your keyboard.

2) Type, or copy/paste, the url of your image. There should be no space between the right bracket and the H in http.

3 Following the url of the image, type [ /img ], again, with no spaces between the end of the image address and the left bracket, and with no spaces between the left bracket and the forward slash, and no spaces between the l in url and the right bracket.

If you want to include a hyperlink to an Internet page, follow the same procedure above, but substitute url for img.

I looked at your commercial fonts, but I won't be doing reviews of anyone's commercial fonts, because they would and should be judged on a completely different basis. For a free or shareware font, my decision is "is it worth the bandwidth and the diskspace?" For a commercial font, the decision is "is it worth the money?" All of my reviews so far have taken into account amateur or semi-pro status, and the expectations of that level of expertise. When fonts are offered for sale, their quality should be judged against the standards of other commercial fonts. I hope some people will give you reviews of your commercial work. Unfortunately, I won't be one of them.

I am in no way an expert in fonts. I don't even read the font identification forum, and there probably aren't more than 100 fonts that I can identify just by a text sample, (but I could probably identify the designer on many more, just not the font names). I just decided to start doing reviews because kirksucks wanted some feedback, per the first post in the thread, and nobody else was doing it, so I took the initiative. My reviews are simply that, what I think of the work by the people who have asked for feedback. If you read all of them, you'll know that I'm not fond of hand printed fonts, mostly because there are already too many of these. I also have expectations that more recent work will be equal to, or better in quality than previous work, which is why I review them in sequence, from most recent. Like most of us, I google my own work every so often. The only online reviews of my Obey series are "Dude has waaay too much time on his hands-" and something on a Croatian blog.

Here's something interesting that a guy named Dennis Jansen did with my AmyBats fonts:

http://sharebee.com/158a5243

That series was surprisingly popular, although they are technically among my worst fonts. I think I spent about a day on each of those fonts. By contrast, I often spent multiple days on single glyphs in the Obey series.

Very briefly: Would I purchase any of your fonts? No. Would I buy any of my own, if someone else had made them? No. Do I own a lot of commercial fonts? Yes. Did I buy any of them? No. Am I doing anything with them? No. I don't even own a printer, and I use Bookman Old Style for just about all of my MS Word documents.

I make fonts because I like to make fonts, and I make them for other people who collect fonts, because other people have made fonts that I collect. I would like to think that my fonts, (most of them, anyway), would be 'must haves' for dingbat font collectors, and anything beyond that is a bonus. I've probably got five or six GB of fonts that have never been extracted from their .zip archives, including yours. I'm at the point where I don't know what I have anymore, and it takes Windows search twenty minutes to go through the folder with my unsorted archives, so I probably have multiple copies of thousands of fonts. If I win the lottery, I'll hire a summer student to sort and label everything after September, 2008. I was pretty well organized, until then. Once I started to make my own, I had much less time to sort and label other people's stuff. I still download the new stuff here and at fontspace, but I actual install only a small fraction of those.

d{esign], I find that the lower case f in PicO really seems to be out of place with the rest of the font. I understand that you probably created the descender so that it could be distinguished from the capital F, but to me, that letter just looks wrong, like the Sesame Street song 'One of these things is not like the other...'. The rest of it is well done. It's clean, but unexciting.

Zepto is more original, but I think it would be better if all glyphs had an equal width. I don't know if this is an optical illusion, but the capital L, for example, seems to be noticeably wider than the capital M and W. I'm not fond of the lower case s and z, the number 2, and the upper and lower case c with cedilla, (Ç, ç). Then again, I'm basing this on the display on the dafont page. These letters might look fine in the context of a document or graphic. Perhaps you could post some graphics of your fonts in use, so we can get a better impression of them.

I'll pass on reviewing your commercial fonts, and that will apply to anyone else who makes commercial fonts as well as free/shareware/free for personal use fonts.

As always, these are just my opinions, nothing more, so other people may find them more appealing than I do.

~bito

@ sonoguerilla: First, embedding of a font means that the font can be viewed in a document, (for example, an MS Word or .pdf doc), when the font has not been installed. If you downloaded my FixCystNeon, there is an MS Word 2000 character guide in which the font has been embedded. Embedding can be done in MS Word 2000 and 2003 but I don't think it can be done in Word 2007, unless you are using Word 2007 to modify a document originally made with Word 2000/2003. I know this is the case for Text Effects like shimmer, Broadway lights. marching red ants, etc.

I'm not sure how to do it in a .pdf, but in Word 2000/2003, chose Tools from the Menu Bar > Options... > Save tab in the Options dialog box > check the two boxes for 'Embed true type fonts' and 'Embed characters in use only' > OK > Save the document. I'm not sure if it works for Open type as well as True Type fonts.

Note: DO NOT uninstall a font that has been used in an embedded document, unless you delete the embedded document first! I did that once, and it corrupted every copy of that font that I had on my computer, including copies in unopened archives! I have no idea why that happened, or if it was an isolated occurrence, but don't take the chance.

Note: You can only embed one font in any given MS Word doc. I'm not sure if this limitation applies in .pdf.

Note: You can only embed a font that allows embedding, and this setting is determined by the font designer. If you want to, you can change the designer's embedding setting and regenerate a copy of the font, but that would be frowned upon by purists. To be certain that the embedding has worked properly, you would need to view, or have someone else view, the document on a computer on which the embedded font has not been installed. If you use a font that is installed on your computer in an MS Word 2000 or 2003 document, but you do not embed the font, someone else looking at an electronic copy of the document will see the text displayed in Times New Roman.

In FontCreator, the embedding settings are found in Format from the Menu Bar > Settings... > General tab in the Font Settings dialog box > Font embedding - Licensing right section, (second from the top on the right) > Edit button > check the box for 'Editable embedding' > OK.

In FontLab Studio5, go to File in Menu Bar > Font Info, (or use the Font Info icon) > open 'Names and Copyright > select Embedding > chose 'Everything is allowed, (installable mode)' from the list box of options > OK.

If you are modifying an existing font to change embedding settings, you would have to generate a new font after making the changes. We at Metaphase Brothel Graphix do not advocate the changing of other designers' embedding settings, but if you chose to do so, that's how you would do it.

For ScanFont 3.13, there are no embedding settings; the 'everything is allowed' option is the default, and another font editing program would have to be used to change this setting to something else.

Hope this helps,

~bobistheowl

Good job, daaams. Finally, we have a second opinion on someone's fonts.

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.