My client needs a fully functional installable font for their design team to use.
I'd love to hear from people about their experiences doing these projects.

What kind of time (ball park) do you typically spend on designing the letter forms - and what kind of letter fems were they?

How many hours I can expect to spend setting it up in Font Creator, (or whatever) to iron out the kinks and generate a good working font?

Thanks!
-Leaky

No one makes professional fonts with FontCreator.

Professionally designed fonts, made on a work-for-hire basis for the exclusive use of a client, would probably cost somewhere in the $100,000 range. The completion time would be in the six months to two years range.

A shitty amateur font can be made in half an hour.

What you need to do is go to Myfonts.com or Fonts.com or the home page of a professional designer or foundry, find a font that your client likes, and buy a commercial use license.

A bold statement for someone who only uses non-professional software and never even has tried to work with Font Creator.

@leaky
The time spent on drawing the basic letter forms is very hard to tell. It very much depends on the complexity/simplicity of the basic design. But for a good looking and well usable design count for a few hundred hours. Once done and the client agrees transferring that design into a font is a doddle with Font Creator. That is, getting the basic glyphs Then, depending on how familiar you are with the program it can take you in between 10 - 15 minutes to clean a glyph or up to 1 or 2 hours. But then you are not done yet. You will have to find the best left/right bearings for each glyph and after that the perfect (or close to) kerning for all glyph pairs. Now it is true that a number of these steps can be partially automated using scripts but in the end you will have to check everything yourselves and make all fine-tuning corrections yourselve manually. That is again hundreds of hours.
Now, assume that you have a reasonably hour rate for your work, say € 120 (which is my minimum) or in the US case $ 170 you can easily calculate what will be a reasonable price for a custom made font that meets the client's specification an has all copyrights transferred to the client.

I use ScanFont 3, from FontLab. There's nothing non-professional about it. When it was sold by FontLab, it cost approximately $500, when FontLab's Studio5 cost about $650. I also have working copies of FontCreator and Studio5, but I find ScanFont 3 to be superior for most tasks. I only use Studio5 for certain tasks, such as adjusting vertical metrics, or generating Open Type fonts.

I did try out FontCreator 5 a couple of times. It can do many of the same tasks as ScanFont 3, but not as well. FontCreator CAN open an Open Type font, which ScanFont 3 can't do, but I can do that with Studio5, or convert the .otf to .ttf. ScanFont 3 has some really amazing editing features. Unfortunately for most people, it only works with Windows, and only with XP operating system or earlier, so Vista, 7 and 8 users are SOL.

If you were to poll Commercial font designers, I doubt any of them use Font Creator, and none of them use ScanFont 3, either.

And one can only do graphics with a Mac ...

Koeiekat - thank you so much for your input, this is super helpful info -exactly what I was looking for.
I will be doing a script, so all of these steps you mentioned will likely be necessary.
I am thinking 3 hours per letterform/glyph total at the high end -yes?
OMG, my hourly rate is $100 an hour.... I thought maybe that was on the high end -maybe I should raise it! -or move to Europe!

Metaphasebrothel -thank you for elaborating on Software.
I'll be creating the letterforms in Illustrator.
Clearly you think ScanFont is better than Font Creator: With ScanFont (currently at $99) can I still edit the glyphs to fine tune them within ScanFont, or do I go back into Illustrator to make adjustments?
And at what point would I want to step up to FLS?

Price is less of an issue than the desk hours of the learning curve of the software. -I'm still waiting to hear what the deadline is,
but I know I definitely will not be given 6 months to 2 years to complete this -4 weeks tops.

Cheers!
Leaky

If you have only 4 weeks and such a moderate hourly fee you end up at something like $16.000. Not going to make you rich ehhh

@Leaky: You've partially misunderstood me. I use ScanFont 3, which is no longer sold by FontLab. It's a 1990's era stand-alone font editor that only works with Windows XP and earlier operating systems. The $99 ScanFont 5 is a completely different animal; it's a plug-in for FontLab's Studio5 product.

I have ScanFont 3, Font Creator 5, and Studio5 installed on my computer. I use Studio 5 for a few routine tasks. I don't use Font Creator. I use ScanFont 3 all the time. I am not a professional font designer.

Despite what koeiekat says, professional font designers are likely to use Studio5. It has the most features, and is the most expensive. I think the kat and I define "professional" differently. If a busker makes a few bucks playing songs on a street corner, and they are otherwise unemployed, one might argue that they are a 'professional musician'. I wouldn't.

Very good semi-pro fonts can be made with applications other than Studio5. You can also get a pretty good haircut with a pair of scissors purchased at Dollarama.

If you've never made a font before, both you and your client are going to be disappointed by the results. Are you prepared to create both an upper and lower case alphabet, numbers, symbols, etc., from your imagination, and have them scale properly at fifty different sizes? You're much better off buying a commercial license for an existing font.

If you want someone to do custom lettering, you should look at Keith Morris' work: http://www.keithmorris.com.au/. He might tell you what Campbell's Soup paid for the custom font he made for them.

~bobistheowl

When making a custom font you charge for
- the design itself (it depends on the style of the font),
- the time spent to design each glyph (and if you intend to design a full latin extended set + ligatures it can be some thousands),
- each weight (light, regular, bold,...),
- each style (italic, cutout, ...) ,
- the skills to actually make the font file (which can be a pretty hard stuff if you have complex opentype features)
- AND the font license. This last point is important as you are releasing a font for an exclusive use, you are SELLING this rights. The amount vary with the exposition of the font, ie if this is a big international structure (with a massive worldwide use of the font) to the local retailler (and his 2 flyers a year). It's important to note that when you are selling a font, you are selling a software. In a normal case you sell a font license for a defined number of workstations (commonly 5 worstations). But when you are making a custom font you are also selling a global license, to allow your client to install it whenever it's needed (cf expostion). These rights are time limited so when the rights ends you can sell the font as one of your regular font or the owner buy new rights.
Take a look at the Costa font from typofonderie for example : http://typofonderie.com/fonts/costa-family/#details It was a font made in 1999 for Costa cruises and is now sold to the public since 2004.

You now understand why it cost so much and can be your job for many months even years.

Sooo ... To answer your question about how much to charge I'll definitely say : it depends

Hello all,
I'd like to weigh in on this discussion. I am fairly new to the font creation process but I have created 2 fonts using a brush tip marker, scanning selected characters into Adobe Illustrator and then pasting each character into Font Creator for the resulting .ttf file. I think custom fonts are the way to go with establishing a personal or corporate brand distinguishing itself from any competitor. I also believe that these days you don't have to rely on an established font foundry for a custom font. KG fonts is a good example but I'm sure there are many more in existence. To get to the original question posted here, I would charge $30 an hour and depending on proper communication between designer and client, the process could take anywhere from 15 to 30 hours and if my math is correct that comes to $450 to $900 a project.

What directed me to this discussion was a question I had which is "At what point in the font design process can you call your font unique if you are using elements from an existing font that is not your creation?" I've seen many fonts out there that look almost identical to an existing font minus a few minor tweaks. Where is the legal "Holy Grail" stating what constitutes a unique font and not a tweaked copy?