Combining Fonts

[ammullen83]

Assignment: Type out two fonts (A–Z, 0–9) and smash them together, splice their DNA. Take the spine from one, and mesh it with the stems or serifs of another. Create two sets of upper-case letters, and numbers 0-9.

I have googled, YouTubed, searched on Adobe. I'm having a problem figuring out how to "splice" the text and combine it. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

[Dov Isaacs]

What are you really asking?

Are you trying to combine the designs of two different fonts into a new font?

If so, you aren't likely going to just be able to do that with conventional design tools. You had better look at typography tools like FontLab and even with that, what are proposing to do will be very time consuming and challenging.

You also may be dealing with significant legal issues, depending upon the End User License Agreement of the fonts you are “splicing together” — you certainly will not be able to resell such a font, probably won't be able to give the font to others to use, or you may be legally prohibited from doing this at all. Read the license for the particular font.

          - Dov

[ammullen83]

Yes, I am trying to combine two fonts into one. It is for a class, so there will be no legal issues since it won't be published in any format.

[Dov Isaacs]

It doesn't make a difference if you are not publishing the results or distributing the font. You must check the End User LIcense Agreement. Many font foundries simply do not allow this for either public or private purposes.

          - Dov

[MichaelKazlow]

If you want real fonts you will need costly tools. If you only want images, you can make a raster graphic image of the letters from two sets of fonts and try to combine them in a raster graphic program. The result will need lots of tweaking and most likely not be pretty unless you spend a lot of time. Original fonts used to be designed as a collection of dots created either with paper and pencil and then special programs to create raster images for each size of the font.

[Danny Whitehead.]

As I interpret it, the brief doesn't require a finished, usable font. It sounds like a case of choosing two existing, licensed fonts, making an Illustrator document, typing 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 1234567890' in both fonts, converting them to outlines and trying to combine them with Illustrator's tools in two different ways.

But I agree that it's likely to take a lot of work to make anything other than a dog's dinner of it.