FontStruct Turns Five

Mike Rankin

FontStruct, the free font-building tool sponsored by FontShop just celebrated its fifth anniversary. In the half-decade since the launch of FontStruct, users have created over 650,000 fonts with the site’s tools.

FontStruct allows users to create fonts from geometrical shapes in a grid pattern in the “FontStructor” font editor. You might think of it as building glyphs from Legos.

After you finish creating all the glyphs in your font, you can save it in TrueType format for use in any Mac or Windows application, and choose the terms of the font license.

Even if you aren’t interested in creating your own fonts piece by piece, you can still use FontStruct by exploring the gallery of fonts created by other users and downloading them for your own use.

Some folks have been able to create amazingly detailed glyphs from those simple sets of building blocks.

Robot Raid

Bat Country

Dioptical

And really, where else are you going to find a font called Badger Spine?

You can find more news, plus techniques, tips, and tricks on the FontStruct blog.