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  • Writer's pictureWarren

Forged a Custom Font

Updated: Jul 24, 2018

Full disclosure, I'm a geographer and more specifically a GIS Analyst. I'm not a typographer, a graphic designer or anything close. I am however attempting to delve deeper in the cartographic roots of geography. On this adventure into the cartographic realm, I realized I'm a sucker for a nice old map. Something about the parchment, the artistry, the ink, I can't quite pin it down but I can stare at them forever.


So I thought these would be a good place to start journey. I would try to replicate the look and feel of the maps I'd been staring at with the modern tools I use everyday. Coincidentally I recently stumbled across this map of Electoral Divisions in the Dominion of Canada. The waterlines, the watercolour tints, and the hand inked labels. This map was awesome, this had to be the first map I tried to recreate.

It was simple enough to start, I assembled some data in my ArcGIS Pro project from Natural Earth and The Province of Ontario open data. The next step was to do so processing in order to create layers that would be used to represent some of those cartographic effects. First up would be those waterlines.

The waterlines were created with the multi-ring buffer tool. They were symbolized to be most transparent and dashed when farthest from shore.

I used the multi-ring buffer tool to create the internal rings and then with some symbology I made those rings farthest from shore more transparent and more dashed.


The tints used to represent the municipal boundaries were also relatively straight forward to reproduce. I used a picture fill with a tint and transparency on the polygons to give the illusion of a texture. However, the labels for these polygons weren't so easy and this is where the real work began...



I couldn't find a digital typeface that was a worthy substitute for the hand inked labels. However, from my search I several helpful pointers which resulted in some reference material I could use. At roughly this same time I came across FontForge. It seemed like the perfect solution. If I couldn't find a typeface to suite my needs, I could just create my own! Having never used font design software before, having zero knowledge of typefaces, and an abundance of enthusiasm I dived right in. It seemed easy enough after watching some documentation videos and reading some of the user guides. What I didn't realized was how many characters exist (I forgot about needing to have both lowercase and uppercase).


In the end the process was way easier, and much more tedious than I expected. The general construction of each character consists of manipulating bezier curves and various geometries (really just fancy digitizing to me).

The result was a mapping of all the characters I'd created that I felt had the look and feel of hand inked letters. The last step was to adjust the metrics (spacing of the characters and how they interacted with adjacent characters), this was the fiddly part. Once complete I saved it as aTrueType file and installed in on my machine.


For some reason I was thoroughly shocked when it showed up as an font option in ArcGIS Pro and I'm pretty sure I held my breath when I applied it to my municipal labels. WOW I made my own font!


Overall the whole process of creating a font was really interesting and gave me a whole are appreciation of typefaces. I'd do it all again, eventually... because I think it was definitely worth it and in my opinion it really ties the whole map together and honours the goal of completely replicating a map style. If you'd like to see how I ended up using the final map style check out my Ontario Craft Brewers Association map.


Happy font forging!




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