What creating a simple font taught me about font design

I never appreciated font designers until I tried it myself

A professional font on the left vs my very simple self-designed font on the right. Image by author.

From early cave painting and hieroglyphs to caligraphers and computer fonts, writing has been one of the most impactful human inventions. Whether you are studying for an exam, reading the news, or doom scrolling through social media, everywhere you look and everywhere you go, there’s a font.

Yet most of us take fonts for granted. If we were asked what makes or breaks a good font, most of us wouldn't be able to define it. We just expect our texts to be written in a well legible font and we don’t think about the shapes, positions, and distances of the characters. We only notice a font when it’s barely readable like the cryptic handwriting of your teacher or it’s used in a weird context like Comic Sans MS in the earnings report of a Fortune 500 company.

When I was working on a new font and text rendering system for my game engine recently, I also created a very simple font that’s packed directly into the executable. If the program cannot find or open any real font files, it still has a way to display text to the user. Even though I massively simplified the process, it made me appreciate the work that font designers put in every day so our texts can look as good as possible.