Fontself Interview and #Shillumni Discount

We had the pleasure of meeting with Franz, the creator and founder of Fontself, an Illustrator and Photoshop plugin that enables a designer to quickly and easily turn any lettering into OpenType fonts. I haven’t got this geekily excited in quite some years—this software is so easy to use and opens up font designing to everyone and we are excited to introduce this to our students here at Shillington!

#Shillumni get 50% off Fontself. Extra exciting news—Franz is offering a special 50% discount for all #Shillumni.

I love that Fontself is not elitist nor comes with a hefty price tag. Tell us your inspiration for creating Fontself.

Fontself actually has a two-sided story. On one hand, I grew up in Africa during the 80s and 90s when there was no digital communication, so doodling creative lettering on paper was the only solutions to be personal when communicating with friends and family back home. And on the other hand, as I got to learn more about design and programming, I got frustrated by the limitations and complexity of existing font creation tools and type technologies. It felt like we could bring more creative freedom in today’s digital world by lowering the entry-bar to making fonts out of anyone’s design. So Fontself grew out of passion and necessity.

Why does every designer need to know about Fontself?

Because Fontself will change their life 😉 Without kidding, think about that: type is everywhere, on magazines, clothes, smartphones and even in AR/VR worlds. So as a designer, you just can’t leave that crucial part of design to others. You need to step into the type game. And our goal at Fontself is to facilitate that leap: just like Photoshop brought the joy of image editing to millions of creatives or Illustrator enlightened many with vector editing.

Fontself empowers any creative with easy yet powerful font editing capabilities, right into Adobe’s apps.

Do you have any favourite examples of how designers use Fontself?

Sure, we’re thrilled whenever we hear from graphic designers who finally made their very first font with Fontself, just as much as when more experienced type designers tell us how much time they can save in their daily workflow. For instance, Paul Virlan, a young freelance designer from Romania, submitted a crazy intricate lettering design on Instagram. We loved it, and a couple days later he turned it into a beautiful font. Also, Simon Stratford, a prolific designer from UK, made a great chromatic multi-layered typeface called Circus Freak, which was later featured on a leading online font marketplace.

We are also pretty excited when people come up with unexpected uses of the tool, like when when a photographer in Switzerland, Patrick Itten, created a font with his 10 years old daughter, or when we see custom dingbat fonts and alien alphabets!

What were you doing with yourself before Fontself?

I studied graphic design and computer science in Switzerland, then had a chance to spend 4 years doing applied R&D for various design and art projects, ranging from architectural visualisation to interactive installations. I used to be a 3D freak, doing a lot of motion graphics and trying any new technique or technology I could hear of, until I finally understood that I mostly enjoyed crafting creative software that others could leverage for their own projects. So in 2006 I focussed on a new playground, typography, a field that felt ripe for some disruption.

What are you most excited about for 2017?

Color fonts. And bitmap fonts. And DIY fonts 😉 Color fonts, because they will change the design industry in 2017: once designers realize they have been living in a black-and-white type world, they just won’t understand why multi-color fonts with gradients and shades aren’t already available everywhere. Bitmap fonts, because of calligraphy’s uneven ink strokes, graffiti’s airbrush splashes or even because of photographic alphabets or Photoshop’s crazy text effects. And DYI fonts, because thousands of designers already joined us on this typographic adventure, coming up with a million cool new ideas by hacking into fonts. Gutenberg would have been psyched.

You can check our font creation add-ons for Photoshop and Illustrator on www.fontself.com and have a look at the fonts created by our users on Behance and Creative Market.