How to make your own font for free

To make your own font for free, start from a ready-made alphabet and restyle it rather than drawing every letter. Font by Zaweba does exactly that: you begin with its base alphabet of 109 characters, change the look of every letter at once with a stack of sliders, and export a TrueType (TTF) or OpenType (OTF) file. It's free software under the EULA, it works offline and it needs no account.

The rest of this article walks through the process, from a blank project to a font you can type with.

What you need

A computer and the app. Font by Zaweba runs on Windows 10 and 11, and there are Mac and Linux versions too. You don't need any drawing skill or knowledge of type design jargon, and you don't need a scanner or a tablet. The base alphabet was drawn from scratch by Zaweba, so the fonts you make from it belong to you.

It does help to have a purpose in mind. A font for a café menu, a set of classroom worksheets or a band poster will push you towards different choices, and having real words to test with makes every decision easier.

Step by step

Begin with a preset. There are eleven, including Plain, Slab, Rounded, Italic, Stencil, Outline, Polka and Wonky. Choosing one sets up the style stack, the ordered list of operations applied on top of the base letters. Nothing is locked; the preset is only a starting point.

Next, work through the style stack. Each operation has an on and off switch, its own sliders and a reset, and you can drag them into a different order. Weight runs from a hairline to black. Width makes letters condensed or extended. Corner rounding softens them. Serifs attach to the stem ends of every letter, and you can pick from nine shapes. Every change applies to the whole alphabet at once, and spacing and kerning are redone after each one.

Keep an eye on the live preview while you work. Type real words, not just the alphabet, and look at them small and large in the waterfall.

When the overall style is right, look through the glyphs grid for any letter that doesn't sit well. Open it in the glyph editor to adjust it, or leave it alone if it's fine. Most fonts need very little of this.

Then fill in the font settings: a family name, your name as designer, a version, copyright and a licence. These are written into the font files.

Finally, export. You can export one style or a four-style family of Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic, as TTF, OTF and WOFF2. The files are checked as they're made, and any warnings are listed. Install for me puts the font on your Windows account with no administrator prompt, ready to use in your other programs.

Getting a good result

Restraint usually wins. A font with sensible weight, a little rounding or a well chosen serif tends to be more useful than one with every effect switched on. Change one thing at a time and check the preview after each change.

Test at small sizes. Thin strokes, fine serifs and busy decorations can disappear when text is small, so look at the bottom of the waterfall as well as the top.

Save your project as a .zfont file before you export. It keeps every setting and edit, so you can open it later and make a new version.

Other ways to do it

Traditional font editors ask you to draw every letter as an outline, which gives total control but takes a long time and some skill. Handwriting services turn scanned letters into a font, which is personal but depends on your handwriting. Restyling a ready-made alphabet sits between the two: quick, consistent and still clearly your own.

For most people who want a font for a business, a classroom or a project, that middle route is the one that gets finished.