Designing a Font from Scratch — and Submitting It to Google Fonts in 24 Hours
The One-Day Challenge
I‘ve always been inspired by Adam Savage‘s engaging One Day Builds video series. In each episode, he tackles an ambitious project from start to finish in a single day, often ending up with an impressive final creation. This got me thinking — could I apply this same concept to my passion for typography and font design?
So I set myself a daunting challenge: design an original font completely from scratch and submit it to Google Fonts, all within 24 hours. I knew it would be difficult and require intense focus, but I was excited by the prospect of pushing my skills to the limit and seeing what I could create under pressure.
Sketching the Basic Proportions
I started my font design journey by digging up some rough letter sketches I had made in an old notebook a while back. I had an idea for a tall, bold, sans-serif display font — something that could make a strong impact when used in posters or large-scale designs.
To begin fleshing out this concept, I opened up Adobe Illustrator and set up a document with guidelines marking out key proportions:
- Baseline
- X-height (the height of lowercase letters)
- Cap height (the height of uppercase letters)
- Ascender line (for letters that extend above the cap height)
- Descender line (for letters that drop below the baseline)
I also established some basic rules and ratios to give the font a consistent look and feel:
- X-height would be 2x the height of the ascenders/descenders
- Stem width (the thickness of vertical strokes) would be 1/4 the width of the capital letters
- Lowercase letters would be 3/4 the width of the capitals
With these guidelines in place, I had a solid foundation to start constructing the individual glyphs.
Defining the Signature Style
To give my font a distinctive look, I decided on a couple key stylistic choices:
- Any typically curved letter parts would instead have rounded corners, using a 12mm outside radius and 6mm inside radius.
- Apertures (openings in letters like ‘C‘) and the ends of arcs would feature angled cuts rather than smooth terminals.
These subtle details, along with the tall, bold proportions, would help set my font apart and make it memorable.
Constructing the Uppercase Letters
With the rules established, I dove into actually drawing the capital letters in Illustrator. I started with core shapes like ‘O‘, ‘B‘, and ‘D‘, applying the rounded corners. For letters with only straight lines like ‘E‘, ‘F‘, and ‘H‘, I used the stem width and my predefined cap height.
More complex glyphs like ‘G‘, ‘K‘, ‘Q‘ and ‘R‘ required some finesse to adapt to my style rules while still maintaining legibility and balancing the rounded and angled elements. Thankfully, the consistent proportions made it relatively painless to create a cohesive set.
After a few intense hours, I had a complete uppercase alphabet that captured the aesthetic I was aiming for. On to the next challenge!
Tackling the Lowercase
Designing the lowercase letters proved quite a bit trickier than the capitals. Determining the right proportions, angles, and rounded corners required a lot of trial and error to maintain consistency with the overall style.
I employed more of my signature angled cuts on the ascenders and descenders of letters like ‘b‘, ‘d‘, ‘p‘, and ‘q‘. Figuring out how to translate the look to the more complex curved forms of ‘a‘, ‘e‘, ‘f‘, and ‘g‘ took some head-scratching, but I eventually landed on solutions that felt in harmony with the rest of the font.
It was a long day of painstaking work, but I managed to complete the lowercase character set, along with numbers and some essential punctuation, before heading to bed. The finish line was in sight!
Putting It All Together
The following morning, I awoke with renewed determination to complete my font. First on the agenda was generating an actual working font file from my vector artwork.
Thankfully, a quick Twitter plea for advice led me to the excellent Glyphs font creation app. I downloaded the free trial and dove into some tutorial videos to figure out how to use it.
I quickly realized I would need to reformat my Illustrator file to be compatible with Glyphs. This meant manually pasting each and every glyph into the app and resizing them to match up with the guides. Tedious, but necessary!
Spacing and Kerning
With my glyphs imported into the font creation software, it was time for the crucial steps of setting the spacing and kerning. In other words, making sure the letters were appropriately positioned and had pleasing gaps between them.
Spacing was up first. I learned a handy rule of thumb: measure the width of the counter (open space) in a capital ‘O‘, divide that by three, and use the result as the default spacing on either side of each letter. I made manual tweaks for wider characters like ‘M‘ and ‘W‘.
Now the really time-consuming part: kerning! Using keyboard shortcuts, I painstakingly adjusted the spacing between each and every possible letter pairing that looked awkward to my eye. I repeated the process for both lowercase and uppercase text, referencing this excellent list of common kerning pairs.
After several bleary-eyed hours of tiny nudges left and right, I finally had a usable font with proper spacing! It was far from perfect, with many glyphs still missing, but I was immensely proud of what I had managed to create in such a short time.
Submitting to Google Fonts
As the 24 hour mark rapidly approached, I exported my font in the necessary .ttf format and prepared to submit it to Google Fonts for consideration. I knew it was a long shot in its current rough state, lacking complete language support and full polish, but I figured it was worth a try!
With mere minutes to spare, I filled out the submission form, uploaded my font file, and collapsed in satisfaction. Challenge complete! I decided to call my creation "Odibee Sans", a play on "one day build".
The Aftermath
Unsurprisingly, a few weeks later I got word from the Google Fonts team that Odibee Sans needed more refinement before it could be accepted into their library. They kindly encouraged me to keep working on it as time allowed.
And so I spent one additional day addressing their feedback. I created the remaining essential glyphs, reworked several of the core letterforms to improve legibility and consistency, and vastly expanded the kerning pairs for a better overall look.
I even managed to throw together a small promotional site for the font at odibeesans.com using Adobe Muse, yet another one-day project!
Final Thoughts
Taking on this font design challenge was an incredibly rewarding experience. It forced me to focus intensely, make quick decisions, and push through the desire to endlessly tweak and perfect every detail.
While the final result may not be the most polished or professional font out there, I‘m immensely proud of what I was able to accomplish in such a short timeframe. It was a fantastic way to level up my skills, test my limits, and prove to myself what‘s possible with a bit of grit and determination.
I encourage all creatives to try out their own "one day build" challenges, whether it‘s crafting a font, designing a website, filming a short video, or anything else! You may be surprised by just how much you can achieve when you give yourself a firm 24-hour deadline.
So go forth and create! And be sure to share your successes (and failures) with the world. Happy making!