I made some fonts for fun!
Who doesn't love FONTS? Quick story! I'll never forget when I was interning at Digital Kitchen and a senior designer explained to me, the totally-clueless-but-eager-to-learn intern, the difference between fonts and typefaces. It's like when your older sibling tells you why everyone giggles after you cluelessly say "69" or when Rob Schneider explains the "Three Seashells" to you if you’re in the movie Demolition Man.
Anyway, I've always loved finding, collecting, using, studying and curating new fonts because I'm super cool and have a lot of friends. About 99% of the ones I've used in my lifetime have been "freebie" resources available on the internet from other super cool font hobbyists like myself. To pay it forward, here are a couple (hopefully more soon) free fonts to use for any personal or commercial project.
I only ask you don't redistribute them in your own font pack or sell them or something spammy because I've worked hard on these for some reason and I'm trying to actually pay something forward for once. That's all. Except for all that fine print down below you have to read.
For reals, though. Download these and use them for whatever the hell you want!
xoxo
Jimmy-Cryptic
Jimmy-Scratch
Louis james
Character Guide .PDF
The Character Map or Character Viewer on your computer works 99% of the time. But sometimes you just need to know the keyboard code to type in something bizarre like the ¶ symbol or something really common like the © symbol. I got really tired of Googling "Character Symbols Mac" and remembering which site had the current curly quote combo and which one had the em-dash code. So, I made this handy-dandy little .PDF. Since it's a .PDF you can highlight and select any character and copy/paste it into your document. Hope this helps!
All downloadS INCLUDE .OTF and .TTF fileS
1. If you think I should start making font formats other than OTF & TTF, Contact me in my about page and tell me which ones.
2. If you think anything looks weird or broken or something, Contact me. If you have any suggestions on the kerning, line spacing, letter spacing, weights or anything else - assume it was a creative decision, don't contact me and adjust it however you like :-)
3. These fonts seem to work fine on my computer, so if they don't work on yours, please don't yell at me. I use a Mac if that makes any difference? I don't know. Again, I don't really know what I'm doing.
4. Please don't yell at me about anything.
5. I'm making these suckers using FontSelf Maker. I can't recommend it enough. So far, it has absolutely worked as advertised for me. I figured out the "basics" with Jimmy-Scratch. With Jimmy-Cryptic, I did the "grunt work" assembling the whole thing in Illustrator and, no shit, the Uppercase, Lowercase and Numbers were signed, sealed and delivered in three clicks. THREE! I tried a popular font maker program a few years ago and you literally had to draw out the font pixel-by-pixel, letter-for-letter. I "drew out" the Jimmy-Cryptic font in Illustrator, lined it up and BOOM! Three clicks later, I've got a font. If you want to make your own fonts for whatever reason and kkkkiiinnnddddaaa know how to use Adobe Illustrator, holy shit man, look no further - FontSelf.com yo.
6. Because you've read this far - The difference between a "Font" and a "Typeface" is thus - A typeface is a set of letters, numbers, etc. in a particular, replicable style. If you're looking at it on paper, it's a typeface (we'll get to that in a second). A font is a little piece of software, usually a few kilobytes in file size you install on your computer that encodes the letters you type into whatever particular, replicable style it's programed for. See what I mean? So what you're looking at is currently a typeface ... But when I installed it on this website, I selected the font.
7. Regarding 6. - That's how it was explained to me and I think it makes sense, but again, I don't know what I'm doing. I make horror movies. If I'm dead wrong about this, please refer to 4.
8. Jimmy-Cryptic was scanned from an old book. I'm sure it's some popular old school typeface and I know there are a lot of freebie fonts (FONTs not typefaces) available online that look this one, but this one is mine and it's free for you to use and it's right there so it's better.
9. Because you made it all the way down to number nine or because you skipped to this one first (that's what I would have done) here is a photo of JR Smith and Miley Cyrus because she's a huge fan of his and it's super adorable and this photo will make you happy.
