Make market-ready fonts with this 8 point checklist

Fine tune your typefaces with this checklist

Whether you're making a new piece of kinetic typography or putting the finishing touches to a dynamic responsive typography set, there are a few criteria to tick-off before your font is ready to be unleashed onto the world. We've put together this checklist it eight important factors to ensure your typeface takes off.

01. Multiple weights and styles

All fonts come with regular and bold versions, but you can expand your font's appeal further by also including multiple weights beyond those basic options.

02. Glyphs

With obvious exceptions such as symbol fonts, all fonts should have complete glyph sets including accented letters and characters such as straight and curly quotes, currency signs and punctuation symbols.

03. Alternate characters

Your fonts should ideally have features that allow them to be adapted in different ways, including ligatures, stylistic alternates, small caps and so on.

04. Spacing

The spacing between your letters should be neither too small, nor too large, both of which will make text difficult to read. play around with your design to ensure that you find the best, most proportionate spacing possible.

05. Functionality

No matter how beautiful your fonts are, no one will be interested unless they install properly in all common contexts: on both mac os X and Windows, in font menus in adobe and microsoft software, and so on.

06. Multiple file types

Make sure you include a variety of file types, such as eps, ai, ttF, and otF, to ensure as many people as possible will be able to use your fonts.

07. Naming

Ensure that the name you give your font is original and won't be confused with others.

08. Originality

Run a check through MyFonts to discover whether your font is too close in appearance to any existing ones.

This article was originally published in Computer Arts magazine issue 250. Buy it here.