These days anyone who starts out flirting with the world of graphic design ends up getting his feet wet in basically everything. Becoming the digital equivalent of a one-man band entails choosing the perfect font for every project. And although there are thousands of open-source fonts out there to choose from, it’s also possible to create your own. Modulator is a web tool that lets you create fonts and export them for personal use via an intuitive automated interface.
Unlike tools like Birdfont, in this case you don’t have to do any vectorizing. Imagine the nightmare of having to create an entire alphabet from scratch! Modulator saves you this agony with a wizard where you can edit the general parameters of the style in question: with each edit you’ll see a preview of your change for each individual glyph.
As you can see in the attached screenshot, all the options use sliding bars (although you can also insert numeric values) that divide the possible changes into four fields: dimension, proportion, shape, and optical corrections. From there you can edit particular technical aspects like the roundness of the edges, kerning, average height, baseline consistency, stroke openness, or ridges. This might sound like Greek to many people but basically you just have to tweak the values and check your changes in real time in the example field where you can enter a reference text.
Once finished, you can export your creations in OpenType format (.otf) or as a zip-packaged Webfont under a GNU General Public License, meaning you can do whatever you want with it.
