I enjoy the waves of wealth the Web has brought us to create new things with, even in fields we may've shied away from traditionally. Lowering the barrier like this can only be a good thing, for it turns the craggy peaks of an intimidating learning curve into rolling hills, encouraging development of one's skills and potential future expertise — but keep in mind I think "expert" is a largely meaningless word! Nevertheless, the fun cannot be denied.

Heard a few days ago about FontStruct, brought to you by FontShop. In previous years, I wouldn't have thought of fonts as a social networking activity like swapping music or sharing pictures, but with the emergence of more media made easy (like the music-making programs that are continuing to rise), it was only inevitable.

FontStruct is at once easy to use and enjoy. It's the easiest font editor I've seen so far that blends a reasonable amount of modular power with an elegant, minimalist interface that lets you focus on your fontage — with the glaring exception that keyboard shortcuts do not work in fullscreen mode. (It's a Flash app, and a well-done one at that.) FontStruct even has a well-made video tutorial (you know how fond I am of those!), and it indeed helped me get up to speed in a few minutes.

A little over 1.5 hours later of browsing and dabbling with the FontStructor to make my darling new font, here it is:

I call it "Crimbelle", because it sounded right.

Very, very nifty that you can embed fonts like this; that's the first I've seen, and a very catchy way to share the fonts for sure. I would imagine as this catches on, we can expect to see more people who've never made a font before have some fun with this. Fonts don't have to be literal, either; there are many pictoral ones, some very impressively designed like this gallery of robots:

Another design inspiration usage: quickly creating some glyphs to be used as vector scalables in a larger design. With the whole process of "build, share, download" a quick one, your ideas won't get stale/forgotten.

A side nicety about this is, FontShop is a business, so FontStruct is a gateway to their offerings; their advertising is delightfully non-intrusive:

Go, create a font and let me know how it went!