Customization of a ready-made font: letter refinement for uniqueness
When customization is justified and when it's a waste of money
Modifying a ready-made font is worth it if the brand needs a recognizable detail, not a completely independent graphic system. This works in three situations: when the budget does not allow ordering a font from scratch, when it is necessary to close a specific functional gap (for example, a lack of medium-weight style between Regular and Bold), or when just one or two accent letters are sufficient for headlines and logo.
It is not worth customizing if the brand needs fundamentally different typographic mechanics — another proportion, another rhythm, another feeling of the text as a whole. In this case, refinement turns into endless patches that still will not give the feeling of an original font, and in the end, it may cost more than a full-fledged development.
What exactly is changed in the letters
According to studios working with customization, changing the shape of signs accounts for 60% of all such projects — this is the most common task, even surpassing adjustment of intervals. Modifications are usually spot-based and affect not the entire alphabet, but several 'characteristic' letters that the eye remembers faster than the rest.
- Diagonal cuts in terminals and punctuation — give the font angularity and aggressiveness of the brand;
- Rounding in letters where there were once straight angles — an example is TT Commons, where rounding was added to letters a and d in the style of letter t;
- Changing the construction of a letter from single-part to double-part or vice versa — a classic technique for 'a' and 'g';
- Simplifying decorative elements — removing asymmetric terminals for a calm, neutral design;
- Inserting brand graphics into digits or diacritical marks — this is how it was done in projects Ivi, Sports.ru, O'STIN and Citymobil;
- Adding a logo as a separate glyph triggered by a specific symbol;
- Creating an intermediate typeface — TypeType, for example, changed the weight Medium from 500 to 475, to achieve a more restrained text weight.
Tools: not only Glyphs and FontLab
Professional editors give control over every curve, but for pixel-perfect correction of a couple of letters this is often excessive. There are more accessible options that cover 80% of typical designer tasks without special training.
| Tool | Type | For what it's suitable |
|---|---|---|
| glyphShaper | browser-based, free | quick editing of individual letterforms without installing software |
| Fontself | Illustrator extension, free | building a custom font directly from vector outlines in a familiar environment |
| Lipi.ai | AI editor | automatic generation of letterform variations based on a sample |
| Glyphs | professional, macOS | full control over contours, OpenType features, interpolation |
| FontLab 8 | professional, Mac/Windows | working with large font families, version 8.4 added more than 500 improvements |
Step-by-step methodology for refinement
The main mistake of beginners is to immediately jump into the editor and change letters 'by eye'. The correct order is different: first analysis, then correction, then checking in context.
- Write down the characteristic letters of the brand — those that appear most frequently in the name and headlines (usually 3-5 characters are enough for recognizability);
- Determine a unified modification technique — one and the same principle (for example, diagonal cut) should be repeated in all modified letters, otherwise the font will disintegrate into heterogeneous fragments;
- Make corrections iteratively — one letter at a time, immediately checking it in the set with neighboring characters, not in isolation;
- Check readability on real texts of various sizes — a large headline and a small caption behave differently;
- Compile a test pangram with all modified letters and run it through different typefaces and languages, if the font is multilingual;
- Document the changes in the form of a separate style guide — which letters and why were changed, so that designers do not accidentally reproduce the correction inaccurately.
For reference: in a quality custom font, for example, Ivi Sans Base, each glyph contains 362 characters, 13 OpenType features, and support for 105 languages — and all these elements must maintain consistency after refinement, not just the 'brand' letters.
Typical mistakes in self-customization
Designers without typographic training often stumble on the same few things.
- They change the shape of a letter without checking how it connects with neighboring characters — the result reads awkwardly in real text, even though it looks good in isolation;
- They violate optical height and stroke thickness — the modified letter visually 'sticks out' of the line;
- They copy techniques from another font literally, without adapting them to the proportions of their own — resulting in a visual salad;
- They forget to check the customization in variable mode if the font supports interpolation across width — and modern variable fonts usually have five key points: Condensed, Narrow, Normal, Wide, Extended, and tweaking one point can break the others;
- They ignore the license and modify a paid font without checking the terms of use.
Where the line is drawn between customization and a new font
The legal and reputational issue here is no less important than the artistic one. Open Source licenses — OFL, Apache — explicitly permit modifying the font and using the result in branding. With paid fonts, it's more complicated: most licenses sell the right to use, not to modify, and without separate permission from the copyright holder, you cannot even refine the contours for an internal project.
There is also a practical criterion that professional studios use: if the volume of changes exceeds 60% of the original font structure, it is more reasonable to consider the result a new font and brand it as a separate object with a full transfer of rights, rather than as a modification. This is not a formality — with such a volume of changes, the similarity with the original is still lost, but the legal risks remain if the rights are not reassigned.
When customization is justified and when it's a waste of money
Modifying a ready-made font is worth it if the brand needs a recognizable detail, not a completely independent graphic system. This works in three situations: when the budget does not allow ordering a font from scratch, when it is necessary to close a specific functional gap (for example, a lack of medium-weight style between Regular and Bold), or when just one or two accent letters are sufficient for headlines and logo.
It is not worth customizing if the brand needs fundamentally different typographic mechanics — another proportion, another rhythm, another feeling of the text as a whole. In this case, refinement turns into endless patches that still will not give the feeling of an original font, and in the end, it may cost more than a full-fledged development.
What exactly is changed in the letters
According to studios working with customization, changing the shape of signs accounts for 60% of all such projects — this is the most common task, even surpassing adjustment of intervals. Modifications are usually spot-based and affect not the entire alphabet, but several 'characteristic' letters that the eye remembers faster than the rest.
- Diagonal cuts in terminals and punctuation — give the font angularity and aggressiveness of the brand;
- Rounding in letters where there were once straight angles — an example is TT Commons, where rounding was added to letters a and d in the style of letter t;
- Changing the construction of a letter from single-part to double-part or vice versa — a classic technique for 'a' and 'g';
- Simplifying decorative elements — removing asymmetric terminals for a calm, neutral design;
- Inserting brand graphics into digits or diacritical marks — this is how it was done in projects Ivi, Sports.ru, O'STIN and Citymobil;
- Adding a logo as a separate glyph triggered by a specific symbol;
- Creating an intermediate typeface — TypeType, for example, changed the weight Medium from 500 to 475, to achieve a more restrained text weight.
Tools: not only Glyphs and FontLab
Professional editors give control over every curve, but for pixel-perfect correction of a couple of letters this is often excessive. There are more accessible options that cover 80% of typical designer tasks without special training.
| Tool | Type | For what it's suitable |
|---|---|---|
| glyphShaper | browser-based, free | quick editing of individual letterforms without installing software |
| Fontself | Illustrator extension, free | building a custom font directly from vector outlines in a familiar environment |
| Lipi.ai | AI editor | automatic generation of letterform variations based on a sample |
| Glyphs | professional, macOS | full control over contours, OpenType features, interpolation |
| FontLab 8 | professional, Mac/Windows | working with large font families, version 8.4 added more than 500 improvements |
Step-by-step methodology for refinement
The main mistake of beginners is to immediately jump into the editor and change letters 'by eye'. The correct order is different: first analysis, then correction, then checking in context.
- Write down the characteristic letters of the brand — those that appear most frequently in the name and headlines (usually 3-5 characters are enough for recognizability);
- Determine a unified modification technique — one and the same principle (for example, diagonal cut) should be repeated in all modified letters, otherwise the font will disintegrate into heterogeneous fragments;
- Make corrections iteratively — one letter at a time, immediately checking it in the set with neighboring characters, not in isolation;
- Check readability on real texts of various sizes — a large headline and a small caption behave differently;
- Compile a test pangram with all modified letters and run it through different typefaces and languages, if the font is multilingual;
- Document the changes in the form of a separate style guide — which letters and why were changed, so that designers do not accidentally reproduce the correction inaccurately.
For reference: in a quality custom font, for example, Ivi Sans Base, each glyph contains 362 characters, 13 OpenType features, and support for 105 languages — and all these elements must maintain consistency after refinement, not just the 'brand' letters.
Typical mistakes in self-customization
Designers without typographic training often stumble on the same few things.
- They change the shape of a letter without checking how it connects with neighboring characters — the result reads awkwardly in real text, even though it looks good in isolation;
- They violate optical height and stroke thickness — the modified letter visually 'sticks out' of the line;
- They copy techniques from another font literally, without adapting them to the proportions of their own — resulting in a visual salad;
- They forget to check the customization in variable mode if the font supports interpolation across width — and modern variable fonts usually have five key points: Condensed, Narrow, Normal, Wide, Extended, and tweaking one point can break the others;
- They ignore the license and modify a paid font without checking the terms of use.
Where the line is drawn between customization and a new font
The legal and reputational issue here is no less important than the artistic one. Open Source licenses — OFL, Apache — explicitly permit modifying the font and using the result in branding. With paid fonts, it's more complicated: most licenses sell the right to use, not to modify, and without separate permission from the copyright holder, you cannot even refine the contours for an internal project.
There is also a practical criterion that professional studios use: if the volume of changes exceeds 60% of the original font structure, it is more reasonable to consider the result a new font and brand it as a separate object with a full transfer of rights, rather than as a modification. This is not a formality — with such a volume of changes, the similarity with the original is still lost, but the legal risks remain if the rights are not reassigned.
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