Typophile

How many hours to design a font?

Julian

I am sure this discussed already somewhere but I could not find it:

How many hours does it take to design a standard font? On average?

Let's say caps and lower case and numerals, standard punctuation and accents - the same as you would get in a 256 postscript font. Spaced kerned and basic hinting. Format can be OpenType but not with all the crazy ligatures, alt. characters and obscure accents.

Did erik spiekermann once quote 120 hours?

How much does a car cost?

There are too many variables involved to give a meaningful ballpark estimate. I've seen posts in this forum stating that upwards of eight hundred hours were involved with the creation of one font. On the other hand, I have managed to knock out a few with complete Latin 1252 and CE 1250 character sets in less than twelve hours each, including hand-kerning each and every possible letter combination. It all depends: Tata Nano or Maybach?

Somewhere between 62 and 146.5 hours.

When I started, I was faster. Now that I know more and have seen the error of my ways, it takes longer.

So far my experience is somewhere between 4 hours and 8 years...
Also let me just quickly ask, which accent is the most obscure?

14,5 hours, roughly. (q.e.d.)

Thanks for your answers, I am now none the wiser.

As are we all, Cool_hand.

"What we have here, is a failure to communicate."

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