Lightboard: A Font Blog Post Hero Image

Lightboard: A Font

03/11/2012

While working on an internal iOS app, a design concept began to emerge that would require a custom font. We wanted to mimic a board of LEDs that would show different words and phrases as if they were lit up. At one point, we discussed a programmatic solution that would draw each “LED”, but ruled that out after further consideration.

Within a matter of hours I was able to create a font and use it right in my designs.

What we decided to do was to “bake” the text as images, which potentially meant a lot of hand construction of the letters, words and phrases. Rather than spend a ton of time doing that and risking a lot more work in the future, I decided to create a custom font.

In the past, I’ve used things like Fontographer, but I didn’t need something that robust. I remembered using another web-based tool called Fontstruct and that was exactly what I needed. Within a matter of hours I was able to create a font and use it right in my designs.

The resulting font is called Lightboard and it should be making an appearance in a soon-to-be-released iOS app we’re working on. The font is still undergoing some minor tweaks, but when the app is released we’ll be releasing the font as well.

Fontstruct Font Editor Screenshot

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