Designing “Firehouse”

Back when I worked at Big Idea, our Licensing VP wanted to distribute fonts with the VeggieTales style guide. Due to font licensing restrictions, we decided that the least complicated way to do that was to create our own custom fonts. That was a decade ago. Fortunately for me, while the era of OpenType fonts is upon us, PostScript Type 1 fonts are still fairly standard on the Mac, and the process to create them has remained more-or-less the same for the last 12 years.

SpringSprang’s “City of Franklin – Firehouse™” font is based on the painted type in the window of the Williamson County Fire & Rescue firehouse less than a block from our office. I’ve always loved type and have been known to take pictures of it when I see something I like. To the right is the shot I took with my iPhone walking to work one day. This is what I used as inspiration to create the full set, filling in the blanks where needed.

After cleaning up and straightening out the letter images in Photoshop, I used Adobe Illustrator to create the final art. The number “14” didn’t seem like it belonged, though, so I made the numbers look more like the letter forms.

Once the art was completed, I used my workhorse copy of Fontographer 4.7.3 to create the font itself. Fontographer is largely unchanged in the last 12 years, only receiving occasional maintenance updates to keep it compatible with current operating systems. I’m looking forward to the long over-due version 5 coming this May from FontLab, which will support the OpenType format.

To celebrate our new endeavor, we’ve decided to make the Firehouse font available for free from our website for a limited time. Now through August 31, 2010, you can download it for free for Mac* from the SpringSprang website. (Some restrictions apply. See documentation for details.)

After August 31, we intend to have other “City of Franklin” series fonts available for purchase, and the Firehouse font will be included with those.

* Currently we are not making a PC TrueType version of Firehouse available. Call me a typography snob, but the TrueType format is really an inferior format for various reasons. However, an OpenType version (PC compatible) will be made available once we’ve upgraded to Fontographer 5 in the coming months.

Enjoy!

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