When Heather Loeb started college in Florida two years ago, she had never even been on the Internet, let alone made a font. She was planning to be a nursing student. That changed when she got her first computer. I liked making websites and playing with graphics, and eventually I couldn't find fonts I wanted, and I started to make my own. At first she found the learning curve steep, but the font community came to the rescue.
People are pretty friendly.
When they make fonts, it's because they love fonts, and they'll help you out. Now Loeb has a Web-design business on the side, for which she designs her own alphabets under the nom de font Gyrl Friday. Each font designer has her own reason to font. Jen Dickert, a twentysomething Cure fan in Connecticut, makes fonts based on the Gothic handwriting used on the covers of rare Cure albums. Catherine Ball, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University, makes Old English fonts that inorporate archaic letters not found in modern fonts.