If you’re more ambitious, create your own letterforms and color them as if they were drawn with a brush or calligraphic pen. This works especially well for handwriting and script fonts (figure 3.) Taking it a step further you can even draw beautiful typefaces in hand lettering style for use as ornamental text or headlines (figure 4.)
If drawing is not your thing, don’t despair. There’s an even easier way to make fonts of color. Pictures. The color OpenType font format can use bitmaps as well as vector drawings for glyphs. That means that you can construct a font from seaweed, rocks, candy, rebar, or anything else you want. Then just take a photo of it; cut/copy/paste the pix into a font editor; kern the glyphs and Voila! New color font (figure 5.)
Spice up your font library with some color fonts today. Type never looked so good!
For more information, visit: www.fontlab.com
Fig. 3: Color used to simulate brush strokes (Take Charge, OpenType SVG font by Greg Nicholls at creativemarket.com)