I’m a retired professor living in Japan. I’m a writer, not a designer. I’d like to write children’s books using a font that helps learners to overcome the irregularities of English spelling. There are many other examples, but I’ll give just one here. The sound ‘K’ can be represented orthographically by “c” (cat), “ch” (chemistry), “k” (kangaroo) , “ck” (black). I’d like to make a font with animal characters that help readers to quickly identify that each of these four possibilities have the same sound. Here is a crude example:
Is it feasible for someone with no font design experience to make a prototype font set? If not, any advice would be welcome.
Are you familiar with Kevin Larson’s work for Microsoft? He did a presentation at Atypi on exactly this topic Pigs and Cups: Helping readers with dyslexia - ATypI
I couldn’t find a video on YouTube, but maybe just contact him?
Nobody was born with type design experience and there many tutorials, it’s just about how much time you want to invest. What you would like to do seems possible but fairly complex and needs a lot of OpenType magic accounting for edge cases. I would just make a prototype with a very limited characters set, then you can extrapolate and see if it’s for you.
