For the last six months to a year I’ve been using a certain set of Rune Fonts as the perimeter decoration for both my map and the cover art to my book. However, I knew I didn’t want to use a stock font that could be picked up and used by any other author for $10. I needed to create something that was original to my series, so I started researching how best to go about it.

I ended up finding a font designer on Fiverr who said he could create a set of runic letters for me to use that would by copyrighted to myself, so I hired him. Unfortunately, when I gave him the stock runic font I had been using and asked him to create something similar, but obviously not the same, he merely took the runic font I had been using and stuck a simple tag on the end of each one and called it original. That kind of originality would have me in court for copyright infringement. My only choice was to do it myself.

I spent the better part of a week trying to design 26 runic letters. Let me tell you, that is much harder to do that it sounds. Once I had them hand drawn on paper I thought I would just scan them into my computer to use in Photoshop. That didn’t work out the way I had envisioned. The scans looked really bad, which forced me to then rebuild every one of them using the pen tool in Photoshop. I’m sure there was an easier way to do that, but I didn’t know what it was.

Once the designs were complete, I uploaded them to the font designer I had found on Fiverr and he in turn formatted them into a type font I could use anywhere. The size he produced turned out to be about 4 font sizes larger than every other normal font and the spaces in between words were half the size they should be, so every time I use the font I have to resize and restructure it in order to make it fit. But at the very least I do have a working Runic Font that I can use for all my graphics. And it is copyrighted to me under the name Aldoran Runes!

“Aldoran Runes!”

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