It amuses me to make logo-like images to put on my home page. Some time ago, I noticed that my name ("Aneel") is pronounced very similarly to the Spanish word anillo ("ring"). That got me thinking about the ring as a symbol and as a graphic design element.
In November 2002, I was playing around with Canvas (a graphics program) and came up with an alphabet based around adding and subtracting twelve wedges from a ring. I used it to make a logo and then promptly forgot about it for a couple years.
While downloading a bunch of free display fonts, I thought "Hmm, I should make an actual font of that anillo character set...". So I looked at it a bit. I was inspired to make some changes to the character set. At first, I was working in Canvas, but I found it too slow to try out new ideas by selecting wedges and using the path combination commands. So I made a set of pieces that could be combined to make all of the characters and wrote a little script to combine them. And a little webapp, to call the script (when you have a really nice hammer, everything looks like a nail).
When I was happy with the letterforms, I decided to check out font editing programs. So far, the only one I've found that seems to want to import my pieces (made from the original vector art, not from the composited PNGs) is TypeTool (or I imagine its big brother FontLab). Even that was a hassle (Save in EPS format in Canvas, open in Illustrator, save in Illustrator 3 format, import into TypeTool).
I made a test font, which has the characters A through O (most of them watermarked with the FontLab logo by the TT demo). But somehow, I can't bring myself to spend the $100 to buy TypeTool to make this font. It's a display font, so the PNGs that the webapp generates are good enough for my current purposes. I'd be happy to produce the font, if someone cares enough to buy me a copy of the program.
