I Made a Font Every Day for a Year. Here's What It Did to Me.

I want to tell you about a philosophy I had.

Every font I made, I named after a woman. Not randomly. Intentionally. The thinking was this: there are millions of women in the world, each one different, each one carrying her own personality, her own weight, her own way of moving through a room. If I named every font after a different person, I would never run out of ideas. The name would suggest the character. The character would suggest the shapes. The shapes would become the font.

It sounds poetic. And for a while, it was.

The First Six Months Were Actually Good

I want to be honest about this part because it's easy to look back at something that ended badly and rewrite the whole thing as suffering. It wasn't.

The first six months of making fonts every day were genuinely some of the best creative months of my life.

I had a routine. Wake up, open the tools, start drawing. Every morning was a blank canvas with a woman's name at the top of it and a question: what does she look like? What does she sound like? What kind of words would she use? I was translating personality into letterforms, and that process was endlessly interesting to me.

By end of that same day, the font was done. Not just the glyphs, the poster too. The mockup. The product page. One complete thing, finished, ready to exist in the world. Then I'd wake up the next morning and do it again with a different name at the top of the canvas. Weekends I'd distribute everything to the marketplaces. Then Monday, start over.

Twenty to twenty-five fonts a month. That's almost one per working day, start to finish. It wasn't a straight line, though. The timeline through 2023 and 2024 kept getting knocked off course, which is why the total came out to a hundred and fifty fonts.

And the sales came. Not huge. Not life-changing. But real. Month two was better than month one. Month three was better than month two. The numbers were moving. Small wins, but they were wins, and they were coming from something I was building with my own hands every single day.

I was making twenty, sometimes twenty-five fonts a month. Looking at that number now, I don't know how I did it. But at the time it didn't feel impossible. It felt like momentum.

The Month Everything Stopped Moving

I can't tell you exactly which month it was. It didn't announce itself.

One month I just looked at the dashboard and realized: the number was the same as last month. And the month before. I had added more fonts, done the same work, shown up every day, and the result was flat. Not declining. Just flat. Like hitting a wall so padded that you don't even feel the impact, you just stop moving forward.

I kept going. Added more fonts. Stayed consistent. Told myself this was temporary, a plateau before the next climb.

The next climb didn't come.

What came instead was a different kind of exhaustion. Not physical, though that was there too. Creative exhaustion. The kind that doesn't announce itself as burnout, it just quietly drains the color out of everything you make.

I would open my tools and stare at the blank canvas. The woman's name at the top. And I would think: what makes this one different from the last one? What makes Quinbie different from Nazarena? What makes this script different from the one I made three weeks ago?

Sometimes I could find an answer. Sometimes I couldn't, and I made the font anyway, and deep down I knew it was the same font with a different name on it.

That feeling is worse than making nothing. Making something you already know is just a copy of something you already made, wearing a different name, hoping nobody notices including yourself.

The Problem With Quantity Is What It Does to Your Standards

Here's what I didn't understand when I started: quantity has a hidden cost that doesn't show up immediately.

When you're making twenty fonts a month, you don't have time to ask hard questions about each one. You don't have time to sit with something for a week and decide if it's actually saying something or if it's just filling space. You develop a rhythm, and the rhythm becomes the point, and somewhere in there the question of whether the work is actually good stops being the main question.

The main question becomes: can I finish this by Friday.

I started looking at Pangram Pangram. Studying them, really. Counting how many fonts they had. Looking at the gap between releases. Looking at how each font felt distinct, how each one had a specific reason to exist, how the whole catalog felt like it was made by a studio that asked "does this need to exist" before answering yes.

And I realized I had been answering yes before asking the question.

I started thinking about what it would look like to start over. Not with a new font, but with a new approach entirely. Fewer fonts. More intention. A catalog that felt like a collection instead of an archive. Something with a point of view that you could feel before you even looked at the individual typefaces.

That thinking eventually became what Phoenix Dungeon is now. You can read more about that specific decision in the first piece we wrote about this rebrand. But the short version is: the exhaustion of quantity was actually pointing me toward something. It just took a long time to see it clearly.

Her Name Was Riskha

In the middle of all of this, I made a font called Riskha.

Riskha is my partner's name. She has been, in a very real way, the reason I kept going during the harder months. The reason I woke up in the morning and opened the tools even when I didn't feel like it. The reason the whole project felt like it meant something beyond just income.

I made a font with her name on it. A romance script, soft and deliberate, the kind of font you use for something that's supposed to feel like a feeling. I put more into that font than I put into most of what I made that year. Not because I was performing effort, but because it felt right to make something that carried her name with actual care.

Riskha is not the bestselling font in our catalog. It's still sold on the microstock platforms where we publish, though not in this shop, since it isn't a pixel font.

I don't say that bitterly. I've made peace with it, mostly. But there's something about that fact that I keep returning to, something that says more about creative work than any strategy article I've ever read.

You can pour the most genuine part of yourself into something. You can make it with real feeling, real intention, real care. And the market will respond to it exactly as indifferently as it responds to everything else you've ever made. The algorithm doesn't know what something cost you. It only knows what it can sell.

What "Resigned" Actually Means

I don't make fonts regularly anymore. That's the honest answer to where I am now.

The catalog exists. The products are listed. The shop is open. If someone finds Overy or Cattreya and decides to buy it, that's genuinely great and I'm grateful for it. But I'm not sitting here every morning with a name at the top of a blank canvas and a question about who she is.

I don't know if I'd call it giving up. It doesn't feel like giving up from the inside. It feels more like arriving at a version of honesty that took longer than it should have.

The honesty is this: I made something across two chaotic years with everything I had. It gave me what it could give me, which was real, and then it stopped growing, which was also real. I can keep pushing into something that isn't responding, or I can take what those years taught me and use it to build something different.

I'm trying to do the second thing.

The resigned part isn't resignation from the work. It's resignation from the idea that effort alone determines outcomes. That if you just show up every day and make things and keep going, the results will eventually match the input.

Sometimes they do. Sometimes the platform has already decided, and no amount of daily output changes that. That's not a reason to not make things. But it is a reason to be more intentional about what you make and where you put it.

What I'd Tell Someone Starting Now

Make things because they matter to you. Not because the math works out, not because you saw someone else's income screenshot, not because you have a plan that looks good on paper.

Make things because the process of making them gives you something that nothing else does. That's the only foundation that holds when the numbers stop moving.

And if you're going to spend a year of your life on something, spend it on something specific enough that it could only have come from you. Not twenty-five fonts a month named after women you've never met. Something that has a reason to exist beyond filling a category.

I learned that the hard way. I'm still learning it, honestly.

Phoenix Dungeon is the attempt to apply that lesson. Pixel fonts, done with intention, in a space where specificity still matters more than volume. It's early. We don't know how it ends yet.

But at least this time, I know why I'm making what I'm making.

That's more than I could say a year ago.