Hey HN,

I recently made 3d style Bagel web font (with some more styles) from scratch, and wanted to share the process in case anyone's interested in experimenting or giving feedback. You can play around by typing https://www.bake-ai.com/fonts

[Backstory] I was experimenting with Stable Diffusion + ControlNet to generate icons. To my surprise, generating letters this way was actually better than using traditional 3D tools like Blender for this purpose. That led to the idea: what if I could turn into an actual real working font?

I found a few tools, but most were either paid or lacked support. So I leaned on Cursor (been using it since launch) and spent a few hours hacking together a Python script using FontTools(https://github.com/fonttools/fonttools, Opensource font generation python library). Eventually, I got a working .ttf file with an SBIX table (used by Apple’s color fonts)!

[Technical details] 1) Create base glyphs Drew black letterforms by hand on iPad (or used open-licensed fonts for other experiments). 2) Add texture/style Used ComfyUI + Stable Diffusion + ControlNet to generate stylized images for each letter. Could also be done in Midjourney, Photoshop, etc. Key part is keeping image sizes consistent. 3) Generate font files Used FontTools (Python). Tried FontForge, BitFontMaker, even paid tools like Glyphs and Fontself — none worked well for image-based fonts. FontTools + SBIX table finally did the trick.

[Constraints] SBIX fonts are still relatively heavy, and not all software supports them yet. Photoshop does, but Figma doesn’t (yet). I plan to submit a feature request to Figma once things are more polished.

If anyone’s curious to try the font, happy to share it. Would love feedback, ideas, or just to know if this inspires you. I’ve been doing solo creative projects for a while — it can get tough, but knowing it sparks something for someone else helps a lot.

Thanks for reading — and feel free to AMA if you're trying something similar!

Updates on availability - Available: Chrome, Safari - Unavailable: Firefox

I'm using a Mac with the Chrome (Arc) browser. It might not work properly on some browsers. If it doesn't work for you, reporting it would really help me improve it next time. Thanks!

Updates on ideas from the community - Add cream cheese for bold version - Want Wholemeal version