(note: this was supposed to be posted as of march 3rd.) today i learned how to make a custom font using adobe illustrator and fontforge(a free, open source font creator).
first, you would create your desired characters in illustrator, whether that be directly creating them in illustrator or converting hand-lettering to vector format. then, save each character separately as a .svg file and open fontforge. then, in each box that fontforge designates to each character, paste the corresponding .svg file. one this has been completed and the cropping enhanced, you can export it as a .txt file to generate the font.
i already created my own font with this! you can now see it as my main font throughout my website's pages.