Take a look at this:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.imagettftext.php

And make sure that the font exists on the system and that it's in the system path, looks like GDFONTPATH is the environment variable that GD uses to look at for fonts.

Lol, yeah in the eyes of a novice I have no idea what this means.

I have the font in the same directory. That wouldn't be enough?

I don't know how to make it clearer than this. Looks like you may need to do the trick they explain there to make PHP see the font file.

fontfile

The path to the TrueType font you wish to use.

Depending on which version of the GD library PHP is using, when fontfile does not begin with a leading / then .ttf will be appended to the filename and the library will attempt to search for that filename along a library-defined font path.

When using versions of the GD library lower than 2.0.18, a space character, rather than a semicolon, was used as the 'path separator' for different font files. Unintentional use of this feature will result in the warning message: Warning: Could not find/open font. For these affected versions, the only solution is moving the font to a path which does not contain spaces.

In many cases where a font resides in the same directory as the script using it the following trick will alleviate any include problems.

<?php
// Set the enviroment variable for GD
putenv('GDFONTPATH=' . realpath('.'));

// Name the font to be used (note the lack of the .ttf extension)
$font = 'SomeFont';
?>

The fix was so simple!

Ugh, just had to add ./ to the beginning of the font name.

I didn't know...

Glad that's over.

Thanks for all your help.