I made a font!

I made a font out of my own handwriting, and I love it!

This is probably not very exciting to anyone else – I know. I’m easly amused. But I wasn’t planning to make my own font. I was just having trouble finding one for my new Cup Tea logo. None of my installed fonts really matches my personality, I was thinking. Plus, what are those licensing messages on all those other fonts I’ve downloaded?

I couldn’t be bothered checking, but it got me wondering about the ‘handwriting’ fonts I like so much. Are they really someone’s handwriting? How?

Google led me to Calligrapher – Draw your own font.

I’m a natural born skeptic, but also very curious, and it does say ‘no credit card required’, so I got ‘started for free’.

The process was pretty simple. . .so simple, I kept second-guessing myself along the way.

You just need to sign up (log in) then create a template, which means, just choose which letters and symbols you want to include in your final font. The free version of this app allows you 75 characters, which is plenty for the English alphabet, times two (upper and lowercase) plus numerical digits and a handful of punctuation marks.

Then, you need to dowload that template and print it out. What you get is a couple of pages of grid lines and boxes for you to write each character in, because of how your handwriting is the font, see? And then you scan your completed template documents (or just take a photo of them, like I did) and upload them back into the app.

This is where I got a bit discouraged.

My handwriting looked horrible on the screen. You could see every little imperfection in the pen marks, so some lines were thick some thin, and then my letters were uneven, and. . .it all just looked pretty wonky.

But I still had a few more steps to go. The next one was to make adjustments. The tool allows you to pull up and edit each character. You can erase accidental ink dots, move the character up or down so it sits on the same plane as the rest of them, make it bigger or smaller – just a bunch of little tweaks to improve the overall look of your soon to be new font.

That helped a lot, but I was still not all that impressed with how the inklines looked on screen. I ain’t never seen a handwriting font look so much like someone’s actual chicken scratch. Maybe I just don’t have the kinda penmanship that should be immortalised in a font.

And then I found the ‘build font’ button, and I clicked it and waited. . .and waited while the app’s hidden machinery churned along. . .and suddenly all my inklines magically smoothed out! And everything became evenly digitised and, my gosh, so cute!

The only thing I had left to do was download my new font, the same way I have downloaded hundreds of fonts before, and install it into my fonts drive. I rebooted my drawing app (Inkscape) and there it was: my new ‘hamogeekgirl’ font.

I know I know, my handwriting – even as a digitised font – is not the prettiest in the world, but knowing that it’s uniquely MINE is a buzz, especially when I’m using it for personal projects like my very own journal / portfolio space on the World Wide Web.

If you want to capture your own handwriting in a font of your own (if you haven’t already) I highly recommend giving it a go. It’s just… fun!

Check out the full Calligraphr tutorial here.

By the way, thinking about fonts reminded me of a Samoan artist who makes me proud. Joseph Churchward created something like 500 to 700 original typefaces (or lettering designs) in his lifetime. . .lettering that continues to be used all over the world. I only found out about him like 4 years ago at Te Papa Tongarewa, museum of New Zealand. Who knew that back in the day a quiet man from the middle of the Pacific ocean was behind so many iconic character designs.

Well, now we do.

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