Free handwriting fonts… well almost free
Published by on January 2nd, 2005
Most designers will twitch at the thought of font creation. Mention creation of a loose handwriting font and they are likely to lapse into the desperate need to run for the nearest French Foreign Legion recruitment office.
I was flicking through a couple of unopened issues of MacUser - yup, I was clearly so busy or so wrapped up in my own world that two issues had made it to my mailbox but been tucked away unopened - and discovered a small article on fontifier.com.
Fontifier allows you to create a proper TrueType font file from your own handwriting. The process is simple and straightforward, in 7 steps, and the cost is minimal (particularly right now with the wonderful dollar exchange rate throughout most of the world!).
First, you must download a PDF file of their official font template and print it out. I cheated and simply pulled the template into Photoshop to create the font with a Wacom tablet.. I’m lazy. I quickly drew some less than attractive letters in the relevant boxes. The template enables you to define the baseline position of the letters and covers the main font letters and symbols you will need. There are some additional international language templates available from the site for French, German, Spanish, Portugese, Swedish, Finnish, Danish and Norwegian.
Once you are happy with the letter shapes, you must scan the template and upload it back to the site. Of course, using Photoshop, I simply saved the file and uploaded as a 72ppi flattened JPEG file.
The next step allows you to give the font a name and add your name for copyright information, then generates your font and presents you with a preview of the generated file. The preview is not particularly large, but is certainly big enough to make an assessment of whether you are happy with the result.
Once accepted, you simply give them a piffling $9 - either by secure Credit Card payment or through PayPal - and receive your completed font for installation.
Admittedly, it’s tricky to write well and normally using a Wacom compared to a pen and paper, but I was a little surprised just how untidy my handwriting font looked in the preview - less to do with fontifier and more to do with my lack of pen control.
For optimum results, I would suggest writing your letters on a separate blank piece of paper first, perhaps as complete words as opposed to individual isolated letters. This promotes a more natural feel for your handwriting and will certainly improve your results. Scan the chunks of hand writing in and spend a little while cutting out the letters in photoshop and pasting them onto an import of their template.
I guess that heavier, high contrast strokes would generate the best results. But compare the hours of effort involved in bringing your scanned and outlined handwriting into Fontographer with a few minutes creating a template, uploading and waiting a full 10 seconds or so for their system to build the font file, I think $9 is worth every cent.
I’m certainly going to experiment with this service and create a font or two - I had the inspiration to create a handwritten style symbol font of a range of smilies… perhaps I’ll post here.
