Making My Handwriting Into a Font

For a while now, my other half (an efficiency-obsessed engineering PhD student) has been scheming about ways to “mass produce” my talents. “I’ve got it!” he said one day, “We should make your handwriting into a font!”

I flinched and explained that a lot of the reason that people have me write out custom calligraphy is because people love having hand-written quotes, envelopes, etc. “Ah-ha, but how would they know?” he countered. Well … part of the charm of calligraphy is the fact that it isn’t consistent. I always look for consistency if I am unsure whether someone actually wrote something out or “cheated”. You can identify a letter, then look at the subsequent letters to see if they are a little bit different from the letter you picked out.

Despite the fact that I am always 100% for writing things out rather than typing them out, I must admit I was intrigued by a post on Craftgawker promising that I could make handwriting into a font for free without fancy software or headache. It’s called [MyScriptFont.com]. All you do is print out a template, fill it out, scan it back in, and upload it to the website. The site then converts your work into a vector font.

There’s the handwriting into a font that I created. Based on what I’d written on the template, I thought it was going to be truly amazing. A ground-breaking, game-changing font, if you will. But, that’s not what I ended up with. What I did get was a bunch of disjointed letters that end up coming together to look whimsical and unique. Will I use this font much? Well, probably not. However, what I do like about it is I never can find numbers that suit my taste. This font solves my problem in that I created my own. I also love the hand-written quality of the special characters.

I’d like to try making my handwriting into a font again and perhaps sticking more strictly to print (you’ll notice that I tried to go cursive on a lot of the letters). I notice some problems with the “e” in that it’s a bit higher than it’s supposed to be, though I stayed in the lines on the template. Why couldn’t that have happened with a letter that’s not used often, like, I don’t know, a “z”?

So, stay posted for another, more print-like font. And in the meantime, if you’d like to have the whimsical font I created, just send me an email [[email protected]] with “Lindsey Font” in the subject line. I will send you the font right back, gratis!