Making your own handwriting font June 30, 2008
It is no secret that technology helps make our lives easier- navigating in our cars, communicating with our friends across long distances, traveling to new places without getting lost. We can be assured that our Granny Smith apples will always have that same taste thanks to patented and genetically modified seeds, we can sleep easier at night knowing that the carbon monoxide alarm in the hall will alert us of any deadly gas, and we can drink our milk assured that it has been pasteurized and hermetically sealed.
However, technology is also inadvertently responsible for an absence of the human touch, as these days few things are rarely hand-made. Sentiments for loved ones are better expressed by store bought greetings cards and a myriad of fast food restaurants have made it easier than ever to avoid preparing home cooked meals. Instead of stopping by a friend or neighbor’s house we prefer to send a mass email, updating everyone at once as to how we are doing. Given the state of things it seems harder and harder to maintain that personal touch.
One small but interesting idea to combat this trend is to make a font from your very own handwriting. After all, so many of us are using the computer more and more, and handwriting all those Christmas letters or thank you notes for a wedding seems like an impossible task. What about sending out an electronic invoice with your signature confirming a received payment? Wouldn’t printing name tags for an event or labels for scrapbooking seem a lot more personal if they were printed with your own handwriting?
Now some of you may have heard of Fontographer, the most famous and most popular font creation software. Those people probably also know that the most common Bézier drawing programs used for vector output are Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand. But most people probably don’t know that it was Fontographer, not Illustrator or Freehand, that was the first Mac-based Bézier drawing program back in 1986. Since then Fontographer has become an important tool for many designers, however at a price of $350 US, it has remained out of reach for most non-designers.
This is where the website Fontifier comes in. With the Fontifier website you print out a template, write in each letter, number and symbol (they have a template with accents for writing words in other languages as well), scan the page and Fontifier does the rest! They show you a sample of your new handwriting font and if you like it, for only $9 you can buy the TrueType format (for PC or Mac) that you can use in your word processor or graphics program, just like regular fonts such as Helvetica or Times New Roman.
I went through the process and found it to be very easy. A couple of my letters didn’t turn out quite the way I had expected (a really fat capital “K” and a lower case “a” without a hole), so after scanning the page in .TIFF format I edited the few screwy letters in Photoshop so that they were consistent with the rest of my casual and spunky print, thus avoiding having to rewrite all the characters on a new template. The final result spreads the letters out a little more than my actual handwriting, but I can easily adjust that in Illustrator. I have used my new font several times already and am glad to have it as one more tool in my arsenal. So if you are looking to add a personal touch to any digital document, try this idea out and see how it feels to have a your very own font!
Posted in Graphic Design, Innovation, Just Plain Cool, Tips and Techniques | Comments Off
