This typeface was commissioned to preserve an individual’s handwriting. It was important to leverage font technologies to make the font feel natural and easy to use without complex design skills.
Handwriting is very unique to each person. The uniqueness of handwriting comes from the individual differences in how people shape and connect letters, influenced by factors like muscle memory, personal habits, and learned techniques. For this project we had a handwriting sample that had about 80% of the needed characters to make a typeface. I began with hand-tracing these characters and then constructing the remaining ones based on what I learned in the tracing process.
In typical typefaces, there is only one version of each letter but in handwriting fonts these repeating shapes look stale and unconvincing—real handwriting has shapes that vary every time they are written. We can emulate this using an OpenType feature called contextual alternates, which automatically substitutes one or more alternate letter shapes as you type. We also added ligatures to create the genuine handwriting look based on a number of connected characters that the individual repeated frequently in their writing.
