Want to Use That Great Handwriting of Yours for a Signature Style?
by Keith Gatling | 4 years ago
Unlike me, my oldest daughter has beautiful handwriting. So beautiful than when she was in high school, she said that there should be a font made of it.
Well, you really can’t say something like that around me without me looking into it. And that year, for her birthday, We paid $40 and got her a font of her handwriting; which impressed some people and annoyed others.
How it impressed people seems really obvious, but how could it annoy people?
Well, there was that one teacher who, when he was collecting assignments from the class, got to hers, and very sternly told her that he said the paper should be typed, and not handwritten.
To which she replied, “It is typed. It’s a font of my handwriting. You never said what font it had to be in. Isn’t it nice?”
On hearing this, he just sighed, collected the paper, and walked away, mumbling something about "the Gatling family.”
So where can you get something like this done?
Well, the website we did it through 11 years ago no longer exists, but I’ve found a good possibility at yourfonts.com.
After you download their two-page form, fill it out, and submit to them, they’ll automatically create a 200-character font set for you in 15 minutes for $14.95. It includes a signature.
You’re probably wondering who needs 200 characters, since there are only 26 letters in the alphabet. Well, there’s upper and lower case, numbers, punctuation, special symbols, international characters, and even your signature. And if you’re never going to use some of those international or special characters, you can always put your own little doodles in their place (think about your own hand-drawn smileys).
Another possibility is FontLushious at Etsy.com, which at $25, costs a little more, but only gives you 105 characters (which can also include signatures and doodles). The turnaround time there is three days because there’s an actual human involved in the process.
Which one is the better choice for you? I don’t know. Obviously, if you want the full 200-character set, you should check out yourfonts. But it also wouldn’t hurt to shoot a note over to FontLushious to find out more about them.
So whether your handwriting is as beautiful as my daughter’s -- or is like mine but you simply want to be able to type in it -- now you know that it can be done.
PS: Once upon a time, I stumbled across a place that would create fonts from “archival handwriting," as in from handwriting samples from old letters. But I couldn’t find it when I did the research for this piece.
Oh, well.
