Design Your Own Fonts – Free Guide

As you guys probably know, I am a teacher. And the teacher heart in me wants everyone to know how to hand letter. So I put together a little guide of how to start. Now you might be thinking, that you are not the right person for this. Something I often hear is that people say they can not do it because their handwriting is ugly. Hey here is the good news! Your handwriting doesn’t have to be pretty. Because hand lettering is so slow it is almost like drawing. More like easy drawing though, because it’s mostly about straight lines and curves.

In this post I will be teaching you the basics about fonts. There will be a second post about decorations such as banner and frames and a third post, that goes more into compositions. The goal is that after todays lesson, you can create your own fonts. (Wow that was very teacherlike, I even told you guys what the goal of the lesson was…)

You don’t need much to start with. Paper, pencil, a ruler and an eraser. If you want to get more creative you can use colored pencils or markers. I have a whole set of black markers and fineliners. You will have your favorites at some point. Lettering also works with chalk or on the Ipad. (I will also make a guide for lettering on the Ipad later on.)

You might remember those days in early primary school or even kindergarden, when you had to write in the lines. You always have a base line, middle line and a top line. Our eye considers it nice writing when all your letters have about the same hight.

Fonts

There are three different main font styles. Then you can turn all of these three into thousands of different fonts. There is “sans serif” which the first photo. Most of the people’s handwriting is a version of sans serif.

Then we have “cursive”, (Photo 2) which you learn later on at school. Funny enough I always hated writing in cursive. To a point where I would straight up refuse to write in cursive and just wrote the whole text in sans serif. The teacher made me rewrite everything. Now I think it is a very romantic looking way of writing and I love to write like that. This is probably also the style you’ll think of, when you hear hand lettering. I will help you learn how to write like this.

The last one is “serif” (Photo 3) This is when all the letters have the little lines at the end. It is easier to read a text when it is written in serif. The little lines help creating a imaginary line for the eye, which helps us to stay on track.

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Remember how I was talking about the base, middle and top line? Well now you can experiment with that. Traditionally the middle line is in the middle of the base and top line. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Try to move it further up or down and write a word. You can use any font for that. Here are some examples:

Cursive

Now, before you can test out everything, I want to show you the “secret” to cursive. You can start out by just writing the word in cursive like the first word in picture 1. Then every time when you write and you stroke down, you want to make the line thick. Stroking up is a thin line. In picture 2 I am showing the arrows, so you can see what I mean. If you are doing this with pencil you will have to “color” the lines so they are thick. If you end up liking handlettering you can buy a brush pen. A brush pen is a pen with a tip that’s like a brush. If you push hard your lines will be thick. This helps a lot with cursive.

A lot of people also drop their letters while writing in cursive. This is, when some of your letters go under the base line. You will have to decide, if that’s something you like. In picture 3 you can see how I did that. Just don’t look at the lines to much, but just drop some of the letters.

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Experimenting

So now is where it gets really interesting: You now know all the important basics and you get to experiment. The three main fonts can be combined with the shifted middle line. All fonts can be bold as well. Or decorated with flowers, dots or anything. The possibilities are endless. When I started lettering I challenged myself to pick one word and write it in as many fonts as possible. (Yes, I worte the word “maple sirup” and I don’t know why…) Try it out yourself! It challenges your creativity and you might even find out which styles really fit you. Plus you get to create something yourself instead of copying.