Simply Fontastic!
I’ve been in love with handwritten fonts since I was a kid, and I love the ‘personal touch’ of sketching on a page. Aside from using graphics tablets, I’ve been looking for more ways to bring tactile experiences to digital expression. Some of my colleagues introduced me to fontcapture, and all of my warm, fuzzy feelings for hand lettering (and apparently nostalgia) returned! fontcapture is an absolutely free service that allows you to create your own handwritten font – not just a temporary font, but an actual TrueType font that you can install onto either your Mac or Win computer, and then use across all of your applications.
The process is seriously straightforward: download and print a PDF chart, write on the chart with ye-olde school pen, scan it, then upload it back onto the fontcapture website. Shazam! The site then allows you to briefly ‘road test’ your font, and then you can instantly download your font and put it into permanent play. You, your students, or even your mother can now be a font designer (Hi, Mum – this one’s for you and the charity card designers). There are so many possibilities for this tool: personalizing and stylizing student writing, journal writing, lettering practise for elementary & middle school students, art projects, building classroom font collections. Suggestions?
In my ESOL classes I’m using student font design to focus on student “voice” and personal identity. Today we took just 40 minutes to design and process our own fonts, and now we’re offering the fonts to the public. Check out some example fonts from our class here or a pack of 10 student-designed fonts here.
How cool, thanks for sharing. Will try it in our kiwi classroom.