Pink's Sense of Design

Participate in the "Third Industrial Revolution"
Fontifier

When I read Pink’s book over the summer I took special care to bookmark the activities that I wanted to come back to, so I was particularly pleased when I saw that the Fontifier activity was an option for homework. Being able to type in your own handwriting had always interested me, but I didn’t think it was possible. Lo and behold, Fontifier will let you do just that! For a price, of course.

I was a little skeptical when I first opened the web page. It looked so plain and simple, and I was not at all prepared to whip out my credit card to finish this assignment. However, the process to get to a preview of your font was surprisingly easy and free. You just had to print out the Fontifier template, fill it in with your handwriting, scan it, upload the picture to their website, and Fontify! you are presented with an example of how your font will look. You can then name the font and submit your name for copyright purposes, and after a small fee your handwriting is, well, yours.

 

Fontifier Template

Generated Font

It stunned me to see a sentence in my own handwriting appear on a screen where I had written nothing. I’d like to think that I’m pretty good at recognizing handwriting – especially that of my friends, family, and self. Show me a letter, grocery list, or even a doodle and I can probably point you towards the right person. As Pink alluded to on page 94, “[Handwriting is] the ultimate expression of individuality,” so it would make sense for the written word to have the same quirks as the person who birthed it. This artificial handwriting was undeniably recognizable as my own, but it was still off. It was too clean, too straight, too… formatted.

Curious, I decided to copy the font preview by hand and then scan my writing so I could better compare the two versions. The differences are small and ultimately forgivable, but still easy to spot. Look at my handwriting below and see what you can notice.

My Handwriting

Where my capital “T” slants upward to frame the upcoming sentence, the font’s “T” was just that, a “T”. In the font, no letters are allowed to touch. A “g” that hung too close to neighboring lines would be severed before it could mingle. My letters, however, are there to make friends. The “e” and “r” are always holding hands and “g”, “j”, “p”, “q”, and “y” always reach down to say hello. Where the computer generated lines are all impeccably straight and even, my writing has no set spacing, and you can even see where I lost track and started writing larger between the “@” and “(“.

It’s struck me that even though the font was written by a human, the graph that I had to write the characters in was so limiting that there was no room to express the quirks of my writing. Despite the computer’s best efforts, there was no way that it could keep up with even the most minor expression of right brained thinking, and therefore, the font falls flat.

If you’re a little more lavish with your money or simply curious how your font would turn out, I encourage you to visit Fontifier at http://www.fontifier.com/