Howrey Script
My handwriting, vectorized into an OTF and given away free under the Open Font License
Download the OTF
Free under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Use it on personal projects, client work, posters, t-shirts, anything. Don't sell the font itself, do sell whatever you make with it.
I have been writing all-caps in marker pens for as long as I have been making things. The proportions, the angles, the way the strokes thin and thicken when I move quickly; that is a voice I keep reaching for in design work, and I kept hand-lettering the same shapes over and over.
So I drew the alphabet once on a clean spread, scanned it, and pulled it into Glyphs. A few weekends of cleanup and spacing later it was an OpenType font with full A-Z, 0-9, and the punctuation that does the most work in poster headlines.
The first place it showed up was the wordmark for an iOS app I was prototyping. Then it became the family name on a few Christmas cards, then the headline on a poster for the Texas Arts Project. Once it lived in a font file the friction was zero. I could type a sentence in my own handwriting in the time it used to take to letter the first word.
Putting it under the Open Font License was the part I cared about most. It is my handwriting; I would rather other people make things with it than guard it.
The genesis
One alphabet, front to back.
Drawn in one sitting in a Strathmore notepad with a felt-tip pen. Capital A through Z, numerals 0 through 9, the punctuation that comes up most in headlines: question mark, exclamation, ampersand, parentheses, brackets, comma, period, en dash. The whole sheet got scanned at 600 dpi and traced cleanly into vector before any spacing decisions.
ALIEN.
The first time I typed a sentence in my own handwriting and it appeared instantly on screen, I sat there grinning like an idiot. Some projects pay back over years. This one paid back at compile time.
Why