Lately I’ve been experimenting with a lot of low fidelity deliverables, supported by tools such as Konigi Sketch, and SketchFlow. One missing feature is the ability to write in a decent low fidelity font. So thanks to the guys at Your Fonts, I’ve now got my very own hand written font in TTF format, complete with emoticons, arrows, my signature, and other useful pieces. Five minutes and a scanner is all it takes, and you’ll be surprised how useful it is. Give it a shot.
12 Comments
As my handwriting is disgraceful, I’d rather my clients didn’t see it. But that does look pretty cool!
Posted by David Barrett at 5:33 pm on 15 April, 2009.
That’s really cool - your handwriting would make awesome graffiti Des!
Posted by Leah at 9:20 pm on 15 April, 2009.
Your handwriting is legible. Mine has been likened to a drunken spider after 8 years in medical school.
Posted by Paul M. Watson at 10:14 pm on 15 April, 2009.
Your Font is a pretty nice little thing. I’ve used it on couple of projects and it always does the job. I don’t know what it would look like for print stuff.
Posted by Marc-André at 11:45 pm on 15 April, 2009.
That’s nice and all, but when you only have one glyph for each letter, you look psychotic. It’s like HAL pretending to be human but getting stuck in the Uncanny Valley of Typography.
Posted by Nathan Peretic at 3:36 am on 16 April, 2009.
This is really cool. What would be even more awesome is if I could use my Tablet laptop as input instead of printing out the form.
Bonus: perhaps this will help motivate me to improve my handwriting!
Posted by Martha Rotter at 4:54 pm on 16 April, 2009.
Hopefully people would use an image replacement technique, or even just write the message in alt text, and not be bad and lazy and just use an image with shitty alt text.
Posted by Stephen at 6:28 pm on 19 April, 2009.
Hey Stephen,
I wasn’t suggesting using your own custom fonts on the web here, more just using them for low fidelity deliverables, in which case the file format will fall back to whatever font is available.
Des
Posted by Des Traynor at 6:36 pm on 19 April, 2009.
Why do you say that UX community migrates back to low fidelity deliverables? Which are the high fidelity deliveravles it is migrating from? I’m realy curious about this because I thought we were moving to even higher fidelity - to “as real” html/JS/CSS prototypes.
Posted by George at 8:22 am on 21 April, 2009.
Hey George,
I’m saying this, because I’ve seen it come full circle. There was a time when we’d sit with clients and then work thorugh ideas on paper, then as the notion of the waterfall process became more fleshed out, we moved toward high fidelity deliverables, effectively slick wireframes complete with gradients, shading, straight lines, perfect alignment etc.
On lists such as iXDA, and in the tools we’re using (such as SketchFlow Balsamiq, Konigi Sketch, Axure Sketch etc) I’m seeing the trend back toward low fidelity wireframes, which show nothing other than layout, and even that’s rough.
There is no high fidelity nor low fidelity. There is only, and only ever has been RIGHT fidelity and WRONG fidelity. You should never display a level of fidelity above what you’ve considered. That is why I believe we’re seeing a migration back toward low-fi.
Hope that helps,
Des
Posted by Des Traynor at 9:39 am on 21 April, 2009.
You need to build in contextual alternates so that double letters don’t make it a dead giveaway that it’s a font.
Posted by Jason at 8:48 pm on 28 April, 2009.
Дизайн у Вас интересный, я вот тоже для блога искал - стала прикручивать, а все посты куда то делись. Эээх… буду писать заново
Posted by SemsheepeRism at 3:29 pm on 15 June, 2009.
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[...] Hand Written Fonts - Fonts made out of your own handwriting for that personal touch. Seems slightly frivilous, but Des Traynor swears by it. (via Contrast blog) [...]
Posted by DeveLinks - 17-04-2009 | Ross Duggan at 5:31 pm on 17 April, 2009