Hand­writ­ing fonts are hot. In our digital world of zeros and ones, on and off, black and white, hand­writ­ing fonts are a bit quirky. They evoke quickly writ­ten notes — but more delib­er­ately than a scrawl. We sell a lot of hand­writ­ing fonts on Fonts.com and we are con­sid­er­ing adding more to our offering.

Hand­writ­ing fonts are some­what less soph­ist­ic­ated than formal scripts. They lack the refine­ment of most cal­li­graphic designs. They dif­fer from cas­ual scripts in that their char­ac­ters are not made from flow­ing brush strokes. They are rarely subtle, and some­times are actu­ally in-your-face. And, yet, they def­in­itely have their own beauty as well as a “cer­tain some­thing.” Used appro­pri­ately, they make their point with speed and style.

A hand­writ­ing font does not have a per­son­al­ity per se — the usage cre­ates the per­son­al­ity. But a hand­writ­ing font does have a per­sona or atti­tude, affect­ing the con­tent in a dis­tinct­ive way. Hand­writ­ing scripts can be edgy, laid-back, play­ful, or ingenu­ous. You wouldn’t want to set more than a couple of words in one of them. (If you did, the repeated idio­syn­cratic char­ac­ters would call atten­tion to them­selves, mak­ing the copy look con­trived.) They are, how­ever, per­fect designs for logo­types and word­marks, posters and head­lines. They are also ideal for suc­ces­sions of words not in big blocks of text. Such uses include invit­a­tions, menus, cer­ti­fic­ates and cap­tions. These pieces, whether on a page, a sign, a ban­ner or a screen, seem per­sonal, like cor­res­pond­ence — per­haps because of the rel­at­ively quiet way in which they’re read. So, even though part of your brain knows it’s not pro­cessing a per­sonal note, the piece “feels” a bit like one.

Please let us know if you are inter­ested in see­ing more of these kinds of fonts avail­able from Fonts.com

If you think about it, the craft of typo­graphy is little more than the com­bin­a­tion of three simple things: atten­tion to detail, com­mon sense and visual acu­ity. Sure, there are typo­graphic rules and guidelines, but they are, for the most part, just based on what is sens­ible and pleas­ing to the eye. Learn­ing to identify the parts of a char­ac­ter may increase a designer’s busi­ness vocab­u­lary, and know­ing the lin­eage of mod­ern Gara­mond designs may aid in the choos­ing of a good mod­ern revival of the face, but the real key to typo­graphic suc­cess is basic­ally just “sweat­ing the details” and a simple coordin­a­tion of mind and eye.

Take, for instance, the typo­graphic rule of avoid­ing all cap head­lines. It’s one of the first typo­graphic rules on an educator’s hit lists. It’s also one of the first rules pro­fes­sional graphic design­ers break. The tenet about not set­ting all cap­it­als, how­ever, is really based on little more than simple logic. Cap­ital let­ters take up more space than lower­case letters—up to 30% more space. Head­lines, sub­heads and pull-quotes are about set­ting brief blocks of copy in a rel­at­ively small space. It’s only com­mon sense to use the most space-efficient let­ters: lower­case. Sure, there’s all that stuff about how “word shapes” (made from ascend­ing, des­cend­ing and x-height lower­case let­ters) help us to read faster and that all cap­it­als only cre­ate rect­angles as visual iden­ti­fi­ers, but just the fact that the little let­ters can pack more inform­a­tion than cap­it­als into a given piece of design real estate, ought to be enough reason to rely on them.

Oh, it helps to know when to use an em-dash instead of an en-dash or that “smart quotes” are prefer­able to foot and inch marks, but so much of what it takes to cre­ate good typo­graphy is just pay­ing atten­tion to the type.

Points, picas, line spa­cing, and kern­ing are only the mech­an­ics. Soft­ware applic­a­tions are just tools. It takes com­mon sense and a care­ful eye to cre­ate com­mu­nic­a­tion that is invit­ing, makes an impact, focuses atten­tion, organ­izes inform­a­tion and cre­ates a mood – ulti­mately giv­ing life and per­son­al­ity to the prin­ted word.

“What’s new?” We’re asked this ques­tion daily. A friend might find out about a new love interest. A rel­at­ive could learn about a new limb on the fam­ily tree.

Want to be able to tell a fel­low designer what the hot new typeface is? It just might be possible.

Fonts.com makes a major new typeface release announce­ment just about every month. Many of these are new addi­tions to the ITC®, Mono­type®, and Lino­type® typeface lib­rar­ies. If there are par­tic­u­lar kinds of typefaces you would like to see designed (scripts, sans serif typefaces, serif designs, dec­or­at­ive faces, etc.) let me know and I will pass along your requests to the team that determ­ines what typefaces will be developed for these libraries.

This is a real oppor­tun­ity for you to have a voice into what new typefaces will be designed. A board of type experts meets three times a year to determ­ine what new addi­tions will be added to the ITC, Mono­type, and Lino­type typeface lib­rar­ies. Their next meet­ing will be on Janu­ary 21st, and I will be sure that the review board is aware of your preferences.

Inde­pend­ent type design­ers and type foundries (big and small) want to provide graphic com­mu­nic­at­ors with typo­graphic tools they want and need. Few, how­ever, reach out to their cus­tom­ers and ask them what they want. While I can’t guar­an­tee that all your typo­graphic wishes will be gran­ted, I can ensure that your request will be heard.

Sure, it’s over­used, but that doesn’t make it a bad design – just pop­u­lar. And Papyrus does tend to show up in less than stel­lar graphic design solu­tions – but, if this is the reason for sup­posedly soph­ist­ic­ated design­ers revil­ing the design, it smacks of elitism.

Would I, use the Papyrus? Prob­ably not – but not because it’s a bad design. If I wanted to make a dis­tinct­ive graphic state­ment, I would use a typeface with a little less “face time” – one that really would stand out from the crowd.

Which brings me to why I’m writ­ing this. I saw the movie Avatar™ last week­end and was blown away. While the story was little more than a rewrit­ing of “Dances With Wolves,” the cine­ma­to­graphy, anim­a­tion and spe­cial effects were vir­tu­ally bey­ond belief. Like the ori­ginal Wiz­ard of OZ™, Gone With the Wind™ and Star Wars™ movies, Avatar has set a new bench­mark for film mak­ing excellence.

So why are the sub­titles for the Na’vi people, the alien prot­ag­on­ists of the film, set in Papyrus? It is the only unima­gin­at­ive visual aspect of the movie. If the choice were mine, the sub­titles would have been ori­ginal cal­li­graphy. (There are times when cus­tom hand­let­ter­ing is the per­fect answer.) One would think that, in the $300,000,000+ budget for Avatar, there would have been some room for hir­ing a let­ter­ing artist or cal­li­grapher. If there was only $30 allot­ted to the sub­title typeface (which appears to be the case), designs like ITC Noovo™, ITC Tem­pus™ Sans, Briem™ Script or Car­o­lina™ would have car­ried off the alien and beau­ti­fully exotic demeanor of the Na’vi quite well – and would not have reminded the audi­ence of a res­taur­ant menu.