In 2025, I was in the process of updating my personal website and portfolio. And in the midst of the discussion surrounding AI, I wanted to make my website feel more human-created, more me. My concept was to basically design a website that looked like I wrote it as I do in my notebook and journal with pencil. After all, I am promoting myself. This is where I decided to do something I had never done before: create a custom font that is based entirely on my handwriting style. WHY CREATE A FONT? Doing something I had never done before made for a fun challenge. And I could learn a lot about font creation along the way. Ever since my grandpa passed away earlier this year, I was on a mission to embrace more of my artistic side as he had done for much of his life. He was the first and only person I had ever known in my life who created his own font, over 20 years ago. He did calligraphy as a profession, and he saw that if he just created a font based on his calligraphy style, he could easily create amazing works of art for customers with just simple adjustments to the strokes and tails of letters. Creating my own personal font would make my website appear like something I had sketched out myself, as if I were showing you the inner sketches of my journal and design process. In essence, it would give a distinct identity to my website. THE PROCESS Creating a font isn't easy though. I didn't know where to begin, but I decided to start sketching out letters and punctuation over and over again in my notebook in order to find the best version of how I write each letter. I always write in capitals since I was taking fast notes during my time in undergrad and grad school. (I quickly found out that my handwriting became illegible the more I wrote lowercase). I then took macro shots of each letter with my iPhone and loaded them into Adobe Illustrator. While I initially wanted to preserve the scratchy look of pencil, I found this to be pretty difficult and decided to pursue a more smoothed-out approach to my lettering, which still gave a distinctive look and feel that matches how I write. After carefully tracing each letter out in Illustrator, I saved them as .svg files and used FontForge (an open source application) to create the font and prepare it to be exported in all the common file types (OTF, WOFF, etc.). I then constantly tweaked the kerning, size of letters, and more as I exported and re-exported the font. THE AMPERSAND (OR LACK THEREOF) If you’ve noticed, I deliberately avoided designing the ampersand (&) symbol. Ever since I had to write notes quickly, that I have not properly learned how to write the ampersand without thinking about it carefully. So when writing quickly, I've always resorted to just a simple plus sign (+), which is reflected in this font. This is just the first version (1.00) of this font. It will always be a work in progress as I add new characters and continually tweak it as time goes on.