Getting the best from your font

Most of what makes a font look like your hand is decided while you write it. Here is what actually moves the needle, heaviest first.

1. Write normally, not neatly

The single biggest one. Asked to write a letter for a font, nearly everyone slows down and produces their best letterform — which is not the one they use. The result is technically your handwriting and still reads like a stranger.

Write as if jotting a note to yourself. Slightly messy and genuinely yours beats tidy and invented, every time.

2. Write at your everyday size

The surface is large to fit every hand, not to be filled. Enlarging your writing opens the curves and relaxes the slant, and you end up with a poster version of your hand. Writing at your natural size.

3. Fix the letters you type constantly

e, t, a, o, i, n, s, r, h appear in nearly every word. One poor e is visible everywhere; a poor q almost never shows. If you only rewrite a handful, rewrite those. Redoing a letter.

4. Keep to one writing instrument

A font written half with a pen and half with a finger reads unevenly, because only one of them carries pressure. Pick one and stay with it. Finger or stylus.

5. Give your common letters more than one form

Real handwriting never repeats exactly. Several genuine forms of a letter stop letters and coffee from showing two identical copies, which is the clearest tell that text was typed. Your a's: versions of a letter.

Where the tier changes the result

Worth knowing plainly, because some of the answer is not a habit.

A Free font holds one settled form of each letter, with clean, even spacing. It is a real font and it looks like you.

A Pro font additionally uses:

- Spacing fitted to your hand — each letter's room measured from its own shape, and word spacing set to your writing's rhythm. - Your joins — the connections your hand makes between letters, so cursive flows rather than sitting in pieces. This is the largest visible difference on a connected hand. - Several forms of each letter, moving between them as you type, so repeats vary. - Kerning — letter pairs tucked to sit correctly together.

If your writing is joined-up, the joins matter more than anything else on this page. If you print rather than join, the difference is smaller and mostly shows in repeated letters.

What Pro adds to your font covers it properly, and the pricing page has the current terms.

What none of it can fix

A font is a set of fixed letterforms. It cannot reproduce the continuous flow of a pen, where each letter is shaped by the one before it. Inkling gets closer than most, and it is still a font. What Inkling does — and what it can't.