Make your first font

About ten minutes, start to finish. It's free, and you don't need a card.

What happens

1. Start a font. Give it a name — you can change it later. 2. Write your letters. You'll be shown one letter at a time on a writing surface. Write it the way you naturally would. If a letter comes out wrong, write it again before moving on. 3. Look at what you've made. The Letters room shows every letter in your hand so far, and what's still missing. You can rewrite any of them. 4. Get your font. Inkling assembles the letters into a font file and hands it to you. Getting your font file. 5. Install it. Once installed, your hand shows up in the font list of every app on that device — Windows · Mac · iPad.

The three rooms

Your font has three places, and you'll move between them freely:

• Write — where you put ink down.
• Letters — everything in your hand so far, and what's missing.
• Font — where your font gets made and downloaded.

Before you start

A stylus on a tablet gives the truest result, but a fingertip on any touchscreen works. See What you'll need and Finger or stylus.

Write at the size you'd normally write. Not carefully, not neatly — normally. The font is only as much like you as the writing you give it.

You don't have to finish in one sitting

Your work saves as you go. Come back and add letters whenever you like, and rebuild the font when you do.