Sigmund Frued's handwriting analyzed:)

Smashing Magazine's guest Harald Geisler walks you through making a handwriting font

This is the most comprehensive, and well thought-out guide to how to make a handwriting typeface I have yet to see anywhere. Harald takes you through the concept, the intent, and finally through the mechanics of how a handwriting typeface should be created.

And the kicker is that he recreated a famous person's handwriting quite faithfully: that of Sigmund Freud. He wants €19 for 6 fonts, one a Pro font with alternating characters so anything you type comes out a little differently line by line, as a real human would write (no offense Mr. Turing).

Me, I'll save my bucks for a real psychiatrist, but the article is well-worth reading if you intend to make your own handwriting font. Massively details, the guy's a prince for sharing all his experience.

My Best,


Gary

That's interesting! Haha, I've always wondered if handwriting - not generic, cursive letting strokes can be feasible as a font. I was never much for Freud, but I love his adage that a balanced person is one who knows how to love and work.

Hi and welcome to TalkGraphics, Gina.

I thought two of the more interesting things about Harald and his article are:

• His approach is completely professional. I "slummed it" with FontLab about ten years ago to produce an acceptable approximation of my own handwriting and have not gone back to calculate slope, alternate o's, and the other "fussy stuff" that makes his handwriting font of Freud a commercial font.

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• Graphology is a legitimate science and field of study, that can tell with accuracy certain details of a person's psychological makeup. And yet Freud is visibly absent in the chronicles of handwriting analysis. In 1880, when graphology was begum to be taken seriously, the pioneers were Ludwig Klages, George Meyer, and William Preyer, all German, all with some sort of doctor's degrees. In fact, it was Preyer who observed that people who could write even after the loss of a limb (writing with a pen between one's teeth, writing with the opposite hand), didn't fundamentally change the nature of the handwriting, leading him to call handwriting "brainwriting."

There are several fonts available for free around the web of Emily Austin, Cezanne, and others' which are pretty faithful to the original. Authors such as Balzac, Goethe, Edgar Allen Poe, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Albert Einstein, Charles dickens, and of all people, Sir William Herschel, the father of fingerprinting, all analyzed handwriting with a fair degree of accuracy, with no knowledge of the studies of the three German professors.

My Best,

Gary

It is amazing, and really, really well-done. Only problem is that Freud's handwriting is a little too incomprehensible to use for advertising material! Will look up the fonts for Emily Austin and Cezanne - any others? to see if they are more legible.

May be a moot point -- the kids around here stopped learning handwriting some years ago, so maybe we could only use it on ads aimed at the 50+ market...