Howrey Script
My handwriting, vectorized into an OTF and given away free under the Open Font License
I have been writing all-caps in marker pens for as long as I have been making things. The proportions, the angles, the way the strokes thin and thicken when I move quickly; that is a voice I keep reaching for in design work, and I kept hand-lettering the same shapes over and over.
So I drew the alphabet once on a clean spread, scanned it, and pulled it into Glyphs. A few weekends of cleanup and spacing later it was an OpenType font with full A-Z, 0-9, and the punctuation that does the most work in poster headlines.
The first place it showed up was the wordmark for an iOS app I was prototyping. Then it became the family name on a few Christmas cards, then the headline on a poster for the Texas Arts Project. Once it lived in a font file the friction was zero. I could type a sentence in my own handwriting in the time it used to take to letter the first word.
Putting it under the Open Font License was the part I cared about most. It is my handwriting; I would rather other people make things with it than guard it.
Download the OTF
Free under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Use it on personal projects, client work, posters, t-shirts, anything. Don't sell the font itself, do sell whatever you make with it.
The genesis
One alphabet, front to back.
Drawn in one sitting in a Strathmore notepad with a felt-tip pen. Capital A through Z, numerals 0 through 9, the punctuation that comes up most in headlines: question mark, exclamation, ampersand, parentheses, brackets, comma, period, en dash. The whole sheet got scanned at 600 dpi and traced cleanly into vector before any spacing decisions.
{ } “” ‘’
/ | \ ~
ABCDEFG
HIJKLMN
OPQRSTUV
WXYZ1234
567890!?.,
; “+=°@$%&()[]
I’VE WRITTEN A LETTER TO DADDY
HIS ADDRESS IS HEAVEN ABOVE
I’VE WRITTEN “DEAR DADDY, WE MISS YOU
AND WISH YOU WERE WITH US TO LOVE”
INSTEAD OF A STAMP, I PUT KISSES
THE POSTMAN SAYS THAT’S BEST TO DO
I’VE WRITTEN A LETTER TO DADDY
SAYING “I LOVE YOU”
I’VE WRITTEN A LETTER TO DADDY
SAYING “I LOVE YOU”
The first time I typed a sentence in my own handwriting and it appeared instantly on screen, I sat there grinning like an idiot. Some projects pay back over years. This one paid back at compile time.
Why
About the typeface
Drawn once,
now type forever.
Howrey Script started the way most typefaces don’t: as one person’s actual handwriting, drawn in a single sitting on a Strathmore notepad with a Faber-Castell felt-tip pen. I’d been hand-lettering the same shapes for twenty years, in posters, in marker pens on butcher paper at workshops, in Christmas cards, in the margins of meeting notes.
The decision to make it a font was simple: I was tired of redrawing the same alphabet. So I drew it once, cleanly, on a single spread, scanned the page at 600 dpi, and pulled it into Glyphs. A few weekends of cleanup and spacing later it was an OpenType font with the full uppercase A–Z, the numerals 0–9, and the punctuation that does the most work in headlines.
Putting it under the SIL Open Font License was the part I cared about most. It is my handwriting; I would rather other people make things with it than guard it.
The practice
A felt-tip pen
on a single page.
The font keeps a few choices the hand made on that day: the way the strokes thicken when I move quickly, the slightly bouncy baseline, the angle on the leg of the R that no rational typeface would let through.
It also keeps the limits. Single weight. Caps only. The punctuation set most posters actually need. Nothing else. The discipline is not in what the typeface can do; it’s in everything I refused to add.
Howrey Script doesn’t have stylistic alternates. There’s no Cyrillic. There aren’t multiple widths or weights. The whole project is one cut, one moment, one alphabet, captured the way I draw it when nobody is watching.
Type tester
Try it.
Glyphs
The whole set.
Hover any cell.
What’s not here
On purpose.
- No Cyrillic. No Greek. No Arabic. Latin caps only.
- No lowercase. The hand drew capitals; the font keeps capitals.
- One weight. The brush load was what it was.
- One width. The page was the page.
- No stylistic alternates. The first try is the only try.
- No ligatures. Letters touch when they want to.
- No tabular numbers. No fractions. Built for headlines.
- No accents. English, French without diacritics, German without umlauts. The set is what it is.
License
Free.
Forever.
Howrey Script is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Use it on personal projects, client work, posters, t-shirts, books, the cover of your album, the menu at the wedding. Modify it. Embed it. Bundle it with your software.
The one thing the license asks: don’t sell the font itself. Sell whatever you make with it.
If you ship something using it, I would love to see it. Send me a picture; the address is on the contact page.