How To Create Your Own Handwritten Font For Free

Have you ever received a nice, handwritten letter from a friend or family member?

Of course you have!

My guess is that you DIDN’T throw it away without reading it.

Am I right?

People don’t throw away handwritten notes or letters without reading them first.

This is why when investors use direct mail marketing to get leads from motivated sellers, handwritten letters generally have a much higher response rate.

In other words, more people call you, wanting to sell you their house!

But I’m guessing you don’t have time to handwrite hundreds or even thousands of letters. You’d spend all your time writing and forget what your spouse looks like.

Bad idea.

Instead, many investors (myself included) turn to “handwritten font.”

What is Handwritten Font?

Handwritten font is exactly what it sounds like: computer font that looks just like handwriting.

I’m sure you’ve seen examples before, as your computer gives you a lot of options.

But let’s be honest: Most of them look terrible.

Just because the font is slanted a little doesn’t mean it looks handwritten.

Of course, you could find some good free fonts online through websites like FontSquirrel.com, but even those can look fake.

Instead, what I do is turn MY OWN HANDWRITING into a computerized font that I can use in Microsoft Word, Photoshop, or other programs on my computer.

Yes — that means you can TYPE, and it will look just like you wrote it by hand!

Pretty snazzy, huh?

So, how do you create handwritten font?

Here’s how.

How to Create Handwritten Font For Free

Step One: Head to www.MyScriptFont.com and download the template PDF.

Step Two: Next, when you’ve downloaded the PDF or the PNG file onto your computer, simply print out the single-page sheet. It will look like this:

Step Three: Using a sharp (thin) Sharpie (or a thick pen), fill in each letter or character that you see in gray. Use your own style, but try to stay the exact same size as the light grey font you’ll see on the paper.

When I first tried this, I used a ballpoint pen, which didn’t look that good at the end. Later, when I re-made my font with a Sharpie, it worked much better.

Step Four: Next, you’ll need to scan in your completed worksheet to your computer. If you don’t have a scanner, you could try using your smartphone with a scanner app like TinyScanner — just be sure your lighting is good and the photo is taken directly above the document so it doesn’t warp the look of the document.

Step Five: Back on www.MyScriptFont.com, upload your document from your computer to MyScriptFont. You’ll also want to name your font something that you’ll recognize, such as your name. See image below for instructions on doing this.

You can also choose which format you want to download it in: TTF or OTF. It shouldn’t matter which you choose, as most computers and software can handle either. But I use TTF.

Step Six: Finally, after you have clicked the “Start” button, you’ll land on a page that shows a sample of what your font will look like, using the phase, “The quick brown fox jumps.”

If you are happy with your font, then simply click the name of your font and download it. If you are not happy with the font, simply start this process over and try again! It took me 4-5 tries before I was completely happy with my font.

Step Seven: Once you’ve downloaded the font, you’ll need to install it on your computer. If you have a semi-new computer (within 10 years old), you should be able to simply double-click on the downloaded file and follow the simple prompts to install the font.

If your computer is older than my grandma, you might need to search Google for information on how to install a font. For me, on my Mac, it takes less then five seconds (and two clicks) to install a new font.

Step Eight: Finally, you’ll need to completely exit out of whatever program you were in, and then restart it. This means if you are creating a piece of direct mail marketing in Microsoft Word, you’ll need to exit Word completely and re-open it. Fonts are loaded when a program is opened up, so your new font will only be available once you’ve completely closed and re-opened the program.

Now you should be able to select your own, personal handwritten font for your document!

Here’s how mine looks:

So what do you think? Does it look “real” enough to you?

Leave your comments below!

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.