Aika: handwritten typeface

The brief

Aika is my handwriting, turned into a typeface. No client, no brief, just a suspicion that the thing I write on paper every day might be usable if I stopped treating it as an accident.

What I made

The hard part of a handwritten font is not drawing it. It is deciding how much of the mess to keep. Digitise your handwriting honestly and you get something nobody can set: letters clash, the baseline wanders, and the same character varies in a way that reads as a mistake rather than as a hand. Clean it up completely and you get a neutral sans wearing a wig.

So I kept the tilt and the uneven stroke ends, and threw out the inconsistencies that only existed because my wrist was tired. Then I spaced it the way you would space a text face, tightly and evenly, so words hold together at small sizes instead of drifting apart the way scanned handwriting does.

I released it free under the Open Font License through Fontesk. Charging for it felt strange. It is my handwriting, the marginal cost of one more person having it is nothing, and a free face gets used, which is the only way you find out where it breaks.