---
title: I built a font out of my handwriting
description: Some weekend fun!
category: logs
date: 2016-01-22T00:00:00.000Z
---


After two days of literally dotting my i's and crossing my t's, my obsession for a custom font is finally over now. 28 hours with paper, pen, Inkscape, and FontForge is a time well-spent. In hindsight, I could've used my handwriting on a printed paper, but it was quite a task drawing every glyph manually with a mouse.

Why the effort? Well, I plan on creating a webcomic series and I figured it'd be best if I had my own font for it.

Any learnings? Oh yeah! Kerning! It's the meticulous art of balancing the space between two characters visually rather than geometrically. As a kid, I've been around printing presses and it never occurred to me how we took printing presses for granted. I mean, it's one thing to kern things with software, but to do it physically? On the type blocks. Man, that's crazy! [Typesetting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typesetting) is an art hands down! And [kerning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning) is a rabbit hole of interesting stuff on typeface design too. Worth a read.

By the way, have you heard about its cousin [keming](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/keming)? Well, now you have. There's an entire [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/keming/top/?t=all) dedicated to it. Go have fun.