Web Development: How to Design and Construct a Functional Cursive Font

How to Design and Construct a Functional Cursive Font

Final product image — What You'll Be Creating

Cursive type was once an oxymoron, but modern OpenType technology now lets us create true cursive fonts with letterforms that behave according to their context, just like true cursive lettering, to some degree.

How to Create Your Own Cursive Handwriting Font

Here are some quick tips on creating your own beautiful cursive font from scratch:

Do a simple warm-up before starting. Take a couple of minutes and draw the sticks and circles to get used to the materials. It will help you relax and write beautiful letters.
Relax and take your time. Ignore the emotion and just breathe. This will help to cope with handshaking.
Select a letter style. Look at the options on the Internet, learn the spelling of letters. It will help you to make a really beautiful and professional-looking font.
Try different materials. Ballpoint pen, pen, and ink, felt-tip pen—everyone has their perfect tool, so choose your own.
Relax and enjoy the process!

If you're looking for a shortcut, download some free cursive fonts from Envato Elements. There are a lot of creative options that can add some flair and style to your work.

Rossegenia Font Download Cursive — You can find handwriting cursive calligraphy fonts like Rossegenia on Envato Elements.

You can also check out this list of beautifully designed cursive fonts that are ready for you to download:

Fonts

30+ Best Stylish Cursive Fonts

Melody Nieves

Now, it's time for you to create your own cursive handwriting font. Let's get started!

1. Do You Really Need a Font?

This may seem like a strange question to ask, but more and more these days, designers overuse fonts. The word “font” literally means “cast source”, referring to the metal blocks that once made up a typeface. These blocks were made of incredibly hard metal, designed to survive hundreds of thousands of presses, or later on, to serve as molds repeatedly casting copies of its letters into softer metal slugs for letterpress printing.

With this, there is an implication that fonts are meant for heavy, repetitive use. Type designers sink a great deal of work into a font to ensure that it functions as well as possible in any given setting.

Thus, if you only need one decorative word, it does not make sense to design (or nowadays buy) an entire font. You're probably better off hand-lettering your word or phrase and importing it into your design. But if you need multiple different headings or want to set a particularly long passage in that typeface, or want a design that can otherwise print whatever the heck you want it to, then a font is the way to go.

2. Creating the Design

Type designs are often the result of happy accidents. Often I might casually letter something on paper that looks really good, and that will turn into inspiration for an entire typeface. For example, here were some headings I wrote for some physics/stat homework that I thought might make a nice typeface.

Word of advice: if you're trying to letter a sample, it’s often helpful to letter on grid paper so you can keep your letters—and scan crops—nice and straight.

These were written with a broad-nibbed calligraphy pen. You can buy some very inexpensive calligraphic fountain pens for less than $10 from manufacturers like Sheaffer.

You will have to scan them into images in order to vectorize the designs. If you don’t have a scanner (like me), you can simply take a picture from an orthogonal angle and use that. Both of the above scans were made with an iPhone camera. The image quality does not have to be great—you only need concern yourself with avoiding geometric distortion.

3. Tracing the Letters in FontForge

To create the font itself, you will need a font editing program. Several horrendously expensive options exist, but one great app, FontForge, is free and open source. We'll be using FontForge in this tutorial. Make sure you set it to use only integer coordinates (File > Preferences > Editing > SnapToInt).

Step 1

The first thing we have to do is import the scan into the FontForge drawing area. Do this by clicking into a glyph edit window and going to File > Import.

Then, making sure you're in the Background layer, use the move and scale tools to position and size the reference image. For demonstration purposes, I'll start with the letter ‘r’ in this sample, so center the ‘r’ in the middle of the glyph frame, right on the baseline.

Step 2

We start by drawing the junction where the letter’s instroke begins.

Then we plant HV-curve points at all the minima and maxima of the letter’s contour. Using HV-curve points helps anchor into place important points along the letter contour, and also forestalls endless headaches with missing extrema points down the road. For now it’s fine if the path intersects itself.

Then copy the instroke points and shift them straight horizontally over to form the outstroke points. It's very important that the y-coordinates of the two sets of points remain the same.

Then finish outlining the glyph.

Step 3

Adjust the bézier handles of the curve points to better match the contour of the glyph.

You can see a filled preview of the glyph in the main Font view.

Step 4

Now we can tackle the next glyph, in this case an ‘i’. Start by roping off the ‘r’ by setting its advance width on top of its outstroke edge.

We trace the glyph with the same techniques we used to do the ‘r’, taking care to make the junction between the ‘r’s outstroke and the ‘i’s instroke smooth.

You will need to draw the outstroke of the ‘i’ at the correct height, so that it lines up the instrokes of all the other letters, so it can be enormously helpful to create Fontforge guidelines marking out the heights of the joins. Create guidelines by dragging down from the top ruler in the glyph window. Make sure the guidelines are rounded to integer coordinates.

Then just draw the rest of the glyph.

Step 5

This ‘i’ was drawn in the ‘r’ glyph space; we need to move it to its own glyph slot. Select the contour (and dot) by double clicking the paths, and cut and paste them into the ‘i’ glyph slot. Set the advance width by setting all sidebearings equal to 0 (Metrics > Set Both Bearings). Shift the background image if needed.

You can still see the letters side by side by typing them in the wordlist box. This is extremely useful when making cursive fonts to make sure the joins are smooth and line up.

Step 6

Here I am tracing the letter ‘l’ from the sample. It can be easier to copy an existing letter (in this case, a dotless ‘i’) and move the points to match the new letter, though everyone has their own way of hand-tracing scans.

The HV-bounding-box-points system sometimes breaks down, as it can be impossible to trace certain curves using just HV points.

In this case, it may be necessary to insert additional curve points along the spline.

Hand lettering is rarely perfect, but fonts do have to be (one of the disadvantages of using fonts). That means that in order to avoid problematic combinations, the letters, especially their instrokes and outstrokes, have to be somewhat standardized. In the case of the ‘l’, that means lowering the tail so that it sits on the baseline.

Step 7

Here is a tracing of the letter ‘c’. As you can see, I made a few changes from the written version to make it play well with other letters. The Metrics Window can be very useful to test strings of letters.

4. Deriving the Rest of the Alphabet

Your lettering sample will probably not contain every letter in the alphabet. In fact, you can sometimes get better results deriving letters from letters you’ve already drawn. For example, a script ‘a’ is very similar to a ‘ci’.

I created the aforementioned ‘a’ just by squishing together a ‘c’ and an ‘i’ in the sample.

Each letter you create will beget more letters. The ‘a’, for example, gives rise to the ‘d’.

The ‘d’ is not the only letter that comes from ‘a’. You can also conceivably derive the ‘q’, ‘u’, ‘i’ (if you started with an ‘a’ instead of an ‘i’), ‘n’, ‘m’, ‘p’, ‘h’, and several more from ‘a’. There are countless ways you can derive an alphabet starting with a few sample letters. One way is shown below, starting with an ‘s’, ‘a’, ‘c’, ‘e’, ‘l’, ‘o’, and ‘r’.

Here is an example of a font I made with all 26 letters.

5. Assembling a Functional Font

At this point, the font contains a full alphabet, but barely works as a font, since the letters only work together at the most basic level. The next part of this tutorial will focus on creating necessary alternates and programming the font to link up the letters in a pleasing cursive script.