How To Make Your Own Handwritten Font

I'm not quite sure why, but for years I've wanted to be able to type on a computer in my own handwriting. I knew it was possible to do, and I'd seen websites where you could do it, but I guess I never had the means to do so.

Recently my boyfriend left his iPad with me...I use it much more than he does :) I immediately started looking for drawing apps, and found one called Paper that I really liked. It's so much smoother than any drawing app I've ever seen--on a touch screen OR a computer.

Anyway, I started writing words and realized I could finally make my font like I'd like to do, and now I'm going to pass on how you can do that, with a tablet or just plain paper!

First you'll need to go to MyScriptFont.com. There are other sites like this, but this was the best actually free one that I found (there's another that says it's free, but you have to pay like $10 to actually download your font). Download the font Template to your computer. If you're going to print it out and write on it with a pen, do so. If you'd like to do this with a tablet and Photoshop like I did, go ahead and open it as a 300 dpi, grayscale file in Photoshop.

Next, if you haven't already written out the alphabet and all the symbols you want to include, do that. Using the template as a guide will help you remember symbols you can use. I wrote letters and symbols on different pages of my book in the Paper app and then emailed them to my computer and opened them in Photoshop next to the template. If you're doing it this way, then you'll need to use the Quick Selection tool (shortcut "W") to select only the letter you're using. For some reason, mine came out a little fuzzy at first, so I expanded the selection by one or two pixels to really get the whole effect of the letters. You can do this by going to Select --> Modify --> Expand --> 1 or 2 pixels. Once you've gotten the whole thing selected, copy the selection and switch over to the template, where you'll paste it.

Find the designated space for that letter, and use Free Transform (Ctrl + T) to fit the letter into the box. I just matched it up with the gray letter, for the most part, to determine the size and spacing.

Continue this process for the rest of the letters and symbols until you fill the template. I added a few accented letters because I use one for my name and use the others on occasion :) Save your file when you're finished.

Go back to the website, and click Choose File to upload your file. Then name your font in the space provided.

Hit "Send File" and wait for your font to be processed.

Ta dah! You should see a preview of your font and a link (the part I circled) to download the TTF file. Click that.

Next, you'll need to open up the Control Panel and go to your Font folder. To make it easy, if you have Windows 7, you can just open the Start menu and search "Fonts" and you should see all the fonts on your computer. Drag and drop the file you downloaded to this folder to copy and paste your handwritten font to your font folder so you can use it!

You can test this out by going to a word processor to see if your font is now available, which it is on mine! :)

Congratulations! Now go type away or make a bunch of other fun fonts. I already have another one all written out! Now I just need to bring myself to do this long process all over again.

Enjoy!

DIY iPhone Case Art

If you're like me, you get bored of your iPhone case way too quickly. I spend so much time on Etsy and Amazon and eBay looking at iPhone cases that are relatively inexpensive, but a lot of the time they don't offer any coverage/protection for my phone. I'm pretty clumsy, so I didn't want to just get a bumper or something that won't protect my phone if I happen to drop it. I've had my Speck case for 6 months (it's super boring in my opinion, just plain white and gray) and it's offered a lot of protection to my phone, but I'm just sick of it.

SO. My solution: buy a clear case and make my own designs! After searching for a decently priced clear case (I did my research to make sure whatever I spent money on would actually offer protection...I ended up buying this one from eBay), I realized that people had already come up with this idea, and had made some really cute case art! I started to search around for templates, because I saw that idea quite a few times (I honestly was just planning on tracing my phone on some cute wrapping paper or something). I found this template from See That There's blog, downloaded it, and started working in Photoshop to create some cute covers! So I'm going to share that with you, in case you're not sure how to go about it.

First, you'll need to download the template above, or find your own. Open the file in Photoshop. Since I want to be able to use the template over and over again, I'm going to select the entire image (Ctrl+A), copy it (Ctrl+C), create & name a new file, and paste the material (Ctrl+V). I cropped out the stuff I didn't need, just because I'm OCD like that.

Next, use the Quick Selection tool to select the shape, and choose "Save Selection" (Select > Save Selection...).

Now for the next step, I designed my own quick little pattern. If you have a free pattern or something else you want to use (you could use a photo, anything), you can skip this step.

To create the pattern, I started off with a basic 1" x 1" canvas.

I just made a quick little blue triangle design. If you want to keep things symmetric and orderly, it helps to use guides (do this by turning on the Ruler view and dragging lines left/right from the vertical ruler and up/down from the horizontal ruler). To make my design I used the Polygonal Lasso tool to make triangles, and the Paint Bucket tool to fill them. You can make any design your little heart desires here! Here's my 1x1 square:

Next you'll need to define the pattern. Go to Edit > Define Pattern... and give your pattern a name, then select OK.

Now go back to your template and go to Edit > Fill > Contents > Pattern, and choose your newly created pattern. If nothing was selected, which is ideal for being able to choose exactly what parts of the pattern you want to show, then you should not see the iPhone outline anymore.

Once you've filled your pattern or photo or whatever you want, you'll need to load the selection you saved (Select > Load Selection...).

 I want the freedom to be able to choose exactly what part of my pattern will be showing, so I'm going to enter Quick Mask Mode (via the Quick Mask Mode icon on the toolbar, or Select > Edit in Quick Mask Mode) and use the Move tool to decide what you want to show.

When you get it just where you want it, exit Quick Mask mode by clicking the icon again or via the menu. Then you'll have a selection of the design--select the inverse and "cut" the extra pixels (Shift+Ctrl+I and then Ctrl+X, or use the menus).

Now you have iPhone art that's ready to be printed, cut out, and placed in your clear iPhone case!

I'm sure there are other ways of doing this, but this is just my method. Maybe later I'll come up with something quicker and easier. I'd love to see what you guys come up with if you'd like to post! And if you have any questions, feel free to comment!