Tutorial: How to Make A Handwriting
Font Look Even More Like Handwriting
By Rene’ Bross

With the increasing popularity of freestyle layouts and art journal pages, a hand-written look to journaling is becoming more and more in demand. There are many handwriting style fonts and you can even have your own handwriting turned into a font. But there is a way to make digital handwriting look even more realistic.

Here are a couple samples of what I'm talking about. In the first sample, the handwriting font is typed out straight forward, left justified, with some added spaces at the beginning of each line to make it look a little more like it was actually handwritten.

Now this looks good, but we can make it even more realistic. Very few people can write in a completely straight line every time. I know I can't. So let's give it a little tilt. I tend to write with a tilt going up on the paper. With your arrow key selected. Got to Edit/Transform/Rotate. Point the arrow just outside the selected box at one of the corners and you will see your arrow turn into a curved arrow. When you see the curved arrow, move it up and to the left. Then the selected type will rotate.

Here's the paragraph with a very slight tilt upward.

Ok. Looking even more realistic. Now we're going to add one more step to make it even more real looking. We have our type tiling upward, but the lines of type themselves are still perfectly straight. We will put a very slight bend in the type to make it look less perfect.

First select your type tool, then select all of your type with the type tool. This will turn the type to white on black- temporarily. Then in your tool bar above, you will see an icon that looks kind of like a telescope (it's actually a warped "T" over an arc), or you can go to Layer/Type/Warp Text from the top menu.

In the dialog box, in the Style pull down menu, select Arc. You want just a slight arc to your type to give it a realistic effect, so in the Bend slider box, slide down to +4. (you can play with the other options to create other distortions. Just remember that you only need a slight bend for a realistic look to your type.

Here's the finished paragraph:

As you can see it looks a lot more like someone actually wrote this with a pen then the first straight lined sample above. Play with the warp tool to find a look that you like. You can also use the warp took to arch type around an object or in a circle. Discover it's uses. It's a lot of fun!