Sometimes, it’s nice to step away from the hum-drum day-to-day work and inject a little bit of your own personality into the digital world. We spend so much time looking at screens, and using the same standard fonts can feel impersonal. I recently decided to do something a little different and create a font based on my own handwriting. The result is a unique, personal touch that I can use anywhere—a fun way to stand out from the crowd!

The journey began when I stumbled across the Calligraphr website. The concept was immediately appealing: turn my actual handwriting into a TrueType (.ttf) font. I created a font I call By The Way, a play on my initials (BTW), and captures my own casual, personal feel of a handwritten note. The process was incredibly simple: I first downloaded the template pages from the site, then carefully wrote each letter and symbol in the designated boxes. Once complete, I photographed the pages and uploaded them back to Calligraphr. Within minutes, the site processed my input and delivered the TrueType (.ttf) file. I was so excited that I ended up creating eight different versions: regular, bold, small caps, small caps bold, and each of those in a narrow width! I’ve been using it ever since in things like PowerPoint presentations and Word documents.

Using the font on my local computer was simple, but I recently wanted to use it on my website as well. For the web, I needed the modern .woff and .woff2 file formats to ensure maximum compatibility and fast loading times across all browsers. To handle this conversion, I turned to the FontSquirrel Webfont Generator. This free, incredibly helpful tool made the conversion process a breeze. All I had to do was upload my “By The Way” TrueType (.ttf) files to the generator. After selecting a few simple options, it quickly provided a downloadable kit containing the necessary .woff and .woff2 files, along with the required CSS, allowing me to finally use my custom handwriting font on my own website. You can see a sample of my “By The Way” font in action right here: https://www.pixelated.tech/bytheway.

Here’s a quick recap of the process I followed:

• Discovered and visited the Calligraphr website.
• Downloaded the custom font template.
• Wrote all the characters in my own handwriting on the template.
• Photographed and uploaded the completed template pages back to the site.
• Downloaded the generated TrueType (.ttf) font file.
• Used the FontSquirrel Webfont Generator to convert the .ttf file to web-ready .woff and .woff2 formats.
• Installed the .ttf version locally and uploaded the web versions to my site.

The entire project—from the initial idea to seeing my own handwriting displayed on my website—was an absolute blast! It’s deeply satisfying to have a font that is truly mine and know that I created it with just a pen, paper, and a couple of great web tools. If you’re looking for a fun, creative project that results in something unique and useful, I highly recommend creating a font based on your own handwriting.