Role: Typeface Designer
Tools: Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, BirdFont
Skills: Typeface Design, Typography, Letterform Development, Vector Illustration, Font Production, Kerning, Visual Design
Nancy Script is a hand-drawn typeface based entirely on my grandmother Nancy's handwriting from her recipe book. My goal was to preserve every small imperfection, loop, wobble, and quirk that made her writing feel alive. Rather than smoothing or modernizing the letterforms, I focused on honoring the original texture and personality of her handwriting so the typeface feels as though it came directly from the pages she once wrote.
The process began by photographing pages from her recipe book. I used Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop to increase contrast and clean the images while preserving the natural character of each letter. I then traced every glyph in Adobe Illustrator, carefully studying the subtle variations in stroke weight, spacing, and proportions that occurred naturally in her handwriting. Finally, I imported the vector letterforms into BirdFont, where I built a functional typeface by assigning glyphs, refining spacing, and testing the font across words and phrases.
Throughout the project, I resisted the urge to perfect the inconsistencies that give handwriting its personality. Instead, those variations became the defining characteristics of the typeface. Nancy Script is more than a digital font; it is a way of preserving my grandmother's handwriting and allowing her presence to live on in every word it forms.
