Fonts and Handwriting
The other day I was walking around and saw something that was unusual. It was just a sign advertising some store but what stood out was how scuffed the sign was. It was clearly handwritten and was not very well made but that was what was interesting about it. So much text and media we see is so carefully curated; digitally crafted to appeal to people as best as possible but this wasn't that; just a sign by some guy rushed together to do the job.
Of course there are a lot of benefits to having everything be digitised. It's quicker to type than to write, it's much easier to edit and search through. It's better for displaying, sharing and interacting with. In terms of styling there's some limited options, you can make text bold, italic , or even combine bold and italics. You can change text colour or text size to display fonts in many ways.
Even more powerfully, you can make text animated or . (Click the interactive word to see an effect). Obviously this is really powerful and allows for completely new ways of expressing your manner in ways that aren't as static as something like a sign or written text might be. There's a lot of interactive media that I really like and it's possible to do some incredible and beautiful things.
An example of the power of fonts and custom styles is video games which use their own fonts. This sentence is written using the primary TF2 font which is immediately recognisable to anyone who knows it. TF2 has multiple fonts that it can use for different purposes which really helps it to build its own brand for the purpose of differentiating it. There's also other fonts associated with certain games, Overwatch and Minecraft have very distinct ones. Even the first pokemon games had a font which is very characteristic of those games; even though it was partially born out of the technical limitations it still has its own styling that jibes with the rudimentary graphics of those games. This is the red/blue pokemon text which even now I associate with iconic phrases like "It hurt itself in its confusion" or "I like shorts! They're comfy and easy to wear!" However, modern pokemon games use generic fonts which are easy to read but they lose a lot of the iconic nature of the older pokemon font.
One way to try to inject your own style is to use a specific font. I actually created the one used for this paragraph based off my own handwriting. However, it's a laborious process and quite difficult to make it layout in a way that looks good. I did a decent amount of cleanup but even so there's a few things that don't look quite right. It's extra work if you want bold or italic versions of the font (I didn't bother). This is awesome but there's a tell-tale sign of its inauthenticity when you look at two copies of the same letter they're obviously the same: it doesn't have the natural variability of handwriting that can make it more real and expressive.
