Never thought of adding font designer to my resume, but here we are. I was contacted by a relative of mine working on a book collecting and restoring the works the 20th century Latvian writer Broņislava Martuževa. Many of the manuscripts were heavily damaged and had to be deciphered and traced. In order to help speed efforts for future works within foundation, I set out to build a typeface resembling her handwriting as closely as possible.
Gear used
- Phone for reference capture
- Adobe Illustrator for vector tracing
- FontForge for first demo, later upgrading to FontLab for rest of development
My own handwriting
The first prototype was my own handwriting – the very same evening I got the call I set out to tracing my own lettering and seeing if I could get it to work. Finding free open source software wasn’t that difficult, working with it was a bit of a different question. After a bit of tinkering I did have a basic working font on my hands that didn’t look half bad!
For somebody that has been chronically online for most of his life, it was rush inducing to finally be able to write at the speed I think. It also provided me with a neat asset to use in my own projects – maybe this very page.
That’s all she wrote
At first I tried to extract what I can from the existing reference photos – a couple of postcards and notebook pages. That proved ineffective, so I resorted to tracing the letters by hand. Hands down, the most experience I’ve ever gained with the pen tool.
The final result
I spoke to the head of the foundation after sending off the work and she was absolutely lovely. She was very pleased that they now had the ability to produce official announcements, promotional material, and most importantly of all had another piece of the Martuževa legacy preserved in the digital age.