I don’t want to be legible to a computer

I made a font of my handwriting. It was for a longer piece I intended to create on a standalone website, using CSS to stretch, shrink and generally mess with my writing in ways that challenge what it meant to be legible. I assumed I would be starting with an illegible handwriting font (given my illegible handwriting).

Breaking apart my letters, removing the cursive that bound them, and confining each letter to a box helped the legibility a lot in my case, and I assume in many others. It’s a popular ask, using handwriting to make a font, but other than jokey “doctor’s handwriting” fonts or pretend children’s writing, it’s difficult to find genuinely hard-to-read examples, Webdings (originally built for incorporating graphics into websites, apparently) and other purposely obtuse fonts aside. This may be obvious, but it’s interesting; a font serves to communicate, after all.

“Don’t mistake communication for legibility. Just because something is legible doesn’t mean it communicates and, more importantly, doesn’t mean it communicates the right thing.” — David Carson

Legibility is “the quality of being clear enough to read”. A process where I wrote a bunch of letters in little boxes and scanned them into a program made my writing legible, and to some even pretty. Legibility is a prerequisite to understanding, a prerequisite to…