February 19, 2007 | In Handpicked Fonts

Contemporary Handwriting Fonts

The FontShop shelves are stocked with thousands of delightful script typefaces, but it can be difficult to find those that convincingly simulate handwriting without sacrificing legibility. We culled from our collection the best handwriting typefaces in various writing styles — from print to cursive, simple to swashy. Read more about our selected favorites in this week’s newsletter.

Careful, Legible Print

MVB Calliope

3 weights. See more in the FontShop Newsletter.

FF Providence Sans

2 weights, dingbats, and serif version. See more in the FontShop Newsletter.

ITC Zemke Hand

ITC Weber Hand

Venture

Panoptica Script

Unicase, monospaced font with alternates.

Longhand

2 weights.

Quick, Natural Scrawling

Louisiana

Includes alternates to avoid repeating letter forms: ‘D’, ‘B’, ‘S’, ‘g’, and ‘y’.
Also includes 2 ligatures: ‘jj’ and ‘Ti’.

P22 Freely

Brisa

Two fonts, one with connections, one without. Use either by themselves, or both together.

MVB Sacre Bleu

Plenty of ligatures to avoid letterform repetition. Note ‘ee’, ‘ll’, ‘tt’, ‘pp’, ‘oo’.

FF Justlefthand

Part of the FF Hands package with the heavier FF Erikrighthand. Each with accompanying small caps.

FF Market

3 weights, 1 condensed width.

Linotype Feltpen

2 weights.

Felt Tip Roman

3 weights. Woman and Senior variations. See more in the FontShop Newsletter.

Dizzy

1 weight with alternates for all lowercase letters.

Linotype Notec

Berranger Hand

Iva

2 weights.

Linotype Sketch

Flood

ITC Bradley Hand

2 weights, 1 italic.

Filzerhand

FF Ropsen Script

2 weights, each with small caps.

Kremlin Cyrillic

Just a basic but nice character set.

Cursive and Swashed Scripts

BistroScript

Includes a variety of creative ligatures such as ‘br’, ‘he’, ‘wt’, ‘tt’, and more.
Also includes stylistic alternates for variety in letter forms: ‘i’, ‘j’, ‘o’, ‘r’, etc.

MVB Emmascript

2 weights. See more in the FontShop Newsletter.

Fineprint

2 weights, each with alternates, ligatures, and swashes.

Handsome Pro

6 styles, contextual alternates. See more in the FontShop Newsletter.

Amadeo

2 weights, alternates, small caps.

Make Your Own!

HandFont

Can’t find the style you need? Make a custom digital font based on your own handwriting. Send us a scan and our type design professionals will create a working font in your preferred format. The HandFont above is Ventana de Dia based on the writing of Lita Mikrut Franco.

In our next two posts we’ll list typefaces inspired by historical handwriting and comic book lettering.