FF Erikrighthand and FF Justlefthand are two of the first examples of loose, natural handwriting made to work as type. The software used to produce the designs was just being developed. It certainly didn’t hurt that Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum actually know “how to write.” That’s not to imply that van Blokland and van Rossum were merely literate, but rather that had been taught handwriting from Gerrit Noordzij, a master calligrapher and type designer at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague. Noordzij teaches that writing is the origin of typography, so it was a natural progression for van Blokland and van Rossum to create typographically sound fonts from their own handwriting. To start, they each put down a few alphabets on paper. Just van Rossum wrote left-handed using a thin fineliner, and Erik van Blokland used a fat marker. The resulting fonts created a first – allowing people to indulge in the irony of typing a letter in a handwritten script. This pioneering work opened a whole new area in type design – many “rough textured” handwriting fonts have since been made by others. Almost for novelty alone, the FF Hands fonts additionally include a set of small caps and oldstyle figures. In 2010, these fonts were reissued in OpenType, with hundreds of additional ligatures and glyphs for FF Justlefthand and a revised design for a more authentic FF Erikrighthand, again at the forefront of digital handwriting.
