Personalized fonts! For FREE!

A long time ago, on one of my flights, I found a page inside the SkyMall catalog that would let you order a personalized font. I thought it sounded amazing!

It was a cardstock insert, and on both sides of the page it had little cells in light blue. They had guidelines, so that you knew how tall the letters should be and where the baseline would be, kind of like when you're learning to write, except more technical.

I. Wanted. One.

All you had to do was fill out the paper, and send it in with like, $300, and they would send you a disk with your font on it.

This amazed me.

I tore out the paper, and practiced my writing so that if I somehow stumbled upon lots of money I would be prepared to send my page in and get my font.

But $300 was a lot of money. Even more than the $84 ($82?) that an American Girls Collection doll that I couldn't afford either. Much more.

So I never got my very own, personalized font. Even though my little letters were written out perfectly, and I didn't go outside of any of the lines or ignore the baseline. I sure coveted that font though, the same way I wanted a "Welcome to (my longitude) (my latitude)" doormat that I saw in the SkyMall magazine a few flights ago. Okay, I actually wanted the font even more than that.

Imagine my surprise and excitement when Olympus shared Bismark's link to Yourfonts.com, which is a site that creates personalized fonts for FREE.

WAAAHOOO!!!

I printed out the pages with the little cells, and even though only the first page is required, I filled out both pages, so that I would have the extra letters with accents and stuff.

And then I carried them around in my notebook for a few weeks because I don't have a scanner. And I use scanners every day at work, but I just really didn't think about it. We've been busy.

But today, I finally took the time to nab a scanner in the computer lab, and I uploaded my pages that I wrote so carefully, and in about a minute I had my very own personalized font.

Holy smokes! It's as good as I had always hoped it would be. For like, years.

My only trouble now is, what do I do with it?

I can't decide.

I suppose I'll probably use it on posters. I could use it to write people letters. But when I send real letters, I kind of like to really write them. Because there's just something nice about real, handwritten letters that are not just typed letters that look handwritten.

I'm really excited with how it came out, though. The letters nestle all together just like real writing, and not with all the extra space around them like when I actually wrote them. Typing actually does look pretty much like my actual writing, aside from the fact that my real writing has variation. For example, sometimes my "e" are round, and sometimes they're sharp (like this font). I'll use both in the same sentence sometimes. I think maybe it has something to do with what letters it's next to...but I digress...

I highly recommend YourFonts.com because:
1. It is kind of a novelty.
2. You don't have to be a fancy technical person to use it.
3. It does not cost $300.
4. You don't have to wait until you get your hands on a copy of SkyMall to do it.
5. You can pretend you've written out your homework or essay by hand, and actually type it.
6. You can write letters that have a personal touch, even though they're typed. (Note: If you type because your handwriting is illegible, this will evoke in others a sense of irony, because your writing will still be typed, and also still be illegible.)
7. You can send postcards to clients that seem like they're personalized but are not.
8. You can address your wedding invitations by hand without actually doing anything by hand.
9. If you trick your friend into filling out all of the cells, you can write your friend letters from himself.
10. They even have a fancy schmantzy extra high resolution option in case you just can't get enough of your own handwriting.
11. You can write letters to companies that appear to be personal but are not.
12. Times New Roman, Schmimes New Roman. Who needs it?!
13. Um. Actually. I think those are all of the reasons that I've got for now.

FUN!

OH! 13. It says on the site that you can use your font to personalize your digital scrapbook pages. This is actually a really good idea. I will probably do this.

I'm going to make more. I'm going to make a handwriting one, and I don't know what other fonts, but this is just too fantastic for me to stop with one!