Dear Prudence a fun handwriting script font

Script fonts are a pain in the backside to create, there, I said it — however, I do love them. In fact, I’ve been hard at work creating a new script font. I’m calling it Dear Prudence, but more on that later. It’s a fun handwriting script typeface that would be ideal to replicate a scribbled notebook look and feel.

Designed with a graphic tablet and pen

Dear prudence is the first font that I’ve done using my graphic tablet and adobe illustrator brushes. I’m not really a fan of illustrator brushes, but now that I’ve tried them, well, I’m still not a fan.

Everything was done using a marker pen brush, with a fat tip. Once finished I put into glyphs app, then tweaked it to enhance the ink pen feeling.

Dear prudence was my attempt at joined up writing. You know, making it look like it’s been written, written convincingly. I’ve not entirely succeeded, but it’s a start and as Plato said “The beginning is the most important part of the work”. Not sure if that makes sense but I love throwing about a few quotes.

Kern it tighter than a nats chuff!

This is lazy on my part, but rather than try and make all letters neatly flow into each other, I used the sledgehammer approach. I forced them to look joined up with kerning. It worked and it didn’t work.

It’s not easy I can tell you, usually I don’t kern my fonts, I just add equal space left and right, and let you do the hard work. I had to go into kern overdrive with this one.

It felt like I had a kern pair for every letter combination. Kerning to me seems so subjective, it doesn’t seem like an exact science – especially on a script typeface like Dear prudence. As this is a handwriting font the kerning is very loose and to my taste.

I got hold of the 100 most common English words to test and help me tweak the kerning. I think I’ve trapped most of the kerning problems.

It’s not perfect, some letter combinations don’t sit together as well as I would have wanted.

Truth be told, I should have done contextual alternatives for those combinations.

I’m going to leave that for another day.

A few type samples

Dear prudence name

Well, isn’t it obvious? No.

It’s a song that John Lennon wrote while the Beatles were in India at the Maharishi’s retreat. It was written as a tribute to Prudence Farrow, the sister of Mia Farrow to come out of her room and enjoy the sunshine.

The song, it reminded me of a letter or a note that you might write. Bingo! perfect name for my font.

Use it creatively

Well, it’s a bouncy fun hand-drawn typeface, so would lend itself less informal kind of designs. It’s ideal for replicating a journal entry, or writing in a notebook. It looks better at larger point sizes, but not too large.

Go crazy with it.

Whats included

Dear prudence includes 130 glyphs including uppercase, lowercase, numbers, punctuation and a handful of symbols. The font format is otf. It’s not a web font, and was never intended to be one.

Buy Dear prudence £5

Now just before you disappear, I would love to see what you can do with my fonts. Please drop me a comment or an email to show and tell what you have done.

That is all.