27th August, 2025 by Rob Keller
After a couple of years in development, A Hand-Drawn Font is finally ready to meet the world. Yes, the font family is called A Hand-Drawn Font 🤷🏽🤪
It didn’t start in my sketchbooks, but from something more practical: lettering I used to label tools and materials around the studio. Later, while working on an autobiographical zine, I found myself constantly rewriting and rearranging text (I had been writing it all by hand) and realized it would make more sense to turn those letters into a font. That zine is still not finished… but the fonts are!
A Hand-Drawn Font is rough, but not sloppy. It’s a little unpredictable, but still highly readable. The strokes are wobbly, the spacing is wonky (thanks to the mostly monospaced-ness), and yet it holds together. It’s consistently inconsistent (in a good way).
The family includes 11 weights plus italics, tons of emojis, squiggly underlines, and a big set of alternate characters. With over 1,700 glyphs per font, there’s a lot to play with… and it makes fun & funky typography practically automatic.
There’s also a special collection of Artist Letters drawn from the handwriting of well-known icons like Ca-low, Rembranndt, Meero, Pikaseau, and others. I pulled unique letters directly from their notes and postcards, then shoehorned them into the style of my font. These alternates can be inserted manually or randomly to give extra flair and pizzazz. Think of them as zingy flavor enhancers for your typography — like Slap Ya Mama… it goes great on everything.
Alongside the font release comes a mini zine/book called Some Ways Thru the Mess. It’s a tiny type specimen disguised as a kind of motivational book, featuring more than 20 (fake) quotes that are maybe actually for real inspiring. It’s weird, cute, and fun… just like the fonts.
In conclusion and finally: A Hand-Drawn Font probably isn’t the best choice for your next fintech dashboard or luxury smart-home startup. But it’s a solid choice for places where personality matters more than polish (zines, posters, art books, packaging… or anything that could use something a little handmade, a little off, and very human). Human-made design FTW!
You can see the full family on the product page and can download two styles for free to try out and use however you wish. We unfortunately just discovered that our online font tester has some bug, so new fonts aren’t able to be loaded (we have no clue how to resolve this, BUT, we are working on a new tester so we’ll not try to get that completed asap (you heard it here first)).
Thanks, as always, for supporting our strange little corner of the type world!