Creating Amelia's Handwriting

As we began finalizing the 2D assets for Amelia's scrapbook, we knew we had to pick the right typeface that would embody our main character's personality.

As it turned out, we had the perfect custom handwriting in-house with our very own Annie Schweiger! Having joined the Airtight Alibi Productions team earlier this year, Annie lends her artistic skills in many parts of the project, sketching environment concepts, assisting our graphic design team with custom drawings, and bringing our main characters to life - and now, she's the artist behind Amelia's penmanship, too. However, we needed to call upon the skills of another team member, Julia Holdnack, to pull all the pieces together and deliver a fully functional TTF file. Read on to learn more about Julia's process!

Meet Julia

The developer behind the acclaimed Penelope Pendrick series, Julia Holdnack is also the lead 3D artist for the majority of our game's environments. Before she became a full-time gave dev, Julia was a freelance graphic designer, specializing in font design. When we were looking to develop our very own font, Julia stepped up to lend her expertise!

Meet the Team

Sphinx of Black Quartz and... Neon Carrots?

To begin, Julia requested a high-definition image of several words, phrases, and symbols in Annie's handwriting.

Annie was conscious of keeping each letter separate whenever possible, avoiding the connectivity of cursive so that the font creation process would be much simpler on Julia's end.

For font designers like Julia, creating individual characters is only part of the job. She also needs to look at how the characters interact with each other and what custom kerning she needs to set between unique letter pairs, hence the amusing collection of random words.

​The brown fox and the lazy dog can only jump so far!

Ad Vectoriam!

Next, Julia vectorized each character in Adobe Illustrator and made sizing consistent across the letters.

At this point in the process, she also needs to adjust the thickness of certain letters if they were scaled up or down a significant amount.

Two to Tango

When using a font that's supposed to mimic the imperfections of the human hand, seeing two identical letters next to each other can break the effect. With that in mind, Julia made a series of alternates based on common letter pairs and duplicate letters. For example, she programmed the font to switch from "mm" to a special single character that illustrates two slightly different "m"s within it.

She also likes to create custom alternates for frequent pairings like "ch" and "er." These small but significant touches go a long way in preserving a sense of authenticity.

You've Gotta Be Kerning Me!

Using the free program FontForge, Julia imported the letters as an SVG and checked the scale and vertical alignment of each one. Next, they were ready for the unicode system, where it was time to set kerning metrics!

Here's how a sentence looked at this point, before any kerning:

Since this is a handwriting font, kerning is an easier undertaking because nothing has to be super precise. If the letter spacing is not perfectly exact, it actually looks a lot more natural.

Here's how that same sentence looked after the first pass of kerning:

Much better! Julia couldn't celebrate for long, though, because at this point the program crashed and the save became corrupted, so she had to redo all that kerning work. The joys of technical work!

Kern! Kern! Kern!
​To everything (kern, kern, kern) there is a space (kern, kern, kern)
And a gap to every pairing of this font face
(The author of this blog post apologizes for these increasingly corny - er, kerny - headings.)

Julia now has to review every single character pairing to further tweak kerning pairs. She's noticed that script fonts like this one tend to need a lot more love with all-caps kerning because the capital spacing is based off of what looks good next to lowercase letters, not other capitals. She did this with numbers as well.

Spot the Difference!

With kerning and special ligatures successfully programmed, here's how a couple different phrases look, before and after:

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See You in Silvercrest

That's a wrap! A big thank you to Annie and Julia for their hard work in bringing Amelia to the next level with this custom font face. Every new element we bring to this project makes us more and more excited for our players to experience the completed game someday. Until then, thanks for stopping by!