Have you ever wanted to create your own font from your handwriting?

(NOTE: They started to charge for this. You can try  pilothandwriting.com while it is still free! Please post alternatives in the comments below. Thanks for everyone who let me know about this!)

This is a cool little 10-15 minute activity that will keep on giving back to you for years to come. That’s right add that final customizing touch to your Windows, Linux or Mac machine – Your handwriting as a font!

With some free time a visit to a website called YourFonts.com, a scanner and a printer you can create a font for use in any application on your computer. To me this sounded way too cool to pass up. I went and downloaded the printable template from here and carefully followed the steps.

The template looks like this:

You print it out and add your letters to each corresponding box. What you see above is the first page. There are two pages but the second one contains only special characters. Anything that you omit will not be included in your font.

So if you just wanted to have a font contain numbers, letters or characters just fill in those. The font file will be smaller for it.

I was pretty excited, I grabbed a sharpie and went to work on my page. Here is what it looked like when I was done:

Now I messed around with the scanning properties and decided to use the grey scale you see above at 200dpi. It gave it a pretty cool look. You can of course scan in color as the site recommends. You will have to convert that scan to a JPG, GIF or PNG file (If yours spits back a PDF).

Most scanning programs can save as for you. Now that I had my template filled out I was ready to upload it and have YourFonts recognize each of my characters and spit back a font.

They ask you for your file and to name your font and add a copyright line to the file as you can see below:

You are not required to fill in these fields and you can leave the default if you don’t want to be identified as the author of this font.

I filled in the fields uploaded and then waited about a minute to be show this:

That add custom text line at the top will add just that to your font file. This will be displayed when someone previews the font. Again it is not necessary to complete your Font. I clicked on Download and was ready to rock and roll.

You hit that download your font now button to do just that. You can grab my font here. (It is a rapidshare link) After you click on the button to Install & Use you will see brief information on how to use your newly created font on your computer. Share your fonts with us in the comments!

We would love to see what you guys come up with!!