Making Text look written on paper?

[Tab-itha]

Hi, I'm currently working on a folder and really need some help. The general look I'm going for is, that everything on the page is written/draw with a fountain pen in blue ink.

I made an Art Brush for Illustrator out of a scanned in line, drawn with a fountain pen and the drawings look pretty convincing with this Brush applied to them (slightly ueven color, slightly uneven border as if they were really drawn with a fountain pen and the ink was bleeding slightly into the paper).

My problem is that I want the text to look the same. However, the only way I have seen so far to apply an Art Brush to a text, is to create an outline and apply it to that. That looks very bad and rather unreadable with the lines ovelapping and the text getting very thick because it's an outline instead of one path.

Does anyone have an idea or tutorial on how I could make the text look like it's written with a fauntain pen or how I could get the font as one path instead of an outline? I have Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign all CS2 so that's the programs I could use to achive this. Any ideas? Thank you very much.

Tabitha

[SurfPark]

Trust me, you do not want your body copy to be in a stylish font. Your titles and headers can have a cool ink pen effect, but if you have to keep it simple for your body text. I know that sounds boring and restrictive, but when it comes to fonts, less is more.

There are a lot of free fonts that look hand written (http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=603), but these are meant to be used to call-outs or headers, usually at 14pt or higher. Using these in your body copy will make reading horrible. You don't want your font to be distracting from your message.

If I wanted the effect you're talking about, I'd use a handwritten type font for the header with a serif font for the body. It will have that feeling and still be readable.

[seosamh]

Hi, I'm currently working on a folder and really need some help. The general look I'm going for is, that everything on the page is written/draw with a fountain pen in blue ink.

I made an Art Brush for Illustrator out of a scanned in line, drawn with a fountain pen and the drawings look pretty convincing with this Brush applied to them (slightly ueven color, slightly uneven border as if they were really drawn with a fountain pen and the ink was bleeding slightly into the paper).

My problem is that I want the text to look the same. However, the only way I have seen so far to apply an Art Brush to a text, is to create an outline and apply it to that. That looks very bad and rather unreadable with the lines ovelapping and the text getting very thick because it's an outline instead of one path.

Does anyone have an idea or tutorial on how I could make the text look like it's written with a fauntain pen or how I could get the font as one path instead of an outline? I have Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign all CS2 so that's the programs I could use to achive this. Any ideas? Thank you very much.

TabithaI'd agree with surfpark in that it's probably not the greatest idea to have body copy as handwritten text, tho that's not to say it's always the case there may be some reason for using it as such.

an option tho, could be to get a white sheet of paper, get at caligraphy pen and then start writing, scan this in, and put it in your document, using the blending modes to get rid of the white.(there's another recent thread that will explain to get rid of the white.)

you may need to adjust the levels on your scanned image to make the background pure white. selective colour will be good for that, select the white and take all the sliders down to -100%, do that a couple of times so when you sample the background colour it's 0 0 0 0.

[Tab-itha]

Trust me, you do not want your body copy to be in a stylish font. Your titles and headers can have a cool ink pen effect, but if you have to keep it simple for your body text. I know that sounds boring and restrictive, but when it comes to fonts, less is more.

Thanks for the response and the advice :), thankfully it's not needed, I'm well aware that fancy fonts aren't intended for large amount of text, but I guess the misunderstanding is my fault, I should have been more specific with what I need it for.

The project is a small brochure (DIN A6), ten pages with a maximum of one or two sentences per double-page spread, no photos, no other embellishments save a couple of very minimalistic drawings. More than enough space in the layout to use a handwritten font and still make it look good. With the brochure you can enter a lottery and win a fancy fountain pen (which is were the ink idea comes in ;))

There are a lot of free fonts that look hand written (http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=603), but these are meant to be used to call-outs or headers, usually at 14pt or higher. Using these in your body copy will make reading horrible. You don't want your font to be distracting from your message.

I'm already using an handwritten font, the problem is that even handwritten fonts look very slick, if printed they are too smooth to look written with ink. If you look at a line drawn with ink you can see that it has darker and lighter parts and that the border is very uneven where the ink has bleed into the paper a little. I have managed to recreate that effect with the drawings (as if they too were drawn with a fountain pen in ink) by making a custom art brush and applying it to the drawing. Unfortunately that doesn't work with text and I fear there isn't a solution at all.

an option tho, could be to get a white sheet of paper, get at caligraphy pen and then start writing, scan this in, and put it in your document, using the blending modes to get rid of the white.(there's another recent thread that will explain to get rid of the white.)

I thought of writing it by hand and scanning it in but my handwriting is simply too horrible for that. Aditionally I fear that, if there are variations in size, spacing and lettering (as there inevitable are in real handwriting), readability might become a problem.

[Yossarian]

One quick and dirty way I've worked a little more human feel into a handwritten font is to set the type in the computer the way I want it, print it out, trace it by hand, then scan it back in.