Sketch & Hand Drawn Lettering

Carl Shank • January 29, 2025

Sketch & Hand Drawn Lettering. The history of font development includes a wealth of calligraphic fonts and artistically crafted hand drawn typefaces. A number of these lettering fonts have been drawn and submitted by smaller type foundries and entrepreneurs seeking to make their mark in the font world. A casual look at ChatGPT gives some idea as to their source and character. Fonts that mimic pencil drawings often have a hand-sketched, textured, or rough-lined appearance. These fonts are great for artistic projects, children's books, casual branding, or creative typography. The sample fonts below are mostly given for personal use only, use on personal invitations and so forth, but some have been made available for commercial use as well. They demonstrate the wide range of hand drawn fonts available for use and purchase.

Sketch Block Bold shown here is a free version font. This font is a rough, hand drawn font that looks like it was shaded with a pencil. Sketch Block Bold is a trademark of Lukas Bischoff. Copyright (c) 2009 by Lukas Bischoff. All rights reserved.


Pencil Pete font below is a playful, loose pencil-style font with a sketched feel offered by JOEBOB Graphics as a shareware font.

Chalk and Graphite inspired fonts are hand drawn specialty fonts that are perfect for a school themed design. Chalk Hand Lettering mimics a pencil or chalkboard look.


Graphite STD, available in nine flavors, is designed to look like it was drawn with a soft pencil. This is a professionally drawn font by David Siegel. David Siegel earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a master’s degree in digital typography from Stanford. In 1985, he assisted Hermann Zapf in the production of the Euler typeface for the American Mathematical Society. In the mid-1990’s he collaborated with Hermann Zapf in the production of Zapf’s typeface, Linotype Zapfino. It has been part of the Adobe Originals program started in 1989 as an in-house type foundry at Adobe, brought together to create original typefaces of exemplary design quality, technical fidelity, and aesthetic longevity.


Today the Type team’s mission is to make sophisticated and even experimental typefaces that explore the possibilities of design and technology. Typefaces released as Adobe Originals are the result of years of work and study, regarded as industry standards for the ambition and quality of their development.

Doodle and Scribble fonts are also hand drawn and use a freehand style about them. Skribble is a messy, yet readable font with a hand-drawn aesthetic. KG Sketch mimics quick, freehand writing with a natural pencil look. The Penciling font shown below is an old type hand drawn font from Phillips Old Fashioned Type Book, New York, 1945 and has been revived by CARE Typography. The resurgence of interest in hand-lettering and calligraphy has led to a boom in custom and artisanal fonts. Designers often blend calligraphic influences with modern digital tools to create unique typefaces.


Successful Layout & Design

Vanity Type

By Carl Shank • June 6, 2026
Reading through an old volume of Frederick Nelson Phillips, Inc, Type Faces:With Which We 'Prove It With Proofs' in Typography for Advertisements (New York, 1924), I came across some type that falls outside of the standard typography models, called "vanity type." The term “vanity typography” is not a formal category in typographic history like Old Style, Transitional, Modern, or Sans Serif. Designers typically use the phrase informally to describe typography that draws attention primarily to itself rather than serving the text or reader. Vanity typography occurs when type is used as a display of the designer's skill, fashion, or personal taste rather than to improve communication. Readability is sometimes sacrificed for self-expression and artistic flair. Such type styles use excessive ornamentation, decorative letterforms, overuse of effects like shadows, outlines, gradients and distortions, unusual spacing, and generally typography used to impress rather than inform. Notice in the sample by Phillips, the different "A's," "F's,", "G's," "H's," "L's," "M's," "S's," T's" and "W's." This is not calligraphy lettering, but rather type that could have been used for verses or opening letters to paragraphs or stories.

Puritan Typography

By Carl Shank • May 15, 2026
Puritan Typography Theology Informing Type “Creational realities have not spilled out randomly without purpose; rather, they reflect the wisdom, design, and intention of the good God who made them. It’s our job, then, to observe and learn. . . . And indeed, long before [Jonathan] Edwards began to keep his notebook of earthly pointers to heavenly truths, the seventeenth-century English Puritans were writing lengthy volumes organized around exactly this sort of principle.”[1] “The Puritans were a group of ministers and laypeople within the Church of England who sought to promote Reformed and experiential piety while striving to purify the national church from Roman Catholic influences in doctrine and worship, beginning during the Elizabethan era and continuing as a powerful force until the early eighteenth century. More broadly defined, the Puritan movement included those who were firmly within the Reformed and experiential tradition that flourished not only in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, but also well into the eighteenth century north of Hadrian’s Wall (among the Scottish Presbyterians), across the North Sea (among the Dutch Further Reformation divines), and across the Atlantic Ocean (among the New England Puritans and eighteenth-century evangelicals).” [2] Puritan typography flows from Puritan theology. The English Puritans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries inherited a typographic world shaped by the late Renaissance, the Reformation, and early modern printing. Their type styles were not merely aesthetic choices. Rather, they reflected theology, scholarship, readability, economy, and cultural identity.
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