Joshua Saunders turns his daughter’s handwriting into a typeface that grows with her.

The idea, as designer Joshua Saunders tells it, came completely unprompted. His daughter Avery (then six) had always loved drawing with pens and paper, but found herself drawn to her dad’s iPad after seeing his work. “Every time she’d open up a drawing app, there’d always be sketches of the latest type or characters I was working on,” he says, and it wasn’t long before Avery was asking to make her own font.

“The first version was inspired by all the times she’d write a card to a family member or write the names of characters or toys she was drawing”. Saunders fed the letters into an online tool that uses a template for each character, filled in by hand before being turned into a working typeface. He tells us how nothing was tidied up to preserve the character of the lettering, “If anything, I wanted to have complete freedom to create it how she wanted,” he says. The irregularities stayed, with shifting letterforms, uneven spacing and the sense that each character was made once and left alone. It reads less like something designed and more like something kept.

With each version named by age, starting from six, they’re now working on a second as Avery grows. “A very clever and creative friend of mine suggested we keep making it over the years, which will hopefully become weights within the font family,” Saunders says. “There’s something potentially quite beautiful about being able to see her handwriting essentially ‘get better’ over the years.”

For Saunders, the work sits slightly outside his usual focus. “Outside of big briefs and Zoom meetings, my love has always been lettering,” he says. This has none of that structure. No brief, no timeline, no pressure to refine. “She quickly became my dream client.” Just making something together, and leaving it as it is. “She loves it too. And is super excited to be working on another. We used it for a few things, like her birthday party invitations, and for a close friend who wanted it as the display font for his latest photography book. I’d love to see what others could do with it, especially with such an emphasis at the moment on handmade, human elements within branding.” 

Getting Involved: Make your own font.

Inspired by this article? Get involved in making your own typeface at home. It needs a bit of know-how, but with online tools like Calligraphr and MakeYourOwnFont to guide you, it’s well worth a go.