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Hand-drawn fonts are a crucial tool for creating an informal design style with a human touch. As with all handcrafted art styles, however, you cannot exceed the authenticity of works of art that were actually created by hand. Brush scripts provide a quick and easy way to add hand-painted lettering to your designs. However, traditional fonts can look a little wrong. SVG fonts are an innovative new technology that retains the details and texture of the original hand-drawn scan. This results in a much more realistic font that is difficult to distinguish from authentic handwritten fonts.

Traditional fonts consist of vector graphics in a single color: black. This is ideal for defined sans-serif or sans-serif characters, but handmade fonts must be vectorized into solid-fill glyphs with hard outlines, meaning that they lose the definition of the original hand-drawn lettering. SVG fonts can include full color graphics and transparency, opening up a whole world of innovative new fonts known as color fonts. One of the most common uses of SVG / Color Font technology is to create next-generation hand-made fonts that look incredibly realistic with all the details of a marker pen or brush.

While SVG stands for "Scalable Vector Graphics", hand-made fonts with SVG technology are not vector graphics at all, but are created with an embedded bitmap image. This means that the type appears pixelated if the font is scaled larger than the original bitmap size. The best SVG fonts are created with high-resolution scans. However, keep this in mind when working on a large print design.

SVG fonts are used like traditional fonts. You can edit the size, tracking and even the OpenType functions as usual, but you cannot change the color of the font directly. One workaround is to apply a color overlay, hue / saturation adjustment, or some kind of mask to change the look.

Because SVG fonts are a relatively new technology, not all creative programs support them. Adobe users need Photoshop CC 2017 or Illustrator CC 2018 (or newer) to use them. Procreate users can import fonts from version 4.3.

When you need to add handmade font styles to your designs, SVG fonts provide the most realistic and authentic results compared to the basic appearance of traditional fonts. SVG fonts have some unfortunate disadvantages, but they always come with backup TTF or OTF versions, so you have the best of both worlds! I curated this collection of the best SVG fonts with a hand-drawn style, including friendly handwriting, elegant watercolor lettering, and rebellious brush scripts.