Creating VS Grandma's Recipe: A Handwritten Script Font Inspired by Real Handwriting

VS Grandma's Recipe: a handwritten script font inspired by real handwriting.

How we used inspiration from real handwritten notes, letters and recipes to create Vicarel Studio’s first handwritten script font, VS Grandma’s Recipe

---

VS Grandma’s Recipe is a realistic handwritten script font inspired by the actual, beautiful handwriting of our (designer, Carly Salzman’s) grandma, Dorthy.

For years we’ve looked for realistic handwriting script fonts, and we haven’t been able to find the right one. Despite there being countless options available, handwritten script fonts oftentimes have letters that are too repetitious or too calculated — with VS Grandma’s Recipe we bring you a typeface that actually feels like handwritten letters.

Our goal with this handwritten script font — or, any hand lettered fonts, for that matter — is to create something that captures the unique character and quality of truly handwritten notes, letters, or in this case, handwritten recipes. 

In order to create a realistic handwritten font, you need to consider the nuances of true handwriting. After analyzing numerous handwritten fonts, we noticed that the disconnect oftentimes came from the consistent digital application of something that was intended to feel handwritten.

Simply: in order for us to create the best handwritten script font, we simply needed to embrace the nuances of realistic handwriting, not the rules of typography. In acknowledging this, VS Grandma’s Recipe adopts inconsistent angles, imperfect line weight, inconsistent spacing, sporadic connecting and/or unconnected entrance and exit strokes, variability amongst letter forms, and a mildly inconsistent baseline. 

BUT, to get a handwritten script font that is not just beautiful, but also functional, the trick is to create the aforementioned inconsistencies, consistently.

Grab VS Grandma’s Recipe –>

We have found that the best script fonts often offer plenty of alternative letterforms (alts), variations for connected or repeated letterforms (ligatures), and plenty of illustrative/type elements that are inherently inspired by the style created (glyphs). VS Grandma’s Recipe offers you the opportunity to explore 2-3 variations of every letter, number, and punctuation. These subtly different letterforms enable a word like “baseball” to have two different “b’s”, two different “l’s” and two different “a’s”, allowing for a truly realistic handwriting font style.

With all of this in mind, VS Grandma’s Recipe was born: a perfect hand drawn typeface that feels authentic, organic, and truly like a note scribbled on paper from the greatest woman on earth: Grandma.

This beautiful handwritten script font has incredibly diverse applications, and it works great as headlines and body copy. This unique hand lettered font is perfect for a bespoke logo design project, it’s the perfect handwritten font for wedding stationery, and it can be used as a beautiful handwriting font for liquor labels and other packaging projects. Use VS Grandma’s Recipe for branding, packaging design, blogs, websites, apparel, and magazines for the wedding, travel, liquor, influencer, photography, vintage or apparel industries and so much more.

After years of finding ourselves unhappy with how calculated and robotic other handwriting-inspired fonts felt, we decided to create our own. VS Grandma’s Recipe is the best handwritten script font, and it was created by designers, for designers.

The best handwritten script font, VS Grandma’s Recipe.