Handwritten text has a place in design. Not only handlettering for poster design or other design projects is beautiful, even in logo design handwriting can work. But if you go with that approach, you should not stick to free or even paid typefaces for it.
Handwriting typefaces are quick and easy
What a time we live in. We can search for and find millions of typefaces within minutes online. Many of them are free to use, and if we’re willing to pay for fonts, we get a broad selection of professional and simple to use solutions.
And that is exactly the problem handwriting typefaces bring with them.
If these typefaces are so easy to find, to buy, and to use, anyone can do that. And if anyone can, a lot of people will. As a result, we’ll get designs that aren’t unique anymore. And wasn’t uniqueness the main reason we were trying to use handwriting in our design project?
If you create a poster with a handwriting typeface, you can get away with it, as a poster has so much more details to create uniqueness. Two designers using the same typeface for a poster design will still create totally different designs. But in logo design, you want to reduce the details in your design to create simplicity. Therefore, logo designs have only a handful of identifiable details - the typeface being one of the most prominent.
But logo designs are repetitive, aren’t they?
Granted, logo designs are repetitive. You can find millions of logos using a circle - just like the EA logo. But no one uses a circle to create a unique logo design. The circle serves as a stabilizer for the design, not a feature of uniqueness.
Handwriting, on the other hand, is specifically chosen to give us uniqueness. A feature that is totally lost, if you can find hundreds of other logo designs using the same handwriting typeface.
Another problem with handwriting typefaces
But even besides logo design, handwritten typefaces come with a downside.
Most of them are repetitive in themselves. If you use the letter “e” multiple times in your design, this letter will look the same every time it is written with that typeface. You can get around that by using uppercase or lowercase text, add bold, italics, or even underlines for it. But at some point, you’ll run out of options to add variations.
You can still try to use such typefaces as elements in your poster designs, but don’t use it as a typeface for the body text, as this is a sure-fire way to lose the effect that you wanted to achieve with it in the first place.