This has given rise to a new genre: the “sketch font” or “rough display face.” Fontself is exceptionally good at preserving hand-drawn imperfections. A designer can scan a sharpie scribble, auto-trace it in Illustrator, and generate a rough, energetic font that would take hours to replicate in Glyphs. Marketplaces like Creative Market and Envato Elements are now flooded with these “Fontself-made” fonts. They are charming, immediate, and utterly unsuited for long-form reading.
Fontself has effectively disintermediated the type designer. A graphic designer no longer needs to commission a type foundry or spend weeks learning a new application. They can make their own. This is empowering, but it also raises uncomfortable questions about value. When everyone can make a font, what is a font worth? The race to the bottom on Creative Market ($5 for a “handcrafted” font) directly correlates with tools like Fontself. fontself maker for illustrator
However, Illustrator’s bezier architecture is not optimized for type design. Professional font editors use a specific point-optimization logic (fewer points, specific handle ratios) to ensure clean hinting and interpolation (the process of generating weights between a Light and a Bold). Fontself inherits Illustrator’s tendency to produce extraneous points, especially when converting strokes to fills or using effects like drop shadows. The result is fonts that look pristine at 72pt on a Retina screen but collapse into pixelated, uneven blobs at 12pt on a website. Fontself implicitly admits its audience: it is for the headline, not the body text. This has given rise to a new genre:
Fontself Maker for Illustrator is not a type design tool; it is a lettering realization tool. It takes the discipline of type design—which is about systems, constraints, and invisible rigor—and reduces it to its most visible, satisfying part: drawing pretty shapes. For display faces, for personal projects, for rapid prototyping, it is unparalleled. It removes the friction between idea and artifact, allowing a designer to hold their own font in minutes. They are charming, immediate, and utterly unsuited for
This is both its genius and its Achilles’ heel. By leveraging Illustrator’s pen tool, Fontself allows designers to use muscle memory they already possess. A brand designer can sketch a bespoke logotype, convert it to a font in five minutes, and use that same font for a headline across a pitch deck. The friction of exporting paths, importing into a separate app, and re-exporting is eliminated. This immediacy fosters a feedback loop: draw, test, kern, adjust—all within a single environment.
But as a tool for building serious, text-facing, cross-platform typography, Fontself is a dead end. It lacks interpolation, OpenType features, professional kerning, and hinting. To use Fontself for a book, a newspaper, or a global brand identity would be professional malpractice.
A review of fonts generated with Fontself reveals a distinct, almost predictable aesthetic. These fonts tend to be: (1) —since most users draw with uniform strokes or basic pens; (2) Geometrically naive —lacking the subtle optical corrections (overshoot, side-bearing nuances) that professional type designers labor over; and (3) High-contrast in a bad way —where thick and thin strokes feel accidental rather than intentional.
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