Creating a handwritten font for Culture Amp
By: Olivia King
Tags: Fonts, Design, Typography, Type Design, Process

Even before we started work on Culture Amp’s custom typeface, I was nervous about making a handwritten font. Disastrous images of a marginally improved Comic Sans or Chalkboard circled ominously. The graveyard of student projects that is DaFont haunted my dreams.

The custom type projects I’ve worked on in the past have all largely been display or text typefaces. Handwriting falls into a unique category of its own. When done well it adds personality and humanness to a project. Done badly it can quickly make a piece of work feel amateur, rushed or unresolved. We knew this needed to be both refined and imperfect, and finding that balance was probably one of the hardest details to get right.

For me, a lot of our process in making this typeface was more about leaning into what felt uncomfortable. As designers we’re often taught to rely on our gut, and use this tacit knowledge to find the edges of what feels ‘right’ to us and our audience. In this instance though, I want to make a case for embracing the squirmy feeling of navigating something hard and unknown. Sometimes you just have to dive in.

Defining the role of your typeface

Concept and Prototype

In an identity, every component has a part to play. There needs to be a specific reason for being that’s not just ‘aesthetic purposes.’ The role for this typeface was important as we started to establish the brand, and understand this it might be worth a slight digression into who Culture Amp is.

In a nutshell, Culture Amp is a global tech company with a powerful employee and experience platform. They have a unique ability to combine data and psychology, analytics and human experience, and insights and behaviour to help people have better experiences at work. For companies to really put their culture first.

This blend of humanity and science is what makes Culture Amp distinct, and became a central theme in the development of their identity. Our handwritten typeface was our distinctly ‘human’ element, representing the emotion and imperfection of human nature. After all, you can tell a lot about a person from their handwriting right? (For the record you can’t — Graphology is now widely regarded as a pseudoscience for all of you out there trying to to find future serial killers with handwriting samples)

As per my previously noted dread around getting a handwritten typeface right, we decided to de-risk this gamble with a prototype. We gathered references for specific handwriting with the tone and personality we were after, and used this to draw out an alphabet that emulated some of these styles. I scanned this, live-traced in Illustrator (sorry) and then imported into Glyphs. While deeply typographically flawed, this gave us a workable typeface to use in our concept presentation and ultimately sell the dream to the Culture Amp team.

The first prototype

Down the rabbit hole

Exploration and iteration

As with many of our typefaces at For The People, we turned to Mathieu Réguer to bring this to life. Mathieu has an incredible ability to work with our concepts and make them better than we could have dreamed. In briefing him on this project, we looked to answer some important questions:

What type of pen or pencil would be best for this?

What angle should the text be at? Are all letters at the same angle or different?

What weight do we want?

How much texture do we want and how do we achieve this digitally?

What’s our letter height and spacing?

All caps or lowercase or both?

How do we make sure this is accessible?

What writing scale should we use as a base?

How do we make this feel natural?

Many of these questions would already be answered in a typical typeface, but in handwriting these are all variables determined by the holder of the pen. So that’s where we started — with many pens on paper.