The archetypes of digital handwriting, these fonts were the result of experiments with (at the time) new software, and years of indoctrination of how to write. Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum of LettError – educated in an environment where handwritten letterforms were considered to be the origin of all typography (both studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague under Gerrit Noordzij) – it was a natural step for them to derive a typographically sound font from their own hands. They wrote out the alphabet (Just is left-handed and used a thin fineliner, Erik is right-handed and used a fat marker), then scanned and digitised the letters on a computer. These fonts became the first of many which allowed people to indulge in the irony of typing a letter in a handwritten script. In the mean time a lot of other ‘rough’ handwriting fonts have been designed by others. Yet FF Erikrighthand and FF Justlefthand remain quite different from the rest. LettError’s pioneering work in this area has opened up whole new areas in type design. For typo-buffs, FF Hands include als a set of small caps and oldstyle figures, and even ligatures.

In 2010 the world’s first digital handwriting fonts have been optimized again and finally converted into OpenType.