While reading Zeldman this morning, I came across this interesting site. Have you ever gotten one of those annoying marketing pieces in the mail where the president of some company has sent you a "personal" letter telling you why you need his product? It looks as if the writer has handwritten the letter to you personally (but obviously hasn't). Well, now boys and girls, you can do the exact same thing to all of your friends!

Check out Fontifier, the easy way to create your own font. Print their template, fill it out, scan it, and upload a GIF image, and voila, you have your very own personal TrueType font.

The site is a little confusing at first (as Zeldman points out, click on the instructions under each of the numbers). They also mention that you may need to rotate your scanned image "so that the template is in the correct orientation" but never specify what the correct orientation is. My first upload failed because I had the image in portrait orientation when it should have been landscape.

My end result: a font that looks "sorta like" my handwriting. My lowercase 'c' looks uppercase and my lowercase 'm' floats way above the baseline. I also have the tendency to connect certain letters, such as the 't' and 'h' in the word 'the,' which obviously doesn’t happen in the computer-generated text. If you write in cursive or a mix of print and cursive, this tool probably won't generate anything close to what your real handwriting looks like.

I'll probably never have a use for my personal font, but I thought the tool was kind of cool just the same. File this one under "I did it because I could."`