Calligraphy generator

Calligraphy is lettering written with the stroke of a pen or brush: a broad nib varies its stroke by the angle it is held at, a pointed pen or a brush by pressure. Each font here copies one of those tools.

Thank-you cards, quotes to frame, labels, menus and headings that should look written rather than typed.

Alex Brush is the pointed brush and the lightest here, with looping capitals. Mr Dafoe is a brush pen, the heaviest and most slanted; Tangerine is a narrow chancery italic, shown here in its bold, with small letters short beside its capitals; Fondamento is the broad nib, upright, and the only one with an italic of its own.

Mr Dafoe’s dry-brush edges are part of its look; download it at 3× so they stay crisp when the PNG is enlarged on a print-sized design.

Cricut sells calligraphy pens, but a pen follows a font’s outline, so these fonts come out as hollow letters when drawn. For a written look from the machine, pair the pen with one of Design Space’s single-line writing fonts.

Tangerine sets small: give it two or three sizes more than the text around it. Fondamento comes with a true italic, so install both of its files and Word’s Italic button uses that instead of slanting the upright.

The steps for any style, the PNG and the SVG into each app, what the licences allow and what happens to your words, are on the font generator.