savdevarney.com

I think on paper. Years of notes live on my Supernote, full of arrows, highlights and plus signs. I wanted my site to feel like one of those pages: a page from my notebook, in font.

And I was curious whether a font could come straight out of the notes themselves, with no letter sheet to fill in, and still look like me, quirks and all.

Sav Hand, a font made from 301 pages of my notes. It found about 16,800 letters on its own and keeps three real versions of each, so neighbors never look stamped. It comes in three pens: my fineliner, a wider pen, and a wide sharpie.

Around it: a highlighter that draws like a real chisel tip, labels printed on label-maker tape (my hand is for what I write, machine type for what I label), and diagrams drawn the way I would on a whiteboard.

The notes keep every pen stroke as points, so the font is built from my actual strokes, not traced from pictures. Handwriting recognition reads the words, the strokes are matched to letters in the order I wrote them, and only the letters that look like my usual ones are kept, then inked with a round nib.

The site is SvelteKit, rendered to plain HTML and CSS with no JavaScript at all. The highlighter, the tape and the diagrams are drawn at build time, so the browser only ever gets finished pictures.