There’s a small, ridiculous moment of joy I get several times a week now. I’ll be laying out a new card in Photoshop, I’ll click open the font dropdown, and there it is — nestled in between all the proper, professionally-designed typefaces made by people who went to school for this: BeThatCat. My font. My handwriting, digitised, turned into something I can click on like it belongs there.
It makes me squeal a little bit every single time. I’m not exaggerating for effect — genuinely, a little squeal.
I want to tell you how I made it, because the how is genuinely simple. But I also want to tell you why it mattered so much, because I think that part might be more useful to you than the tutorial.
The job I didn’t think was mine to do
Somewhere along the way, I’d absorbed the idea that fonts are made by type designers. Real ones. People with a whole discipline behind them — kerning tables, x-heights, years of study in letterform anatomy. Making a font felt like a locked room, and I was very firmly on the outside of it, nose pressed to the glass, admiring the typefaces other people had made.
This is a pattern I notice in myself constantly, and I’d guess you recognise it too: we quietly sort the world into things “people like us” get to do, and things that belong to the qualified, the trained, the official. Illustration, sure, that’s mine. But type design? That’s a specialist’s job. Except it isn’t, not really. Not if all you want is a font that’s honest and specific and yours — one that doesn’t need to work for every designer on earth, just for you, on your own cards, in your own particular sweet-and-silly voice.
So I decided to just try it. Not to become a type designer. Just to see what would happen if I let myself.
What I actually used
I made BeThatCat using a free online tool called FontCrafter. No software to install, no prior experience needed. Here’s the whole process, roughly:
1. Download the template
FontCrafter gives you a PDF template — a grid of boxes, one for every letter, number, and punctuation mark you’ll need. You print this out, or download it to your ipad.
2. Draw each letter — three times
This is the part that surprised me most. You don’t just draw an “A” once. You draw it three separate times, in three different lines of boxes. The first line is for your capital letters – if you want to differentiate – the second and third is for lower case letters. FontCrafter uses your three versions of each letter to introduce natural variation, so the font doesn’t look robotically repeated when it’s typed out — the same way your handwriting never makes an identical letter twice. It’s a small design decision that makes a huge difference to how alive the finished font feels.
I did this on my ipad, using a simple ink brush, no fuss. Some of my letters are wobbly. I left them wobbly. Wobbly was the point. If you do this on paper you can use a black pen, thin permanent marker or whatever you’d like to experiment with.
3. Photograph or scan your sheet, and upload it
Once every box is filled in, you photograph/scan the completed template and upload it back to FontCrafter. The tool reads your handwriting and maps each shape to its corresponding letter automatically.
4. Adjust everything online
This is where it stops feeling like a photocopy of your handwriting and starts feeling like an actual font. FontCrafter lets you adjust:
- Spacing between letters, so words don’t feel cramped or too loose
- Colour, if you want to preview or export in something other than plain black
- Texture, which can rough up clean lines into something that feels more hand-drawn and less vector-perfect
I spent the most time here, nudging spacing back and forth until words looked like words and not just a row of individually nice letters.
5. Download your TTF
Once you’re happy, you export the finished result as a .ttf file — a standard font file. From there, it installs and behaves exactly like any font you’ve ever downloaded. I use mine in Photoshop for card layouts, and it works just as well in Canva if that’s more your speed.
That’s it. That’s genuinely the whole process. A printed sheet, a pen, three tries per letter, and an afternoon.
Why it’s the right font for cat cards, specifically
BeThatCat isn’t a neutral, all-purpose typeface, and I didn’t want it to be. It has my particular wobble in it. It leans a bit silly. It’s got the same warmth and slight mischief that I want my ragdoll-cat cards to have — because it is my hand, just formalised into something reusable.
That’s the bit that a downloaded “cute handwriting” font could never quite give me. Other fonts are someone else’s warmth. This one is mine, which means it fits my cards the way a key fits a lock it was actually cut for. You can see it on my Ragdoll Cat Birthday Commandment series below or here.
The part that matters more than the font
I want to be honest with you: BeThatCat is not going to win any type design awards. It probably wouldn’t impress anyone with real, trained skill in this field. And that’s fine — that was never what it was for.
What it did do is quietly dismantle a belief I didn’t even realise I was carrying: that only qualified people get to make the small, specific tools of their own creative life. That everything else has to be bought, downloaded, licensed, borrowed.
There is a whole category of things sitting just on the other side of that belief for you too — I’d put good money on it. Something you’ve assumed belongs to “people who trained for that,” which is actually far more reachable than you think, the moment you stop asking permission and just start drawing the letters.
So here’s my actual invitation: what’s the thing you’ve quietly decided isn’t yours to attempt? What would it feel like to open that dropdown — whatever your version of the dropdown is — and see your own name looking back at you?
Go find out. It might just make you squeal too.
Thank you for reading and I hope you found this useful. I share more about my journey and art on Instagram and I’d love for you to join me!
