Many moons ago, when the web was young, my friend Omar (along with a slew of other talented people) worked very hard at a small company called New York Online. It started out as a dialup BBS (hello, old school!) and morphed into web consultancy. The details are fuzzy now, but we were on a crazy deadline to make a brand new web site for NYO in about 48 hours. We tried a million different things, our designer pondered a variety of fonts, color schemes, icons, but the deadline was just too tight. Ultimately, we ended up doing this: I hand wrote all the navigation text with a Sharpie, we scanned the text in and voila! Our site was designed, albeit in a very bare bones, temporary, no frills kind of way.

I am finally getting my bookmarks organized over on del.icio.us, a very cool "social bookmarking tool" that I should probably devote a separate post to. After I added in my own, I was browsing through bookmarks filed under the design tag and came across Fontifier, an application that "lets you use your own handwriting for the text you write on your computer. It turns a scanned sample of your handwriting into a handwriting font that you can use in your word processor or graphics program, just like regular fonts such as Helvetica."

I don't know that I'd want to use my own handwriting as a default computer font, but a tool like this would've definitely made our 1995 web design project a hell of a lot easier.