I launched my font... What's next?

I few days ago I quietly launched my font School Cursive on TeachersPayTeachers.com.

My main reason for creating a font commercially is that I wanted to motivate myself to keep going until I had a finished product, and to stay on track with creating sometimes other people need rather than get sidetracked by whatever technical challenge seems novel and interesting.

But although a single font may be a finished product, if you want to create handwriting materials it it can hardly be called a finished solution. So what are my next plans?

My first priority is to get people to actually use my font. Having real customers is motivating. Having feedback from real customers is even better. It's one of the reasons for creating the blog (the other reason that I have quite a few things to tell, actually). So my first priority is to improve this blog: more information about the font, more information about my design process, more practical tips for how to use the font in the classroom.

My second priority is to offer teachers a more complete solution for creating handwriting materials (both practice materials and instructional materials). That means adding versions of the font with guidelines, arrows, start dots, etc. A good source of inspiration is the very complete Getty-Dubay font-family. However, there are some limitations to having these extra features ‘built into’ the font itself. For my free Loblosch font, instead of a font with built in guidelines, I offered guidelines in an overlay font. It's a bit more work to use, but it enables me to offer dashed and dotted guidelines (built in guidelines are always solid lines, I'll explain why in a future article) and it allows the teachers to give the guidelines a different color from the text. 

My third priority is to create ready-to-use materials with the font. 

Although I've ordered these areas of action by priority, I can do them in parallel. In fact, I had better do so, because for my first priority - getting more customers - there can be quite a delay between actions and effects, and it would be a shame not to do anything else in that time.

So... now you know some of my plans. But how much and how fast I do them, is partially up to you. If you use my font - even it's only the free demo - leave some feedback on the TeachersPayTeachers resource page - so I know what your needs and priorities are. So that I can rearrange my priorities accordingly.