Compose
A customer writes a message, chooses a style, and sees a proof before it becomes physical.
Case study · Full-stack product + hardware
From a message in a browser to real ink on a card.
Handwrite is a live product that turns a few typed words into a physically written postcard. ShopOfLuba designed the customer experience, the handwriting engine, and the workflow that carries a job to a real pen plotter.
to someone you missThinking of youfrom Düsseldorf✦
Not a mockup. A working product where software has to make a physical thing—reliably, legibly, and with care.
The system
One experience, across a browser, a queue, and a machine.
Every handoff matters. The product keeps the customer-facing proof and the production workflow connected instead of treating the plotter as an afterthought.
Translate
Custom recorded handwriting is laid out as vector strokes and compiled into plotter instructions.
Make
A worker streams the job to a real pen plotter, with the same layout that was approved on screen.
Check & send
Payment, production state, operator review, and fulfillment stay connected all the way to dispatch.
What made it difficult
The interesting work lives in the gaps between digital and physical.
Building a nice ordering interface was only the beginning. The harder job was making the whole chain dependable enough to produce something worth sending.
The preview has to be trustworthy
The browser proof and physical card share layout rules, so “looks right on screen” has a meaningful connection to what the plotter writes.
Handwriting needs more than a font file
The system starts with real Apple Pencil recordings, keeps multiple glyph variants, and preserves the small irregularities that make a line feel made by hand.
A payment is not a print command
Orders move through review and production states before the hardware receives a job—important when the output is a real, non-reversible object.
Built for the real world
Human review stays in the loop.
Customers can order online, but a real card is still reviewed before it reaches production. The system tracks authorization, approval, print state, and fulfillment so the right job reaches the machine at the right time.
Tools behind it
Next.jsTypeScriptPostgreSQLStripePythonG-codePen plotter
A live experiment in making digital work tangible