Rainwood Typeface

Last Updated on July 12, 2026 by Editorial Team

Rainwood is a handmade font that combines handlettering, brush and paint touch and was created by IanMikraz.

Features:

• It includes 232 glyphs, 52 alternate characters and 2 stylistic alternates.
• Opentype features (Stylistic Alternates, Standard Ligature and more). You can access all those alternate characters by using OpenType savvy programs such as Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign and CorelDraw X6-X7. For other programs that doesn’t support OpenType Features or Glyphs Panel such as Photoshop, you can use Character Map in Windows to access the alternate characters. Tutorial for Character Map in Windows: http://youtu.be/cxonI5QvULk
• Suitable for apparel, branding/logos, greeting cards, painting design style, or any design that needs natural and personal touch. Mix and match the alternate characters.

The freebie includes Rainwood font in .OTF and .TTF formats

The character of Rainwood comes through clearly in that forest preview: thick, wet-looking brush strokes rendered in a soft gradient that shifts from seafoam green to pale mint, almost like watercolor bleeding into damp paper.

The letterforms lean and swing with real inconsistency from stroke to stroke, which is exactly what gives a handlettered typeface its human warmth instead of the mechanical evenness of a typical script font.

You can see the brush’s pressure and release in the terminals, thick where the hand pressed down, thinning out where it lifted, and that variation is what separates a genuine handmade brush font from a script font that was digitized from a single stroke path.

This kind of typeface earns its keep on projects that want to feel organic, personal, or a little wild rather than polished and corporate.

Think apparel graphics for outdoor or nature-driven brands, packaging for artisanal food and drink, wedding or greeting card lettering with a rustic edge, logo lockups for studios and makers who want a hand-touched signature look, and poster or album art that leans into a painterly, expressive mood.

Anywhere a brand wants to signal craft, nature, or a personal hand behind the work, a font like this does heavy lifting on its own, often needing little more than a clean sans-serif paired underneath for contact info or supporting copy.

Working With the Alternate Characters

With 52 alternate characters and stylistic alternates built into the font, the real value of Rainwood is in how much it can vary within a single word.

In Illustrator or InDesign, open the Glyphs panel and look for the alternate glyphs tied to repeated letters, then swap them in so that two of the same letter sitting next to each other, or appearing twice in a headline, do not look like stamped duplicates.

This is the trick that keeps handlettered type looking hand-lettered instead of obviously typed out.

If you are working in an app without OpenType or glyph panel support, the Character Map route mentioned in the font’s own documentation is the way to pull those extra forms in.

It is worth budgeting a little extra time for this step, since brush scripts like Rainwood are built to be curated letter by letter rather than typed and left alone.

When you’re setting it, give the letterforms room to breathe. Because the strokes are thick and the ascenders and descenders swing wide, tight letter spacing or a cramped line height will crowd the loops and flatten the personality the brush strokes are meant to carry.

Increasing line height slightly and setting the type at a larger size than you’d use for a standard script tends to let the paint texture and gestural quality actually read.

Color is another lever worth pulling. The gradient treatment in the preview shows how well this style of lettering takes to tonal shifts, watercolor textures, or even a flat single color if you want it to sit quietly inside a logo.

On packaging or apparel mockups, try it in solid white or black against a photograph background to test legibility before committing to a multi-tone treatment like the one shown here.