The signature that writes itself

My name at the top of this site isn’t a picture. It’s 21 pen strokes, drawn one after another at the pace of a steady hand, the way you’d sign a card.

How it works

The letters come from EMS Allure, a single-line script font. Each letter is one continuous line rather than an outline, so it can be drawn instead of filled in. It’s open source, from the Hershey text collection.

Every stroke is its own path. It starts hidden and is revealed along its own length, at the same speed for every stroke, with a 40-millisecond lift of the pen in between. The whole name takes about 2.6 seconds.

Why not a video

It stays sharp at any size, it weighs about 10 KB, and a screen reader reads it as text: “Rustam Akhadov”.

If your device is set to reduce motion, or JavaScript is off, there’s no pen. The signature is simply there, finished.