how do you write your FOUR

open

IV

had to check this. first one, although i alternate quite a bit

I'm an open-fourer myself, but I'm thinking about making the switch to closed. Not having to pick up my pen (or pencil) to draw the stem seems like it might be able to save me a few minutes of free time that I can enjoy when I'm retired.

I do open, but always wanted to do closed. Maybe if I win the lottery.

i considered the switch but my 4 looked too big, my hand wasn't used to writing it and i lost control

All typefaces everywhere (except for Comic Sans, probably) use closed. 4, see? What do these font designers know that I don't know?

love the idea of g00blar always wanting to write a closed 4 but never being rich enough.

re- printing open 4, in fairness the use of the 'a' is much stranger. who uses that in handwriting?

my boss. he puts little horizontal lines through his 7s too

^ I do that!

open but closed 4 is definitely 'nicer'

i think i do that too.

wait a minute, are we saying that everyone writes DIFFERENT? this is important stuff, people

i write my a's that way, and i also put a cross through the 7

i also do closed 4s

i also - and this is weird - start my 9's at the bottom, and end them in the loop

^that's what I'm sayin xp

Looked at my fours on the page here:

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y161/MarkGrout/four.gif

Like this. Which is more the first one, right?

closed '4' can be written top down in two strokes (just like the open version) or bottom up in one stroke. the former seems a bit pointless but the latter a bit weird - all other numbers are written top down. except for tracer's 9s.

I looking at the different ways people write things. I wish more ppl had posted on this thread:

Post your handwriting and then someone else on here who knows better analyse it.

Mark G, that's the rare "open closed" four, you must be ambidextrous too

x-post err I "love" looking at . . .

my 9's are p's backwards. i was never happy with my aesthetically repulsive curves, and greatly envy those that can carry it off.

doing it upside down is just showing off though.

start from top left: 2, 3, 4, 7, 5 (i add the top horizontal line last tho)
start from top right: 6, 9

0 and 8 start from top middle going anti-clockwise

mark that's a closed 4 with a little flair

i copied my 9s from a girl i was in love with in 8th grade. it is a little showoffy and unnecessary. but i loved the way they looked. it's easier to make the stem of the 9 curve as it does in typography if you start at the bottom. your stroke has to go backwards for awhile which is weird, but you end up with your pen going forward, ready for whatever comes next

sometimes i like to mix it up crazy and do a double loop of the 9 circle before ending with the straight vertical line down (no bottom curve for me)

why on earth would you do that

I write my 4 like Mark G.

Mark G, that's the rare "open closed" four, you must be ambidextrous too

― asplundh tree expert co. (iiiijjjj), Wednesday, 27 May 2009 16:29 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Nope, very right-handed.

haha what? xps

Closed 4, always put a line through my 7's, in respect of my really really distant Spanish ancestory.

people that put the hook and serif on a 1 probably also do anal retentive stuff like not bite their toenails when company's over

i think of the hook on the 1 as guaranteed proof of europeanness

dutch do the hook but not the seriph, AFAICT

and many of the eastern european countries also- they have great handwriting, all these extra details.

damn, actually, open 4. I kinda like the hook and serif on a 1 and a 10, but not on a 11-9.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/7a/Kark92.JPG/100px-Kark92.JPG

http://i2.ytimg.com/vi/e3zUnr-24rg/hqdefault.jpg

I'm trying real hard to find it, but Channel 4 anchors used to sit at a desk that was shaped like a closed #4.

i also - and this is weird - start my 9's at the bottom, and end them in the loop

i do this too!

otherwise, closed 4s, no lines through 7s, sans serif 1s.

Open 4, and I add lines through my 7s and Zs

i've started adding umlauts to things willy-nilly

this is how i write my 4

http://www.thefreshscent.com/wp-content/post_imgs/0507/420themovie.jpg

taught myself to go closed 4 in 7th grade and never looked back

inspirational speeches of our time

I'm more interested in a sevens poll. Who adds a little dash on the stem? I know I do! otherwise it looks too much like a one.

or a two

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=farty%20four

i regret never having cultivated a habit of making the top curve of my 3s a sharp, tight little spike, as in some of our more distinguished typefaces

I used to do that, up until I realized that it looked dumb in my handwriting (ie, fifth grade).

one day in geometry class I decided to switch to closed 4s and european 7s. never looked back.

I managed to switch rather effortlessly...I think I just practiced writing a page of closed-4s and that was it?

Loops on 2's.

- I write an open four, which is probably good, because a closed one could get confused with a crossed sevens

- My crossing sevens is, amazingly enough, not an affectation; the fact that I write lowercase A in the type style is

- (Around whatever high-school period I re-learned lowercase A, I also tried to learn to write lowercase G in a type style, which would have been totally sweet, but that is like near-impossible to learn to do smoothly by hand)

i do the lowercase g thing

god i am vain

it goes - one circle, short stick to the right, big oval that drops down, take pen off paper and add the little stick at the top right

Any reason I changed how I write my letters or numbers was so I cld keep things straight when working on math or chemistry.

It always took me like 20 seconds of concentrated thoughts to make one that didn't wind up looking like a malformed 8, and then even if I succeeded it would leap out of the rest of the text as the letter that someone was obviously slaving over for pretentious effect. Maybe I will give it another shot when I retire.

(xpost) It's quite interesting how fancy one's cursive i can get after a few semesters of college math... not to mention the {} brackets.

I put a lot of love & labor into figuring out how to draw the ampersand back in seventh grade. So worth it.

I bet I know where this is all going: Post your handwriting and then someone else on here who knows better analyse it.

closed 4 def but i like to detail my #s - serif 1, dashed 7, put diagonal thru 0 - also do the typeface style a cant remember when i started that but it was probably an affectation at first now its def w/o thinking

I worried as a child about those double-closed-loop "g"s since they are sort of backwards from the one-loop "g"s. I think I toyed with the idea of writing them but couldn't quite get them uniform. Guy I copied my notes from at university wrote his "a"s with the overhead loop and I was somewhat in awe of this but it looked kind of untidy even when he did it.

1 = straight line unless I'm writing a postcode and fear AMBIGUITY. Then I think I'll put a little tiny serif on and it always gets too big and looks weird and wish I hadn't tried it. It's not like it is actually ambiguous seeing as the wrong version wouldn't fit the correct format.

Oh... open 4.

hahaha, I say highway farty far! Of course, I'm from St. Louis, so..

open four, btw

normally open but I have a volunteer gig where I have to fill out forms that require the closed version to scan properly. forms also require that I write my sevens differently (normally put a cross through and have a little thingie hanging off the top bit).

Closed 4, now and forever. 4 was my favourite number even before I started school, and it fascinated me that there were two ways to draw them. I just preferred the look of the closed 4, and was subsequently mildly rebuked by the kindergarten teacher for drawing one on the blackboard instead of the closed-variety she'd asked for and expected. (To her credit, she admitted that my way was perfectly legit, and never discouraged its use again.)

open - closed sometimes gets confused with 9 if you aren't neat.

open 4, always cross a seven

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Open 4s. SO with Abbott on the pleasure of a well-draw ampersand. (There's a whole blog about them here: http://ampersand.gosedesign.net/ )

I realised recently that I've been doing 8s as two separate circles, rather than in one go. I don't know how this happened.

1 = straight line unless I'm writing a postcode and fear AMBIGUITY. Then I think I'll put a little tiny serif on and it always gets too big and looks weird and wish I hadn't tried it.

mmhmm, it ends up being too much like a seven so I do the line underneath too and it looks like who knows what. Ah we..

Looking through my notepad it seems that I alternate between open 4 and closed 4, although the left hand line in the open four varies between vertical and very nearly touching the right hand line.

er, well, not we..

that's what happens when your writing's going off the screen for some reason.

Tracer Handwriting is very nice. Most of my other male friends with nice writing are kind of obsessed by fonts or are artist/architect/whatever.

I'm left-handed and a design stan so a lot of my handwriting is very typefacey: often a serif on the 1 on top, but never a bar, a typefacey a most of the time (it totally depends on the letter coming afterward), 3 that looks like half a triangle atop half a circle, 4 is always closed. Had years of practice because my childhood address was 4313. I cross 7 because that makes phone numbers with lots of 7s and 1s in them nice and unambiguous.

i write an open four but the motion of writing it is like a capital G - no picking the pen up off the page. Line through sevens, sans serif ones.

my lowercase 'g's are like superscript 's's or incomplete figure eights - i've only met one other person who does this.

so who writes '5' with the 'top hat' added on last ?

Spent last summer typing hundreds of pages of hand-written numbers where the author had done this (very obviously, as usually the top bar was dangling unconnected somewhere to the right of the rest of the 5) and was a bit mystified as it'd never occurred to me before.

never occurred to me to do it any other way. It's not an 'S'. Ugh, I've just tried it - how uncouth.

I used to do mostly open 4s until I started doing Sudoku on the DS and had to do closed 4s for Dr Kawashima to recognise. Now it's closed 4s all the way.

so who writes '5' with the 'top hat' added on last ?

always!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.