Grungy, hand-lettered type has been with us for a long time. About a decade ago, I did all the headlines and callouts for my blog with a Bic pen -- I thought the look was super cool. That look gets pretty old, though; not many sites should look like a fifteen year old's angsty poetry journal.

More recently, the awesome opening sequence for the movie Juno put the spotlight on a growing trend towards scratchy, hand-lettered fonts that look like actual typefaces, rather than chicken-scratches. This look will probably be cliche soon enough, too, but in the meantime I've been hunting around for fun hand-lettered fonts that actually look like type. Naturally, they're all free...

Sketch Rockwell is one of the first fonts in this style that grabbed my attention. It's nice and chunky with pronounced block serifs that make it great for brash headlines. A full set of upper and lowercase letters, as well as punctuation and symbols, makes it usable as well.

Tiza is roughly based on the font Giza, but it's a lot rougher than Sketch Rockwell. Without the half-sketched fill of the other font, Tiza feels a lot darker, but it's still a nice choice.

I'm partial to Positiv-A, given my domain name, but I think it holds up nicely on aesthetic grounds as well. It's a really nice sketched version of Kabel Light, and stays faithful to the original font's shapes. Downsides? No extended character set.

Pointy isn't quite as tight as some of the others; it drifts dangerously close to the "scribbling on my notebook" look, but it's close enough to the edge that I'm keeping it. Mock-shadows are fun.

Karabine is a total Times New Roman Bold, but its uppercase characters have been craftily replaced with mirror-image lowercase letters. It's a little odd, but the look works. The feel is very pencil-on-rough-paper.

Grutch Shaded is another Times-esque font, but its outlined-white-letters on black shadow give it a much different feel. It's got a nice rich set of symbols international characters, so you won't run into hassles trying to to finish a sentence in it.

Green Piloww is super-Helvetica-esque, and I'm a sucker for nice Helvetica variants. The extended character set isn't available for download, but the author says to contact him if you're interested..

I'm not quite sure what to make of the name "McCoy Hello Lori," but this one's a nice stencilly font, a little reminiscent of the stone letters in B.C.'s title frame. Some of the letters feel really goofy (the "A" in particular), but for the right phrase, it can look really nice.

La Fraktouille has no extended characters, but it's the only blackletter style font in the mix. As you can probably guess from the name, it's loosely inspired by Fraktur, but lacks its namesake's happy, rounded capitals.

Clementine Sketch is dangerously close to the cheesy lemonade-stand fonts, but it works really nicely and carries a friendly vibe without getting too out of control. It takes some love to make things work (the "^" character must be used to close the tails on trailing letters, for example) but the effect is really nice.

WC Roughtrad is a feels-just-right sketch of Helvetica Bold; it's clean enough that it wouldn't feel out of place in a professional setting. Even with pencil scribbles, that's the kind of dignity Helvetica brings to the table.

FAIL rounds out the Helvetica love with a Condensed Black weight, though its outline style makes it feel a bit more stencilly than some of the other adaptations in the list. Also? It's named FAIL. You have to love that.