Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) are efficient in solving different pattern recognition problems and have been applied to extract image features (IFs). This paper investigates using deep learning (DL) techniques to improve the performance of the writer identification (WI) process. This work presents a novel approach for WI tasks by combining a DL technique with machine learning (ML). A convolutional neural network (CNN) is employed as a feature extractor along with a ML algorithm to classify those features. The standard Alex-Net model is utilized to extract IFs that located in the fully connected layers (FCLs). The support vector machine (SVM) model is selected as the classifier due to its efficient capabilities to improve identification performance (IP). The proposed model is tested using various types of the datasets, namely the Islamic Heritage Project (IHP) and Clusius. Furthermore, IAM and ICFHR-2012 datasets have been employed for benchmarking the proposed model. The results demonstrate the model achieves superior performance.