The award-winning Hipster Script by Alejandro Paul is based on a style of hand lettering that was created for advertising in the 1940s and 1950s yet stills looks fresh today. While the lettershapes have their roots in copperplate script styles, it’s the tool that made the difference. Painting the letters on board or paper with a round brush, the artist created thinner and thicker strokes by exerting less or more pressure, varied letterforms according to context, interrupted the connected flow by lifting the brush. A faithful digitization must emulate all these aspects of brush lettering, and Hipster Script does it very well. Have a close look at the various letter combinations in the sample above, such as the recurring “-er”, or letter pairs such as “ee” and “ll”. These variations are selected automatically for specific combinations using OpenType’s Contextual Alternates function. The result is a convincing imitation of hand-painted letters. Use with OpenType-enabled layout software!
Unlike most of our interviewees, Crystal Kluge never dreamt of working OpenType magic or getting the most out of FontLab software. Pens, pencils and brushes are her tools of choice. She’d already found her own enchanting style of lettering and illustration when she was approached by Font Diner’s Stuart Sandler, who had spotted her work when shopping for wedding invitations in Minneapolis’ Uptown area. In 2006 the twosome started the Tart Workshop. It’s a dream team: Kluge draws cheerful, sassy letterforms and pictograms, Sandler makes them into smart and usable fonts with a catchy swing. And the beat, as they say, goes on.
The growing interest in script and handwriting fonts has resulted in some remarkable success stories. A few months ago we featured Font Garden’s Ellinor Maria Rapp, who in turn expressed her admiration for her Canadian colleague Ronna Penner. And Ronna’s story is quite interesting too. Her foundry, Typadelic, submitted its first fonts to MyFonts years ago. Sales remained slow for a while and she concentrated on other activities. But lately she’s come back with a vengeance, hitting the top of our charts with Sweetheart Script and Cookie Nookie. And as you will see, there’s more where that came from.
View options
- Sort by
- ↑ Return to top
