I was asked by frog design to create a custom handwriting typeface for a major company in the finance industry, to be used in a branding project.

Nicknamed Concierge Script, it is meant to imitate the confident and gestural semi-cursive handwriting of a businessperson signing a contract or writing a professional letter with an oblique-nibbed fountain pen. Accessibility was a must, which meant that letterforms shouldn’t be too stylized, nor overly uniform.

To arrive at the desired style of handwriting I wrote hundreds of samples, trying different scripts and pens. Through constant dialogue with frog, we narrowed it down further and further until we arrived at the perfect sample, from which the rest of the alphabet was extrapolated.

To achieve a convincing handwritten effect, a ton of OpenType alternates were included, which dictate how a letter may look based on its position within a word (initial, middle, or final letter). In addition, there is randomization, which ensure that no two letters following each other will look the same. As such, there are 8 variations of the lowercase “a”, and 135 glyphs just to cover the 26 lowercase letters (some letters, like the “x” and “z”, didn’t require quite as many alternates).

The project was a fun challenge—it helped sharpen my OpenType coding skills, and my design prowess was similarly put to the test. My nature is to draw letterforms as perfect and tight as I can, but Concierge Script called for an imperfectly human aesthetic.

View more of my typefaces, including interactive type testers and PDF specimens, on my website, http://HerzbergDesign.com/fonts