The only typeface in the world that looks like nice, ordinary, fully cursive handwriting. Or neon.

Handsome follows the archetypal lettering style of Brush Script / Mistral / Rage for cursivity in the lowercase and a few of the caps. The rest of the characters, including the figures, are concoctions. More…

Handsome was drawn freehand within Fontographer, using a Wacom tablet and stylus. The technique is wickedly clean, producing a perfectly even line. For the Nib version the tablet’s pressure-sensitive feature, which is supported by Fontographer, was used to achieve the varying weight of the line, because the angle of stress is not constant. The idea of having different “pen” versions of the same style is, as far as the designer is aware, unique to Handsome, and should prove useful to art directors.

It’s ridiculous that 99% of script fonts, especially those with a deliberate hand crafted look, adhere so rigidly to the baseline. Kind of defeats the whole point of the thing – nobody can write that smoothly! And the smaller the point size, the more obvious the flaw becomes. The trick is, in doing an irregular font, to strike the right degree of irregularity.

For the look of real handwriting, Handsome is most convincing at around 15 pts. At much smaller or larger sizes it works differently. At display size, the feel of the non-nib styles is very slick, more like a speedball Kauffman, owing to the smoothness of the finish.