Scripts: Elegant Lettering from Design's Golden Age

Elegant, quirky, fluid, brutish, ostentatious― a visual resource of cursives and other typefaces that resemble handwriting.

From wedding announcements to IOUs, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of scripts―some “classic,” others eccentric. Derived from handwriting, these are typefaces that are stylized to suggest, imply, or symbolize certain traits linked to writing. Their fundamental characteristic is that all the letters, more or less, touch each other.

Scripts tend to fall in and out of fashion, but they are most definitely part of the typographic landscape today, and the more curious and distinctive they are, the better. Drawn from the Golden Age of Scripts, from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, this is the first compilation of popular, rare, and forgotten scripts from the United States, Germany, France, England, and Italy.

Filled with examples from a broad spectrum of sources―advertising, street signs, invitations, type-specimen books, personal letters―the book is a delightful and invaluable trove of long-overlooked material. 300 color and 50 black-and-white illustrations

Steven Heller is co-chair of the MFA Design: Designer as Author program at the School of Visual Arts, New York. His many previous books include
Typographic Universe, New Modernist Type, and Scripts.

Louise Fili is director of Fili Design, a New York-based design studio specializing in typographic treatments. The recipient of the AIGA Medal in 2014, she is the coauthor with Steven Heller of Scripts.