Talented Twin Cities-based designer Carolyn Porter has designed a fantastic typeface, with a riveting back story. The typeface is called Marcel Script Pro, and is available from P22 Type Foundry.
I love this script! It has extremely comprehensive OpenType support which can be accessed in InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. The font consists of more than 1300 glyphs that capture the texture of ink on paper.
Along with the usual OpenType support such as discretionary ligatures, contextual alternates, swashes, and stylistic sets, Marcel Script Pro contains some unusual OpenType features:
A “www” ligature is included, to make that pesky and ugly world-wide-web acronym more attractive:
You can add swashes before and/or after almost any glyph by typing @ and # one or more times to adjust the length of the swash:
With Stylistic Set 11 applied, some cool things happen:
Typing ink* creates an ink spot. The font cycles through different spots each time you press the asterisk key:
Typing “orn!” creates an ornamental swash. Each type you press the !, a different swash from a list of about 20 appears:
The font has such a great back story: Here’s a short summary from the P22 Web site:
The font Marcel is named in honor of Marcel Heuzé, a Frenchman who was conscripted into labor during World War II. During the months Marcel was in Germany, he wrote letters to his beloved wife and daughters back home in rural France. Marcel’s letters contain rare first-person testimony of day-to-day survival within a labor camp, along with the most beautiful expressions of love imaginable. The letters — stained and scarred with censor marks — were the original source documents used by designer Carolyn Porter to create a script font that retains the expressive character of Marcel Heuzé’s original handwriting.
In fact, the story is so compelling that it prompted Carolyn to write a book titled “Marcel’s Letters”. Read more about Carolyn's fascinating book project here.
I can’t imagine the labor of love this font must have been, and the countless hours that Carolyn put into researching and crafting the font. Good work Carolyn!
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