Scripts: Elegant Lettering from Design's Golden Age

Seen in everything from wedding invitations and birth announcements to IOUs, menus, and diplomas, script typefaces impart elegance and sophistication to a broad variety of texts. Scripts never go out of style, and the hundreds of inventive examples here are sure to inspire today’s designers. 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 those before and after. 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. Featuring examples from a vast spectrum of sources—advertisements, street signs, type-specimen books, and personal letters—this book is a delightful and invaluable trove of longoverlooked material.

“For a type nerd, the only thing missing from Scripts is a centerfold of voluptuous Spencerian. . . . About ninety percent of the book is images, glorious images.” —Communication Arts

Steven Heller is the co-founder and co-chair of the MFA Design / Designer as Author + Entrepreneur program and co-founder of the MFA in Design Criticism and MFA in Interaction Design programs at the School of Visual Arts. For thirty-three years he was an art director at the New York Times, and currently writes the Visuals column for the New York Times Book Review. He is contributing editor to Print, EYE, and Baseline magazines, and writes the popular blog THE DAILY HELLER. He is the author or editor of over 130 books on design and popular culture, including Design Literacy, Design Disasters, and 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design. He is the recipient of the 1999 AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement and the 2011 Smithsonian National Design Award for "Design Mind."     Louise Fili is a New York-based graphic designer specializing in food packaging, restaurant identities, logos, and book design.