Today we are very pleased to introduce the world to our newest brush script: Plum Brush Script.
The Goods
Plum Brush Script is a hand-painted modern brush calligraphy script. Plum has been designed as a semi-connected script with a ragged edge to emulate a wet brush. Plum Brush Script is perfect for branding and packaging where you're looking for a hand-painted charm.
The Story
I was painting in my sketchbook one day over quarantine when I decided to build out a new brush alphabet. We've always received emails about missing characters from our existing brush alphabets, so I set out to do a full glyph set, including uppercase, lowercase, numbers, accents, punctuation, and special characters.
Fontself
Plum Brush Script was an opportunity to give Fontself another good chance, and I discovered that the software includes features that simplify character replacements. It writes the OpenType code for you. I knew from previous brush scripts that double letters are the most important place to use double-letter ligatures: two identical brush characters in sequence ruins the illusion that the type is painted.
I looked up the most common double-letter sequences in the English language, and painted those letters. Although somehow I didn't paint the double 'm' in 'common'!
Once the typeface was in production, my work to paint the perfect double-letter ligatures ended up being unnecessary: the automatic substitution was too clunky when the ligature replaced both letters. So I rebuilding the double-letter ligatures to only replace the second letter with a new character.
Extending the Character Set
I started learning Spanish at the end of last year, and I learned that the Spanish language considers n-tilde to be a letter of their alphabet. With that in mind, I made a conscious decision not to omit or fake any of the most common international characters.
When you scratch the surface of accented characters, you start to realize how many languages can't fully function without accented characters. Or rather, how many languages you can serve by adding accented characters. So I took the time to add as many as I could.
Take It For A Test Drive
Plum Brush Script adds charm to any project while still maintaining strong legibility. Check out our type previewer and take it for a test drive on your next project: