@36daysoftype - C

Today I was initially split between the terms Cursiva, ancient cursive blackletter, and Cranbrook school of art, famed for its deconstructivist and experimental typography in the 1970s. However, with grand plans for a lot of blackletter this series I decided to steer clear of cursiva and Cranbrook for me represents more thoughts around typographic layout and setting than actual design. For these reasons, I decided to develop a response around the predecessor of cursiva, just cursive writing in a modern sense.

"Cursive is any style of penmanship in which some characters are written joined together in a flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster, in contrast, to block letters. Formal cursive is generally joined, but casual cursive is a combination of joins and pen lifts. The writing style can be further divided as "looped", "italic" or "connected".

The cursive method is used with many alphabets due to infrequent pen lifting and beliefs that it increases writing speed. In some alphabets, many or all letters in a word are connected, sometimes making a word one single complex stroke. A 2013 study found that cursive does not increase writing speed in both French and Latin alphabets."

 

I also looked at some more contemporary examples of cursive writing as I wanted my response to be contemporary relevant. 

I then progressed to sketch out a number of C's C isn't the easiest letter in the world to make cursive because traditionally the pen starts in the top right-hand corner and works its way down and around the curved form so getting the pen there in the first place from the left-hand letter is a little tricky causing some typographers to avoid making the C fully cursive, but I had to give it a go seeing as I was literally trying to demonstrate the writing style as fully as possible. All done with a 6mm parallel pen in a bit to create as much contrast in weight as possible and make the form elegant. 

Cursive text appears fluid and is usually extremely elegant as one form flows into another. I adorned the fluid for in black to help accentuate the narrowest elements of the character and placed in on a competition appropriate purple that 36 days are using for branding this year. This might seem a little obvious and easy as a colour choice but I thought it would help people focus on the elegance of the form, there are no attractions, it is pure contemporary cursive writing. 

Text:

"C is for Cursive - the flow of letters from one form to the next, originating from cursiva blackletter but I’ve got a lot of blackletter in store so this character is more fluid."

The form was very well received and currently sits at my most liked character of the 3 so far. I think people just like this style of relevant contemporary typography, its sexy right now.