Lily of Sorrows - Spencerian Script

Lily of Sorrows · Spencerian Script (3 styles)

Lily of Sorrows my new hand-drawn Spencerian script with the fragile, mournful elegance of a letter written by candlelight. Every glyph was drawn by hand and traced faithfully the hairline swells, the slight tremor of the nib, and the long weeping tails were kept exactly as they were penned, not smoothed into a digital script. It is a typeface for things that deserve ceremony: wedding suites, memorial and remembrance pieces, gothic and dark-romantic branding, poetry books, perfume and candle labels, tarot decks, album art and anything that wants to feel handwritten and a little haunted.

The family comes in three styles that share the same alphabet, spacing and features, so they can be mixed freely:

• Regular - the pure hairline script. Delicate, airy and calligraphic.

• Smudgy - the same letters inked with a swelling, rough-edged brush. Grainy, heavy and textured, as if the nib was pressed too hard and the ink bled.

• Smudgy Outline - the Smudgy silhouette as a hollow outline. Lovely on dark backgrounds, for layering behind the Regular, or filled with colour and pattern.

The capitals do the talking

The capitals carry sweeping flourishes, and the font is built so the lowercase settles inside them. Contextual alternates (calt) are on by default and quietly adjust the lowercase that follows a capital so the two nest instead of collide. Switch on Interlocking (ss05) and the nesting turns dramatic words tuck deep into the capital swashes for monogram and logo work.

What's inside each style

• 586 glyphs per style - 1,758 across the family

• Uppercase, lowercase, numerals and a full set of hand-drawn punctuation

• Alternate lowercase (ss01) - a plainer, quieter lowercase for longer text

• Alternate capitals (ss02) - a second set of capitals with different flourishes

• Alternate numerals (ss03)

• Interlocking (ss05) - dramatic nesting of lowercase into capital flourishes

• Stylistic alternates (salt) - cycle through every alternate for a letter from the glyphs panel

• 24 ornaments and swashes (ornm) - flourishes, dividers and tails to finish a line; also mapped to Private Use codepoints so you can reach them in apps without OpenType feature support

• Extensive kerning and proper mark positioning, so accents sit correctly in every style

Language support

Full Latin-1 and Latin Extended-A coverage: 330+ characters supporting Western, Central, Eastern and Northern European languages including French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Icelandic, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian, Croatian, Slovenian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian and Turkish (Ğ İ Ş Ç Ö Ü).

File formats

• OTF (OpenType CFF) — desktop, full features

• TTF (TrueType) — desktop, full features

• WOFF and WOFF2 — web, with a ready-to-use @font-face stylesheet

Using the alternates

All alternates, interlocking and ornaments are accessed through OpenType features or the Glyphs panel in Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Affinity Designer/Publisher and other OpenType-aware apps. Turn on Stylistic Set 1, 2, 3 or 5, or open the Glyphs panel and pick alternates by hand.

Good for

Wedding invitations and stationery · logos and monograms · gothic, dark-academia and cottagecore branding · book covers and chapter headings · packaging for candles, perfume, tea and apothecary products · tarot and oracle decks · album covers and gig posters · quotes, greeting cards and social media graphics.