Filmotype Honey
Filmotype Honey (2010). Originally designed and released in the 1950s, this casual brush script has been remastered in hi-fidelity in the OpenType format. It includes an extended international character set, automatic fractions, and some special OpenType magic to automatically ensure natural, flowing strokes.
Filmotype Honey is typical
of the style of brush lettering that was popular in the late Fifties and early Sixties.
It’s urbane, energetic, and casual all at the same time. You half expect it to offer you a
cigarette or a drink.
We don’t known who designed this face for Filmotype, but it was very cleverly done. The, lowercase letters connect at the top, middle or bottom, depending on what comes before or after, just like real handwriting. To make this work, there are multiple variations of most letters, designed to link up properly with whatever is around them. The Filmotype operator had to deal with all this manually, but, using some OpenType magic called “Contextual Alternates”, the font will choose the right letter variations automatically, as you type. If you're working with Filmotype Honey in an OpenType-savvy program*, you don’t need to do a thing. It simply works, and looks just as its designer intended back in the Fifties. And without the hangover and nicotine stains.
Filmotype was the earliest of the desktop headline setting machines, introduced in the mid-1950s, and popular in art studios throughout the U.S. for over a decade. A large library of faces was developed for the machine, and many of them have never been digitized. Filmotype Honey is one of many classic Filmotype fonts planned for revival, in cooperation with Filmotype’s founders. I’m excited to be helping to bring back these great faces.
* Adobe Creative Suite, QuarkXPress 7 or newer, to name a few.