Bickham Script Pro 3
After 20 years, Richard Lipton’s Bickham Script Pro 3 has finally reached the finish line.
Bickham Script Pro 3 is the latest extension of the Bickham Script type family, a connecting script designed by Richard Lipton and a part of the Adobe Originals type program. This updated version of Bickham Script has been in the making for decades-or centuries, depending on when you start counting.
Bickham was based on the superb examples of the writing master’s art from George Bickham’s 18th-century compendium, The Universal Penman. Lipton is an accomplished calligrapher, who has designed several cursive typefaces that explore this tradition and the possibilities for turning a complicated style of writing into a digital typeface. Bickham Script Pro is in many ways his typographic masterpiece.
In addition to a greatly expanded array of alternate letterforms, ligatures, and swashes, Bickham Script Pro 3 adds support for Cyrillic and Greek alongside the existing support for Western, Central, and Eastern European languages in the Latin alphabet. The Greek and Cyrillic, like the Latin, offer a variety of alternate forms appropriate to each script.
Bickham Script is primarily a display typeface, meant to add an accent of beauty and calligraphic elegance to a typographic composition in headings or short passages of large text. It derives, however, from what was originally considered a practical everyday writing style.