Introducing Meritocracy, a full-featured handwritten font with tons of alternate characters and OpenType features. My goal with this font was to make you a typeface that will look as much like hand lettering as possible. Using the built-in OpenType pseudo-random contextual alternates and over 300 individually drawn ligatures, you can infuse your typography with personality and variety.
Meritocracy comes with more than 900 glyphs! Specific OpenType features include contextual alternates, stylistic alternates, a second stylistic set for variety, multiple alternate glyphs for many letters (accessed through the glyphs panel), multilingual support (including multiple currency symbols), standard numbers, and seven ampersand styles. It also includes 325 standard and discretionary ligatures, all of them individually hand-drawn to be different from all other glyphs in the font. These ligatures allow you to give a super-realistic hand-lettered look to your typography. You can write the same word in so many different ways if you combine the default set, stylistic set 01, and standard and discretionary ligatures in different ways.
SPECIAL OPENTYPE FEATURE: If you are using OpenType-capable software like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, or CorelDraw and you have contextual alternates turned on, you can see the letters randomize themselves as you type, mixing from the default character set and stylistic set 01. (You can always turn on contextual alternates after you have already typed your passage and it will randomize all at once, or you can choose to turn off contextual alternates and substitute specific glyphs yourself – I find that if I\’m typing a word or two, I prefer to control the individual glyphs myself; if I\’m typing a paragraph, I like to use the built-in randomness of the contextual alternates feature).
Note that this pseudo-randomization (aka contextual alternate feature) is ON by default in Apple\’s Pages app and OFF by default in Microsoft Word, but it can be turned on.
The OpenType features can be very easily accessed by using OpenType-savvy programs such as Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign. (To access most of these awesome features in Microsoft Word, you\’ll need to get comfortable with the advanced tab of Word\’s font menu. If you have questions about this, ask me!)
