Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering

• Write with a flexible pointed nib or a brush pen, pressing into thick downstrokes and lifting into hairline upstrokes.
• Loosen the copperplate model: let slant, letter size and baseline wander so the letters bounce, and stretch loops, entry and exit strokes into flourishes.
• Make one name, word or short phrase the whole design, centred on white, cream or soft colour with wide margins, and set any details small in a quiet serif or tracked sans.
• Colour it in black ink, gold or watercolour and gouache washes, and frame it with loosely painted leaves and flowers rather than rules, with at most a monogram or wax seal as an emblem.
• Write the key words by hand for the occasion and scan and vectorise them for logos, prints, stationery and posts; mass-market work sets the same look in brush-script fonts.

Wedding stationery and craft culture in the United States from the mid-2000s, becoming a mass hobby in the early 2010s through blogs, Pinterest, Instagram and craft publishing, with a British strand from London publishers. Wedding calligraphers worked the pointed pen before the boom: Maybelle Imasa-Stukuls, an Oakland calligrapher who likes her work 'perfectly imperfect', drew an illustrated map and wrote the addressed envelopes, place cards and menus for a wedding in Saratoga Springs featured in the Spring 2005 issue of Martha Stewart Weddings (The Design Files, 2013, which calls her 'a modern calligrapher'). Molly Suber Thorpe, a Los Angeles designer and calligrapher who graduated from UCLA's Design Communication Arts programme in 2009, wrote Modern Calligraphy (St. Martin's Griffin, 2013), which its publisher billed as 'the first book to teach this bold new style', for script pieces 'like the ones featured in wedding magazines and popular websites like Pinterest'; workshop manuals by Kirsten Burke (Studio Press) and Imogen Owen (Quadrille) followed in London in 2017, and Running Press published the 'popular Instagram letterer' Nicole Miyuki Santo's By Hand in 2018. The start date is approximate: the wedding strand is documented from 2005, the mass hobby from the early 2010s. The atlas has no entry for the copperplate (English roundhand) and Spencerian penmanship it loosens, so it has no parent here; hipster-artisanal, the handmade-branding revival of the same years, whose 'flowing casual scripts' and chalkboards ran alongside it, is an influence on its chalk and script-accent strand rather than its source (an analytical reading)

1. Internet Archive catalogue record: Molly Suber Thorpe, Modern Calligraphy: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started in Script Calligraphy, plus 20 DIY Projects for Weddings, Parties, Blogs, and More (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2013, vi + 184 pp.), with the publisher's description ('The first book to teach this bold new style'; pointed pen and ink, watercolour and gouache, digitising; projects for weddings, entertainment and personal stationery; pieces 'like the ones featured in wedding magazines and popular websites like Pinterest') and contents ('Pushing the envelope: postal art'): https://archive.org/details/moderncalligraph0000thor
2. Molly Suber Thorpe, About (UCLA Design Communication Arts, 2009; Modern Calligraphy, 2013; Mastering Modern Calligraphy, 2019): https://www.mollysuberthorpe.com/about
3. Lucy Feagins, 'Modern Calligraphy · Maybelle Imasa-Stukuls for The School', The Design Files (18 September 2013): an Oakland calligrapher using 'a pointed pen dipped into ink'; 'I like when my work is perfectly imperfect'; an illustrated map, addressed envelopes, place cards and menus for a wedding in Saratoga Springs in the Spring 2005 issue of Martha Stewart Weddings; 'a modern calligrapher': https://thedesignfiles.net/2013/09/modern-calligraphy-maybelle-imasa-stukuls
4. Open Library: Nicole Miyuki Santo, By Hand: The Art of Modern Lettering (Running Press, 2018), with the publisher's description ('popular Instagram letterer'; brush pens, brushes and paint pens; 30 projects 'from watercolor place cards to cozy pillows'; 'an on-trend pastime'): https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19753391W
5. Internet Archive catalogue record: Kirsten Burke and Jill Hembling (both listed as authors), Kirsten Burke's Secrets of Modern Calligraphy (London: Studio Press, 2017): https://archive.org/details/kirstenburkessec0000burk_2017
6. Internet Archive catalogue record: Imogen Owen, Modern Calligraphy Workshop: The Creative Art of Pen, Brush and Chalk Lettering (London: Quadrille, 2017): https://archive.org/details/moderncalligraph0000owen
7. Fashion Institute of Technology Library, Maker Minds research guide: Calligraphy (lists Thorpe's Modern Calligraphy and Santo's By Hand): https://fitnyc.libguides.com/makerminds/calligraphy
8. Angelynn Grant, '3 Typography Experts Weigh in on the Recent Hand-Lettering Boom', AIGA Eye on Design (9 March 2015), with Ken Barber, Martina Flor and Ale Paul; Ale Paul, co-founder of the type foundry Sudtipos, speaking of the hand-lettering boom in general: 'an almost invasive DIY streak, with almost no evident rules, happening wherever craft and computers interact'; 'What works in Pinterest will likely not work for a butcher': https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/3-typography-experts-on-how-to-tell-good-hand-lettering-from-the-wannabes/
9. Emily Potts, 'How @Goodtype Made Hand Lettering Instagram-famous', AIGA Eye on Design (12 February 2015), on Instagram hand lettering in general (the wider scene; it does not mention brush lettering or modern calligraphy): https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/how-the-goodtype-made-hand-lettering-instagram-famous/
10. Dummies (Wiley), 'How to Do Bounce Lettering' (page dated 11 July 2017): a style 'often seen on DIY projects'; 'Let your downstrokes go below the descender line': https://www.dummies.com/article/home-auto-hobbies/crafts/calligraphy/how-to-do-bounce-lettering-241864/
11. Zebra Pen, 'Bouncy Lettering Tutorial Using Brush Pens' ('Bouncy lettering is where the downstroke of a letter dips below the baseline'; brush pens that give 'thick downstrokes and thin upstrokes'): https://www.zebrapen.com/blogs/enlightened-writing/bouncy-lettering-tutorial-using-brush-pens
12. Monotype, 'Wedding Whimsy: Marie Boulanger Explores Popularity of Brush Calligraphy Typefaces with The Independent' (22 July 2025): 'an approachable brush calligraphy style has quickly become the norm' for wedding invitations, favours, name cards and banners; so-called 'wedding fonts', and 'cliches aren't always a bad thing': https://www.monotype.com/company/news/wedding-whimsy-marie-boulanger-the-independent
13. Wikipedia, 'Copperplate script' (a roundhand based on English Roundhand; Bickham's The Universal Penman, 1733–1741; fine-point metal nibs): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copperplate_script
14. Wikipedia, 'Spencerian script' (Platt Rogers Spencer, c. 1840; used in the United States c. 1850–1925): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencerian_script
15. Oh So Beautiful Paper, 'Colorful Watercolor Crest Wedding Invitations' (3 July 2018), by Sandy of Roseville Designs: 'a calligraphy-style font for the names', a formal serif for the initials in the crest, a watercolour crest whose florals became the envelope liner, 'a custom wax seal incorporating the monogram from the crest', digitally printed: https://ohsobeautifulpaper.com/2018/07/colorful-watercolor-crest-wedding-invitations/

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