This new design has taken more than twelve years to "get out the door" so to speak. It began as a one weight custom design for Vanity Fair magazine named VF Script. The design was based on some lettering on a 1920s French automobile poster and it was done quickly, finished in a few weeks at most. The connecting strategy was not a concise as it could have been, and many problem letter combinations were solved with ligatures. This caused composition problems since this was all done in the pre-OpenType days. Getting access to those ligatures required determination on the part of the compositor. Too much determination it turned out. Vanity Fair used it for a short time, but it never really played a large role in the typographic identity of the magazine.
From time to time the design would get pulled out, but there never seemed to be enough time to sort out the problem of the connection logic. The difficulty with a connecting vertical script is how to harmonize the connections of the lowercase r, s, v, w, and z. Not to mention how is the lowercase o going to work, without using ligatures. It took a while to work all this out, but finally the problem got solved.
During the development I was encouraged to make lighter and lighter weights, and as the design axis emerged I realized I had ten useful weights. Alternate forms of the b, f, and o can be accessed using OpenType Stylistic Sets and there are the usual OpenType features that are normally included in my fonts. I hope you find it useful.
Insouciant is available exclusively from Terminal Design
