Cocktail Hour

Cocktail Hour is a playful, slightly unpredictable script with two weights, Regular and Bold. Long, sweeping capitals sit alongside smaller, dancing letters, giving words a loose rhythm. I made it with invitations, dinner menus, personal stationery, and expressive branding in mind. In some ways, this is another experimental font for me. When I made Lovers in New York, the letterforms felt more predictable in how they worked together. With Cocktail Hour, I let the letters move around more. Some reach upwards, some stretch out, and others curl into the space around them. The result depends quite a bit on the words you choose, which is part of what I enjoy about it. That freedom also makes spacing and kerning more complicated. The more irregular the letters are, the harder it is to make every possible combination feel equally balanced. I worked on these relationships and added ligatures and alternate characters to give certain combinations a more natural flow. Even so, some words may benefit from a little manual spacing or a different choice of letter. Not every letter has an alternate. I added alternatives where I felt they would be useful, focusing on frequently used letters and combinations I encountered while testing English words and names. They are individual options to try within a word, rather than a complete second alphabet. The font includes accented Latin characters, but much of my work on ligatures and letter combinations was guided by English. If you plan to use it in another language, please try the actual words you need in the font tester. Having the characters available does not necessarily mean every combination will have the same flow as the examples shown. I would also recommend trying a few alternates before settling on your final layout. A different capital or ending can change the shape of a whole word. The preview images show some of the combinations I liked, but your own text may need a slightly different approach.