The Current State of Hand-Lettering Cursive Fonts
Cursive fonts have been getting a lot of attention lately, particularly the ones people are calling Jordan in Cursive. I spent a couple months digging into this after seeing it pop up on design boards and social media, and here is what I actually found. Jordan in Cursive is essentially a brush-script typeface that mimics fast, confident handwriting. It has thick downstrokes and thin upstrokes, with a few default ligatures built in so certain letter pairs connect naturally. The popularity surge seems tied to wedding invitation designers and content creators looking for something that reads as premium without going full calligraphy. Here is the thing most people miss. The font only works when you understand how its OpenType features actually function. If you just type normally and expect the letters to flow together, you will get jagged, broken results about half the time. You need to use the contextual alternates and ligature settings in your software. In Illustrator, that means enabling contextual alternatives under the Character panel. In Figma or CSS, you are relying on the browser or tool to honor the font's feature tags, which is less reliable than you might hope.
I ran into a specific problem while working on a branding project last year. The client wanted the word "Jordan" at the top of a logo lockup, and the default rendering looked completely wrong. The "J" and "o" connected with a weird cross-stroke that made the name unreadable at small sizes. I had to manually swap out the default "o" for the alternate glyph that sits lower on the baseline, then adjust the kerning pair by minus twelve units. Once I did that, the connection looked clean. It took me maybe twenty minutes to figure out the right glyph substitutions, but the first draft looked like I had just slapped the font on the canvas without any thought. That is the main pitfall. People treat Jordan in Cursive like a regular font and it performs like one until you actually engage with its alternates. The font package usually includes a glyph panel or an OpenType feature sheet. Scroll through it. You will see multiple versions of common letters like "a," "e," "t," and "y." Each one serves a different positioning purpose. Using the right one for the right context is what separates professional-looking output from amateur output. Beyond the technical side, there is a practical benefit to understanding this font. It reads as personal and warm even at small point sizes, which is unusual for script typefaces. Most cursive fonts fall apart below 14 points. Jordan tends to hold up to around 11 points if you give it enough tracking, maybe 9 points if you are not worried about perfect legibility. I used it for address block typography on a set of 200 wedding programs and it held up fine at 10.5 points with slight letter-spacing added.
The downsides are worth noting too. This font is heavy. The file size runs around 340 kilobytes, and when you embed it in a web project that adds noticeable load time. If you are building a mobile-first site, I would recommend converting the text to outlines for the hero sections where it appears, or using it as a static image overlay instead of a live web font. That cuts the render pipeline issue entirely. Another limitation is licensing. The commercial license for this font runs about $75 to $120 depending on the vendor, and some of the lighter deals you see online are either cracked or limited to personal use only. I have seen multiple versions floating around with different license terms, so always verify before dropping it into client work. Using an unlicensed copy on a project that generates revenue is a real risk, and it is not worth the small savings. If you want to start using it, the straightforward path is to grab the .otf or .ttf from a reputable foundry, install it, and open the included PDF feature guide. The guide maps out which glyphs work together. Then test it on a real project early, not after you have already designed everything else. You will quickly learn which letter combinations trigger the built-in ligatures and which ones need manual adjustment. The learning curve is maybe two or three hours if you are familiar with basic typography tools, but it pays off in the final output quality.
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