The ballpoint pen woman’s handwriting
 
As the name suggests — the Iris’ Hand is a woman’s personal handwriting, written with a ballpoint pen.
 
Iris’ Hand is an amazing font — almost indisting­uishable from “real” handwriting. Thanks to the over 200 different ligatures — i.e. the combinations of letters — and alternative character forms the typeface is extremely lively and varied.

Really handwritten

In order to preserve the liveliness of the handwritten original in the font, different forms of glyphs appear in the ligatures of the Iris’ Hand, so that, for example, an e looks different almost every time, depending on which letter it is (or isn't) connected to.
In addition to all the letter combinations, the double letters and numbers (aa, ff, AA, MM, 22, 66, ...) are also built as ligatures with alternative forms.

As if by magic

Requirement for the auto­matic application of the ligatures is that your application supports OpenType-features. Typically, most programs have at least the ligatures feature enabled by default. Then the alternate character forms automatically appear as if by magic when entering text and make the text look convincingly handwritten.

Other OpenType features such as “initial or terminal forms,” “discretionary ligatures,” or “fractions,” and others may need to be activated separately.

From light to bold

The ballpoint pen actually offers almost no possibility of consciously influencing the writing ductus. And yet the ballpoint pen also has its own characteristics, which are clearly expressed in this font. The stroke is not always uniformly thick. Sometimes only a delicate, thin line is created. Often it breaks off suddenly and leaves a gap.
The Iris’ Hand goes even further: In addition to the “normal” version, it is also available in a thinner (Light) and a stronger version (Bold).

More or less oblique

Handwriting is sometimes written more or less slanted. So does Iris’ Hand. The normal version is only slightly slanted. But there is also an italic version that is significantly more inclined by 20°, which makes the script appear more regular and somehow feminine.

The Iris’ Hand is also a variable font! This means that there are not only the usual individual styles — a font file for each style — but when using the variable font, all variations are available in a single font file. And every intermediate level can be created and displayed with it — as long as the software supports this still young font format.