That typeface just seemed to fall into place, Mark says. He had a pretty good idea of what the whole thing would look like in his head from the beginning, and he continued to sketch it during boring meetings. In 1995, Mark tried to turn his unusual upright script into a digital font. He drew it in Adobe Illustrator, using the circle tool and line tool, but it didn’t look right. It was too stiff and geometric, so he put it away for a while.

In 2001, Mark took some time off after his partner, Pat Thompson, won a large sum of money on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? He devoted six months to type design, and Coquette (which he then called Ruby Script after his daughter) received a lot of attention. Mark put pencil to paper this time, drawing inch-tall letters on tracing paper. The design looked lovely. He scanned the drawings, using them as a loose reference in the background while working in Illustrator. He didn’t do a lot of measuring or checking for perfect geometry. He went with the flow of all those ‘s’ curves and French curves. “Everything seemed to click,” Mark says. “The combination of eyeballing it, drawing it by hand, then free-drawing it on screen, trying to capture the same gestures—it just worked. I’ve used this technique a lot since then.”

While it took three tries over a period of eight years to get the design right, Coquette is one of Mark’s favorite designs because it finally came out the way he had pictured it in his head. He has ambitious plans for Coquette’s future: a plainer version of the same style, with more normalized caps and a less script-like lowercase; a hairline weight and a super fat weight; and perhaps a neon version or a simple rounded version.

Type designer colleagues have suggested Mark craft a connected version, but he says part of the reason Coquette works so well is because it’s not connected—it’s a magic trick. He’s also considered a thick-and-thin version and an italic version; maybe a Cyrillic, which would present a tremendous challenge in a typeface so hybridized. “But it would be fun,” Mark says.