Slashdot Mirror
The Handwriting of Type Designers
jamie found this blog post wherein an Australian Web technologist, Cameron Adams, wondered whether the handwriting of his favorite type designers encoded some sort of influence on their designs. So he wrote to them and asked for a sample. The result will make you slow down and appreciate the beauty and the aesthetics of type. Or else it won't.
The only one of those whose writing resembles one of their fonts is Mark Simonson with his "felt tip roman" font.
The last two in TFA do have rather spiffy handwriting, though.
Actually, it was the end points of all their characters that they lopped off of Helvetica, from perfect 90 and 0 degree angles of the Swiss type to a random assortment of everything in between. It's the cheap and easy way to tell the two apart.
The native alphabet of every typographer on that page uses roman letters. There is no difference between their written language and our written language except spelling, accent marks, and perhaps a few ligatures.
http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html
You must be new... to typography.
What's surprising is the appearance of an article like this on Slashdot, a site frequented by roughly zero typographers. Not that the lack of typographers is a bad thing, Slashdot is about Free software, bashing Microsoft, and language paradigm flamewars. Hardly this site's target market.
I have more than a passing interest in typography, but trust me, it takes years to learn about this stuff. I would suggest Slashdot leaves type related articles to Typophile, I love typography and all the others.
Remember that this is not just creating text. It is an intricate art form, dating back thousands of years. If you, or anyone else, wants to educate themselves The Elements of Typographic Style is essential reading. One other thing I've found: many typographers (but not type designers so much) are even more pedantic, exacting and pretentious than software engineers, or even grammar Nazis. If you posted the above on the Typophile forums, they'd probably be round your house with pitchforks and torches. :)
I am no expert nor a professional, but I used to make fonts with Fontographer. I don't think my handwriting had anything to do with the result. As a rule, my handwriting is pretty messy. When I was a student, not many friends could borrow my notes. That said, if I apply some effort, I can write legibly and with more effort and time, I can "draw" sentences in good lettering or calligraphy. It's just that normally I don't want to spend effort and time to write nicely. Creating fonts is like drawing. You try to use your aesthetic sense to see if the result is good. If not, you make modifications. You don't do that when writing. Unlike drawing though, you don't simply rely on hand-eye coordination. You can move anchor points
using a mouse or a keyboard.
FWIW though, Nikola Djurek's and Dino's are pretty nice. Eduardo Manso's, OTOH, looks like a grade school kid's (like around second grade or so).
Man, I'm not sure if you just didn't get that or what. Are you thinkin' about those chickens that they keep locked up, doing nothin but drawing interesting and imaginative fonts on the ground?
Nay, he is rather referring to the the common colloquialism of calling bad handwriting "chicken scratch," thus implying that some of those dudes have horrible handwriting, but that didn't stop them from creating beautiful fonts. Indeed, a tool's a tool with art, what matters's in the mind and in the heart, whether with the hand or with the mouse.
By the way, if you explain why you think something needs a citation, or even go a little out of your way to explain how you looked it up on google and couldn't find anything, so you are wondering where he/she came up with that; if you show you went to effort, instead of lazily implying that the gp is wrong, then you will be a lot more likely to get a response, and a lot more worthy of respect.
Qxe4
It's not a poor and uninspired ripoff of Helvetica, it's a poor and uninspired ripoff of Monotype Grotesque, but with the same proportion and weight of individiual symbols as helvetica.
These are the handwriting samples that I like most. For some reason, both of these individuals write their "d" in a single upward sweeping loop, without the subsequent vertical downward stroke--although Dino seems to do this only for the terminal "d."
Erik's sample is interesting to me because of the unconventional ampersand, and how it is clear that he writes the stem of his "i" before dotting it (I do the reverse when I print, which is my regular script, as opposed to writing in full cursive, which I rarely do).
Sebastian's handwriting is vaguely reminiscent of graffiti artists. I like it, in particular, I like the shape of the "a" and the overall crowded, upright feel.
Eduardo's sample makes me think he's either playing a joke, or he's 7 years old. The apostrophe is absolutely bizarre--it is not so much written as it is drawn.
Marian's "crazy backhand" is actually my favorite among her three styles of handwriting, but what is more curious is that she even *has* three clearly distinct styles of script.
Kris's handwriting looks remarkably--in fact, uncannily--similar to the handwriting of my ex-boyfriend, who is German. I wonder if he studied in Germany.
Finally, Dino's sample is really quite beautiful--it has distinctive touches (the "D", "s", and "g" in particular), is calligraphic, and exudes elegance.
The other samples I found mostly unremarkable. Sorry. There are some shared themes between each designer's handwriting and their typefaces, but I think the comparison is tenuous as well as retrospective. If one did not know in advance which writing sample belonged to which typographer, it would not have been at all obvious how to match them up.
Larabie and the Erik Spiekermanns of this world are in different leagues.
Most of Larabie's fonts are display fonts, rather than text fonts (i.e., ones that would be used for setting headings or signs, rather than paragraphs of text), and many of them are of a quirky novelty nature. Making a fun-looking display font is one thing; making a typeface that can be used to set large swathes of text, in such a way that the text is readable for long periods of time, is more difficult. Entire books have been written on the art of typography, on serifs and optical weights, the perceptual psychology of reading text and the tricks of the great typefaces of the past. As such, it takes far more accomplishment and mastery of typography to make one good display font that gets accepted for use in print than it does to make three hundred nifty-looking display fonts.
You can see a sample of his handwriting in an interview he did with Free Software Magazine in 2005: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/interview_knuth