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.
I'm always criticized for my sloppy handwriting, and it's refreshing to see that the experts in the field of readable, beautiful type can be just as "lazy" or sloppy as me.
That would be an interesting poll:
How many words per day do you write with "pen and paper"? ...) ...)
o) 0
o) 1-5 (passwords on post-it)
o) 6-20 (milk, breat, ramen, condoms, beer,
o) 21-200 (still in school, you insensitive
o) >200 (i do it for a living!)
lsr@#suechtler
Not really, think of it this way, if you are going to be making letters that will be reproduced thousands and millions of times, you are going to try to make each one look the best, if you are writing a card, it doesn't really matter as long as it is somewhat readable.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
a similar article with comic book letterers.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Their hands were actually cut off for their poor and uninspired ripoff of Helvetica.
I disagree. I found their writing really beautiful. Handwriting in the end, isn't different from drawing (nor drawing is much different from handwriting) so you have to look at them artistically and study their lines, shapes and relationships like you would do with a free hand sketch. Apart from revealing their personality (as for any of us), handwriting is the best proof that everyone has an artist inside of us. And an art critic, as well. :)
Why wouldn't there be? It's not like designing a typeface is easy.
That's true, of course, but I would think that people who do this type of thing would have excellent handwriting (and some of them do), just as I'd expect a graphic artist to be able to draw freehand. Then again, someone might be more comfortable with a tablet and Gimp than pen and paper; the same principle could be at work here. Ah, well, just another preconceived notion shot partially to hell.
Writhe your naked ass to the mindless groove.
>Anyone else notice that the typographers who either reside in the US or have resided in the US their writing is much more legible?
I did... the rest are writing in their second or third language. How's your penmanship in your second language?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
It's the same as my first language, seeing as how they're the same alphabet...
There are some interesting correlations there, comparing relative x-height and the feel of the typography from person to person. I'm not a professional typographer, but I teach basic typography units as part of computer graphics courses.
I'm guessing a pro typographer could easily see correlation among the examples. Designer-types often express in their handwriting what they desire their overall "vibe" to be. Since typography is abused so much, and there are so many edge cases to look after, it's only natural that the fonts that result look more stilted and less artsy than the handwriting that may have inspired them.
Related principle: Design students learn very early on not to set large bodies of type with decorative fonts.
I fail to see how the quality of one's handwriting is important. The point of day-to-day writing is to write something down that is legible, and can be easily re-assimilated when necessary.
People who spend more than 1/4 of a second per letter aren't handwriting; they're either being artistic, or trying to boost pride through snobbery. I can "handwrite" much nicer than my everyday writing, but why would I waste 3 minutes writing a single sentence just to make sure each letter is curved?
It strikes me that English is likely not the first language of many of these typographers, yet all but one provided their sample written in English. I wonder if that unintentionally skewed the samples for the better?
It's been nearly a decade since I've put pen[cil] to paper in another language, but I know that when I was writing French in high school, I did much better at penmanship than when I was taking notes in class or doing other day-to-day writing. It wasn't so much a conscious effort at making my handwriting look better, as it was the natural delay in writing something down slowly as I translated it in my head. I imagine it's a similar principle to forging a signature; you're being very deliberate about what you write, so it tends to come out looking cleaner.
That said, Erik and Dino have really cool handwriting. My own daily jottings typically resemble Goran's - and that's writing in my native language! I could probably qualify to be a doctor based upon my handwriting alone; guess it's a good thing that I type well.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
There are only so many pieces of music you can make with the same 7 notes.
Not a sentence!
Only 52? There are many more than that in a decent set. There are also only a limited number on notes a musician can play (generally speaking), yet people keep coming up with new ways to play them. I'll give you that type is a much more subtle and restricted art form than music, but the same principle still applies. Style and usage also evolves over time and this is reflected in it.
You have no idea what you're talking about. As evidenced by your reference to "creative use of whitespace" and "web sidebars" (?!). Those things have exactly nothing to do with typography, they're hallmarks of the sorts of wankers who have "Web Designer" on their business cards. Actual good typography is very difficult to execute and ultimately invisible. No, you don't simply want the "maximum amount of words on a page," because that would be utterly fucking illegible. Packing those words in to a compact yet legible form is where the unappreciated artistry of typography does its invisible thing. Those pages of miniscule stock quotes in the newspaper? Why you can read them without going blind? That's because of typography.
One other thing I've found: many typographers (but not type designers so much) are even more [...] pretentious than software engineers
Wow, have you ever done a great job of illustrating that point.
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.
If you cared a whit about the subject as an art, you'd be happy to have it exposed to more people in such an interesting way. Frankly, I'm happy to have seen a really interesting article without having to risk visiting a site populated by assholes like yourself.