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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.
that there are so many people who are renowned for creating text... and that someone would have a "favorite." Incredible.
Man, Marian Bantjes absolutely won that little penmanship-contest-that-wasn't, no? Amazing to have three different kinds of awesome penmanship. I can barely manage one.
...'tis easier to blame than to improve.
was modding but have to post...
"...can be just as "lazy" or sloppy as me."
Seriously?
I thought their writing was gorgeous; compared to my horrible chicken scratches.
Dude, if you want to see sloppy writing, I will send you a sample.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
so, what's the difference between ledgible and artistic? Not all of the typefaces we use are necessarily ledgible. At first I thought the first sample was pretty bad, but after looking at it, I noticed that his lettering was consistent. Whether I thought it was appealing or not does not matter. I have in the past worked on my signature, simply to make it stand out a bit and more distinct. Point? The point is, I can't pen my name with the consistency that Erik Spiekerman spells "handwriting". He has found what works best for him and applies it *every* time he writes, me I still can't decide how big of a loop to make for the letter "e".
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
I preferred Dino's. Learning multiple scripts is easy, anyway. Just get a fountain pen and go to dover.com if you're interested.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Perhaps because he used his handwriting for it?
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I can't recall the last time I wrote out a full sentence. I probably haven't done more than a dozen in the last ten years. It's just notes and lables now.
I like writing letters. When I was young, I'd write letters to my favorite uncle and grandma, and now when I'm older and support two Plan International children, I write letters to those.
:-)
I'm European and have an Indian friend with a 6-year-old. For his birthday, I wrote a letter to the little guy, who was totally amazed that someone would write him a real letter
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Now that's interesting. I've been known to do some comic book lettering from time to time, but my actual handwriting is pretty damn horrible these days. Small, but horrible. The reason is application. I use handwriting to jot down notes, where the primary goal is speed. Studies have found that the slowest known way to write the English language is in block caps, so that's out the window straight away. The overall look of the letters goes downhill from there.
By comparison, writing letters for comic books is really more of a kind of drawing. You have to read the script to know what to write, but when you're making the marks on the paper you're not really thinking about the words at all, just the letterforms (in my experience, anyway -- and that's even when I wrote the script myself).
Even more interesting, my dad was also pretty good at block caps. I used to see his block writing around the house, on moving boxes etc. It was even more precise than mine (I assume because in comics you're trying to convey a little bit of emotion with the letters). His handwriting for notes was legible, but totally different. And my dad was also a doctor. I've seen him write prescriptions. They are illegible, totally illegible. I swear to you it's a code! I bet they write them that way to prevent hypochondriacs and junkies from writing believable fake scrips.
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While I program for a living much of my day is spent writing stuff with pen and paper. A computer simply cannot support the same flow of thoughts as a couple of pieces of paper can. When I'm done sketching out my project I turn to the computer for the actual programming. /so >200 //Also I think it scores a point or two with the boss when you take notes pen and paper wise, he can see that you are actually paying attention while someone staring intensely at his laptop screen could just as well be playing solitaire.
... the handwriting of Donald Knuth (the creator of Metafont/TeX/...)
Erik's sample is interesting to me because of the unconventional ampersand,
That's an ampersand? Looks a lot more like @ to me.
and how it is clear that he writes the stem of his "i" before dotting it
That's common. How do you think they got the phrase, "dotting the i's and crossing the t's"?
== Jez ==
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I know you were joking, but I thought this would be interesting to share anyways.
The reason why lowercase is easy to read is because each word has a distinctive shape. Your mind learns to recognize these shapes, so it can identify the word without having to read all the letters.
In contrast, uppercase letters all have the same, block shaped outline - you're forced to read through the majority of the letters to identify the word, which slows you down.
For example, see which of these two typo-ridden words is easier to read:
RSCHEEARCH uinervtisy
The lower case one is easier to figure out, because it still has some semblances of its normal word shape.