Category: handwriting

What does a type designer’s handwriting look like?

India3 Comments

Erik Spiekerman's handwriting

In case you haven’t seen it—I hadn’t—faithful reader Schizohedron points out the following fun thing to look at:

There’s great power in a typeface, but what’s always interested me more than the typeface is the designer behind it – why did they create the typeface? Where did their inspiration come from? How did they start?

Lately, I’ve been asking just one question, though. Something which has always intrigued me: these people that help us communicate … how do they themselves communicate? If we strip away the monitors, and the printing presses, and the typefaces … how would William Caslon have written on a post-it note?

. . .

So, to satisfy my own curiosity I asked a number of prominent typographers to send me a scan of their handwriting. This is the result.

The respondents are Erik Spiekermann, Göran Söderström, Nikola Djurek, Sebastian Lester, Mark Simonson, Kris Sowersby, Eduardo Manso, Veronika Burian, Marian Bantjes, and Dino dos Santos.

Making Letters

India2 Comments

Two quick workday things:

  1. The Early Office Museum has lots of cool pictures of and information about office tools such as typewriters, adding machines, pencil sharpeners, paper fasteners, and so on. If you’re a geek for that sort of thing, have at it.
  2. Deron Bauman points out a WaPo article on the decline of cursive (which I’d already seen mentioned on Bill Walsh’s blog this morning but hadn’t actually gone over to read), which gave me the idea of looking for some handwriting manuals from my grandmother’s time and place. She learned to write in turn-of-the-century Atlanta and had a lovely round hand that was probably typical for her day. In the grand tradition of letting the Internet do my legwork for me, do any of ye Gentle Readers have any suggestions for books I might get from Alibris or Abebooks?

My own day-to-day handwriting is usually a slovenly mix between print and cursive, but I can write a pretty regular script when I pay attention. A couple of months ago, I collected all the samples of my dad’s handwriting I could find, with the intention of trying to make a font out of it; he was trained as an engineer and wrote a very neat, elegant, partially linked print. So far, no further action on that, but it’s in the back of my mind.