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Handwriting is an endangered species. But it’s not gone yet, and nostalgia might be the thing that keeps it around.
Despite the dominance of emailed thank-yous, sepia-hued Instagrams of curlicued notes are beginning to pepper the accounts of trendsetters like Oscar de la Renta communications director Erika Bearman, aka @OscarPRGirl, and handwritten correspondence-based blogs like Letters of Note and FOUND magazine.
FOUND founder Davy Rothbart said the notes he gathers tell two stories: one that’s written and one in the penmanship. A particular favorite, a boy’s letter to his estranged father, gets messier and deeper-grooved as emotions peak. Having to decipher the words, Rothbart said, makes you feel the boy’s frustration.
“[Handwriting] tells you everything,” he said. “It gives me an immediate feel for who the author is and what state of mind they were in when they wrote it. You can see their energy and their emotions.”
That loop scrawl is what President Obama’s new Chief of Staff Jacob “Jack” Lew calls a signature. A handwriting expert told us that it’s ”among the most uniquely weird we have seen in a quarter century of graphology.”
Typography is everywhere — you’re reading a particular typeface right now! — but could beautifully tailored typography make you buy a different cellphone? A new book details Nokia’s quest to find out.
“Twenty-Six Characters” is a stunning typographic specimen book showcasing the fundamentals of typographic craft, using Nokia’s Pure as a high-profile case study. Neophytes beware — it gets highly technical very quickly. You’ll find lighthearted descriptions of such classic typo-geek topics as: the differences between hyphens (-), en dashes (–) and em dashes (—), hinting for screen-based legibility, and how the typeface isn’t a mere 26 characters, but rockets up to 891 glyphs of punctuation, language-specific characters and mathematical symbols.
