THE HAND IS MIGHTIER THAN THE PIXEL. BACK TO BASICS LETTERING.

Poster by Gary Pantner
Centuries
before the computer artists and artisans used a very complex tool for
making letterforms - their hands. At five digits per hand it was the
first digital lettering tool. Letterforms in all shapes and sizes were
drawn, carved, and engraved using this tool. And even allowing for its
technological quirks, the hand created of some of the most beautiful
lettering ever devised. Which underscores the paradox that after
centuries of progress we have both gained and lost something of value.
The amazing computer has made arduous procedures unnecessary and
insured increased precision yet it also atrophied certain instincts
needed to create both beautiful as well as beautifully bawdy hand
lettering.
For at least three years, however, there has
been a resurgence of interest in the hand. Of course, this is not to be
confused with the kind of precision drawing that master type designers
honed as a wee lads and lassies, but rather it is a reaction to
reflexive precisionist sensibilities that are made so easy by the
computer.
Although drawing on the computer is perhaps no
less complicated than on paper, the logic inherent in the new tool
nevertheless eliminates the serendipitous edge that is endemic to the
old one. But there are other distinctions. Typesetting is official;
hand lettering is informal. Typesetting is mechanical; hand lettering
is expressive. These days, just the word "expressive" connotes
liberation from the confines of technology, even though it may only be
an illusion.
The computer ensures tidiness and
orderliness sometimes leading to blandness, the hand is currently
making a comeback in profound and imaginative ways that draw on both
past and present. Yet for inspiration designers need not return to
medieval times. Though it does help to know the history of hand
lettering and understand that it was integral to graphic design for
centuries after the invention of moveable type, it does not matter
today if designers reinvent the wheel since each person's hand tends to
produce unique signatures.
Nonetheless historical
rumination is useful to illustrate where hand lettering came from and
where it is going. During the early twentieth century typographers and
type designers produced precisionist lettering by hand because time,
technology, and economy demanded it. When photostats were too expensive
or slow, hand lettering was the cheapest and quickest way to create a
custom headline for a book jacket, poster, or point-of-purchase
display. Sho-Card lettering, as the practice of creating one-of-a-kind,
hand drawn display was known back then, demanded of its practitioners a
decidedly high degree of lettering know-how; not just copying existing
traditional alphabets but devising novel and novelty scripts, gothics,
and further hybrids.
To expertly hand letter in the "old
days" was the same as mastering the computer programs Quark,
Illustrator, or PhotoShop today. But to admire a virtuoso of this form
just view lettering created in the twenties and thirties by William
Addison Dwiggins for his book spines and title pages (and even his
lesser book jackets), they were flawless specimens. Dwiggins' work was
more formal than informal because his books were designed to stand the
test of time. Yet there were other designers engaged in ad hoc writing
simply as a respite from the rigor of traditional typography. It was
fairly common for designers to use brush and pen-scrawls as display
lettering-cum-personal signature. Paul Rand frequently used a
light-line hand drawn script instead of conventional type to give
advertisements the informality necessary to intimately engage the
audience, and signal a casual rather than institutional sensibility.
Handwriting was something of an antidote to the hard-sell gothic type
conventions that prevailed in most newspaper ads. It emerged as a
signature style in much of Rand's work, and his playful scrawls were
ultimately used on packages for IBM computer and typewriter products as
well as various book covers and annual reports.
At the
same time Alex Steinweiss, the first graphic designer to create
original artwork for 78rpm and later 33 1/3 LP record album covers,
developed a custom alphabet called the "Steinweiss Scrawl" as a means
to inject quirky character traits into his illustrative album designs.
Steinweiss' curlicue script was later licensed to the American
type-house Photo Lettering Inc., sold as a standard typeface, and was
used by those who wanted a more colloquial sensibility in their design.
Similarly, Alvin Lustig, the modernist graphic, interior,
and product designer, used handwriting on book jackets to compliment
expressionistic collage and montage. Lustig sought to recreate the
plasticity of a modern painters like Paul Klee and Mark Rothko in
commercial art rather than conform to rigid standards, and his informal
hand script contributed to this fluidity. At the same time, a
prevailing fashion reigned (particularly in book jacket design) for
conventional calligraphy that Rand argued was too decorous and stiff.
Alternatively, he believed, handwriting was more natural and,
therefore, consonant with the anti-ornamental tenets of Modernism.
By
the mid-sixties hand lettering became a socio-political statement. With
the advent of the American Underground Press, the clarion of the
anti-war, civil rights, and sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll alternative
cultures, graphic styles radically changed from precisionist to ad hoc
in reaction to the real and symbolic implications of professionalism
(and capitalism). Given the formal mainstream design language of the
time purposefully artless hand lettering intensified the schism. Words
scrawled in an untutored way with Magic Marker were used as headlines
in Underground papers and on posters that critiqued the establishment's
stance on war, race, and gender.
Posters produced by the
1968 French radical student design collective, Atelier Populaire, never
contained real type but instead such phrases as "Fascist Vermin,"
"Order Begins," and "We Are the Power," violently inscribed by a
designer's hand, underscored the polemic import of each message. There
was also a more aesthetic side practiced in the United States by
psychedelic poster artists who fashioned meticulous hand rendered
lettering based on the resurrections of old Victorian wood- and Art
Nouveau metal-types. Victor Moscoso, who helped mastermind psychedelic
alphabets, rendered the negative spaces between letters rather than the
positive letters themselves as a means to create vibrating sensations.
Every detail was achieved by hand because it was necessary to maintain
total control to achieve the typographic optical illusions that he
invented. Moreover, there were no technologies available that could
match his obsessive artistry. As a radical style Psychedelic lettering
did not last long, though hand lettering continued to be popular
throughout the seventies and into the early eighties.
With
the introduction in the late eighties of the Macintosh as graphic
design's primary tool hand lettering diminished as an overall conceit.
Type designers scurried to adapt old typefaces for the new digital
platforms as they experimented with bitmapped and hi-resolution
concoctions, which led to a post-modern typographic style rooted in new
traits such as degradation and distortion. Nonetheless, a unique
phenomenon arose that married hand lettering concepts together with
high-tech digitizing software. Designers in the nineties, many who
never designed a typeface before, used the new programs to transform
otherwise one-of-a-kind hand lettered beauties -- and monstrosities --
into downloadable font packages. The age of ersatz hand lettering
began.
The most ubiquitous of all the digital hand
lettering alphabets was the late Frank Heine's 1991 "Remedy" (published
and distributed by Emigre Fonts). With its happy-go-lucky curlicue
conceits it recalled the Steinweiss Scrawl and soon became (along with
Barry Deck's Template Gothic based on handmade stencil lettering) the
most emblematic font of the period. Many other hand lettered-looking
fonts followed and graphic designers used these simulated hand-faces to
express jocularity. The "reinvention" of the hand doubtless was in part
an anti-digital reaction that inspired some designers to return to the
one-of-a-kind-Sho-Card-inspired quirky hand lettering.
Ironically,
the scanner and digital camera have made it easier to use hand
lettering that is painterly and abstract. The computer's ability to
digitize anything is phenomenal. But digitization inevitably results in
mass production and mass production invariably removes the quirkiness
from any letterform. How can someone claim to be eccentric when two or
more other designers are using the same packaged expressionistic
lettering? Arguably, one reason for today's renaissance in hand
lettering is to thwart such predictability.
Hand labor
offers tangible and intangible results. The hand offers serendipitous
expression that speaks personally. Hand lettering enables a designer to
make a distinct mark. James Victore's dirty hand is all over his
posters and book jackets. Influenced by the legendary Polish poster
artist, Henryk Tomaszewski, who painted his posters with words,
Victore's rough-hewn graffiti rips into his paper to give the words,
indeed the overall look of his work, an aggressive aura that could not
be achieved through standard typefaces alone.
A less
aggressive, but no less expressive method can be found in linoleum cut
letters, which not only convey a distinct illustrative graphic
personality, they colorfully enliven a page with vibrancy that type
alone would not allow. Linocut letters do not mimic classic typefaces
but follow a tradition of woodcut letters that recall the German
Expressionists. And while this may be a time consuming way to make
design, after spending untold hours with a key-board and mouse, as most
designers do, writing or cutting by hand is decidedly cathartic.
Although
a computer can be programmed to reproduce the quirks and idiosyncrasies
of humans it will not automatically spit out something that has a
sublime watercolor scrawl. Nor will it credibly produce the
transcendent messiness of the brush marks or scratchy doodles. And it
will certainly not replicate the words carved into wood or other
malleable surfaces. Although a good programmer could train the computer
to almost anything, why bother?
Moreover, even with all
the frequent upgrades for PhotoShop and Illustrator it is still easy to
discern what is hand produced from what is digitally mastered.
Eventually everything goes through the computer, like food passing
through the digestive tract, if only to be digitally prepared for
backend printing. But in work that originates from the hand the sources
of inspiration are unforeseen because they rely on mistakes, misplaced
marks, and careless (or carefree) juxtapositions. As design becomes
more computer-generated, as programmed special effects are increasingly
integrated into the designer's vocabulary, the human factor must not be
underestimated. The hand is graphic design's oldest tool - and for now
it is also the best alternative to formulaic solutions.
About this article
This article was originally published in form 196 (May - June 2004).
About Steven Heller
Steven Heller, is the art director of the New York Times Book Review
and the co-chair of the MFA/Design program at the SVA, New York. He is
contributing editor to Print, Eye, and Baseline
magazines and author of several books on graphic design, popular art,
and satiric art, among which: The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption?,
Design Literacy, Design Literacy Continued, Graphic Style: From
Victorian to Digital, The Graphic Design Timeline, Design Dialogues,
Typology, The Graphic Design Reader, Citizen Designer, Merz to Emigre:
Avant Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century.
He is currently writing a biography of Alvin Lustig.
About form Magazine
form is one of the leading design magazines in Europe and is issued in
both German and English. Renowned specialist writers report six times a
year on the latest trends in industrial design, graphic design and
interaction design. Since 1957, form has been been an authoritative
source of information and inspiration to designers, entrepreneurs,
lecturers and students alike. The internationally oriented magazine
founds its reputation on thoroughly researched articles, lavish photo
sequences, noteworthy interviews, a vivid layout and high print
quality.