Bad Handwriting
Everyone else has linked to it, so the following isn’t precisely a new scoop, but here is a really fascinating article by Cameron Adams about the handwriting of typographers. I found the article timely because I’ve been corralling up information about what I see as the enhancement of typography in web pages with the current and upcoming CSS @font-face support for some sort of blog entry thing, which should be bursting forth somewhere in the near future. (I make no promises about it being insightful, mind you.)
I wasn’t shocked to discover that a lot of the typographers featured have horrible handwriting. After all, house designers allegedly have bad livingrooms, and web designers frequently have blogs that aren’t quite put together yet. There’s something about being involved with something professionally that causes a person to give up on any application of the career in their personal life. Mind you, my own handwriting is chicken scratch, so I’m not much of one to talk.
However, after some tragic scuffles with legibility the article comes to Nikola Djurek’s sample, which looks like something that was used to draft the Constitution. Handwriting of that quality makes me feel like my own attempt at imparting words to paper is a stillborn abomination that was tossed into a dumpster somewhere around the third grade.
Actually, I’m pretty sure my handwriting was better in the third grade than it is now. I’d hit the high point of mastering cursive, and had yet to begin the downward slide in legibility that would coincide with my obsession with keyboards and the flickering glow of monitors.
I need to add an “elsewhere in the web” sidebar or section to this site, I think, for stuff like this. Hardly a novel concept, I’m sure. I’m sure there’s a WordPress plugin (or twelve) for that, considering the many blogs I’ve seen equipped with such. Does anyone have any suggestions? I guess I could stop being lazy and look for myself, actually.
Tags: typography