Computers made hand-lettering both possible and inevitable. Here, Jonny Hannah’s cover typography for “Telling Tales” and John Gray’s lettering for “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.”Steven Heller, a former art director at The New York Times, is a co-chair of the MFA Design Department at the School of Visual Arts and a blogger and author.
You may have noticed it, or maybe not. It may not be perceptible to the layman’s eye. After all, type and typography are supposed to be a crystal goblet — transparent — seen and read but not heard. Type should not be boisterous or distracting, though it must be appealing. In recent years there has been a veering away from the exclusive use of traditional typefaces (or fonts) to an increase in hand or custom lettering for advertisements, magazines, children’s books, adult book jackets and covers, film title sequences and package designs. Hand lettering is not just used, as it once was, for D.I.Y. youth-cult concert posters and T-shirts.
Calvin Klein, IBM, Microsoft, even the Episcopal New Church Center have run ad campaigns using what might be viewed as sloppily scrawled, sketchily rendered, untutored lettering. Its applications are so widespread that a couple of years ago, I co-authored a book about it (Handwritten: “Expressive Lettering in the Digital Age,” Thames & Hudson), and from what I can see, there is no sign that the trend is on the wane.
Owing to its infinite capacity for perfection, the computer has made this kind of hand lettering possible and inevitable. Incidentally, this is not the beautiful hand-crafted calligraphy celebrated by scribes and hobbyists and used for wedding invitations and diplomas. On the surface, this riotously raw lettering looks like it was produced by those who are incapable of rendering letters with any semblance of accuracy or finesse. And while this may or may not be true, a decade or so ago, this lettering was a critical reaction to the computer’s cold precision. It was also, in certain design circles, a means of rebelling against the purity and exactitude of modernism. Eventually it became a stylistic code for youthful demographics (the poster and title sequence for the film “Juno” stands out as a high-water mark in hand lettering, and before that, the TV series “Freaks & Geeks” used the trope), before being embraced by the mainstream (like the aforementioned IBM advertisements).
Some hand lettering derives from roughly sketching vintage and passé letterforms (including Victorian, Art Nouveau, or Art Deco styles), making them even more imperfect and, by doing so, injecting a contemporary aesthetic. Others are crazy and novel scripts and scrawls based on nothing other than an eccentric sensibility. Some look suspiciously like the kind of block letters with shadows that one might draw on a doodle pad. With the popularity of comics and graphic novels, hand lettering of the comic strip variety has also emerged as vogue.
Once, designers replaced official typefaces with their own handwriting because it was too expensive to set type (see Paul Rand or Alvin Lustig). These days, it is not an economic decision at all. Hand lettering is seen as a means to distinguish expressive from non-expressive messages. Or conform to certain fashions. I recently rented “Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist” because the poster reminded me of the laissez-faire lettering of “Juno,” which I liked so much. It said playful and youthful. Lettering can certainly trigger that Pavlovian response, and hand lettering can do it better than most formal typefaces.
I am a big fan of this anti-type typography. This may be because it is something I can do without mastering complex techniques. But it is more complicated than that. Nonetheless, hand lettering is liberating. Sure, most official documents, in fact, most things we read (like books, magazines and blogs) require official typefaces — the more elegant, readable and legible, the better. But not every type treatment needs to be standardized. The hand offers a more human dimension and individual personality. Of course, this will inevitably change. A popular design trope will be copied until it is overused and we’re sick to death of it. But while it is still done well, my advice is to enjoy it, for in another few years it may simply be that style of the early 2000s, quaint and old hat.
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