Got a spare fifteen grand lying around? That’s the estimated price for this 15th-century decorated breviary at Christie’s. Written in gothic bookhand, with 366 vellum leaves and covers of 17th-century leather over wooden boards, it’s a treasure. There are only four large decorated initials, but still. It’s beautiful.
A new book — based on an older idea
I actually worked with real tools and materials today in my studio! It was very good to [Oops — excuse me a moment while I go wash out the glue brush. No harm done. Why is that when I forget and leave my expensive Italian glue brush, it takes all kinds of time and elbow grease to salvage the brush, but a cheap Crayola So Big brush washes clean in no time?] …
As I was saying, it was good to leave the virtual world of pens and brushes and knives, and spend a day with real pens and brushes and knives … and paper. I love paper. And ink. I love ink. A couple of months ago i had begun reworking an idea I began working with in 2004, based on a childhood memory of my mother. I’m pleased with today’s work.
60 by 62
My friend Beth, who just turned 60, has set herself a challenge to finish making 60 books by her 62nd birthday. So far she’s posted images of the first 3 books. It’s really wonderful to look through the images. I’m looking forward to viewing the next 57 books! I’ve added her blog to my blogroll at the right. Have a look also at her editioned book, For Immediate Release.
Medieval manuscripts online from Stiftsbibliothek
WOW.
Just. WOW.
I read this article (subscription required) in yesterday’s online edition of the New York Times. It’s about the project of Stiftsbibliothek to put their treasure trove of medieval manuscripts online. The article states:
The collection includes material as varied as curses against book thieves, early love ballads, hearty drinking songs and a hand-drawn ground plan for a medieval monastery, drafted around A.D. 820, the only such document of its kind.
This morning I went over to the Codices Electronici Sangallenses (CESG) of St. Gall and looked around. They’ve done a spectacular job for those of us who really want to get a good look at the writing in these books. Each page of each manuscript has been scanned and is available for viewing at 4 sizes, from 416ox x 624px up to a whopping 3,328px x 4,992px. Click on the thumbnail at the top of this post for a 700×600 piece of the largest image size — and an idea of just how close a look these scans provide.
There are 144 manuscript books online now; St. Gall holds 355 manuscripts that were produced before 1000 AD, and their goal is to have all of those scanned, indexed and online by the end of 2009.
I’ve blogged before about the British Library’s Turning the Pages technology which allows browsers to use a virtual magnifying glass to get up close and personal with some truly magnificent historical manuscripts such as the Lindisfarne Gospels. Other manuscripts don’t have the magnifying glass option: the Luttrell Psalter and the Sforza Hours, to name a couple. (Hint: you have to click and hold to get the pages to turn.) They’ve now got Turning the Pages 2.0, but the technology requires plug-ins I haven’t downloaded yet, so I’ve only looked at these using their low-tech alternative. The largest available images are not more than 1,100px on any side, which is quite small in comparison to the scans on the St. Gall site.
Typeface design and font creation software
ypography is interesting at the moment: we’re designing fonts. I wrote out an uncial font using a Zig scroll marker (first 4 letters shown above), scanned it in, and then vectorized the scan. The resulting paths are too complicated to go into Type Tool, and so I have traced each letter with the pen tool in Illustrator and then imported each into Type Tool. The initial letter of this paragraph has been traced in Illustrator. It’s tedious work, but somehow addicting.
We’re using Type Tool 2 on the Macs in the computer lab, but I’d like to work at home. I’m using the demo version of Type Tool 3 for the PC (available here). I had been told that there are many free font creation software programs available for the PC, but I haven’t been able to find any that are outline-based. I’ve been through the extensive list Luc Devroye at McGill University has here, with no luck.
I plan to try this again using the alphabet below, written with a metal pen and sumi ink — I think I could use this scan directly in Illustrator without tracing, because the edges would be sharper and therefore simpler. We’ll see.
Suitcase Fusion 2 — Coming Soon
An amusing commercial for the new version of Suitcase Fusion: “BraveFont” —
BraveFont from ilovetypography.com on Vimeo.
Feathers, Fins & Foliage — Opening
The opening reception for “Feathers, Fins & Foliage” was this evening, and there was a very lively 
turnout at LeMoyne,
both for the members-only reception at 6pm and for the general reception beginning at
7pm.
I took just a few photos before my camera batteries died. I’ll get more tomorrow night at the First Friday reception.
Robotic Calligraphy: An Oxymoron
Although I’ve seen it before, I don’t think I’ve posted about The Bible Scribe, a 2007 installation/project by robotlab. The installation itself addresses much larger issues, but the discussion I’ve seen about the project has mostly turned on whether the robotic writing is calligraphy or not. (I’ll spare you the suspense: it’s not.)
A poster on the Ornamental Penmanship list this week claims that because of its precise, beautiful and voluminous work, the robot should be granted Master Penman status. Of course not. The robot is a masterpiece of engineering, but its work is not penmanship and it’s not calligraphy. It’s printing — an unusual and interesting form of printing, but printing nonetheless.
Handmade in Graphic Design
raphic designers have been taking up handmade lettering and graphics with a vengeance lately. Look at these recent popular books:
- Fingerprint: The Art of Using Hand-Made Elements in Graphic Design, by Chen Design Associates
- Handwritten: Expressive Lettering in the Digital Age, by Stephen Heller and Mirko Ilic
- Hand Job: A Catalog of Type, by Michael Perry (disclaimer: I haven’t read this one … yet)
- Over and Over: A Catalog of Hand-Drawn Patterns, by Michael Perry
… and these recent essays and posts:
- an essay about the value of hand-crafted visuals by Kate Rutter at Adaptive Path, a high-tech design firm
- a post by T. Scott Stromberg, an information architect at EMC, about the importance of being able to sketch wireframes
- a survey of contemporary and historical examples of handwriting and calligraphy collected by Smashing Magazine, an online web design magazine
Not to mention these showcases of current design that incorporate the handmade look:
- this collection of recent hand-drawn movie posters
- this showcase of grunge-style graphics, typefaces and textures
I could go on and on.
What is behind this pull toward the handmade? I think it has to do with the fact that the tools used to produce anything show through to the finished product. As more and more of graphic design is made wholly on the computer, the variety of design tends to be narrowed. Good designers are cognizant of this tendency and work to combat it. Hence the move to make what comes out of the computer look as though it hadn’t been made on the computer. Hence to move to start with the wide variety of media that were the tools of graphic design, and then take it to the computer.
Just some experimental writing
Not much to show lately. It’s all been either wedding invitation addresses or learning software or typographic exercises.
I recently addressed 75 envelopes made of handmade paper that seems to have been abandoned at the pulp stage. Throughout the work, my thoughts kept circling around to how many decades of experience it’s taken for me to arrive at the point where I could actually letter on such a surface. But a blog post can’t really illuminate that particular battle.
I could show you my really lame 1st video in Final Cut, but really, why would you want to see it? In short, I made a vector-art flowerpot pretend-water three pen-drawn flowers so that they grow. It’s a steep learning curve, and I’m slow.
The typographic exercises are nothing to write home (or here) about. During the last exercise I kept thinking how much easier it would be to hand letter. Maybe I’ll do a comparison in another post.
Shown here is something I did last night during a telephone meeting, when my hand was mostly disengaged from the brain. The pen is a Speedball nib and the Schmincke gouache was left over from drawing the flowers for the Final Cut project …