Painting Speech

I posted recently about the strange plaque that Carl Sagan and Frank Drake designed which was sent on the 1972 space probes. The Rosetta Project is more evidence of humankind’s drive to impact posterity and preserve knowledge. Kevin Kelly has an interesting post about it here.

Posted to the Ornamental Penmanship list this week: a link to a blog post entitled, “The Dying Art of Penmanship“. It stirred up some talk, as usual. Yes, we’re relying more and more on advanced technology to get things done … as opposed to traditional technology, of course. After all, paint is technology, and so are metal pens.

The implication in these hand-wringing analyses that crop up from time to time is that we are somehow less involved in The Making of Things now that we’re using tablets and electronic palettes instead of dip pens and ink. I don’t think that’s true, but it is harder to stay grounded. “Blue? Wait, what’s it look like in magenta? Oh, no, that’s not so great. Let’s try a nice mossy green. Hmm. Maybe blue. How about a nice drop-shadow — or maybe a bevel …” It’s easy to allow oneself to be driven by the options rather than driving the design process. Those monks who traveled from England to Afghanistan and back for some lapis lazuli for their manuscript books — now they were driving their design process!

What’s missing today, perhaps, is the physical cause-and-effect aspect of making things. When I do hand lettering, the movement of my hand and arm is directly related to the shapes of the letters forming on the paper. The ink glistens on the pen, slides down the nib onto the paper, and dulls as it sinks into the paper. By contrast, the click of a mouse can do so many disparate tasks: cause a letter to appear on the screen, or color in a shape, or close a file.

Yesterday in my typography class, I was speaking with the professor about how I use Adobe Illustrator to prepare my hand-lettered artwork for reproduction. She told me that Wacom now makes a stylus-and-tablet that emulates a calligraphy pen, so that the artist writes directly on the tablet and calligraphy appears in the graphics application window. She insists that these styluses are as sensitive as traditional copperplate nibs and that all the commercial hand lettering being done today is done using these $3,000+ tablets. Hmm. I like technology. Really I do. But I can’t imagine liking this electronic pen. As Peter Thornton (who really needs to get a website!) says, “It’s not wet enough.”

What with traveling this summer and Tropical Storm Fay, I haven’t had much access to the Internet lately. Now school has started, and I’m looking forward to the classes.

I’m taking History & Theory of Graphic Design this semester. The textbook is Meggs’ History of Graphic Design but I’ve also bought Johanna Drucker’s new book, Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide, written with Emily McVarish.

Some interesting links from the first week of class:

• Ancientscripts.com has a lot of information about writing systems. The timeline visually shows which writing systems existed when and for how long.
• This wonderfully weird plaque was designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake as a greeting from earth to any aliens who might come across the Pioneer 10 & 11 space probes that were launched in 1972. It’s an interesting look at our own cultural skew. No language was included for obvious reasons, but isn’t an arrow a culturally derived symbol as well? In ancient Rome it was considered perfectly fine for men to be depicted nude but only prostitutes and low-class women were depicted nude. I guess 2,000 years is a blink of the eye: public outcry in 1972 caused this poor woman’s genitals to be erased 🙂

And a couple of amusing links:

• Sumerian Beer Project — History has shown that when people quit hunting/gathering and settle down in one place, three new elements of life emerge: writing, religion, and beer. For the Sumerians, one of the first agricultural civilizations, all three were interwoven. Again, 5,000 years is but the blink of an eye, although the technology has mutated: today it’s television, football, and beer, right?
• Write like a Babylonian — See your monogram in cuneiform, the way an ancient Babylonian might have written it.

Just back from more than two weeks in Montana and Wyoming, half of it spent sightseeing and hiking in Yellowstone. These trees were on the hillside by the trail up to Mount Washburn. I keep telling myself that I shouldn’t be expecting more from my sea-level Florida lungs than they were managing at 10,000 feet above sea level.