Dots, letters, and stars, rethought

I recently lettered an interesting quotation a second time, after a gap of a couple of decades.  An astronomer's students had named a newly discovered star after him [Michael Lescault], and he asked for 5 lines from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to celebrate the event.   Having given away the first version, he asked me to rethink it without any pre-conceptions.

Here's how a calligraphy design evolves.   Get the original text, complete with correct punctuation.  Check your spelling!  Don't mess with the line breaks in poetry, unless you have an overriding design need.  Look for ways to echo the text's words "stars" and "night" and "face of heaven."  "The garish sun" would have overwhelmed the design, and anyway the text says to "pay no worship" to it.

If you look closely, every period, letter o, dot over i is written in gold rather than silvery blue.  if you're not a calligrapher, you'd be amazed how hard it is not to dot that i.  Calligraphers get into a kind of flow, and it's hard to interrupt. 

A star constellation connects dots and o's

A piece of calligraphy should give you more than you notice at first glance.  It's good to get used to looking more carefully.  After a good night's sleep (a key ingredient in any design process), I used vellum overlay to sketch a number of different ways to connect some of the dots and o's, to make the kind of constellation chart that kids use to learn where the Big Dipper and Orion and the Swan are.  It took a surprising amount of erasing to decide on the configuration, which I then added with blue ink.  If you look closely you'll see a few dotted lines in black too; it just seemed interesting to lead off the page. (BTW I first lettered it a little larger, on a black background, and decided against the palette.  No idea why; it just looked incomplete.) 

I am fanatical about including enough of a citation for any reader to track down the source of a quote.  And I like to sign my work inconspicuously--this time in pencil. 

If the design seems obvious and inevitable, then the designer has done a good job.  What would you have done differently? 

Save those DPI!

While writing about how thrifty you can be when you make letters out of pixels, I thought of the final alphabet offered in my Calligraphy Alphabets Made Easy, Putnam/Perigee, 1986, ISBN 0-399-51257-8, a book of 366 alphabets for every day of the year.

The letters of this alphabet are made out of coarser and coarser grids, starting with an A that is 26 x 26 [that is, 676 dpi] and ending up with a Z made of a single diagonal slash.  While the high-res letters express their analog pen and ink versions well, it's interesting to notice that even the relatively lo-res Q, R, S, T, and U can express themselves with curves, swashes, serifs, and contrast thick and thin. 

You can fill grids with anything, of course, from pixels to stitches to people.  Here I filled each letter's grid with itself; zoom in close and you'll see the A is made out of A's, the B is made out of B's, and so on.  It's a fun exercise to try.

Dwindling pixels

Grassroots geniuses with primitive pixels

I've always enjoyed watching people solve problems in letter design.  One of the simplest involves digital thrift: how few pixels does it take to make the alphabet?  Of course some letters take only a few, but a grid that will accommodate them all usually requires 5 dots on a side.  That's a resolution of 25 dpi.  And that's enough.

Those dots per inch of dpi can be just about anything: close-packed mosaic tiles, members of a marching band, ears of corn, Indian beads, or quilt squares.  American visual history is full of letters made out of the unlikeliest stuff.  The eye is predisposed to look for images in clusters.  Drop the resolution any lower than 5 x 5, however, and you start to get into trouble.  The craftswoman who made the cross-stitched motto here made up her design using a grid 4 x 4, often narrowing it to 4 x 2 or 4 x 3, and occasionally widening it to 4 x 5.  Discovering that she was in trouble, she came up with some charming solutions.  And some awkward ones, too.
This little cross-stitched gem lets you kibitz on the thought processes of someone winging it, coming up with creative solutions for insoluble tasks.  It is a nice example of American folk art lettering, much more revealing and endearing than something perfect executed from a printed design.  And it offers a cautionary lesson in why 5 x 5 is a kind of lower limit for rendering letters on a grid.  You'll be even happier with 5 x 7.   
 

You have to map out the whole alphabet when you put it on any grid--hexagonal cells, random crazy quilt, or repeated dashes.  Lo-res letters are full of pitfalls, as you can see if you look at the second B, the first M, and also H, E, K, N, and A.  How would you have solved these design challenges? Would you have resorted to single stitches sprinkled in with the cross stitches? 

• The B that looked clear as a capital mutated into an 8 when it lost its serifs.  
• The stitches that made the E's middle stroke had to be reconfigured into single dashes to fit.  
• A single horizontal stitch was also required to make sense of the S and H.  
• Single diagonal stitches made the center of the M, and would have helped make sense of the N.  The second M, allowed to spread to 5 x 4, is easier to read and more consistent. 
• Meanwhile, the design allows for unnecessary widening of the second O.  
• K could just as well be bottom-heavy rather than top-heavy.  

American handwriting, a practical skill

Most Americans don't devote much thought to their handwriting, except to frown over how much worse it seems to be nowadays.  American handwriting, however, is not some generic natural phenomenon but a distinctive American artifact.  How we write is just as arbitrary, and odd, as driving on the right, making pants out of blue denim, putting ice in drinking water, adding lemon to a cup of tea, or spelling "analyze" with a "z."  (Or calling z "zee" and not "zed" like a Canadian.)

American handwriting came from Copperplate, by way of writing masters like Spencer and Palmer.  New materials were emerging at the same time that an expanding American economy demanded a more efficient script.

Copperplate required a very flexible pen, which performs better on expensive rag paper or parchment, restricting the teaching and use of penmanship.   Hill's Manual, 1883.

Within a generation, Spencer and Palmer had stripped the thicks and thins from Copperplate to accommodate stiff metal pens and cheaper paper.  Palmer Method of Business Writing, 1917