Designer Morten Halvorsen created Shake, a typeface of letters written by someone with a tremor caused by Parkinson's disease. The handwriting is that of Halvorsen's mother.
"My mother was diagnosed with Parkinson's eight years ago," Halvorsen writes. "And her handwriting has changed in the years since. I created this font to preserve her handwriting, and enable her to continue to write with her own letters."
All funds from purchases of Shake go to research on Parkinson's. You can also commission Halvorsen to make a typeface from your own loved one's handwriting.
Shake: The typeface with Parkinson's (writewithparkinsons.com, via Kottke) Read the rest
Nicolas Damiens and Julien Sans thought it would be cool to offer inspiring fonts based on the scrawl of some of their favorite recording artists like Bowie, Lennon, and Cobain, whose handwriting appears on the cool cover of his published journals (above). IP lawyers put the kibosh on their SongwritersFonts project real quick-like. Read the rest
Stunning script by Santa Rosa Tattoo. See more on their Instagram: @santarosatattoo. (via r/PenmanshipPorn)
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I'm the son of a physician and inherited his poor penmanship. I wish I had the invaluable but dying life skill demonstrated in this video. (via Uncrate)
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Over at the Penmanship Porn subreddit, Eschermer showed his or her page of a transcription from Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol."
Another example:
Elegant hostility:
[via Core 77] Read the rest
Meg Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley. Her debut novel, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, won the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award. Its companion, The Book of Etta, is now available. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and writes like she’s running out of time.
As an author of apocalyptic fiction, I get letters from all over the globe from people who are more prepared for the end of the world than the average individual. Many of them focus on the more popular aspects of prepping: growing and/or storing food, conserving water and even building their own cisterns, and weapons training and storage to be ready for the worst. When I first started writing in this subgenre, I thought about my own odds of survival in the worst sort of worlds. Nobody really survives nuclear war, so I didn’t build a bomb shelter. I’m not the fastest of my friends, so I hope to provide means of escape for them by being tasty zombie food. But those slow apocalypses allow for me to examine what my own role might be in another kind of world. The question is: would writers still write? Could I, if I had the time?
In my second book, it’s been a century since Bic and Parker and Pilot shut down. There are no new pens and ink isn’t as simple as one might think. In most cases, it’s a complicated combination of pigments, fixatives, and preservatives. Read the rest
Behold Library Hand, a font designed specifically for librarians without typewriters who created cards for card catalogs. What's cool is the variation within the guidelines: Read the rest
It's not from Superman. It predates the Stussy logo. Why did schoolchildren around the globe get infatuated with this stylized S? Vice takes a (kinda shallow) dive into the provenance of the stylized S. Read the rest
Calligraphers continue to explore the possibilities of portable tablets for enhancing their craft, and few are doing more than Ian Barnard. Here's his latest tutorial, turning handwritten script into a neon-like gradient.
Bonus video: just look at this hand-lettered banana:
• How to do gradient & shadowed lettering in Procreate on the iPad Pro (YouTube / Ian Barnard) Read the rest
In addition to making amazing pen-and-ink calligraphy, Ian Barnard is great with an iPad and Apple Pencil. And the latter allows for do-overs if you make a mistake halfway (or more typically, on the final letter or stroke). Read the rest
