Salvador Leon
Madrid, Aug 9 (EFE).- The “lettering” fashion, the return of manual writing to the design industry or the proliferation of ink writing artists, marks the celebration of World Calligraphy Day this Wednesday, an increasingly popular art in the face of the dominance of the digital.
Established in 2017 by the British writing instrument company Manuscript Pen Company, this celebration aims to highlight a trend that, after being overshadowed by electronic devices, is enjoying a new popularity.
The design of letters, fonts and slogans with brush tip markers (“brush lettering”), chalk (“chalk lettering”) and other elements such as pencil (“hand lettering”) to decorate notebooks and diaries or include in other elaborations Today it has hundreds of video tutorials on YouTube, whose wave of success was started about five years ago by a teenage boomer.
“If you ask in a class who has ‘lettering’ markers, half of them will raise their hands, for sure,” Daniel Hervás, professor of graphic design at the School of Art and Superior Design of Mérida (Spain), who He has observed in his classes how this fashion has begun to arouse the attention of an audience of all ages, including teachers who want to implement it in their lessons.
Although this practice differs from traditional calligraphy in that it designs and draws the letter instead of directly tracing it, its popularity has highlighted other contemporary forms of calligraphy such as abstract calligraphy, practiced, among other styles, by the artist Mr. Zé.
“Going from the iPad or the Mac to picking up a brush frees you a bit from the stress or the speed that we demand from the computer,” says this Spanish artist, who highlights the “added value” provided by textures and agrees with Hervás in that “we live in a time in which technology has saturated us and people are already looking for the sensation of something manual”.
THE LETTER AS HERITAGE
Also creator of works framed within the so-called “caligrafitti” (artistic calligraphy applied to the wall), he observes that “both at the level of calligraphy and ‘lettering’, many people have seen that it is a way out and that perhaps there are many jobs for a calligrapher when reproducing ancient texts and works”.
In this regard, he highlights the historical dimension of this discipline by recalling that it is something that has always been used in propaganda and mentions posters from the Spanish Civil War: “letters are one of the greatest assets we have”, since “we makes history”.
The historical evolution of calligraphy, he maintains, allows the scholar to discover how the texts passed “from one social strata to another”: the passage from Romanesque to Gothic calligraphy makes it possible to identify how the texts went from being at the service of the common people to reflecting a more elaborate style because it is considered an object of ostentation, of more meticulous elaboration, by the nobility.
Apart from “lettering” and the use of calligraphy in design, the return of handwriting has become important in other trends such as the “bullet journal”: the writing of agendas in which handwritten tasks are arranged in a list accompanied by symbols indicating the state of completion and urgency.
Mr. Zé recommends celebrating the day by writing by hand: “WhatsApp is very convenient, but when they write you a note by hand, you see the intention and understand the value. We throw WhatsApp away and, when they leave you a note in the fridge, leave it there.” EFE
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