Knowledge Of Letter form
The practice of calligraphy gives a deep ingrained knowledge of letterform construction, so that custom hand lettering will be of the highest quality and unique. Yes, drawing your own wordmarks by hand is the only way to acquire this intrinsic knowledge. You won’t get it watching a lecture, you will only get it by doing ! And this is the main reason that we teach calligraphy here in our Melbourne Lettercraft Lab. As digital natives, we lack this knowledge because it isn’t taught at University, and this is the reason that so much of the hand lettering we see on the internet is of poor quality.
Quicker Way Of Thinking
Embracing the art of drawing the letterform by hand enacts a particular way of thinking unique to using the hand ! Milton Glaser used to say that he couldn’t think without a pencil. With a pencil or pen you can design a quick sketch of a customised word mark in less than a minute. This is a customised logo created from scratch, not a logo created using modified type which anyone can do.
