I’m a bit of a fan of calligraphy, as in, the writing thereof. I have owned a few cartridge calligraphy pens in my time, and have been known to fashion my own reed pens, from the clump of reeds that popped up uninvited in my parents otherwise well-manicured front garden.
I saw this blog post on Handwritten Newspapers a while back, and finally got around to watching the attached videos (gotta love a long weekend) this weekend. The documentary on the calligraphic newspaper in Chennai is an interesting one, which I think I could appreciate more if I could actually read it. Funnily enough, upon heading to the main page I found that Steve Jobs is in the latest post on that blog, waxing lyrical about calligraphy (that part is about 10 minutes in) and the influence that the study thereof had on the fonts within the Apple Mac.
I remember reading an article in a craft magazine some years ago now about calligraphy, and thinking that it is a great medium. Yet I found that some of the images alongside the article really bored me. I find it hard to get behind calligraphy, or typography, for its own sake. Maybe that’s because it’s a medium best linked to a message.