Hoefler & Frere-Jones

Photo: Scott Carney

The distance between handwriting and typography is at its greatest in the West. It's been more than five centuries since the Latin alphabet, as we experience it in type, looked anything like letters made with a pen; the very anatomy of our alphabet, with its stonemason's "serifs" and printer's "cases," has come a very long way from writing indeed. It can hardly be surprising that as type has come to represent the official, the sanctioned, and the eternal, handwriting has become an almost trivial appendix to our notion of what letters look like.

It's especially easy for Westerners to forget what a minority opinion this is. Most of the world attaches special significance to the hand-written, and lives with an intimate knowledge of its forms and an appreciation of its cultural and social dimensions. A Chinese businessperson of stature can be expected not only to admire the calligraphy in a colleague's office, but to correctly identify it as the work of Song Huizong, and to discuss its virtues with erudition. Contrast this with his American counterpart, who can go an entire career without needing to learn the name of his corporate typeface.

Both senses of the word "writing" remain united in the Arab world, where calligraphy and literacy are at times inseparable. Nowhere is this more evident than in the offices of The Musalman, a Chennai newspaper published since 1927, which has the extraordinary virtue of being the world's last surviving newspaper written entirely by hand. "We somehow manage to make ends meet," says one of the newspaper's four calligraphers (or katibs) who every day devotes three hours to a single page. "There's no monetary benefit for us, we are just here to learn Urdu."

The handwritten newspaper gained wider attention last summer when Wired dispatched photojournalist Scott Carney to document The Musalman's inner workings. Later this year, we may learn more about the paper's inevitable entanglement with digital typography, when Premjit Ramachandran releases his documentary film The Last Calligraphers. —JH

More about Urdu, the Nastaliq script, and the calligraphy of the Islamic world.

Typeface: Gotham Bold

Literally: that's our Gotham typeface, as used by Senator Barack Obama. Curiously, John Edwards is also using Gotham, giving the font a combined 68% of the vote in Iowa! —JH

Change.

I started a typeface called Feldspar in 1999, which I've yet to complete. After eight years, most such projects would have lost their inertia, but this one's moving steadily along, driven by a single, fervid dream: I am determined to one day see it in the hands of Dan and Mike at Aesthetic Apparatus.

Aesthetic Apparatus is one of those studios we love to see using our fonts. It's not merely because they're fans of our more American-inflected designs (above, some AA posters featuring Cyclone, Acropolis, Gotham, Knockout, Ziggurat, and Giant), it's because they put the screws to the fonts: they juice them for every last drop of flavor, and then come back to coax still more out of every design, creating new and unexpected textures that you wouldn't think possible. The driving philosophy behind the studio's work is — well, here: let's let Dan and Mike explain the process in their own words:

A transcript is not yet available. —JH