Handwriting and You

Posted on | June 30, 2010 | No Comments

Last night one of my co-workers came up to me with a handwritten list of orders and asked if I meant to throw it in the recycling. He said he thought it looked like my handwriting. As we both took a closer look, at the same time, we said, “It’s Mari’s.” Then we had a laugh that we could determine who had created the list, by the style of their writing.

I spent the rest of the evening thinking about handwriting and how amazing it is that we all have uniquely different writing styles. Out of the 20 or so people that I work with, I think that I could pick out most of their handwriting styles with just a few words. And, there are people who I don’t even see anymore, whose writing I could describe to you because it made such an impression on me: there’s Gabe’s cool comic book print, precise and stylish, my great-aunt’s perfect cursive, an elegant link to the olden days, my old school-mate Krista’s artistic self-creation, which lacked vertical strokes of any kind and could be a bit challenging to decipher (but so cool to look at), and so on.

I know we don’t give it a lot of consideration, and that the uniqueness of handwriting is just one of those cool-but-under-appreciated things about life, but if you think about it, we have all essentially created our own typeface (or typefaces). Even the sloppy ones that are hard to read are somebody’s style. And how much do you love seeing a kid move from kindergarten structured print, into a style of their own? For me, this is a vital act of freedom that says to the world, I’m here, and I’m unlike anyone who has ever gone before!

There’s a lot more going on with handwriting than what first meets the eye.

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Category: Culture, Typography, Wordage
Tags: cursive > handwriting > type > Typography > written style

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Handwriting and You

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