On Monday, February 17, 2020 at 9:29:04 AM UTC-8, Andre Jute wrote:
On Sunday, February 16, 2020 at 2:47:12 PM UTC, wrote:
On Sunday, February 16, 2020 at 3:30:09 PM UTC+1, Ted Heise wrote:
On Sat, 15 Feb 2020 17:10:55 -0800 (PST),
Frank Krygowski wrote:
On Saturday, February 15, 2020 at 5:37:50 PM UTC-5, John B. wrote:
On Sat, 15 Feb 2020 14:01:55 -0500, Frank Krygowski wrote:

I have a friend who's a skilled and enthusiastic
calligrapher. It's amazing what some people can do.

When I was going to grade school "proper" "penmanship" was
still not unknown and I had one teacher what wrote the most
beautiful penmanship, "Spencerian" I think it was known as,
that when she wrote a note to your parents, "John must try
harder", you wanted to frame it to hang on the wall. :-)

A lost art.

My previous boss does the most wonderful calligraphy you ever will
see. I still get lovely Christmas cards from her.


OTOH, I was the student to whom they gave a special pencil, one
that would guide my fingers into the right configuration. They
hoped it would help. It didn't.

Two-words: Zaner-Bloser. I had a grade school teacher who made me
use one of their pens. Ugh. Didn't help. The notion of moving
my whole arm was entirely foreign, and only made matters worse.

Ever since high school, I've written everything (except my
signature) in upper case block letters. When I write with care,
it looks almost as good as a draftsman's work. When I'm hasty,
it's still mostly legible.

--
Ted Heise West Lafayette, IN, USA

An old colleague wrote his research reports always by hand in upper case block letters with a pencil. He had a beautiful handwriting. When he retired we gave him a font of his own handwriting for his computer.

Lou

In my ad agency, just about the time crude computer setting came in (you sent out for it because this was a dozen years or so before desktop computers came in) we had an old chappie who could handletter any font perfectly down to 10pt. Display text (headlines) he painted with a brush and they always looked better than the computer set text because in those days computer kerning (spacing letters to fit better together rather than evenly) was either crude or non-existent. In addition, he taught the new intakes of "designers" straight out of inadequate graphic design colleges how to draw a perfect hairline with a brush with a single hair in it. He was some unimaginable age to us youngsters, but we were lucky he didn't want to retire.

Andre Jute
Now let us praise the humility of useful men -- adapted from Ecclesiastes

Those absolutely perfectly lettered and perfectly reproduced names and other insignia on older bikes were all hand done by people. Seeing artists at work is what made it clear to me that I would NEVER be an artist.