Monday, January 4, 2010

. . . and type that doesn't seem to . . .


I ordered Paul Shaw's Subway and got a kick out of the envelope in which the book arrived. Paul's calligraphy of my name is delightfully amusing above the informal address. My favorite part, however, is the way Paul totally ignored the pre-printed label. Subway, an expansion of Paul's much-read essay in the AIGA, online mag, is newly-published in a limited edition.

5 comments:

Suzanne Dell'Orto said...

I like his real handwriting, too! I always wished for that casual architecty/comic book type of writing, kindof like Raymond Pettibon. Maybe that will be my New Year's resolution...develop the handwriting of my dreams!

Marla McLean, Atelierista said...

You can practice on envelopes and send them to me, I love getting old fashioned mail with real handwriting.
Here's something you 2 type-crazed women ought to see at: www.wireandtwine.com/subtraction/
Type-Humor T's!

Beth Tondreau said...

The Winter 2009–2010 issue of American Educator has an interesting article about improving children's writing by making sure to teach handwriting. Steve Graham, the author of the article "Want to Improve Children's Writing? Don't Neglect Their Handwriting," also gives a link to a program for first-graders:
http://www.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/casl.xml
**
LOVE those Ts! Khoi Vinh is Design Director of NYTimes.com and really knows his stuff. I'm not surprised he disses Cooper Black.

Suzanne Dell'Orto said...

I get that, too, and I was thinking about you when I read it. The article was really interesting. I can see stuents laboring over writing in my classes, but never made the connection that the faster you are able to handwrite, the faster you can get your thoughts out.

It coincided nicely with the article in the NY Times magazine on Sunday about how in the 1950's half of all blind people could read Braille, and now only 1 in 10 learn it because it's being replaced by computer talking technology. Some experts believe that not being able to read [Braille] limits cognitive function.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03Braille-t.html?ref=magazine

American Educator always has stuff in it that makes me think, both about my teaching and little N's education.

Beth Tondreau said...

What an interesting article Rachel Aviv wrote. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03Braille-t.html?ref=magazine

I was particularly struck by the following extracts.

“If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind Access Journal, told me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.”



The act of writing, Ong said — the ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them — transformed the shape of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a container, shaken and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought emerging in the midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized sequence and complex thought that we value in a literate society.