Steven Heller has a fascinating interview up on Voice with master calligrapher Bernard Maisner. Here's our favorite part:
I put a great deal of research into jobs where historical accuracy is desired by the director. I did writing on-camera for a documentary film about the Oswald/Kennedy assassination by famed German filmmaker Willi Huismann. I had to write like Lee Harvey Oswald live on camera. Writing samples of Oswald were provided to me from the U.S. National Archive and Records Administration. I studied the writing, analyzed and made U&LC alphabet charts from Oswald's writing, traced and memorized every letter, as well as his combinations of letters, and studied other characteristics of his writing so that I could write the way Oswald did--immediately and without thinking. He was dyslexic, wrote many misspelled words and penned in a script as well as a printed style, often strangely combined. It was a very difficult handwriting to forge. I even researched, purchased and wrote with a particular fountain pen, a Parker '51, made in the early 1960s, which would have been likely available to him at the time at Army PX stores, nationally and internationally.
Oh. And this, of course:
On the subject of signs, one of the saddest things to me about the demise of hand lettering and the rise of computer-generated font/signage is the absolute ugliness of current signage in society. Sign painters were so talented and creative, and their genius truly beautified shops and public streets. Look at photographs of old New York and Paris and small-town America--the signs were gorgeous. Walk up and down the street now, and with all our developed technology, modern signage is profoundly ugly.
Read the whole article here.
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