![]() The toolset of a Hand Letterer is usually a lot of pencils, fineliners and markers with bullet tips. A very important thing to note is that the tool does not dictate if we are talking about Calligraphy or Hand Lettering, but it can be an indicator. If we go very strictly by this definition what is often called Brushlettering is technically Brush Calligraphy. What we call “Hand Lettering” is the art of drawing Letters.Īnd then “Calligraphy” by definition is the art of writing letters. So basically the term lettering can refer to creating Hand Lettering or Calligraphy. So often people who do both Hand Lettering and Calligraphy will refer to themselves as Lettering Artists. The word “lettering” is a verb, which describes the act of “making” letters artfully. I feel like most of the confusion comes from how similar these terms are. So the difference between Hand Lettering and Calligraphy might not be obvious if you look at an end result, especially if the Lettering Artist is good at emulating Calligraphy. But what is the difference between Hand Lettering and Calligraphy? A very big one. So that’s the main difference between building letters by hand and typing them out. Every version of the letter can look different, you can merge any letter with another one and connect letters that aren’t even next to each other, so type offers basically no flexibility in comparison to the manual creation of letters. When building Letters by hand, there are no limitations. Fonts might offer alternatives and ligatures and some stylized version, but in it’s core, you can only get as creative as the font designer was. So whatever you type out is not the same as handwriting. Like different weights or italic version fonts of the typeface. But if you ever downloaded a font family (aka Typeface) you might have gotten a whole set of files. Back when Type was just blocks of letters, a font would be a specific size and weight of a typeface, nowadays size isn’t that much of an issue, since glyphs are vectors and thus infinitely scaleable. While we’re at it – a font is not the same as a typeface, a font is actually just part of a typeface, so one particular set of characters. It’s Bickham Script available in Typekit. This is one of those Fonts in the Copperplate style that comes with ligatures, contextual alternatives and swashed or flourished versions of letters. In the image you can see some of the variation a font can have. A Type is the print shape of a letter, so in a way type refers to all letters that are printed (or typed out digitally). This also helps you understand the term Type. So it’s wrong to talk about Copperplate font unless you install a digitized static set of glyphs of the Copperplate Style in the form of a font file on your computer and type out the words. So what is it actually called when a “font” is written by hand? It’s called a style or script or hand. But the font remains static, it is not Handwriting which has natural variation. ![]() So you can add context-based alternatives or ligatures. The OpenType format allows for the font to be programmed. There are what is called OpenType Fonts, which have additional abilities. A font is a file containing glyphs for every letter, so a static representation of that letter, that looks the same in every position, when typed out. A lot of people ask me what “font” I am writing. ![]() Let’s start with the easiest distinction. But let’s just look at those words and see how successful I am at keeping it reasonably compact today. ![]() So then I try to break it down, try to explain it as shortly as possible but – hell I write novels for a reason. I get the question whenever I make a comment about the fact that I am bad at Hand Lettering and prefer Calligraphy. You guys know I am crazy about research, you know I love to write, I also am a gigantic word-fanatic so this is a subject I have been spending a lot of time with. Words are confusing, especially when it comes to those “mushy” terms where no one is really sure what they actually mean. ![]()
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