 going to talk about a calligraphy hand, which is reviving a calligraphy hand, which is really fitting because we just had that Steve Jobs video about the importance of calligraphy classes. Sometimes we come across really beautiful specimens of writing just in daily lives, and just as a letter affectionato, you just are enamored with some of these, and you just want to know how to write it. And sometimes you are lucky enough that you know the original calligrapher and can go to them and it's like, ah, how can, like how do you write this, how do you do this? But sometimes you're not that lucky, and you might not know who wrote it. And sometimes you might come across specimens that are just so old that nobody even remembers the original calligrapher who wrote it. And that's what happened to me. I was browsing eBay one really late night as we all do in our really exciting lives, and I came across this manuscript. And for a mere $30, crazy, I got this 15th century manuscript, and I was just completely enamored, and I wanted to know how to write it. And I went to all the calligraphers that I knew, and I asked if there was anyone that was practicing in this style, and the inevitable answer was that I would have to figure it out for myself. So I set out to do it. I started out with doing a lot of research. I started to rate all the books that I had to figure out what style it was, and eventually I came to the conclusion that it was written in a style called Patard, which was invented around the 14th to 15th century. Here's a chart from Hildegard Korber's book where she talks about the development of different hands, and I had to cut this chart off a little bit short because there was more at the top, but we can see that most Gothic hands hail from Carolingian, which was the most dominant hand in Western Europe, around the 800 to the 1200s. And we can see that Patard on the lower right side hails from Gothic cursive. It's a formalized version of the Gothic cursive. This is a hand that Shakespeare might have written in. And I wanted to know what was happening around this time. Calligraphy just doesn't happen in a vacuum. It was used as a form of communication, as a method of recording knowledge, and what was happening around this time. And so I saw these Gothic forms. They had a lot of relation to Gothic architecture of the time. If you see these Gothic arches, you can see them looking very similar to the Gothic arches of the ends or the ends. And this is the start of the Renaissance. People are starting to be literate. They are seeking knowledge, and books are really high in demand. This is the same time that Gutenberg has invented printing in Western Europe. He has invented movable metal type, modeled after textura. And it's very straight and it's very rigid. And if you compare it to Batard, we can see that Batard is more flowing. It has more curves, more thins. It's quite delicate compared to textura, which the Gutenberg Bible, the metal type, is based off of. And I would like to compare this to the resurgence of hand lettering today. Hand lettering today is popular because it is a response to the static nature of digital design, although things might change with variable fonts, apparently. So if we think about the scribes back in this day, maybe the scribes wanted to show off what they could do that technology of that day just could not. And then I had to analyze the manuscript itself. I had to figure it out everything that I could know about it, at least the amount that I need to figure out how to write it. And this is a photo of my workstation where I have this really big, giant, magnifying glass lamp. And I was looking at this little manuscript page. That's a little quarter. That's how small it is. It's crazy. It's so small. I can't even imagine reading in that size, let alone writing in it. So, amazing stuff. So if you look closely at this Batard sample, it's from a book of ours. The book of ours is the most common type of manuscript that is found today. It was a type of book that, well, I'll just say rich people would carry around to help them pray at certain times of the day. And we can see all these ligatures that don't exist for us today. We can assume that this is because the materials that were needed to create this manuscript were so precious that they wanted to save material as much as possible. This manuscript is made out of sheepskin. So if you can imagine the amount of animal that was needed to just create one book, you can imagine that the scribe wanted to save as much space as possible. There are so many archaic forms going on. This carrot-shaped F is actually a long S. It's just beautiful. And it just contains so many forms that we don't see today. So I look towards to Edward Johnson. Edward Johnson is the famous British calligraphy rivalist. And back in his day, there were no calligraphers. So he also had to start from scratch in order to revive calligraphy. And these are his seven rules. So there are pen scale, pen angles, the shape of the O, then the ductus, which is the way a letter is written, the number of the strokes, the order of the strokes, the direction, and the speed. Now, some things are easier than others. The speed you might never figure out unless you're looking at the scribe and the flesh. But some things are easier. For the pen scale, you measure the widest point of the letter, because that is probably the width that the tool was, usually a nib. So using this nib width as a measurement, you measure different parts of the letter. So for the body, it was around 3.5. The ascender was pretty short, 1.5. The inner linear spacing varies quite a bit, but it's usually around an average of 3. The descender I left as a question mark, because these are really long, spindly lines that just stab into the letter underneath. So that was a little vague. And the pen angle was mostly around 42, although the entry and exit strokes are a little bit steeper. And I assume that's because the scribe wanted to cram in more words per line. So the scribe was probably trying to connect them a little bit closer. And then I had to figure out what each letter was supposed to look like. This is just from one side of the manuscript. There's 12 different kinds here I'm showing. And if you look on the lower left side, it's really, really wide. But if you look at the top left, it's almond shaped. So which shape is the shape that you're supposed to be looking at? And so I used a little bit of Photoshop. I overlaid these 12 O's. And you can see that there's an average O shape starting to emerge. Maybe that is the target that I should be targeting. So using this method, I was able to analyze the more common letters that I found in this manuscript. And I needed to do detective work for some letters, such as this M. I was using the logic that the scribe would have wanted to be most efficient as possible. The scribe is probably trying to get the most precision, the fastest way that he could write it. And using all these different ways of thinking, I was able to try out different ways. And if you look at the top row of these M's, I was trying out this method where I was lifting my pen twice, and I was stabbing each letter. And then it was creating these little triangle ink wells because ink is a physical matter. It responds to the tool that is touching it. And it just seemed really laborious and time-consuming. It just didn't look right. And then eventually it got to the conclusion that it was probably the method used in the third row, where you would have to stop and adjust the paint angle twice. But you wouldn't have to lift it. Then I was analyzing the skeletal structure of the script. I was trying to figure out the relationship between each letter and the rhythm of the script. And the way I did this was by enlarging the manuscript at a really large size. And then I put a vellum over it. Then I was tracing it with a pencil. Now this method is beneficial because you might get bogged down with how the ink is working. You might get bogged down with the angle of the nib. You might get caught up in all these technical details when you're trying to figure out one thing at a time. That is the most important thing. You're just trying to figure out one thing. And that's how you go about it. And I was trying to write in all these different sizes. Calligraphy is a very physical activity. We use our bodies. And when you're writing at a really large size, you tend to look at the letter at a larger size. So you might be looking at how precise the form is. What is this angle? You're looking at the blacks of the letter rather than the whites. As opposed to when you're writing at a smaller size, you might be thinking about the distance between each letter rather than getting caught up in the arches of the ends or the ends. You might be focusing on the distance between each line. You might be focusing on the rhythm. So this is a tree versus a forest scenario where you need to figure out both. And then after I figured out the basic forms and I had a sense of how to write this hand, I started thinking about what I could do with it as a person in 2018. I know how to cut quills. They're amazing to write with. But they take so much time. And I love them, but it's just really impractical to keep on writing with quills. And although the original manuscript was probably written with a quill, I wasn't about to keep on doing that. So I had to change the nature of the letters a little bit. And if you look at a metal nib, it behaves in a similar manner to a quill, but it's more rigid. So if we think about the ways that a metal nib creates strokes, there is 100% contact where you lay down the pen on the paper and it creates a mark. And then in the second photo right here, I'm showing the transition where you have 100% contact and then you lay onto the corner of the nib. And it creates that sharp little line. And then we have to think about everything in between. So in this descender, I'm showing where I was slowly transitioning from a full contact to the corner. So you're getting this width variation in between. I think we often forget as digital people that calligraphy or doing anything by hand, the tool can really affect how the letter looks like. And it's not just a zero and 100%. There is everything in between. And so here you can see the script starting to change a little bit. So if you compare it to the original on the left-hand side to what I was initially trying out on the right-hand side, you can see that the rhythm of the script is a little bit more regular. I've gotten rid of the archaic looking S in favor of a more regular rhythm. And I had to figure out what letters would look like when I didn't have a sample in my manuscript. So this is an example of some work I was doing with a K, where I had these letters that vaguely looked like elements that I could pull from, which are on the top row. And I was seeing what my K could look like. So it could have this rounded A center like the H, but maybe it could taper off like the T. And for the leg of the K, maybe it could come around in an elegant manner like the H, but maybe it could stop at the baseline like the M. There's no right or wrong. You're just doing a lot of detective work to figure out what works for the vision that you have. So I figured out a basic level of a character set, where I got rid of the archaic looking forms. The R is more Roman, so is the S. And then from here, I started to think about what it could actually be like, what I could use it for. And although the book of ours is a long form manuscript, if you've got a sales receipt that looked like this with really tiny vatard, you might be hard pressed to read it. And if you're the one sending out the invoice, maybe you might never get paid. So I had to think about what I would use this for. Maybe it's better for display situations rather than text. Maybe it's better at a large scale size, because these are gothic forms. They're a little bit hard to read, although I brought in more curves into it. So perhaps it's better as a festival logo. Or when it's in a really short word format for fancy occasions, or food packaging, or a band. So once I started to redefine what I was using this script for, that opened a whole new world of thinking. This is when I started to transition from just taking what I had figured out on a technical level and trying to see what I could use this hand for for myself. So I came up with all these different alternates. This is the part where I was having a ton of fun. I was trying to see what I could do. If you see the bottom row, I have five different y's. This is just a small sample set from everything that I was doing. Maybe you want a diagonal y, but maybe you want a u-shaped y. O.G. open type features. I was making that joke to myself. And I want to point out that everything that I'm sharing today is just process. For a finalized piece of calligraphy work, I would have written the same thing over and over and over multiple times before I would even show a sample of what I was doing. So it's honestly a little bit vulnerable for me to show all this process because everything is not perfect. And as a designer, I'm used to perfecting everything before I'm showing it to the public. But I wanted to show everything as it was. Everything I'm showing is not manipulated in any way. I just literally scanned it and plopped it on my slides. And that's why sometimes the spacing might be a little off. The forms might be a little off. But I'm not trying to be perfect here. I'm just trying to get it into my muscle memory and seeing what I can do. Because when you're creating something that's so personal, you really have to think about what it means for you to be doing this. And calligraphy is such a physical activity. You have to think about different sizes. If you're writing at a really large scale, you might be using your shoulders. You might be using your arm at a smaller size. And then maybe you might be using your wrist. And at the smallest size, you might be using your finger joints. And that is no small matter. It really changes the way you think about letters. And so I started to get into more modern forms of writing. And this is where I started to try all these crazy, different variations. I shortened the x-height a little bit to see what that would do. So that created a script that was a little bit wider, that was a little bit darker, and more contrasty. And then it went all crazy. And there was crazy, tall x-height to see what that would do. So it creates a more pointy-looking script, and it's lighter. And the characteristics are just completely different. I even merged it with the different hands that I knew. So here, I merged batard with textura, which has a more flatter. So that's where the flat tops come from, almost like the letters are hanging from a wash line. But the bottoms are round because that's what I kept from batard. And then just for fun, I was trying to see what it would look like when I double-stroke the letters. And then here, I was offsetting my upstrokes, which are really thin. But they're usually covered by the thick stem downstrokes. But I want to offset a little bit to see what that would do. This is just me just going crazy, having a lot of fun. None of these explorations took a long time. This is just me trying to figure out what I can do. Because you have to learn from the past. But when you're reverse-engineering things and trying to figure things out, I think it's really important to redefine what you're looking at and think about what you can do and what you want to use it for. So this is a sample of what I was writing in the later stages, where you can see that the sample on the right is a little bit more tighter than the original manuscript on the left. It's a little bit straighter. It's a little bit more regular. But there's just no denial where it's coming from. The origins are really clear. And so this is just all a process. And I'm still evolving this hand as I go. And I'm hoping that me sharing this journey would hopefully inspire you to go on eBay and buy some manuscript pages and do the same. Thank you.