I am curious about your opinion on this. It is very common to see blog posts and interview answers defining lettering and calligraphy. At first they seem very different concepts, but there is such a clear line today? How would you define
Seb Lester's logo interpretations? He writes letters but he also draws letters with the pen. Could we call it calligraphic lettering
?
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I find it a little ironic that the people who are most insistent on the distinction between writing and drawing letters are type folk, most of whom do neither.
sAY WhAT!?;)
They are all a subset under heaven. Calligraphy is "writing" words. Lettering is "painting" words. Lettering is "drawing" words. Letterdrawing is drawing typefaces. Though under hell, they are all fontographering, them's the names I was raised under, under heaven. The fact that these Can! all come out of the same thing, a computer, with no apparent human intervention, may have blurred how they got in there, perhaps.
...and isn't Chris partly right? Is not calligraphy sometimes! lettering too small to correct? And isn't lettering, sometimes! calligraphy too large to leave as it was written?
"I find it a little ironic that the people who are most insistent on the distinction between writing and drawing letters are type folk, most of whom do neither."
I'll bite, the What is a "type folk"?
As David said, "Neither are a subset of anything" is nonsensical. I fear that you, and maybe others in this thread, have interpreted the word "subset" as some kind of lowering of the calligraphic arts, but that's not what the word means at all.
It is clear there are different interpretations of the word "lettering" and I'm happy to acknowledge both. We could draw an analogy to the words "baking" and "cooking." There are times that I've found myself saying "I'm more of a baker than a cook" or "My wife likes cooking but doesn't really like baking." These imply an opposition between the terms. But taking "cooking" in a broader sense, it also makes sense to say that baking (like boiling, sauteeing, roasting, etc.) is a kind of cooking, not the opposite of cooking. None of these seems wrong to me--it's just that words don't only have single definitions.
Thus we have to be clear what definitions we're using. If you reread my contribution to this thread with clear eyes, I think you have to acknowledge that that is all I was trying to do. And I hope in rereading it you see the modesty of my wording, and admit that it would be unfair to take from that that I am one of these awful people "who think themselves experts" or "who assume to know it all."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h67WnHTERhM&feature=youtu.be
As to the video, I would consider this an exercise in lettering. It, the calligraphy, is amended, "touched up," with the same pen.
I wish I would have had this video when I submitted the design to Dave and his crew at FontBureau. One of his techies saw the l/c 'a' and said it cannot be done with a pen. Needless to say I had a giggle at that. She was a "type folk" David!
It is the opposite for me. Most of my designs start off straight out as outlines without any drawing to trace. The exception to this is Petranian, a much more calligraphic face than the rest of mine. That one, I started drawing the caps with charcoal but the final forms were quite a bit different than the drawings. I did do all of the lower case right off with FontLab and no drawing to trace. To me, it is about drawing form to counterform instead of either writing or painting a glyph. As a young man, I had done plenty of old-school calligraphy and lettering with pen and brush so I know the feel of it but just don't use the tools you do.
I "need the tools" to inform the direction/concept/idea. I know calligraphers that draw on screen, I am just not capable. Do you see, Chris, why I called that video lettering?