I have noticed over the decades the fall of the art of typography.  It used to be that artists and designers were required to learn hand lettering, because there was no such thing as fonts in a computer readily available.  Then, with the advent of Prestype, whoo hoo!  Look out world, it was party time.  You then went and got items typeset from a reprographics vendor so you could cut & paste paragraphs and copy it into place.  Along with a little amberlith or rubylith and you were set.

Now, with the advent of computers & fonts, any Tom, Dick or Harry can “create” a font, tweak a font and go nuts.  The last font book I bought for my reference, so I could have a place to even remotely begin if a client came in and said “Match this font.  I don’t know wht they used.”, has over 250,000 fonts in it, with probably 1/3 of them unusable for any serious commercial purpose.  I still have my Letraset & Chartpak “bibles” as a primary go to… 

What on earth elicited this post from me today?  Well, a convo with one of my Tweeps reminded me of this and how it’s an otpional class for desingers and artists nowadays.  

I thought I’d show you part what my mother made for my 2nd birthday, a book of original illustraitons for me to color and painted pages for me to read…. she went to Burnely Art Instititute back in the 60′s, which used to be on the corner of Broadway and Pine in that white haunted building and was required to learn hand lettering as part of her studies.  She later became a designer for some of the major sign companies in town as well as in her own right as an independant business owner.

I wish I could do this, but alas, I too am limited to computers now, but my prestype collection is in the hands of my 10yo niece if I really feel inspired.  The nice thing is that even after 40 years, most of this book has remained intact and is still in my possesion.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Enjoy.