The Journal

Writing, lettering, and typography

I am currently reading "Arabic typography: a comprehensive source book" by Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès. Its a great book. I haven't finished it yet, but yesterday I came across a paragraph about writing, lettering, and typography. Since its related to the previous post, I thought I should put it here before I forget it it. Huda said: 

In the professional field, often production of text is divided into three categories; writing, lettering and typography. The first, writing is described as the free-flowing and uncorrected manual production of text. The second, lettering is considered a meticulous method of producing carefully drawn letters, which allows for corrections during the text production process. The third, typography, is considered the industrialized method of text production-wether on the level of type design, or on the level of applying existing type to design applications. 

For my reference, I think, I would relate writing to script. So, now we have a comparison another between script writing, lettering, and typography. 

Ok, the last sentence was not correct I think. I got the quote wrong. Its probably because of the language barrier. After looking at it again, I think basically that writing is just taking the pen and write, without caring about the rules or the calligraphic style. But, lettering is writing carefully following certain aesthetics. Its more like drawing the letters, artistically. I think that lettering could follow a certain calligraphic rules, or it could be just drawing letters in an appealing way.*

At the end of the quote, I like the fact that she distinguished designing type from designing with type. I was just discussing those two school of thoughts with a friend yesterday. We were discussing how more studies, researches, and practices should be conducted on both of them as they are a bit related, but they are different practices as well.  

* This part was added to the original post afterwords.