[noufalibrahim]

I practice calligraphy as a hobby and am quite amused by this. From a marketing perspective, "hand written" letters on high quality paper sealed with wax and delivered to a customer is probably a good way to get their attention.

However, because of my background, I'm looking at it from the writers point of view. The almost elaborate ritual of writing a piece starting from selecting the paper, ruling it, selecting the ink, nibs, hand (that's what we call fonts) and then getting into a semi-trance while you write it is enormously rewarding. It's the opposite of everything tech. You have to plan out the whole piece in advance and can't just "iterate". You can't backspace an error and often have to throw away an hour of work just because you lost concentration and wrote an 'e' instead of an 'a' in the last word of the piece you're working on. It's got a lot of room for "disciplined freedom". Using a non standard letter form in a place so that the overall piece is more harmonious is very gratifying. Another interesting thing is that listening to music while writing can disturb your rhythm as your hand and pen starts to pick up the beat of the song rather than the letter forms and the piece is damanged. Several things like this come into play while doing the piece and almost therapuetic for me. I wish Bond luck with their product but it'd be a loss for people to not indulge themselves in actually writing by hand just because this (or other similar) products exist.

[crististm]

Can you share some starting points for a newcomer to calligraphy?

[noufalibrahim]

Gladly. I learnt all my bad habits from a bunch of "Calligraphy for Dummies" style books and regret it. It took me quite a while to undo all the damage I did. If you're serious about it, here are the resources I recommend.

1. Get only "Foundations of Calligraphy" by Sheila Waters. It's an excellent book and gives you detailed instructions on all aspects of the craft from tools, to setup, to hands, to layout and even advice on preventing burnout. The only shortcoming is that it focusses exclusively on square nib calligraphy which is very different from pointed pen hands (e.g the kind you see on http://www.jakeweidmann.com/collections/calligraphy/products...). I'm not really into pointed nib scripts (like copperplate or spencerian) so I can't really recommend much on that front.

2. Get yourself the highest quality materials you can afford. I generally use manuscript calligraphy ink along with speedball nibs and a speedball holder. I use a 90gsm paper from http://www.jkpaper.com/ which is heavy enough to handle the ink but light enough to see through for the rulings. I like to support the little guys so I usually batch order my materials from http://www.johnnealbooks.com/. Don't skimp on materials. When your initial work is crappy, the quality of the materials compensate a little and give you the motivation you need to keep at it. (Cf. http://zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beginner...).

3. Sheila Waters book covers this but it's important to practice rhythm (where you memorise a short piece and write it out at a consistent pace to train yourself) spearately from practising analysis (where you critique your letterforms and correct errors in spacing and other details so that you get better). You'll need to spend atleast 20 minutes on each of these per day. Add to that some more time to fix up your paper and seat and you'll need to dedicate about an hour per day.

4. It's useful to keep a bunch of cheap calligraphic markers around so that you can doodle your letterforms. I find it relaxing to do that and it helps me "stay in touch".

5. I have a program on my website to generate calligraphic rulings for various nib sizes and scripts http://calligraffiti.in/rulings. In my own case, the tedium of ruling each sheet manually used to put me off and the programmer in me scripted the task.

6. The http://www.calligraph.com/cyberscribes/ is a mailing list for practitioners which I've benefitted from before.

I myself put out some of my work at http://calligraffiti.in/ and did a presentation for a friends company which was later put up on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Kis5GBr2fk

Feel free to email me if you want to talk about it in any more detail. I'd be glad to help.