Burning up the blogosphere recently is Cameron Adams’s Handwritten Typographers, a brilliant sampling of how today’s finest typographers write stuff down on paper. Some of the results are fantastic. Hardly surprising that people devoted to designing type also write in an interesting hand, but Adams asks some further questions:

Do typographers exert some extraordinary control of the pen that laypersons don’t? Does a typographer’s handwriting influence the typefaces they produce? Has the rise of digital communications made handwriting redundant? Do modern typographers, born of digital tools, lack the finesse of their more wizened counterparts? If so, does that change the way their type is designed?

One thing I’ve always been interested in is the conscious development of a handwriting style. Do people (typographers or not) spend time practicing and perfecting a handwriting style? One guess is that any naturally talented designer already has some drafting skill that’s automatically transposed into the more automatic features of handwriting, but I’d like to see a feature that looks at prominent designers who admit to practicing and perfecting their handwritten styles, like an illustrator would perfect his line.

I’d buy a little pocket-book made up of notebook scraps that chronicled the handwriting evolution of, say, 25 famous artists/designers. Yes I would.

Recent experiences in renewing my passport made me reflect that we all probably spend a fair amount of time developing our signature–I’ve got notebooks from my childhood filled with flailing attempts to make my name look cooler on the page, most of which failed.

Ever been forced to sign your name exactly inside a little box, any contact with the page borders immediately invalidating the entire form? There’s a handwriting-consistency test if there ever was one. My shaky hand means the one signature I did manage to get inside the box still doesn’t look all that close to what you’ll see on an average contract or credit card slip. Oh well, it’s only border control, right?

Adams’s experiment struck me as a wonderful spin on the “ask artists how they do what they do” genre, which has always been a wonderful/terrible thing for me. Reading great essays on how, for example, certain novelists do what they do can fill you with inspiration, and then along comes some anecdotal evidence that some of the best living authors of the day, say Philip Roth or Don Delillo, write almost monastically, genius writers hammering away in solitude for 10 hours a day, trying to get something, anything right, and we’re all reminded that you’ve got to put the work in, no matter what you’ve done before. But we’ll save that digression for another day.

There are times I’d rather just see how an artist writes stuff down, or organizes his/her day, than always read about the why. In a unique way, that’s what Adams has done here.