I figure that my interest in calligraphy has been caused by some major situations, to wit: I am left-handed, and have a very difficult time doing calligraphy. (but I recently discovered a calligraphy set for Lefties!!! Finally!)
Words have always been a genre I love. When I was little, I tried constantly to break the code of letters on paper. Adults and older kids could make sense from those, but I could not. Eventually I became a bibliomaniac, like my parents. I still love the look of words, their texture, shape, design. I love the fact that only special people could read during the Dark Ages, and they wrote with love and concern, and illustrated the manuscripts with pictures. Words were magical and very special.
Language was kept alive in the form of the hand-scribed, scholarly documents, and the history of language was preserved. Pictures and words were put together to cover all the bases, as it were. I think this makes good sense, and I do it with my own art work, although it is usually so subtle as to be secretive or cryptic. Words and visual images belong together!
One can spend a lot of time perusing these sites! Remember what calligraphy means - beautiful writing. Calligraphy has been in the world since humans began making marks toward written language! Why not make it pretty? Arabic (see Calligraphy here on Suite 101), Chinese, Byzantine, Latin, and on and on. The invention of movable type by Gutenberg caused the eventual decline of the hand-written word, but it is not dead yet! We can enjoy the modern uses of calligraphy all around us. Advertising, of course, utilizes it constantly (just be more attentive and you will be surprised!) People want hand-lettered this and that; or the appearance of calligraphy with the Lucida typefaces available on most computers. Lucida Calligraphy, Lucida Handwriting, Lucida Blackletter, etc. Check them out. They are only for names, or special, short uses, not for text. To check out the differences in typefaces, look at the descenders and the give-away letters such as g and s and a. I am using an eminently legible serif face, Times New Roman, 10 point (note the name... It is well-named.) I don't much like sans serif, like Arial, but they are also very useful in designing a document.
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