Calligraph and typography

The practice of designing and producing the written word as a work of art is the esthetic object of calligraphers and typographers. Beautiful hand-writing has been accomplished through the skillful use of the reed pen (Greece and Rome), the Quill pen (in Europe to about 1850), and various pens, crayons, pencils, markers and other writing devices of modern invention. Additional writing implements used in calligraphy include the diverse sorts of brushes, employed in China, Korea and Japan. The qualities of writing surfaces, and of inks or pigments and other materials have also to be taken carefully into account by calligraphers. Designers of printing typefaces, printers and other typographers have the same concerns as calligraphers for beauty, and while producing very ornamental type-faces and printing they also attempt to balance between esthetic and practical considerations such as inking and printing technical problems, character density costs, and legibility. Advertising agency artists frequently create calligraphic display letters of unusual design, especially for trademarks and trade names, and musical calligraphers transcribe scores for their publishers, to mention two usually overlooked categories of practitioners. In Asia and in Europe through the Renaissance some religious philosophies invested mystical, symbolic means in such calligraphic considerations as the measured proportions of letters, direction of writing, continuity of letters and other matters. In medieval Kabbalistic manuscripts often written in careful, and sometimes calligraphic, Arabic, Aramaic or Hebrew, the shapings of letters and vowel points was considered significant. In first and second folio Shakespeare plays an alleged symbolism employing peculiarly formed letters has been reported.