Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Hand-drawn graphics mark a return to the creator's immediacy and craft. Increasingly, advertising campaigns, CD covers, and branding are adopting the rough-hewn style of manually created typography. This is the first publication to offer a complete overview of handwritten typographics, drawing on an extensive array of letterforms from around the world.

At the heart of the book are hundreds of examples, presented in creative themes: "Scrawl" (letterforms that are raw, splotchy, untidy); "Scratch" (scraped, cut, and gouged fonts); "Script" (type that is sinuous and ornate); "Simulate" (faces that have been redrawn or copied); "Shadow" (dimensional, voluminous, and monumental letterforms); "Suggestive" (forms that imply the metaphorical, surreal, and symbolic); and "Sarcastic" (the ironic, comic, and satiric in lettering).

In an age of digital typography, Handwritten returns to the values of craft. This outstanding collection of unusual, meticulously wrought, and often breathtaking pieces is a must for students and practitioners of design.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Positing that many contemporary graphic designers, in flight from or in rebellion against today's dominance of computer technology, have opted to present a more informal, expressive, and human sensibility by featuring the look of handwritten or hand-drawn art in many of their works, Heller and Ilic have surveyed the field and found more than 500 recent works that demonstrate this practice. Their thesis does not directly address but nevertheless seems to support the larger issue of a resurgence of humanistic ideologies in the visual arts in the face of the many dehumanizing forces in modern life--a thesis both justifiable and sustainable. If a leading dynamic in contemporary graphic arts practice is the dialogue between tradition and change, between the canon and the avant-garde, between the normal and the new--then one interesting question to ask of any designer is what degree of grace, skill, intelligence, and humor that artist brings into this dialogue. The authors present many examples of these solutions in a book itself well presented. This reviewer always marvels at the extraordinary vigor and creative diversity that is present in contemporary visual arts, and always wonders why there are so few compiled works published. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals. W. S. Johnson Monroe Community College