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Calligraphy is based on penmanship; it’s essentially "writing letters". Lettering, on the other hand, is based on draftsmanship, i.e. "drawing letters".
Joseph Alessio
For the longest time, I was unaware of the difference between the art of lettering and calligraphy until one day, I read the article titled Understanding The Difference Between Type And Lettering by Joseph Alessio. In the past few years, there has been a resurgence in the popularity of designing type and custom lettering with several designers making a career out of it, and along with that, some misconceptions about terminology have arrived. The art of drawing letters or lettering is also different from typography, which qualifies as a subset of lettering.
With the linguistic nuances in place, today, we are going to explore a brilliant letter artist Abhishek Khan, and his hand-drawn illustrations that are illuminating his digital letter studio and store, Handjobs Inc. He brings alive his craft on the covers of notebooks, which he calls Observer’s Handbooks. Khan humorously says that the Observer’s Handbooks are the best medium for taking notes as they open faster than any other application. Also, on the plus side, it requires no charging, passcode or face ID and is designed to conveniently fit into your pockets or hands. Irony-loaded humor and social commentary on our increasing dependence on technology aside, let us explore one design on the covers of these handbooks that particularly caught my eye.
From the imaginative mind of Khan comes the explanation that this cover art depicts real-life events in which plants were connected to a polygraph machine, commonly known as a lie detector. The machine detected signals whenever the plants were subjected to threats, to the extent that even the mere thought of harming the plant caused a significant spike in the recorded data. These experiments have faced substantial criticism from the scientific community, which does not consider plants to be sentient beings.
These are rare & unseen notebook covers. Much of these cover art belong to books recovered from a buried chest in a local forest. Much of the cover art was far too damaged bdiscernible, leaving us with no option but to invoke seance to help recover the titles of these lost texts. We only recover text for cover titles as main body is too long for our patience.
Abhishek Khan, on his Observor’s Handbooks
Each of the designs on an Observor’s Handbook is hand-lettered, hand drawn and handprinted in a limited quantity of 50 for each edition. The price increases with each subsequent edition. There are several unique designs to choose from. You can even have your name calligraphed on the inside cover of some of the handbooks. So what are you waiting for? Click here to order yours today!
Follow Abhisekh Khan here.
If you enjoyed reading this, here's more from Homegrown:
How India's First Art Glass Studio In Mumbai Makes Glass Come Alive Using Molten Magic
How Type Artist Manav Dhiman's Creative Process Manifested His Devanagari Totes
Indian, Regional & Latin: A Type Foundry With A Dual Perspective On Visual Heritage
