I’ve noticed that many of us seem to be grieving the death of traditional handwriting and the lost art of mailing handwritten letters. I can’t even remember the last time I sat down and wrote a letter and mailed it with a stamp.
When I was a child, my mother would make me write handwritten thank you notes to every person that sent me a gift. She insisted that she was teaching me a good habit that I would remember when I was an adult. Thank you Mom; but unfortunately, I think you are one of the only people I know that still writes handwritten notes on beautiful stationery. I admit I miss getting handwritten letters in the mail. As a matter of fact, typically, I only send and receive letters that are 140 characters long, if you know what I mean.
Textile designer Donna Rumble-Smith felt the same way and used that nostalgic feeling to fuel her inspiration to create an installation called “Signatures Exchanged for Passwords.” She embroidered handwriting that turns into more familiar, less emotional, less intimate text that we see in every email. According to http://mocoloco.com, “Not only have we traded our signatures for passwords, but all the personality and thought behind those epistles has been diluted into shared fonts and a send button that comes with more than its fair share of regret.”
There is a fantastic write up about Donna and her work featured on design.nl, you can read it here – Capturing The Beauty of Handwriting These designs are so beautiful and so sad, all at the time.
