The Calligraphy Stars of Instagram

What can you make in fifteen seconds? You can’t knit a hat or sew a dress. You can’t cook a meal or bake a cake. You can’t 3-D print a thingamabob or build your IKEA hack. But you can write a word. And a word, written in black letter, uncial, Copperplate Script, Roman capitals, or even the “Star Wars” font by a professional, has all the virtues of those far more complicated handmade things. With an Instagram video, you can spend fifteen seconds watching something exceptional being made before your eyes.

The artist and designer Seb Lester (@seblester) is the resident celebrity of Instagram calligraphy, with a half million followers, and another half million across other social-media platforms. “So much of calligraphy is about movement and rhythm, and a short video can capture the beauty and the magic of calligraphy in a very Internet-friendly format,” he said. “Recurring words in people’s comments are ‘mesmerizing,’ ‘hypnotic,’ and ‘satisfying.’ For reasons I don’t fully understand, people clearly enjoy watching the process of something perceived as ‘perfect’ being made from start to finish.” Two weeks ago, Lester posted an Instagram video of him lettering the word “mesmerize” with two pencils in one hand and flourishes above and below. It now has more than eighteen thousand likes.

More popular still are his hand-drawn takes on pop-culture icons. “It occurred to me that the ‘celebrities’ in the world of letterforms are famous logos.” So he did the Gap, “Star Wars”, and the New York Times. There’s something magical about watching those familiar printed forms appear before your eyes, the catch of the pen on paper, the almost backhand coloring with the narrow corner of his Pilot Parallel pen required to make the serifs on the “G.” You can see the ink drying on the page as he letters "AC [lightning bolt] DC," and the luxurious sheen of copper flowing from the nib on a simple “Thanks” when he reached four hundred thousand followers.

This work is digital, but it also registers as physical. “Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) might be a factor in some cases as well,” Lester said. “People sometimes say the scratching sound of the nib in conjunction with the movement of the pen creates a pleasurable sensation.” When the word is done, however, the effect is seamless.

Linda Yoshida (@lindayoshida), a Los Angeles-based graphic designer, found her celebrity subject in “Game of Thrones” quotes, bringing together two fan communities in an elegant swoop. She posted one quote each day for the ten days leading up to this year’s season première, carefully considering typeface, ink color, pen choice. “Kill the crows” was done in black letter with walnut ink (like dirty water, or dried blood), and the black crows were sketched using a crow-quill nib—a calligrapher in-joke. “It was really fun to build up anticipation from my Instagram followers, and they look forward to what quote I will be posting the next day,” she said. “Other calligraphers also started posting their own favorite ‘Game of Thrones’ quotes. If you start a trend, others will follow.”

It’s not only perfection that brings pleasure: I’ve watched @the_md_writes (“MD by day! / #CalligraphyNerd by night!”) practicing basic strokes in brush calligraphy over and over again. Thick lines, thin lines, “U”s, “O”s, underlines. They aren’t all identical but they are awfully close, and her hand moves like that of an athlete limbering up. Artem Stepanov (@meisographic) has a similarly captivating video of oval drills (just what it sounds like—the ovals are “essential for developing a light touch”). “People want to see people doing human things,” John Stevens (@calligraphile), who, like Lester, is a well-known professional designer, said. “As so much is digital, I think the craft of calligraphy offers a window to humans making. I thought that Instagram would be a good teaser to show viewers inspiration without a long-winded explanation. It’s like window shopping.”

As you fall into the markedly friendly world of Instagram calligraphy, you also start to pick up a whole different vocabulary. Calligraphers talk to each other of favorite pens and vintage nibs, speak glowingly of the paper they are printing on, and send each other the most fabulous mail. It feels like another world, not one of the past—you are on a social network, after all—but one in which those doodles on your notebook, or your obsession with the way ink flows from the pen, might turn into something beautiful and shareable.

Many of these letterers, in fact, go back and forth between the pen and the screen (it is 2015). “I’m still very thankful to my sixth-grade teacher for teaching the entire class calligraphy,” Yoshida said. “Because of her, I got interested in lettering and typography and decided to study graphic design. Learning calligraphy again years later brings me back full circle.” Chae Ho Lee (@heypenman) does hand lettering, but he’s also had calligraphy laser-cut out of plastic, blind embossed on cards, and digitally “embroidered” on fabric with Photoshop to make pieces that look like heirloom handkerchiefs but exist only on the computer. When I complimented him on his new tricks, he did my name, accented with a butterfly, and put it up on Instagram about ten minutes later. On another scale is the work of Faust (@faustnewyork), which combines the look of classic calligraphy with the size of graffiti—on the sides of buildings, on a nouvelle Fabergé egg, on a chalkboard. Faust is the one who posts other people’s tattoos of his work, making the digital physical in yet another way, with the needle on flesh; recently, perfectly, “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.” Faust has a bit of the same attitude about his own, often ephemeral work: he photographs the murals, but not pieces like stickers. “I appreciate it when someone else takes notice and may take a photo and post it. To me, that's much more fulfilling than documenting it myself.”

The calligraphers’ tales point to reasons for this lettering renaissance, beyond its suitability for Instagram’s square, aesthetically pleasing frame. The first is flexibility. Designers want to keep their hand in the game physically, learning from the old letterforms that remain the base for new fonts, logos, and applications that take the scrolls off the page and into the environment. “It’s nice to slow down, take a deep breath, and go back to doing things in analog mode, be it drawing, knitting, sewing, or calligraphy—something that has been done by our parents, our grandparents, and many generations before that,” Yoshida said. “And we know that it won’t be outdated or expire in a year because our gadget du jour couldn’t keep up.”

Corporations, too, which once turned to abstract geometric forms for a sense of permanence, have turned back to handwriting. In 2013, News Corp. rebooted their logo: a scrawl derived from the signature of its founder Rupert Murdoch, signifying a return to family control and, perhaps, a more candid relationship with the public. Instagram’s revamped logo, revealed the same year, also maintained a scripted casualness. And designers only seem more invested in bringing the vagaries of the homemade and the hand-drawn into the digital realm: a font based on Albert Einstein’s handwriting will have variations that account for mood, material, and repetition (are any two “O”s of yours exactly alike?). Its creators say that the font is really a project designed to get people to focus on their own writing—ammunition for the ongoing fight against the removal of cursive from school curricula. Getting rid of cursive seems to imply that one day no one will need to set pen to paper. Instagram calligraphy is a great visual argument for why “need” should not be the only factor in saving script. Watch long enough, and you, too, will start Googling “Lamy fountain pens” and “copper ink.”