This sign, quotation marks for emphasis and all, is a cultural treasure. It has stood on this pole for decades on a one-block street of simple rowhouses that are also cultural treasures, but we can leave it to our friend Father Pitt to tell you the story of the street. Our interest is in the sign.

Note how the two instances of the letter E in the word “KEEP” are different. They are not just placed differently in relation to a theoretical baseline: they are shaped differently, though they are matching in style.

“How would you do that?” asks the baffled modern designer, poring over the OpenType specs to see whether it is possible to have a non-position-dependent variation of characters in the same word.

The correct answer to “How would you do that?” is “with a brush.” (“You mean like in Photoshop?” asks the confused designer in our imagination.) Half a century ago, the usual way to produce a metal sign like this was to letter it by hand. Yes, those neat gothic capitals on the sign are also lettered by hand, possibly with the aid of a stencil.

The same was true of advertisements if we go a little further back. In the 1800s, when display advertisements began to appear in magazines and newspapers, they were mostly done in type. Likewise with advertising posters, for which huge blocks of wooden type were created. But improvements in printing made it possible to reproduce artwork economically and accurately, and by the 1890s the most expensive ads and posters were often hand-drawn and hand-lettered.

A full-page advertisement from MacLean’s Magazine, January 1, 1919. All the words are hand-lettered.

But now it has become impossible to use hand-lettering in anything meant to face the public. It isn’t even against professional standards: it is so obvious to modern designers that letters come from computer fonts that no one even needs to articulate the principle, because no one can imagine an alternative.

How deep-set is this prejudice? Here, reproduced at a reduced size for the fair-usey purpose of criticism and comment, is the cover of a popular manual for calligraphers: a book, in other words, about making letters by hand.

What do we notice about the letters in the title and subtitle? Anybody?

Most professional designers would probably see nothing odd or jarring about the lettering of the title and subtitle. The few who did would probably tell you, “I would have used a calligraphy font.”

What we notice here is that it has become unthinking dogma that it is unprofessional to produce lettering in any other way than by picking a font on a computer. Even the description of that calligraphy book says, “Use it to enhance your journaling, create personalized cards and invitations, or simply enjoy the calming, creative process of hand lettering.” No one, not even the author of a reference book for calligraphers, expects this to be a job skill.

We can point to a similar phenomenon in popular music. It used to be that singers sang, and the task of the recording engineer was to capture the sound of their voices. Then came Auto-Tune, and within a very short time—about ten years—the number of popular recordings without artificially pitch-controlled voices was effectively zero. It has become part of the professional standard in popular music: even in live performances, the singer does not face the public without computer-controlled pitch.

We could go back and forth in history and point out similar examples of human craft being replaced by machine uniformity. (The printing press itself is a very good example.) The main thing is to recognize the phenomenon when we see it, and then we will recognize that it is happening again. We are living through another of those times when a human craft is rapidly vanishing, because the assumption has taken root that it cannot be done to professional standards without the aid of a machine. This time the craft is writing: that is, arranging words to be read on a page or screen. In many fields it is already true, and in others it soon will be true, that writing is not considered up to professional standards unless it has been generated by artificial intelligence.

Take a look at this long thread in the OpenAI community forum about “catastrophic failures of ChatGPT.” Something happened about a year and a half ago that made many users think they couldn’t rely on the bot anymore. They took to the forum to complain that the bot was broken and couldn’t be relied on, and what struck Dr. Boli particularly was how many of them used the bot to compose their complaints that they couldn’t rely on the bot. You can tell them instantly by the AI quirks: frequent subheads, short paragraphs with frequent emphatic single-sentence paragraphs, key concepts in bold, numbered lists with bulleted sublists, even tables. These users didn’t trust the bot to do their writing, but how else could the writing get done?

We who write frequently are only vaguely aware of what a miraculous ability that seems to be in the mind of the average English-speaker. It is as miraculous as forming neat, sign-worthy letters by hand, or as miraculous as singing on pitch. (As Dr. Boli has often said, professional writers stand in awe of people like plumbers, who are the real miracle-workers.) If you are a writer by nature, you may find it a pleasant recreation to sit down with a pen and write out your thoughts on some subject that has captured your attention. That is how this article was composed, in fact. But the idea of having to compose a written communication fills most people with terror.

Thus when the bots came along and offered to do their writing for them, most people jumped at the chance.

Writers, of course, wondered why it would be more efficient to write a prompt for the bot so that the bot would write what we meant to say, which we would then have to examine carefully to make sure it really was what we meant to say, when we could just write what we meant to say. Isn’t using the bot twice the effort? In just the same way, a sign-painter might wonder why it is easier to arrange a complicated and expensive rig to paint signs by computer than it is just to pick up a brush, and someone who likes to sing might wonder why you would go through the slog of spinning up a computer to process your voice when you could just sing and be done with it.

But writers are a tiny minority. For most people, the answer is obvious: The bot insulates me from the terror. My seventh-grade English teacher will not be scowling in my imagination when I turn in this writing, because the bot will make it acceptable.

These terrified people are the ones who make the decisions about what is professional and what is not. Writers seldom become corporate managers, and corporate managers are seldom good writers. The corporate manager has seen how the bot turns out perfect-looking writing. He will demand that the hired writer use the bot to do the writing, because that will make the writing professional—and, of course, you can get so much more done, because the manager believes that writing is a laborious and time-intensive process that can be made instantaneous by prompting a bot (forgetting, of course, that someone has to compose those prompts, and then compose different prompts when the bot botches the job the first time). Technical writers tell us this is already the norm in many offices. Gradually all the technical and marketing writers, if there are any such positions, will have been hired for their skill in prompting the bot, and the ones who have not adapted to bot-produced writing will not have jobs.

It is possible that there will be exceptions. Classical music seems to be immune to Auto-Tune: it is expected that Verdi operas and Schubert lieder will be performed in natural voices. A similar exception may solidify in culture for certain kinds of writing: perhaps the readers of literary fiction, which is to say the kind of good-for-you textual broccoli that comes with a list of questions for discussion in the back of the book, will still expect their authors to generate the texts from their own unaided brains.

But most “professional” writing will be done by prompting a bot, and in a generation the act of composing prose by human mental activity will be looked at the same way we look at calligraphy now: it’s fun for your journaling or for people who find it a calming hobby, but no one would imagine that professional work could get done that way. We may look back at old pre-bot writing and wonder how the writers got certain effects that seem to elude the bots, the way we wonder how signmakers managed to get two or three different versions of the letter E in the same font. But on the whole we will be satisfied with the slick, professional, and uniform results we get from the bots, and it will not occur to us that there might be another way to get the same work done.

---

If you have an interest in hand-lettered signs, or think you could develop such an interest, we have a whole page of manuals of showcard writing in the Eclectic Library.