“My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does.”
– Graham Greene
Thanks to modern technology, an intricate web is being woven between everyone on this earth and beyond. The ultra-reliable modes of digital communication that we possess make the connections we share with one another much more immediate. We are no longer restricted by distance. Unfortunately, this comes at a cost – our words lose urgency and tenderness when filtered through a flawless font.
Any worthwhile relationship takes time and effort, principles at odds with the immediacy of instant messaging. Text messages are designed to be quick, but with speed comes the depersonalisation of our interactions. Emojis attempt to combat this but even these are unreliable – they can be read out of context alongside the detached curves of a typed message.
We at Royal Mail believe the solution to this is simple: we must recapture the charm and sophistication of long-distance correspondence inherent in letter writing, a sadly endangered practice that is incorrectly seen as inferior to the digital alternative. Handwriting could never again replace the wonders of digital communication, but it can nevertheless supplement the inadequacies of our burgeoning technologies.
While penning a letter in your own unique hand takes longer than typing the same message, it is a practice that exemplifies the nuances in our relationships. What a letter says to the reader is not restricted by its words – not only does the effort taken to write it show care for the other person, but personality and emotion are housed in a pen-stroke in a way that digital communication fails to replicate. Letters are infinitely more intimate: it’s much more difficult to throw away a heartfelt letter from someone special than it is to delete a text message by the same person.
Without further ado it brings us great pleasure to invite you to explore this booklet which evidences the impact handwritten communication can have on today’s fast-paced culture. In the words of Toba Beta, “handwriting enables civilisation”; it carries with it our souls, imprints on the page emotions we sometimes don’t even know we’re feeling until they’ve been expressed through the curls and flourishes of our unique styles. This is absolutely something worth preserving, so it gives us pride to invite you join us in this noble mission.
Yours sincerely,
Royal Mail
In the first stage of the project I have set up a postcard stand asking people to write ‘Something They Should Have Said’ and drop it into the black box. All writings are anonymous.
I have created a publication - a collection of handwritten postcards to recapture the charm and sophistication of long- distance correspondence inherent in letter writing, a sadly endangered practice that is incorrectly seen as inferior to the digital alternative.
Looking through and reading the various things people have chosen to write in the postcards shows how much more personality and emotion is in handwriting and how more thoughtful people are when they write with pen and paper rather than a digital message that will be lost in the message thread.
I have put up a poster ‘Things I Should Have Said’ asking people at the Falmouth University to write anonymously something they should have said to someone.
I have provided A5 size postcards in three colours - red, pink and yellow, as this is a warm colour palette and these colours represent feeling and emotion. The red and yellow colours also resemble with the colours of the Royal Mail logo.
I have also provided different black pens - a thick sharpy, a thin ballpoint pen, a thin black pen, etc. to give people the choice and creative freedom.
I have provided a black box with a cut out for people to drop their postcards into the box.
I have collected 34 postcards in 1 week. There was a great variety of things people chose to write - some were silly and funny, some were quite personal and emotional. People have used the space of the postcards differently - some written vertically, some horizontally, some used all of the space and some have left quite a lot of white space around the text. And there were of course as many different handwritings as there were postcards. It almost wouldn’t be possible to collect all of that digitally.
I have created a publication that collects all the postcards, using red, pink and yellow colours. The book is named ‘Commuovere’ which is an Italian word meaning ‘a heartwarming story that brings you to tears’ and has no one-word equivalent in other languages. I have used coptic binding to put my publication together.
The covers of my books have a rectangular cutout, which shows the name of the book. The idea of the cutout comes from a postbox where people drop envelopes with letters.
The metaphor is that the book is a post box with a collection of cards that people dropped into it.
After binding my publication I have asked strangers in cafes and coffee shops in town to look through the postcards in the book and handwrite their thought and feelings about one of the postcards of their choice - about what is written, or the handwriting, or the way it is written, or maybe write something they should have said that was triggered by one of the postcards.
This suggests to the reader that they can write their thoughts next to the postcards in the book.
The second publication is called ‘Fattura’, which is an Italian word meaning ‘manifacture, making’. This publication explains how I have collected the postcards and also a message from the Royal Mail about the purpose of this project. This piece of writing was created by Justin Prinsloo - a Journalism graduate that I have commissioned to write this paragraph for my publication.
I separated my publication into two books because I wanted to concentrate the attention of the reader on the handwriting solely in the ‘Commuovere’ book.
Typefaces used:
I have put my publications into a wooden box.
When digital communication was not around and people wrote letters to each other, they would store them in boxes. A handwritten letter is one exemplar handwritten by someone signi cant to you with emotion. They could not have been stored in the ‘Cloud’ or in ‘message history’. People kept the letters and went back to read them again sometimes.
In the box I have also put a pen for the readers to write their thoughts in one of the books.
I have made line illustrations in Adobe Ilustrator to support the text in the second book and show the reader visual examples of the process of colecting postcards.
I have decided to use illustrations instead of photographs because it works well with the colour palette and the layout of my books.
