You have created a piece of distressed lettering, an enduring and deathless visual trope. It is a manifestation of distressing—the general term for the effect created by the recipe—a broader phenomenon, straddling fashion, furniture and more. Its deep design deserves a look not just because of its ubiquity and vigour, but because design reflects culture—and life.

In the grammar of design, distressing is technique, style and a source of meaning all at once.  But like many approaches to lettering, (stencil letters and brush drawn ones) it amplifies the value of words without having a fixed meaning of its own. It demands, and gets, attention again and again; we seem to not tire of it.    

In the grammar of design, distressing is technique, style and a source of meaning all at once.  But like many approaches to lettering, (stencil letters and brush drawn ones) it amplifies the value of words without having a fixed meaning of its own.

In the materialist view, distressing’s power originates in its purely optical properties. Cultural associations necessarily lie downstream. Distressing belongs to a category of visual artefacts that we have labelled biomotive: we are hardwired to react. We helplessly perceive rounded shapes as soft, and pointy cusps as sharp. We ‘feel’ them as sensations, rather than read them like words or pictures. As with colour, odour or sound, the process of interpretation follows later. 

Over time, interpretations crystallise into tropes or conventions, stored in the well of culture. Subsequent observers learn them, so that distressed means “grungy” in this context and “suffering” in another. But the durability of the sign’s signifying power across eras and continents is underwritten by what we have termed as its physique.

But culture is more than a passive reservoir of memory. Culture sustains the distressed surface like a sugar solution sustains bacteria in a dish (as in a type of blood test known as a culture). It is the theatre of action, and a patron, recruiting distressing for a wealth of roles. 

Given its broad sweep across space, time and material, distressing might deserve a larger title than technique or style. Yet the term movement seems an overreach. Movements seem to need champions, and to be theorised as resisting or proposing a great cultural, political or economic shift. But being versatile and promiscuous, distressing has been pressed—or rubbed— into service for several causes, more like a mercenary soldier than a serving nationalist.

Distressed surfaces, whether in buildings, jeans or lettering can be read as opposing a sterile modernist aesthetic and a fatigue with its neutrality and avoidance of surface ornament. Distressing allows a way of perturbing the continuity of the surface without resorting to ornament. 

By eroding the exterior of things, distressing can reveal structure. Wood is made of grains, and fabric of fibres. Paradoxically, this is an agenda of modernism, like exposed brick or buildings with exposed services, also cliches in the interior design of casual dining restaurants. 

But each of these practices are not mere visual strategies with aesthetic agendas, reacting to an excess of one attribute with another, or ways to relieve the fatigue of plainness. Brickwork and exposed ducts also signal a modest, non-monumental stance towards architecture’s relation with the citizen. 

Several themes explore the same emotional or ideological spaces as the distressed surface. Grunge fashion is one, and grunge typography too. The mega phenomenon of denim is another which is a century old. The tradition of lovingly faded, worn jeans one wore as a teenager has been recast in industrial form, precisely damaged and built to last. Gritty industrial interiors are yet another.  

Underlying these visual trends is the idea-canvas on which they appear. They are global moods or themes that are an amalgam of political and economic shifts, with their attendant social and cultural anxieties. They provoke and support the visible movements. 

Distressing is supported by the idea of underplaying one’s wealth, underlining a lower social status, or stating one’s protest against the economic order. It can be an act of ironic identification. It can be read as an attack on cool, studied rationality. It’s also a cry, a shout of emotional insistence with a suggestion of pain: notice me, and feel what I feel. It’s a neurotic gesture that’s positioned as a survival mechanism. 

Distressing is supported by the idea of underplaying one’s wealth, underlining a lower social status, or stating one’s protest against the economic order. It can be an act of ironic identification. 

The gestures of an underclass are often tamed and co-opted by an overclass. Inside a tony restaurant, we can sit aside a chic distressed wall with plaster scraped off the brickwork, and signal not an identification with poverty but its opposite. Rebels and rulers are both welcome. 

Inside a tony restaurant, we can sit aside a chic distressed wall with plaster scraped off the brickwork, and signal not an identification with poverty but its opposite. Rebels and rulers are both welcome. 

Alongside the co-opting of underclass gestures by the rich sits guilt, best characterised by growth of  anti-corporate sentiment around the world. Guilt can be worn to signal virtue, creating a sort of market for ethical positions. When a flagrantly rich white woman wears a badge that reads “White privilege is real” you know that society’s genius and madness have collided and merged. 

Ironically, the western tradition of the distressed surface has its roots in England’s stately homes of  the 9th century, in ‘antiquing’, a treatment of furniture to create an artificial image of age. Once considered cosy, elegant and feminine,  It has jumped out of its container and cloned itself multiply: gone viral in the truest sense. Given the social and upheavals that are in play around the world, distressed surfaces and their ilke seem set for a very long stay.

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The first, easy answers heard most often—antiquity and beauty—are, by themselves, inadequate. Little of the antique survives in our consciousness. And simply quoting beauty is circular (leading to the inanity that we like it because it’s beautiful and beautiful because we like it), unless qualified—so read on.

The Deep Design of our abiding love for calligraphy is that it is born in manufacture, and is thus as recent. Up to and during medieval times, when reading and writing were not widely distributed skills, calligraphy was a utilitarian tool for official work, and for the production of books for the very rich. It was beautiful in the way that craft is, but beauty per se was not the point. The word itself, in English, dates to 1604, well after the birth of print, the technology that pushed books from the realm of craft to objects of manufacture.

It’s intuitive that the value we place on calligraphy should rise in proportion to its replacement by printing, and that in a paradoxical way, the art of calligraphy is a consequence of printing. This is explanation no.3: we value calligraphy as we do a craft. For craft objects remind us that with manufacture, we traded individuality and beauty for economy, abundance and choice. (It took modern design to make manufactured objects desirable)

We value calligraphy as we do a craft. For craft objects remind us that with manufacture, we traded individuality and beauty for economy, abundance and choice.

Though many medieval crafts and arts have died, calligraphy thrives. The base reasons is cultural: manual writing still survives the keyboard. With the standard of everyday handwriting in free-fall, we admire good writing. As an extension of functional writing, it is a picture of us at our best.

This is not to argue that calligraphy does not possess a fundamental beauty, distinct from a culturally learned conception built on associations and fashions. While unprovable and even controversial, Deep Design argues for a innate beauty-sense, as universal among humans as grammatical language.

Such innate beauty is a property of all human writing, which employs the fundamental themes of repetition, variation and symmetry, best expressed as rhythm. Each stroke spaced in a rhythmic manner is as important as in music, which employs intervals of time and tone in specific, near-universal ways. Calligraphy can employ these with great freedom, taking liberties with legibility. Thus we can delight in Japanese or Arabic calligraphy without reading a word of it, our visual systems pleasured by the arrangement of strokes as abstract patterns. This script-agnostic pleasure is the nearest we can come to testing the notion of innate beauty.

Yet this explanation needs further questioning. If the rhythm of strokes is appealing, would we respond with as much delight to a pattern of strokes and lines, arranged in beguiling ways? We do respond, but calligraphy has a peculiar additional pull.

Our attraction to calligraphy even in unfamiliar scripts points to more than our love of rhythmic patterns. It also suggests that our awareness of the presence of words. and thus, of a transmission of meaning, is a crucial layer of our affection. It’s got to be words. (Many of the patrons of the great books were not literate, Akbar among them).

Our attraction to calligraphy even in unfamiliar scripts points to more than our love of rhythmic patterns. It also suggests that our awareness of the presence of words.

Eastern calligraphy, such as those of the Islamicate worlds of Arabic, and the Chinese and Japanese traditions, has a distinct spiritual dimension, separate from its functional role as the scriveners craft. The act of calligraphy, and the adoration of it by the viewer is an encounter both with the deep self and with divinity. The spirit enters into the body of the writer, and influences the pen or brush, the ink and the word; the finished result critiqued in terms of the writer’s ‘energy’.

The revival of western calligraphy as a vastly popular artform may well owe to Edward Johnston, an early 20th century scholar of traditional lettering, typographer and teacher. Johnston drew (not wrote) the Underground letter, the first typeface to be used for signage in the London Underground, and the roundel logo still uses it. Johnston distilled the principles of calligraphy, specifically the broad edged tool as a guide to modern letterforms, and is deeply influential in modern typography. Calligraphy is an unparalleled tool for a student to unlock the deep design of typographic form.

So, since the 1920s, calligraphy fountain pens and felt pens and tools of all kinds are widely available along with an array of materials to satisfy any modern medievalist. That odd oxymoron contains a point:

So, since the 1920s, calligraphy fountain pens and felt pens and tools of all kinds are widely available along with an array of materials to satisfy any modern medievalist.

The quickest way to sample the popularity, vitality and sheer variety of this art form is a visit to Pinterest or Instagram. Notice that the reference to the traditional letterform is never far away, despite the sassy one-liners, funky inks and millennial sensibility. The earlier comparison with music can be extended: like classical music and jazz, calligraphy is a living tradition. It recalls, exploits, and ceaselessly remixes an idealised exemplar from the past. Calligraphy is being performed, and it’s forever young.

We relate to calligraphy because we can read it, but not only. When we practise it, we traverse the ages. We connect with manual skill, smell ink and feel paper. We gain social currency by writing well, but we can also experience its meditative effect and its spiritual side. We can be humorous, silly or profound, with nothing more than the interplay of words and how they are written. Stuck for words? Use the alphabet, Deep Design’s favourite 26-letter shloka. Go to a good stationery store, or online, buy some cool gear and have a go. It’s as human you’ll ever be.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Different strokes: Why we like Calligraphy’ in Business Standard, 27 October in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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You see it everywhere, absolutely everywhere: rough-and-ready brush lettering or something like it. It’s proudly imperfect and knowingly naive.

Brush lettering has long existed as a contrast to the mechanical perfection of type, of manufactured letters. But these new roughly wrought creations are distinct from the skilfully writtten, neo-calligraphic styles that commercial sign makers introduced us to.

The durability of this phenomenon is somewhere between that of a major historical shift like Modernism and a trending hashtag, A movement? Not in the sense that future histories of design will recognise. Major arts movements were new ideas, championed by charismatic leaders, underpinned by a philosophy that responded to political, technological or economic shifts that were the air.

Modern movements are media-fed, and so faster to peak, ebb, die and be reborn after a time. They start life as styles, arising from anonymous mavens in urban sub-cultures, who may achieve glamour and fame once in a while, like Banksy who now justifies that name in a rather different way. For a phenomenon to survive, is not enough being visually new. Nor will its intellectual underpinnings suffice—such as protest, or the acknowledgement of new technologies. It must have universality, and claim that it can be applied to any situation, medium and art. Modernism is one such style, movement and phenomenon.

To explain why the shaggy lettering phenomenon thrives, we need to understand the emotional realm it occupies. Like great stories, ideas that satisfy emotions can be infinitely repeated without losing appeal.

To explain why the shaggy lettering phenomenon thrives, we need to understand the emotional realm it occupies.

Shaggy lettering’s thriving, as a look into its deep design might lead us to speculate, is because It encodes an ethos. It is associated with the expression of certain categories of ideas that are in the air; you might call it a global mood. It cannot be called a pure style, for it cannot be blindly applied like paint without an eye to the message it is helping to propel.

Expressing certain sentiments slakes a particular thirst. It satisfies an emotional requirement for a global community linked by shared notions, call it a mood. Here’s a speculation of what that mood is, and thus, what its deep design is built on.

Consider its deliberate imperfection; its texture and materiality (inky, splashy and brushy), which can be seen as a fact of life for the sender of the message, or carefully preserved to manipulate the emotions of the receiver. At an elementary level these attributes signal speed of execution and extreme economy of means—improvising to quickly make do with what is around.

Consider its deliberate imperfection; its texture and materiality (inky, splashy and brushy), which can be seen as a fact of life for the sender of the message, or carefully preserved to manipulate the emotions of the receiver.

This economy also signals vulnerability, and instantly destroys distance; it appeals to our instinct to defend the weak. In the new democracy, be an old school authority at your own peril. Status has lost its status, these brushed glyphs seem to say. Better to ask, what do you think?

Economy, vulnerability and immediacy are properties are most true of, and thus most valuable to groups such as makers of organic or local foods, who use this economy of means to signal authenticity (why else deliberately signal roughness?) and difference from the establishment. When there’s a good vulnerability going, can brands be far behind?

Protest is another; we only need to see these awkward letters to know that what they say is urgent and deeply felt.

I believe local tradesmen and protest banners were the progenitors of this lettering, refreshed by graffiti, and the thick marker. It is an irony that in many countries protestors now carry mass made, laser-printed banners. What a betrayal.

Such authenticity and immediacy are transferable outside these domains. Protest comes with a certain strength and a strong sense of personal agency: we can make a difference, but I can too. I need few resources to do so. Join a challenge, do something, try a hack: the fix is in, and it’s cheap and simple, in Steven Levitt’s words. Sincerity trumps nuance and careful consideration. Nuance is the sophistry of elites anyway; like complexity, a smokescreen erected by the Very Impotent Persons. Victory to the Visceral!

This personal agency is best supported on social media, where I can tap out easy outrage or make common cause with a band almost costlessly, where accusation is simple and refutation complex. Political correctness is now pop-correctness. I stand opposite experts or authorities, ready to tear them down if I have the social clout.

Not that social clout and expertise are necessarily mutually exclusive, but I’ll take the expert with the higher twitter engagement. I’ll go with this doctor’s views over another because his twitter feed is eagerly cheered and his skin looks great; ok, he has an MD too. Peer-viewed beats peer-reviewed. Whose peers? Mine!

Don’t think I’m right? Well, I’ll just pick up a really fat brush, dip it in a bucket of paint, and…then let’s see.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘By My Own Hand’ in Business Standard, 4 August, in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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