Forget the computer — here’s why you should write and design by hand
J.K. Rowling scribbled down the first 40 names of characters that could appear in Harry Potter in a paper notebook. J.J. Abrams writes his drafts that are first a paper notebook. Upon his go back to Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs first cut through the complexity that is existing drawing a simple chart on whiteboard. Needless to say, they’re not the ones that are only…
Here’s the notebook that belongs to Pentagram partner Michael Bierut. The majority of the pages in the notebook resemble the right side, although he has got thought to Design Observer which he had lost a really precious notebook, which contained “a drawing my then 13-year-old daughter Liz did that she claims could be the original sketch when it comes to Citibank logo.”
Author Neil Gaiman’s notebook, who writes his books — including American Gods, The Graveyard Book, and also the final two thirds of Coraline — by hand.
And a notebook from information designer Nicholas Felton, who recorded and visualized ten years of his life in data, and created the Reporter app.
There’s a reason why people, that have the possibility to use a computer actually, choose to make writing by hand a part of their creative process. And it also all starts with a significant difference that we may easily overlook — writing by hand is extremely different than typing.
On paper Down the Bones, author Natalie Goldberg advises that writing is a activity that is physical and so impacted by the equipment you employ. Typing and writing by hand produce very writing that is different. She writes, I am writing something emotional, I must write it the first time directly with hand on paper“ I have found that when. Handwriting is more connected to the movement of this heart. Yet, once I tell stories, I go directly to the typewriter.”
Goldberg’s observation may have a little sample measurements of one, however it’s an incisive observation. More importantly, studies in the field of psychology support this conclusion.
Similarly, authors Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer students making notes, either by laptop or by hand, and explored how it affected their memory recall. Inside their study published in Psychological Science, they write, “…even when allowed to review notes after a week’s delay, participants who had taken notes with laptops performed worse on buy essays online tests of both content that is factual conceptual understanding, in accordance with participants who had taken notes longhand.”
All have felt the difference in typing and writing by hand while psychologists figure out what actually happens in the brain, artists, designers, and writers. Many who originally eagerly adopted the computer when it comes to promises of efficiency, limitlessness, and connectivity, have returned back to writing by hand.
There are a variety of hypotheses that exist on why writing by hand produces different results than typing, but here’s a one that is prominent emerges from the world of practitioners:
You better understand your work
“Drawing is an easy method that i can’t otherwise grasp,” writes artist Robert Crumb in his book with Peter Poplaski for me to articulate things inside myself. This means that, Crumb draws not to express something already he understand, but already to produce sense of something he doesn’t.
This brings to mind a quote often attributed to Cecil Day Lewis, “ We try not to write to be understood; we write to be able to understand.” Or as author Jennifer Egan says into the Guardian, “The writing reveals the story in my opinion.”
This sort of thinking — one that’s done not just using the mind, but also aided by the hands — can be applied to any or all kinds of fields. For example, in Sherry Turkle’s “Life in the Screen,” she quotes a faculty person in MIT as saying:
“Students can go through the screen and work at it for a time without learning the topography of a website, without really getting hired in their head as clearly as they would should they knew it in other ways, through traditional drawing for example…. Whenever you draw a site, when you place within the contour lines in addition to trees, it becomes ingrained in your head. You started to understand the site in a way that is not possible using the computer.”
The quote continues within the notes, “That’s the manner in which you get acquainted with a terrain — by retracing and tracing it, not by allowing the computer ‘regenerate’ it for you personally.”
“You start by sketching, then chances are you do a drawing, then you make a model, and then you go to reality — you are going to the site — and then you go back to drawing,” says architect Renzo Piano in Why Architects Draw. “You build up a kind of circularity between drawing and making and then back again.”
In the book, Orbiting the Giant Hairball, author Gordon MacKenzie likened the creative process to a single of a cow making milk. We are able to see a cow milk that is making it is hooked up into the milking machine, and now we understand that cows eat grass. But the actual part where the milk is being created remains invisible.
There is certainly an invisible part to making something new, the processes of which are obscured from physical sight by scale, certainly. But, elements of what we can see and feel, is felt through writing by hand.
Steve Jobs said in an interview with Wired Magazine, “Creativity is just connecting things. Once you ask creative people how they did something, they feel just a little guilty because they didn’t really get it done, they simply saw something. It seemed obvious in their mind after a few years. That’s because they had the ability to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. Together with reason they certainly were able to do that has been that they’ve had more experiences or they usually have thought more about their experiences than other people.”
Viewed from Jobs’s lens, perhaps writing by hand enables people to do the latter — think and understand more info on their experiences that are own. Just like the way the contours and topography can ingrain themselves in an architect’s mind, experiences, events, and data can ingrain themselves when writing down by hand.
Only after this understanding is clearer, is it far better return to the pc. In the exact middle of the 2000s, the designers at creative consultancy Landor installed Adobe Photoshop to their computers and started utilizing it. General manager Antonio Marazza tells author David Sax:
Final Thoughts
J.K. Rowling used this piece of lined paper and pen that is blue plot out how the fifth book within the series, Harry Potter while the Order of the Phoenix, would unfold. The essential fact that is obvious that it looks exactly like a spreadsheet.
And yet, to say she may have done this on the spreadsheet would be a stretch. The magic is not into the layout, that is only the start. It’s in the annotations, the circles, the cross outs, and marginalia. I realize that you can find digital equivalents every single of these tactics — suggestions, comments, highlights, and changing cell colors, nonetheless they simply don’t have the same effect.
Rowling writes of her original 40 characters, “It is quite strange to check out the list in this tiny notebook now, slightly water-stained by some forgotten mishap, and covered in light pencil scribblings…while I was writing these names, and refining them, and sorting them into houses, I experienced no clue where these people were going to go (or where they certainly were likely to take me).”
Goldberg writes in her own book, that writing is a act that is physical. Perhaps creativity is a physical, analog, act, because creativity is a byproduct to be human, and humans are physical, analog, entities. And yet within our creative work, out of convention, habit, or fear, we restrict ourselves to, as a guy would describe to author Tara Brach, “live from the neck up.”