Letters anyone can make

Walk down a commercial street in Assiut and read the price cards and notices taped in the windows. A few are old, painted or written by someone who had trained for it, the letters spaced so evenly you only notice when you look for it. Most are new: printed at home from a phone in an evening, in whichever three or four typefaces came first in the list, stretched to fill the paper, outlined in yellow so they stand out.

People who care about lettering find this painful. But we are not the ones deciding. The ones deciding are the people who never noticed lettering at all, and who can now make their own.

For most of history, writing something and setting it out on the page were the same act, done by the same hand. Then, for a few centuries, putting letters in front of the public became a trade. It needed equipment, and the equipment came with rules, and the rules came with a shared sense of what looked proper and what looked cheap.

Give everyone the equipment and the rules dissolve. Whatever is nearest gets used. Whatever is used enough starts to look normal, then becomes the standard, and the trained hand looks old-fashioned beside it.

And yet people still read the difference. Ask someone on that street which window looks more trustworthy and they will point to one without being able to say why. It is the spacing, the weight, the restraint. They feel it without having the words.

That feeling does not disappear. Every craft the public picks up starts rough and improves as people copy what works from each other. Lettering will go the same way. The new standard will not be the old one, but there will be one.