The brush was never the point

In a narrow street in Tunis there is a man who has painted shop signs by hand for most of his life.

He learned it from his uncle: how to mix the enamel, how to space the letters so a name reads from across the road, how to lay gold leaf on glass without a crease. For years every barber, bakery and tailor nearby wore his work above the door.

Now most new signs arrive printed. A shop owner chooses a font on a screen, a machine cuts it from vinyl, and the sign is up the next afternoon. It is cheaper and quicker, and it looks like every other sign on the street.

He can spend the next ten years arguing with that. Plenty of people in his position do. They tell anyone who will listen that the printed signs are soulless, and they are right, and the work goes elsewhere anyway.

Or he can notice what has actually changed. The brush was never the valuable part. The valuable part was the eye: knowing which letters a passer-by sees first, which colour survives the sun, what makes a shop look as though it has always been there. That is exactly what the people choosing fonts on a screen do not have.

The man who leads the change sells that eye. He designs the sign, lets the machine cut it, and still paints the one window a year that deserves gold.

The trade is still worth doing. It just is not the trade he was taught, and it is not going back to being that trade.