According to David Brooks' column today, "People remember information that is hard to master. In a study for Cognition, Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel Oppenheimer and Erikka Vaughan found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than information transmitted in easier fonts."

So all these years spent tweaking obstructionist serifs and micromanaging kerning and becalming exuberant flourishes is for naught? Hear me, oh legibility squad, thee who sit on committees critiquing expressive letterforms and who delight in bringing down your iron fist upon the calligrapher's wrist, what if God really is in the complexity? What if the cereal box that can't be read from the milk aisle afterall but requires a closer view is the one we recall and reach for? Or the tangled romance cover with s's commingled like Medusa's curls, what if that's the one we send someone to the Fred Meyer to buy secretly just before midnight?

I never thought David Brooks, with whom I disagree on almost everything, would inspire me to art. But here you go, "Legibility, Rest in Peace." Unretouched brush calligraphy done with one of those brushes that has such a fugitive ink that if I don't scan it right now it will vanish tomorrow.

© 2010 Iskra Johnson