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RSSHas the Internet made communication boring?
Feb 25
Design, Technology writing Comments
Several months ago a blogger by the name of Shaun Usher began a blog called Letters of Note. If you haven’t checked it out you really, really should. The concept behind the blog is that every weekday Shaun posts a scan of an old piece of correspondence, along with a transcription of the text. Moreover, the sender and/or recipient of each letter is usually a famous person that figures greatly into history.
I really enjoy the way that Shaun lets each piece stand for itself; at the beginning of each post he may give a small bit of context, but other than that we are left to read the letter and draw our own conclusions. It helps that almost every post is extremely outstanding, bringing history alive with emotion and drama. For example, here is a letter written by Mary, Queen of Scots to her erstwhile brother-in-law hours before she was to be executed.
What’s perhaps even more striking than the content of the letters is the image of the actual artifact: ink on paper. Hand written or typed, a formal script or a casual scrawl, always on a very distinct piece of stationery. These details add so much character to the story. For example, in the Mary Stuart example from above we can see the coarse canvas paper, the royal training of her penmanship, and the urgent hand with which she wrote that tragic letter.
What I’m getting at is this: where has the lost art of letter writing gone? All our correspondence is email, text message, etc. written in uniform text on a white background. No email will ever reach the level of expression and richness of story that these old letters portray.
However, I’m not here to bemoan the loss of an art form, I’m here to look for solutions. Because surely with all our technology and creativity we can make our letters more expressive again, no matter what medium they pass through. One of my hopes for the upcoming ubiquity of multitouch interfaces such as the iPad is that we will get a lot closer to the content that we create. With the immediacy of a touch interface, we will be able to directly interact with and design our correspondence in a more intuitive manner, instead of being constrained by a mouse arrow and a text field.
So this is a call to all the designers and developers out there (myself included): let’s get to work on making this a reality. And then, finally, one day our emails may actually be worthy enough to be viewed as artifacts.
Photo by a.drian