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I swear I will never look at a pencil the same way again

Posted by John Lampard on Thursday, 28 August, 2008 to the design and art subset

A few heartfelt words in honour of the humble pencil…

Once you start to notice their markings, pencils draw you into a beguiling world of exotic lettering. With color unavailable to their designers - absurdly, the color of a pencil either definitely indicates the color of its lead, or is completely arbitrary - pencils have historically expressed their identities through playful typography. The range of information they need to convey (manufacturer, product name, grading and classification, place of origin) calls for a self-contained system of semantic distinctions, and the unforgiving process by which tiny letters must be hot stamped into soft pine demands durable letterforms of considerable ingenuity.

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