Why Technique Alone Never Creates Expressive Lettering

Technical skills are taught as if they lead to control. You just need to know the right angle, the right amount of pressure, the right proportions, etc. and you will get better. It’s true. Technical skill allows you to be intentional. Without it, your work will be a mess. There are plenty of letterers who know enough to produce technically sound work. But their lettering is boring. The problem is that they focus on technique as if it alone will solve their problems. Technique isn’t expression. It’s a means to expression.

Expression happens when you don’t have to think about technique anymore. At the beginning, every single stroke takes so much thought and consideration. You have to think about the technique while you are doing it. You don’t have the mental space to consider anything else. As you develop your technical skills through repetition, you begin to have more mental space. You can make more subtle decisions. Expression is a subtle decision. It requires being free from having to think about the technique.

Another problem with focusing on technical skill is that it values perfection. Perfection is just uniformity. Uniformity is clean, but it’s not expressive. Expression requires some level of variation. You want to be able to feel the difference in the way you apply pressure sometimes, or the way you space sometimes. You can’t strictly write down the variations you need. You need to feel them. When you focus on technical skill, you lose your sensitivity. Your work becomes optimized instead of expressive.

Expression also requires judgment. It requires knowing when to push something and when to hold back. When to loosen up and when to tighten up. When to make a letter sprawling and when to make it compact. That kind of judgment can’t be taught. It requires observing your own process and paying attention to what happens when you feel different, or when you work at a different pace, or when you focus on different things. Technical skill is the raw material, but judgment tells you what to do with it.

Expression isn’t something you achieve by learning more rules. It’s something you achieve by learning which rules to follow in which situations. Technical skill gives you options. Not a set of rules to follow. When you combine that technical skill with sensitivity, then you start to get expressive work. Your letters don’t just feel like letters. They have tone. They have intent. They have your presence in them. You can’t be taught presence. You have to cultivate it through practice and paying attention and pushing yourself past doing technically good work into doing expressive work.