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A Signature of the Times? (Or, a Tenuous Link between Barack Obama and Ryan Gosling)

By Ray Hu - January 4, 2013

in Graphic Design

From NPR via Mashable: "As many had expected he would, the president did sign the fiscal cliff agreement with an autopen. The bill was back in Washington, D.C., while Obama was in Hawaii on vacation. So, it was signed by an autopen machine that produces a copy of the president's signature." Beltway commentators have questioned the, er, Constitutionality of his vicarious inscription, but Obama's autograph-by-proxy apparently passes muster, obviating the need to send a physical document par avion. The issue first came up back in June 2011, when CBS published a side-by-side comparison of the two signatures (on an earlier bill) for armchair graphologists:

This time around, Mashable has posted a short promo video of the Autopen of Interest.

Legality aside, I was particularly interested to see that the "Signature" in the logo for Automated Signature Technology is in none other than Mistral, which triggered an uncanny allusion to a very different implementation of the same font. As Willem Van Lancker noted in his in amateur review of the film (from a design perspective), the typeface was recently featured in the logo of Nicholas Winding Refn's noirish 2011 thriller Drive.

via Mikie Daniel

While the rest of the AST logo appears to be in Avant Garde Gothic (of adidas fame), it looks like several script-style typefaces turn up in AST's branding: from what I can tell, they use Elfring's 'Flushing' for the "70th anniversary" treatment, below, but I haven't identified which one they use for the Ghostwriter logo (as seen in the video). In any case, as Mashable commenter Smoe S points out, the typography (and tone) of the AST video look conspicuously dated, at least partly for its anachronistic brand identity.

The company apparently dates back not to the 80's but 1998, when it took its modern incarnation as Automated Signature Technology; according to the company history (and graphic above), the autopen itself dates back some 70 years, to World War II. Of course, both NPR and Mashable note that a mechanical precursor dates back some two centuries: Thomas Jefferson's 'polygraph' (not to be confused with the lie detector) dates back to 1806, an industrial design curio par excellence.

Which is a very long way of asking: with the advent of the keyboard (and its touchscreen analogs), will the art of handwriting fade into the oblivion? Now that I think about it, I suspect that millenials (myself included) are probably the last generation to learn cursive in grade school; vestigial ligatures still turn up when I'm jotting things down at speed. But with pixels increasingly rendered as sans-serif typefaces for display, it seems that script (handwritten and otherwise) is increasingly regarded as a decorative flourish; the archetypal letterforms on Apple keyboards, for example, only reinforce the grid-based legacy of Swiss typography.

Conversely, I've realized that my own John Hancock has been reduced to an illegible squiggle, thanks to grainy POS displays and their iPhone/iPad analog—viz. the Square app, for which I find myself rotating my finger in two cursory swirls (it looks like a child's drawing of a cloud) to authorize transactions. To think that I used to practice my signature before signing, say, my passport or credit card...

via Square

Seeing as my evidence is purely anecdotal, I'd be curious to hear what others think about the perceived decline of the handwritten word (stories about autopens, Ryan Gosling, Monticello, etc. welcome as well).

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Tom Mc

11 years ago

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"Why not a stamp wielded by a trusted aid, or heck, a specially hashed and tracked PDF watermark?"

You need to have your head examined if you believe a President's signature should be handled in this manner.
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Sam

11 years ago

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Andrew - Oh, I don't know if that is true... For instance, I had never heard of kerning until the last 10 years, and since then I've discovered whole blogs of people talking about typesetting, heard about publishers reviving the art of hand setting, and documentaries about nothing but typefaces. I'd say it is having quite the renaissance, in fact. Of course "day to day" people may have little interest in it, but did they ever really have interest in it?

Handwriting is a different issue - I'm quite certain that learning cursive was a huge waste of time for me - I've never used it since learning it, and fine motor skills can be learned many ways, possibly by doing something that is useful also. People still need to have reasonable handwriting, and artists and craftspeople will still take it upon themselves to learn calligraphy, it just doesn't need to be taught to everyone by default.

Autopens are a bit surprising to me, though they've been in common use for a long time (first time I heard of them, it was in the context of the university president where I was in school 15 years ago), they strike me as a weird holdover where as a people we simultaneously believe that someone must be physically present to sign a document to make it legit, and that people don't have to be physically present to place their conceptual approval on it. Which is it? If people must be physically present, then the Autopen is useless. If people DON'T have to be present, then why the farce of the Autopen? Why not a stamp wielded by a trusted aid, or heck, a specially hashed and tracked PDF watermark? It just seems strange that we don't need the person to be there, but we are still attached to the "ink signature" concept.
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Andrew

11 years ago

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Not just handwriting is on the decline. Knowledge of type and typesetting, kerning, leading, ligatures, etc. is fading into obscurity, if not oblivion.
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powers

11 years ago

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Jefferson would be proud. At least about the autopen part.
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Tom Mc

11 years ago

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I think cursive handwriting teaches much necessary fine motor skills to younger children. As one ages it becomes apparent that one will adapt to his own system.

I don't think it's a bad thing that most things are electronic - the days of not being able to read one's handwriting are long over - however I think there's some merit in preserving this lost art. It's like being able to read or draw a paper map, use a card catalog, or operate a manual machine - tasks we don't do very often but A) learning to do these things builds character and thinking skills and B) when you have to do them, the transition is seamless. How many times have I tried to give directions to people whose phone fails them only to have them not understand the cardinal directions? Too many!

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