You know what? Our third grade teachers lied to us. The number of times we were ever required to know cursive in adulthood are exactly zilch, unless you count the awkward squiggle you make on a screen in the grocery store checkout line. The only reason I appreciate cursive at all is that some people grew up and managed to make beautiful things with it—people like Seb Lester, the artist who can draw any logo using calligraphy with amazing accuracy.
I hope you weren't planning on getting anything done today, because trust me, you will be entirely mesmerized by what you're about to see. Lester manages to execute this so quickly and flawlessly that you might suspect there is a machine doing it if you couldn't see his hand. To be fair, though, Lester clearly has an edge on his calligraphy competition in this department: he is so amazing at this precisely because it is what he does for a living. Lester creates typefaces for huge companies like Nike, The New York Times, NASA, Apple, and Intel. His work is frequently featured on movie posters and album covers. In fact, you've probably looked at Seb Lester's handiwork a thousand times without realizing it by now.
He recently uploaded a video on YouTube showing off his amazing freehand calligraphy skills, and the results are so stunning that you could basically use them to distract people long enough to rob a bank. Here are just a few of the logos he features in his video:
1. The Gap
2. Harry Potter
3. ADIDAS
4. Coca-Cola
5. Google
6. American Horror Story
7. Game Of Thrones
Here's the full video showing just how insane his calligraphy skills are below:
Of course, Lester is far from the only one posting crazy awesome calligraphy. Just in case you needed to feel bad about your illegible handwriting, here are some other awesome examples of calligraphy use:
Tolga Girgin's 3-D calligraphy
His entire Instagram is basically a mind-trip of calligraphy illusion. Bustle featured a bunch of his images in an article here.
Cristina Vanko's calligraphy experiment
For a solid week, Vanko responded to text messages exclusively with handwritten notes she had taken pictures of, a lot of which are compiled here.
This insanely beautiful and complex calligraphy
Literally insane how fast they managed to do that. INSANE.
But hey, we don't have to feel left out, even those of us who may or may not have failed penmanship in elementary school. If you want to learn calligraphy yourself, here's one of many handy how-to videos to get you started:
Images: Karen/Flickr; YouTube (8); Cristina Vanko
