Bond – Robowritten notes as a service | Hacker News Reader

Bond – Robowritten notes as a service

hellobond.com

42 pointswoebtz27 comments

I practice calligraphy as a hobby and am quite amused by this. From a marketing perspective, "hand written" letters on high quality paper sealed with wax and delivered to a customer is probably a good way to get their attention.

However, because of my background, I'm looking at it from the writers point of view. The almost elaborate ritual of writing a piece starting from selecting the paper, ruling it, selecting the ink, nibs, hand (that's what we call fonts) and then getting into a semi-trance while you write it is enormously rewarding. It's the opposite of everything tech. You have to plan out the whole piece in advance and can't just "iterate". You can't backspace an error and often have to throw away an hour of work just because you lost concentration and wrote an 'e' instead of an 'a' in the last word of the piece you're working on. It's got a lot of room for "disciplined freedom". Using a non standard letter form in a place so that the overall piece is more harmonious is very gratifying. Another interesting thing is that listening to music while writing can disturb your rhythm as your hand and pen starts to pick up the beat of the song rather than the letter forms and the piece is damanged. Several things like this come into play while doing the piece and almost therapuetic for me. I wish Bond luck with their product but it'd be a loss for people to not indulge themselves in actually writing by hand just because this (or other similar) products exist.

Can you share some starting points for a newcomer to calligraphy?

Gladly. I learnt all my bad habits from a bunch of "Calligraphy for Dummies" style books and regret it. It took me quite a while to undo all the damage I did. If you're serious about it, here are the resources I recommend.

1. Get only "Foundations of Calligraphy" by Sheila Waters. It's an excellent book and gives you detailed instructions on all aspects of the craft from tools, to setup, to hands, to layout and even advice on preventing burnout. The only shortcoming is that it focusses exclusively on square nib calligraphy which is very different from pointed pen hands (e.g the kind you see on http://www.jakeweidmann.com/collections/calligraphy/products...). I'm not really into pointed nib scripts (like copperplate or spencerian) so I can't really recommend much on that front.

2. Get yourself the highest quality materials you can afford. I generally use manuscript calligraphy ink along with speedball nibs and a speedball holder. I use a 90gsm paper from http://www.jkpaper.com/ which is heavy enough to handle the ink but light enough to see through for the rulings. I like to support the little guys so I usually batch order my materials from http://www.johnnealbooks.com/. Don't skimp on materials. When your initial work is crappy, the quality of the materials compensate a little and give you the motivation you need to keep at it. (Cf. http://zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beginner...).

3. Sheila Waters book covers this but it's important to practice rhythm (where you memorise a short piece and write it out at a consistent pace to train yourself) spearately from practising analysis (where you critique your letterforms and correct errors in spacing and other details so that you get better). You'll need to spend atleast 20 minutes on each of these per day. Add to that some more time to fix up your paper and seat and you'll need to dedicate about an hour per day.

4. It's useful to keep a bunch of cheap calligraphic markers around so that you can doodle your letterforms. I find it relaxing to do that and it helps me "stay in touch".

5. I have a program on my website to generate calligraphic rulings for various nib sizes and scripts http://calligraffiti.in/rulings. In my own case, the tedium of ruling each sheet manually used to put me off and the programmer in me scripted the task.

6. The http://www.calligraph.com/cyberscribes/ is a mailing list for practitioners which I've benefitted from before.

I myself put out some of my work at http://calligraffiti.in/ and did a presentation for a friends company which was later put up on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Kis5GBr2fk

Feel free to email me if you want to talk about it in any more detail. I'd be glad to help.

Whew! I was worried there was something that marketing people couldn't cheapen. Thank goodness technologists have labored night and day to counterfeit handwriting. I especially like their oxymoronic slogan, "The Personal Touch, at Scale".

As has long been said, "If you can fake sincerity, you've got it made." I guess they're all set.

These guys are far from being the first to automate handwriting and signatures. Chances are if you get a form letter back from a politician, important person, etc. it's been signed by a robot like this.

Ok, sure? I read the tone as contradiction, but I don't think I said that they were first to do signatures.

You might enjoy the movie 'her'. And by enjoy I mean it will probably anger you :).

My handwriting is inconsistent and after decades of typing, I'm prone to making mistakes when writing by hand which quickly renders writing thankyous a painful chore. If the choice is between me sending something like this or not getting around to sending anything, I think this has its place.

My wife uses TouchNote to send physical postcards from her phone of photos she's taken of our children to various family members. I think they're pretty cool, especially when you consider that doing this otherwise is painful enough that it never happened.

If they're using your handwriting, I wonder if they randomise between a few instances of each letter rather than having one of each. I imagine all of us check convincing handwriting fonts by comparing multiple instances of the same letter?

Artisanal spam. Why not?

It's not a new idea, though. The direct mail industry already does this. See

  http://www.getitopened.com/

"NEW! Use our proprietary technology to hand-address your envelopes! We specialize in production methods for high volume mailers that will incorporate realistic hand addressing at a fraction of what it would cost to contract a workroom to do the job. Simulated fonts made from real handwriting samples are also available."

They can also put stamps on slightly crooked so it looks hand-mailed, have hand-written sticky notes attached to the contents, or include a hand-written letter on yellow lined paper.

Because nothing says 'insincere' like non-handwritten handwritten correspondence.

Nailed it.

If you want to make your spam worse, insult me by having a robot try to trick me into thinking you wrote it yourself.

MailLift (https://maillift.com/) takes the alternative approach of crowdsourcing the writing.

Getting a handwritten note is cool, I guess, but as soon as this type of thing becomes mainstream it's just as meaningful as an email yet far less efficient. I'm not seeing the big secret play behind the scenes that would make this really valuable.

What am I missing?

Slow adoption, niche service. Companies who adopt it think they'll look ahead of the curve, and to anyone who pays attention to paper mail and doesn't automatically treat it as spam, they might.

That's what I mean though, is the cure for email handwritten notes? Maybe there will be in person couriers for all important communication now. /s

I actually think a short handwritten note to thank someone for meeting with you or whatever is a nice gesture that stands out from the standard email and doesn't take much effort. Of course, that's real handwritten, not faux handwritten.

I do receive marketing materials from time to time that make a particular effort to stand out--sent FedEx or physical swag of some sort or gimmicky attempts at games/contests/etc. I admit they usually get me to at least look at the mailing though I'm probably no more likely to buy something.

I agree handwritten notes or physical communication of some sort can be effective if people think it's genuine. The problem with making a startup out of this is you are inherently fighting virality because once you do go mainstream you lose the personal value of it.

An interesting comparison is how Facebook started charging to get into a strangers inbox. The intentions behind this seem to be the same. A world fighting for each others attention...

Yeah. It only really works if it's not the norm, i.e. it stands out. If every donation thank you letter over $20 starts being sent out this way, then it becomes worthless in a hurry. The other downside is that it encourages outsourcing the personal touch. If you're a charity, you should individually reach out to your large donors, not outsource that to a faux handwritten form letter. (Though as others have noted, politicians use robo-signers a lot.)

No thank you. The huge risk of a single customer finding out this deception and raising a storm on social media would completely reverse the potential benefit of having a more personal touch.

Maybe if used very carefully and very scarcely.

Maybe now someone can create a scan-handwritten-notes-and-email-me-the-contents-as-a-service?

Interesting, I don't think that this has a big place in the consumer market, but I do think this could be valuable to companies wishing to make a statement in some select letters. Maybe just as that top tier "because we could" category. When you need to stand out, they could provide that opportunity.

Hey I would like to upload just a SVG and get it drawn with ink. Is that possible? Multi color too?

From a purely mechanical point of view, writing is fairly hard. You have to do more than bring a pen into a position, you have to apply some pressure, as well.

I'm currently building a whiteboard plotter (as opposed to a pen) and it is a PITA.

is there any software out there that does this, or did you write it yourself?

Yes. I am using a CNC motion controller (right now, GRBL) and it processes gcode generated by Inkscape.

Here is a video in which I test a parameter change (too far, in this case - it wobbles): http://youtu.be/a3iNFk0GibE

Does it show variation between instances of the same letter? Or is it basically like making a font of your own handwriting, where every E looks like every other E?

Uncanny valley.

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