I was reading James Edmondson’s (excellent) new book over the weekend—the Ohno book; a book about type design. One small comment caught my eye in the chapter on spacing, and stayed with me:
Tape and scissors are go-to sketching tools for their immediacy
I thought back to my time studying type design at Cooper Union in New York. I recalled the endless hours of sketching, cutting and rearranging, and—this is key—how much I hated my damn scissors.
Tools are just tools, but when tools don’t work as you expect them to, they really do impact the work. They impact your enthusiasm to do the work. They chip away at you, bit by bit, until you’re exasperated. These scissors did that to me. I couldn’t cut another letter.
That might sound dramatic until I tell you that I mean it quite literally. Somehow the combination of those scissors and the kind of paper that’s useful for sketching type just didn’t want to work together. I’d blame the paper, but I think that I know the real culprit.
I’m going to start a new type design project, and the Ohno book was making me excited to get going… but then I read that line, and I thought about those scissors. If bad tools could chip away at my enthusiasm, I thought, surely good tools could make me even more excited.
As the internet often does, it presented to me moments later a pair of scissors that I needed (yeah, I know). They were made the old fashioned way—all metal, no plastic—and looked beautiful. The kind of object you want to keep on your desk rather than shove in the drawer.
As soon as I saw them, I immediately imagined them gliding through the paper holding my sketches. Crisp, clean lines. None of that weird thing where the paper just sort of flops between the blades. I’d cut, I’d rearrange, and I’d cut again! Sketching would be a joy.
The tools that we gather—especially those that could last us a lifetime—are often worth the investment. If you love the thing that they help you to do, bring them into your workspace. Whenever I do work with tools that feel great, I feel great too. I feel great about the work.
This time, it’s scissors. Sometimes it’s paper, or the right pencil, or something much more expensive. Each one adds a little more joy to my making process, and that’s worth so much more than the tools cost.