How Digital Calligraphy Can Improve Your Ugly Handwriting

Independent development team, Etienne Nguyen Tan Hon and Yong Jie Hu wants to help you improve your handwriting. The study of calligraphy can help do that — plus give you a life-long craft. Enjoy

 How Digital Calligraphy Can Improve Your Ugly Handwriting Independent development team, Etienne Nguyen Tan Hon and Yong Jie Hu has announced the launch of Calligraphy HandBook on the App Store.

Nowadays, it seems that computers and virtual keyboards take over handwriting. People have less occasion to handwrite some words on a white sheet of paper. But, in some cases they still have to manually write words and sentences: filling a form or a check, writing a shopping list, a short message on a post-it, college or university exams, etc. In such cases, having a good handwriting will increase the impact of your writings.

Why people have bad handwriting? Obviously you get bad habits since the years you write your first letters. And these bad habits stick to you, even amplify with the years. Bad learning leads to bad writing habits, such as:

  • Bad tense body position.
  • Writing with hand and wrist instead of shoulder and elbow. Your palm sticks on one point of the paper.
  • Tight and short pen grip.
  • Heavy pressure of the pen nib into the paper.
  • Lack of patience causing unfinished or mis-shaped letters and words.

What calligraphy can bring to cursive handwriting? You may think that writing letters has no connection with calligraphy. It’s basically right. But, the fact of drawing letters in an artistic purpose will lead you to better practice of your handwriting. The main reasons are:

  • Drawing letters in calligraphy is made in a very low speed. This is a good way to slower down your writing speed.
  • The stroke sequence (or ductus) for drawing a letter is a precise decomposition of the letter into several parts. Each part is drawn with a different stroke direction. This practice will help you to deeply understand the structure and the proportion of the letters.
  • Drawing large letters will force you to make better curves and lines.
  • Practicing calligraphy is drawing letters inside a pre-defined frame. Beginners start to write with guiding lines and grids. Height and width of the letters are precisely defined according to the nib width. For example, the letter “a” in Fraktur Gothic hand must have exactly 5 pen nib height. With a different height the style has changed, the letters will not be consistent.
  • Position and direction of the lines and curves are fixed. For beginners, they have to be drawn according to the models. Advanced calligraphers used to develop their own style for each alphabet.
  • Letters and words can be freely decorated. Calligraphers make beautiful writings with flourished strokes and swirls.

What Calligraphy HandBook can do for your bad handwriting? Digital calligraphy on a mobile digital device will make your practice easier and more enjoying. The challenge is to bring an ancient art of writing into an up to date technological device. The advantages are really significant:

  • Starting a calligraphy session with only one click. Calligraphers don’t need to prepare papers, ink, pens and nibs. It’s not necessary to clean up your work station at the end of the session.
  • The virtual papers and guiding lines can be cleared and re-used without limits. The working view can be enlarged at will.
  • Digital calligraphy is highly and quickly rewarding with helpful functions and tools. The application provides 19 models of calligraphic hands, tracing exercises on papers with guiding lines and grids. The strokes are smoothened with a specific algorithm. Some pen nib models digitally created are impossible to replicate in real life.
  • A self evaluation module with scoring performance

Device Requirements: * Compatible with iPad2 or newer * Requires iOS 6.0 or later * 67.5 MB

Calligraphy HandBook 1.0 is free with in-app purchases, available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the Education category.

Category: Graphics & Design, typography, Photography, Art, Video

Calligraphy Handbook by Nguyen Tan Hon-Hu Calligraphy Handbook by Nguyen Tan Hon-Hu
Calligraphy HandBook Screenshot Calligraphy HandBook Screenshot
Calligraphy Handbook  Screenshot 2 Calligraphy Handbook Screenshot 2


Paris, France – Located in Paris France, independent developer team Etienne Nguyen Tan Hon and Yong Jie Hu focus specifically on iPhone and iPad development on graphical domain. Copyright (C) 2014 Nguyen Tan Hon-Hu. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone, iPod and iPad are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.