FranklinGothicHandLight is part of a series of hand-drawn fonts from way back in time – before computers changed the way we worked.

When I was in advertising – before computers – a very time consuming part of my daily work was sketching headlines. I used to be able to sketch headlines in Franklin Gothic, Times, Futura, Helvetica and several scripts.

We had a kind of huge inverted camera – which we called Lucy. We projected the alphabet onto a sheet of transparent paper, outlined the letters with a fineliner and then filled them in. It was very tedious work, but the resulting headline had its own charm and we had a permanent race going on who was best and fastest. I won most of the time! They used to call me the fastest “Magic Marker” this side of the Atlantic.

Great days, just like today!

Your sentimental type designer from the past Gert Wiescher