<title>Your investment computer — here’s why you need to write and design by hand</title>  <p>J.K. Rowling scribbled along the first 40 names of characters that would come in Harry Potter in a paper notebook. J.J. Abrams writes his first drafts in a paper notebook. Upon his come back to Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs first cut through the existing complexity by drawing an easy chart on whiteboard. Needless to say, they’re not the ones that are only…</p> <p>Here’s the notebook that belongs to Pentagram partner Michael Bierut. All of the pages in the notebook resemble the best side, although he's got said to Design Observer which he had lost a really precious notebook, which contained “a drawing my then 13-year-old daughter Liz did that she claims could be the <a href="https://essay-writer.com/">paper writer</a> original sketch when it comes to Citibank logo.”</p> <p>Author Neil Gaiman’s notebook, who writes his books — including American Gods, The Graveyard Book, together with final two thirds of Coraline — by hand.<!--more--></p> <p>And a notebook from information designer Nicholas Felton, who visualized and recorded ten years of his life in data, and created the Reporter app.</p> <p>There’s a good reason why people, that have the choice to use a computer actually, decide to make writing by hand an integral part of their creative process. Plus it all starts with a significant difference that people may easily overlook — writing by hand is extremely unique of typing.</p> <p>On paper along the Bones</em>, author Natalie Goldberg advises that writing is a physical activity, and so affected by the apparatus you utilize. Typing and writing by hand produce very different writing. She writes, “I have found that whenever i will be writing something emotional, i need to write it the very first time directly with hand in writing. Handwriting is more connected to the movement associated with heart. Yet, once I tell stories, I go directly to the typewriter.”</p> <p>Goldberg’s observation may have a little sample measurements of one, but it’s an incisive observation. More to the point, studies in the field of psychology support this conclusion.</p> <p>Similarly, authors Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer students making notes, either by laptop or by hand, and explored how it affected their memory recall. In their study published in Psychological Science, they write, “…even when permitted to review notes after a week’s delay, participants who had taken notes with laptops performed worse on tests of both content that is factual conceptual understanding, relative to participants that has taken notes longhand.”</p> <p>All have felt the difference in typing and writing by hand while psychologists figure out what actually happens in the brain, artists, designers, and writers. Many who originally eagerly adopted the pc when it comes to promises of efficiency, limitlessness, and connectivity, have returned back once again to writing by hand.</p> <p>There are a number of hypotheses which exist on why writing by hand produces different results than typing, but here’s a prominent one which emerges through the world of practitioners:</p> <h2>You better understand your work</h2> <p>“Drawing is a means in my situation to articulate things inside myself that I can’t otherwise grasp,” writes artist Robert Crumb in his book with Peter Poplaski. This means, Crumb draws not to express something already he understand, but already to help make feeling of something he doesn’t.</p> <p>This brings to mind a quote often attributed to Cecil Lewis, “ We do not write to become understood; we write to be able to understand. day” Or as author Jennifer Egan says to your Guardian, “The writing reveals the whole story for me.”</p> <p>This sort of thinking — one that’s done not merely utilizing the mind, but additionally utilizing the  hands — can be reproduced to all the kinds of fields. As an example, in Sherry Turkle’s “Life from the Screen,” she quotes a faculty person in MIT as saying:</p> <p>“Students can look at the screen and work at it for a time without learning the topography of a website, without really getting hired inside their head as clearly because they would should they knew it in other ways, through traditional drawing for example…. You put in the contour lines and the trees, it becomes ingrained in your mind when you draw a site, when. You come to know the site in a real way that's not possible with all the computer.”</p> <p>The quote continues within the notes, “That’s the manner in which you get to know a terrain — by retracing and tracing it, not by allowing the computer ‘regenerate’ it for you.”</p> <p>“You start by sketching, then chances are you do a drawing, then chances are you make a model, and after that you head to reality you go back to drawing,” says architect Renzo Piano in Why Architects Draw— you go to the site — and then</em>. “You build up a kind of circularity between drawing and making and then back again.”</p> <p>Inside the book, Orbiting the Giant Hairball</em>, author Gordon MacKenzie likened the creative process to at least one of a cow making milk. We can see a cow milk that is making it is hooked up to the milking machine, and we also know that cows eat grass. But the actual part where the milk will be created remains invisible.</p> <p>There is certainly an part that is invisible making something new, the processes of that are obscured from physical sight by scale, certainly. But, components of that which we can</em> see and feel, is felt through writing by hand.</p> <p>Steve Jobs said in a job interview with Wired Magazine, “Creativity is things that are just connecting. Once you ask creative people the way they did something, they feel only a little guilty since they didn’t really get it done, they simply saw something. It seemed obvious to them before long. That’s simply because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize things that are new. While the good reason they were in a position to do which was that they’ve had more experiences or they will have thought more about their experiences than many other people.”</p> <p>Viewed from Jobs’s lens, perhaps writing by hand enables individuals to perform some latter — think and understand more info on their experiences that are own. Just like the way the contours and topography can ingrain themselves in an mind that is architect’s experiences, events, and data can ingrain themselves when writing down by hand.</p> <p>Only after this understanding is clearer, will it be best to return to the pc. In the center of the 2000s, the designers at creative consultancy Landor installed Adobe Photoshop on the computers and started deploying it. General manager Antonio Marazza tells author David Sax:</p> <h2>Final Thoughts</h2> <p>J.K. Rowling used this piece of lined paper and pen that is blue plot out how the fifth book within the series, Harry Potter while the Order associated with Phoenix</em>, would unfold. The essential obvious simple truth is that it looks just like a spreadsheet.</p> <p>And yet, to say she may have done this on the spreadsheet will be a stretch. The magic isn’t in the layout, which is only the start. It’s when you look at the annotations, the circles, the cross outs, and marginalia. I realize that you will find digital equivalents to each of these tactics — suggestions, comments, highlights, and changing cell colors, nonetheless they simply don’t have the effect that is same.</p> <p>Rowling writes of her original 40 characters, “It is very strange to consider the list in this notebook that is tiny, slightly water-stained by some forgotten mishap, and covered in light pencil scribblings…while I happened to be writing these names, and refining them, and sorting them into houses, I had no clue where they certainly were likely to go (or where they were going to take me).”</p> <p>Goldberg writes in her own book, that writing is a act that is physical. Perhaps creativity is a physical, analog, act, because creativity is a byproduct of being human, and humans are physical, analog, entities. And yet inside our creative work, out of convention, habit, or fear, we restrict ourselves to, as a man would describe to author Tara Brach, “live from the neck up.”</p>