SNP’s word of the day: Micrography

Word: Micrography

Meaning: Literally, “small writing.” Historically, a Jewish form of calligraphy that developed in the ninth century. Currently, a similar—but not so much religious—way of using tiny, tiny text to render large-scale art, often used by bored graphic designers.

Usage: “Did you see the micrography in yesterday’s Style mag? Perfect to a T.” (We’re punny today!)

You should know it because: Yesterday’s beautiful, near-perfect T Style Magazine (might as well tell you now, T editor Sally Singer is my Anna, my Carine, my everything) was also its hundredth issue. To re-imagine the T logo, as they do in every issue, they commissioned the micrography artist Michael Waugh. His work is stunning: a black T formed out of Edgar Allen Poe–like birds, appearing to have been painted with a feather’s tip but, on closer inspection, are comprised wholly of minute handwriting. What’s written are tweets—the Twitter kind, not the bird-emitted kind. And not just any typically meaning-free tweets, but the tweets from Cairo’s Tahrir Square last February, when Egypt revolted and the Mubarak government fell.

The interesting thing is that micrography, or microcalligraphy, was first practiced by Jews living in Egypt in the 10th century. Scribes transformed biblical writings into decorative patterns and marginalia. You can see some lovely old European examples here. Often the form not only matches but also gives expansive life to the content. In Waugh’s work, for example, the twisted birds are no mere aesthetic choice. They make me think of the Eagle of Saladin that flies on the Egyptian flag, adopted in their 1952 revolution, and of those wrathful birds that symbolize freedom, if by force, everywhere. It’s an image worth a thousand micrographic words, and more.

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