What Separates Calligraphy, Lettering, and Type Design?

Jessica Hische separates calligraphers, lettering artists, and type designers by tool and purpose. Calligraphers work with writing implements and painting implements, so they are informed by the tool. The work is mastery of the tool and of what the tool can do, plus rigid practice in the styles they stay inside. The tools are physical.

Lettering artists are sometimes informed by calligraphy and sometimes not. They use letter forms as a vehicle for artwork and make a one-off piece that is not meant to scale. Type designers are the scalers. They approach typographical design as engineering: how to make a design that can be endlessly bent and used when nobody knows who will use it, and that still has to hold up in many different contexts. Typographers, in her account, arrange type, so any graphic designer is a typographer.