Salt Lake Tribune - Different strokes
Calligraphers Don and Ron Tate have an interesting clientele. If they were to jot down all the names and addresses of their customers in a Rolodex, it would read like the guest list at Gov. Jon M.
Huntsman's birthday party. Wait. It just might be the guest list from Huntsman's birthday party.
You see, following in the long tradition of calligraphers who worked for kings and queens, the two have clients who include international businessmen, foreign dignitaries, the über rich and - in the Tates' case - LDS Church presidents. "In our business, word of mouth will make or break you," Don Tate says. "These are people who want things that are one-of-a-kind keepsakes, done just to their specifications, so what they end up with is an original.
" "People come to us with special requests, kind of like how a celebrity asks a dress designer to design something unique to wear to the Academy Awards," adds twin brother Ron. "Only we work in paper, pen and glass." Ron recently won first place at the Springville Art Museum's annual Utah Artist's Show with his engraving of a Book of Mormon scripture on five layers of glass.
Don has designed logos for several award-winning private wine labels.
from Dallas to Draper, has designed fonts for brides and businessmen. Now that the two are living closer to one another, they might trade off projects to help meet deadlines.
"You'll get a bride who will want a special font for her wedding announcement and then hope to have them all handwritten by a certain time," Ron says. A recent client requested a "set" of hand-written genealogy charts, done on a paper so thick that it looks more like cloth. He wanted each individual family member to have his own.
While the penmanship might be similar on each piece, it is the the almost indiscernible, human-made variations in the script that gives each chart its character and aged look. ''People always ask us if we are worried about computers taking our place,'' Don says. ''The answer is 'no.
' The people who hire us don't want something that can be replicated on any computer, anywhere.'' Not to mention that most computers cannot accommodate all of the curlicues that swirl around each letter. Calligraphy - or the art of beautiful penmanship - has been around for centuries.
The Tate brothers say that the fanciful scripts they use in their art projects are based on the same strokes grade-school students learn when they begin to write in cursive. "Every student learns it for about three days and then they abandon it," Ron says. The brothers, who grew up in the mining town of McGill, Nev.
, were introduced to it in elementary school. But they became intrigued with handwriting because of the birthday cards they received from their uncle, done in perfect penmanship and containing a 5 bill. "As little kids, we noticed this and would wait to get his cards every year, just to see what our names would look like," Don says.
The 64-year-old brothers are mirror twins, a common occurrence in identical twins who tend to have similar traits and features - only one has it on right hand and the other has it on the left. For instance, Ron's hair parts from the right side of his head and Don's natural part is on the left - as if looking in the mirror. "But we kick with different feet," Ron says.
When it came time for college, the two enrolled at Brigham Young University. Don majored in communications and art. Ron majored in art and minored in communications.
''Of the two of us, Ron has always been the more artistic,'' says Don, who left Utah to pursue a career in advertising and marketing, and worked in the insurance industry. Ron stayed in Utah, teaching art for many years. "Ron is a fine watercolorist, too," says SLCC art professor Lana Gruendell.
"Calligraphy does seem like a dying art form, but students can learn a lot about the history of type if they learn about calligraphy - and that is an important aspect." Don, who has always had a calligraphy business on the side, has signed on as an adjunct professor to teach calligraphy classes at SLCC. Over the years, Don has delved more into the history of the art of penmanship.
He owns a collection of more than 100 pens once owned by master calligraphers over the ages. The long-stemmed pens are usually handcrafted to fit the size and hand positions they used when holding the pens to write. "No two people hold their pens alike," he says.
"I suppose we have our different styles and techniques," Don says. "But he and I often trade things back and forth in order to get them done.
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