For Lauren Tang of Rabbit’s Loop Calligraphy, lettering isn’t her passion or her calling – it’s her compulsion. A perfectionist, Lauren’s purist tendencies are so formidable that she’ll tear out an entire page if she doesn’t like how she’s written the date. Since elementary school, Lauren has been obsessed with pens and stationery. “We would stock up on stationery and trade [it], me and my sister, and we would buy coloured pens,” she says. “Every time I got a new set of pens, I would write my name in every colour, test[ing] out all the colours on one page.”
Lauren’s impulse to write beautifully and neatly followed her to university, too, where she loved note taking. “I would take scribbly notes in class, and then redo every single page again,” she says. “It’s such a waste of time! But all of my notes were colour coded.” From that preoccupation stemmed a love of fonts, lettering, arts and crafts, but Lauren never thought it would lead to a profession. Instead, she pursued her commerce degree and landed a practical, analytical job as a financial advisor.