A practical guide to drawing letters by Ivan Castro Foreword by Ken Barber
Most creative fields – illustration, photography, painting, advertising – work primarily with images, colour and concepts, but in graphic communication, artists and designers rely almost exclusively on letters – i.e. text – to communicate their ideas. I have a strong graphic design background, and I consider letters the language of graphic communication. Calligraphy: notice the texture of the paper inside the letters, and the expressive variations of the stroke.
Lettering: here, the contour of the letters is much more controlled than in the example above.
Nowadays, the go-to media for working with text is typography; and, as this is the 21st century, that is digital typography. It hasn’t always been that way, though. To make a long story (very) short, let’s say that the Romans invented our writing system, the Latin alphabet, which they had basically ripped off from the Greeks. The Latin letterforms evolved over the centuries, and in the 15th century, the era of mass communication was kickstarted by the invention of printing by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany. Another timewarp to the 20th century takes us to a scenario in which multiple printing systems and different ways of generating letterforms were used simultaneously, each of them in their own contexts and by different professionals. As far as hand-drawn lettering is concerned, the middle decades of the 20th century saw the “golden age” of the form: during the 1950s and 60s, every publisher or advertising agency had its own team of letter artists, who would render in a quick and effective way the copywriting or logos needed. Before the computer age, hand-lettering was the fastest way of getting that work done. Hand-drawn letters were not just an aesthetic option – they were the language of the production process of that time.
Typography: a specimen of Bulo, a typeface designed by Jordi Embodas.
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Today it doesn’t work that way. If you need some form of letting done quickly, you just type onto your computer’s keyboard and voilà! There are thousands of great digital typefaces available, and there are also thousands that are lousy.
This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just the way it is: just as lettering was in the 1950s. Anyway, sometimes we find our needs are not met by a specific typeface. Maybe we need something warmer, more expressive, with a specific composition; or we just can’t find a typeface that has the feeling we have in mind, because typography is attached to certain rules and restrictions and sometimes we are forced to go beyond them. It’s time then to draw our own letters. I need to be clear from the outset that this book doesn’t go for a nostalgic way of approaching the craft of lettering; instead, if offers a contemporary way to solve graphic design problems.
CALLIGRAPHY, VERSUS LETTERING VERSUS TYPOGRAPHY In recent years, typography, calligraphy and lettering have become very popular among designers and artists. As part of a renaissance in crafts movements, handmade letters are now commonly used in the media and are widely admired. There is some confusion, however, about the meaning of these terms: sometimes we see calligraphy works referred to as “lettering”, or drawn letters called “handmade typography”, and so on. So let’s be clear on the differences between these three methods of producing letterforms. We associate calligraphy with the generation of letters using a writing tool: whether that’s a pen, a brush, a pencil or a lipstick, it doesn’t matter. We make a stroke for every essential part of the letter. Sometimes we can make a whole letter (or a word!) with just one stroke. We can create formal, classical letterforms or do some free, experimental letters. All of it will be writing. When we create lettering, we’re closer to the act of drawing than writing. We’re building alphabetical signs with
a drawing tool, using as many strokes as needed to get the exact shape we want. We can sketch, erase, correct, add, and try again to get that perfect letterform. Usually with lettering we’ll pursue a more refined, studied result than in calligraphy, where we’ll have created a rawer form. I say usually because there are always exceptions. If you compare a fine piece of English Cursive handwriting to your beloved’s name scratched onto the bark of a tree with your house keys, the former, being calligraphy, will look finer than the latter, which, according to our definition, would be lettering. In this postmodern age, you can also see some illustration work that uses letters as a pretext. Artists decorate letterforms with some aesthetic resources without really affecting the shape or the structure of the letters. The difference between this kind of work and lettering proper is very blurred, but I wouldn’t consider it to be the same thing. Typography is related to machines. Today, that means a computer, but as printing developed it went from lead and wood type and printing presses, to monotype, linotype and phototypesetting. Regardless, the fact is that in using any of these methods of production, we’re employing letters that have already been defined by others: the typeface designers. We’re not doing anything that affects the form of the letters, because in that case we would be creating a lettering work that starts with a typographic form. So, in summary: calligraphy is writing, lettering is about drawing, and with typography we work with prefabricated letters. These methods are tightly connected. Of course, calligraphy and lettering have more in common with each other than they do with typography, in the sense that they usually have a more human, warm and crafty look. But don’t forget that the typeface you’re reading right now (Century Schoolbook) was once
Introduction
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FORMAL FEATURES We can describe Roman Capitals as clean, pure forms. If we look closely at the structure of the letters, we’ll find they are formed by geometric forms – circles, triangles and squares. And in the simplified version we’re doing, this is even more evident. So, we must focus our attention on obtaining the correct structure of the letters, looking closely at their proportion and remembering the spacing. Let’s start practising, following the instructions given in the previous chapter and using the same guidelines as for Carolingian, using the ascenders line. This will give us a scale of 7.
MAKING OPTICAL ADJUSTMENTS FOR A PERFECT BALANCE The topic of balance doesn’t only apply to capitals, but it’s especially important in this script. Every writing system has its own formal model we can associate with everyday situations. For example, Chinese is written up to down, and its characters are arranged like firemen going down a pole. Devanagari is the writing system used in India and
In horizontally symmetrical letters, we should always leave slightly more blank on the bottom, to optically balance them.
The shapes that don’t fill the blank space around them evenly will look smaller, so we should go slightly beyond the guidelines to correct this optical effect.
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Nepal, and it’s written left to right with a horizontal axis at the top of the letters that makes them look like clothes hanging from a rope. The Latin alphabet is also written from left to right, but the axis is the baseline. Our letters are like people standing on the floor. Imagine you are standing with your feet together. Your balance will be poor, and it wouldn’t be difficult to topple you with a light shove. To gain stability, you would have to separate your legs. And that’s exactly what we have to do with certain letters that have a horizontal symmetry, like H, X or Z. If we do these letters exactly symmetrical, they’ll appear unbalanced. To correct this, we’ll make slight modifications to give more air on the bottom of the letters. In the H, we’ll put the bar a bit up from the centre; with the X, the blank on the bottom should be a bit larger; and the bottom stroke of the Z is going to be slightly longer than the top. This applies to some other letters, and we’ll discuss these specifically later. There’s another perception issue to solve and it has to do with the size of the letters. As we’ve seen, every shape manages the blank space around it differently. Remember the square, the triangle and the circle? What I’ve not mentioned is that the shapes that leave more blank around them are perceived by the eye as being smaller. A triangle and a square of exactly the same height won’t look equal. To correct this, we’ll have to draw the triangle a bit higher, maintaining the base but going up at the top in order to make it apparently have the same dimensions as the square. The same occurs with the circle, which will have to grow in all directions. When writing, we’ll have to do triangular letters like A or V a bit up the capitals height, and rounded letters like O or S up and down the guidelines.
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• The horizontally symmetrical letters should always have more blank on the bottom – to keep the balance in their shape.
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• Rounded and triangular letterforms will look smaller. Don’t forget to make them slightly larger to correct this.
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VARIATIONS Try playing with the factors you already know: the proportion of the letters, the thickness of the strokes, a composition using capitals and minuscules or just capitals, playing with the baseline... since you’re not attached to a particular structure or writing tool, the possibilities are endless. Remember though, that it’s important to maintain the high contrast, the thin, long serifs and the vertical axis.
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• PROJECT 2 Headline for a magazine In this project, we’ll be drawing a headline for an article in a magazine. Before starting to draw, you will have to think about the copy (the text), the topic of the article, the target audience of the magazine, and the graphic orientation that you’re going to give your lettering as a result of these factors. So, this is what I’m going to do, and you can follow the process. The copy for my headline will be “Hipsville Cocktails”, and the article will be about American vintage drinks recipes from the ’60s that have been rediscovered by a cocktail historian pickpocketing the little black book of a retired bartender. The hypothetical magazine in which the article will be published is specifically about cocktails. So, the graphic strategy I’m going to use is an emphasis on the ’60s American factor. For me, that story evokes Frank Sinatra in Las Vegas, so it has to be elegant, but also cool and hip. A Modern Roman will work well in balancing these considerations.
SEARCHING FOR REFERENCES Now, I’m asking you to draw a headline for an article on cocktails and assuming you know how this should look. But maybe you have no clue about cocktails. Or you don’t know how a magazine headline should look. Don’t worry: I get commissions every day for projects on topics I know nothing about, and I survive. An important part of the job is searching for references and documentation. Before starting a project, and especially if we’re not much into the topic, it’s very important to look at what others have done before us, to get inspired and in the mood. You also have to learn to look not just in a straight direction, but also at the surroundings. For example, in the project I’m going to do, I shouldn’t only look for magazine headlines on cocktails. Instead, I should look at all kinds of old magazines; studying the way they are designed, and trying to think why art directors made certain decisions. I need to look too for alcoholic drinks advertising and bottling, Rat Pack record sleeves, Palm Springs tourism brochures… anything that will help me get into the mood and understand the field I’m in.
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• PROJECT 5 Latin music record sleeve What style could be better for a Latin music record sleeve than Latin letters? Duh, just kidding. If only all design decisions were that easy… But on this occasion it really does work. Latin letters, with their spiky serifs and the natural movement they make when used properly, will look great on the cover of a rumba, mambo or cha-cha-chá record. For my example I've done a fictional album called "Let’s Mambo with Cugat". Spanish-American bandleader Xavier Cugat was probably the biggest name in mid-20th-century Latin music orchestras. And he married the actress Charo. Win-win. Note that I’m going for a more complex composition here. A whole sentence means not only are there more words to draw, but I've also had to interpret the text and give it a proper hierarchy.
In this first sketch, we’re starting to get an idea, but there’s still work to do. First of all, I think it is too monotonous. There's too much text with the same letter style, and not enough difference between the words. We’ll talk deeper about composition later, but at the moment think about a common-sense issue: Mambo or Cugat shouldn’t have the same importance as Let’s or with. So, I have to decide what’s the most important aspect of my composition and make it more present. That’s called hierarchy. Apart from that, there are
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some formal issues I should fix anyway. First of all, if we look at the first line, in Mambo the “bouncing” is pretty well balanced. I've put the letters in that word up and down, to avoid their serifs touching each other, giving a natural bounce. With Let’s, since those particular letters have no serifs, I haven’t applied the same movement there. Something similar happens in with, but this time the problem is not a lack of movement, but a descent. The letters vary in relation to the baseline, but they don’t look balanced. And well, there are some spacing issues in this word as well.
In this new sketch, I’ve solved some of the problems we had in the first one, including taking a new approach to the look of Cugat – doing it in capitals, bolder, and with a wider proportion. I think that the lettering now stands pretty well – although perhaps we should have a more open spacing, and probably
the L in Let’s should be slightly taller. I’m not happy about the composition, though. It lacks movement, and considering we’re thinking about using it on a record cover, which has a square proportion, the position is too horizontal. I need to think about this some more for the final composition.
In the final version (below) the composition is much more dynamic because I've played with the size and the situation of the different elements. This idea is breaking the linearity of the previous composition. And in this case, adding a burst of colour also helps give the group of elements more depth.
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3.8 | Interlock
In the late 1950s, a really modern and surprising style of lettering started to spring up in many different manifestations of popular culture. Seen on everything from movie posters to paperback book and record covers, the new style was fresh, hip and vibrant; it had its heyday in the ’60s and made it to the late ’70s. The masters of the style were, to name but a few, Ed Benguiat, Rick Griffin in his early days, and my personal hero, Harry Chester. We’ve seen what happens when we make letters bounce up and down the baseline: the text gets a dancing, flowing movement. Interlock letters take this movement to the next level. Not only can we make letters jump up and down, we can make them interrelate in a very intimate way. We open the counters so we can fit parts of other letters inside them. We enlarge certain strokes or make serifs to create room to take in the next letter. Gee, I don’t really know how to keep describing interlock lettering without sounding dirty. Size is another important factor. In order to make letters interlock, and also add more dynamism, changing their size is almost mandatory. We also use a mix of capital and minuscule forms (which is known as unicase). Some perfect examples of interlock letters can be seen on the album covers
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of ’50s and ’60s bands: look for Surfing by The Ventures, Surfbeat by The Challengers, Surfer’s Choice by Dick Dale, Surf Rider by The Lively Ones. The list is endless. Nowadays, we tend to associate this style with mid-20th-century surf culture, which is understandable given that the use of interlocking letters was commonplace in the scene back then. But it wasn’t used exclusively in this field. It made it to mainstream movies and TV (see the stunning lettering in the opening to the US ’60s sitcom Gilligan’s Island), and it had a strong influence over horror aesthetics. The headlines that Harry Chester drew for Warren magazine’s Famous Monsters of Filmland are true masterpieces.
THE LOGIC OF INTERLOCKING In fact, interlock has less to do with the shape of the letter itself than how the letters relate to each other. Usually we work with condensed, Gothic letters with low or no modulation. Sometimes we use slab serifs. But hey, don’t be surprised if you find an interlocked Modern Roman. The compositional freedom offered by this style makes it possible to break rules we have learned as dogma. For example, the length of the strokes, the continuity of the thickness of them, the logic of thin and thick, and the formal relationship between letters is something
you can play with if you’re looking to create a wacky composition. Having said that, this approach will only work if the whole lettering piece is balanced. If not, it will just look like a bad joke. The way to start doing an interlocked lettering piece is by thinking. Basically, it’s about drawing letters inserted into each other, so we have to find out how to make them fit. There are certain letters that have plenty of space, like L or T. Let’s consider some examples. If you have the pair LO, just make the O a bit smaller and place it over the bar of the L. In other cases it is not that simple. C is also an open letter, but not that open. So, if you have to solve the pair CH, you can just extend the bar of the second letter so it fills the space left by the C.
On the left, we’ve broken some rules in this E to get a more expressive letter. Below, depending on what pair of letters we have, it can be easy to interlock them or you’ll have to force a bit the situation.
Or you can be more extreme and place the first vertical stem of the H inside the letter. But, what if we have a pair like NO, in which there are two closed letters? In that case, we can always place a big serif on the top of the N and place the letter O under it. Breaking the law. Let’s do a basic exercise in interlocking with the word Monster (see right). The first thing we should do is draw the hairline structure of the word, look at it, and try to find a possible relationship between the letters. The first one we see is the bar of the T, under which we can place the S and the E. In MON we have no other choice than to place slab serifs in M and N to make room for the O. And that’ll do. In the second example, the interlocking is already done. The T made me place S and E down, to keep the balance, I’ve placed the O up. And to avoid drawing an extremely long bar in the T, I’ve added some serifs in N and R, keeping the space busy. Finally, I’ve added a consistent thickness.
Tracing a hairline structure before drawing the outline of the letter, will help us identify a possible relationship between the letters.
It’s not that you have to manipulate every single letter in a word, but in this case, it’s appropriate.
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On this page are some examples of interlocked lettering. Although the idea is basically the same – making letters interrelate – the formal resolution can vary from the irregular, angular forms of Beach Party to the curvy, quasi -psychedelic Cachopo. Opposite is a composition of text in classic surf interlocked letters, originally cut in a linoleum board.
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Introduction
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In the second sketch, I've improved the lettering, correcting the details I spotted in the previous one, and it certainly looks much better. I've redrawn the h a bit further up the baseline – in the last sketch, it shared the baseline with the s, and being smaller, they looked unbalanced. Now we’re keeping their sizes in relation, but it looks more natural. I’ve also set the group in a slight diagonal direction. There are two reasons for this: firstly, it gives a more casual feel, as if the word had just been dropped down; secondly, it makes room for the words Speed Shop, which I’ll add later with a sans serif typeface.
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There are still a couple of things to fix at the beginning of the word. The terminals at the base of Tr coincide, creating a continuous line that looks a bit awkward. Also, the counter of the r is still a bit closed. Something similar happens with h, which should be a bit wider. The T goes a good way below the baseline, and when I inclined the word, I was afraid that it “hung” too much, because it’s the lower point of the whole. But when I doodled Speed Shop, it automatically became balanced. Anyway, we now have that blank space between the T and Speed, which I’ll try to fill.
THE ABC OF CUSTOM LETTERING Paperback with aps Size: 216 mm x 260 mm 176 pages ISBN: 9780957664975
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