Hand-lettering

Long ago and far away, like in the 1970's when I was in grade-school, I used to love to decorate my school folders and notebooks with all kinds of hand-drawn lettering. Bubble letters were a big thing with all the girls, including myself, but I was also smitten with fancy signatures, calligraphy, and album cover art. The very first album I purchased was Fleetwood Mac: Rumours, and I fell in love with the decorative lettering across the top of the album jacket, with it's beautiful glyphs and serifs.



I wanted to be able to draw letters like that, with swirls and curlicues and lines of various weights and thicknesses. Soon thereafter, albums like the Eagles Greatest Hits were added to my collection and I spent hours studying the albums and practicing my "E"'s and "A"'s and "S"'s in pencil and ball-point pen.

My love of decorative typography has never left me, but I never made the time to practice or play with it once computers made hand-lettering seem like a quaint but obsolete skill. However, with the resurgence and demand for handmade it's not surprising that hand-drawn letters, signs, posters and info graphics have been enjoying a new appreciation in our increasingly homogenous and mass-produced world.

Recently I've stumbled across the amazing work of Sean McCabe (or Seanwes as he is occasionally known) and his work kind of re-ignited my love for decorative hand-drawn typography and composition. I went so far as to enroll in a small on-line course that Sean teaches called "Digitizing Hand Lettering, from Sketch to Vector" over at Skillshare.com. Sean suggests learning and understanding the how's and why's of typography design, but emphasizes that the only way to truly learn is by putting pen to paper and practicing again and again and again. So I did, a simple doodle of my name, and though I could pick it apart bit by bit I am, after-all, shaking of layers of cob-webs, and I have no doubt I'll get better.



My tracking is weak and my line weight has some serious issues, but the process itself was rather meditative and fun. I sketched first in pencil on a lined piece of notebook paper, inked it with a Micron pen, scanned it into photoshop and added the texture and vectorized it in Illustrator.

Yay for hand-lettering! If you'd like to see some lovely examples simply check out Pinterest and search "hand-lettering". I've found several tutorials, step by step photos of processes, and some really cool posters, signs and other graphics that are inspiring and just plain old fun to look at!