Hand lettering for SXSW

Hand lettering is one of my favorite ways to create type, so when Salt & Time needed some large signage for SXSW, I immediately knew what I wanted to do. Here's a glimpse behind the design process in creating hand drawn type from start to finish.

It all starts with a sketch. I wanted the lettering to have a vernacular feel, like type you might see painted on the side of a butcher shop in a small town. The letters are slightly condensed with a narrow set width, tall x-height, and a ball terminal. Like how I just went all typography professor on you there? I can talk type all day long, and most days I do. To keep things consistent, I have a baseline (bottom line that type sits on), a mean line (middle line where most of the lower case letters stop), and a cap line (top line where most capitals stop) to guide in me shaping/sizing the letters. Without those lines, the letters would be a lot looser and feel too loose for this project.

Once the letters are shaped the way I want them, I redraw the outlines in black ink so I can bring it into the computer easily. Scanning in pencil drawings creates more work than needed, so this step is crucial, although it requires a very steady hand and some patience.

After I'm done with the ink outlines, I scan this into the computer at a crazy high resolution, 1200 dpi. This allows me to use the scan in Photoshop as a bitmap line drawing and quickly change the color without losing much resolution. But, I almost never work with type in Photoshop, so this is just a quick stop before I move into Illustrator. Ahem, *students*, please take note!

The scanned type is then brought into Illustrator and I use the Live Trace tool to translate it into a vector shape that can be manipulated. Unlike what you may have heard, Live Trace is not a 1-2-3-bam-MAGIC! tool. It takes a lot of finessing to get the settings right so your drawing isn't some hot mess of a million points. Again, patience is key here to getting the settings correct for your type of drawing. It all pays off, though, because the closer you can get it in Live Trace, the less mess you'll have to clean up later. Here's a screen shot from Illustrator showing the outline and points of my letter "a", shown in magenta. Those lines in the background are from the pattern used behind the type. After going back and forth with the points, I end up keeping a lot of the wonkiness (that's a technical term) in the letters so it still maintains a hand drawn feel. The curves aren't perfectly smooth, but that helps it maintain the vernacular look. You can see that most easily in the "u".

Here is the final sign, after a day of getting beat up a bit outdoors. It's five feet wide and 2.5 feet tall. It feels sooo satisfying to design something that will be HUGE. That stacked "g" is bigger than Ben's head. For the record, I didn't make that arrow. We had a nice arrow facing the other direction, but after a day they had to move the location of the sign, so the arrow was flipped via sharpie. Overall I was pretty happy with the way this turned out, and it definitely helped grab people's attention.

If you want to learn more about hand lettering, there are tons of great tutorials online and lots of great books to study. Or, you can also sign up for my Expressive and Experimental Typography course.

SXSW starting up

Hay Maze from Full Belly Farm Hoes Down festival. Capay Valley, CA.

So far, so good on the letter challenge. I've already send out two letters and have been facebook-free. Weaning myself off twitter is a bit harder, as I find that much more exciting and useful. I used to mock twitter, and then I finally committed to it and haven't looked back. Speaking of twitter and all things social media-related, SXSW is starting in a few short days. I'm a bit nervous to be finally living here in town for the maddness that is SX. The locals complain endlessly about the traffic and crowds, but they forget how much cold hard cash the event brings in during a 10-day period.

 Salt & Time will be selling grilled sausages and drinks starting next week outside of Public School, so be sure to swing by from 3/16-3/19 and say hello. I may pop in to help out and do some crowd watching--they will be just outside of the French Legation Museum, which has a great line up of shows.