Luke Lucas is an illustrator, designer, and typographer with a self-made career spanning two decades. In the late ‘90s, he co-created FourInARow, an inline skating magazine that was distributed worldwide. With two other partners, he started Lifelounge-Simultaneously a creative agency, online creative cultural portal, and glossy print magazine. It was through Lifelounge that he began to experiment with conceptual illustrative typography, custom lettering, and type design, and it wasn’t long before he was attracting illustrative type briefs from agencies, publishers, and brands across the globe. His regular clients include Nike, Target, USA, Esquire, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. In 2011, as a new father, Luke left Lifelounge to spend more time with his family and to pursue a full-time freelance career focusing on type.
This piece was created for the 2012 group type show Who Shot the Serif at Sydney’s He Made She Made Concept Gallery. The process for this piece, as with most of my work, was to commence with some initial sketches on paper to help visualize how the letters and ligature might interact. Once the lettering was decided, I made a scaled-up version of the type, placed it over several layers of black foam core that had been glued together to form a dense base, and began to insert dress pins along the edges of the letters. Once all the pins were inserted and my fingers stopped bleeding, I used French embroidery cotton to connect the pins by making overlapping lines in a repeated pattern across the face of the type. Once this stage was complete, I finished the work with a final outline in the same cotton to help define the letterforms.