Book 43: Hand Lettering A to Z
The random letter generator eventually came up with "SY" and I found a delightful book by Abbey Sy, Hand Lettering A to Z: a world of creative ideas for drawing and designing alphabets. I happen to have a font making program that hitherto-fore had only been used for making an ocarina tab font, so I thought why not try it for a real font?
I admit the book itself wasn't much help to what I was doing. It was about traditional media like ink pens and watercolor, and if you want to do some lettering on paper it's a brilliant resource. It did have some good universal tips like making sure your size is consistent and thinking about coherent design and all that. It was also very helpful in providing a wide variety of font styles to be inspired by.
SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK: If you want to be inspired to make your own font it's great. Again, the meat of the book is traditional paper media, so whether that's helpful to you is something you would know.
ART PROJECT:
Ok, here is what I was most looking forward to. I ended up having so much fun making the first typeface that I made a second, bonus one. The first is all animal shapes with each letter starting with the name of the animal it was shaped like.
and the second font. As you can see I need to work on the S, which was inspired by those diamondy line Ss that were popular with schoolkids.
