The Lettering Workshops

Whoa, there’s way more to lettering than I had thought and this book appears to have it all! I will start with my conclusion: I recommend, without reservation, this book for anyone who does lettering and even for those who don’t- you will find it interesting and useful either way. Just reviewing all of the chapters in the table of contents is impressive – I never knew there was so much to lettering! I appreciate that the author gives a brief history of the lettering, that it actually did not begin until the second half of the 19th century. More amazing, it was American letter painters who named the art. Funny how much we don’t know about something we look at every day 🙂 She points to Ford and Coca-Cola as examples of early lettering; looking at them now in a book about the art of lettering, I realize how lovely these logos really are.

Turns out the art of lettering pretty much disappeared once we had computers but happily, she points out, in the last decade vintage lettering “styles have made a comeback.” Yay! I already enjoy this author for the information she gives not to mention the illustrations I’m seeing at the beginning of the book. In one of the first chapters she talks about how to make a grid for your letters to hang on and that reminded me of grade school in the mid-1950s, when we used a grid of sorts to learn handwriting.

In just about any book on photography you were going to see a section on composition. How interesting that there’s a chapter on composition for lettering as well! Much like in photography, composition has a lot to do with thinking about what is important and what you want to convey so that you compose with that in mind. Interesting point is that which composition you choose is going to affect your choice of the style of lettering. Not only that, but the lettering style needs to be consistent with your message’s content.

The author asks us to learn the distinctions among the three general types of letters which are lettering, calligraphy, and typography. Very interesting reading and I know I will appreciate lettering more now when I look at it. She gives an example of Italian brush calligraphy and I am in love with it. At the end of the book the author talks about digitizing the work with software and vectorizing it. Have to say, I had no idea what vectorizing was before this. Turns out Adobe makes great vectorization software – of course, it also makes wonderful photo editing software 🙂

This book covers the gamut of the lettering process and does it in easy to understand language for folks like me who don’t know much about lettering. I found I not only understood what she was saying, I was interested as well. She uses great illustrations for her concepts, many of them commercial works. Some you will easily recognize. As I stated at the outset, I heartily recommend this for people who want to learn lettering, or just want to learn about lettering!