Logo Font & Lettering Bible

Up until about the mid-1960s—the dividing line between the crew-cut conformist age and the new age of inquiry—the majority of logos and display headlines in magazines and ads were hand lettered with brush or pen. The changeover to a preference for type over lettering undoubtedly had something to do with the emergence of huge photolettering type catalogs by that time. But even Photo-Lettering, Inc., maintained an active studio of hand let-terers to tweak fonts for custom jobs.

As late as 1989, some agency hired me to hand letter three words for a newspaper circular ad. I thought they were nuts, since the style they specified was almost identical to an existing font. But they didn't want type, they wanted unique, custom lettering exclusively theirs.

The tradition lives on today in the upper echelons of publication design. You might look at a logo and say, "But it's just Helvetica." No,

it's $20,000 worth of hand-lettered Helvetica with a slight upturn added to the crossbar of the lowercase e that justified the expenditure and gladdened the heart of some CEO.

To this day, despite the computer revolution that has loosed the font industry from its pig-iron age moorings, type has yet to match the limitlessness and flexibility of letters drawn by hand where each letter shape can be nipped and tucked to accommodate the surrounding ones and every word or phrase can benefit from the designer's maximal interpretation.

Because of the continuing glut of computer fonts—the greater percentage of which are embarrassingly amateurish—the idea of custom lettering has lately been discarded along with the 1.5MB floppy disk. This is fine for the many and for those who don't mind using OPF (other people's fonts) as the basis of their logos. After all, the amazing number of fonts now in existence, and the hundreds more that shall emerge between the time of this writing and its publication, might be said to provide a measure of exclusivity to our work since most people will never even be able to identify the fonts we use.

But if you are designing an exclusive logo for a company or a magazine masthead, would you really want to use a font that anybody can purchase for a few bucks or download for free?

Certainly, the owners of font foundries, myself included, hope designers will continue to buy our fonts for making logos. However, in my other job, as a book writer, I'm the embodiment of the noble Chinese saying: "The extract of the indigo plant is bluer than the plant

itself," which means, May the student surpass the teacher. Of course, I hope you don't surpass me, because I need to earn a living, too,

DESIGNERS DO IT WITH STYLE

The difference between a designer and an actual artist is, a designer can indicate preferences and arrange preexisting graphic elements but cannot draw well enough to bring his best visions to fruition by his own hand. A designer's inability to draw may also unconsciously limit his ability to conceptualize.

Of course, lots of designers create incredible pieces that make us all go, "Wow!" and want to copy them. And since the end result is all that matters, who cares if assistants do our creative grunt work? The trendsetting designer Herb Lubalin had letterers such as Tony DiSpigna and Tom Carnase to bring his wonderful conceptions to fruition. Seymour Chwast, on the other hand, despite the many designers he's employed, has always kept his hand, literally, in the work he produces.

"Today's designers," says letterer Gerard Huerta, "are assemblers of stock images and fonts. They learn how to assemble from source books and put it all together, and they never have to hire a photographer or illustrator, because it's just a matter of assembling ready made pieces."

It wasn't always this way. Many of the art directors of old who hired the Norman Rockwells and EG. Coopers of those times had prodigious drawing and lettering skills. But standards have fallen. Few of us today can design, draw and letter the way guys like Will Dwiggins, Walter Dorwin Teague, Clarence P. Hornung and C.B. Falls did. (See "Letterers Who Draw" on page 102.)

Throughout this book, I will try to create that breakthrough for you, from being a designer who specs type and pushes it around, to one who creates type and then pushes it around.

You, too, can be like Frank Lloyd Wright, who wrote, "Were architecture bricks, my hands were in the mud of which bricks were made."

I will attempt to do this merely by convincing you that you can do it—you've just been afraid to try. Another reason you've relied on OPF is that nobody ever told you the little secret that I was privileged to have revealed to me by the late, legendary cartoonist Wally Wood: "Never draw what you can copy; never copy what you can trace; never trace what you can photostat and paste down." Nowadays, we'd say, "Never trace what you can scan into Adobe Photoshop." And there you have it; the secret to becoming the logo designer you've always wanted to be is: "Research."

THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK

wrote this book to enable you to expand your creativity and end your reliance upon the logos and fonts of other designers to become a logo and font designer yourself. Of course, there's nothing wrong with using OPF, especially if you like them. I do it myself—constantly, as we all do at times—but won't you feel proud when you can point to a logo or font and say, "Look, Ma, I drew that...6y hand!"

At this point I should define the terms hand-drawn or hand-lettered not just as letters we create with drawing tools on paper, but also letters we create on computer, because the hand still guides the digital tablet, mouse or trackball.

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Bonus Design Books

Graphic Design Logo Lounge
http://rapidshare.com/files/133210599/_graphic_design__Logo_Lounge_2.pdf

New Riders Designing With Web Standards
http://rapidshare.com/files/133217646/New.Riders.Designing.With.Web.Standards_-_Zeldman.pdf

Rotovision Digital Color
http://rapidshare.com/files/133280882/Rotovision.Digital.Color.And.Type.Apr.2002.from.GFXworld.org.part2.rar