Letter Playground Alphabet Experiment Taking Shape

I recently uploaded a series of uppercase letters in 2 styles at Letter Playground. All the letters have been quick sketch studies at low resolution with a lot of opportunity to experiment. Playing with ideas and style concepts always leads to something good.

The cap "I" letter upload last night was rendered is a much cleaner style than the rough sketch versions. After rendering a letter this way I now want to create a complete uppercase alphabet in this style. I plan to use shapes of jewelry and fountain pens with a lot of bright toy colors when designing the letters.

A Cap Letter Project

This weekend I started a series of cap letter color illustrations for upload to Letter Playgorund. These are fun to do and anything goes. Very small size with bright color and a pleasant break from the technical demands of a commercial lettering project.

Gotta be Bad to be Good

Gotta Be Bad to be Good is a freeform script style I have been developing for the past few years. This style is a loose mix of upper and lowercase letterforms. When the piece was only 3 words it needed more interest and was changed into a play on words. After getting the rhythm and flow worked out for Gotta be Bad to be Good I decided to change the visual read to something a bit more complex with flourishes and swirls. The final result is quite different than the initial sketch and definitely more interesting to view.

You Call the Shots

Another quick wrist script exercise with a Lamy calligraphy pen on graph paper. I made the strokes thicker with a Sharpie marker and scanned the lettering for use as a template.

Little Dude

Here are some preliminary sketches for the Little Dude lettering design. This project is another example of how I change letterforms and structure while drawing in Adobe Illustrator. The tight sketch was a good start but was out of balance and the cross stroke of the double t did not read properly. All in all I am pleased with the final result and plan to continue developing this lettering style.

SkinnyBoy

The concept sketch was drawn on a 5" X 8" sheet of notebook paper.


The sketch was scanned for a template in Illustrator. The letters were drawn using single strokes of the pen tool. The offset path filter was applied to the strokes for the base letterform shapes. I added serifs to the path shapes and adjusted all vertical stroke thickness. Some letters required changes from the original concept sketch.


I eventually drew all the letters needed to build a complete character set and imported each letter to Font Lab Studio for output to OpenType format.