By hand or by font? ALL IN UPPERCASE AS THE MIGHTY ONES OF YORE DECREED or in mixed case? A "hand-written" font or a more mechanical one?

Regardless, here's some stuff I doodled out for a friend on the subject of laying out your lettering. It's pretty much Lettering 101 level stuff but hey, maybe I left some stuff out. (Like any "how to wrangle your art program to do the job" stuff, for instance, since they use Manga Studio and I use Illustrator. Or the side notes on how the American superhero ALL CAPS tradition evolved to counteract the terrible, bleedy printing.)

This is so good! You packed so much practical info into these two pages, and I had a good chuckle. I agree about the oval balloons, also because they rarely work with the drawing style. The only comic I know where they blend in perfectly is the Smurfs. They may be the easiest to make (now), thanks to vector shapes, but that only makes their vector shape nature glaringly obvious...
I shun all caps for typographical reasons: the eye recognizes letters much better, and with much less effort, when they are in lowercase, because then they all present different silhouettes. In contrast, a text in all caps present an endless series of equal-size rectangles to the eye. It makes reading more difficult and tiresome. Caps were never meant for long texts and now that there is no technical impediment to proper typography, people shouldn't feel forced to write that way!

A lot of very good information in this set of pages! Good advice.

I recently condensed my thoughts about typography for my board gaming blog, so I'm gonna be paraphrasing a bit here, but if anyone at all gives a damn about your typography (either positively or negatively), you're probably sacrificing something about your story to do that, and you should think about if that's what you want.

Typography is a lot like stage lighting for a play. Is it important to have good lighting? Absolutely. It is a powerful tool that provides focus, direction, and emphasis. There some theatrical experiences that are entirely based on how the lighting works, and if that's the direction you want to go, there are a lot of cool things you can implement to pull it off.

But if you're not making a laser light show here, you really don't have to do much beyond the basics. The characters and plot are the focus, so all you really need to do is make sure that nothing about your typography is disengaging your reader. No layman is actually going to notice the difference between a 90 watt bulb and a 100 watt bulb. Just use what you've got. And hey, if you got the wrong bulb and the audience notices, you can always switch it out. I find that with new artists, that focus on doing things "right" (finding the perfect technical tools) prevents them from actually making a comic, and not making comics is the #1 biggest mistake in making comics.

I love how many different options you cover! Lettering is something that can have so many different, all equally valid, approaches. Yet it's often presented as "THE ONE (MARVEL/DC) WAY" and I love that you let this tutorial open up the world of lettering rather than narrow it down. Yet you still include the key components of the craft (margins, shapes, layouts, etc.) that make lettering effective when used well. So good!

Oh man that 'talking in circus posters' thing is such an ingenious idea! It definitely wouldn't work for every comic, but with the right context it's great.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far... far away, I once wrote a series on using a tablet and Photoshop tools to hand-letter a comic. I haven't looked too hard but I suspect it's still out there. It was my response to not being able to find or make an appropriate font for my own work, and so now I hand-letter each page. Not as hard as it sounds.

Necroing this a little bit, but I thought people might be interested in trying this out as well:

http://www.myscriptfont.com/

There have been handwriting-to-font applets around for a while but this one works better than the ones I've used in the past. Previous attempts I've made have had big errors in spacing, alignment, and weight on the page but the output here is pretty good. Although I'm a huge proponent of hand-lettering even I have found the process a bit tedious, especially when I have a lot of text to cover. The result of this one is pretty good. Since I letter in all caps anyway, I filled out the lowercase letters as a second set of uppercase so I can get some variety in the line on the text, and also vary my capital "I" so that the personal pronoun gets crossbars.

Anyway, worth a throw. And free. Just don't put punctuation in your desired TTF filename or it'll cause an error. Here's how my new font "Mr. Average" looks in use:


Not half bad.

I've got to decide how much I really like it for active use - I like to be able to claim I hand-letter my pages, since it makes me feel sophisticated and important. But with a little more tweaking I may get used to this.

Other people might like to give it a throw.

Ooo, that's slick!

Throwing in another vote for this lettering thread. The OP has made me aware of what a rebel without a cause I've been when it comes to lettering. Especially that general rule of thumb for leaving space around the text within the word balloon!