Hand Lettering Basics: A Tutorial for Beginners

Table Of Content

• The free toolkit for font style generator
• Effortlessly create a letter in no time using Venngage's letter maker tool
• Script
• Are you ready to hire an incredible freelance lettering designer?
• Use control characters for your font design
• What to think about when hiring a lettering designer
• Make your fundamental font design choices

These programs aren't cheap, although Glyphs has a decent 'Mini' version for the Mac, with some functionality removed. The other obvious advantage of these packages is that you can export your work-in-progress as a font. You probably have the urge to jump into hand lettering head first, and start drawing intricate, detailed quotations.

The free toolkit for font style generator

Gothic lettering (sometimes called “blackletter”) is a particular style of calligraphy. Because it was commonly used in medieval Europe, Gothic lettering evokes feelings that date back to that era. There are many different ways to use vintage lettering styles or fonts. They’re appropriate for branding, signage, product packaging, advertisements, and more.

Effortlessly create a letter in no time using Venngage's letter maker tool

Use our special font generator to make your content shine. Sans serif letters lack the decorative feet used with serif letters. Instead, they typically have a clean look that makes them easy to read. After drawing the skeleton, let's continue on adding weights to the letter. Then draw a line as demonstrated in the picture, make sure to follow the order of drawing lines, because this will make your process easier and more smooth.

Script

This style marks the transition between the Humanist and Modern styles, so it combines a little of both styles’ characteristics. In fact, we’re constantly surrounded by letters, everywhere we look. All these sources offer us different perspectives and insights, and show us the endless ways typography can be used. Let us know if you're a freelance designer (or not) so we can share the most relevant content for you.

Are you ready to hire an incredible freelance lettering designer?

As a hand letterer you need to be able to express feelings and emotions solely with the style of the drawn letters. Many people out there confuse hand lettering, calligraphy, typesetting and type design and use the term “type” or “typography” to refer to all of these. Sans serif letters are also effective for pairing with other styles of letters. Because sans serif letters are clean and simple, they complement script and other styles. Brush lettering has a very natural feel thanks to imperfections, and it also adds personality.

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In three simple steps, unlock the power to create captivating and trendy copy and paste fonts. Your typeface might have a limited set of characters because that's what's needed for a specific project or because it's a very decorative design. However, if your aim is for for other designers to be able to use your font design in a variety of projects, then it needs to be flexible.

What to think about when hiring a lettering designer

There's a growing market for non-Latin typefaces and some scripts are woefully under-served. But can someone design a good script for a language they can't read? When a designer is choosing a particular typeface, they usually want a palette of different options to design with. Does your typeface have a true italic, not just a slanted roman?

The process of adjusting the overall space between letters is called tracking or letter spacing. In most cases one will apply positive tracking rather than negative, in order to create a more open and airy composition. A serif is the small line attached at the end of a letter’s stroke.

The power of typography

Transform your plain text into a piece of art with just a few clicks. Get millions of stock images and videos at the best priceUnlimited access. After we have added the inlays we want to add some little interior shadows and textures. In our KickOff Lettering Toolbox we are explaining in more details on how to make shadows, but here we will just skip to the most important parts. In The KickOff Lettering Toolbox you can find many different serifs we've included for inspiration but here we will focus on bracketed serif.

These “kernable” gaps will most commonly appear around letterforms like A, W, V, T. When working with type and arranging paragraphs on a page we need to pay attention to a few factors and make sure the thing we’re designing will be legible and clear. Except of course, if you’re creating some abstract, experimental typographic poster, aiming for total chaos and anarchy.

I highly encourage you to go ahead and break all of them! Learn, experiment, forget what you learned, make mistakes and start over. By doing so you will develop a style that is unique to you. However, using hierarchy is not always about highlighting certain parts of the text.

In addition to looking at overall quality, we specifically vetted each designer on this list to make sure they had experience with and specialized in lettering design. The distance between two lines of text is called leading or line spacing. By adjusting it, we can play with the texture and color of the paragraph, creating visual interest and building hierarchy. The optimal size of the line spacing depends on various things, such as the volume of words in relation to the usable space, the display size or simply the vibe we are going for. If we work with well-constructed typefaces, we won’t need to apply massive amounts of kerning.

Although it can look modern and clean when done well, justified alignment can go really wrong very fast. Because the words have to fill the whole row, awkward spaces can occur between them. Be sure to even everything out nicely and again, if necessary, play with the size of the text, the lengths of the text box and the kerning.