Hand Lettering

Hand Drawn Lettering

One of the most effective ways to personalise a media product is to create unique hand drawn lettering. This technique can be very effective when used for titles. It is advisable to not use this technique for body text to ensure readability. But this rule can be broken in certain circumstances.

Step 1 - during the planning process, decide what words (if any) would look effective hand drawn. You can indicate this on your thumbnails and sketches.

Step 2 - using a variety of different types of pens (experiment with thick and thin nibs), begin to hand draw the word in a variety of different styles. Don't get too caught up about getting it perfect first time. Go with the flow and have fun! Below are excellent examples from one student who practiced hand drawing the title for the contents page of a magazine:

Step 3: You now need to digitize your hand drawn words. You can do this by photographing them or scanning them into the computer using a scanner. Once they are digitzed you can then edit them using a image editing package such as Photopea or Gravit (both free).

Step 4: Edit your chosen hand drawn letters. Watch this video to be show how to do this. Below is an example an edited hand drawn word used on the actual page (click on the button to view more examples):

Credit goes to Tracy Travers of the Digital, Media, and Design Art Teachers Facebook page for the lesson idea.

Shape Up!

Many logos are created using letters that are hand drawn to fit inside a shape, object or idea. This can look really effective. Doing this by hand means you have the freedom to create unique letters to fill recognizable shapes.

  1. Draw a faint outline of the object you want to fill with the letters. This could be anything from the shape of a musical instrument, an outline of a building, shape of fruit or even the outline of a animal. But it must look like the object it is meant to represent. The easiest thing to do is to Google image search the term 'silhouette' with the name of the object after. For example, silhouette apple.

  2. Starting in the middle, carefully draw the middle letters of your word.

  3. Add the rest of the letters on either side.

  4. Rub out the outline of the shape to leave just the letters.

  5. Digitize the hand drawn image by either photographing it or scanning it into the computer.

  6. Edit the hand drawn image using a graphics package of your choice. Below are some examples of the type of image you could create: