Discipline | Jack Standbridge

Do something for one hundred days!

Recently, I’ve been making an effort to focus on consistency in putting my work out there. If you come to this blog frequently, you may notice that I post one piece a week without fail, and have been doing so for over a year now. I decided to take this attitude a bit further, and post one piece a day, every day, on my Instagram account. So far it is going well, as you may have read in my last week’s blog post. Just under a week ago marked the one hundredth day of posting a picture a day, and I’m nearly through posting the backlog of pieces that I built up in making this blog. Complex pieces are the kinds of things that take days to execute, and often spend weeks in the concept and design stages, so it’s not possible to post one brand new large piece every day, so there may have to be a little more emphasis on glamour shots and progress pics from here on out, but I’m planning to keep up the consistency.

My initial goal was to keep at it for 100 days, partly as a challenge to myself, but also because habit forming is a powerful tool for everyone to use, perhaps most especially for creative types. People may often ask how they can keep up with the creation of a large amount of creative work, often feeling burnt out or failing on the motivation side of things. It is often said that motivation is a welcome visitor, a friend who stops by, but discipline should be your faithful companion who never leaves your side. The reason for that is because if you have discipline, you don’t need willpower to keep going. That is to say that if you have formed good habits, it’s easy to stick to them, and what better way to form a habit than to do something for a hundred days? (Interestingly, willpower is considered as a finite resource in the brain; using it up is something called Ego Depletion.)

For me, self promotion is not something that comes naturally, so my decision was to make it something to focus on. Posting my work on Instagram seemed scary, and I felt like I would rather stick to my nice, familiar blog format, but now that I’ve done it for 3 months, I have no intentions of stopping.

A little on the piece: it’s a mix of calligraphy and lettering all in one. The calligraphy was done in walnut ink, which gives the rich colour and variation in tone. Then I used my lettering tools to outline the calligraphic forms and add some ornamentation. Stylistically, Italic and Romans complement each other very well, so much so that in practically all typefaces, you will find italics used in conjunction WITH THEIR ROMAN COUNTERPARTS. Each is considered an essential element of typography and letter forms. The only difference here being that these are the root forms, the source from which the typography was inspired, though most might not know it, and even hearing the word “italic” would first think of the typographical meaning of slanting letters rather than realising that it was first the name of a script.

So, a little challenge for you: consider a habit that would benefit you, or that you would like to be able to have. Once you have decided, do it for one hundred days. You may find that it’s easier than you think, but one last thing: don’t tell anyone until you’ve finished!

Rules rule! Right? Right! Except sometimes it’s fun to break the rules, or at least to play with them and find out what happens. Of course, I’m not talking about the kind of rules that keep the world running well, like don’t steal stuff, or, say, gravity. Well, I suppose those are more laws than rules, but they’re similar, anyway. I am, however, talking about the rules you learn about how to do something well. One of the great things about consciously breaking the rules is that first of all, you must learn the rules. A good understanding of the rules is that leads you to make informed decisions when making something.

This piece, then is about breaking the rules, but only sometimes. If you broke the rules all the time, everything would end up looking terrible. Trust me, the way letters are constructed work because they’re based on rules. Some of the rules can be bent, and even broken, and you can end up with some very stylized typography. For example, Art Deco typography eschewed some of what you could consider traditional rules for letter construction in favour of geometry and symmetry. However, I often see people unintentionally breaking the rules in lettering because they don’t know them yet. In their minds, they are not breaking the rules because they are unaware that what they are doing isn’t right. In that case, it’s a great thing to first learn the rules, and then experiment with breaking them in order to find out why they work and what happens if you don’t follow them.

Well, with this piece, what rules did I break? Well, none, as far as I’m aware. My first idea was to create a piece that had the weighting of all the letters reversed i.e. thick strokes where there should be thin, and vice versa. The problem was that it looked awful. Though I already understand the rules about the weighting of letters, it renewed my appreciation of their importance. Instead, I decided to go with a fun Gothic style for the “Break the Rules” part, followed by a tame typographical “sometimes”. In starting, I did a few quick experiments with a broad calligraphy nib (as you can see below), just to get an idea of what I wanted out of the letter forms. Then I quickly moved on to fitting the letters into the composition I wanted for the piece, and worked on some ornamentation to go beneath. Finally I scaled everything up by drawing a grid on a larger sheet and matching it to the sketches I had made. This is a very convenient way to translate pieces between size, especially seeing as I had done my initial sketches on dot-grid paper. Once the piece was sketched out fully, and then later inked, I removed the pencil grid and was left with what you see above.

What else is new? What has been happening since Inktober finished? Well, I’m still doing a piece a day, which you can always catch on my twitter page. Having finished the alphabet of drop caps, numbers, I did a couple of ampersands and then moved on to doing a pencil sketch each day. Take a look:

Ampersand 1: