Jack Standbridge

Hand Lettering

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Tag Archives: Logo

Seize the Day

Posted on July 14, 2014 by jackstandbridge

So the lettering subreddit has a weekly challenge for people to participate in. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have many contestants, unlike the word of the day on the calligraphy subreddit, which has several submissions every day! That one, however, isn’t a competition, so maybe that makes a difference. Anyway, I think the lettering challenge has few takers because lettering is a pretty lengthy process compared to calligraphy, so it’s quite a time investment to take part. This week, I decided to give it a go.

Seize the Day

I only had a couple of days to bash out a piece seeing as I’ve had some client work I’ve been focusing on since the beginning of last week. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to achieve with this piece. Luckily I wasn’t going for any insane level of detail, so finishing it quickly was fairly doable once I had it planned out. My goal was to emulate a style that I’ve often seen with the logos of things like production companies and music studios. The style seems to include a single word in a brush lettering or Gothic style, often done with a liberal amount of flair (dare I say pizazz?) followed by one or two smaller, more sensible, neat Roman words beneath. It typically ends up reading something like “SUCH AND SUCH music studios”, with the such and such being the name. This piece is a little bit of a deviation from the style in that the Roman letters are a little more stylish than what you might usually see, where they are very understated. The reason for that is that this being a lettering piece rather than a logo means that I have more freedom to explore the combination of styles a little further, knowing that it won’t ever need to be sized down to fit on a business card or social media branding.

On a related note, I’m still exploring brush lettering as much as possible, (the aforementioned calligraphy word of the day being very helpful) and I’m thinking of looking into getting some broad nib pens like pilot parallels to explore Gothic styles a little more and expand my knowledge. Understanding a style thoroughly takes a lot of exploration and time, sometimes!

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ADB

Posted on June 30, 2014 by jackstandbridge

A little while ago, I was contacted by someone who had seen a reddit submission for my Friday piece and was interested in getting a piece of custom lettering to be used as a logo. The piece consisted of the initials “ADB” for a French group, and stands for “Les Amis du Brochet”. It’s strange to think that it was through reddit that I came into contact with a client who lives so close geographically.

ADB Shot

The initials were to be set over the background of the Savoy Flag (and in this case in the shape of a shield). That part being predetermined, my role was to find a suitable lettering style to complement the backdrop. I went through several different styles, mainly based around Copperplate calligraphy and Roman capitals, though I had a play around with some black letter and abstract styles before settling on what you see above. France is a country that puts great store in handwriting, much more so than most English speaking countries, with handwriting practised rigorously on special lined paper called “seyès” with five horizontal lines per vertical line. This leads to people saying that all French people have the same handwriting, and while it’s not really true, there is a higher standard to be upheld. As a result, France is a country that boasts a wide array of calligraphic signage and logotypes. If you’re ever in France, take a walk in the streets and look up at the shop fronts to see what I mean.

A Copperplate calligraphy inspired piece, then, was the perfect choice in the end, for this logo. It blends the French dedication to the written letter form with the Savoy flag (and a little of my own lettering flair,) situating the logo not only in a country, but also in a specific region. As a little side note: the client requested a fish hook as one of the details to be included in the piece, which you can see on the lower left stroke of the A.

Here are a couple of the other design ideas I had narrowed it down to before it was time to choose the final style:

ADB Roman Link

A Roman style interlinking monogram.

ADB Gothic

A lowercase black letter style with a flourished ligature.

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New Logo/Banner

Posted on June 23, 2014 by jackstandbridge

So, new pieces every Monday. Where’s today’s piece then? It’s up there, at the top of the page! It’s part of my personal branding project that I’ve been working on, which includes the new banner and the monogram for social media platforms that I posted a couple of weeks ago. Not only does it give me a new logo (the old one needed a revamp) but it also showcases the kind of work I do much better than what I had before. Now when you come to my website, it’s much easier to get an instant idea of what I do and what this site is about.

Logo

So what was wrong with the old one? Firstly, it was part of Thing a Day. That means that it was a piece that was conceived and executed in only one day. Secondly, I started doing Thing a Day almost as soon as I discovered what lettering was, meaning that they were all beginner’s pieces. Since I started, I’ve learnt a lot about lettering, logo design and calligraphy, all of which I’ve implemented in this piece. Being in the place I am on my journey to becoming ultimate lettering master of the world, I’m a lot better equipped to apply what I’ve learnt. Designers often say that they find it the easiest thing in the world to design a logo for a client, but when it comes to designing one for themselves, they come to an impasse. Thankfully, after some time thinking about what I wanted out of this piece, I came to some pretty strong conclusions as to how I wanted it to look.

Logo Warm

First of all, I wanted a monogram made of my initials. A monogram makes the ideal logo for a letterer, as being a logo made of letters it encompasses the aspects of letters and logos perfectly. I had tried several times in the past to make some monograms out of my initials, and ended up with pages of different ideas. No dice. However, this time, with the clear goal of making myself a new logo, I found a solution that worked much better than my previous ideas.

Second, I wanted the piece accompanying the logo to fit into a banner shape to replace the old banner on my website, and to explain what it is I do, but also showcase the brush lettering style of copperplate-inspired calligraphy that I employ in pieces. I originally thought to have the words “Logo Design” and “Hand Lettering” be very different from each other, having “Logo Design” as a thick small caps sans serif. However, with my name in Roman serif, “Hand Lettering” in brush pen calligraphy and “Logo Design” in sans overall made too much type soup, so I gave the two lines a similar flavour, albeit with a different spice to each one.

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Meurig Jenkins Logo

Posted on March 25, 2014 by jackstandbridge

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been designing a logo that turned into a very big project as it progressed. The logo is for a composer called Meurig Jenkins, specializing in video game composition, but who has fingers in almost every musical pie you can imagine, from brass band to dub step to indie folk and Spanish guitar. Check out his amazing compositional work on his soundcloud, visit his website, or follow him on twitter!

ig jen snap

Originally, the idea behind the piece was to have the name as the negative space between swirling, snaking ribbons, but as it progressed, the more I felt that it needed to be something more than the initial sketches. I’ve always known about the beauty of fractals and as soon as I had the idea that the background could be a a design like a fractal, I knew I had to do it. The problem, of course, is that fractals are not only mathematically precise, but they are also infinite. While I would love to know more about fractal generation, I’m no mathematician, and I needed something that was the right shape and density of detail that it would both fit around the logo and be possible to execute in simple black and white. Of course, the end result is not a fractal. but I looked to fractals for inspiration, to try to find shapes and principles that are present in their designs. I went through numerous variations of the shapes and details to give the best effect. Eventually, the design I had settled on included a lot stippling to emulate the gradient-like nature of elements found in many fractals. This wasn’t a problem until the point when it came to vectoring the design. I didn’t want to use computer generated gradients in digitization, because in the end, they give a very different feeling to what you can achieve with stippling. The problem, then is that a vector file including thousands, if not tens of thousands of tiny circles, ends up being enormous. I was lucky that the design has rotational symmetry, meaning that I only had to fill half of it, then duplicate and rotate it by 180 degrees. Even still, there were many times, especially towards the end of the process, when the number of elements on the screen was simply too much for the software, leading to many crashes. Of course, I got into the good habit of saving my work about once a minute.

The final piece:

Meurig Jenkins Final

 

Here is just the fractal design behind the name:

Fractal

 

I wasn’t lying about the stippling! This next one is entirely made of dots. Please don’t try to count them.

Fractal Stippling

 

The file is made of many layers, and I quite like the look of this layer on its own. There is a row of triangles lining the outline in the centre of the design and extending out towards the edges. Take a look!

Fractal Triangles

 

The original piece, of course, includes the name, unlike the versions above. However, the reason I vectored the entire fractal, instead of leaving out the parts behind the name, was so that I could do this too:

Meurig Jenkins Final Inside

 

It’s almost the opposite of the original, with the name containing the design, rather than excluding it. This image, however, has a very different feel to it, I think, but is a useful variation because it fits in a smaller space but retains a glimpse of the details of the original.

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