Lift Up Your Hearts

Posted on August 26, 2014 by jackstandbridge

Following on from last week, this week has seen a lot of broad nibbed calligraphy practice, which means burning through paper at an alarming rate! The good news is that I bought 20 nice A5 Rhodia notebooks a few weeks ago, half of them with a dot-grid pattern and the other half plain. The dot grid is great for sketching out ideas without having to worry about marking out boundaries and guidelines; unfortunately, the spacing between the dots don’t quite match the width of any of the broad nibbed pens I bought, so it doesn’t help too much with calligraphy practice.

This piece is the first in a two (maybe three) part series that I’m going to do. The plan is to have them structurally as similar as possible. This one is half of a sentence spoken by Winston Churchill on June 12, 1941 in his speech to the Allied Delegates. I first heard it when it gained some popularity due to being auto tuned into a funny little song, but the meaning of the message stuck with me. The full phrase is “Lift up your hearts; all will come right.” It’s then followed with “Out of the depths of sorrow and of sacrifice will be born again the glory of mankind.” It’s stirring to think of the context in which those words were spoken. The Second World War had been going for two years, and would continue for another four. Knowing what we do now lends a feeling of gravity to the words, but I feel it’s a message that holds meaning in many contexts.

Here’s a shot that is a little closer and shows the banner and the Tuscan style lettering of the word “your”.

The piece has quite bold and simple shapes on the top and bottom, so I kept the banner from being too detailed so that it doesn’t distract from other elements, whereas usually I like to include a bit more detail. The main reason I’m keeping it as simple as it is, however, is that for it to work side by side with the next piece in the series, being too detailed could make the composition look too busy. I may make a 3rd piece with the phrase “Out of the depths of sorrow and of sacrifice will be born again again the glory of mankind,” which would be a wider piece to fit beneath the first two above.

Don’t be Afraid to Dream

Posted on August 18, 2014 by jackstandbridge

This week is another New-Pen-Week! Last time, I got some Rotring Rapidographs, which I use pretty much the same as the old fine liners I started out with. Not much changed in the style of work I produced, but for me, the process was changed a little. This time, however, I got some Pilot Parallels, which are a kind of fountain pen for broad nibbed calligraphy. I’ve been wanting to start practising some broad nibbed calligraphy for a while now, so that I can further my understanding of Gothic/Blackletter styles, and this week allowed me the chance to give it a go!

I found a wonderful image that displays a style of Blackletter that I haven’t seen reproduced quite the same anywhere else. The title of the image is “Williams Style of German Text”, which doesn’t seem to bring up much other than the original image, so I don’t have much more information than what you see there. I’m sure there is much to learn in exploring the style, and I’m going to spend the next few weeks trying to understand the intricacies of what makes the letters function in the way they do, but in the mean time, I took some inspiration from the style, as well as several other styles I’ve seen around the web, and came up with the piece above.

The pens came with two inks, which was unexpected, but it provided me with the opportunity to experiment with a bit of colour, which is something I’ve been purposefully avoiding in other works in an effort to focus on form. After all, restrictions are what give us guidance, and having too many directions to explore often leads to little progress. That being said, it’s sometimes refreshing to allow yourself a little deviation. These inks are black and red, though refills are available for all manner of colours, so I’m interested in getting some more in the future. In the mean time, I found neat feature on my camera that replaces individual colours in a photo for others, no photoshopping required. Here, I’ve replaced the red ink with a green, blue, and brighter red. Look how each colour creates a different feel for each piece. Colour matters!

The speckles that surround the letters were made by pulling on the tip of the nib, and letting it go, which flicks the ink on to the paper. Unfortunately, it also flicks it everywhere else, so I ended up with some red fingers, pens and surfaces. Before I did the speckles, I first drew out some guidelines for the word “Dream”, then wrote in the red parts. Once they were dry, I went over in black to complete the bottom part of each letter, then added in the Copperplate above with a brush pen. The speckles came in last because I didn’t want to get my hands so messy if I ended up making a mistake and discarding the paper!

The Truth Shall Make You Free

Posted on August 12, 2014 by jackstandbridge

Since I did the Days of the Week project, I haven’t thought of a new series of pieces to do yet, but I seem have done a few inspirational-ish quotes lately, so I thought I would continue the trend. This one is part of the unofficial motto of the CIA. Doesn’t sound like it would be so inspirational, does it! In fact, the full motto is “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” which comes from a bible verse. The official motto is “The Work of a Nation. The Center of Intelligence,” which didn’t seem like it would make a good lettering piece, so I thought I’d go for the unofficial one.

With this piece, I wanted to achieve something similar to what I was going for with Just Some Words. I’ve seen plenty of pieces around that make no attempt at combinations of styles, but rather focus on the form of the piece, and keep the words all in the same style. I feel like I got closer with this piece than I did with the other one; it’s a style I would like to explore further in the future, so there may see what I can do to make a few pieces thematically linked as a nice little series.

Here’s a little look at the pieces of paper that lead up to the final piece:

I recently became a mod over at /r/lettering, and seeing the quite frequent posts asking for advice for how to begin, I was thinking that I might post a blog post soon that is aimed towards providing some insight into the process. I usually make some comments about what happened on the way to each piece, but a more general tutorial might be a good place to direct people who are looking for some window to how to go from a blank piece of paper to a finished piece. Above, you can see a little bit of what went into designing this piece from initial sketches to trying out some ligatures for the word “The” to making a full pencil sketch to see how it would look at the right size.

Never give up & never surrender

Posted on August 4, 2014 by jackstandbridge

Here’s a little piece I did just recently. Something motivational which should help to look at any time it seems like it would be easier to stop trying with something. When it comes to finding inspiration, it can be a problem for many people, so this is a nice little mantra. Never give up! Never surrender!

Surrender to what, though? It’s not exactly a battle, is it? Well, maybe it is, in a way. A battle between the person who wants to get things done and the temptation to give up. One thing that you can say for certain about successful people is that they would say “No” to the question “Did you ever surrender to your doubts?” It can seem daunting when you’re trying your hardest and feeling like you’re getting nowhere. They say “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, which is a neat little cliché. The reason things become clichés, however, is because they’re true. If it weren’t something that resonated with a lot of people, it wouldn’t get said again and again until it was over used. I, on the other hand, am not building Rome, so what am I building? At the moment, it s a portfolio. But it’s also consistency. I’m holding myself to the promise of weekly updates, and though they may end up a few hours late some weeks, I’m not going to let myself fail. I will never give up, and never surrender, even if it seems like it would be easy to do so. You are also not building Rome, unless you are, in which case, well done. But if you’re not, what are you building? What won’t you give up on?

The art of war (a rapidograph experiment)

Posted on July 28, 2014 by jackstandbridge

This week I received some new pens which I hope to use in place of the Unipin and Micron fine liners that I’ve been using up until now. These new pens are Rotring Rapidographs, which are a kind of technical pen. What that means is that I won’t have to go out all the time to buy new fine liners, (though of course they will need ink refills,) and I won’t have to worry about the slow blunting of the tip. These pens have a mechanical tip that never dulls, unlike the felt of the fine liners, so barring them being stamped on, they should be just the same in 20 years!

This piece was my first with these new pens aside from a few test scraps to get used to the different feel. I wanted to do a piece that would test out a few different uses for them, including hatching and filling in large sections. In all, they worked out really well, giving very consistent line thickness. The ink seems to be better than that of the fine liners, too, creating a much better matte surface that doesn’t seem to suffer at all from reflecting camera flashes or other lights, leading to great straight shots.

The piece itself is a quotation from the Art of War by Sun Tzu, which seems to contain a lot of wisdom. Though the quote is about victory and battles, coming from a book about war, it has quite a pacifist sentiment to it, which I found quite interesting. Of the quotes I found, this one suited my needs well. I wanted to continue to explore into the world of Gothic lettering, which is something I haven’t examined as closely as other styles, my main areas of study being Roman and Copperplate calligraphy. In this piece, there is a combination of all three! This being my first real quotation piece in a long time, I also wanted to do something with an interesting visual hierarchy so as to make it the kind of thing you might see on a poster.

Take a look at a few progress shots:

Sketching out the top half after the space was measured out.

Pencil version complete.

Half way through inking.

Auto pilot engaged

Posted on July 21, 2014 by jackstandbridge

Sometimes I have one of those days when I can’t quite get my mind in gear. Wouldn’t it be nice to just have an auto pilot mode? Well when you have a timetable to stick to, sometimes you just have to do it anyway! Searching for inspiration can be tough, so in light of that, I made this piece this week:

I can’t remember when I heard the phrase, but it’s suited the feeling. I decided to make a light hearted, quick piece that wasn’t too complicated. After all, it’s been a pretty hectic week! Last week I did the words of the week challenge on the lettering subreddit. This week, there was a drop cap challenge, so I decided to do a bit of a speed challenge! I tried to focus more on the fluidity of the lines and less on minute, precise details. I often get bogged down in the details of something, so once I zoom in, it’s often hard to zoom out again and look at the piece as a whole. Maybe it’s a trap a lot of perfectionists fall into, or maybe it’s just me, but the solution is to force yourself out of the usual conditions so that you can’t succumb.

Having some lovely Rhodia dot grid notepaper really helped in diving straight in and not over thinking things. More time that I’m willing to admit usually goes into measuring out the space on the page before I even make a pencil mark for most pieces. Sketching out the design took about half an hour, followed by roughly an hour for inking. That’s much faster than the turn over for a typical piece of mine, so I’d say that the challenge was a success. I’m pleased with the piece, too.

Aside from those two pieces, I also wrapped up a little client project for a tattoo design this week. The brief was to have the word “Ruby” in a similar style as Monday. The dimensions to work with turned out to be perfect for the word. As it was just for a basic design, the client opted to have a slightly less detailed piece than Monday, so you’ll notice a few dissimilarities.

The next lettering challenge isn’t up yet on the lettering subreddit (where are you mods?) so I don’t know if it’s something I’d like to do next week, but I’m thinking that I might make a thing of doing the drop caps, which come up every fortnight. I think it would make a good series!

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.

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!

Just Some Words

Posted on July 7, 2014 by jackstandbridge

Just some words, just for fun. Another piece inspired by the brush pen style of Copperplate calligraphy that I’ve been doing recently, which has been steadily infiltrating my lettering work.

I thought, with this piece, that I would keep it as simple as possible. I love to create fine details in all of my pieces, so recently, I’ve been focusing a bit more on simplicity, in order to concentrate more on form. So this piece was going to be filled in with solid black, but when it came down to it, I thought I would add in some of the “shine” elements that I had included on the ornamentation on Monday. I thought that there’s no reason not to, and if I wanted to, I could fill it in after I had finished, so that it was fully black, but I think the effect suits the piece well.

Something else to mention with this piece is that it’s not a combination of typographic or calligraphic styles, which is something I do in most pieces that involve more than one word. The reason for this is that having more than one style in a piece naturally gives it a hierarchy, or at least some contrast in the way you view the words. With this piece, however, I felt that seeing as the word length was so similar, and there being no really strong focal point of the phrase, it would be best to have it all in one style. Aside from anything, the meaning of the phrase is such that it lends itself to something that seems more casual, so it would seem odd to have “Just Some” in a weaker style that “Words”, which would probably be the way it would work out if you wanted to give any of the words more weight. In that case, the word “Words” would seem too important make it seem that it wasn’t, in fact, just some words.

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.

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:

A Roman style interlinking monogram.

A lowercase black letter style with a flourished ligature.

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.

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.

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.

Jack Standbridge

Hand Lettering

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