Monday

Posted on April 8, 2014 by jackstandbridge

It’s Monday! Or at least, yesterday was Monday. In celebration of this fact, here’s something I finished on Sunday!

I posted it over at reddit a couple of days ago, and it got a good response, but I’ve only just had the time to make a blog post about it. So, what’s the deal? Well, I’m thinking of starting a series called Days of the Week. I’m sure you can guess what will be featured. I’m planning on doing a different style for each one. The goal of the project could be that each piece should be as different from the others as possible. We will have to see how diverse I can make their styles. Striving for diversity is a great way to expand your skills and your portfolio, so it’s a win-win situation!

I think that many people could be afraid that they will produce terrible work, so they never try. People often ask me how I learnt to do things like this, and the answer is really just that I started doing it. I saw that others had done lettering pieces and posted them to the Internet, and I wanted to try too. Practically everything I’ve ever lettered is posted here on the website, and if you take a look through my portfolio, I’m sure you can see how things have progressed. Some of the earlier pieces aren’t so great, and I’ve learnt a lot since then, but I think it’s worth leaving them up there because it’s an honest reminder of where I came from. I think it’s worth being honest about something like that. They are the beginning of a journey that I’m taking, a journey that hopefully has no end. To come to the end would mean that there is nothing left to learn, and no improvement to make, and I’m sure if anyone thinks they are in a place like that, then they are missing something. So, I’m looking forward to finding out where this project will take me!

This project might be punctuated with other pieces, so it might take a while before I have the full-week set uploaded, but stay tuned to see what the rest turn out like!

Here’s a vectored version. I tightened up a couple of lines here and there, but overall, it’s pretty much the same as the inked one above. The main difference is that in digitisation, I have the opportunity to use gradients, so where I used hatching on the sides of the letters to shade them in the inked version, I had a play around with using gradients to achieve a similar effect.

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!

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:

Here is just the fractal design behind the name:

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

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!

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:

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.

Out of my MIND

Posted on March 24, 2014 by jackstandbridge

Here’s a little piece I did for a competition over at the lettering subreddit. I found out about the competition 3 days before it was to be closed, so I had to work quickly! Fortunately, Thing A Day set me in good stead to do so. I don’t really know where the idea came from. I was trying to think of things to submit for the competition, but couldn’t come up with anything, so I had taken a break and was messing around with ambigrams of the word “moon”, seeing as I could see it out of the window. Somehow, in the sketches, I saw how the M could form the curve of the D, and the phrase sprang to mind (or out of it).

This time, however, it needed to be vectored. Not too great a task, but it didn’t help with the time constraint. This one is also an ambigram, if you hadn’t noticed, meaning it’s the same both ways up. I had a little fun with vectoring it, playing around with the colours, etc. but I think that it’s best viewed in plain old black and white. I’m sure there’s something to be said here about the relationship between colour and form, but I’ll leave it to the better informed. In other news, I’ve recently been learning some HTML and CSS, so with any luck, I’ll be able to get my head around making a new website, which will be exciting!

Another blog post will be up in a day or two about a very big project that I’ve just finished, which ate up a large amount of my time. Hopefully after that, I will have more of a consistent output in terms of numbers of pieces and blog posts. (Dare I say Thing A Day?)

The best time is now

Posted on January 25, 2014 by jackstandbridge

Still on catch-up mode here, so this one was done a while ago, but it’s not too old. This one wasn’t a piece for a client, just one that I decided to do on my own steam, just like in the good old days of Thing a Day.

After a few variations, I settled on going for the old words-within-words style. I did something similar for Tomorrow is a Dream, but this one is a little different. I think that when you first see it you read the word “now”, of course, because it’s so big. Then comes the rest of the sentence, which is finished by the word “now” again. So in a way, it reads “Now. The best time is now.” It has more impact and helps the message, I think.

This piece also has an element that I’ve wanted to try out for a while in it. Imagine that the words “the best time is” simply make everything behind them turn the opposite colour, creating what looks almost like a checker board pattern. The challenge with it is that if you were to simply follow along the guidelines in the picture below, you wouldn’t execute the design successfully.

The problem arises when you consider following along the pencil lines with a fineliner. In fact, when you look at a pencil outline like this one, you only see the line. But when you look at the finished piece, you don’t so much see the line as you see what is contained or excluded by the line. Because of this, you need to think about the thickness of the stroke that is created when you draw along a line. In fact, it’s drawing ON the line that is the mistake. To allow the negative space, or the white spaces, be the same proportion as their black counterparts, you must always make sure to draw around the surrounding edge, and never on the line itself, unless you want the white parts to become too small. Take a look at the picture from a silly angle to see what I mean:

I’m working on a big logo design project at the moment, but luckily I’m having the time to post bits and pieces here and there to try to catch up with myself, but it might take a little longer to get a post done about this logo, though when it arrives, there will be a lot to talk about, as it’s my most detailed piece yet, by far.

The Urban Orb

Posted on January 24, 2014 by jackstandbridge

Second in my series of “What was going on a month ago” is a post about the a bigger project that I did. The client wanted 3 things: first, a logo for a series of youtube videos consisting of the words “The Urban Orb”, second, the text “Next Episode” to be shown at the end of each episode during the preview of what will happen next time, and third, a large number of quotations and phrases to be edited into the videos, but to be done in calligraphy, not lettering.

The Urban Orb is a streamer who usually broadcasts himself through streaming websites like twitch.tv, but in this case, he wanted to have a series consisting of a challenge run through of the game Dark Souls uploaded to youtube. Though he was unsure exactly which colouring/texture was going to work out best once the videos were edited, we settled on the outline of the project, and I started work. In the end, the client received several different versions to test out on the final videos, allowing for legibility, unobtrusiveness, and thematic consistency. The logo was designed to be easily read, unique in its ligatures, and styled to match the feel of the game it is used to watermark. In the end, to blend unobtrusiveness and legibility against all backgrounds, the final version consisted of a solid black outline with a semi-transparent white fill, allowing the logo to be constantly visible, but never stand out harshly in the way that a solid colour would do.

The Next Episode text was done in a similar style to The Urban Orb logo, but was designed to fit a much larger space. The text was originally intended to be in a calligraphic style that would interact with the ornamentation around it, and though it was sad to leave some of the calligraphic designs by the wayside, I think that the increased legibility and thematic consistency is worth more than the ornamentation’s interaction with the text. As it stands, the text is nested within the ornamentation, which also continues up to surround the in-game interface, thereby integrating the text with the aspects of the game.

Executing the calligraphy was a very different task to the design and execution of the lettering. To start with, calligraphy is more of an all-or-nothing process, where one mistake in a quotation can mean that you must start again. Some quotations were much longer than these three, so a mistakes could mean that double or triple the time would be needed to get it correct. I used traditional dip nibs and ink to write these – black ink on white paper. Once they were completed, I scanned them into the computer and colourised them digitally, though they are not vectorised, of course, which would take more than one man’s patience worth, I think.

In all, this project was wonderful to work on, not least because I was exposed to so many inspiring quotations, some of which I had read before, but many of which were new to me. Most were on the topic of perseverance, success and failure, which certainly helped me continue past making a mistake towards the end of a long quotation!

Don’t mess with the Ref

Posted on January 21, 2014 by jackstandbridge

Hello again, it’s been a while. Things got side tracked in various ways, and I haven’t been around to update this bit, but I’ve been busy (sometimes very) with various commissions and other projects. So, finally, I have got round to doing a bit more in terms of updating, first with a piece I did more than a month ago!

This piece was commissioned more than a month ago as a Christmas gift for someone. The theme (as I’m sure you can guess) is that of a football referee. The word ref is coloured to match a ref’s uniform, and the piece is decorated with their tools, being a whistle and a flag. Coming from the UK, I was unfamiliar with these aspects of refereeing in American football, so it was interesting to incorporate them into a lettering piece, particularly the flag, which was a pleasure to design, and which functions as the full-stop (or period) for the sentence. Here’s a close up of the illustration:

Unfortunately. the piece has been shipped, and is halfway across the world, so I don’t have a chance to take any more pictures or scans of a better quality, but I guess that’s how it goes.

I have a few other pieces to upload and blog about, one of which I have already posted on my logos page, which should also be getting a few new submissions soon enough!

Thing a Day (Day 7)

Posted on October 27, 2013 by jackstandbridge

It’s here. Day 7. I feel like I should have some grand words to write. Some great insight. Instead, I’m sitting here with orange peel on my lap. The good news is that I fixed the computer, so everything should be tip top from now on! The other good news is that I designed AND inked a large piece today, which is more than I had planned, but I thought that finishing the final day with a pencil sketch would be a let down. And the best news is that it’s nearly bed time! I stayed up far too late getting this finished.

Well, anyway, let’s take a look at it.

Fortune favours the bold! Or at least, let’s hope it does. And yes, it’s the British spelling of “favour”, what can I say. As for what happened with this piece, I can say that it’s an idea that I had yesterday, and everything was going smoothly until the word “the” became unstuck in time and space and refused to settle back into normality, therefore making it impossible to fit into the design. Fortunately, I had the bright idea of placing it within a ribbon. As you can see, the dots around the edge are to keep it in. Let’s just hope it doesn’t slip out of the end.

Thing a Day. What can I say? It was pretty tough to keep up to my own standards, and it certainly used up vast chunks of time, but I would certainly say that it was worth it. Thing a Day will stop now, and I will upload on a less (but still) frequent basis. It will also give me more time to explore things that are more experimental.

Lastly, I can say that Thing a Day will be back! Sometime in the near future, there will be more things, and more days, and they will go hand in hand.

Posted on October 25, 2013 by jackstandbridge

Thing a Day! Here it is, my thing for today. Today’s thing started out as the underdog, the discarded idea, the shunned orphan of the lettering world. Fortunately, a kind man came along and lifted him from the slums of his relegation in the back of a notebook and put him into the sketchbook for inking.

I had the idea yesterday, but didn’t see how it could work out well in terms of spacing. I needed to have the word “tomorrow” very tall and thin for the proportions to fit, but it seemed lanky and weird when I first tried some sketches. Feeling discouraged, and for want of anything else to do for today’s thing, I decided to give it a proper sketch out anyway. It was . . . OK.

Here it is in vanilla form.

It didn’t seem to work all that well to me, so I knew I needed something else. What I ended up trying was something that I initially thought might ruin it, but there’s no point not trying when it’s just the work of a single day. In the end, it seems that the you can never know until you try, and fortune favours the bold.

On another note, you may notice that my header has been upgraded in image quality. I couldn’t stand how terrible it looked, so I borrowed someone else’s computer to upload some photos from my camera. It worked out great! Hooray!

Tomorrow is the last day of Thing a Day, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to come up with a good one! Come and check it out.

Thing a Day (Day 5)

Posted on October 24, 2013 by jackstandbridge

So, today, my new lead holder and leads arrived, meaning I can finally sketch with a sharp pencil again. And the lead pointer really does the trick! Now, all I need is my computer fixed, a large and wealthy customer base, and I’ll be all set for being a professional graphic designer. Well, we’ll see what we can do about the second one.

Anyway, in yesterday’s Thing a Day, I mentioned that my ideas for today’s thing would be to improve the site a little. I’m sure that you will have noticed the change already, as it’s right there at the top of the page! Well, as you can see, it’s a lettered header to replace the old boring one. Unfortunately, iPad attacks! Oh my grainy! Well, we’ll see what we can do once the computer is fixed.

This thing didn’t take much in terms of the concept of it, seeing as it’s just my signature and the word lettering, but the proportions and arranging of the letters was quite tricky.

Take a look from another angle:

Odd to think that there are only two days left of my Thing a Day challenge. It will certainly free up a lot more time for me to do ILT (Important Life Things), but it’s teaching me a thing or two about giving myself a lot to do, and how to be productive even when not in too creative a mood.

Come back tomorrow for the penultimate Thing a Day!

Thing a Day (Day 4)

Posted on October 24, 2013 by jackstandbridge

Well, I’m past half way through my thing a day week. Over yesterday and today, I was planning and inking one larger piece, the planning being yesterday’s thing and inking being today’s.

I’m quite pleased with how it’s turned out having started from this:

Today’s thing is a little different from other things. It uses bolder shapes and no serifs. It’s an experiment with an unconventional shape. It is two sentences, and it’s the first piece with no hatching.

And aside from anything else, it looks taller than it is wide, yet it is wider than it is tall. Strange.

Would you believe that it’s seven inches wide, but only five and a half tall? One of my stumbling blocks in designing it was that I was trying to sketch it out in portrait, when in fact it needed to be landscape.

As for tomorrow’s thing, I have some ideas already. Something to make the site a little more appealing, hopefully. Stay tuned!