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HomePosts Tagged "process"

process Tag

Beginner, Crafts, Hand Lettering, Illustration, Tutorials, Typography

Chalk marker and traditional chalk lettering have been popular for a while now and they don’t seem to be letting up any time soon! While I love both, there’s soooo much less mess with chalk markers, so it makes them a little quicker and easier to experiment with. I had a thought the other week about using a wet paintbrush with my chalk markers to simulate depth. That idea ran into creating a paint streak effect, which led me to experimenting with fine line highlights and shadows. As I came out of that rabbit hole, I was so excited all of my experiments actually came out the way I had hoped, or better! This week, I’m sharing exactly what I did (including other effects), so read on for 10 chalk marker effects anyone can do!

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Beginner, Business, Courses, Fonts, Hand Lettering, Typography

In my course, Learn Font Making, I take you through all the steps to prepare your lettering for font making, convert it into a working, professional font and I share my best tips for selling your font, too. I’m often asked by students is if I think the market is too saturated for new font makers. Although converting your lettering into a sellable font *is* a process, the fact the font making market is booming right now should not hold you back from starting; it should actually do the opposite. In this week’s video, I share my perspective about the saturation of the font market. I also share tips to stand apart from the crowd to get your fonts noticed by those buyers. Read on for it all!

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Fonts, Hand Lettering, Tutorials, Typography

My newest font, Skinny Jeans, just went live this week! I’ve been making a point to share process info for the fonts I make (here’s Espresso Roast), so that’s what this week is all about 🙂 Skinny Jeans is a font trio that includes the main script style, a caps style that pairs perfectly and a symbols font to add extra personality to layouts. The hand drawn + illustrated symbols also come as a vector file to make things quicker for those who work in Illustrator. This font is by far the most in depth of all I’ve created; it contains 30+ ligatures, alternates and extra features. In the video below, you’ll see what raw materials I used to initially hand letter the font, then the steps I took to make it a fully functioning font. Read on to see everything!

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Fonts, Hand Lettering, Tutorials, Typography

When I first got into font making, hearing “customized (or coded) font features” made me question if I really knew what they were. I went digging away and an entire new world of font customization opened up in front of me. I knew OTFs were better than TTFs, but I had no idea how powerful OTFs really could be. If you’re unfamiliar with terms like stylistic and contextual alternates or discretionary and standard ligatures, we’re talking about em all this week!

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Fonts, Freebies, Hand Lettering, Resources, Roundups, Typography

If you love lettering and are ready to take things up a notch, converting your lettering into a font is a great next step! Not only will you experience typing with YOUR letters for the first time (nothing like it!), you can also sell your font(s) for some extra side hustle cash. But where do you begin? There are different types of software, plugins, automators..the whole process can seem overwhelming. I know it was for me, which is why I put together this clickable font making resources list with the exact software and tools I use to create and sell hand lettered fonts. You can grab it below and also read more about the process. If you’re looking for a full step-by-step course on how to create *and* sell hand lettered fonts, be sure to visit my course here!

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Fonts, Hand Lettering, Typography

Happy Thursday! This week was a big week as I finally completed and released the Espresso Roast font trio. As you can imagine, a trio of fonts that all work together and pair stylistically is not a quick accomplishment. This was my first time creating a font trio, so I wanted to post a little about my process to help any aspiring font makers out there 🙂 Here’s a peek inside, along with a font previewer, so you can play with Espresso Roast directly in the post!

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Hand Lettering, iPad Lettering, Skillshare, Tutorials, Typography

I wanted to change things up a little this week and go super down to basics. The truth is, when it comes to learning, a lot of the times, I’m most inspired by just *watching* the thing happen. Seeing it take place, someone else’s process without all the nitty gritty little details along the way – just the ‘have-to-knows’ first. Maybe you’re like that too. On the chance you are when it comes to lettering, this week I want to go super simple and just share how I would do a basic lettered quote/phrase on the iPad – what I think about as I’m writing, what I’m paying attention to, and what I do to change course when maybe things aren’t going exactly how I like them. If this is something you’d like to see more of, let me know! I want to provide all I can on clearing up anything that might be holding you back 🙂 Full process below – and if you want to go further after this, my Intro to iPad Lettering course is located here. Let’s go!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Typography

Happy Friday! I’m so excited to announce the conclusion of the Font Project this week! It’s been a great 6 weeks learning how to really take a font from some doodled letters on paper, to typing on screen. I know I still have a ways to go with learning the ins and outs of Glyphs Mini (as with any kind of software), but it’s a challenge I’m looking forward to take on. I have a few final tips I wanted to share from this week’s work, and I also want to announce that my new font has a name and it’s available for download! Read on for it all!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Illustrator, Typography

Happy Friday and welcome to Week 5 of the Every-Tuesday Font Project! I can’t believe next week is our last week! This past week was such a HUGE week of learning for me. Taking your letters from Illustrator and putting them into Glyphs Mini is definitely not as simple as copy/paste – but it isn’t hard, I promise! Just a *little* tedious. You shall see 😉 Below I have a full video on how I set up Glyphs Mini and how I set up my Illustrator file to bring everything in at the right sizes and finished the video off with kerning in Glyphs Mini and exporting the font, then typing with it in Illustrator. As tedious as this week was with a learning curve and just the steps in general, it was so incredibly satisfying. Read on to see these letters become a font!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Illustrator, Typography

Welcome to week #4 of the Every-Tuesday Font Project! See the previous 3 weeks here. This past week was spent vectorizing the lowercase portion of the alphabet in Illustrator in the same manner the uppercase was vectorized last week. Since the uppercase portion has a pretty smooth/clean aesthetic compared to the original live trace, I worked to maintain that same cleanliness with similar weight contrasts throughout the lowercase. One of the biggest lessons this week was that creating consistency throughout the lowercase is definitely more challenging than with the uppercase. There are far more details in the lowercase letterforms that you don’t really realize until you get into it. For example: the weight contrasts and curvature of the ‘c’ should be the same as in the lowercase ‘o’ should be the same in the lowercase ‘e’, etc. This created quite a few differences in the original drawn letters to the cleaned versions, but when placed together to form simple words, the font really started to come to life! The personality I had intended is coming through and it has me really excited about getting this into Glyphs Mini. As with last week, I took a bunch of timelapse videos of my Illustrator work where you can see me pulling portions of other letterforms to define new ones. Read on to see it all!

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Fonts, Hand Drawn, Hand Lettering, Illustrator, Typography

Welcome to week #3 of the Every-Tuesday Font Project! See Week 1 here and Week 2 here. This past week was spent vectorizing the uppercase portion of the alphabet in Illustrator, which was created last week. I followed the same methods of vectorizing + cleaning paths as seen in this tutorial and this one. I found my pen tool and occasionally using my Wacom tablet to be the most helpful when it came to cleaning up lines (here are my Wacom recommendations if interested), but anyone handy with a mouse could do a very similar job. I tweaked my initial live trace slightly (exact settings I used are below) to create rougher outlines to start with, which gave me more room to decide how ‘hand drawn’ each letter could feel. Read on for more of my process and some time lapse videos!

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