#First in cursive bubble letters font series

So, I’ve retired Almars, and put Nib Gothic into use starting with this comic. And, having designed it from the ground up – rather than vectorizing a scan – I feel more confident in its legibility at different sizes. While I still think Almars holds up, this new word bubble font is a better fit for my comics. In homage to comic lettering tools of the past, I’ve called it Nib Gothic. With these new ideas, I’ve been itching for a while to redesign my word bubble font. I also came to admire Eric Sloane’s lettering-squat, businesslike, yet personable. If you’ve ever read a Speedball instruction book, you’ve probably seen his alphabets. I’ve also done some further research into early twentieth-century lettering techniques and styles. It also explains in very clear terms the dos and don’ts of building letterforms with vector paths. The book presents her creative process and aesthetic decision making through several lettering projects. I found Jessica Hische’s book, In Progress, pretty inspirational. Over the past year, I’ve been studying lettering, calligraphy, and typeface design in my spare time. I retired my original font, and used this one for the next forty comics, starting here. I went to work: I scanned the page, vectorized the letters, adjusted their line weight, introduced a bit of slant, added numerals, some dingbats, Polish support, and Cyrillic characters. Here was an alphabet that was designed for word bubbles, hand lettered, and historically appropriate. Bradley, a cartoonist for the Chicago Daily News in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. The alphabet, drawn by Joseph Almars, is abstracted from the comics of Luther D. In this book, I found an incredible example of cartoon lettering. Of particular interest to me was Book 4: Commercial Lettering.

#First in cursive bubble letters font series

It so happened that my mother-in-law was cleaning out her attic, and found a series of textbooks from a mail-away art course, published in 1953. And, as I gradually realized, not historically appropriate to the aesthetic of the comic.

My first word bubble font was uneven, though. So, I tried creating a typeface based on my handwriting, which you can see in the first forty or so webcomics. Appropriate to the medium, but fitting to my own style. I wanted my lettering to be legible, but not too cookie-cutter. In my own comics, I wanted to avoid these extremes. There are artists who hand-letter, so their pictures and words have matching quality of line…but it often hurts their legibility. My other option: I could hand-letter everything. I could use a BlamBot or Comicraft font, sure, but none of them felt right for the 1920s feel I was trying to create in Rudek and the Bear.

There’s a conventional style of word bubble font-based mainly in the lettering style of Artie Simek and Sam Rosen in the 1960s. I mean, the word bubble font should match the style of the comic itself, right?įor most of us, there aren’t really too many choices, though. How important is the word bubble font to the overall experience of a comic?

Let’s think for a moment about word bubbles.