I’m a bit of a font geek; I did my first Old Englishy, “illuminated” style calligraphy when I was 11, and have at times made part of my living as a calligrapher/sign painter. As a painter painter, a lot of my more abstract work involved a lot of letter forms; I can often identify a font on sight. So yeah, font geek.
One of my pet peeves, in the post-ink-and-paper world we live in, the fake “hand” fonts. There are a million of them. Their purpose is to fool the non-font-geek into thinking your computer printout was laboriously hand-printed by a retarded righthander with his left hand.
When I see movie credits that are ostensibly hand lettered, I immediately scan for identical letters–two lowercase a’s, two capital R’s, whatever–to see if they’re different, in which case I feel a little better about the world, because someone actually took the time to hand letter the hand-lettered letters. Or, more often then not, I see that they are exactly identical, and therefore they are *fake *hand-lettered letters, which cheeses me a tiny bit for a couple seconds. I get over it pretty quickly, but it still cheeses me.
Hum, I can certainly see that people might like the aesthetic of mock-hand printed fonts without necessarily wanting to fool anyone, similarly to how ‘Olde English’-fonts generally aren’t meant to fool anybody into thinking the item had been printed in days of yore.
This to be on topic, now why I’m actually posting this: lissener, the font you posted has an interesting ‘&’ sign I don’t recall ever seeing before; is it common in handwriting (in the US/UK perhaps), or is it an idiosyncrasy of that particular font?
Hand-lettered fonts have their place: for example, lettering cartoons and comics. Companies like Comicraft sell fonts specifically for comic lettering that are very professional-looking. Even Marvel Comics and the like use Comicraft fonts.
Charles Schulz had a proprietary font that he used in his strip. What was cool about it was that he had several versions of each letter, which gave it that tiny bit of variability.
Occasional calligraphy geek here. I’m totally with you - no matter how you fancy up what your computer prints out, it’s still just something you typed. There are so many things that are distinctive about hand-written documents, including the variety of shapes for letters, the difference in speed/elegance, and my favourite, the variation in ink. On something hand-written with a quill, you can tell where someone dipped the pen because the ink is stronger at the start. If you, the calligrapher, can manage to dip only at the start of each line, you get this beautiful effect that gives the illusion that the light is shining from your right side.
Something I’m working on for my web site is to hand draw each page, scan it as a JPEG and then ‘map’ the links onto each word. More work, I suppose, but I think it’ll look really cool if I do it right, and it appeals to my ‘Luddite artisan’ nature.
You know what I do? If I want something to look handwritten in photoshop I’ll use a handwriting font but then warp it in subtle ways to take some of the uniformity out of it. Not enough distortion to make it look messy, but enough to give it a little life, and to keep two instances of the same letter from matching exactly.
There are a few ways to do this. If the font is rasterized you can use one of the distortion filters like wave or ripple (with a very low setting), or you can use the liquefy tool and warp it by hand. If you want the font to remain a vector, you can fit the text to a slightly curvy path, or you can use the text warp tools to add other kinds of distortion. You can also play around with the size and spacing for individual letters, but this can be too fussy for larger blocks of text.
I don’t know if this is a whoosh or not, but Schulz actually lettered his strip by hand (except for a few instances towards the end of the strip’s run, when he was physically unable to letter the strip by hand, where a font based on his handwriting was used.) Schulz had very distinctive handwriting that stands out, especially (for me) the way the horizonal line of his “G” went into the loop.
Yeah, it’s a subset of the belief that material shouldn’t imitate other materials. A plastic cameras shouldn’t try to look like a metal camera. Linoleum shouldn’t be printed to look like stone.
The movie credits are bad because usually movies will have adequate money in the budget to pay a calligrapher.
However, the use that bothers me most is “hand addressed” envelopes. I don’t want Barack Obama sending me hand addressed thank-you notes that aren’t actually hand addressed. And if I don’t like it from Barack, I certainly don’t like it from folks selling condo time-shares.
Okay then. Schulz lettered the first two panels of this strip by hand, but the third was done on computer- you can tell there’s a difference. I could be wrong, but I don’t really see any slight differences in the individual letters in the panel lettered by computer other than possibly the "E"s- all the "O"s look alike, for instance.
Well, that’s pretty interesting. Like you, I don’t believe there are any alternative letter forms in that example. Do you happen to know why the third panel was not hand lettered?
There’s also some bigger (less artful) word spacing in the last balloon.
Those double periods that Schulz uses are very cute and work well.
And here’s what I just learned from Wikipedia about ellipses…
According to the recent (controversial) biography of Schulz by David Michaelis, Schulz was in the process of lettering the strip when he felt a strange sensation. He took the strip (and others he was in the process of lettering) to his assistant, who lettered them on her computer. Schulz was rushed to the hospital where it was discovered he had colon cancer, which is what led him to announce his retirement.
