Friday, February 1, 2013

A lesson in hand lettering from a “Drawsigner”


Von Glitschka is an illustrative designer whom I have been following for years and I thought I would share his work to those who might not be familiar with him. He has his own flair for drawing and vectorizing hand done type and he is very helpful with showing his process. He has spoken at the HOW Design conference and was recently approached by Lynda.com to develop his own instructional series on their website.

On his website IllustrationClass.com he offers detailed, step-by-step photo instructions on how he does his own hand-lettering. The tutorials come as a downloadable zip file containing images and notes that take you along his process for each project with his clients. He says the challenge with illustrating letters in logos is that you have to solve the visual problem of relating one letter-form to the next one all while capturing the illustrative essence of the object.  His process involves a lot of vigorous sketching of letter forms over and over again on top of tracing paper. This particular project was for a Jim Henson product entitled the Skrumps.


The goal for this logo was to create something that was fun, whimsical and creative.  After obtaining reference, he begins the sketching process, he then chose three options to refine and build vector shapes to present to the client. 




These are some images of Von going through his sketching process before doing anything on the computer. 



 
And here are some vectorized and cleaned up comps he presented to the client.

Von believes that doing hand lettering and illustrating are very much the same. It’s a matter of balancing shapes and space and refining forms to create something that’s aesthetically pleasing. I believe this is one of the many reasons why he refers to himself as a “Drawsigner”.



If you are interested in lessons from Von, raw files are available on his website Illustration Class. He also has tips and other helpful articles on his blog.




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