The joy of lettering A creative exploration of contemporary hand lettering, typography & illustrated typeface

So many of today's popular crafts rely on creating beautiful text to showcase favorite quotes, personalize items with names or initials, or highlight inspirational words. This can be a challenge for many crafters who lack training or experience in this skill and don't want to use premade stencils or decals. This guide illustrates various types of stylized typography, techniques for hand lettering, how to use alternative materials to create lettering, and examples of lettering projects. Step-by-step instructions are provided for the lettering techniques, though most are extremely broad, such as sketch the outline of the letter and add details to complete the design. More detailed tutorials with screenshots show how to digitize your hand lettering, how to make a sketched logo into a vector graphic, and how to create your own hand-lettered digital typeface using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. An artistic hand and willingness to be creative are required, and, as such, this book may serve more as inspiration than strict how-to. Fans of hand-lettered crafts will find the design of the book appealing.--Heidemann, Anne Copyright 2017 Booklist

Hand lettering has numerous uses in a wide range of decorative arts and crafts, from painting to scrapbooking to journaling. Graphic artists and typography experts Kirkendall and Escalera introduce basic lettering skills, including faux calligraphy, chalk lettering, brush lettering, and illuminated lettering, as well as methods for working with digitized lettering using Photoshop and Illustrator. A selection of decorative projects provides opportunities for putting lettering skills into practice through stenciling, block printing, and papercutting. VERDICT The organization is haphazard-the authors jump from topic to topic frequently-and beginners may be disappointed at the lack of guidance on basic techniques. However, the projects have lots of appeal for fans of lettering-based artwork. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.