What could be more

appropriate for the cover

of a book called Tender

Murderers (far right) than

lipstick lettering? I got

out my wife's lipstick (Oh,

they really hate that!)

and wrote a few samples,

right, which I scanned

into Photoshop, then cut

and pasted. The letters a

through f show which

parts were chosen for

the final composite at

bottom. Almost all the

rough letters, especially d

and f, were cleaned up

and tweaked in one way

or another. Although this

was meant to look rapidly

handwritten, I still aimed

for consistency, balance

and rhythm just as with

any lettering. For the

cover art, I was given a

1940s book cover as a

direction. I flopped the

legs and made other

changes to more or less

make the art mine.

та n
тіѵшг

& BOOTLEG WHISKEY!
Swingin'Haarlem Nights

I had a chisel-edge marker that was so new it bled on tracing paper at the end
of strokes, suggesting serifs. The marker sketch at left became the guide for my
fonts Haarlem White and Haarlem Black, above. Later, when I'd decided to add
the lowercase, the marker had dried out enough so that I couldn't get that fleet¬
ing bleeding effect and had to sort of figure out what the strokes would have
looked like based on the shapes of the capital letters. By the way, Harlem was
originally spelled Haarlem, which was the original name of New York.

LOGO, FONT a LETTERING BIBLE

What was the most memorable scene in the original 1968 Planet of the Apes film?
For me it was the one in which Charlton Heston comes across the Statue of Liberty
buried in the sand. So when I was hired to come up with title lettering for the
remake of Planet of the Apes, I went to the beach at Santa Monica and tried writ¬
ing in the wet sand with a wooden tool usually used for clay modeling. One exam¬
ple, right, shows the unexpected, evenly spaced curls of sand left in the tool's wake,
which I incorporated into the capital letters. For the lowercase letters, I dipped the
same clay tool into paint to produce an alphabet and a set of numerals (examples
below). A wooden stick has no ink repository like a pen, nor the capacity for
absorbency like a brush. The hard, flat end of the stick and the necessity of
constant redipping when the paint played out certainly influenced the letters. I
call the font Djungl. It shows how the implement can inspire the lettering and
how almost any weird tool can be tried. My apes lettering wasn't used in the film,
but I got a check and a half-done font out of it—not bad for a day at the beach.

Below is a sample of the font Djungl. I
still don't quite like all of it, but I'm not
sure why. I've often said that the differ¬
ence between a free font and one you
have to pay for is about six weeks. And
it might take me almost that long to
thoroughly go over this font and fix
everything about it until it looks right
to me. This process will mainly involve
trying to make every stroke of every
letter consistent in weight, style and
"feel" with every other letter. I may
even go back to the beach to make sure
my letter shapes, and the angles of my
strokes, are consistently true to life,
and to get a tan.