IN THE BEGINNING.

nee upon a time,

all lettering was
hand-lettering. By
the nineteenth and
twentieth centur¬
ies, when type had
become cheap and
accessible to all,
the indicator of a
quality job was
that the logo, the
main display headline or the embellished ini¬
tial cap had been hand lettered, rather than
set in standard fonts that any competitor could
obtain for a few dollars.

ENTER TYPE, EXIT LETTERING

Up until about the mid-1960s—the dividing
line between the crew-cut conformist age and
the new age of inquiry—the majority of logos
and display headlines in magazines and ads
were hand lettered with brush or pen. The
changeover to a preference for type over letter¬
ing undoubtedly had something to do with the
emergence of huge photolettering type cata¬
logs by that time. But even Photo-Lettering,
Inc., maintained an active studio of hand let-
terers to tweak fonts for custom jobs.

As late as 1989, some agency hired me to
hand letter three words for a newspaper circu¬
lar ad. I thought they were nuts, since the style
they specified was almost identical to an exist¬
ing font. But they didn't want type, they want¬
ed unique, custom lettering exclusively theirs.

The tradition lives on today in the upper
echelons of publication design. You might look
at a logo and say, "But it's just Helvetica." No,

it's $20,000 worth of hand-lettered Helvetica
with a slight upturn added to the crossbar of
the lowercase e that justified the expenditure
and gladdened the heart of some CEO.

To this day, despite the computer revolution
that has loosed the font industry from its pig-
iron age moorings, type has yet to match the
limitlessness and flexibility of letters drawn by
hand where each letter shape can be nipped
and tucked to accommodate the surrounding
ones and every word or phrase can benefit
from the designer's maximal interpretation.

Because of the continuing glut of computer
fonts—the greater percentage of which are
embarrassingly amateurish—the idea of cus¬
tom lettering has lately been discarded along
with the 1.5MB floppy disk. This is fine for the
many and for those who don't mind using OPF
(other people's fonts) as the basis of their logos.
After all, the amazing number of fonts now in
existence, and the hundreds more that shall
emerge between the time of this writing and
its publication, might be said to provide a
measure of exclusivity to our work since most
people will never even be able to identify the
fonts we use.

But if you are designing an exclusive logo for
a company or a magazine masthead, would
you really want to use a font that anybody can
purchase for a few bucks or download for free?

Certainly, the owners of font foundries,
myself included, hope designers will continue
to buy our fonts for making logos. However, in
my other job, as a book writer, I'm the embodi¬
ment of the noble Chinese saying: "The extract
of the indigo plant is bluer than the plant

LOGO, FONT a LETTERING BIBLE

itself," which means, May the student swpass
the teacher. Of course, I hope you don't surpass
me, because I need to earn a living, too.

DESIGNERS DO IT WITH STYLE

The difference between a designer and an

actual artist is, a designer can indicate prefer¬
ences and arrange preexisting graphic ele¬
ments but cannot draw well enough to bring
his best visions to fruition by his own hand. A
designer's inability to draw may also uncon¬
sciously limit his ability to conceptualize.

Of course, lots of designers create incredible
pieces that make us all go, "Wow!" and want to
copy them. And since the end result is all that
matters, who cares if assistants do our creative
grunt work? The trendsetting designer Herb
Lubalin had letterers such as Tony DiSpigna
and Tom Carnase to bring his wonderful con¬
ceptions to fruition. Seymour Chwast, on the
other hand, despite the many designers he's
employed, has always kept his hand, literally,
in the work he produces.

"Today's designers," says letterer Gerard
Huerta, "are assemblers of stock images and
fonts. They learn how to assemble from source
books and put it all together, and they never
have to hire a photographer or illustrator,
because it's just a matter of assembling ready
made pieces."

It wasn't always this way. Many of the art
directors of old who hired the Norman
Rockwells and EG. Coopers of those times had
prodigious drawing and lettering skills. But
standards have fallen. Few of us today can
design, draw and letter the way guys like Will
Dwiggins, Walter Dorwin Teague, Clarence P.
Hornung and C.B. Falls did. (See "Letterers
Who Draw" on page 102.)

Throughout this book, I will try to create that
breakthrough for you, from being a designer
who specs type and pushes it around, to one
who creates type and then pushes it around.

You, too, can be like Frank Lloyd Wright, who
wrote, "Were architecture bricks, my hands
were in the mud of which bricks were made."

I will attempt to do this merely by convincing
you that you can do it—you've just been afraid
to try. Another reason you've relied on OPF is
that nobody ever told you the little secret that
I was privileged to have revealed to me by the
late, legendary cartoonist Wally Wood: "Never
draw what you can copy; never copy what you
can trace; never trace what you can photostat
and paste down." Nowadays, we'd say, "Never
trace what you can scan into Adobe
Photoshop." And there you have it; the secret to
becoming the logo designer you've always
wanted to be is: "Research."

THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK

/ wrote this book to enable you to expand
your creativity and end your reliance upon the
logos and fonts of other designers to become a
logo and font designer yourself. Of course,
there's nothing wrong with using OPF, espe¬
cially if you like them. I do it myself—con¬
stantly, as we all do at times—but won't you
feel proud when you can point to a logo or font
and say, "Look, Ma, I drew that... by hand!"

At this point I
should define the
terms hand-drawn
or hand-lettered not
just as letters we
create with drawing
tools on paper, but
also letters we cre¬
ate on computer,
because the hand
still guides the digi¬
tal tablet, mouse or
trackball. But the
important distinc¬
tion as far as this
book is concerned, as
to whether a logo or

Paul Whiteman

The logo, font and lettering
samples in this book have
been liberally selected from
the past as well as from the
present. The basic principles
of typography never
become outdated, they just
reappear dressed up in con¬
temporary garb. Case in
point: In the past there was
the iconic bandleader, Paul
"Pops" Whiteman, and at
present we have Shepard
Fairey's ubiquitous Andre
the Giant logo, about which
he says, "The concept
behind 'Obey' is to provoke
people who typically com¬
plain about life's circum¬
stances but follow the path
of least resistance, to have
to confront their own obe¬
dience. 'Obey' is very sar¬
castic, a form of reverse
psychology."

Paul and Andre: two icons
separated by over seventy
years, and both leaders in
their fields. That's what I'm
talking about!