The Clothes When I first started lettering, I cared more about the clothes than anything else—I used the same basic skeleton over and over again, tacking on serifs and swashes where I saw fit. After a few months, I started to realize that all my work had a sameness to it. Instead of creating distinct lettering styles, I created one style, with many

You can use this to your advantage if you really want a client to pick a particular version, colorizing only that sketch (and showing a few color options), which lets them clearly know it’s your favorite.

Proper research alleviates a lot of anxiety at the start of a project—the more confident you are in your understanding of the subject matter, the less worried you will be about your ability to come up with solid concepts.

When making decorative lettering, the decorative bits, no matter how over the top they may be, should make sense and feel like natural extensions of the letterforms themselves, not tacked on and unnecessary.

The typographic lockup and proportions of the page have the biggest effect on the skeleton—if I have to cram a long word onto a single line but still want to give it visual importance, the skeleton must be narrow, the letters taller than they are wide.

Visual research is something that should be a part of your day-to-day life, not just something that you do at the start of a project. Be a sponge; absorb everything around you. Read books that have nothing to do with design and lettering, visit art and science museums, pay attention to fashion, stop to admire interesting graffiti or amateur sign pa

When I send these sketches to the client, I hardly ever colorize them. I want the client to focus on the layout and letterforms, and not be distracted by color. Color is so powerful and so subjective that if I colorized my sketches, the client would, without a doubt, gravitate toward the version in the color palette they like the most, even if they

didn’t want my typographic muscles to atrophy—I had spent too much time training them while working for Louise. I gave myself a goal: I would draw one letter a day until I worked my way through twelve alphabets (choosing twelve because maybe I could make a calendar or something at the end of the project). I would work in whatever style I wished and

The image above is a sketch I drew in Photoshop with a Wacom Cintiq (a display and stylus that lets you directly draw on the screen). For a few months I was obsessed with this magical device and abandoned my sketchbooks. Over time, I found that clients reacted differently to these more finalized looking designs—they scrutinized them more intensely,