06/20/2019
I miss hand-lettering. I was taught the old-school way —through fear and intimidation— from an excellent yet frightening veteran teacher, Rob Lawton at ETSU in Texas in 1982. (More stories about Rob later. For now, let’s just say that he was Extremely “detail oriented”.) Rob‘s teacher was Mortimer Leach. Aside from having the best name in design, Mortimer was the director of the “Lettering Department” at Art Center in Los Angeles in the 1950’s. His two brilliant books, Lettering for Advertising and Letter Design in the Graphic Arts” came out in the late 50s and are some of my favorite books in my distressingly burgeoning library. Lettering is all about details and Mortimer’s book showed step-by-step how to do it wrong and how to do it right. I’ve taught my own share of lettering students and continually go back to these lessons, and to this day, every time I kern something, I wonder if I’m doing it correctly — no optical kerning in InDesign for me. (It’s not rocket science, but try explain it to a room full of sophomores who have only used the computer and call everything a “font”.) There’s something good about trying to teach old tricks to new dogs, and Mortimer’s my go-to guy for inspiration and technique. Look him up or try and find the books (try worldcat.org) or stop by my office (or Meta's) —we are always ready to pull a dusty book off the bookshelf and tell you why you need to read it.
