Lettering Layouts: Create Beautiful Messages

1. Lettering Layouts Trailer: If you hand letter on a regular basis, or just giving you a letter and groove on, or have had years of experience, chances are you've needed to create a lettering layout, at time or two. Of the most beautiful displays with hand lettering is within quotes, simple messages, and phrases. I'm talking greeting cards, art prints of every size, signage, web banners, and more. Because of the emotional quality a hand letter piece is able to achieve, creating a visually effective layout strengthens the message that much more. If you've ever struggled with which lettering styles to pair, how many of them to pair, how to use decorative elements, or which texts weights and sizes are best for your layout, this class has you covered. My name is Taylor and I'm a graphic designer and hand letterer. I use my professional graphic design education to make more strategic decisions in my lettering layouts. I'm here to share my exact process. In this class, you'll create beautiful visually effective hand lettered quotes, phrases, and messages, establish a clear hierarchy to communicate your message, properly utilized lettering style, weight, and shape to enhance your layouts, and make purposeful decorative element decisions within your layouts. With your enrollment in the class, you'll also receive three handy bonus PDFs. One with 15 quotes, you can get lettering right away, a clickable resources PDF so you have access to everything used, and an inspiration elements PDF with my favorite elements, flourishes, lettering shapes, and styles, all drawn out to remove any guesswork. All you need to get started is a regular pen, pencil, and any paper you have on hand. Hit enroll and let's letter her some layouts. 2. Welcome: Hey and welcome to the class. I am so glad you're here. I just wanted to start out by saying, what are lettering layouts? To just start things off, I want to give you some examples of what we're aiming for in this class and what you can expect from this class. What are lettering layouts? Here is our first example. You can see we've got our lettering set. It's all centered, it's contained within a circle and we've got some that are extending beyond it. We're going to do a full dissection of some of the strongest ones of these examples just so you can get a more thorough idea of what's going on in all of these. We can figure out where to begin with our own. Here's another example. I'll hand letter it. You can see there's some decorative elements thrown in on all of these different styles of lettering. There are different weights, different shapes that the lettering is contained in, different textures being utilized, different angles being used, different baselines. Where are the strategies in this class coming from? Just to give you a little background about myself, I'm a formally trained graphic designer. I have a four-year degree in graphic design. I graduated in 2008 from the Savannah College of Art and Design. I've been working professionally as a graphic designer now for about eight years. Because of my strong background in graphic design and being familiar with typography and typographic layouts in the print sense. When I added on lettering about three years very seriously, a lot of the things I learned by being a graphic designer, I was able to quickly integrate into my lettering. One of those was layout, because layout is such an important skill to have when you're a graphic designer. Taking those skills from my graphic design past and coupling it with lettering, I've got some really strong strategies that I want to share with you that will really make a difference in your lettering layouts moving forward. This class is not a course on how to hand letter. If you're looking for a class on just getting started with hand lettering, definitely check out my water brush lettering essentials class, which will give you a foundation of figuring out your own style. There's a few different techniques that you can practice depending on what you're most comfortable with and will give you a huge advantage when you go and figure out your own style. I offer a bunch of tips on customizing your own hand lettering there. Then bounce lettering, just takes it one step further. That bouncy effect that you see in a lot of lettering these days. I'll show you exactly how to integrate that in your own style. This class is a course for using and preparing your hand lettering for real-world applications. They could be greeting cards, art prints, signage, web graphics, the list goes on and on. This class is perfect for anyone looking to improve their layouts or compositions for their lettering. The goals of this class are to create beautiful, visually effective hand lettered quotes, phrases and messages like you saw with the inspiration ones at the beginning of this. It is to establish clear hierarchy to communicate your message properly utilizing lettering style, weight and shape to enhance your layouts and make purposeful decoration and element decisions within your layouts. In the next video, we're going to go through three examples of successful lettering layouts and we're going to figure out why they work and how we can use the same kind of techniques in our own lettering layouts moving forward. 3. Layout dissection: So picking up where we left off in the last video, in this video, we're going to walk through dissecting some of those really cool layouts that we saw, so we can figure out how to use the same techniques to make our lettering layout stand out even more. Layout dissectioning in order to create effective layouts, we're doing a little research right here on how the ones we already love are communicating to us by doing our own visual dissection is what I'm calling it, will have a great starting point for our own layouts. Example number 1, which you saw in the previous video. If we take a few notes by looking at this, we can say that there are two variations in text style. You can see we've got the script which hold in helm are set in, and we've got sans serif for everything else. There are curved lines that focus your eyes to the center of that circle that's coming around right here. So these curved lines draw your eyes right to the center and focus you immediately to hold the helm because it's extending outside of the circle and it's the only text style that's different than everything else. So the arcs'd text at the top and at the bottom is integrated into the circular lines that encompasses a full layout just to focus your eyes that much more on the center and on reading the message. There are two clear variations in scale. We've got the large-scale which hold and helm, and you can even say that anyone in can are pretty close in scale to those. Then everything else the, can, the, when the sea is, are all similar scale, so similar size. Setting just hold and helm script at the largest scale calls immediate attention and emphasis because it is the most different, it's very clear, it's the largest, it's extending beyond that circle and it's set in script, so calling attention to itself immediately. So your first impression when you look at this is hold the helm. Looking at our baselines and decoration, so we're taking things down even further, I call this like looking at the skeleton of it. So if we look at the baselines which are set in magenta right here, we've got a curved top baseline right here. We've got a curve bottom baseline and everything else is straight except for hold the helm, which is set at an angle. So really basic right here we've got a curve, and then we've got an angle, and then we've got straight lines. There's only three different variations and baselines. The only decorative elements used on this are the curved lines. Now it does make use of a texture. But even if that text style weren't there, it would still be very effective and it's pretty cool because this is the only decorative element really being used here. The typography and the lettering is what's really coming forward in communicating, which is what we want, we want our message being read first and foremost. Here's example number 2, which you saw earlier. If we take a few notes on this one, we can say that there are two noticeable different scales of type. There's very large, for alive and remarkable and then all the other texts is pretty similar in size. So all the text is contained between the arc'd text at the top and the bottom, very similar to what we saw in the last example. You can see right here what is the point up here and remarkable, everything's drawing you into the center where our largest text lies. So there's simple decorative elements that call your eye where to go when your readings. So we've got this arc'd up here that brings you down, we've got these line elements that are drawing you in even further, and then we know where to read afterwards by these very simple flourishes right here. We're keeping everything black and white for this class to avoid that extra level of complexity, we want to keep everything to the very basics and get a really strong layout and adding coloring can be a distraction from getting a really strong layout coming out first, so colors should always be the last thing that you consider. However, it does really help with hierarchy if you want another level of hierarchy, color is a great way to introduce that. As you can see here, there's a medium bright background that calls attention to the layout because it is so bright and then the light bright color that yellowish really stands out. So all of your most important words are highlighted in that yellow and you know right away that the tertiary texts is set much darker, so you go to those second or third from the most important messaging words that are within the layout. Finally, our first impression when you see it is being alive, you see alive first and foremost. So if we look at the baselines and the decoration used in this layout, we can see once again, we've got two curved lines, we've got some straight lines and angled lines, just like we did in the last layout. Once again, very simple decorative elements. We've got a couple of flourishes and some line accents. A lot of people think that you need to throw a lot of different elements and for it to be effective but in reality, your type is doing all the work for you, which is the cool thing because that's we're working on is our lettering so let the lettering work the hardest you don't need all these decorative elements to try and hit your message home, let the lettering and the words speak for themselves. Example number 3, this is the last one. If we take some notes on this, we can say that there are three levels of scale use. There's large, which you can see with stories and buried, medium, which untold grassy fields of laughs are set in, and then small, remain beneath and full. So there are two noticeably different weights being used. There's a light on the small scale topography and there's a heavy weight use on the large and medium-scale type. The hard angles on many of the flourishes you can see we've got these angles right here. They tie in very nicely with some of the harder points found on many of the large and medium scale letters I'm looking at. This e up here, the serif on the s right here, even this little decoration right here, our t has some really hard lines, we've got some coming off the u right here. So it's mixed all throughout. You can see these angles tie in very nicely with those little embellishments. The messaging is nicely contained between the arc'd text at the top and the reverse arc'd text at the bottom. Waving curved baseline type is found in the middle throughout. So you can see exactly where your eye needs to go and where it needs to stop because we start up here and it brings you right into the message, and we finish right here and it brings your eye right back up into the message. So this is the exciting part where we want to entertain our eyes a little bit. We've got the more distinguished baselines that are a little more varied. We've got a wave right here, even though this is straight, this is angled. So we've got a lot of variety and a lot of visual interest happening. The first impression of this one is buried stories. Even though it read stories, buried, you could read it either way. For me, it was buried stories. If we look at the baselines and the text decoration, we've got the curved baseline, once again, we've got our straight and our angle. This one has the addition of this wavy one. We do have a lot of words in this one so it does help break everything up and still make it not overwhelming to the reader because of how everything is sorted out with scale, weight and shape and baseline. So the decorative elements, even though this is pretty complex, you can see we really have flourishes and some diamond accents throughout, so those are those angles and that's it. The typography in this and the lettering is what's really coming forward more so than the decorative elements, even though the decorative elements definitely add a lot of visual interest to this layout. So in summary, there's a limited amount of different decorative elements being used. There's always a clear message hierarchy. That is the first impression that you're getting, you can tell right away the main part of the message when you look at it. There're type, style, weight, and scale used to differentiate different parts of each message. Different baseline shapes create visual movement throughout each layout. Finally, each layout has a clear direction for the reader's eyes to go. Keeping all of this in mind, we can move forward with our own layouts and remember these considerations and how they worked in these layouts and see how we can use them to make them work just as effectively in our own layouts. If you're looking for more examples, you can click on the six stunning typographic layouts to blog link on the materials bonus sheet that came with the class and you can locate that by hitting your project right underneath this video and it'll be right on the right side. You can get to it on a laptop and a desktop computer, and they're right there and just download that materials links sheet, and it's right at the bottom of that sheet, so you can click on that and I've got three more dissections. So if you want to pursue that a little further, that's where you can find it. In the next video, we're going to go over the materials for this class, and then we'll jump right into making our own lettering layouts. 4. Materials + Bonuses Overview: Before we get into creating our layouts, I want go over the materials that I'm going to be using in this class. This looks really overwhelming right now and I totally get that, but I want to start this off by saying you honestly only need a pencil or a pen. All this other stuff is totally extra. Don't feel like you can't continue on unless you have these materials. I'm just going over the materials I use in case you'd like to experiment with some new materials, but by all means you can totally complete this class with just a pen and a regular pencil. This as a set of Microns, these are really awesome because they don't bleed through paper, and I really like that. They come in a bunch of different sizes. I find myself using the o2, which is a 0.3 millimeter one the most, which has propelled me to start using this. Other kind of pen called Le Pen. It's very similar in point size to the o2, which I really like. I get these in a four-pack, and that way I have a bunch of the same instead of having to buy a whole pack and getting a bunch of sizes that I don't use as much. That's why I use this Le Pen pretty often, and you're going to see me using this quite a bit throughout this class. They're really affordable too. I think these are six bucks. I should probably show you what these look like too, giving you an example. I'm using just regular copy paper in this class and tracing paper, that's the only types of paper that are going to be used. I'm going to move this over to the side so I can show you what all these different pens look like. Microns, they look pretty basic. This is what the tip looks like, and then Le Pen, very similar, I like how dark it is. It's a really rich black, so that's really nice. I also use this Tombow Fudenosuk pen, which is pretty cool when you buy it. It comes in Japanese packaging which makes it feel really special, and if you're just starting out with [inaudible] lettering, this is actually a pen that I would totally recommend trying out because you can get your nice thins, and then if you hold it on the edge and you press down, you get some really nice thicks. This is pretty nice for experimenting with your thicks and your thins. I like this one a lot, and then I recently started using this Prismacolor brush tip marker, which has been really cool. This Fudenosuke is the middle ground between just mono weight line and then this one gets pretty big. You can see you when I press down, I get a nice thick stroke, and then I still have the capabilities of thinner strokes too. This is what this one looks like. When I need to do really giant type for hierarchy, I'll go to this one as my large one. This is a Prismacolor brush tip marker. For the pencil, I'll just use a basic mechanical pencil, I've been using this one for forever. This is all I stick with, that's all I really need. If I need to outline anything, that's really easy. These ones don't have very long-lasting. Erasers, I like using a separate eraser. This is just a clic eraser right here. It lasts a really long time, and that way I can just go in and get the areas that I need to erase. So this is the eraser that I use for all my stuff. I also like using a Gelly Roll white pen if I need to put in any fine details into my thicker black strokes. This is a really nice way to add that extra detail, because we're just working in black and white in this class. This has been really nice to add that extra detail. If you want to use a compass for curves, that's totally fine. I like free handing it, but if you want to be a little more precise, definitely feel free to use a compass. I'm just using a ruler. This is a fancy one, but ignore that. Just use any ruler you need. If you want straighter lines. Like I said, I free handle out of my arcs and my lines, but if you want to be more precise, break out the old ruler. Tracing paper is going to actually play a pretty big part in this class. I would recommend picking some up that's really affordable, and it's going to really help your lettering layouts because you can adjust things on the fly. We'll get into all of that more throughout the class. But a tracing paper is an excellent way to improve your layouts very quickly without having to redo everything every single time. I definitely recommend getting some tracing paper. Tracing paper, regular copy paper, pen, pencil, that's really all you need. If you can't do tracing paper, if you have a light table, that'll work fine as well. So those are the basics. Because you enrolled in this class, I'm also giving some freebies away. First of all, there is a PDF materials list, and this is a clickable PDF, you can click on anything that's underlined, and all of the materials that we just went over on here, so you can have access to everything being used in the class. I also have some additional resources which we'll get to as the class goes on. That typographic layouts blog post is also on here that we talked about in an earlier video. If you want to reference that, there's a link to that as well. As we're moving in to our layouts, I've got a list of 15 quotes. If you don't have in mind the type of message or quote that you'd like to use for your layout, here are 15 that you can choose from. That if you want to practice they're right here so you don't have to spend forever trying to find the right message to get going. Finally, I have this big resource of inspiration elements, that we're going to be referencing as we create each one of our layouts. It's just a bunch of elements that I use very often in my layouts and my lettering just to give you a little bit of inspiration and a little bit of a jump start. When you start creating, there's some ideas for decorative elements that you can add into your layouts. I've got some simple flourishes that I use quite often in mine. There's lettering shapes, there's arcs, angles, wavy baselines, and then over here I've got mixing lettering styles and weights. You can see the nice contrast between styles, like what we saw in the earlier examples. These are on here for you to reference as needed. Those are the main bonuses. You can get to these by going to your project right underneath the main video screen, and then it's going to be right on the right hand side, and you can access those on a desktop and a laptop computer. That's where these are, so go and pick those up, and in the next video we're going to get started with our process. 5. Process: In this video, I want to walk you through my exact process when I'm getting ready to create a layout with my lettering to make it visually interesting and have it read by the viewer or the reader the way that I would like them to read it. It's really important that we get our message across. A few things that I keep in mind when I am creating my layout is I'm choosing my quotes. I've got my list of 15 quotes right here and the first one we're going to do, we're going to do three of these together. The first one is life is tough but so are you. My biggest advice when you first begin is to look at it not just as a quote or a message or a phrase or whatever type of message that you're using for your layout. When you look at it, look at it as if it were poetry. The most important thing is to figure out what creates the most emotion for a reader. What stands out the most, what's going to make them relate to it in the biggest emotional way. Because we're playing on feelings when we're reading something and we want to get a feeling visually when we see it. When you're looking at it, if you're reading it as if it were poetry, which part or which words would stand out the most to you, which ones do you need to apply the most emphasis on for the viewer? Right here life is tough but so are you, right here we've got, life is tough, so we're making a pretty big statement right here. Tough is a significant word in this statement, life is tough but so are you. The end of this, we want to put a lot of emphasis on you because our main motivational message right here is that you are tough, life may be tough but you are also tough. You, for me when I read this should be the most important. I'll underline this and I'll say this is number 1 for hierarchy. Whenever you're creating your hierarchy, you want between one and three levels of hierarchy. Right here, life is tough, I would say tough is really important but I don't think it's as important as you because this is how I'm finishing off my statement, my main message is you are tough. Life may be tough but you are also tough. Tough I'm going to say is number 2 and then the rest are just supporting for this message. But so are and life is shaping number 3. Once I have this broken down, I already have a game plan and if we reference the dissection video earlier of looking at different layouts and how they approach the main first impression that you got from each layout. Now, we can move forward and refer back to that and see how other people used different decorative elements or shape or way or style to emphasize the main points of their message. Because we already know you is the most important and we know that this one should probably be the largest or the heaviest in weight because we want people to notice it the most. We also need tough to be noticed in conjunction with you, but it needs to be apparent that tough is not the main focus, you is the main focus but this is still important, everything else is supporting. Now, that we've got our hierarchy, now we can reference our little inspiration sheet and we can choose out some ideas that we want to play around with because this part is all about experimentation, no one gets this right the first time. We're going to play around with a bunch of different ideas on how we can create a beautiful layout, a very effective visual layout as well. Because we have this inspiration elements bonus sheet, we can go through and see what types of decorative elements we'd like to use. This all comes down to your personal preference, maybe play on your strengths, things that you're good at illustrating or feel like you would get the message across there much better knowing your lettering style and your illustration style. Just look at this list or create your own list and figure out which types of elements you would like to begin playing with. I already know I really like playing with ribbons, so I think some of my elements that I want to use for this would be a ribbon. What else? I always like using flourishes, so maybe I'll use a flourish. This is really important that we keep this very basic like you saw in the dissection. All those really effective layouts didn't use very many elements. Maybe this is all I want to keep for now, just a ribbon and maybe some flourishes and if I decide to add on anything later, then I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. I want to keep things as basic as possible. This first one we're going to keep very simple. As far as lettering styles in weights, I recommend keeping one to three styles in weights in your layout. You don't want to go overboard, a lot of people have a tendency to throw everything in the kitchen sink and just experiment and go crazy and throw everything in there, but that's the exact opposite of what we want to do. Keeping things more simple allows the message to come across stronger. Everything else is supporting. Right here, I think I'm going to, let's see. I go to this a lot. This is one of my favorite go to's, it's using this light weight Sans Serif, all caps for my supporting words. I would do like life is tough, life is, actually tough is going to be number 2 and then but so keep those small and then tough, maybe I want to go and try out my Fudenosuke brush pen right here and maybe this one is also going to be a San Serif but it's going to be thicker. That's how I'm going to make it stand apart from my tertiary type is I'm going to just make this thicker and heavier. This is tough and I know that since my "you" needs to be a little bit stronger than tough, maybe I'll go to my Prisma color and just make this one extra thick and maybe I'll throw in a script just to make this stand apart from tough. Now that I know or just have an idea of what I want to use moving forward, now I can begin laying out my lettering. This part is really important, this practice. I do this every single time I make a layout and I always feel like things are more thought out, more strategic, more logical and it's going to create better outcomes in the end no matter what. In the next video, we're going to take this and we're going to execute it from beginning to end. 6. Simple Layout: Jumping right in from the last video we've already got our pens that we're going to be using to establish the different weight with hierarchy. we've got some elements picked out and now we're going to start laying out our lettering. The first thing I do is totally ignore the elements, these are going to come later, but it's good to know what we're already thinking about using, so we're just going to focus exclusively on the lettering for this part. I've got my pens and looking at my little reference sheet here, I think I want to try two different layouts to begin with. I really like the look of an angle because there's a lot of energy behind this statement. I'm going to try an angled layer and then whenever I have a few tertiary words that begin a message, I like putting them in an arc, so I want two play around with that too. That's just my personal preference, but definitely feel free to experiment with whatever you feel comfortable with. I'm going to try the angled layout first and see where it gets us. I've got my laPen for my smaller text, I'm keeping it all caps, and then I've got my [inaudible] , my tombow. I'm just going to call it a tombow from now on, for my tough which is my secondary as far as the hierarchy. Then I've got my Prismacolor, which is going to give me a thicker, heavier weight for my number one piece of lettering which is u. I'm going to try the angle, and this is where I'll grab my mechanical pencil and I'll just draw out some angles so I can keep things in line the weigh I would like them. I'm just going to written out, "Life is," get this guy and maybe, make this nice and big,"Tough but so are you," so that feels pretty good. I'm trying to think about where I would incorporate my elements into this. I could definitely throw in some flourishes that come around and even everything out write here. I want to call attention to you. Actually it might be better if I do the little burst elements, these guys for you because it's an exclamation to the end of my phrase. I just want to make sure my message is being received when you're looking at it and you're reading it, I want it to feel like how it looks. "you," since it's such a statement, I think these lines would be more effective than just these sweet little curls. I know that's something that I want to integrate instead I'm going to throw these lines. Maybe I can incorporate sum like for shadow right here. If you're having trouble knowing where to put the lines, took a little while for me to figure out where to put them each time where I could draw them without having to think anymore. Just think about your light source. if light's coming this direction, it's going to push everything to the left, so that'll help. That's looking okay. I'm not totally sold on it let me try redoing it here, see what that looks like. Maybe I'll create some greater contrast and just the scale, so the size of things, so let's keep this, "Life is," making a statement, "tough." Maybe I'll put the, "but so are'" in a ribbon. that's feeling pretty good. I like this layout, and I think I'm going to let me erase my lines for each of these with my click eraser. Make sure your ink's dry before you do this otherwise, you smear everything. Also don't get paranoid or worried about the different richness of your blacks because at the end of this class I'm going to show you how to create digital lettering off of this, and everything will be won flat sheet of black at the end. don't get paranoid about your different pens having different richnesses. that's looking pretty good, I feel good about this. This is a little funky with these coming down under here, I might make these longer. I could even throw like a few dots in hear to make it extended a little further. That feels pretty nice. There's one idea and we're going to move on to the apt one and see what we like better. You can keep going like this so you can choose different styles. It's all about what you're comfortable with, I'll play around with a lot of different styles I'm not going to waste your time here with a bunch of different ones. I just want to give you an idea of my process because that's always bean really helpful for me is, seeing other letters, just create stuff and figuring out how I can create my own process off of that, so hopefully this helps. I'm going to walk you through the curved one next, so I'm just going to create a freehand arc here, that's what I usually do. I'm going to do. All right, let's see what I can do with this guy. I known I like these bursts around the word "you," so I'm going to keep that. Still I have to try and figure out what I'm going to do with the rest of this though. Let's get rid of this arc, it's not a very persuasive ark so I know I need to improve that. Let's see, I think I can do a ribbon, like on here. Since it's a small ribbon and just put out "Life is" in that little ribbon above the words and seen how that feels. I also want to try setting "Tough" in script, it's just going to be a smaller script and a little bit lighter on the weight than the "You." I'm going to try that next. If you want help on creating bounce lettering like this, I do have a class on that, which I will put on that bonus sheet, so you have access to that class if you want some tips on getting your letters a little more bounce. Then let's fit this in. This is an area that I'm recognizing. I need to figure something out with that where the G is hitting. I'm going to do one more of these and keep this back to the sensor. We can just seen what that looks like. I'm going to do that up here, so I'm not wasting paper. This is just experiments. I usually put a ton of sketches on one sheet of paper, all different sizes, figuring out what I want to do. I'm one of those people that when I'm writing, I got to be really close to it so this is definitely a little bit of a challenge for me to write so far away, I've always had my hand close to the paper when I write. It's probably not good. That's looking pretty cool. I like the way that looks. Then I'm just going to put in, and I'm going to look at my little sheet right here. When I have just some small amount of words, I really like putting these lines in. It's a really simple element that draws attention to the sell layout, so everything gets read pretty well. It looks like I'm a little off center write here, but we're going to fix that later. Then I'm just going to drop in the you. I'm figuring this out in real time just so you know. I didn't have this prepared. I wanted to be as genuine as possible with showing you my process, so I didn't want it to seem rehearsed. I think I'm going to extend this, so I underlines you, because I think that would help finish everything off. This is your stopping point and this is your starting. All that feels really good. I think I might actually remove this faux drop shadow up here because I want all the attention going on you, and I don't think it needs it. Those are the changes I'm going to make there. Now that I've got a really good one that I'm feeling great about. Comparing it to the angled one, I do like the angled one, but I think I'm going to move forward with this guy. I'm partial to this curve driven, I really like it. We are going to move farther back. I'm taking you start to finish in this video. We're going all the way. I'm going to move this over here so we've got that as a reference. Moment, pens out of the way. My goal right here, is I'm going draw this to the scale that I wanted and as nice as I can possibly get it. That's my goal, but I'm not going to freak out if anything's off center because we're going to fix that with tracing paper. That's where a tracing paper comes in. Right now I'm just going to try and draw it as best I can. Free hand because then it's going to look more authentically lettered. That's why I stay away from the compass, but I've been drawing free hand in arcs for awhile. I think that's mostly and I just have practices on that. I'm just going to free hand my arc here. That feels pretty good. I'm happy with that. I think my you could be just slightly more centered, but everything else feels great. This feels like the arc could be a little less arced so reduce that arc a little bit. But other than that, I'm really happy with how this is coming along. Now it's time for our tracing paper. I'm just going to grab a sheet on it here. I'll come to show you how this part works, mix the two. What we're going to do is just lay this over the top. I already know I want my arc of my little ribbon. I need to turn this for a sec so I can draw this right. I want my arc to be less extreme. Going off of my base, I'm going to take this less extreme, and it helps seeing it right below so I know where everything else is following with it. I'm just going to move this up a little bit so I can write out my words. I need to space these ones further apart. That could be improved obviously. Bring back down. I'm going to bring this over. Now I known my put so needs to be knocked a little closer to the left. I'm going to start this a little earlier. It's looking pretty good. Then my you I wanted to knock this just a little further over. I can move my tracing paper over to where it needs to be. I think you will line up perfectly right there. Now I can trace over, because I moved my layout over. I would wait for this to dry, and then I might even go in one more time with another sheet of tracing paper and just fix this ribbon text up here. But other than that, this is looking really good. This is my lettering layout number 1. In the next video, we're going to get a little bit more complex. This is our first run through, everything else will be much quicker from hear I promise. I just wanted to give you the full gamut of my process when I'm going from just the word or the phrase from the very beginning, all the way to the final using tracing paper to correct anything that maybe we miss stepped with when we first drew it out. That is our first lettering layout completed. 7. Advanced Layout: We're going to get a little more complex with the second one. I've got a longer quote this time and we're going to experiment a little bit more. Right here I've got a quote by Helen Keller. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. I love the feeling of this quote. So that's why I chose it. If we look at it from a poetic standpoint, what resonates with us the most? So when I read this, it is daring adventure like that is the main focus of this because it's got the most energy out of all of the other words or phrases that are within this message. I would definitely call that my number 1. So daring adventure. I Love just the pictures in your mind that you get from that and the feeling that it creates and then we're saying life is either a daring adventure, this amazing, wonderful thing, or it's nothing. That's kind of the main point that we're getting to at the very end. It's either a daring adventure or it's nothing. So nothing at all, I'm going to say is my number 2. So now that I've got these, I think everything else is just really supporting those main points in this message. So everything else is a number 3, so I'm just going to leave everything else like that. How I'm going to do this is, like I mentioned before, whenever I've got a bunch of tertiary at the beginning I really like playing with an arc. That's just my own preference because I feel like it leads you right in, directs your eye right into the content. Where's my pencil? I think I'm going to start with just the type and then we're going to figure out the elements that we're going to throw in there. I know I want to start with an arc and I need a long one because I've got, life is either a, I might include this on the arc, I might not. So let's do what we did before. So, life is either, sometimes when I have a quote, if I have an A, right here, I like, because an A, is a pretty nice letter for doing one of these things and I feel like this is a natural flourish which I really like. I think I'm going to try that it here. I'm going to connect, I'm going to bring it in and maybe try and match it here. That doesn't look very good. Let's try that again. I'm very loose with these sketches because I'm just trying to figure out what I want to do here. A, that feels a little better and then we're going to make, Daring Adventure. Daring, seems like it has to be angled just because the word, just how it feels. So I'm going to put this at an angle. Let me do that. I think I need to make the smaller, give myself a note right there. Daring, needs to be pretty big and then I'm going to do the same thing I do with the A or feels good. It's a nice parallel between it makes you focus right on the main message, which is my number 1, which I like. Here's something else, whenever I have a message that's got like small word in between it, it's a great opportunity to focus on both of these and make this one tertiary within the secondary level importance. I can do this a little larger, nothing, then I can do one of these things where it's at an angle and it's script and then come in like this. Then I can do Helen Keller's name, small down here. Maybe one of those. All right, that's feeling pretty good. I know that I've got a ways to go with this, but this is a really good start and I want to pursue this layout because I loved the parallel that I'm getting, I like this angle. I love my little arc up here. I'm feeling really good. Now I'm going to introduce some different weights. I like that I've just got a few elements that are script, everything else is Sans-serif, but I'm going to add more contrast by changing up the weight. What I'm going to do is keep my smaller stuff just with the pen then I think I'm going to go with the Tambo for, life is either and nothing all. Then use my Prismacolor again for, Daring Adventure. This is what I'm thinking I'm going to do, is make this nice and big then I'm going to use my Tambo for the secondary stuff. You get the idea. We're going to draw it out. I'm going to try and do my best to do like a final one and then we can jump right to the tracing paper for the sake of time. I'm going to base my really good drawing off of this one and I'm going to hope for the best here. I think I want to reduce the size of this, so doesn't compete with this. So this part definitely needs to be smaller. Then you got to put, Helen Keller, kept her credit. Let's try dots this time. Obviously I've got some super centering issues here, but we're going to fix it. I'm not going to freak out about it. I'm going to stay in the game and now I'm going to introduce some really simple flourishes I think to bring everything together. Just keep things really simplified here. I'm just going to free hand these and see how it goes. Obviously I want to draw attention to this messaging and this messaging. So that's why I am wrapping this around and I got to figure out how to start this off. Some of these are coming in like this. This gives me a good opportunity to focus, something like that. That feels good. That's feeling really good. I definitely have some improvements that I want to make, but overall, I'm pretty satisfied with this. Let me erase my pencil lines so we can have a final idea how it looks without pencil. It's feeling good. It's got a little ways to go, but I'm feeling good. We're going to bring in the tracing paper, fix this up a little bit, let's see what we get. I know that I want, Life is either, to be a little smaller. I think I'm going to move my A, up a little bit. Then I want Daring, to be more center. So I'm just moving my tracing paper. I'm leaving everything else below it. This is how I'm making everything aligned. Or, feels really good the way it is. I just might not make it so angle. I might bring it down a little bit just the way the letters are like the flourish though. It's feeling pretty good, pretty centered. We just want to make sure that nothing at all is centered below everything and I want it to be straighter than it is. It's looking good and now we have left is her name. If you ever want to check everything the really easy way is to just put it on a blank sheet of white paper and that's feeling pretty good. I might tweak a few things. I usually bring my stuff in Illustrate where I can tweak further. If you want to do everything hands down than just grab another sheet of tracing paper, set it right on top and go for it. I'm going to put in that photo drop shadow. We're going to throw in the flourishes and then we're going to call this done. So I'm going to speed up the video for the rest of us. This is looking like it's pretty much done. If we take a look at our last one compared to this one. Obviously, they're pretty different. This is far more simple, but we have way fewer words here. So that also helps just another thing to keep in mind when you're choosing your phrase or your message, what you feel like undertaking. Right here, I want to just be clear that you don't need a ton of different elements to create some really visually effective layouts. Right here we were using all Sans-serif and where you're throwing in just script and a few small areas and then the decorative elements that we're using there just flourishes really simple lines really and look at how effective the layout becomes, where we know exactly where to focus. We get a feeling when we read it. In my book that is a very successful layout and down here we're using Sans-serif once again then one script element. We've got a ribbon and then just these little lines, and that's it. That's all we're using. Just really simple elements, but everything is really thought out because we've done our homework at the beginning of figuring out where our hierarchy lies. That is the majority of work here. Everything else is just font, it's just play time. We're going to finish up everything with a final complex quote. To finish everything off, we're going to get a little more complex with our decorative elements and we're going to use a longer message once again. Then we're going to call this done. 8. Complex Layout: Okay. We're on to our last layout. Basically I'm giving you three examples so you can see my whole process and a variety of different quotes and layouts just to help along with any areas you may be struggling with. This last one we've got a longer quote once again. We're just going to dissect that. We're going to follow the process and we're going to come out with a really beautiful layout. Right here, I've got to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow by Audrey Hepburn. As I'm looking at this and reading it as if it were poetry, to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow. There's a lot of little cues going on here. We know that planting a garden, this is a focus, so it's a noun out of all of this. This, seems like it should be important, is to believe. There's a lot of aspirational words that you're going to come across if you're focusing on quotes and believe is the giant of aspirational words. Whenever you come to something that's hope, believe, trust, all of those kinds of words. I usually set them in script because it feels aspirational when it is a script and it's usually a decorative script, so it calls a lot of attention to it. Like what we have right here, this decorative script because believe, like that. That is a word right there. This I already know is going to be my number one because it's aspirational, and tomorrow seems like it's probably going to be on the same level as garden because we're ending it. That's the conclusion to our statement. It's believing in tomorrow. Another day is coming, so tomorrow is also important. That's how I read it. I also want to say like there's no wrong way to do this. This is just me personally when I dissect something. This is what's calling out to me. Different words may be calling out to you and those are the words that you want to focus on to have the reader feel them when they're looking at them. For me, these are the words that stand out. Different words may stand out to you. Just don't get too caught up in feeling maybe you're choosing the wrong words. It can be different. Quotes have different meanings for everyone, so don't feel like you're making a mistake there. Don't think too hard on it. Okay. These ones I feel like are going to be on the same level. I'm going to give these a number 2 and everything else is going to be supportive. Just remember, keep it between one and three. I've got three right here. Some phrases and some quotes, maybe you only have two. Maybe you only have one thing that really stands out and everything else supports it. Don't feel like you've got to have three every time. It's totally fine to have two. I would shy away from four Just because it just adds a level of complexity that's not needed for the reader. Okay. Now we can jump right into this. As I mentioned before, whenever I have a phrase leading up to something, I really like using an arc, so I'm going to use that again here. Just feels really good in there. I could easily make this a straight line, but I think it's more visually interesting to have an arc, so I'm going to do this once again. If arcs aren't your thing, we got other choices here. Just don't feel that just because I happen to keep putting an arc in here, it doesn't mean that it just needs to keep happening. All right. To plant, actually just to change things up. Let's do one that's like a wavy line. All right. Garden. I want to change things up a little bit from the past layout. I'm going to introduce a serif for a garden in tomorrow. Serif has the little feet on it that you're probably familiar with. Madness pen is running out of ink, but it looks cool. I love the texture. That's what we're going to do. We're going to mix it in with our sans serif. We talked about having a script too, so we're going to do believe really fancy. All right, you get the idea. What do I want to do here. I'm going to keep this straight because we're making a statement and believe, I wrote this at an angle and I think I want to keep it that way, so maybe believe. We're going to make this complex. Since we're ending with it, we might as well challenge ourselves a little bit. I want to end this like here. If you went back to the dissection video, there's a ton of different ways that you can organize your types where your lettering. I'm doing like the z pattern right here. I'm directing people read down, read up, read across, but focusing everything on believe right here, because everything else is straight until you get to here. That's my main focus and that's important. All right. We're going to write out garden on this line trying to keep it centered. All right. Obviously, this needs to be centered and my strokes need to be a little more consistent than they are right now. Fix that later. I'm going to write out believe before I drop in these two. I like doing this one of these habits lately where I like the tops of my eyes not just being dots for the really pretty stuff. Right now, I'm making it super decorative. It's the perfect opportunity to bring my little trick in, and that's doing a looping thing, or I get a flourish out of it too, which is fun. I want to bring that in here. Saw the opportunity and I went for it. All right. What we need is to somewhere in here, so I think I'm just going to write it out. Is to believe. Then I've got the word in, which I think I want to keep along with believe. Then have the reader's eye come from here down. Let's just do a skewed. It's angled and I'm still having straight lines in it. All right. Then tomorrow we're going to keep this as centered as possible. Actually I want to bring my line down a little bit so I can start the t under the b. Maybe here. All this white space that's created right here. I think I want to move my tomorrow up actually, because this feels like too much. Maybe I'll make this a little smaller and push it up in here. But now I know I want to do that. I put the little feet on. Out of here, we need to put her name on here. Give her some credit. We're talking about a garden and this is a really awesome opportunity to integrate some leaves, garden elements, but use flourishes as well. Since we've already used a flourish here, we should probably use flourishes elsewhere, so it ties everything together. First, I'm just going to draw out some flourishes and see how things are feeling. I really don't have any rhyme or reason. I play around with flourishes a lot. There's no real secret with what I'm doing. I'm literally just figuring it out as I go. It just takes a lot of practice with anything. If you want to do anything, well, it's going to take hours of practice, I don't want to go too overboard. I think I need something here. Because above everything, we want to make sure our message is coming through. That's the most important thing. I want to throw in a few little flowers, I think, because they're really simple. All right. I don't know if this is something I want to do. Maybe I'll just leave it, but let's see what it looks like if I put some leaves on these. All right. That's feeling pretty nice. I'm going to erase all my pencil marks so you can get an idea of what it really looks like. You can even do this one. I guess I have a little bit of a curve. I think I'm going to do this up here actually, instead of the arc. Just the way my flourishes went. I think it would actually look really nice as a wave here so I'm going to do that even though I didn't fully pursue it down here. All right. Looking at this, what I need to change when I move into my tracing paper, I know that this needs to move over here a little bit. This needs to move up. We're going to do a wavy line right here. We're going to start like this. Everything else I think is looking good. I think I need to call a little more attention to this text because it's going to get lost if I don't. I think I need to thicken these up actually, because if I have all these flourishes, it's going to get lost. One of the main things to remember is to always make sure that your messaging is not lost, because that's the whole point of this. It Is to create a feeling for the reader and if they can't read all the words or know where all the words are, it's pointless. All right. That feels good, I'm going to go to my tracing paper. I'm going to speed the video up through all this because we've already been through this before. I just called out everything that I wanted to change and you'll see me make that. I'm going to speed up the video. Coming right up. Okay. We are all done here. I did decide to go definitely a lot more sparse with my leaves. I felt like I went a little overboard on this one. Just way too many and I was distracting from the message. Everything's a little more condensed here. It's not breathing quite as much as I'd like it to, so I think I would go in here, put another sheet of tracing paper on top, reduce the amount of flourishes. I think I would go to my microns actually and get an even thinner tip for these lines just to show a little more contrast between the lettering and the embellishments. Once again, you just want to make sure that your messaging is the focal point of your whole piece. I think those are the issues that I still need to resolve with this. But other than that, I like how it feels. I think tomorrow could even be squeezed down a little further. But outside of that, I'm feeling pretty good about it. I did go to the Tombow for all my tertiary texts, and that the way that I'm setting it apart is that it's a smaller scale and it's sans serif versus my secondary, which is serif and it's a little bit larger. Then I've got my script, that's my number one on my hierarchy. That is this final piece, and in the next video, I'm going to show you how to make this digital really quick. 9. Digitizing + Farewell: So in this video, I want to share my trick for converting your lettering to a digital format that then you can create extra digital artwork out of. You can sell prints of it, you can do further editing and illustrator, which is what I usually do. A nice way to take all of these different shades of black that we have right here and turn them into the same rich black that then we can carry into illustrator or Photoshop and edit even further. Instead, if you don't have a scanner, this is a really good alternative. I use an app called Scanner Pro, which is right here, there's a link to it on your PDF bonus for the resources and materials links. It's just a few bucks, so it's super worth in my opinion. So I'm just going to add a new picture, I'm just going to hold it over trying not to get the shadow of phone in there. Hit the button and then it's going to pop up this blue outline. Hopefully you can see it, there we go. You're just going to drag the corners around the artwork,so you're just getting the artwork in there, and they're going to hit save selection. You're going to hit where it saved it, and I'll bring it up, and you just want to make sure if it's a color right I've, now you can see it's got the different shades of black right here. It's taking a picture of it is a color photograph and we don't want that. So we're going to come over here and hit edit. Then where you see these three little dots, you're just going to tap that and choose black and white document. Once you do that, I'll change everything to one shade of black, and you've got the super contrasts. You're not getting any little specs or anything it's just grabbing the darkest parts of your image. So then it's perfect. You're going to hit done, and then what I do is I hit share and I add it to my photos. Then from my photos I can airdrop it onto my Mac and then bring it into Illustrator. Then I can live trace it there, and if you're not sure how to live trace on the PDF bonus sheets that came with the class. I've got a link right here to two vectorizing tutorials, they're totally free. There's vectorizing doodles, which I would recommend it's my most recent. Tutorial you can use the exact same techniques on lettering. Then I also have this one it's a little bit older but still totally applies. If you don't have the scanner app and you want to use just a traditional scanner checkout vectorize hand lettering that video. So this is on your bonus, the materials listed links, so they're right down here. The Scanner Pro app, you can click on it right there to read more about it if you're interested in that. That's my little trick of bringing it from here to the computer or super-fast without needing a scanner and getting it exactly high contrast black and white like I need it in order to work with it. If I want to apply color digitally, then everything is setup and ready to go for me. So that concludes our class, let me bring in the last two versions that we created. So I'm going to put these on white, you've already seen this one from earlier in the video, and we've got the first one that we did. This is where we started, just experimenting, playing around and then we ended right here, which this one's still needs a little bit of work in my opinion, but it can totally pass as an effective layout. We've got our hierarchy and everything else there. We've got three different lettering layouts that range and complexity, I'm really happy with everything. From here, once you digitize, you can create prints out of them, you can create greeting cards. Etsy is a great place, you can self host these as digital downloads. There's all uses for these lettering layouts once you have them. I encourage you to play around experiment, don't get frustrated, don't give up. Part of creating these is constantly improving them and going back. Definitely don't expect to get it right the first time I draw things out, gosh, sometimes 20-30 times before I'm really happy. It's just part of the process. You learn a lot about what works and what doesn't work. I really encourage you to just experiment and don't get discouraged if it's not looking how you want it to look at, no one starts out being a pro. It takes a lot of hours of practice to get to where you want to be. So just practice and you will get better I promise there's a lot to learn as you're doodling and drawing and embellishing your layouts. Just remember to take a look at your word or phrase, break down the hierarchy, decide on what elements you want to use. Decide on the style and the weight of your lettering before you even begin and then start creating your layouts based on all of that knowledge going into it, and you'll have far better outcomes I promised from here on now. The project for this class is just to create any lettering layout of your choice using any phrase, feel free to use that quote list and pull it off of there and create your own. I love to see what you do, so definitely start a project in the class. For more on me, I've got links on this materials list right down here. You can find me on Instagram. I post a lot of lettering around Instagram if you'd like to follow me there. My handle is @everytuesday, and I also offer a free graphic design and lettering tutorials every single Tuesday over my blog, every Tuesday commerce, a bunch of freebies there as well. So thanks so much for checking out the class, I hope you enjoyed it and I will see you next time.