As you may have caught on to by now, custom lettering is one of my specializations and passions. I love type and script treatments and coming up with new forms for clients logos and graphics. Designing complete custom lettering is a very involved process but extremely fun.
To share my lettering process I will start with a brief on this project for a yummy homemade chocolate shop in the small town of Owosso Michigan. The lettering need was brought to me by FORGE here in Dayton Ohio. Spagnuolo’s an Italian Chocolate Shop, needed a fresh and more professional look. I was told a script was desired, something modern but not to elegant with a slight retro and home style feel. I of course started with my brainstorming process, taking in everything about Spagnuolo’s and the chocolate goodies they offer. I considered many ideas but I was very inspired when thinking about the process of making the chocolates. I couldn’t get drizzled chocolate out of my head. What if the script for their name was written in drizzled Chocolate! Off I went…
Here I am showing just a few of many thumbnails I sketched out as well as where I started refining some chosen script treatments. It is all about refinement. I start with thumbnail and refine, refine, refine. Refining involves pencil, erasing, redrawing, reworking, and even cutting/ripping off other pieces of paper and making patchwork until each letter is right.
Here I am really honing in on the chosen script on paper still. I stay with pencil and paper as much as possible. My goal is that by the time a reach the computer I am simply building an already well defined piece. Naturally some refinement is done in the computer as well but I find the more I refine on paper the better! In my opinion a design should never start in the computer, but simply be built/finalized.
Building the line work in Illustrator and like I mentioned making some slight refinements.
Here is one of the final versions where I took the new script that was finalized in Illustrator, and used Photoshop to make it look like real drizzled chocolate script. Ta da!
This is just one of many lettering projects I have completed and I hope to share more in the near future! Thanks to FORGE for having me work on such a great project. Oh! and if you would like to order some yummy Spagnuolo’s Chocolates visit their site at spagschocolates.com
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WOW! What a great post! I need to do something similar to showcase how I tweak my videos. Your work is outstanding! I’d love to having you on my “What’s teh Big Idea?” podcast to explain why businesses should get a professional (like yourself) instead of relying on their nephew in Highschool!
The script is lovely, but I myself would like to see it without the third dimension added in.
I love the look of ultra-clean sweet-shop logos.