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Let's Make Letters!: Experiment, Practice, and Explore
A definitive workbook for anyone who wants to express themselves and their creativity through letter making and typography.
Let's Make Letters! goes beyond traditional lettering books with a range of projects from lettering basics for beginners to experimental and imaginative prompts that push creative limits. Experiment! Progress! And most of all, have fun. Designers, artists, scribblers, teachers, and students will build skills, confidence, and curiosity as they take up new and familiar tools to draw, depict, and distort letters in original and inventive ways.
Let's Make Letters! goes beyond traditional lettering books with a range of projects from lettering basics for beginners to experimental and imaginative prompts that push creative limits. Experiment! Progress! And most of all, have fun. Designers, artists, scribblers, teachers, and students will build skills, confidence, and curiosity as they take up new and familiar tools to draw, depict, and distort letters in original and inventive ways.
192 pages, Paperback
Published October 26, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 11, 2022
There are SO MANY books on the subject of lettering: Traditional theory. Step by step demos of perfect letterforms. Tracing templates. Alphabet studies, and so on. How about a book about the experimental side? Not a one size fits all, but ALL kinds of styles by trial and error, by professionals and amateurs alike. More importantly, how about a book that encourages the fun part of MAKING/LEARNING about type, with an emphasis on playing vs perfecting?
While not just a typography primer, inspiration showcase or reference guide, "Let's Make Letters" is a useful workbook (thankfully without useless blank exercise pages eating up valuable print real estate) targeted for the typographically timid or stunted. There's foundational basics and visual examples that drive points home clearly and thoughtfully. (I found myself nodding over the same good theories every design student learns, plus new insights worth mentally bookmarking for future.)
The most worthwhile part of the book comes right from the title itself; the idea of unlimited lettermaking (different approaches, different structures, different languages) that is both dynamic and inclusive. Rather than being passive, this book is an encouraging catalyst demonstrating there's always more than one way to do something. By accident or by intention, each experiment also smartly coincidences with an introduction of a distinctive trait or art/design lesson (e.g. monograms, structural building blocks, perspective).
The further I read, the more I appreciated the accumulation of these exercises (particularly at the start of the distort section), as it reflects what brand designers do with type, or what layout designers do arranging elements. The act of breaking letters apart and rebuilding again is also what concept designers fundamentally do—reinterpreting a traditional approach or graphically incorporating a message within an existing form.
"Let's Make Letters" is a fun, typographic playground led by ever-motivating designer/educator/author Kelcey Gray. She best sums up her book's philosophy with this great quote: "Never let the fear of not doing it right, get in the way of doing it at all."
While not just a typography primer, inspiration showcase or reference guide, "Let's Make Letters" is a useful workbook (thankfully without useless blank exercise pages eating up valuable print real estate) targeted for the typographically timid or stunted. There's foundational basics and visual examples that drive points home clearly and thoughtfully. (I found myself nodding over the same good theories every design student learns, plus new insights worth mentally bookmarking for future.)
The most worthwhile part of the book comes right from the title itself; the idea of unlimited lettermaking (different approaches, different structures, different languages) that is both dynamic and inclusive. Rather than being passive, this book is an encouraging catalyst demonstrating there's always more than one way to do something. By accident or by intention, each experiment also smartly coincidences with an introduction of a distinctive trait or art/design lesson (e.g. monograms, structural building blocks, perspective).
The further I read, the more I appreciated the accumulation of these exercises (particularly at the start of the distort section), as it reflects what brand designers do with type, or what layout designers do arranging elements. The act of breaking letters apart and rebuilding again is also what concept designers fundamentally do—reinterpreting a traditional approach or graphically incorporating a message within an existing form.
"Let's Make Letters" is a fun, typographic playground led by ever-motivating designer/educator/author Kelcey Gray. She best sums up her book's philosophy with this great quote: "Never let the fear of not doing it right, get in the way of doing it at all."
June 16, 2022
This is the most interesting book about typography I’ve ever read. I know, that sounds like an oxymoron, but it is fascinating. Combining a history of specific fonts, designers, conceptual graphic design and creative exercises, I could not put this book down.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews