In May 2017 I received an internship at Murphy Empire of Portland Maine. Murphy Empire is based in the Old Port on Center Street. The building that Murphy Empire resides in also shares space with Rugged Coastal (design) and Timber & Frame (video production). Murphy Empire and Rugged Coastal often work closely in conjunction on client projects. This summer I practiced the art of hand lettering. Through proper and repetitive mark making, Murphy directed me through extensive hand lettering practices. This internship gave me a hands on experience about the history of letter forms, and how certain tools create the different marks that we see daily. I learned the importance that hand lettering holds in the design world, and in my opinion underrated. The art of hand lettering breathes life into typography; making letter forms into a unique being. I have completely fallen in love with this art form because making a mark with your own hands holds so much emotion rather than picking out another typeface. The marks that I create have a certain personality that only I own. I believe it is so important for designers to visit the art of hand lettering at least every once in awhile, it is where all of our typography stemmed from. From the ink and flat tipped brush, to digitizing in Typetool; I have found a new avenue of design that I plan to integrate in as many projects as possible, and continue to practice in my career.
Creating a word mark is an exercise that involved bringing personality to a word through hand lettering, then converting it to a vector. I chose to work with my dogs name. I repetitively wrote the name “Nelly” out using different tools; brushes of different weights with ink, pens, pencils, markers, fat-tipped markers. This allowed me to see contrast between sizes and weight in the curvature of letters. After this process I compared the different marks, narrowing my choices down to roughly 13. From there I chose the best 2 marks to vectorize in Illustrator. I brought these into the computer by photographing the words and tracing it with the pen tool. From there they became a vector by placing nodes on each letters most extreme point, this helps establish accurate curvature, and unnecessary amounts of nodes. After that process, I began to make conscious decisions on stylizing the marks.
