Calibrating Lucky Stripes

Some years ago (maybe a couple, maybe more: I excel at losing track of time), Ricardo Gomes, from Lucky Stripes Cigar Box Guitars, needed a script lettering for his guitars.

For me, this was a really cool project: making scripts is always fun and challenging, I could do a fast project (since it’s lettering), lots of freedom and, man, guitars. Guitars are super-cool. Specially Ricardo’s.

But the most important thing that happened was that some time passed and we could see how the lettering behaved in many different settings and applications, thus showing us what worked well and what wasn’t working.

This article is about this: what was wrong and how we fixed it.

1. Lucky Stripes?

Before we go and talk about lettering, you should check Ricardo’s guitars. He a luthier that makes custom cigar box guitars (meaning: the resonance box of the guitar is actually a cigar box), where he recycles materials to actually build them.

Check this beauty out, for example:

He even made one for Seasick Steve! Here’s a video of Seasick Steve playing a Lucky Stripes guitar:

So, if you want to contact him, do it: he’s super nice!

2. The Past

So, as we were talking, I doodled something, just to retain some ideas of what we were talking about.

Here’s the sketch:

Although most would feel ashamed of posting this in the interwebs (let alone showing this as a sketch to a client), I’m doing it anyways, for the following reasons:

1. This is a visual synthesis of the chat we had that in no way tries to be an usable solution;
2. From this I went directly to the computer, since I’m not a big fan of solving stuff on paper;
3. There’s nothing wrong with ugly sketches, simply because they’re sketches;
4. I don’t want to feel constrained to a very precise sketch while I’m working in vector, since it blocks my mind from trying something new;
5. And I don’t want to give the impression that a sketch is super-polished artwork. The amount of time that takes to produce an impeccable hand-made drawing is the same (or more) than a digital one, so it’s unrealistic to show something very close to final.

After I took a picture of the sketch with my cellphone, I did a quick center-line vector digitization of the sketch in Illustrator, sent the bitmap to oblivion and started tweaking it, until I got something like this:

Next step? Width Tool!

Although incredibly buggy (we’ll talk about that in a minute), the Width Tool is awesome to work with stroke modulation. Here, I maxed the stroke out, trying to find how thick the weight could go, and then started to add the thin strokes, in a pointed nib sort of logic: thicker down strokes, thinner upstrokes.

After getting close to what I wanted, I expanded the stroke, getting a Bézier hell like this:

And with modulation artifacts like this:

So, unless you want a destroy look in your piece, using the width tool as final art is a no-go, since it produces, as we just saw, an incredible amount of points (read here, here and here), not-so-smooth curves and a lot of strange artifacts.

So, as always, I redrew the whole thing on top of this, with proper Bézier point placement and with some minor tweaks. Here’s the result (with the previous drawing in red):

And BAM!, work done! Well, sort of.

3. The Problems

We were happy, for a while. I guess that, in my case, I overlooked some of the composition issues because I didn’t had some distance to see it more analytically, and, to be honest, since then I’ve learned some more things to look out for.

So, having the chance to tweak it again, after some time, I was thrilled! I had a long time to look at it and think “I’d change this” or “That doesn’t look right”, and now it was time to solve it!

Anyway, let’s talk about some of the problems.

3.1 White Space

The overall interplay of positive and negative space here is pretty much inconsistent and with two major mistakes:

1. The amount of white space between the L and the u is huge, sometimes appearing as part of two different words;
2. The r is a disaster: too blobby, too close to the t‘s bar (overcrowding that area) and the loop is not readable at all.

3.2 Flow

In general, the design had too many (apparent) corners, resulting in a somewhat breaky flow, with too many places for the eye to decelerate and make a sharp turn. Since we were looking for a smooth result, this wasn’t desired.

At the same time, although some irregularity in letter size and slope was intended, in some cases the letters were too small (like the u), too big (like the r) and too slanted (S and t).

3.3 Line Consistency

If you ever worked with a pointed nib or a pointed/conical brush, you’ve probably have guessed that the modulation is very weird.

Let’s think of the thin lines as the thinnest that the tool we’re trying to emulate is capable of doing. With this said, there’s some space for variation in the thickest parts of the strokes, but not so much for the thinnest (although possible).

I happened to do it the other way around: the thicker strokes are pretty consistent, while the thinner… well, they’re a mess.

 3.2 Size issues

The main reason for calibrating this logo was that it didn’t work properly at small sizes, for two reasons:

1. Due to poor design;
2. Due to bad printing conditions and ink spread.

The following image show us what happens with loss of resolution and with ink spread. If you want to test your stuff, this was done playing with incremental Gaussian Blur and then applying a Threshold filter.

So the most immediate things that happen and severely compromise legibility and form recognition are:

1. The counters and inner forms that are too small immediately disappear. In this case, the c and the e;
2. The overcrowded areas (like the t‘s bar and the r, or the upper and lower part of the y) become unreadable black blobs.

4. The Solutions

The goal was to correct the previous problems without changing the form too much, since Ricardo has developed a respectable fan base in the time period.

Here’s a list of some of the most important changes:

1. Opened the counters, to avoid the ink spread so that they wouldn’t disappear;
2. Corrected the line inconsistencies;
3. Corrected the sharp turns, in order to become smoother;
4. Corrected the i‘s dot to balance it’s weight and the white space around it;
5. Corrected the r, paying attention to the loop and the horizontal stroke;
6. Harmonized the u and the space between it and the L;
7. Added some ink-traps in problematic areas;
8. Simplified the p‘s and k‘s vertical stem (there was no need to retain the calligraphic quality of it, since it made the bottom blobby);
9. Altered the swash in order to become more organic and smoother.

And here’s a side-by-side comparison of the old lettering with the new:

And here’s the blur + threshold result:

 5. Wrapping Up

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Cheers!

10 Tips On Kerning And Metrics

This is a brief collection of quick tips on kerning and metrics, as the title may have suggested, that I find valuable.

Although this is intended for Type Design, this article should be valuable for DTP software kerning or Logo Design. Or anything that has to do with letters.

And if you’re wondering what’s the font in the image above, here it is.

All set? Let’s go!

1. Proper Spacing Means Less Kerning

This should be a no-brainer. If your font looks good overall, you’ll have to kern less.

So, try to keep your metrics as consistent as you can, well overshot and only go for kerning when you feel that there’s no other way to space it better. I usually space the letters as I am drawing them, to see if I have a good flow and I might solve some spacing problems in the letter form itself.

2. Classes

Use kerning classes. There.

In case you are wondering why, it’s just way easier to grab a bunch of glyphs of the same group (for example a and all it’s diacritic marks), assigning them to the same kerning class and then kerning them than doing it pair-by-pair. Even if you have to deal with some collisions, it’s a lot less work.

3. Kern First, Ligatures Afterwards

As much as kerning is tedious and I love to push it to the end of the production, it’s not a bad idea to do the ligatures after you’ve already kerned at least the alphabet: in that way, you avoid having to correct bad spacing to your ligatures, saving you some time and some eyeballing doubts.

4. Mirroring

Mirror, mirror, mirror. Horizontal and vertically. At the same time and with just one axis mirrored.

The goal here is to step yourself away from text as more as you can, and trying to see “pure” forms. It lets you approach the design as an abstract composition, making it easier to balance your spacing.

And this is not just for kerning and spacing: it helps you to get a good flow in your design and it’s easier to perceive not-so-obvious design flaws.

Also, I’ve recently found that I can read fluently upside down or when the text is mirrored: it’s like having a super-power!

5. Straight Neighbours, Round Neighbours

Before going for text-string kerning (I use Just Another Foundy‘s Test Text Generator, by the way), I start doing kerning with straight and round neighbours (and/or a mix of both) in both sides of the pair I’m working on.

For example, if I’m kerning A/V, I’ll have something like HHAVHH OOAVOO HOHAVHOH. And I just noticed that the font I’m using here is not properly kerned. See? It works.

6. Pay Attention To The Space Width

This one is often neglected.

Most of the times, if you space your sidebearings right while your drawing, usually you don’t have to kern the space glyph at all. So, you have three options:

1. Set your space width and do your metrics accordingly;
2. Do your metrics and set the space width accordingly;
3. Ping-pong between the two.

In my opinion, go for option number 3.

Metrics and kerning deal with the space between letters – and that includes the space between words.

7. Blur your eyes

This one is related to §4, the goal is the same than in mirroring.

8. Keep Rhythm Consistent

While kerning, try to keep equal perceived space between the letters. Not mathematical.

All letterforms are different (I like to state the obvious), no there’s no equal solution to every single pair. Even if we think that we shouldn’t kern n/h, I believe that we should check it out anyways. In this example, the top right curve of the n can be creating too much white space, for instance. And it only takes a second.

9. Don’t Forget The Left Side, Jedi

One common thing to forget is to pair lowercase on the left with the uppercase on the right.

While this should be going without saying, when you’re kerning hundreds or thousands of pairs, you can easily forget this. Your end user might want to use your font to write something like YoU’rE sO fLuFfY and you’ve might have just lost a client for not having those pairs kerned. Or saved the world. Who knows!

Anyway, lowercase/uppercase pairs are not uncommon at all, specially in logo design. So keep this one in your to-do list.

10. Trust The Eye

Well, this is the most valuable advice on type and graphic design. It’s very usual to be insecure and trying to find some über-rational process, way or calculus to make you feel that your choices are the best, but hey: type is for the eye, not for the computer.

If what you see feels good, then it’s good. If it doesn’t, then it’s not. It’s that simple. You’ve looked at type your whole life, even before you could read, so just assume that your subconscious is a very well trained machine for eyeballing these things. And the more you try, the better you become at it.

And trust me about this: I’m a optimization geek. I spend a lot of time trying to perfect the way I do things (as you might have noticed while reading my article on Bézier curves) and the better it looks, the less I’m concerned with geometry or space rationalization.

11. Final Thoughts

I wrote this because kerning is one of the things type savvy people complain the most about, but I think it’s not that hard. And yes, after some hours doing it, I also complain about it.

But it doesn’t take as much as you’d might believe it does, time-wise or knowledge-wise.

I hope this has been valuable for you, somehow!

And feel free to drop me a word! Cheers!