lust auf lettering Archives — Studio Martina Flor

July 2, 2016

The Book

THE FIRST STEPS

After holding talks about my teaching methodology at TypeCon 2014 and AtypI 2014, defining the structure of my book turned out pretty easy. I remember coming back from the AtypI Barcelona Conference, driving directly from the airport to the studio, sitting at my desk and putting down on an A3 paper all the ideas that I had in my head. This was the plan de route for the book. planderoute

Left: first mind map of the content of my book in November 2014. Right: First pages plan of the book before finding a publisher.

I wanted to make a book that would speak to a broad readership under my personal belief that everyone can learn to draw letters. I also wanted it to feel as if the reader was at one of my workshops, with clear visual explanations. As a result, the book is 50% handmade, including sketches done by me, handwritten notes and schematic illustrations that explain in a didactic way how to draw letter shapes.

Since I defined the first structure for the content, I worked on it on and off aside my studio work. The growing amount of commercial work I was doing didn’t allow me to work on it on a daily basis and it wasn't until TYPO Berlin 2015 that I set a deadline for it.

SIGNING WITH A PUBLISHER

I met Bertram Schmidt-Friedrichs, the head editor from Verlag Hermann Schmidt, at Typo Berlin 2015. We were spontaneously introduced to each other by book designer Tomas Marauzkas. In a 5 minutes conversation I pitched the book I was working on and I believe that I spoke about it with such an enthusiasm and conviction that, some days after, Bertram invited me to Mainz to speak about the project.

Since they have a wide expertise on typography and design books, Verlag Hermann Schmidt seemed the right match for what I had in hands. I was after a publisher that would understand the sort of project I was after.

It took us a two hour meeting to realise that we were on the same page with the direction of the book. One month later we were signing the contract that 9 months after will bring to life this book.

DOING THE BOOK

My son was born a month after signing that contract with Verlag Hermann Schmidt. As every first-time mom, I had no idea of what it means to welcome a baby in your life nor how that influences your daily routine, your family and your work. The first months my son was there where truly challenging, enjoyable and confusing. I didn’t really know how I could ever go from that position to back to work again. However, I was sure of one thing: I wanted to make this book happen.

Funnily, the conditions turned out to be relatively positive to work on it. Since during those months I was taking in very few commercial commissions from clients, I could concentrate almost exclusively on this project. mewithbaby

Me working at my home office with baby

I was creating the content, the illustrations as well as taking care of the layout for most of the time and, therefore, the making of process turned out to be really toilsome. Having an engaged, open minded and straight forward editor coordinating the steps as well as giving me valuable feedback was essential to finalise the book.

The book was written in english and translated to german. Since a big part of it is composed by handmade sketches and handwritten notes, the process was time consuming as well as implementing the corrections.

martinaflorshand

Physical proof of designers hard work

THE RESULT

The book is much more than I initially imagined, and it was shaped through an exciting creative process with my editor as a partner. It concentrates on the process of drawing letter shapes by hand, i.e., the art of hand lettering. However, the goal is not to make imperfect, quirky, handmade-looking type, but rather to create well-shaped, polished, exquisite digital lettering.

To that end, I show the basics of letter design as well as essential tips to master different lettering styles.

I will guide you through the process of creating a lettering project, from start to finish, from analog to digital. Beginning your design by hand, you will learn about sketching methods and techniques to improve your drawings.
Once you have finished sketching, you will jump into the digital environment and draw your letter shapes in vectors. You will finalize your piece by coloring it and adding texture.
Last but not least, I will share some insights about the commercial work of hand lettering. I will describe the most common kinds of commissions and give advice on how to reach out for clients and how to showcase your work.

Before you run to your favorite book store to get your copy, you should know that this book shows just one way of doing things: mine. It is informed by my personal experience of working in the commercial world, by all the teachers and colleagues I learned from, and by my involvement in teaching at universities and private workshops.

My aim with it is to share all I have learned through trial and error. Rather than showing pretty alphabets that you can copy and color, this book will provide you with concepts, tools, and techniques that will guide you in your own path to hand lettering. Be ready to learn about them and make them your own. After reading this book, you will see letters in a totally new way.

You can order it online here or find it at your favourite book store.

Join thousands of readers in this community and upgrade your lettering skills! If you're as excited as I am, send this link to a friend, so they can subscribe too.

Tags: Book, hand lettering, lettering, lust auf lettering, the golden secrets of lettering, Workshop

July 2, 2016

My lettering work

THE DECISION

I believe I’m one of these people with big career turn and moving to Berlin has a lot to do with that. I started to work exclusively as a letter designer more or less at the same time that I moved to the city. Working as a graphic designer and being an art director for 7 years I had of course been doing typography related stuff before. Still, it wasn’t until I moved here that I decided to stop doing any other graphic design work and pursued making a living exclusively from my lettering work.

My first step towards it was to clean up my website of all the things that I had done but I didn’t want to do anymore. My second step was to print new business cards. This was my way to say to the world that I was a letterer.

My first business cards as a letter designer

THE CONTEXT

Berlin is one of the cities with more type designers per square kilometre in the world. Berlin breaths typography: there’s monthly meetings (called Typostammtisch) where the typographic community comes together to discuss typography related topics, there’s a few conferences with a focus on the mater and there’s a vibrant community of designers working in the field. You can even find a museum of Letters (Buchstabenmuseum) that rescues abandoned vernacular signs from the streets from all around Germany.

kosmetik

Vernacular signs are all over the place in Berlin

Traditionally Germany has a focus on formal typography. Topics as readability, legibility and clarity are essential. And these are all things that my work doesn’t necessarily pursue. My work is colourful and expressive, at times is even not readable. It's about conveying an idea and telling a story. For this I use letter shapes that combined with color and texture create a new visual text.

I was truly hesitant whether this typographic community would accept my approach to letter design. Topping all my expectations, this community welcomed my work and ultimately triggered it. Throughout these years living and working in Berlin my work became more colourful, expressful and playful than i's ever been.

THE WORK

When started working commercialy with lettering I quickly realised that I had to improve my workflow. On the first place, to be able to manage multiple projects at the same time. On the second place, to cope with tight deadlines of agencies and publishing houses. My work process is moulded through that and has become more effective with the time.

Throughout this years I have parallel run a few side projects. The biggest one that I started was Lettering vs Calligraphy, where together with calligrapher Giuseppe Salerno we organised an online battle that got a lot of attention from the audience and the media. That was one of the most exciting times of my life. Also, the way this project improved my work showed me for the first time the impact that this sort of endeavours may have in your bulk of work and the sort of commissions you get.

letteringvscalligraphy

The variety of letters we created together with Giuseppe Salerno.

Some years after that I started Letter Collections where I was designing and sending postcards to friends, colleagues and complete strangers. As a result, I created a collection of 100 postcards where I experimented with several lettering styles that informed my work immensely.

Side projects, commercial work and my teaching has been my main occupations during this years. Thanks to the growing attention towards my work, I have been regularly invited to speak at conferences.

THE TALKS

Speaking about my work and teaching has been one of the most nurturing things I have done so far in my career. It pushed me to organise my ideas, to question my methods and to identify what is important and what is not.

I have the luck to travel often to speak at design and type conferences, and it amazes me every time the fact that I share the stage with people I have admired since I was a young design student. Speaking about my work is just something I love to do and allows me to keep in mind the few things that are essential.

The title and the slides of my presentations about my experience at teaching lettering where made my hand.

TypeCon 2014 was the conference where for the first time I presented a talk exclusively focused on my teaching. I gave a similar talk at AtypI 2014. Breaking down my teaching method into a few clear simple steps that would fit in a 20 minutes presentation made me realise that I had an own personal method, that it was also didactic and certainly effective to achieve personal results. These talks, called after my online clases The Golden Secrets of Lettering first planted the idea of making a book about it in my head. And so I did.

In my next post I'll be speaking about my the book Lust auf Lettering and its content. Click here to read it.

Join thousands of readers in this community and upgrade your lettering skills! If you're as excited as I am, send this link to a friend, so they can subscribe too.

Tags: golden secrets of lettering, lettering, lettering workshop, lust auf lettering, martina flor, teaching, the golden secrets of lettering, typography

July 2, 2016

My lettering workshops

THE START

The first lettering workshop I hosted was for free. I had just arrived to Berlin, fresh out of my type design studies in the Netherlands. No one really knew me in the city and I was positive that I could teach lettering, however I hadn't done it before and I wasn't sure if I was any good at it. My thought was basic and straight forward: if no one had to pay for it people would just sign up. That would give me more chances to have a room full and I would ultimately have the opportunity to try if I could do it.

I organized that workshop with a heart full of expectation. I planed every detail: how would I welcome the attendants, where would they seat, what would be the best for beverages and snacks and which goodies I would give away. I even organized an after workshop party, where the attendants could relax and fill in what I called The Wall of Letters, a wall-sized grid to fill with letters. After its completition it read "all the letters are equal".

The workshop exceded all my outlooks. The results were good, attendants were thankful and I felt that I had succeeded on trying to turn words something that I did intuitively. It was my first time at teaching letter design, but I felt that all the years of experience at teaching typography back in the years at Universidad de Buenos Aires translated into confidence and precision to convey concepts. That, jointly with my will to make it happen turned out to have a positive impact in my teaching.

Workshop organised in collaboration with Jakob Wolf

THE TEACHING METHOD

Over 5 years went through since that time. My first workshop lasted three days (three days!) and my workshops nowadays last 6 hours top. What has changed? My precision at sorting out the truly essential concepts that I want to give the people as take away. With the time I have also learned to identify profiles of students and how to help them improve their design process, so my efficacy at teaching translates into their success at working and getting the best out of the sessions within an economical process.

At these workshops I teach an effective technique to draw letters by hand very popular among letter designers: the improvement of a drawing by layers. Moreover, I convey a series of type design principles. Altogether these are the tools that they attendants could use for the continuation of their own practice. I also share insights on my experience at working commercially with lettering and I give tips on how to improve the workflow on a commission.

Demo of the sketching technique I use in my workshops

But perhaps the most relevant thing that I do with my teaching is to turn naive eyes into sharp, critical eyes at working with typography. And this is perhaps the most rewarding part of it, the feeling that attendants walk away with a degree of illumination. These students with my contribution will hopefully never look at letter shapes the same way again.

THE SERIES

I have taught over 35 workshops. Sometimes privately organised, at times in-house at agencies and publishing houses or universities.

I took my workshops to many cities. From the beginning I pursued the vision of turning them into an international series. And I did. I have hosted workshops in Barcelona, London, Buenos Aires, Turquey, Lugano, Dubai, Dessau and many other places in and outside Europe.

goodtypeseries

Picture with workshop attendants

The series of workshops became a living-the-dream experience that allowed me to travel to many countries as well as welcome more than 400 students eager to learn more about letter design.

However, this scheme was not sustainable. The amount of work and money invested into organising a workshop in another city began to undermine the concept of "international".

ONLINE SKILL SHARING

I quickly found out that my wish to reach new audiences was not possible to realise through face-to-face workshops. This is when online platforms like Domestika (in spanish) and Skillshare (in english) turned out to be great outlets for my endeavour.

Teaching my online skillshare class

They are a different experience than a face-to-face workshop: its affordable nature and the fact that you can structure your own content turns each class into a unique way of sharing the manner in which you do things. It also provides tools to create a community that is now over 12.000 students.

These years of teaching have translated into a community that comes back to me from time to time for showing me the last lettering they did for a poster or the hand lettered invitations for their own wedding. It is jut get to see how I contributed to their knowledge in some way.

My teaching at letter design started as a side project and is nowadays a big part of my work. And this experience all in all has helped me to build self confidence in what I do and allowed me to reflect on how I do it.

In my next post I'll be speaking about my commercial work and how did it all started. Click here to read it.

Tags: golden secrets of lettering, good type, hand lettering, lettering, lettering workshop, lust auf lettering, teaching, typography

June 15, 2016

Celebrating my book release

GoldenSecretsofLettering-germannew

After intense years of work, I have published my first book on Letter Design called Lust auf Lettering published by Verlag Hermann Schmidt. The book will be released in English under its original name The Golden Secrets of Lettering in April 2017 by Princeton Architectural Press in the U.S. and Thames & Hudson in the U. K. The Spanish version will be published toward August 2017 by GG. Other languages will follow.

The book is the result of five years of teaching letter design as well as running a studio in custom typography and lettering. On account to all the effort, heart and brain that I put in this project I dare to say that this is a milestone in my work. As such, it sort of pushes me to look back in retrospective and try to join the dots that lead to this point of my career.

Within the upcoming week, I'll post a series of texts in this blog. They will cover my experience at giving workshops in letter design, my commercial work, my talks at conferences and, of course, the content of the book. Join me in this online celebration!

Find Lust auf Lettering in bookstores in all german speaking countries. You can order it online here.

Join thousands of readers in this community and upgrade your lettering skills! If you're as excited as I am, send this link to a friend, so they can subscribe too.

Tags: Book, lettering book, lust auf lettering, the golden secrets of lettering, Workshop

May 11, 2016

My book – Lust auf Lettering

lustauflettering-thebook

I'm thrilled to announce that my book is out in german language and you can pre-order it here. English and Spanish language publications will follow. Cheers to that!

Tags: Book, lettering, lust auf lettering, Workshop