A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to take part in a workshop run by D&AD, called 'Typography - Love Letters'. It was part of a wider group of design orientated professional development courses that they run; they're definitely worth a look. The course was run by Phil Baines, professor of typography at Central St Martins, where the course was held. The basic premise for the workshop was to spend the day as far away from a computer as possible*, get our hands dirty with good old pencils, paper, scissors and glue, and have a good look at some letters.

We started the day by drawing out lots of letters, many times. Phil provided us each with two pencils sellotaped together that looked at bit like this - 

We were asked to treat the two pencils as though it were a brush, which meant when we were drawing we could only pull the pencils (rather than pushing - as you would when completing the letter O, 'pushing' the pencil from the bottom to the top of the letter), and that when drawing, we would have to be very flexible with the angle we held the pencils, in order to replicate the peculiarities of the letters we were drawing. It was really tricky, and I didn't quite get the hang of using the pencils in this way, as you'll see here.

We moved on to drawing with the pencils as though they were a flat-edge nibbed-pen; the crucial difference being that the angle at which we held the 'pen' was fixed, and that we could now push as well as pull with the pen when drawing the letters. Historically, this was as much to do with the changing of tools (you can’t push with a brush, but can with a pen) as it was developments in writing surfaces. Parchment and vellum provided much smoother surfaces to write on than papyrus, and so allowed the development of single stroke, rounded letterforms.

Here are a few of my letters drawn with a 'pen', with the nib held at 90 degrees to the baseline. This gives the letters a wide vertical stroke and a thin horizontal stroke, with the letters balanced left to right, top to bottom. The letters are most like the 'Carolingian minuscule' which was based on documents from ancient Rome, and developed between 8th - 12th Century.

We carried on drawing letterforms in this way, sweeping forward in time at a considerable speed. My favourite letter to draw was this G. The pencils were held at 45 degrees, giving weight to the bottom-left and top-right of the letter. The key to getting it right** was to draw the letter in small, manageable sections, shown below. Why not have a go?

We met after lunch just outside St Martins, on Red Lion Square. We had been set some pre-course homework - to hand draw a street sign, to be legible at 25 yards. It was here, on Red Lion Square that we were going to test out our street signs. My heart sank as I took my sign out, noticing how much smaller everybody else's was. I'd made the lettering about twice the size it should have been. Error number one.

On a sizing note - text should be large enough to read at a distance, but this needs to be balanced with keeping costs down - the smaller the lettering, the cheaper the sign. Not only would my sign have looked ridiculous rolled out across the City of London, but it would cost an absolute fortune. 

Some other interesting points came out of this exercise. I hadn't given a great deal of consideration to the negative space within a letter before, and this exercise highlighted its importance. Have a look at the 2 sets of letters below.

So, the R's. In example number 1, the negative space in the lower half of the letter is larger than in example 2; the diagonal stick is further away from vertical stick of the R, and it curves outwards very slightly.  Blur your eyes, or stand back from your screen. It's easier to distinguish the vertical from the diagonal stick in example number 1; where the stems are tightly packed you're more likely to see a blurry blob rather than the distinct shapes. Have a look at the top of the A's and the bottom of the W's, the case is the same here - in the first example the letter forms are much more open, and as a result, much easier to read at a distance. Although the letters that I'd drawn were large, the bottom of the W and R were much too cramped for a glancable sign.

We spent the afternoon with paper, scissors and lots of glue. We were given lots of bits of paper with words printed in various sizes, fonts, with different letter spacing and line heights. After cutting out lots of letters, we were to stick them back down, thinking about the perfect letter spacing and line heights, or thinking of different and interesting ways to arrange the letters on a page. Did you know that the ideal spacing between words in a sentence is the same space that a lower case 'i' would take up? Surprised? So was I. 

I also learnt a useful tip when doing these exercises. The larger the negative space within a letter, the more it lends itself to decoration. That is, you can play around with the layout of the letters, increase the spacing easily, and the words or letters will still hold their own. Where the negative space is tighter, the letters will look more awkward if you try spacing them out; the big spaces between letters will be too much of a contrast with the spaces within the letters. 

All in all it was a great day, I learnt loads and it was really nice to be away from a computer for a day, and just using really simple tools. 

*This rule was broken momentarily to play a can you tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica quiz. The answer in my case was 'err, sort of, sometimes'. Have a go.

**I use the term loosely