Characters with Character

also, an inexplicable amount of seagull-chat in the footnotes.

One of the things I really enjoy is typography. Wait, no, don’t hang up, I promise this is interesting¹! I got bitten by the typography bug when I was a multimedia² design student in the early 2000s. Amongst all the other stuff that still fascinates me, I got really into type design. I spent a bunch of time back then hand-painting various sans-serifs with flat brushes and black ink in a misguided attempt to make the next Helvetica³.

Fast forward a few years and I’m starting to make my own comics. I’m not sure about anyone else, but I find the process of hand-lettering to be the most physically demanding part of the process⁴. I made a typeface based on my own lettering and used that for a bunch of stuff in the early 2010s, and for each book I’ve done, I’ve updated and redesigned it. I’ve also made a bunch of typefaces for a bunch of other cartoonists too⁵.

One of the things that I work towards when I’m making a typeface is to try and make is seem organic, like a human has written very neatly rather than a computer mechanically repeating the same letter shapes over and over. Us humans are pretty great at recognising patterns, and when a distinctive letterform repeats over and over in a block of text, that’s all I can ever see after that.

So, to keep some of the magic under the table cloth and not to get too tedious with the details, I use some opentype features when I’m designing a font that cycle through a set of variations on the same letterform, and code it so that it should be kinda random as to which A to collect from the set of very slightly different ‘As’. It works pretty well, but I wanted a way to make the variations a touch more pronounced while I was lettering.

So recently, I put on my ‘write some code’ spectacles and set about making a script for illustrator that would give all of the letters in a text box a bit of a shake and give them all a slight variation in rotation, scale and position⁶. Let me show you:

Here’s a block of text⁷ that is set in my lettering typeface.

I’ve got my ‘Textrandomiser’ script all hot to trot, ready to rock in my scripts folder.

It pulls up this dialogue box. I tinkered and tinkered with this until the default settings suited my lettering style.

This then makes a new group that holds all the letterforms⁸ and gives them all a gentle wiggle. I don’t want it to go too crazy, there’s a fine line between legibility and being a goddamned maniac.

Look what happens if there is no steady, restrained hand on the wheel and those sliders slide up into the beyond⁹;

Urghh, gross. Like someone dropped alphabet soup into a washboard. GROSS.

I’ve found it kinda useful to have the ability to gently massage how ‘organic’ my blocks of text can be. It suits the way I draw I think,¹⁰ a bit loose and ragged around the edges.

I got coding help from the AI robot¹¹. Although I have a background in code (see above: BA(hons) Multimedia Design 1st Class) having a tireless and encyclopaedic robot butler checking/correcting my syntax, suggesting methods, identifying and fixing bugs etc is WILD. I’ll write more about all this at some other time because I’ve got a lot of thoughts and feelings about it all. That aside though, it is a real thrill to be able to have an idea for a tool and then a few short hours later¹² to have a working version of it. Amazing.

If you are interested in giving this script a try, let me know and I’ll see about getting it hosted somewhere to download. I have absolutely no idea what kind of appetite there is for this kind of thing, it seems pretty pretty niche.

UPDATE - I’ve got it up on a page on my website now for anyone to take a look at.

1. Interesting to MEEEE.

2. I spend a lot of time trying to work out what to tell people when they ask what I do. I am variously an illustrator, comic artist, designer, teacher, mentor, consultant, shed-tinkerer, pen maker etc etc. Maybe I am a multimedia designer? I’m not sure that’s a word combination I’ve heard used with conviction since the late 2010s. Ah, who cares. Someone give me a job title I can be proud of in the comments.

3. Yes I’ve seen the film, no, I don’t care to discuss it, I will be taking no further questions at this time.

4. A little background - I have broken both my wrists a few times over the years, and had an operation to remove little bone splinters from my right one specifically. The x-rays looked like the bottom of a bag of popcorn, and it still makes crunchy, grindy noises when I move it. This hand is also attached at a bit of an angle as my right radius bone is shorter than my left after the time 15 dumbass year old me went running full speed at a friend while holding a yoga ball to see ‘how far I could bounce off him’.

5. Get in touch if you want one, there’s an FAQ and contact form at the bottom of this page on my website.

6. It’s also got the ability to add a bit of a variation in tone too as I thought that might be useful. Haven’t found a good use for that feature yet.

7. If you recognised Lorem Ipsum and knew the next words were Dolor Sit Amet then award yourself Five Dork Points! Don’t spend them all at once! Also, I bet there’s folk who take pride in reciting Lorem Ipsum to a frankly tedious degree, like those people who memorise pi to the 100th digit or something.

8. Let me talk illustrator for a moment - It expands the appearance of the text to do this, which means the text is no longer editable. Which is kinda a bummer, but it does keep a copy of the editable text on a different layer so it’s not all bad. Also, I’ve decided to hide all these failures down here in the footnotes where nobody will read them so I get to pretend I got everything right first try up in the body of this post.

9. I found out that the number inputs completely disregard the upper limit of the slider. I think the rotation slider only goes up to 3, a modest and tasteful value, whereas the number input box will gobble up any old number like a fucking seagull. Gross.

10. Like a fucking seagull learned to draw.

11. You know the one - Cat, I Farted.

12. Thinking back, the first version of this script was written on a train in the middle of Denmark somewhere, my laptop tethered to the 4G on my phone.