Typographic Design: "Generations"

I created a typographic design of the word "Generations", where each letter is written in, and represents, a different style/type of Latin lettering/typeface—roughly in reverse historical order of when each typeface was developed (see Step 4 for more detail).

My creative process for this piece was extremely nonlinear; I've decided to present the following steps in a way that reflects and embraces this atypical progression rather than editing it into a conventional procedure.

• calligraphy paper
• ballpoint pens (I used 0.5mm and 0.7mm)
• brush pen (I used the Tombow Fudenosuke Soft Tip brush pen)
• parallel pen (I used the PILOT 1.5mm parallel pen)

Practice is the only way to learn and improve!

Sure, I did a bit of active practice, too, but most of my letter-drawing skills were developed by simply doing it—passively doodling (but for letters) whenever bored and such—and by sharing with, receiving feedback from, and imitating artists better and more experienced than me (in a typography and linguistics Discord server).

(Above is an example of some doodling I did when I got bored doing practice problems.)

After a trip to Washington, D.C., I was super inspired by all the stone letter carvings to learn letter carving myself.

Luckily, with the availability of YouTube, it's relatively easy to teach yourself a skill. I referenced the following videos, among others:

• Cutting a Letter in Stone (andrew whittle)
• How to do wood carving, straights for numbers and letters, Sarah Goss (BeaverCraft Tools UK)
• How to carve curves for letters and numbers, Sarah Goss wood carving demonstration (BeaverCraft Tools UK)
• Simple Carving With Basic Tools (Wood By Wright How To)
• Chip Carving w/ Wayne Barton - P2 Chap5 - Roman Lettering (Wayne Barton)

Learning by doing was a big part of this process; physically working with the wood and chisel myself allowed me to develop an understanding of how they behave and interact. You can see the improvement in cleanliness and smoothness from the rectangle (the 1st thing I tried) to the "R" (the 2nd thing I tried) to the "h" (the 3rd thing I tried).

(Although wood carving is not the focus of this Instructable: 1) I used pine instead of plywood due to plywood's layers, per my mentors' recommendation; 2) a wood gouge, rather than a mallet and chisel, would be ideal.)

Only after dipping my toes into letter carving did I come up with an idea for this contest. My thought process went something like this:

1. Carve a big fancy display letter G (one that I'd previously doodled and liked; see image in Step 1) into wood
2. What if this was extended to be a word starting with G?
3. Maybe I can do something highlighting the history of Western typography—perhaps showcasing typefaces in reverse chronological order (since fancy display typefaces are quite recent)
4. If I do that, I could use the word "Generations" to be thematic!

Referencing the Wikipedia articles History of Western typography and Vox-ATypI classification (for typefaces), I planned the following order of typeface types:

• G: display
• e: script
• n: sans serif/humanist/geometric
• E: slab serif
• r: didone
• a: round hand
• t: italic
• i: classical
• o: blackletter
• n: uncial/Carolingian
• S: Roman

(In my first draft of the order, uncial (majuscule) and Carolingian (minuscule) were separate (with Carolingian being represented by the letter "o"), since I consider the invention of lowercase letters to be a pretty significant historical development. But Carolingian being represented by "o" would've made the distinction between uncial and Carolingian invisible, so I merged the two. I also realized I had forgotten to include round hand, so adding it in balanced out the changes.)

Done in pencil, except where the lettering style was best suited for a specific writing utensil (brush pen for "e"; parallel pen for blackletter "o" and uncial "n").

For the following letters, I referenced the following typefaces:

• n: Futura (as well as Helvetica and Gill Sans)
• E: Rockwell
• r: Didot (as well as Bodoni)
• a: Pinyon Script
• i: Hoefler Text (as well as just general knowledge of and familiarity with generic serif typefaces)
• S: Trajan

In this step, I also tested the best way to write the capitals: as tall as they normally are (as I did for "S", which was capital since the Romans didn't have lowercase letters) vs. small caps (as I did for "E", which was capital in order to highlight the slab serif). I settled on small caps to balance and unify the design.

The "h" in Step 2 took around 45 minutes. Assuming more practice would bring me down to maybe 30 minutes per letter at most, the project would take around 6 hours, not considering the time needed to sketch the letters in pencil first and to test how I wanted to paint it (cover in black first, then carve? or just paint the carved letters? what color(s)?).

This was doable, but it would take the entire rest of my Sunday, and I'd still have to write it all up. I decided I didn't want this creative, for-fun project to be stressful, so I opted to just create a final draft on paper, in black ink, in the spirit of still submitting something. (Maybe one day I'll have the motivation to finish what I started and carve it into wood, though!)

It's difficult to break down and explain the individual steps involved in doing this, besides simply pointing to the experience gained in Step 1. I guess a general procedure for each letter would be something like

1. Outline the letter, then fill in (or, if using a brush pen (as for "e") or parallel pen (as for "o" and uncial "n"), the shape will come naturally)
2. Clean the edges and smoothen the curves using the 0.5mm ballpoint pen. (yes, I messed up the uncial "n" and fixed it with whiteout.)

In the picture with partial progress, you can see some of the practice I did beforehand.

And with that, a hand-drawn calligraphic piece paying homage to the history of Western typography!