Selections from the 2025 Lettering Style Challenge hosted by Aurelie Maron.
All designs started as sketches and most were executed in Procreate on the iPad. I refined the lettering for Dance is Music Made Visible in Adobe Illustrator where I could make the curves truly dance.
Check out my process for creating The Best is Yet to Come below.
The Best is Yet to Come: Bevel
One Day or Day One: Stroke
Love Hurts: Spike
Radical Acceptance: Interlock
Imagination is the Only Weapon: Psychedelic
Have a Nice Day: Ligature
Dance is Music: Spencerian
Here’s an example of the process of creating one of these pieces. After creating a refined sketch on tracing paper, the image was scanned and brought to Procreate on the iPad. Here the sketch was carefully traced, colorized, and shaded to give it personality and impact.
After research, brainstorming, and thumbnails, each idea is first created as a sketch which is refined and then brought to the computer or iPad for creating print- or digital-ready files.
For client lettering projects, you would be presented with a sketch or preliminary digital file to get signoff and agreement on the direction prior to final execution in digital format.
Getting hands on and a little messy is always fun!
I produced a hand screen-printed variation of one of the designs.
