Comment by bluenose69
9 months ago
It's a long time since I thought about doing Leroy lettering, so I was delighted to see the tiny clip of someone doing that. My thoughts on Leroy were a bit divided, I have to say.
When I was young we were first taught how to letter by hand, so when we were allowed to use Leroy, it felt a lot like cheating. I suppose it was great that perfect results were easy to achieve, but replacing skill with pattern-following was not necessarily an improvement.
To this day, I linger over old research articles that have maps and graphs that had been lettered by hand. Many papers written in the 1800s have beautifully clear line drawings of apparatus that can be much more useful than the photos included in newer papers.
Yes and: Lettering guides (sort of) allowed multiple people to maintain drawings. Even then, individual skill and technique allowed team mates to recognize each other's work.
I knew one person who had perfect hand lettering. And could mimick other people's lettering. Alas, they eschewed forgery, embracing jazz instead. (They hand lettered their own liner notes, natch.)
Source: I was a truly terrible draughtsman.
> Alas, they eschewed forgery, embracing jazz instead.
Neil Caffrey would be proud!
Leroy sets was something that would set my dad off on a rant of his struggles with a Leroy lettering set. These would come on in quiet moments of contemplation. When I entered design school his first question was regarding Leroy lettering. We were the first class to go through the curriculum with a Macintosh lab and I never used a Leroy set.