Workshop Archives — Studio Martina Flor

May 28, 2020

That one time a rough sketch saved my life.

Drawing letters is an incredibly slow-moving job. This is one of the first things I realized when I started working with lettering full time. Since I used to run a one-woman studio and wanted to make a living from it, I had to come up with a workflow that would allow me to do multiple projects while responding to the working rhythm of agencies and publishing houses (where projects are due yesterday).

I still remember the first time that I received a big commission of lettering, it was for the cover of New Statesman magazine in the UK. I was so excited! This was my first assignment with the potential to have tons of exposure—the magazine has a circulation of 35.000 copies in the UK— and for me to make a great piece for my portfolio.

The art director sent the brief and the exact words to illustrate. I had everything I needed to get started, and so I did. I worked three days straight on this artwork:

By the time I showed the artwork to the art director, the deadline was just one day away. Thank god she liked it because I would not have made it to the deadline if she would have not liked it!

From that point on, I started to rethink my work process. I said to myself that there must be a more effective, less time-consuming process to work on my designs and, at the same time, be able to test ideas with my clients.

Working with sketches.

This is when I started working with sketches. Working with quick sketches is convenient for both the lettering designer and the client, as it allows you to deliver a concept in a short time and confirm if you are both on the same page regarding the direction of the project. If not, it is easy to sketch some new ideas and discuss them with the client.

I once received a commission with a really fast turnaround. Although the deadline was extremely tight, I was interested in the job and decided to take on the commission. Once I got the briefing and cleared some doubts with the art director, I started sketching some ideas right away. A few hours later, I sent a first colored sketch to the client. It looked like this:

The art director got back to me right away: she loved the direction. However, there was a little problem: I had used the wrong text for the lettering! The text I needed to illustrate were actually those three words at the top of my drawing.

For being an artist that works exclusively with text, I had made a huge mistake! After taking a deep breath, I wrote back apologizing and two hours later I was able to deliver a new sketch using the right text. I got positive feedback and could move on to the digital drawing and finalize the work as quickly as possible.

Almost no time was lost considering that, ahem, I had started the project with the completely wrong text! Bottom line: sketching saved that commission, the relationship with the client, and all the future potential commissions that may arise from it.

Sketches: way to go.

Working with sketches has two more benefits. Although you are establishing a lot of essential elements in your first sketch, many of the details will follow later in the process, which keeps the work interesting for you and thrilling for the client. Another benefit is that sketches enable the client to experience the working process; she or he can see the individual steps and influence them.

Additionally, in the digital era, a working process that involves hand-drawn sketches is well appreciated and adds value to your work. Clients will perceive your work as a craft and not only as a job.

Developing a good sketching technique is something that is worthwhile investing time in, not only because it can create a more effective workflow, but also because it can help you achieve more unique results.

I’ll be hosting a FREE masterclass next week. Stay tuned and sign up for my newsletter below to be notified.

Tags: lettering, process, rough sketch, sketches, typography, working with clients

May 26, 2020

Tell better stories with your lettering.

I cannot help to find awkward when someone says that lettering is “the new thing” because it has been there for a long while. You just have to raise your head and look around you.

This is the storefront of a bakery in Paris. By looking at this sign I can almost picture the bread they make. I can picture the baker, using THE BEST ingredients, and working carefully on each bun, in a beautifully equipped kitchen. The baker surely puts a lot of attention into making that bread, just like the artisan that made this sign, who carefully painted every single stroke and serif of that lettering. By looking at the sign you just want to eat that bread, that has to taste delicious—and I can say, it did taste delicious. That is the power of lettering, to communicate much more than the literal meaning of the words.

Why lettering styles matter.

As letters embody the message you want to convey, their shape is essential for your storytelling. Do you want your lettering to look friendly? Cold? Should your lettering look official, or throw you back to a specific time in history? The text and its shape are counterparts of the message.

I remember that when I started creating lettering I was fascinated with brush letter shapes. All I wanted to draw was brush lettering, and so I did. I drew tons of brush lettering pieces and became pretty good at it. It didn;t take me long to realize that brush lettering was not always a good fit for the message. I felt stuck there, like missing the words to tell new stories.

I realized that in order to become a better lettering artist, I needed to be able to approach other styles confidently. Furthermore, this would make my work more interesting for me! The great thing about being able to approach several styles is that you can get to tell more powerful stories. Aditionally, it enables you to approach different kinds of briefs, which comes in handy when you are looking to work commercially as a lettering artist.

Approaching a new style is always challenging, simply because it lays outside of our comfort zone. Understanding the principles of the style, its origins, and foundations can provide you a very good starting point.

Approaching a new lettering style.

These are essentially the steps to approach a new lettering style:
1- Research to find our where its origins are. Pro tip: it usually derives from a calligraphic style.
2- Try to understand the logic behind it and the underlying rules.
3- Customise it and make it your own.

Let’s take for instance black letter—Oh yes, I know that you might be wondering “could you please start with an easier one?”. Well, let’s knock the most challenging one and get it over with!

Blackletter is an umbrella term for a group of calligraphic styles widely used throughout Europe between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. It is executed with a broad nib and is defined by its angular and narrow ductus. In broad-nib calligraphy, the tool is moved downwards and sideways in order to draw the letter shapes. It is held at a constant angle so that the nib always points in the same direction. The unchanging angle is what makes the thick and thin strokes consistent.

The curves of the letter shapes are often “broken” through abrupt changes in direction. As a result, the script has a dark, heavy look, and its basic shapes—especially those of capital letters—often deviate from Latin letterforms. Understanding how this calligraphic style works is essential to create blackletter lettering.

Here’s an example of a recent assignment I made for American magazine 5280. The art director approached me to “create an illuminated manuscript inspired lettering”. I didn’t need to write the headline with a broad nib here but knowing the foundations of blackletters calligraphy made the whole difference. Afterward, I could go ahead and customize the stroke endings and the shape of the flourishes. These cannot be achieved with a calligraphic tool and is what sets lettering apart from calligraphy: you can always draw it in a unique way.

Does this mean that you need to master black letter calligraphy to be able to create a black letter inspired lettering? Of course not! But understanding calligraphy is surely a necessary part of creating lettering. A smart lettering artist always has a set of calligraphic tools at hand!.

BTW, today is my birthday. I'm happy to celebrate it with you in this little space! 🎉

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Tags: black letter, lettering, lettering styles, lettering tips, letteringtips, storytelling, stylistic, tell stories

August 1, 2017

South American Speaking & Teaching Tour

170801SouthAmericanTour-MartinaFlor I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be visiting South America this August to talk and teach lettering workshops in several cities. I'll be bringing books and products form my shop with me, too!. The workshops are booked out but you can join me at the talks. Here's a list of workshops and talks per city.

Tags: lettering, martina flor, south america, talk, tour

June 28, 2017

Book presentation and workshop at TDC, New York!

As I started as a lettering artist I always pictured myself traveling and teaching here and there. I started my workshops in lettering design in Berlin with the vision of making them internationally, to be able to reach as many different audiences as I could. I traveled with my workshops to a lot of places: Switzerland, Spain, U.K., Argentina, Arab Emirates, Peru, Turkey and more. These workshops grew and they turned into a book.

This June I had the pleasure to travel to New York to present the book at The Type Directors Club and teach a workshop there. I couldn't imagine a better place to do that! One more proof that the bigger your dreams, the greater the accomplishments.

Thanks to everyone who came to my presentation and book signing, and to those that signed up for my workshop and did great work.

Workshop_NY_

Tags: Book, lecture, lettering workshop, martina flor, martinaflor, new york, tdc, Workshop

April 10, 2017

Upcoming Workshop in Type Directors Club. New York, June 10, 2017

I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be teaching lettering workshop at Type Directors Club in New York next June.

Workshop-TDC-MartinaFlor1400

In this hands-on intensive workshop you will drive the process of drawing and refining custom lettering. In this one-day session you will be introduced to effective techniques to create a lettering from scratch. It is ideal for beginners as well as advanced letterers who want to improve their technique. You will walk away from this workshop with a sharper eye when working with typography and with practical tools to improve your own creative work. Read more and book your place.

[button url="https://www.tdc.org/event/create-lettering-martina-flor/" style="white" size="small"] More information & booking [/button]

Tags: lettering workshop, new york, tdc, type directors club, typography

July 2, 2016

My lettering work

THE DECISION

I believe I’m one of these people with big career turn and moving to Berlin has a lot to do with that. I started to work exclusively as a letter designer more or less at the same time that I moved to the city. Working as a graphic designer and being an art director for 7 years I had of course been doing typography related stuff before. Still, it wasn’t until I moved here that I decided to stop doing any other graphic design work and pursued making a living exclusively from my lettering work.

My first step towards it was to clean up my website of all the things that I had done but I didn’t want to do anymore. My second step was to print new business cards. This was my way to say to the world that I was a letterer.

My first business cards as a letter designer

THE CONTEXT

Berlin is one of the cities with more type designers per square kilometre in the world. Berlin breaths typography: there’s monthly meetings (called Typostammtisch) where the typographic community comes together to discuss typography related topics, there’s a few conferences with a focus on the mater and there’s a vibrant community of designers working in the field. You can even find a museum of Letters (Buchstabenmuseum) that rescues abandoned vernacular signs from the streets from all around Germany.

kosmetik

Vernacular signs are all over the place in Berlin

Traditionally Germany has a focus on formal typography. Topics as readability, legibility and clarity are essential. And these are all things that my work doesn’t necessarily pursue. My work is colourful and expressive, at times is even not readable. It's about conveying an idea and telling a story. For this I use letter shapes that combined with color and texture create a new visual text.

I was truly hesitant whether this typographic community would accept my approach to letter design. Topping all my expectations, this community welcomed my work and ultimately triggered it. Throughout these years living and working in Berlin my work became more colourful, expressful and playful than i's ever been.

THE WORK

When started working commercialy with lettering I quickly realised that I had to improve my workflow. On the first place, to be able to manage multiple projects at the same time. On the second place, to cope with tight deadlines of agencies and publishing houses. My work process is moulded through that and has become more effective with the time.

Throughout this years I have parallel run a few side projects. The biggest one that I started was Lettering vs Calligraphy, where together with calligrapher Giuseppe Salerno we organised an online battle that got a lot of attention from the audience and the media. That was one of the most exciting times of my life. Also, the way this project improved my work showed me for the first time the impact that this sort of endeavours may have in your bulk of work and the sort of commissions you get.

letteringvscalligraphy

The variety of letters we created together with Giuseppe Salerno.

Some years after that I started Letter Collections where I was designing and sending postcards to friends, colleagues and complete strangers. As a result, I created a collection of 100 postcards where I experimented with several lettering styles that informed my work immensely.

Side projects, commercial work and my teaching has been my main occupations during this years. Thanks to the growing attention towards my work, I have been regularly invited to speak at conferences.

THE TALKS

Speaking about my work and teaching has been one of the most nurturing things I have done so far in my career. It pushed me to organise my ideas, to question my methods and to identify what is important and what is not.

I have the luck to travel often to speak at design and type conferences, and it amazes me every time the fact that I share the stage with people I have admired since I was a young design student. Speaking about my work is just something I love to do and allows me to keep in mind the few things that are essential.

The title and the slides of my presentations about my experience at teaching lettering where made my hand.

TypeCon 2014 was the conference where for the first time I presented a talk exclusively focused on my teaching. I gave a similar talk at AtypI 2014. Breaking down my teaching method into a few clear simple steps that would fit in a 20 minutes presentation made me realise that I had an own personal method, that it was also didactic and certainly effective to achieve personal results. These talks, called after my online clases The Golden Secrets of Lettering first planted the idea of making a book about it in my head. And so I did.

In my next post I'll be speaking about my the book Lust auf Lettering and its content. Click here to read it.

Join thousands of readers in this community and upgrade your lettering skills! If you're as excited as I am, send this link to a friend, so they can subscribe too.

Tags: golden secrets of lettering, lettering, lettering workshop, lust auf lettering, martina flor, teaching, the golden secrets of lettering, typography

July 2, 2016

My lettering workshops

THE START

The first lettering workshop I hosted was for free. I had just arrived to Berlin, fresh out of my type design studies in the Netherlands. No one really knew me in the city and I was positive that I could teach lettering, however I hadn't done it before and I wasn't sure if I was any good at it. My thought was basic and straight forward: if no one had to pay for it people would just sign up. That would give me more chances to have a room full and I would ultimately have the opportunity to try if I could do it.

I organized that workshop with a heart full of expectation. I planed every detail: how would I welcome the attendants, where would they seat, what would be the best for beverages and snacks and which goodies I would give away. I even organized an after workshop party, where the attendants could relax and fill in what I called The Wall of Letters, a wall-sized grid to fill with letters. After its completition it read "all the letters are equal".

The workshop exceded all my outlooks. The results were good, attendants were thankful and I felt that I had succeeded on trying to turn words something that I did intuitively. It was my first time at teaching letter design, but I felt that all the years of experience at teaching typography back in the years at Universidad de Buenos Aires translated into confidence and precision to convey concepts. That, jointly with my will to make it happen turned out to have a positive impact in my teaching.

Workshop organised in collaboration with Jakob Wolf

THE TEACHING METHOD

Over 5 years went through since that time. My first workshop lasted three days (three days!) and my workshops nowadays last 6 hours top. What has changed? My precision at sorting out the truly essential concepts that I want to give the people as take away. With the time I have also learned to identify profiles of students and how to help them improve their design process, so my efficacy at teaching translates into their success at working and getting the best out of the sessions within an economical process.

At these workshops I teach an effective technique to draw letters by hand very popular among letter designers: the improvement of a drawing by layers. Moreover, I convey a series of type design principles. Altogether these are the tools that they attendants could use for the continuation of their own practice. I also share insights on my experience at working commercially with lettering and I give tips on how to improve the workflow on a commission.

Demo of the sketching technique I use in my workshops

But perhaps the most relevant thing that I do with my teaching is to turn naive eyes into sharp, critical eyes at working with typography. And this is perhaps the most rewarding part of it, the feeling that attendants walk away with a degree of illumination. These students with my contribution will hopefully never look at letter shapes the same way again.

THE SERIES

I have taught over 35 workshops. Sometimes privately organised, at times in-house at agencies and publishing houses or universities.

I took my workshops to many cities. From the beginning I pursued the vision of turning them into an international series. And I did. I have hosted workshops in Barcelona, London, Buenos Aires, Turquey, Lugano, Dubai, Dessau and many other places in and outside Europe.

goodtypeseries

Picture with workshop attendants

The series of workshops became a living-the-dream experience that allowed me to travel to many countries as well as welcome more than 400 students eager to learn more about letter design.

However, this scheme was not sustainable. The amount of work and money invested into organising a workshop in another city began to undermine the concept of "international".

ONLINE SKILL SHARING

I quickly found out that my wish to reach new audiences was not possible to realise through face-to-face workshops. This is when online platforms like Domestika (in spanish) and Skillshare (in english) turned out to be great outlets for my endeavour.

Teaching my online skillshare class

They are a different experience than a face-to-face workshop: its affordable nature and the fact that you can structure your own content turns each class into a unique way of sharing the manner in which you do things. It also provides tools to create a community that is now over 12.000 students.

These years of teaching have translated into a community that comes back to me from time to time for showing me the last lettering they did for a poster or the hand lettered invitations for their own wedding. It is jut get to see how I contributed to their knowledge in some way.

My teaching at letter design started as a side project and is nowadays a big part of my work. And this experience all in all has helped me to build self confidence in what I do and allowed me to reflect on how I do it.

In my next post I'll be speaking about my commercial work and how did it all started. Click here to read it.

Tags: golden secrets of lettering, good type, hand lettering, lettering, lettering workshop, lust auf lettering, teaching, typography

July 20, 2015

Free Spots for my new Skillshare Class

I'm giving away two free spots for my class 'The Golden Secrets of Script Lettering' on Skillshare. To win, take a photo of SCRIPT LETTERING pieces found in your city or any other city and share it on Instagram or Twitter with the tag #goldensecretsoflettering. You've until next Friday to submit your entry. Winners will be announced on Monday next week and will get a free spot to attend the online class. Good luck!

instagramwitdraw

Tags: goldensecretsoflettering, hand lettering, learn, lettering, script lettering, skill, skillshare, teach, typography

July 13, 2015

My new Skillshare Class

I'm really excited to release my new online class 'The Golden Secrets of Script Lettering' on Skillshare. Although being an completely independent unit, this class is a good complement for my previous class 'The Golden Secrets of Lettering' and it’s tailored for designers, illustrators, and everyone who wants to improve their set of skills for creating lettering.

One of the challenges of working with letter design is to come up with shapes that are personal and unique. My classes do not intend to give you models that you could copy, but giving you tools that you could use to boost your creativity at creating letter shapes. Your handwriting is one of those tools: no handwriting resembles another, therefore learning how to improve features on your own written words will help you achieve those personal shapes you’re aiming for.

In this class we will be creating a lettering piece with our name departing from our own handwriting. This assignment will teach you how to make a lot of fundamental design decisions like how to improve defective letter shapes, spacing, proportions and make individual letters more sharp and unique. I’ll also give you some insights for doing flourishes.

We’ll be going together through the entire task, from sketch to digitisation. And I’ll be showing you some of the sketches from commercial commissions and share some tips on how to improve your own creative process.

Watch the trailer and enroll in the class here.

Look forward to see you all there!
My classes are available in two languages: English (at Skillshare) and Spanish (at Domestika.org).

Tags: hand lettering, handwriting, learn, lettering, skill, skillshare, teach, teaching

March 27, 2015

Free spots for my Skillshare class

I'm giving away two free spots for my class 'The Golden Secrets of Lettering' on Skillshare. To win, take a photo of lettering pieces found in your city or any other city and share it on Instagram or Twitter with the tag #goldensecretsoflettering. You've until Monday next week to submit your entry. Winners will be announced on Tuesday and will get a free spot to attend the online class. Good luck!

Tags: goldensecretsoflettering, lettering, skillshare, teaching, typography

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