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.