Midweek Surgery: Otto-whatnow?

(Yes, I've admitted defeat with Wednesday Surgeries… I'll still try to do them on a Wednesday, where possible, but I might as well recognize the fact that I can't always manage it!)


This is a Mac-only workflow tip. Apologies up-front to all my Windows-based readers, but I simply don't know how to replicate this on a Windows system…


Also, apologies if I was the only person who didn't know about this, but a quick straw-poll of Mac-using friends and colleagues suggests that I wasn't alone in ignoring …

…The OSX Automator application.


I'm aware that I've barely scratched the surface of what Automator can do, but the one pre-set function I'm going to talk about today is already saving me significant amounts of time and inconvenience.


You're about to start a new issue or project. I'm not sure how you set up your .ai files, but I now save a single blank document into the folder where the Illustrator pages will be saved. This document is the correct dimensions for the project, has the layers already set up, and has a couple of standard balloons and a sample of text formatted to the size and font selected for the specific book pasted outside the art area. 

In Finder, I click on that file, go CMD-C and then hit CMD-V twenty-one (or however many more pages you require) times. This gives you a folder containing twenty-two identical but unhelpfully named files.

At this point, you need to fire up Automator, which you will find in your Applications folder.


Choose 'Workflow' from the options screen that greets you:

Drag and drop your files from the Finder into the Automator window as indicated:

And your files will be added to Automator, waiting for you to tell it what you want to do with them:

Scroll down the list of actions (the inner of the two columns on the left) until you find "Rename Finder Items" and double-click it. This will get the action ready to apply to your files:

(The sharper eyed among you will probably have noticed that you can keep adding actions from the left, so that complex workflows can be built up. You could, for example, add another instruction to move the files to another folder once the first action is complete. As I say, I've barely scratched the surface of this one.)


You now have a number of options for re-naming your files in a batch. In this case, I want to have sequentially numbered files…

…with brand new file names:

All you need to do now is click on "Run":

…And your files will all be renamed and automatically given numbering:

Whilst this sounds like an astonishing faff, when you try it, it's actually remarkably fast -- certainly quicker than renaming the files manually!


It's also worth directing your attention to some of the other options in this screengrab:

For some reason, when I export TIFFs from Illustrator, AI has inexplicably stopped adding the .tif extension to the end of the file name. Note the "Add Text" option above, which even has the option to add file extensions.


A quirk of CS5 I haven't been able to work around yet is the infuriating habit of adding "-01" to the end of filenames when you do an export. Using the "Replace Text" option above, you can search for "-01" in a batch of filenames -- if you leave the replacement text field empty, the offending text is simply eliminated from the name of all the files in the batch.


I have a distinct feeling that this little chap…

…is going to become my new best friend.


Cheers!


Jim

Wednesday Surgery: The Shoulders Of Giants…

I was mulling over some thoughts for today's Surgery but then noticed that Todd Klein had posted a splendid update to his blog. Todd is a friend of this blog, and a letterer who has won the Eisner award for Best Letterer so many times that they should probably just engrave his name on it.


So… when Todd speaks about lettering, I shut up. This time, he's made a detailed post about lettering a section of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.


Alan Moore.
Kevin O'Neill.
Todd Klein.


Compared to that, I got nuthin'. Read Todd's post here.


Whilst I'm deferring to wiser heads than mine, I would also direct your attention to this unrelated but superb tutorial on constructing lettering in perspective by Clem Robins. I had to Google this up for a recent discussion on another Digital Webbing thread because I'd failed to bookmark it. That was a mistake -- I've bookmarked it now, and so should you!


Cheers


Jim

Wednesday --errm-- Thursday Surgery: The Doctor is Late

Sigh! Apologies, once again, for bringing this to you a day late. The second plumbing catastrophe of the Festive Season has disturbed my otherwise calm and serene demeanour, and disrupted the normally zen-like processes of my working day.


Today, we'll cover a couple of points raised by Kyle Jones…


Forgive me for summarizing your first question, Kyle, but the crux of it is this:

You wanted to compare a page you'd scanned from a bought comic to one that you'd found on the internet side by side in Illustrator to assess the point sizes of the fonts used, but found the sizes of the two page scans very mismatched.

I suspect that you're over-thinking this quite substantially. It is true that the internet scan will have been created with thought only to its pixel dimensions, meaning that it is likely to have very large dimensions in mm and relatively low resolution.


However, assuming that your Illustrator document is standard US comic dimensions, then it is the right size. If the page was scanned from a standard US comic, then simply scale the scanned image to fit the Illustrator document (keep in mind that you will need to scale it to the trim line, because the printed document will have been trimmed down from full bleed). Regardless of the resolution, this has to be the right size, because this is the physical size of the original document!


I would caution against getting too hung up on making an exact match for someone else's point size. What's important is that you can read it (easy to check if you print out a sample at actual size) and you think it looks good.

The second question is shorter and sweeter. Since next week is Comicraft’s yearly sale where every font is about $20 (not trying to be an advertisement for them, I’m also looking into a bunch of Blambot fonts), which ones would you recommend […?]

I have literally no regrets about any of the Comicraft fonts I've purchased. You're quite right to note that the annual New Year Sale is the perfect opportunity to pick up some absolute bargains, but which fonts you choose are a matter of taste. You mentioned that I expressed a preference for Blambot's Hometown Hero over Comicraft's JoeKubert, for example. My preference for Hometown Hero is simply because I'm utterly beguiled by Nate Piekos' double-T auto-ligature, that runs the crossbar of the T across both uprights:

I don't expect anyone else to feel the same way -- it's just that I have done this in my own handwriting for many years, so the font makes a very personal, direct connection to me. Something in Comicraft's TimSale makes me think of classic 2000AD letterer Steve Potter's work and using it calls to mind vast bodies of fantastic comic stories from my childhood.


You should be looking for fonts that make you happy, fonts which it will give you pleasure to use. That pleasure should feed through into your work and add something to your lettering that no tutorial, and no amount of practice, will be able to provide.


Cheers!


Jim

Wednesday Surgery: MIA

On the home stretch with the deadline crunch, ladies and gents, but I've only time for a quick note today -- my apologies.


By way, hopefully, of an apology, I hope to have some more practice packs available for you lovely people in time for the Sunday Surgery (which is Boxing Day, unless I'm very much mistaken).


See you on the 26th!


Cheers


Jim

Thursday Surgery: Unlettered Pages! With Scripts!

With apologies, once more, for the delay, I'm happy to bring you the delayed Wednesday surgery post.


One area where prospective letterers seem to be at a disadvantage is finding sample pages to letter, either for practice or for portfolio purposes. There are lots of scripts on the web that pencillers can have a crack at, pencils for inkers, inks for colourists, but letterers…? Not so much.


Now, it is true that there are plenty of web-comics and small press titles out there with utterly horrible lettering, so you could just pitch up to them and offer to do their lettering, but that's not much help if you're just looking to get some practise in (and some people can get a bit defensive when you point out that their web-comic looks like absolute pants because they lettered it in ComicSans).


There are some sample pages on the 'Activities' thread on the Digital Webbing forum (which are well worth a go -- I've tried several of them myself, and some of them are hard!) but beyond that a quick Google turns up precious little.


Consequently, I'm happy to bring you some unlettered sample pages, with scripts.


The links below are direct downloads of ZIP files, which should uncompress with any suitable utility to give you the artwork files, and the scripts in Microsoft Word format.

Please note that these pages are supplied for lettering practise only and may not be used for any other purpose. If anyone breaches the copyrights then I will have to remove the files.

First up -- Judge Dredd: It Came From Bea Arthur Block (Part 1) provided by kind permission of editor Matt Smith at 2000AD/Rebellion. There are six B&W pages, and the ZIP file weighs in at roughly 4Mb.


Download Judge Dredd pages.


(NB: I didn't letter the published version of this strip. That was done by the supremely talented Annie Parkhouse. Extra thanks to PJ Holden for letting me have the pages and the script when I was doing some try-out pages for 2000AD earlier in the year.)


Next -- Fractal Friction Pgs 1-10 provided by kind permission of the named creators on each page. There are ten colour pages and individual scripts for each, so the ZIP file is a bit larger, weighing in at 11Mb.


Download Fractal Friction pages.

Please feel free to post the results on appropriate forums, such as the Digital Webbing Lettering Forum if you want some feedback. 


You can also post links to your lettered versions of these pages in the Comments section of this post if you'd like me to provide a crit of them in a future Surgery session.


I have feelers out to other collaborators and publishers, and I hope to be able to supply some more pages next week. 


If you know of any other resources where unlettered pages and the corresponding scripts can be found online, please use the comments section below to share the links, and I'll collect them together in future post.

Wednesday Surgery: Time is Fleeting

Just a quick organizational suggestion for Wednesday's surgery. This tip has honestly put about 15-20% on my productivity.


Lettering a page essentially has two parts: the boring part and the interesting part. The boring part involves transferring the text from the script to the Illustrator page, placing the artwork and positioning it correctly. In an ideal world, you could stick all this on an Action, and be done with it but, unfortunately, you can't!


The interesting stuff is the actual lettering, which has pretty much nothing to do with anything of the above.


I can't speak for anyone else, but I find there's a time of day when I'm not at my creative best. For me, it's later in the day -- after eight or more hours sitting staring at that monitor, I'll admit that I start to flag. For many other people, it's the earlier part of the day.


If you have the luxury of planning your work more than a day in advance, then use your less-productive hours to do the part of the job that requires little or no creative thought: prep a whole batch of files so they're ready to letter. Because I do this last thing in my working day, I can have a day's worth of worked prepped and ready to go for the following morning. If you've got a laptop you can do the prep work sitting in front of the TV having a nice glass of wine and pretending to listen to your wife/husband.


Trust me: the pretending to listen to your partner part is solid gold. :-)


Cheers!


Jim

Wednesday Surgery

Cast against Type?

(Do you see what I did there?)


Going through the stats for the traffic on this blog when it passed its 5000th hit, I was struck by the fact that Part Three: Setting Type has the least number of views by a substantial margin. If you're working your way through the guide sections, then I would urge you to go back and read that section if you skipped it.


Now, I know it's not the sexiest of titles, nor the most glamorous of subjects, but good typography is the strength to which I play all the time. Balloon placement continually causes me headaches, but I do take comfort in nicely formed blocks of text.


You may think you know about setting type, but you don't -- I still learn new things about typography almost daily and I've been designing for print since 1994. Perhaps you don't think it's important, but one of the most glaring things I see in amateur lettering, one of the things that most quickly and obviously lets down sample lettering posted for crits on Digital Webbing, is bad typesetting.

There's no point in reading the section about creating balloons if the text you're going to put inside them looks awful! It's the text that people are going to read. If you think that the section on Type is confusing, or hard to understand, or doesn't cover some aspects in enough detail, please, use the Comments section to leave some feedback and I'll revisit the whole subject.


Here endeth the moan.

I know what you're thinking…

Harking back to the Non-Standard Balloons section, Emperor requested a quick how-to on telepathic balloons. As Nate Piekos notes in his excellent Grammar and Tradition article (which you have read, haven't you?), many letterers now make up a balloon style for telepathic speech, but a classic, old-school ballon can be achieved as follows:


Start with a normal thought balloon, as previously described in the Non-Standard Balloons section. Draw a thin, pointy black triangle with the Pen tool:

Duplicate this triangle twice.


(You can copy & paste, or you can hold the ALT key down and drag with the Selection tool. If you hold down SHIFT as well, then the drag direction is constrained to vertical or horizontal. Try it -- it's easier to understand than it is to explain. Note that if you use the ALT-drag method to copy, you must release the mouse button before the ALT key, or the operation will simply move the original object.)

You can use the Selection tool or the Rotate tool to tilt the left and right triangles to that they point inwards, towards the centre one:

You can then either Group these, or use Add Shape in Pathfinder; either will work.


Now use the Offset Path function that we previously used when talking about Breakout Balloons, but set the value to 1pt (remember, you can input the value in points and that you need to manually change 'Joins' to 'Round'):

As with the breakout balloons, the result looks like a mess:

But you can use the Selection tool to SHIFT-click the inner shape, which will deselect it, leaving only the outer, offset shape selected:

Change the Fill to white and group the shape with the original black triangles:

Rotate the the grouped shape by about 45° (hold down the SHIFT key to constrain the rotation to exact angles if you want precisely 45°):

Now you need to imagine roughly where the 'corners' would be on your thought balloon:

And start adding your your pointers to each corner:

Until you're done.

Obviously, by its very nature, a lot of these balloons represent communication by someone not physically present in the scene, in which case these balloons just float as they are, with no tails.


Sometimes, however, it is necessary to indicate the 'speaker', in the case of telepathic 'conversations' for example, in which case the balloon will usually take a zig-zag tail, as discussed in the most recent Sunday Surgery:

And that pretty much covers it! As usual, please feel free to use the Comments section to request clarification if I've not explained something in sufficient detail, and to leave requests for other balloon styles, or any other subjects for the next surgery.


Cheers!


Jim

Wednesday Surgery (ahem)

With apologies once again for the delay, here's the Illustrator tip I promised.


Acknowledgement is due to Italian letterer Jolly for this post to the Digital Webbing Lettering Forum, which links to this article from the excellent Real World Illustrator blog. The post below derives much of its content from Mordy's excellent hint, albeit in an expanded form here.


This is fairly advanced Adobe Illustrator stuff -- if you're working through the step-by-step guide, this will probably make more sense to you after the section about sound effects, which is coming next week. There's a little bit of overlap with that piece, but this hint is also of value to designers and AI users in general so I thought it was worth separating out into a post of its own.


(If everyone else already knew this, then I apologize, but it was new to me and I had to investigate a bit and then share it.)


When creating SFX, many letterers will convert the text to outlines and then do all the manipulation of the SFX afterwards.


Because my background is in setting type, however, I like to format a lot of my SFX with the typesetting tools. I'd certainly recommend trying it, even if you don't stick to using the technique. For me, it helps to keep the SFX in my mind as a word, as well as a graphic element to be placed on the page.


So… we start with some text, utilizing upper and lower case…

… to give some variety to the letterforms when we change to font to an FX font:

At this point, we could just hit CMD-SHIFT-O and change the whole thing to outlines, or we could set to work on it with the typesetting tools, changing the point size of the characters and nudging them up and down with the baseline shift:

You can highlight an individual character and then reduce the tracking to pull the character which follows back towards the highlighted one -- reduce tracking is CMD-SHIFT-[ (open square bracket key):

With a small amount of practice, you'll very quickly be able to knock up pleasing arrangements of letters in short order.

And here's where we get to the tip. Ordinarily, we would then have to convert to outlines in order to add decent stroke and fill effects, which isn't a problem, except that the text ceases to be editable.


However, if you click on the text with the Selection Tool (black arrow) so that the text is selected as an object, you can then go to the Appearance palette and click on the unassuming little triangle shown:

… You can add a stroke to your text.


Big deal, I hear you say, I can add a stroke to my text from the Stroke palette.


Yes, you can, but read on!


Now, you use the same menu to add a Fill to the text:

I can tell you're still unimpressed, since you can Stroke and Fill your directly from the relevant palettes already.


However, if you look at the Appearance palette, you'll see that by using this method, you have your fill above your stroke and when you change the Fill colour to, say, white:

…The characters appear merged, even though they're still editable text.


It gets better, though, because you can add increase the stroke weight and it will only expand outside the characters -- the Fill masks the part of the stroke that would otherwise appear inside:

I wouldn't recommend adding more than a couple of points of stroke weight using this method (at higher values, the behaviour of the paths can become a bit unpredictable), but the results are quite acceptable at lower values.


You can change the fill to a gradient:

And then edit the gradient fill as you would any other, altering the angle:

And the colours:

SFX created like this can still be masked to create 'cut out' effects so that they appear to be in front of or behind elements of the artwork, but all the while remain completely editable with the text tool:

Whilst this isn't a universal solution -- you'll still need to convert to outlines for a lot of the fancier distortion and perspective effects, if you're doing a first pass through a book for a client who (let's say) frequently asks you to change the spellings of SFX, then this technique could well end up saving a lot of time.

Thursday…

…is the new Wednesday.


Sorry, folks -- I'm up to my eyes in sharks and evil dwarves and Shakespeare today (no, not all in the same book)* which means that the cracking Illustrator tip I had for today's Surgery column will have to wait until tomorrow. Apologies for that, but it's a good one.


Cheers!


Jim


*Although that does sound pretty cool

Wednesday Surgery

Come File With Me…

Matt Brown asked in Sunday's Surgery about recommendations for a logical filing system.

I always hesitate to offer my own template/system/practice as a model for others unless it's something I've been taught by an older, wiser head somewhere in the distant mists of pre-history, when phones came attached to houses and you moved large files by splitting a Stuffit Archive across multiple 1.44Mb floppies. Plus, filing systems are a bit subjective -- I've never figured out why people object to the way iTunes files their MP3s if left to its own devices… I mean, who wouldn't want their music organized Folder: Artist/ Folder: Album/File: Track …?


On the other hand, simplistic as it is, here's an illustration of how I keep my files organized. Top level directory (with an alias on the desktop and again in the sidebar of Finder windows) unsurprisingly called Lettering, contains an Admin folder, inside which there are folders for each publisher, inside which invoices and contracts are kept. Then there's a folder for each publisher, inside which the structure goes:


Project Name/ Issue Number/


Inside Issue Number is a folder for Artwork (with sub folders for Colour and B&W if you start working on pencils before the colours are ready), a folder called AI Editable, and ones called TIFF Final and EPS Final.


(These last two are for outputting files and may not be necessary depending on how your publisher wants the files submitting.)


AI Editable contains the live lettering files, which are similarly named something logical like ProjectName_IssueNo_Lettered_PgXX.ai … you can then record an action with the necessary export settings specified by your publisher and then use AI's 'Batch' function to export everything in the AI Editable folder into the relevant TIFF or EPS (or PDF or whatever) folder.


Once the job is signed off, I always clear out the exported files, since these can always be re-exported from the original AI documents with minimal effort.

Getting My Back Up

Whilst we're on the subject of house-keeping, I'm going to mention backing up.


Time Machine on OSX 10.5 and higher is great, and a real life-saver when you accidentally overwrite a file, but you also need a proper back-up and archiving strategy, too. It's possible to become over-paranoid about the levels of redundancy you require, but you need to keep two things in mind:


Optical media degrades. Don't believe me? Go find a data back-up CD-R that you wrote five years ago and stick it in your CD drive. I did this with a stack of them recently, and discovered that half of them didn't work.


Hard drives fail. I had two, bought separately and used for different purposes, fail within a fortnight of each other. One with no warning at all, the other with a brief bout of chugging noises and then nothing. Everyone seems to swear by a different brand of HDD, and everyone seems to have a horror story about a different brand of HDD.


Going forward, my strategy is to use an external drive as an archive, and to assume that it won't last more than two years. At eighteen months, I plan to migrate all the data onto a brand new drive and relegate the old one to a back-up of the main, new archive.

There are plenty of free back-up utilities available on the internet -- for the Mac, I like CarbonCopyCloner, although I know plenty of people have other favourites. Feel free to share any recommendations in the Comments section.

By Order of the Management

Still in the same general area of computer housekeeping, I've also been asked about font management and keeping track of your fonts.

I know there are lots of people who like font management software, and Extensis and Linotype both make font managers that are well spoken of.

However, I've never got on with font managers; I've always found them disruptive to my workflow and you're unlikely to have a vast number of lettering fonts. I'm a complete font nut -- I even ask for them as Christmas presents! -- and I have about 90 individual fonts, which represent about thirty actual faces. Before I install a purchased font, I use OSX's Finder Labels to colour code the file itself, and I only ever install them in the Username/Library/Font directory, so that they're easy to find and identify.

It's a bit rough and ready, but it works…