Comic page style test

[blamillo]

Another couple of typography tricks that may be worth trying out:

• For angry speech or shouting, you can try a coloured inner stroke to the word balloon. This works well if you combine it with interesting balloon shapes to suggest fiery, icy, or acidic qualities to the speech.
• Applying some random jitter to individual letters’ size, baseline offset, and rotation can introduce a bit of chaos, if that’s desirable.
• Play around with warp and distortion effects. Joyful or musical speech - and especially sound effects - can benefit from wave, flag, arc, and bulge treatments.
• Sometimes you can even have the type expanding outside the confines of word balloons. To do it with the style you’re using, you’d scale the type up so it’s pushing against or breaking the boundary of the balloon, and then apply a white stroke to the outside of the text, so it’s like the balloon is wrapping around the letters. This is usually only done with single words - I could see it working with the little brother’s “Martin!”

[jmoglesby]

I love the way this reads. The characters come in so clear as the first read, but the movement and context the scene gives are a great second read. You know what's going on with the characters and have a great sense of space. A lot comics don't do this well, and it actually makes them quite hard to get a clear read at first sometimes. All of the speech bubbles look fine, except perhaps the "Martin!" one where the brother has his first bit of dialogue. The shape of the bubble is a little confusing, as the pointed bits coming out of a speech bubble in this way normally indicate that multiple people are saying what's in the bubble. Overall, really great looking! I hope to see more!

[jmoglesby]

@jmoglesby Sorry, I just realized that the dialogue box thing had already been mentioned.

[braden H]

@blamillo said in Comic page style test:

Applying some random jitter to individual letters’ size, baseline offset, and rotation can introduce a bit of chaos, if that’s desirable.

I'm gonna have to look in that for sure! I think it's pretty easy with the blambot fonts.

@blamillo said in Comic page style test:

Sometimes you can even have the type expanding outside the confines of word balloons.

Also a good idea! Thank you

[braden H]

@jmoglesby said in Comic page style test:

All of the speech bubbles look fine, except perhaps the "Martin!" one where the brother has his first bit of dialogue.

My shouty bubbles do not read as shouty bubbles. Ah well

Thanks for the feedback! It's adding a little bit more polish every time!

[glenfx]

The art and style look really great (love it), the balloon shapes are better placed on the second version though I like the shapes they had on the first one the most (the spikes did felt like more than one character was speaking though).

You can check some tips from Nate Piekos at his website Blambot (he is a pro letterer and also has different comic book fonts available as well).

You can read the tips here:
https://blambot.com/pages/comic-book-grammar-tradition
https://blambot.com/pages/lettering-tips

He also just released a book about lettering that could be worth a read too:
https://blambot.com/pages/the-essential-guide-to-comic-book-lettering

[braden H]

@glenfx Awesome! Thanks for the feedback and resources

[chrisaakins]

@glenfx THese resources were great! I read these instead of doing what I should have been doing. Haha!

[glenfx]

@braden-hallett No problem!!

[glenfx]

@chrisaakins hahaha yeah it happens .