This week I completed my third and final logo challenge. If you haven’t been following along, I set a challenge to letter three existing logos. The aim of the challenge is to help you get a taste of hand lettering but with structure at the same time. The structure comes from knowing how your drawing outcome should look by drawing an existing logo. For more information about the logo challenge and to see my progress so far, have a look at Lettering A Logo Parts One, Two and Three.
For my final logo I chose the Coke Cola logo from 1887. It’s really quite surprising how old the Coke Cola logo is. Although it’s changed a little over the years, it doesn’t look out-dated in appearance even though it’s using a Victorian script font. This is possibly because script fonts and lettering are quite popular in design work at the moment.
After lettering the Cadbury chocolate logo last time, and discovering relaxing helps me to produce a looser style of lettering, I tried to get myself into a relaxed state again to draw the Coke Cola logo.
Similarly to the Cadbury chocolate logo, I managed to focus and draw out the lettering for Coke Cola within good time. Again quicker than the first logo I chose, which only consisted of four letters. The Coke Cola logo consisted mostly of curves. The first logo I drew, the Ford car logo, was similar and I spent a lot of time trying to get the curves right on the Ford logo. I tried to make sure all my pencil curves were smooth and not disjointed at all. Since drawing the Ford car logo and Cadbury chocolate logo, I have learnt that it is important to get lettering proportions and structure right. However, if getting down the pencil outline of the lettering isn’t the final stage of the drawing, then there’s a little room for error. As you can refine curves and shapes when you’re outlining the lettering in ink.
As always you can watch my lettering progress in the video just below and see how the Coke Cola logo developed. If you look closely, you might be able to make out where I left rougher pencil lines this time, rather than tiding them up first before inking.
Lettering three logos has been invaluable to me. Although I was just replicating lettering that already exists I learnt a lot from the process. The biggest thing I have learnt is that practice is very important. Each time I practised I learnt something new, or realised how I could do something differently the next time I lettered. I’m sure with more time and practice my lettering skills will improve!
