A couple of weeks ago, I posted my old lettering checklist on Twitter.
I’ve been working on an essay about learning new things as an adult, and I pulled this up as an example of something that I absolutely needed to have at hand when I was starting out, but which I don’t need much anymore.
When I started out, there were too many lettering guidelines for me to just keep in my head, and I’d end up forgetting one thing or the other, so every time I finished lettering an issue, I’d go through the whole issue with this checklist next to it and fix my work one item at a time.
I’ll talk more about why this was useful in that essay, but for now, I thought I’d talk through the list for newbie letters. Also I wanted to update with stuff that I think is necessary, but which I personally didn’t need back then.
Here’s the old list:
This, I feel, is the minimum you need to take care of if you want to be considered a competent letterer. Most or all of these guidelines can be broken when necessary, but that’s a matter of discretion.
(1) is fairly obvious. Your primary job as a letterer is to enable the reader to read the page correctly.
(2) was important back then, because I’d just begun to branch out into using different styles for different artwork, and I had occasionally used elements of one stylesheet on another book because I couldn’t remember what choice I’d made. This reminded me to keep a library for each lettering style so I wouldn’t mess up.
(3) might seem obvious, but it’s still a good reminder to have, particularly because sometimes you’re lettering over inks, and you might only realise you’ve covered something important once the colours are in. So it’s worth a check. Also, this includes characters, which people can accidentally cover at times.
(4) Nate Piekos explains tangents here. They are to be avoided.
(5) and (6) were things I learned from working with artists. You might not realise this at first, but both action lines (e.g. bullets shooting from a gun, someone running at speed, etc.) and eye lines (when characters are looking straight at one another, or at something important) are storytelling tools. You should do your best not to impede the artist’s storytelling.
(7) and (8) are basic guidelines (check out the relevant entries here in Nate’s excellent “Better Letterer” series), but when you’re trying to remember so many different things (everything else on this checklist), it’s handy to have a memory trigger. In fact, the new things I add below are going to be this kind of stuff.
(9) and (10) used to seem subjective to me (one of my clients insisted on these early on), but as I learned more about planes in composition, I’ve come to agree with these. 9 is interesting. If you’ve got standard line-art and standard bordered balloons, the balloon feels like it’s sitting on top of the character as desired, but if you use a strokeless balloon, it can look like it sinks into the character, which should be avoided. 10 might require some elaboration, but in short, a balloon should clearly belong in one plane in a panel, preferably in the same plane as the speaking character.
(11) might again seem basic, but I used to have trouble remembering it. Basically, if there’s an explosion, your SFX should make the reader follow the trajectory of the explosion—stuff like that. (Check out “dynamic sound effects” in the Better Letterer series.)
(12) was something I noted after realising that artist-drawn SFX which had then been coloured looked better than the SFX where the letterer had just used a primary colour like red or yellow. Makes your work fit with the art better.
(13) was also something a client told me that I took to heart. If you just focus on the reading order, you might end up putting lettering in corners or far away from characters where the reader might accidentally skip it. I see even practiced letterers doing this on occasion, and it’s easily corrected. Just stare at the whole page once you’ve lettered it, squint a little, and see which bits of lettering seem to disappear. Those need to be moved closer to the rest of the action.
There were other fairly basic things that I’d always remember to do, but for that reason, I never wrote them down – I was already good at them. Prime among those were: keep your stacking consistent (e.g. mostly horizontal, mostly vertical, mostly round – this’ll give your balloons a consistent look too), and draw your tails from the centre of the balloon towards your character’s mouths (just looks more professional).
So with that in mind, here’s my recommended lettering checklist, updated for 2023:
- Ensure correct reading order
- Ensure stylesheet consistency
- Ensure nothing important is covered
(before and after colours) - Check and remove tangents
- Avoid action lines
- Avoid eye lines
- Balloon tails of consistent width
- Consistent air around balloon text
- Consistent stacking (vertical/horizontal/round)
- Tails should point from the centre of the balloon to character’s mouth
- Avoid placing balloons over character/BG intersection (particularly for strokeless balloons)
- Avoid placing balloons over overlapping planes
- Direction of SFX
- Ensure SFX colours work with the palette
- Keep lettering in engagement zone (ensure nothing’s too far from the page centre to be engaged with)