Since my Apollo project design is largely being inspired by old school comics, Fantastic Four in particular I’ve been doing a lot of research just looking at what type looks like in these comics so that then I have a better idea what to look out for when scouring through foundries on adobe fonts and the like.
Typography In Comics
In a previous post I talked about how I looked through a lot of comics, both ones on my shelf and ones I had to rent out ebooks of from the library. From doing this I observed all the different components that make up comics and how they have evolved through time but can still have similar sensibilities to them. One of the most important of these components is the typography or rather the “lettering”.
As well as observing typography by flipping through comic pages, I also did a fair bit of observing comic typography on pinterest. My comic covers board in particular is a treasure trove especially when it comic to headers or display fonts as the Epic Lunar Adventures of The Apollo Space Programme is gonna need a fitting logo for its cover page. I also made a board specifically for comic typography.
I looked at the different types of lettering done for narration, dialogue, headings, sub headings, etc. and from that I was able to get a feel and deep understanding of how I need my typography to look.
A comic book letterer writes out all the text by hand into the pages of the comics after the artist has done their job so for me the biggest and most important thing apart from getting the right feel from the typography, is that it looks hand rendered.
Another big thing that I noted was that there would often be a lot of different types of lettering going on in the one issue which makes me think that I won’t be able to restrict my fonts to just two or three. I’d want to have four or five at the least.
Search For The Right Fonts
So once I knew what I wanted I went to Adobe fonts and looked through all the foundries till I found the right ones. This in retrospective was not my best moment in terms of time management as I ended up spending many hours scrolling through foundries that bore no fruit in my search but hey, you live and you learn I guess. The perfectionist in me just took over and I had to make sure I explored every single option before deciding.
Some font choices came easier than others, like for body copy I did come up with a few different options but I was able to settle on one pretty quickly called Might Makes Right BB as it looked the most like the lettering style I’d been seeing in comics.
Before searching for the other fonts I did a sketch of vaguely how I wanted the logo on the comic cover/home page to look…
The Epic Lunar Adventures of the… line at the top is kinda a nod to the way fantastic four comics always have “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine” and Avengers with ” World’s Mightiest Heroes” at the top. You have to hype it up a bit.
I wanted a logo that give off a similar look and feel to the original Fantastic Four one so I decided that some overlapping was the way to go. The only thing with that was that it made choosing to consider fonts or not harder as the overlapping could make them look much better or sometimes worse.
After Searching through foundries I went into illustrator and scrolled though what I had and then picked out ones that looked like they could work for the ‘Apollo’ part of the logo. My rational was that if I pick the right one for it, the rest would fall into place.
I kept narrowing down my options, starring the best ones. I ended up coming across the font ‘Auster’ which had that kind of hand rendered Fantastic Four logo vibe to it and so I knew it was the one.
As I was testing colours and doing the overlapping thing, I realised that I wasn’t 100% satisfied yet so I looked back at my sketch and I decided to take a notion…
I decided to keep the middle three letters from the regular font style then I got the a and o in italics, I reversed the o and set them on their respective sides.
There’s a beautiful Symmetry to it now and I think this way it looks way more epic and comic like and I’m really happy with the result.
Putting It All Together
After I had my Apollo it was time to add the other text around it to complete the logo. I did some experimentation and was able to settle on some complementary type faces that I now know to utilise throughout my prototype to keep things cohesive.
