INTERVIEW - LIGUE DU LETTRAGE
French website specialized in lettering & calligraphy
Hi! I’m Loïc, aka Doug. I’m a graphic designer, and I’ve loved lettering for quite a few years now. For the past two years, I’ve been trying to turn my passion into a career, as well as doing graphic design for a living. Self-taught, I learned the ropes of my job by watching other graphic designers and following online tutorials. I then decided to reinforce my technical skills with a training course that led to a diploma!
In the early 2000s, my interest in lettering started through a love of graffiti art. I am originally from Amiens, in the North of France, and would from time to time take the train down to Paris, where I remember seeing some incredible stuff, especially near the Gare du Nord, where every available space was filled up! I would mindlessly doodle my little graffiti, trying only to add some sort of dynamism into my drawings and producing something that I liked. At the time, my biggest inspiration was the work of guys like Nasty, Can Two, Jonone, Mode2, Shoe or 123Klan - people to whom I still look up to. They were pioneers, in the sense that they combined the energy and creativity of graffiti with the constraints of advertisement. They’ve worked with a lot of big name brands, like Nike, Stussy, Carhartt, Zoo York…
I’m also interested in illustration, and even though I personally can’t really draw I was always interested in artists such as Mambo, Banksy, Fafi…, who also come from the world of graffiti and street art. I recently discovered the work of Jean Mosambi, a French artist who creates posters for concerts and other cultural events, usually using techniques like silk screen printing in a very cool vintage style. As far as lettering, calligraphy and graphic design go, my influences are varied, from Doyald Young to Aaron Draplin, Saul Bass, Gemma O’Brien, Herb Lubalin, Ryan Hamrick, Tyrsa, Faust, Jessica Hische and so on… I could go on for hours!
After that, I rather naturally turned to lettering. At first, I would doodle everything that went through my head, then after a while I started sharing my work on Instagram, where you can find a lot of other artists. I remember Goodtype Tuesdays, back when the Goodtype account “only” had 20,000 followers (they have more than 600,000 now). Every Tuesday, the objective was to create a piece that fit a particular theme. Thinking back, I realize that having a set theme helped me a lot, as well as having a deadline. I would go home after work and try to have something ready by the end of the night. I remember quite a few late nights where I tried to finish my piece on time!
Unlike some artists, I don’t really have a particular style that can be recognized at a glance. I like to dabble in lots of different things, and I think that it is something that you can feel in my work: lettering, calligraphy, typography, logos… I never liked being put in a box. To me, each technique brings something different, and that’s what’s great about what we’re doing: we all start with the same 26 letters and 10 digits, and in the ends the results are extremely different. I think that the lettering community is extremely creative, as well as friendly and helpful, especially the Facebook group “Je me mets au Lettering”.
As far as my process goes, I try to sketch on paper as much as possible before I start on the digital part, but it all depends on the expected result: I like a rough sketch as much as clean, vectorised lettering! At first, I would spend a lot of time drawing and redrawing my curves, sometimes reworking a sketch more than 10 times before scanning and vectorising it, but I realised that the more I reworked it, the less of its original essence would remain… What I mean by that is that you don’t always have to focus on every little detail, what counts is the overall look of the piece, and a few touch ups on Photoshop can really bring out its qualities, like incorporating it into a photo or a mockup!
One of the other problems that I used to have was that I would focus on the equipment way too much: I thought that if I had such or such brushpen I would be able to create incredible things in the blink of an eye. When I finally bought a brushpen, I realized how important practice is: I almost immediately wrecked the end by overtwisting it...
That is going to be my final words: practice makes perfect, and if I could only give one piece of advice to anyone looking to get better, it would be to fill as many sheets of paper as possible with letters, in every style and color!
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