Tips and Tricks to Improve Your Lettering

These pro tips from Chisko Romo will give new life to your lettering (and get you more likes on Instagram)

Chisko Romo (@chisko_romo) is a graphic designer with more than seven years experience as a lettering artist. Throughout his professional career, he has collaborated with brands such as Adidas, Ted Baker, Moleskine, Apple Music and American Eagle, among many other great brands.

He enjoys experimenting with shapes and volumes in lettering, interpreting letters as graphic forms that convey feelings, and creating compositions in different styles that he shares on his Instagram. That's why Chisko has given us three simple tips and tricks that will help you edit your photos or add effects in Illustrator, to turn your compositions into pieces worth showing the world with pride.

Here are Chisko’s tips for lettering that will pop:

1. Remove unsightly edges

Chisko makes physical letters using engraving and laser cutting techniques, so the final pieces often have burn marks, especially on the edges. To show a perfect piece, without marks or stains, the designer uses the Smudge tool on Photoshop that simulates the effect achieved by passing a finger through fresh paint.

Play and experiment with the shadow and the brush, but always try and follow some kind of logic. Find your own style.

Trace the outline of the shape with the Pen tool. When finished, press CMD + Enter to make a selection and switch to the Smudge tool set to 0% hardness. This tool takes the color or color combination at your starting points and smudges it in the direction indicated by the mouse cursor.

Click and drag to the edges of your selection, then invert the selection and drag back to the edges. This will give your 3D edges a perfect outline.

2. Merging to add shadows

You'll then be working in Illustrator, so you should have a version of your design in vectors–just the line drawing. Select everything, go to the Object menu and expand. Then use the Pathfinder tool to join everything together to make a single line.

Press Cmd + C to make a copy, drag the lettering by pressing Shift and change the color of one of your pieces to white and send it to the back. Then use the Merge tool, click on the white lettering and click on the original piece, this will create a shadow with depth.

Press Cmd + F to change the original lettering piece to white, this will improve how the result looks. The Merge tool groups the color with the white, so it is important to know which piece is in front and which piece is behind.

Then take these separate layers of your lettering design to Photoshop: one for the shadow and one for the white piece. Place a photo under it and go to the Filter menu and apply the Gaussian Blur tool. This allows you to create a texture or gradient from the photo.

Activate the letter layers, and apply transparency to the corresponding shadow layer with the Multiply tool. This way you can give more texture and volume to a linear piece.

3. Shadow play and perspective

This trick allows you to convert a 2D piece to a 3D one through the shadows and perspective of your strokes. Add to Photoshop any logo or lettering over a black background. This identifies which strokes will go over others. Select those strokes and erase them with a very soft brush to give the impression that the shadow of one part of the letter is cast over the others.

Chisko Romo teaches the course Introduction to Lettering for Instagram in which he shows you how to create compositions with different lettering styles that you can publish on social media.

You may also like:

Professional Photography for Instagram, a course by Mina Barrio
Illustrated Lettering: Creativity and Expression, a course by Alex Trochut
Calligraphy and Lettering for Instagram with Procreate, a course by Nubia Navarro (nubikini)