Creative fonts have become the norm now, especially for children- I guess this is largely due to the availability of thousands of free downloadable fonts from the internet.
In my childhood days I remember being allowed the dining room all to myself for several hours where I would decorate my projects with creative hand lettering, to accompany my research from the family eencyclopedias. With no computers to download fonts from, my creativity was stretched to design my own fonts. Sadly none of these projects are left, due largely to my fastidiously tidy mother who vowed never to be a hoarder like her mother-in-law (whose house was most exciting to us kids) and also as a child I never saw the value in keeping these works to look back on. Incidentally I did go on to study graphic design and become a book designer, so all those hours of blissful solitude in the dining room paid off.
It was whilst designing and illustrating my New Zealand Nature Journal book, I had the chance to really think about creative hand lettering associated with different themes and habitats. In this book I tried to match the font design of headings with the habitats.
So, with “A Walk in the Park” I designed a font with internal veins to mimic leaves for the page that said Autumn leaves.
With “A Walk in the City Street”- All letter ascenders had a wee light on them.
For “A Walk in the Mountains” I used a blocky 3D font.
“Moonlog” was done with bubble font and 2 moons for the “O”s
And so on.
I enjoyed this so much I have started teaching holiday workshops focusing on creative hand lettering with children. I also teach workshops to children and adults on nature journaling and we look at how we can include creative hand lettering on the journal pages.
In the creative hand lettering workshops I ask children to think about themselves and write their name in a creative way that tells me something about them- their personality or likes etc.
We also look at words of animals and create fonts that incorporate the particular animal in it. Or part of the alphabet made up of flora and fauna.
Creative fonts in nature journals add another dimension to the page - they add to the drama and mood of the page and extend the response to that habitat or parts of the ecosystem we are documenting.
Find a copy of Sandra Morris’ beautifully illustrated book here - Welcome to News Zealand: A Nature Journal. Learn more about Sandra and her publishing work through her website www.illustration.co.nz. You can also find her on Instagram and Facebook.