Customer Reviews

Logo, Font & Lettering Bible

5 star:		(43)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I'm a typography nut and a college design instructor. I love older, more traditional approaches to typography and am always wary of many newer books that think of type as the simple digital byproduct of computer keystrokes. Here's a book that makes the important connection between real typography and the digital world.

Once you get past the awful cover of this otherwise incredible book, you'll find an exploration of type and letterforms that draws from history and explores numerous aspects of type in a whimsical and entertaining way. This is one of those rare books that lets the design talk about design and shows good and bad examples as well as successful rule-breaking. The tone is light and entertaining, and the author doesn't prattle on with formal, intellectual approaches.

The book covers how to see type, how to work with type, how to create type, what is (and isn't) a logo, and also shares works by great typographers like Michael Doret and others.

While typography is not on everyone's list of most entertaining subjects, this book is as fun as it is educational. I'm recommending it to all my students at the Art Institute and can't see how any designer would fail to both enjoy it and benefit from it. If you buy one type book, this is the one.

I predict the Logo Font & Lettering Bible: A Comprehensive Guide to the Design, Construction and Usage of Alphabets and Symbols by Leslie Cabarga will become a classic for the graphic artist, designer and signer.

The publisher is hyping this book as a Logo book. Their pitch says: "This book-a hands-on guide to the entire logo-making process-combines an enjoyable visual approach with extensive, industry-tested information." And all that's true. However I wonder if the writers for How Design Books have ever done lettering or desinged a logo. I don't think so by the level of excitement in their releases.

No, this is not all together about just logos, fonts and lettering; this is about the very soul of an art, a design discipline, and a fine craft. This is about the way creative people think and react to visual stimuli. This is about the most visually exciting and inspiring book for graphic designers to come along in long, long time. In fact, I cannot remember any that really come close.

BRAVO, Leslie, my JMU Typography students will LOVE this one -- and I know it's one they'll really use just because it's so much fun!

If you don't buy this book, you'll be missing something very important.

Fred Showker, Design-Bookshelf.com

I normally don't buy many books dealing with art but the title caught my eye. This book is excellent. I've been a typographer and letterer for over half my life and I wish I had something like this 20 years ago. It covers many aspects of good logo design as well as using and modifying a font for a design. In my opinion the best part is when Mr. Cabarga goes into some detail about designing and creating your own font. This is an idea that I have been toying with for sometime and now that I have read this book I have a lot of ideas on how to get started. I couldn't recommend this book enough.

I am amazed at the large number of positive commentaries about this book. It because of them that I made the mistake of buying it.

I am a professional designer/typographer and please trust me when I tell you this book is absolutely worthless. The only people this book may appeal to are those who design 30$ logos for crowd sourcing sites. I wouldn't normally come down on it so hard, as I can appreciate the effort the author put into it, but this book makes a point of promoting bad quality design. Even the way the book is designed (by Leslie Cabarga himself) is so bad that it will make any self respecting designer want to jump out of a moving train into an electric fence. Mr. Cabarga is not a designer, at best he is an illustrator (check out his website and think if you want to buy a book about type design from a guy who made the Mighty Mouse logo).

I guess any book that promotes itself as a "bible"(with the exception of the actual Bible) is not worth the paper it's printed on.

If you want to see examples of good lettering buy one of Doyald Young's books (Logotypes & Letterforms: Handlettered Logotypes and Typographic Considerations). If you want to learn something about type design, then Karen Cheng's Designing Type will give you a decent introduction. If it's typography you're into, the R.Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style is a must. Or just visit the websites typophile.com and ilovetypography.com for free.

Whatever you do, stay away from this book, please.

As a college instructor who teaches a variety of graphic design classes, I am always on the outlook for another book for inspiration and supplemental material for lectures. I have quite a decent number of books about typography in my personal library, but since getting a copy of Cabarga's book, I would count it as the best of the best. I am enthralled that I have found some good background on what exactly goes into designing fonts and lettering by hand. I also found the information about Fontographer extremely helpful. I would recommend this title to designers and design students and instructors.

I bought this book immediately after seeing it! It is one of the best books I have seen on Logos & lettering because not only does it illustrate logos, but he tells you why it works or doesn't. This book delves into creating your own type and explains how to do it, using Illustrator or Fontographer. I am in a typography class now and this book will certainly help me finish the semester and in my career as a graphic artist. If you only buy one book on logo design--this is it!

I have always been interested in type design and lettering, however as a visual person, I've always felt that the books on the subject were a little too dull and dry to invest my time in. This book seperates itself from the rest of the pack. It's really geared towards designers and visual artists and it makes you want to read it from start to finish.

First off, this book has a TON of content. Yes, it's a loose format that reads more like a magazine than a book, but it doesnt hold back on substance.

Secondly, this book tackles a broad range of subjects. From the history of logo design to hand lettering, type design to using Adobe Illustrator, even setting up your own font foundry! Its all here.

This book is a classic, order a copy today!

Yummy! With humor, clear illustrations, and useful suggestions, Cabarga provides a wonderful resource for anyone who wants to be a letterer, illustrator, font or logo designer. But this hardbound book is not just for "wanabes." I found it includes comprehensive coverage of most everything learned throughout 30 years in the same disciplines along with new valuable timesaving tips. If I had the patience and tenacity to attempt such a compilation, it could be no more complete and not nearly as well presented as LOGO FONT & LETTERING BIBLE. My essay can now be reduced to three words: "What he says."

Leslie Cabarga, a talented illustrator and designer in his own right, does not limit examples to his own. World-renowned artists such as Gerard Huerta, Michael Doret, Tim Nikosey, Tony DiSpigna, and Seymour Chwast -- four dozen in all -- contribute to the wealth of inspiration. In the 1980's I had the privilege of working with uncles for one of these typography leaders -- producing over 200 hand-lettered packaging logos. It was there that I first saw an original triple outline inking of flourished letters by Gerard Huerta and was privileged to study a fraction of the techniques used.

Cabarga urges readers to become critics of their own work. This also reminds me of employment at the Huertas. A bulge could occur when joining curves using technical pens. After working on it for a while and thinking to myself "It's good enough," this infinitesimal area would be the first thing the creative director would point out. After admitting that I saw it too, he remarked, "If you saw it, why show it to me?" I quickly learned to be obsessively concerned about adjoining curves. Ink bulges may not be a problem today with digital lettering but there are other telltale signs of an amateur. Cabarga shows what to look for.

Your eyes are in for a tasty treat. Beautiful examples of calligraphy, and their influence on Roman font characters, are well demonstrated and discussed. But the book is by no means limited to calligraphy. Cabarga patiently differentiates cartooning, illustration, logo design, icon artwork, trademarks, and font design. LOGO FONT & LETTERING BIBLE compares digital tools such as the now defunct Macromedia FreeHand (my past favorite), Adobe Illustrator (which has supplanted the former), the seemingly forgotten Mac OS 9 version of Macromedia Fontographer (which in 2005 was integrated into the FontLab line of digital typography tools and updated to Mac OS X -- hooray!), and the preeminent FontLab.

LOGO FONT & LETTERING BIBLE covers the history of typography and encourages users to build a library of signage photos and magazine scraps for inspiration. Each subject I thought might be overlooked was eventually covered. Even esoteric techniques such as what I refer to as character ink reservoirs (called clog reduction on page 115) are here. Skeleton Strokes on page 152 demonstrates wonderful timesaving suggestions for digital lettering. Optical character spacing and stroke widths are discussed in detail beginning on page 112. Do you want to learn how to clean up the best scans for converting drawings to vector art? Jump over to page 158. Everything you want to know about Bezier (pronounced "Bez-zee-ay," thank you) curves but were afraid to ask is, well, practically everywhere but particularly in the section Bezier Curves for Cowards that begins on page 140.

Mississippi readers will approve. Just as I was thinking, the author needs to demonstrate how to arch text on a path (FreeHand did a better job than Illustrator), I turned to page 191 and, bam! There it is. The comparison on page 226 of residual shape differences in Illustrator and Fontographer after Bezier points are removed from a path is insightful. Not to leave you hanging, the book concludes with suggestions for getting work, building a portfolio, and negotiating fees. Additional resources and a helpful index rounds out 240 pages, which, like all trips to a candy store, seem to end too soon.

Typography doesn't have to be a dull subject. Finally, here is a book that proves that it isn't, it isn't at all.

From the fine writer of two must-have color books [The Designer's Guide to Color Combinations and Designer's Guide to Global Color Combinations], Leslie Cabarga's "Logo, Font & Lettering Bible" is likely the best book out there on letterform design and use.

Cabarga engages the reader with his fun, witty, easy-to-read writing style, uses rich visual detail [and superb layout] to explain what you need to know about creating and using type in design.

If you are a new, or even an advanced user of Illustrator, he offers great instructions, insight and step-by-step drawings about using the program to change the look and feel of your fonts. This also may be the first book of its kind to go into such detail on using Fontographer to create new typefaces.

This is a fine book that can be both read for pleasure [yes, I said pleasure] and used as a guide in developing and polishing type and logo building skills. I believe a book like this will get a lot of use. It's a good one!

Like some of the other reviewers here, I teach, I design and I have a passion for typography; all of us wish this book had been with us earlier in our careers, but just in case you didn't think any of Leslie Cabarga's earlier books (Designers Guide to Colour Combinations) were quite useful enough, he has outdone himself with the Logo Font and Lettering Bible.

This 240 page hardbound book is an eclectic mix of typographic do's and don'ts, software technique (drawing with beziers), lettering analysis, layout practice, design history and business advice - in other words there's a bit of everything here (actually quite a lot also), but then both graphic design and life are often like that.

Loosely organised into four sections - The Logo, Drawing Letters, Font Creation, and a Business Section, the book fairly bulges with Cabarga's infectious enthusiasm and pragmatic attitude. The illustrator-specific techniques of the lettering section make up the bulk of the book at 70-odd pages in which Cabarga dispenses good ol' visual commonsense like it's going out of fashion. This alone is worth the cover price, even if you're fluent in Illustrator and know your ellipsis from your elbow. I admire people who tell it like it is, and Cabarga speaks from direct experience in almost all the cases he cites. There is also an abundance of beautiful examples and pertinent quotes from a number of well-known type designers, both living and dead. Many of them make us think either 'ah, now I get it...' or 'wish I'd done that...'

Many students tell me that their understanding of a given topic often occurs in direct relation to the instructor's enthusiasm for the teaching of it; in which case the books 'Bible' moniker should explain that this is really a 'how to' manual on a mission.

The Logo Font and Lettering Bible has been across my desk and in and out of my classes ceaselessly since I bought it late last year. There is hardly a graphic design-related classroom question that some aspect of this book won't cater for. But don't borrow my copy - go and buy your own.