A Cold, Dead Hand*
In this issue of Survival Tips, I’m taking a brief departure from online meetings to share something really cool: the creative process my dear friend and colleague Heather Martinez used to design the custom lettering in Surviving the Horror of Online Meetings. If you’ve seen the book, Heather is the mastermind behind its design and lettering.
*A “hand” is a way of referring to a lettering style.
Title lettering and design by Heather Martinez. Illustration by Mark Monlux.
At the beginning of the project, I gave Heather just one piece of creative direction: "Think Plants vs. Zombies.” We had spent HOURS playing that game, and I knew she’d get the goofy aesthetic of hapless, clueless zombies right away.
From Plants vs. Zombies, developed by PopCap Games, published by Electronic Arts
Heather used a Neuland FineOne Art marker, a brush nib marker, to develop the lettering style used in the book. It’s great for illustrations, but it can be tricky for lettering artists because of its long, soft nib. But Heather loves a challenge. She began with a fun-loving style called Twinkle. You can find out more about Twinkle in her conversation about it with Sandra Dirks here, and download a Twinkle exemplar here.
Heather Martinez refining Twinkle lettering.
Then, Heather took inspiration from some of the illustrations Mark Monlux had started to create for the book to define attributes of the lettering style she would eventually call Zombie Hand.
Then, she closed her eyes and went deep inside to channel her inner zombie. As Heather recounts, she imagined herself as…
…a floppy-headed zombie with a crooked smile and a twitch in my writing arm. Where I lacked the appetite for brains, I made up for it in my hunger for letters. With the marker in my hand, I begin to write out the chapter titles for the book. My body moved and twitched the entire time. I liken the experience to lucid drawing only with a frightening twist.
As a result of Heather channeling the living dead, Zombie Hand came out perfectly for the book: wonky, with different sizes, different widths, and different rotations. Awkward, but successful in relationship with one another.
Sort of like online meetings. Everything is different. Participants will join the meeting at different times, on different devices, using different browsers, on different operating systems, with different versions, with different bandwidths, and different levels of patience for process and using technology.
And yet, despite all the awkward wonkiness, a skillful hand guiding the process can bring it all together.
You can read Heather’s own account of her design of Zombie Hand here.
Surviving the Horror of Online Meetings is now available on Kindle and paperback! Find them both on Amazon.