PENSICK & GORDON TOY WHOLESALERS building: LA

[nkalanaga]

Here's Bank Gothic with the line ends straightened.  I have Bold, but forgot to use it...



Straightening the ends in Paint took about a minute.

[nkalanaga]

Here is Bank Gothic Bold, with the ends squared.  Doing it as a monochrome bitmap file "pixellates" the image, as every pixel is either black or white, no shading.  For a hand painted sign, following brick lines, that works very nicely.  Set the pixel size to match the brick height you want and most of the work is done.  In this case, I don't know the brick size, so these are just samples.



The BOLD doesn't look much different from the regular font, at least to my eyes.  You might still want to tinker with the line widths.

[peteski]

For this type of work vector-based programs like Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw or Inkscape make editing and customizing glyphs much easier (after they are converted to curves).

[nkalanaga]

Maybe, but all I did was convert the slanted ends on the vertical lines in the "C" and "S" to horizontal, which literally took seconds in Paint.  Just use the "line" function to fill the offending pixels with the other color.  The lettering itself was done in Paint, so there was no conversion from text, or other fancy stuff.  Converting the font, or image, to vector would have taken longer than making the image.

Widening, or narrowing, the image is just as easy, use the "stretch/skew" function.

I'm sure the vector programs are much more versatile, but for my purposes, the time spent learning them would outweigh any savings in production time, and I don't need the scalability of vector graphics.

[peteski]

Nick, I understand how and what you did with the bit mapped text.  In vector-based program I also create a text object with whatever I need, then it takes 2 mouse clicks to convert that text to curves.  Then I can easily edit any of the shapes which were originally letters.  What is also good about vector-based programs is that I can give the text outline in any color or thickness (for example to fatten up the letters). Again, just couple mouse kicks away.

Yes, there is a learning curve involved in working with a vector-based program, but it is so much easier to deal with when it comes to designing items with accurate dimensions. Not only there are rulers, grid and guidelines I can use but every object in the drawing shows its size and location withing the drawing. That comes in very handy when I need to print something that will have an exact fit on a building or a boxcar.  These programs also are capable of layers in the drawing, so I can scan a side of a boxcar or a building's wall then lock that in a a layer then draw the exact-size artwork over the scan.  When I print it the fit will be perfect.

[nkalanaga]

For your purposes, I can see where vector graphics would be handy.  And, yes, I admit it has a lot of nice features, that my simple bitmap techniques don't.

Most of my stuff is so simple that changing programs would be an unneeded complication.  I'm not a graphic artist, and never will be!

Most of my decal work is weight data, for reweighs, and is generated in Excel, a sheet at a time.  After developing the spreadsheet, I can turn out a finished sheet in about an hour, including changing the font, converting the spreadsheet to an image, resizing it, and arranging the data for printing.

Doing lettering for a specific car takes a little longer, mostly because of the research, but still isn't "tedious", or that difficult.  800 DPI seems to be higher resolution than Tichy's printing, and I can't resize my data sheets anyway, as they wouldn't fit the page.