30 Inspiring Examples of Lettering in Graphic Design

Article by Awwwards Team in Design & Illustration - December 20

Words. There are those who read them, there are those who write them, and then there are those who draw them. Lettering is the process of creating illustrations with letters, numbers, or any type of character or phrase. It’s far removed from the ordinary writing most of us do. The original aims of this technique consisted in maintaining legibility and uniformity. The creativity of graphic design has on occasion made it a work of art beyond simple inscription.

The imitations we see applied in web design through CSS, unlike hand-written lettering, use full typographies to which we can apply new CSS3 capabilities such as multiple shadows, gradient backgrounds, and 3D effects to imitate the effects of lettering. Of course now-legendary plugins such as Lettering.js, Arctext.js, and BigText give you greater control over the design and allow you to apply different styles to each character or add curved path text effects.

In this fantastic post on Codrops, “Creative Web Typography Styles", we can see some of the applications of these techniques.