A letter is
the record
of a tool
Nell Bardsley
Lettering artist
& type designer
Leith, Edinburgh
Shopfront fascias in one-shot enamel, gilded glass for interiors, and four retail families drawn from the same hand. Scroll on and the letters stop being a typeface: below this, a nib is dragged along a skeleton and the shape is worked out live, in the browser.
01 The hand
Turn the nib.
You are turning
the typeface.
Nothing below is an outline. Each letter is stored as the path the pen travelled — a skeleton — and the shape is worked out by sweeping a straight edge along it. The edge is held at one angle the whole way, which is why some strokes come out thick and some come out as hairlines. Move the angle and the thicks and thins move with it. Same skeleton. Different letter.
The control word. Lowercase only — this nib is cut for minuscules.
- Strokes
- —
- Pen travel
- —
- Contrast
- —
- 0° is a flat nib. Verticals come out at full width, horizontals vanish. It is the stress of a slab, and it is almost unwritable by hand.
- 30° is where a hand actually sits. Diagonal stress, a thin on the top-left of every bowl. Every humanist face in the world is downstream of it.
- 90° reverses the contrast: horizontals go heavy, stems go thin. Fine for a fascia, and wrong for a paragraph.
02 Releases
Four families,
one hand.
Each of these started as the same skeleton at a different tool setting, which is why the diagnostic letter beside each one is drawn by the engine above rather than set in the finished font. Licensing is per-family, perpetual, with the web licence included.
-
Quoin
A narrow nib held close to flat, so the contrast is severe and the serifs come out as the natural end of a stroke rather than as a bracket bolted on. Cut for headlines at 40 pt and up. Below that the thins close up and it stops being readable, which is a feature of the drawing and not a fault of the printing.
-
Gansey
The workhorse. Thirty degrees, medium nib, nothing clever — a face for annual reports, timetables and the small print on the back of a ticket. Fourteen styles because a text family that cannot set a footnote and a running head from the same drawing is not finished.
-
Mullion
Reverse contrast, pulled off a set of pre-war shopfronts on Great Junction Street where the horizontals carry all the weight. It reads at forty metres and it is unkind at ten point. Made for boards, awnings and the top of a window.
-
Ligger
A round nib rather than an edge, so there is no contrast at all and every join has to be earned by the drawing instead. Two weights, 380 contextual alternates, and an ampersand that does most of the work on its own.
03 On the wall
Enamel, gold,
and a steady arm.
Fascias are painted in one-shot enamel with a sable quill, freehand, off a full-size pounce pattern. Glass is gilded from the back: loose leaf floated onto gelatine size, backed up, then the letter cut through with a scalpel so the edge is glass-sharp rather than brush-sharp. Neither can be undone, which is the reason both are still worth paying for.
Lead time is six to ten weeks. I letter about twenty jobs a year and turn down rather more, usually because the sign wanted was really a vinyl cut and would be better and cheaper as one.
| Job | Where | Work | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ovenstone & Reid | Constitution Street | Fascia, 4.2 m, one-shot enamel | 2025 |
| The Persevere | Bonnington | Gilded glass, two windows, 23 ct | 2025 |
| Halkett Fishmongers | Newhaven | Fascia and stall riser, blocked | 2024 |
| Mearns Bindery | Canongate | Door glass, gilded and matted | 2024 |
| Somerville Removals | Seafield | Two lorries, hand-lettered | 2023 |
| Kirkgate Baths | Leith | Reinstated 1928 fascia, from photographs | 2023 |
04 About
First floor,
above a chandler’s.
I trained as a signwriter before I ever drew a typeface, which is the wrong way round according to most people and the right way round according to me. Four years holding a quill against a wall teaches you what a stroke is for. Six years since, drawing them at 2,000 units to the em, has mostly been an argument with what the brush already knew.
The room has a north window, a plan chest of pounce patterns going back to 1961 that came with the lease, and a wall of gouache that is arranged by nothing at all. I teach a broad-nib evening class twice a year and it fills in about an hour, which says something cheerful about the state of things.
- Trained
- Signwriting, 4-year indenture
- Studio
- Leith, Edinburgh
- Released
- 4 families, 27 styles
- Teaches
- Broad nib, twice a year
- Lead time
- 6–10 weeks
- Takes on
- ~20 lettering jobs a year
05 Commissions
Tell me what
it says.
Fascias, glass, vehicles, a mark for something, or a face drawn from scratch. The useful first message is short: what the words are, roughly how big, and when you need it up.
| Lettering | From March |
|---|---|
| Gilded glass | From May |
| Custom type | One slot, autumn |
| Teaching | Waitlist |