Off the top of my head:
- Don't cross balloon tails
- No more than 25 words max in a balloon or peoples' eyes are gonna glaze over (same for too many balloons on a page)
- Break up balloons by sentences; usually no more than 2 sentences in a balloon.
- Don't put two different emotional beats in one balloon (or panel), since your character can only emote one thing at a time
- Avoid making tangents on the artwork with your balloons
- Plan your lettering alongside your artwork; lettering should complement the art, not look crammed in like an afterthought.
I try not to leave a lot of outside space, but enough to make the lettering fit nicely. I take the placement of the art into account & try to leave space for the lettering. It's interesting coz it sometimes forces me to do some unorthodox lettering schemes. The area where I will tend to be lax is tangents- if I stress on that too much I get OCD with it and it doesnt allow me to letter effectively.
I know a lot of us use Clip Studio Paint, which has some built-in vector-based tools specifically for making speech bubbles, other people use Adobe Illustrator (also vectors). Back in ye-olde'n days comic book artists used some special tools I think? I don't know what they were called, at the very least a compas or stencils.
Even though I use clip studio paint I still hand-draw my speech bubbles, I've gotten used to freehanding them so It's less clunky and I think it looks nicer than messing around with vector points. - But that's just personal taste.
A few. The first was this panel from Ch 1 of my series- I had to do all this monologue, or the scene wouldnt have flowed well, but how could I fit all that monologue into the panel?
This was a couple of panels from a Valentine's Day special I did. I underestimated the amount of space I had, which wasnt enough for the dialogue, so I ad-libbed and arranged it. I broke one of the cardinal lettering sins- which is crossing tails, but it worked in this case...
I hand-draw mine too. I used a vector program to letter my first chapter, but I found the perfectly-shaped vector balloons clashed with the artwork too much, so I went and re-did all the lettering. I prefer the organic look of hand-drawn lettering, it adds a little more personality at the cost of taking a bit more time.
@Michelle Maybe when I do another comic [series] I want to learn to hand draw/craft the word balloons. As for hand lettering- I'll pass. I tried that in my early days of comic making- I like my handwriting, but not as lettering for my comic.
Indeed it did! I guess we can consider this as sorta a bonus-tip, you can get away with crossing tails if the bubbles are color-coded!
@Michelle Props to you for hand-lettering! It's something I've wanted to learn to do for awhile. Do you have any advice for doing that?
A couple weird rules of thumb I've picked up that aren't hard-and-fast rules, but have been good guidelines for me:
- point the balloon towards the character's mouth. If you point it at their elbow then yeah everyone knows what you mean but it still feels like their elbow is talking.
- the end of the tail usually falls about halfway between the character's mouth and the spot where it connects to the balloon.
- it often looks nicer if the tail connects to the centre of the balloon, rather than connecting over on an edge
I just use the pen tool in photoshop to make mine! So they aren't perfectly identical ovals, but they're still nice smooth bezier curves.
I have a bit of cheat for this; I digitally hand-letter and use the text tool as a guide! The "font" is still my handwriting, but I don't have to worry about figuring out the kerning/leading/spacing/sizing.
My other tip would be, if you're doing it digitally, ZOOM IN -- zooming in absurdly close is what keeps mine from being wobbly.
All very good advice!! Something I haven't seen mentioned yet is how the bubble outline can be an excellent way to denote tone: anger, sadness, anxiety, whispering, etc.
It's one of the best ways to emphasize a character's expression. If a character is crying and their bubble outline is wobbly or shaky, it will translate to a shaky voice in your mind.
Here's a sample of what I mean, thanks to one of my favorite comics, Sakana11:
(haha go figure, she's got a sample of more than one type on the most recent page)
Another basic tip I can think of: Remember that bubble placement creates page flow; it's just as important as paneling. Our eyes go from bubble to bubble and see the artwork in between.
There was a page in my own comic where I made a mistake in lettering that I've since learned to avoid:
For panels 2-5, the bubbles do not assist the paneling. Ideally, according to the panels, the eye should flow down the artwork on the left, shift back to the top of the right 3 panels, only to go back down again. Instead, my bubbles just lead your eye down the center of the page.
This is one of those where the artwork didn't really allow me much flexibility to change the bubble placement, otherwise I would. It was just set up poorly.
On that note, if you accidentally set it up wrong and it's confusing on which bubble to read first, SOMETIMES you can solve it with a tail connecting the bubbles.
The top one is what I had at first. I struggled with this because I realized that it was confusing--the middle one is most prominent, but it's read left to right, and the left bubble is so far down. The reader has a greater chance of reading it wrong.
I solved this by connecting them like in the second image. This way, at a glance, you know the middle bubble is in fact the second one to be read, so the eye snaps to the left bubble naturally.
Obviously this is a solution to a very specific problem, but it's good to keep things like that in mind!
if youre using circular bubbles, format your text in a diamond shape. so:
becomes
which fits into the shape better, taking up less space, and generally looks quite satisfying.
but try not to break up a preposition (to, on, with) or pronoun (the, a) with its noun, or bolded phrases. and try not to have a single line consisting of a one or two letter word. eg:
(alright, that last ones a bit top heavy, not sure how to fix that...)
and if somethings really not fitting, making one line a couple pts bigger can really help, and isnt very noticeable.