Tips on typesetting and word balloons

[punkarsenic]

There's lots of rules about this, and generally I wing the word balloon placement on what I think works and some rules I've learnt, but...

1: generally, there's a rule that you should be able to fit a lower case 'o' all around between your text and your bubble edge

2: if you're struggling to make things fit, you can make one line slightly smaller and people wont notice

3: generally capital i with the bars across is only used for the word I as in myself, the rest is just a line for the letter i (this is mainly for when youre typing in all caps like a lot of comics do)

4: google the rule of thirds, it kinda explains a lot of stuff wrt composition that i cant

[Chuu]

I was just thinking about this since I am pretty weak in the skills of making bubbles on the computer. So, thanks OP for making this as a post! These tips on here are rather helpful in making bubbles and have excellent use of placement! I really adore how @stnmaren does their bubbles, it looks so smooth and it flows well with the eye. ( Great use of colors too! )

@AnnaLandin -I'm a big fan of your comic ( The art is great, and I adore the story and the pacing--i could go on but dsajkhkdha), and I really like the tip you are mentioning here-- planning out the bubbles in your thumbnails do sound really beneficial in sorting out your project.

I do have a question if anyone reads this though!: Where does one get free fonts? All the fonts I have on my pc aren't really the best to be using--and it isn't as eye catching-- so if anyone have any recommendations it would be much appreciated!

[AnnaLandin]

Where does one get free fonts?

I get my free fonts from dafont.com! Just set the search to filter for public use/100% free fonts, and be sure to read the read-me file for each font you download. =)

[Cielle]

when I first began making comics, I didn't plan at all. Font-size, bubble size, it was all a ~.~Surprise~.~ how it'd turn out. that's how monsters like this happen:

Now I know better and plan my pages around my text =_=. I also changed my bubble-style, so that helped also.

my pages are always the same size, so I've found that as long as I use the same font and the same size, everything is still legible when I export. I've found that not all texts are created equal. They come in all shapes and sizes, even when they are technically the same "font size". Behold:

as you can see, all those texts were at size 17, but they are all different in size. This is the standard size I use for tapastic, 940x1329 pixels. I recommend finding what size text works for you based on the font you like and how it looks when you export.

[Shanny8]

For the most part I try to make sure all my word balloon text is the same size unless I'm really stressing certain words depending on situation of the panel. Sometimes I will reduce the size of the text for certain situations(like for my last current page, I had 2 characters talking far away from the character in the foreground- I reduced the size to show that).

As for word balloon placement- I try to leave room for the placement of balloons. I usually try to keep the balloons with in the confines of the panel, but I will alter the placement if I feel it makes a better design element that creates a more aesthetically pleasing flow for my eye. I try to always take into account the placement/flow of the lettering so that it is easy to follow.

I type out my text first so that I can see if I need to re-word the dialogue(if it is too much- that's one of the reasons I always make my scripts more fluid like). Then I create the balloon itself around the text to fit in the area that I need. I try to leave enough space that the text itself isnt cramped for space, but not too much where all that empty space is eating up actual picture space.

[El_Psy_Congroo]

It seems a lot of people (myself included) experiment and change and adjust their typesettings as they learn. Basically winging it and seeing what sticks. For all you comic veterans, do you create some kind of style sheet in the planning stages that helps you determine what fonts you will use in a comic and how, what designs to give your balloons, etc? And if so how do you structure or test it out so you don't end up changing things retroactively (which is easy enough to do for webcomics but I imagine this as a question more geared towards those who publish in print)

[Shanny8]

@El_Psy_Congroo I dont really have a "set of fonts" that I will use for my comic other than the main word balloon/dialogue font and the title logo. As I'm lettering I usually get a feel for what other font I want to use in addition to the main dialogue font- though I'm a big Tom Orzechowski fan(guy who used to letter the X-Men comics back in the 80's; lettered Spawn in the 90s), and so I try to incorporate ways of how he did his lettering into my work. When using certain words that are hyper stressed, I will use a font in my arsenal that allows me to get that effect.

I do test out my fonts, so that I have an idea of what works best for the page/panel. I've noticed that when I first started getting into fonts & lettering I used to pick out a lot of stuff coz it looked "unusual, wild, or cool looking", where nowdays I'm a little more conservative with my choices- and mainly because I'm trying to get max usage out of them. The panel above is from my print series, The Clique; I dont really change up my mechanics as much. As for balloon designs- I havent had to design any special made balloons yet, but I'm looking forward to the challenge.

@Cielle you have the Joe Kubert font? I have the Andy Kubert font...lol

[Cielle]

haha they must be related somehow XD

[Shanny8]

@Cielle my bad- Adam, not Andy(Joe has 2 sons- Adam & Andy. Adam is the one with the font). And they all draw comics.

@Kaykedrawsthings I use Illustrator for my lettering as well- though I am starting to warm up to using Clip Studio to try out creating hand drawn sound FX.

[Zanreo]

Usually keep it the same size and bubble thickness (between comics too, though I've made a few changes as the comic went on) unless purposefully making the text bigger or smaller to show a character shouting/talking quietly, though a few times I've had to make it a few sizes smaller if it was too big to fit in the bubble and the bubble couldn't really be made any bigger (though in those situations I usually try to cut down text or reword things first, if possible... unless of course when it's purposefully MEANT to be a textwall, which was the case for one of those situations)

I... should probably get better at sketching out balloons before adding them. Though even then it can be hard to tell if my text is gonna fit just from that, I pretty much have to actually type it out to be sure.

As for fonts, I use "Sunday Comics" from blambot, mostly because it was one of the few free lowercase comic fonts (I'm personally not a fan of doing all-caps comics, I don't mind it in other comics but for my own it just doesn't seem to fit). And I like how it kind of "sticks out" while still being easy on the eyes to read large amounts of. For other text (some panel descriptions ect) I often use mini-wakuwaku... or just stick with Sunday Comics.

Paying attention to bubble-placement pays off! Placing a bubble between two characters can be used to silently imply a barrier or sense of separation between them, for example.

Yep! I recently put a bubble over another character's face to imply that the other character was talking "over" him and getting the attention instead. Generally the rule is "don't put bubbles over characters' faces", but here I purposefully broke this for a specific effect. There's lots of little storytelling tricks you can do here...

[El_Psy_Congroo]

So, inspired by my recent decision to forgo outlines for panels I decided to try the same thing for word balloons. Can you guys let me know what you think?

vs

[SpavVy]

Meh. I tend to not keep them the same size but I do my best to make sure that it's not too drastic and that it's really easy to read.

[katverwho]

I try to keep my text sizes the same, since little details like that can just look SLIGHTLY off enough to show the artist hasn't learned how to plan their comics well enough to have consistency. You pretty much never see pros who vary their font size.
I like to hand letter sound effects in my comic Meat&Bone, but I think using a font for the bulk of text and speech is fine, so long as it's not ugly or too obvious, like comic sans....there's a bunch of really great comics fonts available for free. Letters, like your lines and colours, help set mood. You wouldn't typeset a horror comic in the same font as a love story.

As for laying out word balloons, there's a great thread you should skim with a lot of pointers from the other week HERE.

[isaacfriedman]

I intentionally make my text messy by hand writing every letter.

It allows me to play with size and angle and ruggedness of the lettering a bit more and also feels more natural. If I were doing a comic that was meant to feel neat and structured, I'd definitely type the text in photoshop when I do the editing, but with all three of my comics, hand-written works contextually.

[Shanny8]

@El_Psy_Congroo I like the absence of the outlines; the only thing I notice when it is used in other comics is that it really works well against colored backgrounds. Backgrounds that use really light colors or have a good degree of white in them- doesnt work as well.

[avalonmao]

I try not to use outlines nowadays and use more or less a standard font. I try not to make my words smaller than 12pt!

[Chuu]

You are seriously my hero, Annalandin! I think this link really helped me immensely! Now I've found a font for my series! ;o;//

[jennula]

I'm using two font sizes - one standard size and a smaller one (1-2 pt smaller) for muttering or background conversations. I wasn't really doing this before SPEJS though, so my comics had quite a font-size party perviously XD

I was really horrible with not planning in speech bubbles until maybe a year or so ago. Nowadays I'm trying to plan in dialogue in the thumbnails, and after I've scanned my thumbnails and arranging them for making a finer sketch, I usually add the text and speech bubbles so I know if I need to re-arrange characters and such. I would really recommend doing this so you have a general idea of where your speech bubbles will be and so on, it'll help you a lot in the end =)

As for making speech bubbles, I'm using the sppech bubble tool in Clip Studio actually ^^; I think it works just fine, and looks about the same, or even a bit better, than my previous approaches =)

[Shanny8]

@jennula I would eventually like to make Clip Studio my "all in one" program, but right now there are things that I do with other programs that I cant do well with Clip Studio right now. Lettering isnt one of things- coz I havent tried lettering with Clip Studio, but I'll try it eventually. If it can do a lot of the things that Illustrator does, then I'll be good with it.

[jennula]

I used mainly Photoshop for making comics, but when I switched from Mac to Windows, I couldn't use the student/teacher license I bought for my Mac computer on my Windows computer (but Clip studio worked regardless of system), so I decided to try and ditch Photoshop all in favour of Clip Studio =) I'm not using vectors for anything (well the speech bubbles are vector, but it's kind of low-level stuff I guess) though, so for me the transfer went pretty smoothly. But yeah, some things took me a while to figure out how to do, I guess ^^;