Wellderly Script
For the June 22 New York Times Magazine I was asked to do the lettering for the ‘On Language’ regular feature. The word was ‘Wellderly’, which is a nice come-onbination of ‘well’ and ‘elderly’, meaning the elderly who are in good health.
Get the dash-making script for Illustrator.
To use it:
- Unzip the above file noting where it extracted ‘wellderly.jsx’
- The script is currently not very robust, in Illustrator, you need to make sure:
- All type is converted to outlines: menu “Type/Create Outlines”
- Paths are not grouped: menu “Object/Ungroup”
- Compound Paths are fully released: menu “Object/Compound Path/Release”
- Select the paths you’d like to apply the script to
- Go to menu “File/Scripts/Other Script…”
- Navigate to the file ‘wellderly.jsx’
- Set the values that the dialog boxes ask for
hi
i just saw this yesterday morning!
take care
mike
very nice
Haha very cool
On Language is a great column, and i really admire both yours and Will Safire’s work
keep it up!!
Very cool lettering design. I actually own wellderly.com website and currently parked it until I figure out what exactly I want to do with it. I like your graphic design. I’ll have to keep you in mind in the future when I develop my site.
What a beautiful piece of art. Can you explain how it is that you did what you did? Was there coding in there, or just a lot of tedious pixeling?
All best!
db
I started by offsetting the outlines of the letterforms in Illustrator so the paths filled in the letters. Then I used a script I wrote to style the lines with random colors and different sized dashed lines. After running the script on multiple copies of the word, I choose the letters that I liked best and cobbled them together.
Thanks for explaining how you did the lettering for wellderly. What I especially liked about your art was that the design looked like something a granny might use. I don’t know if I’m saying it right, but the artful lettering seems to match the subject matter to a “t”.