Do you recognise this book?
Did you spend hours painstakingly tracing it’s characters for school project headers?
You my friend, were not alone. You probably didn’t know back then but you were once a typography geek. This book single handedly turned a whole generation of school kids into font admirers. It was the typography bible for those too young to contemplate what a typography bible was.
The cover design makes me giddy with happiness and when I showed The Koala, he got the same feeling. His favourite was the bubble lettering. What was yours?
Do today’s kids know the dedication and the joys of hand lettering? It makes me sad to think kids these days might create their assignments on the computer and print them out. You don’t get intimate with fonts that way. No sir.
The Lettering Book by Noelene Morris was published by Scholastic in 1988. I can’t find any information online about Noelene. Where are you? What became of you? Did you know when you wrote this book that it would studied carefully by school kids everywhere?
I love this note from Noelene. I wonder if she knew when writing this page what an influence her book would be. I think maybe she did: “You will soon find yourself experimenting, and in a short time you will have invented many styles of your own.”
I’m reminiscing on bubble lettering, block lettering (with 3D cube effect), cloud lettering and that famous capital S etched into wooden school desks everywhere. Oh the good old days.
Bunny Eats Design 
You have literally no idea how much I loved this book! Had forgotten all about it…wish it were acceptable to use it for marketing collateral! Can you imagine?
OMG I remember using this book and taking it everywhere with me! it was as I recall the best present ever
Thanks for reminding me about this book 🙂
Gene and Hayley, it’s funny isn’t it? When I remembered this book I thought for sure that others would find a page in their hearts that were dedicated to it too. I was right!
I loved this book so much. I’m trying to find something similar at the moment for my 7 year old son who’s a little ‘typography geek’ too….I’m so proud!
Cute! You could always try making your own type specimens for your boy. Get them while they are young!
I was reminiscing about the bubble font today which led me to remember this book, and then google it. Such great memories, its exactly how I remember it. I’m now a graphic designer so go figure! Any idea what the bubble font is called?
Hi Ladesha, I am happy to read that this book also affected you and that you are a graphic designer now. There are a few bubble fonts out there. Here are links to a few just to start. Mind you, even in the narrow niche of bubble fonts, there are many different personalities.
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/sparkytype/sudsy/
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bogusky2/grafo-graffiti/
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/hvdfonts/blow-up/
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/schizotype/mook/
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/pintassilgo/ziclets/
Some keywords or themes that may be useful (aside from BUBBLE): psychedelic, groovy balloon, retro, graffiti.
Hope that helps!
Greetings! This is my first comment here so I just wanted to give a quick shout out and say I really enjoy reading your blog posts.
Can you suggest any other blogs/websites/forums that deal with
the same topics? Thanks a ton!
Hi Trisha, it depends on the level of typography. As a designer there are a few typography websites I swoon over. Some good places to check out: http://www.typophile.com
http://www.linotype.com/7/fontmagazine.html
http://typographica.org/