Welcome!

Hi! We’re Tina and Noah and this is Practical Lettering -

You can think of this newsletter as a working archive: high-res scans of hand-lettered alphabets, vintage ephemera, and commercial art from the 1930s–1960s, paired with stories and history behind it all.

If you’re here, you’re probably someone who cares about how letters are actually drawn, in paint, ink, thread, or pencil. This Substack is meant to be useful to you first, and as a byproduct, it also shows you exactly where the fonts we design come from and why they look the way they do.

Free subscribers get bi-weekly posts featuring vintage ephemera and font writeups, stories behind lettering styles, how they were used, and what makes them work.

Paid subscribers get everything free subscribers get, plus:

• Subscriber-only deep dives and full ephemera archive: In-depth explorations of hand-lettered alphabets, specimen plates, sign styles, and vintage ephemera, with high-resolution scans you can study, print, and reference in your own work.

• Vector files inspired by vintage lettering ephemera: Clean vector drawings of select lettering styles from our archive, ready to for your own designs.

• Early beta access to in-progress fonts: See new Practical Lettering fonts before they launch, whether we’re reviving a historic alphabet directly or hand-lettering something new inspired by vintage sources, with process notes on how we’re bringing these letterforms into the digital world.

Founding members get all paid benefits plus a digital “morgue” (our full working archive of scattered reference material), a permanent discount on all Practical Lettering Studio fonts, and more physical perks we’ll announce as we build this community.

Practical Lettering is an independent type foundry, but it’s also a long-running research project into historic lettering. The “practical” part matters to us: our fonts are designed with the physical world in mind, not just computer screens. We want them to feel human and to change once another artist uses them, whether that means tracing letters on paper, tweaking Bézier paths, or printing onto textured stock.

Our goal isn’t perfection on the baseline; it’s letters with character that reflect the artist who scales, traces, prints, or redraws them. We think of these alphabets as working reference material as much as font files.

We also just love collecting things: old sign-painting manuals, lettering books, showcards, labels, packaging, menus, matchbooks. This newsletter is our way of sharing that obsession with other people who get excited about the same details.

Tina cut her teeth managing a traditional hand-painted sign shop, then went on to spend years with chain stitch embroidery and grocery store signs. That foundation in real-world lettering now shapes everything she does in embroidery and freelance design.

Noah started out as a technical artist in the game industry, using programming to streamline workflows for other artists. Over time, that same problem-solving mindset turned toward chain stitch embroidery, branding, and lettering-driven logo and packaging work.

We both fell in love with chain stitch embroidery as a lettering medium. Chain stitching has a long history in lettering shops: bowling shirts, car club jackets, work uniforms, and advertising for small businesses. We learned to chain stitch using the same techniques the old timers used, and that mindset carries directly into how we design our projects today.

Thanks for being here at the start.

— Tina & Noah
Practical Lettering Studio