Lettering

[Peter Ellis]

Looking for help with laying out lettering on curves.

Suggestions ? I need to lay out on a full circle as part of my makers mark design.

[TwinOaks]

If you don't have any experience w/ graphic arts, it might be faster and easier to get someone to do the lay out for you. If you have access to some computer graphics programs (and there's a lot of good free ones) You can see if it has the "add text" feature to it.

Essentially, you need 3 concentric circles, spaced for the height of the leather, - top, middle, and center of the letters, then you need to divide the arc in which you want letters into the number of letters + spaces. Ex: Noble_Lion_Leather is 18 spaces. If you want it across the top of a circle, you need to divide 180 (degrees) by 18 (the number of characters *including spaces*) to get the arc degrees for each character. That gets you your 'grid' for laying out the letters, then you add the letters and spaces to each arc. If you're going for a full circle, then use 360 instead of 180.

With a computer, you type in what you want, select a font, select a size, select a size of circle, and push enter. We've got quite a few top notch computer folks on here, and I know I've seen one or two offering graphics layout. If you're gonna order a Delrin stamp, call Brenda at LaserGiftCreations.com and tell her what you want. I corresponded with her via E-mail and gave her a rough description (and I mean ROUGH). She sent back a .bmp of the proposed layout and it was exactly what I wanted. I'm sure others who make stamps can offer similar services, but I haven't dealt with them personally. I have NOT heard any bad reports on any of the stamp makers offering their services here.

Hope that helps,