Berol Pencil - Brochure

"Going thru one of my portfolios, I found this old Berol pencil brochure I worked on back in 1994. Art Director, Ray Mueller, hired me to work with him on this project.

My job was to create all the copy for the brochure in some Scriptura Communis (common handwriting) style. I created an original style for this brochure with the goal of looking as if it were written in pencil by a school student with good penmanship sometime circa 1920s/30s.

I based my hand on a Palmer business style, but for better readability I increased the x-height to open the counters; eliminated all the loops (except for the f) for better clarity at small point size; shortened the ascenders & descenders for tighter leading; deleted most of the entrance & exit hairlines & compressed the intra-spacing for tighter copy fit.

Ray provided me with a scale mock-up of the layout which I enlarged and used to figure out the proportionate shape/areas the copy would occupy, navigating around & conforming to the art. The finished piece is an accordion fold, opening to 11.5"x 34." I even did the Japanese characters seen ghosted behind the block of text in the enlarged detail."

~2011, Don Marsh~

Client: Berol Pencils
Art Director: Ray Mueller

Note: AI was used to increase size and clarity of a low resolution source file resulting in some smaller type characters to be rendered inaccurately.