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kleinletters.com
Personal blog · kleinletters.com/Blogdesignculturehistory
kleinletters.com is a personal blog at kleinletters.com about design, culture and history. Since 2010, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 15 times, most often “On the Leroy Lettering System as Used in Golden Age Comics”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Todd Klein's blog for lettering and comics history: Leroy drafting-lettering templates, the Routed Gothic font, comic font comparisons, and his series on comic lettering.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- On the Leroy Lettering System as Used in Golden Age Comics3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-12-29
- Wizards of Leroy (and Wrico) Lettering2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-03-23
What Hacker News says?
It doesn't look imprecise per se. These are just the letterforms you can get out of wood with a router. I'm curious why it's associated with blueprints, but I have no insight into the history of applying type to blueprints. EDIT: to answer my own question, it has to do with the scribing device used for Leroy letters. One of which was used to source this font. Nice description of how it was used here https://kleinlet…
Comment linking /Blog/leroy-lettering-by-jim-and-margaret-wroten/
on “Routed Gothic Font”Submitted The art and history of lettering comics as a story · 127 points
HN discussionThe old drafting font templates. When I started engineering they still did some of the plans by hand, using these templates to write out the lettering with a pin that would convert it to pen. They used it on some comics too. https://kleinletters.com/Blog/leroy-lettering-by-jim-and-mar...
Comment linking /Blog/leroy-lettering-by-jim-and-margaret-wroten/
on “Routed Gothic Font”Submitted Wizards of Leroy (and Wrico) Lettering as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYes, it's supposedly inspired by Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, which are both excellent books. However, the letter shapes of those two books are closer to each other than they are to Comic Sans. It seems the font creator relied more on his intuition of how comic letters should look than on observation. There's a good comparison of the three fonts here: http://kleinletters.com/Blog/?p=3599
Comment linking /Blog/?p=3599
on “Classic Fonts That Will Last a Whole Design Career”Submitted Wizards of Leroy and Wrico Lettering as a story · 1 points
HN discussionTodd Klein's entire blog is amazing. Elsewhere he has an entire six-part retrospective on working for DC in the '80s (aside from being a letterer, he was Assistant Production Manager for years) with tons of pictures of their offices and people. https://kleinletters.com/Blog/the-dc-comics-offices-1982-199... https://kleinletters.com/Blog/the-dc-comics-offices-1982-199... https://kleinletters.com/Blog/the-dc-comics-of…
Comment linking /Blog/the-dc-comics-offices-1982-1991-part-6/
on “The art and history of lettering comics”Submitted Comic Sans Font Examined (2009) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAbout ( https://kleinletters.com/Blog/about-my-book/ ) FYI / tl;dr After about 5 years of back and forth and then not hearing from a prospective publisher about completing his book project Todd Klein decided to take all the work and publish it on his blog here as a series of articles (some previously posted that were part of the content he was building for the book).
Comment linking /Blog/about-my-book/
on “The art and history of lettering comics”Submitted On the Leroy Lettering System as Used in Golden Age Comics as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
