Creating A Gothic Alphabet

Historically, the ‘Gothic' alphabet refers to a series of scripts used to write texts in Europe between the 12th and 15th centuries, roughly speaking. These scripts varied in quality, shape and style but they also shared definite characteristics which we still look for in Gothic alphabets today.

If you want to design your own instantly-recognizable Gothic alphabet, here is what to aim for:

1.            Overall, a dense, compressed, slightly prickly appearance with little space between letters.

2.            Strong contrast between thick and thin strokes.

3.            Very few round shapes in the body of the text – most letters based on a rectangle with sharply defined, pointy corners or corners cut off to form a diagonal.

4.            Some kind of finial (decorative blob or stop) on any free ends of strokes.

5.            Elaborately overdone capital letters.

Typically, Gothic letters such as ‘a', ‘c', ‘x' etc stand around 4.5 nib-widths high. (If the width of the nib used to write the script is 1mm, those letters would stand 4.5mm high; if the nib were 2mm, each letter would have to be 9mm high to get the right contrast and proportions.) Longer letters above the line such as ‘b' and ‘l' measure another 2.5 nib-widths, and letters below the line such as ‘g' and ‘y' measure another 2 nib-widths.

If you want to write Gothic using calligraphy nibs, or to see an example of a Gothic alphabet, you might find it useful to refer to a tutorial site.

However, you do not have to have a calligraphy pen to create a Gothic alphabet. It is possible to design one using crayons or even a ballpoint if you draw the ‘thick' lines as long rectangles and the ‘thin' as single lines. Finials can be diamond shapes, spirals, squares, circles, triangles … each shape gives a slightly different ‘feel' to the final alphabet. Using strong, contrasting colors to decorate the initial letters adds to the Gothic feel.

Without pictures it is hard to explain more about creating your own Gothic alphabet. It is helpful to look at examples of the script: try the Gothic alphabet page at the Calligraphy Skills website for more ideas about how to work with the basic historical script to invent your own form of Gothic expression.