Dan Forster On The Aladdins Cave That Made Him A Lettering Legend

Creative Boom: Inspiration Graphic Design Dan Forster on the Aladdin's cave that made him a lettering legend The award-winning lettering artist and type designer reveals all about the father who shaped him, the studio that changed everything, and why hand skills still matter in 2026. Written By: Tom May 7 April 2026 Tony and Dan Forster in Tony’s studio, 2003. There's a particular type of kid who spends their school years drawing band logos on their maths books. Dan Forster was that kid.

Metallica logos filled his exercise books, and he once spent several painstaking weeks hand-painting a Red Hot Chilli Peppers logo onto the back of his jacket, only to leave it on a bus and lose it forever. "Gutted," he recalls, understandably. Today, he's one of the UK's most respected lettering artists and type designers, with a client list that includes Apple, Lucozade and Twinings. And the teenage graffiti and the Apple commission are not, it turns out, entirely unrelated. Both are expressions of the same obsession: the beauty of letterforms and the human urge to make them by hand.

Yet Dan's path to that vocation was far from straightforward. It involved a decade-long detour through graphic design, the death of his father, and one of the most magnificently untidy studios in the history of the craft. Absorbing the process Dan grew up in the orbit of his father, Tony Forster, a calligrapher and lettering artist of extraordinary skill whose work is today archived on this Instagram account. "A day without laughter is a day wasted," Tony was fond of saying, and his drawing sessions came complete with sound effects for full comic effect. Left: Tony Forster. Right: Dan Forster. Both images cira 1978.

Initial drafts and development work for the Paperchase logo, Tony Forster, 1989. Various hand-rendered artwork by Tony Forster. As a small boy, Dan would pester him for pictures, usually of diggers. As a teen, he began to notice his dad's day job involved drawing letters for clients, including the Paperchase logo. He watched, asked questions, absorbed the process. "I didn't really know it at the time, but I was observing a design process in action," he reflects today. When Tony suggested calligraphy lessons at 16, though, Dan found it hopelessly frustrating.

"I got so frustrated that I couldn't draw the letters as perfectly as I wanted, so I just gave up quickly," he admits. Lettering seemed, at the time, like "some kind of dark art". He went off to study graphic design instead. The exercise that changed everything Before he left for college in 1995, though, his father set him a project. "I want you to hand-draw a lowercase Helvetica 'a' repeatedly, until it's perfect," he told him. Dan's response was not enthusiastic, but he set to the task all the same. Several days of tracing and redrawing followed, letter by patient letter, each imperfect attempt discarded.

By the end, he'd drawn around 50 versions. The results, he acknowledges, did improve. Then his father sat him down for the lesson. "You'll never learn anything about the shape, proportions or beauty of letterforms by just pressing a key on a keyboard." It's a sentence that has stayed with Dan for 30 years, and it carries fresh weight for him in the current era. 01/04 Dan’s Helvetica ‘a’ drawings. Fine-liner pen and white gouache, 1995. "It's funny thinking about this story now, especially in this age of AI," he reflects.

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The article discusses the significance of traditional skills in modern design, which is relevant to brand strategy, but the concepts presented are not entirely new or groundbreaking.