Jim Campbell's lettering guide

As much as I rely on Comicraft's Comic Book Lettering guide as a manual on, well, comic book lettering, there's still some things that the book doesn't show, and thus, some things that drive me absolutely crazy.  One of those is the "radio" balloon, used sometimes when characters are heard talking from intercoms, phones, radios and the like.  I've managed to avoid making these balloons up until this point, but I'm working on lettering an Andromeda Jones story that needs to have them.  Here's what I'm talking about:

I've managed to find very few resources online that help with such tasks, so my friend Brant Fowler pointed me to a PDF file that should serve as a decent source for any would-be letterer.  It's A Guide to Comic Book Lettering with Adobe Illustrator by Jim Campbell, and you can download it here.

The guide goes over a number of common and not-so-common lettering techniques, some of which are different than what I use currently, some of which I've never had explained to me before.  Campbell's guide is made for Illustrator CS3; I use CS4, so there are some differences (Adobe recently came out with CS5, so the information is somewhat dated in some cases, though it's mostly still accurate).

In any case, this is a handy (and free) guide that I'd recommend that any comic letterer check out.  It's not a comprehensive guide and, as I said, there are some techniques that I do differently (mostly different ways to solve the same problems), but there are things that this guide points out that I've never read before, as because of that, it's a great resource to have around.  Check it out!

Here's a direct link: https://files.me.com/jim.campbell/qqt5ck.