LAYOUT

Here is a useful tip for choosing text style, after you have been engraving for a year or two, it is easy to drift into using four or five font styles, perhaps these are the ones displayed in your shop or web site, and you can get 'stuck in a rut' using the same fonts. So make a deliberate effort to use different styles, experiment a bit and I don't mean bringing up a graphic or engraving a scrap bit of metal, that is not 'the end result' It is only when you actually engrave an award hold it up and look at it will you get the true perspective.

Moving on to discuss, engraving size and layout. Experience has taught me that 50% of the battle in achieving a nice neat inscription is down to size and perspective. You can have a really ornate font with nicely spaced text, but if it is too small or even worse, too big, then the customer may not be over impressed. Over the years, I probably realized that whilst the size of my text has been pretty good, the badge and design work has been done at too large a size. Quite often, badges / designs (especially the military variety) have text inside the badge or ribbon, so in order to read this text, engravers make the badge too big. Well this is understandable, but taken all things into consideration, I would rather reduce the size and get a neater layout. A classic example is a traditional British Navy Badge (very similar to a US Navy or USAA in style and size), for quite a few years this would be engraved at 45 - 48mm on a plain one pint tankard, but now I use 38mm.

This will help the novice engraver and give them a starting point to begin with. The following is based on a plain 1 pint tankard or a similar sized cup/goblet using metric sizes. A single logo or badge, round or square in shape, would be in the area of 36 - 42mm and placed in the top half of the available space, not in the centre. A rectangular design would have to be scaled down according to the longest side. Putting 3 lines of text beneath the logo would mean dropping the logo size down 4-6mm and having the text at approximately 3 mm. Text inscriptions only, say 5 lines, would probably mean increasing the letter height to 3.5mm - 3.8mm. These are only guidelines and would vary depending on the length of the longest line and whether it is all capitals or upper and lowers.

I normally use the same type of font throughout, variation being achieved by using capitals, upper & lower case, upper & lower capitals, spaces and italics. I would very occasionally use a second font to highlight a name, I would never, ever, use three fonts. If faced with a long complicated layout, the golden rule would be ‘less is more’ i.e. do not try to over complicate with too many variations or ornaments

The majority of salvers are round, some may be a Chippendale shape with semi circular cutouts, but the engraving area is still round. If the engraving is just a logo or badge, I normally engrave in the centre, the exception would be if the client gave alternative 'specific instructions' on this point. The same would apply for text only. The next example is how I would engrave a badge and text, I would not say that badge centre with text above is incorrect, but to my eye, it does not look as good. The example far right is a layout I would never personally use. If asked specifically to use this layout by a client, I would probably print out an alternative layout and give them a choice, they normally change their mind when given the option.