martina flor’s advice on getting into lettering design
The Berlin-based creative is here to fix your letters.
We recently spent a few jam-packed days in sunny Los Angeles for Adobe MAX 2025, where we learnt about all the awesome stuff happening at Adobe, got inspired and hung out with some rad members of the creative community.
One such creative was Martina Flor – a super-cool lettering artist, author and educator. Here, she shares her advice on getting into the industry.
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How’d you get into this area of work? I started as a generalist graphic designer and, at some point, I fell out of love with design. Early in my career, I became art director at a clothing company and I would come home and draw. My day job was a lot about administrating the work of other people, being in meetings, and I felt that it wasn't as creative as I had envisioned it to be. I was coming home in the nights, and sitting down to draw letter forms and illustrations. At some point I started to wonder, “What would life look like if I could turn these two hours that I dedicate every day to drawing, into every day for the entire day, and people pay me for it?” I decided to double down on that.
I left my apartment and my boyfriend at that time – it felt like a big life crisis – and I moved overseas. Super-dramatic. But that one year of studying type design really opened my eyes to this new world. I fell back in love with design and I found, in letter design, the perfect marriage between two things that I love doing: illustrating and design.
When you draw letter forms, you need to draw something that people can read and that carries a message, so you have a lot of boundaries. At the same time, there's a lot of room for self-expression, and that's what I loved about letter design. From that point on, I went all in. I decided to move to Berlin, where I live now, and launched my career as a lettering artist.
What do you notice about letters that a regular graphic designer wouldn't notice? Well, the work of a letter designer has a lot to do with paying attention to details, looking at things in the way they really look, and not so much in the way that they are built or constructed.
I normally do this type of content where I show designers how, despite a letter being done in the ‘right’ way – like using the geometric shapes properly – things don't look right. You need to use your critical eye and make optical adjustments. I think that what a letter designer trains over and over again is this attention to detail and nuance that many other designers just miss, and what is great about sharing this knowledge with other designers is, once they see it, they cannot unsee it.
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While you're educating designers, what are the most common problems or questions that you hear? Often designers come into the world of lettering because they're looking for a more creative outlet for their work, the same way that I did. You know, when I was a generalist graphic designer, I found in lettering something that felt more creative, more expressive, and at the same time, it was all within design. So I could use my skill set to double down in a specific niche. And oftentimes designers come searching for the same thing.
The common question is always, “How do I transition from being a generalist graphic designer into someone who is more creative and specialised in this?” And my answer always has to do with leveraging what you already have – the skill set you already have as a designer, the client base that you already have, and leveraging that into this new stage of your professional life.
If you are creating a branding project for a client, how can you solve some of the assets of that project with letter design, so that you start slowly building up this portfolio of work that has more of this flavour of lettering design?
You explore a lot of this stuff on social media. For example, you film yourself pointing out signs on the street and say, “This is how I'd fix it.” How did you get into the social media side of things? The content creation that I do started not long ago. I have a pretty sizable following on social media that has been built through the years of working as a lettering artist, creating designs for brands and clients, and sharing my work on social media. And in recent years, I have become more vocal about my own perspective as a designer – making visible the way I see the world. You know, all of these things that I share on social media now are things that I have been doing forever: I walk down the streets and I try to ‘fix’ things, and I look into the nuance of signs. I have made that more visible.
I think it also has to do with growing up as a person, becoming more confident as a designer, and just daring to do things that are out of the norm, whereas before, I was hiding behind the work and not being so visible myself.
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Do you have any advice for designers who want to try their hand at lettering? I try to surround myself with content and things that are related to the thing that I want to learn. So read books about it, listen to podcasts about it, open your eyes to the lettering that is around you. I think doing that, or seeing the world through that lens, is the best way to learn something.
And then, of course, you can dive deeper into the fundamentals, but I think having that first contact with the craft – through looking at books, listening to podcasts, coming to conferences and going to talks that have to do with letter design – will show you whether this is something that may or may not be for you. If it's for you, then you can dive deeper.