# Level Up Your Layouts: How to Effectively Letter Long Quotes - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/level-up-your-layouts-how-to-effectively-letter-long-quotes/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Illustration & Drawing · Quick win · Rated 7 /10 # Level Up Your Layouts: How to Effectively Letter Long Quotes Updated August 2026 Gia Graham · Designer, Letterer, Illustrator Intermediate · 34 min A focused 34-minute framework for taming long, multi-word quotes through hierarchy, structure, and a repeatable five-step sketch process. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Flevel-up-your-layouts-how-to-effectively-letter-long-quotes%2F1794913405) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. ## A short course with a genuine structural spine "Level Up Your Layouts" does not try to teach hand lettering. It assumes a working knowledge of letterforms and instead isolates one specific failure point: the moment a quote grows past a handful of words and a layout that worked fine for "hello friend" collapses into visual noise. Gia Graham spends the first third of the class defining four components of composition (hierarchy, legibility, structure, balance) with side-by-side examples that make the abstractions concrete. The Rumi quote comparison, where a 25-word phrase is shown with and without a deliberate reading path, is the clearest illustration of why legibility and reading direction matter more as word count climbs. The back half is a five-step production pipeline: planning, brain dump, skeleton sketch, framework building, letterform building. This is where the course earns its keep. Rather than talking about hierarchy in the abstract, Graham walks through a real George Lucas quote, decides which two words deserve emphasis, and shows how choosing different words to hierarchize would change the reader's first impression entirely. That single demonstration does more to teach editorial judgment than most lettering tutorials attempt. ## Where the technique gets specific The framework-building lesson is the most technically useful segment. Graham explains cap height, baseline, and x-height as distinct guide lines, then shows the practical trick of duplicating a guide layer to keep angled or slanted words on a matching angle rather than eyeballing it freehand. This is a small detail, but it is the kind of workflow habit that separates a composition that looks accidentally balanced from one that is actually engineered to be. The framework stage also reinforces a repeated principle: repeat sizes and cap heights across word groups to create a visual thread of consistency, which is a concrete, checkable rule rather than a vague aesthetic suggestion. The letterform and embellishment lessons are thinner by comparison. Style selection is covered mainly through Graham's own reasoning about purpose and content (a chunky slab serif for a word that "feels heavy," a whimsical condensed style for a word that "feels light"), which is useful as a mental model but offers no drawing instruction. Embellishment gets even less: the guidance amounts to using illustration to fill dead space and create eye flow, with the acknowledgment that a fully illustrated approach is a separate topic for another class. Anyone hoping for foliage or flourish techniques will be disappointed. ## Verdict The course is honest about its scope and delivers on it. In roughly half an hour it gives a working vocabulary for composition problems, a legible five-step planning process, and one genuinely reusable technique in the guide-duplication trick. It is not a lettering class, a style class, or an illustration class, and it does not pretend otherwise. The tradeoff is pacing: because it moves briskly through structure and balance to get to the project, viewers who need more repetition or more worked examples per concept may want to pause and rewatch sections rather than expect the depth to arrive later. For someone who can already draw decent letters but struggles specifically with what to do when a quote gets long, this is a tight, well-targeted fix. The standout The skeleton-sketch-to-framework-guide sequence, where cap height, baseline, and x-height lines are drawn and duplicated to keep multi-word, multi-line compositions proportionally consistent, is the single most transferable technique in the course. ## What you will learn - · How to identify and hierarchize the most important words in a long quote using size, color, and style - · How to choose structural frameworks (horizontal, vertical, triangle, slant, wave, arch) to organize multi-line layouts - · How to build a skeleton sketch that locks in proportions before adding letterform detail - · How to construct framework guides in Procreate, including baseline, cap height, and x-height lines for consistency - · How to match lettering style to a word's meaning and purpose (bold slab serif for weight, monoline for lightness) - · How to add embellishments purposefully to fill dead space and create visual flow rather than as pure decoration Best for: Letterers who already have decent letterform skills but freeze up or produce lopsided layouts the moment a quote runs past four or five words. Skip it if: Absolute beginners who haven't yet practiced basic letterforms, since the course spends no time on stroke construction or lettering fundamentals. Clarity of Instruction Engaging Teacher Helpful Examples Organization of Lessons [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Flevel-up-your-layouts-how-to-effectively-letter-long-quotes%2F1794913405)