One of the joys of taking commissions is being introduced to text that may not be familiar, and The Man in the Arena was one such. Written by Theodore Roosevelt it notes that it’s not those who criticise, or who stand on the sidelines heckling, but the person actually doing the job who is the one that matters. I really liked the text and may well write it out again. However, it did create a number of interesting challenges. The title was very long, and to write it out in one line resulted in only a few long lines of text below, with the title far too dominant. Splitting the title resulted in two uneven top lines, with the lower line longer, and a rather square block of text which looked rather dull and uninteresting for such inspirational words.

 

 

In the end, I settled for a long and narrow block of text, with the title along the side as shown here. The first phrase determined the width of the piece, there weren’t too many hyphenations or difficulties in the text running on to the following line, and it created an unusual shape which I think invites you to read the text. Of course, all this was decided after I had written out the text in rough and tried the lines in various positions. Here the text roughs are cut into lines of approximately equal length, the credit is the correct size and in position but the title isn’t long enough – it needs to stretch the whole length of the text block.

 

 

It took quite a few tries before the title was the right length.

 

 

 

 

Because there were so many short lines, it would have been easy to get them muddled, so I numbered the lines on the final piece of paper I used in faint pencil, and also numbered the lines in red on the roughs to avoid any errors.

 

 

 

 

 

Then, again to avoid errors, I placed each line of text above where I was writing. This ensured that not only did I not make any errors in the text, but that the lines ended where they should.

 

 

 

 

 

I was asked to do two versions of the piece, so I decided to write the title of the second one in red. It’s interesting how simply changing the colour of the title affects the ‘mood’ of the piece.