Our personalities come out in the way that we write: the way we close our o’s, loop our j’s and curl our e’s. Some people have writing that is naturally neat. Some will have writing that is free-flowing like a secret message. Whatever it is, it is beautiful and I love engraving them onto pieces of jewellery for you! Here is a guide below on how proportions work with engraving someone’s writing onto a bar. For simplicity’s sake, all the samples below are shown on a petite bar. All of the bars I cut are about 1/4 inch tall. (Confetti is 0.75 inches wide, Petite is 1 inch wide, Standard is 1.5 inch wide, and Luxe is 1.75 inches wide). The guide below will help you visualize what your signature or writing may look like, as well as some suggestions! Here is a template for you to print out if you'd like something tactile to view! For simplicity's sake, all of these below are shown on a petite bar proportion as a sample.
EXAMPLE 1: JUST RIGHT!
These two samples are just perfect. The letters are relatively consistent in size. This will fit perfectly on the bar!
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EXAMPLE 2: TOO LONG!
Issue: These examples here below are too long for the petite bar. I have to shrink the whole thing to fit, resulting in the letters being really small. Solution: Pick a longer bar and or shorten the customization. One or both may have to be done depending on your sample. Again, here is a template for you to print out!
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EXAMPLE 3: TOO TALL OVERALL!
Issue: The examples here below show writing with larger capital letters. Some people naturally write their capitals bigger, but this means I have to shrink the customization so that the capital letters are not cut off. The proportions are tall here.This means that the lowercase letters are going to get quite small. If I don't shrink it, the upper case letters will get cut off and will not be engraved. Take this example below: The J in John is quite large compared to the rest of the writing. I have to shrink the entire image to make the J fit. If I don't shrink it, the J will get cut off. As you can see, the J already barely fits the height of the bar. In the Love, Mom sample, the L is quite exaggerated. This is what happens if I do not shrink the image - the capital letters will get cut off. You can see here in this example, that when the engraving is done, the top of the L and the bottom of the L will get cut off. The vast differences between the letter sizes here make it so that I have to shrink it as much as I can so that the biggest letter isn't cut off. But I have to make it as big as I can so the smaller letters can be as big as possible without cutting out the larger letter. As you can see here in the first sample,
Solution: Pick a disc so that there is more room for me to rotate as needed to fit as much of it as big as possible! In this case, a larger bar would NOT solve the problem as a larger bar will still be the same height. A larger bar would just be wider. In fact, a larger bar will mean that there is even more space on either side of the engraving and will make it even more awkward.
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Please note that the examples above are just guides. There is no "right" or "wrong" signature to engrave! You can still choose to have your engraving done with your selected sample even if it is too tall or too long.
If the signature is sentimental to you, then it's something that you should have engraved! The sentiment of a signature is what theses pieces represent. Please don't let this guide dissuade you from the sentiment of the piece!
However, if you would like something more legible, please consider using the templates offered above and the examples offered above as a guide. Just remember that proportions of small jewellery only allows for me to enlarge your signature. I do NOT alter the signature as I do not want to alter or change the penmanship of your loved ones. Another tip is to draw a box around your signature (even with tracing paper) to see what the proportions are.