Lettering a 60 cm chalkboard menu in two hours

2025-10-26 · 3 min read

A friend who runs a small weekend stall asked for a chalkboard menu, 60 cm by 40 cm, eleven lines of text, to be done on a Saturday morning before the stall opened at ten. I said yes before thinking about it, and then spent Friday evening working out how to letter at that scale when everything I practice is 5 mm tall on a desk.

The plan was to treat it as a layout problem first and a lettering problem second. On Friday I drew the board at one-fifth scale on paper, 12 cm by 8 cm, and worked out the hierarchy: the title in a heavy brush-style capital about 5 cm tall, the section headers in a narrower upright capital at 2.5 cm, the items in a casual upright script at 1.8 cm, and the prices in small plain capitals. Three sizes of text, four at most, and generous margins of 4 cm all round. I counted the characters per line and found the longest item line would run 38 characters, which at 1.8 cm tall and an average width of about 1.2 cm per character came to 46 cm, fitting inside the 52 cm live width with room to spare.

On the board itself, the first forty minutes were ruling, not lettering. A chalk line snapped for the margins, then horizontal baselines and cap heights for every line, measured with a steel ruler and marked with a light chalk tick. Center lines for the centered title and headers. Only then did I pick up the chalk marker. The script lines were drawn first in a very faint sketch with a soft white pastel, then gone over with the marker.

The marker behaves nothing like a nib. It has no thick and thin of its own, so the contrast in the script letters comes from drawing the downstrokes twice, slightly offset, and filling the gap. That is slow, roughly a minute per word, and the eleven lines took an hour and ten minutes. The title went last, because if I had gotten it wrong at the start the whole board would have had to be wiped. Finished at 09:40 with twenty minutes to spare. The mistake I will fix next time: the item lines are visually heavier than the headers, because I made the script strokes too thick, so the hierarchy reads backwards from across the stall. Nobody else noticed. I noticed all day.