Illustrating Crafting Interpreters

Bob Nystrom demonstrates his meticulous process of hand-drawing and inking the diagrams for his book Crafting Interpreters.

I'm writing a book on programming languages. I hand draw all of the diagrams and illustrations in it. Here's what the process looks like. You can read the book here: craftinginterpreters.com Each diagram starts with a couple of pencil sketches on graph paper where I figure out how I want it to look, scale, etc. Once I have a solid sketch that I like, I overlay that with a sheet of tracing paper and trace over it in ink. I use a Pigma Micron 0.1 for most of it and a 0.005 for some of the finer lines. I hand letter the text using a little guide I printed to make sure all of the text is the same size. I draw registration markers — the two little dots in the corners of the page in the video — to ensure that every illustration is scaled the same in book. Once the ink is done, I scan it in at 1200 DPI and bring it into Photoshop. The ridiculously high resolution is for the print edition I'll be doing later. I crank the levels to eliminate paper texture. I brush out any remaining dust or light spots. Then I hand-kern all of the text. I know, I'm obsessive. But I'm not great at lettering, so when I'm drawing, I try to focus on the letter shapes and not worry too much about spacing. Then I fix the spacing later. Often, I'll make mistakes on a few letters and I'll try alternates and then remove the mistake and put in the alternate in Photoshop. Once it's all good, I crop it — using the registration marks above — scale it down, and export it as a PNG. Then all that remains is to add an img tag to put it in the book. The video here was shot using my