Over the weekend I made a quick day trip up to Philly for, Penned AIGA, a lettering workshop with lettering artists and designer, Ken Barber, of House Industries. I love hand-lettering so I was really excited about developing my knowledge in the skill. There were actually two parts to the workshop, a hand-lettering morning session and an afternoon session where attendees could learn about designing with pre-fabricated typefaces.
The first session completely sold out, but I managed to get into the second.
Ken walked a small group of us through the process of creating lettering inspired by existing type. I used Stymie as my inspiration for my whimsical logotype for "Queen Bee" — which I only used because we were supposed to use words that repeated letters. For some reason I could only think of Queen Bee.
Later, when I got home, I scanned in my tracing paper sketch and redrew the letter-forms in Adobe Illustrator, which then gave me the flexibility to add color, make adjustments, and scale as needed.
It was a lovely afternoon of design inspiration.
Interested in AIGA events? Check out the site to see what's happening in your city.
