On Saturday I had the pleasure of attending Penned: A Hands-On Lettering Workshop with Ken Barber of House Industries. The much anticipated AIGA Philly event had been sold out for some time and I was really excited to attend. In just a few short hours, Ken gave an entertaining and insightful presentation on lettering and his own process and experience as a letterer, and guided the class of fifteen students in our own lettering project.

Ken leading us through the early stage of the lettering process

Our assignment, using several typographic references that Ken provided, was to hand letter the word “hoagie” however we’d like (an apropos word selection for a workshop held in Philadelphia — we take our hoagies very seriously around these parts). We worked for a few hours as Ken went around the room advising and critiquing our work. Here’s a look at my process:

In my initial sketch, my G started out with a bit too much trapped space below the A, which Ken helped me to see more clearly when he came around and showed me some ways to improve. Those are his sketches on top of mine in tracing paper, below:

In my next version, I tightened up that space, reworked the H a bit, and made a few other tweaks overall (including filling in my outlined letters) to reach my final product:

Now I don’t mean to brag (okay — I do just a little bit!), but my drawing was the big winner when we all hung up our drawings and voted on our favorite. I won a CD with a sweet House Industries font, and some music from the House Industries band. Pretty fun!

Definitely keep your eyes peeled for some hand-lettered items in the Curious shop soon — I’ve been bit by the bug, for sure.

top image via AIGA Philly; all other images via my iPhone