Hand Lettering and Calligraphy Learning

Over the last few months, I've started working on my hand lettering and calligraphy skills much more consciously and posting them to my instagram as a means of accountability. I have almost 200 followers so far, it keeps me motivated knowing that someone other than myself gets to watch my progress!  (you can follow me @emilyvanhoff if you're interested.)

Here are a few highlights. Mostly just little sketches, but I'm learning a lot and having so much fun!

Sketchcamp Grand Rapids

Hyde Creative took an educational day off today at Sketchcamp Grand Rapids. My favorite workshop was, of course, the fantastic hand letterer and calligrapher Molly Jacques. She was super inspirational, I've never had any kind of lettering instruction and watching her work was wonderful and made me want to go draw letters all day long. :)

Here are a couple of my sketches from the day: 

Bella Approves.

Isaiah 40:31

A fun fathers day gift commission from a friend.

I haven't had a good excuse to draw type for a while, it was fun to work on!

Isaiah 40:31

2012 Steelcase Foundation Annual Report

The annual report that Rachel Hyde (of Hyde Creative) and I made for the Steelcase Foundation last year won a Silver Addy, so we needed to come up with something even more fantastic this year.

The report includes 5 stories highlighting some of the programs funded by the foundation. The stories chosen this year highlight each of the foundations guiding principals, and we chose to illustrate each of these principals with 3 dimensional stitched letters pulling together lots of brightly patterned new and vintage fabrics.

I love letters, I love fabric, I love stitching, I love tangible objects incorporated into graphic design, I love beautiful, well made things. Needless to say, this was SO MUCH FUN to work on and I am more than happy with the result. Check it out for yourself, but I think we succeeded in surpassing the high bar we set last year.


Stitched fabric letters by me, art direction and design by Rachel Hyde.

See the complete report on Steelcase's website HERE.

cover

Story headline / guiding principal

Story page

Worlds awesomest pie chart. :)

back cover

Look at the color reflected on the paper, so beautiful!

at the photo shoot.

And of course, the necessary cat photo. And some in progress letters.

For the love of letters.

My Aunt and Uncle recently visited my 95 year old Nana in Jersey, and they talked about my senior show, which centered around this handmade alphabet:

Postcards from my Senior Show

My Nana explained to tham that she has always loved practiceing the Palmer Method of handwriting.  She would write the letters on the page horizontally than the rotate the paper vertically and write over the the letters again. She said she could sit at the table doing this for hours.  Looks like my crazy love of letters actually comes from somewhere!

This is a recent sample of her handwriting that she sent home with my Aunt and Uncle to show me. It's beautiful! And it creates a wonderful abstracted pattern. Letters as objects rather than instruments of communication? Love it!

Penmanship of Anne VanHoff

I wikipedia-d the Palmer Method, it's pretty awesome, I think I found my new pastime.  It looks a little more human than the time I tried to teach myself to write in helvetica... yes, I did that once.

We don't really need to talk about it...