RGD Craft Crawl - Vancouver

Location: BCIT - Downtown Campus, 555 Seymour Street

Vancouver is home to many older apartment buildings with absolutely stunning historical signage. Their hand-painted letters, and chipped enamel have survived on the front windows of these aging buildings and this workshop is about using these signs as a foundation to practice vectorizing letterforms, while also preserving these beautiful signs in a new medium.

Choose a sample from my collection of signage photographs, or bring your own photo of a sign that’s important to you and we’ll use it as a base to learn the best practices of vectorizing letterforms—how to place points effectively, how to build smooth bezier curves, and techniques to make sure your vector letters look great at any size! We'll talk about what separates a clean vector from a messy one, and how to capture the personality of handmade letters without losing it to over-correction. You'll need a laptop with the full version or free trial of Glyphs (Mac only) or a vector software you're already comfortable with.

By the end, you'll have a colourful, vectorized piece based on real Vancouver apartment signage and the skills to draw clean letterforms in all your future projects.

Alanna is a type designer, and self-described letter nerd based in Vancouver, Canada. She is the founder of Arcane Type Foundry, where she designs versatile retail and custom typeface families with charming personalities. She also teaches typography at BCIT, co-organizes a Vancouver typography speaker series called Type Brigade, and streams live type design on Twitch because she loves sharing the magic of fonts with everyone. Alanna approaches type design as working on living, growing projects—there are always ways to expand and improve whether that means more styles, more features, or more language support.