Pen & Pencil

As the instigator of the renaming of Pen Night to The Pen and Pencil Club of Prince Edward Island, I felt a certain obligation to create the first membership cards for the newly-named group.

As I was talking to myself about different ideas, it dawned on me that pen being embedded in pencil might be an interesting starting point.

I took P E N C I L out of the Akzidenz Grotesk drawer and played around with various arrangements.

What cemented things was remembering that I had a large ampersand, a wood type orphan that I acquired along the way. Sliding it into place as the glue, with its jaunty leg that sorta looks like a pen (or a pencil), I knew I had my design.

I decided to print two-colour, black for the letters, yellow for the ampersand. Things got really interesting when, after printing a run on white card stock, I experimented with some different colours: this opened up a whole new world of unexpected interactions between the yellow ink and the paper colour, pink being my favourite result, mostly because, well, who-woulda-thunk.

The cards are, of course, bigger than a typical membership card: that was intentional, as I planned for them to both stand alone and to work well as the cover for a pamphlet-stitched sketch or ink sample booklet.

I distributed the finished products tonight at the September meeting of the P&PCoPEI and they appeared to have been be well-received. I look forward to seeing how the members remix them.