In late 2024 I bought the Lettering Manual book from House Industries, an incredibly cool design house based in Delaware. The book is an homage to the art of hand lettering and a how-to guide teaching the basics of the craft. As a hardcore typophile, I jumped at the chance to buy this book.
It Really is a ‘How-To’!
In flipping through the book, I noted it is divided into three parts with multiple exercises that encourage actual, hands-on learning:
- Lettering Basics
- Lettering Technique
- Lettering Models
I am excited to start reading the book, doing the exercises and hopefully learn the basics of hand lettering. I will track my progress here, including highlighting advice or lessons that resonated with me and showing my work from the book’s exercises.
About the (Physical) Book
The actual, physical book is gorgeous. It is perfect bound with a snakeskin textured soft cover. The interior pages are on a heavier paper, which makes the book feel more substantial and like it is meant to be used and repeatedly flipped through. Almost like—you know—a book that wants the reader to be a little rough with it because the reader wants to learn from it.
The layout is, of course, top-notch using an easy-to-read font for the content and large areas for examples, full-page color photos when necessary and plenty of font examples to ogle.
I am so excited to dive into this book and learn, learn, learn!
How Did I Find House?
I was introduced to House in 2005 or 2006 when I was developing the Brettro logo. I stumbled across their Ed Benguiat fonts and found the font family that would help define Brettrospective.
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