In order to get some more lettering practice, I asked my Facebook friends if any of them would like me to design something for their names. One of my best friends then requested that I create some lettering for her son’s name so she could include it in his nursery.

 

My original design featured thick characters and was balanced asymmetrically.

The first draft of my final, vectorized lettering was done in red and white. At the time, I didn’t realize his nursery was blue and orange. :)

 

After posting it for critique on reddit, I realized I had more work to do in order to get a sharp finished piece. (I had traced the original sketch in Illustrator, and had gone over each line with the Smooth tool to take out all the erroneous anchor points. This resulted in sloppy characters that were too “fluid.”)

I went back into Illustrator and recreated each character from scratch using the Pen tool. That’s what I get for trying to do something the easy way!

 

The resulting piece was just the right balance between fluid line and crisp corners. I added a white drop shadow to give the characters depth and to add some weight.