#russ i especially love how YOU NEVER LEARN THE WORDS OR HOW IT GOES BEFORE YOU START SINGING A SONG

[lock-my-feelings-in-a-jar]

i am going to actually lose it, i am in love with the way he gets something wrong, laughs a little in the middle of the song, then apologizes at the end for not knowing the words and then laughs like he just had the time of his life regardless. the pure joy in this man sure is something.

[jasminwiniarski]

Designer Essay

What can Jessica Hische teach young designers? Little did I know before writing this essay on Jessica Hische that she’ll end up such a big inspiration for me. When creating the essay website I tried to portray her warm and positive spirit. I’m always glad to learn about female designers and what struggles they have to deal with in the industry. Yet this essay is not about that, you can find it on my GitHub. And as a young designer myself (can I already call myself that?), I can honestly say that I learned a lot from writing about Jessica Hische.

What can JESSICA HISCHE teach young designers?

Jessica Hische is a 34 year old letterer, illustrator and type designer. She has a degree in Graphic and Interactive Design from Tyler School of Art. She’s currently working from her shared design studio Title Case in San Francisco, CA. Art was always something she wanted to do, ever since she was a child, and even today she claims drawing is her form of therapy. After one graphic design class she knew that was what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. She’s mostly known for her lettering work like her Drop Cap project for Penguin Books, designing the credits for Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom or refreshing logos like the Mailchimp logotype. She wrote two books: In Progress, where she shares her way of work; and Tomorrow I’ll Be Brave, an illustrated children’s book. She describes herself as an optimist and over-sharer, but above all she’s a big advocate for procrastiworking: 

“I’m compulsively always working on things I feel like working on instead of what I should be working on.”

So what can Jessica Hische teach us, young designers, besides how to create a memorable logo redesign? The short answer is that, side-projects are good and even necessary if you want to be a successful designer.

Firstly, side-projects can keep you motivated throughout your career. The work you do when you get hired might sometimes be dull and you might end up doing the same thing over and over, with side-projects you can enter some diversity into your work and you won’t end up losing steam when creating because you constantly work on different things. Jessica Hische says she used to be a workaholic, working 16 hours a day and people kept asking how she never gets fed up with what she creates. Her goal was not to get bored with one job, because there’s a difference when you constantly do work for clients and when you do things for yourself, so that you don’t lose your style or yourself. During the day, she was working on projects for advertising and publishing clients as a letterer, but for her night job she decided to focus more on the fun-work, creating weird side-projects and self-expressionistic art. Her client work consisted mostly of lettering but her passions include lettering, type design, illustration, web design, writing and public speaking. 

“I love lettering and type but they don’t make me 100% creatively satisfied.”

So to stay satisfied she had to find a balance between her day and night job, the day job was paying the bills and this allowed her to follow and explore her passions the rest of the time. She compares this to Bruce Wayne and Batman: Bruce is the successful business man that’s making all the money, which can later fund Batman, the masked vigilante that has all the fun with his crime-fighting side-project. Instead of telling people that she’s going into her mysterious Bat-Cave to work on her private work, (not that Bruce Wayne would ever admit that he’s Batman) Jessica Hische goes off and calls her side-projects her passion-projects. Those projects are often results of the many emails she gets, with questions about her work: “Will you send me the template you used for your website?”, to which she answered in creating the Don’s Fear The Internet website, which teaches you all the basics of creating a website. “Are there any classes or books you would recommend to learn how to be a letterer?”, so she wrote a book and started teaching classes on Skillshare. “Should you work for free?” (A designer’s favourite question) For this she created a rather funny float-chart answering this question, and this got a lot of attention, she started writing a blog answering questions about pricing your work. The point here is that the work that you get paid for, it can be boring but it enables you to do more fun side-projects even if those don’t bring in a revenue. This balance of client and personal work can keep you motivated, combining career with happiness will keep you wanting to push forward.

Secondly, there’s always a lot to take away from those side-projects, it’s a way of practicing your skills but also gaining new ones. Around the time Jessica Hische went freelance, she knew she needed something to keep her creative juices flowing, because she knew that work for clients won’t always be exciting. So to practise her lettering skills, she started the Daily Drop Cap project where she illustrated a letter a day, going through the entire alphabet, she created 12 entire alphabets and invited other designers to participate in the thirteenth. This ended up being a great lettering exercise, but it also brought a lot of attention to her. Point being, that side-projects can be practical, especially the ones that Jessica Hische likes to dive into. 

“Side projects have become a great way to flex my muscles in realms that I don’t get to enter for client work.”

Sometimes when working for clients, like I said before, you end up creating the same thing or a version of the same thing over and over, if that’s because of an existing trend or because that’s the work you’re good at and known for so the clients (the non-creatives) ask you to create something similar for them because they don’t know what you’re capable of. So when doing side-projects you learn new things like new techniques and skills, like when Jessica Hische created Don’t Fear The Internet in collaboration with her husband, she learned a lot about HTML and CSS herself. Side-projects are not only practical because you gain experience, but also because you expand you portfolio. As a designer you need to prove to people what you want to to, otherwise they won’t know that you’re capable of doing those things. This is how Jessica Hische landed the Drop Cap job for Penguin Books. With her Daily Drop Cap side-project, she proved what’s she’s capable of doing with one single letter, this caught the publisher’s attention and Jessica Hische was asked to create 26 book covers, drawing every letter of the alphabet. 

Lastly, what we’ll learn from Jessica Hische is that side-projects are necessary if you want to discover your passions, because how can you find out you like something if you’ve never tried it before. She would have never found out that she wanted to become a designer if she wouldn’t have taken a graphic design class in university. As soon as she realised that design focuses more on problem solving rather than on self-expression, she became dedicated to learn the craft. So if you’re currently in university, it’s important that you also work on side-projects to gain new skills but also find something you enjoy doing. If you are passionate about your work and about what you do, it means that you are going to be motivated to keep learning and keep bettering yourself, which is necessary in this industry. Jessica Hische’s advice here is: “The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.” Side-projects helped her discover who she is over the years and develop her own personal style and become an expert in what she does today.

To conclude, Jessica Hische proves that side-side-projects or in her case passion-projects, are necessary for you not to lose your mind when working. You can get fed up with clients constantly telling you what to do, even if you want to do something your way it’s the clients word that matters. Therefore you need to have side-projects so that you can create whatever it is you want to create, this way you won’t get bored of your profession and you’ll stay motivated to keep doing what you love. Furthermore, side-projects are important for you to keep learning. You never know what client work might bring your way, that’s why you need to keep pushing your boundaries. This also means that you’ll always be doing something new, so you won’t get bored and you’ll be expanding your portfolio. Finally, it’s something you’ll be doing for yourself, because you have a passion for it and just because it’s fun. Side-projects are a way to keep your personal style alive and keep you happy with your work. As for Jessica Hische, her passion-projects are not only fun, like the Mom This Is How Twitter Works project, but they also show who she is as a person: a passionate designer with a warm and welcoming personality, and someone who like to draw, teach others and simply make people happy. Her passion-projects also helped her land some exciting work opportunities and keep her creatively satisfied throughout her career. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what young designers can take away from Jessica Hische.

Sources: 

Youtube videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZbqJxQJ5LY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RBbTHhZY7c 

Interviews:

https://www.freelance-wisdom.com/interviews/2016/8/5/jessica-hische \

https://www.designboom.com/design/interview-jessica-hische-03-31-2014/ 

http://theeverygirl.com/letterer-and-type-designer-jessica-hische/ 

http://thegreatdiscontent.com/interview/jess-russ-p1 

Jessica Hische’s website:

http://jessicahische.is