My Girl Crush on Jessica Hische

“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.” — Jessica Hische
http://www.lettercult.com/archives/1396

For Jessica that work is lettering.

At just 26 Jessica has achieved so much - she is ridiculously talented, productive to the point of hyper mania, a perfectionist, proactive networker and constant thinker - yet she maintains a humility, an open sense of fun as evident in her interviews, conferences, blogs and tweets and her work retains a warmth and human element as a result.
She creates her type directly into illustrator with a mouse but also does some lettering by hand. Her illustrations are largely done in illustrator yet they still retain feeling and warmth. It is easy to see that her work is largely influenced by the past, with vintage type, imagery and pallet all harking back to the pre 50's.

Every time I go hunting for beautiful typography I am drawn back to her work.


In 2006, Hische was living in Philadelphia, teaching some classes, and doing some freelance design work. She made a Christmas promo —the Twelve Days of Christmas, each day illustrated on its own postcard - and sent them out to 250 magazines and agencies and also to “a few people I thought were awesome,” she says, “including Louise Fili, Christoph Niemann and a couple others.”

http://jessicahische.com/illustrategizes/the-12-Days-of-Christmas

The promo landed her a job at Louise Fili's studio where she quickly worked her way up to the position of senior designer. During her two and a half years with Fili she completed illustrations for a variety of publications, created lots of amazing lettering, changed the Louise Fili identity, released her first font - Buttermilk and beautified much product identity.


Here's a few examples of her wonderful work during that time:-

Buttermilk Font
Buttermilk was designed in 2009 and is available for purchase at myfonts.com

Aventino
Identity and business card design for a Texas based restaurant- hand-lettered.

Letterpress Business Cards

Dirty Blonde the Courtney Love story - page by page lay out done in Photoshop

Since leaving Louise Fili in September 2010 she has been busily working as a freelance graphic deisgner and illustrator, teaching at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, holding exhibitions, attending conference including the Semi Permanent 2010 in Sydney......

Semi Permanent Exhibition, 2010 - Guest Speaker (from Vimeo).

but the project she has become best know for is Daily Drop Cap.

aily dropcap is an ongoing project was originally intended to keep her active in case she didn' t have enough to do. Each work day a new hand crafted decorative initial cap is posted for people to download for free and beautify their blogs.

Letterpress versions of the letters are also available for sale through her website - The Daily Drop Cap. There is currently 8 beautiful versions of any given letter available and the project is still ongoing. http://dailydropcap.com/

Here are some of the other projects she's undertaken since leaving Louise Fili -

So, as you can see, Jessica is a crazy, perfectionist, workaholic with a beautiful aesthetic and down to earth attitude. Print Magazine, March 2009 voted Jessica as one of the New Visual Artists "Design's Rising Stars". Letter cult named her 2009 person of the year. She appears to have boundless energy, ideas and talent. I personally think she is a wonderful inspiration but secretly I'm not sure I'd swap my lovely life for her crazy hectic one!