5 minute read
Jessica Hische
J E S S I C A H I S C H E
Jessica Hische has a successful career that has led her down many different avenues to spread her work around the world. Beginning as a simple freelance illustrator, she was able to incorporate her passion into her work that would build in degree overtime. Building the amount of lettering into her illustrations caught the attention of others. This led to her landing many job opportunities based only on her lettering. Job after job, she continued to work and hone her craft. Her proficiency and passion for her work brought her to the crossroads of literature. Here, she published two children’s books and a book on lettering called In Progress.
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Jessica Hische has made her mark on the typography world and is continuing to spread her work through the reach she has created over the years.
Quotes from Hische:
“As a letterer, when I’m hired to draw the word “holiday” I don’t first draw the entire alphabet in the style I wish, then position the letters to spell out the word. I draw the word as a unique image. This means that in a lot of lettering, if you rearrange the letters it would look pretty crappy—it’s meant to be seen and used in that configuration and that configuration only.”
“I strive to create beautiful and legible work with just enough personality and a high level of technical precision.”
“Typefaces are an essential resource employed by graphic designers...”
(Lupton 2010). So what is a typeface? What makes them so important? Typefaces are very different from the earliest forms of lettering and writing. Calligraphy was created based off of bodily gestures and sounds. “Typefaces, however, are not
bodily gestures—they are manufactured images designed for infinite
repetition” (Lupton 2010).
The first printed letters were created over five hundred years ago. Johannes Gutenberg revolutionized type when he created movable type. At the time, at least in Germanic languages, there was no longer a need for scribes to hand write entire books or documents. The establishment and invention of printing allowed for the mass production of books, documents, and letters. Many of the typefaces we commonly use today were inspired by fonts created by various printers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These historic typefaces are usually combined with a contemporary design in mind in order to create a new typeface that is compatible with the current technological advancements and different industry-standard programs (Lupton 2010). Today’s industry requires a certain level of uniformity and sharpness in each character within a typeface.
“Renaissance artists sought standards of proportion in the idealized
human body” (Lupton 2010). The anatomy of individual letters and the anatomy of the human body and closely related. This concept was the first instance of a grid system being used in typeface production. An entirely new world of fonts emerged with the rise of industrialization in the nineteenth century. Industrialization and mass consumption created a new demand for advertisement. Advertisement became the next big form of communication, hence the increased need for typography. During this time, monster fonts became the new face of typography and advertisement. Traditional typefaces were dehumanized and widely experimented with unlike ever before. This new demand for advertisement and typography would bring forth an entirely new group of individuals and designers who would take graphic design and typography into their own hands, leaving the world a completely different place than it was when they found it. Perhaps one of the most formative and experienced individuals in modern typeface and graphic design is Erik Spiekermann.
He lived in Stadthagen until he enrolled at Free University of Berlin. While he was at university, he payed for his education by running a printing press in the basement of the building he lived in at the time. After Spiekermann graduated from Free University of Berlin in the 1970s, he moved to London, where he spent the first decade of his career working as a freelance graphic designer. During his freelance career, he also taught courses at the London College of Printing. Spiekermann’s interest in the technological side of design began after he lost all of his press equipment to a fire in 1977. He knew technology had progressed and decided it was time to catch up in the industry he had come to love. He was even one of the very first people to purchase a Macintosh computer in Germany. Spiekermann began working along side of two other graphic designers, and eventually they launched their first firm called MetaDesign out of Berlin in 1979 (tdc 2021). Over the years, MetaDesign has expanded and now also has locations in both London and San Francisco. MetaDesign has worked with several large name companies, such as Audi and Volkswagen. After founding MetaDesign, Spiekermann and his wife, Joan Spiekermann launched the FontShop in the late 1980s. This was the first producer and distributer of electronic fonts of its kind. An extension of the FontShop, called FontShop International became a hub for the publication of an extensive range of typefaces. Spiekermann has been honored for his contribution to typeface at several Universities across the world and holds a position on the board of the German Design Council. In 2002, he published his first book on typeface called Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works. The book was written for Adobe, and was published in English, German, Portuguese, and Russian. One of Erik Spiekermann’s most praised projects was the production and release of his font family for Nokia. Following Nokia, Spiekermann came
