Butcher, Baker, Alpha­bet Maker

Jes­sica His­che is one of the most eagerly anti­cip­ated speak­ers at Semi-Permanent 2010. Sam Eichblatt tracked her down in New York. From ProDesign 107 with addi­tional images.

It’s a decept­ively simple idea, but a stroke of genius when it comes to self-promotion. A young Brooklyn-based type designer leaves her day job to go freel­ance in Septem­ber 2009, and needs a per­sonal pro­ject to keep her motiv­ated and show off her skills. Blog­ging? It’s been done. Online port­fo­lio? Already got one. So the designer, who draws every new alpha­bet by hand, vows to cre­ate one new let­ter every work­ing day — a dec­or­at­ive drop cap. After a brain­storm­ing ses­sion with friends, she also decides to make each let­ter avail­able for online use only, “for the beau­ti­fic­a­tion of blog posts everywhere” — a sort of open-source style dic­tion­ary. Ten months later and with a tar­get 12 alpha­bets on their way to com­ple­tion, the Daily Drop Cap is keep­ing people engaged with what designer, illus­trator and typo­grapher Jes­sica His­che is pro­du­cing, while keep­ing the spot­light on what she’s good at and allow­ing her to set her own agenda.

“I real­ised it wasn’t just mak­ing the let­ters that would make it pop­u­lar, it was mak­ing it more inter­act­ive and allow­ing people to re-use the drop caps,” says His­che. “I’ve had unbe­liev­able amounts of feed­back. Months and months later, people are still send­ing me stuff, and I get so much traffic because of people post­ing about it on dif­fer­ent blogs. What I thought would be a side pro­ject has been help­ful for my other pro­jects as well.”

Just twenty-five, His­che (“just like ‘fish’ but with an H”) says the Daily Drop Cap pro­ject has also encour­aged poten­tial cli­ents to over­look her com­par­at­ive youth.

“It was a hindrance at first, being young,” she says. “But I got so much expos­ure that people now just take me ser­i­ously, as well as tak­ing it as an inspir­a­tion for how quickly you can do things.”

And, given the way she works, His­che is quick. It can take her as little as a couple of hours to draw a new typeface, though her first com­mer­cial font, But­ter­milk, was three months in devel­op­ment (on and off). Her trade­mark vintage-look, hand-drawn style is cre­ated in Illus­trator rather than Font­lab, the pre­ferred soft­ware for most typo­graph­ers as it gen­er­ates crisp, per­fect curves. How­ever, His­che says a bit of wonk­i­ness works bet­ter for her.

“I don’t want it to look too math­em­at­ical or per­fect, or for my work to look like it can be made by any­one,” she says. “Before I star­ted the pro­ject I was already pretty fast, but any prac­tice makes you faster, and I make decisions faster. There’s a lot of fine-tuning that hap­pens. It takes me less time now to make a new dis­play font for some­thing than to scour the Inter­net for some­thing really good.”

As a pro­mo­tional enter­prise rather than a profit-making one, the DDC sits along­side Hische’s iden­tity and book design pro­jects, and her other work as a freel­ance illus­trator. This has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Enter­tain­ment Weekly, and often includes her char­ac­ter­istic swirly, vintage-look let­ters and wry anthro­po­morphic draw­ings of anim­als — such as the one fea­tur­ing partied-out, passed-out cats pro­duced for the new year’s issue of a fin­an­cial magazine.

Her cal­en­dar is, she says, gen­er­ally clogged up for four weeks in advance. She gets so many ques­tions emailed to her from stu­dents and other design­ers that she’s cre­ated an FAQ sec­tion on her web­site to avoid hav­ing to respond to each indi­vidu­ally. Hische’s suc­cess is, how­ever, not an acci­dent. She spent three years freel­an­cing heav­ily at night after clock­ing out of day jobs at Head­case Design in her nat­ive Phil­adelphia (where she worked on, among other things, Dirty Blonde, a com­pil­a­tion of Court­ney Love’s scrawled, illus­trated diar­ies) and New York-based stu­dio Louise Fili, which spe­cial­ises in pack­aging, res­taur­ant and book design.

His­che admits that, right now, she has five new drop caps to catch up on, but says that com­ing up with new ideas has never been a prob­lem. “I never know what I’m going to do until I sit down, which can be intim­id­at­ing. But I always want to do some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent to what I’ve already done. It’s always good to know what you don’t want to do — given lim­it­a­tions I tend to do bet­ter. I actu­ally thought I would be more exper­i­mental than I have been, so I’m going to push myself more for the last ones.”

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