Mus­ings on Semi-Permanent, vol. 2.

In part two in of our Semi-Permanent 2010 ret­ro­spect­ive, Emma Par­nell recalls the youth­ful exuber­ance and undeni­able tal­ent of illus­trator Jes­sica Hische.

For a girl who owns the URL ‘iamobsessedwithmycats.com’ (it redir­ects to her web­site) and describes her life as “a sol­it­ary exist­ence where nobody showers and you get covered in cat hair”, Jes­sica His­che is actu­ally a remark­ably charm­ing and tal­en­ted young woman, all be it with a slight feline fetish.

She opened the show at Semi-Permanent this year and provided the audi­ence with just the jump start they needed, real inspir­a­tion powered on by youth­ful enthu­si­asm for her craft, which is of course let­ter­ing, illus­tra­tion and more recently type design. She began by tak­ing us through some of her stu­dent work which, being only twenty-five, was some­what recent and provided the audi­ence with a good insight into how she entered the industry, not to men­tion provid­ing a won­der­ful show­case for her eccent­ric sense of humour. This showed par­tic­u­larly in the board game she designed as a take on ‘The Game of Life’ only she named it ‘The Game of Divorce’ where you had to choose who to live with, mum or dad.

This may seem like stu­dent banter but humour is a great thing in illus­tra­tion, she laughed, “there’s noth­ing people like more than dogs doing human things” — except pos­sibly cats doing human things hey Jes­sica? But it’s not all fun and games. It’s obvi­ous His­che has worked extremely hard to get to where she is today, and at such a young age too. She worked as designer after uni­ver­sity for three years for Head­case and Louise Fili before going freel­ance and has now worked for every­one from the Boston Globe to the pub­lish­ers of the Twi­light novels.

At present His­che is work­ing more and more in font design. She’s designed her first font ‘But­ter­milk’ but still approaches the sub­ject with the same humble atti­tude – talk­ing of how the old type mas­ters mock her when she doesn’t know the ter­min­o­logy. Per­son­ally, I’m not sure that mat­ters when you can pro­duce such beau­ti­ful pieces of work. A fine example of this is her cur­rent work illus­trat­ing the book cov­ers of clas­sic nov­els of the past.

This girl seems to have the world at her feet and she cer­tainly has tal­ent in her fin­ger­tips but it was her enthu­si­asm that really won me over. As design­ers we all face ‘chal­lenges’ on a daily basis but she had the abil­ity to laugh it off. She said she should make a book of all the bad art dir­ec­tion she has ever received, her favour­ite being “don’t make the fish look left it’s depress­ing.” She’s even seen her type on retro romance nov­els and, not only that; she loved the idea of this. She showed us the res­ult and it looked noth­ing like she inten­ded, but I think at this point she had won over the audi­ence with her enthu­si­asm. It really was a bad romance novel but all she could say was “its every girl’s dream to have their type next to shiny lady leg.” Of course it is Jessica!

More:
Read a ProDesign inter­view with Jes­sica His­che
Read Emma Parnell's review of Kat­rin Sonnleitner's Semi-Permanent talk

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