YouSaid · the spoken record

Jessica Hische

lines on the record: 84
first: 2024-10-20
most recent: 2024-10-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That, like, sometimes you just got to get that first viable option out the door. And then once you're ready, you come to me and I help you. And it's great.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, of course. So you can, I have a website that I occasionally update. It is jessicahish.is slash awesome. I have, you'll notice I have a bunch of weird URLs on my website. So that's a place to find me. Otherwise, I am on Instagram and Threads a lot. And so I was formerly a very active Twitter person and now I'm not really there so much. And I kind of bop around with the other Twitter clones, but I'm on threads quite a bit. So Instagram and threads are good for social. And then email I'm easy. Hello at JessicaHish.com. And then what your readers could do for me, I think it's, you know, the work that I do in terms of the logo refresh stuff. I feel like this audience is just totally my perfect audience for it because you guys are all a bunch of smart, awesome founders that want beautiful logos but understand.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anywhere, but these are the valid paths. If we go down this path, this is the most intuitive and most correct way to do it. That is closest and most accessible to us. And we can noodle on it until kingdom come, but do we have to? Like, you know, like this is good, you know. So I don't know. I feel like it's like understanding. I feel like there's some weird knowledge around understanding that nothing is ever 100% perfect and the most you can expire is like 99.8 or whatever. And that last 0.2%, you could spend your whole life trying to do that, or you could move on and do other things and understand that it's like nearly perfect.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like my strength with the work that I do in general is just being incredibly decisive and understanding that there's 10 good answers to everyone question. You know, like some people are real maximalists about decision making and need to look at like every gray sofa that exists before they can choose the one gray sofa. Whereas I feel like I can look at 10 gray sofas and go, it feels like there's two or three categories of sofa here. And then within those categories, there's a couple of good options. Here's a brand that I recognize is known for being of high quality. That one's good enough. And I can get to it really quickly. And I feel like not everybody can do that. And I think that that permeates through like everything that I do in my life. It definitely is a huge part of the logo work because you really can do anything when it comes to typography. Like it can go in 50 million directions and it's just about having someone tell you like, yes, we could take this.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why I want to work with them. So, with the house, I definitely had opinions about stuff. But in general, I'm just like, hey, this is your thing. You're the expert. Like, what do you think? Like, let me give you the parameters and the things that we have to think about. And then because you know more about wood resources and you know more about like the cabinet spacing and like whatever, you tell me what you think is going to work best based on all these things that I like laid out for you. You know, so I found it to be quite easy. I only got really like wiggled out about very like a couple of different fine-tuning.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I actually feel like it's quite easy for me to trust people to do their own thing because as long as I go to them as being like I appreciate you and your vision and that's why I'm paying you, then the last thing that I want to do is micromanage them because the reason why I'm paying them is because I don't have the bandwidth to do that myself because honestly I'm one of those people that like if I had nothing going on like if like my job totally blew up or whatever, I would probably be one of those people that just specialized in a different thing like every six months and would be like, I'm going to build a house now from the ground up. I'm going to do this from now, whatever. And I just feel very capable of doing anything that I want to do because I understand that I can like find the resources for it. So when I hire people to help me do a thing, it's because there is this implicit trust in what they do and that's.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, and that I think was the biggest thing for me is just because I feel like I feel very well resourced in being able to deal with hardship because I'm always able to sort of like recontextualize and reframe. And I think part of that is doing so much like intuition justification, which is what we talked about is like sort of walking through things, being like, why is this? Why does that happen? La, la la la. And so when something bad happens, it's like understanding why it happened and then understanding the paths that it can take forward and the different attitudes that you can bring to it that can help you come out of it.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That in order to dream of these things, you can actually create structure and discipline around it and that it's not just something that is just inherent and comes. Like you have to actually have like a practice around being hopeful and positive. Like I just really liked that as a concept because I kind of feel that I feel that way just about like navigating through life that, you know, everything that we do as a choice and that we can choose to frame things one way or frame things another way. And like understanding that you have power in that, I think is really important. And so I just like really loved that. Like hope is a discipline.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know it's funny being a lettering artist because I'm not much of a quotes gal, like all things considered, like I should be because I could make a million dollars by just making live, laugh, love pillows or whatever, but I'm not like usually continually collecting quotes, but I was just at a conference up in Portland called XOXO, and one of the presenters showed a quote on the screen that resonated with me like more than most things that I've seen in recent memory. And I feel like this is my new, it was one of those quotes that like I was like, maybe I should get a tattoo of that. You know, like when it gets to that level where you're like considering a tattoo, you're like, okay, that's official. And it was that it was hope is a discipline. And I just really loved that. And it's by Mariame Kaba or Mariam Kaba. The idea that we have to choose to create positivity, that it's like a choice.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. Well, there's a few things. Well, there was one that's just like a super random one that was just pure delight. Penco, and they make a lot of wonderful stuff. I carry a lot of their stuff in my store. And one of the things I bought recently from them is this like a pen cup, like a pencil cup, and it's ceramic, but it looks like a paper bag, like kind of a lightly crumpled paper bag. And then it just has like printed on it, like Penco or whatever. And I just really like it when objects, like when you take an existing object and give it a new form. And I find that to be like very delightful. And so that was, I think, one of the things that I really loved recently that I bought for the store.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a second season's coming out. I know. So that came to mind because I knew the second season was coming out. So I'm just really excited about it. But yeah, I think that's probably tops for me.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's like it's incredible. I also would tell people when I had first started out, I had a full time job and then was doing freelance in the evenings. And people were like, how do you not get burnt out? Whatever. And it's because my day job was so different from my night job that it felt like I was doing two separate eight-hour shifts instead of one continual 16 hour shift. And so I think that's something to sort of think about is that there's always going to be things that need to get done as a part of your work or things that you're interested in and passionate about and just having enough diversity in what that means is going to allow you to like maintain enthusiasm for doing all those different things for much longer. And actually like the more homogenous your life and career and job is, the faster you're going to burn out. So just making sure that you have enough variety and all the things that you do.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you get pretty ruthless about your schedule when you're a parent, where, like, when you're at the office, like you are just heads in, like working. And so I think just trying to stay as focused as possible in that way, I do this thing where I bounce back and forth between projects a lot as I'm losing steam. And so having multiple things to work on actually keeps me motivated to keep working. I think it's kind of an ADHD thing where I will start my day one way and then as soon as I start losing steam, I switch to a different thing, lose Steam, switch to a different thing, lose Steam, switch to a different thing. So rather than taking like breaks, I just take a break by working on something that feels fresh. That can be super helpful.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Milestones and things like that. And then this is a wild card one too. I just finished The Emperor of All Maladies, and I'm just like a big fan of reading things about human biology and things like that and found it totally fascinating. So do read that one too.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, oh, what's another book? I don't know. I feel like I'm just going to end up recommending all the books that I'm currently reading. This month, I read both Patti Smith's Just Kids, which I loved also and was also, I feel like I'm reading a lot of books about sort of being an artist more so than being a designer. And that book I found really interesting, just sort of like hearing her story of moving to New York and having nothing and just sort of like trying to be an artist and make art and having that be the thing that drove everything that she and Robert Maplethorpe did. And I don't know. I just feel like I'm looking for ways to kind of get out of my very business driven sensibilities around art making and get into a space that's more loose and free and driven by passions and feelings more so than necessarily like career-based.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rick Rubin's creativity book is so good. Definitely recommend that. I feel like it was a real, I haven't listened to it on audiobook. I read the physical book, but I also heard the audiobook is very Zen. And I feel like it's just a very good palette cleanser in terms of being an artist and creating because it feels both high level but also very actionable. So really recommend that in terms of learning about and understanding typography, there's this book called Inside Paragraphs by Cyrus High Smith. It's very small and very digestible. You can like read it in one bathroom visit. It's illustrated really well. It has cool illustrations. So if you want to learn about some basics of type and typography, it's a really great book and incredibly accessible and not like reading like Bringhurst or something like that. So big ups to that book.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the only thing is both of my old, well, my oldest child is a real super reader. She's always like ahead of the game. So the second that she could read, she was like, oh, picture books are for babies. And so now she's reading like she goes into Pegasus books and is just like, where are your books for teenagers? And they're like, you're not, you're nine. We're not going to show you that, but here are the middle grade books or whatever. And so there is a little bit of that. There's also, I mean, you are a parent, but you are a parent.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Letters can be athletic, bubbly, or creepy. And then it's like, well, what does a creepy C look like? And then when kids are starting to understand letter sounds and recognizing letters, they can start thinking about like what other words start with that letter sound. And then they start listing stuff out and become immediate like over-the-shoulder art directors. And so it's been really fun like showing it to other preschoolers and like TK and kindergarten kids because they're immediately like, well, our should be a river. It should be a river. And I'm like, well, how do you draw a river? And then so it becomes this fun imagination exercise too. So definitely check that out. It's up for pre-order now and comes out October 22nd.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it is like a new spin on an alphabet book, but instead of it being like an alphabet book for brand new babies, which you could totally buy it for brand new babies because it is very simple and fun and they'll like the bright pictures, it's kind of for the age where kids can recognize letters but can't necessarily read and write yet because they get so into seeing letters drawn in these different styles and like imagining what other letters could be drawn in. So each of the letters is drawn to represent the word that it sounds like.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, well, I do have a new kids book coming out in October. And so, aside from all the logo stuff, like please do check out my kids' books. It's called My First Book of Fancy Letters.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Concepts that are adjacent to each other or whatever. And I have found that sort of like Claude and ChatGBT are very good for things like that. Like I'm working on another kid's book now and I'm trying to think of the directions that it can take. And one of them is sort of like illustrating different feelings and things like that. And like I could sit there and like brainstorm what are the different emotions or whatever, or I can just ask Claude like list 50 emotions and then I can cherry pick the ones that come up that feel right. You know, so I do find it's really good for that early brainstorming stuff. And that's been really nice.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing the more low key production end of stuff. And that's kind of my favorite part of the process is like, we know what we're doing and now it's just about like going in and like, you know, when it comes to zhing logos, for instance, like the days that I spend knowing exactly what I'm going to do and all it is is me just moving little busy eye handles around and getting it feeling right and whatever, those are like pure therapeutic zen for me. And so I think like I will always have that as a part of my work and will probably not have AI be outputting that part. But I have been able to have it be helpful in the iterative process a little bit, both through generating sketches with that project and then also through like a lot of stuff with, you know, writing with my kids books and things like that is like coming up with lists of words.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it was still really neat to see, and I could see the validity of that in the creative iterative process. I think the biggest thing for me is that I find that the sort of sloggy, slow dregs of work is very fulfilling to me that a lot of the evangelists of AI are like, oh, imagine if you could spend all of your time high-level thinking and coming up with the concepts and guiding the vision and whatever, and then just get AI to do everything else that you don't care about. And for me, that just sounds like not the most holistic approach to how I work, like, because I can't, the reason why I do all the things that I do and why my process is the way that it is because while I love thinking and I love coming up with conceptual stuff, I find it to be very like cerebrally taxing. And then I need to break from that by doing.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a part of the generative process for creating that art. So I did have fun creating custom lettering and then trying to run it through stable diffusion to get stable diffusion to generate instances of my lettering in different styles. We were making these like clouds. We ultimately didn't end up using it”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit. I am sort of in this really interesting position in terms of AI where my partner works at Meta on gen AI stuff. So he's like a director on the Gen AI team at Meta and is very bought into AI as a whole thing. And I am a little like about its impact on a lot of the things that we do. I think overall it will become a tool and be very useful, especially in a lot of different fields. But I think this sort of timeframe in which it's more novelty is going to have kind of a not the best impact on things like illustration, but eventually we'll all come out of it and it'll be fine. In terms of how I've been able to integrate it into my process, I did some work for Salesforce last year where the theme for Dreamforce was going to be very AI driven. And I felt like I needed to explore AI.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's called Jessica Hish and Friends. You can just Google JHN Yeah. So I put JHNF on as a part of the Google Maps name so I don't dispel my name to strangers because I have like a weird German spelling last name. And I also have a second store called Drawling, which is like drawing with an L throne in there. And that one is like an all-ages art supply store that's sort of a kids art supply store. So that one kind of grew out of JHNF as well. So those two stores exist. And then with my books, if you just look up my last name on any of your favorite book sellers, you'll find me.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A way that kids will appreciate and enjoy. You know, like I'm just always thinking about what's a way that I can say a thing that has been said before but hasn't been said in this way. And if I can turn that into a”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you think about all the objects in your life that have followed you throughout your life, right? Like, what's a thing that you've had since you were in fifth grade or whatever that is still magically in your possession, in your house? You have that because the story of that thing is so important to you. And I think that the work that we create, the design that we create can have that. It can be like imbued with so much story and meaning that when we think about moving on from it, we're like, but this. And I think that's one of the ways to build a lasting brand is to just make sure that the story of creating it feels so real and visceral and important. And so the store is like a way for people to have a physical connection to other work that I create, like the prince and things like that. And then with the kids, the kids book stuff, that's also sort of about creating like lasting stuff. Like I like creating physical things in the world. I like repackaging things that I've learned in therapy.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is like a real nerd professional about whatever it is that they do is that they bring you along the journey and give you the language to talk about the thing through their eyes and through their experience. And so like to me, like the funnest thing for me is actually telling clients and teaching them about all the things that we are doing along the way. So then they go out into the world as like a newly minted type nerd and can communicate all of these things to other people. And that connection is just really important, the connection to the work, the story behind it. I feel like that's one of the ways that we create lasting work is understanding that the work exists because there's a story behind it. And things, if they're just created because of like the aesthetics or they're just created, you know quickly or whatever, it's really easy to discard them because there's not a story behind it.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, yeah, of course. So I'm based here in the Bay, as we've talked about, and I have a studio in downtown Oakland, and my studio is kind of like Barbie's Creative Dream House, where the top floor is my office. That's where I am right now. And then the bottom floor on one side is a workshop. So I do a lot of printmaking. I've just always, I went to college at a school that was very focused on like interdisciplinary work. And I feel like I bring a lot of like manual analog processes into my work a lot. And I find it really important to make physical things as a part of my creative process. So I do a lot of printmaking. And then on the other side downstairs is a brick and mortar store. And so I've always wanted to have a brick and mortar store because as an artist, I think having people have a physical connection to your work can be really important. I think one of the reasons why a lot like people hire me to do things for them is because one of the gifts of working with someone.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think when you blur your eyes on your brand, there was a really clear cohesiveness to it already. And it was just about massaging it into a more consistent professional looking place.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's definitely enough for some people because I think sometimes I think you specifically had a very clear Vibe going on with all of your brand stuff, you know, like some people, it's totally like a mishmash grab bag of random trends. And there's no real voice that's coming through. But I feel like you've been doing this for a while. And like when you see everything together, there's definitely like a very clear sort of vision and vibe that you get from everything. Like I always tell people that having terrible vision can be like your best asset when it comes to like logo and brand because it allows you just like take your glasses off if you have terrible vision and look at it and get the feeling when you can't see the detail. You have to be looking at it with blurred eyes. Like what is the, what is the overall look of this thing and just trying to get as broad and noodle-ly as you can with it instead of it being about those really specific one by one stuff, you know?”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start super top level and really ask yourself very broad questions about why you think it's not working. And then kind of go tighter and tighter and tighter and be like it really could be like this C has always bothered me, you know, like and then we can get real specific about that when I'm doing the refresh. But I think I also need to understand like sort of the overall reason why we're doing this, not just the like little bugaboo that bothers you specifically but might not bother anybody else.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Best thing is just sort of like seeing what's there and really being able to understand what's not working about it and what your goals are. And so like I said with that sort of like reverse justification of intuition, I think if you know that the logo is not quite where you want it to be, just spend a couple days like asking yourself why like what is the thing about this that bothers me and don't get specific don't be like the way the R is or whatever. Like maybe that's the thing that we talk about down the line, but always think big picture before you think minutia because sometimes people think that like they'll throw a bunch of minutia stuff at me, but it's because they haven't really stopped to think about what is the overall thing that's bothering them. And you just never get there if you're always trying to address detail before you address the big picture stuff. So you have to just like always.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inside of our business, but then can we hire you at the end to make it look good? You know, if we can get everybody bought in and get it like 80% of the way there. Depending on what people's budgets are, I kind of have different ways of working or just depending what their needs are. Because my whole thing too is I don't want to step on anybody's toes because sometimes companies have these really amazing designers that are working in-house and it sucks as a designer who started at a company and thinks that you might be able to get a chance to like work on what is considered the most important asset in terms of the brand and they just farm it out to someone else instead of letting you touch it so to me like that's a recipe for anything that I create to be immediately killed because someone inside is going to be like it's time to shine and then they're just going to kill all my work. So I'm always like how do we collaborate?”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do is I treat it much more like a commercial lettering project where I say you have to own the rights to this eventually, but hey, let's break that out and let's keep the creative process lighter and less expensive so then we have more room to explore. So then if some stakeholder comes in last minute and like blows everything else up and we need to start over, you haven't already paid to own everything that we've created. You just pay to own the thing that we create in the end that gets chosen. And so I really like the idea of keeping the creation process more flexible and to try to scale to what people need versus having a really rigid way of approaching everything. And so sometimes people will bring me on really early in the process where if they have an internal team or if they're working with an external agency or something, they want me there from the get out. And then some people are like, we have no money and we are going to try to do this as much as we can.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So again, like, and to go back to the process, how it's always about figuring out what people are trying to accomplish. So a lot of my process scales depending on how broad of an exploration that we're doing. So the way that I treat it is I treat my branding work not dissimilarly to how I treat commercial lettering, which is atypical. You know, like brand people what they typically do is because the client has to own the assets outright at the end, no matter what, what they tend to do is bill everything that the client owns everything as you are moving along. So it's all sort of like work for hire, but the idea being that it's a buyout of everything that is being made. And so what that means is that when a branding agency is pricing stuff for you, they're taking the buyout rights and baking it into every round of work so that every round gets more expensive because you are owning all of the work, right? And so what”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They do just as you need them, and they just get kind of like consultant equity kind of thing. Like that should be more present because people don't necessarily need to have internal brand teams for like the first six months to a year of when they're doing stuff unless they grow really significantly.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you have limited resources and those resources aren't necessarily going to get devoted to doing a $200,000 brand exploration because when you have $500,000 of money at all to like for a year to like try to get things going, you certainly should not spend half of that money on branding. And that's, and that's my opinion. But that's not to say that brand can't be important and can't come in at some level or can't be thought of as a partnership between you and someone else where, you know, there's this whole idea of like fractional leadership now, which I feel like hasn't really infiltrated my world as much, but I don't know why it hasn't because most people don't have internal comms teams, internal brand teams, until the company is very mature. And the idea that you could bring someone in who is a real expert in whatever it is.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we were kind of like olds at the time, and take that with a grain of salt. Don't judge me because we were like 28, 29, like coming over to work at Facebook and everybody there was like 23, 24. And so all the people that we ended up meeting in the bay were more people our age that were like moving on to start companies and things like that. And so we just got to see that perspective so clearly of like what it is to branch out on your own to fundraise to do all this stuff, to pivot, to do little experimental apps and see where that goes, to get acquired as a team versus getting acquired as a, you know, technology or whatever. And I've been able to see that in a way that I feel like a lot of people that do my job don't get to see. And that makes me very sympathetic and towards what it is to want to build a brand as a founder. You know, like I understand.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, most of the folks that I know that work in brand or, you know, kind of traditional graphic design print design, they don't necessarily have a lot of insight into how building companies works. You know, like they're not friends with a ton of startup founders and things like that. And I've just had been in this like very fun position being like everyone's token creative person in the bay for a while. And this has been for a long time, right? So I remember speaking at like a Silicon Valley event that was like women in Silicon Valley in like 2009 or 2010, something like that. And it's interesting to be a person that has never actually themselves worked at a tech company but felt so involved and understanding about how all of that works. My partner, the reason why we're in the bay is because he got hired by Facebook back in 2011.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're trying to open it up to a new audience or whatever. And depending on whatever that goal is, brand can have a different place in that equation.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, they're not the only ones doing it, but they're repackaging. Where the brand really is the thing that shows people that the thing that you're doing has value. But for a lot of people, the brand should be somewhat invisible so that the thing itself becomes the star. You know, like if we think about the experiences that we have using products, right? Sometimes there's products where there's a ton of like fun and delight built into how you use it. And that can happen through brand, through like, you know, design choices and things like that. And sometimes the delight is the fact that nothing is getting in your way as you're using that product. And so you just kind of figure out what is your, like, what's your ethos of your company is the whole thing about like doing a thing well, doing it simply, and making sure that everybody, that everything gets out of the way of that experience? Or is it like we're trying to generate this delightful thing?”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think, well, there's different companies, right? There's companies where brand is literally everything, where they're doing something that's not crazy innovative in the first place and the brand is the thing that is the whole company. And that's fine. That's a completely valid way to do stuff. It's sort of like people that can take information and recommunicate it in a way to another audience or whatever that they hit that audience in a way that the original information couldn't do. Think about all of the people who write books on psychology and medicine and all kinds of stuff that write it for a broader popular audience. They're the ones reading the medical papers. They're the ones digesting all of this like really huge, complicated data and turning it into something that normal people can read, right? And I think that there are companies that are doing that. They're taking a thing that is not innovative or isn't”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hire a marketing person. They have to have a taste about how that happens. They should be able to look at that and intuit most of the way that you should be able to use it without being explicitly told do not do this.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is used moving forward, and that if you do, the brand might be quite complicated, or there might be even just parts of the logo that make it difficult to work with. Like my goal always when designing a logo is to design a logo that's so easy to use that you don't have to be an extremely skilled designer to design well with it. Like that's my number one goal because I know not everybody is going to be at a stage where they have like a brand, an internal brand team or like a designer that's like a rock star designer that can work with really complicated assets and make them look good. So I just want the assets to sort of teach you themselves by just how they exist, how to use it, you know, like you as a person that has any taste whatsoever and hopefully people that you're hiring for any job at your company have some degree of taste. You know, if you hire an engineer, they have to have taste about how that happens.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, part of that is because some brands, like if you have a massive company like hundreds of employees generating hundreds of things sometimes having too many assets can be can overcomplicate stuff because unless you have a really, really well written brandbook outlining how to do everything that people are adhering to very closely, you can get like the assets kind of running rampant throughout all of the stuff and being used incorrectly. But because you're not a massive company and you have creative control over the things that are happening and can help direct that, we can be much more playful with the assets and give you the ability to sort of use things in different ways. So it kind of depends on how much you trust all the people that are handling your assets. If you need, like, I am of the mind that you shouldn't need like a 500 page brand book in order to direct how the brand”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The handwritten one I really liked because I felt like we could bring the line quality of the illustration into the handwriting. But then the only problem with the handwriting is that if you want to blow that out, if you want to include other handwriting throughout the rest of the brand, finding something that matches that perfectly without creating a custom typeface is a whole thing. And so I really like being able to kind of combine the two where we have this like broader visual vocabulary that we can pull from because you're going to have headlines. You're going to have subheads. you're going to have all these other uses for typography moving forward. And if you just have one thing to pull from, it's a lot harder to work with. You know, it's just nicer when you have like a few elements to play with. It's like having a wardrobe, right? Like if you have only one shirt and one pair of pants, like there's only so many things that you can do. But if you have all these things that kind of work together and can recombine, then you can blow out a brand system like much more easily.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, totally. I think the final answer or the final logo, we took it down a lot of different paths trying to see where it was going to land. But ultimately ended up keeping it like pretty close to home and really focusing on that asset of the fire. You know, like we tried so many different versions of like, it's microphones with the fire and it's, you know, marshmallows with the fire, et cetera. And it was just about like, you know, sometimes the simplest solution is the correct solution. And I don't know. I just feel like in terms of what we were doing for blowing it out and making it really cohesive, we went a lot of directions where there might have been like multiple versions of the logo depending on the scale and ultimately ended up in a place where it's like much more, you know, in line and consistent across the bar.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or do the thing where you draw like a little circle or whatever and see if that circle is the same size at the point where two strokes join together or the point where the stroke is just vertical and on its own. And you'll notice that there's differences even in typography that's meant to look extremely rigid and geometric.”
2024-10-20 · Lenny's Podcast · How to see like a designer: The hidden power of typography and logos | Jessica Hische (Lettering Artist, Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source