Type Caste

Jessica Hische is making her mark around the world – and a stylish mark at that.

It is the end of an era for type lovers across the globe. On the day I spoke to New York-based typographer legend Jessica Hische, she had just posted the very last entry on her much-loved Daily Drop Cap site.
“I’ll no longer be posting to it as of today – it’s absolutely, 100 percent done. The last letter of the last alphabet went live today,” she announced to Her Magazine.
Since September 2009, Jessica has posted an illustrative initial cap daily (or at least regularly) free for creative-conscious internet users to use (in a non-commercial way) as they pleased. At its peak, the site attracted 120,000 visitors per month! With that much traffic, it’s fair to assume the creator would want to make a bit of money from her efforts, right? Wrong!
Jessica’s determination not to make money by flooding her site with advertisements came as a result of watching a movie. “After I had watched The Social Network I thought nope, no ads on the site. I like it as is. I want it to be cool. An advertising company had contacted me about putting ads on the site but I decided against it. I’ll figure out how to profit from it in a way that feels more natural than putting ads on it.”
There will be no more postings to the site and it will stay online as an archive but Jessica is sure it’ll still attract a decent amount of traffic. You can visit the site by going to www.dailydropcap.com.
Jessica is also well known in the design world for other online projects including her recorded brainstorm, ‘Should I work for free?’ (which is available in possibly every language bar Maori) and theinternetsendsmecake.com.
“The sendsmecake site started as a joke,” says Jessica. “I had a studio space that I shared with a couple of other designers in Dumbo, Brooklyn and we had been talking about how designers would get all these emails from people begging for you to promote their work. It could be really overwhelming. I wished there was a way to judge a person from criteria other than their work. This was a way to narrow it down.”
If a designer sent a cake, Jessica would judge the person entirely on their baking skills. They could have been under-talented at design but great in the baking department and so she’d blog about them. She found this to be a great solution to learning and writing about people but terrible for her waistline.
Jessica’s career in design really began after graduating from the Tyler School of Art with a degree in graphic design. She worked for Headcase Design before taking a position as senior designer at Louise Fili Ltd. Spending her days learning about fancy typography, she developed her freelance career at night. After two and a half years of little sleep and a lot of lettering, she left to pursue her passion for lettering and illustration and to try her hand at type design.
Jessica has since travelled the world speaking to young designers, has released two typefaces—Buttermilk and Snowflake—and has enrolled in the Cooper Union program in typeface design to further her education and hopefully create some very useful fonts in the very near future.
From 9-5pm, she resides in her studio in The Pencil Factory in Brooklyn, New York (she has a No.2 tattoo on her wrist paying homage to this) a hub of human interaction, which she says is vital.
“When you’re a freelancer, it’s hard to keep a regular schedule when you work from home. You wake up and put your laptop in front of you and work – there’s no walking and no directed eating times. If I work from home all the time, I’m surrounded by cats and chores and I end up procrastinating and not showering until 5pm. I led a healthier life if I got out of the house everyday.”
Jessica spends most of her non-working hours at home watching Battlestar Galactica with her “talented better half”, Russ Maschmeyer, and their two cats, Olivia and Billy D. Williams, or out and about consuming pork-fat rich meals and fancy cocktails.
Last year Jessica came to New Zealand for the Semi-Permanent Conference in Auckland. Semi-Permanent is a world leading design conference that, to date, has hosted 26 events in nine cities, covering five countries, with 164 speakers and over 42,000 attendees. Moving into its ninth year in 2011, Semi-Permanent has become the leading event of its type internationally. It covers all disciplines of design, including graphic design, film, fine art, illustration, web design, photography, visual effects, and architecture.
While in New Zealand the key speaker fell in love with Piha, the wine of Waiheke and fashion company, Moochi as well as our “friendly and welcoming” design community.
Like any creative industry, plagiarism is a problem for this designer and she will often use her influence to educate those who try to copy her work.
“There are very few people that are willing to call people out in a non-anonymous way. I’d much rather write to them and educate them that what they’re doing is wrong. This happened about a month ago when a Dutch company had taken all of the content of one of my designs and used it to make a web app without my permission.
“When they refused to take it down, I wrote on Twitter ‘Hey, if you think stealing content is wrong, send these guys a letter’ and they got bombarded with followers of mine. After that, they took it down and wrote me an apology. I try not to call people out in a public way like that often but if they refuse to amend it, that’s when I go after them!”
Now that her Daily Drop Cap project has finished and she has time away from her speaking engagements, Jessica is free to concentrate on the design work she loves, including current projects for clients: Avis, the New York Lottery, Nike and Royal Mail in the United Kingdom.
“I don’t see work as ‘work’, it’s something that I enjoy doing,” Jessica says. “And, when I’m not working, I’m figuring out other ways to work. I don’t foresee retiring in any capacity in the future; just slowing down a bit and hopefully finding a way to keep making art as long as possible.”
Nakita Ardern
www.jessicahische.com