Jessica Hische
Related people
Episodes
Notes
First of Kind · Jessica Hische’s Little Shop of Wonders
-
What Surprised Jessica Hische About Her Neiman Marcus Christmas Work?
Jessica Hische was surprised that Christmas pieces she designed for Neiman Marcus a couple of years ago could become someone's grandmother's cookie jar.
She was excited to make holiday work and knew it would be executed well because the company cares about craft. She could not know what would be manufactured from the drawings. Holding the finished pieces, she realized one could be passed down in a family and travel far, even if those people never learn her name. She treats the work as her chance to make the world around her more beautiful, and she cannot predict which object will do it.
An Instagram post feels like a waste beside that. About 15% of the people who follow her will see it, an
-
How Did Jessica Hische Letter a Wes Anderson Film?
Jessica Hische lettered a Wes Anderson film by blending a classic script with something more hand-hewn. A calligrapher had been on the project already, and she thinks that person could not bend those skills into his extremely specific vision, so he clean-slated the lettering. She never saw the earlier work. His art direction named the timeframe of the story and included stills of titles from a Claude Chabrol film.
The letters stay handmade because she does not snap to a grid or automate copies. They are imperfect on purpose, so a person shows in them. Someone on the art team recommended her to a producer. A small test led to her and Wes Anderson emailing each other.
The job arrived before
-
Why Does Jessica Hische Call ADHD a Superpower?
Jessica Hische calls ADHD a superpower because she wants her kids to harness it instead of treating it as a disability.
After Studio Works she became kind of a workaholic and started working after hours, something she had hardly done before. When her kids say she works a lot, she tells them she does it only because she loves the work and it makes her happy. Who they become is her biggest priority. Pursuing joy and creativity shows them the pursuit is worth it, and success can sit alongside chasing joy. The fluency takes self-knowledge about how you thrive and exposure to the things that make you thrive, almost without apology.
She and the household discovered they are neurodivergent, which
-
Why Does Template Product Design Feel Disposable?
Jessica Hische says template-based product design feels disposable because the content and the visual design never become one thing.
A template-based way of building scales, since a very small set of visuals and constraints can roll lots of things out. The content the design surrounds never gets its full breadth of interest. She compares that split to a marriage. Some couples remain two islands that happen to be married. Others, over time, become one island, and the boundary disappears. Content and visual design that stay separate never reach that point, so the design is easy to throw away. People suggest a rebrand because the design was never integral to the experience. A space wholly furn
-
Why Does Jessica Hische Design in the Browser?
Jessica Hische designs in the browser because she builds the structure first and carves it like a sculpture, the same way lettering tells her what a piece needs to become.
She keeps the process segmented and does not try to solve every problem before the work starts, because new problems appear while she is working. The vision has to evolve from the reality of the experience. The same habit carries into StudioWorks. She learned web design in college in Flash and Dreamweaver, left it alone, and later only edited existing CSS. When she built websites, she never designed in Photoshop. She built the structure, then carved it. She treats the work as raw material to hone toward a final form, and
-
Why Does Jessica Hische Want Studio Works to Stay Small?
Jessica Hische wants Studio Works to stay small because growing well beyond the team would fail the vision and make giving back less possible.
She thinks a blow-up tomorrow would be bad. The shape she wants is slow, sustainable growth: the current team, maybe some customer service people, small enough to punch above their weight. No one person should sit atop a pile of emeralds. The practical aim is to make sure the kids can go to college and to help aging parents. The ultimate goal is to turn Studio Works into a vehicle for giving back to the community.
Keeping the team really small, and not growing beyond what the work needs, makes giving back possible. Turning Studio Works into a proper
-
How Did Jessica Hische Learn to Build Websites?
Jessica Hische learned to build websites by digging in beside web people she could ask, after a long interest in HTML and CSS for her own portfolio. She went from editing her Blogger CSS to building things from nothing, and she co-founded a software startup with her friend Chris Shifflett.
In her early 20s she shared a studio in Dumbo with Chris Shifflett and Cameron Kozon, who later founded Brooklyn Beta. She arrived from the Pencil Factory in Greenpoint, a stretch among illustrators and one of the best times of her life. After she quit her day job to freelance and bought an apartment, working from the apartment lasted only a couple of months. The Pencil Factory was full, and Tina Roth Eis
-
How Does Jessica Hische Train to Defend Her Intuition?
Jessica Hische treats a strong feeling she already knows is true as training for defending her intuition. In a client meeting the answer can be so obvious, and she still has to verbalize where the feeling came from without making the person feel like a dummy or announcing that she is the expert.
She was making art for a holiday campaign and presenting the work when someone asked why the design leaned so heavily into red. The reply that comes first is that the campaign is for Christmas, but saying it is Christmas and calling the person a bozo is wildly unproductive. The letter forms were really modern, so a completely modern path and a new color palette were available. She defended the red a
-
Why Did Jessica Hische Need Total Independence?
Jessica Hische needed total independence because insecurity made command of her own destiny the only way she felt secure. If everything blew up, she wanted a plan she could carry out herself.
Coming from a family without wealth, she did not understand that debt could be okay or that it could enable things. She bought cars in cash, paid off her student loans in two years, worked constantly, and ate free pizza from a bar that gave pizza if you got beer, because debt frightened her. Complete independence was fear of letting someone else have any say over her future. She trusted she could figure it out when she was in command, and she did not know what would happen if she only had to follow. Sh
-
How Does Jessica Hische Protect a Logo?
Jessica Hische protects the logo by holding the real mark until a company can keep it. If she makes an outstanding logo for a company with no design team, and the company does really great, growth pushes them to hire an out-of-house agency or an in-house brand team. The first thing that brand team wants is a brand refresh, because they do not want to inherit someone else's work. Skip that risk and the work evaporates as soon as the company is successful. The outcome she refuses is a logo made for an unsuccessful company, thrown away the moment the company becomes successful, a loss that says nothing positive about the work.
She would much rather let the company use a placeholder logo that i
-
Why Would a Life of Only Ideas Burn Jessica Hische Out?
Jessica Hische would burn out fast if her whole life stayed in ideas and she never spent time physically making the work.
The zero to one stage is really fun and also very taxing. It is difficult, it takes a lot of mental energy, it is stressful, and the outcome is unsure. Some people love that part as their whole part and then pass it to someone else to execute. She would burn out so fast if she spent her whole life in big ideas and big pictures and spent none of it in the execution. The balance is still spending time physically making and physically creating, so she does not have to solve everything in the beginning or put all the pressure on herself to get it perfect before it is handed
-
What Separates Calligraphy, Lettering, and Type Design?
Jessica Hische separates calligraphers, lettering artists, and type designers by tool and purpose. Calligraphers work with writing implements and painting implements, so they are informed by the tool. The work is mastery of the tool and of what the tool can do, plus rigid practice in the styles they stay inside. The tools are physical.
Lettering artists are sometimes informed by calligraphy and sometimes not. They use letter forms as a vehicle for artwork and make a one-off piece that is not meant to scale. Type designers are the scalers. They approach typographical design as engineering: how to make a design that can be endlessly bent and used when nobody knows who will use it, and that st
-
Why Does Jessica Hische Design Useful Things?
Jessica Hische keeps beauty and utility together in every project she takes on. A painted mural in her shop reads "everyone loves beautiful, useful things," and the meeting of utility and beauty is her favorite thing.
She does not like making objects that serve no purpose. Getting motivated to create something that is only beautiful is really difficult for her. A piece needs to solve a problem or become a presence in someone's life.
The same pairing is why her professional work leaned toward logos. Logo work solves utilitarian problems and addresses core issues rather than slapping a style on top of something.