Transcribed with Otter.ai
Guest Jessica Hische
Unknown Speaker 0:02
Hey. Hey everyone. Welcome to unique ways with Thomas Girard and audio podcast I’ve got a really notable guest on today. She’s a lettering artist and author with a tendency to over share and a pen chat for procrastin working, please join me in welcoming the one and only Jessica his welcome. Yeah. Thanks so much happy to be here. Ready for 20 questions? Yeah, here we go. Great. Question one, tell me a little bit more about yourself. What do you do? Sure? So I’m a lettering artist primarily, so, which means that I do custom lettering artwork for different kinds of clients, lots of logos, title designs for film and television, book covers, other sorts of commercial work, like advertisements and things. And then on top of that, I’m also a children’s book author and illustrator. So I’ve written and illustrated three children’s books. And then I own two brick and mortar shops here in Oakland. One of them is a like, fun, fancy, grown up store. And then the other one is a primarily kids art supply store.
Unknown Speaker 1:07
Awesome. Number two, what’s a key piece of knowledge that makes you different?
Unknown Speaker 1:13
A key piece of knowledge that makes me different,
Unknown Speaker 1:17
I feel like I really have a good understanding Well, I mean, there’s two approaches. One the professional approach. I have a bunch of really insane minutia knowledge about typography and letters and so it’s one of those things when you’re so deep in your career, you don’t quite have a grasp of just how niche your knowledge base is, until you start working with people that have no grasp of that knowledge base. And so that’s one of the things. And then I also feel like, on a personal level, I feel very connected to humanity, some weird way like I I feel like I really understand that the way that you interact with people, and just trying to be like a good person and a kind person in the world ends up rippling out in these really visible ways in your community. And so I feel like it really that really dictates, sort of how I interact with the world, kind of trying to put out the positive vibes,
Unknown Speaker 2:20
nice and just to know for our audience, our most popular episode is also a typography episode with Eric speakerman. Definitely check that one out. Number three, why this? Of all things? Why do you do what you do?
Unknown Speaker 2:32
I do? I do lettering in type design,
Unknown Speaker 2:36
primarily because I always knew I wanted to be an artist and create art in some way, but I find that I’m really inspired by constraint, and so being a commercial artist like, immediately makes my creativity go through the roof. I don’t like, sorry, I don’t like getting open ended briefs that are like, do whatever you want. Like, that doesn’t actually help me. I tend to love projects where I’m problem solving and working with sort of a tight pile of things that have to be included in a project. And one thing that’s really nice about working with letter forms is that there’s so much that you can do with them, like they can kind of go in any stylistic direction, but ultimately they have to be legible, and you have these, like, really concise set of assets to work with, which is, you know, the alphabet and some punctuation and numbers. And it depends on what alphabet you’re working with, of course, but I just really like knowing that, like, there’s this specific set of things that every day I’m going to draw, and it’s about, what do I do with those things? And I think that it just has really always been a source of inspiration for me, and I never find that I’m really lacking enthusiasm or inspiration to work with them as a resource awesome.
Unknown Speaker 3:58
And so people struggle with number four, but the question is, what does your future look like?
Unknown Speaker 4:04
My future is interesting. So I am at this sort of crossroads where I do a lot of things, and I’m trying to figure out which of those things should be a priority,
Unknown Speaker 4:17
if they if I should have a priority, or if I should just keep doing a lot of things my I have three little kids right now, and so my main goal is to be able to stay creative, make money, and also spend as much time as possible with my family. And so a lot of the choices that I make in my career have to do with how do I set myself up to have a really great work life balance and still be available to do all the fun last minute things with the kids, like going to their like publishing party on a Friday morning when they write their first essay, like that sort of thing. And so a lot of my choices with what I want my career to look like are very full.
Unknown Speaker 5:00
By how I want to be present in my family’s life.
Unknown Speaker 5:06
Great and five, we say, is unique to this show. The question is, let’s talk about location. How does the notion of place play into what you do? Place plays an enormous part into what I do. I’m really, really influenced by the places that I spend time.
Unknown Speaker 5:22
When I graduated from college, I worked at a small studio and then went freelance very soon after, and I’ve just never been able to work from home. I always have to have a separate creative space, and how that creative space manifests has a big impact on my work. So when I was living in New York. I loved living in New York, and I had a studio in Brooklyn, in the pencil factory in Greenpoint, and was just surrounded by other creatives, and specifically other illustrators. And I feel like both New York and the fact that most of my buddies were illustrators had a really dramatic impact on the kind of work that I wanted to do and the kind of life that I wanted to lead. And now here, being in the San Francisco Bay area, it’s a very different vibe. I feel like both energized by being one of the only solo practitioners that I know, most of the people that I know here, you know, they kind of go in and out of running their own design businesses and having a full time job, because it can be very tempting to, you know, work for a larger company and have great benefits, but I find it really fun to sort of be like the token creative person in a lot of the tech world groups that I hang out in, and I also feel like it’s impacted my work, because I find that I’ve had a bigger focus on doing logo design work, and specifically logo design work for sort of startups that are ready to have a glow up and, you know, sort of
Unknown Speaker 6:56
refine their branding, rather than doing a lot of from scratch, restaurant, projects and stuff like that, or, you know, smaller businesses, which might have been more my bag if I stayed in New York.
Unknown Speaker 7:09
Nice. I love it. So number six is, if you had to start from the beginning, what advice would you give your former younger self? I think I would tell my younger self to go to therapy way earlier. Do feel like a having I was in therapy for about four years really consistently, and I feel like it really helped me rewire my brain, because I’m a pretty naturally anxious person, and I have always been a bit of a people pleaser and someone who has sought validation externally, and I think it really helped me to focus on trying to make work and be the person that I want to be, not for the benefit of other people, but for myself. And so I really would have told myself to do that a little sooner, because I probably would have felt a little more well rounded earlier in my life.
Unknown Speaker 8:01
Nice and seven is what’s a day in your life? Like
Unknown Speaker 8:05
a day in my life? Well, I have a new schedule because I started exercising. So typically I wake up at 630 get my two older kids ready for the bus stop, bring them to the bus stop at 715 get my third kid ready. And this is all with my husband, of course, too, and then bring him to school, then pop by the gym, work out for about an hour, come into the office and do a bunch of admin work for two hours or so, and then in the afternoon, I
Unknown Speaker 8:37
block out my time for doing more creative work, or production work, or print making. And then I head home about 530 and then pick up my young all my kids on the way home, we all have dinner together. They’re in bed by 830 and then when I have deadlines, sometimes I work at night, but mostly I just chill and hang with my husband and watch too much television.
Unknown Speaker 9:01
Perfect. And number eight is around lifelong learning. It’s a popular topic. How do you stay up to date?
Unknown Speaker 9:08
You know, I’m not. I don’t stay incredibly up to date in terms of technology, just because I feel like, I mean, I know everything that’s going on with it, but I am not constantly trying to re educate myself on how to use the software that I use to create my artwork, mostly because a lot of the updates to technology for artists is meant to speed up your process and create ways to sort of like, iterate faster, whereas I feel like I struggle with always trying to blaze through my process instead of slowing it down. So I tend to sort of do things not analog, because I’m definitely working in digital, digital environments, but I tend to not get super excited about learning new technologies that will help X.
Unknown Speaker 10:00
COVID, the part of the process that actually brings me the most joy
Unknown Speaker 10:04
that said, I feel like I’m really in touch with everything. I’m extremely online. Spend way too much time reading articles about all kinds of things. I speak at and attend conferences fairly often, and listen to podcasts about creative things. So I feel like I’m very like informed, but not necessarily, you know, incorporating those things into my own creative practice.
Unknown Speaker 10:27
Nice, and you just mentioned this. But tools? Can you talk about digital and analog tools? Sure, of course, I used to do my sketches entirely analog, just in Loic term, or however you pronounce it, sketchbook with a black wing pencil. But once procreate in the iPad and the Apple Pencil came came around and became more sensitive, it just became such a compelling way to create my sketches. So I primarily sketch and procreate on an iPad Pro. I don’t use it in fancy pants ways that can be like overhead camera onto Instagram, I mostly just use the, you know, 6b pencil brush and then one technical pen brush, and then create all of my sketches that way. Sometimes they’re very, very tight, and sometimes they can be a bit more loose and for ideation. So it kind of depends on the client that I’m working with, or if I’m doing it for myself or for a client, and then, typically, for most of my work, I’m then exporting my sketches and recreating them in Adobe Illustrator, sort of just point by point. I do sometimes work in a hybrid way, where I’m bouncing back and forth between procreate and illustrator and creating sort of like bitmap components to pull into Illustrator, to have more hand drawn elements, but that’s kind of more for my children’s book stuff and less for my
Unknown Speaker 11:52
professional work, which tends to need to be vector as the final artwork.
Unknown Speaker 11:57
Great. And you mentioned around number 10, which is the halfway point. How do you deal with work life balance?
Unknown Speaker 12:04
So for work life balance, it’s mostly I have really strict hours in the office just out of necessity, just because these are my childcare hours. So it’s pretty easy to have work life balance, and
Unknown Speaker 12:18
part of it is really controlling the flow of work, you know, like I people think that I’m the world’s busiest person when they see the output that I have, but my schedule, to me, feels actually quite light compared to how it was in my 20s. So I tend to just have maybe, you know, four to five active projects at a time. And they vary between, you know, how intense and laborious they are, and they’ll be at different stages in the creative process. So data, you know, like week by week and day to day, I actually am quite flexible with my schedule. So if someone comes into town on a Wednesday and wants to get lunch, it’s not like I’m stacked, you know, sun up to sundown with work, and that makes it much easier to spend time with my family. And, you know, sort of create boundaries around work. I don’t mind working at night. I kind of like working at night. I find that I can focus much easier at night. And so when I have a passion project that I feel like working on, one of my big methods for getting that done is actually working on the passion project, or like the for fun thing during the day, and then saving my client work that has a deadline for the evenings. Because I know that I will stay up to complete the work that’s due tomorrow, but I will not stay up to do, like a for fun project.
Unknown Speaker 13:39
And so yeah, but I honestly, I don’t work at night very often, just because it’s tough when you’re waking up at 6am to take kids to the bus stop to want to stay up until 1am working on a thing I did that last night, though,
Unknown Speaker 13:54
nice 11 is if you weren’t doing what you do now, what would you be doing?
Unknown Speaker 14:00
See, that’s sort of an interesting thing. I feel like the class that I loved the most in college, that was not a creative class, was forensic anthropology. I took it as one of my sciences,
Unknown Speaker 14:12
and this was pre the whole, like true crime wave of everything, and it wasn’t treated as like a true crime class. But I’ve always just been really obsessed with, like human biology and kinesiology, so I feel like I would end up in some sort of medical profession, just because every time I go to the doctor, the doctors always ask me if I am in the medical profession, because I ask so many questions,
Unknown Speaker 14:34
nice and what would you not like to do with your career? What would I not like to do? You said,
Unknown Speaker 14:40
I think the thing that I would not like to do is
Unknown Speaker 14:45
focus too much with staying like on trend, or like, you know, doing what it seems like, the the wave of people, or the internet or the algorithm.
Unknown Speaker 15:00
Or the platforms like want me to do, I feel a bit contrarian a lot of times where, if there’s like, a very easy way to find success on Instagram, like, I just run away from it. And part of that is just wanting to feel more agency over my creative life and my work, and feeling like it is being driven by an internal source, not an external source. Because I found that in my career, the times in which I have felt the most lost were times in which I was spending too much time looking sideways and figuring out what I should be doing based on what the people around me are doing, instead of sort of looking within and figuring out what drives me personally. How
Unknown Speaker 15:48
about a favorite word, quote or sentence?
Unknown Speaker 15:52
You know, I I’m not really like a quote gal, but I did see one the other day that was like a person quoting an anonymous other internet person, which is that alpha males are men who aren’t ready for their full release yet because they still have bugs. So that’s just like a completely unrelated quote. But I really loved the idea of the whole alpha male thing as being something that’s just like a pre release, man,
Unknown Speaker 16:23
nice and you have one word to describe yourself. What word do you choose?
Unknown Speaker 16:30
This is a toughie. I feel like
Unknown Speaker 16:32
it’s like a weird like. I feel like friendly is a lame word to pick. But I feel like I truly am very like, open, like, open to experiences, open to people, and maybe like the word like connection, because I feel like I I just like, really love connecting with other people and finding ways to connect with people like in the creative process as well.
Unknown Speaker 17:00
So yeah, probably somewhere in that zone.
Unknown Speaker 17:03
And 16, what keeps you up at night?
Unknown Speaker 17:06
What keeps me up at night? Well, I mean, I am an A Night Thoughts person, and so I definitely have my worst anxiety Night Thoughts in the evening. It usually has to do not with anything professionally, but just being sort of like worried about the well being of people around me that I care about. You know, I tend to manage my anxieties by walking down worst case scenario paths in my mind, which can sometimes be very helpful, because then I feel like prepared in case anything happens, and I also know that most of the things that I think about are not going to happen. So it sort of makes me understand the probability of those things happening better. But it’s also can be quite exhausting, and it’s very dependent on lifestyle stuff, and, you know, sort of like hormonal cycles and that kind of thing. So I tend to, I had to switch to decaf because decaf, or caffeine, was giving me Night Thoughts a lot more often. So now I’m a decaf drinker.
Unknown Speaker 18:10
Great and final stretch, what’s a dream you’re chasing
Unknown Speaker 18:14
a dream I’m chasing? I currently feel like I’m chasing a dream of being a more locally present creative I feel like the first few couple of decades of my career, because I’m just about to turn 40, and I’ve been doing this for a minute,
Unknown Speaker 18:32
I felt like my generation was so about global connection, because we were sort of early social media people and a lot of us made our best friends online, and the idea that you could be globally connected with such, you know, an appealing thing. And I feel like the last couple of years, I’ve not wanted to shrink from that, but I’ve wanted to spend more time focusing on my actual local community, instead of it being, you know, being more of an international or national person,
Unknown Speaker 19:04
nice and 18, what inspires you?
Unknown Speaker 19:08
The thing that in I there’s so many things that inspire me. I feel like meeting people, um, that do very, very different creative things from me and have very different creative paths. I find that to be always really inspirational. I like to have friends and folks that I interact with that are all like, have, you know, sort of on the different strata of incomes and, you know, different experiences. And I find that I the inspiration just totally evaporates for me when I feel like I’m in a more homogeneous environment where everybody is kind of at the same level, or, like, wants the same goal, about the same income, that kind of thing. I just feel like more inspired personally, if I have more diversity in sort of like, the people that surround me, yeah.
Unknown Speaker 20:00
Great. And last couple here, any advice you’d like to share?
Unknown Speaker 20:05
Oh, there’s, I mean, there’s a ton of advice. I could just talk for days and days about things I’m I’m sort of, I sort of have a boy brain, and I just want to solve everybody’s problems for them. And so if you ever need me to, like, solve a problem for you, just email me, and I will be very happy to stroke my own ego by telling you what to do. But I think, like the it sort of circles back to that looking sideways thing. I think it’s the hardest thing to do as a creative person is to just not spend all of your time looking at other your peers and people above you and focusing on the things that they’re doing and how that relates to the things that you’re not doing, because it’s really difficult to feel gratitude when you do that. And you know, having a way to practice have some sort of gratitude practice is so crazy important just to ground yourself. And so that would be my biggest advice, is like, figure out a way to have a gratitude practice and then also spend more time, like looking within instead of looking around. You.
Unknown Speaker 21:11
Great. And finally, number 20, how can our listeners keep tabs on you? What’s our call to action? Sure you guys can keep tabs on me on most social media platforms, though, right now I’m on Instagram as at Jessica his and threads as at Jessica his My website is also Jessica his.is/awesome
Unknown Speaker 21:32
and I have a shop Jessica his dot shop. And then if you’re here in the Bay Area and you want to come visit my shops, I have a store called j, h and f that’s below my studio in downtown Oakland, and then a store in temas gal alley called drawling,
Unknown Speaker 21:48
awesome. Well, such a pleasure having you on. Thank you so much, of course, yeah, thank you so much. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai