Color Wheel

Typographic Texture

Texture

Video Summary: Marian Bantjes

Marian Bantjes is a Canadian designer, typographer and illustrator.  Everything about her is fascinating, from her work to her individual style to her personal story.  Marian was an art school dropout and found a job as a typesetter at a publishing company.  She worked for many years as a graphic designer at the design firm Digitopolis, but eventually became disenchanted with the client-based model of design strategy.  After leaving the company Marian moved to a remote location on Bowen Island, where she focused on personal projects, wrote furiously on the design blog Speak Up, and eventually found her own creative voice around age 40.

Following the personal mantra "Everything I do, I do for love," Valentine's Day became Marian's "thing," and she continues to create incredible custom valentines every year.  She has since become a wildly successful and sought-after designer who always follows her own personal ideas and instincts, rather than catering to the client.  Marian has published a book entitled I Wonder, constructed in the style of illuminated manuscript.  She is described by her colleagues as having an "obvious obsession," as copious amounts of time, love and attention are apparent in all her work.  Marian advocates for the fusion and inclusion of fine art in the commercial world, and for working against what's expected.

Video Summary: Jessica Hische

Jessica Hische is a San Francisco-based designer and illustrator specializing in lettering.  Her many notable projects include designing the book cover lettering and ornamentation for the Barnes and Noble classics series and the typeface for Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom.  She gained recognition in the design world for her project Daily Drop Cap, in which she created a new hand-drawn illustrative letter every day and shared them as free downloads on the web.  Not only was this a smart marketing strategy, but it kept her on her creative toes! 

I would describe Jessica's work as bright, whimsical, stylish and super fun.  Her work has an aesthetic that definitely appeals to my personal sense of style, and she has an attention to detail and subtlety that makes her a standout among lettering artists.

Jessica is the co-founder of Title Case Typographic Artisans and shares this functional office space with her partner, Erik Marinovich.  Together they hold lettering workshops for aspiring designers around their communal work table.  Jessica and Erik start their work days with the ritual of changing into their studio moccasins and are self proclaimed "type nerds."

Some of the best advice I gained from Jessica's interview was to choose a career doing day-to-day work that you love, and to draw creative inspiration from EVERYWHERE.

Scale

Scale | Depth | Motion