♪ [funky soul] ♪
Thanks for joining us and without
further ado, Jessica Hisch.
♪ [funky soul] ♪
I re-outfitted myself in the
Git Hub bathroom.
So, thank you Sonia
for providing such a
lovely dress for free for people to wear.
And also
[everyone laughing]
I think not actually
for people to wear,
for her to wear on Fancy Fridays.
but I washed in the bathroom,
and they were like, "The
bathroom's great."
Walked into the second stall, and there's
all those crazy things about condoms
and babies, and Ryan Gosling.
And then I walked out
and immediately saw this sparkly dress
in front of me and I was like,
"Got to put that on!'
[everyone laughing]
And then, every color of eyeshadow is
also available here for you to wear,
So, anybody that has access
to the ladies' restroom,
and wants to have crazy eyeshadow on,
that's a thing you could be doing.
[audience laughing]
So, I do a lot of public speaking,
so I don't want this talk to be too talky,
because I like that it's all
nice and casual,
and we can have conversations afterwards,
but, I love the idea of talking
about Passion Projects
since I'm a such a major "problem-haver"
of Passion Projects, almost.
I am sort of compulsively always working
on things that I feel like working on
instead of what I should be working on,
but I always find time for the things
I should be working on.
So, anyway, I'll just begin by talking
about "procrastiworking" in general,
which is kind of a term
that I ended up coming up with
as the umbrella thing for the work
that I do when I should
be doing other work.
And, it's funny because my friend
Mig is here from Chicago,
who just happened to be in town,
and I sort of first was able to understand
this whole side work passion
nonsense that I end up doing,
because of a video series that he was
doing as a passion project on the side.
So, he had this project called,
"Humble Pied,"
which is still up and about,
though, not actively added to,
I think, at this point,
in which he just asked people
there's all sorts of blogs
that do this now,
but this was just 2009, so, early on
that asked you, "If you could give
one piece of advice to people,
what would it be?"
And, my piece of advice was,
"The work you do while
you procrastinate
is the work you should be doing
for the rest of your life."
And of course, like anything
that you write down, or tell people,
or post to the Internet,
it was taken in every
which wrong way,
so I had a bunch of
A-holes on Twitter
being like, "So I should just masturbate
and play GoldenEye for
the rest of my life?"
[audience laughs]
Which is, of course,
like every single thing
you ever write online,
people misread in every what
way, read however they want.
But, I tried to keep it light.
My response was, "If you
get paid to masturbate,
you should absolutely do that
for the rest of your life."
[audience laughing]
Because, why not? I feel like
there's a whole field called,
"being paid to masturbate,"
or "pornography,"
or something like that.
[Procrastiworking]
But anyway, this whole idea
of working on the things
that you want to be working
on isn't a unique idea.
It's just one of those things
that sounds really selfish,
until you have better understanding
about what it is.
To think about always working on the
thing you want to be working on
or when you have that
feeling in your gut like,
"this is what I have to do right now,
because if don't work on it,
it's like creative food-poisoning,
and I have to just get it out.
And if I don't get it out, I'm going
to sit here all day and have
a sour stomach about it.
[Procrastiworking]
It's just, a lot of people can't grasp it
because they have really normal jobs.
We don't have normal jobs.
I would imagine that being at GitHub
is not a normal job.
You guys have dresses
in your bathroom.
[audience laughing]
But I was always kind
of a "procrastiworker."
And that's why, you know, I, I
And please, all shitty talks
start with a photo
of the speaker as a child.
So, I'm prefacing this
won't be up long.
But as a, [laughs] as a kid even,
I always sort of knew
what I wanted to do
because I never had another
thing that I wanted to do.
I would draw for like eight
or ten hours a day,
and my brother was
a complete hellion
when we were little kids.
but I was super easy.
I would just be in the corner.
You'd pump me full of art supplies,
I'm good to go.
So when I was in school,
thankfully I didn't meet
any resistance from my parents
when it came to doing art stuff.
They just pumped me full of art supplies
and let me to do what I wanted to do.
I didn't get any major
feedback of like,
"you shouldn't go to art school because
no one gets jobs out of art school."
because they had to deal
with my brother. [chuckle]
So it was easy [laugh].
[some laughter from the audience]
But I started to sort of see
in the work that I was doing,
the stuff that I was focusing on,
and the stuff that I felt that I
was more passionate about,
and more interested in.
So when I was in art school,
so this was just some drawings
from my freshman year of college.
I have really loved to draw shiny things
with a number two H pencil.
I don't know, it was a thing.
I also sort of can't draw. I hold a pencil
like a five-year-old holds a crayon.
I get nail marks in my palm
from holding it too tight,
and I get tennis elbow
like nobody's business,
so I mostly work on a computer.
The computer has been my "Art Savior."
But when I was a sophomore,
I went to Tyler School of Art
and they sort of encourage you
to take a ton of electives.
You can't actually declare your major
until the end of your sophomore year,
at the school that I went to.
So freshman year was all foundation art,
sophomore year was all
just experimental stuff.
But I found out that I always thought
that I was going to be an artist.
I went to school to draw.
That's what I went to school for.
But then I took a graphic design class,
and I found myself procrastinating
from all of my fine art to work
to work on my graphic design projects.
And, of course, when you're a sophomore
and you're taking graphic design,
all your fine art friends
that are doing performance art
naked, covered in jelly, they're all like,
"What a sellout!"
[audience and Jessica laughing]
[stifled laughter] So, at the time,
I was like,
"Whatever. I want to be a sculptor too."
But I couldn't ignore
the fact that all I wanted to do
was to do these design projects.
So, I just threw myself headfirst
into the design program,
and ended up just loving
every second of it.
And I was that total asshole in school,
that did five posters instead of one
because they were just really into it.
[audience laughing]
And it took until my basically walking
down the aisle, graduating
for all of my classmates to realize
that I wasn't just the word's
most intense brown-noser.
I just really loved what I was doing.
So when I graduated,
I ended up working for Louise Fili,
who runs a studio in New York,
that focuses on restaurant
packaging, and identity stuff.
And before that, I was interning
at a place in Philly that did
a bunch of illustration, and book
design, and stuff like that.
So I really ending up falling
in love with illustration,
and how the illustration world worked.
All my friends in Philadelphia were
illustrators, they were all cool.
They all liked to just hang out.
And then, Louise Fili offered me a job,
because I randomly sent her a
series of postcards that I made.
And I freaked out, I had a meltdown.
I didn't think I was going
to move to New York.
I thought I was just going to hang out
with my illustrator friends
in Philly forever, because,
unlike San Fransisco,
Philadelphia is a freelancer's haven.
It is amazing. Everything is so cheap.
There's no businesses, ever. [chuckle]
I mean, there are, but not really.
[everyone laughing]
Here, it's like every single person works
at a start-up. It's really funny.
During the day, it's like a fucking
ghost town in this city.
Everybody's just either down here in SoMa,
the Mission is really just all only
homeless people during the day.
[audience laughing]
but it's interesting to be here,
and be in this field that isn't
the "everything field."
In Brooklyn, everybody's a freelancer.
Everybody's just around all day.
And in Philly it was like that too,
so moving to New York was a major change
I didn't foresee happening
because I wanted to be
a freelance illustrator
like all of my friends were.
But, it was while I worked for Louise
that I ended up sort of discovering
all this hand-lettering stuff,
and it was what I was really
passionate about.
I did a lot of lettering in school,
but I didn't really know
what it was about.
I just sort of did it because I was
too broke to buy fonts,
and [chuckles] that's why
people do stuff sometimes,
because they're broke and resourceful.
And also, because,
I don't know about you guys,
but stealing is really hard.
You have to actively do things to steal.
That's why I just buy shit on iTunes
all the time because I'm too lazy.
If I wasn't lazy I would probably
steal everything.
[audience laughing]
Not now that I make real money,
but as a broke student,
I totally would've stolen everything.
But I'm lazy, so I iTunes things.
So, anyway,
while I was working for Louise,
because it was a really tiny studio,
I ended up doing a lot of freelance work
just to make ends meet.
Whenever you are working
for a small place,
they usually pay you in thanks and lunch.
So, I got paid well enough,
but I was making like $34,000 a year
living in New York City, which is not much
when the non-cockroachy apartments
start at $800 a month with roommates
that are 35 and sexually-addicted
[laughs] gay men [suppressed laughter]
that are really out and about.
[audience laughs]
So, [laughs] so I was doing
all this freelance work,
and in doing that, I started
discovering the kind of stuff
that I was really interested in doing too,
because I loved graphic design,
and I loved working for Louise,
but I really loved the interaction
of being an illustrator,
and working with creatives all the time,
instead of working with the end client.
I noticed that a lot of
the work that Louise did,
she was working with restauranteurs,
and people that have never worked
with designers before.
And, if you're working with people
that aren't used to
working with designers,
every single time that
work with them,
it's like an educational process.
You have to basically prove to them
what your value is, and show them
what you're good at every single time,
versus when you're an illustrator, you're
hired to just kind of do your thing.
You come in at that part
of the project, you leave,
and other people finish it up,
which sounds really scary to people
that are startupy that are like,
"I want to be there for the whole thing."
"I got to see it through."
But, as someone who can
sort of like hand things off,
and trust other creatives,
it feels like a way
to collaborate constantly
with other people.
So while I was doing
all this freelance illustration work,
I ended up trying to incorporate
some of the lettering work,
that I was doing
while I worked for Louise,
into my freelance illustration work.
So, the slide on the right is this.
I got hired by, I forget even
what magazine it was now.
But, it was an article
about the teenage brain.
I think it was Harvard Business Review,
or something,
which is an awesome magazine.
And I just drew a bunch of teenage stuff
in a brain environment.
[everyone laughing]
It was really fun, and I started to
just incorporate
more and more
of this hand-lettering
into my illustration work.
And the more people started
seeing me do it,
the more started hiring me to do it.
So that was sort of the first lesson
that I ended up learning
from doing all this freelance work,
was like, "if you don't prove to people
what you want to do,
how are they going to know
you want to do it?"
So that's like one of the first reasons
why Passion Projects and side-projects
sort of come about,
because there's something
that you want to be doing,
but no one's paying you
to do it right now.
And you have to show them
that you want to do it
before people will pay you to do it.
So lettering became sort of
my first passion project.
It was the thing that I wanted to do,
that I wasn't getting paid to do,
and I had to show people
that I was interested in it.
So I started incorporating
more and more lettering
into my illustration work
in order to get hired
to do more lettering work.
And then, over time,
the more people started seeing it,
I got hired for it over and over again.
People love to hire specialists in things
because people love one-line bio's.
Who here spent more than three minutes
thinking about what their Twitter bio is?
And it like defines you in some way
whether it's some stupid, silly thing,
that means nothing,
it's still a thing that defines you
and who you are.
And when people introduce you at a party,
they introduce you by this bio,
like, "Oh, this is my friend."
"She works at GitHub."
She does this, she has
a crazy dress
in the bathroom."
That becomes your bio.
[everyone laughing]
Forever Sonia will be the crazy dress lady
that works at GitHub. So,
[audience laughing]
to me at least.
That's your one-line bio for me.
So I started thinking about that,
and that's really what matters
when it comes to being a professional
and being a specialist.
If you went to a party, what would
people say to introduce you as?
Hopefully it's not, "Remember that video
of that person running naked
across the, whatever?" You don't
want that to be your one-line bio.
But, being like, "Oh. She does lettering.
She did this. Blah bah blah."
Then, all of a sudden, next time
that someone else is at a party,
and they're working on a
logo project or something
you get brought up as the person
that they know that does that thing.
So, more and more, because lettering
is such a niche thing, or at least was.
Now more and more people are doing it.
I was the lettering person
that everyone knew,
because I was just very friendly, and out
and about, and went to a lot of shit,
and people started being like, "Oh! 
Jessica does that kind of stuff,
I guess we could hire her."
And over time, I mean, that's kind
of how networking happens.
People do networking and they go out, and
they're all weird, and businessy,
and handing out business cards.
If you've ever gone to a party and
witnessed someone actually
trying to network, it's the most worst
thing in the whole universe.
[everyone laughing]
If anyone is ever giving you more than
one copy of their business card,
that is the worst thing ever. [suppressed laughter]
I've had people give me five
business cards at once.
I'm like, "Why do I need five of these?
I don't even need one. We've met,
if you write me on Twitter, we'll have met
again. That's how we contact each other.
But, when you can sort of have networking
just be you meeting people that you have
similar interests, which we all do, then,
all of a sudden, you get to have
a presence within that community as a
person that does a specific thing.
I know that for sure, at this company
there's people that are
specifically good at one thing here, and
whenever you have a problem
in that zone, you talk
to that person first.
And that's sort of what happens
in every single industry.
So, I ended up being able to work for a
lot of really awesome clients including
Wes Anderson, which was awesome. And, that
was just totally a random recommendation
from someone within their art team,
because they were working with
another calligrapher that was like,
"I'm not a calligrapher, I'm a letterer."
So there's a weird difference
between those things and no one knows it.
I do [laughs]
[audience laughing]
The difference is that calligraphers write
and letterers draw, which seems like
a completely weird thing to say,
but you have a specific kind
of handwriting in the way
that you write, and you're really
good at doing that handwriting.
Whether or not it looks good is
up to everyone and yourself.
But, you can replicate that way
of writing over and over again,
and that's what calligraphers do.
They master several styles of writing
so that when someone calls upon them,
and they say, "Hey, we need you to do
our invitations," they're like, "Boom!"
[does impression of calligrapher working]
And it's the same thing every single time,
because they're super well-practiced,
It's crazy muscle memory. They
know what they are doing.
Letterers are kind of feeling around
in the dark a lot of times.
But, it's good, because the thing that
unites our work is the methods
that we use to create it.
So I work entirely in Adobe Illustrator
mostly, and then I use Robo Font
when I make fonts. But it's all vector.
All my work is vector and that's what
sort of unites the style of my work.
There's also other things that
unite the style of your work.
I mean, if you drew an apple,
and you drew an apple,
you'd know whose apple it was. You
know. Even though you're drawing
the same subject matter,
it looks unique to you,
because your artist's hand is in it no
matter what. But, letterers can work
in a lot of different styles,
unlike calligraphers
that usually master a few styles.
So, this was a really awesome project.
I could go in depth into it.
I'm talking super fast to you. Sorry.
I'm--been biking around all day,
I'm wearing a sequin dress.
[audience laughs]
But, even through my professional career,
I started looking at what I was doing
when I was procrastinating, and figuring
out where my passions lie.
So, I share a studio now in The Mission
with another letterer.
His name's Erik Marinovich.
He's an awesome dude.
He's way more awesome than I am
in a lot of ways, and he's Croatian,
and is very friendly and huggy.
But, the kind of work that he's doing
now, he does a lot of calligraphy
as well as lettering, and I feel like
he's actually better at crazy
illustrative lettering
than I am at this point in my life,
because I have sort of gone into this path
of being really interested in type design,
which is a really different
way of thinking,
and I find that I am now procrastinating
from my lettering projects
by doing type design projects, so--which
says something, and says I should probably
focus on doing type design.
But, it's one of those arts
that doesn't pay all that well,
and people bitch about,
and everyone wants to be like,
"Let's make an open-source font
on GitHub," which people have
told me about. [laughs]
Someone actually the other day wanted to
take all of my Daily Drop Caps and make
them into CSS, and open-source it on
GitHub so other people could also
make them. So that we can make
the whole thing faster.
And I was like, "I'm licensing those right
now to other people so we can not do that.
But that's a noble idea."
[everyone laughing]
I love the open internet,
and all this stuff,
and you guys are awesome,
and everyone I know uses GitHub. It's
great, so don't worry, you're cool.
[heavy laughter]
So, I love type design stuff right now,
and I find myself procrastinating
on a lot of my lettering work
to work on type stuff,
and it's just a very different way
of thinking. Instead of thinking
in kind of a more macro way,
you think very micro.
So it's all about these little minute
changes that you're making,
that affect it as a whole, instead
of looking at the full picture,
like the painting of the final thing and
thinking of the presence that that has.
So, you're always zooming in from macro
to micro, but it's so much more about
these little tiny details.
And it's also a lot of this, which
not a lot of people know about.
So, type design is a super
codey thing, sort of.
OpenType is gross and looks like that.
But, one of the original founders of--or
actually one of the first people
that wrote Python, his brother was a
type designer, or is a type-designer.
They're both still alive.
And so, all the type design programs
actually use Python
as a secondary language, and people write
plugins. I took a type design course,
and actually had to take a Python workshop
over the weekend to try and figure out
how to start writing in Python,
which I'm not very good at.
It's a language I have not mastered.
But it's an interesting overlap between
the nerd word and my nerd world.
[I love Lettering & Type ...but they don't
make me 100% creatively satisfied.]
So anyway, back to passion projecty stuff;
while I love lettering and type,
it doesn't make me 100%
creatively satisfied.
So, there's a lot of reasons why people
get into doing what they do.
I love what I do for a living. There's
nothing about it that I don't love,
but I guess there is stuff about
it that I don't love. [laughs]
But, when you're constantly doing stuff
for clients, it's really different
than when you're doing stuff on your own,
so I like to think of my day job,
and my night job as the Bruce Wayne
and Batman situation.
So everyone has their own Bruce Wayne.
You have your Bruce Wayne that is like
an awesome dude, and Bruce Wayne
runs a mansion and pays the bills, and
hangs out with models. Whatever.
And then--But, you know, Bruce Wayne had
a super awesome life and still didn't feel
totally satisfied with
his super awesome life,
so he made Batman, and Batman is
his fun work, his masked vigilante.
So Batman needs Bruce Wayne's
endless cash to fund
his crime fighting side-project.
[audience laughs]
So, we all have this situation where
we have our Bruce Wayne,
and we have our Batman, and many people
would try to tell you that you should be
only Batman, and that you should live
without Bruce Wayne,
because we should always be doing what we
love forever, and who needs Bruce Wayne?
You all need Bruce Wayne.
We all need to pay the bills.
We all need to be able to pay for
all the things that we want to do
when we're a crazy masked vigilante. So,
I don't think it's wrong to want to want
to do things to make money
to support your side-projects,
even if you have a totally shit job,
in which you make money that
pays for all the fun stuff
that you want to do.
You guys don't have shit jobs
because you're here,
which means that it's awesome. I know
that not everyone that's here
works at GitHub, but, you know,
you guys are probably all doing
cool stuff. Whatever.
I'm assuming that. It's San Fransisco.
How can you live here and
not be doing cool stuff?
But for me, being a letterer pays
the bills. It's still a super fun job.
But being a maker of weird side projects
is my masked vigilante time.
I get to do stuff that no one wants
to pay me to do, at least for now,
or stuff that maybe could
never be profitable
just because a lot of the things that I'm
interested in are super niche stuff
that no one gives a fuck
about except for me.
And that's okay. It doesn't matter.
[Pays the bills: Letterer; Fun-work:
Maker of weird side-projects]
It's interesting to be in this city
where everyone is always thinking so big
all the time. Everyone's always on this,
"What's the next thing that's happening?
I'm making a crazy start-up,
and I already have 400 employees,"
and I'm like, "I'm going to make a website
in four hours." You know? [laughs] So,
sometimes it's okay if your side-projects
aren't these massive game changers.
Because, no matter how much of
a game--You know. Everything
that you make will be
a game changer
for somebody. You know. It doesn't
need to be the game changer
for all of America, or all of the World.
It'll be a game changer for somebody.
There's a lot of times in my career where
I think the work that I do is stupid,
or that I am just making decorative,
stupid stuff all the time.
But then I'll these really impassioned
emails from people that will tell me
that like, "Oh, my daughter's applying to
art school, and I didn't think art school
was the thing that she should do until
suddenly she showed me her website.
And, now I feel like she could have a
career and now she's going to
art school. That's a fucking game changer!
And I just do pretty making all the time,
and you can still change people's live
even if you're just doing pretty making.
So, the whole Batman-Bruce
Wayne thing--You know.
for one thing you have to do side-projects
even if you're awesome and Bruce Wayne,
and fucking models and being awesome,
because it's nearly impossible to get
all of your career happiness
from client work alone,
or from your day job alone.
There's always going to be shit
that is wrong with your client
work or your day job.
Someone is always going to a complete
weirdo and ruining your life for a week,
and you need a way to step away from it.
And also, it's nearly impossible to work
for 16 hours on one thing
and not lose steam.
So a big issue that a lot of people have
is like, "Oh my God! How do you
stay motivated to do freelance work at
night? How do you just keep going?"
And the main thing is actually
project diversity.
So that's why Google has that 20% rule.
That's why a lot of people have work at
home Wednesdays or let you do
these fun things at the office.
Because if you have diversity in the work
that you're doing, it doesn't feel like
you're working one 16 hour day. It feels
like you're working three five-hour days.
or 5.233, whatever that equates to.
So for me, the way that my life kind of
breaks down is, I do lettering,
type design, illustration, web design,
writing, and public speaking.
Not all of this pays the bills. A lot of
it is Batman activity, but it all falls
somewhere on this conceptual thinking
to making production scale.
And for me, I found that I like to
just make a lot more than I like
to be in my own head
and think all the time.
So the actual conceptual thinking stuff
only takes up probably a third to a little
over that of my time, and then most
of my time is spent making.
And that's how I like to be, because I'm in
my moment. I'm zenned out
if I can just sit there and make, and
that's why lettering and type design
is so good for me.
But if I only did that, then I would
feel like a hollow shell of a person.
I would be like Bruce Wayne,
but only with the prostitutes.
It would be not good.
[audience laughs]
I don't know if any of this makes sense.
It's the tea.
[everyone laughing]
I actually only had like half of a glass
of that tea. I'm totally lying.
Stone sober right now.
But, side-projects are great, and these
passion projects are great,
because it's this big cyclical motion.
You do the side-projects, which
get you totally amped about making
again, and then, you go into the work
that you're getting paid to do
with a new sense of purpose,
and then you see that through
in a more enthusiastic way
than you would have if you didn't. And
then that pays the bills, which enables
you to do the side-projects, and
it just goes in circles like that,
over and over again.
So that's why I think it's always really
good to have a lot of stuff on your plate.
It's always good to be able to jump
between projects, and that's why
procrastiworking is awesome. Because
you get to work all the time, and always
feel like you're being productive. You're
not masturbating when you're taking
a break from your project, you're working
on other stuff that's really fun and
productive. So, these are all--all of
my side-projects that I've ever done
have been really practical. So Daily Drop
Cap I've made, because I quit working for
Louise and I wanted to be freelance, but I
wasn't sure if I was going to be hired
to do lettering all the time, so I decided
to make a project, that I had to do
lettering every single day. And what
ended up happening was that,
I made the side-project as just an
exercise for me to do lettering
everyday, and because of it, all these
other projects that were lettering,
came about from it.
So, I ended up doing this series with
Penguin this year in which, I'm doing--
it's called Penguin Drop Caps, and I
do a letter for each author through
the whole alphabet. So it's like Austen,
Bronte, Cather, Dickens, and goes
all the way though to Z based
on the author's last name.
It's awesome, a crazy undertaking, and
I've read a lot of books this year.
But it all came about because I decided
to do an exercise on my own time
for like 30 minutes in the morning. And
then, a lot of my side-projects come about
because people email me stuff all the time
so, "Jessica, how do you feel about doing
work on spec?"
There was this whole conversation about
doing spec work because Google was
trying to hire an artist to do work for
free for their Chrome when they
first launched Chrome and it
started this whole wildfire
throughout the illustration community, and
everyone wanted everyone to comment.
Everyone needs to comment and
write posts and blah, blah, blah.
And Instead of doing that,
I made a website
that was a flowchart that told you
whether or not you should work for free.
So I got to do some writing. I got
to be kind of irreverent and funny.
There's a cursing and a non-cursing
version, as you could imagine.
It's nothing all that bad.
Just says, "make it rain bitches a couple
places, or something."
[audience laughs]
[stifled laughter] But sometimes
side-projects come about
in this really natural way.
I made the flowchart in like an hour and
a half, and then just posted it online,
as a .jpeg, and all the nerds were like,
"Oh my God! It takes so long to load!"
So then I spent eleven hours handwriting
it in CSS and HTML,
and that's how it went up. Now it looks
all fucked up because they updated
the font, and it's a little funky,
and I haven't fixed it yet.
But, anyway, it was stupid reason
to do this really elaborate thing,
but so many people saw this. It's had
like a million and a quarter uniques
since I launched it or something, which
is crazy for a flowchart about working.
And because of it I've just gotten endless
people asking more advice on this kind
of stuff. So it sort of spurned [sic]
this whole part of my website in which
I just write articles about pricing, write
articles about freelancing, write articles
about interning, all that kind of stuff.
And, this stuff is like--they say, "If you
want to be an expert, write a book,"
We don't have to write books any more. We
just write really elaborate blog posts.
And then, all of a sudden,
you're an expert.
[audience laughs]
So, [laughs] boom! [laughs]
So it's helped a great deal because,
I think, in really outing a lot of this
professional stuff, this insider info, the
insider info that all the insiders know
but don't share all that much because
they're afraid to expose what they
actually charge for things, I ended up,
having all that transparency had--
And I ended up having a lot of people
trust my opinion more, want to hire me
because they knew that I just was very
straightforward about the way that
I operated. And in the end, even
though I was more transparent,
and posting prices on here that a lot
of people thought were outrageous
that live in Wichita, or something,
I was still able to help a lot of people,
and educate a lot of people,
and hopefully the raise awareness of what
people should charge for all things.
"What do people even use Twitter for? It's
like Facebook without pictures?" This was
an honest question from my family. So, I
made "Mom This is how Twitter Works."
[suppressed laughter] And, in the
end, I--This has gotten--I've gotten
so much feedback of people that
are seriously our age that are like,
"I learned that I was accidentally showing
all of my secret conversations to people
on Twitter because I didn't know
what an add reply was."
And, it's just narrative, and just shows
you Twitter. It's just a stupid thing.
I made it in like a day and a half.
And, that's how all my side
projects end up being.
They're not these commitments
for eight months like,
"Make this total crazy thing,"
If I can't make something in a weekend,
it probably doesn't get made.
And that's just how I operate, because
I'm a sprinter, I'm not a marathon runner.
We were talking about
that a little earlier.
But, that's unique to
me, and that's why
I can only do these, sort
of, one-off websites,
because anything that actually have to
maintain, I just drag my feet on,
and have to hire my mom
to maintain it for me.
Will you send me that template
you used for your website?
A constant of any designer. So I made
"Don't Fear the Internet," which is
a series of videos teaching people basic
HTML and CSS, which a professor
at Stanford told me he
uses in his classes.
So, this shit's crazy. You're like, "I'm
going to make that," and you make it,
and then people start using it. It's wild!
You guys know that.
GitHub's crazy like that. Everybody's
always making stuff.
[audience laughing]
And another big one, "You don't know me,
but can you recommend a printer for my job
that you know nothing about?"
[audience laughing]
Everyone assumes that if you're a designer
you know all printers in
the entire universe.
So I'll get emails from people
in Australia that are like,
"I want to make a business card. Can you
recommend a printer?" And I'm like,
"You live in Perth, Australia. I
don't know any printers there."
So I made this website, "Inker Linker,"
and just had a form that all printers
could sign up and just list
their services, and that was it. And
it was just a WordPress site.
But now there's like 500,
or 600 printers on there,
and a lot of people use it as a
resource. So, it's pretty cool.
["Are there any classes or books you would
recommend to learn how to be a letter?"]
None of these things will
ever make me money.
I pay my mom to maintain
this website for me.
[audience laughing]
Because I just have no desire to update
people's contact information
on a website I will never make money on.
See this ad in the corner there? That was
a link exchange with French Paper,
because they put me in their mailing
list blast once. So they're like,
"We'll put an ad on your site.
Let's do an exchange."
So that's how all these ad
things work on these sites.
It's really fun! Or not.
[audience laughing]
Are there any classes or books you would
recommend to learn how to be a letterer?
Just decided to some workshops.
Made a whole thing about it.
And then--So, people come to
you and have these problems,
and you can either do nothing about
them, and focus on your thing
that no one's asking you about, or
you can do something with them,
and usually they can be really
fast, these workshops we just--
I started a studio with my friend
Eric, and we were like,
"You know what would be awesome? If
we didn't have to pay as much rent
for our studio in San Fransisco. So, let's
have workshops and subsidize our rent
with these workshops. So sometimes there's
really practical reasons for doing stuff.
My wedding website, which you can't really
see that much on this screen, came about
because I was getting married.
That's a practical reason; to
make a wedding website.
[audience laughing]
But it also came about because,
as soon as we announced that
we were getting engaged,
every person on the internet was like,
"Oh my God! You're going to have
the most beautiful wedding
website in the universe!"
And I was like, "Fuck everyone!"
[audience laughing hysterically]
Because, I was so freaked out!
I was just like, "Let's just elope.
Let's not do a wedding."
And Russ is like, "My mom is from the
South. We can do that."
[audience laughs hysterically]
So, the whole time--my family's totally
crazy.
I love them but they're completely insane.
They're hyper-divorced.
It's really intense.
[audience laughing]
So I just wanted to run
away and get married,
and then as soon as the internet was like,
"Oh my God! I bet your wedding invitation
is going to be the best in the whole
universe, and you'll be able to wear it--
[audience laughing hysterically]
[suppressed laughter] So I was like,
"Let's just do something really small.
Let's just get our friends to give
us some artwork. It'll be great!"
And it ended up being this insanity,
parallax website thing
that then Gawker shat on like crazy, which
was really fun. And then they had to do
a redaction because they got so many crazy
hate mail from the people on the internet
that are like, "Jessica is
awesome. Shut up!"
[audience laughing]
Which is really rad. I was in to that.
But--[laughs] And all my side
projects are so dumb.
They're just these one-off
things. I made this website
because I was tired of clients sending me
manuscripts that had the accent
typed after the 'E' on Café,
because no one knows how to type accents
or no one used theproper quotes,
so I made a website, quotesandaccents.com
that teaches you how to type the quotes.
And then, this is the last project that
I'll show you just because this was
a total--Sometimes I like making
just silly, stupid stuff,
and it's really fun, and it's
delightful, and why not?
So I had this idea a while ago, that I
wanted to make these certificates
of awesomeness, to just give to people
that were doing awesome stuff.
Sometimes people write you really
nice things in the mail, or be like,
"Oh my God! I just totally made this
cake for my friend," and I'm like,
"That's great. You deserve a certificate!"
[audience laughing]
But I never made them, because they
would cost like $1,000,000,000 because,
of course, the only way I could imagine
them happening in my mind was with
20 colors of holographic foil--
[audience laughing]
So I never made them. And, a few months
ago, a few of my friends were bitching
on Twitter about how they didn't get into
one of those 20 under 30 competitions,
and I was like, "This
is the perfect time!"
So I made a website called, "Thousands
under 90," and then--
[audience laughing hysterically]
So, [suppressed laughter] if you think
that you deserve an award,
you can give yourself an award
on Thousands under 90.
[audience laughing hysterically]
And the whole thing fills in your
information and says,
"You're so awesome that they're going to
change your profession to GitHubbery,
or something like that." And
there's no printed version.
It just tells you to take a
screen grab of your thing.
And people are like, "You should do a
thing where it converts it into a .jpeg,
and then I'm like, "No! It's a
fucking one-off website.
Just take a screen grab!" But it was so
fun and I got so many people posting
these on Facebook that were friends
of mine, and then tagging me,
and then all their friends didn't
get the joke. So they'd be like,
"Oh my God! Congratulations!"
[everyone laughing hysterically]
Which turned into like two or three days
of just all of us just laughing at
everyone on the internet.
It was really good.
[audience laughing]
But anyway, so there's so many different
reasons to procrastiwork, and to do
these passion projects and whatnot but,
you have to always be coming up with
ways to keep learning, to teach other
people, because we forget how much
we actually know. I mean, you guys
probably know how much you know
because nerds are really good at
knowing how much they know.
[audience laughing]
But we forget that not everyone--you can
blow people's minds. When we first made
Don't Fear the Internet, Russ, he works at
Facebook. He's a total web person.
He was like talking about,
"Oh, we got to teach them how to
do floats and responsive stuff."
And I'm like, "We've got to teach them
how not to make the links blue.
It will blow their minds. Believe me!" And
so, we have this knowledge that really
does blow a lot of people's minds, and
just coming up with ways to teach it
to other people is a great way
to start passion projects.
And, of course, to play because sometimes
you're stuck in a project at work
or whatever and, you don't feel like
you're really experimenting
or playing anymore,
just because you're at
that point in the project
where you just have to see it through. So
you have to come up with new ways
to be able to play. So--and of course to
find your passion, because a lot of times,
we don't really know exactly what it is
that we want yet, and it's only through
experimenting and trying new things
that we actually figure that out.
So, yeah. Thank you, guys!
[audience applauding]
♪ [funky soul] ♪
[GitHub Presents "Passion
Projects Jessica Hisch]
What was your first computer moment? Do
you remember the first time that you laid
eyes on a computer or fell
in love with a computer?
It would be the Gateway 2000.
[audience cheering]
that my mom purchased in, I
believe 1995, or '94, maybe.
When she bought it, it came
with an unsolicited note
from whoever had packed that, that was a
mean note about her being a rich bitch,
[gasping] that some random person at
the computer store was just like,
"Fuck everybody that's buying
these computers!"
[Julie] It's like a bad fortune cookie.
It was like a bad fortune cookie 
in a cow-covered box.
[audience laughing hysterically]
But that was my first, that
was my first computer.
I was allowed to use the computer
for 15 minutes a day,
because it was a long distance
phone call to use the internet.
We had to call--I'm from
Hazelton, Pennsylvania,--
and it had to call Wilkes-Barre. That was
the only place that the internet happened
so, that was 40 miles away, which at
the time, there was a thing called,
"area codes," that people
had to deal with.
- I learned this from Ludacris, actually.
- And so, it was very--
[audience laughing hysterically]
Yeah, that's a nice, nice--all
the ho's and whatnot.
[audience laughing]
But I loved it. We had all the AOL disks
that anyone could ever ask for.
I wish I still had my original AOL AIM
name but I have a new one.
[Julie ] I think we should try to find
those disks an make jewellery out of them.
[Jessica] I've seen people make shower
curtains and all kinds of stuff out of them.
But also, I, my whole hometown used mIRC
as a chat line, which actually just turned
into a giant pit of despair in highschool,
because what happens is
when teenagers have the
internet it's terrible.
[audience laughing]
So, we had this chat room on mIRC called,
"The Dungeon," which was controlled by
a couple of very intense, self-centered
nerds, and then a bunch of crazy,
high-drinking football players.
And so, they--
[Julie] They knew how
to use the internet?
[Jessica] Well, they didn't know how to
use the internet, they knew
how to turn--how to go there.
They knew how to go to there.
And they knew how to shit on people,
so it worked out for them in a way.
But it was--I went on so much in later
high school and just spent
all my time paying attention to what
all the people said on the internet.
Amazing! All of the people,
you digested all of it?
- Just all of it--
- Great.
Before we move on too
far away from dial-up,
can you do your best impression
of a dial-up connection, and what
- that sounded like?
- Whoa!
We have some younger
people in the audience
that maybe have never heard this.
[audience laughing]
They don't even know. I know, I feel
like this, you know I had a thing
for a while where I was like,
"What? You never recorded a song
onto a cassette tape from the radio?
And that became like, "Now I know how old
you are," you know. [hysterical laughter]
[audience laughing]
But the dial up noise might
be the other one so its like,
[does impression of dial-up modem sound]
I don't know. I don't think I can
remember it all the way.
[audience laughing, cheering,
and applauding]
[Julie] I just wanted that
on tape somewhere]
[Jessica continues impression
of dial-up modem sound]
Yeah that's pretty great. I'm sure
that'll be the background to
some Drake song eventually.
- Oh, yeah
- Kanye, Maybe.
[Izis], excuse me.
- Drake's pretty young
- Yeah, so many.
[Julie] I wonder if he's ever
seen a floppy disk.
I'm sure he's seen one.
- We've all seen them.
- He had to use one on Degrassi.
It was probably a coaster at some
hipster bar, or something.
[audience laughing]
- Free idea.
- Free idea.
- Free idea.
- Free idea.
[audience laughing hysterically]
But in all seriousness. [laughing] Okay,
so that was your first computer moment.
How did you know--when was moment--maybe
in college, when you were studying art,
fine art--When was the moment that you
decided, "I want to be a letterer," or,
"I want to be a designer. That's
something that I want to do."
I feel like I just forgot about another
computer moment,
- which I have to mention--
- please share it.
I was--I sort of--I think, art-wise, was a
graphic designer very early on, but then
didn't know what being
a graphic designer was,
because we all had Microsoft Publisher,
and Microsoft Publisher was awesome.
- Yes
- But
my mom also got these packs of paper
from Paper Direct that had all the crazy
certificate borders, and I would make
certificates for everyone, like, with
the soccer border, and we had
this laser printer where you can actually
foil stamp with--through the laser printer
because, it was just a
normal laser printer,
and then would tape a piece of foil to it,
and then, run it back
through the laser printer,
and it would stick to the laser output.
[Julie] You're very own notary!
[Jessica] Yeah. I have been, I
could have been a fake notary.
- Do you guys watch--what's that--
- On the League?
- Yeah.
-On the League.
- Totally. 
- A shout out--
- God! We are just synchronized--
- On the same page--
--right now.
[audience laughing]
But, I think I didn't know I was going to
be a letterer until even after college,
because when I was in school I still--I
thought I was just a graphic designer
that made fonts for my own projects,
but I didn't know that the fonts were made
by real people that were still alive
at that point, I think.
[audience laughing]
Still alive, and also in the popular
documentary, Helvetica.
Which, was not out when I was in college,
so I didn't learn about
them until much later.
But I know many of those--
- those men now--
- Really?
They're wonderful.
- Matthew Carter 
- Okay.
is the most awesome badass
is the whole entire universe,
and Erik Spiekermann--I was on a panel
talking to him, and he interrupted me,
while I was mid-talking, to tell me I was
wrong about something [laughter]
[audience laughing hysterically]
[Julie] That doesn't seem like a
thing a man would do ever!
[Jessica] He's German.
Ever!
[Jessica] He's German.
Oh, that's a whole other--
[Jessica] We forgive him.
[Julie] That's a whole other, yeah
It's different.
[Julie] That's great!
Whole other--
[Interviewer] That's great. We forgive
him. It's fine. It's fine, Erik.
[Interviewer] Okay, next question.
What's your approach for
learning something new?
One is being really excited,
two is hating it.
[audience laughing]
I forget who I was--I was watching someone
speak recently and they were saying that,
anyone that says that they love learning
new things is a lying asshole.
[Julie laughing]
[Jessica] They were like, "No one
loves learning new things.
People love being good at new things."
The process of learning sucks sometimes,
When you learn new things,
you feel like you're terrible at stuff,
and then you question how bad you are
at everything else that you do.
[audience laughing]
Imposter syndrome--
You hate yourself for a little bit--
[Jessica] Yeah! Imposter syndrome.
And then you have that
breakthrough moment,
then you're like, "Oh my God! Now I
love learning! Learning's amazing!"
And it's so much later than the beginning
of learning. So much later.
[Julie] It is. It's like, " Oh! Now
I deserve to be alive."
Yeah!
[Julie] That's fantastic, yeah.
[Jessica] Maybe.
Maybe.
[Jessica] Maybe.
[Julie] We'll see. We'll see. Cool. Where
do you go for daily inspiration?
I go to places that fill my stomach with
delicious treats. Actually most--I don't
go to a lot of inspirationy websites,
because I feel like the internet
can be a crazy circle-jerk
with design stuff.
So, I big thing--I mean,
it really just is people re-posting
shit over and over again
from the same sources over and over
again. And then everyone's just like,
"Oh, I'm so inspired by this
thing I saw last week,
so I'm going to make a new thing,
and then someone else is going
to be inspired by that,"
and it's literally, things are four weeks
old by the time they feel old,
because people are working from the same
sources, because not every thing on--in
the entire world that has been
created, is on Google Images.
So, I don't know if you guys
don't know that. [chuckles]
[audience laughing]
There's lots of stuff on there,
but not everything is on there.
And I found that the more that I actually
looked at those inspiry sites,
the less I was actually looking
to my content for inspiration,
so now now I feel like--I, I love client
work. I'm not one of those people
that's like, "Fuck clients! I hate clients!"
I love client work. I actually find that
my best work that I do is for clients
because I have someone, that I feel
like I have to work for, you know,
instead of me just working for me,
because I can--I want to try
all my projects, of course,
but I let myself give up way faster than
I do if someone else is being like,
"So that thing that
you're doing for us,"
So, the more that I actually work with
the content and look to the content
for inspiration, the more inventive
I think I end up being.
If something ends up having to be
very historically accurate,
I'll, of course, do tons of research.
But a lot of times, especially with
book covers and stuff like that,
read the book! That's your source
of inspiration! [laughs]
You don't have to go online and be like,
"Oh. What did other people that had
to do a book cover for this book do?
You mean, you didn't search for
a bull for The Great Gatsby?
- Yeah. Dribble--
- Is that something you did?
Dribble is a--I have a contentious
feeling, feelings about Dribble.
I love Dan Cederholme, and he's the
most kind and lovely person ever.
And, I am sad for what Dribble has become
because it used to be such a lovely thing
for people to post in progress work,
and now it's a portfolio website
- of 300 x 400 images. But--
- That's true.
[Julie] So moving on.
Not a lot of people love that opinion.
A lot of people are like, "Dribble
is the best place ever.
You--you're aweful, Jessica."
[Julie] I really love the voice
- you use for other people--
- Yeah!
[everyone laughing]
I think it's [laughter]
I feel like I use--I feel like I use a
much deeper voice for my mom
which is really funny because I think I
use a deeper voice for "grownups."
[laughs] But my peers all get that stupid
Kermit voice. I don't understand it.
[audience laughing]
Amazing. So you study--you
started studying fine art,
and you've been really vocal about
the difference between fine art
and what web design is and even
between, you know, what lettering
and illustration is, and what web design
is. Where do you draw those lines?
You know, I think there's a lot of
people that do a lot of things.
But each industry operates completely
differently from one another.
Lettering and illustration are
very similar in terms of
how you interact with clients,
how you bill things, how you handle
artwork rights, you know,
the actual process of working, which is
totally dissimilar from web design,
you know, web design and graphic
design, totally very similar,
except most people forget that you can
separate production from design.
So, web designers; it's usually
one big package.
Client's expect you to
package it all together,
and present it in this lovely thing,
in which the entire price
is conveyed right there. And it's
everything start to finish.
And print designers get to separate it
a lot more because, obviously,
most print designers aren't expected to
also have Heidelberg Presses, and run
your magazine for you.
But a lot of web designers are sort of
expected to sort of do everything.
And, good web designers are people
that know when to separate things
and when they can take
things on themselves,
and have people in place to do the
things that they're not the best at.
Yeah.
So, that's really the differences.
Web design and graphic design
in general, is very much
a teamwork thing,
as is lettering and illustration,
but letterers and illustrators don't
have to assemble the team.
They become a part of someone else's team
versus web design and graphic design
where you are the "teamifier," you are
the person that puts everyone in place
that does the thing that they do best
to actually make the project happen.
[Julie] Right, you need to know
as a web designer, or someone
who's directing a project,
when to tap out and say--
[Jessica] Yeah!
There's someone who's better at
this than I am, and so we should--
[Jessica] Or even mid-project
you need to be able to say,
"What you have just asked for, is beyond
the scope of what I am capable of doing,
and now we need to talk to another
person that can handle that.
- Right.
- And,
that's a major learning curve for all Web
designers because a lot of people
just don't have the balls to tell clients
when they're not good at something
because it's seen as a sign
of weakness or whatever,
or they're not very good at explaining
what it is that they're best at,
and, and giving the confidence
to the client and saying,
"I am awesome at the this thing, and you
are awesome for hiring me to do this,
because I am the best at this thing.
What you are asking me to do
is like Swahili compared
to what I know to speak,
so we need to ask the Swahili
speaker to go do that,
and that's going to be an additional fee,
and I'll show you three people
that speak Swahili in different price
ranges, and then they can speak
Swahili for you, and it'll all be great!"
But a lot of people don't know how
to approach that with clients,
and don't have enough transparency in
their process, and that ends up being
where web designers end up getting fucked,
because they wait too long and then
are still quoting, you know, $1000 for
web development when suddenly
a project has turned into this crazy
e-commerce monster.
Yeah. "Can you do the logo type?
Can you also do the UI work?
Can you also do all the illustrations
because we need people looking
happy on our websites?"
Exactly. "Can you write all the content--"
"Yeah, just write the content
for us. That's fine."
[Julie] Yeah, so that definitely
becomes a problem, and
a lot of your projects have actually
turned into things that are
aimed at better educating
designers and everything.
Do you think a big part of
the problem there is that,
businesses or entrepreneurs in general don't
understand design and what aspects,
make a web designer, and
an illustrator an illustrator?--
[Jessica] I think so. I think that's
the biggest problem,
and it's because it's annoying to have to
educate people every single time--
[Julie] Right.
And that's why I love being a letterer
because they don't have to do that--
[interviewer] yeah.
For the most part. I do have to
come in on that first phone call
and preemptive strike all their weird
shit that they are going to say,
because everybody says the same thing.
They're like, "We just need to
make sure you can read it"--
[Julie laughs]
So my first thing that I'll on the
phone call with client's is like,
"Legibility is my top priority."
[Julie and audience laugh]
[Jessica] And then they're like,
"We trust you implicitly."
[audience laughing]
And you can do that as a web designer too.
[Julie] Yeah.
You know the things that people
are going to freak out about,
and that people are going to ask for.
And if you confidently say that you will
handle that, and you are awesome at that,
they back off, and they don't bother
you as much about the other
stuff, and they just let you go.
I think a lot of people just
aren't very confident, and
they don't know how to present themselves,
and don't know how to
talk about their work,
and it's so, so important. So when people
have that conversation of like,
"Is it worth it to go to art school?
Is it worth it to do X?"
[interviewer] Yeah.
You don't have to go to art school if you
can learn all these skills on you own,
but I think the most valuable skill that
you learn when you're in school
is actually just to be able
to defend yourself.
[Julie] And communicate, yeah.
And communicate. Exactly. Because you have
to be up there with your work on the wall,
and say why you did it.
You can just be like, "I don't know.
- Helvetica's cool"
- "It's my vision!"
[Jessica] Yeah.
"It looked good."
- Yeah.
- Whatever.
[Julie laughs]
No one can do that at critique and not
just get lit on fire by their professor.
[Julie] Absolutely.
So, if you can learn
that in your own life,
by having your own little professional
debate club, you know, that--you're
going to learn 90 percent of what
you can learn in art school.
[Julie] Right. Which is what
we hoped Dribble would be.
[Jessica] Yes.
- For people.
- Exactly.
Do you think it has to do with web design
as a profession being so new?
Print design has been around long, and
so people know what lettering is,
and they know what the process is--well,
you know, depending on the client
you're talking to do you think that
it'll just get better with time,
that clients will familiarize themselves
with what they are asking for?
[Jessica] Well, you know, as old as print
design is, clients are not 300 years old.
[Julie] You're right.
So, you're dealing with
new clients all the time.
- So-- 
- Yeah.
Most people have no idea what the
difference between calligraphy
and lettering is, and people
will hire me and say,
"We have a budget of $1500 and
we need 40 phrases lettered.
And I'm like, "That is not possible
with a lettering person.
Maybe you can typeset it. I can recommend
fonts that you can use, or we can talk
to a calligrapher that is really, really
fast, and see if they can manage it
in their hourly rate. But most
people just--they think fonts.
I've had a lot of people that
look at my work, and they say,
"Hey can I get the 'V' from that alphabet?"
And I'm like, "You know that I just wrote
that word? It's just a picture of a word.
- There's not a whole font
- behind that.
- Yeah.
And it's amazing how much you can blow
people's minds. People just forget
- that human beings create things
- Sometimes.
- Right. Yeah.
- You mean computers don't do it all?
- No. You'd be surprised.
I have to qualify all of my like,
"I make it by hand on the computer all
the time." And people are like,
[making explosion noise]
"I don't understand
- what you're talking about." 
- Amazing.
Like, "Wait. So, you have a
pencil and you use a Wacom,
and then you"--I'm like,
"No, I don't use a Wacom. I use a mouse."
And they're like, "What? How do you draw
with a mouse? You just move the mouse?"
And I'm like, "No. You do a point here,
and a point here, and a point here,
a point here, and a point here."
[Julie] And then you send them
a screenshot of the pen tool
- In illustrator.
- Yeah, and they're like,
- "That sucks!"
- Yeah.
"I don't want to do that."
[audience laughing]
I'm like "That's why you pay
me to do it. It's great!"
- Yeah, it's great--
- It's the perfect exchange.
[Julie] "It works out for both of us."
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
[audience laughing]
[Julie] Amazing!
So, you have collected a lot of web
experience from your side-projects.
What do you think is the
biggest disconnect
between web design or the stuff
that you worked on specifically,
and what someone would
qualify as web development.
Well, I'm actually kind of in a weird spot
because I have talked to so many
web people in the last couple of
years and now I'm like, I feel like
I'm at more web conferences than normal
conferences, and I am one of those people
that's like, "All web designers
should know how to do basic front-end
development, they should all be writing
their own blah, blah, blah."
And I know that the true nerds are like,
"CSS is aweful! Who writes CSS? We use
this other language that compiles it."
[audience laughing]
[Julie laughing]
But, there's so many web
designers that are like,
"I still use Photoshop. I don't care.
I don't need to do that."
And because I never did that, I
feel like designing in Photoshop
is the worst ever. I don't understand
people that can design in Photoshop
because it wasn't made to be
a page layout program.--
[Julie] Yeah. It was made for pictures.
- It was made for pictures.
- Right.
Like, "photo shop."
[Julie] So people make
pictures of websites.
- Yeah. Yeah exactly--
- In Photoshop, well,
I think maybe we should keep you here
because I'm pretty sure none of our web
designers--I mean, we use--
We do a hybrid of Photoshop--Some of
us use Photoshop for certain things,
but we cheat a lot, like take screenshots of
the website and add boxes and words,
and stuff. But most of our designers here
know how to code and write
front-end HTML, and CSS.
I only use Photoshop to make the
photos that I take of my sketches
on my iPhone into black and
white, high contrast images.
- That's the only reason--
- Which you can do with CSS,
by the way. Maybe we should talk later.
- Yeah.
- Let's go hang out.
I could do that. But it would probably
take longer. Just for that--
Yeah.
specific thing.
Right.
Because I was like, "Yeah, [makes a
beeping noise] done."
[makes beeping noise] Done. Cool.
And also, they don't need to be
high-res. It's not a big deal.
- Awesome.
- But, I oftentimes now
when I get hired to do graphic design work
that I know will eventually be on the web,
I make HTML mockups of the design before
I do anything within a new design.
[Julie] Amazing! Why didn't
anyone scream after that that?
That's a pretty good--no.
[audience member cheering]
Thank you! Jesus.
[Jessica cheers]
[Julie] Is everyone falling asleep? Better
not be. Okay. Anyways, moving on.
[audience laughing]
- That's right!
-It's, it's,
I love HTML, and CSS, and PHP,
even though everyone hates PHP,
and I never did Ruby or anything
yet, and I want to but I can't,
because it's a thing that I
know, just, I shouldn't do.
It's a rabbit hole I shouldn't fall down.
Because I have this thing that I do that
I'm good at, and that would be a whole
- other zone.
- Yeah.
[Julie] I mean, most of the people
I know who write Ruby, hate Ruby.
- So--
- Really?
You're probably better off.
[audience laughing]
There we go!
[audience clapping and laughing]
Yeah.
[audience clapping and laughing]
I use Kirby for everything
now, I like that thing.
- That's pretty nice.
- But, yeah. I love it.
It's like a very--everything
that I do is so,
you suddenly look up and
it's nine hours later.
And that's how I really feel about web
design and development stuff too,
and I love activities that are like that.
So, as much as it's really frustrating
when you're spending four hours,
trying to figure out how to make
this jQuery thing happen, in--
[Julie] Once it happens.
[Jessica] Once it happens, it's amazing,
and those four hours feel like they're
- worth it.
- Exactly.
So, I think that web design and type
design are very similar because
in the end, the thing that you're making
doesn't seem as astounding as you know
that it was to create.
- Right. Yeah. The inner nerd
- in you--
- Yeah.
Is celebrating, doing a little dance in--
[Jessica] Exactly.
Exactly. And you that everyone in the
whole world is like, "Oh! That's just like
one of those WordPress templates," right?
And, you're just like, "Fuck everything!"
- Yeah, "Here's this file. Pay me."
- But you know that it's amazing,
and that's why people share shit on GitHub
and stuff like that, because they're like,
"Check out how smarts [sic]
I am!" [chuckles]
[everyone laughing]
[Julie] No. What are you talking
about? None of us
are over there--
[Jessica] And that's why we have TypeCon
which is the nerdiest conference
in the entire universe. Everyone is like
45 or above. And, grey long hair,
- and white Reeboks, free t-shirts--
- Mom jeans.
- Mom jeans.--
- Amazing!
- It's pretty amazing, actually.
- That's pretty great!
So, you have met and gotten to work with
so many people that you admire,
or, you like their work, et cetera.
What's the best way to meet people
that you want to work with?
Well, you know, when I was talking earlier
about having that thing that you're
good at that people know
- that you're good at?
- Right, yeah.
You guys know, I mean, I sure
that you have non-web friends.
It's hard to imagine in San Fransisco.
[audience laughing]
But, there are people from back home
that know you as the web person.
- Right.--
- So,
Every time you go home, you're fixing
everyone's computers. It's a big joke.
in everyone's family that you're
fixing the printer, or whatever.
Did anyone read that McSweeney's
article, recently? It was so funny!
If you haven't read the--Someone posted
a thing on McSweeney's. They wrote it like
this epic tale of them going home
and fixing their girlfriend's parents'
computer. It's amazing
[Julie] That's right. It sounds like
Bootstrap fan-fiction, which exists.
Yeah, but it's--[laughs] you guys are such
awesome, awesome--but you become
that person that thing that people don't
know about, and that's the best way
to meet people. And, within the web
world, you're not just a web designer,
you're a web designer that specializes in
x part and, has done x thing,
and if people know you as that thing,
they recommend you for that thing.
So, the more specific the thing is
that you put yourself out there as being
awesome at, the more likely it is that
someone's going to look at you and say,
"This person is great!" Or, you can just
-be a really cool, fun to talk to person--
- You can wear cool dresses.
You can steal people's dresses from the
bathroom, and all of a sudden everyone's
like, "Oh Jessica, she steals stuff from
our bathroom, we should go hire her
- to draw our logo," you know? [laughs]
- That exactly how that works.
But, if you think about it. When it comes
to full-time jobs it's really different
than freelance, though it's actually not
all that different. I've never had
an intern that I looked at their work
before I hired them as an intern.
So, I've always just hired
people to be my interns.
just based on me hanging out with them.
I would go out to breakfast with someone,
because they just wanted to like,
"Oh I'm in New York and I want to meet
someone." And I would have breakfast
with them, and they'd ask if anyone
was looking for interns and I'm like,
"Me! Right now. You're my intern."
And they're like, "But I haven't
shown you my portfolio."
And I'm like, "I don't care. You're
nice. You're teachable, probably.
That's all that matters."
[audience laughing]
And I think that's the biggest thing.
Either you have this really specific thing
that you're good at and people just point
to you and say, "That person draws
bunnies really well." Or, you have
this personality that makes people want
to keep coming back because they know
that you're respectful, they know that
you're on time, they know that you get
shit done, they know that you're a
perfectionist, and they know that
if you can't do it, that you'll be able to
figure out how to do it another way,
whether you're recommending someone else,
or whether you're bringing
on someone else.
- You know, so it's just like--
- You look for people
who can learn things, who are good at
learning, good at teaching themselves.
Yeah, people that have the right attitude,
people that, have a really, really
good work ethic, and people
that are self-aware.
Self-awareness is the biggest
strength anyone can have.
Know what you're good at, know what you're
not good at, because even if you have to
turn away a lot of work,
if you're the person
that some magazine art director comes
to you and says, "Oh my God! We have
this amazing thing that we want
you to do," and you say,
"Actually, my friend that does this style
of lettering all the time would do this
way better and way faster, and 
there'd be no heartache with it.
Why don't you hire them to do it?"
Next time they have a thing that is right
up your alley, they're going to come to
you without any question, because they
know that you're not just taking on all
the work and just, being greedy but not
necessarily taking on work that you're
- actually good at.
- Right, yeah.
that's excellent advice, actually. That's
really great. So, you have-- I don't know
if you refer to him as your partner,
but your studio mate at Title Case;
- How did you meet him?
- I met Erik through friends.
My friend Aaron Carambula, who now works
at Facebook, he and I took this type design
continuing ed program in New York, and
their website, Friends of Type, launched
five days after--or before
my Daily Drop Cap site.
So we didn't know about each, but
we launched these daily sites
at the same. It was five--four dudes that
posted to Friends of Type, they're still
actively doing it, and we become sort of
like sister site friends and I ended up
doing some collaborative work with
them on Friends of Type. So then,
a couple years ago, we found out we were
moving to San Fransisco, but we're still
in New York for the summer. TypeCon
happened in New Orleans, which was
the biggest drunken fiasco in the
history of the universe. There
was a shooting blocks from the apartment
because it's New Orleans. But, I
was hanging out with Eric there, and I was
like, "Eric, you live in San Fransisco.
Do you have a studio mate?"
And he's like, "No. I just work from home,
and I'm like, "You're going to get
a studio with me. So, I just--we hung out,
we totally jived. He does the same thing
as me, and I never had a studio that does
such like, in the same zone of work.
And it's so awesome to be able to have
these really in depth critiques with
someone versus--I've always shared with
other illustrators or designers,
and you can ask them advice, but they
can't give you super pin-pointy,
hyper nerdy advice that someone
that does exactly what you do can.
[Julie] Right.
It would be like if you were, a
Javascript person in a room
with a PHP person, but you
guys didn't totally overlap
- because even if you could--
- There's no overlap, actually.
There's no overlap. So you could be like,
you could ask that person the question
and they'd be like, "I know how to
google that sort of, but that's it.
So, being able to share a space is really
great, because we get to actually give
- each other shit--
- that's awesome.
like real.
[Julie] that's pretty cool. Moving on
to our next question--any, any cards
from the the audience yet? Any questions?
No? Cool. I'll be selfish then.
I'll just read all of mine. That's fine.
[Jessica] I noticed that you haven't
touched your whiskey.
I haven't touched my--okay,
I'm being shamed now.
[audience laughing]
[Jessica] I might just be
drinking mine really fast.
- I'm also getting really nasally.
- Just hold your nose
- the whole time, actually.
- The whole time?
Just do that the whole time, yeah. So, you
mentioned that your former boss--first
boss or former boss? Louise.
- Former boss. Was my first boss.--
- Am I saying her name right?
- Yeah, Louise.
- Louise Phil?
- Fili.
-Fili. Okay.
- Has been--
- The Italian way.
- The Italian way. You said that she has
been a really great mentor for you,
over the years. What do look for in
someone to be a mentor to you?
Does it happen accidentally? Are they just
friends? Or, how does that work?
I think it's--mentor relationships are
always something that you have to
really nurture because everyone's
different and needs different--you
need to be giving back to your mentor as
much as they are giving to you because
I think a lot of people end up having
weird relationships with their superiors
because they forget how much that superior
is teaching them, and taking
time out of their day, and that they're
extremely slow, and not as good as
they think they are because they're 23 and
really not good at what they're doing yet,
and I think the more you have respect for
people that are above you, and that are
trying to really teach
you, the better it is.
So, in that case, as much as I was not
making a shit ton of money or anything
like that, I was still 100% and my
all because I knew that the more
I respected her and the more I gave to
the projects, the more I got back,
and because I was so respectful, and
because I was always hyper clear about
my intentions there, and always tried to
credit everything like crazy, always asked
permission before I posted anything
to my website--she had
a non-compete with all of her employees--
she only has like two employees at a time,
so all of her employees, me and the other
dude that was there--But the non-compete
said that you couldn't work for anyone
that she's worked for while you work
for her or for a year after, which,
when you're dealing with someone
that's run a studio
for 20 years in New York, is every
publisher, every ad agency, every
person that could possibly hire you, so
I was getting asked to do book covers
from publishers that I know she's
worked for, and I just tried to be
hyper, hyper respectful, and I would go to
Louise and say, "This publisher is trying
to do this thing, but I know that we have
this situation. What do you think?" And,
if she thought she was hiring me for me,
and not me as cheap her, she always
let me do it, so--and I think because I
was so respectful of that relationship,
and of the agreement between
us, we ended up having this
really good mentor-mentoree situation.
It's only when people start being a little
secretive or thinking that they deserve
more that it starts to get a
little toxic. So, I think you just
have to be just really, really aware of
your--how much that person is playing
- a role in your life.
- Yeah. And it's not
like a grab and go situation where you're
just going to take from them what you need
and not also nurture that relationship,
or give back to their studio,
or respect them, so.--
Yeah, exactly. I mean everybody--I'm 
just super empathetic, I think, too. So,
I'm always super aware that even people
are being just bat shit crazy, they're
being bat shit crazy
- for a reason.
- Right.
So I always try to think of that reason
before I react. I don't want to just have
a crazy gut reaction and be
like, "You're being a dick!"
[Julie laughs]
I think this person must have had
a crazy day let's blah, blah,
- blah.--
- Right.
There is some situation
- that's informing their--
- Yeah. You don't need to
throw gas on the fire every
- single time.
- Right.
Sometimes it's okay to just look at the
fire and let the fire do its thing
and be like, "Why is this fire burning?
Let me approach the fire when
it's a little less calm."
- You know?
- Right.
That's amazing. Are you mentoring anyone?
Not--well sort of a little bit, right now.
Erik has had this on-and-off intern for
like two years, he's Croatian, and
there's some sort of Croatian
Men's network in the area.
[everyone laughing]
It's really funny. They all have these
weird men-only barbecues.
And his dad that owns some sort of wine
land, he's not like a wine person.
it's more like, "We have grapes.
We sell grapes to people,"
You know? [laughs hysterically] So they
make all men go and pick grapes together,
- and stuff like that.
- I think we
might make a sound board after this.
[Jessica laughing]
For all of your different accents.
- It's going to be amazing--
- For all my accents?
- Yeah.
- Nice.
- It's going to be great.
- Dominic's accent,
it's more just from Erik faking it. So,
this guy, Stepan, who was one of
the family friends of Erik's family, they
were like, "Stepan's in art school.
He should come be your intern," to
Erik. So, we got an intern! [laughs]
So, Stepan's really awesome though. He's,
he's like a growing designer, he just
graduated from college and while he's done
hardly any actual work under my tutelage
because it's really hard for me
to actually delegate work,
because when you do lettering,
the deadlines and really tight
and the learning curve is
so crazy. So, if I actually
have an intern come in and try and do
stuff for me--I had one time where
I was like, "You're just going to
do the work that I'm doing,
and with the same deadline
that I'm doing,
and that's going to be what we do. And, I
had like ten headlines for a magazine due
the following Tuesday, and by the time the
deadline came around, they were done
with like 75 percent of one headline. And
I was like, "Okay. This is why interns
- aren't really useful all the time.
- Well it's hard also--I read your
most recent blog post about leveling up
in type design, and they're having to
mimic your style, also. And that's
something that you've built
over time, and then you've kind of
ingrained into yourself, but it's
- really hard to translate to them--
- And it's also--even if
you have someone literally try to copy you
there's going to be things that they do
that's different, and there's an essence,
sometimes that they can't get
because it's like, they're going to do
something their way, and you're going to
do something your way. But, he has
done a shit ton of data entry for me--
On the Type Directors Club website,
which I've been redesigning for free.
And then--so, in sort of return for that, 
I have been giving him hours and hours
of lessons on how to actually
deal with HTML, and CSS,
- and PHP. So,--
- That's awesome.
as much as it's not my specialty. It's
a thing that is much easier to teach
- in a short term way than lettering.
- Yeah, and I think this has come up
in a couple other talks that we posted
here. When do you know that you're
able to teach those things? There's
this point where you're like,
"Oh. I know these things well,
I can probably communicate,
how to program PHP, or how to write HTML,
and CSS," and it's often that women tend
to short themselves, and be like, "Oh,
I only did this on my side-projects.
So, obviously I'm not very good at it.
Whereas men in some examples
will actually be like, "I'm a professional
because I've done this, like two times.
Well I think that's always been
a thing, though. And I think
that's been one of my strengths
with my articles.
And with everything, I never
tried to say, "I am the best
- at this."
- Yeah.
I always just say, "This is my
experience. Let me teach you
- my experience.
- Right.
And I think that as long as you can
approach everything you do that way,
you're always going to be
an expert on what your
- experience is.
- Absolutely.
You know how you learned, and it might not
be what absolutely the experts do learn
- or whatever.
- Right.
But you can teach the way that you
learned and they can learn it later
in a better, more streamlined way,
or whatever. But, I also think that
some people just love to teach.
I am one of those people
that I'm just like,
"I love explaining stuff to people."
I could sit there and talk
about stuff forever.
I could teach you all sorts of stuff.
I love public speaking. I feel
super energized after.
I'll go home tonight and be like,
[yells enthusiastically]
and Russ will be asleep on the sofa.
But it's, it's like, some people,
are really experts at what
they do, and are so good at what they do,
but they just don't love teaching.
They just don't love it.
And I think you have to love teaching,
and that's more important than
- being an expert.
- Right.
If you don't love something, don't do it.
Or it's even that--Teaching is a
really specific skill that requires
- such weird energies.
- [Julie laughs]
to be able to do. I admire
people that do it all day.
- I don't--
- Right.
When I do workshops I am like--
I feel like I could have mono
- [interviewer laughs]
- at the end of
a workshop. It's crazy. It's so
- exhausting.
- It is.
But to think that people do that
for like nine months of the year,
for like eight hours a day, is crazy.
[Julie] And get paid pretty
much nothing for it. Yeah.
[Jessica] And get paid pretty much nothing
- for it,
- Yeah.
And it's so exhausting, and it's such a
skill, but it's a skill that most people
don't understand or appreciate, because
they think, "Well. Oh my God! Well, I know
a thing, I can teach a thing."
But not everyone can teach a thing.
Not everyone can teach a thing,
Awesome. That's what I'll title the talk
when we post it on Youtube.
- [Jessica laughs] Nice!
- "Not everyone can teach a thing.
My last question for you--and this subject
header was, "What's next for Jessica?"
What's one design skill or dev skill that
you wish you had, that you don't have
- right now?
- Part--a big skill,
that I wish that I had but I don't have,
but I also sort of don't want to learn,
- Which is tough,
- [Julie laughs]
That's a tough zone. There's a lot of
technical stuff with type design that
I know that I should learn, and that I
want to learn, but I wish that I could
just inject it into my brain Matrix-style.
[Julie and audience laughing]
Because, type design is such
a tiny, tiny, tiny community
- of people--
- Right.
that the people that are making the tools
for type designers are other type
- designers.
- Yeah.
So, in order be able to take advantage of
all the technical tools for type design
you sort of have to be a maker of the
technical tools for type design. And,
I love HTML and CSS, I love a little bit
of PHP, I love learning a bit of jQuery,
and--but, the actual diving in and making
Python plugins, and learning how to
operate all these other weird--
like ten plugins at once,
that other type designers have made
to streamline stuff, and to do really
complex OpenType programming is something
that I really want to know how to do,
but it's that totally like, "Learning
sucks and knowing is great,"
It's that whole process where it
just feels--even if I'm knee-deep
in that industry, it feels really daunting
to me, and I know that it would help
me so much to learn it, but it is
something that I want to learn,
- but haven't learned yet.
- I'm sure there are maybe,
I can think of two--specifically--
people who are in this crowd
- that can maybe help you with that.
- I--yeah. While everything is--
- So I was thinking about--Yeah.--
- Well, the thing is that, I don't
need people to help me with it. I
need no one to help me with it.
Because, my issue is,
- I'm such a delegator--
- [interviewer laughs]
- I'm so good at delegating--
- [interviewer laughs]
As soon as I find people that
know how to do stuff, I'm like,
"Oh, you know how to do this?
Just do it for me. That's great.
- [Julie laughs]
- You know, because
you're good at that. I'll
pay you, it's no big deal.
[Julie] So whoever those two people
were, don't talk to Jessica.
- Don't talk to me.
- [audience laughing]
Don't tell me about your skills, only
tell me once we're already dating
for like a year, and then you're
sitting next to me on the sofa,
and then I'm just like,
- "Oh, how do you do that thing?"
- [Julie laughs]
And then you can tell me.
- But, not until then.
- Amazing.
- [Jessica laughing]
- How would--
- How does Russ feel about that?
- Russ makes me schedule times
with him, to ask him questions.
- That's amazing
- [everyone laughing]
He makes the most horrible faces when I
ask him questions in the middle of working
on a project, because I'll be like, "Oh,
I'm trying to make this thing move
over here, when you touch it, and
he just he grabs my computer
from me, puts it on his lap, and goes 
like this, [taking a deep breath]
- [Julie and audience laughing]
- And, nothing makes me want to
take that computer from him more than that
face and it's just him--It's not him being
frustrated. It's him like, "I'm
getting in the zone." But it is
- the most--
- Yeah.
Like, "hate that you're making me
- do this face."
- Amazing.
- So now we have like,--
- [Julie laughing]
"Russ, I need to schedule two hours of
- jQuery time this afternoon,--
- [Julie and audience laughing]
Will you help me?"
He's like, "Okay.
- [laughs]
- That's amazing.
So we'll send Russ a bottle of whiskey,
- also.
- Yeah.
- I think he deserves it--
- For the two hours.
Way more than I do,
- Exactly.
- For sure.
[Julie] Cool! Well, thank you, Jessica
for being here, thank you to everyone
who showed up, and stuck around. We are
hosting a drink-up at a nearby bar tonight
from now until 11:30, so drinks are on us.
It's at Novella, which
is at 3rd and Mission.
Whoever wants to join us there
is more than welcome to.
And, can we just give Jessica
an outstanding round
- of applause for--
- Thank you guys
[audience clapping and cheering]
Don't give her your business card.
- Only one. Only one.
- Just not five--
Well, you can
-give her one business card.
- Just not five.
- That's the--
- And I'm sorry,
And you're welcome for all
- the cursing. [laughs]
- Thank you!
♪ [funky soul] ♪
Thank you. Thank you, guys!
