Lettering artist Jessica Hische first became famous for film titles while working on Wes Anderson's 'Moonrise Kingdom'. Her latest film project was for the adaptation of Judy Blume's much-loved novel, 'Are you there God? It's me, Margaret' and the soft yet welcoming lettering sets the tone for the film.
When I met Jessica recently ahead of her talk at OFFF Barcelona, I asked her how she went about creating the lettering for such an iconic and well-loved title. "I was just outrageously lucky," she said. "One because I live in a city that has this amazing resource called the Letterform Archive." One of Jessica's friends, Stephen Coles, who is a design writer, is one of the curators there. "They have anything you could imagine in terms of design typographic resources. I emailed Stephen and was like, ‘Hey, can I set up a time to come to the archives? And can you pull a bunch of examples of mid to late ‘70s design work, anything that focuses on feminism or feminine stuff?’. I went in, and they put out samples and I spent half a day doing that. That's one of the wonderful lucky things, I did quite a bit of research visually for it."
But that wasn't the only lucky part. "This is complete blind luck: my studio mate who is a brand designer, and I've known for years overheard me on the call with Lionsgate and was just biting her nails during this whole call," recalled Jessica. "After I hung up, she was like, 'is that for the Judy Blume movie?’ She has the only Judy Blume podcast that she does with our other friend and they have done like 200-300 episodes."
It turned out that her studio mate's podcast was so niche that the film had actually already reached out to do a two hour research session. "So I had this Judy Blume expert designer in my studio with me. We actually commissioned her to help me make mood boards for a bunch of the design directions because I'm like, ‘When is this gonna happen?’"
For more on Jessica Hische, see her musings on whether you should work for free. Find out more about OFFF Barcelona.
