Learn Letter-Perfect Design

In the early days of her career, best-selling children’s book author and illustrator Jessica Hische found herself drawn to lettering, which was something of a throwback art form at the time.

“It wasn’t a well-known field,” says Hische. “It had sort of fallen out of fashion—people thought, ‘Oh, I don’t need to draw letters because I have 400 million fonts.’”

Turns out she was onto something: Based in Oakland, California, Hische is an artist, author, renowned lettering expert, and fixture on social media, where she shares her warm, organic work with hundreds of thousands of followers.

Her preferred tool for making that work letter-perfect: Adobe Illustrator, which has undergone countless upgrades since it debuted in 1987. “I’m on it five or six hours every day,” she says, “but I may as well be using Illustrator 1.0. I believe so much in the core functionality of these tools.”

The iPad version of Illustrator allows her the freedom to “loosen up” and create on the move—an invaluable benefit when juggling work, family, and life in quarantine. “I do a lot of my more precise work on the desktop,” she says, “but on the iPad, I can incorporate elements that feel more hand-drawn. I like my work to be a little wonky.”

We asked Hische to walk us through the creation of an original work in Illustrator. Her guideline for the piece below was simply to “say something big with something small.” So she chose the biggest two words anyone can say.

“I started with an existing hand-drawn sketch, and used a combination of the Pencil tool and the Blob Brush tool to trace over it in Illustrator. The Blob Brush will change your whole life.”

“At this point, I had the ‘love you’ part, but not a lot of details. The flowers were happening, but not the detail within them. I started with the lettering because I needed the overlap between the black and the white. From there, I refined the points and Bezier handles.”

“For me, color is usually up in the air until I’m finalizing a project. But one thing I love about working on iPad is that the process goes very quickly, which means I can introduce color a lot earlier.”

“Next, I drew in the line-work detail for the ‘love you.’ If I were doing that on desktop, it would mean going point by point. It’s working in a very exacting way but not necessarily a gestural way. Being able to draw those lines with Apple Pencil on the iPad was much faster and made them look organic. I essentially drew all of those lines in under an hour.”

“Once I had all my strokes drawn, I hopped back to the desktop to change all my lines from mono-weight to having a stroke variation. The stroke-width variation tool is something I use fairly often, but it’s not yet in the iPad version. This was like the proof of concept for saving to Adobe Creative Cloud. There was no exporting and reopening files—it’s all instant. Work that would have taken me five hours before took about an hour. From there, it was just a matter of making a couple variations!”

Adobe Illustrator: Graphic Art

Vector design/Typography/Logo

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