Jessica Hische
Transcript
Jessica Hische[00:00:00)]Most people are better at understanding the feelings and sensations that typography and logos give us than they give themselves credit for, because what we are as people are endless absorbers of patterns, and information, and all this kind of stuff as we move throughout the world. We don't take time to sit and digest it, but it's still coming in and getting logged, and so even as a non-designer, I think you can look at examples of logos where something's not quite right and be like, "Something's not right here, I just don't know how to name it." But I think a good exercise is just like looking at fonts that are available in the world and asking yourself, "What feeling does this give me?"
Lenny Rachitsky[00:00:47)]Today, my guest is Jessica Hische. Jessica is a design legend, and it was such an honor to both have her on this podcast and also to work with her on a refresh of my newsletter and podcast logo and brand, which is launching around the same time as this episode comes out. Jessica is a lettering artist specializing in typographical work for logos, film, books, and other commercial applications. Her clients include Wes Anderson, the United States Postal Service, Apple, Nike, Tiffany and Company, The Gap, and Penguin Books, and her work has been featured in design and illustration annals, both in the U.S. and internationally. She's helped create logos for Philz Coffee, Eventbrite, and Mailchimp, is a best-selling children's book author, and if you live around the Bay Area, you've seen her work all over the city without knowing it. In our conversation,
Jessica shares the process that she went through to update my logo and brand for my newsletter and podcast.[00:01:38)]What specific elements of a logo and brand impact how you feel about that brand, why a good enough logo is just buying for a long time for most startups, and when it makes sense to refresh your look, also some really clever productivity tips, design advice, and a bunch of really fun stories. Jessica is a master at what she does and I am excited to spread the Jessica Hische gospel. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Jessica Hische. Jessica,
Happy to be here. Lenny Rachitsky[00:02:21)]I thought it'd be good to start with asking you just to describe what it is you do,
because you're very atypical of the kinds of guests I have in this podcast and you also have very unique skillset. Jessica Hische[00:02:32)]Yes. Well, I will describe what I'm most prominently known for, because I'm a person who just does a lot of things, but the thing that I do the most professionally is custom typography, like bespoke lettering pieces. That translates to working for all kinds of things. Sometimes it's for film and television. I've done movie titles and things like that and television credits and stuff. Sometimes it's book covers. Actually, a lot of times, it's book covers, and then a big part of my business is doing logos, and logo refreshes, and things like that,
so basically being the person who knows all the things so you don't have to have that person on staff when it comes to typography. Lenny Rachitsky[00:03:17)]This episode is brought to you by the Enterprise Ready Conference, a one-day event in San Francisco bringing together product and engineering leaders shaping the future of enterprise SaaS. The event features a curated list of speakers with direct experience building for the enterprise, including leaders from OpenAI, Vanta, Checkr, Dropbox, and Canva. Topics include advanced identity management, compliance, encryption, and logging, essentially at complex features that most enterprise customers require. If you're a founder, exec, product manager, or engineer tasked with the enterprise roadmap, this conference is for you. You'll get detailed insights from industry leaders that have years of experience navigating the same challenges that you face today. Best of all, it's completely free. Since it's hosted by WorkOS. Spots are filling up quickly, make sure to request an invite at enterpriseready.com. That's enterpriseready.com. I am excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of OneSchema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Hi,
Christina. Christina Gilbert[00:04:21)]Yes. Thank you for having me on,
Lenny. Lenny Rachitsky[00:04:23)]What is the latest with OneSchema? I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like Ramp, Vanta Scale,
and Watershed. I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs. Christina Gilbert[00:04:39)]Yes. We just launched OneSchema FileFeeds, which allows you to build an integration with any system in 15 minutes as long as you can export a CSV to an SFTP folder. We see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds,
and the product teams that we work with don't have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to integrate with. We allow our customers to offer thousands of integrations without involving their engineering team at all. Lenny Rachitsky[00:05:01)]I can tell you that if my team had to build integrations like this, how nice would it be to be able to take this off my roadmap and instead use something like OneSchema,
and not just to build it but also to maintain it forever. Christina Gilbert[00:05:12)]Absolutely, Lenny. We've heard so many horror stories of multiday outages from even just a handful of ad records. We are laser-focused on integration reliability to help teams end all of those distractions that come up with integrations. We have a built-in validation layer that stops any bad data from entering your system,
and OneSchema will notify your team immediately of any data that looks incorrect. Lenny Rachitsky[00:05:32)]I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust. Christina, thank you for joining us. If you want to learn more,
head on over to oneschema.co. That's oneschema.co.[00:05:47)]Part of the reason I was excited to have you on this podcast is that I was lucky enough to get to work with you on a refresh of my logo and brand for my newsletter and my podcast, which I'm very, very excited about. It's actually going to be launching right around the time of this episode going live, so this is, in part, a celebration of the new look, and logo, and brand. I thought it'd be an awesome excuse to bring you on the podcast and give an inside glimpse into the process of updating a logo and a brand. Partly, because I think it'll just be people are like, "What the hell? How did this change? Where did this come from? Why this versus that?" and also just for people that are thinking about this for their own product or business, to understand the process and understand when it might be right for them, when it might be not right for them. Broadly, how does that sound?
Jessica Hische[00:06:32)]Sure. Yeah, of course. Everybody that starts a company knows that they need a logo. That is a big thing. Some people start a company and think the logo is going to drive the culture of the company, which I don't think that that is true. I think that the product itself, and the team you build, and the people you put together are the thing that should be driving things forward, but I do think the logo and the brand assets can generate a lot of both internal and external excitement and just tell people what to expect from the thing that they're about to engage with. Some people say don't judge a book by its cover. I'm the opposite, where any book... The cover of the book should be giving you incredible insight into what is on the interior of the book and setting the tone and setting the vibe so that when you open the book and read the book, it's a symbiotic thing where you're like, "Oh, I understand what I was getting into. This got me excited about starting it,"
and whatever. It keeps that ball rolling.[00:07:34)]But with the refresh work that I do, a lot of people start companies and they have a certain amount of money. If they're bootstrapping it, they have less. If they get venture money, they have a little bit more. But what they don't want to do is spend venture money on a massive brand exploration when you're still in the hiring process, you're still trying to get early stage engineers, and all that kind of stuff, and so I am sort of a weird contrarian in this way in the brand world where brand people are like, "Brand is everything. You need to take a significant investment in brand because that guides the vision of the product or whatever." But I think being a bit more of an insider within the tech world,
I understand that sometimes people start companies and have an intention to do something.[00:08:24)]While they're doing that, they're building the team, they're doing cool stuff, but then the company has to pivot for one reason or another, whether a competitor immediately comes out with a thing that you're doing or the technology that you're doing gets postponed, whatever's going to feed into it, and so if you invest super heavily on the whole brand vision from the jump, sometimes it's like throwing away money if you have to pivot. What I love about the work that I do is that I understand that a lot of people have to just have something to put on decks and have something to put on a holding page or whatever, and internal teams are totally capable of doing that early work. But then if it does become successful,
you don't want to get locked into whatever it is that you had to throw together before an investor meeting or something.[00:09:15)]I come in then to take the existing vibe and smooth it out, address any of the concerns that came up. A lot of times, it's really utilitarian stuff like this doesn't scale well, or this thing falls apart in this context, or we never had a good avatar version of it, or whatever. Sometimes it's really specific utilitarian fixes,
and sometimes it's just about growing it up and sophisticated it without losing what was there in the first place that people got excited about. Lenny Rachitsky[00:09:46)]To give people maybe a couple more tactical piece of advice here, what's a sign that it's maybe time to do something with your logo and brand from you took a first pass, it's good enough, your wife made one, your husband made you a logo, it's like, "Well, this is great. Let's just go with this"? What's a sign that maybe it's time to, "Okay, we should actually at least uplevel this, not necessarily hire studio but takes something to make it better"?
Jessica Hische[00:10:10)]Well, one of the things is if, suddenly, you're starting to deal with the greater rollout of the look and feel of the brand. If you, at first, just basically had a really beta website and small version of the app but you're about to do a new one that kind of updates and expands it, that could be a really good time to roll it out. One of the things that a lot of people do when they're starting a company is that they'll make a logo with a font that is really popular or widely available or free. If you are about to, let's say, print a bunch of swag for new hires, or you're hosting a conference, or whatever is that event where suddenly you're going to physically invest money in making stuff with your brand on it,
that might be a good time to do it.[00:11:03)]One of the reasons why I tell people why having a custom logo or custom typography can really matter is that if you're using something that's available to everyone, the chances of someone else coming in and copying you are very easy and high. You might be one of these lucky companies that just out the gate is outrageously successful, but with success comes people climbing up behind you trying to copy your success. If that success is very easily copyable and people will try to trick your customers into coming their way by repeating the things that you're doing, including the branding,
one way to avoid that is by doing something that's more customized when it comes to the logo and brand. Lenny Rachitsky[00:11:47)]Let's actually talk about the work that you put into updating my logo and brand. From that, we can spin off into lessons and insights that you have along these lines. Overall, just high level, what's the process you go through to go through a logo refresh?
Jessica Hische[00:12:01)]Sure, of course. Super high level, it's figuring out what the goals are. Some people have a goal where they want their customers to not notice it at all. They're like, "Oh, everybody loves this, but I, the person with a design eye, can see all the problems with it. I need to roll something out that fixes the problems that I see but that no one else really notices." If that's one approach to it, which is a very close in refresh where we're just trying out little things to make it feel custom or fixing things that have come up when stress-tested, whether it looks crazy when you scale it and looks like horsey and heavy-handed when you scale it too big or when you scale it too small,
you lose a lot of legibility and stuff like that. That's what would be a really close in exploration.[00:12:53)]For other people, they might have bigger goals where they're about to pivot the company to try to attract a different audience or things like that. They might have this really cool and successful group of people that are super users but they're trying to expand it, so then it's about, "What can we do to shift the vibe to make it include these new people without excluding our core folks?" My first round is figuring out what that scope is, how experimental, how broad are we going to go for that first round, because then everything else cascades from there. If we go really broad for the first round, then we're in this process of narrowing down the scope as we go down. Whereas if we go really close in for the first round,
we're already just talking about really technical stuff.[00:13:45)]This is another thing that is a little bit unique to me that not everybody else does, but I will hand off files to clients to try in situ really early on if what we're trying to do is solve utilitarian issues. Most other people are like, "No, you don't get the files until we do the final because I don't want you to run away with this or whatever." There has to be some trust with it. Yeah, figure out what we're trying to accomplish and always keep those goals in mind, and then scope out the process based on what those goals are. For each round, we're addressing different things. First round might be about just capturing the overall look and trying things as broad as we can, and then the next round is, "Okay. Well, now we have generally a look that we want, but is it the right weight? Is it the right letter height? Do we have enough details?" That kind of thing,
and then we get narrower and nerdier as we go along in the process. Lenny Rachitsky[00:14:45)]Awesome. In the experience of my podcast logo, I was an ass. At the end of it, I'm like, "No, this isn't right," because we narrowed, narrowed, narrowed, and then I was like, "No, I'm not feeling it," and then we unnarrowed it and went back. [inaudible 00:15:02]
Jessica Hische[00:15:01)]That is not an uncommon experience though. This is why there's a few things that I'm not opposed to that I know people that are very opposed to. I'm not opposed to Frankensteining options together. To me, it's like I'm giving you a menu of all the things that we can do, but I'm like a chef that puts a menu together where you can combine different appetizers and different mains and they all still make sense. Some people will give you a menu and if you try to do that, it's insane and it tastes terrible. But for me, everything that we're doing, I feel like, mixes and matches fairly well,
and I will let you know if it doesn't.[00:15:37)]It's not unreasonable for clients to go down one path and then use that as validation or confirmation that something that we did much earlier was actually the right way. In that way, if a client ever asks me to do something, they're like, "Let's see it in purple or whatever." There's designers that will really fight you tooth and nail, because they're like, "That is wrong, that is wrong,"
but I know that some people just have to see it before they can let it go. Sometimes you have to walk down a path before you're able to understand what the right thing to do was all along. Lenny Rachitsky[00:16:10)]That's exactly how it felt for me. Going back to the goals, the different goals people have when they're exploring this, you mentioned there's just little problems with the logo, it doesn't scale, it doesn't print well, that kind of thing. Another goal is people are pivoting and they want to change the vibe and the feel of the brand. What other goals might appear that you've come across why people want to do this?
Jessica Hische[00:16:31)]Well, sometimes there's a legibility issue that is really glaring once you see it and then people are too close in to notice it, so this is why it's like you have to show it to a lot of people that aren't familiar with looking at those letter forms and stuff. The one that came to mind immediately when you asked was when I did a refresh for Jeni's Ice Cream, which is a really amazing ice cream brand based out of Columbus, Ohio. They had a few utilitarian things in mind. They had this long J that created this pocket of white space underneath it that made it really hard to design with,
but then the biggest glaring one was that they decided to make the apostrophe of the Jeni's over the I as a cool thing. It made the word look like it said penis because of the way that J was drawn.[00:17:18)]It had a little loop at the top of the J. That was the most specific fix that I've ever had to do, is make the logo not say penis anymore. But yeah, I feel like a lot of it is misreads. When you think about logos and things like that, you want it to be something that, at a super fast glance, people can read it right away. That doesn't mean that everything has to be simple, but it just means that everything has to be incredibly legible, especially when you're starting a new company or you have a less recognizable brand. Because eventually, you become a household name and then people can look at just the color and recognize that it's you or whatever, but it takes a long time building equity before you get that. Until that,
it's really important that the legibility is just super tight. Lenny Rachitsky[00:18:04)]Let's talk about actually thinking through my new logo and brand. Can you just talk about what you had in mind as you started to explore directions and we started narrowing what was the mindset, and the approach, and the vibe?
Jessica Hische[00:18:18)]I think with the Lenny's brand, you are what I would call a person that has a beloved fan base that we don't want to exclude or offend by shifting gears super crazily. When I was looking at redoing your brand, it was about what's here that we can look at that we should keep or at least explore keeping in order to make sure that it still feels the same on the other side? We didn't want to do anything super drastic. Some of the things to think about in that way are you have this sort of handwritten approach to a lot of the parts of your brand, and I was like, "How do we do something that feels handwritten, that feels like it could jive with the handwriting scripts and stuff that you were using but might feel a little bit more refined moving forward and in a way that could blend with illustration so that the illustration and the letter forms all feel like they were created by the same hand?" (00:19:17): A lot of times for me, when it comes to doing an exploration like that, it's about how do we make sure everything feels like it was created at the same time and not that we just tacked on new things? Figuring out how to blend everything together is important. Color was also a big one. I feel like people's color stories are something that is an immediate read, where if you blur your eyes and look at a brand, you can recognize it by its color, and so I think keeping your color similar was a big one too. But then I really wanted to try different approaches with the typography, doing stuff that was a little bit more clean, doing stuff that still had a bit of a funky edge to it. Because your original Lenny's podcast type had this sort of cut papery, a little bit off kilter vibe to it,
and so trying to capture that but with new cleaner typography. That was really fun.[00:20:13)]I was using a typeface Degular as part of it, which has a nice wonkiness to it. It was drawn by a friend of mine, James Edmondson, who I love all of his stuff. That was one of the things that we approached because I felt like it could capture the look of the original cut paperesque type. But yeah, it was really fun to try a lot of different things and work within the iconography that you had used on a few stuff with the microphones, and also marshmallows, and campfires, and all kinds of things,
and just trying to make a more unified system. Lenny Rachitsky[00:20:47)]Are there things that didn't work as you tried to explore this process that you recall, that might be worth sharing of just like, "Oh, that was a cool concept," but didn't quite work the way you thought?
Jessica Hische[00:20:57)]With working on this refresh, so much of it was thinking about what are the immediate uses of the logo. Your logo, you have these very specific uses that you need it for, the avatar for the podcast being a top one. Some people, they'll design a logo and then have these illustrative versions of the logo that get rolled out for other things, but I feel like those layouts were actually more important than even just having a basic letterhead-esque logo. That's an interesting way to approach it, because usually, it's like let's start simple, and expand, and make it crazier. I felt like we had to always keep those things in play,
so it was designing brand assets while also designing the logo. Sometimes you'll see examples of that in early explorations just because it makes it feel real to the client.[00:21:53)]That's why there's always the tote bag. You got to put the logo on the tote bag and then it feels real or whatever. But in our case, we had really specific uses that needed to get explored very early on, and that made it a slightly different process for me. In terms of things that didn't work though, I think just trying to work on the level of detail within the illustration and type so that it could shrink down, because we knew... One of the primo examples of the logo being used was on that podcast avatar, and some of the versions felt a little bit too detailed to shrink down that much. Trying to get the balance of that, having the illustrations feel illustrative and whole, but not when they scaled up,
to feel too simple like we just pulled it from a icon library. I think that was an interesting challenge. Lenny Rachitsky[00:22:46)]One of the impetuses for changing my logo, for motivating me, is my wife's a designer, as you know. She's got strong opinions about my logo, and she always was making fun of my logo saying it looked like a clip art fireplace that anyone just could just plug and play. She's always like, "Oh, that's so bad. You got to change it."
That was one of the motivators. I think I might have shared that when we started working together. Jessica Hische[00:23:08)]Yeah. Also too, I think that really talks to what I was saying earlier about making sure that everything feels like it was created together rather than it feeling like these disparate elements, because I think you can have an icon or logo that is quite simple as long as the rest of the brand matches that simplicity. I think, for you, the biggest thing was making the illustration and the typography just feel like it came from the same universe instead of feeling like these separate elements. When I first moved to San Francisco, I moved to San Francisco from New York, and as a New Yorker,
I had an apartment with a full kitchen that never got used. I just ate at restaurants and did takeout for the seven years or whatever that I lived in New York.[00:23:51)]Learning to cook, at first, when you learn how to cook, it's like you're making a pot full of ingredients and none of the ingredients are actually working together. But then the more you do it and the more you understand how these things are meant to blend and cook at different temperatures at different times, you start having this cohesive dish rather than hot ham water. You know what I mean? I feel like a lot of clients come to me and they have hot ham water when it comes to their brand. It's just about turning that into a soup,
something that feels real. Lenny Rachitsky[00:24:25)]I want to take a quick tangent. Most people listening to this podcast are not designers. They're product managers, founders, engineers, and folks building product. I've always wanted to see the world through the eyes of a designer, because there's so much I don't see and there's so much that affects how I think about something that I don't understand when I look at a logo, and so I thought it might be helpful just to spend a little time helping people see a designer a little bit. Let me just ask you this question. When people look at a logo or a brand, what are just elements that make it what it is, that make you feel the thing you want to feel that we may not recognize?
Jessica Hische[00:25:06)]I think most people are better at understanding the feelings and sensations that typography and logos give us than they give themselves credit for, because what we are as people are endless absorbers of patterns, and information, and all this kind of stuff as we move throughout the world. We don't take time to sit and digest it, but it's still coming in and getting logged. That's why if you see something funky in the world, you're like, "That's weird. I don't like that. I don't know why I don't like it, but I know I don't like it." I think even as a non-designer, you can see that in typography. The whole being able to recognize patterns thing, I talked about this a bit at config, it's like it's a safety thing. Looking into the world, your eyes can spot that thing that's a little bit off,
and that thing that's off feels not safe to you.[00:26:08)]It's thinking about when we look at a meal and there's a thing on the plate that looks like it's moldy or something like that. You understand that doesn't look right to me, this doesn't smell right to me. Your body knows it before your brain knows it. Even as a non-designer, I think you can look at examples of logos where something's not quite right and be like, "Something's not right here, I just don't know how to name it." But I think a good exercise is just looking at fonts that are available in the world and asking yourself, "What feeling does this give me?" and just write them down. It doesn't matter, just give yourself permission to say whatever is happening in your mind, the first thing. Don't overanalyze it. Just look at it and be like, "That feels calm to me. That feels exciting to me. That feels whatever to me." (00:27:00): The more you do that, the more you can start seeing similarities in the ones that feel exciting, and the ones that feel calm, and the ones that feel whatever, and then get into analyze mode of, "Oh, these 10 things that I said feel calm are a lighter weight, have more generous spacing, have rounded edges, have rounder bowls to the letter forms." You just start seeing commonalities between the things. It's just about seeing them all together to understand what those similarities are. I think anybody can do that. I mean, you're not going to have the language of the leg of the R and the tittle of the I. Don't worry about that. You don't have to know typography language to think about it,
but anybody's capable of doing that. It can be really fun to just stop and ask yourself and notice. Lenny Rachitsky[00:27:58)]This is great. I want to go actually a little deeper. What I'm hearing is look at something, tap into the feeling you feel when you look at it, actually pay attention to it because there's wisdom in that. The specific things that you pointed out that impact that feeling are, you mentioned, spacing between the letters, the edges. I imagine there's just the color of it. What other specific elements impact the way someone feels when they look at a logo?
Jessica Hische[00:28:26)]There's the width of the letter, so if it's really narrow versus really wide. I always think about the width, the weight, [inaudible 00:28:35] facing, sort of detailed treatment of things, whether things are very hard and jagged or soft and how soft it is. Sometimes we just add a tiny bit of softness so that it just feels printed. You can take a typeface like Helvetica, just the one everybody knows. But if you take Helvetica and just ever so slightly round the edges just a little bit, all of a sudden, you have this typeface that feels more vintage, or softer, or whatever, because we're perceiving it, we would perceive it if it were printed on paper versus perceiving it as this hard geometric piece of technology that we're viewing. You know what I mean? (00:29:20): I know that it's because when you look at stuff printed on a page, it bleeds into the paper a little bit, which means that that softness reminds us in our bodies of a thing that we've seen that was printed. It's cool to sort of walk back your feelings also. You'll look at something and go, "That feels like this," and then ask yourself why does it feel like that. It might be because you saw it on a flyer for a band when you were 22, and it brought out that feeling in you of what it felt like to be 22 at that thing. That's a very specific feeling to you, but it can inform your decisions about design, because you can be like, "Oh, I'm not that much of a special snowflake."
Other people might have that same reaction but have different experiences that are adjacent to that reaction.[00:30:08)]It's cool because you are reverse-justifying decisions. I think that's a really fun exercise to do, is to Song Exploder your intuition. You make a decision intuitively or look at something and intuit what you feel from it, and then really try to dive in, "Why do I feel that way? What could this have reminded me of that made me feel that way?" You have to be just so forgiving and loose with yourself as you do it because then you'll get into some really weird stuff,
and that's really great inspiration juice for picking other things. Lenny Rachitsky[00:30:51)]I love the exercise that you gave. The one you gave earlier is look at a bunch of fonts, look at your font folder. Is that a place to go, just open up your font folder and just go through them?
Jessica Hische[00:30:55)]Totally. Look at your font folder, or go to MyFonts, or a place where there's a ton of fonts, and just search for something. Search for sans serif or whatever. Search for a really basic category of fonts. Serif, sans serif, script, whatever, the top level edge of stuff, and then just page through, page through, page through. Screenshot stuff that you like and make a folder full of screenshots, and then you can take those screenshots and start categorizing them. "Oh, this one feels feminine. This one feels masculine, this one feels aggressive. This one feels whatever." Just take some notes on it. Then, you ask yourself, "Well, why did I feel that way?" You're like, "Oh, well, this feels feminine because it reminds me of wedding invitations," and wedding invitations feel inherently bridey versus groomy. All of a sudden, you're like, "Okay. Well, now I know that if I'm going to use a script for something, this zone of script feels very wedding, so maybe I avoid that for this brand that's actually a cutting edge food packaging company or whatever because it feels too aligned with that industry." (00:32:10): Stereotypes are real and trends are real, and what can sometimes happen is some industry usurps an entire style for a period of time. If you use anything within that style, it's like you're aligning yourself to that industry. I mean, everybody that does branding, one of the things that they do is they analyze the competitors of the company. You just look at a landscape of what are all the competitors doing, what is their visual vibe, and do I lean into that or do I avoid that? If I lean into it, then I'm immediately getting this... Everyone that looks at it understands I'm a FinTech company because I look like a FinTech company. If my whole thing is I'm trying to be divergent from that, I'm trying to show how different I am from the status quo,
Yeah. I'm thinking green. The color green has to be a part of the logo if you want to be a FinTech company. Jessica Hische[00:33:13)]Yeah, exactly. If you're trying to be weird,
then you're like teal. Lenny Rachitsky[00:33:19)]On this topic of seeing a designer, is there any other tip, just before we move on to a different topic, of just how someone could learn to see a designer a little bit more?
Jessica Hische[00:33:30)]Yeah. Another thing to notice, because I'm assuming you're... Product people, I feel like a lot of product people end up having some engineering background, whether or not they're engineers themselves. They have to interface with the engineers and they build stuff, and so they come at it from a data standpoint. I can always tell when there's an engineer that has suddenly got taken an interest in type design and is now a type designer, because everything is very, very regular. You can draw a grid on top of everything and the lines all line up perfectly. You see lots of reverse justification of that when people are making logos and they have a more engineering background. The thing to notice, that is interesting within type, is that, yes, you're absolutely following rules,
but you're breaking those rules quite often to correct for optical tricks.[00:34:24)]If you look at a geometric sans serif, for instance, that's like a category of sans serifs, and they're meant to have a lot of really strong geometry, be very regular, like most of the sans that you think of that you're like, "I'm in love with this over the last 10 years," like geometric sanses. But when you really start to examine them, you notice that there's all these little things that people are doing to make them look perfectly geometric even though they are not mathematically perfectly geometric. That's another thing that you can do, whether you're doing it in Figma or doing it somewhere else, is just type out a couple of lowercase letters. Lowercase specifically are really good for analyzing this because they're smaller than the uppercase letters. You usually have to accommodate for the weight a little bit differently. You'll notice that when strokes combine, so say I have an A and I'm combining the lower bowl of the A,
I'm going to get a little thinner as I come into that.[00:35:23)]Or say I have a two-storey A, so a two-storey A is the one that's like this and then a bowl, you might notice that this vertical of the A there, the bowl actually eats into that stroke a little bit to erase a little bit of that added weight that would've been perceived optically had you kept everything perfectly regular. It's weird because you end up creating something that's perfect and then have to make it not perfect in order to make it be perceived as perfect. That's another just fun thing to start noticing. You notice it a lot more on typefaces and typography that is heavier in weight, because when things are heavier weight,
you're constantly managing these really inky moments where things join together and you have to subtract a bunch of weight from that so that it doesn't get perceived as this dark mark where the letter is happening.[00:36:22)]I think about lowercase Rs and lowercase Ns, where the shoulder of the N or the R comes out, sometimes the top of the R is actually narrower at the top than it is on the bottom, and that's to try to subtract some of that weight in there where that join happens. Anyway, that's just a fun thing to notice that you have to do that. Once you start seeing it, you start seeing where it happens more often, and the answer of why it happens is because correcting for this optical weight issue. You're like, "Oh, man. Now I have x-ray vision. I can see all these weird things I've never seen before." It's very fun. But anyway, a lot of people, when they first start out doing typography, whether you're an engineer or whether you are a designer,
they don't account for that. I can always just look at something and see whether someone is truly an expert at typography or whether this is a fun hobby for them when they're pretty fresh at it. Lenny Rachitsky[00:37:20)]The exercise here is open up Figma, start typing,
A single letter. Jessica Hische[00:37:28)]Make a single letter the whole page and then just draw some vertical lines,
or do the thing where you draw a little circle or whatever and see if that circle is the same size at the point where two strokes join together or the point where the stroke is just vertical and on its own. You'll notice that there's differences even in typography that's meant to look extremely rigid and geometric. Lenny Rachitsky[00:37:53)]I want to come back to my logo just to close the loop there. Talk about just the final result that we landed on, and why you think that was the final answer, and what you think people might get from it,
whatever comes to mind. Jessica Hische[00:38:07)]Yeah, totally. I think the final answer or the final logo, we took it down a lot of different paths trying to see where it was going to land, but ultimately ended up keeping it pretty close to home and really focusing on that asset of the fire. We tried so many different versions of it's microphones with the fire and marshmallows with the fire, et cetera. It was just about sometimes the simplest solution is the correct solution. I don't know, I just feel like in terms of what we were doing for blowing it out and making it really cohesive,
we went a lot of directions where there might've been multiple versions of the logo depending on the scale and ultimately ended up in a place where it's much more in line and consistent across the bar. Lenny Rachitsky[00:38:55)]Yeah. Maybe what I'll do is we'll share, I don't know if you're comfortable with that,
we could just share all the iterations somewhere that we went through. Jessica Hische[00:39:01)]Oh,
yeah. I love sharing iterations. It's very fun. Yeah. Lenny Rachitsky[00:39:03)]Okay, cool. Sweet. The biggest issue we had with the podcast logo specifically is, originally, I was thinking the mic made sense to differentiate it from the newsletter. At the end of it, it's just like, "Why do we have this freaking mic in there? It just feels strange."
That's where we revisited the whole idea and killed the mic and went back to a different version of the fireplace but with marshmallows. Jessica Hische[00:39:24)]Yeah,
I love the marshmallows. Lenny Rachitsky[00:39:26)]Awesome. I love it. That was my wife's... My wife loves the marshmallows also,
Indeed. Lenny Rachitsky[00:39:34)]I guess maybe one last thread there is we explored handwritten typography that you created from scratch, and then there's the block letters. Maybe just thoughts on those two options and benefits and why go one direction versus another?
Jessica Hische[00:39:51)]The handwritten one, I really liked because I felt like we could bring the line quality of the illustration into the handwriting, but then the only problem with the handwriting is that if you want to blow that out, if you want to include other handwriting throughout the rest of the brand, finding something that matches that perfectly without creating a custom typeface is a whole thing. I really like being able to combine the two, where we have this broader visual vocabulary that we can pull from, because you're going to have headlines, you're going to have subheads, you're going to have all these other uses for typography moving forward. If you just have one thing to pull from, it's a lot harder to work with. It's just nicer when you have a few elements to play with. It's like having a wardrobe. If you have only one shirt and one pair of pants, there's only so many things that you can do. But if you have all these things that work together and can recombine,
then you can blow out a brand system much more easily. Lenny Rachitsky[00:40:44)]Yeah. That's one of my favorite things about working with you, is you create all these different variations of ways to use it. It doesn't always have to be the handwritten one. It could be the blocky outlining one. It's not like, "This is it, don't change anything about this. This is the only way to use it."
Jessica Hische[00:40:57)]Well, part of that is because some brands, if you have a massive company, like hundreds of employees generating hundreds of things, sometimes having too many assets can overcomplicate stuff. Because unless you have a really, really well-written brand book outlining how to do everything that people are adhering to very closely, you can get the assets running rampant throughout all of the stuff and being used incorrectly. But because you're not a massive company and you have creative control over the things that are happening and can help direct that,
we can be much more playful with the assets and give you the ability to use things in different ways. It depends on how much you trust all the people that are handling your assets.[00:41:43)]I am of the mind that you shouldn't need a 500-page brand book in order to direct how the brand is used moving forward, and that if you do, the brand might be quite complicated, or there might be even just parts of the logo that make it difficult to work with. My goal always when designing a logo is to design a logo that's so easy to use that you don't have to be an extremely skilled designer to design well with it. That's my number one goal,
because I know not everybody is going to be at a stage where they have an internal brand team or a designer that's a rock star designer that can work with really complicated assets and make them look good.[00:42:28)]I just want the assets to teach you themselves, by just how they exist, how to use it. You, as a person that has any taste whatsoever, and hopefully people that you're hiring for any job at your company have some degree of taste. If you hire an engineer, they have to have taste about how that happens. If you hire a marketing person, they have to have taste about how that happens. They should be able to look at that and intuit most of the way that you should be able to use it without being explicitly told, "Do not do this."
Lenny Rachitsky[00:43:01)]This episode is brought to you by Merge. Product leaders, yes, like you, cringe when they hear the word integration. They're not fun for you to scope, build, launch, or maintain, and integrations probably aren't what led you to product work in the first place. Lucky for you, the folks at Merge are obsessed with integrations. Their single API helps SaaS companies launch over 200 product integrations in weeks, not quarters. Think of Merge like Plaid, but for everything B2B SaaS. Organizations like Ramp, Dorado, and Electric use Merge to access their customer's accounting data to reconcile bill payments, file storage data to create searchable databases and their product, or HRAS data to auto provision and deprovision access for the customer's employees. Yes, if you need AI-ready data for your SaaS product, then Merge is the fastest way to get it. Want to solve your organization's integration dilemma once and for all, book and attend a meeting at merge.dev/lenny and receive a $50
Amazon gift card. That's merge.dev/lenny.[00:44:08)]This is a good circle back to something you touched on earlier that I wanted to come back to, which is a lot of companies, in your opinion, put too much weight on the power of brand, and rebranding, and how much a brand can fix their problems. Can you just again share your perspective on just how this might be an issue for people where they almost overemphasize the power of brand? [inaudible 00:44:32]
Jessica Hische[00:44:31)]Yeah. Well, there's different companies. There's companies where brand is literally everything, where they're doing something that's not crazy innovative in the first place and the brand is the thing that is the whole company, and that's fine. That's a completely valid way to do stuff. It's like people that can take in information and recommunicate it in a way to another audience or whatever that they hit that audience in a way that the original information couldn't do. Think about all of the people who write books on psychology, and medicine, and all kinds of stuff that write it for a broader popular audience. They're the ones reading the medical papers, they're the ones digesting all of this really huge complicated data, and turning it into something that normal people can read. I think that there are companies that are doing that. They're taking a thing that is not innovative or isn't like they're not the only ones doing it,
but they're repackaging it in a way that takes that and makes it so accessible to so many people.[00:45:34)]In that case, brand can matter immensely, where the brand really is the thing that shows people that the thing that you're doing has value. But for a lot of people, the brand should be somewhat invisible so that the thing itself becomes the star. If we think about the experiences that we have using products, sometimes there's products where there's a ton of fun and delight built into how you use it, and that can happen through brand through design choices and things like that. Sometimes the delight is the fact that nothing is getting in your way as you're using that product. You just figure out what's your ethos of your company. Is the whole thing about doing a thing well, doing it simply, and making sure that everything gets out of the way of that experience, or is it like we're trying to generate this delightful thing or we're trying to open it up to a new audience or whatever? Depending on whatever that goal is,
brand can have a different place in that equation. Lenny Rachitsky[00:46:42)]I think some of this unique perspective on the power brand and the need for it in tech companies comes from you're not like a tech person. You work with tech people, you work with tech companies. Do you feel like that has an impact on the way you think and the value that you bring to companies to give them this very outside perspective?
Jessica Hische[00:47:01)]I mean, most of the folks that I know that work in brand or traditional graphic design, print design, they don't necessarily have a lot of insight into how building companies works. They're not friends with a ton of startup founders and things like that. I've just had been in this very fun position being like everyone's token creative person in The Bay for a while, and this been for a long time. I remember speaking at a Silicon Valley event that was women in Silicon Valley in 2009 or 2010, something like that. It's interesting to be a person that has never actually, themselves, worked at a tech company but felt so involved and understanding about how all of that works. My partner, the reason why we're in The Bay is because he got hired by Facebook back in 2011. We were olds at the time. Take that with a grain of salt,
don't judge me.[00:48:02)]Because we were 28, 29 coming over to work at Facebook and everybody there was 23, 24, and so all the people that we ended up meeting in The Bay were more people our age that were moving on to start companies and things like that. We just got to see that perspective so clearly of what it is to branch out on your own, to fundraise, to do all this stuff, to pivot, to do little experimental apps and see where that goes to get acquired as a team versus getting acquired as a technology or whatever. I've been able to see that in a way that I feel like a lot of people that do my job don't get to see. That makes me very sympathetic and towards what it is to want to build a brand as a founder. I understand that you have limited resources and those resources aren't necessarily going to get devoted to doing a $200,000 brand exploration, because when you have $500,000 of money at all for a year to try to get things going,
you certainly should not spend half of that money on branding.[00:49:12)]That's my opinion, but that's not to say that brand can't be important and can't come in at some level or can't be thought of as a partnership between you and someone else where... There's this whole idea of fractional leadership now, which I feel like hasn't really infiltrated my world as much, but I don't know why it hasn't, because most people don't have internal comms teams, internal brand teams, until the company is very mature. The idea that you could bring someone in who is a real expert in whatever it's that they do, just as you need them, and they just get consultant equity kind of thing,
that should be more present because people don't necessarily need to have internal brand teams for the first six months to a year of when they're doing stuff unless they grow really significantly. Lenny Rachitsky[00:50:05)]Along these lines, you have a pretty unique way of pricing your work. For people that may want to explore this with you, share whatever you can about just how you think about pricing and ideally even an order magnitude of pricing so they're like, "Oh, okay. We should actually do this."
Jessica Hische[00:50:21)]To go back to the process how it's always about figuring out what people are trying to accomplish, so a lot of my process scales depending on how broad of an exploration that we're doing. The way that I treat it is I treat my branding work not dissimilarly to how I treat commercial lettering, which is atypical. Brand people, what they typically do is because the client has to own the assets outright at the end no matter what, they tend to do is bill everything that the client owns everything as you are moving along. It's all sort of work for hire, but the idea being that it's a buyout of everything that is being made. What that means is that when a branding agency is pricing stuff for you,
they're taking the buyout rights and baking it into every round of work so that every round gets more expensive because you are owning all of the work.[00:51:14)]What I do is I treat it much more like a commercial lettering project where I say, "You have to own the rights to this eventually, but hey, let's break that out and let's keep the creative process lighter and less expensive so then we have more room to explore. So then if some stakeholder comes in last minute and blows everything else up and we need to start over, you haven't already paid to own everything that we've created, you just pay to own the thing that we create in the end that gets chosen." I really like the idea of keeping the creation process more flexible and to try to scale to what people need versus having a really rigid way of approaching everything. Sometimes people will bring me on really early in the process, where if they have an internal team or if they're working with an external agency or something,
they want me there from the get out.[00:52:04)]Some people are like, "We have no money and we are going to try to do this as much as we can inside of our business, but then can we hire you at the end to make it look good? If we can get everybody bought in and get it 80% of the way there." Depending on what people's budgets are, I have different ways of working, or just depending on what their needs are. Because my whole thing too is I don't want to step on anybody's toes, because sometimes companies have these really amazing designers that are working in-house, and it sucks as a designer who started at a company and thinks that you might be able to get a chance to work on what is considered the most important asset in terms of the brand and they just farm it out to someone else instead of letting you touch it. To me, that's a recipe for anything that I create to be immediately killed, because someone inside is going to be like, "It's time to shine,"
and then they're just going to kill all my work.[00:52:56)]I'm always like, "How do we collaborate? How do I make it so that I'm an asset to you? Not that I'm trying to step on your toes, not that I'm trying to take over what's the cool juicy work from the people who inside that are really excited to do it." I just want them to feel as bought in as I can be. But yeah, it becomes interesting. I feel like I get told by branding people that I'm too inexpensive because they're like, "Oh, for what you do, it should be 60 or $70,000 at a minimum to do all this kind of stuff." I'm like, I feel like the majority of the projects that I do end up being between 25 and 35, but depending on how you bring me in,
it can be less if it's just as a consultant. It's not out of the realm of possibilities to hire a proper crazy expert at stuff. It's not like you're thinking about sinking half a million dollars into the brand. That's a very different experience. Lenny Rachitsky[00:53:51)]Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. Before we get into other stuff that you do, because like you said at the top, there are many other things you do outside of this specific time of work, is there anything else you think might be helpful or important for people to know about working with you on a logo refresh or just thinking about logos and this whole space we talked about?
Jessica Hische[00:54:11)]The best thing is just seeing what's there and really being able to understand what's not working about it and what your goals are. Like I said with that reverse justification of intuition, I think if you know that the logo is not quite where you want it to be, just spend a couple days asking yourself why. "What is the thing about this that bothers me?" Don't get specific. Don't be like, "The way the R is," or whatever. Maybe that's the thing that we talk about down the line, but always think big picture before you think minutiae, because sometimes people think that... They'll throw a bunch of minutiae stuff at me,
but it's because they haven't really stopped to think about what is the overall thing that's bothering them.[00:54:59)]You just never get there if you're always trying to address detail before you address the big picture stuff. You have to just always start super top level, and really ask yourself very broad questions about why you think it's not working, and then go tighter, and tighter, and tighter, and be like... It really could be like, "This C has always bothered me," and then we can get real specific about that when I'm doing the refresh. But I think I also need to understand the overall reason why we're doing this,
not just the little bugaboo that bothers you specifically but might not bother anybody else. Lenny Rachitsky[00:55:35)]Yeah. When I was thinking about this, it feels like my whole feeling was this could be better. That's all it was for me initially, is just like I feel like it could be a lot better. I imagine that's enough for some people, just like, "I think this could be better," and then here's things [inaudible 00:55:50].
Jessica Hische[00:55:49)]Yeah. That's definitely enough for some people, because I think sometimes... I think you, specifically, had a very clear vibe going on with all of your brand stuff. Some people, it's totally like a mishmash grab bag of random trends and there's no real voice that's coming through. But I feel like you've been doing this for a while, and when you see everything together, there's definitely a very clear vision and vibe that you get from everything. I always tell people that having terrible vision can be your best asset when it comes to logo and brand,
because it allows you...[00:56:30)]Just take your glasses off if you have terrible vision, and look at it, and get the feeling when you can't see the detail. You have to be looking at it with blurred eyes. What is the overall look of this thing? Just trying to get as broad and noodly as you can with it instead of it being about those really specific one by one stuff. I think when you blur your eyes on your brand,
there was a really clear cohesiveness to it already. It was just about massaging it into a more consistent professional-looking place. Lenny Rachitsky[00:57:07)]Well, I can't look at the old logo anymore now that I've gotten this thing coming together, so I'm really excited for this to come out. Just a couple closing questions. One is you have a lot of other stuff going on that is not just typography and logo refreshes. You have children's books, you do lettering for classics,
you have a store in Oakland. Talk about all these other things you got going on in case it might interest people. Jessica Hische[00:57:32)]Sure. Yeah, of course. I'm based here in The Bay, as we've talked about, and I have a studio in Downtown Oakland. My studio is like Barbie's creative Dream house, where the top floor is my office, that's where I'm right now, and then the bottom floor on one side is a workshop. I do a lot of printmaking. I went to college at a school that was very focused on interdisciplinary work, and I feel like I bring a lot of manual analog processes into my work a lot. I find it really important to make physical things as a part of my creative process, so I do a lot of printmaking. On the other side downstairs is a brick and mortar store. I've always wanted to have a brick and mortar store because, as an artist,
I think having people have a physical connection to your work can be really important.[00:58:20)]I think one of the reasons why people hire me to do things for them is because one of the gifts of working with someone that is a real nerd professional about whatever it is that they do is that they bring you along the journey and give you the language to talk about the thing through their eyes and through their experience. To me, the funnest thing for me is actually telling clients and teaching them about all the things that we are doing along the way so then they go out into the world as a newly-minted type nerd and can communicate all of these things to other people. That connection is just really important. The connection to the work, the story behind it, I feel like that's one of the ways that we create lasting work, is understanding that the work exists because there's a story behind it. Things, if they're just created because of the aesthetics or they're just created quickly or whatever,
it's really easy to discard them because there's not a story behind it.[00:59:22)]But if you think about all the objects in your life that have followed you throughout your life, what's a thing that you've had since you were in fifth grade or whatever that is still magically in your possession in your house? You have that because the story of that thing is so important to you. I think that the work that we create, the design that we create, can have that. It can be imbued with so much story and meaning, that when we think about moving on from it, we're like, "Ugh, but this." I think that's one of the ways to build a lasting brand, is to just make sure that the story of creating it feels so real, and visceral, and important. The store is a way for people to have a physical connection to other work that I create,
like the prints and things like that.[01:00:07)]With the kids' book stuff, that's also about creating lasting stuff. I like creating physical things in the world. I like repackaging things that I've learned in therapy in a way that kids will appreciate and enjoy. I'm just always thinking about what's a way that I can say a thing that has been said before but hasn't been said in this way. If I can turn that into a physical object that people can have and appreciate, all the better. But yeah, I don't know. While, professionally, what I do is considered very niche, I feel like all the things that I do are quite diverse, because they tickle different parts of my brain. I have to use my hands in different ways and my mind in different ways. It's how I've been able to generally avoid feeling burnt out as a creative,
is just being able to move on between different kinds of work and just feel excited about different things at different times. Lenny Rachitsky[01:01:05)]For folks that want to maybe check out the store, how do they find it? It's called Jessica and Friends, is that right?
You can just Google JH&F. Lenny Rachitsky[01:01:14)]Google Maps, yeah. [inaudible 01:01:17]
Jessica Hische[01:01:18)]Yeah. I put JH&F on as a part of the Google Maps name so I don't have to spell my name to strangers, because I have a weird German spelling last name. I also have a second store called Drawling, which is drawing with an L thrown in there. That one is an all-ages art supply store that's sort of a kids' art supply store. That one grew out of JH&F as well. Those two stores exist. With my books, if you just look up my last name on any of your favorite booksellers,
you'll find me. Lenny Rachitsky[01:01:49)]Last question. I'm just going to throw this out there in case something interesting comes up. We have a segment on this podcast called AI Corner, where I like to see how people have found ways to use AI in their work, in their life to be more productive, do cool things. Is there some way that you've found a way to use AI in the work that you do that makes you do more interesting stuff?
Jessica Hische[01:02:09)]A little bit. I am in this really interesting position in terms of AI where my partner works at Meta on GenAI stuff. He's a director on the GenAI team at Meta and is very bought into AI as a whole thing. I am a little [inaudible 01:02:28] about its impact on a lot of the things that we do. I think, overall, it will become a tool and be very useful, especially in a lot of different fields. But I think this timeframe in which it's more novelty is going to have not the best impact on things like illustration, but eventually, we'll all come out of it and it'll be fine. In terms of how I've been able to integrate it into my process,
I did some work for Salesforce last year where the theme for Dreamforce was going to be very AI-driven. I felt like I needed to explore AI as a part of the generative process for creating that art.[01:03:08)]I did have fun creating custom lettering and then trying to run it through stable diffusion to get stable diffusion to generate instances of my lettering in different styles. We were making these clouds. We ultimately didn't end up using it, but it was still really neat to see. I could see the validity of that in the creative iterative process. I think the biggest thing for me is that I find that the sloggy, slow dregs of work is very fulfilling to me, that a lot of the evangelists of AI are like, "Oh, imagine if you could spend all of your time high level thinking, and coming up with the concepts, and guiding the vision, and whatever, and then just get AI to do everything else that you don't care about." For me, that just sounds like not the most holistic approach to how I work, because the reason why I do all the things that I do and why my process is the way that it is because while I love thinking and I love coming up with conceptual stuff,
I find it to be very cerebrally taxing.[01:04:17)]I need a break from that by doing the more low-key production end of stuff. That's my favorite part of the process, is we know what we're doing, and now it's just about going in. When it comes to judging logos, for instance, the days that I spend knowing exactly what I'm going to do and all it is me just moving little Bezier handles around and getting it feeling right and whatever, those are pure therapeutic zen for me. I think I will always have that as a part of my work and will probably not have AI be outputting that part. But I have been able to have it be helpful in the iterative process a little bit, both through generating sketches with that project and then also through a lot of stuff with writing with my kids' books and things like that, is coming up with lists of words and concepts that are adjacent to each other,
whatever.[01:05:17)]I have found that Claude and ChatGPT are very good for things like that. I'm working on another kids' book now, and I'm trying to think of the directions that it can take. One of them is sort of illustrating different feelings and things like that. I could sit there and brainstorm what are the different emotions or whatever, or I can just ask Claude like, "List 50 emotions," and then I can cherry-pick the ones that come up that feel right. I do find it's really good for that early brainstorming stuff,
and that's been really nice. Lenny Rachitsky[01:05:50)]Is there anything else that you want to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?
Jessica Hische[01:05:58)]Yes. Well,
I do have a new kid's book coming out in October. Lenny Rachitsky[01:06:02)]Oh, [inaudible 01:06:02].
Jessica Hische[01:06:02)]Aside from all the logo stuff, please do check out my kids' books. It's called My First Book of Fancy Letters, and it is like a new spin on an alphabet book, but instead of it being an alphabet book for brand new babies, which you could totally buy it for brand new babies because it is very simple, and fun, and they'll like the bright pictures, it's for the age where kids can recognize letters but can't necessarily read and write yet because they get so into seeing letters drawn in these different styles and imagining what other letters could be drawn in. Each of the letters is drawn to represent the word that it sounds like. Letters can be athletic, bubbly, or creepy, and then it's like, "Well, what does a creepy C look like?" (01:06:49): When kids are starting to understand letter sounds and recognizing letters, they can start thinking about what other words start with that letter sound, and then they start listing stuff out and become immediate over-the-shoulder art directors. It's been really fun showing it to other preschoolers, and TK, and kindergarten kids, because they're immediately like, "Well, R should be a river. It should be a river." I'm like, "Well, how do you draw a river?" It becomes this fun imagination exercise too, so definitely check that out. It's up for pre-order now and comes out October 22
nd. Lenny Rachitsky[01:07:21)]That is so delightful. I know you have multiple kids. Do you start to see the idea with one age of kid and then by the time the next kid reaches that age, it's ready and published? Does that work timing-wise?
Jessica Hische[01:07:31)]Yeah, the only thing is both of my... Well, my oldest child is a real super reader. She's always ahead of the game. The second that she could read, she was like, "Oh, picture books are for babies." Now she's reading, she goes into Pegasus books and is just like, "Where are your books for teenagers?" They're like, "You're nine. We're not going to show you that, but here are the middle grade books or whatever." There is a little bit of that. You are a parent, but you are a parent of a very young person. Kids don't want to buy anything you're selling as a parent. There's a little bit of that where I feel like I get so many wonderful letters from other families about how it's their favorite book, and they read it every night, and it's so important, and then my kids are like, "Yeah, yeah. It's just mom's book, whatever."
Lenny Rachitsky[01:08:23)]Yeah, that's bittersweet. Well, with that, Jessica, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?
I'm ready. Lenny Rachitsky[01:08:31)]Speaking of books, first question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?
Jessica Hische[01:08:36)]Rick Reuben's creativity book is so good. Definitely recommend that. I haven't listened to it on audiobook. I read the physical book, but I also heard the audiobook is very zen. I feel like it's just a very good palate cleanser in terms of being an artist and creating because it feels both high level but also very actionable, so really recommend that. In terms of learning about and understanding typography, there's this book called Inside Paragraphs by Cyrus Highsmith. It's very small and very digestible. You can read it in one bathroom visit, and it's illustrated really well. It has cool illustrations. If you want to learn about some basics of type and typography, it's a really great book, and incredibly accessible, and not like reading Bringhurst or something like that, so big ups to that book. Oh, what's another book? (01:09:33): I don't know. I feel like I'm just going to end up recommending all the books that I'm currently reading. This month, I read both Patti Smith's Just Kids, which I loved also and was also... I feel like I'm reading a lot of books about being an artist more so than being a designer. That book, I found really interesting, just hearing her story of moving to New York and having nothing. Just trying to be an artist, and make art, and having that be the thing that drove everything that she and Robert Mapplethorpe did. I don't know, I just feel like I'm looking for ways to get out of my very business-driven sensibilities around art making and get into a space that's more loose, and free, and driven by passions and feelings more so than necessarily career-based milestones and things like that. This is a wild card one too. I just finished The Emperor of All Maladies. I'm just a big fan of reading things about human biology and things like that and found it totally fascinating,
so do read that one too. Lenny Rachitsky[01:10:40)]I can't help but ask, how do you have time to read, raise children, work on so many projects, have a run a store? What is your secret?
Jessica Hische[01:10:50)]Well, you get pretty ruthless about your schedule when you're a parent, where when you're at the office, you are just heads in working, and so I think just trying to stay as focused as possible in that way. I do this thing where I bounce back and forth between projects a lot as I'm losing steam, and so having multiple things to work on keeps me motivated to keep working. I think it's kind of an ADHD thing, where I will start my day one way and then as soon as I start losing steam, I switch to a different thing, lose steam, switch to a different thing, lose steam, switch to a different thing. Rather than taking breaks,
That's an awesome tip. Jessica Hische[01:11:36)]Yeah. I mean, it's incredible. I also would tell people when I had first started out, I had a full-time job and then was doing freelance in the evenings. People were like, "How do you not get burnt out, whatever?" It's because my day job was so different from my night job that it felt like I was doing two separate eight-hour shifts instead of one continual sixteen-hour shift. I think that's something to sort of think about, is that there's always going to be things that need to get done as a part of your work or things that you're interested in and passionate about. Just having enough diversity in what that means is going to allow you to maintain enthusiasm for doing all those different things for much longer. Actually, the more homogenous your life and career and job is, the faster you're going to burn out,
so just making sure that you have enough variety and all the things that you do. Lenny Rachitsky[01:12:27)]That was an awesome tip. I'm glad I went there. Okay, back on track to our lightning round. Is there a recent favorite movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?
The second season's coming out. Jessica Hische[01:12:40)]I know. That came to mind because I knew the second season was coming out, so I'm just really excited about it,
but I think that was probably tops for me. Lenny Rachitsky[01:12:48)]Is there a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love?
Jessica Hische[01:12:51)]Oh, yeah. Well, there's a few things. Well, there was one that's just a super random one that was just pure delight. There's a Japanese brand, Penco, and they make a lot of wonderful stuff. I carry a lot of their stuff in my store. One of the things I bought recently from them is a pen cup, a pencil cup. It's ceramic, but it looks like a paper bag, a lightly crumpled paper bag, and then it just has printed on it Penco, whatever. I just really like it when you take an existing object and give it a new form. I find that to be very delightful, and so that was, I think,
one of the things that I really loved recently that I bought for the store. Lenny Rachitsky[01:13:28)]Awesome. Pick two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often think about, come back to share with folks, find useful, and work your life?
Jessica Hische[01:13:38)]It's funny being a lettering artist because I'm not much of a quotes gal, all things considered. I should be because I could make a million dollars by just making "live, laugh, love" pillows or whatever, but I am not usually continually collecting quotes. But I was just at a conference up in Portland called XOXO, and one of the presenters showed a quote on the screen that resonated with me more than most things that I've seen in recent memory. I feel like this is my new... It was one of those quotes that I was like maybe I should get a tattoo of that. When it gets to that level where you're considering a tattoo, you're like, "Okay, that's official." It was "hope is a discipline".
I just really loved that. It's by Mariame Kaba or Mariame Kaba.[01:14:25)]The idea that we have to choose to create positivity, that it's like a choice, and that in order to dream of these things, you can actually create structure and discipline around it, and that it's not just something that is just inherent and comes, you have to actually have a practice around being hopeful and positive. I just really liked that as a concept because I feel that way just about navigating through life, that everything that we do is a choice and that we can choose to frame things one way or frame things another way. Understanding that you have power in that, I think, is really important,
and so I just really loved that. Hope is a discipline. Lenny Rachitsky[01:15:14)]I really love that. I love any quote that inspires you to not feel like a victim, and gives you agency,
and reminds you that you have agency over. Jessica Hische[01:15:23)]Exactly. That's, I think, was the biggest thing for me is just... Because I feel very well-resourced in being able to deal with hardship because I'm always able to recontextualize and reframe. I think part of that is doing so much intuition justification, which is what we talked about, is walking through things, being like, "Why is this? Why does that happen, la, la, la?" When something bad happens,
it's understanding why it happened and then understanding the paths that it can take forward and the different attitudes that you can bring to it that can help you come out of it. Lenny Rachitsky[01:15:59)]That's beautiful. Okay, final question. I know that you recently remodeled your home. It's quite stunning. You share photos of it online. You worked with this amazing architect to help make it as amazing as it is. As a designer, here's the question, how do you find the balance between trusting someone, their own perspective and design approach, versus pushing into a direction you think that it should go? How do you find a balance as a designer?
Jessica Hische[01:16:28)]Well, I actually feel like it's quite easy for me to trust people to do their own thing, because as long as I go to them as being like, "I appreciate you and your vision and that's why I'm paying you," then the last thing that I want to do is micromanage them, because the reason why I'm paying them is because I don't have the bandwidth to do that myself. Because honestly, I'm one of those people that if I had nothing going on, if my job totally blew up or whatever, I would probably be one of those people that just specialize in a different thing every six months and would be like, "I'm going to build a house now from the ground up. I'm going to do this from now, whatever."
I just feel very capable of doing anything that I want to do because I understand that I can find the resources for it.[01:17:16)]When I hire people to help me do a thing, it's because there is this implicit trust in what they do and that that's why I want to work with them. With the house, I definitely had opinions about stuff. But in general, I'm just like, "Hey, this is your thing. You're the expert. What do you think? Let me give you the parameters and the things that we have to think about. Because you know more about wood resources, and you know more about the cabinet spacing, and whatever, you tell me what you think is going to work best based on all these things that I laid out for you."
I found it to be quite easy. I only got really wigged out about a couple of different fine tune-y stuff. Lenny Rachitsky[01:18:01)]I imagine architects and designers are like, "Oh no, it's going to be a designer I'm working with. They have opinions."
I'm glad it wasn't that bad. Jessica Hische[01:18:09)]I feel like my strength with the work that I do in general is just being incredibly decisive and understanding that there's 10 good answers to every one question. Some people are real maximalists about decision-making and need to look at every gray sofa that exists before they can choose the one gray sofa. Whereas I feel like I can look at 10 gray sofas and go, it feels like there's two or three categories of sofa here, and then within those categories, there's a couple of good options. Here's a brand that I recognize is known for being of high quality. That one's good enough. I can get to it really quickly, and I feel like not everybody can do that. And I think that that permeates through everything that I do in my life. It definitely is a huge part of the logo work,
because you really can do anything when it comes to typography.[01:18:57)]It can go in 50 million directions. It's just about having someone tell you, "Yes, we could take this anywhere, but these are the valid paths. If we go down this path, this is the most intuitive and most correct way to do it that is closest and most accessible to us. We can noodle on it until kingdom come, but do we have to? This is good." I don't know. I feel like there's some weird knowledge around understanding that nothing is ever 100% perfect, and the most you can aspire and get to is 99.8 or whatever. That last 0.2%, you could spend your whole life trying to do that,
or you could move on and do other things and understand that it's nearly perfect. Lenny Rachitsky[01:19:49)]That is really good advice and a freeing piece of advice. Jessica, it's been an honor to work with you on this logo. I am really excited for people to see it, for it to be the new look of everything I'm doing. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to learn more and potentially work with you, and how can listeners be useful to you?
Jessica Hische[01:20:07)]Oh, yeah. Of course. I have a website that I occasionally update. It is jessicahische.is/awesome. You'll notice I have a bunch of weird URLs on my website. That's a place to find me. Otherwise, I am on Instagram and Threads a lot. I was formerly a very active Twitter person, and now I'm not really there so much and I bop around with the Twitter clones, but I'm on Threads quite a bit. Instagram and Threads are good for social. Email, I'm easy, hello@jessicaHische.com. What your readers could do for me, I think it's the work that I do in terms of the logo refresh stuff. I feel like this audience is just totally my perfect audience for it because you guys are all a bunch of smart, awesome founders that want beautiful logos, but understand that sometimes you just got to get that first viable option out the door. Once you're ready,
you come to me and I help you and it's great. Lenny Rachitsky[01:21:12)]A match made in heaven. Jessica,
Happy to be here. Great convo. Lenny Rachitsky[01:21:19)]So good. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.