Practice.
Find an incredible mentor.
Do what you love.
It's incredibly refreshing to hear someone speak about their life and their work that is genuinely excited about it. She is a great speaker — easy to listen to, explains her work in a way anyone could understand, and is very much herself. She started by showing some of her work from school, which somewhat surprised me. In my mind, the things I create in school won't remotely compare to the work I imagine myself doing in my career. Jessica included her beginning to demonstrate the little things that can influence your future.
It surprised me that she didn't know she wanted her career to be in lettering. For some reason, I imaged that all typographers knew early on that they wanted to be typographers...because lettering is not easy. It takes hours and hours of practice, years of exposure, and an great understanding of type history and tradition.
This is why having a great mentor is important. Get that internship! Take that job! Do anything you can to get under the wing of someone you admire. Jessica landed a job with Louise Fili through self-promotion of her illustrations. She mentioned that she enjoyed doing lettering in college, but by no means was it as refined or beautiful as the work she began creating for Louise. This is what sparked it all. As a mentor, Louise provided a more traditional approach toward design, an unsaid desire to impress, and a very extensive library. This type of work relationship can change your life and become the catalyst to your career. Throughout the two and a half years that Jessica worked for Louise, she continued to do freelance and personal projects on the side.
Illustration and Design live in two completely different worlds. It's fun to watch how people make the both work together in their own career. For Jessica, it seems like she is hired for either one or the other, but it was pretty entertaining to hear her break down the differences between the two design areas.
The biggest gem I took from this talk was that you'll be rewarded for doing what you love. Stay passionate and keep creating, because sometimes, those personal projects can be the reason people know your name. Jessica gained a large part of her popularity from a personal project she started called Daily Drop Cap. If you love it, do it daily. It's bound to get you somewhere close to where you want to be.
