How the process of creating hand lettering can help you write your book
Jessica Hische has written a book named In Progress – see inside a lettering artist’s sketch book and process from pencil to vector.
How can a book with a focus on the art of lettering be transferred across other industries, in particular, writing books?
Have a look at the steps that Jessica uses to approach her projects.
First, Jessica discusses the importance of research and brainstorming as the initial step in her process.
She is focused on doing ‘one thing’ at a time. It would seem that this has contributed to her creating a large volume of work and being a leader in her field. (Maybe she has read The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan?)
Jessica steps through an overview of the major process that she follows as well as the micro processes within each step.
In the book, Jessica writes about how she decided to do a letter of the alphabet each day. These daily letterings were put on Tumblr with the idea that she might create four or five alphabets over the period of a year. This, seemingly simple, commitment saw her being asked to discuss her work on blogs, be interviewed for radio and magazines, and as they say, the rest is history.
To clarify, Jessica works with a focused commitment to her craft. It would seem that her daily commitment to this process, has enabled her to continue to produce fantastic projects.
In hindsight, it might seem obvious that doing this would give her success. However, I am sure that if you asked Jessica if she thought doing what she did would create what happened, the answer would be no.
The question is what you can do on a daily basis that will contribute towards your area of expertise?
With that daily commitment, what could become your outcome? Could this be your book?