Hi, my name is Jessica Hisch.
I'm a letterer, illustrator, crazy cat lady, avid interneter, maker of lots of silly things.
I am currently in my Brooklyn apartment in Bushwick and I reside primarily in San Francisco.
Today I'm going to be showing you guys this project that I got.
It was kind of like all of my projects, the last minute thing that I got really enthusiastic
about and had to make real immediately, which is a series of rugs that are typography based.
They're all lettering, I say type rugs, but I'm using the word type wrong.
But they're really, really fun and I finally found a way to actually make them be real
and not just real in the way that I'm on my knees crawling and cutting them out myself,
so I'm really excited to show them to you.
So while sketching is a really important part of my process and I definitely think that
if I don't sketch my work suffers, a lot of the magic and finalizing really does happen
when I'm in Adobe Illustrator or in one of the font programs that I use.
So for these rugs, I try to get the sketch as close as possible to what the final looks
like, but in the end, once I see it in that hyper-contrasty black on white, I sometimes
make a lot of tweaks or suddenly I'll print it out and notice errors in my drawing or
notice parts of the drawing that feel like the type isn't popping enough or that the
weight of the type is shifted.
So the rugs came about in kind of a funny way.
I got this idea that I really wanted to take these floor tiles and cut something typographic
out of them, so that's exactly what I did.
I ordered something like 20 of them and I spent countless hours sort of mapping out
how I was going to draw it on the back of the tiles and hand cut it and I ended up cutting
them with an exacted blade, which was awful.
But in the end, I was really excited about what the end result looked like.
The only thing was, it took me like five hours and my knees were just destroyed from being
on the ground and my hands were awful and I knew that I wouldn't be able to make more
than one of these or more than a couple of these.
So I had posted pictures because I was so excited about it and a company had reached
out to me that was a felt maker and I didn't realize that it would be something that would
be so easily feasible, you just share things on the internet and people want to help you
out.
But they got really pumped to be on board, so we're sort of figuring out how we can
do it in a commercial way.
So that's really how these rugs kind of came to be, is that I reached out to the internet,
the internet reached back to me and then now I have this physical product that I'm now
trying to figure out a way to keep it in a way that I don't have to sell them for hundreds
and hundreds of dollars because I want to make sure that not just the richies can buy
them, but I'm super excited with how they turned out and this is just one of the sizes
so this is the smaller of the sizes but I'm working on one that's like five by eight
two because the widest that I can cut with the CNC cutter is something like 69 inches
so 69 inches by however much long.
So I'm really excited to see what other things I can dream up in the future with this sort
of like felty CNC technology.
