Featrured Designer: Jill Bell

Jill Bell’s career with letters began by “imitating rubber stamp prints and forging my parent’s signatures in high school,” she admits. It was during that same time she encountered her first Speedball pen. As a result, she says, “my lettering lust began.”

The calligraphic arts continued to be her avocation throughout her schooling, but Bell’s college education focused more on literature than lettering. “I was about a dozen different majors and attended six different colleges before graduating from UCLA with a degree in English,” she says. Otis/Parsons Design School, in Los Angeles, did eventually provide her with a formal education in graphic design.

After college, Bell occasionally worked as graphic designer, but her first “font job” was as a sign painter. “You learn a lot about letters,” she says, “when you draw them six feet high.”

The seemingly logical progression to typeface designer didn’t come till later, with the help of some outside encouragement. Bell often sent tear–sheets of her lettering work to prospective clients, and in the early 1990s a set found its way from an editor’s desk at Eye magazine, in England, to Colin Brignall, then Design Director for Letraset. Brignall immediately saw the seeds of several typeface designs in Bell’s lettering samples. “He just called me one morning and asked if I’d be interested in converting any of my lettering into typeface designs,” remembers Bell. “Several thoughts went through my head: ‘Are you sure you’re talking to the right person?’ ‘I don’t know that my work would make good typefaces.’ And, ‘I wouldn’t even know where to begin.’ The words that came out of my mouth were, ‘Sure, I’d love to.’”

The Process
Bell begins designing a typeface the old–fashioned way: “with black stuff on white paper,” she says. Not only does she draw letters before she digitizes them; in many instances, the foundation for her typefaces comes from a hand–lettering project. Once she has the basic characters sketched, Bell scans them to quickly capture the shapes. But, she stresses, “this is just the beginning. My designs take a long time to complete. I’ll print the initial digital sketches and make corrections on paper, then rescan the corrected shapes. Once I begin to have the design under control, I port the characters into proper font development software. Then it’s more proofing and tweaking,” she adds. “I do a lot of tweaking.”