 me be the first speaker of the day so I'm not a bunch of nerves the rest of the time. This morning I'm going to tell you all about a hashtag that holds a special place in my heart and how it connects to the work I have done at Hallmark as a type designer. I'm assuming most of you have sent or received the Hallmark card before. For those of you who haven't, it's a family-owned consumer goods company that has been around for over a hundred years. Though they are best known for their greeting cards, they also make stationery, holiday ornaments, gift wrap, small gifts, and home goods. Ten thousand people work at Hallmark worldwide. Nine hundred of those employees work at the company as designers, illustrators, writers, editors, photographers, and lettering artists. Also included in that group are two type designers. In-house type design is not a new concept at Hallmark. In 1964 the alphabet group was formed by the late Myron McVeigh. Back then the purpose of the group was to create custom alphabets for use on phototype setting machines. We still make alphabets but computers and fonts have replaced those machines. Currently our font library has about 8,000 fonts in our collection. 2,500 are proprietary to Hallmark, 7,500 are from retail licensing. One thing I noticed when I started working at Hallmark was a lot of the projects I was assigned had women artists as a lettering source. As I started to see fonts in use on Hallmark products and was posting them on Instagram for my followers to see, I wanted to celebrate the fact that I am part of Hallmark's history of being a place a woman could succeed in the lettering and type design world. Though I constantly make an effort to work with all sorts of folks, I figured showcasing fonts that women have created would not only show my peers and type about the power and capabilities of women in the world of lettering and type design, but students and designers who want to take a type design class but have not had any idea where to start. So with that said, let me talk about some of the projects I have worked on over the years of lettering artists, designers, and illustrators that I really think you should know about. The first Hallmarker I'm going to talk about is master artist Lynn Ginta. I remember the first time we met. She had a whole gaggle of artists came to my desk to say hello. Her work is an extension of her personality, joyous, optimistic, and genuine. I really love her collages and how she incorporates imagery with letters. I recently attended one of her workshops and I must say she makes it look so easy. When I was assigned to make a font based off the word mark she made for Think, Make, Share, Hallmark's creative blog, I was a tad intimidated because I wanted to make sure I made something that she wasn't going to go, wow, that looks nothing like my work. When the project was given to me, I was pretty much told to make a font that looked like these subheads. We started having Lynn letter out the words and numbers needed for the font. The reason I asked her to write words over the letters is so I could see how she connects letters when creating words. Then I scanned them into the computer and used illustrator to sort through them, figuring out how much texture I wanted to keep in the font. These vector files were then put into a font editor. At Hallmark, we are proud glyphs users. When I'm making fonts that connect from letter to letter, I often start with these four lower case letters, N-O-R-N-S. With a lot of connecting fonts, it's ideal that all the letters connect in one way or another. Because Lynn's lettering was so loose, I decided to keep the lower case O's not connected by default. Once I got them into a place where I was thought the spacing between the letters and other connections were working, I started adding in high exits I saw from Lynn's lettering samples, which in her lettering was O-V-N-W. Once I got those basics into a place where I was happy, I proceeded withdrawing the rest of the letters. I also made another set of A to Z so it looks more like lettering typed out. After a lot of work, this is the final result. I made the developer turn on the open type features so all the entrances and exits were shown. I often give the lettering source first dibs on naming the font, but this time Lynn let me name it. I decided to call the font maker because Lynn thinks of herself as a maker, and making is such a huge part of our creative culture here at Hallmark. Lynn was absolutely thrilled at the name because she thought it summed up her word and how she makes work, a maker at heart. Barb Mizzic is a co-worker who early on put so much trust and confidence in me when I worked with her on several fonts. She's also one of those amazing artists who's been working at Hallmark pretty much her whole career. Her caring and love she shares of others seeps into her work. When I first started working in the font group, I used to watch her in all paint with watercolors at lunch. She also has a real knack for pattern and form and can letter in so many amazing styles. I recently saw this wonderful card she designed for the line and I just love it. It's seriously such an awesome card. So back to the fonts. Our co-worker Ali was getting married and we threw a wedding shower. Barb made this adorable branding for the party. As we were enjoying the party, I kept thinking to myself, I want to make this into a font. Because I knew my art director would make me make more than just an all cap style with the intention of working them together when later, top of one another, I decided to make three fonts. This font would have an upper and lower case characters to make it more useful for designers. Because I knew Barb was amazing at drawing letters, I asked her if she could draw out the lower case for me. I had some ideas but I wanted to have her take on it. After some processes and art directing a little, we got the letters to a point where we both love them. Though the font ended up being really cool, what was been awesome about it is how's being used in a way Barb and I have never expected. Designers are always requesting narrow sans serifs that look hallmark. What I did not know is how folks would take the fine version and stroke it. Believe it or not, it doesn't look too bad. Though it adds another expansion project on my list. This is the beauty about working in house. You can test out stuff, make something and see how it goes. If something needs to be adjusted, it can be made with made adjusted without little issue. Jeannie has been one of those artists in the studio where I never thought to collaborate with her, but I'm glad I did. The first project we ever did together was taking her lettering and turning it into a font. What I love about working with her is how she unexpectedly opens me up to a new way of looking at what fonts can be. At Hallmark, Jeannie works as a designer and illustrator and is currently an art director for our department. She likes to think in shapes and though her work has geometry to it, it has a fun organic feel. When I came across Jeannie's line of cards for studio ink, I remember that we didn't have a ton of cool looking casual type faces that were smooth in our library. So I decided to do a collection of fonts based off her hand. The hardest part of this font was spacing. When I first showed her what I had during the project, she mentioned that she didn't think it looked anything like her hand. It was then I started to think about the spaces between the letters and her work and I realized that spacing it out really makes the font look like something Jeannie would do. I know this is probably horrifying some designers out there because we're always trained to be not loose on spacing but it just worked for this project so I just went with it. The next lettering artist is one I think you all should know about especially when she's going to be speaking in Kansas City in September at a conference called Made in the Middle. I first met Amber at my job interview and was taken back to how nice and welcoming she was. She was one of the people who was in my department that was my age but we both experienced and lived very different lives and worked in very different ways. Despite us being the same age, I look up to her. I love how the creativity just flows out of her but her appetite for learning is still there. I love how she always reinvents herself. In a way she was part of that reinvention for me in how I think of letters. Now she's a dedicated member of social content for Homeark Baby. I'm super obsessed with what she's doing for them in regards of advertising for social media. While we were still working in the same studio, we got a request from another department to turn this set of letters she drew into a font. They were told we were told that they wanted to focus on making the font look like it was done in chalk. I remember wanting to do some alternative characters for it but the deadline was two weeks and my art director said don't even bother this time. Instead I focused on the texture, something at the time that I was still figuring out. Back in the days when I was using font lab, it wasn't too bad to achieve the texture I wanted and liked. My only real concern was making sure that whatever textures I kept in the font would not crash the work servers. So I did a bunch of tests in a few glyphs to see how large the file would get. Because I knew there'd be some person who would be like I can't use all these points, I made a smoother version. I'm glad I did that because designers use both fonts regularly. The feature of Hallmark is bright and full of amazing women who in my opinion have accomplished more in their young careers than I have. I think about the time I was 26. I had potential but I was a mess and definitely a late bloomer. Livy Long is an extraordinary artist who has accomplished so much since she joined the lettering department at Hallmark in 2014. She just got promoted to senior artist this summer and there isn't a project she doesn't rock on. She's definitely an amazing young person who is sure for herself but never cocky or snotty. Livy does amazing work in and out of Hallmark. Most recently she did lettering from Dana Temanachi's project the illuminated bible. She always has tips for working out, eating healthy and getting me back into yoga. I'm 10 years older than her but I look up to her. Ever since I got hired we had been wanting to work together on a font. Years later we finally got the chance to on a cool connected script project. It was seriously Chris Met working with her. A wonderful exchange of us going back and forth. Though she did a lot of the initial web work I took over once she got these letters done and worked out diacritics and figured out some good solutions for some of the letters she wasn't 100% on. Believe it or not a lot of lettering artists are always requesting I check, adjust or expect me to redraw letters such as the letter lowercase c. I love how Livy uses her own font in her work. These are some of the cards Livy lettered for a line of cards exclusive to Walmart. What she often does to save herself time is to type out some of the words using the font and making adjustments when needed. This speeds up her own process and makes this lettering style accessible to other designers. Allie Smith has been at Hallmark for a few years. She started out as an intern in lettering and got hired after her internship and worked for as a greetings card designer. She has a very fresh take on the wedding and for wedding and holiday and can make the most vibrant colors look modern and fun. She also has a knack for making type look her own. This is some lettering and type treatment she did for a Hallmark calendar. I also cannot count the times I have bought wedding cards from her wedding collection she designed and lettered. Field Smith was a project I pitched to my art director because I noticed we didn't have a lot of mono weight scripts in our library. I was working on one but I wasn't feeling it at the time and after seeing Allie's lettering on the wedding card line I knew it would work really well as a font. I started by collecting a bunch of letters from her. Lucky for me everything she lettered was an illustrator using the line tool so I didn't have to like figure out stroking and glyphs. I just popped the letters in and then just used a noodler extension and figured out adjustments there. Once I got the vectors and glyphs I told her then what letters I needed from her which were mostly capitals and numbers. In this instance I didn't have her vectorize everything because she I had enough material to work with that I could easily take her sketches and translate them to look like letters she would make. After getting the lower case in a good place what I did was I used open type to make the her font look more like lettering. So what I did here was I just used a few lines of open type code to just lower lower the entrance and exit of the letters just so it looks like a natural loop. It's been so much fun seeing this font in the wild. Ali's back in lettering with us so thanks to Field Smith font other designers could utilize her work if need be. In this slide another designer Nan Tsinchai made a whole series of Valentine's Day cards and used Field Smith as the lettering. Having this proprietary font around is another way designers lettering artists and type designers can collaborate on work in an in-house environment. While we're on the topic of Nan let's just say she's a Renaissance woman. She's not only a great photographer but she's an amazing fantastic lettering artist and greeting card designer. She's always up for an adventure and exploring and hence become one of my dear work friends. Nan recently shared with me about how she went to college she was pre-med. Her older sister who was also a designer encouraged her to go for graphic design. I was following Nan on Instagram when she was still student so I was excited to have her come at Hallmark as an intern. She was on my list for collaborating on a font for a very long time but the right project never came along until one random weekend when we both happened to be at the office. You see I was hanging up posters around the office for Kansas City Design Week and I noticed Nan was working at her desk. She was working on a poster for an employee event and asked me if I had any suggestions for the hand text. She showed me all her sketches and I saw this amazing print and I told her to try that. She went hmm I think I might and then I left her to finish hanging posters. A week later I saw the poster and thought it would make a fantastic font. So the next time I saw her I asked if she could pitch to letter if I could pitch to lettering to be developed into a font and she okayed it and in about a month later my art director asked me if I wanted to work on her font and I said oh yeah so we got to work. I asked her to just write words and I also asked her to if she felt that it was coming out of her to try a lower case. She came back with three of these amazingly detailed pages of text. I had no problem grabbing from this for the font. One thing Nan and my art director agreed on is that we wanted to take her lettering and make it into a really clean font. So what I did was I took her sketches, I made path and glyphs and then once all the letters were created I figured out the stroking and then made the adjustments. This is the final result of that font. I really love it can be used simply or you can turn on the open type features and you can get all those little details that is something Nan would do. It's working and lettering from all these wonderful women that have completely gotten me out of my comfort zone as a typeface designer. When I first came to Hallmark I mostly wrote letters with a pointed pen. All these women have inspired me to push my styles. I can now draw letters. This job also allows me to try new things and push myself in ways that are completely against my norm. This is something I sketched up when I was in a black letter class with a retired Hallmark artist. I have recently hit the hundred fonts made at work and looking back is definitely like looking at a sketchbook. For me that's what's awesome about being a type designer. There's always room to learn and grow. Though there are days I really miss lettering I often will take on the random lettering project which gives me more ideas for fonts. I thought I would end this talk by talking about a font that completely took me out of my comfort zone and it's called Millie. My art director assigned me this project to create a font like this lettering he did and use a pre-existing Hallmark font as the starting point. So I started making the font and honestly I really wasn't feeling it. It just didn't look right. So I go to my art director and he agrees and asked to see all my process sketches which I showed him the whole pile. I pretty much used the whole sketchbook. He sees all this stuff and goes I really want you to use these as reference and I want you to pretend that you're a lettering artist trying to copy your own style. This was kind of my reaction in my head to that because I was like my goodness these are horrible sketches I don't want to turn this into a font but he asked me to do it so I kept going. So I get it to a place where I'm pretty happy with it and then he goes the spacing is not irregular. Make it irregular and this is what is happening in my head because I'm just like that is not what we do as type designers. But then like after a few days I had a epiphany and I just went okay I'm just going to go for it and make it perfectly and perfect. So this is what I ended up with and it was kind of scary putting it out on the servers because it was so unlike anything I would do personally. I would never make a font with irregular spacing but designers really took it to it. Like this was the first card I saw the first time I saw the font used on a card this is a singing card that they call Anthem. And then my favorite usage is on these anniversary cards. I mean it looks like I unlettered it which is pretty cool. So to end my talk I'm going to say this quote that I love from Margaret Kilgallen. Whenever I hear people talk about how there's too many fonts in the world or that lettering is oversaturated I think that maybe these people aren't looking beyond what they are inspired by. So here's it is. My hand will always be imperfect because it's human. If I spend a lot of time going over the line and over the line trying to make it straight I will never be able to make it straight. You can always see the line waiver and I think that's where the beauty is. Thank you.