Waving from San Diego 👋

Is there a future for making a living with letters? Let’s dive into it.

This letter was originally sent out to subscribers of the Love:Letters mailing list, a weekly longer-form email series from the desk of Ryan Hamrick at ALFA Studios, on June 29th, 2019.

If you’re interested in personal, honest stories and thoughts on life as an independent designer, parent, spouse, and more, sign up by clicking the image below, and I’ll see you in your inbox this weekend.

As you’re reading this, I’m on a plane heading to San Diego for a nice extended weekend trip with my wife, while the kiddos are off to visit with grandparents for three weeks. A nice little reset before coming back home to some serious focused productivity time.

Last week, I ran down all the things I planned on diving into while the kids are away, from live online workshops, to podcasts, and more. If you missed that one, or if you just subscribed since the last letter, you can find that one and others in the archive.

So anyway, if you respond to this letter with any feedback or input, I may be a little slower to respond as I relax and take a breather with Brooke in California. It should be about 15–20 degrees cooler, on average, than Austin for the time we’re there, so that’ll be a nice break.

ON THE LETTERING INDUSTRY

Speaking of getting feedback and responses to these letters, one thing clearly resonating with many of you has been me being more transparent about the fact that my incoming flow of work inquiries has absolutely slowed in the past couple years. It seems I’m far from alone in the industry on that front, and not just from what I’ve heard from some of you, but from numerous peers recently as well.

My friend Doris Fullgrabe in New York asked why I think this is, and essentially asked if I thought there was still a way for letterers and calligraphers to make a living anymore, let alone support a family. Boy, that’s a big question, and one to which I obviously need the answer to be yes. So I started to work out an answer in our thread that I’ll try to elaborate on here. Thanks for the prompt, Doris!

Doris actually hosted the New York stop of my workshop tour in 2017 on behalf of her work space Friends Work Here, and we’ve been in touch here and there since. You should definitely check out her beautiful calligraphy and letter work.

THAT’S JUST THE WAVE

One of my favorite songs in recent years is one mostly featuring two terribly polarizing characters, where the hook is mainly the only thing I really like, save for some great Kid Cudi humming near the end. It’s the song “Waves” from Kanye West, featuring Chris Brown. I’m very conflicted in recent years about my love of Kanye’s music, and I usually completely avoid any songs that bear Chris Brown’s name, but this one slipped through. Honestly, I mostly like it for a single, poetic line in the hook:

“Waves don’t die, let me crash here for a moment”

I know, it’s simple, but it grabs me every time. Maybe it’s the swelling synths alongside it that give it so much power, I don’t know, but at any rate, it’s stayed with me ever since it came out.

As I started to think through Doris’s question in writing, this metaphor started weaving itself into the fabric of my words. Is there a way for letter-focused artists and designers to make a living still? I certainly think there is, but why do I believe that, and how do I explain it?

THE SWELL

Custom letter work has been a staple of great design forever. If anything, the number of people in the advertising, branding, and other industries who have serious lettering chops and hand skills is far smaller than it’s been historically. There’s a reason some of the best resource books and work examples of hand lettering and calligraphy are from long ago.

Point is, yes, there has been a large rise in popularity, awareness, and appreciation of lettering in recent years, but it’s been around far longer than the immediate memory of most. Even I came to an awareness and love for custom lettering and typography rather late in life. I wasn’t the type of person that had always been naturally infatuated with signage or good typography, and having not gone to design school, this stuff just honestly didn’t really register with me for much of my life. Luckily for me, my eyes were opened to this glorious world of letters just late enough for me to not learn anything about it in school, but too early to benefit from the influx of decent online resources for learning about it that would come a few years later with the surge in popularity of the craft.

And I think the importance of this work will always be there, too. I’ve even started a studio based on that belief. These calm waters are a constant. An ever-present, steady level of existence. Things might get choppy, they might rise and fall, but those waves don’t die. That water doesn’t come out of nowhere, and it doesn’t disappear when they crash.

In recent years, there has certainly been a resurgence and heightened focus on lettering as a powerful tool in design, and naturally, that drew more and more people in. This increase in talent and popularity drove a swelling of demand for the work, which in turn drove an even further saturation of individuals that were attracted to the craft, rising to the highest crest we’ve seen in a long time, especially in the age of digital design.

THE CRASH

As with all trends, though, nothing stays hot forever, and all waves inevitably crash. I do think that for the last year or so, we’ve been experiencing the crash of lettering — at least the early 21st century wave of it. But it isn’t dead.

Right now, the artists that have fully embraced the things you have to do in today’s social economy to elevate your public profile to true star status, like shifting more of what you focus on to self-promo and performance, are gracefully surfing out of this crashing wave. And more power to them, because more often than not, those select few people are somehow still managing to put out some killer work.

Soon, this wave will fully settle. With that, all that extra saturation that it picked up, all those extra people, will disperse and go looking for that next wave. Maybe even some of those surfers. But the sea remains.

The sea of dedicated craftspeople, who have understood the paramount value and importance of letter-focused design since long before that wave, who resisted the trends and the hype around their long-term love, will remain. Ready to throw a life preserver to companies and agencies who thought they had someone in-house who could manipulate some fonts and handle the quick letter stuff, only to find themselves flailing in the choppy depths of realizing that actually, the letters are everything.

If you’re serious about making this your life-long pursuit, don’t get get sucked into the undertow of thinking the window has closed on making a living with letters.

If you want to support this series, one of the best ways to do so right now is to subscribe to get it in your inbox, and share it with a friend. You can also hire my studio ALFA for a project, which will obviously support me directly!

’Til Soon,