Jill Bell
Jill Bell is an American lettering artist, calligrapher and type designer.
A graduate of UCLA and Otis/Parsons, Bell is a graphic artist who creates custom lettering, logotypes, titles, fonts and handwriting for advertising, entertainment, packaging, and publishing. Before establishing herself as a freelance artist, she worked as sign painter in a shop, and for Saul Bass. She also creates original, one-of-a-kind, fine art pieces that frequently feature alphabets and lettering.
Bell has created fonts for most of the major type foundries including ITC (International Typeface Corporation),[1] Adobe Systems and Monotype Corporation.[2] Her fonts include: Gigi, Smack, Carumba, Hollyweird, Bruno and Swank.[3] She has also designed and produced proprietary fonts for companies including Loehmann's,[4] Enesco, GSW Worldwide, the Navicor Group and Nestlé.
Jill Bell's work has appeared in various shows, annuals and books, and has been written about in newspapers, journals and magazines (How, Step-by-Step, Letter Arts Review, Review, Tupigrafia, Publish, Creation Numerique, etc.). Her work can be seen in the following books:
- Type Rules by Ilene Strizver,
- Creative Type by de Jong, Purvis and Friedl,
- Alphabook by Roger Walton editor,
- Extreme Fonts by Drate and Salavetz,
and in other books on type and lettering.
She has spoken at numerous schools, universities, professional organizations and conferences such as Seybold, ATypI, TypeCon, AIGA, TypoBerlin, NY TDC (Type Directors Club), and was the keynote speaker at TypoTechnica 2002 in Heidelberg, Germany. She was a Maestro (judging calligraphy, speaking and teaching) at the Delphic Games [5] in Jeju, South Korea in September, 2009.
Bell judged TDC2 2002,[6] the type design contest of the Type Directors Club, and Linotype's Type Design Contest [7] in Bad Homburg, Germany in 2004.
Bell publishes the monthly Letter News Newsletter, an informative monthly e-newsletter which contains information about any and all aspects of lettering and typography.