From the Courtroom to the Studio
Filmed on October 18, 2016 at the 2016 AIGA Design Conference
For Australian lettering artist Gemma O’Brien, adaptation has shaped her career ever since she dropped out of law school in 2006 to study design. In this session, she discusses how she continually reshapes her craft to fit new media and cultural trends, while discovering new ways to work by hand in the digital age.
Gemma O’Brien is an Australian artist specializing in lettering, illustration, and typography. After completing a Bachelor of Design at UNSW Art & Design in Sydney, O’Brien worked as an art director at Animal Logic, Fuel VFX, and Toby & Pete before deciding to fly solo as a commercial illustrator in 2012. Her typographic work takes on a variety of forms, from calligraphic brushwork, illustration and digital type, to large-scale hand-painted murals.
O’Brien splits her time between advertising commissions, gallery shows, speaking engagements, and hosting hand-lettering workshops around the world. Her clients include Playboy magazine, Nike, Volcom, Kirin, Heineken, Qantas Airways, and Diet Coke. A number of her projects have won the Type Directors Club Communication Design competition, and in 2015 she was recognized as one of the ADC Young Guns.
