Melanie Rodgers

Graphic Designers are the kinds of people who aren’t ever satisfied with doing one kind of thing.  I am a designer, letterer, illustrator, and educator. I have been a letter lover all my life, and while most early interests wane with time, my fascination with typographic form has only intensified. Interest in letterforms, as well as a desire to record things thought and heard, drive the work that I do.

For over 20 years, I have been letting this obsession take me into all kinds of directions, many falling outside the environs of traditional commercial function and into areas including painting, fabric designs, animation, self-published books, zines and decorative objects. It is when glyphs become expressive, provocative, imperfect and arcane that the creative snowball begins to roll down the hill for me.

Legendary 20th century artist Eric Gill said “Letters are things, not pictures of things.” I second that emotion. They are like people – individual, complicated and ubiquitous. And not only are glyphs interesting to look at, they say a lot. As an artist, my goal is to allow the letters to take me and my craft where they want us to go. I relish the physicality I experience when lettering by hand as well as the technical knowledge brought to bear when I work digitally.

Letters and their myriad of forms, make me want to push my work further and further, both in solitary artistic realization through practice as well as in teaching, mentoring and research.