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Anna Mills on the “human”

quality of her typography
The graphic designer talks us through some of
her techniques for designing type, including
the “ping-pong match between paper and
computer,” AKA the “input-output dance.”

Words Elfie Thomas Work Animation Graphic Design

— Typography Poster Branding

17 December 2021

Anna Mills grew up in “a strange upside-down house on a hill in Reading.” She The Latest
speaks affectionately about her early life in this house which her parents inundated View more from Animation
with creative materials for Anna and her brother to freely experiment with. A pencil
Graphic Design
was thrust into her hand as soon as she was capable of holding one. As a pretty much
born-and-raised graphic designer, it is revealing to hear Anna speak about her family
tradition of birthday card-making. She interprets these birthday cards as “some early
Step into the kinetic world of
experience in tackling a brief.” Each family member with their different tastes and Dimitri Erhard's future-facing
private jokes represented for Anna a “very specific audience” to adapt to. So from an graphic design

early age, Anna would carefully tweak “tone, layout, colour, paper stock,” to get a
design just right for each birthday brief.
Reflecting on a bold year for
Considering Anna’s determined approach to birthday card-making as a child, it feels motion design with DEMO festival
like a very natural progression that she would go on to study graphic design. After
finishing her studies at Bristol’s UWE, she now lives and works in Bristol and, since
her uni days, has been developing an extremely pleasing collection of animated
Studio Dumbar/DEPT®’s motion
letters and words. Typography is Anna’s favourite thing to work on and it shows. identity for North Sea Jazz Festival
Sinuous letters shimmy across her posters in a style that often recalls Matisse’s celebrates the energy of live music
satisfying organic shapes, one of her major influences. But Anna’s typography moves
on from the old master’s style and offers something joyfully new. She loves to
animate words and letters, making them dance and hop in space. But even when she This fintech identity was inspired
experiments with static type, she manages to imbue words with a wriggling sense of by YouTube videos of slicing Spam
momentum. The secret behind this lively quality begins to make sense when Anna
describes the way she works. Her approach feels similar to the way an artist might
begin sketching a portrait. All her experiments with words and letters go into a file 3oo is an illustrated site that lets
named “character studies.” She feels that each letter has its own “personality” and it you feed animals in Ukrainian zoos
is this “‘human’ quality” of her typography that “really lends itself to being animated
– I want to see them jump off the page!” she adds.

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Above Anna Mills: Nothing to Spare II (Copyright © Anna Mills, 2021)

Something that stands out about Anna’s work is her interest in developing designs
that look like they haven’t gone through any digital processes. When she sees designs
“in a sort of flat, pixel, clickable, editable landscape,” it “makes me long to see
something that looks solid and unchangeable,” she explains. Although the finished
appearance of her animations seem effortless, her processes are elaborate. Anna dubs
her way of working humorously as a “ping pong match between paper and
computer.” With her first serve of the match, she makes her initial sketch – ping. She
returns the serve with a scan and a careful edit on Photoshop – pong. Then follows a
focused rally between analogue and digital, repeating the cycle until she’s happy
with the result. This “input-output dance,” although fiddly, is a vital ritual in her
practice and helps her to execute animations which “look less like a gif and more like
you’re witnessing a poster come alive.”

This sense of a poster coming “alive” is really felt in Anna’s branding project for
Everpress’s Type in Focus collection, “Outside the Lines”. As the animation begins
we are presented with a static sans serif typeface which is then compellingly
“undressed” to reveal a collection of dancing lettering in Anna’s playful style. She
loves working on projects that give her the space to work fluidly and move away
from “uniformity.” She was in her element on her project An A-Z of Type Terms:
Proper and Improper when she designed “a type term for every letter of the
alphabet.” But she has also shown her eloquence in communicating very abstract
concepts for design briefs. When she did a project for Google Design’s article Why
Google Needs UXEs, she was delighted by the challenge to “visually represent a
profession that’s quite hard to define anyway.” It is impressive to see how Anna
represents really quite technical ideas in a visually interesting way, whilst still
retaining her signature, light-hearted style.

As we close the interview Anna admits feeling nostalgic for “how my brain felt at
uni.” She misses the “meatiness of the projects” and being in a “big class with
everybody’s ideas bouncing off the walls.” She’s thinking of doing a master’s just as
soon as she’s decided what subject she wants to focus on… We can’t wait to see how
this next big plan feeds into her work.

Above Anna Mills: Outside the Lines (Copyright © Anna Mills, 2021)

A
ARTNOUVEAU
ANA-ZOFTYPETERMS
ProperandImproper
(MAINLYIMPROPER) ARTNOUVEAU
ANA-ZOFTYPETERMS
ProperandImproper
(MAINLYIMPROPER)

B C D E
BUBBLY CALLIGRAPHIC DOUBLE ELEGANT FLUID BUBBLY CALLIGRAPHIC DOUBLE ELEGANT FLUID

GH!!K GROOVY HOLLOW ITALIC JAGGED KNOBBLY

MINI ОТР
1000

IV
LOOPY MODULAR NATURAL ORNATE PIXEL

R TOPHEAVY QUADRANGULAR ROUNDED SCALLOPED TOPHEAVY UNFINISHED

VOLUPTUOUS
X Y Z
XIPHOPHYLLOUS VOLUPTUOUS WESTERN XIPHOPHYLLOUS YINYANG ZIGZAG

Above Anna Mills: An A-Z of Type Terms, (Copyright © Anna Mills, 2020)

Above Anna Mills: Word Journey (Copyright © Anna Mills, 2020)

Above Anna Mills: The E that Eats 'E's (Copyright © Anna Mills, 2020)

Above Anna Mills: Blossfeldt Ampersands Copyright © Anna Mills, 2021)

Above Anna Mills: Something's Taking Shape (Copyright © Anna Mills,

2021)

Above Anna Mills: Looking for Balance (Copyright © Anna Mills, 2021)

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Anna Mills: Anything Can B a B (Copyright © Anna Mills, 2020)

Further Info About the Author

www.instagram.com/annam.lls Elfie Thomas

—
Elfie joined It’s Nice That as an editorial assistant in November
2021 after finishing an art history degree at Sussex University.
She is particularly interested in creative projects which shed light
on histories that have been traditionally overlooked or
misrepresented.

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