Artist Melanie Garber created a fun and colourful design for IWD typography challenge

 August 03, 2023

Meet Melanie Garber, a lettering and digital artist based in Los Angeles, USA.

Melanie is one of the many talented women who responded to the call-out for entries to the IWD x Typism annual Lettering Challenge. Melanie showed her support for the IWD Women Creatives Mission by producing unique artwork that celebrated the IWD 2023 #EmbraceEquity campaign theme.

Hear from Melanie about how she created her IWD design, and find out her definition of equity. 

Creating a fun and colorful IWD design

For her IWD typography design, Melanie wanted to do something fun and colorful.

The IWD design’s lettering style is one of Melanie’s “absolute favorites”. Melanie learned it from Dawn Nicole (@bydawnnicole). It’s Dawn’s Chloe Style lettering, a playful style of faux calligraphy that uses teardrop terminals. Melanie also used a lot of teardrops for embellishments with a rainbow color palette. 

“I considered the outlines with the extrusion as one of my signature styles and chose to do the outline in white to make it stand out. Lastly, I used a grungy texture for the background and the lettering to give it that extra dimension,” says Melanie.

Sharing her definition of embracing equity

Melanie believes that embracing equity is not about giving everyone the same thing but giving each person something that accounts for their circumstances and enables everyone to get to a similar outcome.

“I used to use the phrase “we’re all in the same boat”, but upon reflection, I realized it’s perhaps not the best phrase - some of us might be in a yacht while others are in a lifeboat; I think a more accurate way to look at things is that “we’re all in the same storm” but what we have around us may or may not make it easier to weather than the storm - in an equitable world, the person in the lifeboat would be provided more resources than the one in the yacht,” explains Melanie.

Celebrating women worldwide through IWD 

Finally, when asked what International Women’s Day means to her, Melanie says: “It’s a day to celebrate and spotlight women worldwide and in different fields to raise awareness towards gender parity.”