Melody Hansen Will Encourage You to Keep Going

“I make art about your feelings,” reads Melody Hansen’s Instagram bio. Her works spans across various mediums that include graphic design, illustration, writing, creative direction, and lettering.

Originally from Lausanne, Switzerland and currently based in Los Angeles, California, Hansen has attracted almost 70k followers on Instagram. Her posts include handwritten mantras and quotes and unassuming doodles that serve as instant mood lifters.

But it took her some time to find her niche. “When I was 12, my dad brought home the first version of Photoshop from his work and I started playing around with it,” she recalled in an interview with Freelance Wisdom.

“I didn’t really know what graphic design was at the time, but I liked playing around with photos of celebrities and myself and I’d overlay them with text. I would look up tutorials on how to make my text shine or make it fuzzy. It was a fun time to be alive. Then I continued making stuff through high school, drew on top of my t-shirts, volunteered to make posters for projects, spent hours and hours making each page of my PowerPoint presentations color coordinated. A lot of it wasn’t even that good.”

After high school she took a year off, admitting to not really having any plan. “I got into OCADU for Graphic Design in Toronto by showing them a PowerPoint presentation (of course) of everything I had ever doodled or made (except the fuzzy text stuff),” she said. But after a year and a half, she dropped out.

“I started making music at the time, and I started feeling claustrophobic with everything going on. So I let myself take my time. People began asking me for designs, and from there, developed my brand. I’ve always loved typography and always sensed I was good at it, so the handwriting came a bit afterwards when I started posting handwritten text on Instagram.”

Her brand and online presence have grown steadily ever since, proving once and for all that if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Take a look at some of her work in the gallery below:

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I Think It’ll Be Yes This Time

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Time for a new prescription *

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A thought that kept me awake at midnight

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