Earlier on in his career, Cape Town–based designer and typographer Luke Ritchie was commissioned by the Wall Street Journal to create a series of artworks featuring inspirational quotes by successful people in history: politicians, painters and philosophers. He was given creative freedom to select the quotes himself and to illustrate their words with custom lettering. Each phrase became a whole project of its own as he delved into the thinkers’ backgrounds, researching the design trends of their times to inspire him stylistically. He spent months on the project, determined not to use anything—no font, illustration nor flourish—that existed before.

The first quote, by English Romantic painter and printmaker J. M. W. Turner, was Ritchie’s most ambitious and time-consuming piece. Inspired by Turner’s famed landscapes, he created etchings of a fictitious rural scene in excruciating detail against which he set his type, created by referencing the technical characteristics of antique fonts from the 1800s. The quote reads: “I know of no genius, but the genius of hard work,” a sentiment that sums up Ritchie’s outlook entirely. “There are no shortcuts,” he says. “You’ve got to put the time in, and often that’s called genius, but it’s just somebody who’s committed and determined to get there.”

Ritchie is an independent design director with a strong strategic bent, a beating heart for brand design and an obscene amount of screen time spent mastering the art of lettering. His home office is in Somerset West, a town at the foot of the Helderberg mountain on the scenic out-skirts of Cape Town that neighbors the Stellenbosch wine region where he grew up and went to school. It was in his high school art class where Ritchie was first introduced to painstaking technique through watching the week-on-week progression of an older student’s mesmerizing hyperrealistic pencil drawings. He was instantly hooked on the style and the way it satiated his perfectionism.

A post-high school gap year in London working odd jobs in construction, a deli and an upsetting stint at a scam charity was enough of a shock to the system to lure Ritchie home to pursue his artistic streak. As he excelled in art at school, enrolling at the Stellenbosch Academy was a natural step since it offered a hybrid bachelor of arts degree combining fine art, photography and design. “It combined all of the things I was interested in,” he says. “I think it was also important to not be too purist, so it was a good way to merge traditional art with a more graphic commercial application.” Each discipline fed into the next; his time spent developing black-and-white film in the darkroom attuned his eye to a range of tonality he could bring to his design work.

After graduating, Ritchie made it approximately two weeks at his first job at a small design agency before quitting. “When you’ve just finished your highly conceptual degree, you get out into the world and think you’re going to be developing amazingly fun projects, but in reality, your first job is just not like that,” he says, looking back. “I was a bit disillusioned about the work that I was being presented with.” He remembers thinking that surely he wasn’t there to design flyers for local air conditioning companies. Young and stubborn, he began pursuing a freelance career—come what may, even when that meant taking on a logo design job for $5 and proceeding to spend three whole weeks crafting it. “For me, it was freelancing as soon as possible and then just kind of forging my own way forward,” he says. “I always knew I had to make it work because I had rejected the alternative: being employed and following someone else’s vision. The work was always more important to me than climbing a commercial ladder to get ahead. I just wanted to do the work I wanted to do.”

That was in 2009, and in the following early years of Ritchie’s career, he became sought after for type design and lettering. It was an interest he’d picked up browsing sites like Dribbble and Behance. “I think typography struck a chord with me because it was an interesting combination of structure and creativity,” he says. “It’s not just pure artistic interpretation; typography has to be legible and perform certain functions. It has to show consistency, yet it can have so many expressions. That really interested me, and from there, I started experimenting with my own kind of styles.”

At the time, a huge trend in graphic design was vintage display type with intricate, ornate and curly custom lettering that took hours to perfect. “Those are really challenging pieces to work on,” Ritchie says. He’d start with pencil sketches on paper, photographing them to upload onto his computer where he’d digitally trace and redraw the words. He remembers working in Freehand and using the first version of Adobe Illustrator, trying to achieve the smoothest possible Bézier curves with the pen tool by reducing the number of control points. “I was experimenting with various things,” he says, “fiddling with fonts, taking existing fonts and chopping them up to examine what makes them work and what could be manipulated from that to make something unique.” He was interested in bringing out the personality of the written phrase through the composition and interaction of the letters.

Tuning into the design all around him, Ritchie noticed the old-timey style of the Schweppes logo branded onto wooden crates that his grandfather had kept from the mid-20th century (and which Ritchie still keeps in his apartment today). “The drawing of the letters and the way the words were crafted together were so unique,” he says. “I couldn’t find anything like it on the internet, so it felt like a real treasure.” Using the logo as a key, he designed a typeface inspired by the vintage crates that had once held little glass bottles of soda water clinking together as they were carried from the store.

The hours Ritchie spent crafting text led to many magazine commissions from international publishers for feature headlines, drop caps in articles and magazine covers. Through word of mouth, he became well known as a lettering artist beyond publishing, hired for type-driven ad campaigns—a gooey chocolate sauce headline for a McDonald’s McFlurry ad, for example—and creating logotypes for brands.

Increasingly working on brand identity jobs and unpacking 100-page briefs in order to get to something as specific as a logotype, Ritchie became gradually more confronted by the “why” lurking behind every creative decision. “After doing thousands of different pieces, you get used to creating something, and the question of why you’re doing what you’re doing becomes more interesting,” he says. “Maybe it’s just something that progresses as you get older in your career.” He started gravitating toward jobs that required him to be more strategic in communicating a company’s values across all manner of platforms, from signage to social media to stationery.

A project for the prestigious Stellenbosch University in Ritchie’s hometown became a benchmark in his career and a unique working experience for a freelancer going in to meet regularly with the design department and design director over cups of tea. The university’s initial requirement was to refine existing brand assets, something that Ritchie has come to specialize in: “A lot of the work I do is small refinements, which people won’t recognize, and only once you see the final result, it’s obvious that’s how it should have been,” he says. The rest of the project was an exhaustive list including the design of a custom typeface for the university; a modernized ceremonial emblem with enough gravitas to appear on official degrees without reverting to historical design tropes; and an identity system for the entire brand world—all designed with the intention to last the next 100 years and with the text relayed in three of South Africa’s twelve official languages. “Universities don’t brand often,” Ritchie says, “so this will probably outlast me.” It’s work that shows his two sides in tandem: the big thinking and the subtle tweaks.

Ritchie is sensitive to a brand’s history when bringing it into the present: perhaps the definition of timeless. He was entrusted with a rebrand of the historic Rams Head Inn on Shelter Island, New York, a guesthouse that’s more than a century old. The suite of marks he designed—logo, monogram, embellished ram’s head emblem and heart icon—feels like it belongs to all of time while being right at home in the present day on coasters, menus and boxes of matches.

Working independently means Ritchie had to learn quickly how to self-assess, to objectively review his own ideas without becoming too attached. “You can’t be sold on your own work,” he says, “or head down a route without constantly evaluating it.” He has developed a formula: make progress, step away, assess, narrow down and repeat. But the secret is giving it enough time to prove. It’s during these self-assessment sessions where the importance of strategy really becomes apparent: a client-approved north star to follow.

Away from the screen, Ritchie spends his downtime hiking into the mountains with friends. It’s where he goes to recalibrate, detaching from anything digital or design-related. Getting together with people is essential when he spends so much time with his thoughts, totally consumed by the inner workings of a brand strategy or tweaking the outer curve of a single letterform. His driving force is “the craft of it all,” as well as continuing to prove to himself, as he did right from the start, that he can support himself doing the work he wants to do. There’s a quote by Abraham Lincoln that Ritchie included in his series for the Wall Street Journal that’s almost too convenient an ending: “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing.” ca