What are the nuances of graphic designing? Find out from a professional graphic designer!
Read graphic designer, Emily Xie’s journey into graphic design and learn about her opinion on pursuing graphic design as a career.
Recently, Matthew Chen (Editor-In-Chief) and Jianna Venturina (Design Director) sat down in a zoom meeting with Emily Xie and discussed her professional life while working as a graphic designer.
Q: What form of art do you specialize in?
Xie: I mainly specialize in logo and brand identity design.
When you think of a brand, a lot of the time you think of logos, but sometimes the clients want more than that. A lot of things actually go within a brand, including websites, print pieces, or animation pieces.
Many clients will come to us for web design because every brand and business nowadays needs a website or a web presence. That’s mainly the realm and the field that I work within.
Q: When did you start design and when did you become interested in it?
Xie: I grew up in a pretty artistic family. All of my uncles drew as well, and my dad majored in sculpting and is an illustrator. Ever since I was young, our family has been very into art. It wasn’t a field that was supported by my family because my dad has experience in this field, and he knows that it’s really hard to survive in. Because of this, he didn’t want me to go down this path, but I really enjoyed it.
In high school, I was also on the dance team, so I did a lot of promotional pieces for them. Whenever we had a spring concert or other event, I would make posters. I would also design all of our gear, uniforms, and t-shirts, so that sparked my creativity.
People were all very encouraging so it made me think that “Oh this is something that I can pursue!” I also have a friend who got accepted to this college in LA (I grew up in LA as well), called ArtCenter. I ended up applying to that school as well. So, that’s when my training started, and after that it’s been just graphic design.
Q: What has been your experience working as a graphic designer?
Xie: Experience wise, I feel like I’ve been very lucky. It’s been very smooth, and I haven’t really had any difficulties.
I’ve been very fortunate to get an internship while still in school, and I feel like I got a really valuable experience from it.
I had a really good mentor, I made a lot of good friends, and afterwards, I was also accepted into a full time position. I was also able to grow in that environment, so I feel like that was a really valuable experience in my career. Overall, I’ve been very fortunate.
Q: What would you say is one of your favorite and least favorite things about being a graphic designer?
Xie: I guess I’ll start with my favorite thing about design. When I was younger (in high school and the first year of college), I didn’t really know what design was. I thought that design was just making things look pretty.
But as I got more educated and gained more experience, I realized it’s not all about making things different. Things have to be functional and when you’re designing something, most of the time you’re helping a business.
I also feel like this is a good era for design. People are starting to appreciate design more and more, so it’s nice to have our skills recognized. It’s always a good feeling that you’re helping someone.
Something bad, I guess, is that you are trained in a certain way, so you start to realize how many bad designs there are out in the world. You start to complain that things are not well designed. Whether you are a designer or not, it’s like you start to notice things – good and bad – that other people won’t notice.
Q: Do you have a particular story that you want to share about your experiences working in the field of graphic design? What was it like when you were starting out as a graphic designer?
Xie: One thing I can share is that when you’re in school everyone is very encouraging. As a student, most of the time learning is about experimenting, so when they give you a prompt or a project, you can usually do whatever you’d like. For example, if you’re doing a business card, you can use six colors with foil, letter press, and all these different cool things. It looks amazing and really impressive as a student project, but one thing that I learned when I actually started working was that even though it looks really creative, you can’t be applying that kind of stuff on all your projects. For some of the projects, the clients have a very specific budget, meaning they can only afford business cards or only have money for one ink (they can only print it in black, they don’t have enough money to do all this fancy stuff).
Sometimes, it’s not all about making it visually impressive, it’s more about listening to the client’s needs.
Just little detail stuff like that, I think, is something that really hit me. It’s ok, though, you can do that for a personal project, or maybe someday you’ll meet a client that’ll have a lot of money and will be willing to do all that stuff.
Q: What was a major setback in your design career and what did you learn from it?
Xie: I don’t know. This is not really a setback, but it’s something that is unexpected that I could share. The first job that I landed, like I mentioned before, started as an internship, and then they hired me as a full time employee. They also started another company under the same roof. I don’t know if you guys have heard of it — it’s called The Futur. You guys can look them up on Youtube. They do really cool events that I think would benefit you guys a lot. They offer educational videos on business of design and design of business, and they’re trying to reach people all over the world.
They also had another company called Blind, a post production company digital agency, that is the company that I was in. About 2 or 3 years ago, they decided to slowly close down the company that I was under and focus more on The Futur, so I had to make a decision about whether or not I should stay. In the end, I made the decision to quit the company and move up to the Bay Area. I feel like it’s not really a setback, it was just kind of unexpected and was a turning point of my career. I had to make the decision to further my career in another way.
Q: What advice would give to young people who are looking to pursue art or graphic design as a career?
Xie: I feel like a lot of parents say that you could become a “starving artist,” but we don’t necessarily need to be “starving.” There are a lot of jobs out there for artists nowadays. I guess it just depends on which specific career you go into. Specifically in terms of graphic design, there are so many other fields you can go into. You can be a motion artist, you could be a UI/UX (user experience design or user interface design) person, you could be an interactive designer, or a visual designer.
All these tech companies are looking for talented artists so there is definitely a job field out there for you guys. The key is to make your work stand out. When they do job interviews, it’s not really a traditional job interview like if you were to interview for a finance manager or something.
Usually they don’t really look at your resume — they just look at your portfolio. Spend time to have a really strong foundation and build up that portfolio.
Q: So what was your goal as a young teenage designer and how did you achieve that? What does that goal look like now?
Xie: I didn’t really have a goal when I was young. I feel like I didn’t really know what I was doing in the beginning. I just knew I really liked design. I wasn’t really ambitious about it in the beginning. I just didn’t know what I was doing. Everything was so new to me, so I think I was just spending all my time trying to absorb all the information.
Something that I really hoped for was to have my name appear in a movie title as some sort of designer and to apply my skill in some sort of way. I have these dream clients; for example, one day I hope to design for the Olympics or a big company, like an airline or something. I guess you could call them goals, but it’s more like a wishlist because it depends on the client, where you work, and who you work for.
As of now, I did work on a small Netflix movie where my name did appear in the credits, so that was really cool. The airline thing and the Olympics thing is still all up in the air, so maybe in the next 10 years, that could happen.
Q: Do you have any inspirations? Specific people or anything in general.
Xie: Yeah! I feel like it’s really important as artists to be aware of all the designers and designs around the world. We’re really lucky to have something called the Internet where we can just look it up. I go on Behance every once in a while to get inspiration, see what’s currently out there, and see what other people are doing. You just start to collect these visual memory buckets.
I like to think that no design is original. Everything is about remixing what you remember or what you saw. Anything that you’ve seen or read is just remixed together into something that you designed.
So yeah, I feel like that’s really important. I probably get my inspiration from looking at a lot of things. People also tend to get inspiration from nature, but I don’t know how to do that yet. I mainly just get my inspiration from online.
A big thank you to Emily Xie getting interviewed for our Professional Artists Corner. Check out her work below!
Emily’s work: https://www.emilyxie.design/
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