Tell us about your project “With Everything Going On…,” which you recently made in Adobe's Make it Workshop.

I made this earlier this year, in March, using Illustrator on the iPad. A bunch of us were invited to a one or two-day creative retreat, which was really fun, and as part of it, we broke up into small groups to discuss our individual ideas. While there was no real push to do a group project, we wanted to do something that was a bit collaborative around a shared prompt that one of my groupmates, Reyna Noriega, spearheaded around all of these email phrases that have been popping up.

There’s a new email etiquette of padding out greetings around this moment of pandemic, of civil unrest, and of every other instance of this year, including the election. We were coming up with a list of all the phrases, and “In these unprecedented times...” was one of them. I don’t know how many emails you’ve received with that one; I’ve gotten a ton. But “With everything going on…” was the one that really hit home for me — the word “everything” just blankets over the gravity of it all, and waters everything down. It obscures the hardships of these incidents, and the individual experiences of them. We over-consume so much news online, that it can be very numbing and overwhelming to really process it all. So I wanted to draw on that phrase, and figure out a way to highlight and give weight to some of those “everythings,” with the idea of using photography to show some of the things happening.

As a graphic designer and a lettering artist, words resonate heavily in your works. How do you feel the role of design can help others unpack and make sense of a dark and difficult moment in history such as this one?

You only have to open Pinterest one time to understand how powerful language can be. Sure, maybe we can make jokes and roll our eyes about people that buy stuff that says “bless this mess” or things like that — but honestly, having a phrase or quote speak to you can be very motivating.

One of the designers that comes to mind is Lisa Congdon, who’s always very good about posting things that are word-based and feel motivating, and not cheesy. One of the art pieces she posted, in response to the Black Lives Matter protests, said “Keep Showing Up.” That phrase was very powerful to me, and spoke to something that a lot of people sort of struggle with, learning how to be better behaved, and how to be better advocates and allies for other people. Because it’s hard. This is work. This is not easy — but you are re-formatting yourself, and your community, and the world. And you have to keep doing it, even if it’s difficult, and it’ll get easier as you keep doing it.

It’s little moments like that, when I get personally motivated by someone else’s words that they’ve created into art, that all of the cynicism just melts away. There’s always a time when something that you say or make can have that kind of impact on another person — to keep on doing the real work of re-working how they approach the world, and their interactions with other human beings.

How did you go about selecting the set of ten photographs featured in this series?

I’m a big respecter of artist’s rights, so I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t stealing anyone’s photography, or assuming that I could use it as long as I credited it. I definitely did some investigation to make sure that everything I was using was free to use and remix. So the first step was looking through resources, like Unsplash — about two-thirds of the images come from there, and some came from Wikimedia Commons.

I wanted to feature a diverse slew of topics, ranging from Covid-19 to climate change, social justice, homelessness, and the election. Of course, this could be a really huge continuing series, because there’s no shortage of things to pay attention to — I didn’t do one, for instance, of all the wildfires in California, or the flooding in the Midwest, or the hurricanes now frequently happening along the East Coast … the list goes on.

Describe your experience with the new Illustrator on the iPad app.

With Illustrator on the iPad, one of the things that’s really changed is that I now feel like I have a way to sketch in vectors. I still always do an analog-ish sketch — either by hand or on an iPad — but I always kind of keep it looking like a sketch. Before Illustrator on the iPad, I would send that jpeg sketch to my computer, then do all of my vectorization on my desktop. What the iPad has given me is an in-between stage, where I can sort of bounce back and forth between my iPad and desktop — and I really enjoy having additional steps to my work, because it allows me to refine it and edit. I’ll work out all the concepts in my sketching phase, but in terms of finishes and how the actual aesthetic is going to shape up, I do a lot of back and forth, and let the process help determine that. So anytime I can add a step to my process in this stage, it benefits it immensely.

It’s also allowed me to be more gestural with my work. I’ve been interested in doing work that feels a bit more hand-drawn recently, and there’s something about drawing vectors with the Apple Pencil, versus pointing and clicking one point at a time with a mouse, that loosens me up quite a bit. With the Apple Pencil, it feels like you’re drawing with an actual tool — it’s a much more naturalistic experience. I think there are a lot of ways of working that are going to be opened up to me now, with Ai on the iPad, and it’s probably going to push my work into a certain direction. Being able to be a little bit more gestural, a little bit more free, allows my work to feel a bit more human and a little less tight, which is a good thing.

What are some of your favorite features?

This was one of my first projects on the iPad, and I used a combination of the Pen tool and the Blob Brush tool, and I ended up being really into the Blob Brush tool. It’s just a way of working on the iPad that I hadn’t really used before. I also really appreciated some of the editing paths on the iPad that are not on the desktop. In type design software, you can delete points on a path and it keeps the path shape, without collapsing them — that’s something you can now do on the iPad. It’s not a tool to replace the desktop for me, because of the way that I work, but it’s such a good addition, and really makes Illustrator a much richer tool for me.

On a personal level, how are you navigating this time as a mother and an entrepreneur?

Sometimes, I do feel very optimistic, and think everything’s fine, and that we can wait it out — that change is happening, and things are going to get better. At the same time, one of the things I’ve noticed in myself and in a lot of other people is that it doesn’t take much to totally flip you to the other side, right? I think we’re all kind of on a razor’s edge of wellness right now. We just have to plod through. This isn’t going to last forever, we’re not going to be stuck in this weird virus limbo for the rest of our lives. It’s just about figuring out ways to be resilient throughout, and to have your business survive, and to have your mental health survive.

I’ve actually been focusing a lot on doing personal projects in a way that I hadn’t before — I have a workshop downstairs from my office, where I have a letterpress and a laser-cutter, and it’s been really inspirational to just have a minute to experiment in different mediums. And that minute is happening because client work is weird at the moment. If I look at it from one side, it’s scary because I’ll wonder, “How long is this going to last?” But on the other side, I feel very blessed that I can now invest in myself in a way that I couldn’t before. So in that way, I’m very grateful for what is here. I’m grateful that I’ve learned to be a better household manager and cook. I’m grateful that I’ve had to be a super parent, and that I’ve gotten so much extra time with my kids. And I’m grateful that I’m taking this time to invest in my business, redevelop my store, and make more products for it. Because, as a freelancer, it isn’t just about putting yourself out there into the world and getting work — you have to invest in your business, and make things that then get people excited to come to you.

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See more inspiring articles about Illustrator on the iPad.

Header image made with Adobe Illustrator on the iPad.