Many of you are probably familiar with the Alt Summit business cards reputation. I didn’t collect as many this year as I did last year, but when I saw the ones above that illustrator, designer, and writer Emily McDowell handed out, I was sad that I didn’t meet her and that I didn’t get one. P.S. She’s so nice that she even mailed one to me after Alt!
After I saw the card, I had to look at more of Emily’s work and I just fell in love with it. I’m so excited to interview her for today’s Art I Heart!
What kind of awesome creative things do you do?
I’m an illustrator, writer and former art director, so my creativity tends to come out as a mashup of all of those things. I do a lot of hand-lettering, which is something I’ve been in love with since I was a little kid — I remember teaching myself “cursive” in kindergarten.
My work is a combination of old-school pen/paint/paper/scanner and painting with a digital brush on a Cintiq tablet. I do a lot of hand-lettered quotes — mostly from famous, smart people, although I also illustrate my own words on occasion when I come up with something especially insightful — and I sell those as prints, both online and in a growing number of retail shops.
In December, I used Kickstarter to launch a scarf line called Un-Tourist Scarves, which are square silk scarves featuring illustrated vignettes of one particular city, much like the vintage travel scarves of the 1940s-50s, but the twist is that they’re drawn from a local’s perspective. For example, the Los Angeles scarf doesn’t show the Hollywood sign, but it does feature a vegan dim sum truck, a woman walking her Pomeranian in a stroller, and a border pattern made of hundreds of tiny cars in traffic.
In addition to my own work, I do illustration work for ad campaigns and editorial features. I also take advantage of my background as an advertising creative, working with small businesses to develop or refresh their brand look and feel. I don’t work as a graphic designer per se, but I really enjoy creating hand-lettered logos and innovative identity systems.
I’m expanding in a few other exciting directions right now as well: I’m writing and illustrating a card line, and I will be offering iPhone cases for sale in my shop.
Basically, things are super hectic at the moment, but also really fun. The part of working in advertising I liked the most was uncovering universal truths about our human experience and translating them into creative campaigns. Now, instead of using human truths to create a story designed to sell a product, I get to use those truths to actually create the product myself, which is a thousand times more rewarding. I love it when people can relate to the things I make.
How did you get started?
Two years ago, I quit my full-time advertising job to freelance. I’d been unfulfilled in my career for quite a long time, but I was climbing a ladder that I’d convinced myself was the right one. In 2011, I had a series of personal experiences that made me really question how I was spending my life, and it became clear to me that I needed to let go of my job, or at least the way I was doing it. So, about a month after getting the creative director promotion I’d been working towards for seven years, I quit.
I knew I’d freelance in advertising for money, and I knew I had a lot of ideas and creative energy that I wanted to put into my own thing, but I really had no clue what I was going to actually DO. So I went back to basics. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I’d loved to do as a kid, which was (not coincidentally) the same thing I’d done during every boring meeting I’d ever had: draw alphabets. I started drawing words, and then quotes — a logical next step. I created an Etsy shop to sell prints, and I started putting work on Pinterest. Pinterest was a game-changer for me — it got my work out there in a way that wouldn’t have been possible five years ago.
Tell us about your working style. Do you work for long stretches at a time? How long do you think about an idea before you start bringing it to life?
I do work for long stretches at a time! How did you know? Ha! I am definitely someone who gets hypnotized by a creative task like drawing or writing. So when I’m actually making work, I’ll forget to eat, I’ll have to pee for like an hour before I actually get up and go — it’s kind of bad. When I’m thinking of ideas, my brain needs to take lots of breaks, though. And it’s true what they say about ideas — sometimes the best ones come when you’re not actively trying. Note to Emily: I do that peeing thing too. It’s so bad. I’m doing it right now.
I actually don’t think about ideas for very long before bringing them to life. I think this is probably a result of my creative training — cultivating the ability to have a ton of ideas in a short period of time, then toss out the ones that don’t work and refine the ones that do. If I think something works conceptually, I generally trust my creative judgment enough at this point to dive in pretty quickly.
I’m sure you have a million ideas and things that you want to work on. How do you decide what to do next?
Well… I try to achieve a delicate balance between what fulfills me creatively, and what will enable me to pay my rent. Ideally, those two things overlap, and that’s happening more than ever now — but my time is governed first by client deadlines, and I fit in my own work around them. I also have a business coach, the amazing Tiffany Han, who helps me not lose sight of the big picture. My goal is always to be more proactive than reactive — plan my work according to where I ultimately want to be, not just attacking the tasks that are currently in my face. I’m currently having varying degrees of success at this. :)
You used to work in advertising and you still freelance from time to time. What’s that like? Can you share a little about the process of freelance creative work?
I consider myself very lucky, because the way the ad industry is set up, agencies regularly need to hire freelancers — when there’s a new business pitch, or when too many people are traveling on production at once and someone needs to be in the office making work for other clients, or when full-time staff go on vacation or maternity/paternity leave. So if you work full-time for long enough and build a portfolio, you can make a living working as a freelancer, taking jobs at different agencies for a few weeks at a time.
When I’m on a job, it’s generally pretty demanding, so I don’t have much time to work on anything else. As a freelancer, I’m usually tasked with one particular project. Usually, it’s coming up with ideas for a client presentation — which can be anything from writing commercials to thinking up iPhone apps. I started out as an art director, but switched to copywriter in 2008, so I mainly freelance as a writer/creative director. I love art direction, but I much prefer working as a writer — it’s a lot easier (ssh).
There are downsides to freelancing, of course — just like any freelance career, you never know when the next job is going to come in, and you don’t usually get to produce your ideas, so it’s hard to build a portfolio as a freelancer. But for me, it’s perfect right now, because it’s a way to make good money while I build my new career. I feel very blessed that I’m able to use my experience this way.
Thank you so much, Emily!
Emily’s been working on a cool series with Design Mom that features book quotes. They’re all available for purchase in Emily’s shop.
As someone who is an absolute freak about text-based artwork, I’m just in awe right now.