Abigail is an Assistant Editor at IFP, with additional focuses on production and design.
She previously built education plans, media campaigns, and intimate user experiences at Notion, Figma, and Primer.
Experience design generalist and wordsmith, maker (high quality at home production)
Latest inspirations?
Storytelling quilts, children’s books, my grandpa
Inspired by The Atlantic and The New Yorker - storied publications with classic aesthetics without being tired
Needlepoint and quilting are also having a renaissance, alongside the schoolhouse aesthetic
Most surreal project?
Making my own sweater, realizing I’m wearing something I made
Realizing the reach from the Notion student program I helped launch
Creative habits?
Keep asking why, every creative decision needs grounding so I keep asking myself why
What is your creative process?
I forage, I read, I tinker
For my creative process for digital design, I feel like it’s a weakness for me to be not good at the process
Deck
Word choice is a key part of the design, as Elizabeth Lin says
Consider how a story can come to life (ie. for telling a story around elderly people, don’t use a Gen Z gradient)
Pull contextual media about that audience, look at historical examples or pieces from earlier forms of that movement, inspired by the New Woman’s Survival Catalog
“Always try to draw aesthetics from substance”, considering how there’s a wealth of more things to derive from
Inventing new things is extremely rare, it’s from your advantage to draw from things with relevance and roots
Pull from things that were once analog, pulling from history (a book or something physical), doesn’t need to be skeuomorphic in execution, ground things in a physical sense
Mood boards help me tell the story to myself. Iteration is messier and I can’t pick out trends in how I iterate, as I’m pushing things around and not thinking with words.
The final piece is when measurable progress is not being made, I’ll gut check on when to step away
Run designs by a couple of trusted friends, ask them specific questions which will depend on the project/person (how does this typography make you feel and does this align with the story? What do you think this is? Is this spacing correct, does this make sense, how’s the hierarchy, is this the right red?) and other times will have open ended feedback
Composition is a hard one, as not everyone is prepared to answer that
How do you gather inspiration?
Never could crack Are.na
Pinterest as a search engine - starting point of discovery for terminology (captions are richer than people realize, pulled from sources, do a reverse Google Search, understand what era a sweater is produced in, location etc. )
- Organizational system is grouping by private boards
- Doesn’t pare down well, cherry pick from Pinterest but put it all in Figma and then color drop, look into composition
Got Instagram explore page to mirror Pinterest.
Public libraries and antique stores & vintage stores, making relationships to know a material and date to build a sense of history, build literacy and make early guesses.
What are the challenges in your creative process?
Don’t like UI design, foundation as a designer is patchy
Got Elizabeth Lin’s design course, didn’t know what I didn’t know, needed syllabus, how do I learn what I needed to learn
Feeling like there’s a step missing or a right way to do something
Executing on the vibe that you want - if you can see it in your minds eye but can’t nail it on paper, super annoying
Whatever on the screen not matching what’s in your head but you can picture it
Biggest issue is typography - there are great tools for previewing type but not discovering type
Fontwolf is overrated, not utilitarian
Not typography but decorative inspo on boards, not to be used for information
Will go to font foundries that you enjoy, then will browse and read notes
Decorative typeface for product sucks - actively difficult for people to read resources
Map out your creative journey
For a client project:
(1) Pre-creation - 10%, easiest, feels most human to gather and connect with the rest of the world. I don’t know if you ever stop gathering inspiration personally but for work you stop (not economical, caring more about delivering quality and client ideas are not grounded, not going to come up with brand philosophy, clients normally know what they want it to look like ie. X website, not going to advocate for it to be different). My creative perspective is not always going to be what they’re buying and they just want polish and their vision and not my worldview, need execution in a timely manner, try to not bill for it.
(2) Creation - 90% iteration most time spent here, hard to get into flow state for creation, dislike iteration the most because of pushing pixels, undoing things on the computer makes it feel not real
(3) Post-creation - often very little time, also easy, will ask specifically what is needed on bullet point format, wait for feedback
Favorite design tools and why?
Loves Pinterest as it feels like me, knows me, enjoy looking at reflections and perceptions of myself, love developing my own taste, great rewards to actively record interests over time, my filter on the internet
Figma is fine, neutral relationship for work, if it was only used for personal stuff it would be loved more. Great tool for thinking visually out loud, difficult for people to learn and makes it hard to love. Can only collaborate if other people know how to use it and don’t feel daunted by it, ready and willing to use it. Storytelling tool is great, presentations and making use of components and variants
Procreate for art, there’s a great community around it. On iPad so you need another device
Google Docs for wordsmithing
Notion for rearranging meta-parts of a story for drag and drop
Figjam as the most powerful whiteboard tool in the face of the internet, easy to teach, phases of using this vs. physical pen and paper, offers lots of organizational tools to rearrange your ideas and you can’t do that in a notebook, mind mapping is quicker in a notebook
Thoughts on some new creative tool ideas?
- Actionable feedback tool - 2/10, Figma is so strong at iteration already with clients that understand it, can give feedback down to a pixel level and interactions, work natively in Figma so I don’t need another tool (maybe would want overarching feedback on how a design would make you feel but would happen over call or email)
- Visual concepting tool - 4,5/10 tool that took my mood board, reverse Google searched and then pulled references but I wouldn’t always use it, I’m attributing my own meaning to it. ie. still lifes as bathroom shots, not what the artist intended. However occasionally could be more of what artists. Data vis projects - who was on the team, what they won the award from. A huge part of creativity is making the connections, don’t want to be told the colors and themes, want to find the things that inspire me, wouldn’t listen to computer summary because it doesn’t know why I picked them. Loves the search, hunting and gathering and foraging, hunger for research, going slowly. Not sure what would use it for other than save myself time
Asked about typography / iteration solution: Manual search gets in the way, foundries are gatekept and don’t self promote, finding typography and what it’s created for (after font samples) to read about history, no centralized place. Imagine a tool that could autoselect type/image.
Google Fonts, Adobe Fonts, Figma font picker but there’s no information
- Fonts with a specific toggle that meet multiple characteristics ie. meant for print vs digital, referencing the decade that your inspiration is from
- Too many considerations for using fonts, made for a certain aspect ratio, made to be manipulated
Backwards research “bears fruit”, finding type doesn’t - not about beautifying but making things more usable, accessibility edge, eyes will not hold on if it’s difficult to read
Feels like there’s a “fast fashionness” to fonts now, brand differentiation is hard to do with fonts experiencing a 30 second of fame, cultural implications of more diverse fonts
Feels like an AI ruler, graph or grid to tell you if things are proportional or gridlocked
“Spell check for design” - ie. this emoji didn’t render properly, two pixels off in one section
Makes me sharp to know but there are more subtle things to get (spacing less pleasing)
- Could be an interesting figma extension
- Business appeal to saving time, needless mistakes
- Implementation is very hard to read your components
When are you most inspired?
In libraries and antique stores
Where/how do you do your best work?
The kitchen, the shower, and when I’m knitting because I have something to hold down “edges of my blanket” - at risk of getting distracted and flying away but knitting keeps my head clear to work out the complicated thoughts
How do you hope to grow as a creative?
Follow through - I have too many ideas!