Alex Hao
Alex is the social media manager for Baggu. He previously was Notion’s social media manager + creative producer. In his free time, he's also a freelance photographer with a focus on fashion, streetwear, and editorial.
Creative brand builder (social media), content creation, experimental creative (photography, illustration, writing)
Latest inspirations?
Purposeful soft blur photography, Sidewalkkilla photographer, Scavengers reign animation (HBO) because I studied evolutionary biology and it’s beautifully animated (black linework with secondary colors)
Most surreal project?
At Notion - (1) internal video for all hands meeting finding the right Fiverr freelancer to voiceover lines in Elmo’s voice, (2) Writing witty billboards for a New York campaign and photograph them, pulling inspiration from consumer goods
Creative habits?
Duplicating my frames - never erase the middle of the process, especially if you’re going to make a shift in a direction, keep a previous draft, you have to keep them
What is your creative process?
For work - goal oriented:
Making assets attached to a result, understanding what the purpose is. Tight scope, more creative opportunity
More freedom within constraint to play around with
- Start with a brief (goal, audience, user story - screenshot to feel lived in for example)
- Format (reuse assets or have callbacks, reuse content, integrate the marketing, co-marketing, finding unexpected connections and draw dotted lines)
- Concept (all happens in Notion, communication in Slack)
- Production (Figma, Premiere)
For fun:
Dotted line thinking as “really good creatives can suspend the line, make connections that might not feel logical typically”, free association
Using tools like Pinterest/Cosmos, shows you something that is similar, rabbit hole to build a collection
- Look at an image or think of something that to you is related, non sequiturs
- Change a topic that makes you think of something to something, hopping to it
Photoshoots, illustrations, fashion - finding references in an unexpected way, looking cool as a concept, marrying concept to medium
What is your inspiration stage like?
Has a database of ideas “works in progress”, pulling references
Some examples: Alice in wonderland theme, flat on illustrator, color palette for CMYK
You need a diversity of intake, surround yourself with a diverse set of references or people around you with different taste levels to have a baseline. Staying active on social media, seeing a lot, following a lot of artists, consuming content. Building off of a bank of things in your brain, loves the research phase of learning about wacky fun things.
AI generated fashion bypasses you as the creator and getting exposure to those references
When going from prompt
What are the challenges in your creative process?
Learning tools is not fun, creative tools are not standardized so knowing how to use Illustrator doesn’t set you up for Figma (used Lightroom forever but tried other photo editing apps because it’s what you know), just started learning Premiere
It takes inertia around learning creative tools, and there’s a lack of transferable skills between tools
Figma should be easier
What’s missing in your creative toolkit?
No perfect tool for mood boarding / inspiration collection
“I want the algorithm of Pinterest, I want the visual playground of Figma or a whiteboard tool (place and organize images in a visual way the way you could organize scraps of paper), annotate the way you could do it in Notion (production aspects/project manage), visually pleasing like Cosmos”
Are.na to pull in text, sources of inspiration that aren’t images
There isn’t one tool yet that marries all of them, have heard a lot of people talk about this
Found images on Pinterest, mood board on Figma, edits in Lightroom, Photoshop to edit, brought back into Figma to size for Instagram carousel
You could have gotten to the same product with a different combination of tools, tools not transferable (if someone else didn’t know the skills or what you did, they wouldn’t replicate it)
Opaqueness of process on a work level, stakeholders don’t know what type of work goes into it, more education needed (influencer team timeline), so much goes into the creative process
Operationalization - status tracking, working in a team session stage, needs more granularity in stage (in progress), visibility in tools or links in files
File management, platform optimization
Map out your creative journey
For work:
(1) Pre-creation - 10% with good brief / 40% with bad brief, not comprehensive enough
(2) Creation - 70% / 40% specific to social, never spending more than 1+ week to day of the post
(3) Post-creation - 20% pushing it out, gathering initial sentiment / 20%
For personal projects:
(1) Pre-creation - 70% heavily in pre creation because I’m busy, never jumping into idea right away but marinating on an idea, backlog of potential projects (while they’re not being worked on, I’ll see something and it’ll remind me of it)
(2) Creation - 20% once I get into it, I just sprint to finish
(3) Post-creation - 10%
If I’m losing momentum, the project doesn’t happen (ie. tarot card project)
Reused shapes, duplicated (ie. all character eyes are the same), Figma components, adjusting border width
Illustrate Rupaul looks that emulate the same theme
Mythology/folklore reference, florals, Zendaya’s Met dress, hop scotch then editing
Friends with references to spitball and talk to
Favorite design tools and why?
Procreate - one of the best pieces of software, does exactly what you need to do and is so cheap and so good, with iPad and Apple pencil
Inspired by the real world, secondhand stores where you can see objects with stories, bookstores with zines
When are you most inspired?
Late night, most active creatively - will start working at 8pm-2am
Work 9-5, takes time to clear that out then think about personal creative stuff
Where/how do you do your best work?
Laying on the ground on my stomach on my bed or on carpet
How do you hope to grow as a creative?
It’s all about continuing to try and become proficient at different disciplines, being pretty good at a lot of things makes you better at those other things
Become the best generalist that I can be as a creative (learning about video editing)
If you consume something a lot, you should think about creating it (consumption without creation is bland) because there’s so much input already