Jess Wang
Jess is an artist and brand designer at The Browser Company.
Artist (black & white - not charcoal), brand designer, software designer
Latest inspirations?
Classic Scifi movies - Blade Runner, Dune (worldbuilding), interior design + crafing a space for gathering (beautiful pictures of homes & events)
Most surreal project?
Biggest drawing - creating an art piece so large, unsure how to pull it off
A place that didn’t have space for such a big piece
Creative habits?
Always listen to music - have a good playlist queued up.
What is your creative process?
Consume, marinate, make
Take in a lot of content that is enjoyable and grounds for inspiration, mixing it with personal experiences to comes out as art/design
“Not something I have control over”
Creating art (charcoal drawings) in an automatic, mystical way
My style is meditative as I empty my mind
Where/how do you do your best work?
Where I feel the most comfortable, at home in my comfiest outfit at the dinner table with the mood lights on
What are the challenges in your creative process?
Mood dependent, riding out periods with seasonal cycles
If I’m not inspired, it’s hard to create. Inspiration is pulled from memory, personal experience, emotions, films, books, nature and things that people create are beautiful & represent human excellence - but partnered with the otherworldly beauty from nature.
Map out your creative journey
(1) Pre-creation - 30%
(2) Creation - bulk of it but interspersed with pre-creation, will dig up more inspo as I create, woven together - 60%
(3) Post-creation - least amount of time, getting it over with and don’t enjoy (5-10%)
Hates this phase the most, used to post a lot of work on TikTok and hated making videos and filming process, but the payoff with discoverability is good
Favorite design tools and why?
Tools that serve as digital repositories
Figma is #1, using it for things I shouldn’t like graphic design, vector illustrations
Photoshop as the GenAI tool is useful for editing photos, touching it up (needing photos of art blank walls for example), textures
Kidpix has childish charm as an unconventional tool - janky drawings but I want that lack of polish intentionally
Are.na for organizing inspiration and mixed media files (photos, links), serving as the main organizational tool. Not into Cosmos, which is Are.na but prettier.
Apple Notes to organize writing and for quickly jotting down ideas
Pinterest as a visual organization tool as the algorithm is good at surfacing source inspiration to take and dig into deeper. Follow links, read articles about it, link it on Are.na to reference later. Treated as a discovery tool, not organizational tool
Archive things physically - organize old sketches and drawings in a scrapbook, souvenirs in a box
Playlist as something to get you excited about creating
Overall, there are so many pre-creation tools but options feel limited / analogous. Would be excited to use a radically new pre-creation tool.
How do you hope to grow as a creative?
For most of my life, creativity was a self serving / inward facing activity, a form of survival in dark moments. Now creativity is a way to connect with people - center my practice around community, bring people into the process