Yeji is a designer who loves to play in product design, UI/UX, front-end dev, prototyping, and ways to make the web a more fun place.
Gouache, pen, digital
What is your creative process?
Finds inspiration online - figures out a reason to create
Combine different parts together, blend it all together to make a piece
Typically don’t use lofi sketches unless you’re doing UX work
How do you collect inspiration?
Pinterest - comes from random places as well, tend to think of a restaurant I saw with cool branding, stuff I see out and about
Can think back on ideas - doesn’t take a picture but thinks of it for good branding
Bought a portable scanner - scanning texture, wall and then will upload to the computer and organize by day and activity
Map out your creative journey
1) Pre-creation — 40%
2) Creation — 50%
3) Post-creation — 10%
Most frustrating part of the creative process?
Depends for each project, each has its own challenges
Hardest part is the 20% stage during creation - when you’re not sure of the layout, fleshing it out and working through the ugly stage, ongoing frustration
A matter of sitting down and doing it
Favorite design tools and why?
Loves Figma because of how lightweight it is, using it more for graphic design now
Photoshop girl through and through - you can do anything in it
New AI tools within photoshop are really good
- Extending image, removing items to polish up an image
Moodboard process?
One large Figma file - tries to organize but it’s hard to organize and loses track of different things
Send top things I see to an art account to different folders, look at the DMs to see what I sent, building a curated feed for myself
Hard because there’s so much content in different apps, a lot of products have tried to fix this (mymind - expensive, don’t want to be reliant on something I pay for)
Latest inspirations?
Charli’s Coachella set (not high production but engaging), someone online hand embroidering photos of their childhood (mixing mediums), canned fish tins with great designs
Most surreal project?
Google Creative Labs - touchdesigner interactive with the music you’re playing, fun blend of all the different tools and interests
When are you most inspired?
When I have no other work to do or if I have a lot of work to do that’s unrelated - breeds the most creativity
Creative habits?
Doomscrolling - Twitter/Pinterest, other sources of inspiration
Index and save them on a Figma moodboard, collections on Instagram
Where/how do you do your best work?
State of mind - can’t create when I’m burnt out, do my best work when there’s a main reason to or a crunch for myself
How do you hope to grow as a creative?
To keep making things - not falling into a spiral of over mood boarding and finding inspiration, only growing my taste and not getting anywhere with it