There Will Your Heart Be

When I started this blog nearly a year ago, I wrote about fear: fear of the future, fear of the unknown, fear of failure — the list goes on. I’ve never quite understood why it is that I carry so much fear around. Part of it has to do with an inability to accept imperfection. When I see myself falling short, there is horror in my head. And nothing I can do can make it go away.

Another part has to do with an inability to accept impermanence. Over the last year, I have gone through so many different identities. As soon as I feel like I’m starting fit in somewhere, I have to uproot, move on, and become somebody else. I am so grateful for all the good things that have come my way, but on nights like this — sitting here alone in a heatless room in London — I just wish I had something to belong to, and somewhere to call home.

This has been the most accomplished year of my life. It has also been the most lonely. But I think what drives me forward every day is to concentrate on the things that I really care about. Somehow, that keeps me centered and focused. It fights off the loneliness. It staves off the fear.

Poster defending older people’s right to intimacy

I love graphic design. Big surprise, right? I spend a lot of time talking and writing about the way design can serve as a form of social advocacy. But I rarely mention the way it sustains me on a deep, personal level. Design is not just a hobby or a vocation. It is an obsession. It is my addiction.

The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is click through my favorite blogs, soaking my brain in visual information. Throughout the day, I spend time analyzing graphic design everywhere I go, cataloguing the way type is spaced on Waitrose risotto packaging, or the way a photograph is treated on the new Jon McGregor novel, or the way scale contrast is employed on a poster for a new Italian movie starring Tilda Swinton. I can’t help it.

And when it comes time to make design, I feel like Remy in Ratatouille. In the words of my friend and mentor, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, there resides a deep love of visual pleasure in every graphic designer’s heart. Our interpretations of what constitutes visual pleasure vary widely, but we all have an uncontrollable urge to make that love manifest through our work.

Preliminary comp of packaging design for a line of Asian seafood crackers. Illustration by Mandy Lee. Photos by Waqas Jawaid. More to come soon.

The power behind visual communication lies in its ability to create connections. We don’t just deliver a product. Our job is not just to sell. Instead, we are responsible for delivering an experience. We make people laugh. We instill fear. We provide clarity. We manufacture desire. We offer hope. But if we don’t provoke a response — intellectual or emotional — our work fails.

The exciting part about graphic design is that it’s always about something beyond the design itself. Design is communication, not decoration. It connects people to new ideas and unexpected experiences, focused through the lens of a designer’s creativity. Design can give shape and color to a world that can otherwise seem drab and redundant. And for me, it serves as a way of speaking out against exclusion and injustice.

But it also fulfills a penetrating, incomprehensible need to express myself. As big a deal as many theorists make about graphic design as a “crystal goblet” to hold somebody else’s “wine,” I pour every ounce of myself into my work. Nobody ever said the goblet couldn’t have a character of its own.

Posters aimed at older people drawing attention to safe sex

I love food. And the Asian in me loves photographing it. This is a really difficult love for me because I’m also deathly (some would say irrationally) afraid of getting fat. Having been at one point 185 pounds, I’m scared of putting on weight. Unfortunately, my love for food is often overwhelming, and I give in easily to temptation, especially when chocolate is involved.

I’ve always believed that I can’t cook, so I’ve done the next best thing: make friends with people who can. At this point, I’ve convinced three incredible restaurant owners in three different cities to exchange food for design. Most recently, I redesigned a menu for my friend Patrick, the owner of a French bistro in London. His seafood pasta feels like home, his salmon with dijon sauce warms my heart, and his moelleux au chocolat is so good that it makes me cry.

Recently, I’ve actually started to cook for friends. I make this one pasta dish with pesto sauce, white wine, and a combination of Western and Chinese spices. Shockingly, everyone who’s tried it has loved it. It could be that they’re just trying to be nice, but it’s inspired me to experiment more in the kitchen. I’m tired of cafeteria style dining facilities and am planning on doing a lot more cooking in grad school. Fingers crossed.

Filet de Saumon à la Dijon at Chez Patrick

I love my friends. This should be a given, but I really don’t give them enough credit — not publicly anyway. I spent the last two weeks in Princeton and New York with some of my closest friends. And though they were busy with theses and other work, they made the time to see me, take me out for food, and even sit down to episodes of Ugly Betty. Somehow, half a year’s time and thousands of miles of distance have only made the bonds between us stronger.

What I value most is that they believe in me and in what I do. They endure video after video about Paula Scher and question after question about whether the type on a poster looks right. They put up with my insecurities, offer affection and comfort, yell at me when I’m behaving foolishly, and force me to be truthful when I can’t find the courage to be.

One of my greatest regrets about taking the Fulbright is that I have to be so far away from them. I’ve made some good friends in London, but seven months in, I still feel like a stranger here. I suppose this has to do with not being part of a structured program. It’s taught me to be more independent. But it’s also shown me how much I rely on the people I left back home.

The people who keep me most myself

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about these verses from the Gospel of Matthew: “Lay not for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth destroy, and thieves break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven…for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” It sounds obvious, but I think that many of us get so lost in measuring life by what we achieve and accumulate that we lose sight of the things that truly fulfill us.

What I’ve come to understand over the past year is that giving into fear is like stealing happiness from yourself. Conversely, hope comes from putting faith in the things and people you love. I’m sitting here at 6AM, typing this entry, and I’m shivering because the maintenance staff is refusing to turn on the heat. But somehow, writing this has given me hope: I know that tomorrow, the things I hold dear will still be there — because I’ve fought to keep them in my life today.