-: Hello and welcome.
My name is Lee-Sean Huang,
director of design content and learning here at AIGA,
The professional association for design.
As I mentioned earlier,
this is our first live stream program of 2022.
So, welcome back, thanks for sticking with us
and if this is your first AIGA event, welcome.
This event, like all AIGA events is member supported.
So, consider becoming a member at aiga.org.
Also a friendly reminder about our code of conduct.
No harassment or abusive behavior will be allowed.
We'll post a link in the comments
if you wanna refer to that,
but it's basically, be nice and be professional,
and we'll be A-okay.
"One Designer, One Work" is the name of today's program.
This is an ongoing monthly online series
that features one designer
presenting a piece of creative work
that is personally meaningful to them.
Today's guest presenter is Anna Karpinski.
Anna is a graphic designer and illustrator
from St. Louis, Missouri.
She graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design
with a BFA in graphic design and a minor in art history.
She currently works as an art director
at Osborn Barr Paramore, where she focuses
on Missouri tourism.
I've never been to Missouri,
so I'd love to learn more about that as well.
And president...
She's also president of AIGA St. Louis
and a member of the National Design For Democracy Initiative
and the National Diversity Equity and Inclusion Initiative.
She's helped to run the St Louis design week
and AIGA St. Louis's annual design show since 2019.
So, without further ado, I'll hand things over to Anna
and I'll come back and moderate the Q&A when she's done.
-: Awesome. Thank you so much.
I am really excited to do this.
It didn't occur to me until a few minutes ago
that this was the first one of the year, so no pressure.
But I'm excited to do this.
So, I'm gonna share my screen.
Pardon me for looking on the side,
I'll try not to do that too often.
So, this is gonna be pretty casual,
just a little bit of a history
about what it's like kind of growing up
in a creative household.
My parents are both super creative, I'll get into that,
but it's proven to be an interesting journey,
kind of a fun little ride.
So, we're gonna start off with the artist
that I promised that I would talk about, Charlie Harper.
My parents are huge fans of him.
So I grew up knowing about him
and I grew up learning so much
about shape and color and the simplification of objects
and primarily animals, really, through him
and what that can look like.
And I think that having that in early age,
seeing it in a more sophisticated form, I guess
than a childhood drawing was super fun
and it made me start thinking in that way,
kind of automatically, which I think was really great.
So, these are all kind of images I grew up knowing about
and just having around or being aware of.
And then because my dad was a graphic designer
who had all the cool computer programs
I learned about Adobe Illustrator
when it was Illustrator 9, which sounds wild to me,
but they used to have,
I don't know if anyone remembers this,
but they used to have these tutorial booklets
or software, I guess, software that came in the disc
that you could do and it would give you the files
and it would give you a video I think,
or something to walk you through it.
And my dad and I would learn how to use Illustrator together
through this program or through this tutorial.
And it would, again, going back to all of the shapes,
it would teach you how to make things with basic shapes,
because obviously that's kind of
what Illustrator is about.
And so, once I kind of learned how to do that,
I was working off of obviously very simple inspiration,
I'm gonna call it, as a kid.
And those worksheets, but instead of worksheets,
I was using Charlie Harper,
I was using who I can't remember the name of right now,
but the "Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar" books as inspiration
and that was what I was using
to base all of my illustrations off of
and that's how I was continuing my education
on learning beyond the tutorials.
I have distinct memories of there being a vase
of flowers that you learned how to illustrate.
And there was probably, I know I illustrated
a lot of lady bugs because those are obviously all circles.
So, that was really easy for me to do
as a ten-year-old child.
So, you know,
all of my illustrations as a kid looked like the top image,
basically they were all just lots and lots of shapes
in a digital form.
I don't know if I did a lot of that by hand,
actually I think this was all how I use.
These are all used for like my illustration
or illustrator education.
And the reason that I was so interested in this
and the reason I knew this program existed,
and the reason I knew about Shirley Harper
is because my parents...
Yeah and by the way,
the drawing of my father on the left is courtesy of me.
Obviously I was very talented.
So my dad is a graphic designer.
My mom is an illustrator and they're both,
both ended up being teachers as well.
And so I grew up in, and they both worked from home too,
which is like a whole nother thing. Right?
But it was constant creativity all the time.
My mom, as many artists do,
went through different creative phases
throughout her career.
And one of them was found object art,
and I don't have any good pictures of her studio,
but it's nuts.
There are just,
every wall is just filled with thousands and thousands
of things to give you some perspective,
she's selling some snow domes right now.
And I asked her how many she had,
cause she just went through a purge of them,
like when I was in high school
and she currently has over a thousand snow domes.
So it was that kind of vibe.
And I remember being a kid
and having to do diorama's for school
and having to do anything
and it was like just going into a toy shop,
going into my mom's studio.
Cause she had a little mini plastic soldiers.
She had a little mini trees and like flowers
and all of everything you would ever need
as a child to like create anything three-dimensional.
And that was really cool.
And that's how I grew up.
And I grew up surrounded by artists like Seymourchwast
and Pushpin Studio, Keith Herring.
My parents have so much Marimekko everywhere.
I'm gonna, I know I'm gonna pronounce it wrong,
I apologize, Yayoikusama.
I grew up with furniture like knockoffs, obviously,
because it's ridiculous how expensive,
but like knockoff, Charles Eames,
everything mid-century modern.
Although these are actually my parents' chairs.
They just got refinished
that had been in my living room or
has been in their living rooms
since I can remember.
Also, as you can tell, I'm a cat person,
this is great for if you have cats,
cause you can like poke your finger through the webbing
and then your cats will attack.
And so they're multi-functional.
I grew up with a lot of Fiestaware
in every color you can imagine.
Their closet or their China cabinet
basically looks like this.
I wish I had a picture of their actual one, but...
And so when I was in high school,
like obviously I always wanted to do art.
I was surrounded by it.
It felt comfortable to me,
it was exciting.
It was really cool to see constant creativity all around me,
but I didn't wanna be my parents.
I think like most kids want to be very opposite
of their parents at this age.
And so when I was in high school,
I like went the other direction.
I was trying to be photo realistic drawn.
I was like, you know, penning a traditional kind of stuff.
I was trying to go dial all the way over to that side.
And so that was most of what I was doing in high school
was a lot of realistic kind of stuff.
And then when I got into like a later high school,
I started revisiting illustrator again .
But I started again,
like I kind of tipped the opposite direction.
I was like, oh, wouldn't it be fun to see like how detailed,
like what if I could do the post illustration thing,
but by hand.
So I would find something to illustrate
and I will go in by hand
with the pen tool and "hone my skills."
I guess and just like attempt to kind of,
I felt like it was like an extension
of my illustrator education in a way,
but it was also like still very different
from what I had grown up around like simple shapes
bold colors or unrealistic
kind of colors sort of thing.
And so I kind of tipped to that direction
and were, was doing stuff like this for a couple years.
And then I got into college
and it was all over the place, right?
Like I was just doing pattern work I was doing,
I like discovered the magic of doing things analog
and I was discovering just like how awesome it was
to make mistakes and have that be part of your design,
like the books spread with the one and the two
was something that I scanned in and it scanned in like that
like real weird and distressed
and went to my teacher.
And I was like,
I know this looks like I'm trying to be lazy
and tell you that this was on purpose,
even though it was a mistake
so I don't have to do more work
but I actually really love how it turned out.
So I kind of wanna turn this in
and the final and he was fine with that.
And I think that that level of like messiness
was really cool to discover .
And plus I went away for college.
I grew up in St. Louis.
My parents have lived in St. Louis their whole lives.
So when I went away to college,
it was kind of nice to be able to be surrounded by different
types of creativity
and just kind of be able to learn about creativity
from other perspectives than I had grown up with.
So I was kind of all over the place
and I did a lot of sort of things.
And then I came back
and I was doing a little bit more illustration.
I still do design work and stuff,
but it seemed more fun to focus on illustration for this.
And I couldn't find the exact piece, but my mom did a,
we both did pieces for an auction for AIGA St. Louis.
And I did the one on the right,
the dogs and drafts.
And my mom did something very similar
to the one on the left.
And when a co organizer looked at the two pieces,
he was like, oh wow, like mother, like daughter.
And I had this moment where I was like, oh no,
I've gotten there.
Like I came all the way around somehow like by accident,
like it was just inevitable.
Somehow it, whatever the case may be,
it just kind of happened that way.
And I was like, damn I don't know how I feel about this,
but I've kind of like,
as I've done more illustration work and I was like,
I started to have to do it for my current job
and everything.
I feel like I've started just kind of tipping
that way naturally and it's just what I'm doing.
So I've kind of learned to embrace it a little bit.
So now we're back to simple shapes
and we're back to, like,
I just finished the illustration on the left
of our old courthouse here in St. Louis
today basically.
But, you know, so I came back to the basics.
I went back to all of my shapes.
I went back to all of my simple,
illustrations and it's,
I think it's a fascinating journey in the sense that I think
that we, I grew up with a lot of creativity.
I try really hard to swing a different direction
and to go somewhere else.
But because I was so surrounded
by this very specific type of aesthetic,
I feel like I kind of tipped back into that and I'm,
I feel good about it now.
I feel like there was probably a couple of years
where I was struggling with that a little bit
where I didn't wanna just be like my parents.
I didn't wanna feel like my style was like iterative
of them.
I wanted it to feel original to me
and I want it to feel like it was my own creativity,
but it feels like somehow it got there
and it was actually making this presentation was fun
because now that I look back at Charlie Harper,
who honestly haven't really looked at in a while closely,
it kind of feels like it came full circle a little bit.
So thank you.
That's that's all I have.
I just have a brief little story time for you
about like a weird journey and what it was like growing up,
being creative, and I'm gonna open,
I'm gonna stop sharing my screen and open it up.
Lee-Sean: Awesome. All right.
I am popped back.
So having some camera issues here,
hopefully this will work.
Give me a sec while I try to bring myself back.
All right, there we go.
All right.
I'm just dealing with some tech glitches
for the very first live stream of the year.
Anna, thanks so much for that presentation,
that introduction to your story and to your work.
I wanna open it up to questions now to our audience.
You can use the Q and A pod if you're here in Zoom,
or if you're watching along at LinkedIn
or any of our other live streams,
you can just type in the comments.
We are monitoring those as well.
But in the meantime,
I will ask Anna some questions myself,
and then we'll bring in some audience questions.
So the basic structure of your story
was kind of how you came full circle and back home,
starting with what you grew up with,
with your parents and going away for college.
And then kind of coming back to that convergence, I guess,
with your mother's work.
What are you thinking about?
What is the next chapter for you?
Like, is this is a comfortable place
where you've kind of found yourself
or is there other areas or aesthetics
that you wanna explore with your work?
-: I think it's been,
I've enjoy kind of some kind of the simplification
of my form.
Like that's been,
and it honestly didn't really occur to me
that it was kind of basically
what my parents do for a while.
Like it just kind of hit me.
It kind of just hits me every once in a while.
And so that's where I feel comfortable in that,
it doesn't feel like it's because of them,
it just kind of has happened to go back that direction.
And it feels really good.
I think the other benefit of like seeing my parents
be artists was, again, like I said this briefly,
but my mom went through stages as an artist, right?
Artists go through different aesthetic kind of stages
throughout their career,
as they're just trying different things or discovering
themselves are developing and growing.
And so I feel much more comfortable in the state of like,
this is where I am now.
This is what my style is now.
It could change again.
I have no idea.
Being able to see that develop from my found object
to now, she does very
like collagey kind of stuff.
Now she's starting to learn about procreate
and doing things digitally,
but they're still very shaped based.
It's very similar, you know,
and she's playing with color
in ways that she hasn't before.
Being able to see that creativity
and that process has been really cool
because it helps me to be more okay I think,
with like, this is where I am now.
I don't know what I'm gonna look like in the future.
It's just gonna kind of happen naturally
'cause that's how it felt like where I am now happened. So.
-: Awesome. All right.
It looks like we have a few audience
questions popped up in the chat and the Q and A now.
We'll start with Heather.
Heather has a comment for us.
It's admirable that you respect your parents work
while not wanting to directly emulate it.
The question part is,
what would they say about your work today?
-: My mom seems a lot more excited about it.
She was when I was doing the,
she'll always say she's a teacher, so she knows how to,
talk to people.
But you know, she'll always say like,
I don't know if I like the style,
but it looks good, you know?
But now I feel like I'm getting a little bit more
until she's like, oh, it looks good.
Like she doesn't have to have the caviat in a way
of like, I don't know how I feel about the style,
cause it's a little bit closer to her.
So in some ways I think that it's exciting for them
to see it come to this direction.
But I also,
I also, think they don't care in the sense
that they just liked seeing
that I'm creating and seeing them developing
and all of that kind of stuff.
So they've never, I don't think explicitly said like,
I really like the style you're doing right now.
It just feels like there's maybe a little bit more
excitement cause it's something they're familiar with.
-: Yeah.
When you were telling your story,
you're setting things up like, oh,
in high school or college,
you wanted to kind of swing away from
what you had grown up with.
And I kind of thought,
and then Anna wanted young Anna,
I wanted to become an accountant
or something.
(laughing)
-: Not creative based, which, or not that being an accountant
it's not creative but like in a different way. Right?
So that gets us to the second.
-: Yeah Different career. Yeah.
Lee-Sean: Yeah.
Second audience question.
This one's from Michael Beirut,
who wants to know Anna,
did you ever pursuing a career that wasn't creative
or did your upbringing make it feel like
that was what you were predestined to do
because of what your parents did?
-: I think there was a little bit of,
predestined kind of feel to a lot of it,
but I also, when I was little,
like we all go through the careers we want,
like, I wanted to be an archeologist for a while
until my parents were like,
you know that means you have to dig through dirt. Right?
I want it to be a journalist for a while.
I thought that would be really cool.
For awhile I thought about like doing art history
as a career path,
I have the worst memory in the world.
So that felt pretty quickly like it wasn't gonna happen.
I've always been a lot more book nerdy than my parents have
where I'm a little bit more on the liberal arts side
of things to some degree.
So I think that's like a difference that we always had.
And that's something that I've always kind of leaned into
a little bit more with my stuff,
like the research side and the psychological side
and like all of that.
So there were like other things I had thought about,
you know, fashion designer on point.
But eventually I think in my head, I was like, oh,
if I become a graphic designer, I can kind of do anything.
Like that's such a broad title to me.
Lee-Sean: Right.
-: I was like, I can fit whatever I wanna do into that title
and it gave me more room to continue to like explore
and develop and have like kind of the more academic side.
-: Right.
'Cause you could put graphics on textiles
or on screens or another surfaces
in that sense. Right? -: Exactly.
-: We have another question from Heather
who wants to know more about your involvement
with AIGA through your long career.
Could you tell our attendees about
why you've taken on leadership roles
at your local chapter and what you've gained from
that experience as a leader in your local design community?
-: Yeah. So it's funny.
So my dad is one of the founding members
of the St. Louis chapter.
And it used to be called just another art director
or not just another art director's club,
which was like,
I think eight or nine people, my mom and my dad included.
And then it became
(indistinct)
talk to an AIGA national, made it an official AGIA chapter.
So I'm a legacy AIGA, which is like weird.
And I, my dad, when I graduated, he's like,
you should join AIGA.
Join the board is a great networking opportunity.
Like obviously I'll help you, you know,
get in kind of thing, which it,
that ended up not being like an issue really.
And I joined a student conference chair.
It did, it just kind of grabbed me
and I just kept going and kept going.
And then when the issue of presidency came up,
it was at first, I was like, oh, I'm like way too young.
I am super unqualified for this.
And then it just kind of happened.
And then I was like, okay, here I am.
And it's been amazing.
It's been like an incredible kind of learning experience.
And I just got my job at Osborne bar, like in August.
And so when I was job hunting,
having to rewrite my resume
and look through my portfolio
and reflect on my experience
and what I've been doing creatively,
it didn't even occur to me how much AIGA had impacted that.
And that was really cool to see,
like it was more of an impact in like the leadership
and the organization
in that kind of way in the process versus like
actually creating things.
But I've found that to be like more valuable
than I really honestly expected it to be,
so that's been really cool,
but it was again kind of a weird journey, a little bit.
Lee-Sean: Yeah.
(indistinct)
Lee-Sean: Sort of like the predestination thing again.
Anna: Right
-: I love the intergenerational aspects of all of that.
-: Yeah. A little bit.
-: So another question about how you grew up Christie
over at our LinkedIn feed wants to know,
how did your parents balance work time and parent time
when they were working from home?
Cause that was, I guess back in the day before everyone,
or most of us were forced to work from home.
Anna: Right.
-: So as like early pioneers of that,
and as parents, how did they deal with that?
-: You know, I think it was pretty easy
in the sense that because they worked in home
and like they had their own studios,
you know, it just kind of felt like my mom taught.
So she was the one that was like away more maybe,
but you know, they were freelancers.
So as we know,
like you kind of set your own schedule in a way,
so it didn't feel like, you know,
I don't know what it's like to not have parents
that don't work from home, but, you know, I mean,
I was at school most of the time, I guess during the summer,
there, were a lot of times,
we watched TV and my mom would work on an illustration
or I would go up to her studio and I would get to see stuff.
And like, that was kind of cool
to always have all of that around,
you know, I would, there was like a video of me somewhere.
That's never gonna make it to the internet.
That's like, I have a video recorder
and I'm trying to do a documentary of my parents
and they're dealing with a computer issue
and they are not in, they are like,
hey, why don't we put that down?
Why don't we just not.
Cause they're trying to work.
-: Yeah.
-: And I don't understand it.
I just wanna like play. Right?
But they're so it's just like stuff like that.
But you know, it was really just the environment
of just constantly being surrounded
by all these weird imagery, you know,
all these weird graphics everywhere, I think.
-: Very cool. So let's see.
There's so many audience questions
trying to curate the next one.
All right. Let's go here into the chat. All right.
Laura wants to know,
did you always plan to return to St. Louis
after gonna college in Minneapolis?
Or did you consider working in Minneapolis for awhile?
-: Yeah, it's funny.
I, when I graduated, I was so intimidated.
This is like imposter syndrome.
I was so intimidated by Minneapolis studios
and the market, how competitive it was.
And I was so stressed about getting a job.
And part of the reason I think I moved back
to St. Louis was that comfort of like,
it's still competitive,
but it's not quite as competitive.
And it felt like an easier place to start
and it felt more familiar to me.
So in a lot of ways,
I think I came back in part because of that.
And I also,
like I did kind of start missing St. Louis.
I think I was starting to miss, you know,
being around my family.
I was starting to miss how quiet sometimes St. Louis can be.
And it was sort of growing at that point.
It's grown even more, but, you know,
so I didn't mind coming back, but it,
but then I got re...
Someone in Minneapolis reached out to me
like three months after I moved back
and I was like I should have gone for it.
Right? Like I should have done it.
(chuckles)
So lesson learned, I guess.
-: It's almost like you become more valuable
sometimes right after you move away.
-: Right. I was like, you could've sent me the email
three months ago?
But okay.
(laughing)
-: So we have a couple of questions that I'll batch together
'cause I think they have to do with how you sustain your
creative energy.
The first one is,
you're juggling many hats, especially now during a pandemic.
How do you deal with creative burnout?
And then the second question is,
have you ever felt like you lost your creativity
and how do you invigorate it?
-: Yeah, so I feel like I'm experiencing
creative burn out right now.
So a great question.
I've been, so over the pandemic years now, multiplied,
I found that doing creative things
that are directly related to what I do at my day job,
don't really work.
I struggle because I've been doing it all day
and I don't have any more creative juice
for making an illustration or doing a design thing.
Started doing like hobby photography stuff
and that's been super fun because it's still creative.
It's still gets that kind of part of my brain,
like satisfied, but it's so different from what I do.
I don't feel the pressure of having it be good
or I'm worried about showing it
because that's like what I do in my daily life.
I also like color a lot.
I think the color is totally relaxing.
I'll get like something super detailed
and I'll just like go at it for like hours.
And I think that that's really fun
and also reading because I feel like that feels,
again it's creative kind of,
but it's, I don't have to think about it,
which is kind of nice.
And I get to like enjoy someone else's creativity.
So those are the things I've been doing.
Sometimes if I don't feel creative,
I just don't do anything creative for a while
and that kind of helps me because
then I'll start getting an itch again
and then that'll motivate me to like
be creative in some way.
But if I'm out of it, I'm done.
I gotta step away for a while.
-: Awesome.
So another related question to your craft
and your creativity this is an anonymous question
earlier you were talking about
having experimented with many different styles
do you feel like it took you awhile to hone your craft
or to get to a point where you felt like
it was more like you or authentically you?
-: I think so.
And I still, you know, it's funny cause I,
I still don't know if I'm a hundred percent me yet,
because I've,
so I did a lot of...
My old job was I worked at an architecture firm
that does a lot of like guest experience spaces,
like theme parks, museums, zoos, aquariums,
like that kind of work is very different
from like what we traditionally think of as illustration
and design.
So a lot of the stuff I was doing that honestly,
wasn't my style at all.
It was, you know,
a theme park aesthetic, which is very different.
So I didn't have a lot of chance to develop my own
style to some degree.
And I was doing advance work or personal projects and stuff.
And I think over the last couple of years,
it's just kind of naturally started to fall more
into the shape, realm, you know, like real bold outlines,
simplified forms
and it feels comfortable right now.
And it feels like that's something I'm very familiar with.
So I guess right now it's my style,
but I don't think at any point
I was okay, my style is gonna be this.
I think it just kind of started
all of the shading started disappearing
and then all of the little
wigglies nuance lines started straightening,
like it just kind of happened.
-: Yeah. It's sort of like,
there's an additive dimension
and a subtractive dimension. Right?
So there's like the additive
of you're trying different things or because of work,
you have to stretch yourself
to do the house style of the amusement park.
And then there's that gradual evolution of as you said,
like taking away the shading or focusing on a
more minimal color palette
and all of those things like that.
-: Yeah. Exactly.
-: McKayla wants to know,
has transitioning to art direction
changed the way that you approach projects
and design ideation?
-: You know, not a little bit
because I'm thinking about campaigns on a larger scale. So.
And I'm working with a copywriter for the first time,
I think, you know, professionally.
And so there has been a little bit of adjustment for me
and that way of like,
thinking about things and like this much larger subset,
as opposed to, again,
like thinking about one amusement park ride
or one museum exhibit, you know,
you're thinking about an entire campaign
that's gonna last for a long time
and it has to continue to create content.
I do think though that like being the president of AIGA
has helped with that.
So it has not been like a hard transition
because I was kind of already doing that to some degree.
And I was already sort of thinking about big picture
and having to creative director art direct my comms team,
and coming up with like ways in which we can create content.
So there's a little bit of that,
there's a little bit of like getting used to
this new structure, but at the same time,
I feel like the leadership skills,
which are maybe the biggest shift
from and creating ideas,
which is maybe the biggest shift from like graphic design
to art direction were already kind of, there in some ways,
or it had already started to develop.
-: Yeah. I think it's interesting when you
look back and you were saying you were kind of
already doing art direction along
as president of AIGA St. Louis,
and sometimes you're already developing those skills
or doing those tasks before
you get the official title professionally. Right?
Anna: Exactly. -: And connecting the dots,
I think is a way of thinking about it.
-: Yeah. I kind of felt under
and overqualified for everything
because my job was,
my day job was so weird that it's very like niche,
but the AIGA stuff was very much like
all of that kind of leadership and directional
kind of big picture stuff.
So I felt like I had a lot of assets there,
but then I felt like I haven't,
hadn't worked in digital a whole lot.
So that kind of limits you a little bit
when you're looking for jobs now.
So it was like a weird space to be in.
-: So the art pieces that are behind you
on the wall are any of those, your own work
and would you like to tell us more about one of them?
-: I don't hang my own work.
I don't like looking at it because every time I look at it,
I'm like, oh, all my work is like rolled up in posters.
These are all prints that
my parents have gotten me, I think,
except for, so the, let's see if I can...
Oh my God so close.
Okay.
That one, the bright green one is by Micah Smith
who's an artist who we had speak.
Actually, he was the last person to speak
before the pandemic.
He did custom posters St. Louis
with specific screen prints for his event.
And so that is one of those.
The one right below it is from...
Man i gotta remember their names
because I can't remember off the top of my head,
but it's via Minneapolis screen printing shop
that we toured when I was in college.
And they had no education in screen printing or print,
and they just kind of trial by errored everything.
And they have some really awesome stuff
just through their mistakes.
The, kind of like cardboardy post right there
is a type specimen poster from house industries.
And then this is a series of postcards
from one of our local firms,
Almanac brand Almanac that they just,
they had like a cool lunar eclipse party
when that happened like a few years ago.
This is my parents actually did it together for an art
auction it's paper, collage houses.
They said they're never working together again.
(laughing)
-: So that you can tell my,
you can tell very clearly which ones are my mom's
and which ones are my dad's because
they have very different design aesthetics, but yeah.
Lots of stuff up there. -: Awesome.
-: Yeah.
Thanks for sharing a little bit about your environment.
I just wanted to make a quick announcement
and then I have another question coming in from LinkedIn,
but my colleague Susan posted in the chat here in Zoom
and I posted on LinkedIn,
if you are interested and inspired by Anna's story
about getting involved in your own local chapter,
we posted a link there so you can learn more on aiga.org.
Sophia over at LinkedIn wants to know
what books are you currently reading, Anna?
-: So I'm currently reading" Mr. Norrell dr
and Jonathan Strange."
(indistinct)
Jonathan Strange,
which is about two early 19th century magicians
that are fighting.
Yes, thank you.
Are fighting as part of the Neapolitan.
Oh my God. My brain.
Yeah. "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell," thank you.
They're fighting in a war
and it's kind of about the resurrection of magicians
in London.
It's really cool.
It reads like a snarky autobiography or a biography.
It's a thousand pages, so I'm never gonna finish it,
but highly recommend "Cloud Cuckoo Land" by Anthony Doerr.
That's my favorite book of 2021.
It's a love letter to the importance of,
and to the importance of literature
and to storytelling
and how we hold that dear and how we protect it
so that it lives throughout multiple generations.
-: Awesome. Wonderful.
(indistinct)
Anna: Thank you.
I was like,
I couldn't remember the end and I was like,
Napoleon something,
but I couldn't remember Napoleonic or I don't know.
My brain was freaking out. Thank you.
-: It looks like Susan's posted those in the chat as well.
I'll post those over to LinkedIn.
So folks can see it over there.
So Anna, are there any other local St. Louis creators,
whether they're designers or work in other media
that you wanna shout out right now to
let the world know about?
-: Yeah.
So my previous vice-president Jayden Solomon has been doing
really awesome things.
He's a muralist now.
He used to work at my old company actually,
which is kind of funny,
but he's now a muralist
he's he started a really awesome project at the end of 2019
and into 2020 for supporting Black artists
who would do murals kind of across St. Louis.
And that got a lot of attention.
It was really cool.
It's called painted black STL.
I don't know if they're still doing stuff right now.
Obviously the pandemic kind of puts everything,
makes everything a little weird.
And then Shreyas as a comic book artist,
illustrator and teacher at Wash U
and she's put in the chat, her website.
She's really awesome.
She just did an anthology with a bunch of
other comic book artists.
And those are the two off of the top.
I have like a million,
but those are like the two,
like right off the top of my head
that I always tell people about
and I always recommend people look up.
But St. Louis honestly has like a really
strong design community,
but also artistic community.
And they're just,
it's super awesome to watch that develop
and grow and see kind of artists of color also like
kind of make a little bit more of a splash
then maybe in independents.
I know St Loius is a little, like,
we got some problems,
but there's some really cool ones out there.
-: Yeah.
Thanks for the shout outs
to your fellow St. Louis creatives.
So to wrap up, Anna,
do you have any final words
that you wanna share with our audience today?
-: Thanks for having me.
I'm really excited that I got to share my story.
I think you had really good questions too .
Yeah. I'm happy I was the first one of 2022.
Can't believe it's already that time.
(chuckle)
-: Yeah.
Well thanks for kicking off our year with our programming
we do one designer, one work once a month here at AIGA.
So if you're not on our email list,
you can sign up for that as well on aiga.org.
Thanks to all of our audience members.
It looks like we had folks from all over the US as usual,
but we also had Austria,
we had India, we had Paris France,
so that's awesome.
It's great to see this international audience continue
and to continue to support us and our community.
So thanks again, Anna.
Thanks again, everybody.
See you at the next one.
I'm Lee-Sean Huang. Bye.
-: Thank you.