We were lucky to catch up with Kat Super recently and have shared our conversation below.

Kat, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

From Swiss-inspired designs to psychedelic illustration to now retro mascot illustrations, I’ve had monumental moments of realizing that there’s no “one size fits all” for graphic design. Due to frustrations with the design industry, I went running to illustration, found a large gap in the brand design world and now I’m an illustrator specifically for other brand designers.

For background, my graphic design journey began in my public high school where I completed four years of graphic design. To this day, this teacher is my greatest mentor and I’ll always be thankful for his influence on my art journey. However, for the past eight years I’ve been told that good design is doing the most with the least, it’s always clever and conceptual, and it looks like having clean lines with Swiss inspiration. And most importantly, it’s working in New York City at a design agency like Karlssonwilcker.

Part of me feels like somewhere in the middle of college, I forgot how to be a designer. I no longer enjoyed how I always had to be smart and conceptual and how Helvetica is considered the holy grail, so I started illustrating. Sometimes I just want to draw a silly little character because I want to regardless of whether it has meaning or not. Some will argue that that means it’s not true art and that’s fine. It is something that brings me and others joy and that’s enough.

I’ve found that the brand design space on social media feels similar to design school- It consists of designers and coaches all saying the same thing about what “good branding” looks and feels like. Because of this, I’ve reflected on what I truly believe “good branding” means.

To me, brand identity design is about storytelling, putting personal design preferences aside and doing what’s best for your clients. This means that even though a designer loves doing monograms, it might not be what works best for their clients. However, not every brand designer should or needs to be an illustrator as well. It just so happens that because of my journey, I’ve had the privilege of being both- one day I’m more of one than the other.

Meeting other designers through Instagram has allowed me to offer my illustration services to them as a subcontractor, better known as “white labeling” where I’ve found a huge gap in the industry. Most illustrators do art licensing or commissions, yet they are rarely focusing solely on brand designers. Therefore, I’ve crafted a professional yet collaborative experience for other brand designers that focuses on providing them illustration that aligns with their client’s strategy.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m Kat, a brand designer and illustrator that specializes in retro designs and drawing silly little characters. Photographer turned designer, I went straight from design school into running my business– I’ve always said that I might have a more entrepreneurial heart than creative one.

I feel like most creatives say that they have always been artistic from a young age and they have a story about when they first picked up a paintbrush or noticed a logo. But to be honest, for as long as I can remember, I was the type of kid that wanted to start my own business.

Around the age of ten, I tried to start a nail salon business with my friend in their garage. Our lead generation strategy was trying to wave cars down from the main road… if only my mom knew about that. Then, when I was in middle school, I started a jewelry business on Etsy as well as my photography business which I’ve been running ever since.

What I love about being a brand designer is that it feels like I get to be a small part of a ton of different businesses. I get to help amazing small business owners create their brand identity and be proud of it. This involves getting to know their story and balancing what they aesthetically like with what will work for their target audience.

In addition to offering brand identity design, I offer white label illustration to brand designers. Meaning, brand designers reach out to me when they have a client that wants illustration and they feel like they can’t do it themselves. I strongly believe that not every brand designer needs to be an illustrator so this has allowed them to save lots of time on trying to create it themselves.

However, my most popular white label service has been my “illustration clean-up”. This service is for my extra ambitious designers that want to do it all. They’ll be mid project and have already created an illustration themselves, but it doesn’t look the way they want it or it’s not refined enough to present. This is the point where I’ll get a dm or email asking if I can recreate it or clean it up.

My goal is to be the go-to illustrator for brand designers and I’ve already created so many lasting friendships with other designers. From one hour coffee chats to creating a Slack channel just for us to support each other working from home, I find so much joy in the people that I work with.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I’ve only been running my design business for five months and because of this, I feel ill equipped to give any sort of advice or wisdom. However, I’ll share what my experience has been so far as a twenty three year old woman in the entrepreneurial space. What I learned quickly or better yet had to unlearn, is that it’s not mean to have strict boundaries with clients.

I’m a people pleaser at heart and I have a desire to deeply know the clients that I work with. Because of this, I’ve put myself in situations where I become what’s known in the design community as a “pixel pusher”. My face looks young, maybe it’s the round glasses or my bubbly attitude, but being young and a woman in the entrepreneurial space makes me feel like I need to earn other’s respect instead of automatically having it. It means getting called “a baby”.

This issue is something I’m still trying to figure out and the biggest change I’ve made is not taking on retainer clients for the time being and having strong contracts in place. It means that I can’t give my phone number out to clients (which yes I know, should’ve been obvious). I’m sure I’ll learn more about this as I continue my design journey.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been running a photography business as well for six years. I always assumed that at this point, I’d be doing that full-time or had moved into a different photography speciality. For background, I specialize in high school senior portraits.

However, I’ve reached the point where photography no longer excites me. I stopped learning and trying new things and became complacent which is why my love for it dried out. Like anything in life, I’m sure this will just be for a season, but this can be the side effect of using your art for your business.

It was my Junior year of college and I had completed 100+ photography sessions. I’m pretty sure my total revenue was $30,000 which should tell you that I was most definitely undercharging. But, I remember finishing that year and feeling more drained in my life than I’d ever been– the perfect example of how saying yes to everything can eventually lead to saying no to your business.

I spent all of my weekends at photography sessions and before each one of them, I’d subtly hope they’d cancel. I didn’t hope this because I didn’t like the people I was working with, in fact, I love all of the seniors I’ve met; each one of them is easy to talk to, excited for their last year of high school, and overall just nice to be around. I’d hope they’d cancel because my introverted self just wanted to stay home.

Because of this, I had to take a step back and look at my personality and what it’s the best fit for. I also had to consider what I want my life to look like long term. That meant that I wanted my weekends to be free and the most interaction with strangers I have is a 30 minute phone call. Besides that, I can send Loom videos or voice messages where I have time to think them through and feel less intimidating. Design just feels like more of a natural fit.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.bsuperdesign.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/bsuperdesign/