We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dayna Lee a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Dayna thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What do you think it takes to be successful?

Lately, I’ve been rethinking what success looks like to me specifically, as a creative. For the longest time, I (like most people) have always equated success with things like financial wealth, power, or having a great career. Holding the title of Principal designer or Creative Director seemed to be the path that I needed to take as I progressed further into my design career.

That all changed in the past few years when I started to feel burnt out design job after design job. I stopped feeling fulfilled and realized how much I’ve even come to resent being a designer. I felt like outside of my full-time design job, I never wanted to do anything creative like I used to like photography or painting.

In October of last year, I was unfortunately laid off at the start up I had been working as lead designer for a little over two years. While my initial reaction was one of panic stemming mostly from financial worry and the lack of stable income, I decided to give myself a month off to rest.

The idea of rest seemed so foreign to me at first. I found myself not being able to sit still. I was constantly worried about my finances even though I had more than enough savings to take a month long break. I couldn’t rest. Funnily, I got incredibly sick after returning from a family trip during that month and it was as if my body was forcing me to be in rest mode. It was only then that I felt like I started to learn what it meant to truly take a break.

In the past couple months since getting laid off, my life has looked incredibly different from what it used to be. I now balance my time with freelance design as well as working part-time at a plant shop. While I’m not making the same amount of money I used to, I have never been happier and more fulfilled. My weeks no longer feel monotonous — every week is a little different. I’ve had more time to paint, draw, and even do pottery. I’ve learned a lot from my experience at the plant shop on how to run a small business which has inspired me to pursue a new goal of wanting to open my own little shop in the future. I no longer feel burnt out like I used to and one of the biggest things I’ve learned is that I no longer want to be limited to just being a designer.

While Graphic Design was what I went to school to get a degree for and even had a pretty successful design career after, I’ve realized recently that while design is something I’m good at, I didn’t want my creative identity to only be that of a designer. I’ve opened up to the idea of considering myself as a painter, a potter, a photographer, an artist, or simply, just a creative.

That being said, I think being successful as a creative, is having the ability to feel fulfilled and nourished from the work that you do. And by work, I don’t mean something you do for a client or a project that you can include in your portfolio — I mean even the simplest thing like creating new prints for your friend who just moved into a new place or designing a little signages for the plant shop you work at for fun. I think having the freedom to just be creative in different areas of your life without limitation is incredibly gratifying and what success ultimately looks like for someone like me.

Dayna, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am an independent designer and creative who specializes in brand design and also making things by hand. While I went to school for graphic design and have many years of experience as a brand designer and art director, I also enjoy creating non-digital works like paintings, prints, pottery etc.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I wish that there are more resources out there on multilingual and non-eurocentric design. One of the things I felt that my design education lacked in was more references to non-western design history and practices. While I understand the merits of a lot of these art/design movements in history, I don’t think that we as designers/creators should be limited to pulling references only from these sources. I think this inherently creates an industry where a lot of design work starts lose “flavor” and tend to all look the same visually. Looking back at my design education and the early stages of my career as a designer, I wish I had learned more about design beyond Swiss typography or the Bauhaus movement. I craved learning about typographic principles in other languages and non-western historical art movements.

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

I think one of the biggest things I’ve had to unlearn recently is productivity — that I needed to always be productive, outputting or working on something, thinking about the future etc. The “go go go” mentality has always been built in me as an Asian immigrant who moved to the United States 16 years ago. There was always one thing after another that I needed to pursue — a goal I always needed to achieve. But this has resulted in so much burn out and the inability to feel present and enjoy even the simplest things in life. As a creative person, I think it’s so easy to get caught up in finding the best way to monetize your work which in my experience, has led to a lot of resentment. Having to unlearn being a “productive” creative has been one of the biggest challenges but a necessary step to allowing myself to be more creatively fulfilled.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Dayna-lee.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dayna-lee

Image Credits

Dayna Lee