We were lucky to catch up with Hongzhou Wan recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Hongzhou thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about how you got your first non-friend, non-family client. Paint the picture for us so we can feel the same excitement you felt on that day.

My first official client is a filmmaker, I reached out to him as he was looking for designers in a student group chat. This goes back to 2022, the first year I got to go to graduate school in person during the pandemic, I realized that was the right moment to take the initiative as things slowly recovered. We met in the editing room at school after I showed him the portfolio, and then we went through the whole film quickly. I felt fresh to everything – from the dark editing room to the experimental narrative film he was working on. After that, the story went quite straightforward – I designed the title, credits, and poster for his film and he loved it. The collaboration opened the door to many more opportunities, as he referred me to other filmmakers. This experience was a pivotal moment that I appreciate.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a graphic designer currently based in LA. Graduated from CalArts in 2023, I have been working with clients across both cultural and commercial fields ever since. I focus on and offer typography and art direction, and provide services in identities, motion, and web. I don’t provide client with designs that merely serve as instant filler, rather, I propose a half-flexible framework that not only adheres to established rules but also leads its way to the unexpected. Also, stemming from my graduate thesis, I am constantly exploring my designer’s role as player.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Being a graphic designer offers me many doors to the areas that I have never touched on. It forces you to learn new things, and adapting certain scenarios with your skill and mindset. Other than that I can play many roles that span across distinctive duties. Sometimes you play an editor, re-organizing and helping clarify the content, next time you can be a pure maker, solely aiming to build something unseen, and you can be a translator, problem-solver, etc. Though it can be risky that a graphic designer can barely scratch the surface of what they work on, I enjoy the process – the journey takes me to the uncharted.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

I have heard assumptions from non-creatives that graphic designers work in a very specific field or subject of division. For example, I used to talk to my relatives and they asked me if I was going to work on Ads for good. I would say this might be not wrong for the older generation who experience career or world of view in a settled trajectory. And as an Asian, I also experienced the stress from questions like ‘How could you jump from one job to the other that often?’. The world is changing fast, and commonly, people have many slashes, so are creatives, and likely their professional careers cannot be measured with linear manners or an ‘integral’ expectancy.
Maybe we can anticipate to see, and be calm to embrace the fact that the journey as a young creative nowadays is prone to be fractured, nimble, and fluid, which manifests in the way we collaborate with peers, the way of distributing our works, and most importantly, in how we no longer feel the urge to define ourselves within predetermined areas.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @hongzhou_wan
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hongzhouwan/