We caught up with the brilliant and insightful KUAN-WEN CHEN a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi KUAN-WEN, thanks for joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?
So I started my career through helping out my friend’s graduation projects and learned so much skills from him. Since then, I learned a lot of skills and first-hand experiences through projects and work. I believe that design should be created with purpose, and it makes it hard for me to just craft things without clients or ideas in mind, only for the look of it. Although I would wish I read more books and get to know more theories when I first started out. As a non-academic trained designer, I wish I knew those knowledge earlier to back my ideas better when convincing clients. The best skills in design is just having the momentum to try out different methods, materials, and learning new things, because this industry changes so much, especially with the AI revolution, and as a designer, knowing there’s always possibility to create work with new technologies and have the open mind to accept it is super crucial for the career.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Hi, I’m Kuan-Wen Chen, but people call me Wen. I’m a Taiwanese multimedia designer based in New York City. My work includes Graphic Design, Web Design, and Motion Graphics for both in-house and agency work. I started my career as graphic designer and switched my focus to more digital side, so you can see that a lot of my work utilize both analog and digital work process. I love to apply different materials and styles into my design. I am experienced in digital design and have worked with engineers to craft web experiences, while I do illustrations and riso printing as my side projects. I am most proud of my design work for my currently role at Infinite Objects, crafting designs and animation for clients and artists.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
I moved to New York City from Taiwan since 2019 and it was definitely a hard time for me to learn the culture and translate my work for the industry here. Even design is a universal language, I still find it hard for companies and clients understand my potentials just by work that’s in a language that they don’t know of. I had a counseling with a career coach once and we were discussing about my resume, which I listed out some big name I’ve worked with in Taiwan, the coach asked if they are famous. It was a good reality check for me to drop the ego and the glorious past, and really thinking about making more new work, and interpreting my old work for audience to get a better grasp of my vision.
Have you ever had to pivot?
I started my career as a graphic designer and had a blast working on printing and just visual stuffs. But when I come to the US, I realized that I won’t stand out that much if I just keep doing the same thing for my career, and I want to explore design in more aspects, like creating the whole experience instead of just the look of it. that’s why I started to learn about user experience design, website design, even a bit of programming. When I was working for agency, I got to propose a lot of cool ideas beyond just banners because of my knowledge in technologies. This experience access me to more clients and get to show people that I can provide a holistic design work for their projects.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.kuanwenchen.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wenandkuan/?hl=en
Image Credits
Credits: Wen Chen