Noa Emberson is a Graphic Designer, Illustrator and Photographer from Maui, Hawaii. He had a Bachelors of Fine Arts Degree in Graphic Design from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His talent is evident in the range of work he has done (my personal favorite is his 'The Little Things" series). He is currently working on a new "Visual Mixtape" series.
Thank you so much for letting us have this interview! Here are my questions. First off, we'd like to know more about you. Can you tell us a little something about yourself? What influenced you to choose the creative fields as your career path?
My name is Noa Emberson and I was born and raised (mostly) in Hawaii, except for a few of my younger years spent overseas with my family in Brazil, Ecuador, and the Philippines (dad was a shrimp farmer). Mom, on the other hand, was an artist and got me interested in drawing and painting at an early age. In high school, I discovered digital photography and, more importantly, Photoshop. After a brief stint of computer science courses in college I decided coding was not for me and I decided to switch to graphic design and haven't looked back since.
How does designing influence your everyday life? And does your environment influence your designs?
Well, I work in house as a graphic designer by day so I'm constantly playing with type and image. That's what pays the bills. While the projects that land in my lap aren't always the most inspiring, it always gives me an opportunity to practice my typography and layout skills. If you can find inspiration in the small projects that come your way, finding inspiration in the big ones will be a snap, at least in my experience. At night is when I take on freelance work, or work on personal projects and this is when I'm able to spread my wings and do the types of projects that I'm truly interested in. In terms of environmental influences, working as a graphic designer in Hawaii is rougher than it seems! The will power needed to not play in the sun all day instead of working can be draining! I swear that people are more productive in places with snow outside their windows... Don't get me wrong though, I'm not complaining.
Do you draw inspiration from other artists?
I am constantly scrolling through my Google reader for inspiration. My inspiration folder that I save images to is starting to get a bit out of hand. I need to find an intern or something to categorize the thousands of images I have saved over the years. Haha. That said, I've always enjoyed the saying that goes something like "looking at design is not the same as designing" or something like that. I believe I saw it on a poster someone made that is now buried in my inspiration folder. Anyway, like many people, I can fall into the rabbit hole of looking at all the pretty images other people are making and not getting busy myself. It's important to find the balance between finding inspiration and actually working. In terms of specific creatives that I most look up to at the moment would be Scott Hansen, Wolfgang Tillmans, Paul Rand, Chip Kidd, Dieter Rams, David Carson, and the list goes on and on.
You do illustrations, graphic design and photography. Does your work have a common theme or a signature style that link them to you as the designer?
It's true. I'm part designer, part illustrator, part photographer. At the end of the day, I just like to be creative. Whether it's with a mouse, brush, or lens I'm trying to figure out how to maximize my creativity and push myself to try new things. I think this can be seen in the body of work supplied here, it's all over the place! While I tried to limit the projects shown to the ones that I most incorporated Photoshop in (since this is a Photoshop blog), the truth is I am most interested in combining raster images (Photoshop) with vector (Illustrator) and type (InDesign). So I'm constantly switching between these programs to get the most out of what each specializes in. I feel that I am too early on in my career to be limited by a signature style or common theme. I have so much more to learn first! Instead, I'm trying to spend my time doing a wide range of work, which I hope in time will help me develop a unique style of my own. At the end of the day, I just want the work that I produce to be of the highest quality possible and to make sure that it is able to stand up to similar projects in the field.
You are also into typography. What is it about it that you like?
I love typography. Love it. I did not always feel this way though. Early on in my design career I really didn't understand the art behind a carefully laid out page of type. I just wanted to create awesome illustrations! Type be damned! Later, as I worked with type more and more and realized just how difficult it is to make type "sing" on a page and THIS is when I fell in love. I didn't realize it then, but the craft of typography is something you can truly spend a lifetime trying to perfect.
Which project can you say you had the most fun doing?
The project I had the most fun doing would be my Visual Mixtape poster series. Here I was able to combine some of the things I love most in life: photography, typography, and music. The project was born from being fed up with a client complaining that certain typographic elements on a page were simply "too small" for her tastes. So, that night the Visual Mixtape was born, filled with type at a size that I felt was beautiful. From there I created a type system that would be able to house all the information from 25 of my (then) favorite albums. I was also able to incorporate some of my favorite photographs that I have taken throughout the years as backgrounds as well. So we are clear, these posters are meant to be subtle and enjoyed from a close distance and perhaps most importantly, they are not trying to sell you anything. I enjoy the irony of this because the posters that I'm usually working on are trying their best to capture both your attention and your wallet. Furthermore, I'm always interested in projects that blur the line between what is considered design and what is considered art.
I personally liked your entry, "The Little Things". How did you come up with this concept?
My "The Little Things" photo project was born from simple origins. I was watching current TV one day and saw a segment about Nick Harmer's (of Death Cab for Cutie) infatuation with tilt-shift photography. I was inspired, saw how he did it, and realized that I had a whole slew of images that would work nicely with the effect. A few weeks later "The Little Things" was born. It was a fun, lighthearted project to do and to my surprise I have gotten a lot of positive feedback.
How do you come up with a concept and what tools do you use to materialize your concepts?
Most times, the way I come up with a concept will start on paper. I'll mind map key words, look them up in the dictionary, look up synonyms in the thesaurus, look THOSE words up in the dictionary, identify which words are iconic, indexical, and symbolic, and basically formulate lists. From there you begin to get a firm grasp of the problem(s) you are trying to solve. Once I can clearly write out a concept in a small paragraph, almost like a hypothesis, I'll search for inspiration (hopefully not for too long) and gather it all in one place so I can quickly refer to it. Execution follows thereafter. If the execution is a struggle, I revisit the listing process all over again.
Do you have any projects that keep you busy right now?
I have a number of projects that I am working on right now, most notably is another Visual Mixtape poster series. I have also begun to learn digital painting a bit more in Photoshop, now that I have a system that can handle a large enough canvas size to performance ratio.
Any word of advice or message for our readers?
Your personal style will be born from a large body of work so stay engaged in creative projects that you are interested in and don't wait for them to come to you. Also, you should learn how to function with no sleep.
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