An Interview with a New York-based design artist Yu Jen Chen (Nana)
Art is always full of possibilities. Award-winning young designer Yu Jen Chen (Nana) is a persistent explorer of the possibilities one can attain through art, and her educational experience at National Taiwan Normal University and Parsons School of The Arts has made her dream reachable as evidenced by her success in redesigning Brooklyn Fashion Incubator (BFI)’s website and winning a Grand Prize for her short film Hero.
Would you tell us more about your educational background and experience in the art and design industry?
My design career began when I studied at National Taiwan Normal University, during which I applied for an overseas Art and Design Scholarship. The work I submitted was then selected by Parsons so I joined Parsons right after graduation. There, I had the opportunity to systematically learn about multimedia art creation and the story surrounding the relationship between people and technology. After finishing my studies at Parsons, I started my career by doing branding animation at Landor, where I especially honed my skills and insight on icon, logo, and web interaction animation. Right now I am working at Capstone as an animation and design consultant and mainly responsible for animation and illustration for children’s teaching aids.
What is the most noteworthy project you worked on in the first few years of your career?
The redesign of The Brooklyn Fashion Incubator website was pretty impressive. It is a non-profit organization aiming to provide young talents in the fashion industry with mentorship. They were looking to improve the quality of their websites in terms of format and user experience. I was the visual and motion designer in the project. Me and my team conducted lots of research to identify specific improvements that needed to be made. We worked on UI design, style guides, and code. We adapted a professional and inspiring tone and settled on a minimalist and chic font, using dark gray and Burgundy that brought more traffic to the website.
Your short film “Hero“ has won the Grand Prize of the Hong Kong Design Association in the 2019 International Student Design Competition. What is the inspiration behind it?
Briefly speaking, my inspiration comes from life in New York City. The diversity here really inspires me to visualize the people, emotions, and phenomena I observed and has allowed me to turn them into a short film. Hero tells a story about how people overcome their fear and discomfort, in which I also portrayed myself as someone who accidentally falls into an alien world just like Alice in Wonderland. To me, Hero was no doubt a milestone in my design career. A lot of independent artists and clients were attracted by Hero and asked me if I could cooperate with them, including a product team at YouTube.
Other than that, what is one of the most notable projects in your career so far?
Definitely the animation of the Empire State Building projection for Squint Opera. This project took us about 2-3 months to complete, and it was displayed at the Empire State Building observatory experience. My team and I extracted line elements from construction drawings to create an animation that showed the structure of this architectural marvel from the inside out and the bottom up. I was responsible for the animation part, and by projecting the animation onto the wall in VR, I helped to determine the correct size, timing, and sequence. I was really honored to take part in this amazing project.
We are impressed by your ability in conveying emotions through colors and forms. What is the process behind your color selection process?
I had done lots of research on the emotions brought by different colors during my undergraduate years which equips me with the ability of color collocation to convey emotions to the audience. For example, black with a touch of red and white could mean scary, while the combination of fluorescent blue and green stands for modern. I am a big fan of color-matching techniques and I feel very proud to adapt those skills to my professional field to better serve the public.
Contributor: Sophia Zhu