Khyati Trehan

0:00 [Applause]

0:07 hi thank you for coming out today my name is kti Tran I'm from India but I live here in Brooklyn now. And it's been about a year. And I'm something between like a graphic designer and a visual artist and I I really struggle with the little like tag or by line that should come under my name cuz I've been a lot of things I've been a type design intern forever ago like nothing fancy just trying to learn something new how to draw letter forms and spacing and metrics and and interpolation I've been a communication designer at Ido trying to WP my head around strategy and research and the ambiguity that comes with briefs that sound like what's the future of this or what should our business do next and I've been a Brand designer at Sovereign objects a creative Collective founded by this amazing person called Karin FY who used to be an MD at Collins and with her I got to work in teams where we built Brands around worlds like this one inspired by Spanish Cafe culture for a book Discovery app called Tulia so there have been a bunch of other titles in the mix through the work that I've gotten to do for clients like Oscars and apple and YouTube and and Vogue and other like cool names and now I work at the Google creat creative lab where I've worked on visual systems for campaigns and films and products and lots of other exciting things so you kind of get the idea like I've had a pretty varied and Restless career but the one thing.

1:46 That's been consistent throughout is my parallel practice it's the stuff I do while I'm doing all of this. And I feel like I need both at the same time to keep the juices flowing cuz they Al kind of feed off of each other and my personal practice gives me time to like meddle and to reflect and most importantly it gives me lots and lots of freedom and that freedom comes in a bunch of flavors like the first one of course is like complete Freedom where I'm just doing stuff for myself like I can test out new treatments without the the pressure of like a deliverable so I I do a lot of 3D illustrations and it tends to have this like particular finished look. So what if I turned it on its head and brought a more like handmade process by sketching over it and giving the render this like paintly imperfect quality or what if I use 3D tools to make a very like 2D looking animation and kind of repurpose a tool to do what it wasn't exactly built out to do so you know if I was doing this traditionally I'd have to draw the Shadows but in 3D I could just you know place the the light in one corner and let it calculate the Shadows or generative AI processes I kind of go beyond just writing a prompt and hitting enter and like kind of waiting to see what'll come out at the other end and I've deliberately been doing what I call the pingpong process or like a back and forth between traditional tools and AI tools to kind of find my own workflow so I might do some lettering I might animate it.

3:30 And then I might take it take the frames to an AI tool and then I bring it back to the trusty motion software so I've also been like throwing type in the mix as an additional variable cuz AI isn't the best at treating a body of text right now and that this kind of like serves as a little constraint or Challenge and sometimes I use this space for what feels like little diary entries like I got this new bag and my Kindle finally fits perfectly in it.

3:59 So I'm reading more and I have this like new Found Love for ebooks or how since working in big organizations I feel like my life now kind of revolves around the calendar so if we've like planned something outside of work even and it's not on the calendar I may not show up to it cuz I've forgotten about it or what it's like to move to a new country and start over and buy a couch from Facebook Marketplace for like the sixth time and know it won't be my last time and there are instances where a diary entry kind of extends into several entries like I had this day at work that involved a lot of like thinking and he conversations and strategy and it was kind of saturating and on a day like that I usually just go back home and watch Like Love island or The Bachelor or something.

4:54 But that day I just kind of started doodling in 3D with no intention and the only rule that I set for myself is like I'm not going to think too much I've done enough of that in the day and I kind of treated it like automatic writing and the piece just started taking on like this organic form that you see and around that time I'd read about ecotherapy which is a type of therapeutic treatment involved involving guided outdoor activities in nature but what was surprising is that even the act of making a synthetic version of natural forms I found very relaxing especially cuz I was doing it so slowly so I keep coming back to this this like now that.

5:37 Now it feels like a ritual or a practice once in a while as like this way to like doodle and unwind as a plan B if Bachelor doesn't have a new season.

5:51 And then there's the Other Extreme flavor of Freedom that's a 50/50 this involves projects that are more brief Centric but there's a little pocket of freedom in there. And I do these all the time.

6:02 But I think editorial illustration bucket of work is kind of like a perfect example of that for me cuz they of course like accompany a text there's a mission to reference and there's a job to be done but they also can't give away to much like you have to tread the tension of figurative and abstract and the art director and illustrator get to tag team and figure out what qualifies as a good middle so we have a little bit of freedom in sliding across that that scale an example of a hard middle to figure though was this like piece for the New York Times book review of the extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul she digs into the power of thinking outside the brain like how your brain isn't the only thinking vessel in your body that we're like these networked organisms and we move in shifting environments and these environments have the power to transform the way that we think which was like such a fuzzy concept to wrap my head around like how do I even begin visualizing this so after noodling on the concept and a bunch of sketches and lots of reading I ended up landing on a visual that populated the imagery with like sensory receptors and really inflated their proportions to communicate their role and lit up parts of them as if they're like receiving information like they're active so not a scientific diagram at all very abstract so in this moment it was really reassuring to get this feedback from the actual author thank you Annie and editorials are also such a great entry into rabbit holes that I may have never come across like where else would I learn about bioelectricity and that there's a bit of research that suggests you can like persuade this worm to grow a second head by just changing the electrical signals that are being like passed around the worm cells which is wild but and the essay was about that.

8:00 But it was also about what that might mean for us as human beings and regenerating human cells so I try to do that in the illustration.

8:08 And I've somehow found myself in the niche of editorials with a scientific Bend somehow and this was a piece on the role of the mitochondria in autism research for spectrum magazine and the last one I want to show in this bucket is a recent one that I did for Wired Magazine on analog Computing and I always finish an illustration or an editorial illustration project hoping that it'll communicate a little more or like a little differently to the text that accompanies it. And it'll like stay in people's minds and lingered a little after they've moved on to the next thing there's no way for me to find out if I'm successful in doing that.

8:54 But this I think about often so I wanted to drop it in and between the stuff that I do for myself and the stuff I make for others there's a third flavor of freedom in the in the work that I do for this client who is my sister cavia obviously not very little anymore she's grown up and super talented and very way cooler than me and she's a musician she's still very much a client but I can still boss her around a little bit. So it's like the perfect kind of freedom and I know her worked really well.

9:30 And I do lots of like quick visuals if she needs to like post something the next day but this particular project was super special cuz it wasn't just cavia and I working together. But also my husband so it was like a family affair and we collaborated on the key art for her debut album know me better which is a collection of like super personal songs where K writes about who she is and who she wants to become.

9:53 So we kind of made like a box of like clues or little Easter eggs that you'll find out more about when you listen to the song and then we scattered them carefully around her and there was some elements that extended into like other assets like gig announcements and fun limited edition merch that I own and I also get to test like new canvases through her like these background visuals I got to make for her lpoa performance and her set list for this particular performance had a lot of like warmth but at the same time she's like a super energetic performer like she scales across the stage like dances a lot.

10:34 So the visual Direction try to hit a spot in the middle and I had to consider how the visuals would like frame her and support her performance and create like a a visual impact given this the scale of the stage I couldn't be there.

10:50 So I have these like receipts to show that it did happen and I want to leave you with a little sneak peek into my next experiment for cavia that I'm super pumped about where I'm trying to do that little ping ponging that I talked about a moment ago by merging live action and partially AI generated imagery and motion to make like this test music video and I'm by no means a filmmaker but it's it's in these moments of Freedom where I can do anything where I dabble in something I've never done before.

11:26 And it's like such a thrill like I can't way to flesh this out and make a bunch of other footage that I feel quite at peace with the fact that I'll always have a hard time with introducing myself like I did 10 minutes ago like what I do who I am and in the face of all the messaging I feel like I was constantly receiving in school from professionals the industry that I should focus and like do one thing and find that thing I can now say I feel pretty happy being a sum of parts so thank you for listening