Interview with Olga Vasik
This week I am continuing the interview series with Lettering Artist, Olga Vasik. I met Olga a couple years ago while she was passing through on a trip to Oregon. We collaborated on a chalkboard design just for fun and had some really great conversation.
Olga has a great story, as well as an interesting point of view about the designer's responsibility, as well as our tendency to over-share. Hope you enjoy the interview!
Hey Olga! Let's start from the beginning. Tell me about your childhood and where you grew up. How did you get into lettering and design?
I was born and raised in Chelyabinsk, Russia. Actually, I was born in USSR but it collapsed when I was 3 years old. So I grew up at the time when the iron curtain fell and all the information and goods from around the globe flooded the country.
The Russian people weren’t ready for that and I think that had a drastic effect on my generation (including myself). People had already lost their authentic Russian culture, and because of the collapse people didn’t want anything associated with USSR, so they threw it all away.
On the other hand, all the goods and ideas from the West were very attractive and new to the people. That’s the time when American culture really hit the minds of young Russians, sometimes in a bad way. That’s the time when the country lost its design institution (and lots of other institutions) that were very strong and unique in the USSR and still didn’t get it back to the same level.
I used to think that there was great design in the USSR and there was no design in Russia.
But I was lucky enough to be born in my family. My childhood was happy, my parents are great, hardworking and intelligent people and they put tons of effort so I could be me today. I’m very grateful for my family.
I got into design pretty intentionally. I knew that I want to study design, but we have no design schools here so I went for an advertising major, because they had some graphic design classes.
Pretty soon I realized that I wasn’t learning enough in university, so I started to self educate myself.
I got into lettering occasionally. I had already worked as designer but dreamed to be an illustrator. So I went to Moscow for the short intensive course about illustration. That was about 5 years ago. After each class the tutors would pick the best works. My works were never mentioned.
But then we had this class on lettering, and I had no idea something like that existed in the design world. After the class they picked my work as the best and gave me tons of compliments, so I thought, “This is it! I’m a mediocre illustrator and now lettering is going to be my thing!”.
Looking back at those works, I realize that they had no idea what they were talking about! My illustration works were so much better than my lettering pieces, but definitely that was a turning point, so thanks.
Olga's first lettering experience
How has freelancing been treating you in Russia?
Well… Freelance is not a walk in a park. There are a lot of obstacles, ups and downs. As for me, the hardest parts of my freelance career boils down to these 4 challenges:
- Isolation – not good for me. You are always on your own. Always. Working from home in your pajamas.
- To be a freelancer with a full workload nowadays, you have to represent not just quality work but also a constant media presence, which is not really my thing. I don’t enjoy sharing my work, but it’s necessary, so I often have to push myself to post something online.
- Constantly working. It’s a good thing to love your work, but it’s inevitable at some point – you are constantly working. Sometimes I’m jealous of the people who can just leave their day job at the end of the day and not to care about it till the next day. I don’t remember the last time I’ve been on vacation without taking my projects and laptop with me. I don’t know, maybe it’s just a lack of discipline and result of poor planning and some freelancers have figured out how to deal with that.
- Not a steady income. It feels fine at the very beginning but as you get older you kinda start worrying about it.
But then why do you feel that freelance was the only option for you?
- First and foremost, the ability to work on projects you like in a way and style you like to represent.
- Ability to travel when you want to (as long as you want to) – that’s my selling point of being a freelancer.
- Getting to work on small but fun projects, often with underground companies
Is there a deeper reason behind why you don't enjoy sharing your work online?
As a freelancer, I understand the benefits of it. But I don't like to share my life online at all. I guess it's just a personality thing. I just don't have that need, impulse, or whatever that pushes people to share things online everyday. I've seen people who feel happier by doing that, and there is nothing bad about it.
I don't care about getting a response from the general public, the opinion of people I don't know. If I'm particularly interested in someone's opinion – I could ask directly. If I want to share something with people I care about – I could share directly.
Sharing takes time out of my day. You have to prepare things, take a few snaps, choose one, maybe edit it, tag things right and so on...
Sharing takes time out of my day. I would rather spend that time on something more meaningful, like creating good work or enjoying real life.
But we're living in a world that celebrates and rewards over-sharers, so we all kinda have to participate in this game.
What's something important that you learned recently?
Ollie on a skateboard (that’s life changing for me :)
You have a great ability to inject personality into your lettering pieces. Can you talk about your references and your design process?
I guess one’s personality is seen through anything he or she does. Although, I used to think I that don’t have any particular style because I like to approach things differently every time and try new things.
Right now I pay more attention to the letterforms than to decoration. The possibilities of a letterform are actually endless.
I always have ideas in my mind about letterforms I want to try out. I usually take classic letterforms as the base and then stylize them by changing some parameters like angle of slant, contrast, types of serifs and so on.
Sketching is a big part of my work. I definitely work more on paper than on the computer and start vectorizing letters only when sketches seem to be as close as possible to the final result. I ruminate over sketches a lot, usually only keep first and last sketch and throw away all in the middle options, but I guess I have saved one.
I like to sketch big, so I don’t typically use sketchbooks or pads. Only sheets of paper work for me – the bigger the better. I also use a lot of tracing paper for refining my sketches.
As for references I like to refer to classic letterforms as I said. Sometimes I start to sketch ideas and after a couple of sketches I look at the classic letterforms and analyze them thinking, “is that particular letterform appropriate for this style or not”. I guess I’m still learning how to make things right.
You have told me before that, "It's the responsibility of the designer to make sense of all the chaos in the world". Can you describe what you meant?
Oh, that’s a long story. Design is a man-made science as an attempt to understand and systematize all the rules of creation, rules of aesthetics and so on. Human beings have been trying to understand how beatiful things work since the beginning of time.
Although the world is pretty chaotic, humans are not as perfect creators as nature.
To create chaotic beauty (if you know what I mean), we need rules. Design is all about organizing elements, taking some pieces of the chaos and trying organize them in a way that makes sense, to make something beautiful out of it. Some respected people like Massimo Vingelli or Bruno Munari explained these concepts way better than me.
What do you like to do when you're not working?
Tons of stuff. My favorite thing in life is snowboarding, so I’m trying to spend all my spare time (and sometimes my work time) on my board. But it’s summer now and we are out of snow, so I skateboard, do a lot of camping and hiking and some water activities. I also in love with music and have been since I was a child, so I like to play guitar and ukulele. Lately i’m trying to figure out how to play blues on a ukulele. I just really like the process of learning and I have pretty nerdy approach to everything I try to learn.
You ever see anything weird on those snowboarding trips?
My most recent trip was to the Sochi olympic mountain resorts. Russia is weird (even if you live here), but the weirdest thing that struck me was a misconception of the mountain resort itself. The first things I saw on the arrival was an all concrete town with inappropriately tall buildings. No mountain architecture spotted anywhere. Just shopping malls, restaurants, well dressed ladies wearing high heels and furs, men wearing business suits, and all those things wrapped around one of the most beautiful mountains in the world. What a horrible mistake I thought, to build something like that in this beautiful place and what are all those fancy, fashionable people doing in here? Where’s the raw wilderness? But I got used to that pretty soon.
Chalkboard collaboration from 2015
We collaborated last year on that big chalkboard. Do you have any plans to do more collaborations?
I would love to, collaborations are encouraging and fun. But I have no colleagues around! I’m giving a speech at the Typetersburg conference in Saint Petersburg next month. Maybe I’ll manage to make some collaborations there, lot’s of talented artists in that city.
Thanks so much for your time Olga. Hope to see you again soon!
If you'd like to check out more of Olga's work, you can follow her on Instagram and Dribbble.