Since the last time I posted here on the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, another round of Nobel Prizes has come and gone, a pandemic has roiled our planet (though it didn’t keep millions of people from taking to the streets for justice), and we’ve ushered in a new president in dramatic fashion. What also happened was that just days after this last post, I was offered and accepted a full-time job - a position as visual designer on the Pattern team at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. After 9 years of working solo, wishing for a team and for someone to critique my work, I now work with 6 brilliant designers and software engineers who share a love of design and data visualization. I get to have my work critiqued by the designer who created the graphics department at Cell, and I am collaborating with some of my decades-long scientific heroes. I say this not to be immodest but out of gratitude and hopefully as encouragement to the many budding illustrators I’ve counseled over the years.
When you come to the science illustration field from a non-traditional background, people in a position to hire or even to advance your resume for consideration can be uncertain what to do with someone like you, even if that “non-traditional” background is earning a PhD in the very branch of science you wish to illustrate. It took me nine years of freelancing before I happened upon the person who did know.
I met the (now former) creative director of the Broad at a science visualization symposium at Rice University where we were both invited speakers. Though we live in neighboring Boston suburbs, it took traveling all the way to Houston to meet each other. We began working together and before long he was recruiting me for a full-time position on the team he had begun building, Pattern. He later told me that he knew what to do “with oddballs like us.” I will forever be grateful for this.
In the meantime I’ve drastically pared down my freelance work, although I did take on this cover art project, which was about microfluidic devices converting hydrogen ions into electrical signals to regulate pH through a feedback loop. The client requested a Murakami-style design (Takashi, not Haruki, though I am also a big fan of the latter). Low pH signals acidity through an abundance of positively charged hydrogen ions, which act like a battery sounding a silent alarm that then triggers neutralization in the tiniest Rube Goldberg device you’ve ever seen.
Though I take much less freelance work now, I do fit it in when I can. Having freelanced my way through the births and toddlerhoods of our two sons with minimal childcare, building a business largely while they slept, I never appropriately set boundaries between work and home life. When people ask me how I balance work and life, I’m not sure how to answer because I don’t put them on separate scales. A more relevant question might be, how do you weave a life from these two threads, in all its messy and tangled beauty? So I don’t even mind working from home while my kids attend 1st and 3rd grade in hybrid mode, but it does often mean catching up on my day job after they go to bed. When I do have spare time, my attention is largely focused on writing a book that I will be very eager to share when it’s done. That said, do get in touch when you have a project in mind, and if I can’t do it I’d be delighted to put you in touch with someone who can. Until then, be well, stay safe, and thanks for reading.