S7E2: Gene Lee

Gene Lee is senior vice president of customer experience and design at Mailchimp.

Lee studied medical illustration in school — a major he negotiated with his father, who wanted his artistic son to be a doctor. Since then, Lee has worked in many different areas of design and with many different kinds of designers, but the lessons of his education still hold:

If you think about the craft of medical illustration, it’s the art of extracting what you’re trying to focus on and then silhouetting the rest. So you have context of where that organ belongs and then you focus your whole storytelling on that organ by itself. And you do that with color, silhouetting, and so forth.

The same principles — focus on one part, then abstract the rest — can apply to other illustrations, like icons:

Like a browser might just be a rectangle with three dots. You’re like, Oh that’s a website!

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By Jessica Helfand & Ellen McGirt

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.

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Ellen McGirt is an author, podcaster, speaker, community builder, and award-winning business journalist. She is the editor-in-chief of Design Observer, a media company that has maintained the same clear vision for more than two decades: to expand the definition of design in service of a better world. Ellen established the inclusive leadership beat at Fortune in 2016 with raceAhead, an award-winning newsletter on race, culture, and business. The Fortune, Time, Money, and Fast Company alumna has published over twenty magazine cover stories throughout her twenty-year career, exploring the people and ideas changing business for good. Ask her about fly fishing if you get the chance.