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!

A big thanks to our sponsor, Mailchimp.