Meet Yixuan Cao | Graphic Designer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Yixuan Cao and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
My earliest exposure to design was likely the pencil drawing my grandfather shared with me – a simple line drawing of mountains morphing into each other with trees on their shoulders. He would draw a zigzag above a straight line as a tree, and I still carry this way of drawing trees with me now. I began my creative career in a rather unconventional manner, using the walls of my apartment as my canvas for doodling and creating indistinct marks. My parents were understandably upset with my destruction of their carefully curated decor, but I couldn’t help myself – I was always playing with different media, from chalk powder to dried flower petals.
From there, I continued drawing, making, and photographing. It wasn’t until high school that I received my first informal training in Adobe software. At that time, I couldn’t distinguish between a black cursor and a white cursor. However, I eagerly volunteered to create posters and flyers for school events, submitted comics to school publications with my friends, and roamed the halls with my camera to capture memorable moments. I had a lot of fun creating, and that naturally led me to major in graphic design in college.
Personal branding is a project that I feel I have only just begun, and I am not the most qualified person to offer suggestions on the matter. However, I do have a story to share:
I went to the School of Visual Arts in New York City for college. Getting out of a traditional Chinese cultural background, I found myself taking time to learn about myself again. Being in an unfamiliar environment, I encountered a process of updating my identity. I was re-learning what I was interested in, how I wanted to spend my time, and how to make myself feel comfortable. In the meantime, this also had an impact on how I approached my design work. I think this topic was being talked about a lot, but in an institution where most of the things I learned were influenced by white dominant culture, my real identity was being dimmed to the back. I found myself wanting to do my design in a certain way to please my professor, just because he or she had an implication on preferences during critique.
That made me feel miserable about myself, doubting if my works meant anything. Covid hit, and I took a gap year. When returning to school to finish my senior year, I met this professor who always gave his thoughts in the most neutral way during critique. That made me rethink how I developed my project based on comments from class. I started prioritizing my thoughts, knowing that input from other people will help, but at the end of the day, it’s my own decision. That allowed me to unleash my identity a little bit while working on a project, making it more “me.”
I have put this on my website info page:
“Yixuan believes that design can be more inclusive than it is now. Getting out of the collective practice of Western design education, she acknowledges that assumptions were made and bias was formed, and there is no such thing as “universal communication.”
She is still seeking her own voice out of all the experience that shaped her. With that said, she is excited about different cultures around the globe.”
This might be a lifelong project I have to work on. What I know is that if I hone my craft and listen to myself at the same time, my design can be more “on-brand.”

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
If you wanna spend the night with some good music: Smalls Jazz Bar, Public Recods

Dia Beacon and Noguchi Museum are two art spaces of modern works with beautiful gardens to take a walk, plus they are not too crowded!

For taking a walk by the water: Gantry Park in Long Island City, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Domino Park, Pier 17 in Seaport

Lastly, a list of 358 places of NY me and my boyfriend have been collecting(numbers to date and always growing!) :
https://www.google.com/maps/placelists/list/ma30_a6jTsmqvdfUtEScYw

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I want to have a big shoutout to all my plant collections. I started growing plants during the Covid lockdown, and I just found this allowed me a closer proximity to nature while living in a concrete jungle. I also see planting as a great way of interaction. Plants are going to respond to how you treat them, it can be a good response, a bad one, or no response. I learned to be a bit more patient, knowing that it’s an ongoing learning process. I also like to observe the structure of every plant, and sometimes, touch it. Feeling the texture of the plant makes me feel a sense of existence, I think it’s something rare to come by in a fast pace world. Sometimes I feel so nurtured that I think I need my plants more than they need me!

Website: yixuancao.com

Instagram: @_____chipmunk

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yixuan-cao/