Interviews

Samantha Slinn

We're charmed by product designer + illustrator Samantha Slinn's take on the world—her people are both elegant and super-fun, with perfect colors and a gestural, old-school sensibility.

What was your path to becoming both an illustrator and a product designer? How much do the two roles feel related?

I’d say both paths started with small stuff when I was a kid—like my dad teaching me how light and shadows work with crayons on a restaurant coloring sheet—little things like that really got me interested in art and design from the jump. From there, I sort of accidentally found out about product design in university when I was exploring courses, and ended up switching my major to design after taking a couple intro courses. And then illustration came in later, around 2014-ish, when I started binge-watching illustrators and artists on YouTube. From there it became a hobby and then turned into some bits of super rad commission and client work that I get to work on now.

Your illustration feels super-modern with a touch of classic animation cel vibes. What are some of your references and sources of illustration? (Spongebob…?)

I’d definitely say old-school Disney style has had a huge effect on how I style and pose characters. Over-exaggeration is one of my favorite ways to make a point in illustration, so I lean into that a lot and I get a lot of inspo from other artists I follow. Some big ones for me are artists like George Condo, Eline van Dam, and Remus and Kiki to shout out a few—I love how they amplify their characters and play with absurdity.

Over-exaggeration is one of my favorite ways to make a point in illustration.

What are your go-to tools? Is your process digital?

Typically I do everything digitally in Procreate on my iPad. But sometimes when I get stuck for ideas, a couple of pencil crayons and a piece of paper save me. It’s just that age-old thing about analog tools.

What are some red flags when someone approaches you about a project?

Usually just not being able to effectively communicate the project needs upfront, but that rarely happens or you can chat through it on Zoom (super helpful).

On the other end of things, what do you like to hear when someone approaches you about a project—what’s something you’ve always wanted to work on?

I love when clients are able to provide some visual aids as to what they’re looking for versus just a written brief. It helps so much to get your work inline with their vision without a ton of revision cycles. And I’d be really hyped to work on a longer narrative-based animation.

Have you seen your work evolve over time or your focus narrow? Anything new you want to try next?

One thing I’ve noticed is that I still don’t really have a super-defined style. I always thought I would reach a point where I started to hone in a lot more and have many more threads tying piece to piece together over time. But it’s ended up being more that I have a couple reference points I go back to (like big smiles or big hands) and otherwise things keep changing—which is cool and fun to experiment with, but just not what I expected/doesn’t match what you see on a lot of artist’s feeds.

View Samantha’s portfolio.