Design x Pablo Stanley
Illustrator & Co-Founder at Blush
Illustration by Bonnie Kate Wolf
Interview conducted by Michelle Berois on August 11, 2020
Tell us a little bit about yourself and where you’re from.
I am Pablo Stanley, and I’m from Mexicali, a border town in Baja California, Mexico. I studied design there, and then I went to San Diego. I was drawing comics and posting them online when a company reached out and asked me to create a comic series for them in San Francisco. When I got there, I told them I was really a designer and that comics were something I did on the side for fun. They immediately introduced me to someone who worked at Udemy.
I didn’t really know what UX design was at the time. I remember seeing a bunch of little boxes and arrows pointing at stuff. It looked like it was easy, so I said to myself, “Yeah, I can do that, right?” And suddenly I was hired as a UX designer. I fell in love with the community and the field, but here I was, this little boy from Mexicali, talking to startups in San Francisco and meeting the people who developed the apps that I use on my phone. It was surreal, and I felt a little out of place.
Illustration by Pablo Stanley
I started meeting people from different places and realized they were all experiencing something similar. Once I opened up, I realized that a lot of people felt the same, so we shared our insecurities and fears. I was also lucky to have a very supportive team and people who were really willing to guide me. I attribute everything I’ve done to the amazing people I’ve met along the way.
But sometimes I still feel like someone will say, “Pablo, this was all a prank on you! We never took you seriously. We knew from the beginning that you didn’t know what the hell you’re doing. Go back to your little town, Pablo.” So I feel like I’m waiting. I have my bags ready for that moment, when I have to go back to reality. Right now, I’m just riding this dream.
What’s one of your favorite memories of living in Mexicali?
I moved out of Mexicali when I was 22, so the memories I have are from my younger years.
If you grow up in a poor neighborhood there, pretty much the only thing you can do is join a gang. But the whole idea of being in a gang is so weird. The only reason I was in that particular gang was because I lived in that neighborhood. Gangs have to have enemies, and it’s usually the gang in the next neighborhood. But I never knew them. I didn’t know what their aspirations as a gang were, what they were trying to achieve in life, or how they were thinking of changing the world. So I didn’t know why we hated them.
I joined when I was 12 or 13, and left when I was about 16 years old. I remember like 40 people beating the crap out of me during initiation. I looked like Sloth from The Goonies afterward—I had huge bruises and swelling for days. I almost died, too, because they stabbed me in the back really close to my spine. The doctor told me I was incredibly lucky—if it was one or two inches to the left or right, I would have been paralyzed. So that was the end of my career as a gang member. I still lived in the same neighborhood, but I avoided them as much as I could.
The best part of being in the gang though was doing graffiti and murals. I was the appointed “visual artist” of the gang, and it was one of the most exhilarating things in my life.
After my gang experiences, I became a skater. I found this closed-down part of an intersection with no houses or businesses close by, so my friends and I created a skatepark. There were no gangs anymore at that stage, so we made it this really inclusive place where anyone who skated was welcome to be there. We designed our own ramp and rails.
Was the graffiti you did mostly tagging, or was it doing murals?
It was both. The murals were actually done with permission. I would somehow convince people to let me paint murals on the sides of their houses or stores by telling them it was “art” and that I would make it colorful.
I would also try to get sponsorships from companies because I couldn’t afford the spray paint cans on my own. I worked odd jobs at grocery stores or pizza places just so I could buy the materials. I also falsified letters from my school saying I needed spray cans for a school project and got hardware stores to donate some cans to me. I’d have about 40 cans at a time.
I probably made about 12 large murals. My very first one was huge and said, No a la matanza de animales (“Say no to animal cruelty”). As an angsty teenager, I usually did politically charged messages.
Graffiti and murals were really the only creative outlet I had. There wasn’t really any other way to do art. I didn’t have a canvas to draw on. I didn’t have an art studio at home or art classes at school. But the walls were there, so I made that my canvas.
“I didn’t have an art studio at home or art classes at school. But the walls were there, so I made that my canvas.”
How old were you when you first started drawing?
As a kid, I had this notebook where I would draw comics. In fourth grade, I drew a scene with Batman and Joker, but it wasn’t a comic in the traditional sense where the story unfolds in a linear way. It was just one scene where everything was happening at the same time. The present and the future were both there, so I had to keep explaining the scene to my friends: “Step 1, this happens. Then Step 2...”
Then I started drawing comics with frames, the way comics actually look. I didn’t use frames before because I never really read comics as a kid. I only read this one local comic book artist, and I waited impatiently each week for his new comic to be out. It was based on local and political humor, and it was more like doodles than the typical comic-book-style drawings. But I really loved it.
Where did your journey take you when you left Mexicali?
So I literally graduated from school on a Friday, and by Monday I started working in San Diego. If you grow up on the border, your aspirations are pretty limited and focused on the United States. If you grow up in Mexico City, you don’t really think about moving away because it has culture, art, everything there. But when you grow up so close to the border, your culture is impregnated with American culture. You’re always comparing yourself to the US. You see the people with the green grass, the big house, and the cool car. That’s why sometimes I still can’t believe where I am now. I grew up with the mentality that we would always be inferior to the American side, where everything is nicer, shinier, and cleaner.
Going to San Diego was like, “Holy crap, I made it.” I started working as the only designer for a company that sold air conditioners. I designed their building materials and did all their marketing. At first, I was convinced that was it for me. I thought there was nothing else out there and that I’d be doing that crappy job forever. Then I started to realize that maybe there was more out there.
While I was at the air conditioning company, I still had my own creative outlets. I opened a little coffee shop at one point, but decided to sell it. I also had a small store in Mexico with a clothing line I had designed. This was in 2008, when the financial crisis hit. When I heard that there would be a crash, I said, “Okay, that’s it. I’m going to close the shop.” I sold the store with everything in it and decided to go on a music tour in Spain, with some money I had saved, plus the money I made from selling the shop.
I was involved in two projects when I went on tour. One gig was just me, where I sang while I played music samples. For the second gig, I was part of the opening act for Fangoria, an artist that was pretty big in Spain. I was basically a DJ, mixing samples and background music for a drag queen named La Prohibida. She sang, and we even had choreography. It was a cool experience because as a designer you have this special superpower where you can help other artists or musicians by designing their flyers or posters. MySpace was big back then, so being able to animate GIFs was the shit. I did a lot of those, and it was a great way to meet a lot of people.
Illustration by Pablo Stanley
But then I ran out of money. This whole being a starving artist thing wasn’t great. I decided to go back to the air conditioning company for a bit, saved some money, and then started my design studio. I did that for a couple of years until I got invited to collaborate on that comic series in San Francisco.
What is Blush, and what inspired you to create it?
Blush is an open-design tool that makes it easy for people to use art in their creations. I saw a rise in people who wanted to tell their stories. I wanted to empower people to make beautiful and gorgeous things with design. You don’t have to be a designer to do that. I don’t see it as a threat to our craft. I see it as a way to help people understand the value of design and empower them to use it.
“I wanted to empower people to make beautiful and gorgeous things with design. You don’t have to be a designer to do that.”
I feel like as an illustrator we draw a lot of doodles that just end up in a folder somewhere or posted on Dribbble. Why not allow other people to use these doodles to make something cool, instead of just letting them sit in a Dropbox folder gathering digital dust? I released some of my doodles and encouraged people to use it in things they create. I shared illustration systems, where it’s not just one static image but a system that you get to manipulate to fit what you want to say.
Blush came after doing a couple of these systems and seeing that people really connected with them. These systems still required you to know how to use a design tool, a library, and the systems, which are sometimes more advanced. There were a couple of filters before you actually got to use these illustrations to their full potential. But people were still figuring out how to use them, so I thought, “Why don’t we lower those barriers and open it up so anyone can use it? And screw my doodles, let’s bring other artists in and let them make some money too.”
We’re trying to bring these two worlds together. The business side is tough because that side wants to try different things and move fast. But as an illustrator, that process is slower by nature because we care about the craft, about making things look good and being able to tell a story in a specific way. I feel like those different rhythms can sometimes clash, and it’s been tough trying to address and resolve the issues on both sides.
The business side may also see hiring an illustrator as an expensive and risky move, while illustrators may feel like they ended up doing something that isn’t true to their art. To remedy those pains, we’re looking at different business models, where an illustrator can be compensated or incentivized to share their art and also have equity in the company, so that each illustrator can own a part of Blush. The idea is that if this becomes successful, each artist will have the capital to do the things they want to do, like teaching art classes or doing meaningful things in the community. How cool would it be to have the power to do that? It’s not going to happen right away, but our hope is that it happens in a few years.
I don’t know what will happen, but hopefully, in the future it becomes beneficial to everyone who is a contributor. Not just the people doing the tech or talking to venture capitalists, but also the people doing the art—there wouldn’t be anything without the art. We want to compensate everyone. Our goal is to sell the shit out of it and get artists a ton of money.
Previously you worked at Lyft and InVision as a UX designer. What motivated you to leave that behind and take a leap of faith to pursue Blush full-time?
When the pandemic hit, we suddenly had a lot of time on our hands. In addition to that, I’ve always had that entrepreneurial side of me. It felt like it was the right time, and I had the confidence to do it. And I don’t mean confidence like “I’m so good.” It was more about having the confidence of the people that I’ve surrounded myself with. They gave me the push I needed to quit my stable job in the middle of a pandemic.
Sounds like the dumbest thing ever, right? To quit my job and go work on doodles? But my co-founder was the first one to say, “Yeah, let’s do it,” and we couldn’t have done it without the support from our early investors who were willing to take that risk. I had put some effort into this idea, so once we had something that looked like a product, it was difficult to concentrate on my day job. I’m really grateful to my team and the people who supported me.
I think it’s a great opportunity for me to learn and grow and to do something that I truly believe in. Also, I get to talk about illustrations all day, and I get to do it with people I admire. That’s what I spend all my time on now.
You lightly make fun of the design community in your satirical presentation, “The Faker You Are, The More Successful You Can Be.” What was your thinking behind it?
Everything I shared in that presentation was based on a comic series that I started called The Design Team. I created it based on the real-life experiences of being a designer, and it ended up being a form of therapy. I felt like we take what we do so seriously, but I also realized that nobody knows what they’re doing. It doesn’t mean that we’re not great at what we do—it’s just that we’re all figuring it out as we go along.
Speaking with assurance was funny to me. Sometimes I’d have to do it because people don’t want to hear from someone who is unsure about what they’re working on. You want to convey confidence in what you say and what you do, but it always felt really fake inside, like I was playing an act.
I realized that I wasn’t the only one who felt that way, that everything felt like a farce. We’re all human beings with real feelings and insecurities, and I wanted to point that out, to shine a light on these things and show how funny they can be sometimes. I also wanted to just remind designers that we don’t have to take ourselves so seriously all the time.
I think humor is part of my defense mechanism, when I’m feeling vulnerable or talking about things that make me uncomfortable. I try to own those fears and feelings that sometimes don’t feel right. It’s been pretty cool though because people will reach out and open up to tell me they’re feeling the same way. People express to me that it empowers them to feel more confident when they have to present because it’s reassuring to know that they’re not the only ones feeling this way.
Illustration by Pablo Stanley
The talk was the combination of all of these thoughts and feelings and the comics I had created around these topics. We all get nervous, but we don’t need to worry too much because everyone is really in the same boat.
What advice would you give to aspiring designers or creatives?
Be patient. Don’t worry too much about making it right away. Focus more on making as much as you can. Making a lot of shitty doodles and crappy designs is what’s going to allow you to become better and improve your craft. If you keep working at it, you’re going to improve. Don’t worry about making it perfect. Developing your skills takes time.
Don’t try to find your style right away. Do a lot of different things first, and eventually you’ll arrive at something you’re comfortable with.
“Do a lot of different things first, and eventually you’ll arrive at something you’re comfortable with.”
That’s because you’ll be able to choose the tools and methods that speak to you most. Don’t limit yourself to one style or one concept because that could get stale and limit your growth. So overall, be patient.
