Thank you so much Geometrieva for the time you are sharing with us today. We are very excited to engage in this interview about your impressive works. It is profound how distinctly high brow your style is. How did you go about teaching yourself digital design and could you tell us how you landed on your current aesthetic?
Aww thank you, the love is mutual! 🤜✨🤛 You know, it’s a strange story. It all started when I dropped out of school and taught myself graphic design on a pirated version of Photoshop back in Eastern Europe. From there my creative pursuit split in two parallel directions.
On a professional level, I ended up doing product design, with my career taking off from Europe through Singapore and Tokyo all the way to New York and Seattle, where I work on the Instagram team.
On a personal level, I never stopped experimenting with illustration, type, photography and now AI-generated images and motion, often in tandem with my husband Damien. Influenced by dark futurism, cyberpunk, Lovecraft stories and sci-fi movies like Arrival, Blade Runner and Star Trek, my current aesthetic is a synthesis of everything I want to see more of.
Speaking of your aesthetic, could you describe to us how you perceive your illustrative style? In a visual, what features are the most prominent to you?
While most artists focus on a particular subject, such as portraits or nature, I prefer to focus on a single color, material or shape at a time. I call this my “current obsession” in my bio. My past obsessions were superglass and lime accents, and currently it’s the color yellow. Once yellow gets boring I will move onto something else; Not sure what yet but it might be red, spheres, or iridescence.
My work covers diverse subjects and creates strong ambient moods with science-fiction vibes, often mixed with a dose of vintage nostalgia. What really ties the subjects together though are these “obsessions”, allowing each individual piece to be strong on its own, but even stronger together, moodboard-style.
We are stunned by the very specific degree of surrealism you reveal in your body of work. The imagery could very well exist in every possible way but also it still retains a higher sense of mysticism that is foreign to what we have experienced so far in this life. When you’re composing your ideas, what sort of visions are you seeing before you start the physical work?
I do try to be very intentional with how I mix fact and fiction. I want to stay right on the line between the two. My goal is to temporarily transport the viewer into an imaginary future where glass can bend and is used for constructing sneakers, where helmets are designed for life on Mars, where cyborgs live among humans, where electronics never stopped being beige. Slight believable mutations of reality, projected into an alternate-reality future.
When you’re working on your visuals, what sort of rituals do you perform? Is there a specific routine you follow? A certain ambience you need in order to work?
I’ve done great work in the weirdest of conditions. In the dentist’s waiting room, in the car, in a McDonald’s. But with a charged battery, stretched legs and Deus Ex: Human Revolution soundtrack playing in the background I could go on forever.
Despite having dropped out of college, you created your own route to success having worked at major companies like Google and Instagram. Can you impart any knowledge to our audience about how you set yourself apart and made it to the top?
Big tech is an extremely good environment to learn, grow and rub shoulders with some of the best talent in a given field. Getting in is pretty hard though. Just getting noticed by big tech recruiters is a multi-year challenge by itself.
As a designer who wanted to get into big tech, I published my work as often as I could while still making sure to:
1. Publish only what I’m really deeply of
2. Invest in a fantastic presentation
3. Concisely show depth of understanding of the problem, people and solution
One thing people don’t realize is that when it comes to being in the top % of a field, you have to be weird. If you are weird in a way that makes you better in some way, then you should be very proud of that. Find your own niche, your own way of doing things and be upfront about it. It’s a great way to get noticed too!
