Meet Isabella Hilditch

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Isabella Hilditch. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Isabella below.

Hi Isabella, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?

For my work ethic, I have to thank my previous career in professional track and field. Almost every day during that period I was training my body to its absolute physical limit. As a designer now, I pride myself on my great endurance to take on demanding projects and keep working until they reach completion. In July, I founded and designed an exhibition of fine art by production designers in Downtown LA. I was taking on work from every angle and it required a lot of discipline. Late nights, plentiful manual and mental labor, but it wasn’t just my professional goals that pushed me forward. There is something very ingrained in my nature from athletics – the lesson that passion and talent aren’t enough, it’s hard work that’s rewarded the most.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I’m Isabella, but most people call me Izzy. I’m an digital and production designer, which sounds pretty broad, but day-to-day it entails me at my desktop putting together digital concept drawings and web layouts, before seeing them manifest into awesome in-person creations and experiences. With everything I do, my main objective is creating specific, simple, and beautiful design.

I say that Izzy is me, “Issie” is my studio. Issie is the silly nickname I gave myself as a child, refusing to let people spell my name the “normal” way. From a young age, I’ve always fallen into doing things unconventionally. That mindset shipped me from my small suburban London town out to America years ago, and it’s brought me to the founding of my business.

I’m currently taking a break as I’m moving home to England for a period to build my design studio (“issie.studio”). I’m also excited to join the ReadyMag team as an events host for their low-code web design platform that’s tailor-made for designers and creators. A lot of my work and passion have all been about designing for and leading creators to make media that represents them – meaning, I’m super excited to lead events for Readymag in London, and hopefully Los Angeles later on in the new year. One project finished but yet to release – a website for exciting production company New Royalty; another project I’m excited to work on – my new studio website! I love all the twists and turns my career takes, and all the interesting opportunities that appear as I keep working in this industry.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Perseverance, hard work, and being detail-oriented are really important characteristics that have served me really well on my journey recently. When you start working in this industry, work is slow, you have fewer contacts, you have to do a lot of reaching out and putting yourself out there. That takes a lot of perseverance and hard work.

Detail-oriented – starting a business of any kind requires a lot of attention to detail. I think the way you control a lot of the smaller parts of a freelance or business practice is really important in the long-term, and those are things I really value. I can’t speak to how hard work or perseverance can be developed, but detail-orientation – what a journey that was and still is for me! Reading a lot, asking a lot of questions, being on top of things. Also not being offended when people ask you to change things or say you have a detail wrong. When I hosted my gallery this year, I had to judge and then eliminate about 80% of the work that was submitted by other designers in my industry – I found that difficult to reckon with that. A lot of those decisions made were not personal or even about the quality or effort put into the work, but about what the gallery needed. So – rejection or being asked to change things – that’s important, too, and helps you trip up less in the future. It’s usually not personal!

Who is your ideal client or what sort of characteristics would make someone an ideal client for you?

I take on such a range of projects, so it’s hard to answer perfectly. Even though I’m an artist and I have my own aesthetics I enjoy, I love when a client has some clear visual or concept that’s slightly out of the box that they want to create. I started my own artistic journey by going to galleries as a young girl – learning what designs and visuals make other people tick are so intriguing to me. I love creating and understanding a vision and seeing it through. That’s an ideal client for me, someone who is up for that creative conversation! It also takes me down a new rabbit hole of design and art that I hadn’t considered so carefully before.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://issie.studio/
• Instagram: @issiehilditch
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabella-hilditch

Image Credits

Iz Moinan