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Job no:81378-5 Title : RP_All Access (New PB Verdions) Client : Pro-vision

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175 Size : 203.2(w)254(h)mm Co : M6 (mac J)

Dept : DTP D/O : 22.10.05 (Job no:000000 D/O : 00.00.04 Co: CM0)

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FIEL

2003

Tree Hair, illustration (left ) Valdez

uses her personal illustrations as

playground and laboratory, expanding

her artistic vocabulary beyond the

more mundane solutions often made

necessary by more mundane projects.

2001

Tomodachi, illustration (opposite)

Over the years Valdez has created

a growing collection of characters that

have found their way into a number

of her self-promotion items. She calls

them her Tomodachi—the Japanese

word for friends.

Fiel Valdez isn’t interested

in labels or boundaries.

She is interested in things

like art and integrity.

Using her uncanny eye

for the cool and quirky,

she has created

a thriving one woman

design boutique

that allows her to do

the work that challenges

her and her clients.

VALDEZ

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Job no:81378-5 Title : RP_All Access (New PB Verdions) Client : Pro-vision

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175 Size : 203.2(w)254(h)mm Co : M6 (mac J)

Dept : DTP D/O : 22.10.05 (Job no:000000 D/O : 00.00.04 Co: CM0)

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p205

I

believe that when you create, you can create in any medium.

Each medium has its own language, and I believe one

simply needs to be sensitive to the language of a particular

medium in order to create in it.” Fiel Valdez uses graphic design

as the base that allows her to reach freely into the worlds

of illustration, fashion, fine art, and product design. She doesn’t

trumpet breaking through these boundaries, because she

doesn’t perceive them in the first place. “I’m passionately inter-

ested in many things… and I try to connect as many of them

with my work as I can.”

Growing up in Daly City, California, she was influenced early by

embarking on various craft projects with her mother and being

mentored by her piano teacher, Betty McNeil. She took her first

visual arts class the summer before enrolling at UCLA as an

aerospace engineering student. This led to a class schedule that

started with chemistry and calculus and ended with photography

and tool shop. Two years into her studies, she switched to Art

Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, where she

received her degree in photography in 1996 and was awarded

an honors term in typography.

C

REATING NEW LANGUAGES In her last year at Art

Center, she was offered an internship at Hotwired.com,

the new online division of Wired magazine. “The com-

pany was small at the time, and there were some amazing,

creative people there who I worked with directly, specifically

Barbara Plunkett and Erik Adigard. I’ll always remember prepar-

ing images for Erik and missing the boat on the importance

of aliased edges to create the illusion of transparency in Director.

At first, he was disappointed that I had made such a big

mistake, but then he decided he liked the images better with

the sloppy edges. It was a happy mistake, so to speak,

and sort of the beginnings of my ideas about letting one’s

tools speak in the work one makes with them.

“It was also a wild, rather ungrounded experience where the

paradigms of the Internet (visual design, information architecture,

interactivity, etc.) were being invented as we were all going

along.” Her work for Hotwired.com soon led to an assignment

creating the web graphics for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labora-

tory, an unexpected chance for Valdez to tap into her early

aerospace engineering education.

Following this, Valdez returned to the Bay Area to become one

of the first employees of Circumstance, a burgeoning interactive

studio. “That was a complex experience. I came in as a very

junior graphic designer, and by the time I left, I was a senior

designer/art director. I was only there for about a year and

saw the company grow from about eight people to about 40

then back to about 20. It was slightly insane.”

Circumstance brought awards and national exposure to

Valdez’s work on James Cameron’s Titanic Explorer CD-ROM,

Neimanmarcus.com, and Artmuseum.net.

“The most valuable lessons I took away from Circumstance were

about the business of design and the politics of business,

all the things they don’t teach you in school. I started freelancing

right after that and haven’t been on staff anywhere since.”

“

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