PR for the People Spotlight: Hope Meng | Design & Art
This is a series of interviews with participants in PapaLoDown’s ‘PR for the People workshop’. Hear first hand from amazing people and organizations, who are learning how to amplify their stories in the news, grow their visibility and attract new opportunities.
Meet Hope Meng, artist and entrepreneur in San Francisco, CA.
Hope Meng is a designer and artist in San Francisco, CA.
What is your background and experience?
For the last 13 years, I have been working as a graphic designer focused on branding and custom lettering. I tried on a number of different careers prior to design (which I consider my true calling), many of them entrepreneurial in nature. In a previous life, I co-founded the country’s first sewing lounge right here in SF, so my work doesn’t just live on computers. Typography, art/design, and sewing are the main passions of my life and my journey as a designer and artist has been a discovery of how to mesh these three separate fields into a form that is uniquely my own.
What is the current Public Relations (PR) campaign you're working on about?
Though I have had some good attention on my typography work, I am still working on defining my unique voice as a designer and artist. About two years ago, I developed a typographic system based on the visual language of quilt blocks, with the intention of creating fine art quilts with embedded messages.
I also have a personal project I have been working on for the past 5 years called Monogram Project, a years-long effort to design every 2-letter combination of the alphabet. I kicked off the project with the AA monogram and will end sometime in the distant future with ZZ.
What goals do you hope to accomplish through this PR campaign?
My goal is to gain more attention on my passion projects. The majority of my paid work is still through more standard branding and graphic design projects, so I would love to be able to pivot my business to focus more of my time on TEXT/TILE and Monogram Project.
How has the experience of pitching and working with media to amplify the stories in your PR campaign been like so far?
It has been an interesting time to embark on a PR campaign, to say the least. Self-promotion can be deeply uncomfortable, but that’s how I know it is helping me grow.
What are a few things you know now about PR that you didn't know before you started?
There are the nuts-and-bolts lessons like (1) writers are on Twitter (duh) and (2) PR is about relationships, but I think the biggest lesson for me personally is that mindset is such a huge part of pitching yourself. Several years ago I did a lot of work to get over self-promotion, but after taking this workshop I realize that I still have some ways to go to get over artistic insecurity. I have been examining a lot of the limiting beliefs that are holding me back from diving into self-promotion.
What other projects are you working on that we should have on our radar?
In the past few years I have started painting murals and developing interactive art installations. This is an area that feels very rich for me as an intersection of my love for design, art, and getting hands on with my work. I’m currently trying to “pitch” my neighbors on a huge mural on the retaining wall at the end of our block!