Sargam Gupta : illustrator

Interview with Sargam Gupta, former Uber designer and freelance illustrator.

Q: Tell us a little about your story

I joined Uber in 2015, when there were less than 6,000 employees globally and the India head office had fewer than 15 employees. I was the first creative hire in Asia and took care of all the creative marketing efforts for India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. I was the only creative for almost two years, so you can imagine how challenging it was. Things moved at a very, very fast pace and decisions needed to be made really quickly. At the time I was reporting directly into the Brand Team in the San Francisco office. My manager then gave me the freedom to tackle problems in my own way and I feel that it really helped shape who I am today.

I was in Delhi for three years before moving to San Francisco in 2018. I had reached a point where I felt that I needed to reinvent myself. It was like a new job in a way – new products, new team, new city and it was almost like starting again from scratch. It was really nice to be working in a culturally diverse team. And just genuinely, I think that experience was great. Of course, the move itself was challenging on a personal level. I think the older you get, the harder it gets to meet new people. I was thirty at the time and I didn't know many people in San Francisco other than a few folks from the office. But that's what made it so exciting. I like to step out of my comfort zone once in a while and this was definitely something that gave me a 360 perspective on things.

Q: How did you survive that lonely time?

I spent my first month in an Airbnb and I was sharing the house with two more people. I became really good friends with one of the flatmates, who had recently moved from Luxembourg. We explored San Francisco together and I met more people through him. And of course, I had my Uber family. There were a few people back then who’d also moved from India and I had the support of my original team from 2015. It slowly got to a stage where I was comfortable and SF felt like home. But yeah, it took about four or five months to really sync in with my new life.

Q: Was there any shocking moment? Like, why, what?!

I'd been to San Francisco a fair few times before for work, so I guess that didn't happen. I did find the city awfully quiet compared to Delhi. But generally speaking, the way things are structured in India is different from the States and that took me a little bit of time to get used to.

In India things moved at an incredible speed. When I was the only creative in India, I was handling just about everything – project management, design, illustration, art direction and sometimes even copy. The creative team was much larger in the US, and it took some realignment on my part to be okay with just focussing on my core specialties and let other things be.

Q: That’s such a great story. It seems like your work relates a lot to your mental state at the time. What would you say inspires you and how was your mental state through all of that?

I've always had a soft spot for illustration, it's just that life always got in the way and I never really had the time to focus on it. Earlier this year I was traveling to Kathmandu in Nepal for work and I think it all started from there. It was a five day trip but I got stuck there for over two months because of the Coronavirus. I was staying at a hotel when a lockdown was declared. The entire working staff was sent home. It was just me and two other people from the kitchen. There was nobody at the reception, it felt like a ghost town. I later found out from a security guard that I was the only occupant in the entire hotel. I was also the only woman on the premises. To save costs, they had to shut down most services, including the kitchen and housekeeping. They would prepare my breakfast and for the rest of the day I would eat whatever the staff prepared for themselves. There was no transport and I couldn’t really venture out. I would spend my days outside in the garden and occasionally play ping pong or chat with the hotel staff in the evenings. It sort of started there. I had all this time and my thoughts and feelings kicked off a lot of my illustrations.

Q: Do you see the two markets merging?

To be honest, I don’t see that happening in the near future. The needs of each market are so different. Digital artists often use their daily environment as a source of inspiration and both countries are unique in their own way. I feel that this is prevalent in my style as well, which seems to be a mix of both markets. The US is also dominated by contextual illustrations and one sees a lot of art inspired by current events. While one does see that happening in India as well, it’s on a much smaller scale. The only overlap I see currently is in the tech industry where visual trends function at a global scale.

Ref: https://www.playbook.com/