Wenting Zhang is co-founder and CEO of Typogram — a design software company. Previously she worked at Adobe, and her projects there include Adobe XD, Adobe Illustrator on iPad, and Adobe Fonts. Wenting also teaches design at School of Visual Arts, Interaction Design MFA program.
Wenting has given speeches at conferences in Paris, New York, Guangzhou and Shanghai. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Madrid, Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul, among other cities. She has more than nine years of design experience and specializes in typography and design tools. She holds an MFA degree from Parsons School of Design.
What is your typical day, and how do you make it productive?
My typical day varies from week to week. I usually spent the beginning of the week working on the engineering and design of our logo design tool, https://typogram.co. On Thursdays or Fridays, I work on the marketing aspects, like contributing ideas to our marketing idea bank, working on our build-in-public newsletter, and sharing about our startup work behind the scenes.
When I first started working on my startup, I loved the idea of being fully in charge of my schedule. Soon, I realized I would be 100% responsible for my time, task, and productivity. Other than the work assigned to my co-founder, completing everything and meeting milestones are 100% my responsibility.
There are two things I do to help with productivity. The first one I already hinted at: dividing my weekdays between product/ engineering work, like coding and designing, and marketing work, like content creation. This helps me reduce context-switching when I have to do different types of work. The second one is more granular time-blocking using the Pomodoro technique.
How do you bring ideas to life?
I frequently talk to my end users to create the most helpful features that enable them to create beautiful logo designs and unique brands for their products and businesses. Another thing is my creative instinct as a designer, especially regarding visuals and interaction for my side projects like CodingFont.com, a tournament-style game that helps users choose the best font for their code editors.
What’s one trend that excites you?
Artificial Intelligence. It is time-saving and automates repetitive tasks, allowing me to reclaim time and increase my efficiency during work. We just implemented our first AI feature in Typogram, enabling users to generate icons using AI and tremendously speed up their workflow.
What is one habit that helps you be productive?
I discovered the Pomodoro Technique when I was a graduate student in art school and doing my thesis. The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method based on 25-minute stretches of focused work sessions, with 5-minute break sessions.
When I have trouble getting into the work zone, I use the Pomodoro Technique in a way that helps me get into the flow. As part of my work routine, I usually start writing down my to-dos the night before and start my Pomodoro sessions the next day. A very effective strategy is beginning the work session by debugging a minor bug – a quick-to-fix issue.
Solving a small problem like this gets me into the coding workflow and provides enough “inertia” to continue doing other tasks. I will keep working without the 5-minute breaks if I get into a deep flow state. Sometimes, the 5-minute break sessions don’t work for me and disrupt my workflow. It is not strictly the Pomodoro technique without the 5-minute break, but this way of using Pomodoro helps me.
What advice would you give your younger self?
Don’t be afraid to take risk!
Tell us something you believe almost nobody agrees with you.
This one may be controversial: after a long day of coding, I would leave the last batch of code edits uncommitted and finish it up the next day. After I commit code, it feels like a clean state, and there is no immediate action to take afterward. It takes me longer to get back into the coding the next day. Not committing the code gives me the convenience of looking at uncommitted changes quickly in my code editor, giving me a quick reminder of what I was working on.
What is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?
Go out and talk for a 30-minute walk alone. It brings clarity. Another bliss from stress and anxiety I recommend is birding. I watch birds through my office window when I am stressed or tired. I even have a custom office setup for birding. It releases me from constantly looking at the screen and forces me to recollect my mind and enjoy nature.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?
When I feel overwhelmed or unfocused, I make watercolor paintings!
Watercolor has taught me about the unpredictability nature of running a business. Even with all the planning, we don’t know if things will go according to plan. The macroeconomics keeps changing; other startups compete in the same arena; unstable funding from investors – all are factors we can’t control. We need to be ok with not having complete control and go with the flow sometimes, just like watercolor. Deal with the problem when it happens, and keep moving forward.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business or advance in your career?
Side Projects! For Typogram, we create plenty of creative side projects.
This was a comfortable way to market my product as someone who identifies as an introvert. We create small side projects in addition to our primary logo design tool. The most successful one is CodingFont.com. Because many potential users were web devs and people who spent a lot of time in code editors, we wanted to create a fun little website where they could find their dream CodingFont.
When we released it, it got on the front page of Hackernews and featured on top blogs like BoingBoing. We got newsletter sign-ups and sales from this project and continuous referral traffic. An unexpected benefit was also SEO. When CodingFont got picked up on several prominent sites, its Domain authority/ SEO improved. I utilize this to improve the traffic and SEO of my main project. I’m currently planning a CodingFont 2.0.
What is one failure in your career, how did you overcome it, and what lessons did you take away from it?
Switching gears a bit from our startup discussions, I want to share a chapter from my time in the corporate world at Adobe. It was my dream job, and it helped me learn so much! However, my career there started off with a rocky start.
Hired as a designer, I somehow got tagged as a software engineer. At the start, it wasn’t a big deal since I’m okay with coding. But then, the engineering team expected everyone to pass a cybersecurity “black belt” certification, which was out of my lane and irrelevant to my career goals. This is just one example of the problems caused by being in the wrong role. It felt like I was veering off track with no hope for a promotion, especially since our team structure, or the lack of — no design team or manager in sight; I was reporting to an engineering manager while the other designer was reporting to a product manager.
I knew something had to change. I teamed up with the other designer, and we laid out the situation to our division’s leadership, advocating for a structured design team. I specifically asked for a design manager to guide us and provide a designer’s career path forward. I got promoted to next-level designer soon after the switch.
The takeaway? Your career is in your hands. If you see it heading in a direction that doesn’t fit your goals, it’s up to you to guide it back on course. Please don’t wait for someone else to notice and fix it. Be proactive.
What is one business idea you’re willing to give away to our readers?
Start a newsletter to help you start and grow your business. Before we developed a product for Typogram, we created a newsletter sharing brand design tips with non-designers. This allowed us tremendously during the product launch and got our initial group of users.
What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?
One piece of software that helps my productivity is my watercolor set. It gives me the downtime and thinking space when I needed. I usually find a quiet spot or my favorite photo to paint from.
What is the best $100 you recently spent?
My traveling watercolor is the best expensive gift I have gotten for myself. This allows me to capture all the pretty landscapes from my travels and sightseeing. It also gives me some downtime, clarity, and an occasional break from working on Typogram.
Do you have a favorite book or podcast from which you’ve received much value?
My favorite book is Atomic Habits by James Clear. James Clear says, “You do not rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems.”
Building an excellent life/habit/project management system helps me stick to my goals and roadmap in creating content and shipping products. Although sometimes this can be time-consuming, figuring out your process and setting up the system to plan is vital to habit-building and success.
What’s a movie or series you recently enjoyed and why?
I got into the hype recently and enjoyed House of Dragon! I even wrote a post in my newsletter about the leadership lessons the show has taught me, like how action speaks louder than words and how it takes multiple tries to become a leader.
Key learnings:
- Don’t be afraid to make mistakes
- Share what you know as much as you can
- Talk to your users; they help you to make the best product
- Don’t use a ridiculous font for your logo
Carlyn runs the day-to-day publishing operation here at ideamensch and interacts with our awesome customers and entrepreneurs. She is likely editing this with a cat on her lap.