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voice | farah kafei
CONVERSATION WITH ELLEN LUPTON AND JENNIFER TOBIAS
FARAH KAFEI Designer, Doubleday & Cartwright PRONOUNS She, her
Tell us about your first year out of school. What was your first job?
My first year out of school was overwhelming—there were so many drastic changes going on. You go from having been a student for the last sixteen years of your life to not knowing what the next year or two might look like. You go from having a month break in the winter to spend with family or do whatever to spending New Year’s Eve in the office. After grad- uating from Pratt in Brooklyn, I started an internship at a dream studio, Sagmeister & Walsh. I was there for almost a year, and while I learned a lot, it wasn’t the right fit for me. I realized I didn’t know much about work- ing in the design industry or what I really wanted from it. When I started looking for the next thing, that first experience made me open-minded about where I could work and more selective about what I was looking for from a job.
Where do you work now? I work at Doubleday & Cartwright in Williams- burg, Brooklyn, a creative studio in the sports, art, and culture sphere. We work with brands like Nike and Red Bull on culturally leaning projects. Coming out of school, I really loved branding and identity work, but work- ing at DD&C has introduced me to art direction. My day-to-day doesn’t necessarily look like what we studied in school. It includes story mining, research, strategy, and looking for photographers or directors. That’s some of what I did when I had the opportunity to work on an editorial series for Nike Women. We ended up shooting a short doc in Mexico for one of the stories we found, about team Carta Blanca, a group of incred- ible grandmas who have been ballin’ together for over seventy years! Working on that as an art director was fun, new territory to explore.