Melissa Mel
Being an engaged artist or designer today necessitates adaptability, agility and a lot of heart. Our times change on a dime (this week, anyone?), and we have to be ready to roll with them.
Melissa Mel embodies the engaged artist of 2021. Savvy and entrepreneurial without sacrificing tenderness or soul, she creates arresting personal art while serving as a creative director and member of initiatives like Do the Werq and In for 13, and creating her own app, WoMi — all while holding down a gig as an agency art director.
“I think the heart of everything that I create is just staying authentic, and honoring as many parts of myself as I can,” Mel says. “Knowing that there are so many that I have grown through and will continue to grow through and, you know, I'm never, never going to be finished.”
I first met Melissa Mel through Greg Chinn, creative director of The Beat. Melissa created four stunning digital collages for us, all centered on healing “states of doing” — Love, Rest, Joy and Play.
It turns out, Mel’s foray into digital collage came about because of the pandemic.
“I was in a very, uh, not great space,” she says. “I don't do well with involuntary solitude. I love my solitude. And I love my own company. But when I don't have the choice … I found myself needing some kind of outlet and to bring myself out of that darkness. It ended up being these little collages of messages that I was giving to myself.”
She began with “Breathe, Queen. You’re Made of Stardust,” a note-to-self with potential. “I was getting so many messages that were so helpful to me and just like right on time, I was like this could be that for someone else too,” she says.
Around this time, Mel changed her Instagram and personal business names to “Meltifaceted” to reflect her many creative undertakings and “to create this platform of acknowledging all the many facets of ourselves: the good, the bad, the ugly, the no-longer-applicable-but-still-valid parts of ourselves that we were growing through constantly.”
The collages simultaneously call the viewer to action and soothe. They are meditative, energetic and filled with gentle motion and intent.
BIPOC love, pride and advocacy drives all of Mel’s work, from her personal art to her app, WoMi, a digital directory of woman, BIPOC & LGBTQ+ owned small businesses that had humble beginnings as a series of Instagram Story shoutouts. “I started this kind of weekly series that would do my Instagram story shouting out a woman or minority a small business,” she explains. “And that was just a result of having met so many people within my first six months [in California] that had their own businesses, their own podcasts.”
As interest in the series grew, Mel realized an app could broaden the reach of the service while benefitting exponentially more small businesses. “UX and UI design was always something that I had wanted to get into,” she says. Through Worksmart, she attended a Tara Reed Apps Without Code bootcamp and got started. Then the summer of racial reckoning began, and with it came a national focus on supporting BIPOC business. Mel found a Black woman Glide developer and they got WoMi to market.
Meanwhile, Mel’s activity in the Three’s A Crowd community found her getting involved with the In for 13 initiative, challenging design and advertising firms to commit to raising their level of Black leadership to 13% by 2023. It currently sits somewhere around 2%, which is pretty evident from even a quick Google search of design firm “About Us” pages or just … looking at advertising. From there, Mel moved to become the creative director for digital for Do the Werq, an initiative to increase LGBTQ+ visibility and inclusion in the advertising industry.
(I mentioned she has a dayjob too, right? Whew.)
As we exit a trying year and enter what’s already proving to be more of the same, Mel not only leads by example, she reminds us of the importance of art and good design in times like these. "Good design is really just aesthetic communication, right?” she says. “You're trying to convey a message in a way that will compel some kind of action … and you're trying to do it in a way that's memorable, something that will stick with people long after they see it. And I think that's really where a great design can have an effect, especially when it takes the route of humanizing the message and connecting to people in that way.”
“I feel like this year brought to light so much the importance of artists and the importance of creatives, because in this time when we had just a collective darkness and the weight of everything … I think it became so apparent how important it was for artists to keep creating, because we've really, really needed artists this year. It's even more difficult to keep creating in these times, but artists continue put out art and put themselves out for us and so that we have an escape and that we have something to engage in that is joyful, and we can also see ourselves in and not completely forget about what's going on, but engage in it in a way that is creative and inspiring.“
Our conversation returns to digital collage and the importance of authenticity and of remembering to be gentle with yourself. “Part of the journey is just knowing that you're constantly a work in progress and a masterpiece at the same time,” she says. “And just embracing that part of the journey of, ‘this is where I am now.’ Where I'm at is not who I am, it's just a part of of getting to that final form, which is always evolving.”
