When illustrator Sara Wong thinks back to her art school days, she remembers her portfolio was filled with drawings of joy, curiosity and wackiness, themes for a career in children’s books. Fast forward nine years, and she now illustrates titles sounding less like Goodnight Moon and more like Life after Parole. Wong’s shift to editorial illustration has focused her interest in looking deeper into a variety of difficult subjects and peeling away layers of meaning.

Searching for emotional themes to develop, she makes countless drawings and fine tunes her illustrations into compelling interpretations of both journalism and fiction. The variety of subjects in this genre continues to grow, and her work has appeared in a wide range of media, including the New York Times, NPR, Reactor.com and The Marshall Project, a publisher of nonprofit journalism about criminal justice.

Celina Fang, senior multimedia editor of The Marshall Project, describes Wong’s illustrations as “evocative and atmospheric,” adding that they “perfectly convey stories on what a criminal record can teach us about people’s souls and the isolation of being deaf in prison. Her work has the quality of making feelings and experiences tangible and beautifully carries forth the narrative she is trying to tell.”

During the pandemic, when illustrators were tasked with finding ways to draw the impact of COVID, Wong’s image for the New York Times focused on two people who pass each other during a neighborhood walk. Their social encounter is defined by the safety of their space, but they both look back as they move away. Wong contrasts their external and internal experience by adding towering shadows of the couple who are stopped and facing each other. “I did feel pretty lucky that I wasn’t asked to visualize the virus or anything medical,” she says. Instead, she addressed “the emotional state of a world in which we were all isolating and distancing in public.”

Growing up in San Diego, California, Wong was interested in reading, horse riding and picture books, like Quick as a Cricket, a 1990s favorite that remains on her bookshelf. Her school years were filled with diverse art programs, and she wanted to proceed with both illustration and communication studies in college. Despite the shock of facing her first Midwestern winter, Wong left her California beach town for Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. She found the right program in combined classes from the school’s College of Arts and Sciences and the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts. The university has a strong illustration community, and Wong’s professors included author and illustrator John Hendrix, who prepared students for the realities of the industry and the technicalities of being a working illustrator. “I think it was a good thing that they emphasized that crafting a style was not important and kind of a misguided approach to illustration,” she says. “There was more emphasis on your own experiences and shaping your own voice.”

A local design firm hired Wong after graduation, and she was intent on staying there while she developed both her portfolio and her courage to look for full-time illustration work. But, her frustrations as a day designer began to affect her energy for new ideas, and she needed a motivator that would help her find new projects. Instead of feeling like she had lost the opportunity to use her creative skills, Wong found ways to re-energize them with personal prompt illustrations, creating editorial assignments for herself after work.

Wong considered memorable books and movies for her first prompts, and she decided to illustrate Moonlight, a movie of emotional intensity written and directed by Barry Jenkins. “I was struck by how tender the movie was,” she recalls. “Would I be successful at capturing the way that it made me feel?” The challenge to express it in a single image was powerful, and she spent numerous hours on its composition—even more on experimenting with color, a key part of the film’s emotional tone. After posting it online, Wong was surprised by the response. Jenkins himself praised her illustration, and the founders of Mondo, a company that produces movie posters by contemporary artists, requested it for their roster.

They also commissioned her to illustrate another poster for Y Tu Mamá También, a film by Alfonso Cuarón. The plot brings two seventeen-year-old boys and an older woman together on a cross-country journey that ignites  moments of self-discovery for the three. Considering the many dramatic scenes to analyze, Wong had a full palette of colors to work with. Her illustration placed the three main characters in a swimming pool, drawn as a wash of aqua blue. She splashed it with pink reflections of movement and light and drew a thin pink line that undulates across the surface like an engaging web. “I love to draw water,” she says. “It’s a useful visual concept for a sense of change and self-discovery. The figures are all together in the same environment, but they’re also divided at these different phases in their lives.”

“Sara’s work speaks to the surreal and emotional energy many of our stories convey,” says Christine Foltzer, art director of Reactor magazine, an online publication of science fiction and fantasy stories, articles and reviews. “Her illustrations are beautiful, dreamlike and a bit melancholy. They make you want to linger and know more.”

When Facebook offered Wong a full-time illustration job on its Cultural Moments team in 2017, she thought she had found her place. That same year, Facebook introduced Alegria as its in-house visual style. It was controversial, and pushback came from the design community—especially from illustrators, who disliked the adoption of flat, geometric people in unrealistic skin colors. Wong began to rethink her day-design job, and a year later, she became an art director in its Ads and Products division. The position allowed her to collaborate with nondesigners regarding decisions made at the product strategy level that trickled down and shaped the art direction of illustration.

Now a creative director at Meta Platforms, formerly Facebook, Wong works on the division’s in-product visual systems. Her team does important metaphorical and conceptual work that requires a strong sense of voice and the ability to make complex concepts into lucid illustrations.

As she keeps up with her dual careers, Wong’s editorial style continues to evolve. Her figures appear solid and still by intention, which helps emphasize the subject matter, but their treatment depends on the content and its emotional tone. Currently, she’s experimenting with color and light and evaluating how much detail will best serve the figures in each project. Wong’s clients either support a more abstract representation of a figure or want it to be very specific and more inclusive. The intent of her overall style is similar to what she admires in the work of illustrator Eleanor Davis, who was awarded a gold medal from the Society of Illustrators in 2013. “Eleanor gets to say a lot emotionally with a very conservative use of color or texture,” she says. “[Her illustrations are] very powerful to me.”

Last year, Alissa Levin, founder and creative director of design firm Point Five, asked Wong to illustrate the Harvard Divinity Bulletin’s review of Demon Copperhead, a Barbara Kingsolver novel. The story concerns a young man dealing with his drug addiction in rural Appalachia. “Sara’s work is nuanced and often deals with dualities and complicated emotions,” Levin says. “For example, her shadow figures are both haunting and hopeful. A successful editorial image both enhances the spirit of an article while also contributing a new perspective. Sara’s work always delivers on both.”

Wong has long been an enthusiastic supporter of the editorial industry, but she’s aware of changes that have caused some concerns. Illustrators still find the career is difficult to sustain long term because of its short timelines and low pay levels. Currently, she is more worried about the conservative or “safe” approach that is affecting visual communication and impacting what editorial illustrators can and cannot do. “It’s unfortunate,” she says. “Editorial [used to be] the space to take a chance on new voices and try something different. That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.”

During COVID, Meta established a remote work policy, and Wong spends her time working at home in Baltimore, Maryland, with Procreate and Photoshop on the living room couch. Balancing her time with other aspects of her life outside of producing work has been on her mind. It has made her more selective about the personal projects she chooses. She still advocates for illustrators and encourages them to continue looking for new markets, broader applications of illustration and stronger long-term professional avenues for work. “A lot of the noneditorial avenues, especially like illustration and tech—what I do now—were not something that I learned about or even conceptualized as an option,” she says. “So, a lot of [my career] has felt like luck and circumstance and less like intentional decision making.” As an illustrator and communicator, Wong has the confidence in her skills to know that she has worked hard for it all, but she also appreciates that luck has touched her career more than once. ca