Kaavya Jayram

While Kaavya's roles as a software engineer and interdisciplinary artist may seem at odds, she’s found that they share many similarities: structure, composition, detail, and the viewer experience. But figuring out how to describe all of the different parts of her work has been a challenge. Over time, however, Kaavya has leaned into her position outside of one box. Below, she chats embracing your niche passions and how community and connections will follow from there.

About my work

My creative practice
I’m a frontend software engineer, and my work sits between engineering and design. Professionally, I build interfaces for tools that helps people create and work with media. While that work involves generative technology, I don’t generally use AI image generation in my own art. I’m interested in the technology, but when I’m making personal work, I prefer the specificity of my own hand, decisions and visual voice.

Outside of work, I draw, take photographs, do graphic design and create creative coding projects. I move pretty freely between those things. Often a visual idea turns into a technical problem, or a technical constraint becomes part of the look of something.

The same instincts - structure, composition, detail and how someone experiences what I’ve made - show up across both.

Influences and inspiration
Traditional and folk art forms, historical references and older technologies; recently I’ve been looking at Maniam’s Ponniyin Selvan illustrations from the 1950s. I’m equally drawn to early digital cameras, old graphical user interfaces, and the visual constraints of early personal computing. I like studying things made within strict limitations, whether that’s a traditional ornamental system or a low-resolution screen – those constraints often produce very specific and inventive forms. I’m especially interested in translating those visual languages into new contexts.

My training
I’m largely self-taught. My formal arts training was mostly in music - I studied classical violin and singing - while I learned drawing, photography, composition and design through practice, studying other work closely and making projects that forced me to develop new skills. Learning this way made me comfortable moving between mediums and picking up whatever tools a particular project or idea requires.

Favorite recent project
Recently I illustrated a custom playing-card deck built around Indian sikku kolam (a looping art form) motifs and folk-art imagery. I liked bringing the intricacy of traditional playing-card design together with the baroque topologies of kolam. I ended up building a custom drawing tool to construct the patterns over a dot grid. For the animal face cards, I used a Sanjhi-inspired style, drawing from crisp paper-cut silhouettes in contrast to the fluid kolam linework.

A day in the life
There isn’t really a single typical day. Most weekdays I’m working as a software engineer, which means a mix of coding, designing interfaces and talking through product problems.

Outside of that, I’m usually in the middle of some personal project - drawing, editing photos, designing something in Figma, researching a visual reference or building small tools to support my artistic process. I tend to work project-first rather than medium-first, so what I’m doing changes constantly depending on what I’m interested in.

A starter pack for my job:
My MacBook Pro running Figma. My iBook G3 with my old Wacom tablet, running MacPaint. A Gateway DC-T50 and a Panasonic LX5. Blender and a Diet Coke. A stack of old National Geographics.

How I got here

Starting my creative journey
I drew constantly growing up and later got into photography, digital art and making things on the computer. The internet was a huge part of my creative development: finding artists, tutorials, obscure references and communities I never would have encountered otherwise.

Over the years, my visual style has changed a lot and continues to evolve, but there’s always been a throughline in the way I look at art. I’m drawn to it anthropologically: how the visual language of something is situated in its cultural context and a point in time.

Landing my first few jobs, clients and/or commissions
I haven’t had a very traditional path into creative work, and I’ve never really built a practice around seeking out clients or commissions. Most of my creative work has been self-directed: I make things because I’m interested in them, put them out into the world, and opportunities have sometimes grown from that. 

Having a body of work that reflects my actual interests has been more useful than trying to anticipate what someone might hire me for. Some of my most interesting opportunities have come from people finding a very specific project or corner of my work and reaching out because it resonated with them.

Biggest challenges along the way
Figuring out how to situate my work when I don’t have a very conventional creative career or a single medium that defines my practice. It was difficult to figure out what spaces I belonged in or how to even describe what I do. Over time, I’ve had to become comfortable with being interdisciplinary rather than trying to fit neatly into one specific category.

Everyday skills I’ve found helpful for my creative work:
Learning how to study existing work closely. When I find something I like, I try not to stop at “this looks good.” I ask what exactly is creating that effect, why those choices were made, which parts are essential, and which could be removed or changed without losing the idea. I think of that as research as much as inspiration.

Learning to draw taught me to notice proportion and structure; photography taught me framing and omission; design taught me hierarchy and how to direct attention. Those skills all made me better at interrogating work I admire and what I want to carry into my own.

My social media and self-promotion vibe is…
I like to treat social media as a public archive: a place for finished work, behind-the-scenes processes, experiments and references. It’s also a useful way to find people who are interested in the same specific things that I am. 

For self-promotion, I prefer directing people to my personal website - I feel like it presents a more cohesive artistic identity and more context.

Three things I've found useful in my career:

My greatest learnings when it comes to making money and supporting myself as a creative:
I have immense respect for anyone who makes a living entirely from their art – it’s incredibly difficult and often requires many sacrifices. I realized I needed to go down a different path. I instead found work in frontend engineering and design that draws on many of the same strengths I developed as an artist: a strong aesthetic orientation, an interest in systems, attention to detail, rigor and an awareness of how people perceive and navigate complexity. The difference is that my personal work is usually driven by something more meaningful to me, but the underlying craft often feels surprisingly similar.

Advice

My most useful career tips
I’ve learned to document my work much more carefully than I used to; I’ve always been an obsessive perfectionist and that meant I was sometimes too willing to throw out early iterations or works in progress. But keeping those records communicates a lot more about how I think than a finished piece alone; that context has been useful when sharing work, applying for things or even just revisiting an old idea in a new way.

Where I go to feel connected as a creative
A lot of my creative community is online - interest groups for old technology, folk art, collage, etc. @digicam.love has been especially important to me; it’s introduced me to artists and photographers with unique perspectives and a similar appreciation for the history of craft.

What I'd say to someone looking to get into a similar role
It’s kind of a cliché, but networking is so important. People who are deeply interested in a niche tend to know other people who care about it too, and they’re often really happy to talk to new people who share that enthusiasm. Cold outreach to people in your area of interest who inspire you is a great place to start. Even short conversations can lead to new references, collaborators, communities or opportunities you wouldn’t have found otherwise.

There’s a sweet spot between competence and specific taste. Taste without the skill to execute it can’t really go anywhere; competence without a unique point of view can make technically perfect work that doesn’t add much to the conversation. It’s important to develop both at the same time. Get really good at the fundamentals, but commit with confidence to whatever makes your perspective truly yours.