A single idea can open in countless directions. Points of View is a series gathering perspectives around a concept, with each participant choosing their own journey through questions, answers, and the imagination and marvels in between.
This edition explores leverage — including what it looks like to harness it vs. building your own — and how leverage takes shape across systems, relationships, and ideas to create effects that compound over time.
Here, we spoke with María Jesús Contreras, a Chilean illustrator and designer known for her saturated colors, uncanny characters, and wry humor. Her work — both digital and in traditional mediums — moves between editorial illustration, commercial commissions, animation, and personal projects, with clients including The New York Times, Hermès, Netflix, Chobani, and the Musée d’Orsay. Across it all, Contreras has developed a visual language that is immediately recognizable: playful and light on the surface, but grounded in an astute eye for the details, contradictions, and oddities of everyday life.
In this conversation, she reflects on how leverage is built through a recognizable creative voice, relationships nurtured over time, and enough flexibility to keep evolving.
What parts of your process have become forms of leverage over time?
Most of the time, when an opportunity comes up, I try to take it, even when there’s a limited budget — especially if it’s the first time working with someone, since I can build a long-term relationship from there. The fact that I can work with short deadlines also gives me an advantage: I can respond quickly and efficiently when a client has a “fire” to put out.
[As more people are] being exposed to new technologies that imitate art, I can [also] offer content about my creative process. Some of my biggest clients — well-known brands and streaming companies — ask for footage of my process now, from initial sketches to the line art and final piece. Sometimes they share this footage publicly, and sometimes they don’t. [On my own social media] I try to post sketches showing how the final piece came together. Having clear documentation of the process [shows] the authenticity of the work.
What makes leverage fragile?
The visual language you’ve built is your signature. It’s a unique form of leverage that sets you apart from everyone else, and something no one can take from you. Except maybe AI. [Laughs] It’s the more recognizable styles — Studio Ghibli, Pixar, etc. — that AI art tries to imitate. But that creates a trap: The more recognized you become for your style, the more likely it is that your work will be fed into an AI model used to replicate it.
How do you keep that signature from becoming a constraint?
My visual language has taken me years to build, and there have been plenty of times I’ve wanted to be inconsistent and change it. For example, I [also] paint with gouache and watercolors. But with editorial work, the speed, deadlines, sending files back and forth, making revisions makes working in non-digital mediums so much less practical. I could completely change the way I work, but then my entire business would have to change, too. But I look for the right opportunities to experiment, especially in my personal projects, which I dedicate a lot of time to: They broaden my horizons.
How do personal projects and commercial work create leverage for one another?
New clients find their way to me, not just because of the new vision I’m bringing into the work, but because they value versatility and the ability to adapt to different mediums. [Then, with those assignments] I can build a more consolidated portfolio, which also gives me more stability and freedom to keep experimenting.
I’ve found that the bigger the brand or the stronger its legacy, the less they tend to worry about every little detail. They’ve hired you for a reason, and trust you as an artistic partner, which gives you a little more confidence to push back on things and shape the direction. Smaller clients, on the other hand, can sometimes be much more nervous about the money they’re spending, which is understandable. Sometimes that anxiety translates into more revisions or wanting to control every detail. But once they start seeing the numbers, the reach, and the response to the work, they usually relax a little.
How do you stay close to an audience without becoming overly responsive to it?
I connect with my audience through humor, memes, and sharing common experiences. I try to make my social media a space built on comedy, common ground, and not taking things too seriously. I think that environment has helped both my art and my mental health.
