Will Jones
Hair collecting in dense strands on the floor. Browser tabs multiplying across a screen. Towers of identical books. Grids of repeated images. Windows stacked against windows. Things repeated and multiplied until texture, rhythm, and patterns begin emerging from them.
Graphic designer Isabelle Tan notices these moments constantly. Not necessarily because of the objects themselves, but because of what happens once they accumulate. At a certain point, the individual unit stops being the focus. The eye begins reading the whole instead.
Tan is based in New York and currently working on the branding team at the New York design studio 2×4.
Rather than relying on one dominant visual gesture, Tan is interested in what happens when smaller forms accumulate. Across both her professional and personal work, she is drawn to how smaller forms — type, images, sounds, or repeated structures — can collectively produce something immersive and atmospheric.
As a Singaporean designer born in Malaysia and raised in Thailand, Tan grew up surrounded by dense visual environments where multiple systems often existed simultaneously. Storefronts layered with translated signage, compressed websites, tiled advertisements, repeated logos, and multilingual packaging all competed for attention at once. Rather than seeing this density as clutter, she became interested in the visual logic underneath it.
That attraction still informs the way she collects references today. Her archives are filled with screenshots and images of accidental repetitions, strange redundancies, and moments where physical space begins resembling digital space. Apartment windows become grids. Office lights resemble duplicated pixels. Stacks of objects start looking rendered rather than physical. Things in the real world begin behaving like copy-and-paste.
She is especially drawn to visual situations that feel slightly unresolved or unintentional, things that appear default, understated, awkward, or less staged. That instinct exists in contrast with much of the work she produces professionally.
At 2×4, Tan contributes to branding and identity systems for international cultural and commercial clients, helping develop visual languages that need to remain refined, flexible, and consistent across websites, campaigns, publications, environmental graphics, motion, and digital applications. The work requires precision and control, but it has also given her an appreciation in defaults, rough edges, and less controlled moments.
Rather than treating these opposing instincts as contradictions, Tan sees them as part of the same practice. Working within highly polished systems has sharpened her sensitivity toward defaults, repetition, buildup, and the smaller visual gestures that often get removed in the pursuit of perfection.
That interest appears clearly in Voice Print, an award-winning publication project that received an A’ Design Award for Print and Published Media Design as well as an American Graphic Design Award from Graphic Design USA. The book translated speech patterns into typographic compositions, mapping pauses, repetition, rhythm, and disfluencies as visual systems.
Instead of treating stuttering as something to smooth over or correct, the project approached speech as something layered, rhythmic, and structurally complex. Drawing from graphic scores, concrete poetry, and melismatic approaches to sound, Tan used typography to visualize spoken language. Like much of her work, the project explores how things typically viewed as irregular, excessive, or undesirable can be reconsidered through structure, rhythm, and design.
Before joining 2×4, Tan worked across fashion, editorial, and publishing contexts at Wkshps, Synoptic Office, Abrams Books, and Dion Lee. Across all of those environments, one idea seems to persist: an interest in repetition and multiplicity.
Much of Tan’s practice comes down to paying attention to things people are usually trained to edit out.