Rising Stars: Meet Isabella Freeland of Pasadena, California

Today we’d like to introduce you to Isabella Freeland.

Hi Isabella, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I was born in Glendale, California but raised on California’s Central Coast, where my grandparents and parents built Oso Libre Winery from the ground up on our family ranch in Paso Robles. My mother served as CFO and Controller for over fourteen years, all while raising twin daughters. She taught me that women could do it all and look fabulous doing it. My father was General Manager, winemaker, and COO, and also the designer behind most of the branding, label design, and web presence. Design was something integrated into my daily life.
My father was also a hobbyist photographer with a background in geography and GIS. I come from a lineage of photographers on both sides of my family and have always felt that I inherited their instinct to document people and how they interact with place, to read the world through terrain and light. Watching my dad work on campaigns and labels, and watching him see the world through a lens, is a big part of how I came to love both design and photography.
From around nine to fourteen I was deeply into anime, immersed in its vibrant visual language and world-building. I have a cringeworthy yet beloved memory of wandering San Luis Obispo fully costumed as Kagome from Inuyasha. This lives deep in my spirit to this day. From there I found my way to a blog at thirteen called Thinking of Issy (don’t look it up, it doesn’t exist anymore), building layouts around music, fashion, animals, and film. The next year my dad put a Nikon D3100 in my hands and I fell in love with photography immediately. At fifteen I launched Isabella Freeland Photography, a dedicated photo portfolio site I ran for ten years, eventually merging into Isabella Freeland Studio last year. Later I served as Editor-in-Chief and Art Director of my high school yearbook. Those were my first real experiences working with systems, storytelling, photography, and design at scale. During those same years I worked part-time at Oso Libre Winery as a junior designer, photographer, and tasting room associate. It was where I first understood that design, photography, and brand experience were all part of the same thing, where I learned to work directly with people and read a room, to understand a product through its story and the hands that built it, to stretch limited resources without compromising vision, and to wear every hat without losing sight of the whole.
I eventually formalized everything through an A.A. in Studio Arts from Pasadena City College and a B.A. in Graphic Design from Cal State LA, where I graduated cum laude in December 2025. I launched Isabella Freeland Studio during my capstone as a way to give structure to a way of working that has been with me for a long time. The studio is still early. But it feels less like something new and more like something finally named.
My photography practice runs parallel to all of it. Over ten years I have been documenting Los Angeles through what I would call vernacular surrealism, finding the uncanny in the everyday, and the strange and sacred in the overlooked. That work became The Fluorescent Atlas, a self-published hardcover photography book documenting nine years of the city. Filmmakers like Wong Kar-wai, David Lynch, Gaspar Noé, and Stanley Kubrick are woven into how I see color, emotion, composition, and light. Los Angeles itself feels hyperreal to me, a place where artifice and authenticity overlap until they become indistinguishable, where the past and present exist in constant dialogue through spaces that carry a distinct cultural and architectural language. I am trying to make work that holds that tension, the way certain spaces hold multiple histories at once, fluid and unresolved, as if the past never fully left and the present hasn’t quite arrived.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I would describe the journey as chunky peanut butter that isn’t fully mixed. Part of it is smooth, part of it is rocky. Maybe there’s an oil patch. But I think that is part of what shaped my point of view. My final semester at Cal State LA was the most intense test of that. I ran seven projects simultaneously: a self-published photography book spanning nine years of work, a speculative visual identity system for an album, a typeface revival based on Jacques Tati’s 1967 film Playtime, a commission with Adobe, the art direction of a capstone gallery exhibition, my portfolio, and my resume. I also took on pet sitting jobs. There were moments I went a bit insane. Not Ren and Stimpy insane, but close. I am endlessly grateful to my partner Will, who kept me fed, loved, and grounded while also being a willing collaborator in my more experimental endeavors, including, on one occasion, lighting flowers on fire in my backyard. I managed it by treating each project as its own world with its own deadlines, mapping everything out at the start of each week, and checking in with myself daily. FigJam became my best friend. Magdalena Bay and Sparks kept my spirit alive. What I came out of that semester knowing is that I can hold a lot without dropping anything. That turned out to be one of the most important things I have learned about myself.
The current chapter has its own kind of difficulty. I am interning at 4eign Design while navigating months of job applications in one of the hardest economies for creative work in recent memory. Building a freelance practice from the ground up means sifting through an exhausting number of scams and dead ends alongside the real opportunities. But I have never once considered walking away from design. Breaking in without a traditional linear path means spending a lot of energy proving that your work speaks for itself. Learning to frame being multidisciplinary as a strength rather than a liability took time. I am still in that process. I do not think that ever fully stops. COVID threw a wrench into things too, as it did for so many people. There are moments where I wonder about the roads not taken, whether Art Center or Otis might have opened different doors. But I would not trade my experience at Cal State LA for anything. The students and professors I met there genuinely changed my life. I like to think the universe put me exactly where I was supposed to be.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I am a multidisciplinary designer and photographer building cinematic, concept-driven visual systems across brand and digital platforms. I work across brand identity, editorial and publication design, packaging, album artwork, typeface design, and UX/UI. My focus is cultural research, semiotics, and the visual languages that give communities and subcultures their identity. I believe complex and niche subjects deserve design that makes them genuinely accessible and inviting. I approach every project as a small cultural world to research and construct.
My intellectual life pulls toward arthouse cinema, archiving, Jungian psychology, philosophy, astrology, theology, and the esoteric, and the frameworks I have built from those areas are inseparable from how I work. Systems of every variety fascinate me. I believe that everything one studies in life directly informs their work, their tastes, and their creative process. I am wired for intensity, and that shows in my work. I think in webs, not lines. I am the kind of person who loses entire nights to hyperfocus, going deeper and deeper into an idea until something clicks. Theory informs the work, but the experience always comes first.
I am currently interning at 4eign Design, where I am designing their new logo system, collaborating on UX/UI for a music industry SaaS app, and working on album artwork. What I am most proud of is my senior capstone, Hearts Aglow Reborn, a fully speculative 360-degree visual identity system for Weyes Blood’s album And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow. The identity constructs an intimate, esoteric, and humanist world drawn entirely from original photography, symbolic research, and a design language pulled directly from the album’s themes. It contains no photographs of the artist. The deliverables spanned gatefold vinyl with splatter pressing, a CD with lyric booklet, Apple Music motion graphics, and a full merch collection. It was exhibited at the Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery at Cal State LA. It is the project where everything I had been developing across design and photography came together into a single coherent world.
Other self-directed work includes The Fluorescent Atlas, a self-published hardcover photography book documenting nine years of Los Angeles vernacular surrealism; Concert Compass, a full end-to-end UX/UI concert discovery app; The Art of Vinyl, a visual-first interactive database celebrating vinyl culture and crate digging; Hollywood Forever Reimagined, a cultural rebranding of the historic Los Angeles cemetery; and Nouvelle Vague, a typographic publication exploring French New Wave cinema. Freelance credits include a packaging commission for Adobe and marketing materials for the USC Keck School of Medicine.
What sets me apart is the combination of depth and range. I can hold a concept and a production file with equal care. I think in systems but I feel in atmospheres. But everything has to work. Form and function are not in tension for me, they are the same conversation. And I have a photography practice that directly shapes how I approach design, giving me an instinct for tone, light, pacing, and the emotional weight of an image.

Alright so before we go can you talk to us a bit about how people can work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
I am at my best working with cultural institutions, arts organizations, and boutique brands in the music and film space that care deeply about how they show up in the world and the meaning behind what they make. I am currently available for freelance projects across brand identity, print and editorial design, album artwork, photography, and art direction. If you are a musician, an independent label, a filmmaker, a small business, or a cultural institution looking for design work that goes beyond surface aesthetics, I would love to talk. I am also actively seeking a full-time or part-time studio position in Los Angeles. If you are a design studio, creative agency, or in-house team working in the music, film, publishing, or arts space, please reach out. Beyond formal work, I am always open to conversation. This industry is better when people share what they know and what they love. You can find my work at isabellafreelandstudio.com, follow my studio practice on Instagram at @isabellafreelandstudio, and connect with me professionally on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/isabellafreeland.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.isabellafreelandstudio.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/isabellafreelandstudio/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabellafreeland/
• Other: Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/issyfreeland/ | The Fluorescent Atlas: https://www.blurb.com/b/12639596-the-fluorescent-atlas

Image Credits
Photograph of Isabella Freeland © Jeanine Madson Photography | Design & Photography by Isabella Freeland Studio