A female-led Lookout Mountain agency is influencing Chattanooga graphic design

There is always a problem that needs solving when it comes to design, making it an ideal profession for an artist who enjoys being creative within certain rules, confines and bounds, says Mandy Lamb.

Her agency, Mandy Lamb Design, sits upon Lookout Mountain, where she serves clients from Chattanooga to the United Kingdom.

Lamb, 43, realized she wanted to pursue the arts while attending high school in Cleveland, Tennessee, she says.

“I’m super lucky because in high school, I had a really fabulous art teacher, and she was just a really interesting person who had traveled all over the world,” Lamb says.

She guessed she would enjoy graphic design at the time without fully comprehending what it entailed.

“I guessed right and loved it,” Lamb says.

Lamb stuck with graphic design and the state of Tennessee and attended UTC as a William E. Brock Scholar.

When she graduated in 2003, there was little opportunity to work full-time in the arts locally, Lamb says. So she headed further south to Birmingham to work for a boutique design firm, where she learned the ropes for about a decade.

Her boss was a charismatic man who wore a custom-tailored wool three-piece suit every day to the office — even in the sticky, sweltering summer heat, she says. Somehow, he never sweat.

“Sort of the traditional way of a design agency is that you have a male creative director, usually, with a big personality, kind of like ‘Mad Men,'” she says. “It’s much better now than then.”

She returned to Chattanooga before attending the Business Perspectives for Creative Leaders program at Yale University, which showed her the tools to open Mandy Lamb Design in 2017.

“It still takes a lot to make a living within the arts in Chattanooga, but there is so much more here than there used to be,” Lamb says.

A majority of students who study design appear to be women, but that doesn’t translate into the field, Lamb says. It seems very few women practice graphic design, and very, very few women own an agency.

But she’s seen that changing over time. All of Lamb’s staff designers are women.

Lamb says she has never felt like she didn’t get a project due to being a female leader in a male-dominated field.

“I wouldn’t want to work with somebody like that anyway,” she says. “I’d feel like I dodged a bullet.”

Lamb’s eclectic portfolio spans from the re-branding of Rock City’s annual pass program to high-production invitations for CHI Memorial Foundation’s annual Pink! Gala. She’s styled showrooms in Atlanta, Chicago and New York. She’ll design packaging for a national candy brand this year.

She describes her aesthetic as “modern-refined,” but each client has different needs.

Lamb sometimes sees her designs plastered on a passing truck, or her Royal Cup Coffee logo on a hotel carafe.

“There it is! They’re still using it!” Lamb says. “I love stuff like that.”

Years ago, her drawing professor was known for ripping up students’ art in front of their faces when they were getting too attached. Lamb still looks back on that lesson about letting go in design, which can apply all the same to life.

Sometimes it requires small tweaks; sometimes the change can be incremental; but sometimes, an individual has to start all over to get to where they want to be.

Many people discourage themselves and others from pursuing the arts, yet America is the biggest consumer of it, Lamb says. It’s what drives us to buy certain brands or see certain films.

“Guess what,” Lamb says. “There’s art everywhere.”

Yet she admits that being a designer is not a path for everyone.

An artist must be comfortable with a certain amount of risk, but often, achieving great things requires a little bit of venture.

Find Lamb and samples of her work at mandylambdesign.com.