Clare Lambert Hines ’04 Draws Herself a Creative New Career

There is little in life that Clare Lambert Hines ‘04 enjoys more than putting pencil to paper and sketching. These days, the vignettes that emerge often find their way into a growing Instagram account that has attracted more than 79,000 followers from across the world. Several of her funny and honest illustrations about everyday anxieties and absurdities were recently featured in the New Yorker, and many more will be collected in a forthcoming book.

Hines, known professionally as Kayden Hines, is new to the creative scene, having quit her Silicon Valley job in 2017 to pursue her passion for writing and drawing full time. She has always been one to doodle in the notebook margins, from her days at NCS through her undergraduate career at Princeton University. But her early professional work left her starved creatively. As Hines put it, her new path “allowed me to use a part of my brain that hadn’t been used in a long time.”

She started her Instagram account (@kaydenhines) in October 2017 with a mission to say things people think but are afraid to say out loud. The satirical posts about social anxiety, common pitfalls of working, and the struggles of being an adult echo true for thousands of followers online. Her “Fall Denim Trends” piece in the New Yorker was another sign of success, as is the book she is working on for Harper Collins.

“I taught myself to draw digitally, mostly from YouTube videos. But these are more about telling a story that resonates with people. As long as the point gets across, that’s what matters,” Hines said. Her creative process is composed of a running list of observations and ideas, kept on her phone. She may not know at the time how an idea will translate into a drawing, but when she sits down to draw, she tries to keep things simple, both visually and conceptually. “I look for ways to have an element of surprise. What’s the visual equivalent of a joke here?” Hines said.

She pulls from experiences and lessons learned in her career, including a two-year stint at investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, a move she made “because I had no idea what to do” after Princeton, and a corporate development job at Discovery Communications, where she developed important skills but felt out of place.

Each career move got her closer to what she really wanted to do – create. When she left Discovery to attend Stanford Business School, Hines seized the opportunity to explore creativity in whatever form presented itself.

“I loved business school. While I was there, I started pushing my boundaries. I tried out for and made the business school musicals, which are actually really hard to get into. I took classes on film production and marketing. I just tried everything creative that I could,” Hines said.

That pivot helped her land an internship at Apple, which hired her after graduation as a full-time employee in their TV partnerships division. Still, she craved another outlet.

“I was working with people at Apple who were doing the things I wanted to do – make content – and that started to weigh on me. I was miserable coming to work and thought, ‘What am I doing?’ If I want to start doing something creative, it’s now or never,” she said.

When her husband started graduate school, Hines seized the opportunity to quit Apple and focus on her dreams. She started writing TV scripts and creating her online brand, an arena in which her years in digital strategy proved invaluable. As she came up with ideas for Instagram content, she researched how to represent them in the most visually compelling way. This study paid off when she posted a comic about Parmesan cheese that fanned out across the web overnight.

“I came into this with a strategic mindset, which is rare for people who have always done creative things. There were ways I could differentiate myself beyond my words,” said Hines.

Hines’s hardworking nature has also helped her find success, something she credits to her high school alma mater.

“NCS was more influential to me in many ways than college. It helped me learn how to think critically and taught me a work ethic,” she said.

In addition to her book, Hines is working these days on a TV script about Silicon Valley from a female perspective, further exploring the themes of work, gender, and satire. With a host of creative projects on the horizon, Hines says she’s never been happier.