Maurice Cherry

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Podcast

Episode 530: Phillip J. Clayton (Part 1 of 2)

November 20, 2023
Tagged as: creative director, design judge, design writer, entrepreneur, jamaica, Kingston, Phillip J. Clayton, PJClayton and Co, studio owner

Philip J. Clayton is a brand design strategist, design judge, writer, and creative director of PJClayton & Co.

Phillip J. Clayton is a design voice that you need to know. The Kingston-based creative is a strategic advisor, an international design judge, and an expert on branding. We talked for hours about his career and his philosophies on branding and life, so I split this episode into two parts just to make sure nothing got lost. If you’re interested in branding, then get ready for a masterclass!

Our conversation started off with a check-in on this year, and then Phillip shared his goals about being seen as a facilitator and about tackling complex problems and making a meaningful impact. We also talked about how he started his own company PJClayton & Co., the client-vendor relationship, and Phillip dropped a ton of knowledge about his creative process, brand purpose, and the power of extracting valuable information from conversations. (Kind of like what you’re doing with this episode!)

Tune in next week for Part 2! Happy Thanksgiving!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.

Phillip J. Clayton:

I’m Phillip J. Clayton and I’m a brand consultant, a strategic advisor and an international design judge. I focus on brand design and development. I’m a writer. I write articles, copywriting, etc. I focus on art and design holistically as a foundation for advertising and marketing. And I’m usually hired as a creative director. I do have a consulting company called PJClayton and Company.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay, we’ll talk about all of that, certainly. But if you could use three words to sum up what this year has been for you so far, what would those words be?

Phillip J. Clayton:

So…agony is definitely part of that. I did agony…awareness. And enlightenment.

Maurice Cherry:

Agony, awareness, and enlightenment. That sounds like the hero’s journey.

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yeah, well, I’m hoping it will be.

Maurice Cherry:

Have you given thought to what you want to accomplish next year?

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yes, I have. That’s the awareness part. I’ve discovered things about myself personally and professionally. So next year I would like to actually be more focused on becoming what I label a fixer, not necessarily a facilitator. I went into consulting for that reason. I would like to be more on the consulting side and looking at complex problems. They’re usually very impactful. So I like to focus on complex problems with larger corporations, I guess.

And the reason for that is the impact it can have both in this, like in their specific industries or on a societal level, regarding the thinking and the approach to sustainability and marketing behind that internal change. Right? I’d like to focus more on that regarding innovation — R&D — there are a lot of things out there, and the unsolved. Most of them that I can think of, they’re unsolved. They’re worth a lot of money as well. So it does benefit me to sustain that focus if I’m able to sustain myself doing it.

Maurice Cherry:

In your eyes, how is a consultant different from a facilitator then? Because you really sort of try to make that shift.

Phillip J. Clayton:

For me, a facilitator? Well, generally, to my knowledge, a facilitator would normally broker two parties together. I guess the ideal between two parties or to facilitate one party to another, or they find a way to accommodate something else, to align it with another thing. The consultant to me is more of a fixer. And that was something. The word fixer in this context I learned years ago, I think it was on a movie or something. But it intrigued me because I always had this desire to be someone so important that I’m only called when I’m needed. And it’s usually for something that nobody can solve. No, I’m not the only one, obviously, on the planet, but it’s kind of like that being the only one kind of thinking behind it, where you get called in because you are the only person who can fix this problem.

And a consultant, to me, is that because consulting is a form of therapy, in my opinion, where we have to…the execution is the last step of everything. The consultant listens to people, a client I guess you could say, and they have to diagnose a problem and make a prescription to that problem or symptom. A facilitator doesn’t really do that. The consultant…actually, this is why the time is so important that they spend with each client. That’s why if you’re really narrow in your focus, you probably don’t have as many clients as a company that’s serving a wider market. You’re probably working with very few clients. But those clients are really valuable, not just in the work they do, but also in the financial gain that you get from it and they get from you helping them. It’s really a form of therapy because a lot of times the problems that they come to you with are not what is not what they say it is by listening to them and allowing them to speak and asking specific questions, great questions that lead to answers, because we don’t always know the answers either. It’s just the information that we can extract from the conversation that builds trust. And then the client reveals themselves to you and you realize, “oh, there’s either a personal issue here or there’s actually a deeper company problem here.” And what most company owners will do is because there is this cliched response, especially in brand. Our brand is a solution, is that they will come with a list of requests that they believe will solve the problem for their company. And this could be anything from a little new logo or website or rebrand, something aesthetic or surface level, I call it. But those things are results of deeper processes.

So that’s kind of how I view the consultant regarding a fixer as opposed to a facilitator.

Maurice Cherry:

I want to talk about your company, which you mentioned earlier, PJ Clayton & Co. And I think it’s important to note that you started that 22 years ago, which is fascinating. My hats off to you for your longevity of keeping it going all this time. What made you decide to start your own company?

Phillip J. Clayton:

Irony is the life experience. I actually didn’t want the company. I just wanted to be recognized when I was younger.

Well, let me rephrase it. In my mind, a company requires employees. That’s what I knew back then. I didn’t really want that, but I said, I need to be respected as a professional, and I need a name for that. And during my college years, which started in 2001 — if remember I that correctly…yeah, 2001 — I was freelancing before college. You’re doing side projects. I just left high school like a year before, and I’m just getting hired by people who knew I could do graphic design or art or anything creative that I could do. People are hiring me to help them. These were really small jobs, but I always had this thing growing up in the house I grew up in, which was with my father being my first door to the world on design and all that.

At a very young age, I had this image of myself, even at that age I fell in love with, like, movies and advertising, or anybody, if it is an advertising agency, or architecture or some kind of design firm. I was fascinated with that thing, not necessarily the movie itself. And I always had this perception of myself that I wanted to become someone so valuable.

And that’s where it started. I said, “well, one day I would like to have a global firm.” I think my name, PJ — the J — is important. That’s how people find me. So I added the J in there. I’m talking like twelve years old here. I’m writing. My first logo was done around that age, too, which was hand drawn, because what, my father? That’s the era he’s from. Everything was hand done, not computers. I learned from him. I didn’t know what a logo was. I didn’t know what graphic design was. I just saw him doing stuff, and I’m like, “he’s getting paid. This is fun.” And I started at that age, sketching out my logo, which was PJC. I didn’t think about the Phillip J. Clayton part of it yet. I was just like, “PJC represents me. That’s my name, my acronym.” What’s that word for that again? It’s not an acronym. What do you call it? Yeah, no, something more language related, I can’t remember. Initials. Is that what we call it? Initials?

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, we can call it initials.

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yeah. Right. So that’s what I knew growing up. My initials. I didn’t know what a logo was. My father used to sign his work with PJC or PJ Clayton as well. He has a J as well. But he’s Paul and I’m Phillip, so we had the same initials.

As I got older, I started to discover all these things about design. And then Letraset. He had Letraset books, art history books. And I’m just reading through — being dyslexic, when I say “reading through”, I’m really looking at what I can understand. And I realized that there is the typography and this thing called advertising. And he used to do mockups that he presented to clients by hand. He’d build the actual billboards, miniature versions of them, and he understood color separation, for example. That was a manual process back then. And I just started falling in love, and I said, “I want to be the person who knows all of this stuff.”

I wanted to become an admin. This is before I even knew about David Ogilvy. I said I want to be an admin. I want to be some kind of…I don’t remember if I used the word “consultant” at that age. And by the time I was in my teens going to college, that’s when I started to freelance, I guess you’d say, officially, while I’m in college under Phillip, it used to be Phillip Clayton. And I added the J because I said, I need to stand out a little bit here. The more I got involved in projects, I started to have this awareness of how the world works. And I said, “I need to have a company.” It wasn’t a company at the time. It was just Phillip J. Clayton Creative. I think I had it at the time. And it was short of PJ Clayton Creative and worked with that for a while.

And then this one that you’re currently looking at, Phillip J. Clayton. I mean, PJ Clayton and company. That one happened last year when I was pivoting myself. When I finally said, “this is it”. I think I know who I am now and what I want to focus on. And so PJ Clayton and company is the newest iteration of that.

But it’s always been PJC. It’s always been something of that. I have logos. I have, like, I think six versions of this logo. This is the most current and pleasing one for me. I wanted to have something that represented me professionally, and I still wanted to maintain my individuality as a person, where I should be able to walk into meetings in corporate offices without having to become what people expect me to become, I guess, for those meetings. So it wasn’t very important that I maintained Phillip in some way.

And I think it was like five years ago, someone saw that name that Phillip J. Clinton on LinkedIn, actually. And they said, “oh, that’s a very prestigious name.” And that’s when I said, “oh, I’m changing this company. He’s going to be PJ Clayton & Company now.”

Maurice Cherry:

Hey, other companies do it all the time. They change up logos, they change their names around. So it sounds like you already sort of had that foresight.

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yeah, from childhood, like I said, I was always thought highly of myself, but I was dyslexic. So even thinking of myself as smart and intelligent was not my strongest attribute. I guess the self confidence, well, externally was low, but in my head I was very confident, and I knew what I wanted from a very young age. It was “you’re going to be a famous artist or you’re going to be in advertising” — that much I knew.

Maurice Cherry:

What were those early days of the company like? I mean, you started back in 2001. You were still in school. What were you doing?

Phillip J. Clayton:

It was just me. I had no concept of hiring people for help at that time. It was just me and some friends of mine. They work in production, the production entertainment industry, and I started working with them. It was mostly on our art direction and set design. I basically helped them with the graphic side of things. I get paid for that. And then I slowly worked my way into becoming into the management side where they start asking me to manage a whole production by myself: stage, set up, everything. Making sure everything looks good for either the TV screen or a concert. Also worked on music videos. So there’s a lot of art and graphic applications from my side. That’s why they wanted me to work with them.

I was doing all of that as myself, and that’s really the foundation of the company where I was known as, or I was dubbed as, a great graphic designer or an artist. So it was a lot of projects like that. It was either logo work or some kind of art consulting thing where I would use my artistic knowledge to help on something. On a visual. As a visual component.

Yeah. So that was the early days, but as a starting point of my official professional career.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, if you look from then to now, what are some ways — and I mean, you’ve sort of already talked about your personal journey growing as a creative — but what are some ways that the company has kind of changed from then to now?

Phillip J. Clayton:

There’s a dramatic change. I have partners now. I’ve narrowed myself into brand consulting. The clients are different. I mean, I’m between corporate startups and the industries are diverse. It’s fintech. So I’m actually solving business problems now. That’s a big difference there, as opposed to then being a creative service, as opposed to a company that has a creative service.

It’s flipped around now. What’s happened over the years is that I now focus on actual business problems. So I’m a business that offers creative services, but I align it all to a business objective or problem. So it has more impact now as a company and myself as a professional. The partners that I have, or people…clients that I work with, are way more, I guess, grown up. You’d say there’s an adult version of the company now where we’re having serious conversations, having fun about with what we do. Yes, but it’s really trying to have that impact on someone’s company who’s asking for help becoming an industry voice.

As someone once said, I’m speaking on behalf of the company when I communicate anything online. And now there’s this responsibility. It’s like you feel responsible now in regarding or accountable for anything that you say and do. There’s this thing behind me that I need to protect. And I guess that’s the big difference now from then, back then it was, “oh, I want to be creative and make a lot of money” and that’s it.

Maurice Cherry:

Let’s say like you have a new project that’s coming into you, like a new branding project. What does your creative process look like? Because I imagine there might be steps that you have to take to sort of transform that client’s vision into a brand identity.

Phillip J. Clayton:

Oh, absolutely. This is a diagnosis, part of the whole process that, well, once anyone engages me of interest, I have to ensure that one: I can actually help them. I can actually solve, or at least I have a process of how to solve it and then I have to align myself if it’s something that is where we are good fit. But once that happens, let’s say it goes well and we are actually going to work together. That process starts with assessing the company, the business development, product development and management. There’s usually probably a brand audit as well where they are in the market and are they okay in the market, should we point them in a different direction? But we have to start with assessing the company and what it offers. And process mapping is part of that, where we identify what happens when a customer is engaged on what happens at that point and then when the engagement ends, what happens after. So you identify these points, pain points or points of leverage. And a lot of times the process of helping that client is not necessarily always going to be on branding.

They may come for that, but it turns out that they need to redo their marketing or we need to do their business management. But in terms of creative process, it’s going to start with. I try not to, first of all, do research until I’ve been given the information or because I don’t want to taint that perception. And then once I have that, I observe that thing, whether it’s a product or the company itself, whatever I receive, I try to observe that from an ignorant place where I have no idea what this is, but who would buy it kind of thing or what’s the value of this thing that I’m looking at. So you have to understand how it works. And this is why I look at a company, you have to understand how the company works. Then you can go into the strategy of how to represent that value and leverage it as on the brand side. So the process is usually going to start with business.

It has to, in my opinion…I always start there. There’s conversation therapy. That’s the part where I am…it’s where I sit with the client and we have these conversations that lead into the development process. I mean, of course, you have to make sure your agreement is mutual regarding timelines and objectives. And I tend to ask this, by the way, I learned from my lawyer, “what’s your pain threshold” and “what’s the results you’re looking for?” Those two questions are really very good questions to start with.

Maurice Cherry:

Your pain threshold. Yeah, talk to me a little bit about that. What do you mean by that?

Phillip J. Clayton:

It’s a way of identifying what that client is willing to do to get the result they’re looking for. Because a lot of times people try to charm me for some reason. You know what I mean? They try to impress you with how much money they have or money is not an issue, or “we want to be different and bold.” Oh, I love that one. They always come with that one.

Maurice Cherry:

Everybody wants to be bold. Everybody. Every client wants that.

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yeah. And there’s this unique thing and it’s like, what I’ve learned is that no matter how complex a problem is or how unique it is to the client, it’s not that unique on a wider viewpoint or industry viewpoint, but it’s unique to that client. No matter how similar, it’s always going to be unique to that client and that company. But bold and different, distinctiveness, differentiation, fine. But when they say they want to be bold and different, it’s not a well thought through statement, because there’s risk to that. And unless you’re willing to take that risk, you can only be so unique in this sea of sameness, right? But you can definitely stand out with distinctive marketing and branding and all that, or how you represent yourself. If you have something different about a product in a competitive market space, then, yeah, you can differentiate that, but it’s to be bold.

Boldness. I love boldness. It goes against fair, which is different from being brave. I think bravery is a product of boldness. But when they come to me like that and I look at the company, this is why I assess the company, I assess the market, I assess their thinking. You’re learning about the management, the owners, you’re learning how they think, what they like, what they don’t like. That’s what conversation is about. So the pain question is to find out or identify what they’re willing to do to achieve it.

And they can tell me when it’s a pain threshold, like, well, they’re willing to do whatever it takes or, yeah, we don’t want to rock the boat too much. You get those things when you ask a question, right? You start getting the real answers, right? Then based on that you say, well, what’s the result you’re looking for? By the way, I learned it from a divorce lawyer. That’s what she asked, because she said, you’d be surprised. These two parties are, when they really go in with that aggressive approach and they want this and they want that and they realize, well, you’re not willing to do anything for this because relationships, it’s complex, right? So yeah, they want to hurt the other person, but what they really want is justice. In the end. They both want justice, right? That’s where the question came from. So what do you want in the end of this? What are you hoping to achieve at end of this process? And once the pain is threshold, what are you willing to do to get it?

Maurice Cherry:

When you look at a brand or a brand design, are there key elements that you try to put into this design that really make it memorable? I would imagine those probably stem from that conversation like you talked about before.

Phillip J. Clayton:

Always. The value of the brand is really what it represents or who it represents. So what you put into that is meaning. People add meaning to things. When it’s symbols, so that’s what a philosophy is for; what I call brand philosophy. I didn’t come up with it; that don’t mean I called it that way. I need to have that information, that knowledge that helps me or the team working together to develop a philosophy. This represents the thinking inside the company or the ownership. For people to feel valuable on any team, they need to have that accountability that without them, this won’t work. So there has to be a philosophy for this company that the brand now would express as the philosophy that this is their belief system. Right? That’s what people buy into a lot of times, whether it’s in religion or not.

I use religion a lot in conversation because it’s a great example of what a brand is and the belief systems are and how people buy into it, getting vested interest. So I have to have a brand philosophy. And then what you do is you make a declaration, so the manifesto comes out. You make a statement as a company and a brand, or you make a statement that this is who we are, this is what we’re about, and it’s based on this philosophy. So when I look at brands and I’m observing them, yeah, you’re going to see the aesthetic stuff first, service level stuff.

These are functional assets, I call them, because the very good ones are usually from a really deep philosophy. And the results of that is something so simple and powerful. When I see too much effort in the visual, I’m not usually very impressed with that because it means that you’re trying to convince something that’s probably not there. When I see a simple symbol and a really distinctive, confident visual language and architecture to a brand, I know that this company is something that I need to pay attention to.

For example, and that’s what happened, as an example I could give you was when PepsiCo, Mauro Porcini did the PepsiCo design innovation. I think it was 2012, they never had that before. That changed PepsiCo completely as a corporation. How they go about their business and their marketing. Design innovation at PepsiCo added deep meaning to the brand itself because it tells me what their focus is, it tells me what their thinking is or how they perceive their market and the customers in that market. So I look for those things. I look for deep meaning behind the logo, I look for deep meaning behind the communication. And I think that’s because of myself. I think I tried to say less and speak more. I hope I’m doing that now. Sorry. I like to speak less and say more. That’s what I meant to say. Because I think that’s one of the most powerful positions you can have when you don’t have to explain anything, urge to explain anything. If a company can do that, then, I mean, if the brand can do it for a company, then you’re really powerful. So I look for that. I look for less communication, more visual communication, less explanation, less wordy. And visual means typography as well, but less wordy, less explaining everything to me. I just want to see it because the logo is what I’m supposed to see. I’m supposed to see your whole story.

And then the logo is supposed to intrigue me enough that I want to know more. And that’s where we pour meaning into brands, because the brand actually forms when that experience ends. Anything that you have in your mind now after that experience is what the brand does to you.

Maurice Cherry:

How have you sort of seen brand design evolve, like over the past 20 years? I mean, we of course now have AI, we’ve got machine learning and all these sort of things, the way that technology has sort of infiltrated a lot of the creative industry, but then we also have changing consumer behaviors. I’m thinking particularly in the U.S. — I’m sure this is different internationally, just based on economies — but there’s been ups and downs and waves of how people spend money, what people spend money on, what people even value from a brand. How have you seen things evolve over the years?

Phillip J. Clayton:

I’ve seen both sides of that. Good and bad, I guess, or horrible. I know it’s bad or good, there’s pleasant and there’s this horrible experience I’ve seen over at least ten years, is that with automation, the objective changes.

For some reason, the brands that are paying attention, their core values didn’t change, their philosophy didn’t change, what they did was change how they interacted with their consumer and society in a whole. For example, the shopping experience, waste management, these things also all add up to what the brand represents because the company has to do these things. So that’s one, I guess, favorable experience on the brand side. The other side is that it has opened up a whole new services on what a brand is and what the process of brand design and development is. Because I rarely if ever use the word branding as a process.

I specifically say brand design and development because branding for me isn’t actionable — it’s under that process of brand design and development. Branding is a stage of the process where you start to develop these assets that represent and communicate for the company. But because of technology, what’s happening now is that…I’m sure you’re aware of a lot of on-demand services are out and what they’re doing is titled branding. Visual design. Visual identities, for example, have somehow become a separate thing from the brand design process. I don’t know how that happened where people are actually doing visual design as a service and I’m thinking, “how do you get there without the brand design process?” So when you go into on-demand services, what you’re doing is…I can pay you less money because clearly you’re billing by time, which I don’t do, but you’re not really providing a valuable solution.

Now I’m not saying that smaller companies or startups who don’t have a big capital can’t start like that. Sometimes you just want to get the company out and if you focus on doing good business, the brand will form anyway. If you’re going to go into brand as a service and you’re expecting a certain result, then it’s probably not the best move to go on-demand. It’s probably better to focus on your business and just hold off on the development of the things like logos and whatnot. You can just register a company name and communicate as a company. Your brand will form and then obviously you made some money at this time and you can do it now you have a proper process, you have an understanding of what your company does and how people perceive you. But what I’ve seen with brands is that…I won’t say the entire brand landscape is like this, but there are some brands that are aligning themselves with deep and meaningful experiences for the consumer. They’re looking into how to make the seamless process of shopping and acquiring their products in a more sustainable way. Obviously there’s financial incentives there once a consumer buys into your thinking. The other side is that there are brands who are aligning themselves to trends. And we saw this when the pandemic came, when everybody started changing…well, a lot of people started changing their messaging. You’re now changing your core value. This is a philosophy — again, you have to have a philosophy that you stick to. It has to be something that you can adapt to environments in, but it doesn’t change your philosophy.

You’re only adapting how you do what you do, but not the philosophy of it, not your core values. That’s what I have seen happening regarding most brands is that they’re aligning themselves to trends and the consumer is dictating a lot about how they do things, and that’s fine. But at some point you have to stick to what you believe in and the consumer gets over it. We saw that with Nike and Kaepernick where Nike just stuck through, right? And I think that’s the most important part, is not to adjust the brand to fit with these trends, whether — and I mean this on a deep level — whether it’s with social movements or activism or anything, do not change your brand to fit that.

If I’m selling shoes, that’s what my company does, then my brand represents a company that sells shoes. And the background, I can support these organizations, but I should not be marketing them up front where I have a company with a brand that supports, I don’t know, some social movement and that has nothing to do with my business unless you build it into your brand like Patagonia. I think they are very open and upfront. It’s part of their brand philosophy. So unless you have that, I don’t see a hardware company to not sell certain tools, to align themselves with some kind of trend. A hardware company is a hardware company. The more tools or lumber they sell, the more money they make. What they can do now as a brand is that they can use that money, I guess, from your profits or whatever they used to choose to use to support some kind of social cause.

Do that, but don’t label it as your brand purpose, is what I’m saying. Don’t get up and say “our brand purpose is to support this cause.” Your brand purpose is to represent your company. That’s what a brand purpose is. That’s what has changed; brand purpose is not a new thing, and the brand no longer serves the purpose that it’s supposed to serve. It’s now serving human social causes or needs, or it’s not representing the companies effectively because they’re changing the meaning behind what a brand’s purpose is to represent your company. So your company is the one who should be doing the social support. The brand is only supposed to represent your company so that when you see it, you think of the company and what a company does for society. That’s what it’s supposed to be.

Maurice Cherry:

They’re starting to become synonymous these days, especially, I think with, not to put this blame on social media, but I do think because social media has allowed a channel of communication between the consumer and the company that probably didn’t really exist that transparently before. What you end up having is a lot of companies having to, in some ways, sort of change their brand values or put something on their brand values that do stick with a specific social thing that might be happening.

Of course, the one thing I’m thinking about that has to do with this is regarding the summer of 2020 here in the U.S. where a lot of people were protesting and they were out in the streets. That was George Floyd. And you had so many companies kind of posting black squares on Instagram and making vows to do this specific social change or whatever. And now three years later, all of that stuff is non-existent and cut. And I mean, people try to hold companies to try to hold them accountable for that sort of stuff. But to your point that you’re mentioning, brand purpose has now gotten…it’s changed and evolved to now include how the company feels or has a stance with or against particular social issues.

And I can imagine that’s like a really difficult place to be.

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yeah, you don’t want to make your brand too human. It’s patronizing. It’s like, okay, so everybody has this human-centric buzzword now, and everybody has this brand purpose buzzword. It’s like, what is your brand purpose? And they’re going to tell you, I don’t ask that question. I don’t ask what your brand purpose asks. What’s your company’s purpose? When people try to make the brand very human, you have to understand what that means. The human being is a contradiction and a paradox. We’re subject to change. So unless you’re willing to put your brand through that constant change, that’s what it means to be human.

So yes, you can have values like you’ve mentioned there that you can add things to, you can build on it. This can be a foundation, and you can build on that foundation. But if you don’t have a foundation to build on, what’s going to happen is that you’re going to put up a black square, and then it’s going to mean nothing afterwards. But if you’re a company that has a foundation and a core value, and you express that core value — and this is what we do — but we are going to show support for this thing. That’s fine. But don’t make these bold statements as if you’re going to change the company now for the next ten years because of what’s happening.

I’m still a company that sells ice cream. My brand is whatever I write on…it’s Phillip. I sell Phillip’s ice cream, so that’s my brand. But my company sells ice cream, and I would like to donate money to this cause I like to do this, and I like to do that, but that’s not the brand. That’s a company. The brand represents the thinking and philosophy inside the company, the type of people that work at the company. So a company that used its brand to put up that black square, and then nothing else followed that, was either a company that’s just saying, “we do support, but we’re going to get back to work” or a company that gave the wrong message out there and made some kind of promises to the Black community and hasn’t delivered on it, now they’re accountable. That becomes a marketing problem for you.

So you don’t want to make your brand do that. What you want is to remember that company management or business management and brand management are two different things. I don’t know if I’m saying it in a way that people understand or if I’m making sense to them, to anyone listening, but brand purpose — if I’m going to be grammatically correct, I’d say your brand’s purpose — is to represent your company. Your company is what you do and the people that do it or help you to do it, right? The company is a group of people. So it’s about your thinking. It’s about what you find important. It’s what you value as a company. The brand represents that.

And I love using Batman. It’s a very great example of what a brand is. All you see in the skies is his logo. That’s it. But the logo represents the promise he made to the city. That’s all it is. So your brand upholds the promise that the company made. Quality products. Quality service. These things. The logo is the symbol that represents the brand and the company all at once. It’s your identifying mark.

Just develop a good core value system, a belief system that you can uphold next 10, 20 years on average — most companies, I think, they last 30 years, unless they pivot or do some kind of innovation. Like Amazon did innovation. I guess you could say Facebook, because all of these companies, their lifespan was, I think, expected to be 30 years before they closed. But they innovated. So yeah, what’s the brand in that? If they’re going to, they didn’t change. They just adapted to a new environment, made product innovation, service innovation, better customer experience. I just want to make that part clear about the brand purpose because I think it’s very confusing and muddy right now with what a brand is.

Episode 529: Tj Hughes

November 13, 2023
Tagged as: game designer, Missouri, Nour, Nour Play With Your Food, St. Louis, technical artist, Terrifying Jellyfish, Tj Hughes, visual designer

Tj Hughes is a technical artist, the creative lead of Terrifying Jellyfish, and is the creator of "Nour: Play With Your Food."

You may have been scolded as a kid for playing with your food, but with Tj Hughes’ new game Nour: Play With Your Food, that’s the primary objective! I had a chance to speak with Tj, the creative lead behind Nour, fresh off of the game’s release on PlayStation, Steam, and Epic Games.

We spoke a lot about the intersection of art and game development, and Tj shared how teaching himself and gaining knowledge working with a studio helped shape his perspective as a creative. Tj also talked about creating Nour’s unique gaming experience, the challenges and rewards of indie game development, experimentation, and what he wants to do next now that Nour’s been released. If you want to create something truly special, then be like Tj and think outside the box!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.

Tj Hughes:

Hi, I’m Tj Hughes, and I am the creative lead on Nour: Play With Your Food, which recently launched on PlayStation 5, PC, a few other platforms as well. Yeah, I just make 3D art and shaders and just colorful stuff on the computer. That’s it.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice. And I definitely want to talk about the game; we’ll get into that in a minute. But first of all, congratulations on the launch of the game! I know that the game dev process is arduous. It is often not linear. So congratulations on publishing.

Tj Hughes:

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. It’s been a crazy and very long journey. It’s wild to see it just finished. Yeah, it’s hard to process and wrap my head around and also figure out next steps.

Maurice Cherry:

What’s the reception been like so far?

Tj Hughes:

Mixed, which I fully expected. Honestly, it’s a weird game. It’s a weird game and it’s a weird format for consoles, but I’m still confident in it because it works so well at events and stuff. Like, I’ve seen many people enjoying the game. I’ve seen when I was at PAX last this last month, it was super well received. Like, folks were really enjoying it and commenting on it. There was, like, sort of a crowd around it at the time at one point. The Panic booth was really cool and like really fun to be at.

Spaces like that, it really works. But the whole time I was making the game, I kind of feared, like, “oh, once it’s an at home experience that people can run on their consoles, folks might not get it” or they might not see the appeal, or they might have just, like, a different experience with it. Yeah, that kind of turned out to be the case.

We tried to do as much as we could to, design wise to, sort of curve that, but, yeah, it still kind of came across as just like, “oh, what is going on?” But then again, there were other folks…like, there were streamers that played it on stream to a Discord call or while having the chat open and they had a good time with it. And so it’s weird. It’s the kind of game where I feel like in a crowd of folks, it’s a really fun experience. It was an experiment, for sure. It got received like an experiment kind of would.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, I feel like all games are kind of like that, right? Like you hope that the story and the gameplay and everything that you’ve envisioned as a developer and as part of the creative team, you hope that that’s going to be received on the other end by the player. Sometimes it is; sometimes it’s not.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, it’s such an exercise in communication of just, like, how well do the concepts in this game communicate? Does it resonate with people? Do they enjoy it? And so, yeah, it’s an interesting thing because games are just such a weird medium in that just two people’s experience can be so different just because of how much is possible in games. There’s just infinite permutations of your setup or what you can do in the game. And so, yeah, it’s just really interesting to see that see folks kind of rate that experience because one person will have the best time ever and then another person is just like, what’s going on?

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, that’s the way for a lot of games, I think. I watch streamers kind of play modern games versus retro games and things like that, and it’s funny how even I think the language in which people talk about games has changed a lot. I’m in my forties; I am a first generation gamer — I guess that’s kind of a good way to put it. And the way that we talked about video games, like when I was a teenager or in my twenties is totally different than how people talk about it now. People are obsessed about framerates and DPS — they’re spitting out all these terms and stuff and it’s like, “how about you just get immersed in the game and not try to technically pick it apart?”

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, and there’s a lot of focus these days on bugs, too, and how finished the game feels and all that, which I understand, to an extent. Folks are looking out for their value and making sure that folks aren’t trying to penny pinch and whatever. But, yeah, I feel like that has kind of gone overboard and led to folks really technically picking apart a game where that’s not what it originally ever was about.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I just finished playing and beating two other Kickstarter-backed games. They’re both RPGs. One is called Chained Echoes and the other one is called Sea of Stars. And maybe this is my fault — I went on Reddit to kind of see what the discourse was, which…I went on Reddit. But it’s so amazing, like the spectrum of how some people love the game or how some people are picking little things apart. And some people love the music. Some people hate the music. “Why is the plot like this? Why are the characters like that?” It’s like…just play the game. If you don’t like it, don’t play it. Just put it down. Play something that you like. Maybe I’m looking at it too simplistically. I don’t know.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, I feel that sometimes where it feels like the energy spent hating on certain games could be redirected to games that that person actually enjoys. Yeah, I don’t really know what that’s about. I think it kind of satisfies a lot of folks to kind of just, like, I don’t know, just heavily criticize stuff like that. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s something unique to the game space or not, but yeah, it surprises me too when it’s like an indie game that’s being picked apart where it’s just like, “hey, a dude made this in his free time. Maybe not fair to compare it to the game that’s made by a team of hundreds of people.”

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, like indie developer versus AAA studio. Of course there’s going to be a big disconnect in a lot of things just because of that, because of resources.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, just the medium of Reddit and Twitter kind of connects folks directly with the developer, which can be a double edged sword. I’ve received a lot of support and a little bit of hate as well, so that’s been interesting.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I think that’s like a media thing in general. Whether you’re a developer, if you’re a musician, if you have a television show, a movie, a podcast. I mean, in the early days when I did this, I would get so much hate on Twitter and it’s like…if the show is not for you, then don’t listen. People would call me a racist because I only have Black guests and I’m like, “what’s racist about that? It’s the focus of the show. Like, did you not know that’s what the show was about?” It’s crazy.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, that’s wild. It’s not like you weren’t warned.

Maurice Cherry:

Right? And also we’re not trashing anyone. I can understand it. Maybe if it was like a hate-filled kind of show or something like that, but that’s not the case.

People find fault in what they want to find fault in. I find — and the Internet and social media really particularly, I don’t want to put this all on just the Internet — but social media tends to just exacerbate that because it’s given people the illusion that their voice matters.

Well, let me walk that back. It doesn’t necessarily give them the illusion that their voice matters. It gives them the illusion that it’s sort of like “the customer is always right.”

Oh yeah, that’s not always the case. I don’t know who came up with that, but that’s not always the case. Just because you feel away about it and you express it doesn’t make it like law or anything.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly how I’d put it.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, it’s a delicate thing. I mean, a lot of creatives I know have sort of even walked back from social media because of that. It’s like, yeah, it can be a great thing for telling people about your work, but then the feedback you get can be just so caustic.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, I’ve experienced that. And also, just, no folks who have experienced that firsthand, I completely understand it. It’s not for everyone. You do have to develop a thick skin about it. Just kind of learn how to not react to certain things.

Maurice Cherry:

We’ll get more into the game, but now that it’s out, do you have anything else that you want to try to accomplish before the year ends? I’m pretty sure a lot of this year might have been just all leading up to this launch date.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, pretty much all of this year. And I’ve been working on this full time. And that, first of all, is just really cool that I’ve been able to work on a passion project for this long because not everyone gets that opportunity [to] just sit down and just make what they want to make all day. And so that’s something about this project I’ve been super grateful about. It was able to be funded long enough for me to do that. It’s been awesome. But yeah, this year has been just leading up to just the launch of Nour and yeah, now that it’s out, I kind of told myself I was going to rest for a while and so that’s what I’m in the middle of kind of trying to do is just kind of take it easy. And of course we’re updating the game, like fixing bugs and stuff like that, but just in between that, I’m trying to just relax, take it easy as much as I can.

Also kind of let the next steps kind of naturally come to me because this project started out of just me messing around, having fun with a different kind of art medium. I think my best work kind of comes out that way, so I just want to kind of make sure I nurture that a bit.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, you earned a break. You definitely have earned a break. So if you get a chance to take some just R&R, please do that because you definitely have earned it.

Tj Hughes:

I appreciate that. I really appreciate that. Yeah, it’s hard in game dev to just tell yourself to take a break because it’s just like, oh, wait, but there’s so much I could be doing, could be updating the game, could be pushing out this and that. It’s easy to just kind of let it run your life. Yeah, I’m just trying to get away from that habit.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, let’s go more into the game. Like we mentioned, it just launched in September. We’ll put a link to the game website as well as the trailer in the notes. I’ve played the game. I have it on PS5. I love that it starts off with your face so people know it’s from you. It’s from a Black person. I love that. I love that when you start it up, you’ve got that little…it’s like a 3D model of you with the terrifying jellyfish.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, it’s photogrammetry.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. So much of the game reminds me of, like, Katamari Damacy from Keita Takahashi. It’s kind of this unfettered play. There’s some ambiguity to it. You kind of just have to figure it out as you go along. I mean, granted, the subtitle of the game is “play with your food.” So that’s the premise. You play with your food, and you have a number of different sort of food-related scenarios that you can work through.

What was the idea behind that? What was the idea behind the game in general?

Tj Hughes:

The game didn’t start off as a game idea, necessarily. It’s kind of interesting how it came about. It was a very just, like, nonlinear path towards making a game. So Nour kind of started out as an art test. I was basically figuring out how to make shaders for the first time ever and just, like, practicing being a tech artist. And I needed a subject for testing out these new art techniques and whatever. I looked at food immediately because I just recently had started branching out as far as food goes.

I was traveling. I went to my first GDC. I had discovered bubble tea, and I was like, “oh, this stuff is great. I love this.” And, yeah, it was just the perfect subject because it was colorful, it was playful, it had all these different elements that had a kind of physical component to it. I was just like, “oh, I can make this in 3D, like, using 3D models.” And in doing that, part of my inspiration was also anime food and how lovingly food is rendered in 2D by animators and how, say, with Ghibli movies, like, how the food looks so good, you want to eat it, you just want to eat it. Makes you hungry. And so, yeah, I was just hoping that video games as a medium could give the same kind of love to food.

Because food is usually a background prop in video games. It’s usually this low poly thing that an artist spends maybe a little bit of time on. It’s not the focus. I always thought that was really interesting. And also shout out to the low poly grapes in Final Fantasy XIV, I believe it is. But yeah, to the point of them even becoming a meme is just, like, low poly background food in video games. And so I just kind of wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to be like, okay, what if it was just, like, high fidelity, super detailed, foreground food where just, like, everything’s, like, way too many polygons and just, like, HD and so, yeah, that’s kind of how it started.

It was me just making 3D models with different effects on them, different shaders and stuff, and as detailed as possible, and then just taking a screenshot and putting it on Twitter. And folks were super into it. The response was immediately just like, “oh man, that makes me hungry. That looks so good. Wow, that’s great.” Yeah, just super positive responses about it. And eventually I got to a point where some local friends of mine wanted to show…they wanted to show the art at an event, at an event about just, like, interactive art. Just saying anything that’s like art plus tech.

And I was like, okay, it’s not interactive, so it probably wouldn’t work at this exhibit. Not exhibit, but like, event, but I’ll see what I can do. And so I just hooked it up to some controls. Pressing a button on a keyboard just makes a food appear and fall down from the top of the screen. And that’s it. That’s all it started out as. The response was great. Folks were super into it, they were having a lot of fun with it.

That was kind of my moment where I was just like, oh, this is something. I’m onto something. And my background was already making video games, but I kind of didn’t expect this to really be a game. I was just like making stuff because it was pretty and just putting it out there. The game itself kind of evolved from folks, like sharing feedback, just being like, “oh, it would be cool if this food was in it”, or “what if this button did this? This button made the food fly up”, or like, “hey, you should add a meat grinder”, or whatever different things folks would say about the game. And then I would just be like, “oh, that’s great”. And I would kind of like, add it and then see how folks reacted at the next event. I was doing a lot of events and so it was this kind of back and forth of just like, I could directly talk to the folks who were playing the game and get immediate feedback about what folks really wanted in it.

And so, yeah, it was just like a really fun process and yeah, just like a weird way to make a game because I didn’t really start off with a premise or like a concept. I just started just making it from scratch, like no game design document or anything, just directly from my brain into the game engine.

Maurice Cherry:

So there wasn’t really like a story that you were trying to tell. It was just an experience you wanted people to have, it sounds like.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, I had some visuals that I really wanted to make and I just wanted folks to kind of appreciate that without really needing a ton of context. Yeah, there wasn’t really much set up or anything like that. I was just kind of like, “hey, this is a really pretty food. Look at what games can kind of be and look like. You can use this medium to do a lot of crazy stuff. What if we just appreciated the visuals and textures of food?” So, yeah, it was just like an art exercise that was just really heavy on the visuals. That was really what I wanted to accomplish. It was just getting folks to kind of appreciate that side of things.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, is there an optimal way that you suggest people play the game? Because I played it on PS5 and I’ll admit that it felt like the controller was holding me back. I think there are certainly parts where if you, I think, pull a trigger, like a magnet will happen. Or if you press a button, it can change the color of the food or it can change the rate at which the food drops or something like that. It almost felt like, I don’t know if a controller is the right way to play this, and then I’ve seen videos of you playing it and you’re playing on this almost like 16 button, like MIDI controller almost. So I’m curious if there’s like an optimal way that you think people should play the game.

Tj Hughes:

The original version of the game played with a MIDI controller. The first first version was just like…keyboard, but then after that I started getting into MIDI controllers and just like music production and stuff like that. And I hooked up a MIDI controller to the game just for the fun of it. And it’s the Midi Fighter which is this board of 16 buttons and they’re like, arcade-like, fight stick buttons. So it was trying to be like kind of a reference to fighting games, but repurposed for music production. But then I’m kind of like taking it back into video games, which is sort of funny. That was originally how I presented it at museums and stuff. I would just bring out this controller and yeah, it was a really good way to play because it was just the satisfying nature of pressing a button and then seeing a really high-quality visual appear or being able to interact with it in some way.

It was a really satisfying thing. The initial release. We don’t have MIDI support in the current version of the game, but it’s something that we’ve been meaning to put back in because trying to support consoles and stuff, I couldn’t really have it, the MIDI tech back end, in there. But yeah, we’re trying to put it back in. It kind of just got broken along the way of making the game. Yeah, that’s something that we’re trying to get back to the roots of. It’s just like, okay, this game has been shown at a few exhibits with this controller. It would be great if folks could plug in kind of any controller of that sort and just play the game and just see what happens.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I like that experience, though, because it sort of reminds me of sort of like early gaming in the 90s, where I think developers were experimenting with a bunch of different types of input styles. I mean, of course, you had Nintendo with their standard controller. Sega had the same thing. But then Nintendo eventually also had R.O.B. the Robot, and there were like two games that you could use with the robot and then the Zapper. I think the Zapper came with when I got my Nintendo in ’85, I think it came with a Zapper. So it was like a combination [Super] Mario Bros./Duck Hunt, and so that’s an alternate way that you can play the game.

And then with Super Nintendo, you’ve got [the] Super Scope Six or whatever. And so there were all these sort of, like, alternate controllers for different games that you could play the games with. So I like that. This kind of harkened back to that for me because now everything is either Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, PC, like, it’s one of those four things and it doesn’t really give you a lot of variety onto how you play. It just the platform that you play it on.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, and the folks would call all that stuff, like, gimmicky back in the day. And I always thought it was pretty fun, like, Nintendo would always try to be the ones to use those really alternative controllers. Yeah, I miss it. I genuinely miss that kind of stuff.

Maurice Cherry:

I mean, this game, to me, like I said, it really kind of harkens back to that and I think it opens up creativity for the gamer in a different way that’s not just — it’s pressing buttons, but it’s not in like a standard type of controller-esque format. It feels like to me, when you mentioned that sort of 16-button thing, that almost kind of feels like a good way to play it, especially because you were play testing this at exhibits. So you weren’t like play testing this in a play lab or something like that. You were out in open spaces and mixed spaces with people, so people could really interact with it any way they wanted to.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, and even though we were kind of just siloed off to controllers with the console release of this, we tried to do as much as we could with it as well. So with a DualSense controller, we’re just like, okay, even though you’re just controlling the game in a regular way, we still want to find alternative ways to interact with the game. So we use the microphone for that. And in the game, you can blow into your controller and that will blow all of your food away. Or if you make a slurp sound that’ll suck all the food towards you. And then if you whistle or in pitch with a song that’s currently playing in the game, all your food will kind of levitate. And so we just wanted to just whatever way you’re interacting with the game. We wanted to make it to where you just had options that were just kind of weird to kind of complement the MIDI controller back in the day. It was just like, okay, so at least with this controller, there’s something special that you can do that you couldn’t even do on the MIDI controller.

Maurice Cherry:

I mean, I could see certainly something like this doing well on VR or even something like I know you mentioned like, Nintendo with these different controller things. I mean, like the Switch controllers, you can kind of have each joy con in your hand or something like that. I could see definitely a future of don’t. Like, maybe I’m putting idea in your head, I don’t know, but I could see a future where you’re using that as the inputs as opposed to like button presses with some stuff. And that could be another way to unlock more gameplay for people, more appeal.

Tj Hughes:

Oh, yeah, VR is an idea I’ve had for a while. I would still love to do it.

Maurice Cherry:

Let’s talk more about sort of the team and the game dev process because I know that the process can be long. You raised money on this via Kickstarter and you had a team behind you as well as you also worked with Panic for kind of helping to distribute the game. Talk to me about that.

Tj Hughes:

So it’s a fairly small team that we’re working with. So there’s Me. There’s Joey. He does programming. There’s Maximilian. He helps with initially music, but now it’s kind of just everything that he helps out with. Just programming just so much. He’s come a huge contribution to the game as well as James.

Also, like, on the music, we had like a two man music team who just kind of became developers over time. We have Mark who is on sound design and sound effects. So any of the foley or just kind of ASMR sounds that you hear throughout the game, that’s him. And so, yeah, just like small team of five folks just kind of making this over discord, basically. I’m kind of like leading the pack on that. It’s a really interesting process. Yeah, just like especially on a weird game like this, it’s kind of like anything goes type thing where there’s been just weird ideas presented to me, where I’ve just been like, yeah, send it, let’s do it. That’s how multiple things got into the game.

Like the jellyfish idea, just like having this character that comes and steals your food. When you say nonlinear, that describes everything about this game’s process from the funding to the idea, to its actual technical development. Yeah, it’s just completely nonlinear. But it’s been cool though. It’s been a really cool way to kind of make something because it truly felt like we’re just kind of playing around, really. And just like, any idea that sounds cool, we’re just like, yeah, let’s do it.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I mean, we. Talked about this a little bit before recording. The game development process can be long, especially if you’re raising funds through a crowdfunding medium like Kickstarter. There’s been video games that I have helped to fund in the past that just took much longer, I think, than the developer originally might have thought of for it to come out. Like, we talked about Omori, for example. This was a game by an independent developer, Omocat. They got funding for it through Kickstarter in 2015. And I want to say it didn’t start coming out on consoles until like…I know it came out on the Switch in 2020. It might have been out on Steam in 2019, but it was years past when they initially said this is when the game is coming out. And Kickstarter, and you can probably attest to this, Kickstarter is a bit of a double-edged sword. Like, yes, you have people’s funding, but the people that fund it can be real assholes when it comes to, like, “where’s my game? Why don’t you have it now? You said it would be here by this date, I want my money back”, blah, blah, blah. Tell me about that, because I feel like the game dev process and then having to answer to backers kind of might have been a source of contention throughout this process.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, it’s always tough dealing with folks who just really want the product. I luckily feel like I found a really nice corner of the Internet who backed this game because folks have been, for the most part, just super patient with it. It’s actually crazy because, yeah, we’re talking about Omori, but I think we took even longer as far as when the Kickstarter started versus when the game actually came out. It’s such a long process and through so much of it, I felt bad. I was just like, “oh, dang, folks are looking for this.” And I’ve definitely had folks kind of reach out when things were more silent because we’re just really heads down on the game and trying to make it happen. So folks have been super nice and super patient for the most part, but there are definitely a few standout folks that reached out and just weren’t so nice. I definitely had just like a few folks get in the Twitter mentions and it wouldn’t be like a majority by any means. It’s maybe like five people, but we kind of, as humans, remember negative experiences way more than positive ones. And so it was just really stand out how someone called it vaporware or something like that.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh no…

Tj Hughes:

I was just like, “okay, you don’t even have the game yet, so that’s an early judgment.” Yeah, just certain folks, someone got really extreme with it, but luckily we have what’s called the block button, and so that is a fantastic tool to curb these kinds of responses. But yeah, I don’t know. I’m super grateful to have found just like a really supportive fan base and backer base. It’s a hard thing because you kind of can’t predict how development is going to go. Because straight up, I thought this game would be wrapped up by 2020, and then 2020 comes around, boom, hit with a pandemic, right? And I was just like, “oh, okay.” So this is kind of a great time for games in general, but terrible time for [the] mental health of tiny teams working on very ambitious projects. That was an interesting hurdle that no one was prepared for. But it’s hard to make such an ambitious project around such an unpredictable hurdle, right?

Maurice Cherry:

For people that are listening, Kickstarter is not a store. If you pledge something and you get your pledge rewards, that’s great. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, and I’m not going to spend time on it on this podcast, but there are a lot of campaigns that I have helped crowdfund. Where the money? I’ll never see that money again. The developer or the creator, whomever, has just took off with the church’s money, as they would say, you don’t know where they’re at.

I think one campaign I did, the person…it was for tea, of all things, this guy had a tea company and he was trying to raise some money for new blends, and then he just never sold the tea. And then he used the money to come out with an LP because he was starting his music career. It was so stupid.

You have to kind of vet, of course, how this goes. I tend to vet more projects where I can see the people have had some track record of success. But it’s tricky. I mean, I think whenever you’re crowdfunding, it can be kind of tricky, but just realize there are real people behind this. There’s real people behind this. And that if stuff happens, stuff happens. But curb it a bit. Don’t get all in people’s faces about it.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, I think it’s very fair to be like, “hey, we’d like some communication about this” and all that. When it veers into the realm of harassment, of just, you don’t need to attack their character. I don’t know. You don’t need to send a death threat.

Maurice Cherry:

It was never that serious, especially for video games. It’s a video game! What are you getting that riled up about? It’s a game.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, it’s a game, not a therapy session. It’s interesting. Also, he made an LP with the money?

Maurice Cherry:

I’m not going to shout out the name of the company, but they were making tea blends. I had gotten some of their tea before. I’m a tea aficionado and I really like tea. And so I was like, “yeah, I’ve had some of their tea before”, sure. And I think they raised maybe like $8,000. And then we just never heard from the person again. And you know how on Kickstarter you can see the person’s profile is sometimes connected to a Facebook page or like their Facebook profile. And so basically people in the comments had clicked through and was like, “wait a minute, he’s making music now?” Like, wait a minute. What? So we’re just never going to see that tea again because now he thinks he’s a singer?

Tj Hughes:

Okay, for a second I thought they posted their own backer update and was just like, “Actually…”

Maurice Cherry:

Oh no, they never updated or anything! They just went completely radio silent.

Tj Hughes:

Oh, okay. And people just kind of put it together. Okay, for a second I was about to say, that is so bold, bro.

Maurice Cherry:

Let’s kind know switch up a little bit here. We’ve talked about the game and we’ve talked about development and stuff. Let’s talk more about you so people know more about just kind of your background and how you got to where you are now. You’re in St. Louis, Missouri now. Is that where you’re from originally?

Tj Hughes:

Yes. Yeah, I lived here my entire life, bro.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. Did you sort of get exposed to a lot of creativity and design and stuff growing up? I’m guessing that you probably have.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah. So my mom is a traditional artist. She does like acrylic and whatever medium she can get her hands on, really. And my dad was a jazz musician. Kind of just naturally got exposed to art super early on because of that. It was interesting because no one was really trying to push me in the direction of art. It just kind of happened just like naturally. And my dad was also really into tech and would have just like random trinkets and synthesizers and circuit boards just strewn throughout the house and yeah, I just kind of had this subconscious interest in tech that I never really noticed as being weird or different until later on when I just kind of said it all at once.

I was like, “oh yeah, I was kind of exposed to this stuff from way back in the day.”

Maurice Cherry:

That’s awesome.

Tj Hughes:

I grew up just like drawing comic books and stuff. Not to expose my brother and I, but we had our own Sonic characters and stuff. That’s how we started out. We just draw our own Sonic characters and that was huge for us. We would just make these comic books. That was kind of just the early influence. And then, I don’t know, just as the Internet was a thing, we started playing more video games. I was just interested in both those things at the same time.

And as a kid I would just always be like, “oh, I want to be a game designer when I grow up.” I said that without any kind of confidence at all. It was just kind of like a kid’s dream sort of thing. And I remember the moment where I kind of really questioned it, where I was just like, “oh snap, I’m not good at Math. How am I ever going to make video games? This is going to be so difficult.”

But then fast forward to when I was 13. I discovered Unity while procrastinating some homework. One day, I was like, “oh, what is this? It’s an engine that anyone can download. That’s crazy. Let me go and do that.” And, yeah, I just started going through these PDF tutorials on how to make an FPS game. I made this really crappy little first person shooter project, but I was learning the engine, and it was before I was even realizing it, I was just like, “yo, wait, I’m actually doing this. It kind of makes sense. It’s just like, logic.” Yeah, that’s when I kind of realized, like, “oh, snap. I have a really self-learning oriented brain” because I wasn’t particularly good at school. I wasn’t really good at Math, but just figuring things out and putting things together and disassembling them, I was just like, “wow, I’m great at this.” And so, yeah, it just kind of really worked for me. Just, like, teaching myself the video games and how to make them and how to make my own art really.

Yeah, that kind of just worked out.

Maurice Cherry:

First of all, I have to say that’s excellent that you were picking that up so young and that it was available for you and you were in an environment where I’m guessing it didn’t sound like your parents at all were trying to hold you back from doing that.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, that’s something I’ve always realized I’m super lucky about was like, they’ve always pushed me in this kind of direction or just been supportive when they learned what I was making. Yeah, they’re just like, “wow, that’s really cool.” They’ve always been okay with me going into art because they did it themselves. And anytime I would show them something, they’d be like, “wow, that’s really cool.” Even if my mom didn’t really understand it, to this day she’s like, “what do you do? You do, like, the computer thingy?” But she’s still really supportive. She set the donut from my game that’s her wallpaper on her phone. I’m just like, “okay, that’s really cute.” I feel really honestly supported.

The only hard part was when I decided to not go to college for any of this. That was something that was very controversial for a lot of the adults in my life. They were just like, “no, you need to go to college. You got to get a degree. You had to have a fallback, and you had to get the proper education”, blah, blah, blah. But it was also just like, “yo, we can’t afford that. Student loans and all that. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to have debt. I just want to make money and also create cool stuff.”

That was really hard. Part of it was just, like, convincing folks that, hey, I know how it looks, but I have a plan. Yeah, I think I can say that it’s worked out and that school wasn’t exactly necessary for this kind of work, but I know it is helpful for a lot of people to have a curriculum and go through that path. And so, yeah, I’m not knocking it by any means. Just with my set of circumstances, I don’t think it would have been the best move.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, that’s something that the prior generation, I think, is always going to try to impress upon the younger generation. Not necessarily so much the value of education because you were teaching yourself, so you were getting your own education. You were learning about this at a young age prior to college, you were creating projects. I mean, a lot of that is honestly stuff that you would do in college anyway, just with a price tag attached to it. But I think specifically for game development, that’s such a different type of field than say, being a doctor or an engineer or something like that. I mean, game development as we know it is still a very young field and so the ways that you get into it are not necessarily through a four-year institution.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah. Another part of it is that things change so fast that by the time you get through your curriculum, it’s just like, boom, everything’s different. There’s a new tool that everyone uses. Everyone stops using this engine because of the weird PR or whatever. There’s so much that can change so rapidly. I think it really lends itself to self teaching because then you can just find all the latest, most up to date stuff and yeah, people make tutorials out. People make plenty of tutorials nowadays. Even when I got started, there was a lot of stuff, but I can’t even imagine having access to the amount of content there’s out there now. Yeah, I feel like you can kind of make anything nowadays.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, everything you mentioned is 100% like it was in the days of the early web. I’m talking like maybe 98 to from 1998 to 2008 was such a huge jump in web development because the browser went from being this tool of presentation to now a tool for development. And so you started having people developing tools in the browser, using the browser not just as a viewport, but also as your development environment and everything. And there were no programs back then to really teach web design. Like, I went to school and majored in computer science initially because my dumb ass was like, oh, if I’m a computer science major, that means I can be a web designer. Wrong. Absolutely wrong. Everything I learned about web design has been self taught because back then there were no courses unless you went to like an art institute or something like that.

And even then, as you mentioned, the technology changes so fast that the curriculum is out to date. It’s out of date as you’re learning it. So it sounds very similar to the early days of the web, is what you’re mentioning with game development. So it seems like you certainly went in the right. I mean, look, you have a video game that’s out now on PlayStation Steam. You’re doing something right. So I think the way that you went certainly is what’s worked for you, which is all you can ask for, really.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah. Super grateful it’s worked out this way so far. It was also great just being like, “oh, hey, this is a possible route. You don’t have to fork over just like a bunch of debt just to get into this field and make stuff that you care about.”

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. Now, you did start your early career at a studio. You were at Happy Badger Studio. How did you get started there? How did you find out about them?

Tj Hughes:

Once again, through Twitter. Weirdly. Everything in my career has happened through Twitter. Both getting this game out there, getting hired there. Yeah, it was a similar sort of thing. I discovered Unity when I was 13 and kind of just throughout the rest of high school, I’ve just been just making little experiments and learning. Every now and then, I would do a game jam. I would do the Ludum Dare 48 hour game jam a few times. I would just make things to show my friends and I would take screenshots of what I’m making and put it on Twitter. I had a bunch of projects that were way too big that I was never going to complete, if I’m being completely honest. But I was just like a kid in middle and high school, so I didn’t know what I was doing. But it was still really fun stuff to make and it was still really pretty — the different kinds of projects I was making just from those screenshots and stuff.

I would show off this company, Happy Badger Studio, they saw my work on Twitter and they hit me up. They’re just like, “hey, who are you? Want to come by our studio and just hang out because your stuff is crazy.” And so, yeah, we did that. And they offered me a contractor position and me being fresh out of high school, this was right after I graduated, I was like, “this is really cool. This is a dream job.” Like, exactly the kind of stuff I want to be doing. Yeah, absolutely. And so, yeah, I worked with them for a bit and then became a full-time employee there after a few years. It was just really fun. I got to do the exact part of game dev that I wanted to do, which is technical art. I really just like the art pipeline, the art side of things.

And so, yeah, that was just like a really good situation. And there we made SmuggleCraft, which is a hovercraft racing game with procedurally generated tracks and customizable ships. And yeah, it was a super fun project to work on and [it] really got me started with tech art. And I got to really control the art in the game, which was super fun. Like, all the colors and particle effects, that was all my domain. And so, yeah, that was just, like, super fun and a really good experience. I feel like that was honestly my college course.

Maurice Cherry:

I’d say that was your college course, your first real job…I mean, that kind of work right out of high school? I mean, that’s the dream. That’s the dream. Like, if you’ve been doing it, especially as a kid and you’re able to go right into working, I mean, that’s the best kind of education. Especially like, as you said, you learn by doing, so that’s perfect. That’s perfect for you.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, it was a really good situation. That’s actually where I met Joey, who’s on my team as well. And he taught me so much of what I know about programming because we just have sessions of C# just sitting down and he just tells me that he’s a wizard programmer. He knows so much. I know just enough to get by and actually make a game, but he’s who I go to when I’m just like, “okay, I need to do this very specific thing. How?

Maurice Cherry:

What’s in the future for Terrifying Jellyfish? I mean, we’ve talked about the game coming out. We’ve talked about sort of how you’ve gotten here and everything. And now that the game is out and it’s getting that reception and you’re in this sort of rest period, I should say, what do you want to do in the future? What’s next?

Tj Hughes:

I’ve been thinking about this. It’s hard to say. I don’t really know. I definitely have ideas for projects, but I definitely need to take some time to think about how I would make them happen. Like what the ideal setup is, whether I have a publisher yeah, just what the setup would be. But right now I’m focusing on just kind of resting up and just taking a break and letting what happens next come naturally. I don’t really want to force a project. I want to make something that folks are actually genuinely interested in.

I think I’ll do a lot of what I did for Nour. I think I’m going to just kind of mess around a bit for fun and try to fund that as much as possible, but just mess around with a few different art projects, put it out there, show folks, see what they like the most, and then just see it evolve from there. I think that’s kind of my formula now, is not just taking bets on what I, as my ego thinking, is the best idea possible. I want to actually get feedback in real time of just like, “oh, folks other than me actually like this. I’m going to pursue this idea now.” I think that’s kind of going to be my approach. So, yeah, my plan is just mess around a bit, throw a bunch of stuff at the wall, see what sticks.

Maurice Cherry:

Basically that’s a good strategy. I like that. I mean, it’s certainly different from what you would see maybe, like, a bigger studio might do, where they might make — and I don’t necessarily mean a game studio, but like, say a television studio — might make a bunch of pilots and then they will do testing on them and then they’ll sort of go and see, “okay, this is the first one” where instead maybe they could put all the pilots out on YouTube and let people sort of see which one they respond to instead of going with what the studio might think. So I think that’s a good tactic.

Tj Hughes:

I like that, yeah, thanks. Also, like something I’ve been talking about because I want to put the seed out there. I feel like if I talk about it, that’s an easier chance of kind of manifesting it. I want to do more museum games because Nour started out as a museum game, just being installed somewhere with a controller and then folks can walk up and interact with it at an event or something like that. I really love that format of game. I kind of feel like I can do whatever I want. I don’t have to worry about the tech of it all. I don’t have to worry about performance and optimization.

I’m just like, “okay, it runs on the computer and it’s interesting and it’s wacky and attention grabbing” and that’s all I had to worry about. I love making stuff like and also I got to travel to a lot of really cool places with this project as well. I got to go to South Korea, Amsterdam, like South Africa, just bringing this game to different exhibits and stuff. And so yeah, I would just love to do more of that. I don’t know how much of that it’s going on post pandemic, but yeah, any events like that I would love to be a part of again and they would just kind of find me as well. I have no idea how these opportunities were kind of come to me, but definitely want to do more stuff like that.

Maurice Cherry:

I think that’s awesome. I mean, I can certainly see this kind of thing being done in design museums. Like Atlanta has a museum of design. Atlanta. I think they just had a gaming exhibit earlier this year where they I think it was called Pixels and Code. I don’t recall it, but I could think like design museums, that would work. Conferences could work. There is a conference and it doesn’t go on anymore; maybe it will in the future, but there’s this conference in Portland called XOXO….

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, Nour was actually there one year. I think it was like 2018 or 2019.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh wow, okay. I was there in 2018. My team was there in 2019. The startup I was working at at the time, we did an event in 2018. We did like this art and code event, but they had this game expo that’s where I played, like, Hair Naw and a couple of other games. I assume they probably had it the next year, so if it was 2019, I wasn’t there, but members of my team were there. That’s cool. I could see it being done in something like that where people can really interact with it in an open space.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, it was a really cool setting for it because the screen that they got, I guess it was a projector, it was gigantic. They really knew how to present the game. And so I thought that was great, seeing just this HD food up on this big, giant screen. And so, yeah, just more things like that. I just loved how just wacky and just different that convention was.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Tj Hughes:

I just hope more things like that exist, like post pandemic.

Maurice Cherry:

So for people that are hearing your story, they’re listening to you, how you came up in terms of learning about game dev, and now you have your own game out there. What would you recommend to them? If they’re looking to create their own game, what kind of advice would you give them?

Tj Hughes:

I would say just use what resources you have and go for it. It’s completely okay to just google everything. That’s basically what I did. I just googled my way into a career. I have no formal education about any of this. And so use your confidence and ask people as well. Ask people who’ve done it before. There are so many folks that are more than willing to share expertise.

Mentorship is kind of how I really got through most of this. Just folks from Happy Badger Studio just being like, “oh, here’s how you do this. Here’s how you start an LLC and get your business organized. You want to start your own bank account as, like, that’s separate from your personal funds.” There’s just, like, a lot of little pieces of knowledge that aren’t actually hard to execute, but once you know them, it just sets you up. Yeah, I don’t know. Just like tax organization. Don’t ignore that stuff.

Like, taxes. This is if you’re making it commercially, like, if you’re actually trying to make money from it, I would say the biggest thing is start small and ramp up incrementally. Think of it, I guess, like. working out. [That] sort of thing. You don’t go right to 300 pounds on your first deadlift or whatever. You want to work your way up there because you don’t want to tear a muscle. You don’t want to burn out. You want to do what you’re capable of. That was something that I really had to just learn.

It had to just be nailed in me because, yeah, starting out, I wanted to make the biggest FPS project ever. I wanted it to be multiplayer and have, I don’t know, like, be an MMO at the same time. Just a ton of players on the same server, zombies everywhere. It was just like I was in way over my head. I was never going to do that. But still fun to start out and mess around with.

Then I scaled it back and my first game, Feesh, that’s when I made that. I made that during a Ludum Dare game jam, like in 48 hours. That was the tiniest possible little arcade game. I released it on Steam for like 99 cents and with no marketing; folks bought it. That was a great experience. And so I think there really is something to keeping it simple, scaling it back and cutting things. If you have an idea for a feature, just imagine the game without it. I can’t stress that you can never cut too much from a game.

Just actually done is so much better than having it be perfect.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice. Well, just to kind of wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, about your work, about Nour, about the game? Where can they find that information online?

Tj Hughes:

Terrifyingjellyfish.com is the main spot, but social media-wise, Instagram is the most active — @terrifyingjellyfish on there. I post anything I’m working on to there. I’m on Twitter, X, or whatever the heck you want to call it, at terrify– @jellyoccult or at @_Teejay5 online, everywhere. Food.game, if you just want to look up Nour and buy that game. Yeah, everything’s linked. So if you just look up “terrifying jellyfish”, you’ll kind of find everything all right.

Maurice Cherry:

Sounds good. Tj Hughes, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you, one, for just…I mean, you’re such a creative force. I mean, I feel like I’ve learned a lot just from hearing your story and hearing you talk about game development and your process. I think what you embody is kind of the core thing that I try to put forth with Revision Path is to let people know that there’s more than one way to get to what your definition of success is. And I love that for you. You’re really creating what you want to see in the world. It’s coming from this really pure place and I’m really going to be excited to see what you do in the future.

But yeah, definitely take your rest now, but in the future I’m going to be so excited to see what you accomplish. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Tj Hughes:

Yeah, thanks for having me on here. Yeah, it’s been really fun talking about games and through the whole process.

Episode 528: André Foster

November 6, 2023
Tagged as: AI, Andre Foster, College for Creative Studies, detroit, entrepreneur, First Fight, Midjourney, motion graphics, studio owner

André Foster is the co-founder of First Fight, a creative studio and production house located in Detroit, Michigan.

If you’ve been listening to the podcast over the past year or two, you know that the use of AI has been a constant thread through nearly every episode. And this week’s guest, André Foster, has embraced this new tech as part of his creative practice while still producing top notch motion design and animation work through his studio, First Fight.

André gave a rundown on some of the client work and the day-to-day happenings at First Fight, and discussed the importance of perseverance and continuous improvement through difficult social and economic times. The conversation then dives into the use of AI in the creative industry, and from there André talk about his upbringing in Detroit, the city’s creative community, and Bond — James Bond.

For André, resilience, adaptability, and personal growth have been the keys to his success!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.

André Foster:

My name is Andre Foster. I’m the co-founder and owner of First Fight, a creative studio and production house based in Detroit, Michigan that helps brands hit above their weight with style and motion. And what that really means is that we use our own unique style of animation, design and live action to bring our clients message to life. For broadcast or for digital, Disney+, Instagram, Fox Sports, StockX, and Dave & Buster’s are just some of the brands that we’ve worked with.

Maurice Cherry:

Impressive. Really impressive.

André Foster:

Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:

How has this year been going so far?

André Foster:

This year has been rough and not just for us, but I think just for a lot of studios as well. I think the economy hasn’t been that great, so it’s really caused a lot of our clients to kind of tighten their spending. Layoffs, strikes…[it’s] just a lot of uncertainty in the industry. I think that’s been a part of this whole thing that’s just part of being a business owner is just going through the highs and lows of it. But I think what’s been good about it is that it’s really made us refocus on our brand. Just kind of hone in on the actual service of what we provide. I think we really came to the realization that the creative is just one part of it. It’s really just how you can network and how you can execute what you do and how you present that to your clients and even to potential clients.

Maurice Cherry:

How would you say — I mean, aside from just kind of the change like you said in clients and budgets and stuff — how would you say that you personally have grown over the past year?

André Foster:

Yeah, it really put me in a space where I had to really just keep going. I think this whole year just showed me that you have to just be strong and just be able to adapt and then just really just keep doing what you’ve been doing. And then just as I said before, just kind of refocus and make sure that you can just try to just be as good as the service that you’re trying to provide. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. So it’s really just, again, just making sure that you hone in on what it is that you do, what you’re good at and how you’re different. And then like I said, just keep sending the emails out and just keep promoting yourself and just keep trying to put yourself out there as much as you can and just really just trust in the process while you do that. And then while you do do that, you just make sure that you just concentrate on the craft and just figure out ways how to be better.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, as you said that, it sort of reminded me of that saying people have when they say, “if you’re going through hell, keep going.” Like…just sort of find a way to persevere. And I mean, you and I — we talked about this a little bit before we started recording — but it’s been tough for, I think, a lot of creatives this year just in terms of budgets and clients and finding work. And it’s definitely a trying time right now in the creative industry overall. But it sounds like you’re weathering it pretty well.

André Foster:

Yeah, I’m not going to lie, it’s been extremely rough. But as you said, we’ve been weathering it and we’ve just been trying to find work where we can and just again, like I said, just make sure that we trust in the process and just make sure that we keep continue to network and just be able to try to continue to put our brand out there as much as we can.

Maurice Cherry:

Let’s help with that. Let’s talk about First Fight, which you co founded back in 2016 and you just mentioned earlier. Tell me more about it. Tell me more about some of the services and things that you offer.

André Foster:

We primarily do animation and then we do live action as well. With that, we do a lot of design. We do a lot of illustration work too. Along with that, we also do a lot of strategy when it comes to the digital campaigns that we create the content for. So that’s really kind of a newer service that we’ve added onto our team. But really it’s just really just trying to emphasize the uniqueness of what we do and how we do it. Style, emotion is the thing that we always say that we have that we can owner our clients. But yeah, animation and live action and just make sure that we’re trying to get our clients message across in a unique way that stands out.

And for me it’s fun because it’s always interesting how we can try to do something a little bit different than what’s been done before. Our clients pretty much are kind of like in the same industry, but it could kind of range. We deal mostly in the entertainment industry, but lately we’ve been doing a lot of stuff for the self-driving industry, the autonomous, autonomous industry. So it’s kind of just switching it up and just seeing what’s out there and how we could try to bring our voice to their message.

Maurice Cherry:

I was going to ask you about clients. I mean, you mentioned some earlier that you’re working with. Of course, you know, being in Detroit, big automotive center here in the U.S. — Chevy, Ford, Cadillac — but then you also mentioned Disney+. Dave & Buster’s is a client of yours, know, just to name a few. What are the best types of clients that you prefer to work with?

André Foster:

I think the best type of clients are the clients that can trust our expertise and just really just let us go. I mean, that’s not to say that we don’t like to collaborate because we definitely like to do that. But having clients that can really trust in what you’re able to bring to them and just let us go, I think that’s probably the best type of clients that we like to work with. And then also it helps too that they can pay you like how you should be paid. That’s a definite know. That’s something that we look for because we are in a business and we just want to make sure that the value of what we do, we get compensated for. So the Disney Pluses and the Dave & Buster’s, you know, those type of clients, we really don’t have issue with that. So it really just allows us to be able to come up with some great work for them and just go.

Maurice Cherry:

I know you said entertainment was kind of one field that you’re working in, and then of course, the automotive industry. Are those kind of the two main industries that you prefer to work with?

André Foster:

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, we’ve kind of just fell into that, I think, because we are based in Detroit. So the automotive industry is kind of like right in our backyard. But what’s interesting is that some of the stuff that we have done when it comes to automotive industry has been kind of cool because it’s kind of allowed us to be a little bit more creative in terms of showing the car. And actually there’s been some situations where we haven’t really shown the car at all. It’s just been like a lot of lifestyle imagery and stuff like that. So it’s kind of helped us in terms of just being a little bit more creative and just showing the car itself and just making it a little bit more interesting.

Maurice Cherry:

What does your day-to-day work look like at First Fight?

André Foster:

A lot of emails, sending emails out and just checking behind the status of some projects that we have in-house and then making sure that our animators and that our team, they know what it is that they need to do and just checking behind them. I probably shouldn’t say checking behind them, just making sure that what they’re working on is it fits what the project is and what the message is for that project. Just making sure that they understand the assignment, and do it in the brand voice of what First Fight is about.

Maurice Cherry:

What would you say kind of really sets First Fight apart from other studios?

André Foster:

Well, one, I mean, we’re one of the few Black-owned agencies — probably shouldn’t say agencies — or creative studios in the industry. So I think that by itself is definitely what they necessarily apart. But I think it’s really just the foundation of design and illustration. I think that’s one thing that kind of distinguishes us from other studios because we have such a strong foundation of that. I think that we tap into that with some of most of the work that we do, even though we do a lot of different stuff. We do editing and we do some visual effects, and then, like I said, we do live action. But even with those, there’s some fundamental things that we put in that that we take from what we learn with design and illustration, whether it’s compositing or composing a picture and making sure that there’s enough contrast to get the visual interest of what it is that we’re trying to show.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, let’s say when new work comes in, because you’re offering all these different services and you said strategy is even, like, something kind of new that you’re offering. When a new project kind of comes in the door, what does that process look like in terms of getting started and everything?

André Foster:

We get a request, whether it’s through email or we may just get a phone call, and the client will come in with a brief and then we read over the brief and then we kind of get a sense of what the vision is that the client is kind of going for. So I think it’s really the initial brief. And then from that, we just kind of figure out. Like, well, okay, whether or not it’s going to be 30 seconds long, is it 60 seconds? And then we kind of figure out what is the budget for it, and then we kind of craft a plan from that and then really just kind of get a better understanding of what exactly is the message that the client is trying to say with it within the constraints of the budget that they have. Because sometimes the budget is just not there. Sometimes, like I said, we just try to make sure that we try to do what we can within the budget and make sure that we still are able to give the client what they need to get the message across.

Maurice Cherry:

I’d imagine with maybe some of the bigger clients, maybe that’s an easier process. Is that true?

André Foster:

Yeah, they kind of just let you go. And the great thing about the bigger clients is that the budget is not really an issue. So it kind of allows us to be able to go for what we know and just have fun with it and then just really just have fun with it and challenge ourselves, because I think we always are trying to do that anyway in terms of how we execute these things for our clients, whether it’s through animation, video production, and even with the strategy. We’re always trying to figure out…what is the different angle that we can take? How can we make this project different than what’s been done before? And that’s something that we always try to do. I mean, that’s kind of the fight that we always go through. And really, sometimes the fight is within ourselves because we’re trying to fight against what we’ve seen before. How can we make it different than what was? Because it’s so hard to come up with something that’s original nowadays because it’s so much stuff out there.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, I’m glad you said that, because that actually is a good lead into what I wanted to ask about with regards to AI and some of this emerging tech in the creative industry. I think across writing, design, animation, illustration, et cetera, we’ve started to see a lot more adoption of AI tools, both good and bad. I mean, the tools are often trained on other people’s work without their consent, so that’s a bad thing. But then some people are using them or trying to use them, I think, in effective ways. I know back when Disney+ had launched — not launched, they premiered — the season of…

André Foster:

Secret Invasion.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. Secret invasion. Thank you.

And the whole intro was done with AI. And there was sort of this kind of big negative backlash against it and everything. I’m curious, are you using AI in any of your work, or do you have any just kind of thoughts around AI and any of these emerging technologies in the field?

André Foster:

Yeah. We do use AI. And I think what I’ve seen is that I think a lot of people are using it the wrong way, because when we started using AI, we kind of took it as a high leve, well, kind of a Pinterest. Like a high level of what a Pinterest would do for you.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, like a mood board or something.

André Foster:

Yeah. But the only big difference is that you can really customize it to what it is that you’re trying to do in terms of getting an idea, or even just trying to figure out a different color palette. Because what’s cool about using AI, because…I use Midjourney, and what’s cool about Midjourney is it can give you an idea that you never even really thought about, or, like I said, even a color palette that you didn’t even think about. We’re kind of using it in that regard. I don’t think you should use or present AI as a final image. I think if you don’t go back in it, if you don’t try to alter it in some way and then kind of make it ownable to yourself and to what you do, I think that’s where the problem kind of comes in. But, yeah, I mean, we just use it as kind of like a really high level Pinterest.

Maurice Cherry:

I would tell people that ways that I’ve used it before is kind of almost like a decent intern to come up with ideas to bounce things off of. But I wouldn’t necessarily take what one of these tools like — say, ChatGPT for example — I wouldn’t necessarily use what they have flat out as my own, and certainly I wouldn’t pass it off as my own. But it can be inspiration for something else. It could say, “okay, well, I didn’t think about this”, or “maybe I can reword this in a different way now that I’ve got a spark of an idea that this AI has generated.”

André Foster:

Exactly. Yeah. And I’m the same way with ChatGPT, because I’ve used it in the past and I’ll have it write something, and then I usually have to go back in and just make it sound like myself. But for the most part, it does most of the heavy lifting, and it’s just really not meant for you to just have it come straight out the box or present it as yourself without even putting yourself in it somehow, some way. I think with Midjourney, there’s a reason why it’s called Midjourney. It’s really just meant to get you halfway there. That’s the way I took it.

Maurice Cherry:

I thought you were going to say, because the output is mid, but I get that, too. I like your explanation better.

André Foster:

Yeah. And I really thought that was the whole point of it. I mean, maybe the developers probably had a different idea of what the name meant. I like to think that that’s what they wanted it to do.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

André Foster:

Because it’s not meant to replace the artist. It’s just there to get them to a certain point and then have them finish it.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, how do you think clients would feel about that? Do you think they’d think, “oh, well, if you’re using AI, I could do that myself”?

André Foster:

Yeah, some clients may think that. I think any edge that you can have in this industry, you should try to take advantage of it. Because in an industry where things are constantly being due the next day and the budgets are getting a little bit shorter, you have to try to find ways to be able to be efficient and to be able to still play in this game. So I think any advantage that you can get, you should try to use it. I really don’t think that they really care because I think the whole controversy has been just more about what the artists themselves in the industry, I think with the clients themselves, I don’t think they really care. I think as long as you’re able to get their message across, make it look good, and it does what it needs to do for them, I think that’s all what they really care about.

Maurice Cherry:

I think so, too. I mean, it’s so interesting. Like, back when I had my studio and I had clients, it would be so interesting to talk with other designers and they go so much into their process, and they use this in Photoshop or they use Sketch or they’re using Illustrator and all that stuff, and the client doesn’t care about that. The client just cares about their end result. They really don’t want to know the nuts and bolts. I mean, some clients do, but as a whole, they’re not really concerned with how the sausage is made. They just want the sausage.

André Foster:

Exactly. Yeah. I think it’s kind of a bougie kind of attitude, like some artists take. I kind of get it. Well, when I say that toward using it, and I kind of get it. And I think there is a lot of training that goes into what we do, because I have an illustration major. That’s what I went to school for, so I understand the fundamentals and the foundations of it. I know it takes a lot of time to be able to get good at that and to understand it.

But what’s interesting is that with AI, what I see nowadays, I feel like everything kind of looks the same. And I can always tell when somebody who doesn’t have any traditional training, they’ll just put stuff out just because they think it looks cool. But I can see all the different things that’s wrong with it, right, because they haven’t developed that type of taste when it comes to design. Like, you can type in anything into Midjourney and have it spit out something, but if you don’t know how to filter it out and figure out, like, well, this image doesn’t look good, or whatever, that kind of goes back to how you’ve been trained traditionally. But if you’re just putting stuff out left and right, you’re kind of giving yourself away, like you really don’t know what you’re doing. Just typing in prompts.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, it’s another tool to use as the designer. You have the discernment, you have the eye, you have the experience to be able to kind of know what to look for, and know how to craft it in the right way. I do see…a lot of the AI art does have the very similar just sort of style to it. Like, you can look at something and just tell, like, “yep, that’s AI”.

André Foster:

Yeah, it’s a dead giveaway. It kind of reminds me of when…and I’m actually old enough to remember when people used to use airbrush. I remember when airbrush first started coming out and the look of airbrush was so different than, like, a traditional brush painting, and it had kind of that slickness and that real smoothness and stuff like that. And I think there was a lot of people who at least back then, thought that, well, it looks too perfect, it looks too generic, or it looks too whatever. And even back then, people were, like, just getting on airbrush artists like, “well, why don’t you just learn how to paint?” But it’s funny because I kind of see it happening now with AI, because it kind of has that same thing happening. It feels the same, and it doesn’t have any soul to it. That’s why I say I think anything that you use or have come out of Midjourney, you should be able to try to put yourself into it because that’s where the personality comes in.

Like I said, just make it honorable and make it your own and just enhance on it. Because, again, I can’t say this enough. It’s really only meant to get you halfway there.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. Like I’ve used ChatGPT. I haven’t used Midjourney or DALL-E for any of the other sort of image generation ones I have done. Like, I think this might have started a little bit last year when people were getting all of those AI profile pictures made. And it was so funny, the conversation around that at the time, because folks were like…one, they were astounded that they had to pay for it. They were like, “what do you mean I have to pay? Like, it’s $8. You paid $8?” And, I mean, not even a lot of money.

Like, $8 is not a lot of money. But people were, one, astounded that they had to pay, and then two, the way that they talked about the quality was just sort of weird. Like, some of them, of course, the art looks like the person. Some of them it doesn’t, because you’re not working with an artist, you’re working with an algorithm. So what you get out of it is what you put into it in that aspect. But, yeah, it’s now hit the mainstream in a way. I haven’t used any of the larger tools, like I said, DALL-E or Midjourney, but I think I want to try to get started with them just to see what it’s like.

André Foster:

Yeah, it’s fun, don’t get me wrong, because I think what I have seen is a lot of people who use Midjourney who I think maybe got sidetracked with life, and maybe they weren’t the best drawer or maybe they weren’t the best designer. And I think that program allowed them to just really tap back into that creative side. And I can see the excitement behind that, and I really do, because it’s just ignites that part of them that just kind of went away because they didn’t think that they were good enough. I think you need to be responsible with it, too, and just understand that it is a tool. It’s not really meant to replace anybody.

Maurice Cherry:

Right, absolutely.

André Foster:

Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

So let’s kind of change it up a little bit here. You mentioned being in Detroit, so I’d love to just kind of know more about you personally. Are you from Detroit originally?

André Foster:

Yeah, born and raised in Detroit. On the west side. West side of Detroit. I got all of my education here in Detroit. It’s funny because when I go to different places like New York and Chicago, people used to or even on the West Coast, I would tell people I was from Detroit, and they would always kind of give me this “oh, wow, you from Detroit?” Like…and this is pretty much why you still have kind of this negative connotation about Detroit.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

André Foster:

So it’s apparent to me, like, they haven’t been here, like, how it is now, as opposed to what it was back, like, maybe 20 years ago for something like that, or maybe even ten years ago. Because it’s different from ten years now. But I’m proud to be from Detroit. I think I embrace everything that it is to be a Detroiter. I love the swag that we have, the kind of blue collar, hardworking feeling that I think everybody who is from Detroit, they carry with them. So every time when I go out, I just try to represent Detroit the best way that I can.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, growing up in Detroit, were you always kind of interested in design and animation and that kind of stuff?

André Foster:

Yes. I owe a lot to my mom because she really was the one that got me involved into…I think it was Saturday afternoon drawing classes. She saw me drawing a lot, and I was a big comic book collector, too. So what I would do, I would actually trace the panels of the artists that were drawing in these comic books. So she really saw that I love to draw, and then I had just a real passion for it, but she was the one that really just kept on it and kept me going and got me involved in a lot of different after school classes, you know, as I said, Saturday classes, it just kind of kept going. She was also the one that really boosted me up. She was the one that kidn of, and I like to say that, she ordained me to be great. And I think every parent should do that with their kid. You’re like, you know, “you are going to be great one day.”

Sometimes when you say that to your kids, they look at you like, “yeah, whatever.” They just kind of blow it off. But whether they know it or not, I think subconsciously, when you have somebody that keeps telling you that, it does stick with you; it just really does make you kind of carry yourself in a different way. And it makes you a little bit more…a little bit more passionate about what it is that you do, because you kind of have this expectation put on you. So I think that what my mom did is she really put that expectation on me. She used to drive people crazy, like, just random strangers. I remember one time she had a guy come by the house to fix, like, the furnace or something like that, and he came in, did this thing, and I remember he was getting ready to leave, and so she said, “oh, wait a minute, wait, I want to introduce you to my son.” And so he’s just looking there, standing there, waiting to get his check.

He said, “this is my son.” And then she held her hands out like, “this is my son, the artist.”

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

André Foster:

And the guy was…I remember the guy was like, “okay, great. Yeah. All right, can I go now?”

Maurice Cherry:

No, I love that. I love that mom was bigging you up. That’s good.

André Foster:

Yeah. Back then, like I said, you really don’t pay attention to it or almost even kind of annoyed by it. But I’m really appreciative of her for doing that because even still to this day, I carry that kind of confidence in my ability and just that expectation. Like, I want to be better than what I was yesterday. I want the studio to be better than it was last year or even last month. I carry that with me.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, you talked about, you know, also being educated in Detroit. You went to the College for Creative Studies where you studied fine and studio arts. What was your time like there?

André Foster:

My time there was interesting. I was so focused and so determined to be as good as I could while I was going there. What was interesting, too, is that I was working part-time when I was going there. So I actually went to art school for like nine years.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, wow.

André Foster:

Yeah. So it was a long time, and back then, CCS wasn’t as diverse as what it is now, so it was majority white, and I was really the only Black guy in these classes. It was interesting, but I was focused, but I was also very competitive. I remember thinking that every time I would go into these classrooms with these other students and this is going to sound really bad to say this, but I wanted to destroy everybody in that classroom. I’m pretty competitive, but when it comes to the craft in a good way, competitive in a good way. But I didn’t really want to destroy them. I just wanted to show what I can do.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I mean, from the numerous people I’ve had on the show have told me that art school is super competitive. So that makes sense.

André Foster:

Yeah. Especially only a Black guy, too. A little bit extra on top of that. It was an interesting time. I think it went by fast even though it was nine years. But I learned a lot. I was able to foster some good relationships from my time there. Actually, one of my mentors, that’s how I met her, because she was teaching her Laura Parloff. I want to give her some love. But yeah, she was a big influence to me while I was going there. Still to this day, she’s a big influence. So I was able to pick up a lot of good key relationships from my time there.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. And I mean, you were also there during a time when I feel like the industry was starting to embrace technology and computers as part of the craft. I feel like that probably definitely was a big part of your time there, right?

André Foster:

Yeah. It’s funny because when I came up, I was right there at that transition where people started using Wacom tablets. And I remember for a long time I didn’t want to use a Wacom tablet. I didn’t really want to use a mouse to draw on a computer because, believe it or not, people used to use a mouse to draw on a computer. I would just scan in my drawings and then just take it into Photoshop and try to manipulate them. That way. Before then, I would do storyboards markers. I’ll be surprised if I know what markers are, but I used to draw with them and know, do it the old fashioned way.

So when I was coming out, when I first started going to CCS, that’s when that whole big transition started happening. So I was able to have kind of the best of both worlds, that traditional kind of upbringing, and then really just seeing the new beginnings of the new technology happening. So I feel pretty lucky. It’s funny because I feel like it’s happening again. It’s always constantly happening.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I’ve talked about this on the show before, how this time right now, when people are getting into using AI tools and the metaverse and all that sort of stuff, reminds me so much of just like, the early Web and people trying to figure out, well, should I even have my business online? And how do I design a web page? And all this sort of stuff. Like, it’s parallels to it as the technology innovates, I guess.

André Foster:

Yeah. And I remember when I started at Skidmore, when I graduated from CCS, I was the one who was teaching some of the older artists how to draw in painter and photoshop and stuff like that, because they were kind of like from the old guard. They would paint with traditional brushes and use traditional paint to make these beautiful paintings. I think when I first started there, that’s when they knew that, oh, wow, I got to learn this shit too. I got to learn something new. I spent all these years trying to get as good as I am. Now I got to try to switch gears up a little bit. But, yeah, I feel very fortunate that I did come up the way that I did because, like I said, I was able to kind of experience the best of both worlds.

And I think it allowed me to be open or even just know that nothing stays the same. You can’t get comfortable. You have to just keep learning. Learning. It’s just an ongoing thing, right? And you don’t ever want to be dated and you don’t want to be me. Just not relevant.

Maurice Cherry:

I mean, I think that’s something now, again, to bring it back to talking about the AI tools and stuff, I’m starting to get my feet wet using some of it, just because I know that anybody can, I think, look at the news and see how much technology has been implementing all these AI features. So clearly the industry is moving forward with it at a pretty fast rate. So I’m like, “well, I need to get on it. I need to see what it’s like.” For me, I’ve started out with just doing ChatGPT and just trying to get really good at using it and prompts and stuff like that. But I want to get into DALL-E and Midjourney and just sort of see what I can come up with. I know that there are some other folks I’ve seen on LinkedIn that have been posting a lot of their experiments with it and it looks amazing. It looks amazing.

André Foster:

Again, it sparks that creative juice within you. And I think what probably was happening, like some of the tools kind of prevented the creative to keep going. And what I mean by that is, let’s say, for instance, because I’m a Maya guy — so I work in Autodesk Maya, which is like a 3D program — which anybody who ever uses Maya knows that it is a deep, hard program to get into. The biggest thing that I had to learn is that working, especially in 3D, is that it’s different in a traditional sense because you have to wait to see the result. There’s like steps to it in a lot of different ways. It kind of deters the creative because you do have to wait. And I think the creative happens. It really lights fires when you’re able to just keep going and just keep going at it.

You don’t really have to think about it too much. Yeah, I think that’s what AI does. It just kind of helps speed the process up and it makes your imagination go wild. You don’t have to wait on stuff like you used to do or still do in some cases. So I do understand the allure of AI, and AI is not going away. So people should just realize that and accept it. And I don’t think you definitely don’t want to be the person who is going to be left behind with that because I think you should understand it enough to where you can use it. You don’t have to get deep into it.

But again, like I said, you don’t want to be left behind because it’s not going away. You just won’t be able to understand the technology and how to use it for what it is that you do. This already is a big part of our lives and AI really hasn’t just shown up on the scene. I mean, it’s been around since the 50s. That’s what a lot of people don’t understand. Yeah, there’s nothing really new. It’s just a little bit more prominent with some of these newer softwares that they’ve come out with.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I mean, artificial intelligence is a broad field and if you just think about all the different ways it’s been implemented, I mean, you could say spell check in a way is kind of a form of AI. Or Photoshop, like content-aware fill or anything like that. So as the technology has gotten more advanced, we’ve just been able to innovate and continue to iterate upon it. So it’s been here for a long time, I think certainly a lot of people have been using it for research purposes and things like that. But now that it’s really gotten into the mainstream, people think that it just happened overnight. And it’s like, “no, this has been here for a long time.” Facetune, all that sort of stuff has been here for a long time, which is all parts of AI. It all falls under that umbrella.

André Foster:

Yeah, that’s the part that they kind of leave out or they really don’t say enough. And just going back to Midjourney. When Midjourney first came out, I remember I started messing with it and I started typing in some stuff. And some of the stuff that I would get back blew my mind because it’s stuff that I would have never thought about doing. Or even if I went on Pinterest to try to search for a certain image, it would never have given me what I was getting out of Midjourney. It actually sparked something in me. Like, there was one time I was getting pretty good at Midjourney, and I started understanding the language and prompts and stuff like that. And the images that it gave me actually sparked an idea for a series, I guess you would call it, like an FX series, like a really kind of hardcore streaming program.

Some images that I got back, it put me in the mind of Frankenstein. I was like, it’d be cool to have a show based off the story of Frankenstein, but told in a modern way, like set in the 70s, because some of the images that I got back kind of felt like that. So it sparked an idea; it sparked that whole thing. And actually the outcome of that is actually on our website, it’s called Suture. So if your listeners go to that, they’ll be able to see some of the images that I got out of Midjourney that sparked the whole idea. And I did like a whole intro for this imaginary show based off the Frankenstein story. Well, it was pretty wild, though.

Maurice Cherry:

I’ll make sure that we put a link to that in the show notes so folks can go and check that out.

André Foster:

Yeah, yeah, it was pretty cool.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, after you graduated from college for Creative Studies from CCS, you kind of went straight to work. You began working at Skidmore Studio, and you were there for 16 years, which is amazing to think about just in terms of tenure. I mean, before we recorded, I was saying how it sort of felt like the second graduation for you in a way. How did you sort of first learn about them and overall, what was your time like there?

André Foster:

Actually, when I first heard about them, it was through my teacher, Laura Parloff, and she actually had owned her own studio. It was called Color Forms back in the day. And she was actually their competition, Skidmore’s competition. And I actually wanted to go work for her studio because I thought her studio was really cool. She had a pool table; that was a big thing for me. I’m like, “wow, they actually got a pool table in the studio.” And I was like, “I wish I could work here.” And plus, they had a lot of the great artists working there.

But she told me that I should go to Skidmore because she thought my style was more in par with what they did back then. So that’s how I really found out about them. And then I did, like, a class trip to Skidmore and did the whole tour thing. After the tour was over, I actually requested to see if I can come back and show my portfolio. I did that, and I showed my portfolio to the owner and a couple of other creatives that worked there. They was very impressed, and they said, well, we think you’re very talented, and we would love you to join our team. And so it was just that quick. So I was like, “wow, all right.”

When I started working there, I started working in the matte room. For those of you don’t know what the matte room was…it was just like an internship type deal. So you’re not actually working on any real projects just yet. You’re just framing the work that went out. You’re doing the packaging, and you’re going on runs and stuff like that and getting coffee. But again, I was very determined to just try to fit in with these guys and try to be valuable with the studio. So, yeah, I think maybe after probably about a year or so, I got promoted to be on the board of illustrators, which was a big deal for me. I remember just feeling like, “wow, actually, I have arrived”, because the artists that I was looking up to, these guys were like, gods, the way they painted.

And mind you, this is nothing on the computer. This is all hand-painted stuff. But some of the images that they did was just beautiful. And I was like, “Man, I got to learn how to do this and figure out how to learn from this as much as I can.” Yeah, so I learned as much as I could. I was asking a thousand questions and kept getting better and learning new techniques. So the years flew by and ended up going from ten years to 15 years to 16 years.

Maurice Cherry:

I mean, clearly you were doing something right and making a real impact there to have been there that long.

André Foster:

Yeah, I was pretty focused. I think I’ve always been pretty focused, but I think they saw in me that I was ambitious and that I was talented. And then I was able to contribute to the service that they offer. Because back then, Skidmore worked with a lot of different agencies. So I was able to kind of cut my teeth with the whole industry world just by working through Skidmore and seeing how that whole thing goes. So I did a lot of storyboarding, understood the technique behind that, what makes a good frame, what makes a good composition. I learned a lot from storyboarding. Dave O’Connell — I want to give him a shout out because he was my mentor back then at Skidmore. He was like the head storyboard guy. So he kind of took me under his wing, and then he showed me what to do and what not to do and how to make an image sing and make it as good as he can try to make it.

Maurice Cherry:

Are there any sort of projects in particular that stand out to you during that time? I mean, 16 years? I know you probably worked on a ton of things, but is there anything in particular that you really remember?

André Foster:

Yeah, I think it was a couple of ones that kind of stood out. I remember doing a illustration for Mazda. It was a campaign called Zoom Zoom. And I don’t know if you remember that.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, I remember that. “Zoom zoom zoom.” Yeah.

André Foster:

And I did the illustration of the little “Zoom Zoom” kid. Then I had the car flying by him. That was a big thing for me because when I first went to Skidmore, I didn’t really know how to do cars that well. But when I went there, I feel like every artist there knew how to do a car really well. So I was able to learn from them, and then I was able to apply that to this image. So it kind of stood out to me because that was like one of the first true advertising works that I did that actually that was put out there, that had a car in it that was illustrated and they used it. So that one stood out.

I’m trying to think of anything else. I’m pretty sure it was a lot, but just working on storyboards for Blockbuster. Remember Blockbuster with a little…I don’t know if it was a hamster or I think it was two hamsters or something, that was right across the street from a Blockbuster Video store? I remember doing storyboards for them for that whole campaign. It was just cool to really work on a lot of big name stuff back then Blockbuster Video and Mazda and a lot of other big brands. But the Mazda one, I think that really kind of sticks out because that was like my first real commercial piece that got featured.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, when you were at Skidmore, again, you were there for 16 years, but when did you get the idea to start your own studio?

André Foster:

It was something that was kind of always in the back of my mind. The guy that I kind of befriended at Skidmore, who was actually my business partner now, Guy Allen, we would kind of talk about it here and there because I think at that time, skidmore was kind of going in a little bit of a different direction than what we would have liked to be involved in. So it was always kind of rumblings between him and I, like, we should do our own thing. But in 2016, something happened, and it kind of gave us an opportunity to really go about making it happen. I think in February of 2016, we told our boss, “hey, we were thinking about going on our own.” That’s what we did. He didn’t like it that much. He thought, well, because I was there for such a long time, and he didn’t want to see us go, but he tried to keep us there, but he know our wishes to try to branch on our own and do our own thing.

So hats off to him. Tim Smith — may he rest in peace. He actually passed away not too long ago. But, yeah, it was tough, man. It was a big decision because I had been there for so long, it is, like, all I knew, but I knew that if I stayed there, I wouldn’t have been happy because of the direction that they were going in. I just wanted to just be my own boss. And Guy, he felt the same way, and he said, “this is our chance to just really craft something or make something on our own, to really just put something out there that we’re both proud of in terms of the type of work that we want to do.”

Maurice Cherry:

And now you’re doing it.

André Foster:

Now we’re doing it, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

What are your plans for First Fight for the future?

André Foster:

I really want to try to expand our brand and our reach as much as we can more globally. I really want to try to hone in on the service of digital strategy. I think we got the content part down. It’s just really the execution of the marketing of that idea, and I want to make sure that we were able to offer that to our clients, because I think that’s a big thing for us. I just want us to be more of a complete studio.

I don’t want to say the A word — the agency word — because I think when you say agency, there’s kind of not all the time, but there’s kind of a negative connotation when you say agency just because there’s so many different layers of different folks that you have to go through, especially when it comes to the client for them to get their message across. So I just want to make sure that we stay as intimate and more hands on with the work for our clients, but also let them know that we can really expand their voice and their messaging, and we have the know how to go about doing it. So I really want to just make sure that we expand on that more and get that more known as far as what First Fight can do.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, being from Detroit, born and raised, educated in Detroit, you’ve built your career in Detroit. How has the city influenced your approach to the work that you do?

André Foster:

Yeah, I think it’s an influence because I think Detroit has kind of always been like the underdog to a lot of different places. We were saying earlier, like how when you go out well, at least when I go out of my region here in Detroit, there’s kind of like an eye raise when I tell them that I’m from Detroit. But I kind of wear that proudly now because I think I like the idea that we are the underdog and that we’re always trying to prove ourselves and we’re surprising people that we do have all this talent here in Detroit. They can do all these amazing know. You may know Detroit, but you really don’t know Detroit. So I always like to surprise know that way.

Maurice Cherry:

How would you describe the city’s creative community?

André Foster:

Yeah, the creative community here in Detroit is really good. I think what you’re seeing is kind of a renaissance of that. And I think Detroit has always been a pretty creative city anyway. But I think the automotive industry has kind of overshadowed that a little bit. I think people have found other ways to express themselves creatively other than just designing cars and whatnot. The technology also has been used here. The new technology, whether it’s self-driving cars or if it’s the half-res well, not the half-res, but the New Labs is what I’m trying to say. New Labs is a new tech sector here in Detroit that’s really blowing up.

And what’s cool about is that the creative community has kind of been driving that because it doesn’t always have to be automotive based. There’s other different sectors that you can know express yourself in. The scene here in Detroit has been great. I love it. I love the city now. How it is, what it’s evolving into right now has been exciting for me to see because I’ve been here since day one. The last probably last ten years has really just taken off. So I’m just very excited about what’s been happening here.

Maurice Cherry:

What do you wish you would have been told about this industry when you first started?

André Foster:

Patience is a virtue, especially with the motion industry, motion graphics industry. I would have loved somebody to tell me that what you do is cool, but there’s like 20 other people, or not even 20, like 1000 other people that can do the exact same thing. And it could probably do a little bit better. And I think when I first or when we I should say we when we first got into this, me and my partner, I think we went into it with a little bit of a naïveté because I think what we thought was really cool to us was groundbreaking. But we found out that that’s not always the case. It’s really just understanding that you have to try to figure out how to make yourself different and how do you stand out from the rest. So I wish I would have known that more back when we first started this to really hone in on that. And I think we have honed in on that since then.

What makes us different than other creative studios? Yeah, but I wish somebody would have just told me that you have the talent, you have the ambition, but you really got to hone in what makes you different, because there’s a lot of noise out there and it’s hard to really just set yourself apart from the other creators.

Maurice Cherry:

Do you have a dream project that you’d love to do one day?

André Foster:

Yeah, I would love to do the intro to the next James Bond movie. Yeah, I’m a big James Bond fan.

Maurice Cherry:

I could see that from your photo. I can 100% see that.

André Foster:

Yeah. I think in my mind, I’m kind of like the Black James Bond. They kept talking about getting Idris Elba to do it, but I think I could probably do that.

Maurice Cherry:

What’s your favorite Bond movie?

André Foster:

Not the one that just came out, but the one before that.

Maurice Cherry:

Was that Skyfall?

André Foster:

Yeah, I think it was, but actually, I take that back. I think Casino Royale was probably my favorite one because I like Daniel Craig. I love what he brought to that role. But when I was coming up, Roger Moore was like, that was my James Bond. Because he was, I think, that was back in the 80s, I think. But it was really cool because I felt like with Casino Royale, it kind of got back to that what the genre was really about. It was making him well, also just making him a little bit more human and a little vulnerable.

I thought that was really cool. So I think Daniel Craig was able to kind of pull that, um, when he had the baton.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. I’m looking it up now. Spectre was the one before; the latest one was No Time to Die. I saw that one. I thought that one was pretty good.

André Foster:

Yeah, it was kind of interesting because I was like, well, I wasn’t expecting them to kill off James Bond.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

André Foster:

And I hope I’m not spoiling it for anybody, but yeah, it was interesting for them to do that. I guess when you think about it, 007 could be anybody. It doesn’t necessarily have to be that character. So anybody can wear the 007.

Maurice Cherry:

They did. They brought in a new person. They brought in Lashana Lynch. She played 007. I don’t know if they want to continue having her as Bond. That could be interesting.

André Foster:

I would love that. That would be interesting. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

I would love to see kind of just what they plan to do with it. Because I haven’t read the books like the books from John le Carré, but I feel like Bond has to be of a certain age. I know there were Idris and other folks were kind of being sort of bandied around for that particular role. But Bond is what, maybe like in his 30s, perhaps?

André Foster:

Yeah, I think so. And what’s interesting, too, is that any actor who thinks about taking on that role, I think they have to sign a contract that says you’re basically going to give the studio ten years out of your life to play this character. So it’s definitely a commitment. And yeah, I think they need to at least have someone who’s young enough who can kind of age into the role. So they’re 30 or maybe 40. Even 40 is probably pushing it a little bit. But yeah, that’s why I think I know. I keep hearing rumblings about Henry Cavill to play him. I keep hearing that his screen test was, like, off the roof.

Maurice Cherry:

Really?

André Foster:

Yeah. They keep talking about how good he was in it. So it’s going to be really interesting to see what comes from that. It’s interesting because it would be nice to try go in a little bit of a different direction with the character, whether it’s a Black woman or even a Black man. It’d be interesting to see what comes from that, what that will look like.

Maurice Cherry:

I think that would be really interesting to see how they plan on sort of pulling that off, especially now with all the technology and stuff that comes with Bond. It feels like they’re always upgrading him into some new sort of tech or new sort of scenario or environment or something like that. I could see Henry Cavill doing that. And also, he was in the Mission Impossible movie. Not the one that just came out, but the one before that. And he was in The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

André Foster:

Yeah, he was.

Maurice Cherry:

So he’s done spy stuff. I mean, I could see that. I could see that.

André Foster:

Yeah. If they do go with him, I just hope that he’s able to bring something unique to the character because I think Daniel Craig was able to do that. I mean, for a long time. He’s probably really the only one that was able to do that to bring something a little extra to that character. So I’m hoping that if they do go with him, that he’s able to make it his own and make it different.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, James Bond aside, where do you see yourself in the next five years? Like, what kind of work would you like to be doing?

André Foster:

I want to really become a better business person. What I’ve realized in the seven years that I’ve been co-owning First Fight is that there’s definitely a business component to this thing. And I think the creative is just one part of it. But the business part is something that I really want to get better at.

And I think I have gotten better at it because there’s definitely a science to it. There’s the whole networking part of it. There’s the constant putting yourself. Out there. It’s a lot to it. So I just want to become a better businessman within the next five years. Then also, hopefully, along with that, as I get better at it, first fight will be better as well, and then we’ll be able to have more of a bigger reach in terms of what we can offer our clients and even our potential clients. Yeah, just becoming I feel like as I get better, First Fight will get better.

I think that’s what I want to try to be in the next five years, just a more complete businessman. I don’t know if you can say complete businessman, but just definitely better.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I feel you. I mean, I remember when I was starting my studio, I didn’t know anything about business. I just had this sort of notion. I was like, I’ve been designing for a few years. I could do this. And there was so much in those first, I’d say probably in the first five years, that I just was like, I had no clue on how to run a business. I knew how to design. I knew how to make work for clients. But running a business and then having employees and payroll and all this stuff? I was, like, right over my head. I learned it eventually, but it was definitely like a trial by fire process. So I feel you.

André Foster:

Yeah, it’s a lot of stuff that pulls at you because I still do the work within the studio. So it’s always frustrating to me where I’m constantly getting pulled from that, because either I’m just trying to pay attention to what this artist is doing, what this checking up on this email, checking up all the status of this project, and constantly doing that on a daily basis. It’s hard because at the heart of it, I am a creative, and I would really just love to be in a corner and just say, leave me alone. I just want to draw something.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

André Foster:

I don’t want to get any more emails. I don’t want to get any more phone calls. It’s a lot. But I’ve learned to and it sounds kind of funny to say this I’ve learned to really embrace that, and I’ve actually liked the challenge of it. So that’s why I said I want to become better at it and just try to find a real nice balance between that businessman and that creative. I think the payoff is what you’re always trying to go after, like, wow. And it’s kind of that hunter-gatherer mentality. Like, if you do go after work, the payoff is that, oh, when they say yes, or if they give you a direct award because you’ve just been after them for so long.

I do like the rush of that when it does happen. But ask me, like, maybe ten years ago, the same question. I don’t know if I would have said the same thing. It’s just funny how you kind of change your perspective on things as you do this, as you go into the business part of it, because as creatives, I think most creatives are introverts for the most part. And I feel like I can be both. I can be extroverted when I need to be, but for the most part, I’m introverted. I get recharged when I’m by myself and just working on what I need to work on, but I can flip it. And I think over the years, it’s kind of changed because I can definitely become that guy, go after work or just do a cold call and say, “hey, we can do this, we can do that. You should use our studio”, which in itself is like unheard of, especially for an introvert. But I think when you’re able to do both, though, I think you have to do that if you’re going to try to become a businessman in this industry, especially if you’re going to try to own the studio, because you just have to constantly do that.

Maurice Cherry:

Very true. Very true. Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, about the studio and everything? Where can they find that online?

André Foster:

Your listeners can go to firstfight.tv. You can find our work there. You can also follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn. Just search for First Fight and not First Flight because sometimes we get that a lot. So it’s First Fight TV, it’s where you want to go to see our work and go to our site.

Maurice Cherry:

All right, sounds good. André Foster, I want to thank you so, so much for coming on the show. Thank you for putting Detroit on the map, for helping to put Detroit on the map creatively. Like you said earlier, you’re the only Black-owned studio that’s doing this kind of work, and I think it’s something that more people definitely need to see, especially, I think, at this time when the power of the creative voice is being uplifted in ways like whether we’re talking about unions or writers or things of that nature, I think people are starting to really see the value of creative work. And it’s good that you are doing this. You’ve been doing this now for over 20 years professionally. You’ve been working with some of the best talent in the business, working with great clients. I hope more people see that, and that really helps to kind of elevate the work that you’re doing. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

André Foster:

Thank you for having me. And this is awesome. Like you said, I just want to make sure that my story can resonate with someone else who’s even thinking about becoming a studio owner, and hopefully they can get some inspiration from this. And also, too, because you can’t become something that you don’t see, like a Black artist who’s even thinking about owning a creative studio or even going into animation for motion design. Just know that there are other people of color who are doing, you know, I want to be one of those people that can, you know, we’re here and you can do it too.

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