Sean DallasKidd

If you have aspirations of being an agency owner one day, then you might get some great insight from this week’s guest, Sean DallasKidd. Sean is the co-founder and chief creative officer of DemonstratexDDW, and he uses his decades of experience to help brands define their story and communicate with their audiences.

Sean told me more about his new role, sharing what it looks like to run an agency from the C-suite and help it stand out from the competition. We also delved into Sean’s background, where he spoke about attending SCAD, getting into the publishing world, and how his shift to agencies helped prepare him for his current leadership responsibilities. Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable has been the secret to Sean’s success, and it’s definitely paid off! (Big thanks to George McCalman for the introduction!)

Interview Transcript

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

Sean DallasKidd:
Hello, my name is Sean DallasKidd. I’m partner, chief creative officer at DemonstratexDDW. I would say what I do is make brands culturally relevant, and that takes place from brand development, naming, brand architecture systems over to go-to-market strategies. So really trying to create programs and experiences that resonate within culture, drive talkability with media and can be shared digitally and socially.

Maurice Cherry:
How are things going so far this year for you?

Sean DallasKidd:
This is a very interesting year. We’ve got lots of tensions in the US, globally, and so I think this year has been another year of quick adaption to socioeconomic sort of movement that’s happening around lots of new technologies that are turning on and a lot of disruption. So it’s a very interesting year to roll up your sleeves, learn a little bit more, and I’d say get creative.

Maurice Cherry:
Is there anything major that you really want to accomplish this year?

Sean DallasKidd:
Let’s see. This year, I think the main goals for me probably start with AI literacy from a sort of personal and business growth perspective, also want to take care of my people. I think as we’ve kind of seen on channels like LinkedIn, being able to create a business that can sustain over time, that puts its employees and its culture first, that’s one of my sort of big goals. And then obviously, working with brand partners that want to do very interesting, fun, provocative work.

Maurice Cherry:
Any sort of personal goals though for this year?

Sean DallasKidd:
Personal goals, to see more of the world. I’ve been historically a big traveler and the other thing that I love is food. So the over the course of the pandemic, have definitely been leaning more into traveling via my mouth and stomach. And so, this year I would like to actually get out into the world and see what’s happening in different countries and regions in the US.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s talk more about DemonstratexDDW. As you mentioned, you’re president and chief creative officer there, pretty recently as of last year, right?

Sean DallasKidd:
Correct, correct, correct. What’s really interesting with DemonstratexDDW is last year we announced the acquisition of Deutsch Design Works, DDW, which is a 27-year-old branding agency that was based in Sausalito. And so, what we did was acquire the agency for the brand building capabilities that they had, and we thought it was a great fit because Demonstrate focuses on go-to-market strategies and campaigns and programs, and so this gave us the opportunity to not only bring brands to life and market, but really start with the fundamentals, which you often find missing when you’re working with brands. So what are some of the cultural artifacts built into the brand DNA, the purpose, how do you find actions, and so we felt as though being able to help set the bar and the tone at the upfront and being able to pull that into a market will do nothing but good things for our brand partners that we work with.

Maurice Cherry:
What does a typical day look like for you?

Sean DallasKidd:
Ooh, let’s see. Phigital, it’s physical and digital. So Zoom meetings, hybrid meetings, writing some design, and then the most fun part of being a business owner is Excel spreadsheets of things. That’s one of the sort of growth spaces when you become more of an executive creative person is getting right with the Google Sheets.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, was it a big shift moving from partner to president once this acquisition happened?

Sean DallasKidd:
I would say it was different, but it’s been an accumulation of experiences over time. I think that my history starting in publishing, moving into earned media, moving into advertising has become a brick by brick process. The transition didn’t or hasn’t to date been as dramatic of a shift because I have a network to help support and educate me on components and parts I might not be as familiar with on day one. So I would say the transition wasn’t crazy, not to say it’s not crazy. You get what I’m saying?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, I would imagine whenever there’s a acquisition or things like that, you’re bringing more people in, of course, you’re merging company cultures, so there’s always going to be, I think, some clashing or things just as that acquisition tries to reach equilibrium.

Sean DallasKidd:
Exactly. You always have different ways and means, ways of working, different kinds of processes, lead times, you have different billing cycles, all sorts of stuff that you have to work out. I would say the best case scenario in any merger is a mullet. It’s business in the front and a rock show in the back because you’re trying to figure out how to get one set of systems to work with another without clashing in any sort of crazy way. But luckily for us, we’ve been able to make it through that stage and I think we’re starting to get into stride right now which is great.

Maurice Cherry:
And now you mentioned that part of your typical day still has some design in it. Are you still available to get hands on working with clients and with campaigns?

Sean DallasKidd:
Yes, yes. I feel as though I’ve always had, you would say, a problem with people who guard themselves off in the ivory tower, right? And so, one of the things I always tell our employees is that you want to have lived experience before you can recommend a strategy to someone, and in order to stay current, you have to do. So even if a design direction that I might develop doesn’t get picked, it helps me stay current on tools, timelines, amount of resources, different design trends so that when I’m talking to brand partners, I’m using language and referencing things that are happening now and not when I did it back in the day, 5, 10, 15 years ago.

Maurice Cherry:
I had an agency owner on here a few years back, I’m not going to call out who it was, but for folks who listen to the show, they’ll probably remember when this happened, but this person was mentioning that they have an agency and was talking about how they were the only Black agency owner that they knew and that. He’s like, “I don’t know about any other Black agency owners.” And I was like, “Well, that’s not true. I’m pretty sure there’s others out there because I’ve had them on the show.” But have you noticed during your career in advertising many other Black agency owners?

Sean DallasKidd:
I’ve definitely kept an eye out on it, but I will say it’s hard when your head’s down managing the work and the business to take the time to do the proper recon and outreach to folks. It’s a bit of a balancing of time and energy, but I definitely have seen the spark and the growth in that space. I know a couple of folks myself that have some small studios and then there’s some folks that I’ll look out to and see what they’re doing in the New York area that are really tearing it up which is great.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I mean, they’re out there. It’s certainly like you said, they’re at all sizes. Whether it’s small studios, big agencies, et cetera, we’re out there, but it’s about visibility as well too.

Sean DallasKidd:
Yeah, I would say it’s visibility, and then there is, I would say, the system of agency and connection. And so, I think that… What’s a good way to phrase it? The hurdles for growing an agency to the point to where you get visibility is tricky when you’re not a part of the club to start. I could be a great designer, but do I have the connections to be considered or backing to be considered for some of these medium size, large term clients is a different story, right?

There’s a procurement process as you start to grow your agency and payment terms that shift, and do you have the financial backing and resources or credit to be able to invest that manpower into going through one of those processes for the chance to win the business, and then can you float the business in a way that can deal with payment terms of a larger client on a bigger scale, right? You might move from payment terms of I’ll do a project and things get paid out 15, 30 days, 40 days to 90 days to 180 days as you get bigger and bigger clients, and so you see there’s different hurdles in order to be able to even get a bite at the apple that you have. I think that’s one of the tensions that you face as a Black agency owner historically which is why I think that’s one of the reasons why you have a lot less of them with that level of visibility.

Maurice Cherry:
There’s clients out there that are paying net 180?

Sean DallasKidd:
Yes, there are. There was, forgot what the brand was and I won’t even mention it, but it was a CPG brand, consumer packaged good brand that got called out on Adweek and in the industry because I think they wanted their payment terms to be a year.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, come on. A year?

Sean DallasKidd:
A year. And so, when you talk about diversity, equity, inclusivity, you can have a very talented agency, just call it a graphic design branding agency, and you have a staff of five to seven people, you’re doing really good work, and normally you’re getting paid in 30 day terms. Now that bigger client might be like, “Oh, I’ll want to work with you,” but then they give you a term payment of, well, instead of you getting paid a month later, you’re going to get paid six months later. How’s that diversity and equity model going at scale at that point with these small shops? And so, those become some of the bigger systemic issues, I would say.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, you’re right, the balancing act of making sure that your clients and your cash flow is terrorist or at least coming in at a point where it appears to be consistent cash flow, especially when you’re paying employees, that’s tough. But net 365, that’s wild. Wow.

Sean DallasKidd:
Yeah, that’s [inaudible 00:15:31].

Maurice Cherry:
What do you think makes DemonstratexDDW stand out from the competition?

Sean DallasKidd:
I would say the way in which we stand out from the competition is we take a culture-forward lens with the work that we do. What we really try to do is drive this term we call talkability amongst target audiences that we’re looking to drive brand awareness, consideration, or conversion with. We also focus on brand or business objectives, number one. We start there, and as an integrated agency, we do, like I said, brand, naming brand architecture, packaging, but we also do integrated communication. So that’s paid media, earned media, social, digital content strategy, traditional above the line advertising. And so, what we look at are all the different levers of communication to drive those business objectives and then based off the audiences that they’re trying to engage with, what’s true to the brand, and timeliness as well as budget, what’s the right mix to help drive that messaging home to help spark conversation overall.

That really stems from, again, that background that I’ve had of being in earned media, being in traditional advertising and being in publishing, and at each step always seeing that for some of these integrated programs or brand initiatives, the PR team is not in step with what the advertising is doing and the advertising team isn’t in step with what the PR team is doing. As we look at this crazy new communications landscape, it’s kind of like it’s better to look at it holistically and then go based off these sets of truths, what is our best route into the market, looking at all the different components and parts we have access to across paid, earned, shared, and owned channels.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, not to give away any trade secrets or anything that you’ve got cooking at DemonstratexDDW, but what do you think are some of the biggest opportunities in the creative industry right now?

Sean DallasKidd:
Well, for me, I definitely would say AI is the biggest opportunity. I know people are frightened about it, ChatGPT and everything else that’s happening, but I feel as though with any new technology there’s definitely going to be category leaders, new roles that come into the market, and so becoming literate in what AI is and can offer and how you can work with it is the biggest opportunity. Actually, in my mind, Web3 is AI because if you think about being able to become an expert prompter, a creative prompt strategist to work with an AI machine so that it can find information that can then be fact checked to create more nuanced, quickly adaptable copy or design territories for you to explore, I think that’s a really interesting job opportunity. There’s some cultural anthropology that you can mix in with it.

I think there’s a lot there because it helps you tie in not only sort of brand DNA, but it helps pull in to design trends that could be pulled live or recalibrated and personalized for specific audiences. I think it could be a very compelling tool, but at the same time, the literacy is important because you got to know what the trade off is, right? I think we all ran into social as consumers of it, not realizing that the trade off was us and privacy and our data. And so, everyone is excited to use things like ChatGPT right now, but one of the things for me is what’s the terms and conditions? Are they going to get a piece of it?

You go and say, “Oh, great, I’m going do a Super Bowl ad using ChatGPT.” Will they have some sort of way on the backend to identify that this copy or this concept came from that, and then they want points? So I think we need to really understand what the technology can do and also who’s making the technology because whoever’s making the technology is creating a certain lens on where the technology starts to look for information.

Maurice Cherry:
Now we’re recording this the Friday before the Super Bowl, and I bet you there’s going to be a Super Bowl ad that has some kind of ChatGPT, I don’t know, punchline or something in it. I feel like it’s got to be in there somewhere.

Sean DallasKidd:
Oh yeah, yeah. I would definitely say. There are agencies that are losing sleep right now because three weeks ago everyone was hot to trot with ChatGPT and Ryan Reynolds did a ChatGPT ad, and everything they’ve been working on in the last year just got thrown out the window and they’re going to do something so that they’re timely and can make a splash of some kind.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I mean, you know what we won’t see during the Super Bowl? Crypto ads. I remember those from last year, and boy, have the times changed.

Sean DallasKidd:
It’s funny. To your earlier question of staying in the work, the reason why you have to stay in the work is because you don’t want to give bad strategic advice to a brand partner. The easy trap for someone my age that got into social at the MySpace and early iteration of it and kind of settled, gave up on Facebook, does Instagram primarily to not stay current, right, to not check out TikTok and BeReal, and some of these sort of crypto based social channels and some of these niche social channels, you fall into the trap of recommending old and then you become irrelevant, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Sean DallasKidd:
And so, agency is all around the fight for relevancy, and I think the separator for us is knowing the nuance between relevancy for demo that everyone typically goes after 18 and 34 and nuance around the psychographic drivers and different folks because share of wallet goes from anywhere from a 10-year-old up to octatarian. People have needs, and the nuance comes from understanding what’s going to be that right audience that you need to tap into. So you have to stay current.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, absolutely. Now we’ll get more into your approach and your work a little bit later, but for now, let’s get into your background. You’re in San Francisco now, but you’re originally from D.C., is that right?

Sean DallasKidd:
Correct. Southeast D.C.

Maurice Cherry:
Tell me about growing up there.

Sean DallasKidd:
Well, let’s say the D.C. today is not the D.C. of the years I grew up. I grew up in ’80s in Reaganomic D.C. It was definitely a lot rougher around the edges in Southeast where I was. But I would say one of the things that always kept me curious and creative, I always loved to draw as a kid and since, and I was also a latchkey kid, so I chose to take advantage of latch keydom, if that’s a word, to take advantage of all the free museums and zoos and public transportation you had as a minor. I’d spend my summers going down to the National Mall, going over to the Smithsonian or Museum of Art, Portraiture Gallery, all that kind of stuff, and so that’s really what sparked and maintained my interest in creativity.

When I went to high school, I was lucky enough to get into an architecture program. So I actually started doing that in 9th, 10th grade, actually drawing plans and really had a great teacher. His name was Mr. Fotos. He was think of angry Santa Claus with a Greek accent. He taught us everything and was just an amazing teacher, and that allowed me to go to SCAD, Savannah College of Art and Design for architecture actually. I think I started on the sophomore year as a freshman just because of my portfolio and what I learned, and then got into graphic design and illustration along the way.

But the lesson he taught me, and I guess this has always been ingrained in me, he said, “If you’re going to be a great architect, you need to be able to design from the building down to the spoon.” And so, that was one of those sorts of thinking of where it’s not just about the whole, the big idea. It’s down to the details and the nuance, right? And so, that’s just been a philosophy that I’ve carried with me which helps you dig a little bit deeper to kind of understand how people move through spaces, or how people engage with an experience or a design, or how a message needs to be flexible to be able to sit in an internal communications program and be explained so that your workforce is on board, and how it can help inspire creative outputs out in the real world, whether it’s on the side of a bus or some sort of 4D, 3D billboard, or if it’s an augmented reality experience. So really being able to be transmedia and understanding does this thing have scale and flexibility.

Maurice Cherry:
What made you choose SCAD?

Sean DallasKidd:
Well, the city, downtown Savannah is beautiful. It’s hot in the summer, but I would say I loved the architecture there. The teachers are cool, the programs are really interesting, and for me, as you look at the, I would say the standard East Coast go-to design schools, the Pratts, the RISDs there was less… Well, I’ll just say, it was a less sense of entitlement and bourgeoisie in Savannah.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Okay.

Sean DallasKidd:
I felt like I could actually learn things and experiment versus do things the way the teacher did them.

Maurice Cherry:
Gotcha.

Sean DallasKidd:
I kind of saw a bit of that trap as I was looking at some of the different schools of… I think for anyone that’s taking a life drawing class or something like that, you definitely have those teachers that are like, “This is the way to do it,” and it happens to be the way that they do it. And so, I definitely wanted a place where it seemed like I could be more collaborative with different departments as well, and so SCAD just really stood out in that way.

Maurice Cherry:
Gotcha. I gotcha. Yeah, you were in college, I think we were in college right around the same time. You started in like the late ’90s, like ’99?

Sean DallasKidd:
Yep, yep, yep.

Maurice Cherry:
Graduated in ’03?

Sean DallasKidd:
Yep. [inaudible 00:27:33].

Maurice Cherry:
Yep. Same here. Same here. Tell me what you remember from that time.

Sean DallasKidd:
Ooh. Well, when you say that, the first thing that comes to my mind was 9/11, just because I remember that moment very specifically. I was an RA at SCAD and woke up to one of the towers falling.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Sean DallasKidd:
That was just a trip of a day, and the ripple effects of that are felt today. This is why we take our shoes off at airports, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Sean DallasKidd:
So 20-something years later. But beyond that, I would say some of the things that really were interesting to me at the time was the evolution in music. I remember there’s a funny moment when I was walking around River Street or that sort of downtown area in Savannah, and I saw a bus outside for this band called OutKast, and I went, “I wonder what they’re all about.” Little did I know that the OutKast was coming to us all, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Sean DallasKidd:
It’s the same sort of time when the Gorillaz made their first album which is just a mix of every kind of genre possible with layered animation for this sort of virtual band, and they’re still making amazing music now. And so, it was just a really, I think, funky time because it was this age, similar to now, of transition, right? So when you’re a designer, a couple years prior, everyone was using hand tools to do typography and all that sort of stuff, and we were there at that moment when it was like, “Okay, so we’re getting into Pork Express and we’re doing Adobe,” and you’re learning these new programs. Now in hindsight, you know those teachers barely knew those programs too because it was so new.

And so, you’re getting into the age of digital publishing in the middle of this sort of like what’s happening in the world because everything, America’s the safe space and now this thing happened, and everyone’s unified for six months. It was just a wild time. Then you’ve got this technological boom happening, and then you get sped out into this world where a couple years later, an iPhone pops out. It’s a very reminiscent, minus the pandemic part, what’s happening today. It was just chaos.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, you really had to be around during that time to realize the gargantuan amount of technological advancements that have happened from 2000 to now. I mean, you talk about iPhone, but then just a whole bunch of other technologies and stuff, even the way that we do design online. I mean, back then design was slicing up a table in Dreamweaver and posting that on the web. Now it’s all browser with layouts and flexbox and all that sort of stuff, not to mention other service side technologies and stuff.

I mean, I was in college in ’99. I had started as a computer science major, computer science, computer engineering because I wanted to be a web designer. I had cut my teeth in high school in the computer lab at my mom’s job because she taught at a college. I cut my teeth reverse engineering websites, and I made something on GeoCities, and my mom was like, “Why you putting our address on the internet?” I was like, “We live in rural Alabama. Nobody knows who we are.” But I went to school, went to Morehouse, majoring in computer science thinking that was web design, right?

Sean DallasKidd:
Well, it was. I mean, I remember I had to do HTML coding because I was taking some program classes, and for people who don’t know, there’s a program called BASIC and Pascal.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh yeah, yeah.

Sean DallasKidd:
C++. I was taking all those. The internet back in the day was code. ,And then you’d upload images and like you said, you’re doing slices and all that, and now you’ve got… But what was cool about that is lacking today, it feels like to me, is that there was all this experimentation, right? You’d have these Easter eggs on the side, you’re like, “[inaudible 00:31:50] scroll left or right, up or down. Am I navigating through this weird wormhole?” Whereas now everything’s on these sort of modular boxes, and so there’s shades of vanilla essentially, and then however powerful your imagery is, but people are also picking up the same sort of trends on en masse at this point, which is one of the sort of fears or outputs that might become AI down the line is Marvel movie number 856.

Maurice Cherry:
Right.

Sean DallasKidd:
But I think back then there was a great experimentation and we were all sort of learning and playing around, and I think that was probably part of the happiness people were experiencing originally with sort of the Web3, NFT space, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Sean DallasKidd:
It kind of had that same energy. It had some wrinkles to it. It had a little bit of dirt in the fingernails of we’re figuring it out and we’re going to make art and it’s going to be awesome and we’ve got our own closed loop, and then [inaudible 00:33:00].

Maurice Cherry:
I attended a metaverse conference in the metaverse. Was that last year? I think it was last year. It was last year I’m thinking about it, yeah. I attended a metaverse conference in the metaverse, and one of the sessions this guy was talking about digital real estate, and he’s like, “Yeah, we have this digital world and you can buy these plots of digital land.” Somebody during the presentation bought a $10,000 plot of land that only exists in the metaverse, and it made me think of, do you remember The Million Dollar Homepage?

Sean DallasKidd:
No.

Maurice Cherry:
The Million Dollar Homepage was basically, it’s probably still online, to be completely honest, but it’s basically you bought pixels on this homepage. Say you had a 88 x 31 ad tile or something, you could buy the area of that 88 x 31, and it’s like a dollar per pixel and put an ad up there. People were just buying spaces and putting up all kinds of stuff on there, and that’s what it felt like. It’s like this digital real estate that doesn’t really exist, but you’re kind of buying into it for the hopes of it becoming something in the future which I guess is like real real estate.

Sean DallasKidd:
It’s so funny to me, the whole digital real estate now. Whatever it starts to morph into in five, 10 years will be what it is, and everyone will come back to this podcast episode and laugh at me for saying it, but the reason why real estate exists and has value in real life is because we live on one planet. It’s literally a finite resource, right? This is where we breathe, hopefully, and have food and light and all this sort of other great stuff. And so, there’s X amount of space for X amount of people, and there are prime pieces on it.

In a virtual world, much like if we didn’t have to worry about time or eating or breathing, we live in this vastly, huge universe like in the real world. The digital world is the same thing where it’s like it’s infinitely large. There’s, in actuality, no real prime real estate because you can own one square inch and have it feel like a million square inches or you can just go to a different section of virtual town and make your own thing. Yeah, the real estate part is quite interesting in terms of how they attain it or how they attribute an X, Y, Z coordinate to it. It’s not a place.

Right, right. Yeah, in a way, it just sort of felt like it was kind of just like you’re buying a plot in a subdivision because it only exists in that particular metaversal world that we happen to be in, because the metaverse is many different worlds. It’s not, as you’re sort of saying how earth is one finite resource, the metaverse is a whole bunch of stuff.
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Sean DallasKidd:
Yeah, I could literally make my own planet in the metaverse, in my own solar system in the metaverse. So why do I need to buy a 50 pixel by 800 pixel piece of property across the street from Snoop Dogg’s one place?

Maurice Cherry:
Right. And Sean, he paid $10,000 for it, and the guy was wearing an NFT suit or something, and he kept showing off like, “I can show off my NFTs on my suit.” I was like, “This is giving me a headache. I don’t even know what to make of this.”

Sean DallasKidd:
That’s probably a slam. I think there’s always what’s presented on the surface and then what’s happening on the back end and part [inaudible 00:36:48], “Hmm, did you really buy that? Was that a plan?” Like, okay.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Those early days, in the 2000s, as you mentioned, on the web, it was really sort of experimental with publishing and stuff. Now after you graduated, tell me about your early career because you got into media and publishing afterwards, right?

Sean DallasKidd:
Correct. Yeah, so I had a couple of gigs prior, but I would say my professional career really kickstarted in the publishing world. I worked for Future Publishing, Ziff Davis, and Maker Media. I started over at Ziff Davis and now Ziff Davis was really about video game magazines. I was working on their PC focused gaming magazine and then started getting really curious. I’ve always been, I would say, hardworking and curious, sort of always looking to push my edges. And so, I was proactive about reaching out to other publisher or other magazines if they needed help designing pages. And so, I was very proactive and worked with Electronic Gaming Monthly or PlayStation Magazine or Xbox Magazine and all these things just so I can get more experience quicker.

Then I transitioned over to Future, which is like the sort of, they were essentially Coca-Cola and Pepsi as holders, and so they had the reverse version of everything. While I was at Future, I started their custom content division, and so that was working directly with brands to develop branded, independent magazines, websites, apps, podcasts for folks like Best Buy or NVIDIA, brands like Paul Reed Smith Guitars, did a crocheting magazine, all sorts of stuff. And so, that helped do a couple of things of giving me a brief and a business objective for the brands we did partner with, and then gave me the license to concept and develop an entire magazine, for example, that would service those needs and what those sections would be and sort of design language that would go into that, not only that printed piece, but the digital footprint as well.

And so, it was a really great time because at that moment we were making the transition, the death of print was happening, as I said at the time, and so not only were we doing magazines, but it allowed me to do websites, it allowed me to do apps because the iPad had come out. And so, we were looking at how do you translate brand DNA into a digital platform space, which was a really interesting moment that I would call back to the sort of tensions that are happening today. It was really weird because people had this sort of cognitive dissidents between this magazine I’m holding is the brand. And it’s like, no, the brand is the brand, what your brand stands for and your tone and how you sort of approach things and it happens to be a magazine, but it can also be a website, it can also be a podcast, it can also be an iPad app or a tablet app.

You can start to see the split of people that didn’t want to adopt or learn, and then the people who leaned into it, and I’m always been the one that just leans into the chaos because it never looks as crazy on the inside as it does on the outside, and that’s where all the opportunity is. And so, that was a really great moment to go and take that experience over to Maker, because instead of working on multiple brands, this was making one brand that had the business, Maker Media, it had the printed magazines, Craft Magazine and Make Magazine. It then had a body of different websites and then it also had Maker Fair.

And so, now you’re looking at how do you take a brand and have it stretch out into these various forms because they found themselves there and then create order around it and really sort of bring it home so that it could grow and thrive in the midst of the quote, unquote, “death of print.” It’s still around. It’s still doing very well because I think part of it was learning that your brand, believing and knowing that the brand is bigger than the mass at the end of the day or has the ability to be.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, was it kind of a shift to go from working in these publishing companies to going in-house, working with agencies? You also have worked with JWT, worked for FleishmanHillard, now you’re at DemonstratexDDW. Was it a big shift making that change?

Sean DallasKidd:
Yeah, I mean, the days are different. It was interesting. I feel like I had a soft entry, I’ll call it soft, because before going into fully external agencies, I worked in-house at Discovery Communications. They did Discovery Channel, Learning Channel, Animal Planet, and so I was helping with the Investigation Discovery launch and show launches there as well as Velocity Network, and so that was the agency inside. You had to develop a pitch concept, pitch it to the marketing team or the showrunner and come up with marketing campaigns that way. And so, that was a good segue before going fully agency because FleishmanHillard is one of the big global PR agencies, so was J Walter Thompson which is now Wunderman Thompson, and so one’s Omnicom, a sort of agency holding company.

I guess I always did this. I went from Pepsi to Coke or Coke to Pepsi, and so went over to J Walter Thompson and did the same thing, but I think the transition at Discovery really helped out because it gave me insight and understanding on what are the different outputs that come in advertising, what the digital lens, what are people looking for in terms of making commercials or campaign programs. It started to really give me the language and became a good test bed for me in that transition.

Fleishman gave me, I would say, my PhD in quickly pivoting your mind. I worked not only nationally but sort of globally as well. And so, I worked on everything from sort of data security to consumer goods to FinTech to healthcare, you name it. And so, I would get briefs that range from internal communications programs, crisis management programs, general awareness programs, and really focused on creative and content strategy while I was there. At nine o’clock in the morning, you’re talking about the future of electronic payments in developing countries. In the afternoon, you’re talking about the future of medicine. And so, your brain has to be able to pivot because you’re going to be in a room with a bunch of C-suite executives talking about and really having to understand the background information and sort of ways in which culture was moving.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, from this point where you’re at in your career, what does the future of agencies look like?

Sean DallasKidd:
I would say that the future of agency is going to have to be personal. I think that interesting part, and this is why I think AI literacy is so important right now is it gives smaller, medium-sized agencies an opportunity to scale up outputs if done properly, if integrated properly into your workflows. I think that because we’re going to have so many different digital touchpoints that are super niche, you’re going to have to get very personal and personalized in your messaging. I think that the physical interaction and experience is going to be highly coveted, and people are going to appreciate that a lot more because no matter how amazing that virtual experience is, people still need, just have a genetic need to engage with other people and smell the same thing, be in the same room in a very real way. That’s not to say that in 20 years there’ll be some matrix version of that reality, but until then I do think that people getting together and engaging with each other is going to be super important, but I do think those will be more curated, more selective kinds of engagement points with folks.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I think there’s been so much talk about data-driven outcomes and seeing what the data says and all that, but at the end of the day, you’re still dealing with people. I mean, even with this AI stuff, I see so many videos on TikTok and YouTube about people telling you how to craft the perfect prompts for GPT and all this sort of stuff, and I think what it’s still boils down to is that at the end of the day humans are still the entry point.

Sean DallasKidd:
Well, you’re still going to be the decision-maker at the end of the day.

Maurice Cherry:
Right, right.

Sean DallasKidd:
If you are essentially at a 12th grade level and GPTed your way into life and you find yourself there as a 26-year-old, really do the math on that. You started out and you GPTed your way from 18 to 26, the wheels are going to fall out from under you because at a certain point you’re going to be in a room and you need to be able to answer the questions and defend the solution to someone else, and if you don’t know your stuff, because you’ve been essentially the parrot for this fishnet of an answer that your AI gave you, the trust won’t be there. That’s what all the access and the ability to repeat opportunity comes from earning, cultivating trust over time, and that’s a human thing. And so, if you get to the point to where you are pointless, then you won’t as a person have any need to be in the room with people. And so, I don’t know if I lost the point on that one, but I do think that’s a bit of-

Maurice Cherry:
No, no, no, I think you’re spot on.

Sean DallasKidd:
Yeah, it’s a balance.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What have been some of the most important lessons you’ve learned in your career?

Sean DallasKidd:
Being comfortable, getting uncomfortable is the most important lesson I’ve learned in my career. I’ve touched on it over the course of our conversation, but being proactive when transition happens, jumping into the chaos, because I firmly believe that’s where the opportunity lies, and when that new messy space opens, if you’re over there first, you get to make mistakes on a small scale, right? Imagine putting out a bad tweet when Twitter just started or putting up a lame Instagram post when Instagram first started. That’s the best time to do it. You can learn how the audience interacts on the channel and get feedback and get better. You do not want to be doing that high wire act in the middle of the Super Bowl for the first time.

Getting into that space, understanding the language, understanding the nuance and the flow of energy there gets you smart on it because people will eventually come there because that’s where all the changes, that’s where all the new is, that’s where all sort of cultural influencers are being born and sparking new kinds of innovations. Eventually everyone’s going to get there. So always being comfortable with getting uncomfortable is hard, it’s uncomfortable, but I think the reward there is the most fruitful for a long-term career as a creative, not as somebody.

I think you’ve probably seen this over the years, there’s lots of people who used to be a designer, used to be a creative, used to be in marketing, and the difference is not just some of the systemic stuff, but it’s staying relevant, right? In order to stay relevant in today, you need to be smarter than what’s happening today, which means you need to be ahead of the curve a little bit, and that’s a hard thing to keep up with. You got to be the Lil Wayne of the industry. He’s been doing it since he was 12, so he just stays up there. And so, you got to be the Lil Wayne of whatever you’re doing in life.

Maurice Cherry:
I still remember Lil Wayne from those CDs in the ’90s, No Limit and everything.

Sean DallasKidd:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Sean DallasKidd:
And Cash Money.

Maurice Cherry:
Cash Money.

Sean DallasKidd:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
What is it that keeps you motivated and inspired? Because I can imagine this is not an easy thing to sustain, this kind of thing with being comfortable with being uncomfortable because you’re sort of always kind of jolted out of balance in a way, I would imagine.

Sean DallasKidd:
I mean, to be very straightforward with it, family keeps me motivated. I have a kiddo and she is a spark of joy, and so that situation keeps me motivated to keep wanting to do better from just a sort of fundamental lizard brain section of my mind. Creating room and space and opportunity for her and creating, I’ve seen my dad do that so I can do it and I can one-up him, right? Having that yard stick in front of you I think is a great driver.

Then I would say for me another motivator is just I am curious and I feel like my brain is creatively broken. It’s like a faucet that doesn’t turn off. You hear the conversations with people going through these dry periods, and I’m not trying to toot my own horn or anything there, but it’s like my brain just does not shut up with things it wants to do or think about or see. I think that comes from living that, trying to have a more balanced life of… And you ask me the question, what are some of the hobbies and things that you like to do that kind of spark you, those are the sustaining breaths that help keep passion and curiosity going.

And so, when you cultivate or try to cultivate a life where Monday is not a dreadful day, Monday is just Monday, and now the dreadful part of the day is, well, now people are going to expect me to respond to an email because it’s not the weekend. But at the end of the day, I’m writing or designing or talking to people or trying a product or trying this or going to an event. I’m like, “That’s dope.” It’s a good thing and it just takes effort to stay on the ball, but I think that just comes with it.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, who are some of the people that have helped you reach this point in your career?

Sean DallasKidd:
I would like to think myself for… No, I was like, I couldn’t remember that new [inaudible 00:53:25] quote. I’d like to thank myself for the hard work. But honestly, I think it’s a bit of that, just you got to know your center and you got to know your truth and you got to play to your strengths and you got to build up your weaknesses. I’ve been blessed in meeting very kind people that have cracked the door open and given me opportunity. That comes again from the fact that proving or being in that sort of energy state where you are proactively looking to grow. I’m more willing to open the door to someone that I see that’s working hard and looking to grow and looking to be challenged than someone that’s sitting on their laurels. Luckily, the people I’ve engaged with were willing to open the door.

Then I have a great network of friends and colleagues to be able to bounce ideas off of, hear what they’re going through, take lessons from that, and make connections and references. You can’t do everything by yourself. It’s one of the sort of points that I always teach. I always stress to my daughter, she wants to become the next Hayao Miyazaki. And I go, “That’s awesome, and Hayao Miyazaki not only is a great drawer and a writer and all that sort of stuff, but he also has studio space that he has to pay mortgage on and employees, and so he has a CFO and he is got da, da, da, da, da. He is got to work about licensing deals and everything else.” So it’s like you got to have a good network as well and make those connections.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What kind of work do you want to be doing?

Sean DallasKidd:
Man, on my bucket list, I want to do some shit in space. I really want to do something in space.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Sean DallasKidd:
I’m going to put that energy out on this podcast. If somebody knows someone in any country that’s doing something in space in the next five years, it would be great. I think that would just be a trip. I don’t want to go underwater. I don’t want to go into any of that deep sea stuff, but space would be kind of just like I feel like that would be a mind-altering, crazy thing and inspirational thing to do. Something dealing with logistics. Doesn’t that sound cool? I’m working on an interplanetary logistics program, or I’m like, this new bougie hotel that’s in low earth orbit, and so I’ve got to do a promotional campaign or video or collaboration thing. That just sounds dope to me. So that’s what I want to do.

Maurice Cherry:
I interned with NASA for two years when I was in college. So it’s funny because we were talking about college and you mentioned 9/11. 9/11 was one of a turning point for me too because the program that I was in, the way they had it set up, it was based off of Ronald E. McNair who was in the Challenger explosion, and so his family put together a foundation, whatever. So I was a McNair scholar at Morehouse, and the part of the NASA thing was that you interned at NASA for two years and then afterwards you basically had your pick of any NASA facility to work for. So I was like, I had done my first one in California, did my second one in Alabama, and I thought I was all set, until 9/11 happened, and then the funding shifted towards the creation of this new department called the Department of Homeland Security.

Sean DallasKidd:
[inaudible 00:57:22].

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, and they were like, “Yeah.” I remember they called us all into the office and they were like, “Yeah, the seniors will still be able to go forward to work at NASA facilities,” and I was a junior at the time, but they were like, “the rest of y’all, you’re on your own.” I was like, “Oh man.” I say all of that to say that I think now, certainly 20-plus years in the future from when I graduated, there’s probably more opportunities for designers to work with NASA and space than there were back then. I think back then it was still pretty, I don’t want to say confined to academia, but you’ve got even people on TikTok who are budding astrophysicists that are doing stuff that has to deal with space and everything. I feel like it’s possible.

Sean DallasKidd:
Well, yeah, I mean, definitely think it’s possible. My mom actually used to work for NASA. She’s a mathematician, and I think the terms they used to use back in the day though for people like my mom was data analysts.

Maurice Cherry:
Ah, yeah.

Sean DallasKidd:
Give them a data analyst title versus a data scientist title, save yourself a hundred thousand dollars, and they’ll hide those fingers in the back somewhere. I do think that the opportunity today is a lot more open, but the work, it’ll be curious to see how willing people are to do the work because you always see do the work as the hashtag, but the sort of underlying effort, sustained effort of doing the work is the great equalizer in a lot of ways. You will get tired and then you’ve got to get that seventh and eighth wind at the end of the day.

Maurice Cherry:
Look at you. Your mom was a hidden figure. Look at that.

Sean DallasKidd:
Yeah, it was weird. It’s funny, I’ve got these old photos and stuff of her on some airplane thing.

Maurice Cherry:
Really?

Sean DallasKidd:
Well, the thing about D.C. is back when I was there in the ’80s, it’s like a bunch of little Black ladies that run all the sort of inner operations of the government at a certain point because they were all the secretaries and they were working in, they were the data analyst or this kind of thing, and they were just working in the back.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Sean DallasKidd:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to kind of wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, about your work, and everything? Where can they find that online?

Sean DallasKidd:
I am so Google-able at this point in time. You can literally type my name in, but you can follow me at kidisgoat, K-I-D is goat, G-O-A-T. You can look at the company, we are demonstrate.com or you can look at ddw.com if you’re interested in branding work. But that’s where you can find me. Look me up, I’m out there.

Maurice Cherry:
All right, sounds good. Sean DallasKidd, I want to thank you so, so, so much for coming on the show. I really think that your authenticity and the passion that you have for your work really shines through. I mean, even just from your early days of getting into publishing with the work that you’re doing now for Demonstrate, I like what you said about having to be in the work so you kind of stay one step ahead. It’s that sort of thinking that certainly I think is going to take all of us as creatives far, but certainly it’s been such a boon for your career and for your life, and I’m really excited to see the Sean DallasKidd project in low earth orbit one day. I think it’s going to happen.

Sean DallasKidd:
Thank you so much.

Maurice Cherry:
So thank you so much. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Sean DallasKidd:
All right, thank you.

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Justin Shiels

How are your plans for this year going? Good? Not so good? Luckily, it’s not too late to reset, break any unhealthy patterns, and get on track so you can live a life rooted in passion and purpose. And guess what? This week’s guest, Justin Shiels, is just the person to help you make that happen.

We talked about his theme for this year — intentional growth — and Justin spoke about the big life change that inspired him to not only take a break, but to write a book to help others experience their own breakthrough. Justin also shared what it was like coming of age in New Orleans, how his stint as a creative director in the advertising agency shaped his current work, and talked about how he finds joy and maintains his creativity. Justin is a real ray of sunshine, and his energy for changing hearts and minds is what we need more of in this world!

Interview Transcript

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

Justin Shiels:
Hey there. My name is Justin Shiels and I’m a creative consultant, a speaker and an author. Honestly, what I love is solving complex problems using the lens of emotional intelligence. And so a lot of my focus is on how to use empathy and design and illustration to create cultural moments.

Maurice Cherry:
How’s the year been going for you so far?

Justin Shiels:
Ooh, 2023 is a good year so far. I feel like 2022 for me was my year of the pivot. There were just a lot of changes. I got a book deal, I switched to a new job in marketing, and I feel like through that time of working on the book, finishing the book, writing and illustrating, I changed as a person. And so 2023, I stepped into this new year focused on intentional growth. That’s kind of my theme of this year. How can I be centered in my vision as a creative professional and continue to grow in a sustainable way?

Maurice Cherry:
In what way does that intentional growth look like?

Justin Shiels:
Intentional growth for me is really focusing on delivering incredible content via social media platforms. This was my year of embracing video and not being afraid to show my face on camera. That has always been a little bit of a scary part of my creative process. It’s been opening myself up to new speaking opportunities, and it’s been teaching workshops around emotional intelligence and how to reset your life as well as how to be a better creative professional.

Maurice Cherry:
And so let’s talk about this book deal that you mentioned. The book’s coming out later this year, right?

Justin Shiels:
Yes, that’s correct. In December 2023, my upcoming title, The Reset Workbook will come out with Spruce Books, which is an imprint of Penguin Random House.

Maurice Cherry:
Can you tell us a little bit about it?

Justin Shiels:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, as much as you can. I mean, we want people to buy it, of course, but tell us a bit about it.

Justin Shiels:
The Reset Workbook is a guided journal that utilizes emotional intelligence to help readers discover their inner magic. It includes some original content created by me, lots of beautiful illustrations and really meaningful questions that help you on your self-reflection journey. I like to say that the book really came from my experience of having a total life reset.

In 2016, I went through a really intense breakup, and that breakup was profound for a number of reasons, but the reason that I think it changed my life is that it opened me up to the idea of going to therapy for the first time, and therapy for me was transformational. Reading books, journaling, creating new habits around how to be a healthier person all came through this experience, this transformational life experience, and I wanted to take the things that I learned along the way in that journey and build it into something that is meaningful and useful for people.

Maurice Cherry:
So with that in mind, what do you want readers to take away from the book?

Justin Shiels:
The biggest thing that anyone should take from The Reset Workbook is that you can break free of unhelpful patterns and live with more passion and purpose. I like to think of this as a gateway for people that maybe aren’t used to journaling regularly, that want to do some internal reflection and some self-discovery and learn more about themselves. And for some people that end up purchasing the book, my hope is that this is your gateway to trying therapy. I know that in my past experience and especially with my family, the idea of going to therapy was controversial, and I’m trying to normalize the idea that mental health and mental wellness is important specifically in the Black community, in the LGBT community, and it’s a tool, a useful tool for us to grow and change and develop.

Maurice Cherry:
I feel like a lot of conversations around therapy now are, I think they’re starting to become a lot more commonplace. I hear about it in videos and podcasts, et cetera. It’s starting to become, I should say, a pretty common talking point from what I hear that folks are like, “Are you in therapy? Are you going to therapy? You need to go to therapy,” that kind of thing. So it sounds like your book is going to help really facilitate that. That’s good.

Justin Shiels:
Oh, 100%. I feel like millennials we’re much more open to doing that deep reflection and understanding how we can grow and change. I still feel like there’s the opportunity for more people to explore therapy, and I am very thankful to be an advocate in this space, encouraging people to step outside their comfort zones and open themselves up to some new opportunities.

Maurice Cherry:
Now the book comes out in December. Do you have some things that you’re doing leading up to that?

Justin Shiels:
Yes, absolutely. Leading up to the book launch, I’m hosting a number of workshops and doing speaking engagements with the variety of organizations, and my hope is really to just spread inspirational stories, give encouragement and also to teach people how to make meaningful change in their lives.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s talk about your overall work. You said something earlier about last year kind of being this pivot, and part of that was going into marketing and how this whole process of doing that with the book changed you, and it sounds like one of the outcomes of this was creating your own company, your media company called SoCurious. And you wear a lot of hats in that. You’re a creative consultant, you’re a speaker, you’re an author as you mentioned, you’re a coach. Tell me more about that transition.

Justin Shiels:
Yeah. I think so much of being a creative is learning how to wear many hats. For me, my creative journey started in advertising, and so I started as a graphic designer at an ad agency and was able to work my way up to being a creative director at an ad agency. That was an incredible experience, very, very stressful, very, very intense. But what was beautiful about it was that I learned how to become an incredible storyteller as well as have the capacity to work under intense pressure. It also was useful in learning how to manage teams and how to be an advocate for my employees. I feel like working in advertising was really my first step in learning emotional intelligence. So I transitioned from my position at the ad agency and started a job as a creative director for a tech company.

What was different about this experience was that it was much more of a marketing role, and so my focus instead of just coming up with the creative concepts, I did that as well as ran the ad campaigns or utilized agency partners to run ad campaigns and other freelancers, and it’s like the culmination of all these skills come together to kind of help me become the person that I am today, someone that loves storytelling, that loves to create, and that also loves marketing. And so I’m using all of those skills now trying to spread this idea that emotional intelligence matters and that we can reflect and grow and change.

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds like from the name of the company, curiosity is a big part of the work that you do.

Justin Shiels:
Yes, 100% curiosity has followed me at every step of my journey. As a kid, I stayed in the library. I love reading books, and I as a child would just sit and read and read about anything that I could. Similarly, I feel like creativity has always been at the heart of the work that I do. So learning to draw as a young person, focusing my attention on learning skills like Photoshop and other animation programs, it’s all been a part of who I am as a person from the very start.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you mentioned with your time being a creative director in the advertising field, how that taught you certain skills with running a team, et cetera. What are some important lessons you’ve learned on this leg of your creative journey, creating this inspirational content for curious and thoughtful people?

Justin Shiels:
Yeah. I feel like we live in a time where people are overwhelmed by the amount of information that we get in the day, and specifically, we receive so much negative information in our day, primarily from the news, sometimes from our social feeds. It just comes from a variety of ways, and I wanted to focus my energy and my intention on creating positive content that encourages people. My focus with everything that I do is how can I give just a tiny little spark of joy to someone’s day and encourage them to think about the deeper questions of what it means to be a human being in this world.

Maurice Cherry:
So you’re currently in Austin, right? Austin, Texas?

Justin Shiels:
Yes, that’s correct.

Maurice Cherry:
Tell me what it’s like there for you. Are you tapped into the creative community there?

Justin Shiels:
Now, I’ll tell you one thing that I am loving about my experience in Austin is that it is a wonderful city that has encouraged me to get outside and do things. I have never been an outdoor person at any point in my life, and I moved here and now I’m going on hikes and exploring new outdoor terrain in ways that I have never done. It’s actually pretty incredible. Another really great benefit of living in Austin for me is the people here are genuinely incredible, and I’ve been able to connect with a lot of like-minded Black creatives primarily that work in tech, but that also are doing their own set of interesting projects. And so being able to cultivate a community in a new city, I’ve only been here three years, it has been great, and I feel actually pretty proud that I was able to do that, especially with the constraints around living through the kind of strange and unusual times of the past few years.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, the pandemic, I feel like really threw a wrench in a lot of people’s just general social activities, but we’re starting to get out there and do things again. I haven’t been to Austin since… God, when was the last time I was in Austin, Texas? It was for SXSW, I know that. It might have been. Yeah, that was the last time. It was 2015 was the last time. I was supposed to go in 2020. The company that I was working for at the time, we had a presence at SX [South By] and we were going to go, but then Coronavirus.

So then all of that got canceled and we were all waiting to see if it was going to happen. I already had my tickets and everything and then just all got canceled and shut down, so I need to try to make it back. Austin’s a lot of fun. It’s a lot of fun, especially during SXSW, but then there’s just so many folks and it’s just mad crowded. I think it came back last year. Right? Last year was the first time it was in person for a couple of years.

Justin Shiels:
It did come back last year. And you are 100% correct. It gets so crowded here in Austin during SXSW. It is packed, but definitely make your way down. You got to come back and enjoy some of this music and food and just some of these outdoor experiences I was telling you about.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I need to come during the non-SXSW season. It’s a nice conference. I mean, I used to go really back in its heyday when it was really something, but now I’m just like, I’m old. There’s too many people. Like y’all need to. It’s a lot, but I need to come during the off season. So you’ve been in Austin for three years, that’s not where you’re from originally I would take it.

Justin Shiels:
No, I’m actually from Memphis, Tennessee originally. Grew up 901 proud, but I left when I turned 18 to go to college in New Orleans. I went to Loyola University, a Jesuit institution, and I ended up staying in New Orleans after I graduated for 16 years. And so New Orleans is one of those places that just is still very, very near and dear to my heart. I literally just got back from a wonderful one week vacation there where I got to catch up with all of my old friends.

I’m not going to lie, I miss New Orleans. I miss New Orleans a lot, but I feel like a lot of the significant life changes occurred because I was confident enough to move away. Honestly, I feel like stepping outside of my comfort zone pushed me to become a better creative and encouraged me to push myself in some new and exciting ways.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, taking it back to Memphis for a second, I mean, you grew up there. You went to high school and everything there. Were you really a creative kid into design and illustration back then?

Justin Shiels:
I’ve always been a super creative person for sure. I learned to illustrate very, very young, and as a kid, my mom got us a computer. I think I was in the fourth or fifth grade, and that computer was incredible. I don’t know if you remember AOL days.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, yeah.

Justin Shiels:
We got that CD in the mail with AOL, and it opened my mind up because it went from, oh my gosh, my entire world is Memphis to, oh my gosh, my entire world is the world. And so way back then I started an email newsletter before email newsletters were a thing. It was called Iconoclast. That was the very first kind of side hustle project that I had as a little person sending out this monthly email about art. And so creativity, developing content and doing storytelling has been a big part of my life. In high school, my focus was really on visual art. I did a little bit of theater, but I feel like the computer was really their turning point because I loved Photoshop and building little tiny animations during that time period, too.

Maurice Cherry:
So you were a real pioneer back then, sounds like.

Justin Shiels:
I don’t know if I would’ve thought of myself as a pioneer, but I feel like the ideas around communication and media have always been central to my identity.

Maurice Cherry:
So like you said, you ended up moving from Memphis, going to New Orleans, went to Loyola, like you said, studied graphic design, but then later after that you went to the University of New Orleans and that’s where you got your master’s degree. When you look back at those times, what do you remember the most? What stands out to you?

Justin Shiels:
Yeah. What I think is beautiful about the city of New Orleans is there are no barriers of entry. Every single person in this city is one degree of separation from the mayor probably.

Maurice Cherry:
Really?

Justin Shiels:
So if you have an idea, you can start it. There is nothing that will stop you from starting it. During my time in New Orleans, a lot of my core focus was on building brands around culture. So I ran an online magazine called InvadeNOLA for six years. That was a passion project of passion projects, and it kind of came from, there was an article in a local magazine that said that all these invaders had come and they were ruining New Orleans, and I was a transplant to the city that fell in love with the city.

I moved to New Orleans before Katrina. I of course evacuated but came back after Katrina and stayed, chose that place as my new home. And so I felt really passionately about the local culture as well as our capacity as transplants to create positive change. So I focused my content on the millennials living in the city, doing creative projects that were interesting, and I was able to build it into a pretty popular and successful organization, writing regular content, sending out lots of email newsletters and publishing a few printed books and magazine issues.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow, look at that. So what’s you’re describing with InvadeNOLA… That’s what it was called? Invade New Orleans?

Justin Shiels:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, it sounds a lot like, and I don’t know if this even still exists, but do you remember, or does the phrase Not For Tourists sound familiar?

Justin Shiels:
Oh, yeah. Yes, yes, yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Not For Tourists had something like that in some major cities where they would… It was almost like a guide to that city in every city, almost like Frommer’s, which I guess is old school. I don’t know if they still make those, but they’re like these city guides, but it’s written by the people that lived there, the locals, so they can tell you what’s good, what’s bad, do this, don’t do that, that kind of thing.

Justin Shiels:
Yes. Actually, the book that I published during that time period was called The Invader’s Guide to New Orleans, which was a tourist guide for under the radar things to do in the City.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice. So you were, again, another pioneer in publishing, email, books, magazines. And just to give a sense of when this is, so people know, this was what, mid 2000s?

Justin Shiels:
Yes. This would’ve been, I think I started the publication in 2010.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Justin Shiels:
Actually, it would’ve been 2009 to 2015-ish. That should be the right timeframe.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. All right. Yeah, no, that’s thinking of what all else was going along culturally during that time. So after you graduated, you’re big in this project, Invade was one of them. Another one that you created was called Venture Pop, right?

Justin Shiels:
Yes. So actually as I decided that I wanted to step away from the event culture, I as the founder of Invade, I ended up having to do so many local events, and a part of it was that I wanted to cover it for the magazine. A part of it was because I had made all these great connections and friends and wanted to support them, but it was actually taxing, right? I was going out almost every single night, and that just was not a sustainable lifestyle, especially because even though I’m an extrovert, I need a lot of time to recuperate, and my favorite way to recuperate is through my creative practice.

And so I was like, I really want to lean into my creativity more, and it was just the perfect confluence of events. I went to a conference in Texas and ran into a woman that I knew from New Orleans at that conference, and we spent that weekend together going to all these really great speakers and seeing these really incredible workshops. I was so encouraged by that experience that I was like, we need to have this in New Orleans. And so I partnered with two women to start Venture Pop, and we successfully held three live conferences. They ended up being regional conferences that invited a lot of incredible creative talent to the city of New Orleans, and they were fun informational experiences that allowed people to grow in their creative journeys.

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds like there used to be this conference in Ohio in Cleveland called Weapons of Mass Creation Fest. It sounds like it was similar in scope to that where it’s not necessarily a design conference, it’s more like a creative conference, so it’s people of all kinds of creative stripes coming together and learning from each other and networking and fellowshipping and stuff like that.

Justin Shiels:
Yes, that is 100% true. While my experience has been in graphic design and web design and then advertising, I think instead of having it focus on any one specific discipline, a big part of our goal with Venture Pop was to create experiences that allowed people to push their creativity to its limits, to learn new skills, to create new things. In many ways, we were kind of a part of that content creator movement that we’re living in right now.

Maurice Cherry:
In what way?

Justin Shiels:
I think in many ways we were bolstering the idea that in order to become an incredible creator, you have to find and define your own creative voice and share that message with the world. I feel like that actually encouraged me on my journey of having a public facing persona that spreads positive messages on the internet.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you’ve worked for some agencies as well. You alluded earlier that you were a creative director in the advertising industry, so you’ve worked for FSC Interactive, you worked for Springbox, you worked for Fragment Media Group, and we don’t have to spend a lot of time talking about them because that was in your past, but when you look back at those experiences, when you think about them, what did they kind of teach you that you really still carry with you to this day?

Justin Shiels:
Through my time working in advertising, I had the opportunity to work with a variety of incredible clients in New Orleans. I actually was fortunate enough to do a rebranding of the City of New Orleans, the New Orleans Tourism Focus campaign where we did a full rebranding of the visual identity as well as creating commercials. I also had the opportunity to run the social channels for Visit New Orleans and here in Austin as a creative director, I worked with really awesome B2B clients, the most notable one, being Amazon Business.

As a full-time creative director, a lot of my focus was on how do you tell a compelling story through advertising and how do you communicate that information effectively? But the value of that experience more than anything is that it really exposed me to emotional intelligence. Naturally, I am kind of a chill guy. I have resting smiley face. I tend to be a little bit of a people pleaser. And so the experience of being a manager of people challenged me to learn about myself and grow. I had to recognize, understand, and manage my own emotions, but then I needed to also do that for other people, and that’s the heart of emotional intelligence. I really had to focus a lot on building my own self-awareness so that I was prepared for the relationship management that goes into managing a team of people.

Maurice Cherry:
I can imagine just in the advertising industry, having to do all of that on top of working with multiple clients and deadlines and changes, that’s a lot to pile on.

Justin Shiels:
It is so much hard work to create consistently under those circumstances, but it also is incredibly profound and awesome. I became a creative director, and this is crazy to say, because I saw the movie Boomerang. Have you seen this movie with Eddie Murphy?

Maurice Cherry:
Of course. Of course. Of course. It has been a constant… I mean, for me, it’s been a constant inspiration, but there’s so many people I’ve had on the show, and I plan to write an article about this one day about the impact of that movie in the Black creative industry. But no, go ahead. Go ahead, go on.

Justin Shiels:
Well, I mean, on rewatching, it’s incredibly problematic for a number of reasons. But eight-year-old Justin saw Boomerang, and I knew that I wanted to be a creative director before I knew what a creative director actually did for a living. I only knew if I can learn how to do the art for commercials, I can become a leader of teams. And so it put that bug in my ear that it was possible for someone like me, a Black man in America, to be able to lead advertising campaigns for big companies.

Maurice Cherry:
But of course not to be a Marcus Graham type.

Justin Shiels:
I am definitely not a Marcus Graham type at all, but it was such an influential movie because it just exposed me to the idea that that was even possible.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. How have you seen the creative industry evolve over the years?

Justin Shiels:
I feel like the biggest thing that has shifted and changed is the way that we disseminate information. I feel like early in my career, it was heavily focused on TV commercials. TV commercials, and print media were at their height when I graduated school in 2007, and then by 2008, the magazine industry was essentially shuddering because of the proliferation of internet media, new blogs, as well as the introduction of social media. So early in my career, I was like, there’s something special about social media, and I worked to be a part of that early on. So I’m signing up for all the services, making sure that I’m regularly posting content, and made that a big part of how I grew InvadeNOLA and how we worked with Venture Pop. I think the biggest change that we’ve seen over the course of the past few years is that it went from very few voices being able to control the narrative, to now it’s literally endless voices controlling the narrative.

Now, with that, I feel like there are some interesting challenges that have popped up. And so for example, when you look at how Instagram was five or six years ago versus how Instagram is now, not many people see the content that an individual produces. It’s just like, you can have, like me, nearly 10,000 followers and you’ll have a video that only a hundred people actually get to see. That is insane to me. It kind of takes away from the beauty of that platform, but I feel as though there is still this democratization of information, and in many ways it feels like everyone can have a voice and share their message to the world, even if it is being slightly dampened by these kind of changing norms on the platforms.

Maurice Cherry:
First of all, let me step back from what I was about to say. I hate how these different creative fields have been condensed into the term content creator. I hate that so much, but I say all that to say I see so many creators, and by creators I do mean podcasters, folks that make TikTok videos, et cetera, expressly saying that they’re doing what they’re doing or that the pitch that they’re doing for their audience is to appease the algorithm.

If you watch YouTube videos, it’s like, “Make sure you subscribe and hit the bell to get notifications,” or if you’re on TikTok, they’re like, “Could you please comment? Because I’ve been shadow banned.” It absolutely sucks how telecommunications has evolved to the point where we can take a message, broadcast it across the world, and yet we’re still beholden to these weird algorithmic things to get the message out to people. I mean, I understand it. I just don’t like it.

Justin Shiels:
Yeah. I think at the heart of that is we are always in a consistent battle between humanity and technology. I think as we continue to develop and grow, I’m obsessed with artificial intelligence right now, partially because I think it has the potential to upend the creative industry in many ways. But the only solace that I have is that people want to connect with people. They don’t want just information. And so it’s how can I be a real human being that shares parts of myself with the world as a way to connect with the people in my audience?

Maurice Cherry:
What I’m starting to see now, especially on some of these platforms that people have built, I wouldn’t necessarily say built content on, but certainly have built a following off of are starting to erode. Facebook ain’t what it used to be. Twitter for damn sure ain’t what it used to be. And so now people are having to go back to email, hey, there you go, go back to email or live events or other ways to try to connect with folks, because as you said earlier, there’s just so much information out there and it’s hard, I think, for people to try to really, I don’t know, grasp all of that, but I also think a lot of that information is pushed to us. There’s certainly information that we go out there and see and obtain on our own, but so much of information… I don’t even want to say gathering. A lot of stuff is just pushed to us.

I think I noticed this particularly this year. I mean, it’s not a new phenomenon, but I’ve started turning off my phone on Sundays. Saturday night before I go to bed, turn my phone off, I turn it back on Monday morning when I wake up, and that Sunday is so peaceful. I get stuff done, I cook, I catch up on a show. It is so peaceful. But it reminds me of how much information is constantly pushed to you and notifications and Twitter feeds and Instagram feeds, and so much stuff is coming at you in a way where you’re like, it’s relentless. You’re kind of bombarded with it.

Justin Shiels:
Yes. I feel like so many of us are addicted to doomscrolling, sitting on our couches and just absorbing information, absorbing information, absorbing information. I feel like so many of us actually need opportunities to create, and I tend to believe that everyone is creative. Sometimes that can be a controversial statement because many people are like, oh, I’m not creative. I work in accounting, or I work in tech and I don’t know how to be creative. But to me, creativity is using the skills that you have to come up with interesting solutions for problems. You can be creative while cooking or cleaning your home, or you can do it in the traditional forms like writing or illustrating or simply doing tiny doodles on the edges of your notebooks. That creativity is the impulse that I think we need to bolster in order to have a more beautiful world. That’s why I’m doing the work that I’m doing.

Maurice Cherry:
I imagine you’re also going to continue to explore that in the book that’s coming out.

Justin Shiels:
Absolutely. Right.

Maurice Cherry:
See how I tie that together? See how?

Justin Shiels:
I feel like so much of why I published The Reset Workbook was around how can we go through these life changes that we’ve had and come out of the other side with hope and inspiration. I think it’s really about pushing people to find new inspirations, pushing people to step outside their comfort zone, and really it’s focused on how can you design a life that you love.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you’ve mentioned though a lot of your journey as a creative and even I think growing up and always being into drawing an illustration how that’s really shaped your current path. What do you find to be the most rewarding part about what you do?

Justin Shiels:
The most rewarding part of what I do in my career and in my communications online is that I’m able to connect with real human beings by sharing parts of my story with the world. There is nothing more profound or interesting to me than to say something that feels like is totally niche and just me and have somebody connect with that on a really, really deep level and reach out to me via DM and message me saying, “Oh my God, you mentioned that you love Christmas movies on the Hallmark Channel because you can fall asleep during them and wake up and still know what was happening.” I always do that. That’s why I love them so much.

It’s like that kind of direct connection with people is just so profound and interesting to me. I would say though, the thing that is underscored throughout my career and specifically my persona online is that we are empowered to change our lives as frequently as we want. We can all have resets whenever we see fit. And I really want to underscore that idea that change is possible and it’s a good thing. It’s okay to embrace change, it’s okay to learn new things, and your life doesn’t have to be in total shambles to kind of need to reevaluate where you are in order to continue to be on a path of joy.

Maurice Cherry:
Speaking of that, how do you stay creative and inspired in your work so you can keep on that path?

Justin Shiels:
I am incredibly disciplined when it comes to my creativity. I try to either write or draw every single day no matter what. I have been doing this for the majority of my career, and so it started very early on. I would wake up before work and spend one hour of just creating for creativity’s sake. That has continued for years and years and years. Now that I’m working for myself, I don’t have to wake up as early. I can wake up at 7:00 and kind of get going, but the very first thing that I do every day is I journal. While I’m drinking my coffee, I read a little bit, and then based on what I read, I either write a reflection on what I read or I will create a piece of art related to how I’m feeling that morning. And that practice has been transformational in that it allows me to come up with new ideas and it serves as kind of the impetus for the content that I ultimately post on my social feeds.

Maurice Cherry:
So for people that are listening and they aspire to become creative professionals like you, what you’re doing, what advice would you give to them?

Justin Shiels:
If you want to be a creative person, you have to invest in the actual activity of creating. That’s all. It’s really that simple. If I see myself as a writer, all I have to do is write and I am a writer. The hard part is you have to figure out how writing fits into your schedule. We all are busy, busier than we’ve ever been and everything in our life is competing with our creativity. In order to commit to your creativity, you have to be willing to practice. And so that practice should be daily. If you can’t do daily, it should be every other day. If you can’t do every other day, it should be once a week. If you can’t do every week, it should be once a month. But the more that you flex those muscles and commit to practicing, the better you get. A part of getting better in my journey, at least, it’s being confident enough to share my work. And so you make regularly, you share regularly, and then through the course of that, you become the thing that you say that you’ve always wanted to be.

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds like it’s just this continual process of working till you get to that point. I mean, I don’t want to say fake it till you make it, but you’re kind of continually pushing yourself forward towards that goal.

Justin Shiels:
Yeah. I mean, it’s really a question of outcomes versus inputs. In many ways, when we’re setting a goal for our life, we always will focus only on the outcome of the goal as opposed to the things that we need to do in order to achieve the goal. And so following that same realm of as a creative professional or as a person that aspires to be, in this case, a visual artist, how do I become a visual artist? Well, the only way that you become a visual artist is by painting every day. When you paint every day, suddenly you are a visual artist.

Maurice Cherry:
It kind of sounds a little bit like the old, well, it’s not old, but the whole 10,000 hours thing that sometimes gets kind of tossed around. You have to do something continually to kind of build up to that.

Justin Shiels:
Yes, yes. I love that concept that if you’re willing to put 10,000 hours of effort into something, you will become an expert in that. It’s interesting because I don’t know that it… 10,000 hours seems arbitrary of course.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Justin Shiels:
It’s sticky. That’s why it’s so popular, but that’s arbitrary. I think it’s committing to daily practice, putting it out there regularly, and then through that process, growing and developing and changing. I feel like even over the course of my own career, I have had moments where I was creating things that I liked but I didn’t love, and I’m finally in a stage in my creative process where I’m like, “Wait, the things that I make are pretty dope, and I came up with this myself. It came from my brain specifically.” That has not always been the case, but I think it’s because I’m willing to put in the daily effort to continue to maximize my skillset, find my own voice, and also to just regularly develop new takes on things that I’ve made before.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What kind of work do you want to be doing?

Justin Shiels:
At my core, I am an artist and I am a teacher. Those are the two most important parts of my year of intentional growth, and so my focus is to continue to make great content to come out with a bestselling book, The Reset Workbook coming out in December, 2023. And I want to continue to teach both through workshops and through speaking engagements where I can help people amplify their lives, find joy, find peace, and encourage people to step into building their own version of happy.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to kind of wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, your work? Where can they find that online?

Justin Shiels:
You can find me online on most platforms at justinmadethat or at Justin Shiels, but the best way to connect is really to visit socurious.co. That’s socurious.co. From there, you can see many of the articles that I’ve written and you can sign up for my newsletter that I’ve been sending out since 2019 called The Weekly Reset. It helps people live a more intentional life, and it kind of pairs my personal philosophy with illustrations that I’ve created that give you a little bit of a pep talk during the week.

Maurice Cherry:
And the man writes some email newsletters. He’s been doing it since he was a teenager, so you know it’s good. You know it’s good. Justin Shiels, I just want to thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for just sharing your authenticity. I mean, I can really sense and feel the passion that you have for this behind your work, and I think that certainly in this time that we’re in, I’m sort of waving my arms about here, but with all the stuff that’s going on in the world right now, it’s good to have some sort of a way to know that while things may feel out of control, at the end of the day, what you can control is how you react to them. So whether that’s having that life reset or breaking unhealthy patterns, I think it’s really important to always know that, and I’m glad that the work that you’re doing is helping to get that message out to more people. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Justin Shiels:
Maurice, thank you so much. I really appreciate this opportunity.

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Matese Fields

When did you fall in love with design? While some people have always been able to tap into that creative spark, for others it might take some time trying different things until you find your way into design. Such is the case with this week’s guest, independent brand designer Matese Fields. His explorations have taken him all over the country, and now he’s living and working in the creative hub of Portland, Oregon.

Matese told me a bit about some of his latest projects, and then he shared what inspired him to get into design. He also spoke about how his background in marketing helps him in his current work, and gave some great advice and resources for any budding brand designers out there. Matese has been able to make a living and build a life by following his passions, which is something we can all get inspired by!

Interview Transcript

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

Matese Fields:
I am Matese Fields, and I am an independent brand and product designer in Portland, Oregon.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. How has 2023 been going for you so far?

Matese Fields:
2023 has been fantastic. I had a pretty rough 2022. Honestly, one of the worst years I’ve had in a long time. So I think when I came in 2023, I kind of came into this mindset like, “That’s not happening again.” And it hasn’t. So far it’s been great. I feel like for the first time in a long time, I’m kind of firing on all cylinders, so it feels good.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, that’s good. That’s a good turnaround. I mean, I think 2022 was a rough year for a lot of people. Particularly if you were working in tech, or design, or something because of a bunch of layoffs and stuff. COVID is still around. A lot of people had a rough year. I had a rough year last year too, so I completely a hundred percent understand where you’re coming from.

Matese Fields:
Definitely.

Maurice Cherry:
I saw on Instagram you just finished up a branding campaign last month. Can you talk to me about that?

Matese Fields:
Yeah, that was one of the high points of my 2022. I got to work with a company called Black Campaign School. And so I kind of partnered with this group called Three Point Strategies, and helped them reboot what Black Campaign School is. And so they’ve been around I think since 2016. We kind of came in with the goal of differentiating it from some of that kind of DC vibe. Super political, red, white, and blue theme that they had originally had. So yeah, I came in, worked with them on the branding side of determining what Black Campaign School is, sort of redoing that logo, a lot of their brand identity. And then we built out a lot of stuff for their reboot of the actual physical school, which was really cool. I got to do a lot of physical stuff for the camp, which is located at Haley Farm in Tennessee. It’s a really cool, historically Black farm in Tennessee. So yeah, it was great.

Maurice Cherry:
You said red, white, and blue. Was it a political advocacy group or something?

Matese Fields:
Yeah. So basically the goal of Black Campaign School is to teach people who are really involved with campaigning and that organizing for social justice and stuff like that. It’s kind of a school to teach them how to use that and take that to politics, and run for office, or boost that up a little bit.

Maurice Cherry:
Interesting, okay. Yeah, because I was looking through the branding. It’s only as you mentioned it now that I was like, “This is political,” because the branding does not at all scream politics. Which I think is good. I mean, I’ve worked on a political campaign. So I feel like every campaign from California to Florida uses red, white, and blue in some iteration. So when you said that and you mentioned it, I was like, “Is that what it is?” But yeah, and I’ll put a link to it and everything so people can check out what the brand looks like, but I definitely did not get politics from it.

Matese Fields:
That’s great. We accomplished the goal for sure.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Are you working on any other projects at the moment?

Matese Fields:
Currently, no. So I kind of knew that January was going to be more of a slow month for me. So a lot of January was me just trying to get my stuff in order. So updating my portfolio. I’m kind of in the midst of getting my LLC. So doing a lot of work with that. Doing a lot of promoting on social media, just trying to get my work out there.

But I am starting a new project on Monday, which is exciting. It’s a small little contract gig with Breville, which they make tabletop coffee makers and stuff like that. So that’ll be fun. And then on another fun side, I started a Euchre club. I’m not sure if you’re familiar what Euchre is,

Maurice Cherry:
Spades, right?

Matese Fields:
Similar to Spades, but not quite. It’s like a game of tricks, but it has a little different nuanced than Spades. But I’m from the Midwest originally, so it’s a big, Midwest thing for us. So I started a club with a group of 14 of my friends. And I was like, “Well, I don’t have that much to do. Why not just kind of act like this is a project?” So I made a logo for it, got swag made for it, and stuff. So it’s been kind of a fun thing to do.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. I have not heard Euchre since, and I’m dating myself here. I haven’t heard Euchre since Yahoo Games. I think Yahoo Games had Euchre. I think they also had Spades too, but they had Hearts of course, Literati, stuff like that. What drew you to Euchre? Is it a distinctly Midwest game?

Matese Fields:
I think it is. It’s fun when you have a group of a few people. And I feel like every time we’d be hanging out at somebody’s house, all my friends in Portland are from the Midwest in some capacity. So it’s like whenever we’d hang out, we’d be like, “Let’s play Euchre.”

And so we actually had this party back in end of last year, and it was called the Midwest Fest. My friend put it on. Basically it was a party, and everyone brought casseroles, and everything was themed Midwest. There was corn hole, and there was a bonfire, and everything you do in the country of the Midwest. And so we ended up playing Euchre there, and there was so many people interested. We were like, “Why not just start a club?” So yeah, it kind of started from there.

Maurice Cherry:
Interesting. Urban Dictionary defines Euchre as a four-person trump-based, not the president, trump-based card game primarily played on Midwestern college campuses involving a 24 card deck and many beers. Is that accurate?

Matese Fields:
That is insanely accurate. Lot of beers are had. Yes. I started playing in college. That is so accurate.

Maurice Cherry:
What inspired you to become a brand designer?

Matese Fields:
I honestly never saw this for myself. I think if you would’ve talked to me five, 10 years ago, I’d have been like, “No.” But I don’t know. I’ve always been creative in a sense. It hasn’t always been in the design or art sense. But I’ve always kind of had an eye for creativity.

And so when I first started my career, I was very UX/UI heavy, which I love. But it wasn’t quite fulfilling me. And so I kind of always knew that eventually there would be more transition to a more creative side of design. And I tried a lot of different things. I was like, “I’m going to be an illustrator.” And I started doing that. I’m like, “Maybe I’m not going to be an illustrator.” And then I really was into type design for a little bit and I was like, “I’m going to be a type designer.” It wasn’t my time for that either. And so I think just as my career went on, I kind of started forming myself to be more of a brand designer, and then just jumping in and trying to get those opportunities. So yeah, I think that’s it. There’s no straightforward answer for it.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I think it’s good that you were able to explore these different facets of design before you landed on something that worked for you. That’s a good thing.

Matese Fields:
Definitely. I think my entire life has been try everything you can. That was kind of what my whole college career was. I think that’s just the way that works best for me it I want to try as much stuff as I can. And then when it sticks, it sticks.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. How would you describe your design process, when you get a new project? What goes through your mind as you’re putting everything together?

Matese Fields:
The minute I get a proposal, or an inquiry or email, thoughts are already running my head. My brain is just going at a thousand miles a minute at all times. So when I first get an email, I kind of already am thinking through what could be. So that’s one part.

I think the biggest part for me when it comes to working on a project, especially independently, is really getting close with the client. So really determining what is right for them. So with that comes a lot of questions. I like to sit down and just dig deep, and know everything that I can about this client, and why this project is happening, and what they want to get out of it, and the origin behind the company, and the name, and everything. So that’s definitely a big part of the process.

And then I would say, this is something I kind of learned from my time at Work & Co, but I like to show often. I’m not a huge wire frame or sketch things out type of guy. I like to just get in and get dirty super quick. And with that comes a lot of bad things quite, frankly. But I think part of my process is being really consistent with showing how I’m getting to the point that I’m getting to.

So at Work & Co, we should work every day. And it wasn’t always the greatest work, and sometimes it didn’t make sense. But it really helps to form that story around how you get to that final product.

I think one part of my process is definitely just showing a lot of work. Even if I don’t think it’s great or could be tweaked, just showing that process and being super transparent about that. So yeah, that’s the early stages of the process, definitely.

Maurice Cherry:
So it’s a lot of information gathering at first, it sounds like.

Matese Fields:
Yeah, definitely. I want to know everything that I can. And Dropbox Paper is my best friend. I just have things jotted down everywhere.

Maurice Cherry:
So do you start off digital, or do you start off analog?

Matese Fields:
Usually digital, honestly. Yeah, I’ve never been a sketcher or anything like that. So yeah, definitely digitally.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. What do you think are the most important elements of a successful brand design?

Matese Fields:
I think honestly, the storytelling forming the story around what the brand is. And that will kind of seep into ultimately, what the look of the brand is going to be. So I’ve always kind of worked I guess, in between a lot of the strategy sides and design sides. So I think the storytelling is definitely the biggest part of the brand. Just a strong idea of what this brand is. And then that will easily flow into what is the actual part of the visual side of it.

Maurice Cherry:
Is it easy to get the client online with that? To let them know that yeah, we are talking about brand. But actually, we’re going to dive more into what story is being told? Because I feel like sometimes, clients just want to see something. They want to see something visual so they can either accept it or reject it. Most likely reject it, but they kind of want to see something.

Matese Fields:
Yeah, for sure. I do think it is sometimes a little difficult getting them on board with that. But I think I’m a big part of, “This is what I did on X project, and this is how I can work with you to get you to that point.” And it might start super dry, and you might not see anything for a little bit. But once we nail it down, it’s going to be really easy to get to that point where the visuals are going to be. And I think that definitely helps with that conversation for sure.

Maurice Cherry:
Has there ever been a time where you’ve kind of started out in that beginning process, and then by the time you got to the finished product, it was something completely different?

Matese Fields:
Yeah, I’m trying to think of a specific time. But I think that honestly, it kind of happened a little bit with the Black Campaign School. We kind of knew what it was that we wanted to do and wanted to accomplish. But I think the vision of the end goal was a lot different or the vision of the visuals at the end were a lot different. We ended in this more regal, dark, purple, really showcasing the people and the what behind Black Campaign School. And I think the original was we wanted to be happy, and flowing, and pastels, and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean I think there’s been definitely been a lot of times when that’s happened for sure.

Maurice Cherry:
So I want to learn more about you and you. You’ve alluded a bit already since we were talking about Euchre, about your origins in the Midwest. So let’s go back there. Tell me about where you grew up.

Matese Fields:
Yeah. I’m originally from Columbus, Ohio. I grew up in the city up through seventh grade. Went to Columbus City Schools. And then when I was in seventh grade, we moved to the country of Columbus. We moved to this little town called Lithopolis, which is 30 minutes south of Columbus. And I went to a really tiny high school called Bloom-Carroll, which was in the middle of a cornfield basically. Went from a middle school of 1,500 kids to a high school of 380. That was a huge change in my life. And then I went there all through high school.

And then after high school, went to a small college called Capital University, which is about five minutes from Ohio State. Small, kind of private liberal arts college. And then was there all throughout college and a couple years after college, and then kind of moved around the Midwest. I lived in Chicago for a little bit. I lived in Detroit for a little bit. And yeah, now I’m in Portland. Rainy Portland, Oregon.

Maurice Cherry:
Growing up, were you really creative? Were you drawing and sketching a lot, or something like that?

Matese Fields:
No, I was honestly the complete opposite. I’ve always been really creative, but it was more in the music form. Art was my least favorite class. Yeah, it’s really crazy.

But I always kind of had this weird affinity, now that I think about it, for design. I was really meticulous about how my handwriting looked, how my signature looked, and how my notes were organized. So I always had that sense of, I guess design in a sense, but I just didn’t really know it back then.

I was a big music kid. I started playing violin in elementary school. My parents had me in piano lessons when I was really young. And then when I got to middle school and high school, I switched to playing the clarinet. And I played the bass clarinet all through high school, ended up being really good at it. Had a lot of different musical honors and stuff like that in high school. And then actually went to college for music originally. Back then, I just knew I wanted to be a music teacher. I thought I was going to be this really great musical director, and work in colleges, and universities, and stuff like that. And quickly found out that was not what I wanted to do. But I’ve been really musical my whole life, but I haven’t been into art and design my entire life.

Maurice Cherry:
What turned you off from doing music?

Matese Fields:
I love playing music. That was my therapy when I was a kid. I think there was a couple things. When it came to me learning the intricacies, I wasn’t that interested. I just really wanted to play. I didn’t really want to do all the music theory, and learning piano, and all that.
So I think that was part of it. I think another part was I was not focused in college at all. Honestly, probably should have taken time off after high school before going to college, but my head just wasn’t there. It just kind of was like, “Okay, this is not for you. You can keep playing, but a career in music probably isn’t the best thing.”

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I’m thinking if you were playing bass clarinet, I’m trying to think what you would… You almost have to go into a symphony, I guess. When I think of house bands and stuff like that… I played trombone all through middle school, high school, college throughout my twenties. Every band kind of wants a trombone player, especially if you’re talking a club or something like that. But yeah, I would guess if you’re doing bass clarinet, that kind of limits options and venues for you to play, unless you go completely pro or something.

Matese Fields:
Definitely. And I think it’s actually probably one of the easier… If you’re really good at bass clarinet, I think it’s one of the easier instruments to get a gig with, because there aren’t a lot of people that play that instrument. And so I did during college and a little bit after college, I would play in different symphonic bands and stuff.

It was really fun. My piano teacher in college was a bass clarinet major. And so I think she eventually moved out of Ohio. And when she moved she was like, “I’m going to refer you for all these gigs for bass clarinet.” And so for a while, I did that where I get a call, we have a concert coming up. I’d go to the concert an hour before, run through all the music one time, and then play the concert. It was so much fun. And that was great. Being a teacher just wasn’t going to happen.

Maurice Cherry:
So when you were at Capital University, you majored in marketing. Tell me about what your time was like there.

Matese Fields:
Kind of going back to the idea of me trying everything and seeing if it sticks, that was kind of my entire college career. I originally came in as a music major. Music education major. Did that for I think a year, and half of my sophomore year. And then I was like, “Okay, that’s not working. But also, I don’t know what I want to do. And so I did everything.” I was like, “I’m going to be an accountant.” So I was an accounting major for a little while and then I was like, “I really don’t like math.” And then I was like, “I’m going to do psychology.” And then I was like, “Maybe I want to get into real estate.” I thought about transferring to Ohio State because they had a real estate program. And then eventually I was just like, “All right, just do marketing. It’s easy. I don’t know what I want to do in marketing, but it was easy.”

And so picked up a marketing major, stuck with it. And also like I was saying earlier, I just wasn’t really focused in college and didn’t really necessarily care about the schoolwork. But what I did know I enjoyed was working and doing internships.
So once I got that marketing major, I started doing internship after internship. My friends would always make fun of me because they’re like, “You’re onto the next internship.” And I did, I think 12 in college. All different companies, and just seeing where I fit in at marketing.

And then eventually, I started interning with a company called OhioHealth, which is a healthcare system in Ohio. And I was doing digital marketing there. And the team was basically just me and my boss. So I got to do a lot of different stuff. And for a while, I was really focused on analytics and the web side of things, but on a marketing perspective. So SEO and stuff like that. Yeah.
So then eventually I was there, and this kind of segues of how I got into design. I was working at the internship, been there for probably about a year and a half. And they came to me, my boss came to me and was like, “Hey, we need this webpage redesign.” And I was like, “Okay. I don’t really know what that means, but sure.”

And so took on that project, and it was really cool. I kind of got the lead up all the strategy behind it and how we are doing copy and stuff like that. And we didn’t even have design software, so I did wireframes and PowerPoint.
But it was just a really cool process. And then from there I was like, “Okay, I think this is what I want to do. I really like UX, and the web, and stuff like that.” So that’s how I got into design.

But long story short, didn’t do really well in school. But kind of picked up that marketing major and then found my way through internships rather than school. My goal for school is just get through it. Graduate so your parents are happy. But yeah, just get through it.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I think that speaks to what you alluded to earlier with you were always trying a bunch of new things. And honestly, college is the place to do that. College is all about trying new stuff. There’s all sorts of clubs, and majors, and things like that. So it sounds like that really helped inform all of this, I don’t want to say trial and error. Because I don’t like the misconception that just because something maybe didn’t work out, that you didn’t learn something from it. So each of these explorations moved you closer to where you ultimately are now.

Matese Fields:
For sure. Definitely.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you feel like your marketing knowledge, how does that help you as a designer now?

Matese Fields:
I kind of think about this often, because I always joke, I’m like, “I’ve never used my degree.” But I definitely think it helps with my thought process behind how I approach design. So definitely from that strategy side of things, a lot of stuff we learned in college was around the strategy, and how you get to a point of determining what the [inaudible 00:28:46] is, and building a business plan, and SWOT analysis, and stuff like that. So I think my time at capital in the marketing side of things definitely helps with that aspect of how I approach and think through design. And I’ve always really been interested in the strategy side of things. And I think it’s because of that background that I have.

Maurice Cherry:
So it sounds like it’s not just about making it look pretty. Of course you want it to look pretty, but you also have the know-how behind like, “This is what people are going to gravitate towards. This is what it’s going to be something that catches someone’s eye.”

Matese Fields:
Yep, for sure.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now you were at StockX for almost two years. What do you remember from that time? What did that time there teach you?

Matese Fields:
Yes, StockX was great. Yeah, it was a really great place to work at for the time I did. When I first started there, I was pretty young in my career. That was my second full-time job that I had. And so it was really cool because the team, when I first started, it was three of us. My boss Jim Renaud, and then Evan Ames who was the senior designer on the team, and then me.

And it was really cool because I think from the moment I got there, they kind of just trusted me to do what I thought was best, which I was kind of looking for at that point in my career. And so yeah, StockX was really great. It was also just a large team. Our creative team, we had in-house photographers, in-house videographers, art directors that are great, still some of my best friends to this day. And so we just got to do a lot of stuff and got to throw a lot of things at the wall and just be like, “This is what StockX could be.”

So yeah, it was really cool. It taught me a lot about just how to build up that story around a design. We had a lot of ideas on what we wanted to do and how StockX could be better. But most of the job was proving that to the higher ups. So we had to do a lot of work around, “Okay, this is how we’re going to present this to the CMO and this is how we’re going to break out these projects.” And so it was really cool, and I think we got a lot accomplished there.

I worked on a team that was in charge of a lot of the front facing parts of StockX. So the homepage, and the product page, and the searching. And that team, I worked with a couple really great project managers, Leah and Lilly. And it was really cool. We just determined the next five years of StockX, and it was really great working together with them.

Maurice Cherry:
And now you also worked for some agencies as well. Earlier, you mentioned Work & Co, which I said this before we recorded, that Work & Co and Revision Path have a interesting relationship. It goes back a few years. I first became acquainted with them in 2018. I met one of their project managers at XOXO. How long have you been in Portland, by the way?

Matese Fields:
It’ll be two years on Sunday actually.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. So you were there I think after XOXO stopped having live events, because they sort of stopped during the pandemic. But XOXO is like this, I guess the best way I could call it is an internet festival. Even saying it like that sounds weird when you think about the internet now. But it’s makers, and designers, and developers, and artists. The year that I went, Lizzo performed. It’s a pretty nice event. I hope they bring it back one day because it’s actually a lot of fun. But that’s how I first got acquainted with Work & Co, learned about they have all these international offices. They’ve even done some pro bono work for the show before. They’ve been a sponsor before.

Not really sure what’s happening with Work & Co. I know they’ve got an office here in Atlanta, which they did ask me to head up. And then that vanished in the thin air, but that’s a whole other story. I’m curious for you though, you’ve worked at Work & Co, you’ve worked at some other agencies. How were those experiences? Because I would imagine that’s probably different from a place like StockX, which I guess is more of an e-commerce startup in a way.

Matese Fields:
Yeah, definitely way different from StockX. The first agency I worked at was called Truth Labs. It was in Chicago. And that agency also is extremely different from how Work & Co works. That place, we kind of worked in silos. So one person owned a project, and we were kind of the project manager in a sense, and also the designer. It was a really great experience. My boss Tyson there was amazing, taught me a lot stuff.

But Work & Co is very different from any place I’ve really worked at. Their whole thing is collaboration, which is something that I hadn’t had a ton of in my career until I got there. So it was really interesting when I got there. I remember when I first started, the first three or four months, I was like, “I have no clue what I’m doing.” My head was in a whirlwind. And I remember I’d be working on stuff. It’s a little challenging when you first start because you do share work every day. So you’re like, “I want to share the best stuff every day.” And then you just kind of get in your head, and things never really turn out the way you want them to.

I remember working on a project and my boss Alex was like, “We need to talk. What is happening?” And I was just, “I don’t really know what’s happening here. I don’t know what’s going on,” blah, blah, blah. And it wasn’t because of the company, it was just so different. We just had a really long chat and she was just kind of like, “We’re not expecting you to be perfect every day. You just got to kind of show up on your own pace. Obviously we want you to do the work. Don’t feel that pressure to have to be perfect, and everything has to be whatever.”

So it was just like I really had to change my thought process around design. And I think for me, my brain is always going. And so that kind of translates into how I think about my work, and how it first comes on a paper. It’s just once again, me throwing things out there, and seeing what sticks. And working at Work & Co, I really had to simplify my thought process to fit into their mold of how they work, which is interesting.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay, you got to unpack that interesting now. You got to unpack that a little bit.

Matese Fields:
Yeah, I mean Work & Co does fantastic work. Everyone I work there with is so talented and literally every day I’d be like, “How are you doing this?” They work how they work, and that is it. There is no changing their process. You just have to assimilate into that process. And I think that’s where some of the friction comes from.

It works really well, and they do really great stuff. So I guess in a sense it’s like, who am I to change that? So I fell into that, and it was great. I did one of the biggest and best projects in my career there for the PGA TOUR. But yeah, it’s just really different. You just got to fall in and trust the process there. And for me that was hard to do, and I think is what led me to moving towards being independent.

Maurice Cherry:
Are all agencies like that? I can’t say all because you haven’t worked for all agencies, but you’ve worked for different types of agencies. Is this an agency thing, this opinionated way of working? Or was that just unique to them?

Matese Fields:
Honestly, I would say it’s somewhat unique to them. I do think when I was at Truth Labs, there was a lot more flexibility in how we wanted to structure the project. We worked in weekly sprints, but it was kind of up to you to determine what would be in that sprint, and how you would go about it, and how you present it to the client. Whereas Work & Co’s like, “Okay, we’re meeting every day. You’re sharing work every day.” You’re not sharing work to the client every day, but you’re sharing work to the overall team every day. Your reviews what the clients are on this day, this day. We are showing these three directions only. The way we’re presenting them is very structured. I think it’s fairly unique to them. I’ve freelanced for a lot of agencies also, and I think I’ve always had a little bit more flexibility in how to structure things.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s very interesting that you said that’s what pushed you to becoming independent. Sometimes you have to be in a, we’ll say less than ideal work situation. We’ll say that. Sometimes, you have to be in that situation to know what you don’t want.

And this also plays into what you’ve mentioned earlier with trying new things. This was another new thing that you tried. Wasn’t necessarily for you. But it’s again, pushing you closer to the ideal experience that you want to have, which I’m guessing right now is you being independent.

Matese Fields:
Definitely. I really enjoy my time at Work & Co, and I think it was definitely necessary for my career. I learned so much in the year and a half I was there. Honestly crazy. The process does work, if you’re really willing to adapt to that and fall into that. It’ll work great.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s different. Not for you.

Matese Fields:
And they are very product heavy too. And while I love product work, I definitely did want to focus more on brand. That was also part of it for sure.

Maurice Cherry:
Got you. Speaking of brands, what trends in brand design do you think are going to be important in the coming years? I feel like we have so much with technology, and AI, and machine learning, and all this stuff. That it seems like creativity in a way, is pushing to be automated. So from your perspective, what do you think the future of brand design’s going to look like?

Matese Fields:
It’s crazy. It’s hard to keep up with all this stuff. I don’t know. I’m not falling into the automation craze yet. I mean, you’ve seen the pictures where it’s like, “The generated AI photos,” and everyone has six and seven fingers on a hand. There’s work to be done to push us out.

I think Gen Z is going to define a lot of what we see in the future. It seems like they’re kind of running the world right now, with influencing, and TikTok, and all that stuff. So I think a lot of brands are going to have to pivot to fall in line with that. Obviously, it depends on the brand if you’re doing B2B stuff that it doesn’t necessarily matter as much. But I think that’s going to be definitely big. You’ve already kind of seen it. Somebody was telling me about, they got rid of Sierra Mist and changed it to some brand. I don’t even remember what the name is, but-

Maurice Cherry:
Starry.

Matese Fields:
Yeah, Starry. To make it more popular for Gen Z. I think that’s a big thing. I think minimalism. It’s already kind of coming back, or it’s already prevalent a lot. But I think minimalism and really being direct with your brand is going to be really big. And I think a lot of that is rooted in typography, which I love. So yeah, I think that’s going to be big. But yeah, I think as we move forward, it’s definitely going to be a lot around how you position yourself in how your brand is showing up to the world. And it kind of goes back into the strategy, and the copy, and the brand voice. That’s going to be really big.

Maurice Cherry:
I think we’re going to start seeing less virtual experiences, and more in-person experiences. And when I say that, I mean of course, I’d say over the past two years or so, companies were starting to dip their toe into the metaverse. And they’re like, “We’re making these virtual campuses and all,” all this stuff that nobody was going to. Because it costs $300 to get Meta Quest 2 to join this thing, and you don’t have any legs, and there’s only 12 people in here. No one was really going for that.

But I saw brands, I know Taco Bell did this. Where they had a Taco Bell room, a hotel room. And you could I guess spend the night in the room, and it would be all decked out in… It’s like a 360 brand experience where Taco Bell’s everywhere. You get Taco Bell room service. All this sort of stuff.

I see that sort of stuff I think coming more and more. I mean I think that kind of plays to social media and brands and influencers because they’d probably be the ones that would like all that kind of gaudy stuff. But I see brands starting to create more of these in-person things, especially as folks start to get back out into the world more. These past few years, we’ve all been in the house, on Zoom, on Teams, on Google Meet, etc. Now people want to get out, but they want to still, I think, be able to do it safely. And I think companies will start to figure out maybe how they can have these sorts of 360 type of experiences that people will gravitate towards.

Matese Fields:
Definitely. I totally agree with that. You’re definitely seeing it everywhere. I know in Columbus, it’s been there for a while. But there’s a brewery BrewDog in Columbus. And they have a hotel like that too. It’s like you can take a bath in beer.

Maurice Cherry:
What?!

Matese Fields:
Just a bunch of crazy stuff. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but I know the hotel room is very geared towards people who are very heavily into brewing, and the process of beer, and stuff like that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, bath and beer, that doesn’t sound good. But I see why people would do it for the novelty.

Matese Fields:
Yeah, who knows. Might be good for your skin or something.

Maurice Cherry:
It could be. It could be. What advice would you give to someone who wants to start out in brand design? What would you tell them? Resources or anything like that?

Matese Fields:
I think throw as much as you can out there and just see what happens. I definitely think it’s easy to get caught up finding inspiration through other brands and media forms. Like Dribbble, or Pinterest, or whatever. But I think a big part of design is getting out into the world, and finding inspiration by things that are off your screen. So I think that’s definitely a big thing.

I would say read a lot. I have so much to learn from an art history perspective, because I never had that design school education. So I’ve been really just trying to learn more about that. So definitely, learning more about the roots and the origins. I think those would be my biggest things.

I never really had a dedicated mentor. But I think that finding someone who you can come back to, and who will be honest with you, and really keep it real with you is definitely important as well. And learn typography. I think that’s huge. Really learn how to use type. It’s big.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you make time for joy these days?

Matese Fields:
I love sports. I play a lot of basketball. I have been getting back into weightlifting, so I’ve been doing that a lot recently. I’ve been getting back into playing golf. I used to play with my dad a lot when I was younger. So trying to get back into that. I love reality TV, because it is easy to watch, and you don’t have to be invested in it. So I watch a lot of reality TV. I’ve always watched a ton of reality TV.

I have a ton of plants. Really big into plant life, taking care of plants. And I am really big into things. Anyone who knows me knows I just have a bunch of stuff. My mom, when I was a kid, she would always make fun of me. She’s like, “You’re a pack rat. You don’t throw anything out. You just keep everything.”

And so I have a lot of things. I like to go vintage and antique shopping a lot. So I’m constantly rearranging the house or rearranging my room, and just trying to find ways to use all these things that I have. Yeah, that’s probably the biggest. Play a lot of video games, play a lot of Euchre. I’m always busy. I just try to stay busy at all times.

Maurice Cherry:
What video games are you playing?

Matese Fields:
Recently, I just been playing Call of Duty and 2K, which I know is kind of boring. But I grew up, I really loved RPGs and those open world games when I was younger. So sometimes I’ll fall deep into that.

I’ve been playing Horizon Forbidden West a little bit. I’ve played Uncharted for probably 10 times. It’s like my favorite game ever. I used to be really big in Assassin’s Creed, Red Dead Redemption, stuff like that. I’ve been trying to get back into Last of Us, but that game makes me mad. It frustrates me. I might just have to watch the show and not-

Maurice Cherry:
I was going to say, I feel like that’s popular right now because of the show. People are trying to get back into the game.

Matese Fields:
Yeah. So yeah, I played halfway through and then I was just like, “I can’t do this anymore.”

Maurice Cherry:
So earlier you said when you were giving your advice for people that wanted to get into brand design, you said that they should seek motivation in other things. So what are the things that keep you motivated and inspired?

Matese Fields:
Honestly, it sounds clichรฉ. But everything, honestly. My mind is always going. I’m always thinking about something. Whether it’s something I’m working on or something that could be. So I’ll get random inspiration from anything. The other day, I was driving through Portland, and I saw street sign. It sparked something for the Euchre league that I was doing.

So I definitely draw inspiration from being out in the world. But I would say to get more specific, I get a lot of inspiration from music artists and musicians. I’ve really been into street wear lately. So a lot of different street wear designers. Mainly Joe Freshgoods. He’s such a huge inspiration to me, mainly because he does whatever he wants. But there’s always this story behind why he’s doing something, which I think is super inspirational. He just does great stuff, and it’s always for the community and for other people.

So he’s a big inspiration. I would say I get a lot of inspiration from people who just build things. It doesn’t necessarily have to be design related. But Mike Smith from Smith & Diction, everything he does is incredible. The way he talks about his work is really great. People from Lichen. They’re a company in New York, and they do a lot of stuff with furniture and physical items. I think their story is super great.

My friend Alex Tan, he started a studio called Mouthwash. I’ve actually known Alex. We haven’t talked in a while, but I’ve known him since middle school. But he’s doing really great stuff. He’s always been super… I remember in college, we went to the same college. We went to the same church in high school. I remember in college we’d just be talking and everything he’d say, I’m like, “You don’t need to be here. Go do your own thing.” He’s just so smart.

So I think he’s doing really great stuff. Ryan Putnam also. He’s a really great fine artist. I think his story’s really cool of how he does things independently, on his own schedule. So yeah, I mean anything and everyone for sure, I would say.

Maurice Cherry:
Keeping it real Midwest with Joe Freshgoods.

Matese Fields:
Yeah. For my Chicago Days.

Maurice Cherry:
And Black. Well, I guess people know he’s a Black designer. I don’t know if that’s totally evident from the name, but yeah.

Matese Fields:
Definitely. Like the Lichen, they’re both Black designers. Definitely pulling inspiration from everything Black too, I would say, for sure.

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

Matese Fields:
Yeah. So I think in the future, I want to do more things. More physical and more designing spaces. That’s kind of where I see my career going. So I would love to do an exhibit at a museum. I think that would be awesome. Somewhere where I could do digital design, but also design the space and the physical aspects around it too.

I’ve always had a weird affinity for doing a large wayfinding project. It sounds boring when you say it. But I think there’s something beautiful in directions, and telling people where to go, and helping people find their way. So sounds weird, but definitely something like that too. That would be really cool.

Maurice Cherry:
That doesn’t sound weird. I mean, our icon is a wayfinding sign. So it doesn’t sound weird at all.

Matese Fields:
For sure.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What kind of work do you want to be doing?

Matese Fields:
This is what I think about every day now, I feel like. So part of the reason 2022 was a really rough year is because I felt I had lost myself a little bit. I didn’t really know.

I guess I put a lot of purpose of my life into my work. So when I got laid off from my job, I was kind of like, “What do I do now?” For a while I was like, “Maybe I shouldn’t do design.” I felt like I was just there. There was nothing really pushing me. 2022 was a big year of self-reflection, and what I really want to do. And when I finally took the leap and was like, “Okay, I’m going to be independent. We’re going to make this work.” I think that’s when this, “What is the future going to be?” Became a little bit more real.

In the future, I see myself doing less design actually. I think the goal is to make design a part-time type of thing, where I can be really specific about projects I want to take on, and just really specific about what I do, and how I do it, and what I want to do.

And then the other half of that being, I have this vision of making a space. And with that, I haven’t thought of a name. I haven’t thought of any of that. But combined with my love of people, I just love being around people. I love helping people. I love bringing people together. So there’s a love for that. There’s a love for collecting and having things. I do have a lot of things, but everything kind of has a story behind it of why I love it, and why it’s in my collection. So there’s the love for people. There’s a love for things. And then there’s also a love for education.

And so I didn’t do well in college, and I think it was just because I didn’t have meaning behind why I was in school. I was just there, because I felt like it was something I should do, and I was making my parents proud and stuff like that.

But there’s non-traditional ways to learn what you want to do and who you want to be. And specifically in design, I think I was saying before we got on, us as Black people aren’t really taught that you can be successful in the arts, or in design, even in music, unless you’re a huge artist. So I think part of that is me teaching Black people that you can make money doing whatever you want, and you can specifically make money, be successful, be fulfilled in design.

So with all that said, I would love to create a space that could one part be my studio, where I’m doing that part-time design work, and then the other half being a maker space/art gallery/vintage shop/gathering space. And then it’d all be centered around blackness, and education, and storytelling, and community. It is a lot, but that’s sort of where my head is at currently.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, I think that’s super aspirational to make a center for all that positive blackness. I don’t know how it would go in Portland, but I think it’s a good idea. I think it’s a good idea to have something like that.

Matese Fields:
I’ve had the same thought. At first I was like, “I need to move back to Detroit to do this.” And I think Detroit would be a great city for something to happen. I was kind of having these ideas when I was in Detroit. But I’ve been talking to a lot of people in Portland. I think it would actually be something that would be positive for the Black culture in Portland. It’s very white here. Everyone knows it. And when I first moved here, I was very thrown back. And even to me as someone who was the only Black person in my high school, I was like, “What is happening?” And I remember talking to people and being like, “I don’t know if I’m loving it here. I just moved from the Blackest city in America to here.” Everyone I was talking to, they were like, “Well, if you move, then it is going to continue being the whitest city.” So it’s like I think there’s a need for that space to be in Portland.

I think Portland’s a great city. They embrace art, and they embrace design and community. But you go to all these different spaces, and the same person is everything looks the same. The people who own it are the same. That’s not a slight to anyone, but the music is the same. And so I think it’s something that could definitely be beneficial for Portland. We’ll see. I’m pretty nomadic though. I like to move around, so I’m like…

Maurice Cherry:
I mean look, another city something like that could do really good in, Atlanta.

Matese Fields:
I need to go to Atlanta more honestly. When I first kind of started my career, the first year of my career was also freelancing. And I was doing a project for a company in Atlanta called Liaison Technologies, and they’re based in Alpharetta. So I would go to Atlanta every so often, but I haven’t been since probably 2016. So yeah, I would love to go back, for sure.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Well just to kind of wrap things up here, where can our audience find more information about you, about your work and everything? Where can they find that online?

Matese Fields:
Yeah. The best place would probably be my Instagram. It’s @tesecreates. T-E-S-E creates. There, you can find the link to my portfolio. And I post most of my design stuff on there. My website’s a little bit of a mess right now, but that’s also tesecreates.com. So yeah, those would probably be the two best ways.

Maurice Cherry:
All right. Sounds good. Well, Matese Fields, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I think the one thing that I got from your story that I think people listening should take with them is that it’s okay to try a lot of different things. I mean, design is a very vast field. It’s okay to try different things until you find what it is that works for you.

I mean, when I got into design 20 something years ago, there weren’t that many paths that you could go. And now, I think even with all the different places you can go, people still just funnel into, “I’m only going to do UX. I’m only going to do product.” And there’s so much more out there. And I think what your story really illustrates is that it’s possible to make a living as a designer, and that you just have to try different things until you find what it is that works for you. Which it sounds like you definitely have made happen. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Matese Fields:
Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s been great chatting with you for sure.

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10 Years of Revision Path

This is truly a milestone achievement, y’all. We are celebrating our 10th anniversary this year, and we could not have done it without our amazing listeners, guests, fans, and supporters. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to share these interviews and show the world that Black designers, developers, artists, and digital creatives are thriving and creating a better world for us all.

So this week, it’s just you and me. I’m pulling back the curtain and telling the story of Revision Path from the very beginning. I’ll share with you what I’ve learned over the years, the ups and down, and the unknown history that’s being made fully public for the first time. Plus, find out what’s coming up in the near future for Revision Path! (Wait, was that a hint?)

Thank you all for 10 years of Revision Path!

MUSIC CREDITS

  • Music provided by Lofi Girl
    • Amess – A place above heaven
  • Music provided by Chillhop Music
    • Lindeฬcis – Playtime
    • Leavv – Tales of a Flowing Forest
  • Music provided by Artzie Music
    • Jarrad Cleofeฬ – join me
Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
Hello everybody, and welcome to Revision Path. Thank you so much for tuning in. I’m your host, Maurice Cherry. Usually I’d have sponsor messages here, but today we celebrate a milestone achievement as Revision Path turns 10 years old. It’s hard to believe that a decade has passed since we honestly first embarked on this path, and I am thrilled to have reached this point. Over the years, our podcast has become a source of inspiration, education, and entertainment for millions of listeners around the world. It’s taught in schools, it’s even in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. I’m so grateful to our loyal fans and listeners who have followed us on this incredible journey and have made it all possible.

Throughout the years, our vision path has evolved and grown adapting to changes in the world around us. We’ve covered a vast array of topics, we’ve interviewed fascinating guests, shared personal stories, and delve deep into the most pressing issues in our industry and in the world. I’m just so proud of the impact that Revision Path has had on our listeners, and I’m looking forward to many more years of insightful conversations, thought-provoking ideas, and of course showcasing and celebrating Black designers. So today’s episode, it’s not an interview, it’s a look back. Whether you’ve been with us since the beginning or you’re new to the show, I’m going to talk about the history of Revision Path, the ups, the downs, and everything in between. There’s a lot to cover, because it’s 10 years, so grab a drink, grab a snack, and let’s start the show.

THE BEGINNING: 2005-2014

So to go through 10 years of Revision Path, I first have to talk about the first big project that I put on for the web called The Black Weblog Awards. I started those in 2005, and the internet, as well as design on the internet was just in its really super early stages. We’re talking pre-CSS. People were still doing websites with tables and stuff like that. And I created the Black Weblog Awards because there were other online awards events that celebrated bloggers, but I never saw any Black nominees, I never saw any Black winners, and I wanted to do something to celebrate us, because I was a part of that scene, and I knew bloggers, I knew video bloggers, I knew audio bloggers, which we now call podcasters, I knew they were doing some great stuff out there, and nobody was recognizing them. And so I felt like we needed to be recognized for what we were doing online, and I wanted to put an event together that sort of celebrated that.

The first year was a really big success, so much so that in the second year that I did it in 2006, I greatly expanded the whole scope of it, including a bunch of new categories. And one of the new categories I created was called Best Blog Design. And that was my way of showcasing Black designers who I knew were making these really fantastic creative blog layouts with movable type, with B2, which we now know as WordPress, just some really great work, blog spot blogs, et cetera. And again, no recognition from the greater design community, not in design media or anything. And so that category was really where the seeds for Revision Path started way back in 2006. I remember that year the finalists were Concrete Loop. Shout out to Angel Laws who created Concrete Loop, Ummah Park, and Zilla Says. That’s going to be a little bit important in a bit.

So the Black Weblog Awards was really picking up. And when I said I did this category back in 2006, I wanted to do something around Black designers then, but I just didn’t have time. I was working full-time, I was in graduate school full-time, and I was doing the Black Weblog Awards kind of on the side during the summer, but then that grew to become something I needed to work on all year round. And the Black Weblog Awards really, really, really took off. It got national attention from outlets like NPR, The Washington Post, and this was also right around the time that Obama was running for president. And all that sort of inspiration about Black excellence and all that stuff really inspired me, so in 2008, I quit my job, I started my studio, which back then was called 3eighteen media. Now it’s called Lunch.

And basically what I wanted to do with my studio was just focus on building a business and having a roster of reliable clients. And so again, I’m doing this while I’m doing the Black Weblog Awards. I eventually sold the Black Weblog Awards back in 2011. I sold it to Gina McCauley of What About our Daughter’s Fame. She also is the person who created the Blogging While Brown Conference. Sold it to her, she kept it running, I think till 2017, I want to say, but because I was in my studio and I was really trying to establish myself for having my business, I didn’t really even think about wanting to start up something like Revision Path until roughly about five years later, and that was in 2013. So again, the seed for it was planted back in 2006 with that category in the Black Weblog Awards, and it just silently grew for seven years until I started Revision Path.

Now, the funny thing is, I actually intended to start Revision Path with another Black designer. Remember I mentioned Zilla Says is the person who had won that category back in 2006. He’s a Black designer named Kevin Hite. So Kevin and I were going to start Revision Path, the both of us. I had told him about the idea in late 2012, and we were going to start it together, but he kind of dropped out of the project at the last minute. I didn’t hear from him. And at this point, I had already bought a domain, we had come up with a name for it, and I just went ahead and launched it solo. Now, the name Revision Path, that was meant to relate to both design and technology. So if you think of a path in design like an illustrator, that’s where I wanted to get that from.

And then of course we know about design revisions. If you’ve used Subversion or any kind of version control software, you know about revisions. And then it also relates to tech, because paths are part of a directory on a server or something like that. So I wanted to have it kind of play off of both of those concepts. I also purposefully called it Revision Path because of what I went through with the Black Weblog Awards. Now, keep in mind I started that in 2005, it ran to 2011, and if you were around during that time and you knew what the discourse was around race relations, especially with a Black man running for president, there was a lot of post-racial stuff, there was a lot of talk about Blackness in these very odd, weird ways to the point where if I mentioned the Black Weblog Awards, people just wouldn’t even look at it, think about it, consider it. No matter what the scope of it was, just because it had Black in the name, they would not be interested.

And so I purposefully did not want to saddle Revision Path with that. I wanted it to sort of have a bit of a clean slate. You could look at Revision Path and see that this is about Black people. I’m a Black host, there’s Black folks on the show. You know that. I just didn’t want it to be that super obvious, at least not at that time, because I had saw what the reception was for it. I wanted to give the project a shot, and so that’s why I kind of named it Revision Path. So February 28th, 2013, that was when I launched it. I used a super basic template from Themeforest. I made some slight customizations to it. And initially, Revision Path was actually intended to be an online magazine. It was not intended to be a podcast. I was inspired by sites like Clutch Magazine from my friend, Dede Sutton, The Great Discontent, et cetera, and I wanted to do something similar like that and focus on Black designers that I knew were making great work.

Revision Path as a platform has always been about two things, celebration and recognition, point blank. And now those early days of Revision Path were super rough, absolutely positively rough. Even though I knew a lot of Black designers then, some of them even were friends of mine, when I asked them if they wanted to be a part of this, if I could interview them for Revision Path, every single one of them said no. Every single one of them did not want to do it. To them, I was doing something controversial and they didn’t want to be a part of it. Some people thought that I was causing trouble, perhaps causing more trouble, because they saw the sort of harassment that I received when I did the Black Weblog Awards, and the hate campaigns that I would get because of the Black Weblog Awards, and they just didn’t want to be associated with it.

And so I asked them, they said, no, and to this day, none of them have ever been on Revision Path. Now, that’s not me holding a grudge, although I could see it being misconstrued in that way. I don’t twist anyone’s arm to come on the show. If I ask, and you say no, I’m I’m going to leave it at that. And I got a lot of that in the early days. In the early days, I got a lot of negative comparisons to BET. I remember some people saying that I was doing a BET version of a design publication or something like that. Just weird, oddly racist stuff from other Black people, from other Black designers too, which was a bit disheartening, but it didn’t kill my focus on still wanting to celebrate and recognize, because I was inspired by these people, I was a working Black designer, I had my own firm, I wanted to showcase the work that we were doing.

And so I just started reaching out to strangers, since my friends said no. Most of these people aren’t my friends anymore, but I started reaching out to strangers, and that’s kind of what the first few people that had come on Revision Path been. These were people I did not know. I reached out completely blindly. They had no idea who I was. I was nobody. Just saying, hey, would you like to do this? Can I interview you for this website that I have, or I’m trying to celebrate Black designers. And I did that for a few months when I started, and then someone reached out to me in, I want to say it was May or June of 2013. Someone reached out to me.

Her name was Raquel Rodriguez. She was a queer Afro-Latin designer from Chicago. She wanted to be on Revision Path, and she told me that she was going to be down in Atlanta and wanted to record our interview as a podcast, because she was a podcaster. She had a podcast that she did in Chicago. And I was like, yeah, sure, we could do that. Now, I didn’t have any podcast gear. I didn’t have a mic, I didn’t have anything, but I did have a mobile phone with a microphone and an audio recorder. It was the first Google phone, the one from T-Mobile with the little track ball and the flip up screen. And that’s how the first episode of Revision Path was recorded. We went to One Eared Stag in Inman Park and sat in one of the back booths and recorded it. Now, I still keep that audio up, even though the quality is terrible.

I have tried to salvage it over the years. It’s a lost cause. But I keep it up to show that you don’t have to start from perfect. Start where you are and just build and iterate from there. And speaking of not starting from perfect, I have to talk about one of the interviews that I managed to land, which was with Emory Douglas. Emory Douglas is the former minister of culture for the Black Panther Party. He’s also an AIGA medalist. And I saw his designs. I was just browsing the web. His designs, I saw they were being licensed on skateboard decks from a skate shop in Oakland, and I reached out to them, I asked if they could put me in contact with him, and it turns out that the guy who ran the skate shop was a family member of his, and so he put me in touch with him.

And then on a Sunday afternoon, we had a phone call, I recorded the interview using Google Voice, and the rest was history. So when I started recording interviews with guests, I was giving them the option to either do an email interview or to record. Keep in mind, 2013, I would say the general public did not know about podcasting or what is podcasting in the way that they are doing now. Even access to the gear like microphones and such just wasn’t really as commonplace as it is now. And most people were still choosing to do email interviews, although a couple would want to record. And so when that happened, I would record those interviews, I would publish those interviews. But I didn’t do it as a submitted podcast. You basically still had to go to Revision Path and just see it on the website.

There was no way you could really subscribe to it, because I wasn’t even calling it a podcast back then. And I wanted to do other things with Revision Path to bring more of that magazine feel to the platform. And so there were two things that I started to do in 2013. One was the holiday gift guide, which I do every year. And that’s just a list of products, some of them are from Black designers, some of them are just cool things that I liked, that I think other people would like, and I would kind of put that list together every year. Also, most of those things are affiliate links, so it was kind of a way to bring in some revenue for hosting costs and stuff. I also created a series of social media graphics around the seven principles of Kwanzaa, but I was tying those principles to current modern day things.

So I remember the first year for Ujamaa, which is collective economics, there was a picture of Oprah, but Ujamaa was rendered like the Supreme logo. Kuumba, which means creativity, that was stylized Beyoncรฉ’s self-titled album that came out that year. Nia, which means purpose, was associated with Nelson Mandela who passed away that year. So I always tried to tie it into what was going on in the zeitgeist with these graphics. 2014 came along, and with Revision Paths starting to get some attention, I launched a new project connected to it which was a sister site called 28 Days of the Web. Now, 28 Days of the Web features a different web designer, graphic designer or web developer every day for the month of February in conjunction with and celebration of Black History Month. And for leap years, I’d add an additional person. And so I wanted to do this, one, because the first year that I started Revision Path, I started it at the end of February.

So I didn’t really do anything for Black History Month when I started Revision Path, because it started during Black History Month. And so because of that, when I would tell people about it, they thought it was a glorified Black history project, or at least that’s how they would treat it, that’s how they would talk about it. But what I also really wanted to show was that, if I could find 28 Black designers, 14 men, 14 women, showcase them alongside Revision Path and really give a bit of a middle finger to design media specifically, that if I can do this as one person, then why can’t you do it with your mastheads full of staff writers and things of that nature? How am I able to do it as one person, and you can’t do it as a team of ten or twenty?

So that’s kind of a little bit of the reasoning behind why I wanted to do 28 Days of the Web. And it’s taken off. We just had our 10th installment of 28 Days of the Web this year. We’ve showcased well over 200 people. All of the information that I use to put those together is publicly available. There’s their photo, they’re social media and everything. All of that is all provided by them. So none of it is stuff that I’m creating. So that’s an even better part about it. Also in 2014, I redesigned the site. The site got a much-needed redesign, and we started to do more international interviews. In 2013, I think I only did one international interview. That was episode six with Mokokoma Mokhonoana was his name. But I was able to interview some other international folks. I remember that year I interviewed Kevin Karanja, who was episode 24, who’s a designer out of Nairobi, Kenya.

And also speaking of which, March of 2014 is technically when the podcast began. And when I launched it, I had 15 episodes that I had already recorded. Again, when I was asking guests if they wanted to do email or record, some would record, so I kept those as episodes, and so when I launched officially in March of 2014, we launched with 15 episodes. Episode 16, which kicked off the weekly cadence, is with Alicia Randolph. And so that’s kind of where the podcast was born from. 2014 was also when we got our first major sponsor, MailChimp. I had been working with MailChimp in a professional capacity through my design studio probably since about 2010, I think. And they were just known here in Atlanta. They were the hometown hero of startup tech companies. I knew a lot of people who worked there.

I had been to MailChimp. I had MailChimp swag in my apartments. So when I told them about what I was trying to do, they were really enthusiastic about it and they became our first sponsor. 2014 was also the year that I brought on an editor to Revision Path, who is RJ Basilio. He’s probably edited well over 400 episodes of the show. He has been extremely integral to the show’s success. So shout out to him. And I acquired a site during all this somehow. Episode 27 is with Siedah Mitchum, and Siedah Mitchum had a site site called Inspiring Black Designers, and she was doing a similar thing to what Revision Path was. She was interviewing Black designers, showcasing the work that they were doing. Her and I connected, I told her about what I was doing with Revision Path, we had some conversations, and she wanted me to acquire her site.

And then she came on as the first Revision Path staff member after RJ, but someone that was actually creating content. So we had an “Ask Siedah” advice column for designers that we did for a couple of years. She also wrote a couple of pieces for the site, because we had a blog. We were also trying to do basically long form pieces between the podcast episodes. And with that, I was able to also bring on some interns to help out with that. I brought on Eric, Rashida, and Stefanie as my interns. They helped out with marketing, they helped out with writing, they helped out with publicity. And Revision Path really started to gain steam once I had a little crew working with me. And so in the spirit of community, I started to do outreach to the rest of the design.

I would say the design media community like podcasts, websites, et cetera, I reached out to them to try to see if there was a way that they could either profile Revision Path or I could talk about it, or I could even introduce some of the people that I was profiling on their platforms. And so I reached out to Podcast networks. I remember specifically reaching out to Dan Benjamin of Five by five and just getting the silent treatment, never getting a response from him. I tried to get guest spots on other design podcast. I would pitch myself. Like I said, I would pitch guests that I had on the show, and many of them never responded. The ones that did respond usually did so negatively, telling me that they don’t talk about race, or that what I was doing was racist. I remember specifically Dorm Room Tycoon was a site that was pretty popular. I don’t know if it’s still popular, but it was popular back then.

And I had reached out to them about, again, a possible guest spot or interviews or something like that, and the guy who runs it is a Black designer, his name is William Channer, this Black British guy, and I remember reaching out to him and telling him about what I was doing, we had a Skype call about it, and he explicitly told me, “We don’t do that race shit. We don’t touch that. We don’t do that race shit. If you want to do that racial shit, that’s fine. We don’t do that.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” And I never reached out again about that, because that was kind of jarring, especially hearing it from another Black person doing something very similar to what I was doing. It was kind of like, wow, it’s like that. Okay.

I would get harassing emails. I would get harassing tweets. People would tweet about how Revision Path is a racist project. I would get calls to my business to try to get me fired, which is weird, because I own my own business, so you want me to fire myself. These are not smart people. So 2014 was a bit of a wild year. All of that set the stage for some major shifts with Revision Path and me beginning in 2015.

THE RISE: 2015-2018

So 2015 really kicked things off for Revision Path in some interesting ways. First off, a lot of that outreach that I was doing the year before to design media and to other design podcasts and stuff like that started getting noticed by design organizations, one of them being AIGA who reached out to me to join their diversity and inclusion task force.

Now, I joined after interviewing Antoinette Carroll, who was one of the co-chairs of the diversity and inclusion taskforce at the time. And I had been skittish about AIGA. I had my own run-ins with the local AIGA Atlanta chapter, and just didn’t really feel that positive about the organization as a whole because of how exclusionary they were. But after talking to Antionette and telling me about what they were trying to accomplish, I said, “You know what? This might actually be good for me, especially with Revision Path. This could be a good thing.” And so I joined the task force to try to really help advocate for people of color in the design community. And through the task force, I pitched a talk for SXSW based on a question that I was hearing from a lot of companies and agencies and things that were writing to Revision Path, and that question was, where are the Black designers?

I got a whole lot of people asking that question, and so I figured, why not make a talk about this so I could answer the question, because to me, the question is obvious. If you look at Revision Path, clearly the Black designers have always been here, you just haven’t seen them. The you of course being the people that are asking that question. And if you know anything about SXSW, the way that the whole process goes, it’s a hot ticket to get to speak there. Especially if you pitch your own panel, it means you have to get people to vote for it, and then the internal group at SXSW has to decide if it goes along with the programming. And then because it’s such a hot ticket, getting a plane ticket there is expensive, getting a hotel is expensive.

The actual registration is covered if you do the panel, but it’s not a paid speaking gig. If anything, you pay a lot of money to go there and speak. And so I was doing this through AIGA, and Where Are the Black Designers was included in the last mention of panels that they were going to do for the event in January of 2015. SXSW normally takes place two weeks in March, and so I knew by that time that it was going to be really hard to even get there, because I was like, I’m not making that much money through my studio to just pick up and go for a week to do this.

And so I created a GoFundMe campaign in order to raise money. I raised $2,000 to go to SXSW. AIGA did pay for half of that, and I went and I gave my talk. And now another thing about SXSW, if you’ve been, the way that they do all of the diversity programming, they put it in the furthest highest room in the Austin Convention Center, which is 9abc. They may have changed this, but at the time, that’s where all of the “diversity” talks were. And so my talk was all the way back there. It was later in the day. I remember it was on a Friday, and it was not very well attended. The room next to me, there was a keynote speaker, I think it was Jimmy Kimmel, and of course his thing was standing room only because he’s a celebrity, he’s on late night television, et cetera.

I’m just me. And so my room was almost like a bit of an overflow room. There were people who ducked in just so they could charge their phone. There were people that were asleep in the crowd or whatever. And I say crowd, there were roughly maybe about 15 or 20 people in a room that would normally fit about 250 folks. So not a lot of people, very sparsely attending when I first gave this talk. But of the people that were there, one of them being Forrest Young, who I’ve had on the show before. Forrest is… I forget his title, but he works at Rivian, the e-vehicle company. He used to be the former global creative director at Wolf Olins. There were some other folks there I don’t remember. I know there was someone from Pinterest, someone from Dell, someone from Facebook. And Facebook actually invited me to their house that they had there for SXSW.

I got to meet some Facebook people. Facebook at that time, again, 2015, was really excited about the work that I was doing. The Facebook Design oranization that they had that at the time was headed up by Jon Lax, they really were excited about what I was doing and wanted to try to find a way to support what I was doing. And so I left SXSW kind of feeling pretty good that the message of what I was doing with Revision Path was really getting out there. After SXSW, it felt like a light switch turned on, because people finally started to see Revision Path, and see the work that I was doing, and see the people who were being recognized. We picked up some more sponsors that year. We picked up Hover, Creative Market, Joopell, which is this company created by Ryan Carter and Porter Braswell, I believe are their names.

Ryan’s been on the show before actually. We started a Patreon community, and this was in Patreon’s super early days. The platform did not have a lot of podcasters or content creators. Well, it had content creators, mostly video folks, but not a lot of podcasters, not a lot of people of color, I would say overall. But we wanted to do this as a way to kind of bring in revenue, but also with the added benefits of building a community and providing them with exclusive content, merch, things like that. If you followed Revision Path from those early days, Patreon was maybe the third platform that we had tried to do this sort of thing with. We did it with Tugboat Yards back in 2014, I think, and then they got acquired by Facebook, and then we did it with another company called Slice, I think, and then they pivoted to gaming mods, and then Patreon was the third thing that we tried to do.

We hit 100 episodes that year. I was able to interview one of my all-time favorite designers who was such a huge, huge inspiration to me, Sarah Huny Young. We received an unexpected windfall of donations from an organization called Fund Club. Each month Fund Club picks a project or an initiative or something that’s supporting social justice and tech, and each member of Fund Club gives $100 to it. So the more that people join every month, the bigger the donation is. And so we received over $8,000 in donations from Fund Club, which was amazing. I was really excited about the fact that we were having this kind of buzz in the design community, and so I tried to expand the show to do two episodes a week. We did episodes on Mondays and Thursdays.

That didn’t last long. It was a fun experiment, but I don’t think that the episodes really got a chance to breathe because of that. So if you go back to November and December of 2015 where there’s two a weeks, go back and listen to those episodes. I know I talked to Gus Granger, Erica Joy, some other folks, Darhil Crooks who now is a creative director at Apple. Go back and listen to those episodes, because I don’t know if they really got a lot of love when they first came out, because I was trying to do two a week. Revision Path also won its first award that year, which was the Most Inspiring Design Podcast award, and that came from Creative Markets. And we beat out some massive shows for that award. We beat out 99% Invisible, we beat out Design Matters with Debbie Millman, we beat out Adventures in Design.

So that was really something. They messed up the logo in their little announcement, but it was pretty cool to get that. They even sent me a 3D printed medal which I have. It’s in my trophy case in the living room, but I thought that was pretty cool to get. 2016 was big. I started with the capital and the recognition from 2015, and I really made some big additions to Revision Path. I always wanted to have articles that published between podcast episodes. Again, this is sort of hearkening back to the online magazine days of Revision Path. And so I brought on a staff of five writers, Thelma Boamah, Veve Jaffa, AJ Springer, Charlie Jones, and Tammy Danan. So they came on and wrote some just really great articles. And the thing about the articles is that they really added more context to Revision Path between the interviews.

So I could actually handle and talk about topical subjects between these profiles every week. We did a piece about Black celebrities being creative directors. We did this series called Student Perspectives where we talked to Black design students at institutions of higher learning. We would ask questions like, are HBCUs preparing the next generation of Black designers? We’d ask, is it possible for Black designers to be weird and do weird and crazy stunts and still be taken seriously? And that was in the vein of a Stephen Sagmeister or a Jessica Walsh or something. Could a Black designer pull those kinds of stunts and still be taken seriously? We talked about using design to promote activism in the wake of the murders of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown.

We did a three-part series on tech in Africa, which focused on Sudan, Algeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. We tackled the absence of Black glamour in merchandising like makeup or other lifestyle brands. We did some really great pieces that year starting off. I was super proud of Revision Path, because we were still doing the interviews, but then we were also doing these just really great long form pieces that I wish… In the future, I want to find a way to really give those a lot more shine, but we did some great work back then in 2016. I also presented the Where are the Black Designers presentation again in 2016. I did it at HOW Design Live, which happened to be in Atlanta for that year. And that was a bit of a full circle moment, because it was that same venue where the conference was at that I started my professional design career in 2005.

So it was this really great full circle moment. Also got to see some old coworkers who were still there who are now looking at me crazy because they treated me one way when I worked there, and now I am a guest and a speaker, so they have to treat me another way. That was fun. 2016 is also when we launched our job boards. Our job board’s been around for seven years. A lot of companies had kept contacting Revision Path, telling us about listings that were available, and if they could share them with our network, and I was like, I could do a job board, and then turn those requests into revenue for the site, which is really what’s helped keep the site going over the past few years. We launched a Slack community. The Slack community even had events, like we had these Ask Me Anything events where you could talk to former guests, ask them more questions, et cetera.

We hit 150 episodes that year, and I got to interview Ashleigh Axios, who was the creative director for the Obama White House. And remember Facebook Design had sort of hit us up back in 2015, they then kind of took their support and really codified it by becoming a sponsor then. So they were our biggest sponsor to date through massive financial support behind the show. They even flew me out to their headquarters in Menlo Park. I got to record some interviews while I was out there. I met Mark Zuckerberg. I even closed out their design lecture series for the year with a talk called Black Design Matters. We started getting more shoutouts on social media like on Twitter and Instagram. We expanded our merch, which initially was only available through our Patreon community. We sort of opened up our merch shop so people could buy shirts and stuff.

We kept going with our Kwanzaa graphics, which if you remember 2016, that was a very contentious time with the Olympics, Prince died that year, that was also the year of that very contentious presidential election where Trump got elected. So our graphics back then really reflected the state of what was going on in the country then. So once we had our big sponsors on deck, Revision Path started expanding even more in 2017. Apple Podcasts included Revision Path in their Black History Month podcast campaign that was called The Black Experience.

We hit 200 episodes. I brought Sarah Huny Young back on the show and interviewed her again. And with Facebook as our sponsor, we threw our first event with them. So we did it here in Atlanta. We had a panel, Karla Cole and Tory Hargro, who had both been on the show before, were on that panel. Ian Spalter was on that panel, who’s the head of Instagram, Japan. Facebook brought the swag, they catered it, and it was great for what it was. People still ask me if we’re going to do another event in Atlanta. The bad thing about that event, and I’ll be completely honest, that was really just a Facebook event. It was not a Revision Path event. It was a Facebook event with Revision Path’s logo kind of slapped on the poster.

Facebook really tightly controlled the guest list. You had to — and I didn’t like this at all — you had to submit your resume in order to be considered to be invited. So I couldn’t even invite people that I had on the show, because Facebook wanted to see their resume to see if they were hireable by Facebook in order to come to this event. They were treating it as a recruitment event. I was treating it as my first podcast event, and those two things just did not mesh well, which was very unfortunate. That was the first and last event that we did with Facebook Design, because I was not satisfied with how that whole thing went. We did end up attracting more sponsors.

We attracted SiteGround, Google came on as a sponsor, which was really big. We also attracted the attention of a New York City based startup called Glitch, and by the end of the year I was working at Glitch. They extended an offer to me, which at the time the company was called Fog Creek Software. They became Glitch in 2018. But that was a very interesting time, because now my work was not only being recognized by these companies, but it was actually changing my livelihood. So 2018 was another growth year for Revision Path. We expanded onto two major platforms that year, Spotify and iHeartRadio. Spotify used to be invite only for their podcasts back then, now I think anybody with a Spotify account can create a podcast and it’s listed there. But it was a big deal to be on Spotify back in 2018. Apple Podcasts had included us again in their Black History Month campaign. I got a chance to talk about Revision Path in Switzerland as part of the Swiss Design Network Summit.

That was pretty interesting back in March of 2018. And in April of 2018, I received a personal honor, but I really attribute it to Revision Path. I don’t think I would’ve gotten this if I would not have done Revision Path. But in 2018, AIGA awarded me the Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary, making me the first Black person to win it, and the only Black male so far to achieve the honor. So you got to put that out there. And what it says on the award is “for being a renaissance talent who works seamlessly across cultural domains, editorial lines, and multiple forms of media, for being the definitive leader in bringing Black designers to the public, earning you a permanent place in the history of design, design equity and social justice.” Huge, huge honor. I got to meet Steven Heller himself, as well as many other famous designers.

That was really something, going to the AIGA Awards Gala. I rented a tux. It was a great night. It was a really great night. I reached 250 episodes that year. We interviewed Julian Alexander for that episode. We worked with Adobe for World Interaction Design Day, and I brought on three more writers to help keep the blog going. We brought on Dwight Hill, Katie Sneed Jensen and Sela Lewis, who has also been on the podcast. They wrote some really great pieces, including a tribute to the late Dr. Samella Lewis, who’s the first Black woman to receive a PhD in art history. And we also did this really great oral history piece on the organization of Black designers.

A lot of the work that I do in Revision Path, and I would say a lot of diversity and inclusion work particularly done by Black people in design, is really built on the work that the Organization of Black Designers put forth years and years and years ago. So I really wanted to pay homage to them and give an oral history about the organization. Because I don’t think a lot of Black designers now even know about it, and so I felt like it was a good idea to really shine a light on that. And also by the end of that year, we joined a podcast network.

THE FALL: 2019-2022

So remember I had joined Glitch, I was working at Glitch, they decided they wanted to create a media network and they wanted Revision Path to be the first show on that network to sort of headline it.

And so if you look at any episodes, I want to say through all of 2019, you’ll hear Glitch mentioned, or you’ll see a little Glitch fish, these two pink and green fish somewhere in the show notes or something like that. That was part of not my condition to work there, but I thought this would be a big extension of the brand. Turns out that was not the case. 2019 brought some of Revision Path’s biggest honors to date. We hit 300 episodes, and I had a chance to interview production designer, Hannah Beachler, who did production design on both Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. She also did production design work for Beyonce, also worked with Ryan Coogler in Creed as well. It’s really a big get to have Hannah on the show. I’ve been an admirer of her work for a very long time, and for her to be our 300th episode was great.

Along with 300 episodes, we threw a live event. This one was in New York City at the Green Space, which is a famous institution in podcasting and public radio. And with that event, we had Gail Anderson and Catt Small as panelists. We were supposed to have Eddie Opara. He got sick, and so he couldn’t make it. And that was really a lovely event on the surface. So joining the Glitch Media Network was a bad idea. I can say this in hindsight now. It was a bad idea for a few reasons. One, it tied the success of the show unfortunately to my employer. Now granted, I put a licensing agreement in place whereby Glitch only licensed the episodes from me. They didn’t own them, they owned no sort of intellectual property or anything like that.

And I made sure having went over with the lawyer and everything, they only licensed the show. What ended up happening though was, because I was using company resources with the show, that meant the team that I had in place with RJ, the website that I had been doing since 2013, all of this now had to come under Glitch. So we had to change up the format of the website and put it under Glitch’s domain. I think it was glitch.com/revisionpath. We had a redirect, so all of the revisionpath.com stuff wouldn’t break, but we had to use their design. The design was not great. It was using this old version of Ghost, and so we couldn’t do the same types of just basic design stuff that we would do with WordPress.

I couldn’t do it on Ghost. I did have to hire a team, and I have to say, shout out to my team, TK Dutes, Deanna Testa, Margarita Noriega and Brittani Brown. I hired all of them as my team, three women of color, and Deanna, she’s white. But hired these four women, and they really held me down and held Revision Path down for the roughly about year and a half that they were working on the actual podcast. If you listen to any of those episodes around the, I’d say 290 to 320 mark, you’ll hear Glitch Media Network, you’ll hear Deanna Testa, you’ll hear Brittani Brown. TK was doing a bunch of stuff behind the scenes.

But yeah, we had to basically shift all of the production stuff internally along with what I was doing for my job. I was now doing the podcast as part of my 9-to-5 job, and it just killed the momentum that we had built, that I had built really over the past six years leading up to it to join this network that unfortunately was not helping us. One of the other things that was really bad is that, when we joined Glitch and hitched our wagon to them, unfortunately members of Glitch, other people that work there like the finance director, the chief operating officer, et cetera, started to tie the show’s success to the company’s success. And so things that we did for the show all of a sudden now had to have some sort of net positive benefits for the company, for the company’s user base, et cetera, which was not part of the licensing agreement.

You all are just licensing the show as part of your network. And we were developing other shows, we were developing videos, et cetera. None of those panned out, but we were doing other stuff, and the problem that happened was that the company just kept kind of shooting everything down. They kept making excuses for why certain things couldn’t get done. Even for the event that we did, it went off without a hitch, but me and Deanna and TK and Brit were the main ones that had to pull it off. If you’re in New York City — snd I don’t know if the Trader Joe’s is still open — but there’s a Trader Joe’s I think in Union Square or near Union Square that sells wine and alcohol. Me and TK and Brit crossing four lanes of traffic, getting wine for the event, and stuff like that.

We had to basically run all of that ourselves. Deanna and Brit I think both did principal photography and video for that night. So on the surface, everything looked great. Behind the scenes, it was a huge mess. And then all of a sudden I’m getting emails about why are we spending thousands of dollars on an event like this, and it’s not translating to users of Glitch and all this sort of stuff. And it was really taking a toll on the brand value that I had built up with Revision Path, one, because we had hit our wagon to Glitch, but then two, because we had changed things visually so drastically that the audience did not respond to it well. We had some good things that came from it, and I think just the increased awareness throughout the tech community was a good thing, but there were some other things that happened later on in the year with Glitch that inevitably made me want to take my ball and go home. And you’ll see what I mean when I say that a little bit later.

So even though these things were going on, Revision Path still continued to grow. We expanded onto Pandora, we became part of their podcast offerings. Fresh off of the high of me winning the Steven Heller Award, I started a project called RECOGNIZE, which is a design anthology that featured essays and commentary from indigenous people and people of color who I was calling the next generation of emerging design voices. I really wanted to capitalize off of that Steven Heller Prize win, following his footsteps of discovering new design voices, and we received a grant from InVision’s Future Forward Fund to launch the anthology, and Envision published the first volume of articles on Inside Design, which was their kind of online publication that reaches I think millions of designers every month.

Glitch was not happy about that. Glitch was wondering, why isn’t this being published on Glitch? And I’m like, well, this has nothing to do with the podcast. This is something different. This is a different project. But they felt like it should have been under a Glitch Media imprint, and I was not thinking about that at all. It was a totally separate project from Revision Path. So with Glitch, that was strike two. Strike one was the event and them being mad that the 300th episode event didn’t bring in users, and then strike two was, oh, you’re doing this literary anthology, why doesn’t it have to do with Glitch? Glitch is a software tool for software developers to make software. What does design commentary have to do with that? And I understand at the time, because I was on the marketing team, Glitch really wanted to be part of that sort of maker culture. I get that, but this had nothing to do with Revision Path. The name Revision Path was nowhere in RECOGNIZE. It was something completely different.

So later in the year, which happened to be strike three from Glitch, was when the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture added a selection of eleven Revision Path episodes to their permanent collection, making Revision Path the first podcast ever to receive that honor. And I was excited. It came out in FastCompany, a few outlets picked it up. No Black outlets picked it up, I should mention. I was working with a PR company at the time, and we pitched EBONY, we pitched Essence, we pitched The Root. The only Black outlet that picked it up was Blavity, and they picked it up from MSN, which is who we also pitched. That’s a whole other story about Black media.

But the next day at work, Glitch’s chief operating officer at the time gave me just the most unprofessional dressing down that I had ever gotten in my career. This is the day after I got this huge honor, which not only further, I think, sabotaged Revision Path in the eyes of Glitch, but also further sabotaged my job at the company. He said this, and I’ll never forget this. He said, “You just want to celebrate you and your own, don’t you? You just want to take your ball and go home?” And so once I saw the game that Glitch was playing, I decided to do just that, take my ball, take my show, and put it back under my control 100%, because Glitch had licensed the show for me. We had a licensing agreement signed in place. Their legal counsel looked over it, my lawyer looked over it, but they were using Revision Path’s accolade and my hard work to prop up their brand, and meanwhile I’m getting the shaft.

And worst still because of the show’s then association with Glitch, we lost pretty much every major sponsor we had. Google was out. Facebook was out. Facebook was out because the CEO was talking a lot of smack about Mark Zuckerberg, and as you can imagine, that didn’t go over well with them wanting to give us any money. So you can’t be badmouthing your sponsors and think they’re still going to pay you. So we lost pretty much every major sponsor we had. Glitch wanted to turn that sponsorship money into revenue for the company, because we had a sponsorship business development team, but they were not getting sponsors for the show. Nobody wanted to sponsor the show. And so the revenue that was keeping Revision Path going was basically my fucking salary. And at this point, it’s the third strike at the company, because the other thing that happened after the Smithsonian thing, my title gets stripped at Glitch. I’m sort of titleless for a few months. My team gets dissolved, so they’re wondering what’s going on, I’m wondering what’s going on, and then they bring in a new VP of marketing, and then the company tries to pit the VP of marketing against myself like we’re enemies, and I’m like, I don’t know her, she doesn’t know me. We ended up being very good friends. Shout out to Alexa [Scordato]. It was just a weird environment. And I don’t know how I ended up in this place, but I had to get out.

So 2020 came, and the main thing that I did that year was get my lawyer to get us out of this contract. This is not working out. I thought this was going to be a good thing. This is not working out, and I want out. And so I had to get legal counsel involved to help extricate Glitch from Revision Path, because now this association was seriously tarnishing the brand of the platform.

It took a while to happen. It took some back and forth. We did make it happen. We ended up pulling everything from Glitch and putting it back under the revisionpath.com domain. Some of those episodes still need to be cleaned up, because I think they still have some of the Glitch name and all that stuff under it, but we had to pull everything, we had to do redirects, all bunch of stuff. One thing that I wanted to do to set it apart was change the brand, so I did a redesign of the logo, I did a refresh of the website. And since I was still working at Glitch, and it’s a tech startup, tech startups have generous unlimited time off, I said, look, let me me use this unlimited PTO and take Revision Path on the road and go on tour. And so I had talked to a couple of people in some cities with AIGA chapters about programming.

If I could come to their city, do a night with a live recording, if they would be up for it. And a lot of cities were up for it. So we at the beginning of 2020 had planned to do a seven city tour, Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, Kansas City, Missouri, Chicago, D.C. and New York. You’ll notice I skipped Atlanta. Fuck AIGA Atlanta, but that’s a whole other story. But we planned on doing a seven city tour, and the first stop was in Los Angeles. We did our first show there in February, 2020. Shout out to AIGA Los Angeles. We did it as part of their LA River series. We did it in Leimert Park on February 10th, and it was a standing room only event. I remember after that I had dinner with Laci Jordan, Jacinda Walker, and Dave Hall, all who have been on show before.

It was great. It was great. So we had the first city out of the way, I was all set to continue the tour, and then coronavirus. Coronavirus came in what…March of 2020? And brought the tour to a screeching halt. So doing any of the other cities just wasn’t in the cards in terms of trying to get on a plane or anything. I didn’t want to do virtual events, because also I was trying to figure out how this was going to work with my job. Even though Glitch was remote first, that just threw a whole lot of plans out of order, because we had planned to go to SXSW in August. We didn’t know if SXSW was going to cancel their event. If you remember those first few months of the pandemic from March to May or June of 2020, pandemonium. You didn’t know what was going on.

And then just a few months after the pandemic had started, Glitch dropped the hammer and laid me off, and they laid off my whole media production team. So I’m out of a job, TKs out of a job, Deanna’s out of a job, Britt’s out of a job, Margarita’s out of a job, most of the marketing team’s out of a job. And so all this is happening, and I just had to try to find a way to still keep the show going. So if you listen to the show in 2020 during that time, I don’t know if you could tell how… I don’t even know what the feeling is that I had during that time. It was confusion, it was anger, it was sadness. It wasn’t my first time being laid off, so it wasn’t that. It was just like, I still got to keep the show going, and now that I’ve pulled everything away from Glitch, I almost felt like I had to start over.

2020 was a year of me trying to really start things over, because we now had to try to get more sponsors again. I had to get RJ back, which thank God he came back. He came back. I was very, very, very grateful for that. But we kind of had to start over. And by this time in 2020, everybody’s got a podcast. So it’s not even the same landscape as when I started in 2013. Not only does everybody have a podcast, there’s other Black design podcasts out there that have come up after Revision Path, and so sponsors always want to sponsor the new thing, not the old thing. It was just a lot in 2020. And also keep in mind, summer of 2020, June in particular is when a lot of people got out in the streets protesting because of the murder of George Floyd.

It was just a very charged time, and the thing that kept me together was focusing on the podcast. So as the saying goes, the show must go on. So we celebrated our 350th episode that year, as well as our 375th episode. I managed to get Bennie F. [Johnson], who was the former executive director of AIGA, the first Black person to hold the title in AIGA’s 100 plus year history, managed to get him on the podcast. I kind of feel like AIGA owed that to me after the years I put in with them volunteering, but that’s a whole other story. I published a second volume of RECOGNIZE. This time we did it with A List Apart. It was a bit rough with trying to get writers then, because again, pandemic people trying to just figure out what in the world is going on.

So we didn’t get the same amount of feedback. Plus InVision had kind of pulled their support after the first year, and so I really had to kind of try to do it out of my own pocket. 2020 really just overall left me shellshocked. And 2021 came, and then that’s another big loss, because the main thing of 2021 that was really something was that we had to end RECOGNIZE. By this time, things were not getting better in terms of participation in the project from people. The pandemic just affected, I think, the quality of the submissions, as well as the number of submissions that we received. And I just had to make a hard choice to say, you know what? We’re going to pull it. I still want to bring it back one day, but I just didn’t have the financial support, and I think really the community support, to be honest, to really keep it going.

I do want to bring it back one day. I don’t know when that will be. Some time in the future, but that was sort of what started off 2021. Nevertheless, I persevered. Revision Path reached a milestone 400 episodes. We did our 400th episode with Brent Rollins, and that brings us to last year, 2022, which really has been a year of building and rebuilding. I think the major thing is that we were kind of starting to come out of the pandemic a little bit, and so at this point, companies I think were starting to come around. We brought on a major sponsor last year with American Express. We celebrated 450 episodes back in May of last year. That was with Anthony D. Mays. And I partnered up with Omari Souza of the State of Black Design, and we created this new initiative called The Tenth Collective, which you’ve heard about on the show. It’s a combination job board and talent collective. We started that roughly about a year ago in, I think May or June of last year. We did a great bonus episode on Wakanda Forever, and it was really great to do that, because our first Black Panther episode is actually one of the ones that’s in the Smithsonian, so I really wanted to follow up with that.

And yeah, that’s how 2022 really went, was just trying to get our groove back, which leads us up to today.

THE FUTURE: 2023-????

So of course, as you know, this is February. We’re wrapping up Black History Month. We’re wrapping up our anniversary month of Revision Path. And the great thing about February is 28 Days of the Web. This is our 10th installment of doing 28 Days of the Web. We’ve been able to profile over 200 Black designers and developers.

Some of them have even gone on to be guests on the show, which has been a really great thing. Our 500th episode is going to be dropping on April 24th. I’m going to be talking with the one and only AIGA medalist, overall design historian and legend, Dr. Cheryl D. Miller. Make sure you tune in for that. That’s going to be a really great conversation. Also, I am working on a book project. I am working on a book with the venerable Gail Anderson and the just design godmother herself, Michele Washington.

We are writing a book together for Princeton Architectural Press. We’re calling it, I Didn’t Know They Were Black. Really excited about it. I’ll be able to talk more about what the book is about in the coming months, but it’s essentially going to be an expansive history of Black folks in design from the 1900s to now. I’m really excited about it. It’s a lot of work. We’ve actually been kind of working on the project on and off for several years now, but it’s finally got some steam behind it. And Gail has mentioned the book, Michele has mentioned the book, I’ve mentioned the book. I actually first mentioned it back in October when I spoke at Design Thinkers in Toronto. So we are working on the book. It should be coming out… You know what? I’m not going to say when it’s coming out, because we’re still working on it.

It’ll come out in the future, most likely 2025, I would imagine. Don’t hold me to that, but I just want you to know we are working on a book. And what I’m really excited about, super excited about this, in the coming months, you can be on the lookout for our new subscription service Revision Path+. Super excited about this. This is going to be a way for you to get early access to episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounts on design goods and services, exclusive giveaways. Super excited about this. I’ll have more information about that in the coming months, but really excited to get that out there for you all to really find a way to support Revision Path, while also just getting more out of the platform. And for the future after that, who knows? We’ve been doing this now for 10 years. Who knows what the future will be?

I’ll tell you what the future is not going to bring. It’s not going to bring me joining another network. I can tell you that. But I have to say, 10 years of doing Revision Path has taught me a lot. For Black people, merely celebrating ourselves is an act of defiance. Whether it’s getting shunned by designing peers, whether it’s getting sabotaged by partners, et cetera, Revision Path has had to fight every step of the way every year just to exist. And the thing about doing stuff like this, and I think anyone that does a project of this magnitude, it’s like everyone wants to take credit for your success. Everybody wants to take credit for that. Not a single person wants to take responsibility for your scars. So that’s something I’ve just picked up over the years from doing this.

I think social media in general has made it easy for a lot of people to ridicule and rubberneck and point out problems without offering solutions. And in my case, it had to do with seeing a gap in the market, recognizing Black designers, and then putting my own thing out there as a solution. So being a part of the solution and not just an observer of the problem is something that I have also learned over the years. And if you wait to start a project, the only thing that happens is that you get older. I had the idea for Revision Path when I did the Black Weblog Awards in 2006. I was 25 years old then. I launched Revision Path in 2013. I was 32 then. Now we’re coming up on 10 years. I’ll be turning 42 next month. Don’t wait to start. Soon you’ll be too old to do it. So if you have an idea, work and try to get it out there, and just keep going with it. Don’t sit and wait on the idea.

And so much of Revision Path behind the scenes with guests and with my team, it is a intricate lattice work of systems. I systemize things, I outsource, I time shift as much stuff as I can. And the reason that I do this is that it allows me to keep a tight production schedule, while also giving myself and my team plenty of time for breaks, for self-care, for just the other things in life that we all have to handle. Lastly, and I cannot stress this enough, because you have to have undeniable faith in your mission. I don’t want to say blind faith, because you definitely need to sort of defy the naysayers and the haters and the critics and all that sort of stuff. There’s a saying about eating the meat and spitting out the bones. You really have to be the biggest cheerleader for your mission to the dying end. When people see that, I promise you, they will see something special.

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Alleanna Harris

A common sentiment shared by a lot of the guests I’ve had on the podcast is that you can’t be what you don’t see. That starts at a young age, too — think about the book covers and other visuals you saw as a child and how that’s shaped you to where you are now. Luckily, there are dope illustrators like this week’s guest, Alleanna Harris, who are creating images that captivate and inspire kids so they can truly see themselves.

Alleanna and I went over some of her recent projects, including a portrait of Will Smith she drew in front of The Fresh Prince himself. She also shared her process on how she conveys a book’s story through pictures while also making them stunningly appealing. Later, Alleanna talked about growing up in South Jersey, attending UArts, spoke on the benefits of being represented by an agent, and told me what she appreciates the most about her life right now. Alleanna is a rising star, and according to her, a career in the world of illustration is possible! (So keep drawing!)

Interview Transcript

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

Alleanna Harris:
I’m Alleanna Harris. I’m a freelance illustrator from South Jersey. I mainly illustrate picture books, but I also do editorial, commercial, advertising, chapter books. I illustrate a lot.

Maurice Cherry:
How’s the year been going for you so far?

Alleanna Harris:
It’s been going pretty well. It’s kind of different than last year. Last year, I took on a lot, and the year before that, so I’ve been trying to just chill a little bit and take on less just so I could align myself with projects that I really want to do.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I find that a lot of creative folks I’ve talked to just on the show and off the show, they really started the year off kind of slow. Like, they’re really kind of easing into 2023.

Alleanna Harris:
Definitely, definitely. That’s what I’ve been doing my best, just picking things that I really, really like that I’m really, really into.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, based on all that hard work that you talked about before, I hear that congratulations are in order. There’s a book that you illustrated that won in the Black Kidlit Awards, is that right?

Alleanna Harris:
Yep, yep. It won best biography in the first Black Kidlit Awards ever. It’s called Marvelous Mabel. It’s about the life of Mabel Fairbanks. And she was the first Black figure skater, just the first Black famous figure skater. She came up in 1930s, 1940s, New York City. So it’s basically about her early life and all the things that she went through while trying to learn how to figure-skate, and it actually won. And it was the biggest surprise ever. I just went on Instagram and people were like, “Hey, Alleanna, you won,” and I was like, “What?” And I looked and it said, “Best biography,” and I was like, “Oh my goodness, I can’t believe I actually won.”

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, congratulations.

Alleanna Harris:
Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
I also saw, just from peeking around through social media, you also recently did some work with Pentagram, which is a extremely well-known agency. How was that project?

Alleanna Harris:
It was pretty awesome. They emailed me and they said that they wanted some work done in the picture-book style for an animation for the Gates Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And basically, they said that they wanted me to illustrate a character named Abeo, and she was about six or seven, and they wanted a good representation of a kid in early elementary school just so that they could show it to policymakers. And it was up to me to come up with the character and what she looked like and how she moved around. So I actually ended up illustrating a lot of the key frames for the animation and a lot of the assets, the things that she’s holding, like her books and pencils and different formulas. And it was a really amazing process. I got to work with the great folks at Pentagram and another animation studio named Kong in the UK, so that was really, really awesome.

Maurice Cherry:
How long did that project take, just overall?

Alleanna Harris:
You know what? Animation… Well, actually, that would be more advertising. Those kinds of projects are really, really fast-paced, so that took about, I would say, under a month, maybe about three weeks. So it was-

Maurice Cherry:
Wow, it was fast.

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah, it was really, really fast, but it went really well. It was pretty straightforward.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, since we’re already getting into your work, I want to keep going down that road. We talked a little bit before we started recording, and you mentioned that you started professionally as an illustrator in 2017, but prior to that, you were, I guess, testing the waters, maybe, on Etsy. Is that right?

Alleanna Harris:
Yep, that’s right. I started right after college in 2015. And it was funny because my mom, she said, “Well, if you’re right out of college and you want to do this illustration thing, then you know what, I’m going to give you two years so you could figure it out. Do your best to figure it out in two years, and if not, then you could go right into probably, like, a master’s program.” So I was like, “Okay, I really have to figure this out.” And the best thing that I could think of was to just sketch and draw what’s around me or things that interested me. So I did a ton of sketches of places in Philly, and I also did a ton of illustrations of different Philly foods, and different pop-culture things, like living single in a different world. I ended up putting them on a Etsy shop, and it actually did well as soon as I started offering those prints. And that’s where I got my start.

Maurice Cherry:
How was Etsy like? Was it a good platform for you to, I guess, test out whether or not you had a market for your work?

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah, it was really good. I was really surprised, actually, because when I put them on, I was pretty convinced it would take a long time. It’s crazy, but it was a week, only a week that someone first bought one of my prints. And I actually think it was a Ferris Bueller print that was my first sale. And then around that same time, I started sharing my illustrations on Instagram, too, so I started building an audience on there.

Maurice Cherry:
Is that the one where they’re at the Sears Tower and they’re leaning over and their foreheads hitting the glass?

Alleanna Harris:
Yes. Yep, that was the one.

Maurice Cherry:
I love that one. That one is so good. It’s so good.

Alleanna Harris:
Thank you. Thank you. That’s the one I did. That one, and then I did different ones of Cameron’s… I think it’s Redhawks jersey, Sloane’s white leather jacket, and then Ferris’s shirt/vest combo, and that did well, too. So, that was kind of my start on Etsy.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you mentioned earlier, when you were working with Pentagram, that they wanted, quote, unquote, “a picture-book style.” What does your process look like for illustrating a picture book? I would imagine it’s probably different from working with an author than it is working with a company or a nonprofit.

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah, definitely. Well, for picture books, it can actually take a long time. It could take a year or more. Because I don’t actually work directly with authors; I usually work directly with the publishers. So I usually get those projects through my agent. My agent, Alex, she usually emails me with a manuscript and she’s like, “What do you think about this? Do you like how it sounds? Are you interested?” And then I look over it and then I say yes or no. And then if it’s a yes, then I look over the manuscript again, and then they might send me these thing called art notes. Usually they’re within a template for the book, so usually they place the text within the book so that I have a place to sketch everything. And then they give me art notes, which basically tell me what to draw.

But lately, they haven’t been giving me art notes. They’ve just been saying, “Okay, here’s the manuscript, and go for it.” So, I just sketch things, whatever comes to mind, whatever I think fits the story best, and then I send it back to them. The editor and the art director go over it, and then they come up with feedback and notes, and then I revise. Usually it’s a bunch of revisions, just a cycle of revisions. And then I go to final art, I start to add color. Sometimes I do rough color, I just place colors around, and then they give me the “Go ahead,” and then I fix that up. And then it’s another cycle of revisions. And then after I finish the final color, I usually go over it again. And then that’s it. It’s a long process, but it’s totally worth it.

Maurice Cherry:
And you mostly work with the editors, that’s interesting. For some reason, I thought you’d be working more closely with the author since it’s their words and everything.

Alleanna Harris:
I know, and usually… Well, when I started, I thought that would be the case, too, but no, I work directly with the art director and then the editor. Usually it’s both of them together. For my last couple of books, I talked to the authors after the process. It’s really funny. I usually don’t talk to them, not unless it’s through the editor.

Maurice Cherry:
And I would imagine the authors are… I mean, do they like that process, I guess? I don’t know. I guess that’s not really for you to decide, huh?

Alleanna Harris:
Not really. Usually, I guess they rely on the editors for that. If they have things that they want me to include, if they have reference photos or other things like that, they send it through the editor, and then I work from there.

Maurice Cherry:
Interesting, interesting. Well, I guess if the author’s writing the book at that point, they’re like, “Look, you got it from here.” No, I mean, I guess it sounds like the authors are happy with it. I would imagine that would be kind of awkward if you do all this illustration for the book and the author’s like, “I don’t know if this is really what I wanted for the book.”

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah. Oh, no, that would be so awkward. But I mean, I would work with it and then I’d get it to a place where we’re all happy. But yeah, they leave it up to the editor and the art director. I’d say for one of the books, it was actually a early reader, and it was about Geoffrey Holder, the actor and Broadway star. I actually had to go through a lot of revisions for that one just to get it to a place where the author was happy with it. It wasn’t that she wasn’t happy with the art, but it was just a certain kind of feeling that she wanted, because he’s from Trinidad and she just wanted it to have that homey, bright feeling, just, like, Caribbean feeling. It took me a few revision cycles to get there, but I got there, so she was happy with it.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, to that end, when you’re illustrating for a book, is it more about trying to accurately convey the story, or is it about making something, like you just mentioned, making it more visually appealing?

Alleanna Harris:
It’s both because you want the reader… And usually the reader is a kid. You want kids to want to know what they’re looking at, and two, to feel something from the book. So it’s usually my job to get it there, to get it accurate enough where they know who they’re looking at just by their parents, but also, it’s up to me to make it look good enough in terms of color and mood so that it really affects the readers.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, yeah. I mean, you said it’s a picture book, so the picture has to be sort of the primary focus almost, it sounds like.

Alleanna Harris:
Right, right.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Aside from that Geoffrey Holder book you mentioned, was there ever a particularly challenging illustration you had to create for a book, whether it was technical or just getting the look and feel right?

Alleanna Harris:
Oh my goodness, yes. It was actually my first picture book called The Journey of York. I’d say it was more like a oil painting-type style. It was way more realistic. And it had a lot of different landscapes, and all the people had to look really real. So it took a lot of work to get it to a point where it looked right. It had all these different locations in the Pacific Northwest and all this vegetation and all these people. And it was just a lot of going back and forth with my art director, Laurie. It took a lot of research, too. They actually sent me a book, and I do not remember the name of it, but it’s somewhere in my bookcase at back of me. But they had to send me a book, and it had a lot about the clothes that they wore during that time. It also had some examples of the places that Lewis and Clark went, because it was basically about the enslaved man that went along with them, and it was basically the brains of the operation alongside with Sacagawea. So, it was just a lot to that artistically.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, I want to get more into your work and your career. There’s some really dope things that you’ve done that I want to talk about. But before we get there, let’s learn more about you. Now, you’re originally from Philly, but you were raised in South Jersey, is that correct?

Alleanna Harris:
Yes, yes. I’m Philly born. My parents are both from Philly. And I was raised in South Jersey, about 20-30 minutes away, Northeast. So, Philly is really important to me. Yeah, just raised in South Jersey and in a very, very close-knit family. It was a pretty cool upbringing. The town where I was raised in, it’s predominantly Black. I mostly went to Quaker schools growing up. And for those that aren’t familiar with Quaker schools, it’s basically Christian, but they believe that the light of God is in everyone, and they don’t have worship services. They just sit in silence for a little bit of time weekly. They’re known for just very rigorous academic programs. So, I went to Quaker schools for K through 12, kindergarten, all the way through 12th grade, and it was really a awesome experience.

Maurice Cherry:
Did you do a lot of drawing as a kid or as a teenager?

Alleanna Harris:
Oh, yeah. I’ve been drawing forever. When I was little, when I was a toddler, I would just scribble in all of my mom’s legal pads. Every single page, I’d just scribble. Like, turn the page, scribble, turn the page scribble. And then she’d go to work and then take out her legal pad, and then all of them were just covered in scribble. When I got a little older, I would always doodle in the church programs. By the time I got to middle school, I would keep a sketchbook with me. And my mom and my grandma were super supportive because they’d always be like, “Did you remember to bring your sketchbook? Always remember to sketch.” And I would just sketch everything that was around me. In high school, I was more of an academic-type kid. I was very math and science-y. So I didn’t really take a lot of art classes, but I always kept that sketchbook next to me.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, that’s interesting. You mentioned that about being more math and science-y, but also into drawing and art. Is that kind of what initially pushed you into architecture at Temple?

Alleanna Harris:
Yep, that was it. Because I was into math and science, but when I was trying to decide what to do, I was like, “I need something with a artistic bent,” and I thought that would be architecture. So, I got into Temple. I was in their honors program, actually, and I was also accepted into their architecture program at their Tyler School of Art. It was a really, really great program, but I did not enjoy it one bit. I thought that’s what I wanted to do, but I got there and I was like, “I don’t really enjoy this like I thought I did.” I mean, I did well, but I was like, “No, there’s got to be something other than this I could do.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I can imagine… I mean, when I went to school, for example, I went to study computer science, computer engineering at first because I wanted to be a web designer. Now, granted, this was late ’90s, early 2000s, so web design was not… I don’t want to say it wasn’t a profession, but it certainly wasn’t one that you could, I think, really study in a lot of schools. Most schools just didn’t even have a curriculum for it. And I remember taking it that first semester and talking to my advisor about it, and he was just like, “Oh, the internet’s a fad. You don’t want to get into that. Nobody’s going to be interested in that.” And he’s like, “If that’s what you want to do, you should change your major.” So I did change my major. But you went even further. You completely transferred schools.

Alleanna Harris:
I did, I did. I’m pretty sure everyone thought, I don’t know, maybe that I was a little bit crazy, because they’re like, “You’re at Temple, you’re at a great art school. What are you doing?” I had a really chunky scholarship that I was just not throwing away. But yeah, I need something more creative, so I actually ended up looking up other schools, and I found University of the Arts. And it happened to be on the other side of Broad Street. Temple University is on North Broad, and University of the Arts is on South Broad, on the other side of City Hall. So, I looked them up and I saw that they had an animation program, and I was like, “I think this would be really great.” I sat my mom down, I was like, “Listen, I have something to tell you.” And she’s staring at me, like, “What is wrong?” And I was like, “I want to go into animation.” She’s like, “Oh my God. Okay, that’s fine. Just figure out how to apply and we’ll just go from there.” So, I went to the Open House, I applied, and I actually ended up getting a bigger scholarship there than I had at Temple.

Maurice Cherry:
Whoa, look at you.

Alleanna Harris:
I know. Thank you. But it’s like, who knew? So, I ended up at University of the Arts as an animation major, and that’s where I graduated from.

Maurice Cherry:
How was your time there?

Alleanna Harris:
Oh my goodness, I loved it. It was different from Temple because, number one, it’s smaller. It’s private compared to Temple, which is public and it’s bigger. But it’s smaller, but it’s right smack dab in the middle of Center City, so right on the Avenue of the Arts. It doesn’t have a campus, it’s just within everything. This is within Center City. So, when I got there and I got to the dorm and everything, which is basically like an apartment, it was kind of culture shock because you have to learn how to navigate. It is kind of like “living as an adult,” quote, unquote, even though you’re in college. So it was just interesting having to meet people again because… I transferred, so I didn’t get to go to orientation, so I had to meet people.

It was really great because I always liken it to Fame, the school in Fame, because UArts has so many different majors. It’s just such a comprehensive arts university. It has musical theater, and fine arts, and film, and photography. And then I tell people it’s like Fame because we would sit in the dining hall and then people would just start singing and dancing and everything and just be in the midst of that. But it was a really great time. Just so many creative people, so many things to do, so many great professors. It was really awesome. I enjoyed it. I made a lot of great friends, still friends with them today.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, do you feel like it really sort of prepared you once you graduated and got out there working as a creative?

Alleanna Harris:
Yes, definitely, because it allowed me, just going there, to take different types of classes. I had my animation… my core classes, but I was also able to take film classes, and I learned a lot in those. And just the things that I learned within my film classes, it directly applies to how I see illustration, just my point of view. I also took illustration classes. And actually, my illustration classes, that made me realize that I really wanted to go into illustration more than animation. So for sure, definitely. Definitely.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I can imagine that kind of environment because, one, there’s so many different creative disciplines happening at once, but then also, like you mentioned with that lunchroom example, you’re getting to see people exhibit their craft. You have the possibility and the potential to go into anything else just by getting inspired from being in that environment, which I think can sometimes be a lot different when you’re at a traditional liberal-arts school because you’re so locked into your major.

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah, definitely. I agree.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And then as you said earlier, after you graduated, for your early career, you started out with just, I guess, freelancing, starting out on Etsy, seeing if you had a market for it, and then that’s sort of where things took off. But you said you started professionally in 2017. So what were those first two years like after you graduated from UArts?

Alleanna Harris:
They were really interesting because I did things on Etsy. I was starting to build an audience on social media, but I was also doing commissions for friends and family members. So there’s some people who were like, “Hey, can you do this cover, because I have a book coming out,” so I do stuff like that. So, I did a lot of commissions. I even taught senior citizens how to paint. I would go to assisted-living places and we would have little paint-and-sip nights. And that was fun. That was interesting. I also do stuff like that. And actually, closer to 2017, I illustrated a book. Well, my cousin worked within the Philadelphia School Board. And she was working with someone who had a company that had to do with the school board, and she wrote books. So she was looking for an illustrator, and my cousin was like, “Hey, my cousin is an illustrator. You might want to check her portfolio out.” So she did, and she checked my portfolio out and she liked it, and she was like, “Hey, can you illustrate this book for me?” So, that was actually my first experience illustrating a book, and I absolutely fell in love with it. And actually, that was the main experience that made me want to illustrate books.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice, nice. Now, you’ve said that… We talked about this before we recorded, but you said there are a lot of different paths when it comes to illustration as a career and that you can make it lucrative. It sounds like for you initially, you tried out a bunch of different things, like you were teaching senior citizens, you were doing Etsy, you were doing commissions. What are some of those paths that people can take if they’re looking to pursue illustration as a career?

Alleanna Harris:
There are a ton of different paths. I guess just thinking about my major, I was an animation major, so most of my classmates, they ended up going the animation route. They also illustrate, but they’re within story of the animation. So they come up with the storyboards, they come up with the plot points, they do stuff like that. And then I also have friends that are animators now. So, you can definitely go that way.

Within illustration, I know people who illustrate commercially, so they do different advertisements or they work with brands like Google or Apple or Adobe.

I know people who work within art licensing, so they do the patterns that go on clothes or that go on different products.

There are just so many different ways you can go. Or, like me, you could go into picture books, or you could do comic books, and there are just so many different ways you can go.

Maurice Cherry:
And it sounds like, I guess maybe once you get further along on one path, you can maybe bounce between others. Like, if you’re doing picture books, maybe you can also do editorial illustrations or something like that.

Alleanna Harris:
Exactly, yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot of leeway. There’s a lot of leeway because some people can look at your work and be like, “You know what? That will work over here. Do you want to try it out?” That happened with me. Someone from… I think it’s called the Phoenix International, they’re making a graphic novel about Ida B. Wells, and they’re like, “Do you want to work on this? I know it’s a comic book, and I know that you do picture books, but do you want to work on it?” And I said, “Sure.” And I ended up doing a graphic novel. But yeah, that’s definitely how it happened. You could just kind of jump from style to style.

Maurice Cherry:
And I would imagine your process probably still mostly stays the same, even if you’re doing these sort of different types of illustration.

Alleanna Harris:
Yep, yep. Yeah, it pretty much stays the same. You’re right.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, I’m curious to get your take about AI-generated art. That’s a discussion that has really popped up, I’d say, within the last, I don’t know, I’d say, four to five months particularly, once people started using… what was the app called? Lensa?

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
And they started making those AI-generated avatars and putting them out there and everything. I don’t know, the discussion around it, I think, has been so interesting because I’ve heard from artists that are like, “I hate this. This is theft. I can’t believe this is happening,” that sort of thing. And then I hear it from the average layperson that is surprised for two things. One, that the art looks nothing like them, which, I mean, yeah, you had a computer do it, that makes sense. But then secondly, they’re more perturbed that they had to pay for it.

Alleanna Harris:
Oh yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Like, you paid money for that? You gave them how much money? And I would see people on Twitter and stuff searching around, trying to find a free alternative because they didn’t want to pay Lensa. I think it was $8 or $10 or something like that. So they’re like, “Well, I found this Chinese app called Meitu, and I can do it there for free,” and da, da, da, da, da, and all this stuff.

From your perspective as an artist, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, all these AI-generated art’s algorithms and apps and stuff like that, what are your thoughts on all that?

Alleanna Harris:
I have so many thoughts. First of all, well, just, I guess, the bottom line, I’m not a fan. I’m not a fan because some people want to use it to replace working artists. I saw this big thread on Twitter with this guy who used… I think he used Stable Diffusion to make a picture book, and everybody was getting on him about the picture book because all of his characters, they weren’t consistent. It just didn’t look right-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, yeah, I saw that, I think because he also used ChatGPT to write the book.

Alleanna Harris:
Yes, that’s it. That’s it. Yeah, I’m not a fan because it is theft because it needs other people’s work, at least Stable Diffusion does. It needs other people’s work to create art. So why don’t you just actually pay an artist to actually do the art instead of stealing the work to make something out of it? Also, I feel like using AI, you’re not really being an artist, you’re more being a client because AI is doing the work. You’re telling it what you want it to do instead of you actually actively doing it. I know it’s less work to tell software to do what you want, but the process is the biggest part of making the art, and you’re taking all the process out of it.

Maurice Cherry:
There’s a friend of mine, he’s an art director at an ad agency, and he’s been learning Midjourney and been posting the results on LinkedIn and stuff. And it looks nice. I find that the AI art has a particular style-

Alleanna Harris:
It’s a look.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, it’s a particular look. Very stylized, heavy shadows, all the art kind of looks the same regardless of who the subject is. But he’s been taking a class. Apparently people have written classes about how to ask the right prompts to get it to do the right thing. It’s so interesting seeing how far people are willing to take it, I think, just to see what the possibilities are.

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah. Well, there are so many ways that we could use AI that would help or make our lives easier, but I just don’t think that that’s the best way to go about it. It’s like, why don’t we use AI to figure out our taxes or do the work that we don’t feel like doing, having to do bookkeeping or something like that. But the actual art part that really takes a human to do, you’re taking that away. I’m not really a fan, but hey.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, it’s so interesting, at least from what I’m seeing people trying to do. I think it does unlock some people’s creativity that doesn’t necessarily have the skill-

Alleanna Harris:
It does.

Maurice Cherry:
… to maybe take the idea that they have in their head and really draw it, or even spend money to get someone to draw it. So they’ll say, “Oh, well, let’s see what AI can do.” I saw… I think this was on TikTok. Someone had done a Racebent Addams Family, where the Addams Family is all Black, so then they had all of the… Gomez and Wednesday and Morticia, et cetera. It’s like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” And then you look at all the comments that are like, “Somebody needs to take this to Netflix.” I’m like, “Netflix already has both the movies and the new series.” Not saying that they couldn’t do this, but what is… I think when people see that, one, I don’t know if they’re under the assumption that the person created it, but two, if they were to take it to that extra level, that’s when you got to get humans involved.

Alleanna Harris:
Exactly. And you were talking about the level of skill. That’s so true, because I think people want to avoid, I’m going to say this, but the ugly phase, when your work doesn’t look that good, when you’re still learning. But you can’t avoid it. To make good art, you have to make bad art first. That’s also why I’m not a fan, but yeah. You kind of skip over that phase where you’re just learning the materials, learning… If you work on a computer, you’re learning the software. You skip over that to try to make art that’s presentable. And you can’t.

Maurice Cherry:
I do have some writer friends that are using it just for character sketches. It helps them to take the character that they’re writing about to visualize it. So they’ll do it for that purpose, but they’re not going to take that and then go to a designer or an illustrator and say, “I made this on Midjourney. Can you touch this up,” or “Can you do XYZ?” I would imagine some people will go that route. Don’t do that. But I can see some useful applications of it, as long as it doesn’t get too… The person creating the picture book, I mean, come on.

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It’s like, if there is a way to do it without stealing other people’s work and styles, then that would be interesting to see. But I just don’t like that a lot of the different programs are stealing other people’s work, and not even paying them for it. They’re just taking it, “Oh, I like this person’s style, so I’m just going to plug it in.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Well, I know Getty is suing… I think they’re suing Stable Diffusion-

Alleanna Harris:
I heard.

Maurice Cherry:
… because one thing that Stable Diffusion does, and I guess all of these algorithms or AI things do it, is, they’ll take the watermarks, too. Getty Images always has that big rectangular watermark across their picture. And so there are AI-generated images that have malformed versions of that, and Getty’s like, “Ah, ah, I don’t think so. You got to pay us for that.”

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah, exactly. And there’s this thing going around on Twitter. People were saying, “Oh, maybe you should plug in Disney and see what happens.”

Maurice Cherry:
Because yeah, you can feed stuff to it to make it better. But to what end is this going to come from? Because I’m starting to see applications of folks using AI for music, for example. I think Google has this beta program out now where you can give it a couple of phrases and have it generate music in a particular style, which I know musicians will hate that. But it’s interesting how far we’re trying to take artificial intelligence in a way that subverts human creativity.

Alleanna Harris:
Exactly. Along with creativity, it makes you think of ethics, too. Like, where exactly do we stop? When is it okay, and when is this not okay? It’s a bigger conversation.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, educators now are already having to deal with that with ChatGPT. I’ve been talking with a couple of educators now that are just like… Some are still trying to wrap their heads around it, others are already changing their syllabi to say, “Don’t do this.” And we’re starting to see school districts and stuff crack down on it because students… And this is to a point where, in an educational perspective, this is really dangerous. Students don’t know the difference. They don’t know the nuance or the particular human parts of this. They just see it, it’s like, “Oh, this can do my homework for me.”

Alleanna Harris:
Yes. Yes, you’re so right. It’s really something to see. It’s so many new developments in such a short amount of time. Technology.

Maurice Cherry:
I saw this while going through your Instagrams. I was doing research, but you even got to draw Will Smith in front of Will Smith.

Alleanna Harris:
I did. I did. I did. It was crazy because the folks at Harriett’s Bookshop, they contacted me and they were like, “Hey, we’re having this book tour stopping in and we were just wondering if you’d work with us in setting it up.” And I was like, “Oh my God. Of course.” So as I was working with them and getting everything set up and working with possible drawings, I was like, “Okay, something’s up because, one, this project is really rush. It’s going really fast. So I feel like this is someone important, and I don’t know who this is.” And then I emailed them and they were like, “Yeah, we figured we’d let you know. It’s actually Will Smith. And this is a Will Smith’s book.” And I was like, “Oh my goodness.” So, they were like, “Okay, so people from Westbrook-

Maurice Cherry:
Westbrook, Westbrook, yeah.

Alleanna Harris:
Yes. They’re like, “Westbrook is going to call you and they’re going to ask you to do a portrait, and you’re going to say yes.” And I was like, “Okay. Okay, I’ll say yes.” And I actually had to meet with them and send them past sketches to see if they approved. And then they told me, “Well, we’re going to show this to Will, see if he likes it.” And I was like, “Oh my God, you’re going to show it. He just [inaudible 00:39:17] to be Will Smith as just Will. Okay.” So, they showed it to Will Smith, they showed it to Will, and he liked it, and I ended up sketching him in front of him at the event.

It’s funny because I didn’t get to finish the sketch because the whole day was actually pretty hectic, but I was able to give him a drawing that I did. And I actually have the process video up on my Instagram, too. I was able to give that to him and he’s like, “Wow, that’s definitely me.” And I was like, “I know.” But it was great to just be able to say hello and shake his hand and say thank-you. And just to see how it went in person, it was just amazing. That was an amazing day.

Maurice Cherry:
Is he Philly royalty?

Alleanna Harris:
Yes, without a doubt.

Maurice Cherry:
I’ve always been curious about that because, I mean, so much of… Of course, his early story has been about in West Philadelphia, born… We all know that. But then I think so much of his professional career has been wrapped up in Hollywood and California. I was just curious about that.

Alleanna Harris:
Oh no, he’s definitely royalty. And actually, before he got there, it’s just tons of people. There was even a guy dressed up like him in his Fresh Prince days. Like, the striped shirt on, the sideways cap. These would people that are like, “Oh, we walked so far to be here.” And there are people from the Carolinas, I think, they were just waiting for hours. And he pulled in and people were just losing… 6abc was there. They’re like, “Fresh Prince returns.” He’s definitely Philly royalty, no doubt.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow, nice. Now, you’re represented by The Bright Agency, and The Bright Agency reps, a ton of animators, artists, and authors. How did you go about getting representation, and what are the benefits for you as an artist of being represented by an agency?

Alleanna Harris:
It’s funny, it was actually pretty serendipitous. My friend Loveis Wise, they’re a illustrator. They’re really amazing. We went to college together. We both went to UArts. They were a illustration major. And they told me, they said, “You should join Women Who Draw. It’s a really great website. It’s basically a database of women illustrators. You just put a piece of your work there and you say your name and different things about your identity, and then people go there and look for artists.” And I was like, “Okay, cool. I’ll do it.” So I uploaded my info. And not too long after that, I’d say months, my first agent, James Burns, he said, “Hey, I like your work. Is there anything that Bright can do for you?” And I was like, “You got to be kidding me, because it’s…” Actually, Bright was the agency that I was looking at when I was starting to plan, sending out my artist postcards. And the fact that he found my work on Women Who Draw and then reached out to me was absolutely amazing. So, from there, I said yes, and I’ve been represented by Bright ever since.

Maurice Cherry:
What are artist postcards? What’s that? Is it, like, a calling card of some sort?

Alleanna Harris:
Basically, yeah, you put a strong piece of art. It could have different themes. It could be seasonal or just whatever piece of art that you like most. And you put that on one side and then you put your information, your name, website on the other side, and you send it to art directors or agencies. Basically, if they like them, they keep them and they keep you in line for projects.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. So you use that to sort of shop yourself around a little bit.

Alleanna Harris:
No, I didn’t even start. I went on, I put my stuff on Women Who Draw, and he found me there-

Maurice Cherry:
And they came to you.

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Okay. What are those benefits of being repped by an agency? I would imagine it sort of just takes a lot of the admin stuff off of your plate.

Alleanna Harris:
It does. It really does. That’s what I like most because contract stuff that goes through them, they have people who specifically work on contracts. So I could go to my agent even about payments or deadlines, and they could talk to the publishers and the companies on my behalf. It’s just great having someone in your corner who knows the field better than you do.

Maurice Cherry:
And then all you can do is just draw and get paid.

Alleanna Harris:
I love it. It’s so much help.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I mean, that’s the dream for all creatives to be able to have the freedom to do that. Like, just do your work, get paid, and not have to worry about all the in-between stuff. So that’s great.

Alleanna Harris:
Yes. Yes, yes. It’s definitely a blessing. I’m definitely grateful to work with them. It’s really awesome.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you’ve got a couple of books that are coming out a little bit later this year, right?

Alleanna Harris:
Yep, yep. I have two. The first is Good Things by Maryah Greene, and that’s a picture book about a boy named Malcolm. Lives with his dad, and I believe it’s in Harlem. [inaudible 00:44:33] grandma, and his dad actually passes away, so he has to learn how to take care of the plants that his dad left him. And it’s a really good book about grief, and about plants, too. I got to illustrate a lot of plants because Maryah is a amazing plant doctor in New York City. So, there’s that book. These books come out in August, I believe, the 1st of August. There’s also Recipe for Change, which is by Michael C. Platt. And he is pretty young. I believe he’s in his late teens or his teens, but he’s a chef. It’s a cookbook. And I illustrate different foods in different scenes, based on the civil rights movement. And each of the recipes align with the scene. So you have a recipe and a story and a portrait, and it’s really, really educational. So, I have those two coming out in August.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Are they both available right now for pre-order? Because I want to put links to them in the show notes so people can check them out.

Alleanna Harris:
They’re about to be. Recipe for Change is actually about to be open for pre-order in the first week of February, and I am still waiting on word for Good Things.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Well, hopefully by the time this comes out, which will be right around mid- to late-February, we’ll hopefully have links to both of those, but we’ll certainly mention them, as well.

Alleanna Harris:
Awesome. That sounds great.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. How do you stay motivated and inspired with your work?

Alleanna Harris:
You know what, I just think it’s a part of my personality. I’m really self-directed. I have a lot of family support, especially from my mom. And there are certain things that I just want to see on the world, and I want kids to be able to see themselves in books. And that drives me. That’s always the thing that pushes me. So I have no lack of passion or drive. That always pushes me.

Maurice Cherry:
Do you have a dream project of sorts that you’d love to do one day?

Alleanna Harris:
Oh my goodness. I feel like I have a lot of dream projects. I’m always into little-known stories of figures that we definitely should know about, but we don’t. So I love picture books that have to do with subjects like that. But I’m also interested in going back into animation. I’m not leaving picture books, but going maybe into the visual-development part of animation, maybe character design and maybe, one day, art directing, that would be amazing, for a animated series. That would definitely be a dream for me. That would be amazing.

Maurice Cherry:
Is this a series that you’d create yourself?

Alleanna Harris:
Ooh, I’m open to it. I didn’t even think of that, but now that you say it, yeah, that would be great. It could be existing, too, but any way that I could art-direct or do character design, that would be a dream.

Maurice Cherry:
What do you appreciate the most about your life right now?

Alleanna Harris:
I just appreciate being able to use the skills that I’ve worked on. I guess I could say gifts, too, just to be able to use them to help people learn and just give them material to look at, just new books and being able to help kids read and learn new things. That’s just a blessing, and I never would’ve thought that this would be what I do as a career, but I absolutely love it. I love being able to sit down in my room and just draw and then actually have it turn into a book, into things people see on bookshelves. That’s just amazing to me and I’m just forever grateful for it.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What kind of work would you like to be doing?

Alleanna Harris:
Definitely more picture books. I guess, along with the animation thing that I just mentioned, I could actually see myself working on a series. But other than that, I could see myself doing more commercial work, kind of like what I did with Pentagram. Actually, last year, I illustrated a gift card for Target. It was a Christmas gift card. I can see myself doing more of that, more brand work. But yeah, those are the things I could see in the future.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice. We just had Domonique Brown. She has a company, a lifestyle company called Domo, Inc. And she has a collection… Yeah, part of her collection’s at Target now for Black History Month. She also did a few cards for American Greetings, I think it’s a card company. She did some cards for them, too. So, I could totally see your work in that vein. That would be great.

Alleanna Harris:
Thank you. Thank you. I would love it. That would be so great.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you and your work and your books and everything? Where can they find that online?

Alleanna Harris:
Sure. Well, you could go to my website. It’s alleannaharris.com, A-L-L-E-A-N-N-A-H-A-R-R-I-S, .com. And I’m also Alleanna Harris everywhere on social media, so you can find me on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, even Tumblr, TikTok. You can find me all those places. Alleanna Harris.

Maurice Cherry:
All right, sounds good. Well, Alleanna Harris, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I think that just the work that you’re doing is so inspired and really, I think, driven by your own particular creative passion. I mean, as a kid that grew up reading a lot, reading competitions and all that stuff, there is just such an importance on children’s books that I think sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. And so the fact now that we have so many Black artists, especially like yourself, that are creating the books with authors that children are going to read, that are going to help shape them into becoming the people of tomorrow, I think is just such an amazing and inspiring thing. And your work is just so beautiful, and-

Alleanna Harris:
Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
… I’m so excited to see what you do next. And like I said, we’ll put links to your books in the show notes. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Alleanna Harris:
Thank you so much, and thank you so much for having me. This was great. I really enjoyed this.

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