Kirk Visola

If you want to be more authentic in your work and life, then this week’s episode is especially for you. I sat down with Kirk Visola, creative director extraordinaire, and the founder of Mind the Font, a full-service branding and packaging design agency.

We dove right in and I learned about how Kirk approaches design projects while balancing the want for innovation with the need to stay true to a brand’s established identity. Kirk also spoke about growing up and getting into design and illustration, talked about his podcasting endeavors, and he gave some great advice for aspiring creatives of all stripes. We even nerded out for a bit about comic books and video games!

For Kirk, being himself and sticking to those who encourage and support his creativity has given him a great life, and that’s a lesson we can all take to heart!

☎️ Call ‪626-603-0310 and leave us a message with your comments on this episode!‬
Interview Transcript

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

Kirk Visola:
All right, what’s up? How you doing, Maurice? Thanks for having me on, man. I’m Kirk Visola. I’m the founder and creative director of Mind the Font. It’s a full service branding and packaging design agency. We try to focus on things in the food and beverage space, mainly CPG, which is consumer products goods. And as much as this sounds like I’m reading this, I am not. That was off the top of the dome.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. How has 2023 been going so far? I know you’re in California, so y’all have been getting hammered by the rain.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah, it’s not too bad for the most part. I’ve been fortunate enough, I’m in Santa Cruz, which is close to Aptos and Capitola, which were both hit pretty heavily on their downtowns, and also SoCal and on the docks, and then next to the ocean. We lost part of our road here, West Cliff, in Santa Cruz, so it’s been raining pretty heavily. But today it led up and it’s a beautiful day. That’s the weather forecast for 2023.

As far as business and just livelihood, I’m happy to be upright, pushing 50, in my late-forties, and I’m a Black male in this country and I’m still alive. So that has to count for something, so I’m happy about that.

Maurice Cherry:
I heard that. Amen to that. Let’s talk about your branding and packaging design agency, Mind the Font. Tell me more about that.

Kirk Visola:
That’s a really, really good question, which is what people always say on podcast, “Great question,” because we’re actually trying to think of a way to answer the question. I’ve been working in design for a long time. I started in ’98 and I was doing all kinds of things. I was still going to school. I was going to take design classes. And I started working freelance with my wife at the time. And then I was working freelance and I decided to go into the private sector or into corporate sector, however you want to call it. And so starting in 2009, I got a job at Pure Red Creative. If you want to read my resume and when you got off here, that’s fine too.

But fast forward to 2014, I started working at a company called Shaklee, and it was a great job at the get go. My boss, who’s still a really good friend, she was very, I’m trying to think of the best way to put this, very progressive by the means in which people worked. Because I had been freelancing for Lord knows how long, and that was all from my house. It was all via emails when FTP, File Transfer Protocol, first came out, and stuff like that. And I was doing all that stuff and then she left.
No, actually, here’s what happened. I got absorbed into a different place at the company, and then she left and it just went downhill from there. It was a horrible experience. I guess I can get into that later, but what made me leave was the fact that I couldn’t handle it anymore. I was stressed out. Half of my face would go numb going into work. And I’m like, “You know what? Fuck this. I’m going to do my own shit.”

So my wife and I were on vacation, and I was at the point where I was trying to figure out what I was going to do. And we were in the UK and everything there when you ride on the London Underground is, “Please, mind the gap.” It’s like this repeated person over the intercom saying, “Please, don’t forget to mind the gap. Mind the gap.” And so my wife goes, “Why don’t you just call it Mind the Font?” And I just was floored. How did I not think of this? How did I not think of this? So I have to credit her with giving me the name for the company.

And it’s just doing stuff I’ve always done. I’m really good at what I do, but my main interest and my main focus in regards to design work is branding and packaging. That’s like my forte. It’s what I love. And so that’s what I do at Mind the Font. And clients range from new alcohol products to new baby food products or just food products. And also, I’m trying to think of stuff I’ve done, beauty products and perfumes. So we run the gamut on all things that come in a box, and that’s what Mind the Font does.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m curious, have you found there to be any sort of big changes in designing for consumer packaged goods over the years?

Kirk Visola:
Oh, absolutely. There’s always standards that you have to abide by. There are certain things that need to go on packaging that you need to think about. There’s certain techniques that have evolved over the years, especially in printing. That’s a big thing. Printing has evolved so much and all of the protocols of companies trying to go greener, and then print companies also keeping up to go greener. The actual programs that you use are advancing, especially with the big AI thing coming out.

I’ve even kind of dabbled with Midjourney. And it’s weird because people are speaking about how it’s used to steal their art, but what I’m doing is I’m taking art I’ve done and using that as a prompt to see what it does. So it’s like my art as a base, but then putting in the prompt is what it does for Midjourney and add texture to this to make it look more like three dimensional. And it does it to my own artwork. So I’m thinking maybe that’s something that could possibly be an avenue for people to go.

I don’t think it’s going to replace designers. I don’t think it’s going to replace artists. But I do think that it’s a means of weeding out the bad designers and good designers. Like when there was a big real estate boom, there were tons of real estate agents and a lot of them went away, but the ones that were really good at what they did, they’re still there.

And so there’s programs that are advancing, and there’s also different mediums to go about. When I first started, it was basically web and print. This is the late ’90s. There was no real social media. Maybe Facebook started coming out and other things. And all of a sudden, next thing you know, there’s UX designers, product designers, UI designers, web designers, and there’s print designers, social media managers, social media content creators. There’s like this wide gamut of things that people can do now. And so it’s just advanced with all the stuff that’s coming out.

And for me, it’s just too much to keep up with from that standpoint. But in my own field, which is why I specified branding and packaging, it’s like I feel very comfortable there. And I’m always trying to learn. I’m always talking with people. I’m always getting new ideas and figuring out new ways to handle things and bouncing ideas off of people to see what they think. I have a trusted group of friends who are phenomenal designers I talk to. It’s always good to do that, man. And so I think I’m keeping up that way, so I’m doing all right.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s so interesting you mentioned that about Midjourney. I’ve been doing a lot of playing around with ChatGPT, which is another sort of AI generated tool. Midjourney is more for visuals. I think ChatGPT is more text based. And it’s funny, I was talking about this with my mentor and we kind of both came to the conclusion that these kinds of tools, they almost feel like you’re working with a really good intern. They’re not going to be specific enough to be an artisan or a master and expert at it, but they can get pretty good.

Like how you’re mentioning with Midjourney, how you feed your own art into it. I’ve been doing that with ChatGPT, hopefully listeners don’t get mad at this, but I’ve been feeding in some past episodes and generates 20 questions based off the transcript of this interview.

Kirk Visola:
Oh, wow.

Maurice Cherry:
And it’ll put the questions out. I’m like, “Oh, this is pretty good.” They’re not perfect, but it’s a good jumping off point for me to say, okay, “I can take this out. I can change the words here. I can do that.” I’ve even, not for this interview, just to be clear, but I did do it for one interview. I had ChatGPT. I fed them this person’s bio and said, “Generate 20 questions as if you’re doing an in-depth, one hour podcast interview.” And I knew some of them. Some of them were good, some of them were not. But some of them I was like, “Okay, this is promising.” It’s promising.

Kirk Visola:
“If you had a breakfast cereal that you would like to eat, what would it be?”

Maurice Cherry:
Right. And with ChatGPT it’s so interesting because you can even tell it certain books, books that I haven’t necessarily read, but I could say, “Give me a 10 point summary of this book by this person.” And it’s the best kind of Cliff Notes in a way. I know that there are educators that are like, “Oh, we got to ban this shit. We can’t have this in the classroom.” Because some of this stuff is too… I don’t even want to say it’s necessarily too good, but it’ll get you there. It’s not the best, but it’ll get you there. It’s good enough.

Kirk Visola:
Right. Here’s the thing with that, twofold. One, there are actually programs where you can put in someone’s work or a written book from what I’m reading, like their actual essay or whatever they’ve written, and you can plug it into the internet somewhere and decipher if it was written by them or if it was generated by AI. There’s some type of thing that does that. And two, just because it’s written by someone doesn’t necessarily educate them or make them a better writer.

My biggest fear and problem is that all AI is doing is taking stuff we’ve already done and rehashing it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kirk Visola:
And right now the focus is on speed. The focus is on, “Oh, look how quickly I can do this.” What if people just stopped making art? What would we be able to choose from? It would have to go back and it’s just going to repeat the same thing. And the next thing you know, everything is going to start looking the same.

And I noticed that when I put in a prompt in AI, it gives you four images in Midjourney. And the images, they usually have the same colors when you do it, and the type isn’t right, which is something that’s going to work through, I’m sure, but it’s always relatively the same. And I’m thinking to myself, “Man, how can you just sit there and do something up real quick and then use that as your work?” No.

I can see that what you’re saying, as a jumping off point or a starting point. It’s great for that. “Oh, I wouldn’t have thought of doing that shape.” Or, “Oh, I wouldn’t have thought of using that pattern or color. Let me build off of that.” But to just use it as your work? I don’t know, man. I can’t fuck with it.

And the other thing too is there’s been tons of programs that have come out that were supposed to “destroy” the art industry and make art more hard for people to get into. Like Canva. Canva came out and you can do your own design work. And it hasn’t gotten rid of designers. Motion pictures, telephones, the car, everything else is coming out. The only thing I can really say that really hurt people was Netflix. Blockbuster got destroyed.

When there’s some type of disruption in a field, it’s good because it forces people to progress. But with the progression, you don’t want to regress in regards to art and creating art or thought processes. And I think that’s so critical for any type of field is to have a thought process, is to have some type of critical thinking in regards to what you’re doing.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I think that’s being lost with AI because it’s just pulling from art. It’s pulling from our shit to create more to shit give back to you. It’s literally plagiarizing everything that it’s doing. There’s no other way around it. People say, “Oh, well, it’s not. It’s not. It’s this, it’s that. This is the future.” It’s like, that’s great. It’s plagiarizing. It maybe the future, but it’s plagiarizing. It’s literally stealing everything we’ve already done to recreate something.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
And that’s weird. But anyway, enough of that.
But like you said, the art styles do kind of end up looking the same in some instances. And I’ve heard that argument too from designers and artists that are like, “Well, this is going to take over my job,” or something like this. But if someone comes to you, say, a client comes to you and they want you to do some changes or do some design based off AI artwork, you can always just say no. You can say, “You know what? I don’t work with that. I’m not going to work with that.”

Kirk Visola:
Right. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, binary, non-binary folk, thank you for coming to our AI chat.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you approach a new design project?

Kirk Visola:
Carefully. It’s interesting because there’s so many ways to approach a new design project, and it’s so broad. But I’ll try to paraphrase and not be as wordy as actually giving you this explanation as to how I’m not going to be wordy. You get a brief usually of what someone wants to do as far as a design goes. That way the brief’s more entailed, rather than just saying, “Just do something and I’ll let you know when I like it.” Sorry, I don’t work that way. And if I am going to work that way, you’re going to be paying a lot of money for it because I’m not going to do it for free.

So the way I approach a project is to see exactly what the person wants, see what they have, if they have anything, and then what I’d like to do, and this is old school, I go pencil and paper, pen and paper, and I just sketch. I sketch and I fill up sheets and sheets of paper with just sketches and ideas and thoughts. And maybe this will work, maybe that won’t work. And to me, it’s the best tool you have. It’s quick and it doesn’t break. It doesn’t break down. You can’t lose files unless you throw it away.

And once I get to a spot where I think it works, I then start going digital, if it’s supposed to be digital, and I bring it into the computer. This is the way I describe it: Whatever I’m doing, whatever I’m making, I do “high quality comps,” meaning that I will do something in a manner to where it feels real and looks real, just to give the person who’s on the other end a better idea of what’s to come. Like, “Hey, here are the concepts and here’s what I’m thinking.”

And I explain each concept and I put it into a different bucket or theme. And I explain why it works in this theme. I explain why it works for their business, and I explain how it’ll work in the space, whatever space they’re going into, just so they know that I’m not just doing something because it looks pretty. And I think that’s important.

Oftentimes people do stuff because it looks pretty, rather than serve as being functional. Being pretty, that shouldn’t even be in the vocabulary. That shouldn’t even be a thought. Of course, you’re going to do something that looks nice, that’s a given, but does it fit within what you’re trying to achieve, which is in that certain niche, in that certain area? What are you trying to achieve by making this product? Are you doing what’s best for the client?

And so I try to approach initially with gathering information with them as much as I can, seeing where it needs to go, wherever space they’re into, sketch, go digital, put together a thoughtful presentation as far as why I was doing things a certain way and why it will benefit them, and then get feedback and move forward and see how that works.

And honestly, this is a interesting conversation, but I’ve been doing this for, oh my God, a long time. ’98. So, holy shit. 25 years? Is that right? Is my math right? 25 years? No. “Was he that old?”

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds about right.

Kirk Visola:
Oh my God, that is… Wow. Okay, cool. The point was…

Maurice Cherry:
You blew your own mind there.

Kirk Visola:
I got a lot of my sensibility, I’ve been doing this so long. The point is I’ve had maybe six or seven clients in that time who were just disappointed with what I did. And so to me, it makes me feel like, all right, I’m doing something right, because if I wasn’t, the list would be a lot longer.

So I’m also realizing too, this is something very important for people who are starting out and doing any type of art or any type of media that is subjective, anything that visually captures your eye, to be judged is subjective, so art, video games, design, packaging, clothing. Whatever is visually perceived is subjective. And that is fact.

So when you’re designing something, you have to remember that if someone doesn’t like your work, it’s subjective. It doesn’t mean they don’t like you. It doesn’t mean that your work’s bad. It’s just subjective and it doesn’t fit their taste, or it doesn’t fit their style. It’s not on you to make the client like your work, it’s on you to deliver what’s best for your client. That’s your job as a artist, as a designer, as a game developer, you deliver what’s best. And if they like it, great. If they don’t, it’s okay. It’s not personal. So that’s how you have to view things moving forward.

And I just, man, I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I’m so old. But I just realized this a couple years ago, and because my wife told me. She’s so smart. She said, “You know what, Kirk? It’s not they don’t like you, it’s just they didn’t like your design.” Like, mind blown. Like, “Damn, you’re so right.” For everybody who’s starting out or who is in the crux of it every day grinding, just remember that it’s not you, hopefully your work doesn’t suck, it’s subjective. That’s what they’re judging: your work, not you. So there we go.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s a great piece of advice, I think, for even folks that have been in the game for a long time. That’s a good piece of advice to know.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah, and it took my wife, she’s so wise, to tell me that. Because here’s the thing, we’re all emotional creatures. And as designers and as artists, we’re all a bit egotistical. I’ll admit it. I am. And when you hear a fresh perspective from somebody and you remove the emotion and you remove the subjectivity, and you look at it objectively, you’re able to say, “Oh, well, you’re right.” Because everything that you do in the visual world is subjective. So there you go.

Maurice Cherry:
There you go.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
So how do you kind of balance the business side of everything, like the marketing, the finances, the contracts, how do you balance that with the creative aspects of your work?

Kirk Visola:
I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure that out. The business side of things will work itself out. I do what I’m supposed to do to get paid. I do what I want to do to stay fresh. So I will do the jobs I have to do and depending on what it is, if it’s a fun job like branding or packaging, that’s where I can explore. Sometimes you have to do things like marketing pieces or flyers or graphics for a social media post or design a booth or design a shit-talker for whatever.

And so there’s just various little things that go into branding and marketing, or whatever, that need to be done and it’s just more of a production artist or more just a getting it done aspect rather than actually creating things. So for me, what I do if I’m stuck or want to stay fresh or creative is I draw. I haven’t been drawing enough. So I try to draw. I do writing, and I try to make up stories and make up characters.

And I also like to play video games. Now, this sounds silly, but video games unlock a lot of creativity for me. And the biggest reason as to why is because my brain literally has to shut off because it has to focus on the game I’m playing. Like everything else is shut out and so my mind quiets. And when my mind is able to quiet, it actually has a better time thinking. So oftentimes I’ll play a game for, I don’t know, 30, 45 minutes, and I’ll stop playing and be like, “Oh, damn, I just had an idea,” because it makes me refocus. And so whatever the idea is, I try to go with it.

And that’s the other thing too, is if you have an idea — and I have several because of the ADHD — if you have an idea, just start it. Just do it. Just get it out of your head, whatever it is. If you want to paint something, if you want to draw something, if you want to write something, if you want to come up with an idea for a game, if you want to think of an idea for a cocktail you like or a coffee drink, or even a puzzle that you want to do, just do it. I mean, take some time and just do stuff for you. Always mind your deadlines, but also make sure that you do stuff to stimulate you. I always tell people I’m a very creative person, but my medium of earning for my creativity has always been design.

And growing up, I loved reading comic books. This is in my bio, but growing up, I loved reading comic books. I loved all things comics. I would draw, I would pretend I was a comic book hero. I would make up stories. I would watch Star Wars. I would watch everything. And the one thing I did with comics was I copied how they looked. I would copy the lettering, I would make up my own lettering, I would make up my own stories. And all of that is all design. If you look at a comic book, people are like, “Oh, it’s just a comic book.” The amount of vocabulary used in those as well as the form and the pictures and the settings and everything else, it really enhances readers, because you get engaged with it. And also, it gives you lessons in layout, and it gives you lessons in hierarchy, in form, in structure and the way things should look on a page with composition.

So, all of that led into what I’m doing, and I think that people need to realize that you can find creativity in anything, but I think you need to love what you’re doing in order to do so. You can be creative in any way you want. If you have an idea or whatever, just get it done. And I know I’m talking too much, so I’m going to shut up now.

Maurice Cherry:
So, tell me more about these video games. What are you playing?

Kirk Visola:
Oh. See, now we got on a real topic. First of all, let me preface this by saying I’m older, so we’re the generation that grew up playing games. We were the generation that had… And television and the Commodore 64 and Apple and playing Oregon Trail on Atari 2600 and the first Sega and the Sega Genesis and Nintendo 8-bit, and then went to the Super Nintendo. So all this stuff we grew up with. So I love games. I’ve always loved video games and I just got a PlayStation 5 about six or seven months ago and I just never played it. I thought, “Why am I not playing it?” So I broke out Miles Morales and I played that.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Kirk Visola:
I played through it. And then I’m like, “All right. Let me try God of War.” Started it. I’m like, “I have to dedicate time to this and I don’t have time.” The first God of War, Greatest Hits, of course, because it’s been out forever. I played through that, finished it, and I got Ragnarök, played through that, finished it. Then I replayed Tomb Raider, which Tomb Raider was it? Finished it. Started playing a Ratchet & Clank, I’m like, “Ah. I can’t fuck with this.” It’s too happy for me. I need to kill people.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s not bad to say, that’s a video game, right?

Kirk Visola:
Oh. This is some crazy shit. So you heard about Jaguar going off, right? She’s an artist, R&B artist. I can’t think of her last name, but she’s “exposed”.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah.

Kirk Visola:
So she’s talking about things in just really… I don’t know if it’s spilling the T or borderline snitching. I’m not sure which one it is, because sometimes it’s like she’s spilling the T on bad things. And sometimes she’s just snitching thinking, “Girl, speak your mind. Do what you want to do, but people are going to come at you one way or another.” But the one thing she said that really bothered me that went back to white racist senators was talking about… I don’t blame any of people doing the one thing I don’t like is GTA six or GTA. GTA is a terrible game. I mean, you sit there and you sit there and you kill people. You do this stuff and do that stuff. And then what’s going to make you change and do it in real life? What’s going to make you think you can’t do it in real life? It’s like, I can play Uncharted. I can play Max Payne 3, Tomb Raider, Last of Us.

I can play violent video games and never kill anybody or have it come across my mind because I have the ability to separate reality from fantasy. So you can’t say that someone playing a video game in fracks on their life. I’m not going to be Spider-Man, I’m not going to be Batman. It’s a ridiculous notion. Rather than talking about the environment in which they grow up and the violence that they’re exposed to outside of their house, and the systemic and cyclical poverty that they’re exposed to on a day by day basis, especially in poor areas and ghetto… [inaudible 00:29:01] even say ghetto. That’s terrible.

Poor areas of black and brown people. You have to think about that before you say it’s the video game’s fault. It’s a silly notion. But anyway, back to video games, I really have to dedicate an hour at a time because I just get swapped in. And once I’m in a game, if I’m into it, I got to finish it. It’s like, I know I can’t get into it again, because I know I have to finish it. It’s going to be a big chunk of my time. It’s going to be a lot of stuff that I do. So that’s the other problem. But it really does help me shut off. And it’s a nice stress reliever just thinking about the pattern of the boss that you’re fighting. Okay, he’s going to do this, which means I got to dodge which means I got to throw this. It’s like, so there’s always a pattern and there’s always something you can figure out in a video game. That’s what I like about it. Do you play games?

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. I have a Switch. I have a PS5. It’s funny, I’m not a big PlayStation person, but then I look back and I was like, “I’ve actually owned every PlayStation console, even the handheld.” Even though I haven’t really played them a lot. I had a PlayStation one when I was in middle school, high school. I played the hell out my PS2. I had the big chunky PS3 that could do backwards compatibility. My PS4 is in my closet. I just got a PS5 last year. And I have a Switch. I have one of the first… When they came out five years ago or whatever, I’ve got a Switch. Oh yeah. I’m a big gamer. Well, let me take that back. I feel like I’m more of a game collector slash enthusiast because I don’t play as much as I used to. I’ve started recently, I guess you could call it a resolution this year. I was like, “I’m going to start playing more games this year.” Because my switch is literally right next to my desk. And I got one of those little…

It’s called a ShadowCast. A Genki ShadowCast, where you can basically connect your Switch or your Xbox or PlayStation, whatever, to any HDMI input. And so I have HDMI on my main computer, which is a gaming PC. So I have my Switch hooked up to my PC, so now I can just have it in another window. Because I have a ultra wide screen monitor. I just have another window and I’ll play a little Animal Crossing or play some… I play a lot of play Picross, which I started playing when I was in high school. I think Picross is this Japanese… It’s sort of like a crossword puzzle, but you make out a picture instead of doing words. Although I do really crossword puzzles too. And there’s this company called Jupiter that just keeps cranking out Picross games every six months. There’s like a new Picross game. So I had all the ones on the Nintendo 3DS Picross E, E2, E3, E4, E5, E6, E7.

And now the ones on Switch are Picross S for Switch. So now I’m currently playing my way through Picross S8. And it’s very much one of those things where… Yeah. I can just kind of turn my brain off because I’ve played it so much that I already know, my hands and brain already know what the controls are to do the things, so I don’t have to think about it. And it’s such good… I actually block out three hours on my calendar at the end of Friday, just to play that. Not all three hours, but I’ll play it through some of those three hours just to sort of defrag my brain from the week. Like, “Okay. This is good.” Calm down time. Turn the phone off. Yeah. [inaudible 00:32:39] games we played with more recent, Kirk. Thanks for tuning in.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah. Man. You mentioned the PS. And there’s a game that I just… Honestly, man, it still blows my mind even going back and playing it. It is Metal Gear Solid on the PS. And [inaudible 00:33:00] was at Konami for a long time and he owned… And he’s the guy that invented… He’s basically the dude that solidified, invented action adventure games. Without him, there wouldn’t be a Resident Evil. I mean, without him, there wouldn’t be any of those games, because he invented the idea of sneaking around and figuring about puzzles and collectively trying to collect goods and stay as… It’s just brilliant. And you go back and play and it still holds up. This still holds up. The graphics are not great at all, especially on a nice TV. But man, the story play and the cut scenes… Cut scenes became a thing then it’s just, oh. Anyway. All right. I know [inaudible 00:33:43] let’s finish your interview. Shall we?

Maurice Cherry:
I want to go more into your origin story. You’ve kind of already touched on really being into comics and video games. Tell me more about growing up.

Kirk Visola:
I grew up in a small town called Modesto, California. And I know you grew up… We touched about this before we started the podcast. You grew up in Selma, and just because people get a Black president or you live in a certain area, doesn’t necessarily mean that racism goes away. And growing up in an ag heavy city like Modesto, it was very different, for lack of a better term. And I played soccer, I played sports. I had three older brothers. But the one thing I really loved to do was read comics. I mean, let me mention that before, I loved reading comics and I never thought there was an avenue for it. I wanted to be a doctor or a firefighter.

And it wasn’t until I met my ex-wife that I knew about graphic design. And damn. This was in ’98. I basically started doing design when I first learned about it, just because I was so intrigued by it. Her father, my father outlaw was the head of the creative services department in Modesto, called E&J Gallo Winery. And he was the head there and literally known in very, very wide spaces, especially in the beverage, in wine and spirit space, because of the work he had done. He had been doing it since the sixties, and he invented the E&J brandy bottle, and he invented the New Amsterdam vodka bottle, the shapes. So if you look at those, those are very iconic. So he would sit there and he took me under his wing basically, and told me about design.

So from there, I was intrigued and I started taking classes at the local JC and I went to classes at San Jose State. And the one thing that was very bothersome to me was being accessibility to take more classes there, because at the time before they made it into a BFA, Bachelor of Fine Arts, it was just a BA, you had to qualify for their design program. And I quote-unquote wasn’t good enough to qualify for their program. And I remember sitting there thinking, looking at designs and critiquing designs, and I found what I was good at. I just understood design, I understood it spoke to me, and it was like I was the duck. I was the duck who had been sitting at the office desk that finally found out that there was water outside and he could fly.

That’s how I felt, right? And from there, I was just able to have mentor. A mentor was the best in the world at doing something and run ideas by him. I still talk to him. I just talked to him three or four days ago. I mean, he’s my father outlaw, but I still talk to him to get advice and stuff like that. So I look back at that experience and look back at my life, and I just think of all the obstacles that were there that I have no idea how I would’ve found this job had I not been where I was. I mean, I’m in Modesto. Modesto’s known for Scott Peterson, George Lucas, Gallo Wine. Those are our three major claims of fame. And it’s just a small town. It’s not a small town. It’s fairly decent sized town in the Central Valley where it’s not heavily populated by Black people. There are tons of Latinos, predominantly Mexican, that work on the area there.

But I had no idea what graphic design was or that it was even a possibility. And I still wouldn’t have had an idea had I not met my ex, I would not be doing what I’m doing. It’s all the things that had to happen in order for me to be able to do this is just… I don’t know, man. It’s luck. There’s no other way to put it. And I’m not religious. I can’t be, I guess spiritual, but I don’t believe in going to church and everything else. I do believe in karma, and I think that my karma was to be a designer. It just was just happened. So I got lucky man. And I started doing design work from there. Worked freelance for a while when I had my kid in 2000. And then see here, in 2009, I started working in the office I was telling you about. And then from there on out, just did design work. And here I am.

And I think the experiences I had and the wide range of dabbling in different designs, being me a better designer, but also having that foundation of the fantastical world of comic books and video games also helped. It just led to this path for me.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, it sounds like it was also kind of just this constant sense of inspiration too, for you.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah. No doubt. I mean, I can’t doubt that. I mean, my profile pick on my LinkedIn is me holding a Batman cup, taking a sip. My signature, my professional signature, my actual signature is the bat simple. It’s on my passport, it’s on my license. It’s like that’s my legit signature. It’s just kind of part of me. I have on my sloppy ass desk, I have a couple of Grogu figurines, a Boba Fett Star Wars lamp. I have Batman behind me. I’m just surrounded by it. So it’s always influencing me and always has. And I’m thankful I found a career that kind of lets me create.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you were already a working designer when you were studying at San Jose State. How did you balance school and work?

Kirk Visola:
Honestly, I don’t know. I had a kid at home, young kid, and I was working part-time as well. As well as going to school and having a job, freelancing. I don’t know. I’m not saying that to… Because I’m doing a brag or I’m self glossing. I’m saying it because, I don’t know. It’s all a blur, basically. From 2000 until 2010 is all a blur for me. During that time, I had gotten married in ’99, and then had our first kid in 2000. And then a set of twins in 2003, my father passed away that year, and then my brother passed away. Or sorry, he didn’t pass away. He was murdered in jail by cops in 2009. And then 2010, I moved from Modesto. Honestly, dude, that whole decade’s kind of a blur. So you know how you do things in the moment and you go back and you say, “How did I do that?” That’s the moment for me.

Because my ex was laid up in bed when my twins were born, and so I was taking care of the newborn twins. A three-year-old or soon to be three-year old kid. And then my ex. So the resiliency of the human spirit is truly amazing when it’s put to the test. You can do a lot. When you set your mind to do something, you really can do a lot. And I had to do it. There was no choice. So that’s what I remember. I’m sorry, I can’t answer.

Maurice Cherry:
No, no, that’s real. I think about… I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a blank spot, but it’s definitely a blur. I remember vignettes of things from 2000 to maybe 2006. That’s my blurry period because I was in college and I remember certain things. I remember where I interned at. I remember getting my first apartment. I remember graduating. I remember graduating because they had the graduation outside in the middle of a thunderstorm. And the person sitting next to me would not share their umbrella with me. So I kept trying to scooch under the umbrella, and they kept moving it back. So how umbrellas are curved. So the water just wow came down. And I had this sad droopy mortar board when I went to go get my degree. I remember vignettes and things, because I know during that time I was working a bunch of jobs and I hated… I get what you’re saying. I get what you’re saying.

Sometimes you’re so in it that you don’t really remember the… You don’t remember it. Yeah. You were there. But you don’t have full recall of that time. I even have a pop culture blind spot from 2000 to 2006 or so. People will mention movies and TV, and I’m like, I kind of know what that is. People will mention stuff about SpongeBob and Harry Potter. I’m like, “I’m familiar with it in the cultural zeitgeist.” But I don’t really recall being into that because I was in my twenties and just trying to survive. I don’t really remember it.

Kirk Visola:
Most artists or some artists have a blue period. We had a blurry period. But honestly, man, this is kind of sad but true that more than likely it’s just severe trauma that we’ve suffered at that time. And neither one of us know how to deal with it or even comprehend.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And I say it was a blind spot because I had… And I’ll ask you about what your time was like at Shaklee, but I know I was working at… I don’t know if I’ve even mentioned this on the podcast before. I was working at Autotrader as a… I think I was a dealer concierge or something. I was trying to work my way up to something higher paying or whatever. And at the time, I was also a blogger. I won’t mention what my blog name was, but I had a blog and I was talking about other stuff. And I never used anyone’s name. Everyone had a pseudonym or whatever, but they found out about it at work. And they had called me into the office. And they had printed out reams of my blog, which honestly was a little flattered because I fancied myself a writer.

I wrote all through high school and college and stuff. And so I was like, “Oh, for me?” I was kind of bit taken and they’re pointing out stuff that they’ve highlighted. And then I remembered, I was like, “How did they find out about this?” Because I never did it from work. And then I remembered that there was someone at work that I told about it. And that could have been the only way that they found out about it.

Kirk Visola:
Snitch.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kirk Visola:
Snitch end up in ditches as Paul Bettany said.

Maurice Cherry:
And so they tried to fire me and I quit before they fired me. And then I remember I was going home that evening. And I was on the phone with my mom, and she was just like, “What are you going to do with your life? You got this degree, you don’t want to do this, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And I applied to this job in the back of our [inaudible 00:45:10] weekly here called Creative Loafing. I applied to a electronic media specialist gig. That was where the start of my professional design career actually was doing work for the state of Georgia. But that job was so bad. Oh my God. At the time, I thought I was living large. I was 25, I think? 24, 25, had my own office, had cards. I mean, you wouldn’t get this shit nowadays because of the way that the industry is.

But I had my own office. I had cards with a door that I could close, and I thought, “Okay, I’m doing pretty good.” But then there was also all this at the time, this sort of pervading narrative that I kept hearing from people. “Well, you just have a bachelor’s degree. Well, the bachelor’s degree is a new high school diploma. If you really want to get far, you have to get a master’s degree.” And I’m just like, Ugh. And so I was trying to get my master’s degree at that time and my boss was just the worst. I’m not going to slander her on this podcast, but she was just a very bad boss to the point where we had to get mediation from the state to come in. And it concluded with me just leaving. I just had to leave. I was like, “I’m not going to stay here with her any longer.” It’s just not going to work out.

So that whole period is kind of a bit of a blur, because I was like, look, I’m just trying to survive. And also at that time, I had just started my first big design project, which was the Black Weblog Awards. I was working full time, I was doing that, and I was just trying to survive because I didn’t go to design school. So I didn’t have any sort of design knowledge of anything. All I had was Photoshop, blends that I made, because I downloaded a cracked version from LimeWire and it didn’t put a virus on my computer. And I was copying tutorials from books that I… That I didn’t buy from books that I just read in Barnes and Noble. And I either took notes or I took pictures with my little Olympus point and shoot camera and took them back to my apartment and was like, “Okay, so how do I do this?” So I had to teach myself how to do all this stuff. I was just trying to get by, man. I was trying to make it so I get that blurry period. A hundred percent.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah. That’s life. I mean, it’s one of those things too, because being older and you talking about just reading something, reading up on something and figuring it out, it’s like, if I really wanted to, I could do that now, but I don’t want to. I don’t [inaudible 00:47:42]. I just want to learn TikTok. And I mean, I don’t want to get on there and start doing stuff. It’s not hard. I don’t want to do it. And I don’t think that the younger generation, they think that we’re old and we don’t know what we’re doing. It’s like, “What the fuck. We’re the ones that invented this shit. We were the ones who were going on Napster and Limewire and everything else to try to figure out how to get stuff.” That was us. We were the ones who…

Kirk Visola:
Everything else to try to figure out how to get stuff like that was us. We were the ones who saw things go from landlines to mobile phones. We saw it go from VCRs to downloadable HDX files. We’re the ones that saw that. We’re the ones that saw the transition. We were the ones that evolved with it. If the apocalypse happened, like the zombie apocalypse happened, have you seen The Last of Us yet?

Maurice Cherry:
I haven’t seen it yet, the first episode.

Kirk Visola:
Have you played the game by chance?

Maurice Cherry:
I haven’t played the game, so that’s why I haven’t seen it yet because I don’t know if I need to play the game to watch the show.

Kirk Visola:
No, you don’t, but it’s just shitty because you can see stuff coming and it’s just like… but it’s so well done. It’s so well done, but what I’m thinking is if we were to go back into the zombie apocalypse, and everything had to go back before there was all this technology and digital and everything else, many of us wouldn’t survive. Many of us wouldn’t know how to take notes or to do basic things because we’re so dependent upon electricity, and power, and the internet because I’m thinking we are in Santa Cruz and the electricity went out and it’s just pitch black. I’m thinking, “If it stayed this way, could any of us really figure out how to survive? How long would it be before we started going into full on the Walking Dead Kegan mode? How would that take?”

And so I think that we would immediately have some better survival skills in the previous generation, but I just don’t feel like going through that mess, and so hearing you go in and say, “I read this and read up on it and figured out,” I’m like, see, that’s baller status right there, and I think that’s something that I’m happy I don’t have to do, even though I probably should in order to keep up with things, but what are we talking about again?

Maurice Cherry:
We’re talking about you. We’re talking about you.

Kirk Visola:
Okay.

Maurice Cherry:
I wanted to ask about your podcasting. I mean, we’re on a podcast, but you are a pretty prolific podcaster yourself. What made you get into it?

Kirk Visola:
Wow. First of all, I don’t listen to podcasts. I don’t even listen to my podcasts except when I’m editing them. It’s very odd. I know, but I find them to be a bit pretentious at times. I feel like, “Well, it’s always so formulated,” so I feel that way about podcasting, but what made me get into it was, and I’m so glad you said when we started this, it’s just going to be a conversation because that’s what got me into this, was listening to talk radio, and being 13 or 14 years old, I was exposed to talk radio and I was exposed to “shock jocks.” I didn’t listen to a lot of NPR, things like that. I listened to the Don and Mike show. They were out of WJFK in Washington DC. They were syndicated, and I listened to Howard , and I listened to a show called Mark and Bryan.

I listened to this show called The Rise Guys out of Sacramento at KHDK, and then I listened to Carmichael Dave out of KHDK, and then Jim Rome, so I listened to a lot of talk shows, and what I learned is that most of the times when they were doing things and talking, it was just the stream of consciousness. It was just the thought. It was just four guys hanging out, but they made it interesting and they knew how to pivot, and they knew how to keep the topics going. They knew how to really get through things, and there’s a lot of stuff that they would mention, and say, and do, and just the feel of the show was like you were there hanging out with them, and I really like that about talking. I’m like, “Well, I want to bring that to a podcast,” because I try listening into podcasts and it’s so boring.

And I want to just bring that to a podcast. I want two guys who understand design, and my good friend Andy Kurtts, K-U-R-T-T-S, Andy is, that’s my dude. He is so cool, man. He’s cool. He always knows what to say, and he’s a good designer, and I love the guy, and it’s like, I couldn’t do this design show with anyone else really, and I met him on a whim when I was doing something with startup CPG, which is a foundation that helps up-and-coming CPG brands, and we were both on a Pictionary thing, and that’s how I met him. We just did this online Pictionary during a holiday party, and like, “Hey, let’s do some stuff,” so we started doing stuff on Clubhouse, and then we started doing stuff finally on Buzz Sprout, I think it’s called, where you just do podcasts.

And so our idea was let’s just do a packaging podcast, so we go on to talk about all the specifics of packaging, what’s important to put on the front of the pack? What’s important to put on the back of the pack? Do you know about your nutritional labels? Do you know about all the contents that go in? And then we started having people on, and we would have people who actually worked in the industry who owned their own brands, rather designers, and then we realized that it went past that, and we just started talking about design, strictly about design, and that’s how I got into it with Andy, and we have people on every week, and it’s just grown into this fun little sit down and chat with people, and I love it. I love that aspect of it.

It reminds me of the old talk radio I used to listen to, but now I’m actually doing, and only have to do it for an hour instead of three or four. I don’t know how those people do that. That’s so impressive. Three or four hours on the air just talking and talking. I hate hearing myself talk, and which is why I probably don’t listen to my own podcasts, but that’s one thing, and then I did another one called Jerks with my friend Jeremy Smith, and I had to stop that one just because I was doing two a week, and when we did Jerks, it was mainly, it was an honest approach to things, but I felt it took a lot of me emotionally and to do the edits because we were talking about real shit, and then I have to the edits and things like that, and it was just like a lot, and I said, “I have to cut one out,” and I thought, “which one’s going to be better beneficial to me as far as my business goes?”

“And as far as really promoting that,” it had to be Kirk and Kurtts, but Jeremy and I would get on and we’d talk about shows we watch, we’d talk about laws that were made. We’d talk about people that were doing stupid shit, and it would be Donald Trump or Kanye West or whatever was the topic that week we would talk about, and it was good, but it just took so much from me, and I wanted to get back into my own podcast because what I was doing was just having anybody on and talking to them about what they liked, talking about stuff that I liked, but then I’m realizing it’s just so much work and I just am not willing to put in that work. Whereas if I’m doing it with Andy, it’s twofold.

I get a chat with Andy and we get a catch up on work and we get a catch up on life, and then the other thing is that it holds me accountable that someone else is dependent upon me to actually do my shit, so that’s the thing, and it’s not as emotionally draining as Jerks was because it was frustrating, uplifting, happy, and sad. It was just this bag of bittersweet, mixed emotion the entire time, so it was very taxing, and I love Journey Man. Dude’s cool. I still keep in touch with them. Really nice guy, really great guy, but it was just a little too much for me.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kirk Visola:
What made you get in the podcasting?

Maurice Cherry:
I’ve done this for a long-ass time.

Kirk Visola:
The OG.

Maurice Cherry:
What made me get into podcasting? I started back in 2005, again, back with this blog that I had mentioned before. I started, I bought a $10 mic from CVS, like the CVS up the street from me. It was like this little GE mic that you just stick into one of the ports on the back of your computer and you just start talking. Back then, at least when I started, podcasting wasn’t a big thing. I actually don’t even remember if it was really called podcasting back then because podcasting is like a portmanteau of iPod and broadcast, and I know the iPod came out in ’03, but I don’t think podcast was a big word in general back then.

Kirk Visola:
No.

Maurice Cherry:
I know audio blogging was because the precursor to Twitter was this website called Odio that I used to use to just record snippets of stuff and would send it to friends because a lot of my friends lived either in New York or they lived in California. They didn’t live in Atlanta, so we would just do audio blogs and stuff back and forth, and on the side, I would just do a… I called it a blogcast, but I would just kind of record an episode, and maybe I’d have a guest on using Skype. I would have a guest on, and we would talk about just whatever’s in the news and whatnot, and I was learning how to edit. I was doing editing myself with Audacity or whatever, and then I fell into this group of other people in Atlanta that were doing podcasting, and I met this couple, Amber and Rusty, who were doing…

They basically created this organization called the Georgia Podcast Network, and it was mostly Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, the Tri-State area, and we would have semi-regular meetups. There was a website. I think they even put on a few pod camp conferences using the camp style of conferences, which they called an un-conference back then because the attendees are the ones that set the itinerary and got into the podcast community, then met some people, just kind of other folks that were doing shows, and then I kind of fell out of favor from doing it for a while because, I mean, this was around the time also, YouTube started to become big, so people were really starting to get into doing video. Blogging itself was dying out a bit. More people were going towards video.

Audio was still something that largely in terms of distribution was more in the arena of big media entities, so a New York Times or an NPR or something would do a radio show, and then they release it later that day as an MP3 or something because I would listen to that stuff at work or whatever, and so that’s how I first got into it, and there just wasn’t, at least around the time with the Georgia Podcast network, outside of them, really a big community for it. I call that the first wave of podcasting, and then the second wave really came in the mid 2010s with Cereal. Like Cereal came, and then they had that famous ad with the woman mispronouncing MaleChimp, and that seemed to just take off wildfire in terms of people just being like, you can listen to audio on this device that I hold in my hand that has a headphone jack that I’ve been listening to music?

Yes, you can. You can do that. It wasn’t a big, big push.

Kirk Visola:
Right. Sometimes the most obvious answers aren’t obvious.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, but people started to see, I think, the possibility in it because even though Sarah Koenig is a journalist, and she was doing this independently at first, people saw like, “Oh, wait. I can make a show about anything,” and the way that the podcasting industry has, honestly, expanded and grown in the past 10 years is phenomenal, just in terms of the availability and the the suaveness of hardware, the availability of software. I mean, if you have a Spotify account, you can record a podcast. There’s so easy now, and so the learning curve has gotten much, much flatter for people to try to get into it, which I think for better or for worse, has been something for the industry.

I don’t want to say it’s been good or bad, but now, because so many people can do it, everyone can do it, and so there’s just so many different shows out there, but I wanted, at least with Revision Path, I wanted to establish the lane fairly early because I had been listening to other design podcasts, and there were no Black people. And I would ask them, “Why aren’t you talking to any Black designers? I know Black designers,” and sometimes I would get a response, which would usually be negative, but most of the times they would never even respond, and so I started Revision Path, not as a podcast at first, it was just going to be an online magazine because a friend of mine, this woman named Deedee Sutton had a really successful online magazine that she created called Clutch Online, or Clutch Mag Online, I think is what she called it, but she had a really super successful online magazine.

I was like, “I want to do something like that with, but around design at Revision Path,” because by this point in time in 2013 when I started the show, I had quit my job at AT&T five years ago, started my studio, and then I had been in my studio now, and it was successful for five years, so I was like, “Oh, I have the time and the space to actually do this,” and so that’s how Revision Path was born, and I recorded my first podcast in June of that year. We started in February in terms of interviews, but the first recorded podcast was in June of that year, and then in 2014 is when we started to do it on a fairly regular weekly basis in terms of audio interviews, and it just kind of took off from there.

Kirk Visola:
That’s dope. That’s so cool to hear because I’m in the process now on our show of interviewing more Black designers because I told Andy, he’s a North Carolinian white dude from North Carolina, and he’s just, he’s super cool man, and he is definitely an ally. He understands things. He is very encouraging. I keep telling him, “I want this person on,” and I’m like, yeah, and he’s feeding me people that I’d never even met before seen because he’s more in that space for knowing people than I am as far as designers, and so it’s good to see, and so I’m starting to get more people of color, all colors on our show, but mainly Black people because there was a survey, and I’ve mentioned this before on other places where I’ve talked, I think it’s called Design census.org or design census.com, and they interviewed 9,450, so for arguments sake, let’s just say 10,000 people.

And only 3% of the people interviewed design wise were Black because that was the space, and then it was like 13% Asian other, but it was 71% white male were designers, 71%, and you look at agencies and you look at the about us, and you go through the headshots and it’s like, “Wow, there it is right there. This is exactly it.” Okay, and you go to the next agency. “Oh, there you go. This is exactly it,” and that’s how it is, and it’s understandable, but there’s so much talent being missed out on, just even basically from seeing things from a different perspective, being Black and understanding different ideas and stuff.

It was like, for instance, I think also two companies don’t even really try to be creative anymore. I’m serious. I’m serious. Think about the last cool Apple ad you’ve seen, and so I thought Apple’s always, like they had this weird thing where they were showing they did this weird for shortening of people holding up their phones. And then they were small silhouettes in the back and it’s now bigger, and I’m thinking, “Oh, my God, that’s terrible.” Here’s my idea for the perfect Apple ad, apple iPhone, iPhone, if you’re listening or this service goes back to you, I want my royalties on this shit.

What you do, all you do is you show a phone with a screen off, and you just show the phone screen off on a desk, and I want the desk to be a real desk, not like this perfect pristine thing. I want to see a takeout menu. I mean, real life shit, everything kind of just normal, and then I want to hear two people in the background. You hear a show in the background, it’s like, “Nah, now I’m telling you, that’s the dude.” This is how it starts. “‘s the dude from the last night or Night Quest.” “No, it’s not. No, it’s not.” “Yeah, it is.” It’s an argument going on and finally you here, “Hey, Siri?” “Yes?” “Who was this person then?” And then it just comes up, it says, “iPhone,” and then phones scratched out. It says, “I want to win this bet,” so every scenario’s like that, and then you go do another one, and it’s in the car in the holder. The phone’s in the car, in the holder, right?

And you see traffic in the background. It’s kind of blurry. It’s nighttime, and you hear two people talking about, “I’m telling you the Tacoria is right here.” And then it’s like iPhone and Scratcho says, “I want to find that restaurant.” Right? Focus on what it does rather than what it is. That was Steve Job’s big thing, focus on the product, the actual benefits of the product rather than the product itself. So why wouldn’t they do that? Why wouldn’t they found a way to push it? Because everybody knows what iPhone is, right? It’s not a phone. It’s a mini do wall in your pocket, and so why not focus on that?

And I hardly, and this is no joke, I maybe talk on my phone two times a month, maybe actually talk on my phone two times a month because people know I don’t like talking on the phone and they’ll text me, so it’s like, you can have anything now. I want to win this bet. I want to find a restaurant. I want to see what time that movie starts. It’s like it does everything for you, so why not mention that and make it fun? People know what it does. People know why they’re buying an iPhone. You don’t have to show the camera on the back and how it’s like, who cares? We all know it has a camera. We all know it takes good pictures. That’s the given. Just saying that when you design something, it’s going to look good.

What is a solution you’re trying to find? What are you trying to do with that solution? And so for me, being a creative person, I’m always thinking of shit like this, how to solve for a real thing. What would I want to see on a commercial? Anytime I see a commercial and I see a iPhone commercial, it’s Lily, right? She’s talking about AT&T and how you can get a free iPhone. I like her. I love that character because it’s just kind of silly and it’s fun. It’s like a nice counter to the Verizon can you hear me now, guy? So that’s one thing, but it doesn’t speak about the phone itself. It speaks about AT&T services, so have something that does something to do with the phone, but anyway, I think they’re missing that because they narrow their search to what looks good on paper rather than what performs well in real life. You know what I mean?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kirk Visola:
People can present really well on paper, but not be that great in real life.

Maurice Cherry:
Apple also snaps up a lot of really good designers and art directors, and I don’t know what they’re doing with them. I mean, I would imagine they work on many of the other parts of the Apple ecosystem. For example, I’ve never been able to interview anyone that worked at Apple or that, I’m sorry, that currently works at Apple because they don’t let their employees do interviews, so it’s I’ve interviewed X Apple people when they’ve told me what they can about it, but I don’t know what goes on inside that large Taurus building in Cupertino, but that’s some ironclad NDA action right there.

Whatever is going on. I don’t know if the creativity necessarily is making its way out to people because I think even with the last iPhone, with the iPhone 14, a lot of people have been like, it’s not that much of an improvement over the 13, and granted, that’s probably supply issues and things of that nature too, just in terms of the camera and stuff, but yeah, I don’t know if Apple is the innovator like it used to be in that aspect.

Kirk Visola:
No, and also, too, I’m still rocking my old iPhone 7 plus.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow.

Kirk Visola:
I’m still rocking that and I love it. Honestly, I wish they would go back to the four size, the size of the iPhone four. It was just a little bit bigger than a business card. That’s what I don’t want. I’m tired of these phones getting so big. I don’t want to carry around an iPad. I want to carry around a phone, like the old flip phones. I think Samsung, they had the flip phone, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. The Galaxy Flip or Galaxy Fold or something like that.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah. That’s pretty cool. I see some problems with the screens possibly being messed up because of all the opening and closing, but I like the idea. How fun was it? Remember how fun it was to end a call just by closing it, closing it shut, like end of the call. Now you have to just push a button violently in order to make sure people know you hung up.

Maurice Cherry:
A violent tap, a long press.

Kirk Visola:
You want to give them those three beeps. You know when they hang up beep, beep, beep?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kirk Visola:
Okay. That’s the end of the call. It used to just be slam and that was it. Call over, so that’s the one thing that phone brings back, which would also be a fun aspect for a marketing standpoint. With this phone, you could now end calls properly. It shows a dude just like, “Bye,” slamming the phone.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kirk Visola:
I think, yeah, but anyway, tangent.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m curious with the podcast, and as we talked about little earlier, has that helped you become a better designer now that you’re able to really speak with other designers in congress on a regular basis about stuff? Has that helped you out?

Kirk Visola:
Oh, I don’t talk to anybody in Congress or in the Senate at all.

Maurice Cherry:
No, no, no, no.

Kirk Visola:
I know what you said. Not necessarily a better designer, but a better-informed designer. I’m able to see perspectives in a different way from people who’ve done certain things, but I don’t think it’s helped me be a better designer, just helped me understand where people are coming from and just more exposure. More exposure to anything definitely increases knowledge of something in regards to your field, but I don’t know if it necessarily makes you better equipped design wise, although it might, I don’t know. I haven’t really seen a big uptick in my design skills. Maybe I should just keep interviewing people in the hope that it will rub off via telekinesis because osmosis, you need water, so people say, “oh, you’re going to get that osmosis.” You always need a water source, so you can’t get it through osmosis, but through telekinesis, possibly.

Maurice Cherry:
My mother is a biologist. She tells me that same thing, that exact same thing. People can’t get stuff through osmosis. I get it. I get it. I get it.

Kirk Visola:
So you need to have areas of high concentration to low concentration or to living proper in order to have… Okay, Mom, sorry,

Maurice Cherry:
I get what you mean about being a better-informed designer. Even as I’ve done this show and I’ve talked to people all over the world, it lets me know what our differences are, what our similarities are. I feel like a lot of designers have the same issues regardless of where they are, whether it’s their work or finding work or finding purpose and things like that, but then you see how different it is in parts of Africa versus in the UK versus here in the States, even from the rural areas of the states to big cities and things like that. It has, I think, made me, I get what you mean about it, making you better informed. Just hearing more people’s perspectives helps you to see a lot farther than what you just might in your own kind of narrow field of vision.

Kirk Visola:
Right. Yeah, exactly, and that’s exactly what… You said it so much better.

Maurice Cherry:
What kind of advice would you have for any… Like people are listening to this conversation. They’re hearing you. They’re hearing your story. What advice would you give to people that want to follow in your footsteps, they want to have the career that you have?

Kirk Visola:
First of all…

Maurice Cherry:
They want to have the career that you have.

Kirk Visola:
First of all, I think it’s good to understand, like I said before, not everybody’s going to like your work. Right? Everybody’s not going to like your work, and so you can’t take it personally. I also think that it’s good to find a designer whose style you like in different fields, and find multiple influences to help your thought process. I also think it’s good to find a mentor if you can, someone you trust that will be honest with you. And by honest, I don’t mean absolutely mean, but I do think you should find someone who’s not going to bullshit you.

And last, and this is the most important thing that I’ve found, is just be yourself. Just be yourself. Be unapologetically you. Now granted, there are, and you and I both know this from working with people in the corporate space, you have to figure out a way to tone back a little bit at times, because especially if you’re a person of color, black, brown, you have to figure out a way to tone back sometimes, because then you’re seen as being aggressive. You’re seen as being loud, you’re seen as being abrupt. You’re seen as being a disruption. But you can set boundaries by your actions, not answering emails, being cordial [inaudible 01:13:31] people, being firm, and then setting those boundaries. But try your hardest to be yourself because people who will fuck with you will understand you 100%. It’s not going to be, “Oh, I’ve never seen this side of you before.” That should never come out of anybody’s mouth who you’re talking to.

And I say this all the time, that whoever I’m talking to, I talk to the same way. I talk to six-year-olds this way I’m talking to you. I’ll cuss around them because that’s me. I’m not going to blatantly go out on my way to cuss, but if something comes up, I will cuss. And it’s just because that’s who I am. I’m not trying to be rude. I’m not trying to be edgy. I’m just trying being me. And if that happens, it happens. And at times I realize I’ve said something and it’s like, oh, it doesn’t work the best around my two-year-old nephew, because he’s a parrot and repeats verbatim with incredible syntax, vernacular and diction, exactly what you’ve said, so I have to watch that. But be unapologetically you as the biggest takeaway, I would say. But know when to. And this is a horrible thing to say. So it’s like good advice and bad advice, because you shouldn’t have to shrink for anybody. But there’s times in order to get ahead, you kind of have to make sure you do, which is terrible to say.

And if people don’t like you and they don’t fuck with you, then you don’t want to work with them.

Maurice Cherry:
Have there been times in your career where that’s come back to bite in some way?

Kirk Visola:
Yeah, it has. And we didn’t mention Shaklee earlier, where I worked, but I basically had a target on my back after speaking back to the VP at some point. And here’s a fun story, and other people who’ve heard me on other stuff will probably say, “I’ve heard this a thousand times.” When I was working there, there were one, two, three, four, five, like six black people that worked there, maybe seven. And one of the women that worked in a different department that I worked with, she was walking by the VP’s desk. And the VP, she sat in the middle of the office in it’s an open office, which for those of you who are listening, open office plans, they’re terrible for everybody. But anyway, she was walking through [inaudible 01:15:57] open office, and she walks by and she says, and I’m going to call her Sarah for the conversation, “Sarah, how are you coming along on that action brochure?”

The action brochure was a brochure that I was working on that was due for a global conference, which Shaklee holds every year. And last time they did it was in Vegas I think, but I haven’t thought about that shit for four years. But anyway, “So where are we on that action brochure for the global conference?” And Sarah looks at her and says, “Oh, well, I have it back with creative, and they’re making changes to it.” Mind you, I am literally 20, 25 feet from the VP in an open office. And she says, “Oh, well what can I do to help you? How can I help you?” The VP says to Sarah. Sarah looks at her confused and says, “I’m not sure exactly how you can help. I mean, it’s with creative right now.” Being incredibly calm, as Black women have to be in the workplace, or they are assumed to be combative. So that’s another thing.

And then she says, “You know what? Forget it.” The VP, “Forget it. You go do your thing. And I’m going to sit here and do my thing. Okay?” [inaudible 01:17:09] So I hear this and I’m thinking, this bitch. So I get up and I walk over to my project manager who sits even closer to the VP. And I walk up to her and I say in this exact tone, in this exact voice, “Was that about the fucking action brochure?” And she looks at me. And the project manager and I, she’s dope. I love her. She’s at a different company now and whatever, but she’s so cool. She was basically a mom to all of us. And she wasn’t that much older, but she just had that caring and very organized nature about her. And she goes, “Yeah.” And I go, “Tell them if they would stop changing shit, then I’d be able to get it done.” And I said it loud enough so the VP would hear it.

And so I started walking back to my desk and the VP does this. “Oh, oh, oh, I’m sorry, Kirk, what did you say?” And I turned to her and I say, “If you would stop changing shit, then I could get it done.” So this is what she does. Puts her hands up, like the entire hands up, shoulders back, like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, we’re all on the same team.” And I said to her, “Mm-hmm, yeah, right.” And I went back to my desk.

After that moment, it was like a bullseye was on me. Everybody was like, “Kirk is leaving early to go do something,” which I had established because I was leaving early on certain days to get my kids from school and spend time with them, because I was going through a fucked up divorce and custody battle. So I needed every moment with my kids. And then it was like, “Kirk isn’t doing his work, or getting work done, or asking for more work.”

And I was like, “Motherfuckers.” So I got called into the office after that one day, or into HR. And I go in there and the first thing I ask is, “Am I fired?” And they’re like, “No.” I said, “Well, okay, then let’s talk, because here’s the thing, if you’re going to fire me, just fire me. I don’t want to lecture. I don’t need to hear anything. Just fire me.” So they sit down and all these things come up. You’ve been leaving early. And I said, “Well, I told you I was going to leave early because it was my supervisor and the HR lady.” I said, “I told you I was going to leave early.” And he said, “Well, what do you do when you get your work done?” I said, “Well, predominantly, I probably either surf the internet or I catch up on other work than I’m doing.”

And they go, “You don’t ask for more work?” I say, “No, why should I? Why should I ask for more work?” See, Kirk did quiet quitting before quiet quitting was cool. And I said, “Why should I ask for more work?” And they go, “Well, you know [inaudible 01:19:49].” And I said, “No.” They said, “Well, people have come up to you and you’ve had your headphones on, and you put boxes up on your desk.” I said, “Yeah, because I need to get work done and I’m right next to the bathroom. And people know that I’m friendly and they want to talk to me, and I don’t have time to talk sometimes, so I put the headphones in and get stuff done.”

“People have also said that you’re unapproachable,” and we all know what that’s code for. You’re Black and scary. People-

Maurice Cherry:
Or that you’re just Black.

Kirk Visola:
Right? And so I said, well, I don’t understand that. And I look at my supervisor and they go, “Yeah, because you might be hurting people’s feelings.” I said, “Okay, well,” I look at my supervisor and I say, “hey, have I ever given you any flack for a job?”

“No.”

“Have I ever done a bad job?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been displeased with anything that I’ve done?”

“No.”

I said, “I don’t see what the problem is though.” I said, “My job is to do the best I can in the time allotted, with the information that I have. That is my job.”

“You [inaudible 01:20:51] hurt people’s feelings.”

I said, “I don’t give a fuck about people’s feelings. That’s not my job.” And I knew I wasn’t hurting anybody’s feelings because I would have people come back to me repeatedly, specifically asking for me to do work for them. I think it’s a combination of jealousy and other people in my department who I worked with who were fucking busters.

And I think it’s also the fact that I didn’t march to their drum. I didn’t do everything that they said. So they’re like, “Oh, well how can you do this?” I’m like, “Nah.” And they said, “Okay.” And then the HR lady asked, “Kirk, do you like working here?” I’m thinking, “Bitch, what the fuck you talking about? How can you ask me that? You already know the answer. You’re asking me a rhetorical question. You already know the fucking answer.” Like, “Dude, you know the answer.” So I sit there and I look at her dead in the eyes and I say, “I really like who I work with.” And that was it. I didn’t say anything else. It’s like, “You really think I’m going to dig the hole with a shovel you gave me so you can knock me in it, so you can shoot me and put me in it like a damn gangster movie?” No, I’m not digging a hole. I’m going to say what I have to say and it’s going to be honest. I did the people I work with there.

Here’s the thing, man, this is the biggest thing other people can remember too. Working with people is about relationships. And when you have a good relationship with someone, your work is going to be better than it would be if you have a bad relationship with someone. That’s just, that’s everyday life. That’s a job. That’s a marriage. That’s a basketball team, that’s a baseball team, that’s sports, whatever, it’s everywhere. So I have people, and I can think of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven people who I used to work with at Shaklee that have left Shaklee and have come to me for work, to help them do things.

Now, if I was that bad of an employee or that bad of a person, they wouldn’t want to work with me. They wouldn’t seek me out afterwards. It’s like that’s the thing that I measure from being not only a good designer but a decent person to work with. And that’s important to me. So just realize that people at work aren’t your friends, but there are people who can become friends when you get to a certain point. And there’s several people who I work with from there that I really enjoy working with and love. And so there were people that I loved there. But I couldn’t say that I actually liked working there. I would have half of my face go numb going into work. I would have headaches. I would have terrible anxiety. I would sit in my car at times. I would start around 8:30 and I would get to work at about 8:20 and sit there until 8:50 or 9:00, just not wanting to go into the office. That’s how bad it was.

And the day my wife said to me, “You know what? You should look into seeing if you can get time off for stress relief.” I said, “Okay, cool, bet.” So I talked to the Kaiser Permanente psychiatry department, which is non-existent. It’s terrible. And I talked to the dude and then either in person or over the phone or whatever, I don’t remember. But he said, “You know what, they normally only give out two.” He said, “I’m going to give you three weeks.” And I thought, as soon as he said, I’m giving you three weeks from work, this weight had been lifted. I mean, right now talking about it, my face is kind of going numb. That’s how stressful and traumatic it was being at that fucking work environment. And when the three weeks was almost up, I started having the same fucking symptoms coming up.

Same shit would happen at home, knowing I had to go back in. And my wife said to me, “Just quit.” And I said, “Really?” She’s like, “Yeah.” And the moment she said yeah, it’s like the weight had been lifted. I felt like Atlas finally could stop holding up the world. Like, “This is someone else’s job. And ain’t my job.” There was that much stress and pressure on me. And when people were talking about, “Oh, you quit because you were mentally not there,” or whatever, it’s like, “You’re fucking right I did, because it was killing me.” It was literally killing me to be in that environment. And I don’t think people understand the amount of shit that other people can’t escape from. There’s people who can’t do what I do. I was lucky. I was fortunate to have a supportive partner and to have someone who cared enough about my mental health, as well as my physical health to say, “You need to quit that fucking job.”

And my former boss who was working at a different company was just telling me like, oh, I need to stick it out. [inaudible 01:25:40] said, “No, you need to quit. Since you started working here, this, this, this and this have happened to you. All these physical things have happened to you based upon your job. The stress is killing you.” So finally she quit and she said she feels so much better already. She’s getting back into a rhythm. She’s starting to exercise. She’s sleeping better. And it’s like, yes. And I don’t think people realize the importance of A, working in a hostile work environment, but B, working in a hostile environment by being a marginalized person, i.e. not a cis white male. And it’s tough. It’s tough and it’s tougher for other people in certain situations. So yeah, that’s the reason why it left. That’s my experience there. Overall, I learned a lot while being there and I met some nice people. But I can honestly say I would not work there again.

Maurice Cherry:
That sounds a lot my time working at AT&T. It was just, oh my God, not great, not great. AT&T at least at the time when I was about to quit, I thought I had had Crohn’s disease or something. Every time I thought about going in or had to go in, I would automatically get sick. I would automatically have stomach issues. I thought I had IBS or something. And then once I quit, it all just cleared up. It just like, poof, vanished. It was gone. So yeah, working in those stressful environments can definitely do a toll on you mentally, physically. Yeah, I know what that’s like.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah. And I’m sorry you had to go through that. It’s not a good experience.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kirk Visola:
It’s difficult. See, you empathize and you sympathize and it’s hard for people to understand it if they haven’t gone through it. How can you let that happen? Actually, dude that used to work there at Shaklee went somewhere else. And all the shit was happening to him from an abusive narcissistic boss. And he said, “Oh, I have to quit.” And he said, “I remember criticizing you for quitting Shaklee.” But he said, “Now I understand. I apologize because I had no idea before.” Like, “Yeah, man, it’s real. It’s real.”

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

Kirk Visola:
As much as I don’t like Kanye West, one of these great lyrics from one of his songs, he said, and I’m paraphrasing because I don’t know the exact words, because it’s Kanye, he said, “Where do you want to be when you’re 25? She turned around, looked at me, and she said, alive.” I was like, “Damn, that’s kind of how I feel. I would like to say I want to be retired in Hawaii, sipping on pina coladas and mai tais and watching the turtles. But reality, I just want to be around. I mean, I want to be somewhat healthy, doing stuff with my wife, chilling, working, just enjoying life.

As far as career goals, I really would’ve liked to finish a script I’m working on, finish a video game idea, finish a graphic novel. I just want to finish something, because I have all these ideas and they all kind of go around and sync up. Oh, here’s something too. See, the ADHD brain is working. I’m working on a project right now that has a certain character I meet up. And so this is what I was thinking. I hadn’t seen it done before and I think it would be kind of fun. I was going to start a character and the first thing [inaudible 01:29:07] do was write a little brief book intro about him. And the second thing I wanted to do was write a or design a video game that picks up where the book left off. And that’s the only media it’s available in. It’s not going to be in a book, it’s not going to be online. It’s just going to be only the game.

And then after the game, I want to make an animated movie or show where that picks off and pick up from there. So it crosses three different media, but it continues one story. And I hadn’t seen that before. And I was thinking maybe because it’s not as big of a deal or it’s too hard to do, but just different things too. And I want the video game to be able to transfer, like when you’re playing it from a 2D scroller to a 3D sandbox. I want them to interact that way, where you can just pause it, change settings, and then go to a 2D scroller. Think of Rayman versus Batman Arkham Knights or any game like that, God of War or Tomb Raider. So you go from that to a 2D scroller, like Kung-Fu or a Rayman or whatever, or Kung-Fu Master, that was my idea behind that.

But I want to do something along those lines from my personal, not personal, but just for my creative zeal. But mainly just in five years, I want to be able to chill and probably have some better relationships with my sons, my twins. We go deep when we talk. This is always me. So I’d probably like to have a better relationship with them too in five years. But we’ll see what happens.

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

Kirk Visola:
You know what? Just to wrap it up, thank you so much for asking me that question Maurice. I’m putting on my podcast voice. I want to tell you about [inaudible 01:31:09] … No, people can find my agency work at Mind the Font dot com, so it’s like M-I-N-D-T-H-E-F-O-N-T dot com. And then I have something else I do, just kind of my own weird personal thing. It’s called Vsla Brand, but it’s V as in victory, S-L-A brand dot com. And on there, it’s just kind of my own personal stuff. I do have some swag that I sell on there, like hoodies and a T-shirt. I also have a thing called Thought Spot on there, where I write down random stuff that I’ve been thinking or what I’m going through at the time. And I date it, so you can read that. It kind of like is just me unfiltered. And I think that’s it. And also if you look up Kirk Visola, you’re going to find me, which is everything.

It’s pretty weird. You can find podcasts I’ve done, old pictures of me from newspapers when I had dreads. Yeah, Kirk Visola, that’s me. Just type it in, you’ll find me. And also too, anybody listening to this, please seriously reach out to me, and if you want any questions or ideas or thoughts or anything, reach out to me, because we don’t communicate enough, especially other Black designers, other Black creatives, we should be communicating with each other. Maurice and I were talking about this beforehand. And I told him to call me anytime he wants to vent or talk or chat or whatever, because we need to lean on each other in order to make each other strong. So reach out to me anytime y’all. And Maurice, thank you so much for having me on. That’s it for me.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, no, this was a really great conversation. Kirk Visola, thank you again so much for coming on the show. Really I think, if there’s anything that’s come across in this conversation, it is your just unfiltered, complete authenticity about yourself and your work, and your attitude to the work and everything. I hope that that’s something that as people certainly look at what they want to accomplish this year, they can sort of follow in your stead about being yourself, and knowing that by doing that and by being themselves, that they can succeed as well. So thank you so much again for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Kirk Visola:
Thank you, Maurice.

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Domonique Brown

If you’ve been at your local Target lately, then there’s a chance you’re familiar with illustrator and entrepreneur Domonique Brown. She’s the founder of DomoInk, a contemporary lifestyle brand including apparel and home décor, all with art by Domonique. Pick up some of her products in Target’s Black History Month collection and bless your space, y’all!

Our conversation began with Domonique giving me a behind-the-scenes peek at her business, and she outlined some of the unique challenges she’s faced as her work becomes more popular. We also talked about breaking out from your 9-to-5 job to do you own thing, her aspirations to go into fine art, and we discussed Black art and mainstream exposure through other Black creatives. Domonique is a woman on the rise, and I know we’ll only be seeing more and more of her work in the future!

☎️ Call ‪626-603-0310 and leave us a message with your comments on this episode!‬

The DomoInk Collection at Target

Interview Transcript

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

Domonique Brown:
Hi, I’m Domonique Brown. I’m an illustrator and founder of DomoINK.

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

Domonique Brown:
It’s been going really well. I started the year off with my new collaboration with Target for Black History Month, and also I have a collaboration within the same store of Target with American Greetings, where I am selling greeting cards.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, that’s big. That’s big. I’ll make sure that we have links to those in the show notes, so people can check those out. I saw on TikTok, which is actually how I first discovered you, I saw a TikTok from Tabitha Brown. She was picking up your stuff in Target. She was like, “Oh, I got to get these coasters and I got to get this.” And we’ll talk about how that all came about. But it really seems like last year was quite a year for you, and now you’re starting off this year with this big collaboration. Are there any other things you really want to try to accomplish this year?

Domonique Brown:
I really want to get back into the fine arts. I think right now with all these collaborations, there has been a huge focus on my digital work. I’ve been lucky with Target, and I guess I could say also with American Greetings, that they kind of have been, I guess, touching more on my, I guess my artwork on paper. So I really want to build value towards my original artwork. Because before I started doing digital designs, I was just in class drawing with pens and markers. So I think I really just want to get back into, I guess, back to basics and try to get into some more art galleries. My huge dream is to get into art to cell and yeah, just really just get back into just being a fine artist. The digital design work is cool, but I want to have both. I’ll say, there you go. I’ll just say I want both, to be a digital artist and be a fine artist at the same time.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Let’s jump right in there and talk about DomoINK, which is your company. I’m looking at the website here, and you’ve got art, you have home decor, you have apparel, and it’s all your artwork, which is amazing. Tell me about how you got started creating DomoINK?

Domonique Brown:
Yeah, I think DomoINK really just came from me just wanting to have art for my own space. When I first started DomoINK, I had just moved into my first home and we just had a lot of empty walls. So I was like, okay, let me just go to the store and see if I can find something that spoke to me. I would go to all these different stores and I would see nothing. And say, if I did find Black art, I felt like it was very generic, it may be just an African woman sitting there. But I was like, okay, I want something else. I want each space to say something different. This room could be filled with abstract art. This room could be line art. I just wanted more variety. So I just started drawing from my own space and posting it on social media, and people were like, “I want this.” And I was like, okay.

So I decided to create my own store and just build it up to offer a variety of just unique products that will connect to people who are also going through the same thing as me. I think as a Black woman, it’s so tough to find art and decor, or even apparel that represents you. So I wanted to have it to be like DomoINK is a one-stop shop where you can find Black art, Black cultured products 365 days a year, instead of having to wait for a retailer to offer a Black History Month collection in order to be able to get something that’s Black.

Maurice Cherry:
And I mean, speaking of social media, I love how you’re using social media to kind of provide a glimpse, not just into your artistic practice, but also where your work is at. Like I mentioned, I saw you on TikTok, but you’re on Twitter, you’re on Instagram, you have your own TikTok. How does social media help out with what you do? Does it just help you get to a wider audience?

Domonique Brown:
I feel like it allows you to build your own destiny, I feel. I feel like before, let’s say in the nineties where there’s no social media, you just have to get discovered from someone walking into an art gallery. But I think with social media has allowed me to make my own art gallery at basically no cost to where I can reach hundreds of thousands of people, and especially if a video goes viral. So with me being able to post on social media, it has allowed me to connect with you, like as you said, you saw me on social media. But then also even for brands, brands come across. Recently, for Bleacher Report, I had did an illustration for their social media platform. They found me because of a viral video I did of me drawing Martin Luther King with crayon. So I think it’s just social media is so powerful to where you can really build your dream out through it.

Maurice Cherry:
I saw that video too. That’s a really good illustration.

Domonique Brown:
Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you approach creating a new piece of art or a new design project?

Domonique Brown:
I think when I first started, I honestly was drawing for the trend. Like if I saw, let’s say a celebrity’s birthday was coming up, I’ll illustrate really quick for that. But I think I was like, okay, I don’t want to just be drawing celebrities. I really want to draw something that’s meaningful to me and also could relate to someone in their own home. So I think with me having my own store now, I’m trying to think in a perspective of, I guess you could really say what’s marketable and also just connects with people. So that’s why I’ve been going more in the direction of drawing the everyday man or everyday woman, and they’re just living life. I think my artwork is all about positivity and just joy. You’ll never see me draw anything negative. I just really want it to be, when someone looks at my piece, they feel like that could be them. That could be their aunt, that could be their uncle, something that they want to bring into their home and feel good about.

Maurice Cherry:
Is there a particular design that you’ve done that really took off that you weren’t expecting?

Domonique Brown:
I think it was when I did my Black hair series. I really wanted something that was very abstract, but at the same time, you can look at it and be like, “That’s a Black woman. That’s a Black man.” So it’s basically people, their hair is black, their skin is black, and if they have any accessories, their accessories will be in gold, their sunglasses, their earrings, but their apparel is basically African textures and tones. And I just did it one day and I just made a whole series out of it, and I posted it on social media and people were just like, “I want this. I want this.” And I was like, okay. I’m like, I understand now. I think before me, I was just thinking very about myself of, okay, I really want art that looks like me, that looks like my family and my friends. And when I posted it, everybody else was like, “That’s me or That looks like my grandpa.” I’m like, okay.

Maurice Cherry:
So you didn’t have anyone particular in mind when you created that?

Domonique Brown:
No, it was really for myself in a sense of me just, I guess from me just dealing with never finding artwork that looks like me when I go shopping, and I just posted it and it just took off.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, are there any sort of unique challenges or opportunities that you faced doing your work or exhibiting your work as a Black designer?

Domonique Brown:
Oh, I will say, I think that there is still a lack of, I guess, companies wanting to utilize Black art. Sometimes I’ll feel like maybe, let’s say if I didn’t just draw Black figures and I just drew, let’s say white figures, I might be able to get more publication. I might be able to get more views on videos. As you see, I think when you are watching, I guess the trend with TikTok, as you’ve seen with Black creators, they have such a harder time being able to get the same amount of money for brand deals or the same amount of views. So I do feel that same kind of maybe oppression in a sense as a Black artist.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I hear that a lot on TikTok, and in a way it makes me wonder why people even, well, I wouldn’t say why people, why Black creators still mess with the platform, considering how unfriendly it seems to be. But I guess it just has a great reach?

Domonique Brown:
It does have a great reach. And then I feel like if this is with TikTok, why wouldn’t it be the same with Instagram or any other platform? So I think it’s just something, just an overall, I guess the thing that one day I hope whatever end, it’s going to be a really appeal battle to end discrimination. But I guess for me, I’m on TikTok because there’s nothing I can do about it, but what I can do at least try to reach the people who would be interested in having my art in their home.

Maurice Cherry:
That makes sense. And I’d imagine you’re also reaching people there that you might not reach on your other platforms. Maybe they’re not on Twitter that often or Instagram or something, but they’re on TikTok.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah, that’s why I try to post everywhere. I’d be posting my artwork on LinkedIn and people are on LinkedIn just trying to find a job, but I’m like, hey, you never know who could be watching.

Maurice Cherry:
Very true. Look, a lot of people get jobs off LinkedIn, so-

Domonique Brown:
They do.

Maurice Cherry:
… there is no problem with posting there at all. None.

Domonique Brown:
Right? And then at the same time, you might be able to find a job on LinkedIn by posting art, so you never know. So I just try to post everywhere I can and just see what could come from it. It doesn’t hurt. I mean, it doesn’t cost anything to pose, so might as well.

Maurice Cherry:
I need to adopt that mentality. I need to think about it that way.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Your collection with Target, like I said, I saw that on TikTok. I saw that on Tabitha Brown’s TikTok. How did that come about? Did that partnership happen?

Domonique Brown:
What’s so funny is that I didn’t even talk to Tabitha. There was nothing. It was just all of a sudden I wake up in the morning and people are in my DMs sending me the video, like, “Do you see Tabitha Brown posted this?” And I’m like, what? And I look and I’m like, oh my God, this is so cool. I was sitting there texting my friends, writing people, “That’s my cousin. I’m Domonique Brown. She’s Tabitha Brown. Don’t play.”

Maurice Cherry:
See, I didn’t even think of that. I didn’t even think of that until you said it, so.

Domonique Brown:
Right? I was like, “That’s my cousin, y’all. I’m sorry I didn’t tell y’all.” No, but it was something really, really cool and it just felt good to see. She could have just went in that store and just bought, or just basically just highlighted her collection. She has her vegan food collection this year. So it was really nice that she went over to the Black History Collection, she highlighted a few creators and then she walked to the back. Or she could have did it in reverse, she could have highlighted her collection first and then threw us at the end. But it was just so sweet that she started off by highlighting small businesses.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. How did you first get to working with Target?

Domonique Brown:
Honestly, they found me through another brand collaboration. I had a brand collaboration with Jiggy Puzzles. And for that deal, I had created a piece where it’s literally two sneakers walking through California, and it was called Cali Views. I reached out to them, I showed them the art piece, and then Jiggy Puzzles put my artwork on their next puzzle collection. And someone, a Target buyer, saw it, bought the puzzle and fell in love with it and decided to reach out to me and see if I was interested in doing a collection with them.

Maurice Cherry:
Now I see the items that are on Target’s website now. You’ve got two pieces of wall art, you’ve got an art kit, there’s some coasters, there’s a wall calendar. We’ll make sure to link all of that in the show notes, so people can go ahead and grab those if they’re not able to get them from their local Target.

Domonique Brown:
Okay.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you maintain a sense of authenticity and individuality in your work while it appeals to such a mass audience? Target is mass market, it’s as big as you can get. How do you maintain yourself in your art through that?

Domonique Brown:
I think what helps me a lot is that my artwork, I guess what makes it so authentic is that I am a Black woman and I’m literally just drawing from my own experiences and basically just illustrating what I would want to see. And I think with my background in marketing and also just studying PR and advertising design, I feel like I kind of have that idea of always trying to create something that is marketable to a wider audience instead of just creating just for me. I feel like if I was just drawing for myself, it probably wouldn’t be as clean, I will say. It would be more of me just doodling or sketching something out. But with me having that mentality of I’m designing something that will literally make someone happy and feel like they’re represented. I’m always trying to illustrate that. And at the same time, the work that I’m putting out, I guess, speaks to me as well.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, earlier as I was doing my research for this, I thought it was super interesting that you were running this mega business of DomoINK while also having a nine to five. But as we started recording, you told me that’s now changed, is that right?

Domonique Brown:
Yes. That has now changed. I think what really pushed me to create DomoINK was that I had the ability to work from home. By working from home, it takes away the whole commuting, you getting dressed from work, you taking that long drive home for. My job, it was based in Orange County, that’s like an hour drive or two hours in traffic. So I mean, just being at home, it gave me so much more free time than I ever had when I was just working in an office.

I mean, it’s bittersweet because it was, the opportunity for me to work from home came from the pandemic, but you’re stuck in the house all the time. So with me being stuck in the house all the time, and then also the workload had kind of decreased as well because of people just calling into… I guess from my job, it was just less work to do because there wasn’t much to do because of the pandemic. So it gave me it lot of time to really just figure out how can I run a business? And I just went forward. I’d never run a business before, except having an Etsy store where I’m selling pens and earrings a couple years back. But I didn’t know what I was doing, and I just was just going along. I’m like, okay, I’m going to start selling artwork. I’m going to start selling apparel. Now I’m going to start selling plates, I’m going to start selling puzzles. And it just blew up into what it is now.

Maurice Cherry:
Was there a particular moment that it blew up for you?

Domonique Brown:
I will say by 2021, it felt like it really took off was because I started getting published in different articles for BuzzFeed and just doing a lot of brand collaborations. I think with me collaborating with different companies, it brought a lot of awareness to DomoINK. And also just brought trustability towards it. Just basically, I think people started to believing in what I was pushing out. You can go on Instagram and see someone has a shop, but you’ll be like, “That’s really cute.” But I’m like, “Am I actually going to get the product?” All the time.

So I think with me just getting so much, I guess brand awareness, it really just took off from me where people were buying all the time from me, especially around Christmastime when I did CNBC Make It. I had so many sales every single day. My original artwork was selling and I sell my original artwork up to $5,000 and just to wake up and see that, and my account was just absolutely insane. So I guess if I had to pinpoint a certain moment of where I felt I really made it with DomoInk was CNBC.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. That is amazing. That is really amazing. Sounds like that big press really kind of helped out because it got your work out there nationwide, probably worldwide.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah, it really did. Because I was getting orders from Australia and United Kingdom. I’m like, you guys want to pay that international shipping? It just felt really good because it was like, there’s so many artists in this world, and for someone to sit there and just want my artwork in that small space of their bedroom or large space behind their couch. It was just a really good feeling to know, okay, what I’m creating is meaningful out here. It’s not just something I’m just throwing against the wall. So it just felt good.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, let’s learn more about the artist behind the art. I mean, we spent this time talking about DomoINK. And we’ll get into more of the brand collapse and stuff you’ve done later, but tell me more about where you grew up? You’re originally from Pomona, California, is that right?

Domonique Brown:
Yes, I am from Pomona, California. It’s a cool city. There’s nothing to do in Pomona. I will say that Pomona is known for the LA County Fair. I would say that was the big highlight of it. But I think what shaped me as an artist to want to illustrate more, I guess be more of a Black like… oh, I guess I’ll say I’ll draw more Black art, was that when I was growing up, it wasn’t that many Black kids where I was growing up. Pomona is Hispanic. It’s basically the majority of Pomona is Hispanic. So for me, I was growing up, my best friends were all Hispanic. But I think I guess my first culture shock was me being around… basically being a majority of Black people was when I worked at the Post Office, surprisingly. That’s when I started working out in LA. So that’s when I did my shift.

I think it was very educational too, in a sense, because before I’m always around Hispanics. I guess I’ll say my culture was Hispanic in a way, when I’m out at school and everything, but obviously when I’m at home, that’s Black culture time, me spending time with my cousins in LA and stuff. So I’ve always kind of just been out in LA really most of my life. I grew up in Pomona, but I spent a lot of time in LA working or hanging out with family.

Maurice Cherry:
Now were you doing a lot of drawing and stuff as a kid too?

Domonique Brown:
I was doing a lot of illustrations. I think for me, drawing was my escape from school. Even though I have a masters, I never was a school kid. I will say I don’t know how I did it. I look back and be like, how did I do that? I never focused, I will say. I could look at my college notes or my elementary notes and there’s always a drawing on the side of it. That was literally my escape from having to be bored in class or just be bored, just anywhere was, it could be a long drive from my home to Vegas for vacation and I’m drawing in the car. So art was definitely an escape, and it was just fun for me. I never really thought about being an artist when I grew up. It was just like, oh, a little passion project, I guess, I’ll say a hobby.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay, so it was a hobby, but you didn’t necessarily think, oh, this is something that I could do for a living?

Domonique Brown:
No, because I guess for me, it was like, okay, how do you even be an artist? How do you become, I guess now the huge artists are Kerry James Marshall or Bisa Butler, how do you get to that level? I just thought it was just like, you have to know somebody. And I’m like, I live in Pomona. There’s nothing going on out here. Am I supposed to get discovered at the fair? Where am I supposed to get discovered? So I felt like where I was, there was nothing for me. So I was like, what I’m going to do is I’m going to study into the Plan B options of, okay, I could be a graphic designer anywhere. I can do marketing for any company. But to be an artist, I don’t understand how to do that. So I’m going to focus on something that I can easily go on Indeed and apply for.

Maurice Cherry:
I gotcha. I gotcha. I mean, I grew up in a small town too, smaller than Pomona, but I grew up in a small town. And I know what you mean, when you have this kind of creative aptitude, it’s hard to tell, if you don’t see it around you, if you don’t see examples around you of how can I turn this into something? Is this just going to be a hobby that I do because I don’t know how I could do this for a living? So I get exactly where you’re coming from there.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Now you’ve mentioned your MBA. You went to Cal Poly Pomona, majored in public relations, and you said you have an MBA, that’s in marketing from CSU Dominguez Hills. How has your education in marketing and PR helped you out as a design entrepreneur?

Domonique Brown:
I think it helped out a lot. I think with me going to school, while I was in school for, I was in school from 2011 to 2019. So I think of me just always constantly working on, I guess, campaigns for my homework, my presentations, I’m always trying to create ways to, how do you… I think one of my class projects was like, how do you save Chipotle? When they had that whole E. coli PR crisis. We had to make a fake campaign, create fake ads, how to bring a customer base back. So I think with me just always loving how to build a brand has led to me doing it with DomoINK to where I have full control of it in a sense. I’m not working with some other company’s logo or anything. It’s me. Everything is me.

Maurice Cherry:
When you look at your body of work, I mean of everything that you’ve done so far, is there a particular project or a piece of art that you’re the most proud of?

Domonique Brown:
I would say my deal with Target is probably my biggest one, I will say. Because for me, I always grew up going to Target. I worked at Target, so it’s a full circle.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
That is a full circle moment. Yeah.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah. I used to work at Target. And I think it was just funny because when I worked at Target, I didn’t care. I started working there, I was 18. Yeah, I was 18 years old when I worked there. It was like my second job I ever had. And I just came to work. I didn’t care. I was a cashier, I was just ringing up people. And I didn’t even show up my last week. I was a seasonal employee, and they were like, “Okay, you’re done with your seasonal time.” And I was like, okay. And I just never came back. They were like, “Oh, are you going to come back for the last week?” And I was like, “No, I’m just going to just go.” So I left on a bad note. It was just so bad. So it was just funny. So when Target reached out to me and I told them my story about me working at Target, I was like, they’re probably going to say no to me. They’re going to look at my record and be like, “She never came to work. She didn’t even show up her last week of work. She’s terrible.” But I’m a new person now. That’s how I looked at it.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, we can’t be held responsible for those early jobs in our career. I mean, yeah, charge that one to the game. You’re good with that.

Domonique Brown:
We got to, yeah, I was like, that was 10 years ago. Now I’m older now. But I think that probably even helped me too with me getting to deal with Target was just me just talking about, I used to work there.

It was definitely a full circle moment for me. And then also I like Target so much because the product line is a representation of the variety of styles that I do. Like the coasters, the line art. The art prints is my artwork that I did on paper that has just been converted to art print. The mugs is my fine artwork. And the calendar that they sell has more of my digital artwork and different styles. So it was just really nice to just have the full representation of me and then just have DomoINK to be inside a Target. It wasn’t just like, oh, they just through my artwork on something and then it’s just my name on the corner. If you look at the packaging, it says DomoINK. It has my name. It has a picture of my face. It was just really cool to just see how far my business has grown since the pandemic.

Maurice Cherry:
Now a lot of artists I’m seeing now are wrapped up in a bunch of different kind of, I guess, tech intersections. I guess that’s kind of a good way to talk about it. I know last year there was a lot of talk about artists making NFTs. And then this year, well also last year, probably going into this year too, a lot of talk about AI generated art, stuff like that. Do you think about the future of the art and design industry and how it might be impacted by tech? Do you see your work in those capacities?

Domonique Brown:
Yeah, I guess the first thing will be like NFTs. I wish I was ahead of the game with that. I have a friend who recently made $100,000 in one day selling NFTs. And I’m like, how the heck-

Maurice Cherry:
Woo!

Domonique Brown:
… Yeah. I was like, dang, what was I doing during that time? But I feel with, I guess when the economy probably gets some stability, I think NFTs will probably definitely grow. I went to DesignerCon a few months ago, I think it was in November, and people were just standing in line just trying to get them a rare NFT. So I definitely think it’s probably something that will stick around once the economy gets back together, as you see with Bitcoin dropping or if you got your money in stocks, it’s on the negative right now, the economy.
But I think with the AI generated thing, I think it sucks because in a sense that let’s say that person was going to buy a digital portrait from someone, but then with this AI generated art, they can just make their portrait for free or just download an app and pay $8. So I think it definitely hurts artists who their business is based off of commissions. And then also this whole AI generated thing is also stealing people’s art to make those art, I mean the little AI thing. So definitely, it’s cool, but it’s definitely hurtful to artists overall.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. One interesting thing that I saw from that, I think it was late last year, is not just people of course sharing this art widely over social media, but also just how many people, and I’ll be blunt, how many Black people were like, “I can’t believe y’all are paying for that. You paid money for that?” The gross devaluing of creative work is mind blowing to me, first of all.

Domonique Brown:
Oh yes.

Maurice Cherry:
I don’t know. Did you see that? Did you see those kind of things going on?

Domonique Brown:
I did. I did see that. I think it is definitely true, even for, let’s say, even for me as an artist, someone asks me to draw them a picture, and I’ll tell them, let’s say they want something super crazy, they’re like, we want a three-foot drawing or something. I’m like, “You know that’s going to cost a couple thousand. That’s time.” And they’re just stunned by it. It’s like, you’re paying for my time, and also you’re just paying for me just having to use my supplies. I’m shipping it to you. You have to think about it. Just because I draw for fun doesn’t mean I want to draw you for free.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. And also just with materials and stuff like that, and time? All that costs money.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah. And then I think people have taken the fact that it is your time. And also you’re paying for the person’s past too. The person spent 10 years to get to this level. So you’re paying for that experience as well. Because I mean, yeah, you can go to a college and maybe get a kid to draw something for $50, but will it look that great? And then even if it is really great, how do you feel good ripping them off? They still spent a good amount of time doing that. You wouldn’t want to work for $5 an hour. So why would you want an artist to do so?

Maurice Cherry:
Right. One thing that I’ve been telling some artists is that inevitably people are going to still, I mean, they’re still going to use this AI generated art. Because to me, this is just the next step from people doing Facetune or a little FaceApp or Photoshop, whatever here and there, this is kind of the next step from that. Because you’re already seeing people use them for avatar pictures and stuff like that. I’ve seen them on dating apps, so people are already-

Domonique Brown:
Oh my God.

Maurice Cherry:
… Yeah. People are already going the distance with this. But I told some artists, especially ones that do commissions, I’m like, look, if anybody brings you AI art, just don’t do it. Because somebody’s going to come to an artist and be like, “Yeah, I made this with Lensa or Midjourney or whatever, “Can you change this? Can you touch this up?” And I’m telling them, don’t do it. Just say no.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah. And also I guess too, I guess a lot of this AI art is from stolen artwork. So you don’t want to attach your name to something and then someone comes out and says, “You just stole my artwork. All you did was change the color of the hair. You want to get involved in it.” And also you’re just basically supporting people getting their artwork stolen.

Maurice Cherry:
I heard that Getty Images is suing Stable Diffusion and I think another AI art maker. I think it’s Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, suing both of them because their system scraped some Getty Images stuff. And now when people try to generate the images, they’ll come out with a mangled Getty Images watermark. Because they put that big watermark my on all their pictures. So I think it’s certainly something that, I don’t know what legislation’s going to do with relation to that, but I mean, I kind of feel like the cat’s out of the bag, people are still going to use it. Now, whether or not they value it? That’s a whole other story.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah, I don’t know it will be valuable if you became an AR artist, but I don’t know. It’s so new. For me, I haven’t really dabbled with it too much because every time when I tried, I do not how the portrait looks. I’m like, I don’t know who this person’s supposed to be. But I definitely see where it’s going to be a lot of, I guess, issues with it. But I don’t know. I feel like people are using it for their profile pictures. It kind of reminds me of back in the day where people would use the cartoon filter for their pictures.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. Or the Snapchat filters or stuff like that. Yeah.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah. I think it’s more of a little trend for right now. And then once eventually people just get over it.

Maurice Cherry:
Which, it’s actually interesting, the week that we’re recording this, Snapchat is actually discontinuing one of their apps. It’s called Snap Camera. You can download it for your laptop, so you can use Snapchat filters on your webcam. They’re discontinuing that. They’re like, we’re not doing this anymore. I think part of it is because they fired thousands of people last year. But I’m wondering though if we’ll start to see some companies pull back on AI for art purposes. I mean, I think AI is already being used in a lot of stuff anyway. Photoshop has been used in AI for years now with Content-Aware Fill and stuff like that. But yeah, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens in the future, especially as more companies start to throw legislation, or throw lawsuits, I should say, behind this stuff.

Domonique Brown:
Yes, it is going to be interesting.

Maurice Cherry:
Now we’re starting to see a lot more Black fine artists in their work kind of being exhibited to the mainstream. I’d say this has really picked up over the past decade or so. We have Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, they painted the Obamas. You’ve got television shows that feature Black art. We had a fine artist on last year, Dawn Okoro, her work was used in, I think it was The First Wives Club on BET, I think it was used for that show. You’ve collaborated with a show. You collaborated with FX Networks to do some work for their show Snowfall. What do you think about this kind of exposure?

Domonique Brown:
I think it’s amazing, I think, especially for the artists, because shows will pay you to have your artwork in their show. I think for me personally, my artwork was in HBO’s Insecure. So in one of the episodes Issa Rae walks right past, it was an illustration I did of Nipsey Hussle, or even for-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice.

Domonique Brown:
… Another show I had done was A Black Lady Sketch Show. So first season three, my artwork is featured throughout the show. So it was definitely cool because a lot of people reached out to me because they recognized my artwork. They’re like, “Oh my God, your artwork’s in this scene right here.” And I was like, okay. Like I had said earlier in the interview, is that with your artwork being in so many different places, it starts to just build awareness towards you to where people can understand the value of your work. It’s just very helpful, I’ll say.

Maurice Cherry:
I can imagine, like you said, your artwork’s all over the place. Do you just find out about it when it’s shown or do they give you a heads-up?

Domonique Brown:
They do give you a heads-up because a lot of times… I knew that my art artwork was going to be in Insecure. I didn’t know which episode it would be. I never got that kind of information. I mean, I watched Insecure anyways, so I would just sitting there watching it the whole season and it was literally, I think the artwork appeared in the second or third to last episode. So all that whole season, I’m just looking everywhere. I’m like, where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Or for Black Lady Sketch Show, I was just looking around too, where is it? I want to see a piece. Because they had bought a lot of my artwork for it as well. So it’s really cool. I think it feels good that people can recognize your artwork. It’s just weird in a sense of, wow, you know my piece that well? You can just see it blurred in the corner and you know that’s me. It’s a feel-good moment.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, that’s got to be a great moment. I mean, your work’s on TV, your work’s in Target. That’s major. That’s major, major, major.

Domonique Brown:
Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
Who are some of the folks that have really motivated and inspired you over the years? I can imagine doing all this, you’ve probably got a great support system behind you.

Domonique Brown:
I will say my dad definitely, I will say, as my day one motivator, I think. Especially when I was in high school, I had did a program called Ryman Arts. So every Saturday I would go to USC and do classes. So he would drive me from Pomona to LA, it was an hour drive. And also even my mom too as well. They would just drive me to LA and back. So they always pushed for me to be an artist. Because I was taking time out of their day. That’s their weekend from work. And they would just take me down there and then they would stay down in LA for three to four hours as I did my class at USC and then took me back home. Because that was when I was in high school. Also, they’ve always, for my mom, for Christmas every year, she would always buy me, I guess an artist kit they would sell and it would have crayons, markers, color, pencils, and this big old, I wouldn’t say a booklet, but it was a big old cassette kind of thing. And you picked it up and-

Maurice Cherry:
I know those art kits, they’ve got all the waxy color pencils and stuff in them.

Domonique Brown:
… Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I used to always get every single year, when I was growing up, my mama bought me one of those. And so I think they always pushed me to always be an artist. But they definitely were always very pushing me to basically have a career somewhere. And then I’ll say now with me having a fiancé, I think when I met him, I think I wasn’t thinking as big scale. But having him around, I was able to set up my own booth. I had to a booth at 626 Night Market. That was before I was DomoINK. I think I just threw a banner up, it was like Art by Domonique. Come through. I was selling art friends, earrings and pins and stuff. But if I didn’t have him, I wouldn’t of had nobody set up a big old booth for me. He had made the booth by hand. He had bought some pipes and connected them and boom, we had a tent.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah. He set up all the whole everything inside of the booth. And I’m not crafty, no one in my family’s that crafty, so it would not have came out as well without him.

I will say my family has been a huge force behind me just being an artist. Even when I had my first solo art show in 2018, my dad and my fiancé, but he was my boyfriend at the time, they were there all day just hanging my artwork on the wall, putting the hangers on the back of the pieces. So me just having, I guess a whole village behind me. Or even from my extended family, my aunts, they’ve always come out to my shows, buy pieces. And also my friends just posting my artwork on their Instagram or sharing it. Or even from my Target collection, it just felt really good that took the time out to drive to their local Target and just buy a mug, just buy something to just show support behind me.

And also just me just being on social media. A huge support system is just people, followers, they’ll send you a sweet message out of nowhere. I look at my DMs and see someone just write me and say, “Thank you for posting the things that you’re doing because it inspires me.” So that is a huge motivation just overall of people just telling me, keep going.

Maurice Cherry:
I’ll say this to anybody that’s listening that has a friend that is an entrepreneur. Buy their stuff. That is the best way that you can help support what they do. I mean, I think social media posts and things like that is great, but actually putting some money in your pocket, best way to help out.

Domonique Brown:
Oh yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Such a great way to support.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah, no, it is. When I did my solo art show, it was my first art exhibition. It was in Pomona, which was cool. I had friends from high school just come down and just buy a print. I was selling little small prints for $5, just starting off. And they just came down there and bought an art print just to say, “Hey, keep doing it.” And it does, it means a lot to you. Even it’s go small purchase. It’s just really nice to feel like, dang, I made a connection in this person’s life that they came out here and bought something. They might not even like it, but they’re just doing it just to basically push your dreams forward.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What advice would you give for any designers out there that are listing, they’re hearing your story and they want to break into design entrepreneurship and work with brands like you have, what would you tell them?

Domonique Brown:
I will definitely say be okay with the answer of no or rejection. I think when I first started out, I was just posting my artwork and getting no likes on it, when I first started. It used to bother me at first. I’m like, why am I even posting it? It made me want to give up. Or let’s say a brand does reach out to me and they say, “Hey, we want to use your artwork for this billboard.” And two weeks later you don’t hear nothing from them no more. So you got to be okay with the rejection at first. It’s definitely not going to be like you post your artwork, that one piece, and it just blows up and you’re drawing for Target next. You may get lucky, I mean, that’s like a 1 billion chance, but you definitely have to be able to handle the slow growth. That’s the hardest part.

I think that’s what makes people give up is that first part of you’re selling… For me, I started off on Etsy and I was telling my art prints, I didn’t get no sales for months. And I could easily just shut it down, but I was like, I’m just going to keep my listings up and something has to hit eventually. I just kept drawing and drawing and stuff. But what really helped me too a lot was when I first started out, I had a nine to five. So that kind of kept me grounded to where I didn’t become desperate for my business because I had a steady income coming. So I think that helped me a lot with just being able to handle that slow movement.

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

Domonique Brown:
I think I just appreciate me just sticking to my passion of just marketing and design and art has led me to having my own home in California. I think I’ve just been really just taking a moment to just appreciate how far I’ve come. When I first started drawing or maybe just looking back at me, when I was in college, I didn’t have no money. I would buy one burrito and eat off of it all day, when I was in my [inaudible 00:44:40]. It’s just weird right now with me trying to do a careers transition to where I want to go into more of an entertainment and tech field of doing marketing or being an art director, it’s a really good feeling to know I’m being sustained by my art. It’s super weird to just be at this point and still be in, like I said, I have a house in California. I always said to myself, California is really, really expensive and it just seems weird to get this far and be able to have these kind of accomplishments and accolades under myself. And this year I turned 30 and it’s a good feeling to know I got this far knowing where I came from.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s the journey. It’s the journey.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah, it’s the journey. And you to definitely have to appreciate every step of the way. I think it’s really easy to get caught up in what you want in front of you, but you’re not thinking about what you have right now is what your past you was dying to have.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Do you have a dream project that you’d love to do one day? I think you kind of alluded to one earlier.

Domonique Brown:
Oh my gosh. I think my passion project right now is, well, I guess what I’m really trying to build up to is being in art museums. And a big one is Art Basel, I really want to get in that. I just really want to just get my artwork in front of some people in the gallery. That’s just a really good feeling when I go into gallery and have my artwork in there and I see people just standing there looking at it. It’s kind of cool. And so I really, really want to get back into the fine arts, that’s my thing.

Maurice Cherry:
Have you exhibited any art locally in Pomona?

Domonique Brown:
I have, when I had my first solo art exhibit. And then also I had my artwork in the Chaffey Museum of Art out in Ontario, California. That was recently, so I exhibited eight, nine pieces there. Well, my latest one was in Ontario, that made me really want to get back into drawing more on paper to be able to get into more museums. Because it was a really good feeling because… And also it led to a lot of people reaching out to me interested in buying my work. So I was like, oh, this is another place to keep building brand awareness towards me. And also even for DomoINK, because I always try to make sure to throw that in my bio, that I’m a founder of my own home decor business. So I definitely just want to just kind of, I guess get my hands into everything that I can that’s within my education and skills.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, gallery work aside, where do you see yourself in the next five years? Is there any particular kind of work you want to be doing or anything like that?

Domonique Brown:
Yes, I really want to, in the long run, eventually I’ll probably get out of the, I guess corporate space and really just focus on DomoINK. I really want to also just start my own marketing firm too, with a lot of people reaching out to me, trying to find out how they can do the same thing and how do they monetize their art. I really want to be able to become a mentor and offer courses and just educate people. Because there’s so many people who just don’t know where to start. Like for me, I didn’t know where to start, but somehow I was able to make it work. But I just try to think about the people who don’t have that aha moment just by sitting there. So I just wanted to be able to offer more resources and help people just like me be able to get some money and just be able to have financial freedom, because everyone deserves to be able to afford shelter, food, everything. So if I can help someone have their own place, I’m happy.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, your work and everything? And of course we’ll put links, like I said, to the Target collection in the show notes, but where can they find out more about you online?

Domonique Brown:
To find out more about me and my artwork and also shop for my artwork in home decor and apparel, you can go to DomoINK.com. It is D-O-M-O-I-N-K.com.

Maurice Cherry:
All right, sounds good. Well, Domonique Brown, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. Really thank you for sharing your story. I think it’s one thing to see the success on social media and people can kind of have one perception about it, but I hope that from people listening to your story and hearing just how upbeat and authentic are about the work, that they’ll see that this is something that maybe they can achieve too. I mean, the success that you’ve gotten over these past few years is really inspirational, I can’t wait to see what you do next. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Domonique Brown:
Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me. Thank you.

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George McCalman

Y’all are in for a real treat this week, because I got the chance to catch up with the extremely talented and accomplished George McCalman. He is well known for his work a studio owner and creative director, and he recently published his first book, Illustrated Black History: Honoring the Iconic and the Unseen.

George shared how the idea for the book came about, and he spoke about some of the surprising and interesting things that came up during his research on who to include. He also talked about getting his start in the magazine industry as an art director, shared what convinced him to eventually start his own business, and elaborated on how his style has evolved over the years. George is a master of his craft and a true inspiration to aspiring creatives everywhere!

☎️ Call ‪626-603-0310 and leave us a message with your comments on this episode!‬
Interview Transcript

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

George McCalman:
Well, number one, thank you for having me on, Maurice. My name is George McCalman. I am an artist and creative director based in San Francisco. I live part-time in the Caribbean, the country of Grenada. And I run a design studio, which affords me the privilege of doing a lot of creative things at the same time. And I’m also a fine and commercial artist, and I’m often the artist of projects that I am designing and am the creative director on. I do a lot of other things, but that’s it for right now.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s a lot.

George McCalman:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, first off, happy New Year to you.

George McCalman:
Happy New Year.

Maurice Cherry:
We’re recording this right near the start of 2023. How have things been going so far?

George McCalman:
It’s been great. I’m in a very different realm than I was even a few weeks ago. I just had a couple weeks of a break from a book tour that I have been on and a press tour in support of my book Illustrated Black History: Honoring the Iconic and the Unseen. And so I’ve had a little bit of a reprieve, and so for the first time in many months, I have had the opportunity to really synthesize and make sense of the whirlwind that has come from the second half of this year of this book being out and me going out on a book tour and a national book tour. So I’ve just been really reflective for the last couple of weeks, and so this conversation is really timed well because I’ve been just thinking a lot about my experience of being a published author and people interacting with this book and having their responses and what I have learned from their response to this book. It’s been really incredible.

Maurice Cherry:
And I know you’re currently recording in Grenada. I would imagine having a Caribbean paradise at the finish line of a book tour is a pretty good motivation.

George McCalman:
Well, it’s actually just a reprieve. I start back on the book tour in February. So this is actually not even the midpoint. I’m going to be on tour for this book most likely another year just because I feel really passionately that this subject matter should be revered every day of the year and not just localized to a month or a period of time. So I am taking the message of that to the streets.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. When you look back at last year, is there anything that you want to try to change for 2023?

George McCalman:
Yeah. Expansive. I don’t know that I would use the word change for myself. It’s expand. I learned a lot and I was involved in all aspects of the making of this book, which is a really unique place to be. Most authors are not involved with all of the backend, the making and the design and the marketing. And so it’s been a really comprehensive experience too. And if I would say any adjustment, it would just be more, basically.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I’ll make sure that we have a link to the book in the show notes. Yeah, let’s dive more into it. Tell me about the book. I think the name is self-explanatory, but tell me more about the book, what was your idea behind it, all of that.

George McCalman:
The book came from the word … The first sentence of the introduction of this book is I had a curiosity, and that is the very simple truth. I was just curious to know more about black pioneers. And I was just coming to a point where I started realizing that there was an artist inside of me, and so I decided to merge these twin curiosities of, I want to test out the parameters of me as an artist after basically not making art since I graduated from college 20 years before. So I’m a classically trained artist. I’m a painter and a drafts person and a sculptor and a photographer. But when I went out into the professional landscape of being a magazine art and creative director, I didn’t think there was any room for me to be a fine artist. And at the time, there just weren’t people who looked like me in this realm.

And so I knew that would be a hard road, and I decided to go with the convention of working in the corporate world just to establish myself financially and it was an adult decision. But I came to a point a few years ago where I started realizing that there was more that I was interested in. It felt like there was an ocean that I had not touched. And I decided in a flash of inspiration to make this project my first assignment as an artist. And so I researched and wrote and painted a different black history pioneer every day for a month of February, and it just started ballooning. I think that’s the right word. It started expanding from there.

Maurice Cherry:
How did you go about researching and selecting the people to feature in the book? Because as I’ve looked through the book, I have the book actually, you have a wide range of people that you feature.

George McCalman:
I really know that the person that I am personally and professionally has really been framed by my time working at magazines because it’s basically, I got both military and library training at the same time, if that makes sense. There’s a rigor to when you are working under deadline, you have to really be sharp, you have to have your focus, you have to know what the context is of what you’re doing. You have to be really communicative with the people around you. And you have to make sure that what you’re writing is all the time. And so it really trained me to know some of the shortcuts of researching and trusting my instincts around that. And for me, I was interested in people I didn’t know that much about. Even if I knew their name, even if I knew some of their story, there’s always more to learn.

And that’s the thing that I’ve learned in my 15 years as a magazine person before I opened my studio, that even when you think you know everything about a public figure, there is always more. And so it was a trust in the information I was learning, but it was also a trust in myself. And so I was always just looking at the periphery, looking at the fringes, asking myself questions. Who is Edna Lewis? What was Gordon Parks thinking as he was moving through the world? I found myself asking intimate questions to myself of the people I was researching. And so I found myself drawn to aspects of their story, and I was always looking for not just their accomplishments, but their personality. So many of our pioneers were always looking through a contemporary lens, but life was just so much harder then.

And so I can’t imagine what Gordon Parks’ everyday life was. He was always the representative, and there’s always a burden placed on black people in America that we have to represent our community. And I can’t imagine what that was like 50 years ago, what that was like 75 years ago, 150 years ago. How much harder it was to be seen as an individual when your community is always being judged against the majority white community. And so it’s always this push, it’s always this burden, it’s always this pressure. But then you look at these accomplishments and so many of these people, publicly anyway, were really graceful. And so you have to develop this superpower when you’re out in the world. And I found myself thinking, what did these people have to compromise? What did they have to give up? Who did they have to be to be the people that we know and sometimes take for granted?

I was always looking for the hidden messages of who these people actually were, and that just always sparked my interest. It just made me hungry and curious. And even as I was painting them, I found myself drawn to nuances of personality. Gordon Parks was really charming, and so the portrait that I did of him, there’s a twinkle in his eye. I was looking to bring out the anger and the jokingness and the sadness and the power and the force. I really wanted to capture human personality in these paintings and really individualize them.

Maurice Cherry:
Aside from just how poetic that is, that is extremely profound of you as an artist to want to approach it in that way. Even as you mentioned that, I’m thinking of my personal experience, but I’d say maybe a couple of years ago, this was right around the summer of 2020, I was doing a lot of research looking at old issues of Ebony Magazine and Jet Magazine from the ’50s and the ’60s. And one thing that stuck out to me that I thought was really interesting, I saw an ad for … It was some kind of alcohol, maybe gin or something like that. But it was Langston Hughes.

George McCalman:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Langston Hughes was selling alcohol. And I don’t know why that broke my brain for a second because in a way you think of, oh, Langston Hughes, Harlem Renaissance, profound poet. Why is he selling alcohol in Ebony Magazine?

George McCalman:
Yes. We don’t often think of our pioneers as whole people. People who have made mistakes and people who have had different lives and weren’t always doing the things that we focus and categorize them in terms of their professional accomplishments. And you start seeing people are just flawed. Every human being is flawed. We have complicated relationships with our icons in that we have to place them on a pedestal to basically show ourselves and to show the larger community how great we are. And so we always have to work harder to show these things. And then when you see Langston Hughes out of context, it’s confusing.

Maurice Cherry:
It caused me to pause for a minute. Not so much the why behind it, but it made me think … I don’t know. I wouldn’t think of him as a spokesperson for an alcohol company. I’m thinking of him as the poet. And not even thinking of like, oh, well, what are the circumstances that brought him to do this? Because I’m not looking at him being in Ebony in that way as a negative, but it just surprised me to go through the pages and I’m like, “Oh, Langston Hughes is selling gin.” It was gin or something. I don’t know.

George McCalman:
Because Langston Hughes had to pay his bills too.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

George McCalman:
Homie had to pay his bills, and so lots of people did lots of different things to survive.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What would you say is the most interesting or surprising thing you learned while doing this research? Aside from what you just mentioned, which I said is extremely profound.

George McCalman:
Oh gosh. I learned so many things it’s hard for me to pull out. If anything, it just broadened my fascination with basically how we think of our cultural figures. Back to your point of the kind of artist I was at the beginning of this process that I was looking to render a kind of wholeness of people. I was just always interested in the emotional language of portraiture and even how we as black people render each other is going through a current renaissance because we have not always … We haven’t been given the room and encouragement frankly, to render ourselves. And so I knew it was maverick of me to basically not flatten everyone and not render the same style. That would’ve been easy for me to do, but I knew that that was not the right thing for me to do for this project. I really wanted to make sure that I was showing the complexity of who these people were and I was also trying to show the humanity and make that as important as the historical details. That I was basically equating the emotional parts with the historical facts.

Maurice Cherry:
What do you hope people take away from the book? I mean, aside from buying a copy, what do you want people to take away from it?

George McCalman:
Well, I honestly think, Maurice, that we’re super casual about this subject. Not that we don’t know how important it is, but at the time that I started this project, I realized that there wasn’t a book like this and that I wanted people to have it because I thought that we all deserved to have something like this, that we deserve to have this resource. Even though we as black people, we carry our history in our bodies and we have a very particular way of an oral history of passing information down to each other that has survived the ravages of time and racism. This book in and of itself, I didn’t feel comfortable thinking about it until after the book came out and several people have told me that this book is in and of itself a pioneer. Because we just don’t have this information accessible in this way. That there wasn’t a book outside of historical, academic and children’s categorization, that there wasn’t an accessible book just to buy and share about American black history. And so that’s what I want people to know, that this is still a rarefied thing. This is not an everyday thing. This is a pretty amazing resource that we now have. And I made this book for myself as much as for anyone else. I wanted a book like this. And so that’s partially why I did it.

Maurice Cherry:
I also love that the typography that’s in the book for the titles as well as on the cover is from a black typographer.

George McCalman:
There are two black typographers in this book. And because I’m the designer of the book, I was clear that that aspect had to be represented. That I didn’t just want to talk about it, I wanted to show it. It was more important that people knew that that sensibility … There’s this reductive conversation that came up during 2020 again that was like, where are all the black designers? And I was like, “Screw you all. There are plenty of us around. You just need to stop being lazy and do your research to find them because we’re all here.” And I know tons of black designers, and so that’s not a thing. There should be more of us, certainly. But this idea that somehow everyone just woke up and started looking for us, I was genuine. I was like, “Fuck you.” I wanted to know. The two black typographers, one has been in the game for over 30 years, Joshua Darden, and he has a very successful … Which he sold a number of years ago.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Darden Studio.

George McCalman:
Darden Studio. And the other one is a more recent designer and typographer by the name of Trey Shields. A vocal type. And Trey’s hook, and it was a hook that he has just expanded beautifully, was to honor the civil rights protest signs and digitize them and make them accessible to everyday people. And so the book is filled with typefaces. There’re three or four typefaces in this book that both Trey and Josh designed.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Yeah, Trey’s the homie. I’ve had him on the show before.

George McCalman:
He’s amazing.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

George McCalman:
He’s amazing. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s switch gears here a little bit and learn more about you. Learn more about your origin story. Are you originally from Grenada? Is that where you grew up?

George McCalman:
Yes. I was born and raised here. The first decade of my life I lived here, and then my mother and I moved to Brooklyn. I grew up in East Flatbush in a West Indian neighborhood. And all my formal education was in New York. I went to Marine Park in Brooklyn and then Midwood High School, which was a medical science high school. Webster attended Midwood High School. That’s my one celebrity, useless factoid. And then I went to St. John’s University and graduated and then started working in the publishing field.

Maurice Cherry:
Did you always have an interest in illustration and design growing up?

George McCalman:
Always. I was that kid who drew in the margins of every page of every notebook I’ve ever had in my entire life. And it was just raw. It just came out. I had no formal training until college, but I was just obsessively drawing. And I drew superheroes and I made up characters and it was all very detailed, and I would just create these worlds and I would be lost in them to the eternal frustration of my mother. And it just came from me. It came from me and it came for me. But I had no encouragement into this world, and I didn’t know enough of it to realize that I could make a career out of being an artist. I saw no road into it. And so it made sense to me to just walk away from it when I graduated from college.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, let’s talk about college. You mentioned going to St. John’s University. We had another guest on recently, Sharon Burton, who also told me about her time there. Yeah. What was it like for you?

George McCalman:
My college education was a dysmorphic experience. I didn’t know what I had until it was in the rear view mirror, as is perfect parable of youth. We have no context to know what it is that we’re learning until life crashes into you when you have something to compare it to. And for me, I had an education that I was constantly frustrated with because it felt that it was out of step with the cool art schools that were in Manhattan. Number one, I was in Queens, which felt so far removed from the center of the art world, which was Manhattan at the time. And so I’d go into all these galleries in Manhattan, and I had friends who were at Parsons and SBA and Pratt, and it just felt like I was at this Catholic university that had a tiny fine art and graphic design department, and I just felt like my education sucked.

And it wasn’t until I graduated school and started working, I realized how amazing my education actually was and how unique it was in the landscape of how people are taught fine art and graphic design. And one of the main things that differentiated my education is that I learned philosophy and theology alongside art history, fine art and graphic design. It was one of the most comprehensive educations I could have received. And it took me a few years to realize that I was actually ahead of the curve and I’m actually really happy that I did not go to a more prototypical fine arts school. I got a fantastic education at St. John’s.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. How’s that saying go? Hindsight is 2020?

George McCalman:
It sure is.

Maurice Cherry:
I’ve heard that personally because I didn’t even study design. I went to a liberal arts private college. I went to Morehouse. And I initially went there because I wanted to … And this was late ’90s, early 2000s. Because I wanted to be a web designer. I had started learning HTML in high school. I taught myself HTML in high school and learned Photoshop. I designed my high school’s yearbook and the paper, and I really wanted to go into it but the scholarships that I got weren’t for art school. I actually never even applied to an art school. And then I got to Morehouse, majored in computer science. And in my mind I’m thinking, oh, well, it’s all the same, right? It’s all computers and design. It’s all the same. And I quickly realized after the first semester, it was not. I switched my major to math, which is what I got my degree in. But I know what you mean about looking back at the education and seeing how it served you versus the time that you’re there and you have this comparison on what your peers are doing, on what others are doing or what you think they’re doing that you feel like you should be getting at that formative stage.

George McCalman:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
So after you graduated, you talk about going and becoming an art director. Did you go right into that right after you graduated?

George McCalman:
I did. It’s pretty common now, but it was a little more unconventional back then. This was the mid ’90s. St. John’s had a internship requirement that your final year of school was spent in the field the entire semester as if you worked. And so the entire semester, I ended up having three options. I remember being going to interview at these three distinctly different locations, and it was kind of a sliding doors. And even then I knew that I was basically deciding my path with these three. One was an ad agency, one was a magazine, and the other was a small boutique design firm. And I remember being confused about which direction I was going to go in. I really did not know. And I walked into the Office of Money magazine, which is where I ended up interning. There was just a vitality. The office was a newsroom and there were people walking around and talking and gossiping and stuff being put up, and I could see layouts, and it just felt alive. It felt like an organism. And in my early 20s, I was just kind of like, yes, I think this is the environment that I need to be in. And I didn’t know anything about magazine design at that point, but it just felt like I needed to be there. And so I said yes to it, and I think it was one of my first really adult decisions.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s really interesting that senior year you got to have that choice. That’s something that I know that a lot of students now don’t get. They don’t get to see the working world-

George McCalman:
They really don’t.

Maurice Cherry:
Before they graduate like that.

George McCalman:
They don’t. Yeah. Because I teach also. I’m a professor of graphic design. And one of the big issues I have … And it’s not an easy problem to solve. I am critical of it while knowing that I don’t have the answers myself. One of the fallacies of school is that it doesn’t really prepare you for the real world. It’s like one of the last bastions of this purity of education. And it often is counter to how the process of the professional world runs. I quickly learned when I started Money Magazine that there was no graphic design class I had that prepared me for how the magazine world worked and how the design process actually worked. I realized how luxurious school is. It’s a place where you can sit and think and talk and show your work, and there’s no real disruption. There are no real crises. There’s nothing for you to solve outside of the assignment that has been given to you that you have months to ponder and to ruminate on.

And so the idea of instinct is just absent in the school diaspora. And so when I teach now, I teach differently than I learned, and I try to infuse as much of a real life sensibility. The other issue with schools is that a lot of people who teach don’t practice. And so you have a completely different and often very dissonant where the education is rigorous and it is really valid, but it is outside of basically the professional norms of how you would actually solve problems. But then the people who are in the field don’t have time to teach because they’re working. And even for me, teaching was a really difficult thing for me to do with the entrenched deadlines of my studio process. And so I understand that it is a very difficult thing to do. I recently took part in a review of students at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard a few weeks ago at the end of the semester in December.

And this was an active conversation that I was one of six jurors, and we were all in different strata of the professional world, and we were really debating and having this conversation about how what best serves the students. If you’re only learning from people who are not practicing, I’m sorry, the education is only so valuable. But then if you’re only learning from people in the field, you don’t learn what being spacious in your thinking and being intellectual and being academic, you don’t learn the value of that in the design process also. And so the answer seems to be a balance between the two, but that is not always the case depending on where the school is and at what stage the professors are and where the students are. So it’s a very complicated metric to figure out.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s interesting you say that because I’ve certainly encountered that even with some … Honestly, some schools that have interacted with Provision Path in different ways. You name a top design school in this country, they’ve reached out to me in some capacity about the show. Which is great. They like what the show is about. It’s filling a gap in their curriculum in some way that they’re not. But then if it comes down to me lecturing or teaching or something, it always seems to boil down to the fact that I don’t have a design degree. That they’re like, “Yeah, but …” I’m like, “Well, stop wasting my time.”

George McCalman:
Stop wasting my time. And those kind of rules and terms don’t really serve anyone anymore. I mean, just the landscape has changed and design, because of technology, is just so accessible. And I know lots of brilliant designers who did not go to art school, and I don’t believe that you need to have a design degree to be brilliant at what you do. There are lots of people who have defied the convention of formal education and produced really entrancing, relevant, resonant work. And to me, that’s what it’s about. And so I don’t subscribe to this hierarchy of academia. I mean 30 years ago it was used to be exclusive and keep a lot of people out, and that was seen as a value, but I don’t think it serves anyone right now. Culture has changed and education has changed. And because of technology, everything is just more accessible. And so it’s really about what you are doing with the technology. It has nothing to do with did you go to school or not? That’s just such a reductive argument.

Maurice Cherry:
I agree. I agree. This actually is making me think of a question that I do want to explore more on the show this year. And since you’re one of the first guests on this year, I’ll ask you. I’m curious what you think about the future of the art and design industry and how it’s going to be impacted by technology. I think we’ve seen in at least the past year, maybe two years, talk about web three and NFTs and most recently AI generated art and things like that. How do you think these industries are going to be impacted by tech?

George McCalman:
I think it already has been. What we call entrepreneurship is actually just hustlers. That’s what technology has given us. It’s given smart hustlers who are pulling and stretching and tweaking and bending the rigidity of so many of our institutions and our disciplines. The word I use a lot is it has expanded the notion of what design is, who it’s for, who it’s not for. And technology has brought so many things to people who would not otherwise have them. It just brings an aspect of the world to your doorstep. Technology for me, because I grew up outside of it and I was an adult … People who were born into technology, that’s what they know. That’s the real world. To me, it’s not the real world. It’s an aspect of the real world. And so I think of social media as tools.

I don’t think of it as real life. I think it’s a facsimile of real life. And so the language of how I talk about it has given me clarity in that I’m not confused about its place in my life. I started learning graphic design before we got our computer labs. And so I had two years of playing with typography, playing with a lot of the conventions of what is now basically archivable materials because nobody does it that way anymore. But because I learned design with my hands, that is how I continue to interface with it. I still draw out everything I do first. And that dexterity, frankly, has made me a better designer. I don’t rely on technology as a starting point for anything that I design. I bring it in to help move the process forward.

Maurice Cherry:
Good answer. I like that. You started talking about tech and that question just popped into my mind to ask you about that. But to go back to your career as an art director, you have a very storied history as an art director for several magazines. You mentioned Money Magazine, but you’ve also been an art director at Entertainment Weekly, at Mother Jones, at ReadyMade, just to name a few. When you look back at that time being a director for all these magazines, what stands out to you the most?

George McCalman:
I can’t give just a simple answer. I can give a collective answer. Because I learned a lot. I learned a lot of things. And I don’t think in terms of best or worse because I think life is too complex for that. But what I did learn was agency. The word agency. Meaning that I am not stuck when I don’t know how to solve a problem. That there are ways and there are many paths to telling a story, and there’s no one way to do anything. And depending on the context of what you’re doing, I learned how to be a better communicator. Because when you’re working with a lot of people who are reliant on you, you learn that you are a cog in a wheel, but that your role, nobody else working with you has that. So everyone is really important to the process at different times.

And so you learn the economy of collaboration. That collaboration can be a really beautiful thing. And that there’s an excitement when you are working with people who are really good at what they do and that want to tell stories as well as possible. And that telling stories is one of the most unique aspects of being a human being. And that that is basically how we thrive and survive as people. We share information and we share stories with each other. And that’s where I learned that. I’m not sure I would answer this question in this way if I hadn’t worked at magazines. And I utilize magazines also to learn. And I did. I used them for two things within myself. To learn the process of what I was doing. And I moved around a lot.

I never worked at a magazine more than two years because I always wanted to learn what I was doing through a different landscape. There are lots of people that get a job and stay there for decades. I am someone who I learn what I need to learn and then I move on. I have always been that way. And so for me, it was what can I learn about the subject matter? I learned about the financial world, honestly, working in Money Magazine. I learned about the inner workings of celebrity culture, working at Entertainment Weekly. I learned about the wellness world at Health Magazine. I learned about technology working at Wired, working at ReadyMade, working at Afar. I really immerse myself in the subject matter to learn more about how these stories focused on this particular field. What was the combination, what was the metrics, what was the engineering of the subject matter? And so I was always kind of process nerd, if that makes sense. And that’s what I was always looking for. And with magazines, the process can become repetitive because you’re doing the same combination of things. And so the first year I was learning about the magazine and the second year I was learning about the subject matter. And then like clockwork, I’d come to the end of the two years and I’d move on.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, was this sense of agency the inspiration behind you starting your studio?

George McCalman:
Yes. I reached a point where I realized I wasn’t learning anything more. I wasn’t learning anything new. And I had all these skills that I wanted to apply in a different way. And it was working at ReadyMade that gave me the inspiration to open up my own studio, which was the second to last corporate magazine job that I had. And ReadyMade was a magazine about do-it-yourself design. It’s basically recycling. What we now call upcycling. It’s taking something that is at the end of its road as it’s being used and refashioning it for something else where it has an entirely new shelf life and you can use those things. And it was really just clever. It was just really clever design solutions. It’s taking cloths and making a kite out of it, or taking old jeans and turning it into place mats. Just stuff like that that is seen as quaint now, but was really at the vanguard of this recycling movement that is just more every day and more common.

It was recycling before recycling, even in California, was as ubiquitous as it is now. And I got to work with a lot of makers. People who just made things and who were just passionately, quietly … And not starting businesses, but just people who were making things for their own edification, for their homes. And I was honestly just really inspired. And I was just kind of like, oh, I know a lot of people who are working for themselves. And when I started thinking about it, I would talk to friends and contemporaries and professional acquaintances and everyone said, “Do it, do it. Do it. When you work for yourself, you will never go back to the corporate world.” And they were right.

Maurice Cherry:
What are the best types of clients for you to work with?

George McCalman:
It has both changed and remained the same. My interest is in culture. The identity of culture. And so I have coined a phrase just internally in my professional world that I am interested in culture clients. And in the early days it was … I live in San Francisco, so there are lots of artisans. There are people who are making small batches of things. There are restaurant owners. I was always working with clients who were working for themselves and needed help with the language and the messaging around branding. And so I worked with restaurants and I designed products and chocolates and tea, but I was really kind of more comprehensive. It was less me coming in to just design a package and it was basically working on the whole branding from the logo to the identity to the strategy to the messaging to the website, just the whole thing. And I realized that I was drawing on my editorial background to tell the whole story.

And so it expanded to … I started working with the tech world and then quickly stopped. Because I realized that they … I remember having a meeting with Uber. This was like 10 years ago. I was working with TripAdvisor and Uber. And these are big names, big clients at the time. I can tell you, TripAdvisor, I consulted with them for almost two years. They didn’t know how to assign photography. And so I worked with them comprehensively working with a photo editor to basically get them a library of photographers, come up with a system of rate assignments. Just basically the basics that one of the largest companies in the travel world had no awareness of. With Uber, it was they had been focused on the service for so long and they were starting to atrophy some of their customers because there was no story. There was nothing.

And the people who started Uber did not think that that was important until suddenly it was. And I remember having a meeting with them where I was like, “Oh, they’re just taking my ideas. I’m just here speaking to them.” And I was like, I don’t trust this field. I don’t want to have my intellectual property just ripped off and I’m not on the inside, so they’re not going to value what I’m doing. They’re going to treat me like a vendor, and I’m not anyone’s vendor. And I was really clear about my value to myself. And so I stopped working with the tech world for a few years and really just focused more on the one-on-one. And I worked with larger companies, but it was still where I had direct access to the founders and the CEOs so that I could thread continuity between what I was doing. I didn’t want to work with any intermediary people, so I had to be conscious of the scale that I was working in just to make sure that the projects didn’t get away from me. And I was also clear with myself that I wanted to keep my studio small, because I wanted to keep it manageable and basically control and frame the quality of the work that I was doing. I didn’t want to be embarrassed by anything that I was doing if it got too corporate.

Maurice Cherry:
I like that idea of culture clients because yeah, working with tech companies, they will just relegate you to vendor status and-

George McCalman:
And they will just steal your shit.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, they’ll steal it.

George McCalman:
No compunction about it. And it’s the people who don’t know what they’re doing that want to steal your shit.

Maurice Cherry:
And I know in my instance, when I have worked with tech clients, it felt like … Or at least I entered into it thinking it would be more of a partnership. We would maybe bounce ideas off of each other or things like this. And in some instances, they just wanted to just cut the check, which I mean, look, I’ll take your money. I don’t have a problem with that. But I was really thinking that it would be more based on how the initial conversations went, why you sought me out, et cetera. And then it just ends up not being that. They just want to have it to be a bullet point on a DEI presentation.

George McCalman:
It is rarely that. And this is even before DEI so there was no representative of that. And that was the other reason. That I was often the only black person. And I was like, “No, I don’t want to do this.” I left publishing because I was tired of being the only black person. And for me, the tech industry has just become the new media publishing industry. I can see the corollaries and a lot of the people, a lot of my contemporaries have gone over and taken our playbook into the tech world. I mean, Apple very much has snapped up a lot of the most prominent magazine editorial art directors in the field in the United States. And so many of their campaigns, I’m looking and I can see the editorial strata of how these stories are shot and presented. It’s all going in that direction. And it should, because it’s the best form of storytelling. Advertising as a medium, as a typical form, I think is not very good at storytelling.

Maurice Cherry:
No, they are not. In addition to the work that you do through your studio, and you alluded to this earlier in the interview, you’re a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. How did that come about?

George McCalman:
Well, it came about the year that I started the original 29 day project of Illustrated Black History. I tell you, Maurice, it was just a year where I just lost my mind and just began drawing and painting obsessively, just everything. I was just manic for it. And it was like it had been bottled up and it all just came out. And so that year I took a sabbatical, which means that I stopped taking on work. And when I tell you that I had no money, I mean I had no money. I was just living off of my savings. It was a really reckless thing to do, and I’m a pretty cautious person. And I knew that it was the right thing because it just came so easily to me. I fired all my clients and just started everything from scratch. And so I gave myself the time to do that, and I was also trying to figure out how to make a living with it.

And so I ended up doing a series. A series of series. And that is also a playbook from my magazine days. You tell a story in multiple images, threading a narrative and a continuity from beginning, middle to end. And so I did several series on my family, on Illustrated Black History, and then I started documenting the visual identity of San Francisco. And I was really fascinated by the human ecosystem of the Bay Area. And I’d been working on another series about how the tech industry started in the Bay Area and how it could not really have started anywhere else and just all of these threads were coming together. And I had this epiphany one day where I knew that I wanted to do a culture column on the makeup, on the genetic makeup of San Francisco and the Bay Area.

And I had been inspired by a morbid thing. It was when Bill Cunningham, who used to be a columnist for the New York Times, and he was a style photographer and he documented black style in Brooklyn and Harlem, and he equated black style with high fashion, which is something the fashion industry did not do and still does not do, even though they think they do. I was just like, “Oh, I think this is what I should do.” And I remember writing a pitch and deciding whether I was going to send it to the New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle. And because of my magazine background, I outlined everything to myself and I wrote a pro and con list about the San Francisco Chronicle versus the New York Times and how much creative freedom I was going to have. And the whole idea for the column was that I would be writing, illustrating and designing this column, documenting various events that gave you a larger sense of what the Bay Area was all about and what made it unique and special and also frustrating and just all of the things that just brought all the complexities in.

And I sent that to the woman who became my editor, and she wrote back immediately and she said, “This is brilliant. We’re going to do this.” And I remember thinking at the time, “Holy shit. I didn’t think she’d respond this quickly, and now I have to do this on a monthly basis.” And it was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. I would go out to cultural events several nights a week, and I just became this man about town for years. And I would show up as a reporter with my notebook and my pens, and sometimes I would live draw and sometimes I would draw later on and I just drew this column every month and designed it for the style section of the Chronicle, and I did that for years.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. When it comes to work between what you do in your studio and what you do for the newspaper, is your approach different for each one?

George McCalman:
I work in parallel lines, as I’m sure my answers are starting to illustrate. I’m always on the inside and outside of what I do, and I’m looking at both sides of it at the same time. And I think I developed that skill as a magazine person because there’s not just the story that you’re working on, it’s the process of how the story is being made that is as important as the story that you’re making. And as a designer, you are at the intersection of words and images, and so you’re never just looking at one aspect of anything. And it has just expanded my brain, I think, where now I can’t help but think of everything through this parallel thread of thinking. And so in terms of making this column for years, I knew that I was training myself to do basically all aspects of what I was doing.

I was always an art director, so I would have been the designer of the column, but I would’ve been working with a writer and working with an illustrator. But in combining all of those skills, I was sharpening my capabilities, but I was also training myself for this kind of repetitive monthly grind where it just became less of a grind. I remember the first year I was just stressed out all the time, and then suddenly it settled and it was not a stress anymore. And the column used to take me several days to do. And towards the end of that initial run, it would take me 24 hours to do the whole thing. And it just became a little more fine tuned. I really was able to pace myself. I knew what I needed to do. I knew what I needed to accomplish. And so you just anticipate what you need and then you do it.

Maurice Cherry:
How would you say your artistic style has evolved over the years?

George McCalman:
To answer your previous question, I do … And I’m answering both at the same time. I think I have developed a way of backing into the style. I often don’t know what style I’m going to do when I start something, and this book is evidence of that. I really just feel my way into what I was doing. The original column had a lot of different styles, but I basically invented a newspaper style because I wanted it to be stylized. I had to do things quickly, it had to be out of a economy of time. So I developed a shortcut of illustrating that for the longest time my contemporaries thought was my style. And then when I started working on the book, even close friends were like, “Oh, this is totally different from what you have been doing with the Chronicle.”

And I was like, “Yeah, this book is actually what my work is actually.” But I’ve been doing this shorter version of it for a while and it has just become what I’ve been known for. But the truth is I tend to start from scratch every single time, and I do it in my design world and whether I’m designing something, whether I am illustrating it, fine art, it is a brand new thing every time I’m sitting to do it, even if I’ve done it before. And so I’m considering all of the layers. I was like, what is best going to serve this story? Is it something that’s in pencil? Is it something that is in paint? Is it typography? I just think freshly about everything that I’m doing, and I throw out what has come before. I honor what has come before, but I don’t get stuck in the nostalgia of what I’m doing. I will throw everything out and start it up again if I think that that is the right thing to do.

Maurice Cherry:
Who are some of the people that have really helped motivate and inspire you over the years?

George McCalman:
There are so many hidden figures in my life. The truth is, it’s not a lot of artists. The artists who inspire my work are not contemporary artists. They’re people that I grew up admiring. And where I find my inspiration is not really in other people, it’s in nature. The natural world really provides a lot of my motivation. But in terms of the people who have inspired they’re close family friends, they’re people I consider mentors in my life that have just always been many times the last few years where I’ve just admitted to my internal community, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just literally making this up. And there have been many times, there were many times that first year of launching out as an artist where there wasn’t a month that went by that I was like, “I don’t think this is going to work. I think I need to stop doing this. I don’t think I’m going to figure out how to make a living. I don’t think this is working.”

And no one person would let me do that. Everyone was just like, “Nope, nope, nope. Keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going.” And I’m grateful for that because that the first year I was absolutely flabbergasted how I was going to make this thing work. And I could see the talent and I could see that there was something there, but how all the pieces fit together in terms of continuity and financial stability, I didn’t see it. And then I got the column and the column I didn’t give the context for. I started six months after I started being an artist. And that was the first light bulb where I was like, oh, I think I know how to package this work.

And then I started getting more assignments and then it just picked up from there. And there were many stages of the process where something else would happen and I’d think, “Oh, okay, yes, that’s how this fits in.” And, “Oh, right. And then I can do that.” And then when I got my book deal, I realized that my column had been training me to do this book and that I had certainly designed lots of books, but this was the first time that I was all things and that I’d been doing a version of that for the last few years. And so I had been prepping myself for this larger project that I think it would’ve been much harder to do if I had not been doing it. So I just started seeing how all the pieces were fitting together.

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

George McCalman:
That I get to do what I love. I am happy. I am as happy as a pig in shit. I feel really fortunate that I am passionately in love with the creative world that I’ve given myself. I get to work with all of the things and the skills that I’ve been given. And there’s so much I’ve learned over the years that I get to relearn and apply in a different way. And I’ve learned that I get bored really easily and I’m not bored by anything that I do right now, which tells me that I’m doing the right thing. Learning is an absolute essential part of what I do, and I place myself on the ground floor of everything that I do because I see myself as a student also. And so I remain energized by what I do. I have a genuine love of what I get to do on a daily basis.

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

George McCalman:
I have to say I’m already doing what I see myself doing in another five years. I’m going to be making a lot of books. I’m designing a lot of books. I am making a lot of books. My next book is actually on the publishing industry. And I’m also starting to expand into three-dimensional spaces. I’m finishing up my first stint as an exhibition designer. I’m designing a museum show that is premiering in another few weeks in California and it’s a major show for a major artist by the name of Mike Henderson, as a black artist who is having a renaissance right now and he requested a black designer specifically. And the cultural aspects of design is something I’m really keyed to and always representing the black perspective so the people know that design is not neutral. I went to school and grew up hearing this fallacy that design is objective and neutral, and I know that it is not.

And so I teach in that way, I design in that way, I educate in that way, I work in that way. And so I just see more three-dimensional spaces. I see designing interiors, I see designing fully comprehensive experiences where you can see the two dimensionality of the design process in terms of type and art on the walls, but also the three dimensional aspect. The mood and the tone and the feeling of what you should be feeling, of what the average person can walk into a space and experience. That is what I’m going to be doing a lot of in coming days and weeks and years.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, your work, the book? Of course, we’ll put the book in the show notes, but where can people find out more information about you if they want to follow you?

George McCalman:
Well, the book itself, the book was published in late September of 2022, so it is everywhere. And the book, I’m really happy to share, has gone into its second printing.

Maurice Cherry:
Congratulations.

George McCalman:
Thank you. Thank you so much. The response has just been … It has been a very emotional few months as people … Because you make a thing as you know as a designer, but then you don’t really know how people are going to respond to it. And so I have just been amazed and rendered mute many times by the messages that I’ve received and the responses of the people that I’ve met out on the tour. And so this book is everywhere. You can get it at any bookstore, anywhere, all over the country. Of course, I always tell people to support their independent bookstores, so if you are buying it, you don’t have to buy it from the devil, Amazon. There are lots of local bookstores that would love to have your support. And as far as just my social media feed, all of it is the same, whether on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. It is McCalman.co. M-C-C-A-L-M-A-N-C-O, McCalman.co.

Maurice Cherry:
All right. Sounds good. Well, George McCalman, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show for-

George McCalman:
Thank you so much. Thank you, Maurice.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. One, for just sharing your story of how you come into art and really studied it and then going on as an art director, but then also the process of the book. And I think to me, what is probably most important about this conversation is how you’ve taken that flame of creativity and found a way to really expand it out as far as you can into as many different places as possible. Like you’re teaching, you’re doing client work, you’ve got the book, you’re a columnist, and now I feel like this expansion into 3D space, even as you mentioned, definitely seems like the inevitable next step for where you’re going. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

George McCalman:
Your questions were incredibly thoughtful. I’m really grateful for your interest in talking to me, and thank you. That’s all I’m going to say. Thank you so much.

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Chris Charles

How will you pursue your passions in 2023? If you’re anything like this week’s guest, Chris Charles, then you’ve probably already got some great plans in motion. Chris is a true multihyphenate — a creative director, a film maker, a visual artist, a photographer, and more — and he’s blazing his own trail while staying 100% authentic to himself.

We caught up recently and talked about some of his plans for this year with his studio, and he shared his process for approaching new projects while also discussing how he balances the business and creative sides of his work. Chris also spoke about growing up in Brooklyn, joining and serving in the Army for over a decade, and talked about how his style has evolved over the years. He even shared the one project that he’s the most proud of out of his impressive body of work. Chris is a true example of how staying adaptable and building great relationships can be a recipe for success!

Interview Transcript

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

Chris Charles:
Hey, first, thank you for having me, Maurice. Really been digging the platform since I’ve been introduced to it. Once again, thank you for having me, man. My name is Chris Charles. I am a photographer, creative director, designer. I just try to bundle it all up into… As a creative designer or art director.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. How are things going so far? I know it’s just the start of the new year, but how are things going for you?

Chris Charles:
Yeah, so far so good. I was very intentional about taking some time off leading into the new year, so I can kind of rest a little bit, spend time with family. So, thankful I have been able to get that time in and spend time with the kids and the fam. But yeah, so far so good. It’s kind of taken me a day or so to still get into the flow again of work, and consistently checking emails and communicating again. But yeah, I’m ready to get it popping.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I told myself this year that I’m going to start turning my phone off one day of the week. So I’ll turn it off Saturday night, turn it back on Monday morning. And I tried that, actually, a few days ago, just so people know we’re recording this at the top of the year, but I did it over New Years. It was so peaceful. That Sunday was so extremely peaceful. Monday was super productive, and it was so peaceful that I didn’t remember to turn my phone on until Monday afternoon or evening. And I turned it on, and I mean the flood of notifications. People were like, “Are you all right? Is everything…” I was like, “I’m fine. I just turned my phone off for 36 hours.” It’s good, the world can wait.

Chris Charles:
You are much better than me. So I have measures implemented to where my phone isn’t as invasive as I know people who have all the alerts on, the lock screen thing. And so what I’ve done is I turned off notifications on my lock screen, the one that kills the battery. I keep my phone on silent with the exception of a few key numbers; my mom, my partner, my daughter, people who they will need to get to me just in case something happens. Other than that… I don’t know. I don’t know if I can just turn my phone off. I think for me, it’s easier to just have it readily available so people can reach me in the event that they have an emergency. But kudos to you, man. I don’t know how you did it, but you did it.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, it’s an experiment. I just tried it once. So we’ll see if it sticks.

Chris Charles:
I’d have to send a mass email or text message to everyone to let them know, hey, I’m out the loop. I’m not communicating for X amount of time, so don’t expect a response but in the event of emergency, call this other number. I have to have an emergency contact person in place just for that, but.

Maurice Cherry:
I might end up doing that too because certainly I turned my phone back on, and I guess the way that my phone is set up too, I can get text messages on my computer, I can get some notifications, but it just wasn’t on my phone. And so I still was able to do some things, I just couldn’t or didn’t respond back to people right away and stuff. But let’s just say I’m paying for that today. I’m having to do a lot of catch up today.

Chris Charles:
Yeah, a long day of responding to folks, I’m sure.

Maurice Cherry:
But that Sunday was so peaceful. I was like, I’m doing this again. I can’t stress how no pings or nothing. That whole Sunday, I cooked breakfast, I listened to some jazz, I was chill all Sunday. I’m like, I want that feeling every week. I’m going to try to see if I can stick to it.

Chris Charles:
I think you can do it. I think you can do it.

Maurice Cherry:
When you look back at last year, what do you want to change bringing into this year? You mentioned taking some time for rest.

Chris Charles:
Yeah, I’m part Jamaican so I don’t know any other thing than to work all the time. Running my business but also working another job across town, and I just left that job before the new year, just because it just didn’t make sense commuting that far several times a week. But yeah, I think for me, working smarter not harder for 2023. I think 2022… And most of my career, I spent a lot of it doing all of the heavy lifting. I’ve had assistants in the past who helped manage communications and emails and I’ve worked with tons of young artists who volunteer their time, and some I’ve actually mentored and was able to get them going with their businesses. But I think it’s time to build a team. And I think it’s time to start delegating versus me being the lead communicator, the lead invoice generator and the lead key artist on set and then the key editor. Time is so much more important to me, I’m realizing, especially now that I have a young baby, six months old.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow. Congratulations.

Chris Charles:
Thank you. Thank you, thank you. His name is Cerulean Amir, and he’s amazing. But yeah, I think moving into 2023 I definitely want to facilitate me being more present, and the way these knees are set up, doing all the squatting and getting all the angles, I would rather be able to guide that process through other people who are under the umbrella of my business.

Maurice Cherry:
I hear you.

Chris Charles:
That’s the goal.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, let’s talk more about your work in your studio, Chris Charles Co., which you’ve ran now for 15 years, so congratulations on that.

Chris Charles:
Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
Tell me a little bit more about it.

Chris Charles:
So, ultimately, and this kind of plays into the vision for this year and moving forward. I’ve always kind of been a multidisciplinary artist, I mean with roots in obviously photography, design, music. I produce music as well. I’ve worked with a few artists and I’ve always felt that the three words that I’ve used to encompass my business are style, creativity and soul. And for me, that’s kind of the type of person when it comes to aesthetic that I always wanted to be. Even when I was a kid, I just wanted to be cool. And that being influenced by music and jazz and seeing how cool those people were.

I always wanted to have whatever business I ran encompass those kind of things. Just like a cool energy, a cool vibe, some fly music going on, some fly art, whatever it is. So yeah, I think my business, while I also focused on trying to strive to be technically proficient, but it was also about creating a vibe or a feeling to the point where whatever I put out in the universe via the internet, it’s a reflection of those three things, style, creativity and soul. So I’ve just kind of ran with it and it seems to have helped me find my voice over these years. So that’s pretty much… Be it design, photography, music, show-making, those are the things that I’ve really pushed to have come to the forefront.

Maurice Cherry:
So given all of that, what are the best types of clients for you to work with? I know you mentioned musicians, but are there other types of clients that you find you work best with?

Chris Charles:
Honestly, I work just other artists in general. DJs, musicians, visual artists. I’ve worked with other photographers doing portraits and collaborating with them, painters and also high-level business people. For some reason, it’s more like a, wow, this person is amazing. I could learn so much from them, and they hired me to do this work. You know what I mean? So it’s like it’s feeding my desire to learn more and have goals based off of what I’m seeing this person has done, and I’m actually doing what I love to do while learning. So yeah, I would say anyone in the arts, like I said, high-level business people. I’ve worked with district court judges, I’ve worked with mayors, mayoral candidates, city council people, attorneys, high-end real estate folks, and all of these people have great lessons that I can pull from to use at some point in my business. So this is great. I love that.

Maurice Cherry:
So given that variety, how do you approach creating a new project or working on a new design project? Because I would imagine with each of those types of clients, the setup might be a little different, I’m guessing.

Chris Charles:
Yeah. One thing I used to struggle with… Well, I won’t say I struggled with it, but one thing I had to really understand was find a way to maintain whatever vision or artistic integrity I had while still fulfilling my clients’ needs. And sometimes those things don’t always align, and I’ve had to adapt and adjust in order to facilitate my client being happy and just doing the work. But yeah, I think for me, I just like to assume that people who have hired me, it’s not like sight unseen. They’ve seen examples of my work and they’ve seen… Or other people who I’ve worked with and they’re like, hey, I want that.

Unfortunately, I’ve had some clients who have no… Whatever I do, whatever they want was the opposite. So that I think has been a big challenge over the years. But ultimately, it’s just about adapting and adjusting, interjecting those three things, style, creativity and soul while still keeping whatever format my client wants to maintain their brand and push their image forward. So it’s a lot of, I’d say, adjustment. I don’t want to say shape-shifting, but it’s more like a, yeah, I can do this, but I can still slide some of these elements that I always kind of hearken to for this person.

Maurice Cherry:
I feel like that’s a common thing with multidisciplinary folks. It’s like we know that we can do a lot of different things, and sometimes the client is aware of that and sometimes they just want the one thing that they want, but it is a lot of adjusting to try to make sure you’re fitting in with the scope of the project, their involvement in terms of how things are going. It is a lot of… It’s a constant adjustment, I find.

Chris Charles:
Yeah, it is. And I don’t know, I think by nature, just based off of my travels, even as a child I’ve always been very adaptable, but I’ve always tried to stick to a certain thing that, okay, well I’m going to do this but I’m going to do it this way. And it kind of made me a rebel. When I say that, I mean I’ll follow the rules but up to a certain point that I’m just going to just do it this other way because I think it’s more efficient. I kind of relate that to working with clients and just adapting. And yeah, I hear what you’re saying. I know you want the logo with the money, the dollar signs raining and all of that, but maybe we can simplify it a little bit. Here, let me show you this. So I found using examples of other brands within that person’s market helps kind of dial those things in for me too, so I don’t have to really have too much conflict.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you handle the business side of everything? Because the work definitely is the creative part. That’s what you specialize in. But, when it comes to marketing and contracts and finance, how do you balance that with the more creative aspects of your work?

Chris Charles:
It took me a while to actually find a rhythm with managing all the things outside of the art and creating, but eventually I was able to figure out a way to say, for example, automate my booking process so I don’t have to have these conversations and these email threads that just lead to dead ends. Usually if someone clicks and books, they’ve already made their mind that they want book me. So that saved me so much time. I’d also, say, having an assistant, I had a really great assistant and then she moved on to greater things. But I really learned to appreciate how… For one, she was really good at what she does, and she actually is based in Atlanta, so she was working virtually. But that type of communication, I’m not saying I’m a horrible communicator, but sometimes I’m too busy out working to communicate in a timely manner.

And having someone who that’s what they’re doing for me made it so much easier. But other than that, it’s just kind of trial and error. It’s like, hey, I’ve gone through so many phases with trying this invoicing system or trying this business bank account to see that works in payment gateways and figuring out the most seamless, easiest way for a customer to pay a deposit and then book it online without having to have conversation, after conversation, after conversation. So yeah, it’s been a journey. It’s definitely been a journey, but I’ve been able to figure it out just based off of trial and error and kind of doing what works, but also evolving, being open to evolve. There’s a few things I want to add into the mix this year. Definitely want to get someone to do the actual books and have an accountant, or someone who I can contract to have to do the accounting. Because I’m pretty much doing it all of that myself as well, so.

Maurice Cherry:
Now outside of that, being in the arts and being self-employed, that’s a lot to balance, I think particularly with just the way that our attention economy kind of works. What are some of the biggest challenges that you’ve had to face staying independent and doing this for as long as you have?

Chris Charles:
Dealing with the economy. I think managing… Be sustainable, which is every business during economic downturns, and that’s another challenge. I’d say just dealing with the ebb and flow. My business is a cash flow-based business, and most businesses that, but fortunately I don’t have much overhead, so that makes it a lot easier. I’m not producing a physical product that requires me to buy inventory and surplus. So that in itself has really helped me manage the challenges of an economic downturn and keeping clients and being able to have clients who just keep coming back. And some of my best clients are those repeat clients. But ultimately also over-saturation. Over-saturation. When I started doing photography professionally, there were just maybe a handful of really, really great photographers in my area who I looked upon for inspiration, and I saw they had things established. They did great work.

Fast forward to now, it’s like you can just close your eyes and point your finger one direction, and you’re probably pointing at a photographer. You know what I mean? So staying relevant, being open to new ideas is kind of, like a lot of artists, I think specifically more with musicians and kind of trying to grow their art and their craft while still maintaining that voice that put them on in the first place. So for me, I don’t want to look at it as competition. However, it is somewhat of a competition. This is a free market. So if I want to be competitive in this market, I have to pay attention to what other people who are 20 years younger than me are doing. And if I have a client and suddenly I see my client shooting with this 20-something year old, I’m like, oh okay, great. Yay. But also, I’m like, huh, how’d that happen? What do I need to do to where I can keep this particular client or clients? So yeah, it’s a few challenges.

Maurice Cherry:
I know when I was actively having clients and doing client work, one of the biggest challenges, aside from what you mentioned, is just making sure that they still keep you sort of top of mind with what they do. Because I think, like you said, there’s over-saturation sometimes in the market and there’s a number of different people that folks could choose from to do kind of the same work. And so I think it’s really important also to just have those relationships. The relationship building part is so important with so many other people out there, because the benefit I think that we have, you and I, and probably others of our age group, is being able to build those relationships as opposed to just putting out whatever the newest, hottest, latest, fastest tool or product is that can get the job done.

At the end of the day, it’s about relationships. You mentioned one of the clients you’ve had has been a mayoral candidate. I did a mayoral race back in 2009. The person didn’t win, the candidate didn’t win, but she ended up working then for a nonprofit organization and I had that organization a retainer for five or six years. And then every place that she ended up going, I kind of followed her in some aspect in terms of like, oh yeah, I could do this work, I could do this work. Or just keeping top of mind so they know, oh, well I know someone who could use you. So then that relationship building really comes into play because your name gets mentioned in rooms and other places that you’re not necessarily available.

Chris Charles:
Exactly, exactly. And yeah, I think I’ve definitely been fortunate to have had several of those types of clients where I’m talking about 10, and you mentioned the foreign exchange. It’s almost like 10 years we’ve been working together. And then of course, with Nikolai individually and with Phonte individually, it’s been like I’ve been their go-to guy, and I appreciate that. I have some clients who, once again, are in the political scene and some musicians who, there’s no question they will call me, and I don’t take that for granted. But also it’s because we can sit down and kick it after we do a long shoot. We go grab some food, we have a couple of beers, and we kick it for a little while and just decompress and catch up. I value that.

Because to me, that’s connection. And for me, especially when it comes to doing portrait work and photographing people, it’s important that I established that rapport, which could potentially lead to a cool relationship and friendship. But I can’t get a good picture of someone if we’re doing a session, if we haven’t had a conversation that kind of face-to-face, and that way we can feel each other out. I can see where I need to go, how I need to handle this particular photo shoot. Yeah, I’ve been able to, like I said, make some really great, great friends because of that relationship aspect that you mentioned.

Maurice Cherry:
I just started back doing some client work through my studio now, and one thing I’ve been doing is going back through my old contact list of clients. And the first of the year, best time to do it, best time to restart a dormant relationship or a dormant former communication. Just hit them up, Happy New Year, how are things going? This is what I’m doing. Because people just kind of have that energy at the top of the year to want to do something new, try something new. So it’s a good time now to make those relationships happen or to try to at least begin to forge them.

Chris Charles:
Absolutely. Yeah. Just before Christmas, I sent out some tests, newsletters with some things just to see, once again, updating that client list and seeing do I need to remove or add some things and change and seeing the response and looking at the numbers. So yeah, you nailed it, man. Definitely going to be doing the same this year.

Maurice Cherry:
I want to get more into your work and some of the clients that you work with. Of course, you mentioned foreign exchange, which we’ll talk about later, but I want to hear more about your origin story. I know you’re in North Carolina now. Is that where you’re from? Is that where you grew up?

Chris Charles:
No, I actually grew up in Brooklyn, New York.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. ell me about that.

Chris Charles:
Spent my formative years in Brooklyn, but also going back and forth between Brooklyn and Jamaica. We usually go every summer, or every other summer. And Brooklyn is a melting pot of West Indian and Caribbean culture, anyway. So yeah, growing up in New York was such a great experience for me. I think I tell people I grew up, I think in during the best era to grow up, which was the late ’70s going into the ’80s. Because once again, I literally would’ve had a Irish neighbor across the street. Their neighbor was Italian, who was my first babysitter. We had a Puerto Rican family on the corner. We had the Haitian family right there. You had my family, which was a mixed ethnicity. You had people from Aruba, people from Barbados. It was such a melting pot of culture. So I was exposed to a lot of different languages and a lot of different foods and energies. And thankfully, my parents and I, we traveled.

We’d get on a plane and go somewhere, go to LA, go to Jamaica, and my dad had family in Pennsylvania, so we’d be in the mountains. Just being in that type of environment or those types of environments where I’m surrounded by so many different things, it influenced me and grew up in a very musical household and very artistic household. And I played guitar, took formal guitar lessons for years, and my household was the type of household that always had music playing, be it jazz or reggae music. So my parents loved to dance. We do the New Year’s Eve party at our Puerto Rican friends’ home, and they’d be dancing salsa all night. So I just love music and culture. So, I couldn’t help but be influenced by all of that growing up during that time in New York. So went to high school, did that. Played football in high school, actually. So I wound up going to college initially at a Kentucky Wesley College with a partial scholarship to play football. And that was a disaster because that was my kind of first time away from home.

Being in Kentucky as a New York dude was kind of different for me. I made it through football camp, and I was like yeah, I’m not feeling this, and I went back home. So I had to regroup, and my parents were looking at me like, okay, so what are we going to do? You can’t just be laying around here. You know what I mean? You got to do something. So I said, okay. Always loved architecture, always loved art and clean lines and drafting. I took drafting in high school, so I pursued a degree in architectural engineering, the New York Institute of Technology in Farmingdale, it’s a [inaudible 00:24:32] entity, and that was great. But I also have a military family. All my uncles were in the military. My dad was a Marine, my brother was in the army, and that’s also something I always knew I wanted to do. I was a boy scout and I loved wearing a uniform. I was one weird kids who just loved putting on a uniform and being fresh. So yeah, I did college and then immediately joined the Army.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Chris Charles:
So this is, what, ’93, ’94. And wound up getting a job doing surveying, but it was for artillery. So I kind of got hoodwinked. I kind of got made switch with you have engineering background. Yeah, this could be a great job for you. But I’m sitting next to a [inaudible 00:25:18] blowing up stuff, you know what I mean? But ultimately, it was good. I had a good time, did a couple of overseas tours, and I made sergeant. And so now I had to manage a team, and that kind of taught me leadership and politics when it came to, not just the military, but corporate, I came to find out later.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s where corporate gets it from, so that makes sense.

Chris Charles:
Structures, politics of it all. They parallel each other. So anyway, I decided maybe I want to change jobs. So in the military, they have what you can do as reclassifying. So I reclassified as a communication specialist, and more specifically a network switchboard engineer. So like an internet guy, basically. And that was great because it basically helped me transition out of the military eventually with those same skillset sets. And I was able to apply them. But meanwhile, I was also a paratrooper, so I was jumping out of airplanes and went to jump master school. So I was jump master qualified. I was aero [inaudible 00:26:16] qualified.

So I was propelling out of helicopter, jumping out of airplanes, doing all the cool stuff, even though I had these technical jobs, because that was kind of that guy who just wanted to do the hard stuff as much as possible while I still had the young legs. So yeah, eventually 2003, after my last deployment in Iraq… Well, 2004 is when I began… I came back, I think April, and put in my paperwork to get out the military because I just felt it was time. My daughter was very young at the time. She’s 21 now. But I just didn’t want to be away from her and missing her grow and potentially not being able to see her again, not making it back from the deployment is very real.

Maurice Cherry:
Especially right around that time in the early 2000s. Yeah.

Chris Charles:
Yeah. 2003, 2004, maybe going in 2005, ’06 was a rough one because the warfare over there with the IEDs… And it was really bad at one point. And I was there for that when you never knew if you were going to get blown up in a convo at some point. And that hit me. That was real, that was real to me. I said I’m good. I’m a smart guy, I think I’ll be able to figure something out, especially with the skillsets that I gained in the military. And that’s what I did. So I got out of the military in November, 2004, and haven’t looked back since. I transitioned almost immediately into a corporate IT job.

And that was great. I did that for about five years. And then 2009, the 2008, the bubble burst and the economy tanked, and I wound up getting laid off. So here I am, had a corporate job, great benefits, great pay, and now I got laid off. Never happened to me before. I didn’t know what that felt like. And it was horrible being called into the operation manager’s office with all of us who got laid off. It wasn’t just myself, walking back to your desk and you see all your stuff packed up in a box on the table with a security guy waiting to walk you out.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Chris Charles:
It was embarrassing. You feel powerless, you just feel like, wow, that’s what we’re doing? Wound up getting laid off. And I had to really, really sit on it for a minute. And then I realized that was a universe kind of pushing me in the direction of becoming an artist full-time. Now keep in mind, when I was working at this particular company, I became good friends with the art director there, and he knew I was kind of dabbling in photography, and he invited me to drive to Boston to shoot a wedding because I guess he’d seen some of the work I was doing just for free. And he thought I had an eye. So he took me, and that was the first paid gig I ever had as a photographer shooting that wedding. And that’s when also the light bulb clicked.

Was kind of already getting over the job, it was very stressful as far as just the IT and networking, dealing with clients, having to take the blame for other people’s mistakes or whatever. So when he says, hey man, I’m going to cut you a check for $1500, just drive to Boston in my Audi. I was like, oh shit. Okay, let’s go. Hey, maybe I can just keep doing this. And then a few months later, I wound up getting laid off. So it was all serendipitous how it happened, even though I wasn’t seeing that at the time. But it definitely helped guide me into the direction I kind of eventually went. So I took my GI bill and took a little bit of time off. Because I did get a bit of a pension, not a pension, but a severance day. So I was able to survive and pay my bills, but eventually enrolled back into college and wound up getting a degree in graphic design while slowly building my business and getting to know the community.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice.

Chris Charles:
So that was a very big transformative time for me.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And in hindsight, like you said, it worked out in the end. Something I want to just touch on, you mentioned though that time between, I would say roughly the mid 2000s, 2004 to 2008, 2009, that was such a… And I can’t stress this enough for designers that were not around during that time. That was such a wild time in terms of just design, I guess you could lump tech in with it, but particularly web design, graphic design. So many things were changing in that just five-year span that you were lucky if you could stay at the same place for that long because the technology was changing, the browsers were changing, the actual hardware itself was changing, the software was changing. There were so many changes that took place that it would be hard to keep up with everything that’s going on.

Chris Charles:
Yeah, definitely. And I don’t know, for me I think what helped me was being in school… And at the time I was still using Windows, for example, but we had iMac Labs where I was able to kind of… I was like, oh, this is nice. Okay, cool, cool, cool. But not only the technology, but I guess you said the design language, right? Like I said, I loved architecture, I loved clean lines. I loved a certain minimalist aesthetic. And I started noticing design shifting to that versus heavy drop shadow and beveled fonts. And a lot of overly-designed things that have, and I attribute that to Apple, actually.

Maurice Cherry:
Absolutely.

Chris Charles:
I think Apple’s brand pretty much influenced the design world when it came to aesthetic and minimalism. Being able to be able to sell something and tell a story as cleanly as simply as possible and maybe using really great imagery overlay with text. So that whole look… Like when I started seeing that and I realized that that’s kind of how I love that, that’s what it was for me. So it made my transition fairly easy. Because I just wanted to stick to that aesthetic. It was just, like you said, learning the technology and learning in Design and Illustrator and all those things. I was pretty good in Photoshop already. But those other Adobe products, they were kicking my butt for a while. But I think I got a handle of them now.

Maurice Cherry:
I remember the macro media stuff when it switched over to Adobe. I used Fireworks a lot in one of my old jobs. And then Fireworks pretty much became obsolete. Adobe bought Macromedia and changed a bunch of stuff over. And then I was a web designer at the time. There was the whole switch from table-based layouts to CSS-based layouts. Which then changed the browser because the browser then was less about just display and it became more of a canvas. It became more of somewhere you can create things just on there and not have to transpose. I remember cutting up tables in Dream Weaver and exporting them over and making sure everything was right. But now you could use CSS and you could float things and create divs…

And it was just such a big shift… It was a really seismic shift, I think, in design online during that time. And yeah, also the switch from the nineties style of design, especially with tables and things like that because they borrowed a lot from print, to more clean lines. Because it’s just based on what the browser did, because the browsers then had to catch up. This is after the whole browser wars of the late ’90s and stuff. But browsers became less about, oh, this is just a place you can view a website. It’s like, no, this is a place where you can build a website. There’s technologies, there’s like a stack in the browser where you can make things. It was just such a… I look back at that time fondly, but also in hindsight, there was a lot going on.

Chris Charles:
I don’t think… for me, I wasn’t aware of it at the time. I was just like, oh, okay. This is cool. Oh, this is… Okay, cool. This is cool. That’s cool. I even look at… I use Photoshop a lot, for example, and I look at Photoshop from back then to now and how much I can do that I really couldn’t do without having to download a plugin or something. And the same thing with everything in the Adobe Suite. I was using Premiere for a while and I just couldn’t, didn’t jive with me. So even now transitioning over to Da Vinci Resolve has been like, my head explodes every time I use it. So it’s so phenomenal. And it doesn’t bog down my CPU. I don’t have to open up a whole nother program to do as much. I can do it all in here. I can do audio the same time.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Chris Charles:
This is awesome. For 300 bucks, I don’t have to do a subscription, a yearly subscription. I [inaudible 00:34:48] with it. So I’m just really thankful for it. I love technology, so I’m thankful for technology. I’m kind of a computer nerd. I was as a kid, backtracking real quick, I used to write programs on the old… Gosh, it wasn’t an IBM computer. It was a Commodore.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, the Commodore 64?

Chris Charles:
Yeah, yeah. Definitely showing our age. Because that one [inaudible 00:35:12]. Yeah, I’d go to the library and rent and take out these coding books and you’d spend three hours writing code just to make the colors on the screen. And that was fascinating to me. Just learning syntax. And anyway, so it helped me, even in corporate. When I was working in corporate, I had to… The company I was working for, it was a proprietary voiceover IP network, one of the first in the country. So I would have to be able to trace a call from London to California, and I could literally look at the numbers on the screen and see the nodes as the signal is… Well, the communication is traveling and seeing where it breaks. And that always remind me of when I was a kid. Wow, this looks just like when I was programming my Commodore 64. But yeah, I’m just nerding out a little bit on the tech. But it’s a great timing.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, it was. Even visually with… Flash was just everywhere. Flash was such a huge component of creating experiences online. And now in 2023, really years prior to that, I’d say probably as early as maybe 2020 or so, Flash is just a distant memory.

Chris Charles:
During that transitional phase when I was going to school, I actually gig doing graphic design and marketing for a local recording studio. And I had to do Flash. And I was like, what the hell is this? I’d never really had much experience with Flash and I thought it was kind of an antiquated technology, even back then. But they insisted on using it for their banner ads and whatever. But me being at that job was also a big turning point for me because of just where I was. And then being around musicians and kind of transitioning into connecting with artists who needed photography and design. You know what I mean? So yeah, that was a good time.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, let’s bring it back to your studio, then. So you had that spark to start your studio then after doing that photography gig, you’ve kept it going now for 15 years, and your client list is extremely impressive. Just some of a few, I’ll name off here. Moleskine, which are the notebooks, the Italian leather notebooks, Apple Music, Spike Lee. And of course, musicians, The Foreign Exchange. They’re one of my absolute favorite groups. I’ve been a fan since Connected. I’ve been such a fan. This is complete fanboy moment at this point. How did you get involved with them?

Chris Charles:
Yeah, it’s kind of a funny story. So back in late 2009, I was kind of slowly making a name for myself as a photographer. I’m a music nerd, and I was dating someone at the time, time who knew Phonte.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Chris Charles:
Actually, I think they dated years before she and I met. But anyway I was also on… I don’t know if you remember the Okayplayer.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh yeah, I remember them.

Chris Charles:
Yeah, yeah. I was on Okayplayer, and I go into the, what do they call it, the rooms or whatever, the chat rooms, I guess, and just nerd out on music. And at the time that’s pretty much how the product exchange met on Okayplayer. And they recorded their whole album by just sending tracks and vocals across the ocean, because Nicolay was in the Netherlands at the time, living there. So anyway, so it was cool being able to connect with these artists like Little Brother and Questlove, and kind of just being involved in conversations and casts happen about music. And the person I was dating at the time would randomly post my photography into the forums. Like hey, my boyfriend did this picture, blah, blah, blah. And apparently Phonte was paying attention. So one winter, like I said, I think late 2009, we went to a gig.

It was a Red Bull event, and it was a battle of the bands featuring The Foreign Exchange and a punk rock band. And it was brilliant because what they had to do was play each other’s music and interpreted however they saw fit based off of the genre. Right? So it was cool hearing The Foreign Exchange’s band, which was amazing, playing these compositions that the punk rock band made. And then vice versa, you know what I mean? Really good time. Of course, I brought my camera, took some really cool photos of the bands. And then as we were leaving, I hear someone calling me and it’s Phonte. He and I had never met, but he’s like, “Hey man, you Chris Charles? I saw you coming you up here. We got a new album coming out, man.” I was like, “Word? Okay. Hit me up, man.” And that was it. That was the beginning of that relationship. I just loved the process. So I worked with almost all the artists under the, not just The Foreign Exchange, but their record label.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow.

Chris Charles:
So Median when he was on the label, just finished working with, well last year, last summer. BeMyFiasco, who is Phonte’s protégé, musically. And yeah, pretty much have done every project after Leave It All Behind.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Chris Charles:
So did all the photography, the design. Think the first one was Love in Flying Colors. That was the one. And yeah, did all the pre-flight, the layout, the photography, excuse me, and then yeah, all the way up to their last one. So it’s been a great journey with those guys. And we just did a photo shoot a few months ago, actually. Because they have some things that they’re going to be doing here. So it was good reconnecting with those guys again. But yeah, it was just, once again, those types of circumstances that the relationship building aspect of it is what’s important. And we’ve always had a great relationship. Really great guys. So yeah, those guys are cool.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m trying to think how I first found out… I think I found out about Foreign Exchange either through… It was one or two ways. One, there’s a music store here in Atlanta called Moods Music.

Chris Charles:
Yeah, I know it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, Darryl.

Chris Charles:
That’s a hot spot, man.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, that’s the spot. That’s the spot. I’m gatekeeping a little bit now that I’ve told the whole world on the podcast, but that’s the spot though. That’s the hot music spot in Atlanta. But I either found out about them. It was either through there or through this website that a couple of friends of mine founded called SoulBounce. I can’t remember if it was through one of the two. It was one of those two that I remember first hearing about it, because like I said, I’ve been listening. I’ve been a fan since Connected. Leave It All Behind, still gets rotation in this house to this day. “House of Cards,” oh my god, love that group. And even all the other stuff that Phonte did. I know Phonte and Zo! did this ’80s cover album. That was really good.

Chris Charles:
It was Percy Miracle, and I forget the other name. But yeah, Phonte had the Jerry Curl wig on.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, they did Stepping Out. They did Africa from Toto. Yeah. That was…

Chris Charles:
Those guys are so talented, man. Even now with… What’s that show? I know Zo! and Phonte been writing a lot for this new kind of musical skit comedy show.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, is it Sherman’s Showcase?

Chris Charles:
Sherman’s Showcase, yes. And then of course, I designed the Eric Robeson Phonte record, Tigallerro. I did Phonte’s last single. Any visuals that came out pretty much revolving around the phone exchange or Nicolay’s or Phonte individual projects, I also had the privilege of working on. So, such a good time, man.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, man. I think of all that. You mentioned Eric Roberson and now I’m thinking of all the soul music that was also just kind of in and around during that time. That was such a… When I think on that time, that was late 2000s early 2010s. That was such, for me, that was just such a pivotal time. I think I was just turning 30 right around then, too. I was like, oh man. Such good music. And that’s so cool that you were just a part of all of that. And you get to work on it all. Do all that stuff.

Chris Charles:
It’s still surreal. It’s still surreal. Whenever I see… When President Obama had one of their songs on his yearly playlist, I’m like, what? I’m looking at a photograph and design I did and now President Obama saw that, word? I mean, that’s cool. It’s cool.

Maurice Cherry:
Can you give me a sneak peek on whether or not they have a new album coming out?

Chris Charles:
I’m sworn to secrecy.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. All right.

Chris Charles:
Let’s just say we did a….

Maurice Cherry:
You mentioned a photo shoot, I thought I would ask.

Chris Charles:
Yeah, yeah. I’m sorry, that’s all I can say. But yeah, stay tuned, man.

Maurice Cherry:
We’re talking about Foreign Exchange and Phonte too, but Nicolay is super talented as producer. I have some of his solo albums, too. One of them… I forget what it’s called. Something with Shibuya in it, I’m not remembering…

Chris Charles:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
No, no, no. The City Lights. City Lights Volume II. Oh man. That’s one of my favorite, favorite just chill out albums. One of the songs on there is… I forget the… I have to go back and remember the name. Because I know the song when I hear it, I can’t necessarily think of the name of it, but it’s like some song. I don’t know. I call it my getting home from the club song. When you get home super late and the sun’s about to Rise, it’s like that kind of song.

Chris Charles:
Oh, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
I forget the name of it. But they’re all super talented. That whole clique is super talented

Chris Charles:
And super nice. Whenever I get to catch up with Nicolay. The guy’s really, really smart. He has a degree in musicology. He’s not just like self-taught. He’s really formally trained, but also humble and tall. The guy’s like seven feet tall. He’s like about six foot seven. He’s huge. But just the nicest guy. Same thing with City of Lights Volume too. Those guys are always gracious whenever we connect. What’s another one I did? Not the Shibuya one. I did the next one.

Maurice Cherry:
Soweto.

Chris Charles:
Yes. I did the graphics for that one as well, as well for [inaudible 00:45:08].

Maurice Cherry:
Nice.

Chris Charles:
I’ve been lucky, man. I’ve been lucky.

Maurice Cherry:
What do you do to stay motivated and productive with your work?

Chris Charles:
Just constantly evolving, actually, as far as what I do. For me, sometimes it’s just if I’m editing photos, I run into a creative block with where to go with a certain edit. I’ll put it down and I’ll step away and indulge in another media, be it a short film or looking at some art books that I have. But I know for me, staying inspired revolved around kind of exploring the balance between what’s in my head and what I see that catches my eye out in the world. And also music. A lot of my photography and design, I feel it’s so connected to musical energy. And at least to me, I always like to think of a song whenever I present a certain edit or if I do a print.

So for me, sometimes I’ll be inspired by music, or if I’m producing music and coming up with a theme and a rhythm, and I’ll start to see colors and I’ll start to say, oh, okay, maybe I think that’s rare. Then I go back to the edit and it’s like yeah, I add that touch of red to it. So, it varies. But mostly I’d say music and using contrasting mediums to kind of offset each other. So if I’m doing design, I’ll stop and do some photography or look at photography. If I’m doing photography, I’ll listen to music. It’s weird. I kind of traverse these different medium when I need inspiration from something else, from another place. So yeah, that’s one of the ways I use medium.

Maurice Cherry:
How would you say your artistic style has evolved over the years?

Chris Charles:
When I first started doing photography, especially when I was in design school, I was implementing design elements within my photography a lot. And it was just how I saw things. I would do a portrait and find a creative way to add text to it or add texture to it using overlays. I think as I’ve evolved as an artist, I think my style has… It’s gotten a lot simpler. So I’ve simplified it. I’ve been able to deconstruct it in a way that there might be some texture, or I’ll just use a textured backdrop or a textured setting, versus actually adding the texture in post.

But also just kind of continuing to try to master fighting in the technical aspects of photography. And then getting into filmmaking and learning that technology and learning how to edit and just being a one-stop shop. Because I just love all those mediums, so why not learn how to do them? And then eventually that became another aspect of my business. So I think expanding, going from this photography, to design and photography, to dabbling in web design. And then, oh, short films, and then doing promo spots for clients and doing commercials for schools and things of that nature. So yeah, learning new technology is pretty much how I think I’ll be evolved over the years, specifically

Maurice Cherry:
Overall, is there a piece of art or a specific project or something that you’ve done that you’re particularly proud of? Like the crown jewel in your portfolio, or something like that?

Chris Charles:
There are a couple, actually. I think most recently I got commissioned by a really amazing local candle making company, Black-owned, to design a signature candle to be distributed through the NBA, the NBA 75th Anniversary candle series. And they gave me full autonomy to design it within the specs of the candle. And with that, I was given access to seeing what the candle kind of smelled like, and taking hints from the notes of the candle and then implementing that into the design. That to me was very exciting, very exciting. And for that to be connected to the NBA was just mind-blowing. I’d say another one is probably the Spike Lee project that between… It was joint project between Spike Lee and Moleskine where they were doing these cheap, got-to-have-it books, Moleskine books. So that’s where that connection happened.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh!

Chris Charles:
I was able to connect with Spike Lee and his team and come up with a… I had to shoot a short film of a local artist, a Black woman artist who embodied the whole image, the vibe of Nola Darling.

Maurice Cherry:
Nola Darling, yeah.

Chris Charles:
It was cool because Spike Lee, huge inspiration for me. One of my favorite movies is near all of them, but I say from an aesthetic standpoint, [inaudible 00:49:37] blues, the way he used colors and contrasting colors to point out personality differences, and music and jazz. I think another fun time was shooting Martin Lawrence and his daughters’ graduation party. And that was interesting and totally random. One of actually, it so happened that his daughter, her hairdresser was my client. They needed a photographer. And she graduated from Duke University. And I’ll never forget this, this was Mother’s Day a few years ago. And I remember going to brunch with my mom and then having to leave and drive to Duke University to their private banquet thing, golf club. And I’m looking at Martin Lawrence and his family. Oh, and Emmett Smith. Because they’re all connected. Emmett Smith, who’s one of my favorite running backs of all times for the NFL is Martin’s ex-wife’s new husband.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow.

Chris Charles:
So I’m looking at Martin Lawrence and his family, the kids, Emmett Smith, and I’m just there to take pictures and you’re paying me to do this. Are you kidding me? It’s like, that’s living the dream. So yeah, I’ve had some really amazing… Gosh, I don’t know. It’s times like these, and I’m thankful for you to these great questions because it really makes me think about… For one, if there was any time where I didn’t, or if any people didn’t respect the craft of image-making, be it photography or design, and the times that I’ve doubted it as well. Like oh yeah, people don’t take this stuff seriously. But then one day I’m in Venice Italy, because I was commissioned to be there by a client. You know what I mean?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Chris Charles:
And it’s like, wow, I said that but I’m actually overseas right now, and my whole job is to just be cool and take fly pictures. So yeah, I’ve had a few instances of really amazing experiences and being in rooms and work and opportunities. So yeah, I have a few, that’s what I’m saying, I just can’t pick one.

Maurice Cherry:
I think once again, all of that really speaks to the power of relationships.

Chris Charles:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
It really speaks to being able to know who, not just know who certain people are, but to maintain those relationships enough where people are advocates or sponsors for you in places where you’re not available. Especially with what you just mentioned with shooting Martin Lawrence’s daughter’s graduation, like you said her hairdresser is one of your clients, and so that’s how that all happened. They could have picked any photographer. Martin’s a celebrity. They could have picked any photographer.

Chris Charles:
What’s so funny about that, she just called me randomly and she was like, “Hey, I got a gig for you. Just say yes.” I was like, what? She wouldn’t tell me who it was until the day before. She was like, oh, by the way, this is the Lawrence family and Smith family. Like, “Lawrence who?” [inaudible 00:52:29] I was like, oh, okay. Yeah. Relationships, knowing people and doing good work in this treating well manner.

Maurice Cherry:
And the Spike Lee Moleskine, I have the Spike Lee Moleskine. It’s still in the plastic. I refuse to open it.

Chris Charles:
Oh, nice. Yeah, that’s definitely a collectors’ item. Definitely a collectors’ item.

Maurice Cherry:
I’ve had a few people on the show that have done work with Spike, either presently or in the past and stuff. It’s amazing how he pulls in other Black designers to work on his projects, whether it’s like Art Sims doing projects, whether it’s you on this notebook project. I think most recently he did some work with this black typographer I had on the show, Tre Seals for his book, like design the font for the book and everything. Spike is really good about pulling in other Black creatives into his work, which I really appreciate that.

Chris Charles:
And I honestly believe, I think it should be like that. It’s always great to see and I always appreciate it. But how else are we going to continue to spread and learn about each other’s talents without actually giving each other shots and [inaudible 00:53:34] opportunities?

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Chris Charles:
I love to see it. Love to see it.

Maurice Cherry:
What advice do you have for aspiring creative directors or artists out there, particularly those that want to be self-employed like you are and be able to kind of forge their own path?

Chris Charles:
Yeah, I’d say do your homework. And when I say that it’s great to go out with passion and present it, but you have to have a plan. And that could be, do you want to be a generalist? This could be applied to a couple of different mediums, of course. But yeah, do I want to be a specialist? Do I want to be a generalist? I’ve gone back and forth between that as well. For me, it’s about also diversifying, right? I don’t just solely rely on photography or I don’t just solely rely on consulting or design, or filmmaking. It’s about building a brand based on those three words. Like I said, style, creativity, and soul. And thinking about how you want your clients to feel when they work with you and after they’re done working with you, and will that make them want to work with you again? So it’s like a lot of soft skill stuff. I mean, of course, being technically skilled and talented, those are all great things, but if people don’t like you, you’re not going to go very far.

So I think learning how to maintain or establish and maintain relationships with people who align with the vision that you want to sell your artwork to, present your work to, and being able to manage that and navigate that and be in spaces and present yourself well, I think that’s really important. And then also, of course, the more technical stuff about managing business, establishing an LLC, your contracts, delivering, over-delivering at times, under-promising versus the vice versa. Because people will call you out. You said we were going to get 30 pictures, you only delivered 29. It’s like, oh, okay. Gotcha. But if I say I’m delivering 15 and I deliver 30, guess what? Now I’m a rockstar. And a lot of creatives take that for granted. And I also understand that there’s time and money involved with creating and running a business. So be mindful of that. Don’t kill yourself. Rest. Take your time to step away from it and reevaluate, reassess, learn, and then ask for mentorship from people who are already doing it that are in the game.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What kind of work do you want to be doing, like future stuff or continuation of what you’re currently on? Where do you see yourself?

Chris Charles:
Yeah, ultimately five years… It’s funny because I’ve been actually writing out my tenure plan. And in the next five years, couple things. I definitely want to have a new physical space to run a shop and have a team, a dedicated team on payroll to where I can manage and be lead creative or a principal for projects that are being done by people that are working for me. But also, I have a really big passion for veterans’ affairs. So I’ve been researching ways that I can somehow participate in helping veterans, be it they’re transitioning or trying to find their way out in the workforce. Or if they’re trying to start a business, there are so many benefits out there available to veterans who they don’t know they’re there and they’re just out here flapping and trying to work, but also might have some disabilities or issues that their workplace or workplaces are required to accommodate. So yeah, that’s a huge passion of mine honestly, in helping veterans, especially veterans of color, transition and live good lives after having lived through some really potentially horrible situations because of war. But yeah, having a shop and helping veterans.

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

Chris Charles:
Sure. So my main website is chrischarles.co. That’s chrischarles.co, not dot-com. The person who owns that domain name refuses to give it up, so I’m stuck with the dot-co and that’s no problem. That’s fine. So that has pretty much leads you to all of the other work that I do. I have a separate photography website, which you can also find once you go to chrischarles.co. But for people who are specifically interested in photography, it’s my full name, christophercharlesphotography.com. I have a Facebook business page, it’s Chris Charles Photo. My Instagram handle is the_chrischarles, so the, underscore symbol, Chris Charles. Those are the main places to find me. I’m there.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. Sounds good. Well Chris Charles, I want to thank you so much for coming on this show. I think certainly everything that you have talked about speaks to two key things that I think folks should kind of take in mind, particularly as we go into the new year. One is about being adaptable, and the second is about building relationships. I think everything that you’ve described about your career to date has been a testament to both of those abilities, and you’ve been able to craft and use both of those to be able to build a career for yourself, build a life for yourself, and continue to do great work out there in the community. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Chris Charles:
Thank you so much for having me, man. This is really fun. Enjoyed talking with you, Maurice. And yeah, anything you need from me, just let me know.

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Gus Granger

Gus Granger has been a staple in the Dallas design community for over 20 years. Not only that, his design work has reached international acclaim, earning honors from Adobe, AIGA, Communication Arts, and many other groups. But perhaps Gus’s biggest honor is his tireless advocacy work helping eliminate barriers for Black designers and empowering them for success in the world.

We caught up and talked about his recent career shift back to entrepreneurship, and he shared what he’s learned through that transition and how he brings those insights to his current work. Gus also gave some great advice for any designers looking to strike out on their own, spoke a bit about the current state of the design community from his perspective, and discussed some of the moments of joy in his career.

Hopefully this interview inspires you to find a way to help lift others up as you grow!

Interview Transcript

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

Gus Granger:
Hey, my name’s Gus Granger, I’m a designer, by that, I’m an epigraphic design roots, going brand identity messaging, positioning, web, print, really everything that a brand needs to show up and be seen and memorable in the world.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, we’re recording this kind of right before the year ends, so I’m curious to get a sense from you, what was 2022 for you?

Gus Granger:
Yeah, 2022 was a rollercoaster ride, I think we’ve got, with all things, the personal side is, which is kind of most prominent in having three kids and career changes going on, I’ve got a daughter that just started college this fall and that was exciting, which means she graduated from high school in the spring and that was exciting. And I had the amazing experience of joining a partnership team at VSA Partners based out of Chicago, which was a dream job of mine when I worked there as a designer in the early 2000s, and I wrapped up my tenure there this summer, wanting to get closer to my design roots and being more hands on, so that was a big change in the summer and getting back to working as Gus Granger design again and just getting into the trenches with clients and designing and having these in-depth conversations and just being able to walk that journey with my clients while doing the work has been really exciting and something that I’ve missed.

Maurice Cherry:
That is a lot. Well, congratulations definitely on your daughter going to college.

Gus Granger:
Yeah, yeah, it’s wild, the first few weeks was really difficult and my mom said, she’s like, “The first month is the hardest,” and I was like, I wonder what she’s doing now, and da da da, but she’s doing great, she comes home for the holidays pretty soon.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Is she far from Dallas where you’re at?

Gus Granger:
Oh, as far as possible, I’m in Dallas and she’s in upstate New York at Syracuse University.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh wow.

Gus Granger:
Yes. She’s a double major in political science and photography and I think is just tapping into her creative side as well as wanting to change the world and change the systems and make the society better and learning the building blocks of tools and how to make that happen from the inside, so that’s exciting to see her grow in that regard as well.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s awesome, that’s really awesome to hear. So you mentioned with VSA this kind of was a full circle moment for you in a way, you started there many years ago as a designer and then now going back and being a partner, what was that experience like for you?

Gus Granger:
Oh, it was amazing, going back to… I’m having to embrace my kind of elder statesman’s status, which is terrible, but for one, going through design school in the mid 90s VSA partners was a dream, I think the were shops at that point was in VSA and Pentagram, which really kind of helped set my kind of goals for what I wanted to do in the profession, and when I ultimately ended up working there as a senior designer, we came across some of the just most talented and really interesting projects that I’d come across in my career at that point, and it was from there that I went off into the wilderness and started my own agency and drew that for me, working by myself on an extra bedroom to a 50 person studio on the 30th floor of building down here in downtown Dallas to selling it to a client and then going in-house and leaving that.

It was definitely an exciting bookend, kind of not just from having worked there before, but also looking up to the work that that studio was doing in just groundbreaking, just design, in depth understanding of clients and delivering business value while just doing just stunning work, getting to go back and join the leadership team there as they kind of enter this new digital era that everyone is getting their bearings with was really a great opportunity and honor and something that I enjoyed a lot.

Maurice Cherry:
And now you’re working for yourself as a consultant, has it been kind of a big shift going… I don’t know, I guess maybe this is another kind of full circle thing, going back to working for yourself, has it been a bit of a shift?

Gus Granger:
Oh, for sure, I think that, as I mentioned, going from running a large agency, starting it from scratch, and I always say, every time your team doubles in size, it’s a different job, so when you go from one person to two person, you’re like, “What is this?” I’m like, this is completely different from two to four, from four to eight, from eight to 16, I was doing that for about 15 years and it kind of felt like the math isn’t right here, but it kind of felt like six or seven jobs, working at six or seven different places, but during the last few chapters, so much of my time was focused on just running a business and being so distant from the work that I really, certainly wasn’t designing, there were times that I may have been wearing an executive creative director hat, but it was more just business operations and payroll and HR and cashflow management and sales and all the things that were not what I was passionate about in the first place, it’s an essential part of running a large business.

You just missed what you were passionate about in the first place, ultimately, that’s what led me to we transitioning the agency to in-house situation through that acquisition to our client, Cyxtera, at the time, that was a brand new gigantic global technology company, data center, cybersecurity that had been a client of ours that we’d been part of naming, building their brand identity from scratch, and that they had been growing so large as a client, just sat down with the CMO and it was like, let’s look at how this could look if we just took our team and kind of became your in-house group, and then all of us are dedicated, and ultimately, that’s what we did, and that allowed me to get back to being more hands-on and with the same group of amazing people that I had in the 70kft days, but we were kind of on the other side of the client curtain.

And what’s fascinating there is that there’s so many different problem solving challenges that you can confront as a designer, as an art director, as a creative director, as a product architect that would not necessarily be sent to an agency and I’d never been in-house before, and it’s just a very different and fascinating ecosystem when you’re working directly with sales teams, when you’re working directly with product teams, and the pace of work is very different, the way that you manage work is very different because there aren’t, “Budgets,” for your hours and your team’s time, and you’ve got to find different ways to manage capacity and how much time should something take, but it also opens up opportunities to, we’re designing wayfinding systems for least 60 data centers around the world, to graphics for interior sales displays, to events, to video work that just the sheer volume and depth in the brand experience was really, really, really exciting.

But seeing how our clients would have to socialize that and sell that work and get the information gathered, that all of those things that we missed out on that we weren’t necessarily as exposed to being on the agency side, just giving a much deeper appreciation for our clients that sometimes we can have fun kind of teasing our clients and being difficult, make the logos bigger, blah, blah, blah, we can’t get them to sign off on something, yeah, I still have my agency chip on my shoulder of that regard, but it’s much more empathy, I’d say doing the two years there.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, back when we had you on the show in 2015, the firm that you’re talking about is 70kft, and I mean, I think it’s important to… a couple of things that you mentioned I think are important, first, the thing about every time you kind of double your staff, it’s a different job, that is so true, it does distance you from the work a bit, and the more that you have to be the CEO running the business, it takes so much time away from actually being hands-on with the work, sometimes you can do it, I mean, depending on the type of business that you have, you’re able to do it, but it does get a lot harder because you just have to be aware and present about so many other things that have nothing to do with the projects at all that you’re working on.

Gus Granger:
Absolutely, and I don’t say that to scare people off from starting or growing their own design firm or agencies, and there’s certainly ways that I could have grown the agency differently to keep myself closer to the work in leading it, I think at the time, there was just enough fatigue and wanting to do something different that when that opportunity came up with Cyxtera, it was like, look, here’s a way for me to continue doing the type of work that I love doing even more of it and being more hands-on, keeping my team together, and then happened to also be a client that we adored and we’d had done a lot of work with over the years when he was in different companies.

And so there was a lot of just trust and alignment for the business value of great design and what it looks like to advocate for that within groups in a large growing organization, and so that made that change a lot more attractive, so I say all of that, the attractiveness of that moment was like, you know what? This is more interesting than trying to go through a wholesale reset of how I have organized in bringing in different leadership to handle the types of aspects of the job that I didn’t enjoy so that I could be more hands on, it was just like, you know what? Let’s go this way because this looks like fun and something fresh and new and it was, and I’m glad we did it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Because I mean, at the end of the day, you’re running a business, so especially if you’re a designer that maybe came up through design school or if you don’t have that kind of business acumen, you’re either sort of learning it on the job as the company grows or you have to find some way to, like you said, supplement that with bringing on folks that do know the business end so you can build and scale things out hopefully in a healthy way, and I think certainly you grew 70kft, like you said, the 50 people, I mean, that’s a testament to not just the work that you’ve put in on the brand, but also the people and the team that you built around it.

Gus Granger:
Oh, a hundred percent. I forget who said this first, it actually may have been one of my first bosses through VSA, I think it was Dana Arnette, it talked about so much of growing a great team, it’s about curating talent, and that my philosophy through this was just trying to find and attract the best and most talented people possible, and then just finding opportunities for them to do their thing and get folks to work well together, and that was the most fun part of that, in creating an environment where they can find just joy in working with each other and pushing each other and finding new and inventive ways to sell our clients’ story, and we had a whole mix of things that we were very much leaned into business to business technology, but we are also working with a lot of startups and some retail work.

And we also reserved a percentage of our time for non-profit work, which ended up being a lot of work for the Dallas Holocaust Museum, which kind of helped us satisfy this more mission-centric priority for the agency, it was from the leadership standpoint on my side and wanting to make sure that we’re putting our skills to use to benefit society, and that’s something I still try to do with my own time, but that it’s like there’s so much that we are creating that’s just fleeting, make a website and it might be live for a year or less, the client gets acquired and the identity that you just love just gets wiped away, and then what’s left? What impact did you make on the world? You helped someone sell a business and that’s great, you put three more dollars in their pocket.

But I think what we have unique superpowers in capturing people’s imagination and attention and persuasion through our gifts as artists, as creators, as communicators, and too often those skills are not put to work for the most important communication challenges that are holding the world back today, whether it’s just racism, just bias in general, climate change, we can just go right on down the list, and that for us to isolate our gifts for corporate interests is a tragedy, and notably, but we’ve got to eat, we got kids to put through college sometimes, there’s a whole number of things, and finding the right balance of that is key, but yeah, that’s part of my soapbox.

Maurice Cherry:
No, I mean, I feel like that’s been a growing awareness of the industry over the, I don’t know, I want to say at least over the past three years, but I would even go back as far as maybe ’15, 2016, you’ve started to see this sort of unfold in different ways, I would say definitely in the 2016 to 2018, 2019, it was more about, I think, civic design and making sure that people were using their skills towards maybe improving government services and understanding the election process and voting and all that sort of stuff, and then certainly with 2020 and a lot of the protests that happened around the murder of George Floyd, then you started to see a more active presence around social justice issues, and I think it’s definitely going to increase as more, I hate to say, just as more bad shit happens in the world.

But that’s kind of the reality of it, is like as more things happen, we, as designers, are tasked to come up with more solutions that are not just product focused, in a way, it almost feels, almost, I’ll say, it almost feels a little dismissive to just focus on product as a designer almost, I mean, I think there’s utility in it, certainly even as you mentioned with doing stuff with Cyxtera, doing things around cybersecurity and things that’s important, that feeds into product. But I think of the designers of 2011 versus the designers of now, and how the focus back then was so much on product and UX and interfaces and all that sort of stuff, and now it’s about how do we use our skills to solve the problems that are facing our society and our planet?

Gus Granger:
Yeah, there’s definitely a different mindset today, and I think I totally agree that sadly, something has to really go wrong to get people to wake up or enough people to wake up because even you mentioned things like government services and election design, I got involved with that going back in 2000, there’s an organization, I was part of AIGA Design for Democracy that came out of the problems around ballot design in Florida in the election between Al Gore and George Bush, that’s an effort which continues today around how to make sure election systems are better designed to protect the integrity of the vote, and there were many people that were rallying to the cause back then, but there’s the problems that we can be attacking with our skills are ever present, yeah, it’s a matter of we could also wear ourselves out trying to do everything, so you have to, I think, in my mind like, all right, pick your space, I’m like, where can I be the most effective and make a biggest impact?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What is a typical day look like for you now? What does the Gus Granger workday look like?

Gus Granger:
Gus Granger workday, you know what? I think these days I’m so much more guarded with for my health, my mental health, and that I talk about joy and wanting to be in a good space, and I’m like, even though I’m working from home, I’m like, I start each day… I’ll go to one of my favorite breakfast spots and it’s my commute and I have carefully curated and found the best chocolate croissant places in the Dallas metroplex area, I will rotate through those locations and I need to start a chocolate croissant blog, but that’s a whole other podcast, but I say all that, that that’s my happy spot, and I just know that I’m like, I’m listening to comedy podcast, I’m not going to wake up in the morning and to start listening to the grim news of the day because I need to start the day in a positive space.

But from there and I get back and start work back in my pandemic inspired office, which didn’t exist back in early 2020, but now I’m so much more comfortable and cozy there, but I’m working with having a number of different conversations around projects that’ll come to fruition months from now, working with clients that I’m in the middle of right now, and it’s a mix, some of these things are in a design phase and we’re going through looking at identity explorations or design system explorations, others are in a brand strategy phase, and we might be doing interviews with subject matter experts and other internal contacts to really start figuring out the right ways to differentiate the brand and looking at how to start the conversation in the right place and to elevate the right values and principles that are going to help define that brand at its best because we try to do that before we even start designing anything, before we start writing anything.

But I’ll go through that brand strategy and messaging phase with amazing copywriters that I’ve been working with for years and we lay that foundation, and so I’m in different stages of that work. And I’m about to start a web project next week but what’s great is that there’s just enough of it that it’s not a 9:00 to 5:00 type thing, I can go and have a leisurely breakfast and go and walk four miles and come back and I can start my day at 10:00 and if I feel tired, I can take a nap and wake back up and do some of those things and the next day it’ll be completely different, that’s the great part of being the home-based consultant, at least at this moment, talk to me a month from now and you might get a more frazzled version of me, but hopefully I’m able to keep that at bay.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, it’s always, I think, an ebb and a flow with entrepreneurship, some days are going to be better than others, some months, some years, it just sort of ends up happening that way, but it sounds like you found a deliberate way to put joy just into your everyday work life in general.

Gus Granger:
Yeah. And it’s a lesson that I’ve taken I think from the more intense days of my myself in the kft experience where they were… I think from my standpoint, I’m like, I could go through just joyless months and just trying to hold teams together and dealing with all kinds of just different operational headaches, HR headaches, team conflicts, and when you’ve got dozens of people working for you, not everybody gets along, and there are times when that the job becomes camp counselor and couples therapists, and it’s not just for its own sake or it’s like, look, I’ve got to get these folks to work together so that we can get this project completed so we can build it on Monday, that’s an intense part of the experience, and that’s definitely not something they teach you or even allude to in design school and in talking a bit earlier it was like there’s so much that gets into… they’re designers that are ready to start working for themselves as soon as they know how to design, whether they’re coming out of a four year program or if they’re self-taught.

And they’re like, “Now, I’m going to start working for myself,” and I’m like, I am so regularly trying to steer them clear from that, and be like, “Please don’t, for your own sanity,” but there’s so much that needs to be learned at that point from other people, and go and find a creative director, art director, somebody that’s going to take you under their wing, whether you can work for them directly or they’re going to mentor you, that you are going to just make a ton of mistakes, find ways to solve problems that you never even thought of, that you got to kind of go through that for years to really learn how to design at your best, and then once you figure that out, you start working for yourself, it may start being familiar when it’s just you or when you start collaborating, but it will start growing to a point where you’re like, “Oh, this is why people go to business school.”

And you start realizing, all right, do I start reading more business books and all these other things or start hiring for skills that I may not have? Because when you’ve got a dozen people and you’re dealing with at least negotiation, and that’s a different animal these days, because I mean, with remote and hybrid work, it’s a very different atmosphere than when I was growing my agency, but I think those days I’m like, you kind of had to have an office in order for a client to take you seriously, and that that’s like, all right, we’re looking at commercial real estate, downtown Dallas, seven year lease, but how do I grow? How do I contract? Is that even possible? And looking at business insurance and all kinds of… it’s again, stuff that you wouldn’t even get into at design school, but you may find great relationships from other designers, which I did, that had run studios, to be able to pick their brain and to figure out what things that they did and who did they seek out for consulting.

And you start finding consultants that just specialize in working with design firm principles or marketing firm principles, and that’s such an important resource that I feel like just gets overlooked a lot, whether we look at our design conferences and our design groups, we’re talking about how we can be better problem solvers, be better designers, better collaborators, and that’s all essential and that’s central to what it is that we do, I think we’re kind of a naturally entrepreneurial group of folks and want to create our own thing, we enjoy the independence or the autonomy, but the other aspect of it is there’s a lot that you need to learn that we don’t talk about enough in design circles that I’d love to see change in the future.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I’m laughing only because as you mentioned that I’m thinking how back when I had my studio, particularly I think in the first four or five years about trying to have an address was so important and to let people know, oh yes, we are a real business, and I remember, I think I got some little tiny office space because I’m in Atlanta, it was important for me to have an address that was like, “Peach Tree Street,” so people know, oh, he’s official, and I had some little tiny office, I think I got it through Regis probably, the real estate company, got it through Regis, some little tiny office in Midtown that I never went to, but I just wanted to have the address so people knew like, oh, this is official, in the grand scheme of things, did it make a difference? Absolutely not, but in a way sort of like you mentioned, it would’ve been good to have had some knowledge to know maybe I don’t have to have this, maybe I don’t have to waste money trying to do this to prove it to customers I’m never going to get.

Gus Granger:
Well, I don’t know, man, I’m like, it’s kind of tough to prove a negative because you think of-

Maurice Cherry:
It’s true-

Gus Granger:
How many folks reached out to you because you had an address during those days where it’s like, oh, this isn’t in a PO box or somewhere in the suburbs, but just by seeing that you were there on a Peach Street, no one’s going to call you and be like, “I saw that you had an address, let’s talk about the [inaudible 00:28:58].” I think it’s definitely one of those things where I’m like, I think when I had moved from… I’d been working in South Bend, Indiana for some time, my wife was running marketing and PR for Whirlpool Corporation, which was based near there, we were about to have our third kid and we wanted to move closer to friends and family, and we came back to Dallas and the agency was growing at that point and I was like, I’m going to go ahead and get a space in, I think at that point it was like West End in Dallas, it’s a historic district, pretty creative space, and I just knew that the clients that I was wanting to work with were going to want to come to an office and see me and see the space.

And frankly, and I think at that point where I was also just thinking about just as a black designer period, that I’m like, if I’m constantly trying to meet clients in a Starbucks when I’m trying to get them to pay me a hundred grand for a website that what we’re talking about in the 2010s, I think that was a tougher ask at least in the circles that I was moving in then to get where when they could come and be in our conference room and I can bring my director of development to the table, to bring the account manager, to bring the designer and the copywriters and we can put stuff up on the screen.

All of that can happen through Zoom today, but as far as that confidence building, just having an address is one step, I think there’s absolutely types of work that you need to at that point, I’m not sure kind of what the equivalent would be if those barriers were just erased, but you just needed to have a space for the types of clients that we were working with, just that they could see and come and realize this is the real shop.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I think certainly in the earlier days, I started my business in 2008, some clients or potential clients, they really sort of frowned on, oh, you’re just doing this from home now everyone works from home, but certainly back then, I felt there was a much stronger bias, especially to try to get larger clients and larger budgets, they’re like, “I’m not giving you this money if you’re doing this at home,” they want, it’s almost like a social proof of business in some kind of way.

Gus Granger:
Yeah, no, totally.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, you’ve been a design leader and a business leader for over 20 years now, and you’ve already kind of shared some thoughts about what you’d like to see from designers, but what are your thoughts on just the design community today? How do you see things?

Gus Granger:
It’s funny, as I keep looking at, whether it’s LinkedIn and different discussions that are going on at conferences and events, it’s like what we mean by design today is different than what we meant by design 10 years ago or even 20 years ago, and that I’ve come to realize, I’m like, all right, I’m kind of a brand and marketing designer where in a way that I wouldn’t necessarily have carried that label, because even then I’m like, I will rewind back, I’m a graphic designer at my core, and I think I even mentioned that early on, and people are like, “Oh well that’s an old sounding term,” but we always have these labels, whether commercial artists, graphic artists, graphic designer, web designer, but in starting at the foundation of graphic designers, the way I was educated and being hyper passionate about conceptual thinking, typography, composition, understanding audience, adventure, discovery, being inventive and creating surprising and effective work, that in my experience design was kind of medium agnostic.

And so I’ve always had an allergy of, are you a graphic designer or are you a web designer? I’m like, stop, it’s all graphic design in my worldview, and I understand there are people that look at them very differently, but I feel like if you’ve got a masterful command of typography and you can understand a medium, that the world of creating a elegant website can be very similar process to creating an amazing book, but you need to understand what you’re working with, you need to understand your materials, you need to understand the people who need to collaborate in order to make that happen, not to say that web development’s the same as working with the printing press, but there are certain rules that you need to know how a book is going to function, what type of experience someone expects when they pick up a hardcover book versus a paperback book to be able to navigate that content elegantly.

And I think if those same muscles are put to place, the digital experience is the same, so I think things have become even more fragmented today, and that there’s… because we will say design and what will mean is UX design, which may not involve visual design at all, or just UI design using a component library, which is not the same thing as kind of the more commercial artist view of creating something from scratch that may be a step earlier in the process to be like, who is the person that’s actually creating that component library and deciding how that brand is going to show up in the product experience, and what is its relationship with the overall brand as a whole? Is there relationship between how the brand shows up in marketing and how it shows up in product?

But those that are kind of working with a preset component library that may be less involved with aesthetic decisions and more about flow and kind of using existing building blocks to create compelling experiences, it’s a different process entirely than staring at a blank page in the screen and be like, here’s brand X and here’s what they’re trying to solve for in the world, what should it look like? I’ve come through my view of design, my background of design, the version of design which gets me excited is the blank page, or perhaps it’s the existing page which is messed up and the client that comes in is like, “Help me make sense of this or make it better.”
But there’s a lot of design work that’s out there that I hesitate to say it because it almost seems like it would be controversial, it seems to be less creative, which I don’t understand as much, but which is not to say that it’s not a matter of problem-solving because I would have debates with one of my creative directors about design as art or not, and we can go back and forth until we’re blue in the face like, what do we mean by arts? And I’m like, look, we’re in a profession and our roots as commercial artists, and that the whole notion of us creating experiences that people want to engage with, that they feel connected with in a way which is an emotional type of experience, whether it’s bringing them joy or they’re attracted to it or it’s bringing them calm peace.

The skills that we bring to the table there are the same innate gifts, in my view and experience, that are at the core of an artist, and whenever I would review portfolios, I’m like, what can I see in this person’s aesthetic gifts? I’m like, how innate are they able to create compelling compositions? And it’s not just to be like, all right, I’m just going to go ahead and decide that this app needs to look like a Salvador Dolly thing because this is what inspires me today. But one of my favorite architects today is Zaha Hadid and just Google her work, it’s insane, these buildings are beautiful and arresting and shocking and very functional, but there’s a very different thing, you can’t tell me that there’s not artistry, or at least the way that I’m defining art and the way that team or that architect, she’s no longer with us, viewed designing spaces for her clients.

You can say the same thing to be like, all right, if she’s going to create a post office as opposed to someone’s like, “Look post office, look like a gray box, we’re going to put some tracked out Futura on the side, it’s going to be one story, it’s going to do this and it’s going to do the job,” those buildings are going to look completely different, but the cultural impact, the emotional experience of people going into Zaha Hadid post office is night and day to the gray box, and it’s like that’s the view of design that I hunger for, I don’t see as present in the digital space today. I think accessibility and user experience is definitely benefiting it from a bunch of artists anarchists going out there just creating a bunch of chaos, which was exemplified in the flash era, but there was a lot more beauty and discovery, I think, happening in the digital space that was there again, but it’s a whole other rant.

Maurice Cherry:
No, I completely agree, in terms of the kind of less creative, and I see what you mean about it could be controversial by saying that, but correct me if I’m wrong here, but I feel like when you say that it’s sort of like, I don’t know, there’s less kind of verve, there’s not that sort of spirit or enthusiasm, you mentioned Zaha Hadid, I’m thinking also of, and this is probably a bit of a stretch in terms of an analogy, but look at things like AI generated arts and how yes, you can input the right functions or whatever and it spits something out that looks good, but it doesn’t have that human nuance to it, it doesn’t have that sort of certain je ne sais quoi that would make it really, I wouldn’t necessarily even say attractive, because these things do look good, but it just doesn’t have that something, I’m not sure what the word for it is, but I know what you mean, I think, when you say that.

Gus Granger:
Yeah, well, or even in the instance of the AI generated art, I’ve seen some of it, which does have that je ne sais quoi, but it’s getting the prompt of to be influenced by a human being that created that, it’s still leveraging human ingenuity, it’s like a collage, a seamless collage, and that I can just go in there and be like, I want to see the Zaha Hadid Tesla truck, and then it’ll just spit out and be it’ll be this amazing thing and that okay, but I’m like, it’s still going to have this aesthetic and it’s going to also be inspired by what seems to be a proto fascist, anyway, I can start getting into it, Elon Musk read, we’ll back away from the Tesla discussion, technology monsters person.

Maurice Cherry:
I was just trying to maybe extrapolate a little bit on what you were sort of saying, I won’t say the lack of creativity, but I see what you mean about it possibly being less creative because it’s about, I don’t know, the output is just different, you’ve said before that creating great design is easiest when it’s infused with joy, so maybe that joy is not necessarily in the final product in the same way that it would be if a human did it, I know that there’s a lot of conversation around AI generated art, chat GPT and all these sorts of technologies that are mimicking what humans have created by hand, but it’s a really interesting time for seeing where technology can take design, but back to what I said before about what you mentioned with joy, have there been moments in your design career that have been particularly joyful?

Gus Granger:
Oh, absolutely, absolutely, and I think there are times that I look fondly at the times when we’ve got just a group of us and we’re just trying to, it may be my developers and writers and designers and we’re just at our magnet wall and we’ve just got layouts up and we’re just trying to figure out how to solve a particular problem and that there’s the joy part of it, and it’s like, I don’t mean to just to make it simple, be like, well, just somebody tell a joke and that work is going to get better, there’s the ability to have fun with people and to challenge each other is all that comes from a foundation of trust and that we’ve got good relationships with people, that we can now start to critique the work and riff off of each other and cut to the chase and be like, “You know what? This sucks and here’s why.”

And that we can kind of laugh about it like, “Yeah, yeah, I was trying to do this,” and da da, or, “This is amazing and it would be even better if we did this,” that there’s this kind of lens of bringing more candor to a conversation when you have a trusted group of collaborators where you can push and play and make it so people aren’t afraid to bring new ideas to the table because nothing is personal and it can be fun, and coming up, I hadn’t seen this replicated, nor I didn’t never really embraced it, but in one of my early jobs before I started my agency was at a studio called Group Barnet here in Dallas, and there was a brainstorm room and there was an entire shelf that was just full of hats, bunch of just silly stupid hats like biking hats and clown hats and policeman hats, ship captain hats.

There weren’t chairs in there, they were all beanbag chairs, right? And so people would need to sit on these beanbag chairs and oftentimes people would go and put on these silly hats, and it was a culture at the agency of it was family-like, and it was fun, but it was definitely served a business purpose and that it was seeding creativity and openness and not taking each other too seriously, and I think it also just kind of keeps you grounded when you’ve got a stupid clown hat on your head when you’re saying, “What if we did it this way?” So that’s the utility of it, and otherwise when we’re just kind of the opposite and we’re defensive or protective and we’re not sharing our work and we just kind of work in isolation and just present something when we feel like it’s perfect and honed and may not be as open to feedback, it’s just much more difficult to great work that way, in my mind.

And the opposite, it’s when you’re wanting to pursue experimentation that I want to be able to just go over to developers and be like, “What if we did this way?” And when the page loaded, all these images just exploded and here’s why and here’s why it would make sense, and I’m like, “That’s impossible,” to be like, “Well, look, here’s a link which did it,” and I’m like, “Ugh, that’s ridiculous, that can’t happen,” and they come back 10 minutes and then they figured it out, that’s the kind of stuff that has happened throughout whether my VSA days from the 70kft days to being at Cyxtera, that that’s the type of atmosphere that I find the most fun and interesting work kind of came out of it.

Just as a closing thought, and we bring that same energy to whether we’re working on an identity system for a juice bar or helping clients sell cloud computing, to we’re doing exhibition design for bringing boosting awareness of genocide, which it’s not to say we’re not taking it seriously, but this whole notion of building an atmosphere of trust and experimentation so that the team that you’ve surrounded yourself with, which are hopefully people that are there as your cheerleaders, can be there during critiques or while you’re working to push and cheer you on, so that’s that.

Maurice Cherry:
Something else that you do is you maintain an active presence in social justice efforts through a variety of nonprofits, and you’ve mentioned that you’ve focused on eliminating barriers for marginalized designers in the profession and empowering them for success, now, you’ve kind of spoken a little bit on both of these things earlier, but did you have any sort of more thoughts around either of those?

Gus Granger:
Yeah, and I think that’s important, and I continue to do work locally with the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, which is, I think that was a large relationship that we had in the 70kft days, and we were doing all of their exhibition design and worked on naming and identity work back then, but now I’m working with them on their marketing committee and on their new facility, and they’re doing important work here in north Texas to mentoring, whether working with the Adobe Design Circle and helping the scholarships for marginalized designers and mentoring the scholarship designees, other mentoring programs and on continuing relationships with mentees, as I tell all my mentees over the years and I was like, look, you’ve got me for life if you want me, because I think that’s where I’m like, I get the most satisfaction, out of seeing their careers just sore.

But I think when something more tactical and urgent is happening locally that might have gotten involved with political candidates and protest movements, and as I mentioned earlier, it’s like, look, how can we bring our skills to the table to make sure things are effective? And we kind of worked with a bunch of folks and the local resistance movement back in 2016 to oust the problematic congressman and was bringing my design skills to bear there in a way that made sense, I think we just have to find whatever’s possible, and I think in as well as within professional associations and mentioned, whether it’s online groups, whether I try to stay present with black design groups as well, which each had a bit in the past about AIGA and other groups that there’s just in the design profession period, it’s important for us to push.

And I try to do that where I think it’s important that we’re taking our talents and putting them to use, I’m like, yes, could I sit down and do a phone bank for my local congressman? Sure, am I going to be more effective by bringing my skills as a designer? Probably, and that I’m like, what unique skills are you blessed with in this life? What’s your highest and best use to make that particular cause come to fruition? And so to that part, whether you’re helping movements, that’s key, whether you’re helping talented designers to navigate early career challenges, pitfalls, advice, and I get such satisfaction out of that, and that’s a high level summary of the stuff that I’ve been up to.

Maurice Cherry:
What’s something that you’ve let go of that once meant the world to you?

Gus Granger:
We’ve talked a bit about it, but I think it was that agency, I talked a bit about the importance of mental health and how I prioritize starting my day with a ritual that’s going to kind of make sure that I’m in a good mood, that starting and growing my own agency was my dream job, that was my dream going back to college, and I did that and I grew it and I was very proud of it, and in the last chapters, I think from there was just enough things that just caught me off guard, clients that let you down, betrayals from people you thought you could trust, that it became such a burden and a drag that I was like, I’m not happy, and when you look around at all, even looking around at dozens of folks and I’m like, I’m the only person at this place that cannot quit their job.

Anyone else here can give their two weeks notice except for me, and it’s definitely the first world problem, right? I’m like, oh, you’ve got your own design agency and you’re sad, that was very much the reality and I realized it was something that in that moment I needed to let go of and I’m glad I did, and that it’s definitely something where it’s a lot of trust where a lot of people can get into, did all this success happen by chance? If I give it up or I’m going to be able to do it again? It gives you a lot of a key moment of just self-analysis of like, all right, it’s a giant leap of faith, if I take this change, is this next chapter going to be as rewarding and successful for me? And if I have to do it all over again, can I?

For me, it became important to do that, and that I found a way to make a change with how my team was doing work and to protect their jobs was important for me because I think there had been enough just challenges in the years prior to that that we’d gone through just things of having a business of that size and going through just firings and layoffs and things where it’s like business ebbs and flows, it’s like it’s just a different animal entirely and it just ate me up and I didn’t want to go, I just didn’t want to do anymore, and so letting that go that was probably the answer to that question.

Maurice Cherry:
What does success look like now at this stage of your career?

Gus Granger:
I’m still trying to figure that out, I’m quite happy working for myself again, there’s conversations kind of going with really interesting companies that have reached out to me about roles that are a surprisingly compelling fit for my background and passions that I would never have imagined before. But I look at it all, I’m like, what? One, I’m like, is it going to bring me joy?

But what’s key for that joy is knowing that I’m making some kind of positive impact, that I have space to make a positive impact on the world, that I have the ability to make a positive impact on my family and keep kids in college, one’s there, I’ve got two more on the way, to continue to be a good dad and to be a good husband and just to prepare for just a well-balanced life where we can just travel and spend time with friends and family and do what I love. Somewhere in the middle of that is a definition of it, but that’s very much what I’m trying to figure out because I spent most of my career focused on that agency, either preparing to start it and grow it from college, and then having done that, I don’t have that north star anymore, so I’m trying to figure that out and that’s kind of exciting.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I have to say there is a certain, I don’t know, exhilaration to not knowing what’s coming next in a way, there’s certainly, don’t get me wrong, stability’s great, the lore of having a stable paycheck and knowing where the work is coming from is good, but there’s just something really freeing and exhilarating about just not really knowing what’s coming up on the horizon, but I don’t know, to me it’s very empowering, so I get where you’re coming from there.

Gus Granger:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
To that end, where do you see yourself in the next five years? What kind of work would you like to be doing?

Gus Granger:
In my dream, I was just having a great conversation with this black-owned real estate developer in Portland, and she’s doing amazing work, and she just started this firm that is just focused on mission-based projects and affordable housing for the black community, and that is their whole focus, and I’m like, maybe something like that ends up being the goal, and I’ve mentioned all those things that I would want to have be part of that, but I’m like, that is kind of the fantasy, right? And that knowing that every aspect of my work life is helping improve society and the black community would be amazing, and if it ends up being a percentage or a portion of my time that’s going into that, that could be the case too, I think if I can unlock away to kind of have that be the main thing, that would be the fantasy, but in the meantime, I know I’m going to be heads down working hard, putting these kids through college and hopefully I having some fun along the way.

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

Gus Granger:
GusGranger.com, that is G-U-S-G-R-A-N-G-E-R.com, and that’s also my handle on the socials, so you can find me on Instagram, we’ll see if I’ll continue to be on Twitter, but it’s the same handle across the board, so you can find me, I’m pretty easy, if you find another Granger, it might be my dad, but he’s pretty cool if you want to talk to him.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds good. Gus Granger, thank you so much for coming back on the show, of course, you’ve been on the show before, but I know we didn’t talk a lot about kind of, and it was something that we purposely wanted to avoid talking about, but that’s how we first met, you know what I’m talking about, I’m not going to mention it, but-

Gus Granger:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
I just want to say thank you for being just such a positive influence and role model and mentor and everything, just the work that you’re doing across design and business, of course, is impressive, but even more so that you’re really about giving back to the community is something that I certainly look to and I hope a lot of other designers emulate throughout their career, so thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Gus Granger:
Well, Maurice, thank you, and I hope you keep this in here, but I want to thank you in the same regard for all the work that you’re doing, and I know I’ve been talking to you about this for a while, I’m like, this podcast is so essential, and I think back to that designer that was in design school that I’m like, I went through four years and I don’t think I’d been exposed to another black designer other than myself and maybe two others that were in my design program, but the whole notion of being able to be sent a link which has in-depth interviews with now hundreds of black designers, that is amazing, and I’m so glad that your work has been recognized, whether it’s with the Steven Heller Award by the Smithsonian, it is impressive and it’s well deserved and just kudos and I can’t wait to see what’s going to come next. Keep doing it.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, thank you, thank you so much, thank you.

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