Ashley Fletcher

Revision Path is all about inspiring Black designers, and my conversation with Ashley Fletcher is a brilliant example of why that inspiration matters. Ashley drops some serious knowledge on finding your creative community, pushing boundaries, but also the importance of taking care of your well-being.

Ashley talked about her current work, including her business Goods Made By Digitrillnana, and she shared how her educational journey helped her growth in understanding design. We also talked shop on a few topics, including the role of design organizations in 2023, AI and intellectual property, and more.

Ashley’s story will leave you feeling inspired and ready to take your design career to new heights!

Interview Transcript

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

Ashley Fletcher:
Hey, everyone. I’m Ashley Fletcher. I’m a graphic designer and illustrator based in Washington, DC. by way of Prince George’s County, Maryland. I have a passion for visual storytelling and designing with intention and alignment. I’m also the owner of Goods Made by Digitrillnana, an art shop dedicated to celebrating culture and art through greeting cards, art prints, and more. Maurice, thank you so much for having me. Listening to this podcast has been a beacon of light for my career.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow. Well, thank you. I love to start off the interview that way. Wow. How’s your year been going so far? How’s 2023 been?

Ashley Fletcher:
My year has been great. 2023 has been a year of really Repivoting, I think, my creative journey. So I’m excited to see what this new process has in store. I feel like I’ve checked off a lot of boxes. Sometimes when you’re always working and just grinding things out, you don’t really realize, hey, I accomplished all of these things. Also, this is my first year. I’m a breast cancer survivor, so this is my first year without any surgeries. So I am looking forward to what 2023 has to offer as far as my overall healing and well being as well.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow. Well, congratulations on beating breast cancer.

Ashley Fletcher:
Thank you. Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
What plans do you have for the summer?

Ashley Fletcher:
This summer I am going to be working just a few more events. I’m trying to add a few more events for my art shop. So I’ll be at Broccoli City Festival in July. Super excited because the past years I applied and I wasn’t accepted. So it’s always beautiful to see when things start to align and check that off. And I don’t have any vacations planned, but I’m sure I’ll go to New York for one of these amazing, like, Brooklyn Museum art nights and some little local travel as well.

Maurice Cherry:
If you make it up to New York, you should definitely check out the Poster House Museum.

Ashley Fletcher:
Yes. Okay.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I get their emails. I’ve done some events with them as well, but they always have really great exhibitions. I haven’t been to the museum itself yet, but I always recommend people to go there. So if you get a chance to check it out, you should.

Ashley Fletcher:
Yeah, I definitely will.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about your current job. You’re a graphic designer at Brookfield Properties. Tell me about that.

Ashley Fletcher:
Yeah, so they are kind of a real estate house. They work with everything from logistics warehouses to residential commercials to commercial property. So I am a part of their in house team. It’s a fairly small design team in DC. They have about three designers in New York, I believe it’s four or five. And then we also have designers that are working remotely and all over the world as well. It’s an international company, so yeah, it’s been really cool. They have a beautiful office. They received some awards for the best eco friendly, sustainable office. So very beautiful space to be working in and really inspiring. Lots of windows that I love because working at my when I was freelancing, I was in the house all the time, not a lot of suntime. So it’s been a beautiful shift. And I create a variety of things from eblast variety of I just did some graphics for a Summer Sounds event that they have at their properties in Denver. So really wide variety of designer projects that I’ve worked on.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, very nice. And so it sounds like you’re in the office then working. It’s not like a remote or hybrid thing.

Ashley Fletcher:
Actually, it’s hybrid. So I’m three days in the office and two days at home. Okay.

Maurice Cherry:
How’s that been for you?

Ashley Fletcher:
It’s lovely. I love it. After freelancing again, stepping back into the corporate world, I realized how much I miss being around people on a regular basis. So having that balance has been really beneficial to me, I think. And then also the balance of not having to worry about commute for work for those two days because commuting can also be pretty draining depending on how far you are from your job and things like that. So it’s a really great balance.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, that’s something I’m sort of weighing now that I’m back on the job market and looking because I’ve done remote work for so long and this is like before the pandemic. I’ve been working remotely since 2008. So it’s not that I am averse to going back into an office, but Atlanta traffic is no joke. I’m really trying to think of like, if I work somewhere in the office, is it going to be somewhere that I can not have like an hour long commute and that’s even if I take the train as opposed to driving or something like that. But it sounds like you’ve got a good set up, though, with the hybrid.

Ashley Fletcher:
I do. And thankfully my commute is very beautiful. It depends on the day, of course. Traffic in DC is pretty tough, but it usually doesn’t take me longer than maybe 45 minutes. On a rough day, maybe an hour, it’s really nice. And when traffic is sweet, it’s like 20 minutes it might take me to get home. So it’s very nice commute. I remember when I was working way back when I worked for the government and I was traveling, I think like 2 hours away and oh my gosh, I don’t know how I did it. I don’t know how I did it. I commend all the people that have to commute whether driving or taking public transportation. It’s tough.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I’m right across the street from a train station, so it will be easy for me to get on the train. But everyone knows Atlanta’s mass transit is not the best. I’d say it’s probably gotten a lot better, at least in terms of the trains. I can’t say for the buses though. But I want to make sure if I do get back to a hybrid thing that it’s in a situation where I don’t have a long commute. It’s not going to take me forever to get to and from work because like you said, that part can be draining, especially if it’s not a good commute to get there, like, if you’re passing through a certain part of town or anything like that.

Ashley Fletcher:
Yeah, I had an interesting experience a couple of years ago when I was taking public transportation, and ever since then, I was like, I have to be able to drive to work because it’s so draining. You don’t know what kind of experience you might have that day on or off the train. And also for me, I absorb a lot of people’s energy. So having all of that various energy around me, sometimes it’s like, wait a minute. By the time I get to work, I’m like, okay, I need to decompress. I need some sage going on, maybe a little nap. So, yeah, definitely grateful. I think this job came at a time where a lot of things aligned for me. So if you are on the job hunt and you’re having a tough time, I just say manifest, write those things down that you want, that you’re looking for those qualities in that space, because those were deal breakers for me. So, yeah, definitely grateful to have this job come across. And the team is really awesome. Everyone is super helpful, friendly. My first day, like, the welcome, it was just so beautiful. So really grateful.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. What does I guess, like, a regular day look like? Because it sounds like you’re working on a lot of different type of design things for the company. You mentioned e-blasts and a number of other things.

Ashley Fletcher:
Yeah. So we utilize Monday as a software for a lot of our projects. So I’ll come in most times, I know have an idea of what I’ll be working on, so just prioritizing those projects based on their deadlines. Sometimes I’m checking in with the marketing team, so our design team is kind of underneath the marketing team, so checking in with those requests, asking any questions that I need, kind of gathering that designer brief of, okay, here’s all the components to what I’ll be creating and what I need. And then I’ll just go in from there. A lot of our materials, because book build is pretty established, some things have been created already. So I might be going in and tweaking an already existing design. I might be creating something from scratch. Like, I designed some exterior and interior graphics for the Highlight Center in Houston. If you’re in Houston, check it out. It’s very nice. Lovely work. I’m really proud of myself for that. So I spent a lot of time sketching, carving out time in the day for research. Also, again, asking those different questions with the marketing team of things that they needed that I may not have gotten in the brief in ideation sharing that with my creative director and that process of ideation and revisions. So that’s usually what it’s like. They also have something called activated. And so they have various events throughout the office. One day we had, like, boba tea. They may have I think they have a Pride event. Actually, today they have a Pride event. So different various different events to get you engaged with other people in the office and the other tenants that are in the office. And Google is in their office as well. So it’s a cool way to engage and break up the work day. So, yeah, that’s usually what I’m doing, attending some of those events during lunchtime, getting some free ice cream, some free boba tea, and going back to the office and zoning into some of the deadlines that I have.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, honestly, as you describe it, it sounds like the ideal type of sort of design position for where you’re at in your career. It’s open to the point that you can sort of work hybrid, but then you’re also working on all of these different types of things, so you’re stretching your skills in other ways. And the team is nice and there’s like, fun, engaging activities for you all to do. That’s good. That’s great. Actually, I wish a lot of designers kind of had that type of set up because it’s really fun. I mean, it makes work fun in that aspect because you’re not so keyed into the work that you can’t sort of know what else is going on in the company with other people and stuff like that.

Ashley Fletcher:
Right. And I think sometimes for people, that can be the difference from in house or being at an agency. One of my coworkers had shared agency life. It can be a lot more hectic depending on where you are. So definitely want to consider that when you’re looking for places to work.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, before Brookfield, you were doing freelance design. Actually, you’re still doing freelance design. You mentioned that a bit earlier. Talk to me about that. Like, how do you juggle that freelance work with doing your nine to five work?

Ashley Fletcher:
Yeah, so when I first started at Brookfield, I had a freelance project that I was doing. And honestly, it was a little hectic because I was adjusting so much to being back in the office. I went from grad school right into freelance, and that was also during COVID So I graduated in 2020 in the height of COVID So it was a lot of different things were happening within the work industry. So now I’m able to kind of set some time aside and really just being intentional about my timing. Weekends, I’m usually working, and that’s okay. Sometimes I take a break, I’ll spend one day kind of doing letting things fly. So if I want to go hang out with my family or get pizza, whatever, just go outside and take a break. I definitely do that. I prioritize that, especially nowadays, that’s kind of priority of getting that break. But definitely timing. Like, I’ll come home some days if I have my art shop. So I’m doing a lot of work for that. I’ll take a little nap, maybe I’ll get home maybe around seven or something like that, take a nap, get things back started, maybe around ten. And depending on how my creative flow goes, I’ll end around one. Or I might keep going until I’m like, okay, you need to take a little nap before work. So it definitely depends on the project. It depends on how I’m feeling, my well being and everything. So if I’m tired, I’ll try to push myself just a little, but I got to get my rest because you create much better when you’re rested. So it’s been an interesting time. I’ll say adjusting with nine to five in freelance, but again, scheduling and being intentional with my time. So if that means I have to put my phone in a drawer so I’m not checking social media or being distracted by notifications, I’ll do that. Yeah, it’s very helpful.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. One thing with trying to make that balance is, I mean, of course you have your regular nine to five work. That’s the stuff you know you’re going to do, because that’s probably the most money that you’re making. You have your health benefits tied to that, so you don’t want to lose that. But I remember those days of trying to balance freelance at nine to five, and it’s not an easy thing to do, especially if your freelance work starts to outpace your nine to five work. Yeah, I remember when I was starting to do that, honestly, back then they called it teleworking, this was like 2007 or something. And they would say, oh yeah, you could work three days in the office, two days out. But then the two days that I wasn’t in the office, I never did work. I only did freelance work because when I’m at home, I’m thinking, okay, I can sort of juggle doing both. Because your mindset is just different in an office, I find, than when you’re doing it at home. At home, and this is pre-pandemic, of course, but at home you’re around your creature comforts: your bed, your couch, all this sort of stuff. And it’s tougher to kind of get into that work mindset. I remember even at the beginning of the pandemic when I interviewed folks just kind of asking them, how are you getting into work mode at home? Because it can be so difficult to do that. It took me quite a while to be able to juggle that, to be able to switch off work brain and go to freelance brain and try to balance those things. It can be pretty tough.

Ashley Fletcher:
Yeah, it can. And I think as designers, we’re constantly creating, we’re constantly problem solving. And I don’t think we give ourselves enough grace sometimes of multitasking with that. When you’re always problem solving, it can definitely create burnout. That’s why, again, for me, I’m going to take a nap. If it’s one thing that I’m going to do, I’m going to take a nap. And sometimes that helps and sometimes it doesn’t. In between working and starting with all my freelance projects, I think too, being honest with yourself about your time and also with the client. For me, I was working on a project, I started a project right before I found out that I was going to be hired for this new position. So I had to let the client know, hey, my schedule is definitely going to change. Some days I wasn’t able to check my email at all and having to pace that time, or some days I would be working really late and so I’m scheduling emails and check ins with clients to go out the next morning. And then not to mention for me, I had a lot of family stuff happening at that time too, like dealing with aging grandparents and family members that can also wait into your time. So I just had to be honest with myself and say, hey, okay, this is where we are. And also therapy. I have an amazing therapist. She’s like, you should spend some time not freelancing and take a break. This month I think is like the first month that I’m not actively seeking freelance work and hopefully that I’ll be able to shift a little bit back because there’s definitely a lot of projects that I’m interested in doing. But yeah, she told me, she said you need to take a break. You need to go ahead and just enjoy this new chapter a little bit before you continue and get back into work.

Maurice Cherry:
If I can give just a tiny bit of advice there. If you get to the point where you can sort of see that you have enough money to hire an assistant, like a virtual assistant, do it. Do it and just have them do basic tasks like responding back to messages. Like for me, responding back to emails timely was always the thing that kind of caught me up. It was like, oh, I forgot to send this. And I sent maybe something a little too late. If you can afford it, do that to handle the smaller mundane tasks that you can sort of take off your plate so you can then focus on the creative work.

Ashley Fletcher:
Yeah, I suck at that. I definitely agree. And I can’t wait until I have evolved. The practice has evolved and I can do that as well.

Maurice Cherry:
So I want to learn more about you and about your journey as a designer. So we’re going to kind of take things back to the beginning. Are you originally from the DC area?

Ashley Fletcher:
Yes, so I’ve lived in Maryland pretty much all of my life. So yeah, I’m Maryland through and through. Went to high school in Maryland, went to college two times in Maryland, so yeah, Maryland, DC native.

Maurice Cherry:
Did you grow up around a lot of design and everything as a kid?

Ashley Fletcher:
No, I didn’t. But I grew up around a lot of entrepreneurs and creatives. So my mom is a hairstylist, and I think sometimes we don’t give our hairstylists the credit they deserve as far as being creative. What she does and creates with hair is amazing, from cuts to color. So seeing her seeing her as an entrepreneur, navigating having owning her own salon. My father also was in the carpentry industry when seeing him navigate and just creating things with his hands. My grandfather is a fine artist. He’s also a jack of all trades from cooking. There’s so many paintings in my grandparents house that he’s created. He’s upholstered chairs. So I’ve been surrounded by creatives without really knowing. And a lot of the times that I spent in my mom’s hair salon was looking through Black hair magazines and publications. So I spent a lot of time unknowingly around ingesting design without really knowing.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, hairstylist. And I would say also, like, seamstresses. I’m gendering it by saying that, but, like, people that can sew and everything. Yeah, top tier people really like underestimate, I think especially probably hair more than than sewing. But, like, yeah, everyone’s got to get a cut. Everybody has to get their hair done at some point for something that’s a very lucrative I mean, it’s a lucrative thing, but it is something I think we can kind of in our community probably take for granted a little bit.

Ashley Fletcher:
And the community that they bring, especially Black hair salons and barbershops like, it’s a sense of community there. They’re using our hair in a sense, it’s like a bleak canvas. You might have some different scalp situations going on or different things with hair loss and all types of things, and they’re supposed to create something out of that. You can’t get much more creative than that. And it’s a lot of risk with what they do. They cut your hair wrong or you don’t like what they do, you might lose a client. It might create a tough relationship. So my hats are off to what they’re able to do day in and day out, using their hands.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you mentioned going to college in Maryland. You went to Salisbury University, and you majored in graphic design. Since you kind of grew up around all these creatives and entrepreneurs, did you already sort of have a sense like, this is what I want to study, or did you kind of fall into that once you got to Salisbury?

Ashley Fletcher:
So I fell into that after I got to Salisbury. So in high school, I took a yearbook course for juniors my junior and senior year. And my junior year, I went to yearbook camp, and I was introduced to the process of design thinking again, I was collaging and really looking into fashion magazines. Like, I loved Vogue, all of those magazines, the models, just the visual storytelling from that. And so your book introduced me to this thing, like, oh, you can create a design and a publication on this program, and it’s printed and what the print process looks like. And I really loved it, and I thrived in it from the interviewing, interviewing different people from high school, and photography. I really loved photography. I took a photography course in high school, so by the time I got to college, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I was like, well, I kind of like marketing, so I’ll just do business administration with the track in marketing, I realized there’s a bunch of accounting courses and a lot of math involved. I said, okay, let’s be real with yourself here about what you really want to do. And so I started to think about how much joy your book brought me, like being able to wear these multiple hats of one day you’re shooting and take capturing moments, and then the other day you’re dabbling in copywriting and creating captions, and then you’re dabbling in creative layout and design. And I called my mom and I said, I think I want to design magazines. I don’t know what it is who does that, but I think that’s what I want to do. And so I looked through the mass head of some magazine, I don’t remember which one, and I found the title graphic designer, and I had a title to put with the thing. I checked if my school was offering any art or graphic design, and they did. That’s some alignment right there, because it could have been a whole different situation. And I switched. I was like, if I’m going to spend four years learning, I want to learn something that I’m interested in. So I switched to graphic design with the minor in marketing.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. How was your time in general there at Salisbury? Like, once you switched over, do you find that they really kind of prepared you as a designer?

Ashley Fletcher:
I don’t think…so. I went to Salisbury — it’s a PWI — and their population at the university of Black students was pretty small at the time. So of course you have the nuances with that. And then I started in 2010. For me, the design industry was completely different than where it grew. By 2014, in graphic design one, we were sketching things on paper. Then we had to color it with colored pencil, then put it into using the light box, and then putting it into design software. So curriculum was very early on of those kind of foundational processes. So by the time I graduated, because for me, I felt like there was a lack of mentorship in the curriculum and preparedness. I don’t think I was prepared at all. I think sometimes with certain schools and structure and curriculum, if you’re not a stellar designer off the bat, some people might not nurture their skill set or say, hey, let me help you find your way. And there was actually an incident that I had with an instructor that he had said something really racist towards another student for a design. We had a design critique and it was just like really off putting. And so when you have those different nuances and situations and you can’t connect necessarily with your instructors, it’s very hard then to rely on them for help and for them to see you as just a student that is trying to just make a living out of this. And also, I think that the pace of Salisbury is a different pace from DC that I’ve experienced. And so people are enjoying life out there. It’s not too far from the beach, they’re chilling. It’s a very chill vibe there compared to how the design industry is now. So all of those things I left school not really knowing where to go, what I wanted to do in design. Again, at that time, there were a lot of traditional forms of design. Digital design wasn’t really a thing. Yeah, so I graduated and I worked at a beauty shop cosmopros that my mom frequented for all of her hair supply needs. I worked there for a few months. I was a winter graduate, so I worked there for a few months, and then I got a job as an administrative assistant at a medical association. So, yeah, definitely didn’t get a job right off the bat or really know what design looked for me outside of what I was learning in undergrad. I will say though, I did gain a lot of experience. I did designer for a lot of the organizations on campus, like MPHC and some of the other organizations that I was a part of. So I was able to create and explore what my design practice looked like, what I wanted to create outside of classroom assignments. And I think that was really beneficial to where I am now.

Maurice Cherry:
I was just talking for the last episode I did was with Kevin Tufts. He’s a product designer at Facebook. And we were sort of talking about kind of the time period that you were in school, like early two thousand and ten s and how it felt like design really took this abrupt shift into digital and product at a time when I think a lot of us prior to that were learning about more traditional design, like graphic design, visual design, web design. And then overnight that became product designer, UX designer. And you’re like, wait a minute, what? You thought you knew one thing and now your title is different and sometimes it’s the same skills, sometimes it’s not. Like, I can imagine. Certainly if you’re in school at that time, like, yeah, you get out and you thought you were learning one thing, and then you try to look for jobs and everything is different than what you thought it would be from what you learned. Yeah, I can certainly empathize with that. That whole time period was I’d. Say probably from 2006 to 2012. There were so many changes happening in design because of technology. Also, the browser was becoming more of a tool that you could use for design and less of just a presentation for a design. Right. Like, you could now do things in the browser and you have new tools coming out. I think this was around the time I want to say this was around the time, like Sketch or maybe like another web based tool really started to come about. I don’t know if Figma was around.

Ashley Fletcher:
Back then, but yeah, I think Envision was one.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, yeah, InVision. Yeah. So you had this kind of shift from the Adobe style of these extremely expensive, extremely complicated pieces of software because they started to go subscription based. And then in response to that, people are like, well, we’re just going to make something that you can do in the browser. I don’t know if Sketch was in the browser, but it was just such an interesting time because the tools were changing from what industry standards used to be to these new things. And again, the titles were also changing. I feel like when I look back at that, that was a very tumultuous time in design that it was hard to keep up with what was going on because innovation was happening so quickly.

Ashley Fletcher:
Yeah, and graduating in the midst of that when you still are trying to learn this new thing, like four years, learning something that goes by really fast, and depending on your curriculum, depending on who your professors are and their skill set, their skill set could still be in a certain decade of design. And now they’re like, okay, everybody, let’s rush. I remember buying my first Adobe software when you had to buy the CDs and you couldn’t share the CD code or whatever the little access code was to now, like subscription. I remember how much of a big deal that was and just the shift that was coming. It was really tough. By the time I got to MICA, it kind of advanced, too. And so I was with a whole new cohort of people that were ready to create design in this new way. And so I feel like Salisbury was really an exploration of what design is like, a really rough exploration of, okay, these are these different tools. This is layout. But MICA really set the foundation and kind of solidified it for me. Yeah, that 2010 period. Now, even now, we have content creation now, which also shifts the media in which we’re designing for. And so, I mean, Apple is going to come out. They just dropped their latest thing, and that’s going to shift the medium in which we’re creating and the scale and the size and the resolution, all of that matters when you’re thinking about and understanding the tools that you have now.

Maurice Cherry:
During that time that you were like you said, you’re working in this beauty supply shop. You were working as an admin assistant. How were you feeling about doing that kind of work? Like you mentioned before, going to Salisbury, and you spend all this time studying for your craft, and then you get out and you’re not working in what you studied. How did that time make you feel?

Ashley Fletcher:
It was definitely an adjustment process. I think also dealing with I talk about this a lot amongst my friends and family, like post grad depression as an undergrad, when you go from being in this community of people and then you move away from that community of people, that’s such a shift. Like your friends. Like, I had a best friend, she lived in New York, so I didn’t get to see her unless we came to see each other. So that sense of community for me, shifting in who you are when you grow and you’re living on your own in a town or in college, that’s a completely different person from when you were living with your mom in high school. And so going back to that, there’s all these different changes. But I think I knew that what I was doing was just a placement of like I knew that my career was going to be bigger than what it currently was. So having that administrative assistant role, I used to always when computers first came out, my grandma, she had a computer, I would always play like, oh, I’m working at an office, or things like that. And I think it works for the logical I’m a Virgo, so really scheduling, organizing those things I love, I kind of thrive in. So it wasn’t a miserable place. It was also a great company to work for. Again, it was a small organization, but they had just a lot of different things to cultivate community there. And I was able to I was in that role for a year, and then I moved to their meetings department because I guess I was doing so well in assisting with the events that they did. It wasn’t miserable. I always knew even before graduating Salisbury, I was like, okay, I’m graduating. Here are my options. I could go back to school and go to grad school, and I kind of knew a little bit about Mica. And so by the time I had that full time administrative assistant position and then into meetings, I was like, okay, you’ve been here for I think it might have been year two. Now, what are we doing next? Because you can get complacent here or you can take that leap. Just like you took the leap from business administration, which felt comfortable, to going for design. I told myself, you didn’t take that leap just to give up or to just kind of settle for this current position. So I applied to go to MICA and I got accepted.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Tell me about what that was like. I’m pretty sure that was much different from Salisbury?

Ashley Fletcher:
Yes, it was much different. First of all, I must say that my love for Baltimore, oh, my goodness, it’s such a beautiful place to be, a beautiful community to grow. Of course, part of my time was spent in what they call like the MICA bubble. So the bubble of the art community in school there, but during, just constantly inspired by other creatives. That was something that I loved and really propelled my understanding of what a creative practice looks like and how other people are creating. So it was beautiful. I did a post Baccular program, and then I did the MFA program. So when I first applied, I applied to both, but I was accepted into the post baccalaureate. That program was phenomenal. I grew so much. It was just one year, but I grew so much in that one year of my understanding for design. I think by that time, I was a much different person than when I first graduated. I had started to really focus on mindfulness practices, and I was being mindful of the soaps that I was using and the food that I was putting in my body, and also having this awakening of learning about African American and Black artists and designer. And so I learned about Emory Douglas there. He spoke at Bowie [State] University. And I got to meet him and just really teaching myself the history that I wanted to learn, because I was, again, very intentional about that. It’s like, okay, I have this skill set. I know what this is. I’ve looked through Meggs Book of Graphic Design history, and I don’t see any Black people, but I know we’re here. I know I’m not the first graphic designer, so let me do the work to teach myself. And I think a lot of us do that. We have to teach ourselves a lot of our own history. Thankfully, now things are very different. You could pull up TikTok and you have a whole video on designers, fashion designers, whatever you want to learn, you can learn. So, yeah, it was a beautiful time of exploration, being around other designers that had different backgrounds, like a lot of people had. They were science majors. Not everyone had a design background. And so we all brought different perspectives to what we were creating, and it was really good. The curriculum also was just it’s a night and day from my time at Salisbury and my time at MICA. Again, the design industry was very different at that time, too. I started MICA in 2017. So again, two different eras of design. I’m forever grateful for that experience. I’ve blossomed so much and added so many things like motion graphic to my skill set. I remember there was a workshop that we would have different workshops throughout the year. And we had a workshop on after Effects. And I was like, what is this? I thought I got away from math. What are all these numbers. What is this interface? I was completely intimidated. But by the time I started the MFA program, I took a motion graphics class because I realized these target commercials. This is motion graphics. This is how you can use design as a tool in a different medium. It doesn’t have to be traditional print or anything like that. So I wanted to learn how to do that. I wanted to add that to my toolkit and my skill set. I spent a lot of time that first year learning about publication design and these methods that I was drawn to that drew me to design in the first place. Salisbury, at the time that I was there, I don’t think that we learned a lot about the foundation of layout design. And so I was able to get that at MICA. So I spent a lot of that first year exploring that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I mean, it really sounds like MICA just kind of re energized you as a designer and kind of put you on the track that you needed to be on to get to where you’re at now.

Ashley Fletcher:
Yeah, it definitely did. And also the amount of resources that they have. Their career development. Yeah, the career development department, they are super helpful. They help you find jobs, they help you cultivate your portfolio, build your portfolio. They have so many tools of here’s how to interview that they update and keep updated. And so having access to those resources as a student and as a graduate and an alumni, it’s so beneficial. We need those tools, especially, again, as Black designers, where we may not have representation or we may not see ourselves in certain industries. And I think we deserve mentors. We need mentors at every step of the journey. And so they were really a lifeline for a lot of those things of preparing for your portfolio, your resume. They have full templates that they update in different scenarios. And those things I didn’t receive from Salisbury at the time, from my program or the university. I can’t say that those things are whether they’ve improved or not, but yet having access to those various resources. Baltimore is also just a great community for artists. There’s so many different resources and grants. And I had exhibited my work at my first art exhibition. I never would have thought, like, oh, I can show my work here. I don’t have to create art. It doesn’t have to be on a canvas. I don’t have to pull out a paintbrush, but I can actually showcase my work. That was also the first time I ever sold artwork. So I was introduced to new forms of art and showcase my art in different ways. They have something called the Is. It the art market? Mica art market every year. And so this big thing around holiday season, the Illustrator department, they have this big set up so students can sell their artwork. There’s different vendors from the community as well as alumni. So I created and sold my first art print and stickers there. And so that was kind of the birth of the art shop that I have today. So, yeah, getting introduced to all of these different means of showcasing your design and your art, it was really a great time.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. Yeah. Sounds like MICA was transformative in many ways for you.

Ashley Fletcher:
Yeah, it definitely was.

Maurice Cherry:
You mentioned resources, and we sort of had this conversation a bit before we started recording, and I was like, let’s save it for the show. Another resource that is available to us as designers are design organizations. There’s AIGA. There’s the Graphic Artists Guild, IDSA, et cetera. What are your thoughts on sort of design organizations now? Because you’ve said before again, this is before we started recording, but AIGA DC, for example, was a big help for you.

Ashley Fletcher:
Yeah. So in between kind of that shift before MICA and while working as an administrative assistant, the meetings, I was like, okay, I need to be around the people. Where are the designers? I will say give credit to Salisbury. One of my professors was like, you guys need to join this. You need to join AIGA. It’s only however the membership was, it’s only $5. You need to join. You need to join. And in my mind, I’m like, well, I don’t see Black people in this class. I don’t even know if I want to enter another space where I’m like, okay, here we go. That kind of thing also very much an introvert, so maybe my introvert self was like, speaking of, oh, no, I have to go talk to more people or join a group with other people. But that later came back because I listened to revision podcast. Thank you very much. Thank you. Because you guys definitely found me and helped me to just figure out where to go. And I think one episode you were talking about AIGA, and that is a resource. And so I was like, okay, let me look this up. And so I went to one of their events, and I think AIGA DC has been a great resource for me. I was able to apply for a scholarship while at Mica. They also have various events like DC Design Week. And so I was able to do a pop up shop with them, with my art shop. So I think depending on where you are, the different chapters might be a little different. But AIGA DC has definitely been an amazing resource for me to find my way, figure out what places I could work, what different career paths other people had and their journey, and just connecting with other designers. Also, more recently, I was a part of Designers Ignite, and so that was during COVID but it was an opportunity for designers to Black Designers Ignite. It was an opportunity for us to talk about our work, our progress, where we are, and for us to get paid for speaking. So that was an amazing resource. I think COVID and post COVID brought about a lot of different design organizations that I found that I could connect with versus before, it was just AIGA. DC, or AIGA in general, not even DC. And that felt a little bit more corporate for me at the time. Again, the design industry had a major shift early on. Some of the things and practices, they seemed a little, to me, outdated, a little closed off. But as time has progressed, I think AIGA has been a great resource also. It’s an online resource, but brand new website by under consideration. I think that’s the proper umbrella, but they’re a great resource for anything branding, branding, identity, visual identity. So different online resources and communities I’ve been able to connect with. So if I didn’t get it from one organization, then I was able to kind of navigate to some of these other organizations to find the resources and just to connect with the people that I felt that represented me.

Maurice Cherry:
For people that have listened to the show, I’ve kind of mentioned AIGA a lot over the years. I’ve volunteered for them, things of that nature. I really do wonder in general, about the role of design organizations for the modern designer. I remember this might have been, I guess, maybe about right before the pandemic. I know that there was a lot of talk with AIGA about them not really considering UX designers as designers, and I feel like I think the organization started to come around on that. But there have been a lot of topics recently regarding AI art and sort of the encroachment of technology into the creative space and what that means for creatives in general. And I’ve seen honestly, a lot of our modern design organizations have been kind of silent about it. I think I might have heard the most from the graphic artist guild. I know that they do some regular events, but, like, AIGA has been silent. I don’t know if IDSA has said anything or any other types of organizations. I would love to see our designer orgs in general, just be more proactive and talk about the things that are happening in the industry instead of just taking dues and maybe having a monthly webinar. And this is no shade to anyone in particular, but I would love to see them just be more in the community and proactive in that way, because it sort of feels like, especially with AIGA now, them I will single out. I remember when I was volunteering with them and there was this big push for us to get more Black students, really more HBCUs involved with student groups. And it’s like, yeah, but the parameters around a student group might not apply for HBCU, because for a student group, you have to, I think, be within 50 miles of a regular chapter. You have to have at least ten students that are studying design. And then I think a professor has to be or had to be, like, a sustaining member, like one of the top membership levels. If you did those three things, then you could have a student chapter. And I’m like, well, that might be prohibitive for an HBCU that’s like, not near a city or there’s not ten students in the program.

Ashley Fletcher:
There might be two, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Like, it’s prohibitive. And so we were trying to talk about getting them to sort of lessen that for HBCUs, and then they were like, well, if we do it for them, we have to do it for everybody. And I’m like, well, do it for everybody. But I mean, the reason that they didn’t want to do that is because it boils down to finance. If they know each student group is getting at least a minimum amount of money that goes back into the organization, all of that stuff, it’s all somewhat self sustaining in that way. So in that respect, I don’t know if our design orgs are equipped at the moment to really do that. I would love to just see more of that in general, because I don’t really see a lot of it now. I feel like they’re being pretty quiet and reactionary instead of really like, speaking up about how this affects our industry, how sort of these things affect our industry.

Ashley Fletcher:
Yeah, I think we definitely because they hold this title of being a guild for graphic designers and artists, we also expect them to lead some of the different changes and to kind of push to the conversation, to push the changes to advocate for us, especially when it comes to AI. I would have thought with Photoshop releasing this new AI feature that’s going crazy, that they would connect, the two organizations would come together and say, okay, here’s what we have on this. Here’s what this tool is doing, here’s the information, or here’s the discussion that we can have around this. Maybe they are having it. And I don’t know, because, again, I’m not within these organizations, but we definitely want and we talked a lot about the shift that happened in design from 2010 to 2017 or even 2014. I think being in the midst of that and helping designers, maybe it’s a thing of understanding the core audience. A lot of young designers rely on them or may go to them to help them in these different moments of their career. And so if these practices and things are outdated, you’re going to lose those people that really do at the core need your assistance. Like, HBCUs should for sure be supported, especially given how eager a lot of the companies were to highlight Black stories and Black voices and oh, now we have all of these different initiatives to support HBCUs. Well, we want to see that applied across the board, and not just for a short period of time, because we already know that we’re dealing with so many barriers and checklist, stipulations, whatever when it comes to even getting hired for a job. Because let’s be real. Like, the hiring process and those practices are still very challenging. And so if our own organizations that are for us aren’t helping us get over that hump, aren’t leading the conversation, aren’t pushing and encouraging these companies and HR hiring practices to change and shift as design is changing and shifting, what’s really the purpose? What’s going on? I think COVID thankfully shook a lot of organizations and things and practices up. And I think companies need to be doing those checks and balances on a regular basis, not just every decade or natural disaster. We need to be doing these things on a regular basis and having these conversations so that your organization can sustain itself and the culture of design and where it’s headed. Yeah. AI. I don’t even want to talk about it. Don’t understand just the overall checks and balances. I have not used the Photoshop tool. I will use the Lasso and the pencil tool till I can’t no more before I begin swapping out backgrounds with different stuff, until I don’t know. I don’t fully trust it right now. But just like with other things, we evolve and we grow. So I’ll look forward to the day that I actually test out that tool.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I haven’t downloaded I think it’s like a beta version of Photoshop that allows you to kind of it’s similar, I guess, to content aware fill, where it will automatically generate part of an image or something. I haven’t done that yet, but we’re certainly seeing AI filters being a big thing if you’re on TikTok, if you’re on Instagram. I mean, even augmented reality stuff, I guess, kind of maybe ties into this a little bit, like stuff that Snap has done with filters and lenses and stuff. But it would be good to hear from our design organizations. They’re just kind of thoughts about this, even if it’s like drawing a line in the sand or something. Because I know that it’s only going to be a matter of time where people who are not designers will generate AI art things and then try to take them to designers for edits or changes or something. And I feel like there needs to be an industry wide line in the sand that says, we are not doing this. Absolutely not. Like, it needs to be something that is across the board. Yeah.

Ashley Fletcher:
In a way to protect your intellectual property as a designer. I think there was one app that everyone was using and it was putting together all these really cool pictures on Instagram. It’s like, okay, but where are these images being pulled from? It’s being pulled from the Internet. Somebody had to create bits and pieces and is now creating this beautiful picture of you. So I think the music industry has started to set some parameters around AI because they’re using Drake’s voice on a Kanye beat.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, yeah, I remember that.

Ashley Fletcher:
Things like that are happening. So, yeah, we also, as designers, want to need to start having those conversations too, especially when it comes to our intellectual property and how our work can be protected and what our new design process will look like when we are working within AI generated art.

Maurice Cherry:
Well said. Well said. What advice would you give to someone out there who’s kind of hearing your story and they want to kind of follow in your footsteps? What would you tell them first?

Ashley Fletcher:
I definitely say take the risk. I think through these different moments of my journey, it really resulted in me taking a risk. Like just going with it, going with what I wanted. Sometimes I would say, oh, no, let’s play safe and let’s try this. No, go for what you want if you want to, especially in the age that we are in now where you can directly reach people. I know people say this all the time, but it really does matter. Your moment can change from night and day just by you sharing your work, sharing your design process. It can be an ugly design process. It doesn’t have to be the final product. But sharing how you think through creatively different works and things like that can be the next step that you need to elevate and pivot your career and your dream career, or your dream creative journey. Not even just a career, but your dream creative practice. So I think definitely go for it. If there’s something that you want to do, if it’s something in your heart that you’re like, oh, I don’t know how you’re putting all these limitations, just do it. Just take the first step, because I promise you, everything else is going to fall in line. I would have never thought that by me switching my major and being in love with yearbook and magazines would now lead to where my career is now. Everything that I do is fulfilling it’s in alignment with who I am. So really just take that risk. And also knowing again what your values are and what kind of work you want to be creating, what type of clients you want to work with, and manifesting that. Speaking of into existence also, I think trusting that journey and process and being okay, that it can get a little messy. It can not be like, for me, I was out of work for a very long time when this just this past year, to the point where I was like, I don’t know, I was kind of burnt out a little bit from freelance. I don’t know what I’m doing. I really don’t want to work full time, but just not really knowing what that next step was. But it’s working out for me. Things aligned. I got a job that I really loved. I love there’s so many different things that I prayed on and manifested on and just really started to be intentional about the things that I was asking for and not playing. Don’t play yourself small. You got to think big. You really do. Like, whatever you want to achieve in this lifetime, if it’s aligned, it’ll definitely work out. So just really take those steps. I think also asking not being too afraid to ask for help, sometimes I forget that, hey, it’s okay to go and reach out to this person. If you don’t know how to do this thing, like using that network and community that you have because you have it for a reason, whether it’s an old teacher or an old classmate, you just never know. Don’t be afraid to ask for that help, especially with someone who didn’t necessarily have mentors or someone consistently guiding me through this creative process. I’ve just been like, okay, I want to do this. Let me try it. Let’s see how it works. Like, I want to create an art shop. I don’t know what’s going to happen, what’s going to come of it. Well, now I’m in four stores and I’ve sold my artwork internationally. There’s so many different things of taking that leap, but also asking for help along that journey, like, don’t be afraid to do it. The worst that anybody can say is, no, can’t help you, or I don’t know the answer. That’s it, I think. Yeah, just really taking that leap. Also getting your creative practice in order in your creative process, I think that’s something that I didn’t realize until later on down the line, especially after being in Mica and the rigor that is grad school and being diagnosed with breast cancer. I think I was like, oh my gosh, did I work myself to the bone? What is going on? How was I not paying attention to my body during this time? And so really figuring out what creative practice works for you, what that looks like. Fletcher it’s taking a day off throughout the week to go explore, to go be in nature, to go on a road trip or a trip somewhere, if you can just invigorate your creativity, taking rest from working in general just so that you can take care of your well being and your health. The nature in which graphic design lives in, it’s a fast paced environment where people essentially want you to be robots of just working around the clock and churning out these designs. And not everybody can work in that type of creative environment. So really figuring out how you thrive creatively, what things work for you, whether it be your meal prepping to your intake of media and content, what things are really going to get you in a good space to create and inspire you. That’s something that I think is really important for us to have. We can be burnt out so quickly of just always consuming media, content, everything. And then we do that. Within our own practice. Sometimes you don’t need to research for 3 hours with design. Sometimes just give yourself ten minutes to find what you need and be intentional and then go and create. Go and sketch it out. Yeah, I think that it’s really important. Design School doesn’t teach you about the business of design. So if you want to be your own boss, if you want to dabble in different things, you might not get that from Design School. So you’re definitely going to have to teach yourself some of those practices. And so again, having a creative process in place that keeps you a little structured, having the schedule that, you know, okay, today I’m just going to do administrative task. I’m just going to dedicate this day to responding to emails and then you have the rest of the week to create. Coming up with that kind of structure I think really helps. I found myself during my freelance journey getting off the rails a little bit, like I was spending too much time at home. I was burnt out because I was working around the clock, then trying to find more work and trying to update my portfolio, all these things. So it really helps to have that structure a little bit.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow, that’s tremendous advice. I almost feel like we can sort of wrap it up here. I don’t feel like there’s anything I can say that can trump that, but I mean…just to wrap it up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, about your work? Like, where can they follow you online?

Ashley Fletcher:
Yeah. So I’m online. If you want to follow me on social media, you can follow me on Instagram and TikTok and Twitter at @digitrillnana. It should be linked in the podcast. But that’s D-I-G-I-T-R-I-L-L-N-A-N-A. Think Foxy Brown “Ill Na Na” and digital design. That’s what that is. Okay, of course, online. My portfolio is ashley-fletcher.com, and then my art shop is digitrillnana.com. If you are in the DMV area, you can find me in local shops. I’m at the MICA Bookstore in Baltimore, Maryland. I’m also at Sankofa. You can find some of my art goods in Sankofa in DC on Georgia Avenue.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. Ashley Fletcher, thank you so much for coming on the show. You don’t know this. You kind of inadvertently spoke a word into me with all that advice. That was some stuff I personally also needed to hear, and I hope that certainly the listeners will get that too. But your whole story of kind of persevering through not just kind of getting sidetracked in terms of your path to being a designer, but your perseverance and your creativity and your drive and your passion for this just completely shines through in everything that you’ve said. And I’m so excited to see where you go next in the future. It’s always exciting for me when I do this show and I talk to people that are so energetic and dynamic about the field of design and the work that they do, and I really feel like you’re an excellent representation for that. Keep shining, keep doing what you’re doing. And thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Ashley Fletcher:
Thank you so much. You just spoke life into me, so I appreciate it if you are listening to this podcast. Keep going, guys. Like, we got this. I’m so grateful to just have this opportunity to connect and just share some wisdom in a space that once inspired me. So Maurice, thank you so much for all that you do. Yeah, thank you.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit is a strategy and design firm committed to designing a more inclusive and equitable world. They are always looking to expand their roster of freelance design consultants in the U.S., particularly brand strategists, copywriters, graphic designers and Web developers.

If you know how to deliver excellent creative work reliably, and enjoy the autonomy of a virtual-based, freelance life (with no non-competes), check them out at brevityandwit.com.

Kevin Tufts

Kevin Tufts is the real deal when it comes to tech and design. With over two decades of experience working across a number of companies in the Bay Area — Lyft, SendGrid, and Twilio, to name a few — he’s now a product designer at Meta working on their Creation team. So believe me, we had a LOT to talk about.

Our conversation begin with a look at the current climate inside Meta (pre-Threads, FYI), and he gave some thoughts on where the company is going as it approaches its 20th anniversary. From there, Kevin talked about his path to becoming a product designer, and we took a trip down memory lane recalling the early days of web design and what it was like working during such rapidly changing times. He also spoke on what he loves about product design now, and how he wants to help the next generation of designers through mentorship.

Kevin’s secrets to success are simple: seize opportunities for growth where you can, embrace collaboration, and remain flexible. Now that’s something I think we could all take to heart!

Interview Transcript

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

Kevin Tufts:
I am Kevin Tufts. I am a product designer currently working at Facebook, and I live in San Jose, California.

Maurice Cherry:
How has this year been treating you so far?

Kevin Tufts:
I’d say personally the year has been pretty good. I am grateful to be employed and obviously you’ve seen in the media that Meta has had several waves of layoffs, unfortunately. So all things considered, I feel pretty grateful. Feel pretty good, but a little anxious. I’m human, so it’s definitely some wild times not just within Meta, but the tech ecosystem as a whole.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Do you have any plans for the summer?

Kevin Tufts:
Plans for the summer are going to be pretty chill. So one of my side hobbies is I’m an avid cyclist, so I’ve been doing bike events from beginning of April up until just a couple of weeks ago. So this summer I think I’m just going to chill, stay local and got some family stuff happening. I got some folks coming into town, so should be hopefully a quiet summer.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. That’s good. Is there anything in particular that you want to try to accomplish this year, like for the rest of the year?

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah, there’s some kind of like more career-oriented things that I want to sharpen up on and that’s with mentorship and maybe doing more design oriented workshops where I’m teaching kids from different backgrounds but mostly from people of color how to use design tools and how to get into product design as a whole.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I think that’s a really good thing, especially now when I’d say I feel like over the past two or three years we’ve started to see a lot of the younger generation, like Gen Z and younger are starting to look at tech more as a viable opportunity for them to go into for their career. So that’s a good thing. I hope you get a chance to do that.

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah, looking forward to there’s a couple of avenues and programs that I’ve been working with here in the Bay Area that’s been awesome. So yeah, there’s some big things on the horizon for me personally.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Talk to me about the work that you’re doing at Facebook. Like, are you working on a specific product there?

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah, mostly working within what’s called Creation, and that’s the organization that handles a lot of our creation tools like Reels and Stories. And so for me, a lot of my work swirls around Stories, so I get to touch everything from the gallery to the Stories composer, just the experience itself, which has been pretty cool. And then I also work across Facebook, Lite, iOS and Android. And I call that out because most people that are listening, that are here within the US. May not be aware that we have such an app called Facebook Lite, but it’s a stripped-down version of the app that runs on Android and it’s a popular app in kind of like more developing nations.

Maurice Cherry:
So like if you’re using, say, like, I know there’s this terminology of a dumb phone as opposed to like a smartphone, but like a phone that’s not maybe always connected to the Internet.

Kevin Tufts:
You got it. Yeah, you nailed it. So there’s different flavors of that where you can go into low data mode, and then you’ll see almost just a very plain Jane. Just a few images and some text, just a stripped down version of the core app.

Maurice Cherry:
What does your team look like that you work with?

Kevin Tufts:
Team is pretty big, so within the organization there are different pillars that handle different aspects of the experience. I’m on the Creation Growth team, so we run tons of design experiments. It’s a really fast moving, fast paced.org, can be challenging, but really fun because you get to try all types of different unique design directions that you wouldn’t necessarily try in other product spaces around Meta. And we have quite a number of designers as well.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, what does a regular day kind of look like for you? Are you working remotely? Are you back in the office now? What does that look like?

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah, I’m working remotely, and just recently, like most companies in the Bay, we have a new return to office policy. So a lot of us will be continuing to work remotely. And some of us that live here in the Bay are going to be going in three days a week.

Maurice Cherry:
So you would have to be going into the Menlo Park office then?

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah, that’s my closest office.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m trying to place the Bay geography. How far away is that from where you’re at in San Jose?

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah, it’s about a 20 minute drive. 25 minutes? I mean, it takes a while because of traffic.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Okay, that’s not that bad. That’s not that bad at all. Yeah. The last time I was in San Francisco was in God. Oh, that was 2016, actually was 2016. I spoke at Facebook, and I remember it took…oh, wow. I think it took an hour to get from San Francisco to Menlo Park. And I was thinking, “people make this commute every day. This is a lot.”

Kevin Tufts:
That sounds great compared to doing like an hour and a half or two hours if there’s an accident.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I want to approach this part of the conversation rather gingerly. I feel like there’s a third rail that I really don’t want to touch with regards to Facebook. But what’s the mood like there right now? I mean, as you mentioned, they’ve been in the news recently because of conversations around the metaverse. The Meta Quest 3 just dropped fairly recently, and then right after that, Apple dropped their AR headset. Yeah. What’s the mood like at Facebook overall?

Kevin Tufts:
I think because of the frequency of the layoffs, you know, we went into the end of last year with the first big wave, and then we just had the two more recent ones. People, they seem to be resilient, but a lot of us are kind of reserved and really just a little numb because all this stuff has been in such close succession, right. So ultimately everyone is just kind of moving forward and performing their duties as they always would. I think a lot of us are just trying to like, ride this out because we know that it’s going to be challenging for at least quite a few number of months before the dust truly settles. After every large layoff at any company, then there’s always the trimmers that you experience, right, because you’ll have a series of reorgs, so then you have to ride those waves. So that’s kind of where we are right now. But for the most part, everyone is pushing forward and we’re now into roadmap planning season. So it’s like our minds are occupied with just trying to plan for the next half.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, it can be a very odd place to still work somewhere after a layoff. Sometimes you have I guess the best way to call this, or the best thing to call it, would be survivor’s guilt that you’re here when maybe a team member has left or someone else you knew at the company has left. And then especially when these kinds of things happen in succession like that, it can almost kind of feel a bit like you’re walking on eggshells, I guess.

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah, in some regards it’s exactly like that because this is also impacting our performance reviews, right. So a lot of us engineers as well, you’ve been working on a project or maybe you’ve been reordered. So now the work that you had going on, you had to drop it midstream to go pick up something else from someone else’s team. And yeah, it’s chaotic and so there’s the stress of like, hey, how is my performance review going to look? That’s just kind of like where we are. It’s like you can only worry about what you can control. And I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we all get there.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now for those of us who have been online for a very long time, when I say that at least 20 years or so, we remember when Facebook launched. Facebook launched in the early 2000s, like 2003, 2004…I think right around that time. And we’re now about to come up on Facebook’s 20th anniversary, which is wild to think of for an Internet company. What do you think, like Facebook’s place is now in this kind of modern internet era that we’re in?

Kevin Tufts:
Well, obviously we’ve tried to well, I shouldn’t say try, but we’ve entered the VR space, so I don’t see that going away anytime soon. But I think what we’ll start to head is maybe putting more development and focus into AI things as everybody is sort of racing to get there wherever there is. So we may have more of a shift towards AI oriented experiences and less attention on the metaverse and then obviously just kind of moving forward with the ultimate goal of just having a totally connected planet. Right. And what I noticed between the US. And just working on things that will be tested in other countries is that here in the US. The way the media spins things is that Facebook’s dying. And it’s really just kind of how the media frames things. But it’s not. It’s like the popularity of the app hasn’t really dipped and it’s actually increasing outside of the U.S. market. And then within the U.S. market, there’s quite a number of unique things that I think we’re going to be able to latch onto and really just kind of like shock the general public.

Maurice Cherry:
Sort of reminds me of that saying about the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated or something like that. I think Mark Twain said that probably. I mean, with a company as big as Facebook that has a global reach like that. I get what you’re saying about the media, like tech media here or even the more mainstream outlets here will make it seem like, oh, Facebook is this big dying site. But Facebook is still the number one website in the world. And the world is a big place. It’s not just the U.S. I mean the U.S. media scene, the U.S. tech scene, et cetera. Facebook has not only just Facebook the social network, but Instagram and WhatsApp. And there’s other apps and things that are out there in the world that are heavily used. So to say that Facebook is dying feels kind of premature just because it has a reach that eclipses so many other products, so many other companies. It’s a lot bigger, I think, than we might think that it is based on what the media might say it is.

Kevin Tufts:
And we don’t think about a lot of the other sub-products. Right. We have Groups, which is the communities based product within the app. It’s extremely popular messenger. We’ve got our foot in so many different pools right now that it’s really just kind of like the media, the U.S. focused media that’s always basically picking on the company.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. And I mean, folks that have listened to this show for any period of time know I am not a Facebook fan. I’m not going to say I’m a Facebook hater, but you can’t knock the fact that Facebook has…it’s got its reach in a lot of different places across a lot of different products. And so just the social network itself is not the entirety of what Facebook is about.

Kevin Tufts:
That’s right.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kevin Tufts:
And I never thought that I would be working here. And now that I’ve been here almost three years, I could definitely see both sides of the coin, especially in terms of how the media positions things, but also rightfully so. We have a huge trust deficit that we’re continuing to try to improve. But it’s a hard mountain to climb, especially after the ways of layoffs that we’ve just seen. And some of the initiatives that the integrity teams have been cut. It’s tough, it takes time, and unfortunately things move faster than we can react to.

Maurice Cherry:
And some of those things are not even in Facebook’s control. Like the things that happen with workforce reduction and things, a ton of tech companies are doing that because they’re looking at the economy and seeing is the country going into a recession? So they’re trying to sort of react and pivot to what might happen. Like they’re trying to forecast the future here. So I think the longer a tech company and I’d say this is any company, not just tech companies, I think tech companies are specific in this case because they span so many different industries outside of just like software development or whatever. But the longer a tech company sticks around and almost feels like the more issues people will find with it one way or another, the companies are going to mess up. They’re going to inadvertently say something or inadvertently do something or maybe purposely say something or do something. Like the longer a tech company sticks around, it feels like…I’m a Math guy, so if I think of the duration of a tech company as like the limit of a function, it’s like as the limit approaches zero, or wherever the end of the company is, so to speak, things are going to happen. Things are just going to happen because social media influences culture and that influences technology. And so what might have been good five years ago is no longer good now. And if there’s one thing that’s going to be constant, it’s change. And I think when a tech company sticks around long enough, unfortunately they’re going to possibly come up on the short end of the stick when it relates to that.

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah, definitely. Absolutely.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay, enough pontificating on my part.

Kevin Tufts:
Love it.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s turn this back on you. Let’s learn more about you and about your journey as a designer in tech. I want to really take this back to the beginning here. So talk to me about where you grew up.

Kevin Tufts:
So I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the town and city known for LeBron James and it’s river catching on fire in the 1970s and terrible sports. Right. So that’s where I was born and right around the time I turned like eight or nine is when I moved to Southern California. So I have a big group of large group of family in Ohio, and then I have a family based in Southern California between the L.A. and Orange County area.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Were you exposed to a lot of design and technology growing up?

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah, so I was fortunate growing up that my dad, he was a computer guy, so I had a computer in the house growing up, which is completely rare, especially for the 1980s. So my dad, coming out of Vietnam, he was in a program that taught him how to work on mainframes. So when he got out of the military, he ended up landing a job in downtown Cleveland at one of the it’s really just kind of like a storage company, I guess you would say. I remember going to work with him and one computer took up the entire room and there’s these big reels and tapes. Yeah, I’ve always been exposed to tech stuff. And he was also like a big science fiction guy. And between having a computer in the house and then playing games at the arcade at the mall and just really watching science fiction flicks with him, there’s no surprise that I ended up doing what I’m doing today as for a career.

Maurice Cherry:
Now you went to Cleveland State University where you majored in design. I’m curious, before that, did you know that design was something that you really wanted to study?

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah. So by the time I went to Cleveland State and it was a total fluke because I moved to Ohio for other reasons. And while I was there, it looked like I was going to stay for a few years. I just come from Southern California and went to Ohio and got myself enrolled in university because I wanted to make sure I didn’t have any huge lapse in time to get my education out of the way. By that time, I had already been doing freelance things. Like, I was pretty much thinking I was going to be a print designer around that time. So the late 90s, probably around like ’96, ’97 is when I had thought, “okay, yeah, I’ll get into graphic design.” At the time, I didn’t even know it was called graphic design, but I was always the kid at high school doing the hip-hop flyers, a lot of flyers for open mics raves. So it was like the starter. The inkling of me being coming to designer was back in those days doing like bootleg flyers.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, those early print days back then were something else. Just the amount of creativity that you had, even though the medium itself was sort of fairly limited, I mean, that was a lot of fun.

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah. Do something like really weird on the computer and then print it out. And then I would take some markers and then do something on top of that so it’d be like this multimedia flyer thing. Cut stuff out, paste it on and then xerox it again like at Kinkos. All that kind of stuff. Using QuarkXpress.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, man. QuarkXpress. I just had someone on recently and we were sort of talking about those early days with like PageMaker and Quark and trying to figure all that stuff out because I remember Quark specifically because I used that along with PageMaker to design my high school newspaper. And the instruction manual that it came with could choke a horse. That thing was huge.

Kevin Tufts:
And you had no one to read that stuff.

Maurice Cherry:
Nobody was reading through all that. This is way before online documentation. I mean, this thing came with a brick of an instruction manual that you had to go through. And I’m like, I have to know all of this just to use the software. It almost didn’t feel like it was worth it.

Kevin Tufts:
Right. Oh, wow.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, while you were in college, you were also a working designer too, is that right?

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah. So I went to college, I was probably in my mid 20s, so basically I thought I had the world figured out because after high school, I didn’t go straight away to college. And that’s when a lot of my high school friends and people around me were just getting hired out of high school to just do HTML and build some wacky website. So I followed that path. And then when the.com bubble burst, it was a hefty smack in the face of reality. So that’s kind of like, what got me into Cleveland State. But by that time, yeah, I was working for E-Business Express, which is a web hosting company. So I was very fortunate. I was already kind of knowing my destiny, what I needed to do, where I wanted to go. And then I was also, like, in practice where other students in the class were just kind of like, figuring out what Illustrator is or Photoshop.

Maurice Cherry:
E-Business Express is like a quintessential 90s online business.

Kevin Tufts:
Right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Exactly. What kind of stuff were you doing there?

Kevin Tufts:
I started off as a Linux server admin, so I wasn’t even doing, like, design stuff. But what I was doing that was valuable was because it’s a web hosting company is now I understand how things work behind the scenes, like how websites function. So I had that foundation of, like, I guess you would say webmaster at that time. That’s what it was considered. But yeah, just understanding how DNS works for www, your web domain, registering names, taking servers offline, like, really heady stuff. But I enjoyed it. It fulfilled, like, a side of me that I really like to tinker and explore things, and just being a Linux admin that it did it for me. But then it also gave me access to kind of like host my own little microsites and really just enable certain things on the server that people just don’t have access to. Right. Or if you’re designing a website, you’re certainly not thinking about uploading things on the command line and just really kind of Star Trek stuff at that time. That’s how I treated it.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I mean, also the thing back then is a lot of that stuff around web hosting was very opaque. Like, you almost had to be a command line or a terminal coder to know how to really get around, because the graphical user interface, or the GUI, I guess what we called it back then, like, the GUIs, were just not super user-friendly to that point. So you did have to know maybe how to telnet or how to or use a Linux command in order to change the permissions on a directory. Like you couldn’t just click a button or something to make that happen.

Kevin Tufts:
That is a great point. Yeah, in the early days it wasn’t for everyone. You definitely had to have some technical prowess in order to upload a file or to get your web address, like get it all working, pull up a page.

Maurice Cherry:
I remember I was in high school in like the late 90s, and I remember even doing FTP stuff and being told at the time…I think maybe one of my teachers that told me was like, “oh, so you’re hacking, you’re a hacker now.” I’m like, it’s not hacking, it’s just FTP. But because they don’t see any graphics, all they see is just code. Because you know, this was like right before The Matrix or right, Matrix came out in ’99. I remember because I was a freshman in college, it came out in ’99 and yeah, all that stuff about FTP and oh my God.

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah, it was crazy, right? It’s like the only context the common man had was like some science fiction movie and then you think about it…it’s really like quite simple stuff.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, in hindsight, when you look back at it, it definitely is simple stuff. But yeah, during that time, just knowing how to do some of that sort of stuff, like people thought you were like a magician or something. You can make a website, you can put a picture of yourself online. How do you do that? And even what does online mean? Because the concept of being online in the 90s, like mid to late 90s, is such a different thing than now because social media didn’t exist. So for you, do you remember what that time was like for you?

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah, it was a whole new world and it felt like there wasn’t much online to look at. But I do remember like in the early days you had to work hard to make friends. So forums were real big, the IRC channels, so forums and chats, so AIM or Instant Messenger, Yahoo Chat. I remember all those different worlds and rooms and just whatever your interest was, you would just go out into that forum or chat, find your folks and then it was just kind of like not even instant replies, especially in the forum. You go in there, you chatted up, and then maybe 24 hours later you got a response. A lot of that stuff was amazing. I remember downloading my first video and it was a clip of a race car. It was like a drag strip. It was a 30 second clip. And I think it took like an hour and a half, maybe even two hours for that 30 second clip to download so that I could watch it over my 56K or whatever the modem was at the time. But yeah, it was just such a cool adventure and tinkering around with HTML and doing all the corny stuff like making the animated tickers. It was the Wild, Wild West, and I loved every bit of it. But it definitely took some patience. And you had to work hard for anything that you wanted to do on the Net.

Maurice Cherry:
Going back to E-Business Express for a minute, I mean, you worked there for almost eight years. When you look back at that time, what do you remember the most?

Kevin Tufts:
I remember that it really helped me understand how the web functions and everything that’s needed for standing up a business. Because E-Business Express also specialized in helping medium, like small to medium sized businesses get set up online to sell. So it also gave me experience working within the realm of e-commerce. And then while working there, I worked there for eight years. And part of that was because the first few years I spent doing Linux admin stuff before I moved into becoming a full-blown just web designer for the company. So I’d switch roles, and the back end of my tenure there is what gave me experience with design, working with clients. So working more in, like, an agency style format is where I cut my teeth, as I guess you’d say, a traditional Web designer before moving into product.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, let’s talk about that shift. After E-Business Express, you’ve kind of started your career as a product designer at DotNetNuke, which now is known as DNN. How can I explain DotNetNuke? It’s a content management system. I have minimal experience with it. I worked with it briefly at WebMD and just thinking, like, how could someone make software so convoluted and confusing?

Kevin Tufts:
Well summarized.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Tell me about your time there.

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah, so the company is very unique because, as you said to CMS, and we had a lot of big government contracts, and there’s some educational institutions as well. And it was I’m trying to think of how to compare it maybe like a behemoth compared to WordPress. WordPress was really easy to get up and running. But there is a large community for Net Newt and primarily ran on Windows. So then you’ve got the IIS crowd of folks that are into it. So you got the engineer side, a lot of developers that supported the community. And then you also have the support side because there’s a lot of folks that were spinning up businesses around, like installations and helping you get up and running. On DNN, we also had those services as well. And then for me, it was awesome because it was my first foray into product thinking and product design. So when I worked at the company, we had, I think, three designers. Two of them were in marketing, I believe. And it’s just one product design person that did everything. It was like the jacket of all trades, but it. Was really cool. This is the first time getting experience with a design system where at that time we had a sticker sheet. So working in that capacity and then also working on product features. So where I’ve kind of come from more or less building websites that are catering to businesses to sell online now I’ve moved into kind of like more enterprise software. And a lot of the nuances of working within these product spaces and different product features and how to plan accordingly and doing a light amount of user research to the community, things like that. So kind of like an entry level crash course into product design.

Maurice Cherry:
Now. Was it a big shift from E-Business Express? I mean, you’re going from this web hosting environment where you said you were in the back half of your time there doing design to now focusing on product, which I feel like during that time, if we’re talking like, the early 2010s, product was still kind of a new ish sort of term in a way. Did you know what a product designer was when you started there?

Kevin Tufts:
No, because I think around that time also, we were still seeing on job listings, UI/UX. We were seeing like a myriad of job titles that meant the same thing, like visual designer or UI/UX and product designer. So when I moved out to the Bay Area, I had to kind of wrap my head around like, okay, I’m seeing these titles, but the job description is just a product design role interaction designer even. And then the description would be nothing more than just, like, a product design role. So, yeah, it took a while to kind of figure out what the companies were looking for. And then also, what did that mean? Like, what are the job functions that are necessary for me to be successful?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, there was definitely a shift in the industry right around that time where web designers, graphic designers, visual designers just suddenly started becoming product designer, UX designer. And, I mean, that’s something even I’ve encountered now. Like, if I tell people I’m a designer, I feel like nine times out of ten, they’re going to think that means a UX designer. And I’m like, oh, actually, I haven’t done UX design. Maybe not in the way that they’re thinking it, but I feel like that shift just kind of happened. Was that something that you noticed also?

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah, I did notice. It naturally sorted itself out because prior to that, I guess in our era, we kind of came up around the time where you’re expected to know all these different things. You had to be a visual designer. Also, Flash was pretty big too, so it’s like you had to know Flash and then programming languages, right? There are all these things. And I was also a front end developer at E-Business Express, so I did a lot of the integration work as well. And when I came to the Bay Area. I still had that mindset that I had to be a jack of [all] trades and know all these things. And then I was noticing that there are actually specialized roles now. Like, no longer are we living in a day and age where they’re expecting you to be a webmaster. Like, I hated that term and seeing that, it’s like you have to know Java. JavaScript, there was all these back end languages that were on our job description roles. When you just want to use Photoshop.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. When I worked at AT&T as a designer, I think my title was just web designer. But we were doing web design, we were doing graphic design, we were doing front end design because we had to, of course, actually build the whole thing from scratch. And this was at the time when layout switched from tables to CSS. So you had to learn that with all the different cross browser compatibility, especially with IE6. And yeah, we had to know like, a little bit of Flash. Actually we used…oh my God, do you remember Swish? Yeah, Swish was like “Flash Lite”, I guess. It wasn’t made by Macromedia, which Adobe ended up buying, but it was a totally different company called Swish, and it was a more, I guess, sort of user-friendly interface to make Flash animation. But we had to know Flash. We had to know a little bit of Java, and I mean, like actual Java, not JavaScript. Ironically, we didn’t have to know JavaScript, but we had to know Java because we would do these web audio applet things and so we had to know how to troubleshoot the applet. So this is one position, graphic design, web design, Flash, Java, and you’re also sometimes doing some debugging of other people’s stuff. It was a lot into one particular title, and I feel like now that’s five different jobs at a company. After your time at DotNetNuke, you worked for a lot of other companies out in the Bay Area. You worked for — I’m listing off here — Workday, eBay, SendGrid, Twilio. And before Facebook, you were at Lyft for a short period of time. When you look back at those positions collectively, like, what stands out to you? Do you remember any particular things?

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah, I remember at DNN had an amazing time there and I felt like that was the kickstarter to my official tech career in the Bay and just getting my feet wet with engineering teams because we had a team of roughly like 100 engineers or so. And so that was the first time going from like a small web shop where there’s three developers and they’re within arm’s reach, to now I’ve got to talk to engineering leads and have these presentation reviews. So that was kind of like the world that I was living in at DNN.

And then when I moved over to Workday, that was my experience into the world of enterprise software and really how to work within the confines of a design system. Coincidentally enough, I worked on the internal tools team, so that was really unique to be on the team that has to essentially vet and take in requests from other product areas, different components that may need to be built or reviewed to see if there’s any efficacy to having engine spin up resources to bring to life. And then also working across different time zones. So Workday was amazing. And having to work with engineering teams in Ireland, and I’ve also got a couple of trips to Europe out of that as well. So can’t complain with that. The design culture at Workday at the time was growing, so design hadn’t been around at Workday for too long before I got there. I think maybe like a couple of years at the most. So we had a young but super talented design team that was working at Workday at that time, research, I want to call that out as well. So we did have a few research partners that were at Workday. So that was my first time interacting with research, other than me standing up some guerrilla survey or just doing kind of like personal research. My own living from Workday.

So I left Workday and went to eBay. And eBay was awesome because I met some incredible people and I’m still friends with a lot of them to this day. eBay was just a special time in my career where I was able to again, work at a massive company, work on different product spaces. And also, I’m an avid eBay user, so I came in with some personal knowledge of how the product works because some people that work at eBay, they don’t necessarily use the product. I’d say the same thing is probably like for a meta as well, right? Which probably is problematic. But I actually used the thing that I worked on, so that was really cool. Several opportunities to travel throughout Europe, mostly Germany, and eBay was close to home, so I didn’t have that long commute, like a lot of folks in the Bay Area. So that fulfilled my mood, was incredible back then.

And then transitioning from eBay, this is where things get interesting. So I ended up at a company called SendGrid. And SendGrid is kind of like an API communications company, more around the email marketing space. Really powerful tool. A lot of companies use it today. It’s kind of like the rival to Mailchimp for anyone that’s not familiar with SendGrid. So if you know Mailchimp, that’s basically what SendGrid is. And SendGrid was acquired by a company called Twilio. So that’s how I ended up at Twilio — through an acquisition.

When the acquisition took place, SendGrid had a very mature, young, but mature design organization, and Twilio was engineering centric, so they really did not have design. And I think literally there may have been like four designers, four product designers there at the time of the acquisition. Funny story. I’d actually interviewed with Twilio before the acquisition, maybe like a half a year prior to that, and got an offer. Decided that wasn’t quite where I wanted to be in my career because I wanted to go somewhere that had a mature design organization and I didn’t want to go somewhere where it’s just you kind of have to fight for your seat at the table. So I’ve seen some things at that time during the interview process that the folks were incredible, they were great, but I’m like, maybe I’ll pass. So I ended up going to SendGrid and I kid you not, on my first day, my first day in the office with my team and our first team meeting, we got an announcement to basically shut our laptops and we need to receive some news. And the news was that we had been acquired by Twilio. So the company I ran from was the company that ended up acquiring. They got me anyway, so I was the most expensive hire ever.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah. So to wrap things up, Twilio was just an interesting time. PDs were basically working across like anywhere from 4:00-9:00 p.m. At a time. I think I had eight that I was reporting to. So it was pretty chaotic, but at least you were shipping work like, daily. We didn’t have enough design resources. And also it was challenging because I mentioned that Syngra had a mature design culture and organization. So when we came in with a lot of our process oriented things and checkpoints with design briefs, which is necessary, especially in large, fast moving companies, we were trying to get the company to slow down so that we can improve the quality versus just kind of like PM coming up with an idea and ends just building it. And if it doesn’t work, oh well. We wanted to kind of move away from that mantra and more towards being design led. So tiny bit of friction around there, but ultimately they’re getting to where they need to be. And Lyft, I know I’ve done such a tour of duty here in the Bay Area.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I was going to say.

Kevin Tufts:
Finally — it’s going to stop now. But Lyft, I would say Lyft was a cherry on top for my career. It fulfilled so many things that I had been looking for, where I want to move fast, ship quality work, have a mature design organization, and a mature design system. Right? You don’t ever have to worry about what’s real, what’s not real, what’s in flight. Our design systems team at Lyft, product teams, everyone was just incredible to work with. And so I worked on the community safety team. My short stint at Lyft and the team that I worked on was unique because we got to wedge ourselves in between different product spaces without actually being a full-fledged member of the team. So I got to work on the Driver app and the Rider app. And then there’s some kind of like, unique things around the rental car space, which is Fleet, so there’s a lot of interesting work. And because it wasn’t a massive company, you could move fast. There was a researcher embedded on my team, so it was almost like bi-weekly we were testing things, and I just loved it. So I didn’t have to worry about the design system. Inevitably, when you’re working on the thing, sometimes you’re not working with a system that’s flexible enough to adhere to your needs and what you’re trying to solve. But while working with Lyft, I didn’t have to worry about all that. I just worried about the experience itself and everything else just fell into place.

But the pandemic is what got me to Meta. So when the pandemic hit and no one was going anywhere, no one’s driving, no one’s riding, I’m watching my colleagues, like almost weekly, like different goodbye emails that are going out. And it was a wild place to be in the year that everything seemed to have melted down. So out of self-preservation, and a need for not legit thinking the company was going to go over, I ended up making the jump over to Meta.

So I’ll stop there. And that’s the whole transition to where I am today.

Maurice Cherry:
No, like you said, that is quite a tour of duty. One question I think that really stands out among all of that is, like, how have you seen product design change over the years? I imagine from company to company, it’s probably fairly similar because you’re working on software products. I guess you could say Lyft is software, but it’s transportation as well. But how have you seen product design change over the years since you first started?

Kevin Tufts:
The tooling. I would definitely say, in terms of ease of collaboration, that is one of the biggest things that I’ve seen change. And then the tooling itself. So now that we’ve got these robust prototyping tools, it’s so much easier to demonstrate the design and the experience that you’re working on without having to know some hardcore programming languages. Like, back in the day, it was like you had to know JavaScript or jQuery just to maybe animate a dropdown, right? Or you may have had some ideas around something fancy that you wanted to do, maybe you wanted to have a side drawer appear on a website. But in order to do those things, you had to know a programming language or just mock it up in After Effects, which is also tedious. So I would say just the sheer volume of tools in the collaboration space and prototyping is just incredible.

Maurice Cherry:
There’s another podcast that I produce — I’m not going to mention the name of it — but there’s another show that I produce, and one of the things that we have been exploring through that that I feel like is also relevant to our conversation is like, just how much the browser has become a tool in and of itself. Like, the browser used to just be about presentation. You made a website or something like that, you put it online, whatever. But now, as the browsers have gotten savvier, as different frameworks have been created and such, the browser itself is such a tool to the point where there are services now that only exist in a browser. They don’t exist as standalone software, like an executable file or something like that. Like Figma, you can do full fledged graphic design all within your browser. And like, ten years ago, that would have almost been unheard of.

Kevin Tufts:
It is mind blowing to do that in a browser. Like, through Figma, you’ve got these other tools like Webflow, and trying to think of some other ones that are out there canva I mean, it’s just totally jealous of the new designers, by the way. Every time these tools come out and I have to interact with them, and I’m just like, wow, I really couldn’t use this back in the day when I had maybe 100 buttons that I need to make a change on it. I had to go touch every hundred, you know, component.

Maurice Cherry:
Listen…modern designers will never know the pain of cross-browser compatibility. They will never understand how much of a pain in the ass it was to try to get one design to look the same across different versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox and Opera. Oh, my God.

Kevin Tufts:
Safari. Safari behavioral things. Yeah. [Internet Explorer] 6 through 8 were probably like the nightmares. Six and seven, for sure.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, for a while. I know. There was, like, a whole cottage industry around basically browser emulators. Because if you were on Windows, of course you couldn’t really use Safari. You’d have to use I mean, the Windows version of Safari you could use, but it didn’t even render the same between Windows and Mac. And so you had this software that you’d use that could hopefully reliably look the same between everywhere, and you had these little HTML shivs you had to do to make certain properties work. It was man, it was a jungle out there. It’s only like ten or so years ago. It was wild. Yeah.

Kevin Tufts:
Not that long ago, when I was at E-Business Express, we bought a dedicated iMac for that very reason, so that we could run all the browsers on the Mac to see how they were responding as well. It’s like, I don’t miss those days, but I am so grateful that I got to experience it.

Maurice Cherry:
Right? No, absolutely. Because, I mean, I think there are certain skills, I think, that you build because of that, like being able to really debug and even to sort of refactorize your own code that you’re doing, because you know that if you do it this other way, it’s going to look bad in this browser. So now you sort of learn all these little eccentricities and stuff like that. So now things are pretty standardized between the browser, I feel like, and I haven’t done front-end in a while, but I feel like things are pretty standardized now between the modern browsers like Edge, Safari, Chrome, Firefox are pretty much going to render things pretty much the same.

Kevin Tufts:
Yes. And I think a lot of it’s like the proliferation of frameworks like the CSS frameworks have helped out with the consistency as well. Right. The browsers have the support built in for a lot of the neat CSS tricks that you can do. But then also a lot of people have adopted these frameworks that have that stuff built in as well. So it just really speeds up the design and development process. And I could say, like, for people that are front end developers and they’ve moved over to just being a designer, it’s always been easier to communicate with your engine partners too. So when you need to go into engineering meetings as well, it’s always refreshing to communicate in their language as much as you can. Right. So it helps you out that way as well, career wise.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you’ve said that there’s no better time to be a designer than now, and I feel like we may have kind of talked about that a little bit now, just with tooling, but expand on that for me. Expand on that thought.

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah. So let’s say FigJam, the collaboration tool within Figma. It has really opened up my world where I could send people just a design, like an early design. They can go in there, they can comment, or we can comment, live the collaboration aspect, especially in the remote world. Obviously we’re not all in the same space, but it has been world-changing to get early buy in through Figma, through sharing a link and even doing research. The tooling for research has been a lot better over the years. The last ten years, it’s improved greatly. And so speaking to that, yeah, I’m all about collaboration tools because we have to do a lot of virtual brainstorm sessions or design sprints. And without having that mechanism, I’m not sure where we would have been today. We could have probably been doing design sprint in Google Sheets or something like that, right? Which would be terrible. That has just been world changing for me in terms of just building more momentum and getting buy-in.

But also with prototyping. I’m a big fan of prototyping and I do remember the days of struggling for weeks and weeks through using JavaScript and jQuery to do something relatively simple or maybe I had an idea that’s kind of elaborate but do not have the technical skills to pull it off. So prototyping in Figma, Origami and some of the other tools that are out in the market today. It’s like you spend maybe an hour or two going over some tutorials and then all of a sudden you’re off to the races, making a really immersive, native-feeling prototype that you can view on your phone and even share it. So that’s why I kind of like saying, I’m so jealous of all the folks that are becoming designers now because they’ll never know the pain of taking days or even weeks to do something really simple and sometimes it just ends up being like a throwaway thing.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I didn’t even touch on mobile. But you’re like, absolutely right about that. I mean, mobile is another thing where a bunch of different environments across different smartphones are going to render things differently. That’s a whole other part I didn’t even consider. I’d say also just education back in the day a lot. I mean, this stuff was really online. We were all just sort of reverse engineering and looking at View Source code and trying to figure stuff out. And there were books that came along eventually because some people might have been a little bit ahead of the curve, but you couldn’t really go to school for this. And now you have like, Treehouse and you’ve got General Assembly and there’s no short share skillshare. There’s YouTube videos. There’s so much stuff now around education that just did not exist when we were trying to learn design back then. Especially if you were self taught. Like, if you were self taught, you really were self taught because there were not even just these educational platforms to help you to figure this stuff out. You really were doing a lot of trial and error.

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah, great point. I don’t know how I could even forget that because that was a huge part of my life and career and I felt like I took a long road to get to where I am because of that fact. Back in those days, there were very few tutorials online. You could find some Illustrator tutorials. Shockwave. I’m trying to think of some other Macromedia products. That ColdFusion. Fireworks. Yeah, you could find some really remedial tutorials out there, but that was about it. And so those early days, I had to go to a bookstore and look at design magazines. I think Computer Arts was a godsend coming from publishing [in] the UK. But yeah, that was it. It’s like you go to a bookstore and you get all these design books and then I would get some programming books just to see what’s going on. But like you said, maybe you found a website that was cool and you got to go view Source and like, okay, what’s going on here? And then you try to break it down.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kevin Tufts:
So, yeah, all this stuff that we have, like, access to education and just these online schools and I love it. I’m here for it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I remember back in the day I used what was it called? Dynamic Drive. Do you remember Dynamic Drive?

Kevin Tufts:
No.

Maurice Cherry:
So Dynamic Drive was the site that basically just had code snippets. Like, they didn’t really give tutorials. They kind of told you how to implement it, but say you wanted to make it so someone couldn’t right click on your website. Right? Yeah. You could go to Dynamic Drive and find the code. Snippet copy it, copy it, paste it between the head tags, and then all these different no one could right click. Yeah, they really tell you how it worked. You just were like, oh, this can do this. There was a lot of trust, I’ll put it that way, that you weren’t putting something malicious in your site. You would just, oh, copy, paste that and…oh, God, what’s the other one I used to use a lot that was sort of more educational based that’s still around now called…W3Schools. Yeah, that’s right. W3Schools. And I remember because I was also teaching design at the time, this was like, what was this, 2011, 2012, maybe? And I remember telling my students, like, don’t use W3Schools. They call themselves W3Schools because it was www. But I think folks also confused it with the W3C, which is the Worldwide Web Consortium. And I was a member of their Web Education group. And they would tell us, do not tell people to use W3Schools. It is not sanctioned by us. It is not our thing. But it was also still teaching people. It was teaching me how to use some of this stuff. But I would have to tell my students, don’t use W3Schools. Think of it as a reference, but don’t just copy and paste stuff from W3Schools and then turn it in as homework, because I’m going to know that you did that, because I do that, so don’t do that.

Kevin Tufts:
Oh, my goodness, man. Yes. Absolutely. We said dynamic drive. I wasn’t even like it didn’t even ring a bell. But I remember using them to get a script, to do the animated cursor. It had all the types of weird, just weird things. It was almost like the dollar store for scripts.

Maurice Cherry:
Not the dollar store! That’s a very accurate piece of comparison there. Back when HTML…I think it was called DHTML back then. Yeah. Oh, man, what a time. What a time.

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
What advice would you give to someone out there who’s they’re hearing your story, they want to follow in your footsteps. What advice would you give them?

Kevin Tufts:
You know, as you’re trying to figure out what aspect of design you may want to focus in? Experiment, try it all. And as we were just talking about, there’s so many resources online where you don’t even have to pay a penny to try something out, right. But really just be curious on how things are done, whether it’s processes related to product design or maybe how to run a design sprint. There’s so much, and you’ll kind of eventually find your way. Some people generally know, like, hey, I’m not a great visual designer, but they want to get more into the UX of things. Right. And that’s great too. So it’s all about kind of like, figuring out your career path and what your passions are, what your strong suits are.

For me, I love product design, but I’m also really heavily into micro-animation, so I lean towards these prototyping tools. But yeah, it’s like, sky’s the limit. It’s kind of like the advice that I would give them informal training. Like, if you are able to get into a good school that has a great product design program, that is awesome. I know Carnegie Mellon has one. Tufts University has, like, an HCI class. I think most big universities these days probably have some facet of, like, a product design class, but then don’t also have to go to a giant university for this type of an education. Like we already mentioned, it’s all right there online. Just use the resources that are available to you.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, I noticed that the URL to your website is pathstraightforward.com. What does “path straight forward” mean to you, like, in terms of your life and your career?

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah. So I was trying to have a domain name that sounded relatively cool. And at first, I’m like, this is not going to have any type of esoteric meaning or anything, but really, it just summarizes the journey that I took in order to get to where I am today. Because it was really long. It was hard, but I knew that I had a plan, and I just kind of stayed focused on the journey and the path moving forward, and that’s kind of what’s got me here. And I still have a long way to go.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? I mean, you’ve mentioned this kind of tour of duty that you’ve had around the bay at these different companies and such. What does the future look like for you?

Kevin Tufts:
So there’s a couple of things. I think I want to start to move more towards design systems because I really do enjoy working with my design systems partners. And so over the years, I’ve had a number of contributions to different systems that are available. But between that and mentorship becoming, like, having a stronger influence in mentoring younger designers, I mentioned that I was involved in a program here in Oakland, but it’s really impactful when people can have someone that they can talk to and get directional advice for their career. So I want to have more of a stronger influence in mentorship circles.

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

Kevin Tufts:
Yes, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. So it’s LinkedIn.com, and it’s my first and last name, Kevin Tufts. So feel free to connect with me. I am always willing to have a coffee chat with anyone that’s curious about my background or just really general questions about design and my website since I’ve been employed for so long. I’ve kind of taken down a lot of the work there, but also there are some social links in there. You can reach out to me on my website and contact me directly.

Maurice Cherry:
All right, sounds good. Kevin Tufts, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I mentioned this prior to us recording. We have a mutual colleague, Kim Hutchinson. Now she was Kim Williams when I first interviewed her, but Kim sang about your praises. She was like, “you got to get Kevin on the show. He’s such a cool guy. He’s such a good guy.” And I can tell just from this conversation, like, she’s 100% right. You’re down to earth. You know your stuff. And anybody that I talk to that has been around since the early days of the web that has built stuff from scratch is, like, automatically cool with me because, you know, the trenches that we’ve had to go through to still be…I would even say relevant. I want to say that. But to go through the trenches, to still be working and doing what we do now after 20 years is amazing. And I think you certainly built a fantastic career for yourself, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what you do along with the mentoring track and everything.

Maurice Cherry:
So thank you for coming on the show.

Maurice Cherry:
I appreciate it.

Kevin Tufts:
Maurice, thank you. And I really appreciate you having me on the show. And it is awesome that you’ve got a platform that you can expose different types of people from various backgrounds. So, yeah, man, kudos. I appreciate it.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

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If you know how to deliver excellent creative work reliably, and enjoy the autonomy of a virtual-based, freelance life (with no non-competes), check them out at brevityandwit.com.

Chris Dudley

Chris Dudley is an artistic powerhouse. He’s been a working artist for over 25 years, creating everything from children’s books to commissioned drawings (and he teaches art as well). His latest book, Lil’ Boogaloo Shrimp and the Clean Sweep is inspired by the iconic 80’s movie Breakin’, and features the OG Boogaloo Shrimp himself, Michael Chambers!

Chris gave me the rundown on the new book, and we talked about his creative process and what draws him to illustrating portraits and children’s books. He also spoke about growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the benefits on staying there for his career, the keys to his longevity, his work with Hudson Dawn Publishing, and dropped some great advice on work/life balance and staying inspired. You’ll definitely be a fan of Chris after you hear his story — I know I am!

Interview Transcript

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

Chris Dudley:
Well, my name is Chris Dudley and I am the creative director for Chris Dudley Art. I really focus on art and illustration.

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

Chris Dudley:
Actually, it has been going amazing. The scope and range of projects that I’ve been working on have been just straight fun. The recent project has been Lil’ Boogaloo Shrimp and the Clean Sweep, which is with Michael Chambers, who’s famous from the breakdancing movies franchises, and it’s been amazing.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, tell me some more about the book.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah. Well, it’s, I think, the first book of its kind. Scoured the internet, and I haven’t seen a book like this. One of the first books I’ve ever seen that focuses on breakdancing. The premise behind the book is that it teaches kids responsibility and priority using breakdancing. And also, it highlights, there’s a shout-out of a lot of the actors from the Breakin’ movies, Adolfo Quiñones, Bruno Falcon, and sadly, we lost both of them recently, and just all of the main characters from the breaking movie, but also a lot of other individuals.

And in addition to having that subject matter about breakdancing, because a lot of people think it went by the wayside, but it’s still hugely popular and also, it will debut in the Olympics in 2024. And so, it’s still a huge thing. There’s a shout-out to the Olympics in the book. Actually, the final spread, everybody’s breakdancing in Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the background.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, I haven’t seen a book like this yet.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Congratulations on that.

Chris Dudley:
Thank you. It also, if I could add, it’s more than just a children’s book, it gives kids a little bit of history about the background of breaking, its roots in New York. Also, gives some terminology of breaking, like what a freeze is, what a go down is. So, it’s a little bit more than just the story.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. I remember this was back in 2005. When was I working there? Yeah, 2005, I was working for the State of Georgia here in Atlanta, working at the Georgia World Congress Center. And I remember we had just hired this white girl as a PR rep or something. And I mean cute, short, bubbly white girl. I was like, “Oh, she seems really nice.” And the weird thing, well, not the weird thing, but as I was talking to her and I asked her what her hobbies was and she was like, “Breakdancing.” And I’m like, “You’re a breakdancer? You look like a UGA sorority grad. Come on, you’re not a breakdancer.” And sure enough, it would be in a sort of weird way, but sometimes she would do moves just in the office just to show us that, “Yeah, I am a breakdancer.”

Chris Dudley:
Gotcha.

Maurice Cherry:
She invited me to a few events that she was breaking at and-

Chris Dudley:
Oh, nice.

Maurice Cherry:
It was so weird because sometimes we’d be in these board meetings, in a legit boardroom with chairman and stuff, and then someone’s like, “Oh, you’re a breakdancer. Why don’t you bust a move for us?” And I’m like, in a way, this is so embarrassing, but also, it’s like, well, at least you’re not asking the Black person to do it, so I’m not… Let me sit back and watch the show.

Chris Dudley:
Gotcha. That’s awesome.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And I think you told me that part of what you’re doing with the book involves a crew or something here in Atlanta.

Chris Dudley:
Yes, they’re in Georgia. I think they’re near Acworth, the Rockwell Dance Academy. And it’s interesting that you mentioned that the young lady there was a breakdancer, but the Rockwell Dance Academy is led by Honey Rockwell and Orko. Honey Rockwell is a staple name as a B-girl. Actually, just last year, they were both inducted into the Breaking Hall of Fame. And so, B-girls definitely have a place as well. I mean, she’s one of the most well-known. She was with the original Rock Steady Crew in South Bronx, New York.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah. We partnered with them and we’ve got some things in the works. So, it’s really exciting to have that Georgia connection going.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, we’ll make sure to put a link to the book also in the show notes, so people can check that out. Aside from this new project, how are things different for you this year than they were last year?

Chris Dudley:
It has been just ramping up with projects. Last year, obviously, we had a steady flow of projects, variety. This year, the children’s books have just been packed. I mean, I’m booked out with children’s books, booked out away. So, it’s fun where you complete one project and then you can look forward to the next one. But I’ve got, I think, four or five that are already in the queue, confirmed. And so, I look forward to working with each of those authors as well.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. I mean, with everything that you’ve got going on now, what does the summer look like? Is it more work or you got any plans?

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, a little vacation, a little relaxation I would do with the family for the summer. I’ve got three girls and my wife, so we’ll get a little relaxation in, but some work too. Especially with the release of this book, Lil’ Boogaloo Shrimp and the Clean Sweep, we’ve got some events planned this summer as well. Some here in Michigan with the Children’s Museum and another bookstore, and actually, a local breakdancing crew.

Actually, Michael Chambers there in Los Angeles, July 29th, I believe, he’s got an event with Barnes & Noble. So, I may be flying out there to support him on that. But yeah, we’ve got a lot going on this summer. Then coming out of summer, we look to get in, we’re going to be partnering with some schools to get the books into schools as well.

Maurice Cherry:
Very nice. So, you got a lot planned coming up.

Chris Dudley:
Yes, sir.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s dive into Chris Dudley Art. I mean, you just mentioned you’ve got a bunch of these projects that are lined up. What does your creative process look like when you’re working on a new project?

Chris Dudley:
Yeah. Well, they all start similarly because we do a little bit of design work. We’ve designed some logos and so forth. We’ve got a team that does that. But also with the illustration, I like to start out old school with sketching. That’s how I learned to draw. So, that’s part of my creative process with every project, is starting out with sketching. I mean, I can go into the meat of doing a children’s book, if you like.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Chris Dudley:
Okay. It’s basically we get a manuscript and it goes through an approval process. We don’t just take any manuscript. It’s got to… Just to be real with you, when I read the manuscript, if images start popping into my head, it’s a go. If they don’t, it’s probably not a go. And that’s just nothing against the author, but it has to resonate with me because it’s got to be a fun project that I’m looking forward to doing.

And so, from there, the manuscript checks out and we want to bid on that. From there, we will establish the illustration description. So, that’s what imagery is going to go along with what portions of the text, especially if it’s a children’s picture book. And once we nail that down, I’ll do sketches. And that’s where you establish the composition. Well, actually, prior to that, we design the characters, the main characters, and see exactly what they’re going to look like. Is it a eight-year-old African American boy, or does it have to be a little girl who’s three years old and she has a puppy?

So, we have to figure out the dynamics of the characters. What are they going to look like? What time period are we in? Are we in the 2000s? Are we in the ’80s, like with our recent book here? And so, we establish a character and then we do composition sketches of establishing what each scene is going to look like. And those get approved by the author along the way. So, they’re heavily involved with the creative process, so that I don’t just come up with the finished project and then hope they like it. They’re involved along the way so that there’s no surprises on either end.

Then from there, we go to final sketches. We start to flesh out this is exactly what this spot illustration or this full page or this spread is exactly going to look like and the details of it, if there’s need to be background and so forth. And from there, after the client approves that, we do the line work. That’s where we finalize it almost… Well, you’re familiar with how a coloring book looks where you have the simple black lines.

Maurice Cherry:
Yup.

Chris Dudley:
We finish out the book looking like that. That way the client gets to see, okay, this is exactly how things are going to look before we add color. In that way, any adjustments can be made along the way, if need be. So, they approve each process, and then we get into the color theory, because you can’t just throw colors onto the imagery. It has to make sense visually. Also, colors such as red is going to attract attention. So, you wouldn’t just arbitrarily use that just because you want it red. And sometimes, that has to be explained to the client as well, because they may think, “I want to paint this in a blue.” That, well, based on color theory, those won’t work with the composition.

Then we just move toward the formatting process, and then the text is added. And I take the text into consideration as well though when I’m designing the composition, so it doesn’t look forced later. I make sure I allow spacing for that. But yeah, that’s how we move through a project. Then from there, it goes to post-production, and then we have a book.

Maurice Cherry:
So, it’s way more than just art and illustration.

Chris Dudley:
Oh, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
You’re really seeing it through the entire process, entire publishing process.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, from concept to completion is what we’d call it. Yeah, from the initial idea to a finished book.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, you mentioned getting the clients involved with it. I’m pretty sure this is probably maybe not an exhaustive process for them, but how is it for them being able to see the book come together step by step like this?

Chris Dudley:
It’s amazing because it’s no secret most people haven’t learned the skill of being able to draw, let alone to illustrate, which is there’s a difference because with illustration, you’re telling a story with the imagery. And so, when you flesh out a character for a client, it’s so satisfying because they have it in their head, but they can’t see it. And so, when you can present that to them, it’s like, “Yes, that’s exactly what I want.” It’s just so gratifying for them. Then to see that character then doing things throughout the book, their eyes just light up. So, it’s a pleasure working with them and again, keeping them involved in the process.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, it looks like you do a lot of children’s book illustrations. What draws you to this genre?

Chris Dudley:
Well, having kids. Like I said, I got three girls. They’re a little bit older now into late teens, mid and late teens. But I actually spent, and actually people can go look at my website at chrisdudleyart.com, I spent about 15, 20 years doing almost exclusively realism. I mean very detailed graphite drawings. I did art shows and juried exhibitions and all of that. And so, I used that knowledge actually as I segued into, I still do some of that, but the children’s books, reading books to my girls. And I actually had to learn how to illustrate better. I knew it a little bit, but I had to really dive into it. So, I’ve been doing that for the past 10 years now, and it’s taken over really.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you stay organized with a lot of these projects? Because I would imagine as you’re saying this whole process, do you do just one book at a time? Are you juggling multiple books? How do you keep all of that managed effectively?

Chris Dudley:
Well, some of them will overlap a little bit, but it depends on what phase of the process. Honestly, for me personally, the most challenging part is the initial part, coming up with the concept of what the imagery is going to look like. Because once you’ve established that, you then created a roadmap for yourself, and then it’s just following the roadmap. It’s almost like plotting out your course somewhere. That’s the hardest part, where am I going to go with this? But then once you plot out the course, okay, now, it’s just following this path that I’ve laid out.

And there may be some tweaks along the way. And with that, it’s important obviously not to overbook. We’ve all heard the same under promise, over deliver. And so, really, we really focus on with my team, especially my assistant, not making promises that would be too difficult to even try to make happen. Then you’re disappointing clients. So, books, I won’t work on two or three at the same time, but they may overlap. Like okay, if I finish this portion, now I can maybe bring in, but they’ll have different deadlines. I don’t have it where they’re all due at the same time. Keeping it balanced, yeah.

Then we filter in some other relatively smaller projects in there while I may be working on a book, like a one-off illustration or a design project. But I like to really focus on that client’s project, so they get the attention that it needs.

Maurice Cherry:
And it’s important to note, as you’ve alluded to, you have a team. So, this isn’t a one-man operation.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly. I could not do it by myself. I did in the past. Obviously, it was just me. I started, well, way, way back before it was Chris Dudley Art when I was 18, 19. And it was just me, invoicing and trying to figure all this stuff out. But I realized later is that it stifled creativity, doing all of those other administrative tasks. Now, I still do some, but by and large, I want to save my brain for the project.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I think, as you said, starting out on your own, you want to try to do everything or try to tackle everything because you’re just starting out. You want to establish yourself. But eventually after a while, in order for you to really be able to go further, you have to give up some control. You have to build a team. It’s just a necessary part of being able to scale the work that you do.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, it’s necessary.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s switch gears a little bit here and learn more about you. You talked a bit about starting out. You were born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Tell me about what that was like.

Chris Dudley:
Yes, it was fun. My interest in art started very young. I had a couple of cousins that drew a little bit. One was just phenomenal, phenomenal artist, and it amazed me that he could do that with a pencil. And it wasn’t daunting like it may be to some people. And in school, I always drew. I remember back in, I think I was maybe in kindergarten or first grade, and a little weed of mine, it was like a stalk of grain or something that I drew, it got accepted in the children’s exhibition at the Grand Rapids Art Museum.

And so, it’s like that was a “first juried show” and it was accepted. And so, it’s going to be on display Downtown Grand Rapids at the Art Museum. And so, when my mom took me down there to see it and to see it displayed, it was just awe-inspiring. They had the artwork separated by grade level. So, mine was in the first, second-graders. And I remember walking and seeing, I remember the stuff like it’s yesterday, seeing the 12th graders. Obviously, their art advancement was far beyond my level, but it was so amazing that it was possible, and it just sparked that that’s possible. I didn’t have the skill to do it, but it didn’t deter me. It made me understand that’s possible. I can get to that level. And so, that’s where it began.

Maurice Cherry:
And it sounds like your family also really supported you in this too.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, family has always supported me. Even teachers, I joke about it now, they would let me draw in class as long as I did my work, obviously. But yeah, I’ve had a lot of support over the years.

Maurice Cherry:
How has it been working and cultivating your career in the same place where you grew up? I feel like a lot of folks we have on the show may have, of course, started out one place and then ended up moving somewhere else, and that was where their career or their work flourished. What does it mean for you to still be in your hometown doing this work?

Chris Dudley:
Well, it’s taken some time. I started out with, it was Dudley Graphics actually, when I was 18, 19. And I was doing T-shirt designs and it was all by hand. I didn’t know graphic design or how to use a computer or anything. So, I was drawing things and even drawing lettering and so forth, and later rebranded. Actually, when I improved my drawing ability, I was okay, but I wanted to learn how to draw much, much better. And so, in my 20s, I said I want to learn this and really buckled down and improved my skill, but had obviously some success with that, dealing with some businesses and so forth.

But later, that’s when I started doing juried art shows. And I felt that if I could get into a juried art show, that somewhat vetted my skillset. Then some of these were hard to get into. They were hard to get into. So, that gave me a little boost of confidence. Then figuring out how to make it sustainable, like you said, in your hometown and doing projects with companies. I actually did a whiteboard animation with a pharma, very large, I can’t say the name, but pharmaceutical company. And so, finding avenues then how to make it sustainable.

And I was able to explore a lot of different avenues of art. I mean, it was design. It was drawing. There was a little bit of animation work with some of that, but to make it more sustainable even here locally. But then things did branch out where I started getting a little attention from those outside of Michigan. I worked with an author actually in Georgia, and just some throughout the States. And that’s when it’s like, whoa, it opens you up to that global market.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Do you think it’s been a benefit to you to still do this work in Grand Rapids? Have you thought about, “Oh, well, what if I was in New York?” Or even in Detroit, if you stayed in Michigan?

Chris Dudley:
Yes. I found it as a benefit because it puts me in a position to, it sounds cliche, but to give back, if you will, to the community versus when you move away, you’re not in touch with that local community anymore. So, I’ve been able to be in contact with local artists that I know and local authors, because I work with a lot of authors here in Michigan. So, to be able to meet them in some instances face to face, you can’t replace that. It’s worked out. It’s just worked out for me to stay here in Michigan and still have some of those connects outside.

Maurice Cherry:
How big is Grand Rapids? I’m trying to think population wise, how big.

Chris Dudley:
Ooh, offhand, I guess I should know this, right?

Maurice Cherry:
No, no.

Chris Dudley:
Actually, it’s the second… I didn’t know I was getting a geography lesson here. It’s the second-largest city, obviously, behind Detroit. I mean, it’s growing too. It’s continuing to grow. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
No, I mean, I’m curious about that because I’ve had folks that are on the show before that aren’t in these big metropolises. They’re in smaller cities like Raleigh or Grand Rapids, like you mentioned. I think I talked to another illustrator in Detroit. Oh, his name escapes. I think it’s Sean Bell or something like that. But talking about the benefit or one inherent benefit of being able to do this work in a smaller community, I won’t say small, but smaller than a big city, is that in a way, because you grew up there, people know you, so there’s that sort of reputation. But also, you help serve as a beacon for the next generation to see that what you’re doing is possible where they are. They don’t have to move somewhere else or go somewhere else to achieve-

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
… the kind of success that you’ve achieved.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, exactly. That is the key. And a lot of it is about developing your skillset, really getting your work seen. And so, with the internet and so forth, I’m not old, but I grew up without the internet. But now, you have these different vehicles that you can use to have your work seen really all over the world.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Before we get into that, I want to stay a little bit in the pocket of Dudley Graphics because I think it’s important for our audience to really hear about what it was like to design really before personal computers and Photoshop and all that sort of stuff was really a thing. Tell me about your early career of Dudley Graphics because that was roughly between what, ’96 and 2005, 2006, something like that.

Chris Dudley:
Yep, exactly. Yeah. I started out, man, I was 18 and I became a broker with a T-shirt company and I was doing the designing. And like you said, it was all by hand. I mean, it was freehand drawing. Then I would ink it and I would take actual ink drawings to my screen printer to get the camera ready, iron it and so forth. And so, if I had to make an adjustment, it was all by hand and cutting and pasting and whiteout. I did not know how to use a computer. I didn’t have one. So, it was the early days.

I remember when I first got a computer and trying to learn it, but I didn’t really have the correct software. Then had thought, “Okay, how do I input something in my computer?” So, I had to try to learn a scanner and it was crazy. One thing that really helped, I actually worked at a Kinko’s, which later became FedEx Kinko’s, and which is now FedEx office. And I got a lot of training actually in graphic design and just how those things worked. And that really helped me with launching Dudley Graphics.

Again, it was just in the design and T-shirt realm because my drawing ability honestly was, I would say, above average, but above average was to be average person who doesn’t draw. So, I had a ways to go as far as learning how to draw better. And that’s what prompted the rebrand, is I felt, “Okay, my skills are way better than they were. So, I can go with this art thing.”

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, you took me back there with talking about Kinko’s. I remember that fondly.

Chris Dudley:
Okay, yeah. Yep. Yep.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, during that time, I was in high school, right around that time. I was 18 in ’99. So, a little bit later than you were, but I did come up also in that time of life before the internet. I mean, computers actually when I was a kid were almost like a toy.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
At least that’s how they were marketed or pushed. It was like, oh, this is the fun thing you do at school in your free period or-

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
It would be VTech. The company VTech had all these personal computer things. I had this big thing called a Precomputer 1000 that had a one-line screen on it. It had a full keyboard, but had a one-line screen and it had a handle on it so you could carry it with you. I think my mom wanted to throw that thing out the window because it could also make sound. And so, I was learning sound because I also grew up playing music, being a musician. So, I’m learning how to play sound and code on this thing. And I know she wanted to launch that thing out the window most days.

But I say all that to say it’s so different now when you look at schools. And even, I think, just the general conversation around technology for children and designs. It’s certainly something that people try to push their kids into as a viable career field or a moneymaking thing or something like that. Really back then, especially for Black folks, there was not a lot of examples. You had, what, Dwayne Wayne on A Different World. Maybe somebody that was featured in Black enterprise if you had a subscription. So, there wasn’t a lot around, oh, computers are a thing that you can use to build your career. It wasn’t a thing. And I feel like for listeners they should, especially younger listeners, it just wasn’t a thing.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, it wasn’t. It wasn’t. I think, what is it? What would you say? 2000s before, I think, when the internet came out for everyday people and people still didn’t have a computer in their home. Whereas now, most people do. But you think about to have grown up or have grown up at a time where that you didn’t have internet at home, you didn’t have a computer at home even. So, totally, it was a different era.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Or if you had an internet at home, it was via mail order CD.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, AOL.

Maurice Cherry:
You get a AOL CD. You get a NetZero disc in the mail or something like that. And that’s what you use-

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
… to get on for like… I remember getting those things and it’s like a thousand free minutes.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly. Oh, my gosh. Yes, I remember that too. Then you’re waiting five minutes to connect, just listening to that dial-up sound.

Maurice Cherry:
And it ties up the phone. So, if someone’s on the internet, someone also can’t be on the phone in the house.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, it was a whole thing. So, I used the computers at school and I learned it at school. I designed my high school newspaper, for example, and we used PageMaker. We’d use a double PageMaker.

Chris Dudley:
PageMaker.

Maurice Cherry:
And I know we started off trying to use Quark and those-

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, QuarkXPress.

Maurice Cherry:
That software would come with these big… I mean, these instruction manuals could choke a horse. It would be so thick, and it’s like a textbook. How am I supposed to read through all this to figure out how to use this software on this thing? And eventually, we’re just like, “We’ll just do it by hand.” It’s just easier to print and cut-

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
… and copy and all that sort of stuff. So, I know what you mean about having that not necessarily on the job training, but you learned through application. You didn’t necessarily go to school for. You learned by doing or you learned by working almost like an apprenticeship in a way.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, definitely, definitely. And along with that, just to add briefly, is that in that manner, you learn what you need because all these programs, obviously Adobe Photoshop, it’s so deep that even the experts don’t use everything, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Right.

Chris Dudley:
But I think a lot of us artists and entrepreneurs may… It can be daunting, but you may realize that I only need five functions from this program to run my business. I don’t need to know all 5,000 and shortcuts and all that. And so, it’s really finding what you need, and okay, that’s all I need from this program. Then it’s worth it for me to have it to run my business.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. And the chokehold that Adobe and Macromedia back then as well, the chokehold that those products had on the burgeoning digital design industry cannot be understated. I never thought I’d see a day where Photoshop is almost not derided, but I know a lot of designers now will use Figma over Photoshop. There was a time when they would use Sketch over Photoshop. I never thought I’d see a time when Photoshop would fall out of favor because it was everywhere.

Chris Dudley:
Yep, yep. And also, I think a lot of people are still upset about the subscription model. But I guess I get it. You get the updates. You don’t have to come up off of $900, which a lot of people couldn’t back in the day anyway. Or they’re working on old versions of Photoshop and there’s, like you said, a lot of options now. I do a lot of illustration in Procreate on the iPad Pro.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I think Adobe knew that their software was being pirated left and right. I didn’t buy Photoshop until the subscription came out. Everything before them was some cracked version off of LimeWire or Kazaa or whatever that I hoped would not give my computer a virus. And sometimes, it would. But that’s how I ended up learning because I was like, “I can’t afford.” Even when I had my business, I was like, “I can’t afford the cost of this. I’ll still use this cracked version because it works. It does what I need it to do.” Like you said, it does the five things-

Chris Dudley:
Exactly, exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
… I need it to do. Why would I pay this astronomical amount of money for this piece of software if I can’t use every single part of it?

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, you’ve been a working illustrator in this industry now for over 25 years. For you, what have been the keys to sustain that longevity? We’ve talked just now about how technology has really changed the game. How do you still keep current and maintain yourself in this industry?

Chris Dudley:
First thing is skillset. When it comes to art, you have to have the skillset and it’s not… Obviously, no disrespect to anyone, but a lot of times people think about art as it’s just a feeling and you just express yourself. And there are some aspects of art that are that way, but there are rules and fundamentals that you learn. Composition, you have to know anatomy. There’s so many things and you have to learn that stuff before you can just venture off and draw your feelings if you want to say. And so, I really focus on that skillset, learning those things.

Also, art is a different pursuit in that everyone else has to be… They understand that I got to be good at it first before someone’s going to hire me. If you were a baker, I got to be able to bake cookies good first. So, you’re going to be baking a lot. If you’re a singer, you have to show that you can sing. If you’re a writer, you have to write the book. But oftentimes, artists, some artists, new ones anyway, feel, “Well, I want someone to hire me to draw something.” Well, you have to show them that you can draw.

And so, I think a lot of artists don’t have enough of a body of work to show for someone to hire them, so that’s what I… I didn’t want to do that. And early stages I went through were, okay, you want someone. Then I realized that, no, you have to be drawing and producing things so people can see that you know how to do this thing. And when I took that approach, things really just really started to take off. And it can’t just be your practicing. You need to do a project from start to finish. People can see that you can do that, the highest level you can do at that time. And so, that’s what’s really helped me.

Maurice Cherry:
So, working in public. Like they say in math class, show your work. That’s what’s really been a big key for you.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, yeah, and being able to show that you can. It’s not waiting to be asked to do it or waiting to be hired to do it. And that’s what a lot of artists do. Again, no other industry is that way. You know that you have to have this skill at a high level before someone’s going to ask you to do it for pay. But sometimes, artists just wait. I’m waiting for someone to hire me. I’m just sketching in my sketchbook. Well, no, do a project. Even if you “hire yourself” to do a project, show that you have the chops to do it.

Maurice Cherry:
How has tech impacted your work? Of course, we’ve talked about Photoshop and things like that, but lately, over the past almost nine to 10 months now, the conversation has largely been around generative art and Midjourney and DALL-E and all this stuff. Yes. How does that, if at all, incorporate into your work?

Chris Dudley:
I have switched over. I’m almost… Well, I still draw because I love the tactile aspect of just traditional media. Actually, I’m going to be teaching a paint class this week, but the majority of the bulk of my work is digital now. So, I’m drawing on a tablet. And with regard to art, that’s… Well, if I could add, one funny thing to me is, in the art community, drawing hands because of their nature is difficult for just about every artist starting out. And so, one hilarious thing to me is that AI art can’t draw hands either, and that’s something…

I knew someone who, well, just recently they produced a book. And I said, I’ve looked at it like, “Wow, that’s a nice image.” But then I started, just from my trained eye, started to break away. No, this is AI. Again, not to discredit it, but I could tell right away it was AI produced. Then I looked at the hands and they looked atrocious, like claws. And I was like, “Oh, yep, I was right. That’s definitely AI.”

And so, I don’t think, I don’t see it as a battle per se, but I use digital aids, if you will. Sometimes, I’ll even create a scene with poseable characters if I’m looking for a certain pose. And I might take a picture of that and then use that as a reference. So, I’d use some different aids, but I think you have to have the skillset. The tools can’t make you an artist. So, you got to have the skillset behind it. People can’t think, “Oh, hey, I’ve got Midjourney now. I’m an artist all of a sudden.” No, you still need a certain base of knowledge and ability to be able to then use those tools to actually create art.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I was watching some video. I think it was from Wired, and it was an AI artist detailing their steps. And it’s all writing for the most part because you have to get the prompts specific in order for the thing to generate and all that sort of stuff. And it was fascinating to see it come together, but it didn’t feel like art. It didn’t feel like the creative process, especially with something as I think intimate as hand drawing something. There’s more that goes into it than, I think, just a technical skill. I mean it’s creativity. It’s emotion. There’s a lot of specifically, individually, intrinsically, fundamentally human things that go into the creation that the computer just can’t do. It can maybe-

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
… try to replicate it from other sources. And of course, there’s been talk about how these engines crib from other artists, but it’s not the same. I find a lot of AI art has a specific look. It’s like heavily shadowed and it’s a very specific look where I’m like, “Yeah, that’s AI.” It doesn’t feel like it’s from a person because people’s art styles are so varied and different.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly. And it’s very static as well, and some of it’s… I mean, obviously, you’ve got a trained eye to be able to see that but not to, I don’t want to sound condescending, but to a person that just says, “Oh, I like pretty things,” but they’re not into art or know, they don’t know art, they could just see an image and, “Wow, it’s a pretty image.” But if you’ve got a little bit of a trained eye, you can realize, “Oh, it’s okay. It’s nice. But it’s a static image. There’s no emotion.” Like you said, you could feel that it doesn’t have that human element to it. It’s just produced. It’s like a mass-produced restaurant versus a high-end restaurant or that little mom-and-pop shop that puts love into the meal. So, you can tell the difference.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, like a McDonald’s hamburger is going to be different from-

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
… the Smashburger place or something like that.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly, exactly. And there’s a reason that there’s always going to be that Smashburger. Yeah, you have the McDonald’s customers, but there’s a lot of people that says, “No, I don’t go to McDonald’s. I rather pay a few more dollars for a real burger.”

Maurice Cherry:
And I think, for you, because the work that you do involves the clients in the process from start to finish, it would almost feel like introducing AI into it, one, sort of cheapens it in a way, but then two, I could see how it could make the client think, “Wait a minute, I could do this myself.”

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, exactly. Definitely could, definitely. And I don’t think it’s going to… Who knows with technology, but there’s just what I see certain elements that AI just can’t do. You have to be able to, just with what I do with illustration, you have to be able to change the POV. Am I going to go with a bird’s eye view or worm’s eye view? What about the expression on their face? And AI can’t do that now. They can’t take a character and then put it through all these emotions and all these angles and add these other el-… You can’t replace the human element, like you said.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, AI can’t get inspired.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
It can’t get inspired from a work or a piece of music or a feeling. It just tries to recopy and regenerate from whatever it’s been fed into their model.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Maurice Cherry:
So, we spoke about just social media and these platforms and stuff. How do you approach marketing and promoting your work? Are there specific strategies that you found to be pretty effective?

Chris Dudley:
I really try to let the work speak, but also letting yourself be known as well. Because people do, that’s something I realized, they do like to know the artists behind the work. So, periodically posting a picture of yourself with the art and so forth, or even doing a little video or something. Everybody wants, I want a million followers and so forth. But then I started realizing I don’t need a million followers. I’m booked out with work, and I don’t know how many I had on Instagram. I don’t even think a thousand, but I’m booked with work. I have more work than I can do.

And so, that really changed my whole thought process of… Then I don’t want to be putting all my energies or time just into social media when I want to put that into the creative process, and it has worked for me. It has worked. I focus on my skillset and focus on putting projects out and more work comes. And so, I think having the presence though, obviously, is so crucial. Having a website, I think, is very valuable because it really gives a place where this is your work and you’re not competing for attention on social media platform, but then you could have those platforms that direct people to your site as well.

So, I think it’s necessary in today’s age, especially with the visual aspect of doing art, but focus on the work though. Don’t spend all of your time social media marketing, and then you forget to actually be producing artwork.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. Because the followers don’t necessarily translate into work. It may translate into visibility.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly, exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
Into more eyes on it, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that… And also, you may be attracting the wrong type of clients or the wrong type of people.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly, exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
The tire kickers and the low ballers and stuff. They see what you do and they don’t get the value in it. They just see it and think it’s something that could be potentially easily replicated.

Actually, going back a little bit to the AI conversation, one thing I thought that was super interesting is when people started getting those AI art, AI generated avatars out, how many people were, I guess complaining, but they were like, “Wait a minute, you paid for that? You paid for that? You paid how much for that?” Some people. Well, the cost wasn’t what it would cost you to actually commission an artist. It was much, much, much cheaper, maybe $5, $8.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
$20.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
For several images, not just one image. And it was so funny seeing people like, “You paid for that? You paid money for that?” I’m like, “If you were to pay an artist to do it-

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
… you would pay the artist. Do you expect it to be free?”

Chris Dudley:
Yeah. Oh, man, that’s a whole other story too, because art is no other industry, well, maybe photography possibly, but no other industry do people expect you to work for free because people think it’s just maybe some God given talent so you’re supposed to share it for free. And there’s times, obviously, where you’ll be giving with your skillset. But you don’t go to a mechanic and say, “Hey, if you fix my car, I will tell all of my friends that you’re a great mechanic and that’s going to get you some more work.” But people do that to artists all the time. It’s hilarious, man. It’s hilarious.

Maurice Cherry:
I’ll tell you from doing this show, they do it to podcasters too. They’re like-

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
“Oh, you’re just talking to a mic. All you’re doing is just press and record. That’s it.” No.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
There’s so much more that goes into it.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, they don’t see the art behind it.

Maurice Cherry:
Then when you try to show them, they feel like, “Oh, well, this is too much.” Once they get an idea of what the process is and how it is a skilled thing, then it turns them off. From then, it’s like, “Well, now you know.”

Chris Dudley:
Yep, exactly. And to speak to what we’re touching on, that’s what, again, versus just I want to become a social media marketer, that’s what has gotten more work, focusing on the work and then the relationships that I build with my clients. And when we onboard a new author and they see what’s involved, they see what you’re doing to bring their vision to life, that has gotten me more work than marketing on social media.

And so, that’s when it’s that shift of, “Hey, I’ll post and I’ll talk about stuff.” Plus, I’m not a salesman per se, so I’m not trying to hard sell, “Hey, come buy my book.” No. Here’s we created this book. It was a fun project. You can look at it a little bit. And people have bought from that versus me trying to hard sell them. And with regard to more work because then that author speaks highly of the experience they had working with you. That has gotten me so much more work where I have other authors call so and so.

I just finished up a book with Erica Flores, first time author. It’s been an amazing process. That has led to more work. And so, focusing on the skillset, and obviously, your working with clients far exceeds just trying to beg people to buy your products online.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I 100% agree with that. And also, because if you’re focusing on social media, as we’ve seen fairly recently, these platforms can change at the drop of a hat. If you’re busy trying to chase the algorithm, if you’re busy trying to market or make your work fit into whatever this opaque algorithm is in terms of visibility or something like that, it takes away from the work. I think we certainly see it with people that create content for video, like YouTubers, TikTokers. It’s a lot to try to figure it out. And even on maybe non-video platforms like Twitter or Instagram, Instagram is still pictures, but a lot of Instagram now is video.

Chris Dudley:
Yes, it is. It is.

Maurice Cherry:
Then with Twitter and this Twitter Blue, they’ve changed the weighting of how people see your work unless you pay for a subscription. The platforms have gotten so, I don’t want to say unreliable, but they certainly have gotten so caustic and to the point where you can’t really depend on those to get the word out or to get the work out.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
It helps. It still is a megaphone, but you can’t depend on just that to be the thing that propels your work or propels you into whatever the next level is.

Chris Dudley:
Definitely. And that’s why, like I mentioned, having your own website is so crucial. And again, I started before the internet. Well, not just before the internet, but when the internet was starting out, it was before all of the social media platforms. And so, I had a website even way back then. Whereas I see a lot of artists now that pretty good work, but they don’t have a website, and it’s just shocking to me. And they think, “I’m just going to get all kinds of work from Instagram.” Maybe if you were in the inception, but if you’re starting out right now and thinking, “I’m going to start an Instagram and get all kinds of work” and you don’t have a website, it’s not going to happen.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I know even from just trying to reach artists or folks to have on the show, it’s always tough to get them on if they don’t have a site, because even if I send them a DM, the way that the filtering is, they may not ever see it, if I send them something on Instagram, if I send them something on Twitter.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
If they even allow you to send them a message, and it’s like, “Well, do you want people to contact you or not?”

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
What’s the point? Yeah.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you balance your artistic pursuits with your personal life and responsibilities? You mentioned your marriage. You’ve got three kids. How do you balance all of that?

Chris Dudley:
Well, again, with booking, I don’t just accept any and all projects. I’d be with a privilege to be in that position where I don’t have to take all work that comes my way. I can be a little choosy and making sure that I’m prioritizing that time with my wife. We just hit 25 years.

Maurice Cherry:
Congratulations.

Chris Dudley:
So, that’s a huge milestone, and with our three girls and prioritizing that time. I love doing this. Obviously, there’s a monetary component to take care of my family and so forth. But I often think about too is that there’s time that I can’t sell a client. That’s for my wife and for my family, but then often think, but the time that I do sell you, if you will, you’re not paying just for that project. You’re paying for the time I’m not being with them.

And so, when that clicked in my brain many years ago, that changes your margin, that changes the value of what you’re offering. And time to ask me to not be with my wife and my girls, like I said, some time I can give you, but the time you’re going to take from them, it’s worth something to me. So, it’s got to be important. That’s why the project has to resonate with me. So, that’s how I really keep that balance.

Maurice Cherry:
That is so deep. That is probably one of the deepest things I’ve heard on this show, and I’ve been doing this for 10 years.

Chris Dudley:
Wow. Wow.

Maurice Cherry:
No, seriously. It’s like you’re not just paying for my expertise and time; you’re paying for time away from the people that I care about. That’s deep. Wow. That resonated with me. Thank you. Wow.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah. And with that, if I could just compound on top of that, it’s where, obviously with projects, you’re not paid in hourly sense, but a lot of people understand the concept of getting paid hourly. So, if you ask the person that, would you not spend time with your family for five bucks an hour? Most people would say no. And so, if you just keep going up the ladder with the amount, there may be a threshold where people would think about it. But that starts to help you to appreciate that there’s a value add there. That I’m not just going to not spend time with my family and exclusively give mental and emotional energy to your project for any amount. No, there’s a value thing to that.

Also, like we touched on earlier, I forget the book that I read, but they said that don’t spend time doing something that you could pay someone else minimum wage to do. Obviously, when we’re starting out, and that’s what has almost changed my brain. And that’s what made me, like we talked about earlier, we put together a team. And I’ve got assistants and people that handle that because it just doesn’t make sense for me to do something that I could pay someone 10, 15, 20, 30 bucks an hour to do when, my time, I could be doing something that makes way more than that. You get what I’m saying?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, it doesn’t add up. But a lot of people think, “Well, I’m giving away money. I can keep that.” Yeah, but your time is a non-renewable resource, so you got the time that you do sell, it’s got to be at the right price.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, and I think that becomes even more important, especially when you have a family, when you start getting older, when other members of your family start getting older. There’s no amount of money that can buy that time back.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly, exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
When you look back at your career, is there a particular moment or a particular experience that stands out to you the most?

Chris Dudley:
Man, I have a few. And one, I would say, is when I get an award at a juried art exhibition here at Downtown Grand Rapids. That was a very nice privilege. And like I mentioned, starting out with Dudley Graphics, and my drawing ability was not up to par by any means, any stretch. And so, to work hard to improve my understanding of light and shadow and composition and all of that, to get to the point where to be accepted into the juried exhibition again. And you’re paying to have your artwork reviewed and they can just send a no. To get accepted, to get the award, to have my work purchased and so forth, that was a milestone where I felt, “Okay, I’m pretty good at this.” Then it really gave me the confidence that I can take this to other levels.

Maurice Cherry:
What’s the most important lesson you say you’ve learned throughout your career as an artist?

Chris Dudley:
Again, sounds cliche, but to truly stay humble. Humility is something that can slip away. And that’s why I say it’s stay humble because it can be a constant fight for all of us. You’re this imperfect person, but to really strive to maintain humility and never stop learning in your craft. And so, even when I meet with clients now, I tell them, I say, “Yes, you’re hiring me because I have a skillset that you don’t have, but I want to do what’s in the best interest of the project, not what’s in my best interest.”

So, if you have an idea, even though you can’t draw, please tell me. If you can defend your idea, because I’m looking at as an illustrator, I need to be able to defend my choices that I make artistically that, oh, the composition is this way because of that, that way because of this. But if someone shoots an idea to me and I realize that your idea is better than the one I had, hey, let’s make the change to make the project better.

So, that humility, even the face of you have a skillset that someone else doesn’t have, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t suggest something that’s better. So, that’s what I really strive for. And never stop learning. I feel like I’m decent at drawing and I’ve been learning this craft since I was a little kid. And some days, it feels like I can’t draw. Like, “Man, what are you doing?” And other days it’s like, “Oh, you’re pretty good. You got this.” But yeah, never stop learning and never think you just got it down.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, all of your daughters can draw too. Is that right?

Chris Dudley:
Yes. I jokingly what they say, joking but not joking. I made them learn how to draw, and there were times with each one of them. My oldest is almost 20, almost 20, 16 and 15. And they would see me drawing and I would teach them how to draw. I didn’t tell them that it looked good when it didn’t when they were young. I didn’t crush their feelings, but if something was off, I told them. I didn’t just put it on the refrigerator just because they drew it type of thing.

There were times with all of them that there were tears. And I would ask them, “Do you really want to learn how to do this?” And with tears in their eyes, each one of them, it’s like, “Yes, I do, daddy.” And it’s like, “Okay, you see that the eye is crooked. How do we fix it?” And it’s helped them to really grow. And if I could share just a brief story with that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Chris Dudley:
When I was teaching my oldest how to read, it dawned on me that this is hard because if you can picture this, you know how we write, the kid learns how to write the alphabet. What I did was, so to make an A, there’s three lines that you use to make an A, right? Then there’s one line and two bumps to make a B. And this curve line to make a C. So, what I did was I wrote an A, but I kept all the lines. Just imagine doing the first line on this part of the page. Second line over here. And I did the whole alphabet that way on a piece of paper and it looked like a jumbled mess.

But then I thought that I’m asking my daughter to figure this out, learn how to put the lines together, so that they can make all the letters. Then we asked them to learn the name of the letters, the sound of the letters, how to put them together to make a word, how to put those together to make a sentence, a paragraph, and then you got to do it with math. And I thought, “Man, learning how to draw is easier.” Then the thing, Maurice, is that there’s no reference for that. They have to learn it though.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, you have to.

Chris Dudley:
And so, when it hit me that, okay, if you can learn how to read, how to write and how to do math, you can learn how to draw. Then this is a soapbox of mine, but I won’t belabor it. But when I realized that, I realized, okay, my girls can learn how to draw. They’re going to learn how to draw at least the basics.

And another thing, at a class that I got to teach, and I’ll keep this short, is that I told someone, they said, “Well, no, it’s just a talent.” I said, “Well, yeah, you can have a little bit of ability, but it gives you maybe a one to three out of a 10.” But I said, “We make kids for 13 plus years learn how to read, learn how to write and learn how to do math. Everything else is optional. If we made you from kindergarten to 12th grade, you had to draw every year and you were tested on it, everybody would leave school knowing how to draw at least decently.”

But if your kid said, “Ah, it’s hard.” You say, “Okay, quit. Let’s try and play saxophone or try soccer.” But if your kid says, “I’m struggling with reading,” you’re going to learn how to read and we make them do it. And so, that dawned on me. I was like, “Okay, my girls will learn how to draw.”

Maurice Cherry:
I really like that way of looking at it. And you’re right. I mean, as kids we start off with, I think, a lot of applied art education. In kindergarten and whatever, there’s finger painting, there’s drawing and there’s coloring. I remember being in elementary school and we would get these sheets of paper that have it’s blank at the top, and then there’s lined rules at the bottom for writing. And you had to draw something at the top and then tell the story at the bottom of it.

I actually still have them. I still kept all of my mine from being a kid. But the older I got, I remember art stuff just kept getting phased out, phased out, phased out. I had taken gifted courses. I think they called it enrichment back then, but they were gifted courses. And it felt like those were the only times when I got to do something that felt creative because everything else was towards some specific application. Like you’re learning English to learn how to read and how to write. You’re learning math for those applications and stuff like that.

And just the older you get, even if you are really into art and drawing and stuff like that, it’s increasingly treated as a hobby and not as also a fundamental thing to understand. It’s just the world that we live in because as you alluded to, well, you didn’t allude to this really in the interview, but before that we talked about this, everything is designed. Everything that we use in the modern world has went through some lens or filter of design in some capacity. The chair we sit in, the clothes we wear, the picture we write with.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
All of those are designed. And because we interact with these designed things on such a regular basis, almost on a subconscious basis, we know when something is not designed well.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
We know when this pen is bad or this shirt doesn’t feel right. We know that. We may not have the language for it, sort of speaking what we talked about with English and math and stuff, because that’s not really taught to us as we get older.

Chris Dudley:
So true. So true. And I remember someone asked me, “Oh, what do you do?” I said, “I draw and do illustration.” And the look on her face. And she said this to me, man. She said, “You might as well have told me you could fly. You can draw?” And she was just so shocked. And I’m like, “Yeah, I’ve been drawing and learning this for decades.” But what I’ve found is that artists, well, specifically with visual artists, we’ve done it before there was any incentive to do it. And so, that’s what I think makes it so amazing.

It’s like when someone sees someone that can do back flips and do all this stuff, but they’re not in the Olympics, they’re not getting paid. It’s like, “Wow, how did you learn how to do all that?” They did it because they loved it. And another point I’ll make is that it shows that, if you’re given the right incentive and you can do it because of the right incentive, that shows that you could do it all along.

I’ll use the example sometime. Usain Bolt, fastest man. He’s run the 100 meters in 9.58, I think it was. Now, if someone says, “Hey, I need you to do that in a year. You need to be able to run a sub-10 100 meters. I can’t do it. Right? There’s no amount of money. I can’t do it. But if someone says, “Okay, I need you to learn how to draw by next year decently and I’m going to give you $10 million.” What happens? You start practicing every single day. And guess what? At the end of the year, you’re going to be pretty decent at drawing and get that $10 million, which means you could do it all along, but you didn’t have the incentive.

Yeah, so as artists, we learn. We love it, so you learn how to do it and then later, you make a few dollars from it. And it seems amazing because most people, like you said, they veer off that creative path. Then you get older where you need money, and then I haven’t learned how to draw, so no one’s going to pay me with the skillset I have now. So, I got to go work over here and make some money. But yeah, it’s a awesome thing. Everybody can learn how to draw, but it’s cool being one of the few in the world that can.

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

Chris Dudley:
Dream project? Well, actually, one of my dream projects is a book that I wrote. The book that I just finished up, I’m the author and illustrator and the collaborator with Michael Chambers. He’s featured in the book, but I’m actually the author and the illustrator of the book. So, it’s my book per se. But my dream book, actually, I wrote a couple of years ago, and I have just got around to illustrating my own work. This one is called Duddles and the Big Dilemma, and it is a book about that very thing we just discussed about learning to draw and how everybody thinks it’s magical, but it’s more work than just talent.

And it’s amazing to me is that in the book and it explains it, no one says you’re just an amazing gifted plumber or an amazing gifted carpenter or you just naturally know how to whatever. But when it comes to the arts, people want to put this fairy dust on it. Whereas, what is it, I think Malcolm Gladwell is in his book Outliers, he said that you’ve never seen someone who is good, but they haven’t put into practice, in the work, deliberate practice.

And so, that’s one of my dream projects is to finish that, the illustrations for it and really get that book out there. It’s called Duddles and the Dilemma. Well, I won’t want to give a lot away. I’m going to finish this project probably within the next year or so, and there’s a series to the book as well. But it’s about him realizing that it’s not all fairy dust. You got to put in work to learn to draw. It’s not a magical thing, and that’s just the truth of it. And a lot of people don’t want to believe that, but I wish there was just a download that gave me all this knowledge that I’ve learned over the last 30 plus years. I wish it was that easy, but yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So, to that end, what do you see as the next chapter of your career? What do you want to do in the next five years or so? What do you see yourself?

Chris Dudley:
Yeah. Well, more books. Right now, as I mentioned, we just launched the book with Michael Chambers, Lil’ Boogaloo Shrimp and the Clean Sweep. And so, I see the direction of doing more art talks and events with kids. We are actually partnering with a nonprofit here locally. I mentioned about the breakdancing school there in Georgia, but there’s one in Colorado that we’re going to be touching base with. And so, I think that’s going to really be exploding. We’ve already talked to Rockwell Dance Academy about a book project, and so, that’s on the horizon. And in the next couple of years, just more books. More books, man.

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

Chris Dudley:
Well, my website is chrisdudleyart.com and that’s where you can see my portfolio, my body of work and anybody can reach out and contact me directly through that. But my books are available through hudsondawnpublishing.com that I’m connected with, hudsondawnpublishing.com. And that’s where all of the books that I’ve illustrated are available. And that’s been awesome being connected with them. I actually designed the logo. And my oldest daughter, she launched the publishing company. She put a team together. I was joking around about it, designed a logo. She launched it during the pandemic. Got with an artist and made a book and got it out. And I was like, “Wow.”

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Chris Dudley:
And so, since then she has worked with, wow, probably 10 authors. I’ve illustrated a lot of the books, but she’s working with, I think, five new authors right now and that’ll be on that site. So, yeah, it’s been awesome. She has printeries. It’s established printeries locally in Michigan actually, in the west and east side of the state. Got warehousing. So, she’s taken that to the next level beyond what I ever thought that could be.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s amazing. It’s a whole family operation. It’s a family affair.

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, definitely, definitely. Yeah, hudsondawnpublishing.com.

Maurice Cherry:
Awesome.

Chris Dudley:
And actually, the recent book, you can read the intro of the book right there online.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Yeah, we’ll definitely put a link to that in the show notes.

Chris Dudley, I want to thank you so, so much for taking time out and coming on the show. I mean, it always warms my heart to talk to people that have been doing this kind of work for years on years on years because the longevity in just this industry is something that you don’t really see from Black creatives. You can get burned out. We can get discouraged, et cetera. And it really feels like you have found a method and a calling and a passion in this work, and you found a way to not only sustain it for yourself, but also for your family and for the community that you’re in.

I think that is something that is super inspiring. I think any artist wants to make sure that their work has an impact in the world. And most certainly, I can tell just from your passion about it and how you talk about it and just the quality of the work, that you’re making an impact in the world with everything that you do. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Chris Dudley:
Well, thank you for having me. It’s been such a privilege. I truly appreciate and look forward to touching base with you soon.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit is a strategy and design firm committed to designing a more inclusive and equitable world. They are always looking to expand their roster of freelance design consultants in the U.S., particularly brand strategists, copywriters, graphic designers and Web developers.

If you know how to deliver excellent creative work reliably, and enjoy the autonomy of a virtual-based, freelance life (with no non-competes), check them out at brevityandwit.com.

David Tann

If you live here in Atlanta, or you’re a fan of our hometown basketball team, then there’s a good chance you’ve already seen David Tann’s work. As the former VP, Creative Director for the Atlanta Hawks and Philips Arena, he helped establish the team’s bold visual identity…one of the best in the NBA, if you ask me. Now, David heads up his own company, Tantrum Agency, where he uses his career experience with global brands to help companies find their own unique voice.

We started off talking about his recent accolade — Entrepreneur of the Year from Atlanta Business League — and he gave some behind the scenes information about running an agency and working with clients and new projects. He also talked about his time at Wake Forest University, his past brand work with companies including Kohl’s and Carter’s, and shared some insight on how he sees success at this stage in his career. David Tann is definitely the real deal, and I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of his work for years and years to come!

Interview Transcript

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

David Tann:
I’m David Tann, the founder and CEO of Tantrum Agency located in Atlanta, Georgia. We are a boutique brand and design consultancy. I call it creative consulting. I think, for us, it’s really more about the journey and the process of creating whatever it is, less so the actual physical output. I like the process of working with people and I think that’s what we do really, really well. That’s the part of my job that I love the most.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, before we really kind of start off with the interview, I just have to congratulate you on your recent honor.

David Tann:
Oh, man. I appreciate that.

Maurice Cherry:
Entrepreneur of the Year from Atlanta Business League.

David Tann:
Yeah. That’s a big one, man. I never in a million years would have thought that that one would come across the desk, but when it did, I definitely am super, super humbled. There’s a lot of titans in the history of Atlanta who have won that award, so I definitely am super humbled and honored to receive that one.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, man. You should really be proud of that. Congratulations.

David Tann:
Appreciate it.

Maurice Cherry:
Aside from that, how has 2023 been going so far?

David Tann:
Man, 2023 has been, I mean, we’re really blessed. It’s a record year as far as projects and revenue. I think we’re continuing to grow. The first quarter, first half of the year has been amazing. If the second half lives up to the first, it’ll be another record-breaking year for us.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, aside from the record-breaking parts that you mentioned, how are things different for you this year than last year?

David Tann:
I think it’s a lot different for us, less probably so from the outside looking in, but more … We just have more systems in place. It’s taken a while to get the right people on the team and have the right people in the right roles. 2023 feels different than 2022 or any of the years prior just because it’s like we actually have a solid team in place. There’s a lot of things that I used to have to do that I don’t have to do anymore. That’s a really, really good feeling. That means that we’re growing and we’re moving in the right direction.

Maurice Cherry:
Any plans for the summer?

David Tann:
Summer’s always my busy season, man. I think it comes from my background in retail where in the summer you’re really ramping up for holiday. My summers are always … In a weird way, everyone else is going on vacation. I’ll sneak a vacation, a couple of days in, here or there when I can, but usually I’m ramping up. We’re pushing pretty hard in the summertime.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Let’s talk about Tantrum, which turns five this year, right?

David Tann:
Yeah. We just turned five in February. We’re a little over five now heading into the sixth year. That’s a huge one because most businesses obviously don’t make it that far. We feel really fortunate and blessed and thankful to get to that point.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Tell me more about it. I mean, you’ve kind of made a little bit of mention about the team structure, but talk to me more about Tantrum.

David Tann:
I started 2018 in my basement just with this idea. It was something that I had always wanted to do, and the timing of it was never right. After years in the industry, it was just like, all right, family’s good. Kids are a little bit older. I have all this experience. I’m a firm believer in mental health and therapy. Talked to my therapist and she’s like, “What are you waiting for?” Talked to my wife about it and she was like, “You’ve let me be at home with the kids and be a stay at home mom for 10 years. Now go chase it.” That was the battery charge that I needed to go out and do it. I thought, worst case scenario, it’s a six-month sabbatical and then I just go back and get another job.

Here we are five and a half years later, still going strong. As far as the agency goes, we do all different types of work. I say we’re kind of industry agnostic. We’re everywhere from education to civil engineering to healthcare, sports entertainment. We cross a variety of industries, but I think the thing that is the common thread is we have clients that really believe in what they’re doing and are passionate about the work that they do, and they’re willing to go on that creative journey with us. We’ve got some really cool clients that cross a bunch of different industries and we’ve done a bunch of pretty cool projects. As an agency, I think, that’s kind of the thing that I’m the most proud of is the diversity and the type of work that we do.

Maurice Cherry:
What are some recent projects that you’ve worked on?

David Tann:
Yeah. One that I tell people that’s just easy for people to see because it’s just easy, is we rebranded The Atlanta Dream about three years ago. If you look at any of their marks and colors that came from our team three years ago due to the close ties and relationships that we have with the NBA, so that’s an easy one. One that’s really cool that we just did is we rebranded a organization formerly called Equity, it’s now called Beam. They’re in the cash assistance and government aid space. It’s a tech company that helps people get cash assistance quickly and equitably. We rebranded them, did their website, and then we just did a big trade show booth for them at the Cities Summit of the Americas in Denver. That was a big one that we’re really proud of just, because it’s very comprehensive and it got the show all the different skills and abilities that we offer. That’s a very different end of the spectrum.

Then as far, as you mentioned the Atlanta Business League, the day after I won the award for the Atlanta Business League, I was on the road going up to Charlotte to go speak to some high school kids. We actually have curriculum in Charlotte for digital marketing. We’re rolling out curriculum for sports marketing in the fall.

I think those shows such a diaspora of the types of stuff that we do, but those are three good ones that I think I’m really proud of. I think it’s really easy to get kind of caught up in some of the, I call, sexier projects, but the ones that I find the most challenging or the most rewarding are the ones that you don’t expect. We worked on a brand called Genesis Health, which is a healthcare insurance company a year ago. It’s like, how do you make healthcare and insurance sexy? We found a way to do it and it was cool. Those are the things that I like because I think that’s the challenge of what we do from a creative standpoint.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m really glad you mentioned, I don’t know, the sexiness of projects because I think particularly when designers are either looking to strike out on their own or they’re, at the very least, trying to establish themselves as a brand, there’s so much social proof wrapped up in doing work for very well known brands because it sounds good. If you look at your resume and it says you’ve done Nike and Sony and all this kind of stuff, it’s great. As you’ve intimated, the true metal of a designer is how do you take the skills that you have and apply it to non-sexy type of things? How do you make insurance sexy? How do you make healthcare sexy? I mean sexy, of course, is a subjective kind of feeling, but how do you make it so it’s interesting to people and that it still sort of puts forth what the business wants in terms of goals for working with the agency.

David Tann:
Yeah. I don’t know. I think that that’s just fundamental to what we do. I tell people all the time, design is not art. If you’re a artist, you get to create from within and you get to create because something moves you as a person. If you’re a designer, I’m not doing anything till someone comes to me with their problem. Everything I do should be solving their problem.

To me, I think that’s sort of fundamental to what we do as professionals is, at the end of the day, all this other stuff is cool and it maybe gets a lot of attention and hits from a media standpoint, but when this small business or medium-sized business, or even to some degree large corporation comes through with a problem and they don’t know how to articulate themselves or they can’t reach their customer in the right way, then okay, cool, I got you. That gets to show off a whole other skillset. I think that that sort of separates … That’s when you sort of begin to level up and separate yourself from the pack and what others are doing. To me, that’s kind of what I’ve made my career on. I think that’s the part that I’m the most proud of.

Maurice Cherry:
Has business changed over the past few years, just given the state of the world? Have you found that there’s been a shift in the types of clients that you do or the types of work that you do?

David Tann:
I think it’s changed for us, but it has less to do with the state of the world and more to do with just we’re growing. Just being a young business, being a young entrepreneur, starting, being a couple of years into it and leveraging those personal relationships, you generally are starting off with a small project here just to kind of get your foot in the door and show what you can do. Then you do a good job on that and then someone’s telling someone else and then someone’s telling someone else. Our business has changed and our projects have evolved not so much because of what’s happening in the world, just because we’re older, more mature, more savvy, we know more what we’re doing, we’re more confident in who we are, and so we’re going after bigger projects to have larger scope, longer lead times, bigger budgets, et cetera.

To me, that’s just the natural progression of us being in business over time, less so kind of what’s happening with the world and the market. I mean, we’re aware of it and we obviously pay attention to it, but I’ve just learned, especially being an entrepreneur, there’s certain things that it’s like you can control and there’s certain things that you can’t control. The external forces of the market and the world, I’ll never be able to control that. We try to keep our head down and make sure we’re serving our clients to the best of our ability and let the chips fall where they may.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, as founder and CEO of the agency, are you still able to get hands on in working with clients?

David Tann:
Yes and no. I think the funnier part about it is redo creative reviews on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I was just telling my team the other day, I actually am really excited about the fact that I could be in a creative review and the team could show me something or be talking about a project and I have no idea, or they have to get me up to speed on what’s happening with that client and what that project is. I think part of being a leader is putting good people in place and learning to let go and let them deal with what you’ve hired them to do.

To me, I love that aspect of it, but at the same time, I’m always going to be involved. I’m always going to know, at a high level, what’s going on and make sure that the ship’s heading in the right direction. Even if I’m not necessarily always meeting directly with the client, they know that I’ve been involved in that process. To me, that’s very important where sometimes even if someone is emailing and it’s not me, we’ve had a conversation about it and they can say, “I talked to David. This is kind of what we’re doing. This is the thought process,” et cetera, even if I’m not in every call, on every meeting, et cetera.

Maurice Cherry:
Are there particular types of clients that you would say the agency is best to work with? I know you mentioned sort of larger brands like The Atlanta Dream, et cetera, but is there a specific category or type that you find sort of the agency gravitates towards, in terms of business?

David Tann:
I think it’s less about industry. To some degree, actually it’s size is less of a concern too. We do a lot of work with startups and we do a lot of work with small businesses. I think that it’s just part of what I consider to be goodwill is that we have a skill, we have a service, and for the most part, those young entrepreneurs or startups or whatever, they may not be able to afford our services. We carve out a couple of projects a year where we do them at discounted rates or some of them, depending on what it is, we might even do pro bono. We can’t obviously do a ton of them, because we’re a business and we have to keep the lights on. I do think it’s important to keep connected and make sure that some of those small businesses, because I’m a small business myself, that we don’t forget about them and leave those behind. We’re working on all different types and sizes of companies.

I think the thing that is sort of unique regardless of where they are is I like working with people who feel like they have something to prove. I like the underdog. I think everyone on our team has a chip on their shoulder. We’re a small agency. We’re trying to compete with the agencies that have been around for 40, 50 years. From a client standpoint, the best clients are the ones that aren’t afraid to take risks.

The best clients are the ones that, again, aren’t afraid to go on that creative journey and they’re not just asking me for an output. I want a logo. If you’re just focusing on that output or that end result, it’s probably not the best scenario for us because, generally speaking, we know where we need to head, but we’re going to push you and poke and prod so that when we get to that end result, we’re delivering the highest quality, telling the story in the best way, et cetera. For people who want to shortcut that process or cut those steps out of the process, those end up not being ideal clients for us. It’s less about the size and scale, and more just about the mentality and the approach to the project.

Maurice Cherry:
Say a new project comes into the agency, walk me through that. What’s the intake process look like? What does the creative process look like for working on the project? Tell me about that.

David Tann:
Yeah. In five years we’ve only had one client come off the street. Everything has been word of mouth.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice.

David Tann:
Generally there’s some sort of a referral or some sort of a connection to a project that’s coming into the agency. Once we kind of get beyond those initial interactions, connections, as far as establishing the relationship or how they were referred to us and we start talking about the project just at a high level. I mean if you want all the steps, it’s just starting about the project. We’ll initially do some sort of a touch base meeting to just sort of understand what are they trying to achieve and what their plan to scope it, the project. If they have all that stuff figured out, then they can send us the scope. If not, then we’ll go back, based off of our notes, and we’ll try to create some sort of a rough version of what we think the scope would be.

Then we’re doing a typical statement of work, agreeing to the terms of the contract. That can go back and forth for a little bit, just depending on who they are or what the specific needs are. Once all the contracts are signed and the paperwork is done, then we’ll have a formal kickoff because … Many of the times I’m already talking with the client, so I have an idea what they want, but my team hasn’t been involved in that process. I like to start from square one and pretend like I know nothing. My team knows nothing. We start walking through that process of who they are, what they’re trying to achieve, why they feel like they need to do this project, whatever it may be, et cetera. I step back and I let my team ask questions.

From there, we do our own discovery. We’ll do our own research regardless of whatever research the client has done. We are looking at the company as a whole, we’re looking at the market, we’re looking at competitors, we’re looking across industries. Sometimes clients think that their problems are unique, but it’s really not that unique if you look across a different industry or can find something or our client or a company in a similar situation. We’re doing all that research.

From a creative standpoint, we might put together some mood boards. We do a little exercise where we’re talking with the client trying to understand what they like or what they love and what they hate. I don’t really care about anything that’s in between, that’s sort of vanilla. I only care about the things that move them one way or another, because we’re trying to figure out how far we can push them, where the boundaries are. If we know that they hate orange, then it doesn’t make sense for us to show any concepts that have orange in it. You know what I mean? We can already cut that process … We can cut those mistakes out just by asking simple questions upfront.

Once we do that initial sort of creative touch back or touch base, like, “Hey, this is what you said, this is what we heard. This is our research. Here’s a couple rough ideas that we have. What are you interested in?” Then we’ll start the creative process. We try to nail it coming out the gate, but generally two rounds, three rounds tops. After that, I mean, we’re rocking and rolling. Once we get the approval, then we move into production mode and then just start knocking out all the assets.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, sounds like the process is pretty kind of straightforward.

David Tann:
I mean, the process, in and of itself, is straightforward. The thing that you kind of run into is the companies and who we’re dealing with and the approval process, that’s not straightforward. In some instances, we can rebrand a company in four months. In other instances, it’s taken us three years. It’s not that our process is changing, it’s just that the number of people involved, the approvals, sometimes we are peeling back layers to the onion, as far as the company goes. You peel back one layer, which makes you think about self endow differently. It just kind of goes on and on. Our process is pretty standard and pretty vague, but what we uncover throughout that process can lead us down a whole other direction.

Maurice Cherry:
I’d say it’s probably also just a testament to the team, as well, your team being able to work with the client through that process. I like that part you said about knowing the boundaries, knowing how far to push them, because sometimes the client will know what they want, in terms of the output or the end result, and sometimes it uncovers itself through those conversations and brand explorations and stuff like that. It can come out in a different way. Then it’s about knowing whether or not the client is okay with that, how far you can push things creatively. It’s a challenge.

David Tann:
Yeah. It definitely is a challenge, but I think that’s the part of my job that’s the fun. That’s the part that’s the most rewarding. To take something that maybe someone didn’t believe in or maybe something couldn’t see, and to walk them through that process. I think, at the end of the day, if we’re doing this job right, we’re educators too. Part of what we’re doing is we might know where we need to go, but we have to slowly but surely educate the client and build confidence within them to understand why this rebrand is important, or why we need to say it this way, or why we’re shifting the colors this way or whatever. We have to educate them. Sometimes that takes time. I think that that’s the fun part, because once the light bulb goes off and they get it, then it’s a game changer.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What’s your favorite project that you’ve worked on?

David Tann:
Oh, man. This is a super cliche answer, but I don’t have one. To me, it’s the next project is the favorite project, because I’m competitive, man. I’m a little bit different in the sense that I was a athlete as a kid, and so I just always have that competitive nature of me, as a creative. We had a client reference another project that we did for another client. We’re working with them, like, “Hey. I really love this website that you did for so-and-so.” Man, forget that website. We did it. We want to be better than that. We’re trying to raise the bar on ourselves. To me, whatever the next thing is my opportunity to prove that the thing before it wasn’t a fluke, and this is really what we do. To me, whatever products we did in the past, those were cool and I’m proud of them, you know what I mean, but the next one is the one where I’m like, all right, I’m going to show you. That’s just my mentality. That’s just the way it’s always been.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, let’s kind of switch gears here a little bit since you talked a little bit about you as a kid. Tell me about where you grew up.

David Tann:
I’m from Kennesaw, Georgia. For those who are familiar with the Metro Atlanta area, Kennesaw’s about 45 minutes north of the city. Now it’s very much considered part of Metro Atlanta. When I was growing up, it was country. You know what I mean? My high school had cows. I drove past the farm every day on the way to high school. Now, it’s a skateboard park. When I was growing up, my exit was a Waffle House, a Texaco gas station, and Kennesaw College. It wasn’t even a university at the time. Those were the only two things or three things that were on my exit.

I think that that framed a lot of me growing up as a kid. I think the other piece of it too, and I talked about this a little bit in my Atlanta Business League acceptance speech, is because I grew up in the country and my parents worked I had a nanny growing up. She was an elderly lady. She was a former educator in Cobb County. Her name was Jessie May Taylor. She took care of me from the time that I was nine months old until she passed away when I was nine years old. She took in foster kids, so she would babysit us during the day, but she also would take in foster kids. I would see these kids come in and out of the system on a daily, weekly basis. These kids were my friends and I played with them, and they had really tough family environments.

I think it very much molded our view of this is why we give back, this is why we feel the need to go talk to kids in Charlotte. This is why we feel the need to do the stuff that we do for minority owned, women owned businesses, et cetera, because we have a bigger purpose, outside of the creative. The business needs to be a community asset. I think that frames a lot.

As far as me, personally, I grew up playing sports; football, baseball, basketball. I was decent as a kid. I wrote a lot. I think that’s how I expressed my creativity, but I can’t draw, to this day. Stick figures, circles, lines, squares, triangles, that’s how I sketch my ideas. I was the kid that I was always rearranging my room. You’d come in one day, the bed is on this wall, blah, blah, blah. The next this moved here, the next this is there. I would say that’s how I expressed my creativity was writing, through pen, and that. At that time, late nineties, people weren’t really talking about design like that. I didn’t really know that this could be a career. I just kind of stumbled upon this in grad school.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, let’s talk about college. You ended up going to Wake Forest University. You majored in communication. Tell me about what your time was like there.

David Tann:
Yeah. Wake was pivotal, man. I think prior to getting to Wake, I had a high school teacher who did a public speaking class. I loved that class, because she allowed us to be fun and free. That dictated what I majored in when I went to Wake. Because I had so much fun in that high school class, I was like, all right, I’ll major in communication, because I kind of have an idea of what that’s about. I majored in communication. Again, I was a decent writer, so that helped sort of craft that experience of being able to express ideas through written word, but also communicating with people, whether it’s public speaking, small groups, et cetera. I think that helped a lot, professionally.

I think the environment at Wake, with it being such a small school, and I ended up pledging Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. I was the guy that would make our flyers for events. In hindsight, they were horrible because this is, again, late nineties. Photoshop wasn’t a household thing. I’m making flyers in Microsoft Publisher with Clip Art and these horrible default fonts. I think that they’re dope, but I go back and look at them now, I was like, “What was I doing?” I think that that was sort of the beginning of me working in the graphic arts was just beginning to get that taste of it. I would say the two biggest things is just that communication degree and then also the fraternity events’ flyers, et cetera.

Once I graduated from Wake, I remember going to a career fair prior to graduation and seeing all the businesses that were in there. I was like, I don’t want to do any of this. None of this feels right for me. In the corner tucked away was a small table for this school called the Portfolio Center, which is now the Miami Ad School at Portfolio Center. It was called the Portfolio Center at the time. They were just like, “We’re a creative school. Come here for two years and be creative.” I remember telling my mom about it. Once I came home on a summer break, or I can’t remember exactly what it was, I took her over to the school and walked in the door with her. She knew right away. She was like, “Yeah. This is where you need to be.” I enrolled.

Because, again, I didn’t know what design was, I enrolled as a writer. I grew up, like I said, as an athlete. To this day, I’ll tell anyone, we can debate it to the end, but that period, nineties, early two thousands, nobody was producing better commercials better than Nike was. My thought was like, somebody’s got to be writing that Nike commercial. I never thought that there was a creative director, an art director, a designer, a photographer, a set designer. I didn’t know all the roles behind what I was seeing. I just thought that someone had to be writing that.

I entered school as a writer. When I got there and saw all the stuff around the building, I’m like, oh, how do you get to make that chair? Or, “Hey. This Olympic project, who’s doing this?” Every time I’d ask a question … These posters, how did they get here? The answer was design. I was like, “Man. Put me in the design program.” I entered as a writer. Let’s say I graduated in May. School started in June. In that kind of two weeks in between switched from the writing program to the design program and just sort of never looked back.

Maurice Cherry:
There’s a couple of interesting points there that you mentioned that I really want to dive into. It’s so interesting that you sort of had this gateway into design via writing, which I think is sometimes different. I mean, we have all types of folks on the show, but I think you might be the first person I’ve had on the show that has said that their kind of gateway into this was through writing. I sort of latched onto that, personally, because I wrote a lot in high school. I wrote a lot in college. Actually, when I went to college, I wanted to major in English. My mom was like, “Nope. You have to major in something that is going to make some money. You’re not going to make any money being an English major.” I still wrote and everything, even though I didn’t major in English.

Something that we’ve done through Revision Path in the past few years is really try to champion design writing. We had a whole literary anthology called Recognize. We wanted to try to help cultivate that next generation of design writing or design writers, at least, because it’s one thing, of course, to be a visual designer or a UX designer or something like that, but can you articulate your ideas in words, in some way? Whether that’s on a portfolio or case study, or an article, or a book or whatever, because I really wanted to try to help change the face of who we see as a design writer. I just find it super interesting that writing has kind of been your gateway into this.

David Tann:
Yeah, I mean, I think that, at the end of the day, one, that’s not actually surprising for me because I think … It’s not surprising for me to hear your story and understand that because to me, whether or not it’s actual written word, that’s what Revision Path is. We are storytellers. The podcast just happens to be the medium for this particular story that you’re telling. If this was a hundred years ago, these would be books or these would be parables or these would be whatever. One, it’s not surprising for me to hear that from you, but I think for me … I actually fundamentally think that the communication degree is what ultimately helped me to become successful in the design industry, in general. Because when I started at the Portfolio Center, I was in class with kids that had had advertising backgrounds, had design degrees, had marketing backgrounds, had all these sort of creative elements. I was super far behind from a technical, execution standpoint.

What I began to learn over time is let’s say my technical expertise, I eventually begin to catch up. Okay, great. In a design environment, the technical expertise can actually hide a lot of flaws. I can make something look pretty and people will like it because it looks pretty, but at the end of the day, did that answer the clients … Did that solve the client’s problem? When you’re in a design environment, sometimes in the beginning you can get by more because of your technical expertise, because you can make something look good, how to lay something out on a page, et cetera, et cetera. You’re not asking yourself, is this solving their problem? Am I doing what’s right for the client, or am I just doing what I think looks good?

Once I began to put the technical expertise with that approach, which really comes from just the pure communication, how do I reach the people? How do I reach the client? How do I talk to this audience? How do I touch them in a way? What do I want them to remember when they walk away? Same kind of question that you asked me in the beginning, before we started the podcast. When people leave this, see this, interact with this, what do you want them to feel? What do you want them to say? How do you want them to engage? What do you want them to tell people about what they saw? Most designers aren’t asking that question, and I was because that was my background. That, I think, helped me sort of begin to separate myself once I got the technical expertise.

Then on the flip side, now you can put me in a meeting, and even though I’m a junior level employee, my boss knows that I can communicate this idea effectively. When I write an email to someone, they know that it’s going to come off a certain way. I got more leeway, they expose me more, from a leadership standpoint, as I began to progress in my career because of my ability to communicate with the people around me, not so much … I mean, obviously the work that I was doing had to be good, but the ability for me to talk with the team, the ability for me to rally the troops, the ability for me to talk to a manager, I feel like that is fundamentally what made me different. I think that that was sort of a big linchpin to the success, particularly in those early years.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, let’s talk about kind of those early years. You graduated from Wake Forest. Did you go to the Portfolio Center right after you graduated?

David Tann:
Directly.

Maurice Cherry:
Directly after?

David Tann:
A month after graduation, I was in school again.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. You didn’t waste any time.

David Tann:
No time. I was super focused.

Maurice Cherry:
What was the Portfolio Center like?

David Tann:
I tell people it was like medical school for design. I think that that was an important analogy for me, because I don’t think people understood the rigor of it and how much time I was putting into it. I moved back into my parents’ basement to go to design school. I felt like I was failing because I had gone away to college, and then I moved back home. I’m in the basement. I’m starting from square one in design. I know nothing. I’m driving from Kennesaw to Atlanta every day to take classes. When I’m at school, I’m sleeping on the couch. I never left that building. It was super, super tough and rigorous. I think med school to me was like, it’s med school for design. My line brother was in medical school at the time. That same amount of time that you’re putting in into that, I’m putting into this. Our output is just different.

That was my mentality with it. Again, because I felt like I was behind. I really felt like I had to catch up with everybody. I really felt like I had something to prove. I took it seriously, man. I didn’t do any partying or any of that stuff when I was in grad school. I knew that that’s what I wanted to do. I went after it really, really hardcore. I was super focused. That doesn’t mean that I was the best designer when I was in school because, again, I had a lot to learn.

From a technical standpoint, especially those early years, I would say that first three to four quarters, I couldn’t get my ideas out. I have an idea, but I couldn’t get it out on the page the way that I wanted it to. That took time. To be able to execute an idea that’s the craft. I had to put the hours in to get the muscle memory to be able to execute the things the way that I was seeing them in my mind. By the end of it, I felt like I had gotten in a pretty good place. I also did a thing where I did a lot of work that was really kind of feminine in the beginning. I had a couple pieces that … One piece that was in the How International Design Annual. Those pieces were the pieces that got me the job at Hallmark. I specifically did stuff because I thought that if I walk into … Well, part of it was because of my experience in undergrad at Wake.

I was on full scholarship at Wake, academic scholarship. Wake’s a small liberal arts school in the South. I remember this very vividly, but people would assume that I had to be an athlete to be at Wake and to be on scholarship, because there was no way that, as an African American male, I could have the academic acumen to be at a university like Wake Forest without being on scholarship or without playing on some team.

Maurice Cherry:
Interesting.

David Tann:
I remember that these people probably think X of me, so I need to make sure that whatever I do, from a creative standpoint, is so far beyond what their expectation of what they think that I can do, that it shakes them in a different way. I did some work that was really soft and feminine because it was like I knew that as a man of my stature and my size and the way that I look, if I walk in a room, you expect me to do X. Well, if you see this piece and you find out that it came from me, you look at me differently.

That’s what happened. I was at a portfolio review in New York for the Art Directors Club. Two ladies walked up and they saw these couple pieces that I had done. They were like, “Wait, you did this?” I was like, “Yes. Yes, ma’am.” They’re like, “Would you ever consider coming to Kansas City?” They were like, “We work at Hallmark. This work is really emotional, and we sell emotion, that’s what a greeting card is. Would you ever move out?” I said, yeah, and never looked back. That was really the start of my career.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. That part about doing … I really try not to draw these parallels between my own design journey, but even the feminine part that you mentioned there, that’s something that I did when I first started working AT&T. They gave you this design test. With the design test, they’re like, “There’s two things that we want you to design a website for.” This was during the interview process. One was a motocross event, and the other was a bridal shop. I chose the bridal shop because I was like, “Oh, I could do that. That’s not a problem.”

I mean, I got the job, but I remember my manager at the time saying that you’re the only man that has chosen to do a bridal shop. Why didn’t you choose the motocross? I was like, “Well, I felt like I could do better on the other design.” It wasn’t really a gendered thing in my mind, but I liked that sort of … I don’t know. I guess it was sort of disarming in a way, where the expectation is that you would do something like this, but instead you did something completely different and that impressed us.

David Tann:
Well, I think there’s all kinds of lessons that you can learn in that though, Maurice, because the reality is, if you think about it, the job is for AT&T. You choosing to pick the doula Bridal shop means that you’re willing to design something or work on something that may not even be of your own personal interest, which is valuable, and still deliver something at a very high level. Most people are going to pick the thing that they’re interested in. It’s like, okay, that’s great, but does that mean that I can only give you these types of projects where you’re going to give your best effort? Yeah. That’s the way that I study culture. To me, it’s like, of course that’s why you got the job. That makes perfect sense, because you’re showing that it’s not about you. You’re willing to design the thing for the brand. You’re willing to design the thing for the client, even if that’s not your personal interest. I’ve just made a whole career doing that.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s talk about kind of that early work at Hallmark. This was your first real, legit design gig. What was it like?

David Tann:
I think every place I picked up something different. Again, this is early 2000. Hallmark at the time was still … This is pre-social media or at the very beginning of social media. People are still sending greeting cards like crazy. I had mad people be like, “I’ve always dreamed of working at Hallmark.” It was cool. It taught me a lot about systems and a lot about process. They had things and systems and process in place that were way ahead of it’s time. I think that’s the thing that I got the most out of it.

It was a very corporate environment. It was a place that nobody ever left. On the flip side, now as a parent with kids, I can understand the appeal of it because of the security, because it was a family company, et cetera. As a young kid come out of school with something to prove, I didn’t like the idea that I could be there for eight years and still be a baby, because someone is having a 25th, 30th, 40th, 50th anniversary. You’ve just got to pay your dues, but your dues could be 10, 12 years before anyone actually really pays attention to you.

I was hungry, man. I spent about a year and a half at Hallmark. It was a great experience from that first job, because they are very nurturing and do a lot to help develop their young talent, which is what I needed. From a career standpoint, me wanting to chase things and me wanting to do stuff that was bigger and take more risks and be given more opportunities, that was never going to happen one year out of school at Hallmark, just because of the nature of the way the company was. That was about a year and a half at Hallmark, and then I went to Abercrombie. That’s when the floodgates opened, because Abercrombie was going to let me do whatever I wanted as long as I could prove it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, you’ve worked since then with a lot of super well-known retail brands, you mentioned Hallmark, Abercrombie & Fitch, but also Bath and Body Works, Kohl’s, Carter’s. When you look back at that time, collectively, which it looks like it was roughly about a 10-year period, that’s a good chunk of a career. What do you remember the most? What stands out about that time?

David Tann:
Man, it’s a blur. I think it’s less about the time, it’s more just like … Again, I’m a storyteller, so I’m going to give you an analogy. My grandfather was a carpenter. He couldn’t read, but he could build a house, or he had a eighth grade reading level, but he could build a house from scratch. To me, all those places along the way were me mastering a different tool in my carpentry belt. Hallmark was great for process, Abercrombie was great from branding. I got to work directly with the CEO. At the time, Abercrombie was the biggest brand in the world. That experience of working directly with him and working on those teams and doing what we were doing, that was an amazing experience. Marketing, Bath and Body Works, Limited Brands, that time period, nobody was doing it better.

I left Bath and Body Works, and Kohl’s specifically took a job just doing packaging. I managed packaging for 16 brands at Kohl’s. Then Carter’s, came back to Atlanta to actually relaunch the OshKosh B’Gosh brand. That was a brand that I wore and grew up with in the eighties, having a mom that was in retail. Then I made my way over to the Hawks. The Hawks was where I got to put it all together. It was like I had done all these things and you’re amassing all these different tools. Then the Hawks is like, “Okay, cool. I can build a house now.” Then the agency was like, “Okay, cool. I know how to build a house for them, but can I build my own house?” That’s, to me, what the agency really was.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s talk about the Hawks. I mean, you were the VP creative director there for a good while. Was it a big difference working in sports over retail?

David Tann:
Yes and no. I think there were some things that were different just because the NBA schedule is different. When you’re in season, that was one of the things that was really hard to get used to. I had always worked crazy hours because of retail, and I was used to that. I told you before, the summer is always my busy time. It was a point when I was at Bath and Body Works where my wife and kids would go away for a month, because I knew I wasn’t going to be coming home from work. It’s like, “Don’t worry about me coming home late. You go hang out with your mom, kids can play with their grandparents, et cetera. I’m working.” I was already always used to the long hours.

The NBA season, when you’re in season, is brutal. You’re getting up, you’re working your 9:00 to 17:00, and then your 9:00 to 17:00 is done. You hang out at the office for two hours, then you walk over to the arena and the game starts at 19:00, or the game starts at 20:00. Then you’re working a whole other shift, but you’re making sure everything’s taken care of with the fans and it’s just a different type of environment. Then if you make the playoffs, then you’re flipping graphics just based off of, okay, all these if-wins scenarios. If the team wins on Monday, then we play again on Wednesday. If the team loses on … If the opponent wins … There’s just all these scenarios that the NBA lays out based off of what your team is doing and based off what the other team is doing. You have to be ready in all those different scenarios.

It just requires you to be on your game at the highest level. It’s super, super intense, but it is insanely rewarding and really fun. It’s my hometown team, so to work as a creative director for my hometown team, that’s like the dream of all dreams. I had a great experience. It was fun. It was really hard. It was really challenging, but it also allowed me to see what I could do, which more than anything, I would say, with the Hawks, I always felt … Or prior to the Hawks, I had always worked in these corporate environments. I felt like in some way I was always sort of compromising some aspect of what I could do or who I was, in those corporate environments. When I got to the Hawks, it was like I could be free.

They’re not going to judge me based off of what my hair looks like. They’re not going to … If I want to wear this outfit to work, it’s cool. It was just free. They allowed me, or they gave me the freedom to push the creativity as far as I could take it. I think, in some instances, some of the stuff that we did might have even surprised myself. I was like, “Oh snap. This is what this looks like.: Okay, cool. Yeah. It was super rewarding, but very, very intense.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, we’ve had a couple of folks here on the show who have done, or they do sports design or something like that. We’ve had Brit Davis on the show. I know we’ve had a couple of others, but she mainly comes to mind, because I think she might have been the first one I’ve had. Yeah. I feel like that whole world is … Well, first of all, I know that that whole world is really fast-paced. I did a short stint at the Georgia World Congress Center. This is back when the Georgia Dome was still an actual building. I did a short stint from 2005 to 2006 doing some marketing work with the Falcons. I know what you mean about that kind of turnaround and having to get stuff out. Yeah. You have your 9:00 to 17:00, but then if it’s a game that night, then it’s sort of extends over into the evening. That’s a rough schedule though.

Even when I think back during that time, it is a lot of fun. It’s a lot of fun. I mean, it’s a lot of work, obviously, but just that whole feeling because of the comradery of the team, not just the team you work with, but the sports team as well. It’s a great thing to get swept up in.

David Tann:
Yeah. It’s awesome. I think some of the things that are actually really cool about it is, let’s say the team has a [inaudible 00:49:27] playoff run, and we make a really cool shirt that we give out as a giveaway, the next day after the game, you walk around and it’s like everyone in the city is wearing your shirt. You’re like, “Oh, this is cool.” I got a sense of that when I was at Abercrombie, where it’s like I could go to any city and see someone wearing a graphic that I had made for Hollister or whatever, but it’s just different when it’s like, this is your city, you’re the representation of the city. They’re wearing your graphics and they don’t even know it came from you. To me, that was a cool thing.

Shout out to Britt Davis. She’s a beast. Yeah. She’s one of the people I’ve never had the opportunity to work with her directly, but when you’re in the industry, you know who’s who and you know who’s really good at what they’re doing. She’s just one of those people that I’ve always had my eye on and just have a high, high respect for what she does and what she’s able to bring to the table. She’s a monster.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now you run your own agency. You were doing what you’re doing at the Hawks and now you’re doing your own thing.

David Tann:
Yeah. I think that’s been the part that’s been kind of cool and unexpected. Yes. It’s been a wild ride.

Maurice Cherry:
Kind of a through line I think we’ve had on the show probably for the past, roughly two years now. Folks know this. I’ve been always kind of asking folks about their thoughts with Web 3.0 And the metaverse and AI and all this sort of stuff. We talked about this a little bit before recording. Within the past roughly nine months or so, it feels like there’s been this huge explosion of AI, not only coming to the mainstream, in terms of being included in certain software products, but also a lot of talk about the ethics behind using it, whether that’s for images, videos, text, et cetera. What is your opinion on the use of AI and machine learning as it relates to the work that you do?

David Tann:
I’m aware of it. I think that it’s interesting to me just watching the reaction of people to it, but I’m not necessarily intimidated by it or necessarily afraid of it. We don’t actively use it. I don’t personally actively use it, but it doesn’t strike fear in me. I’m not afraid of it. I understand it. I think it’s just sort of the natural evolution. I’m also a little bit older in the game. I remember there was a moment when every photographer was freaking out because they couldn’t use film anymore. People think that that’s crazy now, but when I was shooting my portfolio, everything was on actual film, and then everyone had to make that switch to a digital camera. There was this, “Well, I don’t know. The image quality’s not going to be great, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Over time everything catches up.

I think a lot of the ChatGPT and all this sort of stuff that kind of is going on right now, I kind of look at it as a fad diet kind of thing. Everybody wants to get rich quick. Everybody wants to find something that’s going to make things easier, faster, quicker, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and get the same great results as the person that put in all this work. That’s what makes this so appealing is like, wait, I don’t have to spend all this time writing this novel anymore. I can do it in five minutes. Okay. Cool. But you lose all the nuance of that process. To me it’s like, I understand it, I get it, but I’m not really super caught up in it.

For the record, it’s been here for way longer than we actually are giving it credit for. It’s like when you say, “Hey, Siri,” what do you think that is? Siri’s been learning how you talk and how you annunciate and how you pronounce and hear … To me, it’s been around longer. It’s just that someone’s done a really good job of packaging it up and making it digestible.

I think that there’s a whole group of people where it’s just like, “Oh, cool, I can do this faster.” It’s like, “Okay, cool.” What I do, yeah, we can make some steps quicker, but I’m not taking any of the steps out. I’m not short-circuiting, because the product’s not going to be as good.

Then the other thing that I think is actually really interesting is I saw a meme the other day, which I thought was brilliant in the sense that it was just like, ChatGPT is only as good as what you put into it. They were like, if you own a design firm, you have nothing to worry about, because we all know clients aren’t the best at giving direction.

Maurice Cherry:
Very true. Very true.

David Tann:
If you’re worried that your client is going to replace you, it’s like you should eliminate that fear because if left to their own devices, what they put into it, that’s not what they really want. That’s so much what we do is we’re asking the same question five different ways to get to the heart of what do you actually really want? What are you actually really trying to say? Until that happens, then I think that we’re good. I’m not really stressing that much.

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

David Tann:
I don’t know. I think it’s funny, because if you would’ve asked me that question a couple of years ago, I would’ve been very much … Again, I’ve told you before, design’s not art. I think where it gets dicey is even though ultimately what we do is for the client, we now are beginning to make a name for ourselves and what we do. Now people are coming to us for the thing that we do. You’re like, “Ooh, this is different.” I think from a style standpoint, I don’t really like to get caught up in that. I love that we could do something for a podcasting, women-owned company, and it looks very different than something that we do for a civil engineering firm. I think just the approach is everything that we do has a little bit of an edge to it. I think we’re a lot more confident now than we were four or five years ago when I started the company.

I think that we try to have a little bit more clarity. Everything that I do, I think, leans on my experience from Abercrombie and Bath and Body works in the sense that I’m trying to make the most impactful visual with the clearest message, in the fewest words possible. I’m thinking about everything like a window display, even though window displays aren’t really the thing that they used to be. I’m a kid that grew up in retail. My mom was a store manager. How do I have the most impact with the least words and the most powerful visual possible? How that actually looks, stylistically, that can change quite a bit, but the approach, I think, is what’s consistent.

Maurice Cherry:
What keeps you motivated and inspired to continue this work? I get the feeling that throughout your career, especially going from retail to sports and working at the high level that you have, and now running your agency, there’s probably been some periods in there of burnout and low motivation, et cetera. What keeps you going?

David Tann:
Yes, there’s been quite a few of those moments. At this point, I mean, I’m not supposed to be here, man. I’m a kid from the country who’s a creative director and owns a design agency, but can’t draw. You know what I mean? To me, I think just every opportunity, the fact that someone is going to pay me to be … They’re going to pay me for ideas, that’s crazy to me. I feel super fortunate to be able to do it. I don’t take that for granted. Then I also know I do a lot of work talking to kids and trying to expose them to this. It’s like every kid that I talk to, once they find out what we do and see what we do, every one of those kids, they want my job.

There’s people who will be listening to this podcast who are like, you’re always dreaming of what the next thing is. Hopefully there’s someone who’s listening to this right now. I’m like, “Hey, I want to be where Tann is at. I want to have my own agency one day. I want to work with these kind of clients one day.” That’s not lost on me at all. To me, and I think it’s part of that competitive nature, it’s like I don’t ever want to rest on my laurels. I’m fortunate to be where I’m at, but I know the next generation’s coming. We’ve always got to be on our A game and not take it for granted. I think that’s just the approach that we have for everything.

Maurice Cherry:
What advice would you give to somebody, like you said, they’re listening to your story, they’re hearing where you’ve came from to where you are now, they want to follow in your footsteps. What advice would you give to them if they want to start their own agency or anything like that?

David Tann:
Yeah, man. The path isn’t linear. That’s my big thing. The path isn’t linear. I wanted to have an agency. It took me almost 20 years to do it. I think when you’re in this sort of social media age, when you’re looking at people’s Instagram or whatever, you’re only seeing the highlights. You’re not seeing the journey, you’re not seeing the process. No one’s putting the low moments on there. No one’s putting all the times that someone said no to them, the rejection. Blah, blah, blah. There’s a ton of brands that told me no when I was interviewing or looking for jobs. There’s a ton of clients that passed on us, or didn’t give us opportunities. For me, it’s just the path isn’t linear. I give an analogy of if I say, “Maurice, we’re trying to get from Atlanta to LA,” and I’m like, “All right, here’s the goal we’re going to get from Atlanta to LA. Maurice, how you getting to LA?”

Maurice Cherry:
Oh. You’re asking me how would I …

David Tann:
I’m asking you. Yeah. How you going to get to LA from Atlanta?

Maurice Cherry:
From Atlanta? I’d take a flight, direct.

David Tann:
That flight direct is going to take you about how much time?

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, probably four to five hours, I think.

David Tann:
All right. Four to five hours. I never gave you a time limit. I never said we had to be in LA in four hours or five hours or six hours or a day or whatever. I just said, “We’re just trying to get from Atlanta to LA.” You might take that direct flight. Well, for me, I road tripped it. You know what I mean? I’m like, oh, spring break. Let’s drive down to Florida. Oh, taste of Chicago. Ooh. Never seen the Grand Canyon before. Ooh, Christmas in New York. That’s dope. Let me go see what those lights are about. Just that journey of, oh, let’s drive up to Seattle and drive down the coast to LA. We’ll both end up getting there, but who’s going to have better stories?

I think that to me is, fundamentally, I think that’s sort of the approach to everything is we’re so caught up in the destination that we don’t appreciate the journey of actually getting there. To me, for any of these younger generation, it’s like, yeah, it’s great to know where you want to be, but be open to getting there a different way than what you expected. When you’re open to doing that, then all kinds of opportunities present themselves that may put you in positions that you never even imagined or put you in rooms that you never even imagined. When you get there, you’ll appreciate it a whole lot more.

Maurice Cherry:
At this stage of your career, do you have a dream project or something that you’d love to do?

David Tann:
No, I don’t. I think, to me, the dream project is whatever the next project is. From a personal standpoint, if I never design again, if I never produce another piece of whatever, my career has far surpassed what I wanted to be when I was that kid out of school starting off in this industry 20 years ago, so I’m good. To me, it’s less about the work and more about doing things like this that I inspire the next generation, talk to kids, bring the next group along. That’s the thing that I think is the most important. The work will be the work. Whatever comes our way, we’ll take it and we’ll do the best job possible.

Also, I think part of me too, in just getting older and having kids is just appreciate the things that you have and not the things that you don’t have. I’m appreciative of the clients that we’ve had and the people that have taken the risks on us. I’m not really worried about the ones that haven’t come yet, because if we do what we’re supposed to do and we do it in the right way and we keep our head down and whatever, those people will come. My mind doesn’t process it in that way.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What do you want that next kind of chapter of your life, of your career, what do you want that to look like?

David Tann:
To me, the whole part of this with the agency is, one, I just thought when I started off, or when I had the dream of I want to have my own agency, I never imagined how many people that would be. I never imagined what that looked like from a revenue standpoint or how many years it would be in business or any of that stuff. That, to me, is less of … Again, my mind doesn’t process things in that way, because that’s kind of what people are asking typically when they ask that. Not to say that you are, but I think the thing that I actually think about, more than anything, is if you think about it, the time when I was coming up, there were certain cities that everyone wanted to move to, where everyone had to work in, or everyone thought that their favorite firm came out of and Atlanta was never on that list. I would talk to a bunch of people, and no one ever mentioned all the firms that were in Atlanta. No one ever talked about creative coming out of Atlanta. No one ever mentioned things in that way.

To me, I think what my goal would be over the course of whatever time that we’re doing this is that when you start talking about the best branding firms in the business, you’re checking for us the same way that you’re checking for the other firms in the other cities. I think that if we do our job and we get to that point, then, to me, that’s when the mission will be accomplished because it’s just crazy to me with all the music, all the entertainment, all the culture, all the creative that comes out of this city, it’s just not as recognized or at least when I started, it wasn’t as recognized as to me as it should have been. We just want to be one of those top agencies and top firms that are in the city, that really begin to put this place on the map from a branding, design, creative standpoint.

Maurice Cherry:
Do you think that perception is changing?

David Tann:
I think that perception is evolving, for sure, just because of the growth of the city. I think the city has its own allure. I think from a creative standpoint … Again, I don’t know, because obviously I’m older in my career now, but I want the younger people to be looking at the firms here. I want us to be on that list. Hopefully, it’s changing. If we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing, then I’d love for that to be changing.

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

David Tann:
Yeah. Our agency website is tantrumagency.com. You can check us out on Instagram, tantrumagency. If you want to follow me, personally, on the journey of building the agency, it’s tantrum_ATL. Yeah. I think Instagram, LinkedIn are the best places to keep up to date with what we have going on. We’re in the process of updating our website now, so keep your eye out for the new unveil for that over the next couple of months.

Maurice Cherry:
All right. Sounds good. David Tann, I want to thank you so, so much for coming on the show. I didn’t mention this when we started because I wanted to say it before the end, but when I was first putting Revision Path together a decade ago, I had a wishlist of people that I wanted to have on the show. You were on that list. I didn’t reach out then because I was like, “I’m just starting this off.” I had my own studio at the time too, and I think I started Revision Path right at my five-year mark of doing my studio. I had an idea of people I wanted to reach out to, but it was, I think to your point about what it was like in Atlanta in terms of people knowing it about design, I would mention the show to folks here and it would just get these strange looks and stuff like that.

I say all of that to say, one, I’m glad to have you on the show now. Two, also just to hear your story and to realize just how much we sort of have in common. I, too, am from the country and did a lot of writing, and that was my pathway to design. I hope that people get a sense of just how much … I guess, skin in the game is probably not the best term, but you’ve put in the work. You have more than put in the work over the past 20 years of your career. You deserve to reap all of the success that you’re getting now. Again, congratulations on your Entrepreneur of the Year Award. I’m really excited to see what you do next. I’m really glad that there are black creatives like you that are helping to put Atlanta on that design map. Thank you for coming on the show, man. I appreciate it.

David Tann:
Yeah. Thank you for having me. Before we wrap though, let me also just be clear. You have been doing this for so long and at such a high level, and I think that it’s actually ironic that you didn’t reach out to me, because I’ve been watching you for years. It’s like, “Man, what am I not doing right? Maurice hasn’t called.” I’m telling you this more because I think that it’s important for people to understand and know that sometimes your perception and this notion of reality is skewed, just based off of where you are. The grass is always greener. It’s like I’m seeing all these amazing people or hearing about all these amazing people, or having friends who’ve been on the show. I’m also like, “Man, what am I not doing?”

When you actually reached out to me, I was like, oh, man … There’s like a sense of I made it. You know what I mean? Even with all that I’ve done in my career, to me, being on here with you and talking with you and having this time is a really, really, really big deal. I don’t think that you should take what you’re doing lightly. You should know that your work is super appreciated. You’re making a huge impact in the industry. I think the feeling is a hundred percent mutual. As much as you may have been watching my career, I’ve been definitely keeping track of you. I’m truly, truly, truly honored to be here and very appreciative that you reached out.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. Thank you. I don’t know what to say. Thank you. I really appreciate that, man. Thank you.

David Tann:
Absolutely, man.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit is a strategy and design firm committed to designing a more inclusive and equitable world. They are always looking to expand their roster of freelance design consultants in the U.S., particularly brand strategists, copywriters, graphic designers and Web developers.

If you know how to deliver excellent creative work reliably, and enjoy the autonomy of a virtual-based, freelance life (with no non-competes), check them out at brevityandwit.com.

Natalie Marie Dunbar

We’re keeping the content strategy train rolling this week and chatting it up with Natalie Marie Dunbar, a UX-focused content strategist with a unique blend of skills as a journalist, writer, and researcher. She’s also the author of From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice. Very impressive!

We started off discussing the inspiration behind the book, and Natalie shared her thoughts on the changing meaning of “content creation,” and on what it takes to maintain a strong content strategy in this current tech landscape. She also talked about her early career working with huge brands Kaiser Permanente and the Food and Drug Administration, and spoke on the importance of prioritizing her own well-being through yoga. Natalie is a true content strategy maven, and I think you’ll walk away from this interview with a new understanding on its importance.

Big thanks to Louis Rosenfeld of Rosenfeld Media for the introduction!

Interview Transcript

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

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Hi. I am Natalie Marie Dunbar. By day, I am a senior manager, content design, UX content design with Walmart, and by night and weekends, I am an author, a speaker, workshop facilitator, and sometime yoga teacher.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow, that’s a lot.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Yes.

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

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
It has been full of travel. I think I’m making up for lost time during the pandemic. I’ve been on a plane every month since last September with the exception of October and February. I did do a road trip in February, but was not by plane. I have been traveling for speaking and work. So it’s been a very busy year.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. So aside from the travel, I’m curious, how has 2023 been different for you than say last year?

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
2023 has been, aside from the travel but because of the travel, things have been opening up more. I’m finding that whether, for work or for conferences and things, there’s a lot more in-person appearances happening again, a lot more in-person just interaction, which I definitely have missed, but I think my battery for my energy, I have a different level where I’m able to withstand what I call peopling. After a while, it’s like usually I can be out and about for hours, I can work a full day and then go to a conference or go to a meetup or go to a social event, and I’d be fine.

Nowadays, I have to think what time does it start, how long do I need to be there, and when do I need to shut down so I can take care of myself. So that’s definitely been a highlight of this year, especially with all the travel.

Maurice Cherry:
I just started back traveling, doing speaking stuff last year in October, and I 100% understand what you mean. Prior to the pandemic, I was traveling for work. I would be in a different city or something every month, and it was just, I don’t know, I guess I just had that rhythm, but because of the pandemic, I’ve really lost that. I think some of it is stamina and some of it is also-

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Innate.

Maurice Cherry:
… just we’ve all gotten comfortable for the most part at home and breaching that to go into the outside world, you’re like, “I want to go back home now.”

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Exactly. Exactly that. I can relate.

Maurice Cherry:
So do you have any plans for the summer? You’re doing more traveling?

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
I definitely want to connect with family. I’m in California. Most of my family’s in Texas area, Louisiana, some in Tennessee. So I’d love to be able to reconnect with family members that I haven’t had a chance to see since the traveling and everything started up again, and I would like to actually take a trip that does not involve business or any type of work. I haven’t figured out what that is yet, but we’ll see.

Maurice Cherry:
I think you can work something in, especially if it’s going to be in the way, not in the way, but in the path of family or something. Maybe, I don’t know, go to New Orleans or something like that. Who knows?

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Definitely. My sister and I got together last year in August after not being able to visit for a while, and we have this plan. We haven’t implemented it yet, but we are wanting to go to Cape Verde off the western coast of Africa and just really immerse ourselves in the culture there. So hopefully that’ll be something. I don’t think it’ll happen this year, but I think looking forward, maybe in 2024.

Maurice Cherry:
That’ll be fun. That sounds like a fun trip. So with everything you’re doing, you mentioned you’re working, you mentioned this book that we will talk about in a little bit. What does a typical day look like for you?

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Oh, wow. I have my day job. I am in a lot of meetings. I set aside quiet time for myself to actually be heads down to actually do content work. I think the meeting thing is just part of that is working virtually or remote and just trying to get all the meetings in, especially across time zones. We’re lucky enough to have very talented team that works from all points of the US. So that’s a thing, but sometimes there’s the occasional 7:30 in the morning meeting. For me, I’ve had them, well, not in my current work, but at a past job, I remember being on calls at 6:00 in the morning, not always though, thank goodness, but yeah.

Then after that, I try to take a break, whether I’m taking a walk outside or just hanging out with my pups, connecting with family here in the house, regrouping, touching down on the stuff that makes you human. Then I usually spend an hour or two doing something having to do with the book by extension, maybe looking at speaking opportunities, calendaring, trying to figure out, “Oh, is it time for me to send out my newsletter?” which I need to write myself a note because it actually is note to self.

There are days sometimes though I’ll tell you that I’ll start with the day job at 8:00, 8:30, 9:00 and I’m still going at 9:00 at night on my other stuff. I close one laptop and then open the other. Just depends. I’ve had to put a limit on how many meetups and different things that I sign up for because there’s so much good knowledge out there and so many different organizations that I’ve found as a result of the pandemic. I’m able to attend the meetup that’s hosted in Australia because I can do it on my computer, but I have tended to overextend myself, so I have to take a moment and walk away and have that quiet time.

Maurice Cherry:
The pandemic has really opened up these opportunities to do, I guess, distance meetups or distance talks or things like that, but in that same vein, it can be super easy to just take on a lot of stuff and then at the end of the day, you’re just completely spent because there was this whole thing, I want to say, maybe earlier around in the pandemic about Zoom fatigue, which I think people still have now. One is the frequency of just doing a bunch of different video calls and stuff, but also, it just takes a lot of stamina to be on camera and paying attention and being active that day in, day out for hours at a time, whether you’re giving a talk or you’re doing work stuff. It can really wear you down.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
So true. That’s where just protecting my wellness and taking screen break. At any given moment, I may have two laptops and a large screen going, plus the cellphone and occasionally the iPad. So I try to definitely take that time to just be like, “Okay. I need to walk away from all this blue light,” and the tendency is to want to go turn on the TV, and I’m like, “No, that’s a screen too.” I’m still a person who really enjoys reading actual physical books even though I do have a Kindle. So if I’m in that mode, I’ll try to read a book or like, I said, play with my pup. That usually gets me outside, get out in the front yard even if I’m just sitting out front and just enjoying folks walking by and saying hello and making a little bit of contact that way, but yeah, really trying to be purposeful about not staring at screens all day.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m the same way too. One thing that I’ll do, especially for meetings, I will ask upfront, “Does this need to be a video call or can this be a phone call?” because if it’s a phone call, then I don’t have to look at a screen. I’ll probably be more likely to take that meeting because then I can do it … Like you said, if you’re outside, if you’re taking a walk or something, where I don’t have to be on. I don’t know what your setup is at home, but for me, I have a light on my desk and then I turn on all the lights in my room. So it’s almost like a little mini sound stage. I’m like, “It’s bright in here. It’s hot. I have to be on camera and stuff.” So if it could be a phone call, I’ll do a phone call.

Also, it is just about pacing myself. I’ll get to a certain time of night if I’m working until 8:00 or 9:00, and I’ll just stop because I’m like, “I’m not getting a medal for trying to finish this tonight. If I finish this in the morning, it’ll be just as done then as if I were to try to do it now. Let me go to bed. Let me get some rest. Let me get some sleep or something.” So yeah, trying to strike that balance, especially when you’re doing things on your own or off the clock or something like that, it can be a lot to try to handle.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Absolutely.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s talk about your book, Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice. Now, for those that are listening, we’ll put a link to it in the show notes. We’ll also have a discount code for you so you can get 20% off, bit for those listening who might not have heard about it, can you give them a brief synopsis of what the book’s about?

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Yeah. Unlike so many great books out there that are about how to do content strategy, what it is and how to do it, this is not that. This is more about how do you assemble a team or act as a team of one to create a dedicated, UX focused, in my world, the user experience focused content strategy practice. I’m a purist. I still use the phrase content strategy. There are folks who … Actually, my day job title is now content designer. We could have a whole separate conversation about if there’s a difference and if so, what is it, but I’m talking about building a content strategy practice where all the flavors of UX and content can come together and support an agency or organization in, number one, identifying the importance of content as an asset to every business of any size, and then how do you build and sustain a practice where it coexist either, say, with a design op team or a UX team or within an agency if they have a dedicated digital experience team. That’s basically the synopsis of what it’s about.

Maurice Cherry:
So you mentioned content designer. To you, what’s the difference between a content designer and a writer or a copywriter?

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Oh, boy, I’m going to get in trouble now. So again, I always lead with UX because I’m a user experience fanatic, I would say, but user experience and focusing on the human centeredness of the digital experiences that we create that are more focused on the user interface with a digital experience and helping them with things like wayfinding and achieving whatever their top task is, whether it’s on an app or a website. I’m not so much interested in my writing about selling you on a brand or product. I’m more interested in helping you get the product or service that you came to the website or the app for.

So that’s the difference between, say, marketing copywriting for digital spaces versus the UX content strategy and content design that I’m talking about. There’s also content marketing strategy, which is more, I’m going to oversimplify, but that’s more about, say, content that is created by a brand that you then will disseminate to third parties, whether it be through social media or a guest blog post or … That is all a part of a larger content strategy, but that more focuses, again, on marketing and selling someone on a brand or getting them to buy a product versus, again, how do we help them navigate in a digital space. Hopefully that was clear.

Maurice Cherry:
That was pretty clear. I think so.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
For content strategy and content design, we’re still having conversations about what is different. Content strategy has evolved. There were a few folks before Kristina Halvorson, but her book tends to be the one, Content Strategy for the Web, that everyone remembers, the red book that came out that was like, “Oh, my gosh, that’s what we’re doing,” so where you have content people working with UX designers, interaction designers back in the day, human factors engineers that were designing interactions.

So content strategy looks across an experience end to end, but a content strategy life cycle is actually a circular thing where you’re constantly, you’re doing your discovery work to figure out what’s out there. You’re finding out where your gaps are in content, what you might need to create. You’re getting rid of content that might be outdated or stale, and then you’re launching with whatever new content and, by the way, some content strategists also write the content and some don’t. They hand off to another team who does that. Could UI/UX writers. Could also be content designers. It depends on the organization.

Then the good old optimization, optimizing, testing, and then going through that cycle again and again. So the content strategy work, I always get asked, “When’s the content strategy going to be done?” and people cringe when I say never because it should never be done. It should be something that’s cyclical that you’re always going back to make sure that your content is measuring up to whatever your goals are.

Within that, content design has emerged as content that’s created. I’ve heard it referred to as product content design, where your product may be an actual something that you could buy on an e-commerce site, but it may well be an actual service, say, per bank or financial institution, FinTech, but there’s some product or service that you’re selling. So content design tends to focus on helping users transact by the thing, make the bank transaction, whatever it is that, again, their top tasks that they’re doing, but they’re all related.

Like I said, there’s a lot happening within the industry where we’re still trying to not carve out, well, it could be carve out a niche, but it’s just to better articulate what do we mean when we say content strategy, what do we mean when we say content design, so on and so forth. So hopefully that didn’t confuse people. Hopefully it gave them more to think about and go look up and see what you find.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s amazing how I would say maybe within the past, I’d say roughly about 10 years, how content has started to become more included on design teams. I distinctly remember when content really used to be more of a marketing domain and design was more visual. Well, it’s still visual, but design was visual in that they didn’t have non-designers or non-visual designers on their team, and now we’re seeing team structures where there’s a content designer or a content strategist or they’re included along with designers on these multimodal teams, which I think is pretty interesting.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
If you look at places where Agile is practiced, Agile software development, you will find in some places, especially larger enterprises where you have scrum teams, for example, that might be for a business unit or it might be several within one business unit or whatever it is, but you’ll have a UX designer, UI/UX designer, interaction designer, a program, sorry, a project and a product manager, and the content strategist or content designer on those scrum teams that are embedded in those teams or you may have within certain product areas where you’ll have, like what you just talked about, content designer embedded in those teams or there’s the model where it’s content more as a service to an organization where you’re your own team and then you send folks out as work comes in, whatever resources are available. You could be writing a white paper, you could be writing video script, you could be writing anything, and you create content for anything.

From a strategic point of view, you’re looking across experiences though to make sure that the content that you’re creating is consistent, that your voice and tone is consistent, that if you call a thing [inaudible 00:20:21] over here, that you’re calling it the same thing over there kind of thing. So that’s where your strategy starts to come into play, where you’re looking across experiences and across channels to make sure that even if your team and your work as a UX-focused content strategist is not to create, say, the accompanying marketing pieces for a particular product or service, you still want them to be aware of how they’re describing things because you may need to incorporate some of that copy or content into your work as well.

I find that I do that often at my work. I have marketing counterparts that I work with so that … Think of a handoff. If you think about a marketing funnel where at the top you have people that are curious about a product or service, and then, say, they’re shoppers, and then they start to go through the funnel and maybe there’s conversion where you want them to sign up for loyalty program, there’s a natural handoff that happens in that space where you’re not so much marketing to them anymore. Now, you’re helping them way find and get what they need, but they don’t need to know that that’s a separate handoff. So you need to have that constant communication with your marketing and other departmental partners that create copy so that the experience for the user is seamless.

Maurice Cherry:
How have you seen content online change since you, I guess, started working as a content strategist? You’ve been working with content now for a very long time since the early days of the internet. How have you seen just content in general change?

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Everything when I was really getting into digital content, it was SEO, SEO, SEO, keywords, keywords, keywords. We were not doing questionable practices like keyword stopping and all that stuff, but that was the big focus when I got into this work. The content was longer form, even contextual help content, which we now often will classify more of your UX writing, and UI/UX writing is that wayfinding content that helps you get from one part of the experience to the next.

Back in the day, it was long help pages and FAQs. We weren’t thinking about necessarily the fact that maybe if we create the digital experience in a way where FAQs and things like that aren’t needed, then we’re looking at less content and fewer words and getting out of the way of the user. So I think we had to evolve through that space. I think that’s one of the places where content partners, well, with user experience researchers, because we can put that, put content in front of people and talk with them in realtime using prototypes and sometimes even stuff that’s out there in the wild and understand what it is that people really want and need because there’s a tendency still for some that think that the more content, the better. We want to have everything so everybody can find all the stuff, but the problem with that is that it becomes so cluttered that people get frustrated and maybe the better is to help them with the wayfinding. Maybe it’s the IA, the information architecture, that needs to be more intuitive.

So we’re helping, “Where would you go to find this thing? Where would you go to find that thing?” and understanding that behavior more than just throwing big chunks of content at people and wanting them to consume all of that. We know that, well, there’s still the camp that people don’t read, especially on mobile screens, but I think people do, but their attention goes to finding the thing that they want, and they will read that. If we give them too much, then we’re overwhelming them. So I think the TLDR is that content has gotten shorter and more concise and to the point of what the user has come to the experience for in the first place.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, there’s this flood of content I feel now. We’re still in the web 2.0 age, which is user-generated content. I remember a web before there was user-generated content, but now, of course, you have tweets and blogs and TikTok, and videos, and all this stuff. Now, you have AI in the mix, so there’s a lot of AI-generated content that’s out there. In your opinion, what does it take now to really maintain a strong content strategy?

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
It takes people. I have only scratched the surface of the whole AI. It’s overwhelming to me. In the environment that we’re in right now, so spring 2023, there’s been so many folks, particularly in the content design, content strategy space that have been laid off partially due because we think that some of this AI technology can take the place of a content strategy or content design. I think what people are finding out is that it could be assistive, but it’s not to be relied on. You still need that system of checks and balances. You still need that human touch and human voice to help an experience be engaging and relatable to the human that’s on the other side of it. Yes, things like AI and chatbots and all that, those things are getting more sophisticated, but I would argue that in order to establish and maintain a robust and relevant content strategy, that you need people to do that.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m glad you mentioned people because we are recording this right now. It’s May 18th when we’re recording this just so people know. I just saw, I think it was maybe yesterday, maybe today, that BuzzFeed, which just shuttered their news department, et cetera, had been talking about how they are going to start using AI to help generate … I guess the best way to put it would be to generate affinity content. I don’t know if affinity is really even the best term for it, but essentially, he was telling investors, Jonah Peretti, the guy who created BuzzFeed, was telling investors that they’re going to use AI to generate content, headlines, infinite quizzes, and develop Black, Asian, Latino identity-based content to help corporate brands tap in authentic voice to sell products. That sounds sinister.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Yeah, it does.

Maurice Cherry:
So you’re going to get AI to try to not only just replicate humans, but also replicate Black, Latino, Asian, and then have the nerve to call it authentic, but I see companies try to do that though. I’m seeing brands that are looking at how they can tap into AI so they can do that to generate more content.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
I’d heard that BuzzFeed had shut down their news division, which was shocking but not. This is news to me and the fact that the word authentic … Is that what you said, authentic?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It’s in the transcript that he said.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
I got to go find that. I’m going to go find that. I have lots of thoughts, but there is no authenticity without tapping into humanity. I don’t care how many eyeballs are on AI and how … We’ve all heard, I hope, the stories of the people who sit in Africa and other countries who are having to look at some of the worst content. I even hesitate to call it that on the internet to help filter the bad stuff out, but that’s only one aspect. Again, we need humans. So all of that still has a human element to it for better or for worse, but there’s no way that my lived experience as a Black woman of color … Well, that was redundant. In the digital space, in technology, you’re not going to find AI-generated anything that’s going to be able to relate my story the way that I can or the way that maybe one of my Asian American counterparts can share their stories and their lived experiences. I mean good on them for being upfront about it, but hey. Wow, that gave me chills. I’m like, “Really?”

Maurice Cherry:
That like some Black mirror shit.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
[inaudible 00:29:19]

Maurice Cherry:
It’s very sinister been. I’ve seen some stories, and we’ll get back to talking more about your work and everything, but I’ve seen some stories where, say, an influencer will train a ChatGPT model on tweets or any long form content and then use that in lieu of themselves almost like a digital twin to generate content for them. I’m wondering, and I don’t know, let me not even say that. I don’t even want to put that out in the ether, but I feel like I could see a future where companies are trying to mine content that’s currently online, like what ChatGPT does now, and use that in some weird regenerative fashion, as Peretti was saying here, to create, quote, unquote, “an authentic voice.”

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Good luck with that, Peretti. I think the thing that comes to mind too and, again, I have stayed out of the … I can’t ignore the AI conversation completely because it’s coming after my work, not my work at my job. Let me just say that. Not my work, but just my discipline, the thing that I’m most passionate about. You just can’t get that authenticity. At that point, then just insert a chip into my brain and let’s call it done. That’s scary for me.

The thing is too that I’m hearing is that a lot of what, I guess, people are finding from ChatGPT or whatever other services there are out there is that there’s still a lot of what is generated that’s not accurate, attribution to … I have not gone out and said, “Hey, ChatGPT, who’s Natalie Marie Dunbar? What do they do?” or whatever. I know people have done that and been served up some very interesting information about things that they’ve never done in their life. So there’s that. So you still need batch checkers. You still need human validation, and that’s what I’ll say about that.

Maurice Cherry:
You mentioned there are these contractors that are working in Africa and in overseas, places that are being paid pennies on the dollar, basically, to be that human check, to be that moderation, which is, I don’t know, it’s all just really sinister to think about the fact that content is starting to go down that route.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Yeah, but we’re going to keep fighting to pull it back.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, yeah. I think so.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
I think this is cyclical. I think this is the flavor of the season, and folks are excited about it. I think there’s a lot to be, I don’t want to say afraid. I would hesitate to think that this is the end all be all to we’re going to save a whole bunch of money and not have to have a bunch of content folks because we could just generate it from this thing. I think there’s a lot of danger in that, but I think that also has to come to fruition hopefully in not a horrible way, but yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
So let’s switch gears here a little bit and learn more about you and your backstory and how you came to be this content strategy maven. You’re currently in Pasadena, California. Is that where you’re from originally?

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Nope. I was born in Texas in a town called Port Arthur, if that’s familiar to anyone. Janis Joplin was born there too. Any Janis Joplin fans out there? I grew up on the East Coast, in New York and New Jersey. We traveled. My father was by day of pharmacist and by night a jazz musician.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
When the jazz took over, that’s when we moved east so he could be proximal to all the amazing jazz clubs in New York City, which I will say back in the day, you could actually take your small child to one of those gigs and sit her over in a corner, this may or may not have happened to me, and they could listen to the music and be served french fries and a cola. That was my life. It was great. In the summer, I would go with my dad sometimes to some of his gigs, and it was amazing.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. What did your dad play?

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
He played jazz guitar.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
I was lucky enough to see Herbie Hancock. Well, that’s the one that comes to mind because I remember we were at the Village Vanguard, and I remember my dad sitting in on a set, and I always loved Herbie Hancock’s music even as a kid, and just sitting there just eyes wide open like, “This is amazing,” and going to … My dad recorded a bunch of albums of his own, but also as a session guy with other musicians and being able to go to recording sessions, which were painfully long, not like it is today, no computers, but yeah, and I was just a normal kid going to school, always, always, always, always reading or writing though from the age that I could do it. So that’s been a theme throughout my life is writing.

Maurice Cherry:
So knowing that, was that something that you really wanted to focus on when you went to high school, went to college? Is that what you ended up focusing on?

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Yes and no. So I knew you that I wanted to be … At some point, I refined. It’s like, “I want to be a writer,” became, “I want to be a journalist.” I wanted to write for newspapers and magazine. That was my jam. Then I went to college and majored in sociology and criminal justice. I don’t know what happened. I took a sociology class and I was just like, “I really like this. This is really cool.” Definitely related, the study of social science because how else can we understand the masses of people. I remember when … Oh, this is going to date me and age me, but the area of study in college at that time was mass communications. So we didn’t have all the many channels of mass communications that we have now, but that was the thing that I knew that I wanted to somehow insert myself into that space.

I got sidetracked by sociology and fell in love with criminology and criminal justice. Somewhere along the way I was like, “I’m going to be a lawyer.” That never happened. I had a few friends that graduated a couple years before me, and we were all on that same path. We were very creative people, definitely into … Any class that allowed writing essays and all that stuff, I was all for it. It’s like, “Don’t give me any tests and make me write 10 papers. I’m good.”

I had a few friends that went on to law school and they said, “Don’t do it. Here’s why.” I think for me, I think I had some health issues in my last year or so of college. So that delayed me from taking LSAT and all that stuff. I did a reassessment and then I went and did something. I did nothing with my degree for a while. I did nothing with really anything. I graduated college and then ended up working managerial retail for a while, but I was still writing on the side, not very good. I was trying to take a class here and there and everything. I went a very, very, very roundabout way to land in becoming a writer, really becoming a writer.

By the time I did, I ended up in marketing communications at Farmers Insurance. The way that I got there was I had been writing. I was in a completely different department. I was actually in our real estate owns and property management, but I was a volunteer for all different kinds of things. We did things with the March of Dimes and Easterseals, and I would write for the employee publication and do a little article about those kinds of things.

Eventually, I started getting clips together. Then I had people outside of my full-time job saying, “Oh, I heard that you write. I’ve got this friend. She’s got an independent magazine,” so on and so forth. So I started amassing this collection of clips as we called them back in the day. Eventually, I felt like I had enough to start actually applying internally for marketing communications jobs, and I finally got one. So I started in marcomm. I did this really backwards. I started in marcomm, left that world, ended up being a newspaper journalist for Pasadena Weekly, and then got back into digital and jumped right into the user experience space. So that’s my crazy background.

Maurice Cherry:
So you had a roundabout way of coming back to it, but I’m curious, during those times when you weren’t, I guess, you weren’t professionally writing in that it was your main thing, but you said you were working in retail and stuff like that. I feel like those experiences are still important, especially right out of school, particularly if you went right from high school to college with no break. Sometimes you need a break. That’s not to say that it has to be something that you really have to do, but I’m thinking of myself. When I graduated, I didn’t really get into design until I think maybe three years after I graduated. I was selling tickets at the symphony. I think I worked at Autotrader for a while. I got fired from Autotrader. I had a math degree, and I didn’t want to go to grad school because I was just tired of school, but I had been doing design on the side like how you were writing on the side. I was still designing and doing things like that, but had eventually, also like you, amassed enough work and built a portfolio to the point where I could start actually getting design jobs, real design jobs.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
I think that’s a good thing, that stuff. I’m going to sound old by saying this, but I feel like it builds character. That stuff builds character.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
It does. It builds character. As I’m listening to you talk, I realized that maybe I’ve been telling my story a little bit wrong. I think what it does too is help you in the content world, in the writing world find your voice. I know my father used to tell me, “You will find writing work when you know the story you want to tell and you have something to say,” or something along those lines, and I was like, “Okay. That’s deep. I’m going to go think about that for about three or four years.” [inaudible 00:40:18]

I think from a design, especially visual design, I think you’re learning your aesthetic, it’s the way I want to say it, is seeing the things that make you react, seeing in bad or good ways and honing in on figuring out what your own style is. I definitely have a way when I write long that’s different from the microcopy that I write day-to-day work because sometimes it’s just not appropriate because I definitely have an edge to the way that I tend to write, especially articles. I still dabble in writing long little form articles for blogs and things these days, but yeah, I think I was just learning and refining my own voice in the way that you would learn and refine your own aesthetic. All of the things are valuable. All of the experiences that we have make us the designers and writers that we’ve become.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, because I think what it also does is it gives that perspective of what it’s like to be … I guess you could say, quote, unquote, “a user” as opposed to being the practitioner. Even now when I think about working at the symphony and working at Autotrader and these other places, yeah, I wasn’t doing design. I was answering phones and picking out tickets on seating charts and stuff like that. It wasn’t design, it wasn’t math either, but what it did do is just give me a general education about what it means to talk to people, to help people out, to find out, “Well, why is this thing confusing? Oh, I see why it’s confusing. It’s confusing to me, so of course it’s confusing to you.” If you’re the person that maybe designed the process or the thing, you may not even see that because you’ve got your blinders on to how it was built as opposed to how it’s being used.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Oh, my goodness, yes. That just reminded me of … I might be jumping ahead a bit, but in that crazy circular route that I took, no, it was more of a zigzag to get to the work that I do now, even after getting into digital experience, consumer experience, user experience because it had all those names back in the day, I actually started in content and then I was like, “What if I became a product manager?” and I did that for a little bit. Mind you, the product that I own was user-generated content, so I was never very far from content.

Then I was like, “Well, okay, what do user researchers do?” and that was when I was like, “I am finally going to use my sociology degree,” and I put on the user researcher’s hat for a while, and I did use research. The reason why that came to mind is that there was nothing more compelling than sitting on the other side of the double mirror that we had in our usability lab watching people struggle with something that we thought was so straightforward.

It was like, “Oh, people are going to be able to use this watch. They’re just going to come in. They’re going to do this.” We would have the engineers in there. We would have product people, anybody that wanted to come and observe all the way to the CEO, “You should come and watch people try to use this thing that you wanted us to build, and we’re telling you it’s not going to work the way that you think it is and go through that usability testing,” and they’re like, “No. I don’t think this works the way you think it does.”

Then relating that back to what you were saying about working at the sympathy, and then I’m going to use a word that rhymes, empathy. I’ve built that, and I’m sure you have through those experiences, those very analog experiences, actually, where we’re not using computers and different things to help people and now we’re expecting folks to pick up a digital device of some sort and be able to find their way with beautiful designs and very little words. It’s like, “So how do we make that happen?” and that’s that building that user empathy. I think working with the public, that should almost be a prerequisite. Don’t tell anybody I said that, everybody that’s listening. That’s amazing.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you worked for a while for yellowpages.com. You were doing content strategy, you were a UX product manager, and folks that know that listen to the show, I worked there as well for two years. It was AT&T, but it was yellow pages.com doing website designs and doing … Oh, God. What were those little graphic tiles? XMEGs and X tiles and all that stuff for the yellowpages.com website, essentially those little tiles that would pop up that people could click on. That was what our department was doing, and making a ton of webpages, one page sites, three page sites, five page sites.

In hindsight, I liked the experience. It was a good experience because it just taught me how to design quicker in that way. You have to take the information. Basically, you go into … Oh, what was the thing called? Ice Blue, I think, was the name of the software that we used. You go into Ice Blue, you pick the company you’re doing it for, you have to go and pull a physical packet of where the salesperson has talked to the business.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
I remember that.

Maurice Cherry:
There’s a physical packet of the text that you have to put in and maybe their logo that you have to scan. Our department had one scanner for 30 designers, and you had to scan the logo so you could use that, maybe trace an illustrator, and you’d have to put all this together into a website usually within a matter of hours.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Wow.

Maurice Cherry:
One page sites, I think the limit that they had us at was three hours, and then five page sites … No. One page sites were three hours, three page sites were five hours, and then if it was five or more pages, basically the whole day, but you were not meant to spend more than one day on building a site. So because of that, even with a team of 30 designers, we were always behind.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Oh, wow.

Maurice Cherry:
The managers were always yelling at us, “Why aren’t you all getting more work done?” It’s like we’re designing three webpages, full-fledged webpages a day, design content, all that stuff, putting it together.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Wow.

Maurice Cherry:
It was a harrowing time, but I look back on it fondly because it did teach me, I think, the utility of just shortcuts and working fast and not really having time to mull on a decision for something. You just have to put it out there and do it. I feel like some of my best designs were just shot from the hip because it was like, “I don’t have time to think about how this might look. I just have to do it.”

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
“Brand colors? Okay, we’ll work with this,” blah, blah, blah. How was your experience working with yellowpages.com?

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
So as you’re talking about this, I’m remembering when that push came, when those sites were being built for the folks that had listings and they had more than the free listing. So my experience was the site that held all the listings, we didn’t really touch the listings that much except for when we would add features like these websites. So we had to determine if there was going to be a button or link that was going to … how do we get people from the main yellowpages.com listing site to go into the listing and how do we organize that information on the listing page.
Beyond that, we impacted everything from the homepage to the … We used to have city guide pages. Eventually, we had some product pages. We started adding articles and different things to the website to the yp.com main website. When I joined, I still have images of this on a laptop somewhere, which is our yellowpages.com branding. At the time it was … Oh, what was it? I forget the tagline. I thought I had it and I don’t, but meet something. That’s how far back I go.

Then we had a bunch of just links. There was very little imagery on the homepage and it was links. Again, that was that SEO, which is like, “We have city guide links. What are the most popular cities that people are looking for? Okay. What is our data telling us? Well, we should have this link. Okay. Well, if we’re going to have that link, then what’s going to happen when people click on it? Oh, we should have a rich content-driven city page,” and that was stuff that I wrote about Jacksonville, Florida and Orlando and Los Angeles and so on and so forth, whatever the … I think it was the top 25 cities that people would search for we had the most robust content for.

Eventually, we built that out, and that was when content strategies started to be a thing in the back of my mind. It’s like, “Oh, well, we’re not just saying, ‘Oh, we’re just going to have this whole bunch of content and we’re just going to have SEO value,’ but now we’re going to think about, ‘How are people going to interact with that content? What are some of the ways that we can expand on this?'” So eventually we started thinking about other sites that had UGC, user-generated content, because when I joined, ratings and reviews were not a thing yet. That was the big, big thing beyond SEO. We were looking for that organic SEO from user-generated content, but people weren’t writing reviews on yellowpages.com. It really took time to get some traction around that, and then eventually we did.

Back in the day, you could make a deal with different third parties to bring their reviews onto the site to get critical mass, and then digging into, what is that experience like? How do we discern what is a yellowpages.com original review versus one that we might get from a third party? So all of that is now we’re talking about content strategy. Now, we’re talking about not only what does it say, but what does that experience look like because content is not just words. Content is an aggregate of all elements, whether it’s images, video, whatever it is. All of that is content, but how do you put it together to tell a compelling story and to help people get to what they need? That was the thing.

So that’s full circle, but yellowpages.com is where I wore the hat of editorial producer, which is what I was called back in the day. Then I went to product management, then I was a user researcher, and then right before I left, I was still dealing with the user researcher stuff, but I was also getting back into content because we started doing articles and things like that. I tell people I cut my teeth in all things digital. I did everything but code.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I remember my time at Yellow Page. I feel like I did, and this was at a time when … For folks that are listening, it was the transition from table -based websites to CSS websites.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Oh, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
So not only were we having to create these new sites, in some cases, we had to convert sites. We had to take table sites that maybe another designer a few years ago, maybe that doesn’t work there anymore, we had to take those sites and then change them to CSS. I remember I had written a CSS framework called Slats, and I was trying to get my team on board, get my team lead on board because I was like, “This will help cut down on the time it takes because now all you have to do is just go in and choose a CSS variable, it’ll automatically float to the left, float to the right.” We’re dating ourselves. They were like, “This was still when IE6 was a thing, and cross-browser compatibility was tough.”

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
It was.

Maurice Cherry:
I remember writing it and I sent it to my team lead and she was mentioning, “Well, we’re not sure about if we’re going to use CSS for layouts because of different people’s browsers and maybe they have Internet Explorer, maybe they have Firefox, maybe they have Opera.” It ended up not being used. Even for web audio, we were using Java applets. This was a long time ago.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Oh, wow.

Maurice Cherry:
The cut your teeth part, I totally get that because the time it takes to put that stuff together, at least on our end, was we didn’t have time to really talk to the client or talk to the business about what it is they need. It’s like you get whatever’s in that packet and you just have to make it work.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
It almost felt like a reality show design challenge. You’re presented with such limited information, then you have to throw it together, and then it gets sent over to QA, and once it’s out of my hands, I’m onto the next because it was basically just a never-ending stream of sites. Honestly, the time that I spent there is what inspired me to quit and start my own studio because I was like, “Wait a minute. I can do these websites like the back of my hand. I’m going to take this little framework that I created and I’m going to go and try to serve some clients,” which is what I ended up doing.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Excellent. Yeah, that’s awesome.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you’ve worked with numerous brands over your career. Just to name a few, the Food and Drug Administration, Anthem, Kaiser Permanente, et cetera. When you look back at those experiences, what really sticks out to you the most?

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
That’s a favorite question of mine because what I find that is the common thread between government agencies like FDA and CTP, Center for Tobacco products, et cetera, and places like yellowpages.com, which was owned by AT&T and Anthem, highly regulated. They were all highly regulated. You’ve got your yellowpages.com owned by AT&T, so we had telecom regulation. They got your healthcare, which is a whole another ball of wax as far as regulatory compliance. You’ve got your different government agencies that have their own compliant from agency to agency. I think that’s been a common theme for me up until … Well, I don’t want to say up until now because the e-comm definitely has its own regulatory exposure as well.

I think those experiences helped me learn to balance business goals, user needs, voice and tone all while being very mindful of steering clear of violating any regulatory compliance issues. I think that’s the common thread. I didn’t go seeking them, but I think that’s explains the trajectory a little bit where there’s a common thread for me.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you mentioned earlier in this interview about how you’re doing all this traveling and stuff. Of course, you’re promoting the book and everything. You’re doing your day job and you’re really big about prioritizing your own wellbeing alongside your work. You do yoga. You’re a yoga teacher, is that right? Yoga instructor?

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
That is right. I’m on hiatus right now because of the book thing. I’ve been a little busy traveling, but yeah. Somewhere back in 2005, I decided that it would be a really fun experience to do a half marathon, and you may say, “What the heck does that have to do with yoga and wellness?” Well, a lot because I was going to do one-half marathon, I was going to walk that thing and I was going to be done and I was raising money for charity. 10, 11 years later, I was still doing it, and I had become a marathon coach. It was a side thing. I was [inaudible 00:56:17] for a volunteer organization, but what I found was I was not only coaching, I was also, I use the term racing very loosely, but I did finish every marathon or half marathon that I ever started, and that number is somewhere around 25 or 30 now.

The knees start to hurt and hips start to hurt. Someone said, “You should try yoga,” and I’m like, “But I did and I didn’t like it.” I was in somebody’s living room trying to pretzel my body into a pose and there was no instructor because we were watching a video and I had a really bad experience with it. So I went and I took a couple of classes because I had my coaches telling me, “This might help you. Just go check it out,” and I’m like, “Oh, this is different when you have an actual instructor,” but I’m a person who lives in a larger, curvier body. What I found was that there were instructors that did not know how to teach me yoga. They would just say, “Well, if this is too difficult for you, you could just [inaudible 00:57:16] in child’s pose.” I’m like, “Holy. Okay.” I would walk into studios after doing a training walk or run because eventually I did start running more of 15 miles that I would have a yoga teacher literally look me from toe to head and go, “You know this is going to be hard, right?”

So yes, it’s a little plug for a little bit of body positivity and awareness. So I started looking for yoga for people like me, and cheesy as it sounds, I figured out I had to become the yoga teacher that I wanted to see. During a time where I had gotten laid off from a job and I was only marathon coaching and doing two weeks here, one month there content work, someone said to me, “Have you ever thought about …” I had a dance background when I was a kid. “Have you ever taught about teaching dance again?” I’m like, “I don’t know.” I started seeing online material from a yoga teacher that was Bates at the time in Nashville, and she had created this platform called Curvy Yoga. Hello. One thing led to another, and I was consuming her content and practicing along on her website.

I remember getting an email saying, “I’m going to open up yoga teacher training in the coming months, and if you’re interested, send an email.” I sat there and I thought about it and I’m like, “Well, this is probably not going to be my career career, but I’m already doing the marathon coaching thing.” Ironically, one of the ways that I would try to help people, quote, unquote, “get into their bodies more for marathoning,” I bought a yoga anatomy book because it makes sense to me.

Lo and behold, that was one of the books that I had to buy because I did sign up for that yoga teacher training. I did my 200-hour training, and it helped me to be not only a better marathon coach, but when I got back into the corporate world, it made me aware of the fact that working 10, 12, 14-hour days was not doing my body any justice. It was not psychologically safe. It was not tenable for years and years at a time. I’m still good for a 17-hour launch because sometimes it’ll take that long.

I just started to be more and more aware of how I wasn’t being kind to my body and still expecting to put out the hours of work that I was doing from week to week and day to day. So yeah, so that focus now. Ironically, as I am going out and speaking about my book and talking about the importance of content as an asset and that kind of thing, the talks that I’m doing now are more focused on a chapter that I talk about maintenance and specifically what it takes to keep a strong practice core, focusing on the health and wellness of the practitioners who make the practice what it is.

The thing about content strategy is there’s a part in the book where I’m talking about, I think I call it three persistent principles. One of those things is always be educating. You’re always going to be explaining to whether it’s a new designer, a new product manager, a person in senior leadership, the importance of content as an asset, the importance of content strategy and content design. I can lament for days with other content practitioners, don’t even have to be a manager or leader. Somebody always has that one deck that explains, “Okay. This is what content strategy is. This is what it’s not. This is what we do. This is what we don’t do. This is how you engage us,” and so on and so forth.

As much as it sounds like I can repeat that from rote and it’s not taxing, it actually is because you’re always advocating, always. I don’t know why, but it is a thing where we’re always having to advocate for the importance of content as an asset and having the people on board to get that work done, which is why I wrote the book because people often ask me, “How do I find people like you? How do I build a content strategy practice? What does that even mean, and do I actually need one?” So full circle, yoga and book, there we go.

Maurice Cherry:
I think it’s really smart that you were able to pull that insight out of something that, just as we spoke about earlier, pulling insight out of something that may not be directly related to the work that you do but you’re still able to apply it. So even as you’re going through this with yoga, you’re finding out, “Oh, this is analogous to something I can use to talk about content strategy.”

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
My first talk that I pitched to Confab, which is Brain Traffic, Kristina Halvorson’s big content strategy conference. We actually just celebrated the last one a few weeks ago, but a couple of years back, I pitched a talk called Yoga, UX, and Content Strategy. It still continues to be my most requested talk.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
I married the two because I was so passionate about both of them. In that talk, I talk about creating safe and accessible spaces. In the same way that we do in a yoga studio for people of differently abled bodies, we also want to be able to bring that same approach to the digital information spaces that we create in. I was trying to keep the two separate and then somehow they got conflated and I was like, “Well, let’s just run with it.” That’s dope.

Maurice Cherry:
Those are the best talks though too when you can really make an analogy between two disparate things. For some reason, those really seem to click with audiences. So good on you for that.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Yeah, thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
What does success look like for you now at this stage in your career?

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
I don’t want to describe myself as necessarily a late bloomer because I’ve been over here blooming for a bit, but I think the book has elevated things. I started getting into more public speaking literally weeks before the lockdown happened. I spoke at the local World IA Day conference, which the LA chapter actually met or the LA version happened here in Pasadena because we’re just north of LA, and that was one of those places where I did a talk and it was about information architecture and content strategy, another mashup, because I did a play on … What is it? Does it spark joy? The Marie Kondo whole bit about creating nice spaces. Now, things are escaping my brain.

Anyway, that was another mashup talk that I did. I’m not an IA. Even though I do dabble in information architect, I wouldn’t self-describe myself in that way, but we’re often joined at the hit with IA and content strategy. So I was trying to show the places where we overlap and how we support each other. That was one of those places where somebody was like, “Oh, my God, that talk was so great. How do I find somebody like you? How do I go a practice?” that kind of thing.

Then two weeks later, lockdown. I started looking at places where I could … All of a sudden there’s like, “I can’t go to that conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, but it’s going to be online, I could probably pitch a talk.” I started pitching talks. Then somewhere along the way, I belong to an organization called Women Talk Design, so women and non-binary folks. It’s like a speakers bureau and training place for folks who are in this design space who are maybe underrepresented as speakers and facilitators and that kind of thing.

I think that’s where Lou Rosenfeld encountered some of my talks and articles that I had been doing, and he asked to be introduced to me, and I kid you not, I was like, “Oh, he must want me to speak at the conference because that’s what I had been doing.” I tell the story all the time, but I’m going to tell it again. 25 minutes into a 30-minute conversation was when it was like, “Oh, he’s wanting me to maybe write a book. Okay. That’s different.” He’s like, “Maybe we should schedule more time,” and I’m like, “Yeah, let’s do that,” and here we are. That was pretty phenomenal and very unexpected, but if you’re going to write a book, I would say doing it during a pandemic was not a bad thing. I had something to do with my time.

Maurice Cherry:
What is it that sort of keeps you motivated and inspired now to continue this work?

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
I am accepting my place as … You used the word maven earlier, and that’s one of my favorites now. Accepting my place with humility and grace, but also, I’m reminded often by my son, I did not get here by being lucky, that I put the work in. So now, I’m wondering where does that take me. I love the work that I’m doing. I love the team that I’m on. Design and particularly content design is elevated as much as research and visual design, and I have a lot of respect for the leaders of our org where I work at Walmart.

Beyond that, I want to continue to motivate others, whether that be through some type of coaching. I was at the last Confab a couple weeks ago, and just seeing … Particularly, there was a time when, again, identifying myself as a woman of color in the tech space in content where I was the only one in the room, and to be at Confab and to have more than a dozen people who look like me coming up and saying, “How’d you do it?” or, “Thank you for doing it,” or just being motivated by their excitement of being in these spaces that weren’t necessarily paths that we could see ourselves in, and just reaching out and really just … When people ping me on LinkedIn and they’re like, “Can I bend your ear for a few minutes? I’m curious about this or that.” Yeah, just wanting to be able to talk to people and, again, wave the flag of the importance of content as an asset. I think I’ve said that 20 times now if your listeners accounting.

I think eventually helping people who may read the book and still say, “I’m only a team of one and I need help, and can you come help us build this team?” maybe that’s in my future as a consultant, but right now, I’m happy with what I’m doing and there may be another book in me. I don’t know. I like writing long. I enjoy it.

Maurice Cherry:
So as we get to the end of this, I’m curious, what do you want the next chapter of your story to be? Where do you see yourself in the next five years or so?

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
I have been lucky enough to be included in a group of peers that are leading in the content strategy and content design space, whether it’s authors or leaders at certain large companies. I was trying to think of the word enterprises and it just went out of my head. We’ve recently published Content Design Manifesto. If you Google it, you’ll find it. Literally, it came out a week or two ago. There was a gathering of a small group of leaders in the space who came together to actually think about, “What is the work that we’re doing now? How do we define it? Where do we want it to go?”

So in similar ways to the Agile Manifesto, we got together and did this. We framed the document, the purpose, and the whole thing, and released it out into the wild. I can’t even remember how many hundreds of people have signed this thing to say, “Yes, we’re on board.” So I think for me, helping to not direct, but just contributing to what this discipline can still become. Aside from ChatGPT and all that stuff aside, when folks come back and go, “Yes, we actually do need content people,” being ready for that and helping people ramp up again.

I’ve done that in my career already, probably twice now. There’s been some waves where it’s like, “Eh, we don’t really … We’ve got content. It’s good. We don’t really need a full practice or a full team,” only to find in a couple of years later, “Actually, yes, we do. We’ve got way more content than one person can handle or that no person can handle, and we really need someone who’s adept at getting this done.” So I see myself as being a part of the folks who collectively have a voice in guiding and mentoring the direction of where the practice of content strategy and content design are going to take us.

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

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Oh, my goodness. I am still on Twitter. My handle is TheLiterati, T-H-E-L-I-T-E-R-A-T-I. I have same handle on Instagram. I do try to keep things updated with where I’m speaking, teaching, not yoga, but content strategy stuff. I’m on LinkedIn. I do welcome people to reach out. Just look up Natalie Marie Dunbar. By the way, there is a Natalie Dunbar who is an author who writes romance novels. She is a woman of color. When I had the very fortunate problem of how do I disambiguate, that’s why I used my middle name because that was one of the things I asked, the first thing I asked Lou Rosenfeld. I’m like, “I never thought I would be able to ask this question of a publisher, but now that I have one, how do I do that?” and he’s like, “Use your middle name.” I’m like, “Duh.”

So I’m out there, and all of those, LinkedIn, Instagram, all of those will link you to my … I have a website. On that website, you can sign up for my newsletter. I always tweet a link to my newsletter. I put it on a monthly-ish. Again, I’m late so I need to get on that within the next couple of days and that’ll tell you where I’m speaking and all those good things. So I welcome folks to follow along in my adventures.

Maurice Cherry:
All right. Sounds good. Well, Natalie Marie Dunbar, I want to thank you so, so much for coming on the show. I think if there’s anything that people can get from this is that you have such a passion and a curiosity for content strategy and how it just works within not only the digital world, but in our world at large, and that’s something that, especially as more and more content gets created … We talked about AI and all that sort of stuff. As more and more content gets created, I am drawn back to what you said about it still is going to need humans. It’s still going to need people in order for content to really thrive and to have good content strategy. I hope that people get a chance to pick up the book. Like I said, we’ll put it in the show notes, but I’m so glad that we have you to be someone that is a practitioner of this to help steer us all in the right way. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Thank you. Thank you so much. I appreciate it being here and chatting with you.

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