Tolu Adegbite

What does accessibility design look like at the largest social media company in the world? According to this week’s guest, Tolu Adegbite, it’s a lot more than you may think! Between websites, apps, and devices, there are a lot of considerations to factor in, and Tolu’s unique background makes her well-equipped to solve these problems.

Tolu gave us a peek into the mood at Meta fresh off the launch of Threads, and she spoke about her day-to-day routine being on the company’s app design systems team. She also shared her story of starting out as a developer, and went into how recent current events inspired her to get more involved with including intersectionality as a key factor in her work. Tolu’s also writing her first book, so she talked about how she juggles that with also being a graduate student.

Tolu is a great example of how using your life experiences can shape your creative perspectives!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

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

Tolu Adegbite:

Hi. My name is Tolu Adegbite. I’m a product designer. Currently in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. And I work on inclusive design. Right now I work at Meta, specifically working on Facebook, the design system, and making that as inclusive as possible.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice. How has your year been going so far?

Tolu Adegbite:

My year so far has been really interesting. I think this year started off kind of tough. There were a lot of just layoffs happening in tech. I felt like everywhere I looked on social media, there were just like a lot of sad messages, layoffs people having to really rejig their lives. So I kind of took a step back. I got rid of most of my social media accounts, which is kind of ironic seeing as I work for a social media company, but I really needed to take some time out to get in a better headspace because of all the tough stuff that was going on. But now I’m definitely feeling a lot more optimistic. I feel like things are turning around, so I’m feeling good about the year from here on out.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, look, I can tell you as someone that also was laid off during that time, I know what you mean about sort of retreating from social media and just seeing all of that as it takes place. Because there was a period last year where I felt like there were layoffs happening every week for like a few months. And not in small numbers either. It’s like 200 people here, 1,000 people here, and it can be super demoralizing, especially if you’re somewhere and you’ve survived a layoff like that. Survivor’s guilt. It’s bad and social media just compounds upon it.

Tolu Adegbite:

Absolutely. I totally agree. I know so many people who experienced the same thing, but for the people who weren’t laid off, there definitely is that survivor’s guilt. Looking around, realizing that it could have just as easily have been you. It was a really unusual way to start the year, especially given last year was the complete opposite. Everyone and their dog had gotten a new job and was talking about it on LinkedIn.

Maurice Cherry:

And this is independent of, sort of, talks about layoffs. Social media as a concept has been in a tailspin this year, particularly with the advent of new services — and we’ll talk about Threads — but with the advent of new services and stuff like that, it’s causing a lot of people to sort of re-examine their relationship to social media. Like…we’ll just talk about it. Twitter is crumbling at the moment and people are looking at all these different alternatives to possibly go it could be on Spill, they could go on BlueSky, they could go on Mastodon, et cetera. And it’s causing some people to say, “you know what? What if I just divest altogether from social media and not use any of these new platforms?” It’s an interesting time to be a social media user, I think.

Tolu Adegbite:

It definitely is. I feel like for so long it’s been a source of a lot of community. I am a chronic lurker. So for years I would lurk on Twitter without ever having an account. But I don’t think you can even do that anymore. I definitely can’t see accounts now that I’m not currently on Twitter, so it’s definitely an interesting time. Definitely more difficult to look in from the outside if you are also a chronic lurker like I am.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I hear you. Yeah. Twitter is becoming a walled garden. Some of these other places are similarly like that, where maybe you can only see a couple of things, but you have to join. And it would be one thing if the social media were more inherently social, but then it’s like tied up with algorithms and data collection, and you’re just like, I just want to talk to my friends and see what they’re doing and look at cute pictures and all that sort of stuff.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, especially since the pandemic. I think social media started being a major source of interaction for me during those, what, like, years that we couldn’t really do much in Ontario. Our laws were pretty intense about lockdown. There was a point in time where you couldn’t even leave your apartment. You couldn’t go outside with anyone who you didn’t live with. So social media was pretty much as much as I interacted with my friends and people that I knew.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. What do you want to try to accomplish for the rest of this year?

Tolu Adegbite:

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mindset and perspective on my career. I’m going to keep it short, but ultimately, I think as a Black woman growing up in this country, I’ve learned to present kind of a palatable version of myself. And I realize in the work world, it doesn’t always translate to where I want to go in my career and I’m having to show up differently. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about that, and I’m really focused on my career this year, where I want it to go and how I think my skill set can kind of propel my career forward.

Maurice Cherry:

Can you expand on that a little bit?

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, absolutely. I’m one of those people who I think, lived in a fantasy land. When I was a kid, I was in my head so much, so I really remember my childhood very well. And I remember as far back as grade one, grade two, sitting in class, feeling like I had to be really good. I don’t think I could put it to words back then, but there definitely was this feeling that in order for me to not be seen as a problematic child, that I had to present myself in a certain way. I had to be super smart. I had to always be raising my hand and giving answers. I had to be super nice to the people in my class. I just had to be the best student, a model student, and I’ve definitely taken that through with me today. I feel like I’m a compulsive people pleaser. And that doesn’t really translate well into the workplace, especially when you want to take on leadership roles.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. These companies will drain everything out of you and ask for more, so I know exactly what that feeling can be like of always trying to make sure that you’re showing up in the right way and doing the right things. And oftentimes, even if you’re doing that, just how you’re presented in the workplace, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to have a good effect, which can be a bit jarring, I think, especially if you’re early in your career, it can be a bit jarring because everything that you’ve been sort of told and seen has been to that point where that’s what you’re supposed to do, that’s what you’re being told that you have to present and do. And then you get in the workplace and they’re like…not so much. It doesn’t necessarily translate that way.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah. Especially starting my career as a developer, I definitely did not think about this stuff nearly as much. But I feel like as a designer, half of your craft is just how you show up. You could have the most amazing ideas and innovative, I don’t know, ideas for apps and ideas. But if you don’t show up in the right way, if you’re not confident, no one is really going to take your idea on board as well as if you show up in a certain way, which is really interesting to me. Half of this job is just how you present yourself.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. I’m thinking of like ten to fifteen years ago, when conversations around Black folks in technology, particularly around this new area of tech with social media and stuff like that, and how those conversations have went about and how people are trying to present themselves and making sure that you were a part of all this. It’s kind of amazing that even now, after all of that, that these are still sort of such big concerns, because company culture — trust me when I tell you this — company culture has changed a lot. Like a lot, a lot since then, but yet these are still kind of these pervasive things that mostly people of color have to deal with.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah. Now that you bring that up, I feel like life kind of exists as life before and after the pandemic, but similarly life before and after George Floyd. And I think I saw a complete kind of change in how I think about work, in what we’re allowed to say, what we’re not allowed to say after that. I feel like that completely changed my career. It was recent, but a lot of conversations have happened since then. A lot of conversations that I don’t think would have happened before George Floyd.

Maurice Cherry:

I’m curious about this because you’re in Canada and granted, you know what you’re mentioning, like with George Floyd and things, this is like…I wouldn’t say it’s a uniquely American issue, but certainly it’s something that people worldwide have been able to resonate with. I’m just kind of curious know, you being from Canada, growing up in Canada, and now having to sort of hear about these issues and see how it affects your workplace. Like, how does that make you feel?

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, I think growing up in Canada is really interesting. Our proximity to the U.S. makes it so that sometimes I’m more aware of American news than I am of Canadian news. Our Canadian news sources are definitely talking about American news, but we definitely felt it up here too. I think there’s this perception that these are problems that are unique to America. They’re really not. Whenever I go to the U.S. and I meet Black folks, one thing that really strikes me is that very often I’m asked, “is there racism in Canada?” And it really breaks my heart in a way that the thought of Black Americans is like, is there a place out there where this doesn’t exist? And the answer is no, it exists up here too. But it’s definitely a different brand. I think Canadian culture kind of makes it more covert, it’s less out there than it is in America. But we definitely had those conversations. Definitely was a reckoning here too, but probably not to the extent that Americans dealt with.

Maurice Cherry:

Hmm. Well, I’m not going to stay on this. This is not a nationalist podcast about, you know, issues like this. I want to talk about you and your work, so let’s go into that. So you’re a product designer at Meta. Tell me more about kind of the work you’re doing there. You mentioned you’re on the, sort of, Facebook product. Like, talk to me about that.

Tolu Adegbite:

I know that when Meta came out as a brand, there was some confusion, but I’ll just explain it for folks who are listening. Meta is the parent umbrella company that is an umbrella over Facebook. WhatsApp, Instagram, Threads, Reality Labs, all that stuff. So Meta is the parent company over Facebook. So yes, I work at Meta, but specifically, mostly on Facebook at this moment in time. And it’s been really interesting. I think there’s a very specific external perception, and we’re not going to talk about that too much. But I will say working at Facebook at Meta, one thing that I’ve been really surprised by is just the amount of attention that’s paid to accessibility and inclusive design. It’s definitely a bigger topic here than it’s been probably anywhere else I’ve worked, which is really incredible. Yeah, it’s really incredible. And I’m excited that I’m here at this point in my career that I don’t have to fight and explain why what I do is important and we’re just getting to the work and trying to make these products as accessible and inclusive as possible.

Maurice Cherry:

Tell me more about what does a typical day look like for you? Are you working with a team? Are you working remotely in the office? Like, what does that look like?

Tolu Adegbite:

So I work remotely from Toronto. There are several of us here, but not a lot. Most of my coworkers are in the U.S. on the West Coast, in California. But a typical day looks like…it looks like a lot of conversations with the design systems team; accessibility falls under that team. We do a lot of the typical stuff. We do crits, we talk about components, we talk about the future of our design system. But we spend a lot of time actually thinking about how to make these things considering the largest number of people. When you work on a product that touches billions of people, it really is a huge consideration and something that we spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, I know you mentioned you’re not going to get too much into Facebook stuff. We’re not going to dive into that too much. But on the show a couple of episodes ago, I talked with Kevin Tufts. He’s a product designer. He works…I think he works moreso on the Instagram side from what he mentioned to me. But when we had talked before, this was prior to the release of Threads, which is an Instagram app very similar to Twitter in that it’s sort of this microblogging platform that you can basically put out…I mean, I’m saying “tweets”, but you can put out these small posts. It’s connected in a way to Instagram in that you can share to and from things like that. And that just came out a couple of weeks ago. It’s had massive appeal. I think there’s up to 30 million plus people that joined within the first 24 hours or so.

Knowing that, what is the internal mood at Facebook like? Because Facebook has taken some knocks. They’ve had layoffs, there’s been the whole thing about the metaverse, et cetera. But now it seems like Facebook’s got like a win in the win column. Like, what’s it like there?

Tolu Adegbite:

You know, internally the feeling is really optimistic. There’s some really tangible excitement and that’s a really nice feeling, especially after how things have been in the tech industry lately. You can tell people are really excited and it’s awesome. So many people are trying it out themselves, wanting to test, wanting to dog food, kind of to make sure everything’s working as it should. So it feels really awesome to see that kind of excitement and it definitely is energizing.

Maurice Cherry:

Does any of your work deal with Threads in any way?

Tolu Adegbite:

Not so much. It’s mostly falling under Instagram, so they kind of do their thing. But there definitely are conversations, especially when it comes to inclusive design concepts.

Maurice Cherry:

I’m going to be really interested to see how Threads and these other similar services are going to play out in the market over the next few years. It’s not the first time that there have been a number of Twitter-like clones that have come out trying to unseat Twitter. And I think I mentioned this actually, I don’t know if I mentioned this on the show — I might have mentioned it a couple of episodes ago — but right around like 2006, 2007 when Twitter was starting to sort of come out of its quote-unquote “beta phase”, but it was becoming more popular and more well known. There were a number of other services that tried to compete for that same market share. There was Yammer. There was Pownce. Jaiku. Oh, God…it’s Plurk. That’s what it was. Plurk is another one. And they were all kind of trying to sort of compete for that same space of like “we also want to be a microblogging platform.” And this is prior to what people know of Twitter as now. This was 2007, because Twitter had pivoted from this podcasting startup. Actually, I don’t know if a lot of people know that it started out as this podcasting startup called Odeo — O-D-E-O — and then they pivoted into this sort of microblogging-esque platform around 2006.

So I’m just curious to see how they will fare because a lot of those services now got bought by bigger companies and then they shut them down or they’re just super popular in other countries and not so much here in the U.S. I know people are trying to migrate to Threads, migrate to BlueSky, migrate to Mastodon, et cetera. I’m still kind of taking a wait-and-see approach to see where the masses go or where the conversation — or really where the culture — ends up moving towards. I mean culture in a broader sense, not just like Black folks, but where the general Internet culture is going to migrate towards because it eventually will settle honestly into one place. Like it’s not going to be, I think as splintered as it is right now.

Tolu Adegbite:

I hope that happens, you know, for the culture. I really do miss Black Twitter. That was amazing. I don’t know if it’s still happening because I can’t see Twitter, but I would be really happy if everyone ended up kind of in the same space. That would really be ideal for me.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, only time will tell. I think it’s way too early now for anyone to really be able to pontificate on who’s going to, quote unquote, win. Still a little early to tell.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, we can check back in in a bit and see where this all lands.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. Speaking of that, Facebook’s coming up on its 20th anniversary next year. What do you think their place is now in this modern Internet age?

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, that’s an interesting thought. I definitely remember when Facebook became a thing, probably when I was in elementary school, high school maybe. It’s interesting to see how it’s progressed now, how the audience has kind of like grown and changed and shifted. I think Mark Zuckerberg has been really good. historically, he’s made a lot of good bets. Things are going really well. He’s invested in the right places. And I think going forward it’s still going to remain like a powerhouse. There are billions of users, there’s a really big international presence, and I don’t think that’s necessarily going to change. My great aunt uses WhatsApp. I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon, but I think we’ll definitely continue to see maybe things change, but I don’t really foresee it, I don’t know, going anywhere anytime soon.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, that international presence is also, you know, there’s all these other products that are not just Facebook. You mentioned WhatsApp I know there’s different versions of Facebook in other countries like Facebook Lite, et cetera, and…it’s not the number one website in the world by accident. In some places, Facebook is the internet. So to kind guess, you know, prematurely call it dying. Like I’ve heard a lot, certainly here in the like Facebook’s everywhere.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, it’s growing and changing. And I think Threads is a really big testament to the team being willing to kind of go where the audience needs them to grow with the audience and the base. So that’s pretty awesome to see.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, seeing that Facebook has that global footprint, let’s talk more about what you do in terms of accessibility. Can you kind of touch on how your work affects different products at Facebook?

Tolu Adegbite:

So I started out as a developer, like I mentioned before. Kind of fell into right out of school working on web accessibility, so finding accessibility issues, fixing them…, So when I say accessibility issues, I mean things like color contrast. If you go on a website and you can’t see the text because the color contrast is too low. Or visible focus indicators, if you’re pressing the Tab button to navigate through a form and you can’t see where your cursor is. So things like that eventually morphed into working on it from the product design angle.

But it’s been really energizing to come here and see that this is a focus area and be able to work on these parts of the app design system before they make it to people and starting at that stage. So there’s a small but passionate team working on that. And I kind of see my role on that team as coming from external places that talked about web accessibility and tried fixing it, working on it in multiple different ways. But these days one of the things I’m really most passionate about is inclusive design and specifically what intersectionality means in the context of all these things.

Maurice Cherry:

Talk about that a bit more.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah. So I’ll tell you how I started thinking about that.

I worked at Shopify a few years ago, and while I was there, I wrote an article for the blog. I can’t really remember why it came to mind. Probably still the fallout of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protest in the U.S., but I was thinking a lot about what this means for accessibility. So there’s this awesome woman — she wrote this book called “Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard.” She was the first deafblind person to ever graduate from Harvard Law, which is a pretty massive deal, in part because before she started at Harvard Law, there were not materials that existed for a deafblind person to make it through the program. Right? Like, they didn’t have access to braille for all their materials. They didn’t have, necessarily maybe, interpreters…things like that. And she got through it. I was really touched by her story, but also her social media presence. She talks a lot about her experience as a deafblind woman who is of African descent. She made a post in particular talking about how when she interacts with other blind people, they almost always assume that she’s white. And that really got me thinking. Why is that?

It got me thinking, especially [as] someone who works in inclusive design about things like alternative text. So, you know, when you go on a website and the image is broken and you see a little bit of text, like dog, you see that text. If someone has put an alternative text attribute, which basically is what someone using something like a screen reader would hear, when their screen reader hits that image, they would hear whatever alternative text you put on it. If you put any. And oftentimes if a website even has alternative text, it’s very basic. Let’s say we go on a news website and there’s, I don’t know, a picture of a farmer. It might say farmer standing on a field, but it won’t really say anything about what the farmer looks like. Typically when we do that, I guess in a society where white is kind of the majority is seen as the default, you kind of implicitly are sending the message that this person is white, right? Yeah, it really got me thinking.

I noodled on that for a really long time, and I thought about my own experiences in elementary school. I was one of those kids who had begged to stay inside at recess, so I’d go to the library and read by myself. I read a lot of books, and I actually didn’t read a single book with a Black main character probably until middle school. And up until that point, I kid you not, I just assumed that people didn’t write books about Black people. It never even occurred to me that I just wasn’t coming across books with Black main characters for a reason. And so I was like, “okay, this is absolutely an accessibility issue.” Let’s write an article about it.

And I did, and initially actually, it’s a little bit controversial. It initially was not approved to be published, which was interesting, but eventually the editorial team was like, “okay, we’ll publish it.” But my one condition was, “okay, we cannot publish it during Black History Month.” I’m not going to publish this during Black History Month because I don’t want this to be like a topic that we relegate to Black History Month and never again. But I wrote that article, and it was the first time I’ve ever gotten hate mail. So believe it or not, some folks from the inclusive design community, I’m assuming it was those folks who were reading it, some people made fake email accounts and just, like, sent me hate mail. And I was like, “wow, this is kind of wild, kind of offensive.” But I’m like, you know what? If this is upsetting people to the extent where they’re sending me hate mail about it and telling me that race is irrelevant to people who are blind, then it means that I need to talk a lot more about it.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, look, I can tell you, as someone that has done a podcast where I talk to Black designers, I can completely believe that you got sent hate mail because people are really shook by the acknowledgment of race. Like, what you’re saying is not pinpointing this on any specific person or people. You’re saying like, “this is a behavior that needs to be corrected for greater context.” And then people are sending you hate because you want clarification. It’s madness. But I can 100% believe that you got that, which I’m sorry to hear that you’ve gotten that, but unfortunately, I can believe it.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah. And I guess people had very strong reactions. But I guess working in accessibility, you kind of have these rose-colored glasses — or I did — thinking that, okay, this is a space where we’re talking about exclusion. We’re talking about people who are from marginalized groups. There absolutely should be a conversation about this. And I was really surprised that that conversation wasn’t necessarily welcome, which tells me that the folks who have the loudest voices in this community are maybe from one marginalized group, but aren’t seeing the intersection with others. Like the experience of a white woman who is blind is going to be very different from Black African immigrant who is blind, who is deafblind. And I think having more conversations about that is really important. But I’ve just really learned that for some reason, these conversations have not been at the forefront of the inclusive design movement. That tells me I need to talk about it more.

Maurice Cherry:

Do you think that it’s getting better?

Tolu Adegbite:

I don’t think I’m seeing enough conversations happen about it. The vast majority of people I know who work in inclusive design are white people. And I inherently…obviously the people who are going to talk about this issue the best are the people who’ve experienced it, right? So I think getting more Black folks in the inclusive design community will make it so that those conversations happen more often. But of course, people who don’t experience kind of what happens at these intersections of multiple marginalized identities, of course they can’t talk about it. They definitely shouldn’t be silencing us either.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. Now, we’ve talked a lot about. Your work, what you’re doing at Facebook, et cetera. Let’s kind of shift gears and learn more about you as a person, as a designer. Tell me about where you grew up. Are you originally from Toronto?

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah. So I was born in Nigeria in a place called Ilรฉ-Ifแบนฬ€, and I moved here when I was about four years old, and I’ve lived in the greater Toronto area, like, Toronto, the towns in and outside of it ever since. So I definitely feel very Canadian. But at the same time, I think a lot about my culture. I speak Yoruba. My parents speak Yoruba. To me, we’re immigrants, and it’s something that I think a lot about. Even though I think people often don’t read me as an immigrant, maybe because of my accent, I think it’s still a very important part of my identity.

Maurice Cherry:

Were you exposed to a lot of design and stuff growing up?

Tolu Adegbite:

Absolutely not. I did not think this was a job, which is why I started out as a developer. I felt like that’s the closest I could get to making things online look nice. When I told my parents that I was going to do design, I think there was a bit of a freak out. My mom was like, “what are you going to design? Like, houses?” There definitely was a disconnect in what that meant. But yeah, it’s interesting what design actually means on the inside. It’s been really amazing, and I think there’s, like, nothing else I’d rather be doing.

Maurice Cherry:

Now you ended up going to the University of Toronto. Tell me about sort of, like, what your time was like there and whether it really kind of helped you once you got out there as a working designer.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, I went to U of T for my undergrad. I studied psychology. U of T was the first university I kind of knew of in Toronto. There’s kind of this joke in the Nigerian community that U of T, for some reason, is like, the only university Nigerian people in Nigeria know about. So when I was little, my dad would take us there, take us to downtown, and he asked me once, when I was like, maybe five or six years old, :which university are you going to go to?” And I looked around and we were at U of T. So I was like, “I’ll go to the University of Toronto.” And then I kind of did.

I think in my head I thought I would always go there because it’s just the one that I knew of. So that was really interesting. I learned so much studying psychology, and it’s probably very cliche because I know it’s, like, one of the most common undergrads that people take. But I learned so much about myself and the way that I look at the world in classes like sex roles and gender and cultural psychology, I just completely shifted my worldview. How I think of things, especially as an immigrant. When my parents and I argue, I look at it from a cultural psychology lens. Why are we arguing? It’s because our collectivistic versus individualistic outlooks on the world are colliding. So I think it definitely helped shift how I look at the world. And I think that’s been really important as a designer to not singularly look at things from this individualistic lens, but think of things from kind of how alternate cultures will look at things. And I think I definitely live in between two cultures, so maybe it makes it a little bit easier to shift my mindset.

Maurice Cherry:

And I would imagine, kind of with the work you’re doing with inclusive design and accessibility, that psychology background is probably super helpful.

Tolu Adegbite:

I’d like to think so. I definitely try to look at it from that perspective. But ultimately, there’s so many different disabilities that people have, you’re never going to understand necessarily where all your users are coming from. So I try to, I don’t know, stay humble, try to not fall into that all-knowing designer kind of stereotype.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, I think at least it probably gives you some empathy into knowing what those kind of different disabilities would be. So tell me about your early sort of post grad career. I know you ended up working for Publicis Sapient as a product designer and as a developer, and you were there for a little over three years. Talk to me about what that experience was like.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yes. So after undergrad, I was like, okay, psychology is awesome, but what am I going to do now? And I kind of just went online trying to find interesting things to do, and I was like, oh, web development looks cool. I could do that. So I studied web development for a year at Humber, and then I started working at Sapient as a web developer. That was really interesting in that I worked mostly on websites, on the digital side of things, worked on a lot of different things. But it was also my first time working with designers, UX designers and visual designers. And I just kind of spent a lot of time working with them. I felt like they were kind of like my people. We talked a lot about how users might think about their perspectives, and I was like, I kind of want to do this. I feel like I could do this. Eventually, I convinced my very supportive director to let me kind of dabble in both, and eventually I moved over to UX.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, usually when I think about designers that are working at an ad agency — that’s what Sapient is — it’s moreso, like visual design or art director or creative director. But you were working on the development side. So they had, like an in-house team, it sounds like.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, exactly. So we’d work on different accounts, creating their websites or digital campaigns, like mini microsites and things like that.

Maurice Cherry:

And you said this is your first time kind of working with UX designers and such; did that give you a greater sense of the type of work that you could be doing?

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, I had no idea that that job even existed. I think I always have loved creativity. I love art. I took art in grade eleven. Grade twelve. I took art as often as I could. I would go to art classes. But there was this one art class I took where the teacher told me I had no technical talent, and I kind of believed her. So for years…

Maurice Cherry:

Damn.

Tolu Adegbite:

I know, right? She was kind of right. But for years, I felt like I couldn’t even broach that world. I didn’t draw anymore. I didn’t paint anymore. I was never very good, but there were fun things to do outside of work. But for the first time, I saw design through a lens of not necessarily being making pretty things, but working on creating products and functional things that could exist in the real world, in the digital world. And I felt like I was more able to do that. I’m not going to be able to produce a beautiful oil painting rendering of you, but I can definitely design a landing page or a form. So I think that kind of work really appeals to me. It feels very logical in a way that appeals to me, but also creative in that you’re bringing together these elements in a way that kind of makes sense for your audience. But to me, it’s like the most creative job, even though you’re not necessarily making anything visually, like, groundbreaking or anything.

Maurice Cherry:

Now back then, were you focused on inclusive design and accessibility, or is that something which kind of came about later on in your career?

Tolu Adegbite:

I think starting as a developer working on web accessibility, it definitely was the lens through which I always wanted to work in UX design, product design. And it was kind of how I made my case in that we didn’t have a lot of people who are specializing in accessibility, but even fewer who did that from the product design side of things. So I was able to make a case for that need on the team by working on things through that lens.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, after you were working at Sapient, you worked at Shopify for a while, which you kind of mentioned a bit earlier. Tell me about that experience. I’ve heard that their internal design culture there is really good. Is that what your experience was like?

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, I felt like their culture was really intentional, and it kind of presented design through a different lens for me. Yet again, that’s when I started thinking of design not only looking like building interfaces, but building your team, building very intentional relationships with your partners in product management, in development. Yeah, definitely very intentional. Definitely lots of process behind the way that things were done. It was a really nice way to broaden my horizons I feel it was a really good experience.

Maurice Cherry:

And from a design perspective, what sort of things were you working on there at Shopify?

Tolu Adegbite:

At Shopify, I specifically worked on Shopify Fulfillment Network, which — rest in peace — they had a recent round of layoffs, which is basically shedding that part of the company. But it was kind of their answer to Amazon Fulfillment. It was enabling merchants, small merchants, to ship out things from warehouses from centralized locations. And I felt like design was just taken very seriously there.

I was working on a project to build, like, a system for the warehouse. And so I started by requesting a visit to the warehouse because I had never visited a warehouse before. And so I went to a warehouse. I worked there for a couple of days, chatted with all the folks on the ground and yeah, got to experience the warehouse through their eyes, I guess. And then I went to start doing the design work, but it felt like they took it so seriously. They actually listened to me. They actually let me experience what I was designing for. And that was really cool. That’s still, I think, one of the most maybe interesting projects I’ve worked on. I feel like it was kind of like that seminal project that I worked on that made me officially a designer.

Maurice Cherry:

I get what you’re saying. Yeah. Sometimes once you start to get that internal validation, or rather I would say, once you get that external validation from your team, that the work that you’re doing is making that impact, it does so much for morale. It does so much for sort of just building yourself up as a designer to know that you are making good decisions and that you’re doing good work.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, absolutely. I guess it brought that aspect of maybe what I love about psychology, getting to understand other people into it. It wasn’t just sitting in a room and I guess making decisions from afar.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. Now, you’re also currently working on a book about intersectionality and design, which we’ll get to. But before we talk about that, I’d love for you to kind of give your definition of inclusive design. What does it mean to you and why? Is it something that other designers should be sort of aware of as they work?

Tolu Adegbite:

I think inclusive design to me is going beyond just compliance and following accessibility laws and making sure you’re up to code. It’s about truly designing for a variety of experiences to make a good experience for the variety of users that you have, whether that’s users with disabilities or users without disabilities, maybe users with temporary or situational disabilities.

But for me, specifically, bringing intersectionality into it is what I thought of a lot after know those few rounds of hate mail. I think that word is so often kind of divorced from where it initially came, intersectionality. Kimberlรฉ Crenshaw, like, that whole thing was about the multiple types of oppression that Black women experience, right? Like the misogyny and the racism, how does that intersect to create a unique social experience for Black women? Let’s pivot and look at accessibility in that same way. How does being disabled and being a Black person, being a brown person, being an immigrant, how do those things intersect to create a unique experience of disability, of exclusion, but kind of bringing Black folks back into that conversation? I’ve had experiences where I’ve seen people use the word intersectionality, and never do they even mention Kimberlรฉ Crenshaw or Black people, which I’m like….that’s wild. That’s where the word came from. So I think we need to have those conversations. I think we need to acknowledge where this word came from, what the concept means. Kimberlรฉ Crenshaw…shout out to her. She is still making books. She’s still writing things. She’s still talking about this. We need to acknowledge where this term came from and what it actually means.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, how does this sort of factor into the work that you’re doing with your book? Is it kind of expounding on this in terms of design?

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, I think what I’m hoping to do is have more conversations about this. Get people thinking about it, get people to understand that just like a lot of other places in tech in which we have kind of our dominant group in society, white men driving things, it’s the same thing in the disability movement right now, in the accessibility movement right now. And that needs to shift in order for the accessibility movement to truly be helpful for people who are not kind of the dominant societal group, right? People of color, immigrants are more likely to be disabled because of things like environmental racism, less access to essential health care. It absolutely is an important conversation to have because we make up so much of the body of disabled people in our countries.

Maurice Cherry:

I remember super early conversations around web accessibility back when I was — oh, God, I keep aging myself when I say these things — back when I was designing websites in 2005, and even just trying to advocate for alt text on images and being told that, “oh, well, that’s only for disabled people and they’re not really using the web and stuff like that.” And I know that a lot of the technology around accessibility has increased, especially as browsers have gotten better. but I remember when it was just like pulling teeth to get people to even consider accessibility when it came to their work. They just wanted to make interesting, cool stuff online and didn’t think about anybody, but just impressing, I don’t know, other designers or friends of theirs, not thinking about who the people were that could possibly be using the thing that you’re designing.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, and I think in some circles that’s still the situation, unfortunately. But I think a lot of people maybe don’t know people who are disabled or like a lot of folks don’t maybe or didn’t know people who are Black in the past and that kind of painted their worldview on who Black people are. But if you know people who are disabled like anyone else, people who are disabled just want to have their independence and be able to do things that everyone else does. So if we don’t make our banking website accessible, the consequence of that is…the real world consequence is that someone out there needs to trust a third party to handle their money, and that’s not really a situation that would be acceptable to anyone else. So why should we subject disabled people to that experience?

I definitely think that things like laws and getting sued and lawsuits are a big reason why people are starting to care. Companies are starting to care, net-net honestly, if that’s what gets them to make their websites accessible, that’s fine with me. Be nice if it came from a place of “this is what’s right,” but if it’s going to come from the law, that’s cool too.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I totally agree with that. Having that accountability is unfortunately the only way that some companies are going to make that happen. Like they have to be fined or otherwise censured in order for them to actually take it seriously.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, absolutely. And if that’s what gets us where we need to be and having the right conversations, I can live with that.

Maurice Cherry:

There’s a book on inclusive design written by Reginรฉ Gilbert. She’s been on the show a few times actually, who wrote “Inclusive Design for a Digital World”. Really great book. If people are listening and they want to just learn more about this, they should check that out. But I’m super interested in seeing what your book is going to be like when it comes out because I think definitely what you mentioned with intersectionality and race as it relates to design is something that is still super important, especially during this current — I guess you could say in the U.S. — this current political climate. But I think it’s probably worldwide or starting to become worldwide as it relates to things like critical race theory and things like that, where things are being either rewritten or omitted that just leave race out of it or completely rewrite history in some odd ways. So I’m really going to be interested to see the reception that your book gets once it’s out.

Tolu Adegbite:

I am interested in seeing myself finish writing it. I’ll definitely keep you posted. I’m excited to have this conversation; hopefully get less hate mail this time. But yeah, the fact that people have reacted so strongly to conversations about that tells me that we need to have more of those conversations and it’s something that we’re not talking about enough right now. But we definitely have folks who are starting to build that conversation. So I’m excited to join the chat.

Maurice Cherry:

So between your product design work that you’re doing at Meta, you’re writing this book, I think you also mentioned a bit earlier that you’re in another educational program. Is that right?

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, that’s right. So I’m starting a Masters of Inclusive Design program at OCAD U. So kind of a funny name, but Ontario College of Art and Design…University? It recently became a university. I’m so so excited about that. It’s a really small program, but it’s been really foundational in the accessibility and inclusive design community. And I’m excited to be surrounded by people who’ve done a lot of thought in this area and just to absorb their knowledge and learn from them.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I know Dr. Dori Tunstall was the dean there. She just came out with a book recently called “Decolonizing Design”, but I think she recently stepped down. And there’s another Black woman or BIPOC woman that’s stepping up as dean, I think.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, Dori’s amazing. I ran into her on the street in Toronto once and I talked to her for a while and she was super nice, and I was like, a weirdo. But she played a huge part in the creation of this program, actually, and in making it actually truly inclusive. This program has, like, remote and asynchronous options. It has options for folks who have to work while doing the program. And I’ve never really come across a program quite like that. So when Dori says inclusive design, Dori means inclusive design.

Maurice Cherry:

That’s awesome. Yeah, I had her on the show back in…oh God, 2015. Maybe she’s like episode 107 or something like that. At the time, she was still teaching in Australia. She was still teaching at Swinburne. This is before she came back to North America. So it’s been amazing to see just her glow up and change and really how fiercely she’s advocated for decolonizing design and inclusivity in her work. It’s been really a powerful thing to see.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah. And it’s one thing to say it, but actually doing it and creating a course that’s actually centered around being inclusive and providing multiple ways of learning where you’re able to codesign your education, that’s just walking the walk. And I really admire that. I never come across another higher education program like that, and I hope other programs take note and we can see more options for inclusive education.

Maurice Cherry:

So, Tolu, what does your downtime look like? I mean, I imagine a lot of this work takes up a lot of just, like, brain space and things like that. What do you do in your downtime?

Tolu Adegbite:

I’m working on that. I feel like I’ve been called by people in my life a bit of a workaholic, and I’m trying to just find hobbies that do not necessarily relate to my work. I’ve been doing some photography lately, which is fun. I really love plants. Trying to spend more time outside, but also watching movies, shows. Again, I feel like you really can’t unsee inclusive design. Right now. I’m watching “I’m A Virgo” about a 13 foot tall Black man from Oakland trying to find his way in the world. So, yeah, I really enjoy things like that. I need to get out more. But I love movies. I love film.

Maurice Cherry:

I need to catch “I’m A Virgo.” I know it just came out, I think last month — we’re recording in July. This will air in September. But I think it came out like June-ish something like that. I need to check it out because I’ve heard it’s really good.

Tolu Adegbite:

I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s amazing.

Maurice Cherry:

What are some pieces of advice that you kind of find yourself coming back to? This could be, like, life advice, career advice, et cetera.

Tolu Adegbite:

This sounds kind of silly, but I say this. I think this is a quote from Winston Churchill, who is otherwise very problematic, but “when you’re going through hell, keep going.” Honestly, whenever something weird happens, something demotivating happens, I just think of that and I find it incredibly motivating. If you’re in hell, why would you stop there? You got to keep going so you at least move yourself out of hell. I’m not saying I’m in hell, but I find that quote really motivating and I think of it often.

Maurice Cherry:

Who are some of the mentors that have kind of helped you out in your career? And these could be peers as well, but who are some people that have really kind of helped you to get to where you are today?

Tolu Adegbite:

Oh, my gosh. Basically everyone you’ve talked to on this podcast. But I’ve been lucky enough to have some really amazing mentors in my time. The person who I worked with at my first company, Allison Walton, who got me started in web accessibility, amazing mentor. Zoltan Hawryluk, who I worked with as a developer, I got to dip some of him once a month. Just people who have been in the industry for a really long time have taught me so much. Tory Hargro, who works at Meta, has been such an incredible mentor to me. He’s amazing and he’s so accessible, even at his level, which is amazing. I work with a designer called Alexis Cotton, who has just been an incredible mentor to me. I’ve learned so much from her about how to show up. She’s a really unique and interesting person, and I feel really lucky to have access to all these people who have made themselves so available. And, yeah, it’s very humbling, and I don’t think I’d be doing the things I’m doing now if it wasn’t for those folks.

Maurice Cherry:

I’m going to text Tory and I’m going to let him know that I talked to you for the show. When you think back on your career and sort of what you’ve learned to get to this point, and I think you may have somewhat answered this earlier, but what are you still working on unlearning as you grow as a designer?

Tolu Adegbite:

I’m trying to unlearn that kind of being a wallflower, being humble, minimizing and shrinking myself to be palatable. I think it’s going to be a long process of unlearning. But, yeah, I’m trying to just show up more. I look around at my peers and kind of how they show up in rooms and how they take up space, and I’m like, I should take up that space too. And I think a lot of women struggle with this in general, but I want to take up more space, and I want to show up as that person who yeah. Who just puts themselves out there and doesn’t need to shrink themselves to make a version of them that they feel like is palatable to the people around them.

Maurice Cherry:

Do you have like, a dream project or something that you’d love to work on one day?

Tolu Adegbite:

Honestly, I can’t even think of one off the top of my head. My dream project is talking about inclusive design and intersectionality and where Black people, where people of color, where immigrants fit into this design story.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, as you look kind of into the future, of course, like you said, you’re still working on this book, you’re in this program. Where do you see yourself in the next five years? Like, what does Tolu in 2028 going to be doing?

Tolu Adegbite:

I see myself deleting a lot of hate mail.

Maurice Cherry:

Hopefully more than that. Hopefully more than that.

Tolu Adegbite:

I see myself having more conversations about these things, about it becoming more of a mainstream conversation. I think in the larger tech community, we’re definitely at the point where we’re talking about needing more diverse representation. I’m really hoping we can talk about that in the inclusive design community as well. I see myself growing, helping other folks in the way people have helped me. It’s funny you mentioned that. I feel like ever since the pandemic, I’ve learned to think a lot more short term back then. Couldn’t even plan, like, two weeks ahead. And so right now I’m focusing a lot more on what’s on my plate.

Maurice Cherry:

Look, I’m right there with you. People ask me now about stuff to do in October, and I’m like, “do I want to do that in October? Where am I going to be in October?” So I think we’re all, in a lot of ways, still kind of trying to come out of this pandemic and think about the future. But it feels like with what you’re doing, your path is set. It feels like if you keep on this path now of working on inclusive design, I think you’ve got a bright future ahead. Especially as we look at things like Web3, the metaverse, other social media platforms, things of that nature. There’s just going to be more and more opportunities because the Web is expanding in a way to include everyone that it just hasn’t before. Because technology is changing.

Tolu Adegbite:

Yeah, there’s a new frontier. There’s the Wild West, where no one has ever done these things before. And there’s definitely a lot of conversations to be had about how to make these completely new things inclusive and accessible. I definitely am super excited about the people who are around me at Meta. There’s actually surprisingly a huge number of Black folks at Meta now, kind of starting with Tory. I think he was actually the first Black designer on Facebook, which is pretty wild. But I definitely look around work and I feel like there are the right people around to help on that path, the right mentors, and that feels really awesome.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Tolu Adegbite:

My website is tolu.xyz. Tolu is T-O-L-U. My Threads handle/Instagram is the same — tolu.xyz. Email. I’m also on LinkedIn. You can’t find me really anywhere else. I’m trying to reduce the amount of things that I consume, so those are probably the best ways to find me. Also via email. Old-fashioned.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, you also have the distinction of being the first person on the show to mention that they can be found on Threads.

Tolu Adegbite:

That feels pretty awesome. Hopefully future guests will follow that trend.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, Tolu, it’s been such a pleasure to have you on the show. So great to learn more about you and about your you know, like I said, the web is expanding in many different, know, virtual reality, et cetera, and the work that you’re doing just speaks to the greater need to include everyone in the conversation. So I really hope that with the work that you’re doing that we are all moving forward and closer to fulfilling that goal. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

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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.

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Carmelle Kendall

Carmelle Kendall is a true Atlanta business success story! Not only is she a talented creative director and the co-founder of popular paper goods company Neighborly, but now there’s another title she can add to her list of accolades — children’s book illustrator for “Your Freedom, Your Power: A Kid’s Guide to the First Amendment”!

We talked about how she got involved with the book, and she spoke about getting her start in the advertising industry in NYC, and later in Atlanta with rebranding the well-known hamburger chain Krystal. She also shared how she pivoted her creative interests into her current business, and she gave some great advice for others who are looking to do the same.

Carmelle’s story is one of ambition, determination, and the triumphs of pursuing your passions!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

So I’m Carmelle Kendall. I am a creative director, designer, founder of Neighborly Paper, and illustrator for a children’s book called “Your Freedom, Your Power.”

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I saw the book as I was doing my research, came out with Penguin Random House on July 25, and I’ll make sure that we put a link to that in the show notes. I’m curious, are you spending the summer doing a book tour or doing anything with publicizing the book?

Carmelle Kendall:

I’m not doing a book tour, but I have spoken with the authors, and we kind of have our rollout plans on how we plan on getting the word out there. I’m super excited about it. This is my first children’s book ever, so this was a goal of mine for, like, a long term goal. So I was very surprised when they hit me up to do this project. But I’m super excited about it and just trying to get the word out there any way that I can, because this is a book that is very much needed right now with the current climate in the United States.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. How did you get involved with it? Did the author reach out to you directly?

Carmelle Kendall:

Actually, the art director at Random House hit me up, saw my work just on the Internet and on Instagram and kind of traced it back to me, hit me up and just know there’s a new book coming out called “Your Freedom, Your Power” and wanted to know if I was interested in learning more about the project. And of course, you know, I said yes. I was over the moon elated about it. And then she, you know, just went into detail about what the book was going to be about. She showed me who the authors were. Allison Matulli is a lawyer, and then Clelia Castro-Malaspina, I believe is how you say her last name, is a writer. And they kind of paired up to write this book. And it’s really about…it’s a middle school level book, and it’s about how to protest, how to write a letter to your representative, how to write a petition, just everything on how to get your voice out there. I think it’s a super important book that middle schoolers, you know, adults need. LLike everybody needs [it], but it’s super fun. It’s in a way that’s just, you know, really straightforward and plain for the younger audience. It also talks about previous historic cases throughout the United States history that kind of changed the course of America and learning from those cases and how to implement all of that into today’s society. So it’s really important.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I love the idea of a sort of kid / I guess teenager focused book about civics. Cause I mean…I don’t have children. But like, I don’t know if they teach civics in school anymore. That sort of stuff you mentioned with the book, I learned it in civics in seventh grade, but I don’t know if that’s such the case now, especially over the past I would say maybe ten to fifteen years. And we definitely have seen in the news, you know, protests and things where people are really exercising their civic rights. It’s not really taught as to how you go about doing it, because I think it really crops up around elections because we’re like, oh, write your congressperson this, that or the other.

Carmelle Kendall:

Right.

Maurice Cherry:

But how do you start that? How do you even make that happen?

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah. And you can do it on such a small level, you know what I mean? It doesn’t even have to be around presidential elections, but it’s literally just about anything that you want to change. You have the power to do it. You have the voice to do it. And here are the tools to help you. Yeah. Even I learned a lot from reading the book and illustrating the images. I was just like, “wow, this is such a needed book right now.”

Maurice Cherry:

Very cool. We’ve actually had…man, I think we’ve had a few children’s illustrators on the show fairly recently. I know we had Alleanna Harris. We had Akeem Roberts. We’ve had a couple of folks on the show recently that have done like children’s books, illustrations — kid lit, as they called it. Is that sort of a dream of yours to do more books like that?

Carmelle Kendall:

It is. I have so many ideas. I have so many ideas for children’s books that I want to do. So I’m hoping that this kick starts just a new line of employment for me because I had a lot of fun doing it. It was a lot of work. I will say this book, it took over a year and a half, I believe total, to do it. The deadline got pushed back a few times. The manuscript changed a few times. So very much a labor of love, for sure. But I love doing it. And I have so many ideas for other children’s books, so I’m hoping to get started on those now so that I can keep the momentum going and keep this ball rolling. But yeah, I loved it. I definitely want to continue. For sure.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice. Do you have representation yet?

Carmelle Kendall:

I don’t. So I am debating on…I’ve had people reach out to me for representation, but I have another illustrator friend and she was like, “don’t do it.”

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, why is that?

Carmelle Kendall:

From her experience. She said that she had a representator or representative for her illustrations and that it didn’t work out because she felt like they weren’t really pushing her work out there and that they were pretty much just tacking on their percentage for a lot of the work that was coming in. Not from them. Like just people coming in organically to her and then having her representative take a percentage off without really finding the work for her. And so she got into some royalties, like children’s books that have royalties, and now her representative gets a percentage for life.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, wow.

Carmelle Kendall:

She said, so from her experience, she said that she had a representative for her illustrations and that if it didn’t work out because she felt like they weren’t really like pushing her work out there. And that they were just pretty much tacking on their percentage for a lot of the work that was coming in not from them. Like, just people coming in organizally to her and then having her representative take a percentage off without really finding the work for her. And so she got into some royalties like children’s books that have royalties and now her representative gets a percentage for life.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh wow.

Carmelle Kendall:

And they didn’t come to her through the representative, and so she was just telling me, you know, it’s not worth it and you know, just kind of do it on your own. So I don’t know, I’m a little on the fence about that.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow. Yeah. I can understand then why you’d want to kind of give that some more thought. I know some of the folks that I mentioned that we’ve had on the show, they are represented. I think one of them in particular is represented by, like I think it’s either a Black agency or it’s one that is geared towards Black work, or Black or BIPOC work.

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh, interesting.

Maurice Cherry:

I don’t know. I feel kind of like for illustrators, maybe it just makes sense because you don’t have to do that legwork define work. They kind of just come to you. But then if it’s a situation like you mentioned with your friend, that sucks because they’re getting a cut of money for not even really doing the work.

Carmelle Kendall:

So the one that I talked to, I asked that question, I was kind of like, “okay, so if somebody comes to me without you, like, if they see me on Instagram or whatever and hits me up, then do you get that percentage?” And she said, “yes, that’s the way her contracts work.” And so it made me hesitant. So I said no at that time because I was like, “well, let me do some more research because I don’t know about this.”

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, no, that’s fair. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So aside from the book, what else do you have planned for the summer?

Carmelle Kendall:

So, aside from the book, I’m working a lot on Neighborly Paper, which is my paper company, rolling out new products all through the summer and hoping to get into some more stores come fall so that everybody will be able to purchase Neighborly from a store near them.

Maurice Cherry:

I will make sure to link to the segment that I saw you on where you were featured on the TODAY show. That’s big. Talking about Neighborly. I think at the time, it was like, in 2020. Is that, right?

Carmelle Kendall:

Yes, February 2020.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, during Black History Month. I think it mentioned you were in, I think, twenty stores at the time.

Carmelle Kendall:

Was it only twenty? Oh, my gosh.

Maurice Cherry:

Look at you. “Only twenty. Was it only twenty?”

Carmelle Kendall:

Wow. I don’t even remember the number at that point, but wow! Yeah, it might have been twenty at that point, but we’ve definitely grown a lot since being on the TODAY Show, for sure.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, let’s talk about Neighborly. Let’s get into that. How did you sort of come up with the idea to start that?

Carmelle Kendall:

So it was actually my business partner’s idea. So at that point, we started it in 2016 in New York City. We were both living there in Harlem, and my business partner is actually a childhood friend of mine. We grew up as neighbors in Fayetteville, Georgia. We grew up as neighbors. We ended up living in Harlem together as neighbors again. And so she’s a writer, and she had the idea of coming up with a greeting card line at that time and asked me was I interested in doing some illustrations for the line. And so I said, well, let me see first what the lines are and what I can bring with the illustrations. I didn’t say yes immediately because I wanted to just make sure I could actually do this. And she sent me the lines. They were hilarious. I thought it was great, super cute. I spent the weekend just kind of drawing some images to the design, I mean, to the lines. She ended up loving it. And then she said, “well, I think we should call it Neighborly, since we grew up as neighbors and we’re neighbors again.” And I loved that idea, designed the logo and everything.

Initially, we started out our line with holiday starting in 2016. So we had Christmas. We ended up doing some little, at this point it was like October, sSo we did little Halloween postcards that we gave out as freebies so that people could just get our website out there. But yeah, we started out with eight cards for holiday. We completely sold out of those cards. We had a total of 800. We did like 100 each. Completely sold out of those cards. Unexpectedly, we were like, wow, people really love this. And then people were like, “when are the Valentine’s cards coming out? When are you going to have birthday cards?” Initially, I was like, wow. I thought it would just be like a little hobby. Like, I would draw a new card every few months, but now people are like, when are the next cards coming out? Yeah. Then we were like, okay, this is a viable business right now. We actually need to come out with more inventory. So that’s how it started.

Maurice Cherry:

I love the name Neighborly. I love that whole sort of concept of it coming from the fact that you and your business partner were neighbors. That’s really cute.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah, so and now we’re actually both back in Atlanta. Neighbors again.

Maurice Cherry:

Look at that. Yeah, neighbors and business partners — that’s dope. So right now you’re working at an agency now, but before that work, you were at Dagger as an associate creative director and a senior art director. Tell me about that.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah. So started at Dagger in 2020 as a senior art director, worked on Krystal, which is a fast food restaurant in the southeast; worked on Buffalo Wild Wings; and then got promoted to ACD, which is associate creative director, where I worked on Aflac and a brand called Rent. But, yeah, it was fun. Dagger was great. I learned so much. We did a huge rebranding for Krystal at that time, which was amazing. I got to lead that, which leading a rebrand of that size was just amazing. I loved it. That’s one of my favorite projects to date just because the client gave us so much freedom. We pretty much changed everything except for the logo, which is like a dream. Not a lot of brands let you do that; let you change the colors and let you explore typography and things like that. So, so much fun. I loved it.

Maurice Cherry:

There’s a couple of things I sort of know about Dagger. I’ve heard of it here as a local agency. One of the projects, I think it’s either from Dagger or maybe Dagger acquired it, I’m not 100% sure. But ButterATL…is it part of Dagger? Is it like just a project that they do? Do you know what I’m talking about?

Carmelle Kendall:

Yes. It started out as a part of Dagger, and then now they’ve kind of branched out, and Dagger, I think, is just known as, like, an investor at this point, but now it’s its own entity.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay. Yeah. I know about Brandon Butler. Brandon’s been on the show before. He was actually one of the very first people I had on the show way back in 2013. He was working at Edelman at the time, but I had heard of him because…I don’t know if people know that Brandon Butler is kind of something of like an Atlanta like wunderkind. He had a website store in North DeKalb Mall. I want to say it was North DeKalb Mall, where you could literally go into a store in the mall and buy a website. This was well before I think he did Butter, but I remember hearing about Butter, and I know that Brandon was at Dagger, so I wasn’t sure sort of what that relationship was.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah. Mmhmm. Yeah, Dagger, I guess, helped start it. It started at Dagger, but now it’s definitely its own.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, nice. I’m wondering, like…it probably was really cool to work on with Krystal kind of being such a…it’s not an Atlanta, I mean, I guess you could say it’s a known Atlanta brand. It’s founded in Tennessee, but it’s headquartered now here in Atlanta. I bet that was something kind of working on such a well-known Atlanta/Southern brand.

Carmelle Kendall:

When I was interviewing and they said that Krystal wanted to do a rebrand — and they never really done a rebrand, like, ever in history — that is what made me want to take the job, because what brands have been around that have just never done a rebrand and are just kind of like, we want you to lead this project. It’s like, wow, that was a dream come true and something that doesn’t happen very often. And so I definitely took the job for that project because I just was really excited to do a rebrand of that scale.

Maurice Cherry:

Let’s dive a little bit into that project because you said it was such a grand redesign like that. What did that entail? Like, what did the team look like? How did that process even go?

Carmelle Kendall:

The team was so small, it literally was me and another designer. We ended up getting some freelance help because it just was massive. But it didn’t happen all at once. It happened over the course of, like, a year, I would say. So, yeah. It wasn’t crazy where we did it in, like, a month or so. We really did take our time with it. But, yeah, like I said, the only rule was don’t change the logo. So everything else was pretty much sky’s the limit. So they knew they wanted something more modern, more fresh, just more current. I just feel like everything was kind of looking a little outdated just because they hadn’t had a rebrand in forever. So we updated the colors. We made it more just popping. Like, we wanted everything to pop. Redid product photography for all of the menu items, which was one of my favorite parts. We wanted the food to look more realistic, you know. We wanted sauce dripping down, some of the ingredients might have fallen onto the plate, things like that. We thought of every little detail that you could think of. Typography, colors, design elements. We did some illustrations for it. We had all new photography, all new models, just everything from start to finish. We did everything.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow. And like you said, it took over, like, a year to sort of pull it all together.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, when you started out at Dagger, you were an art director, right? And then when you left, you were an associate creative director. Tell me kind of, I guess, one — and I know this because I hear this either from a lot of freelancers or just from a lot of people — they kind of use art director and creative director rather interchangeably. Like, to you, what is the difference between the two, and how did you shift from becoming an art director to a creative director?

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah, I see people using them interchangeably as well, and I definitely don’t think they should be using them interchangeably. For me, art director, you’re way more in the weeds of the work. You’re working under the creative director. So for me, the creative director is more so leading the charge. But the art director is kind of implementing what the creative director sets in motion is kind of how I see it. So when I first started at Dagger as a senior art director, I definitely was more in the weeds. And then when I left as associate creative director, I was more so overseeing, like, you’re managing the teams, you’re managing the day to day of the teams. You’re more so delegating the work. You’re making sure everything is cohesive, of course, and everything kind of fits together. But as art director, you’re definitely doing the day to day, whereas creative director, you’re leading the way.

Maurice Cherry:

I got you. That makes sense. Now that you kind of put it that way, it does seem like something you would sort of organically level up to, because if you’re in the weeds, then of course you’re able to be an effective creative director because you know what it’s like to be at that level where you’re kind of hands on with the work in that way.

Carmelle Kendall:

And you definitely, as a creative director, need to understand what it takes to make the vision come alive. And I feel like understanding what it takes, you have to be as the art director, you have to be as the designer so you can understand, okay, this is going to take this amount of time. This may not be possible, but this is…you kind of need to know those things, and the only way to know those things is to be in the weeds of the work.

Maurice Cherry:

That makes sense. I got you. Now I kind of want to shift gears here a little bit. Of course, we’ve talked a good bit about your work, but I’m curious to kind of know more about your journey leading up to all of this. Now, you are one of the rare Atlanta natives I think I’ve had on this show, which is great, over ten years. Tell me about growing up here.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah. So initially, my family is from the southwest of Atlanta. Like, our first house was on Cascade Road.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Carmelle Kendall:

And then ended up moving to Fayetteville when I was little, and that’s mainly where I grew up. I went to private school. I went to Woodward Academy for a long time before transferring, going to public school and high school, where I transferred to Sandy Creek. So that’s where I graduated from, which is a Fayette County School, and then moved away, where I went to Howard for undergrad.

Maurice Cherry:

How was Howard?

Carmelle Kendall:

Howard was amazing. I mean, best four years of my life. I’m pretty sure that’s what all the Howard grads say from at least the ones I know. But, yeah, Howard was amazing. I mean, I highly suggest everybody go there.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, when you went there, you were studying marketing. Did you kind of already have that in mind when you went? Like when you graduated high school, you knew you wanted to get into marketing?

Carmelle Kendall:

No, absolutely not. I didn’t know what I wanted. I honestly didn’t think about it. I wasn’t the type of person to like…I don’t know. When I was growing up, my goal in life, I wanted to be a background dancer. I didn’t take school and stuff that seriously. And so when I graduated from high school, I didn’t know what I wanted to be at all. I just wanted to go out and party and have a good time. So I just picked it randomly because I just was like, “oh, business, that sounds cool. Let’s do it.”

Maurice Cherry:

I’m laughing not at the choice, but I’m laughing at the fact that there’s so much pressure, I think, especially when you’re in high school and about to graduate on, like, you need to pick the one thing that you’re going to do for the rest of your life. There’s a lot of pressure to have that forward thinking in mind. I 100% get what you’re saying. When I graduated, I wanted to do something with web design, actually, but at the time, it wasn’t, like, in the curriculum. I graduated in 1999, and so the web was still kind of becoming a thing. The Internet was still becoming a thing. And when you went to school, the closest thing that there was was, like, computer science or computer engineering. There wasn’t any sort of, like, UX or anything. I don’t think those terms, at least not in the general knowledge of design, really existed back then. And I took my first semester. It was all this programming stuff. Didn’t like it at all. I was like, “I don’t like this.” Went to my advisor, told him I wanted to do websites and build stuff for the Internet, and he was like, “the Internet’s a fad. You’re not going to stick around if this is what you want to do. You should change your major.” And so I changed my major to Math. And I mean, this is partially true, but it’s also what I tell people. I just changed my major to Math because I liked Math. I didn’t have any sort of idea of, like, I’m going to be a mathematician. I’m going to be a Math teacher. I had no clue what to do with a Math degree. I just liked Math. But also when I did the math on my credits that I had so far, like, stuff I had transferred from high school, I was like, “wait a minute. I could graduate a semester early if I switch over to Math, and I could still stay at my scholarship program.” So that’s what I did.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah, that’s important.

Maurice Cherry:

Because later, as a working designer, I always get people that are just baffled that I have a Math degree. Like, why? I just…I like Math. I didn’t really have any career plans. Also because the scholarship program that I was in was set up where you did two internships at NASA facilities.

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh!

Maurice Cherry:

And so the goal was, like, you do those two internships, and then when you graduate, you have a job at NASA. And I was like, “well, I don’t have to really think about what I have to do. All I have to do is just graduate college, and I got a job waiting for me.”

Carmelle Kendall:

Right.

Maurice Cherry:

But 9/11 happened when I was in my junior year, and they changed stuff with the program where the seniors that were graduating in 2002 would still get to go to their NASA assignment or whatever, but not the ones after that. And so I was working at the High Museum at the time, selling tickets at the High. That was the job I had when I graduated because I had nothing lined up at all. I had no sort of career plans even coming out of college because I thought, like, “oh, I’m set.” So I get it. I completely understand not having an idea of what you really want to do. I sort of fell into design because I had it as a hobby. I was still doing it on the side, and then now it’s what I do. But I had no plan at all. I was just like rolling with the punches.

Carmelle Kendall:

But I mean, it’s absurd to ask somebody that’s 18 years old what is their plan? You know what I mean? Like, you’re 18. If you think about it, in high school, you’re not exploring all these different career paths. You’re taking geometry and English. I don’t know. I just feel like to have your whole career planned out as a freshman in college is wild. That’s bonkers to me.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Carmelle Kendall:

I think everybody should kind of start out undecided, or I think maybe college, your first year, everybody takes classes in all kinds of different things so that sophomore year, maybe you can have some inkling of what you want to do. But freshman year, that’s crazy. So I didn’t know. Basically, I just chose it randomly. I was like, yeah, businesswoman. I can be a businesswoman. Sure.

Maurice Cherry:

Or do, like, a gap year or something. Just something to kind of give yourself at that time frame, like, more of an idea of what it is that you want to do. Because also, look, as a freshman, I was out partying, too.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

The clubs used to send buses to campus to pick us up and take us to the club and then bring us back to campus. I told this story on the show before I almost flunked out freshman year because I was partying, almost lost my scholarship. I had to pull it together. I really did.

Carmelle Kendall:

I mean…but you’re living life. That’s what you’re supposed to do.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, absolutely.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah. So that’s what I picked just at random. I mean, Howard was amazing, though. I wouldn’t change that for the world. But yes, if I could go back now, I would do graphic design or be an art major or something that pertains to what I do now. But at the time, it was random.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. I mean, hindsight is 20/20, right? You can always kind of look back and know, “yeah, this is what I should do, because it will make sense for what I’m doing now.” So I get that.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

So when you graduated, what kind of work were you doing right after you graduated?

Carmelle Kendall:

So, right after I graduated, I had an internship because I knew that I hated marketing, and I knew I didn’t want to do anything in marketing. And at that time, a friend of mine worked at a fashion PR place in L.A. And so she said, you know, “I don’t know what your plans are after graduation, but you can come intern with us if you want.” And at that point, I had no other plans. That was the only thing on the table. So I said, “yes, I will do that.” So I lived in L.A. for, like, nine months, I believe, and I interned there. And during that time, I was kind of like, “okay, I don’t know what I’m working towards. Do I want to do fashion? What am I doing?” Basically, I started realizing that I really like graphic design. I really like art direction. I want to see what this path has to offer. And I remember senior year before graduation, I remember I set up a meeting with my career advisor, and I said, “who are the people that make ads?” And she said, “that’s called an art director.” And I remember going home and googling how to be an art director and came up with these schools where you could get a degree in art direction. And so while I was interning in L.A., I just was applying to all of these art direction programs and ended up getting into SCAD. Or no, I ended up getting into Miami Ad [School] and those ad school type places. But it’s just like a certificate of completion. Like, it’s not a degree in any way.

Maurice Cherry:

Right.

Carmelle Kendall:

And so I realized I wanted to go to SCAD because I could get a degree. And so I applied to SCAD for their grad program, and I ended up not getting in because I didn’t have an advertising portfolio which is needed for the grad program. I ended up moving back to Atlanta and taking classes at SCAD. Not in the grad program, but just as a regular student. And I took, like, Photoshop, Illustrator, I learned all the programs and then got my professors to write me letters of recommendation for the grad program and then ended up reapplying and getting in the second time.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice. I think that’s really something that you still kind of had this vision, but you just sort of found different ways to kind of get to it. I mean, one, taking these courses and getting these certificates, at least you got your feet wet with what it would entail without sort of fully getting in first. But also you use that to help build your portfolio, then you can apply and get into SCAD. Yeah, I like that approach.

Carmelle Kendall:

And all of the people in my program, they had had art direction as their majors, as undergrads. They all had been working towards this grad program for years, whereas I had just heard about it my senior year right before graduation on what an art director even was. So I was very much behind everybody. Like, I was just now learning Photoshop, whereas these people knew Photoshop all through college and were designers and things like that. So I definitely felt behind. I will say. But yeah, I mean, my goal was to get into this program and kind of just hunkered down and just learned what I needed to learn and reapplied.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I mean, aside from the curriculum focus, like, how was SCAD different from Howard?

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh, it’s different in every way possible, I think. I remember my very first day at SCAD, I walked into the cafeteria, and there was, like, a classic pianist playing classical music on the piano, and I was just like, “oh, my God, where am I?” Because at Howard, you’re like, twerking while you’re eating the lunch with a DJ. You know what I mean? Like, it’s a party, and I go to SCAD, and it was like a person playing classical music on the piano, and everybody kind of eating in silence, and I was just like, “what did I do?” It was very different, very different. And also, I think art school is just way more competitive. Art is so subjective, and so it’s just a way more competitive environment, I think, than Howard was.

Maurice Cherry:

Aside from, I guess that competitivenes, did you find community there? Did you sort of make friends there? Because one thing I’ve heard from folks that are on the show that will go know, like a SCAD or a MICA or something like that, is that it can be a bit difficult sometimes to kind of find community.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah, I can see that for sure. Because it’s so competitive. Like, your classmates are not your friends. You know what I mean? You’re going against them a lot of times at SCAD; you do group projects because I don’t know, you just do a lot of group projects. At least in my major, we did a lot of group projects. And it was so competitive because after graduation, you don’t want the same portfolio as your classmates because you’re all applying to the same jobs, right? So you want to stand out. So I think in that sense of it, I don’t know, you’re just not as friendly, you’re not as welcoming, because you want to distance yourself from your classmates so that you stand out come graduation time. So I can understand how people say it’s hard to make friends. I did make one of my best friends at SCAD, and I think I had a handful of friends that are still really close to me that I see all the time. So for me that wasn’t the case, but I definitely can see how people feel that way. For sure.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. Now did you go to SCAD here in Atlanta or the one in Savannah?

Carmelle Kendall:

I went to the Atlanta campus.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay, all right, well, you’re right there in Midtown then, and you’re from the city, so I think that probably was a big advantage, at least socially, because you didn’t have to stay in that bubble of SCAD. Like, you could go see your parents or whatever. You could break out of that and still be in a city that you’re familiar with.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah, but if I was to do it again, I’d go to Savannah, though.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, really? Why is that?

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah. Because I would have loved to just live in a new city, a different city than one that I was already so familiar with. Like, when I go to visit Savannah, I always think, like, why didn’t I come? Like, it’s such a cool city. If I could do it again, I definitely would go to Savannah rather than Atlanta.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay. Now, with Neighborly that you mentioned earlier, did you start Neighborly while you were at SCAD or was it before then?

Carmelle Kendall:

No, I started Neighborly in New York when I lived in New York. So right after SCAD’s graduation, I got hired in New York.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, nice. Yeah, I know. As I did my research, of course. I see that you’ve worked for quite a few agencies. You did four years at Y&R, which is now as VMLY&R. You did a year at The Integer Group. You did a little over a year at Havas. You were at…when you were in New York, you were at Havas, right?

Carmelle Kendall:

When I was in New York, I was at VMLY&R.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay. VMLY&R. When you look back at those experiences collectively, how do you think they really help prepare you for the kind of work that you do now?

Carmelle Kendall:

I think starting out as a junior art director in New York probably was the most enlightening experience as far as learnings. New York has a different work ethic, in my opinion. Like, starting out my career in New York, I was working till 10:00 p.m. every night, and this was pre-COVID, so there’s no remote working. There’s no “I’m going to take this call from home.” You know what I mean? You’re in the office until ten [or] eleven o’clock at night. I remember there was one time, and this is with hard drives and things like that, so I remember there was one time I had to physically go take a hard drive to one of my boss’s apartment at like two in the morning.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

Carmelle Kendall:

Because they needed this hard drive for a client presentation the next day. It was grueling. You just learn so much. You learn how to talk to clients. It was my first time going on set. It was my first time traveling. Like, I traveled to Uruguay for shooting and things like that. It was like a crash course in advertising, pretty much.

Maurice Cherry:

You mentioned the hard drive at 2:00 a.m. That, for some reason, that reminded me of The Devil Wears Prada where Andy has to take the magazine to Miranda’s apartment, and she’s like, “put it on the desk. Don’t talk to anyone, just put it on the desk.”

Carmelle Kendall:

Yes. And as a junior art director, I mean, you’re the one that’s going to have to do it you know? Who else is going to do it? Not a senior person. That was the life for four years in New York. It was grueling, for sure.

Maurice Cherry:

What brought you back down to Atlanta? Just wanted to break out of that.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah. I mean, I was kind of at the point, you know, I love New York. Let me just say that I love New York, but it’s expensive. I was at the point where I was, you know, I’m tired of being broke, I’m tired of not being able to save any money. I’m tired of working to death, basically, like, just working into the night and things like that. And so to the point where I was just like, “you know what, I want to come back to Atlanta.” I put in my notice and I came back to Atlanta, where I freelanced for about a year before moving to Chicago. That year ended up being great. I got to be with my family, be with my friends. But freelance, you have your own struggles with freelance. But at the time, to me, it was better. It was what I needed to do. I needed to just…yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

And I’d say good on you for recognizing that, because I think sometimes, especially when you’re really locked into a particular job or a particular pattern, a lot of the popular advice — I guess you could say it’s popular advice — but a lot of the stuff you’ll hear is that you have to sort of stick with it. You got to pay your dues, et cetera. But if it’s really weighing on you and it’s really affecting your day to day, it takes a lot to break out of that.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah. I also think now is just a totally different climate than back then. Now I think just a lot of things have slowed down since COVID and now it’s like hybrid work models or people working from home, and I just think it’s a lot more laid back than back then.

Maurice Cherry:

Do you think it’s starting to ramp up again?

Carmelle Kendall:

I think it’s starting to ramp up again, but hopefully not to the point where it was then. I was working around the clock.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. It sort of feels like now with companies, we’re at…what’s a good analogy for this? It’s almost like when you’re trying to learn how to drive a stick shift and you can’t sort of get the rhythm between the brake and the clutch and trying to get all that together, and it’s kind of jerky back and forth. I feel that sort of like feeling is happening right now with companies that are still trying to decide how they’re going to operate with employees, quote unquote, post pandemic. The country said the pandemic is over. The government’s like, we’re not funding, you know, whatever, but COVID is still out there. Some places that have went remote are either continuing to go remote or they’re deciding on remote or hybrid. They’re still trying to sort of figure out what the rhythm is. Because before the pandemic, the rhythm kind of was, as you said, kind of just go go go. This is how it is. Now that people see that as another way to work and another way to live and still be able to get work done, companies are like, we still have all this office space. Like, what are we going to do with that? We want people to come in the office two days a week, three days a week. They’re still trying to figure it out, I think.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah, it’s definitely a silent battle right now between the employers and the employees as far as like hybrid versus remote versus two days, three days a week. It’s definitely a back and forth going on right now. Some agencies are like, we’re fully remote or work from anywhere. And then some people are like, no, we’re in the office. Come in the office every day.

Maurice Cherry:

The last place where I worked was fully remote. And I think one of the people who worked there really took advantage of that a lot by just traveling to different countries. I mean, we would meet with her and she’s like, well, this week I’m in London and this other week I’m in Paraguay or whatever. And the company eventually had to say, “okay, you need to stay in one place.”

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh, really? Well was she getting her work done?

Maurice Cherry:

She was getting her work done. But the problem is, or I guess the problem that arose, at least that’s how I heard it was that because she was jumping from country to country with different time zones and stuff, there’s just certain countries that the business can’t do business from. So — and I mean, not like political dissident countries, like she wasn’t in North Korea or anything like that — but there were just certain places she was at where they were like, “OK, we’re not sure that you can work from there. We need you to kind of stay in one place for a while because it’s making paying you difficult” because she’d be in one place one month, one place somewhere else, just kind of jetsetting around. Because in my mind I was like, she can’t be getting paid that much to be doing all this jet setting between countries. Maybe she was, I don’t know. But yeah, eventually they told her, “okay, you need to stay somewhere for a while.” And then I think once she did that, she was somewhere maybe for about a month or so. They laid her off.

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh, no.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, they laid all of us off, so we all were kind of in the same boat. But it was so weird because I know that that’s something that people have done during the pandemic is just take advantage of the fact that you could work remotely. Why not work from anywhere? But the company was like, no, you need to stay somewhere for a while because we can’t keep track of where you’re at. And it’s messing up, I guess, business operations with how we pay you or something like that.

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh, interesting. I wonder if it’s because of like taxes or something.

Maurice Cherry:

I also think they just didn’t like her. I think that could have been part of it too. We’re all working, don’t get me wrong, but if you’re working hard and then someone else is working hard, but this person is like jetsetting between all these places, I think it might have been a little bit of jealousy. They were like, “okay, you need to stay your ass in one place and stop doing all this traveling around because I can’t travel, so why do you get to travel?” That’s what I think it was. But they had a more friendly, corporate friendly excuse.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah, because if she’s getting her work done and she’s…you know what I mean? That should be what counts. And if she’s working the hours of everybody else, I don’t know.

Maurice Cherry:

I don’t know. But again, it’s sort of like what I talked about before. Companies are just trying to figure out how to sort of work now in this new environment because this is such a new thing. Like, before you went to the office, you worked your eight hours or whatever and you went home.

Carmelle Kendall:

Right.

Maurice Cherry:

Work was that sort of “other place.” And now that your work can also be where you live and if you can do that from anywhere, why stay at the place that you’re at?

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

Now with the work that you do with Neighborly, you’ve got a full time gig and the book…how do you balance all of that?

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah, I don’t think I’m good at it, to be honest. The book was a labor of love. There were nights that I stayed up to like two, three in the morning finishing those drawings because you’re on a timeline and that timeline generally isn’t going to move because of you, you know what I mean? Especially if the book comes out on a certain day, that’s it. You can’t just say, “oh, I need another month.” You have to be on somebody else’s timeline. So there were nights that I stayed up to like two, three in the morning and then literally woke up at like seven to start my normal workday. So, yeah, not fun. But I knew that doing the book was a long term goal of mine, and not every day you have this opportunity for something that you basically been dreaming about, and the opportunity presents itself. You kind of have to just buckle down and do it. So, yeah. Not fun, but I did it. Neighborly. Right now, we’re at the point where we fulfill orders, obviously from the orders that come in on our website. But it’s a lot of just negotiating with buyers right now for those larger wholesale orders. So we have Valentine’s cards and Urban Outfitters this past Valentine’s Day. So those orders are the gigantic orders. And if that’s the case, if we have a big order like for TJ Maxx or Marshall’s or whatever. That’s when we hire people to help us out, because those orders could be like, 20,000 cards.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

Carmelle Kendall:

And if that’s the case, we hire packagers. We hire people to help us fulfill the order, like put them in boxes and things like that. Ship them out. So those come. Obviously those aren’t, like, every day that we’re fulfilling those large orders. So it’s more manageable. Every once in a while, we get these big orders, and then we hire helpers. So it makes it way more easier for us.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow. I was saying freelance, and not in a pejorative way, but it’s a business.

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh, yeah. Since the TODAY show, we have gotten these huge wholesale orders. We’ve been in paper stores. We’ve been in Urban Outfitters. We’ve been in Marshall’s, TJ Maxx, Home Goods. So, yeah, with those big orders, you definitely need help. It’s way more than just me and my business partner can fulfill because they’re just so large. So, yeah, we have a list of packagers that we hit up that just kind of help out when needed.

Maurice Cherry:

So it sounds like the TODAY show was, like, a really big boost for you.

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh, 100,000% for sure. I don’t remember. If you’re saying that we’re in 20 stores, which could be right. I just don’t remember before the TODAY show. Now we’re in thousands because of these large wholesale orders. Like with Home Goods. That was like 800 stores right there with the Home Goods order. So. Yeah, we’ve got a lot of stores, for sure.

Maurice Cherry:

It’s so interesting how creatives that I’ve had on the show, and it’s usually ones that do some kind of digital, creative work, like full time, in some capacity, tThey always have a side project or a side business or something that is tactile. Like…it’s cards. It’s home goods. It’s ceramics. It’s always something tactile. Is that on purpose, I wonder? I don’t know. I find that to be interesting.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah. I mean, you don’t have clients.

Maurice Cherry:

That’s true.

Carmelle Kendall:

When it’s tactile. Nobody telling me what I need to do with the design or the artwork. It’s no client. You’re doing it for yourself. Yeah. At least that’s what I would think it will be. That’s what it is for me. I knew that if I’m going to do something on the side, I don’t want any clients. I want to do what I want to do, do what I like. Do what my business partner likes and that’s it. We’re doing what we want to do and that’s it. I mean, we do do custom cars, which in that case we’ll have a client, but for the most part it’s what we want for the line, what we envision for the line, what we want to put out, whether it be notepads or journals or calendars or whatever. We’re doing what we want to do, pretty much. I mean, we take into account what our audience likes and what our audience wants to see, but there’s nobody saying “no, make that blue purple,” like no, that’s all me and my business partner.

Maurice Cherry:

I got you. That makes a lot of sense then when you put it that way, I like that.

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

For the retailers, are you normally just shooting for these larger big box stores or are smaller boutiques also a target?

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh yeah, we’re in boutique stores all across the world actually. Now we have some international too, but with the smaller boutique stores, they’re smaller orders just because they’re mom and pop shops. So we definitely do reach out to the big box stores as well because that’s the huge orders that span for 800 stores like in the TJX case or Urban Outfitters and things like that. That’s where the huge orders come from.

Maurice Cherry:

Got you. That makes sense. So with everything that you’re working on, what do you want to try to accomplish for the rest of the year?

Carmelle Kendall:

So, at the beginning of this year I had some goals and I can’t believe it’s already summer and I feel like I haven’t done many of my goals that I set out to do. One of the goals was to learn 3D software. So I actually start my 3D class tomorrow, so I’m really excited about that. I’m going to be learning Cinema 4D which I have been wanting to learn for a while. And then other than that, I want to start working on these other children’s books ideas that I have. I have so many ideas, so I want to start putting those to pen, to paper. And then with Neighborly, we have a lot of ideas for products, new products that we want to roll out so want to start getting those into stores and on the website so that people can start purchasing those and then just doing know with advertising I want to build up my portfolio more and go on some more shoots and productions. Looking forward to that too.

Maurice Cherry:

Now for someone that is listening to what you’ve accomplished, they’re hearing about all your success and they want to kind of follow in that same vein. What kind of advice would you give them?

Carmelle Kendall:

I would say to start freelancing, start doing things on the side. A lot of times if you do what you want to do on the side, a lot of times it can become your full time. So if you’re not getting the work that you want to do in your full time job, just start creating it on the side. I’ve had side hustles and side projects pretty much since I started in advertising. I realized that I just wanted to spread my wings and not have to do everything for a client. I wanted to sometimes just create for myself. And so I’ve always just had things going on on the side, whether it be for freelance or just because I wanted to do it. And that has helped me so much in just growing my portfolio and getting other business. So I would say, always just do things on the side. Just do things for yourself, do things just to stay creative because you want to. And it always lead to something. It always will lead to bigger things.

Maurice Cherry:

If you could go back and give teenage Carmelle that wanted to be in the video, if you could give her some advice, knowing what you know now, what would you tell her?

Carmelle Kendall:

I will probably say, don’t be afraid to explore. Just art, the art world and things that you think are unattainable. Because when I was growing up, I didn’t have artists around me. My mom is a doctor and my dad is a lawyer, and so I wasn’t in the art space. I didn’t know an artist, I didn’t know anybody in advertising. This is all something I found out late in life. I always drew and painted and things like that, but I didn’t think it was attainable. I didn’t think being an artist was you can make a living off of it. So I would tell myself, just explore those things, like explore what makes me happy without having that fear of am I going to make it in the art world? Just be fearless and explore what makes me happy, basically.

Maurice Cherry:

Where do you see yourself in the next five years? Like, what’s the next chapter for Carmelle Kendall?

Carmelle Kendall:

I see myself doing more books, having books on the shelves, in stores everywhere, having Neighborly on the shelves in stores everywhere. I see myself just learning new things. I believe that I’m a student for life, so learning new programs, learning new software. I always just want to stay experimenting with my craft. Hopefully my artwork has evolved in five years. Hopefully it doesn’t look like it does now. I want to always be continuing to evolve and just being a better artist and designer is what I see for myself.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah, well, they can always go to my website, which is Carmelle.com. The book is called “Your Freedom, Your Power”, which is available everywhere books are sold. And then for Neighborly, they can go to neighborlypaper.com and find a list of all the stores that we are in. Or they can just purchase directly from neighborlypaper.com.

Maurice Cherry:

All right, sounds good. Carmelle Kendall, I want to thank you so, so much for coming on the know. As I was kind of pulling my research together for this, I kind of always have a thought in my mind about who the person is before I talk to them and what the interview might come to be like. And the main thing I’m getting from this is like, hometown hero from the a left, did your own thing, came back, you’ve got this great business, it’s a fun business, but you’re also still kind of working in the advertising world as well. And from what I can tell just from talking with you, you’re keeping it humble. You’re certainly super proud of the work that you’ve done and the success that you’ve accomplished, but you’re also super humble about it. That’s a really good quality to have, especially in this world where there’s just so much like, posturing and clout chasing and all that kind of stuff. I’m like, I get from you that you are like, the genuine real deal, and I’m really excited to see where your work goes in the future. So thank you so much for coming on the show.

Maurice Cherry:

I appreciate it.

Carmelle Kendall:

Thank you so much for having me. Like I said, I’ve been following you since 2020 when I listened to you on a podcast, so I was very honored.

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.

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 Quiรฑones, 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

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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.

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 Dylan Thomas

This week’s guest is a true legend in the game — the one and only David Dylan Thomas. He’s the author of Design for Cognitive Bias, has over twenty years of content strategy and UX experience, and he’s presented talks and workshops worldwide on topics at the intersection of bias, design, and social justice.

We had a pretty broad conversation, touching on everything from his latest talk in Copenhagen to how he started The Cognitive Bias Podcast. David also shared his story of growing up in Maryland, attending Johns Hopkins, and gave his thoughts on the present environment of creating content online. You might want to take notes on this episode, because David drops a lot of knowledge!

Interview Transcript

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

David Dylan Thomas:
My name is David Dylan Thomas. I am an author and a speaker. My day job really is to just go around and get people excited about and give them better tools for more inclusive design, and I do that from talks and workshops that I give at conferences, organizations, what have you.

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

David Dylan Thomas:
Busy. I’ve been doing a lot of traveling. It’s like I’m making up for years of growing up without travel, and then the most recent three years of no travel because of COVID. I’ve been to Stockholm, Denmark, Japan, and then last fall I was in Berlin and just Seattle and all these other places, so it’s been really fun but exhausting.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow, so you’ve been making up for lost time.

David Dylan Thomas:
Exactly, yeah, and it is this very much like growing up, I did not make a lot of money or my family didn’t have a lot of money, so the idea of travel was just totally out of reach, and now it’s the exact opposite end of the spectrum where I’m like world traveler and I love it, but yeah, it’s a lot.

Maurice Cherry:
Living the dream.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Speaking of all this travel, do you have anything that’s planned for the summer?

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, it’s not slowing down. Well, so I’m going to be at UX London in a few weeks. I’m going to visit some friends in San Francisco in a few weeks. I’m hitting up a gig in Tampa, family vacation to Montreal, so it’s staying pretty busy. I might get a break in August. I’m not sure yet, but it’s all good, but yeah, there’s still more to come.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. I mean, you’ve got a stacked year so far. That’s pretty good.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. I hate the act of travel, like air travel I despise. I…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… [inaudible 00:04:00] it, but I love being places. I just hate getting there, so that’s the other exhausting part is the actual act of air travel. I’m not a big fan.

Maurice Cherry:
I know the feeling all too well. I went to Toronto back in October last year, and it was my first time traveling since before the pandemic, at least air travel before the pandemic. I was like… I was kind of dreading it a little bit, to be honest. I was like I had been seeing stuff on the news about people fighting in air airports and on the plane and stuff, and I was like, and I’ve been Atlanta. I’m like, “I don’t want to do,” I mean, I wasn’t flying spirit or anything, but I was like, “I don’t want to go to the airport and it’s a whole thing.” You know?

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
I just want to get to where I have to go without incident, and it was fine, but I was kind of a bit worried leading up to it. I’m trying to get my sea legs back with travel because I used to travel a lot, like pre-pandemic for work and for the show, and I’m trying to like ease back into it now.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, I’m fully on board at this point. I’ve been… I think I’ve traveled more post-pandemic than I ever did pre-pandemic…

Maurice Cherry:
Wow-

David Dylan Thomas:
… at this point.

Maurice Cherry:
What lessons did you learn this past year? How would you say you’ve grown and improved?

David Dylan Thomas:
I’ve learned what my, or I’m starting to learn, I’m beginning to learn what my boundaries are because as much as I enjoy the travel, there’s a psychological hit, a social hit, there’s a family hit, there’s an economic hit, to be frank, but I’m learning. I won’t say I’ve learned it yet, but what I’m learning is balance and trying to figure out, “Okay, what am I comfortable saying no to?” I’m in the privileged position of having enough things going on and having enough financial stability to be able to say no, so where does it make sense to say no? Where does it make sense to say yes?

An example would be like Japan is a very expensive trip, and I was paid for my time there, but it’s always going to be more cost-effective to do something online. It’s sort of one of those I’ve never been, I love it so much, I’m willing to take a bit of a financial hit on that or whatever. It’s figuring out how much of that before it becomes a burden, that kind of thing. I would say balance, or that’s what I’m endeavoring to learn in this past year is, what does that look like?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm, and now I would say outside of the travel realm, is there anything in particular that you’re learning about now?

David Dylan Thomas:
My new hotness is really grappling with ownership. I mean, I’m finding that my talks, my work is drifting pretty rapidly into the political, so I talk about design, I talk about UX and content strategy, but increasingly the stakes, the things I’m talking about are things like Facebook’s impact in Myanmar. These are quickly becoming very political topics, and the stuff I’m reading, I’m reading currently Braiding Sweetgrass, and there’s a lot in there that’s really challenging me around ownership, like the idea of ownership and, where is it appropriate? Where is it problematic actually? Where is it actually doing more harm than good to have these strict notions of ownership?

A basic example would be if you think about colonial perspectives on Native Americans and taking the land from them. That presumes that Native Americans uniformly believed the land belonged to them, when in fact, many Native American cultures didn’t believe in ownership at all. It was sort of like, “Hey, those aren’t your strawberries or my strawberries. They belong to themselves and that’s it.” We don’t own things in that sense. Really, if you were going to do a reset, for example, to say, “Okay, what would reparations look like in the context of Native American land?” One version of that would actually be not giving the land back, but actually abolishing ownership of land, which is I think is a far more controversial, right…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… concept than just saying, “Oh, we’re just going to give all the land back.” That’s hard enough, but so we’re not giving the land back. We’re just saying no one’s going to own any land. I think that would freak people out way more, so that’s the kind of stuff that’s really got me excited and challenged in terms of what I’m learning about right now.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, especially in this country. I mean, manifest destiny and everything. You talk about ceding ownership and people get hot.

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
That is a hot potato to deal with.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, that is the, “Y’all ready for this conversation” meme? That’s…

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Let’s talk, I guess, a little bit more about the work that you’re doing. I saw just recently that you spoke in Denmark at UX Copenhagen. How was that?

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh, it was fantastic. Copenhagen is nice, and it’s one of those conferences where the talks are great, but what’s really awesome is just the people, the conversations you have in between talks at dinner after. Copenhagen’s a great place to have those conversations. Helle Martens who runs it is so kind and so thoughtful and is a great host, not just hosting the conference, but hosting her guests, her speakers at the conference, everyone involved. What I remember most, though, about UX Copenhagen is really just the great conversations and the people I met there, which is to me like the highest value of any conference is not the talks, although I enjoy the talks, it’s the people. It’s getting to meet new people, getting to reestablish old relationships, and UX Copenhagen was great for that this year.

Maurice Cherry:
Had you done that conference before?

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, that talk is actually historic for me. The book Design for Cognitive Bias comes from a talk called Design for Cognitive Bias, and the first time I ever gave that talk was at UX Copenhagen in 2018, which was also my first international conference. She invited me based on a podcast I did with Saskia Videler. She was like, “Oh, it sounds like you’re doing really cool stuff. Can you come to my conference and talk about cognitive bias in the context of like UX and content strategy?” I’m like, “Yeah, I can.”

I put together that talk, and putting it together was really where I found what I believed to be the spine of the book, even before I knew it was going to be a book, which is really this notion of not just, “Hey, here are these biases that our users have,” but, “Hey, here are these biases that we as designers have.” Really, this isn’t a talk about bias, this is a talk about ethics. When I figured that out, I unlocked that, that became what the talk was, what the book was, but all that started at that first UX Copenhagen I went to in 2018.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice, so this was kind of a good return to form in a way.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, it was kind of a homecoming, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, and now speaking of talks, you have a new talk that you’re doing now. Can you tell me a little bit about it?

David Dylan Thomas:
Sure, so this is a massive talk that I’ve been working on for a while, and it all started once, I don’t know what it was, but some social media company did something terrible. There’s way too many examples of that for me to remember which one it was, but I got mad and I posted something like, “I swear to God, my next talk is going to be called. “No, Seriously, F Engagement,” except I didn’t say F, I said the actual word…

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… and…

Maurice Cherry:
You can say fuck here, that’s fine.

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh, okay, so “No seriously, fuck engagement.” Of course, people were like, “Oh yeah, you should give that talk.” It was kind of a joke, but then I was supposed to give the closing keynote at An Event Aparts, which ends up being the final An Even Apart in San Francisco. I needed a new talk because I’d already given all of my other talks. We kind of went back and forth and I said, “Look, my new talk, it’s like super anti-capitalist. Are you sure you want me to do this?” They’re like, “As long as you have like actual positive advice and it’s not just a rant.” I’m like, “Yeah, I got great, great advice or challenges that I want to kind of put out there.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
The talk ends up being based on a quote from Martin Luther King which says, “We must rapidly move from a thing-based society to a person-based society or thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” This is something he said like 50, 60 years ago, and I basically start off by saying, “Okay, if we agree that’s a good idea, what is our role as designers, makers of things, whatever, in that shift?” I start by saying basically, “This is what a thing-oriented web looks like,” and I talk about things like Facebook and engagement and how the obsession with engagement could lead to things like genocide in Myanmar where they let lots of hate speech just sit up there because, frankly, hate speech is good for their bottom line. It increases engagement.

I sort of paint that portrait, and then I say, “Okay, what would a person-oriented web look like?” For that, I look to things like the Siksika and the Wyandot, who are Native American tribes that have different perspectives on just fundamental assumptions about humanity, basically that, “Hey, maybe you’re born having value and I don’t need you to have a lot of money for me to consider you having value.” You know what I mean? What happens if we take those assumptions and build the web based on that? I can point to a couple of different instances where people are kind of experimenting with that, but the whole point of the talk is we don’t have that web.

How do we build it? Really, it’s more of just like a challenge, almost like a design brief for the audience to say, “Okay, if we were to make these other assumptions about people and about how we should interact, what would we build? How would we build differently? Let’s go do that.” It’s the first time I’ve ever given a talk that’s more of just a challenge for something that doesn’t exist yet, as opposed to saying, “Hey, here’s all of this evidence from science about these methods you can use to make your stuff more inclusive.” I love that, but the thing that I’m really into now is this notion of, “Okay, what’s the next step?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I like that the talk is sort of putting the onus on the listener, the audience, whomever, to kind of come up with what the solution is. You’re pointing out the issue. You’re not giving necessarily a solution, but you’re saying, “These are the things that you need to think about so we can come to a solution.”

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah. It’s really challenging the audience to listen to themselves, frankly, because a big chunk of the talk I get very personal. I go into therapy that I’ve been through, I go into how I found value in literally writing down my values and trying to proceed from there. The only tangible advice I give the audience ends up really being around, “Hey, after this talk is over, I want you to go home and write down your values and ask yourself, ‘Is your work taking you closer to or further away from that?’ If it is getting you further away, well, what can you do to get closer?'” That to me is the beginning of that journey, so it gets very personal, too.

Maurice Cherry:
You know, I did a talk, it was 2020, maybe 2021, but I did a talk called Content is Subject to Change, and I had sort of come with… I guess I won’t say I came up with the idea on a whim, but I was talking about how content on the web is in this sort of state where nothing is really being sufficiently archived because the internet and the web itself was never meant to be a tool for archive. It was a tool for research. It came out of research institutions and how like the early web, the “Web 1.0” was really about research and discovery. Then, of course, Web 2.0 sort of ushered in user-generated content, and we’re sort of in the throes of, I don’t know, I guess we’re sort of limping into Web 3 with the way companies have been approaching the metaverse and such.

The reality is that users create and put so much content on the web. I mean, tweets, Instagram posts, photos, videos, et cetera, and none of that is really stored anywhere, not in a very active way. You can look at, or you can try to find articles from 10 years ago and all the links are broken. none of the images work if you can find the actual article at all. People point to the Internet Archive, but they’re just a small nonprofit. They can’t archive everything. They can’t even archive things in certain countries. They can’t archive Flash. I mean, Flash was everywhere. Now, Flash is a relic, and all of that stuff that was created with Flash is just like dust in the wind, essentially.

David Dylan Thomas:
I have an interview with Jack Dorsey that is-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh wow.

David Dylan Thomas:
… [inaudible 00:15:31] to Flash, and it’s such a tragedy because one of the questions I asked him is, “What makes you pessimistic about the web?” This is like 2008 or something. What makes you pessimistic about the web? What he said was, “I think it’s going to be hard to prove what is true.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Like oh my God. Not being able to just post that online every single time something blows up, like, oh my God, but yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, even to what you were mentioning there with what Jack said, look at now with deep fakes and AI and MidJourney and all sorts of stuff. Like what is real? I’ll see imagines on Twitter or whatever, and it’s like, “Wait, I think that’s real. That might be real.” It sort of is falling into that sort of uncanny valley, especially as the technology gets better. I say all of this to say I like the fact that you’re giving sort of a design talk that’s not specifically about, I guess, digital design, but more so the concept of design and how that relates to what we go through in society.

David Dylan Thomas:
Well, yeah, and truth be told, it’s a political talk. I don’t market it as such because I’m giving it at design conferences, although I did give it at a journalistic conference once, but it’s a political talk because the things I’m talking about, the things I’m recommending are for everyone. This is at the societal level, and it’s what King was talking about. King was talking about what he was talking, about not for designers, not for politicians, but for everyone.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
He wanted everyone to be involved i this shift, and he saw the need for it. I’m like I’m speaking to designers for the most part, just because of the milieu in which I work, but I’d be happy to give this in Congress, in civil activist organizations, in churches, in just stand on the street corner and yell it. This is something I believe in and that I think is applicable at a very, very universal level.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, and I think certainly as technology increases and as we start to… I mean, AI is pretty much already being used now by companies and a bunch of different things. Not to say that AI is like the scapegoat or the catalyst for the talk that you’re giving, but it’s important that more people outside of our profession know about this. They know that this is sort of, I have to say it, it’s sort of a condition of the world that we live in now. It’s like this is a thing that we have to contend with and it doesn’t just have to deal tech or just have to deal with design. This is a human problem.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, and the thing I try to get across in the talk and in my work in general is it’s just a tool, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
I mean, the same database that was used to hunt down people for their medical debt, it’s like, “Hey, you got cancer, but guess what? I don’t care. You have have to pay these bills.” That comes from a database and hospitals, people go and buy that debt. These two guys who were running one of those companies that had those databases sort of had a moment of truth when Occupy happened and they flipped it and said, “Okay, now we’re going to use the exact same database to find people who owe medical debt and then forgive it. We’re going to use the exact same financial mechanism of buying that debt from hospitals for pennies on the dollar and then forgive that debt.” They’ve forgiven something like $6 billion of medical debt that way.

Exact same tool, exact same database, exact same like… I don’t know if AI was in there or not, but let’s say, yeah, why not? AI’s in everything, but it’s like that’s a very, very old story. There were examples going back to indigenous Peruvians who were doing similar things with taking the same tool for different purposes, so this is… When I see AI, yes, it’s scary, and yes, it’s doing all sorts of mischievous stuff, but it is the exact same story. It depends what you want to do with it, and you can use it for great good, or you can use it for great harm.

Maurice Cherry:
The reason sort of like I said that it’s good that you’re giving this talk or you want to give this talk outside of our industry is that more people need to be aware of the consequences of these things or why it’s sort of something that we’re bringing up as a point. AI has really blown up to mainstream, at least to the point where the media is really talking about it outside of specialty outlets. It’s blown up over the past nine months where now the creators of this stuff are testifying before Congress about what are the best ways to curtail this or to use this or something like that. It’s important that these are issues that we talk about now before they sort of spin out of control.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, and I think that what I want people to do is not focus on the tool so much as the players behind the tool. There’s a great PBS Digital Studios channel that show, it’s not around anymore, but it was called Idea…

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, Idea Channel with..

David Dylan Thomas:
… Idea Channel…

Maurice Cherry:
… Mike Rugnetta. Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, fricking love that, and one of the episodes at some point they’re like, “Hey, we’re instituting this new policy on our show where when we talk about a new technology, we are not going to embody it, which is to say, we’re not going to say AI is doing this or AI is doing that. We’re going to say people are doing this with AI, people are doing this with ChatGPT, whatever that technology is because we don’t want to give the impression that technology is embodied, that it is its own thing. No, human beings are using a thing to do a thing. I feel like we need to keep our eye on that because if we point people and get hysteria around a particular technology, we sort of draw their attention away from the people because the people are the thing you need to be losing your mind about, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
You know, Elon Musk firing all the content moderators is the thing you need to be worried about, not Twitter per se, or I sat on a panel earlier about ChatGPT and content and people freaking out. “Oh, ChatGPT is going to take my job,” and I’m like, “Trust me, you do not need to be afraid of ChatGPT, you need to be afraid of shareholders. Shareholders are going to take your job hella faster than ChatGPT.” Shareholders have been taking people out a thousand employees at a time for the past two years. They’re the ones, but we’re not having this panic over shareholders, so yeah, I’m like, “AI, great.” It’s interesting, but the big story isn’t AI. The big story is who’s using it for what. The who is the big story.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, I first heard about you from your book Design for Cognitive Bias, which you mentioned earlier. For those who might not have heard about it, one, will include a link to it in the show notes so you can pick it up, but can you tell us a bit about the book?

David Dylan Thomas:
Sure, so the basic premise is that we have biases, our users have biases, our stakeholders have biases, and when I say bias, I just mean your mind has to take shortcuts just to get through the day. You have to make something like a trillion decisions a day. Right now, I’m making decisions about how fast to talk, what to do with my hands. If I thought carefully about every single one of those decisions, I’d never get anything done, so it’s actually a good thing that a lot of our decisions are made on autopilot, but sometimes the autopilot gets it wrong, and so the book is really… We call those errors biases, so really the book is saying, “Okay, if we accept that bias is going to be with us, what do we do? At the user level, what are some biases we can design our products in a way to either mitigate or maybe even use for good? How does that also play with stakeholders? How do we sort of use persuasion techniques to leverage biases they may have to steer our organizations in maybe more inclusive directions?”

Then, really, I think the most important part is our biases. How do we keep our biases from causing our users harm? All of that is in 92 quick little pages you can read, but yeah, that’s the spine of the book is this journey from our user’s biases, our stakeholders’ biases, and then our biases, and all the way through these very concrete examples and concrete methods to try to work with that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I love that the book really emphasizes the importance of recognizing and understanding them because that’s sort of the first step to fixing them or to create in spite of them, I suppose, to make more effective and inclusive work to strive for DEI. Oftentimes these things are brought up only in a sort of DEI context, which I think gives some people, some people, gives some people permission to not think about it at all because they’re like, “Well, I don’t fall within the, I don’t know, BIPOC spectrum or whatever. Why should I have to think about this?” You know?

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, which is actually the number one reason you should have to think about it.

Maurice Cherry:
Exactly.

David Dylan Thomas:
Right, right [inaudible 00:23:57] supposed to be, you know? No, and then the thing is like, yes, when people think of bias, one of the main things they think about is race or gender, which absolutely they should, like two of the most harmful biases out there, but it’s even things like, “Hey, stuff that rhymes is more believable.” If you’re making something rhyme, you better make sure it’s true. It’s things like that that are both within and without the realm of race or gender. Yeah, it is important at a global level to understand how these things work.

Maurice Cherry:
You know, that’s even something that I think about honestly with this show. I think about it in the context of podcasts in general. I remember I think I saw some study, it was either from Pew or from maybe Edison or something like that, but they were talking about how most people believe I think it was like 80-something percent of podcast listeners sort of get their news from podcasts. That’s what they believe over, say, mainstream media, which is really dangerous because anyone can put out a podcast. Just because you say some shit on a microphone does not necessarily make it true, and so I think about that even in the context of this show.

I’ve done over 500 episodes. I try to get as varied a swath of people as I can to talk about a universal experience, which is being a Black designer or a Black digital creator or whatever, and that is broken down across gender, sexual orientation, gender presentation. It’s broken down across so many different things, age, geography, industry, and I try to do that to not sort of introduce what I think people may already look at. They may look at all of the people that I’ve interviewed and say like, “Oh, you just talked to a bunch of Black people. It’s all the same.” It’s not the same. It has changed drastically over the years. We talk about a lot of different topics. It varies. Every person’s conversation is different because every person is different so…

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
… I understand kind of that need to recognize the bias so you can work against it.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, and by the way, if people out there are like, “Oh, you just talk to a bunch of Black people,” I’d be like, “Have you met Black people? We don’t all agree. When was the last time you hung out with more than five black people and they all agree?” Are you kidding with this? When’s the last time you sat in a barbershop for more than five minutes?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Right? We agree? What?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Have you met black people? That’s funny. That’s a t-shirt right there. That’s funny. I like that. With everything that you’re doing, what does a typical day look like for David Dylan Thomas?

David Dylan Thomas:
No such thing. Well, okay, two such things, so one is the travel Dave where I am on a plane and I’m getting up in some new city and doing this weird mix of touristy stuff and my job. Those days look like this weird mix of I’m going to go check out this castle or this museum, and then I’m going to go rehearse. It’s very much like touring a comedian or a band. You go and you do the thing, but you also try to have a good life at the same time, or you meet people in town that live in that town that from the web or something. That’s travel Dave, and then there’s home Dave, which is I don’t do a schedule in the sense of at 9:00 AM I do this, at 10:00 AM I do that, but I do have a Trello where I just have my priorities.

It’s like the first few things I’m going to do is try to have… I like to wake up slowly, so I have a nice breakfast, watch some TV, maybe play some video games, maybe do some reading. Then, I’ll get into things like household chores like laundry or trash, or maybe help with the dishes and cleaning. Then, I might get more into things like, “Okay, let’s check some emails. Let’s go through all of that stuff.” That’s more of like depending on how the day comes out because I might have a meeting, I might have this, that that’s sort of fixed. Everything else that’s kind of liquid time that I can kind of play with is sort of like, “Okay, this is the next thing on the Trello that I want to get to.” Some days I’ll get through maybe laundry and the day’s over because there’s just too much other stuff going on.

Other days, I’ll be like, “I actually got through all 500 emails. My God, how did that happen?” That’s a little more fluid and it’s what I’ve learned over time works bests for me, both from an anxiety perspective, but also from just a functional perspective because I have the luxury of having a job where, with very few exceptions, my time is my own. I can choose how to spend my… I’m not required to be in a certain place at a certain time with very few exceptions like, “I have to be in that place giving that talk at that time, so that’s one hour that is a hundred percent accounted for.” For the rest of it it’s like, “You could be doing dishes. You could be meditating. You could be playing with your son. Any of those are options that are just as equally valid. I don’t have a boss saying, “Hey, why aren’t you doing this right now?”

Maurice Cherry:
Hmm. Yeah. I think with any sort of entrepreneur, that’s the challenging thing is balancing it, managing your time, and still getting stuff done within the midst of all of that.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, and I’d say that’s my biggest challenge over the past year is really now that it really is much more fluid, making sure that I’m not over-optimizing for gigs, that I’m really making time to be there for my wife, to be there for my son, to be there for my family, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
Excuse me, and kind of give that its due weight and its due context because it’s really easy to fall into the trap of, I’ve found it, to fall into the trap of like making everything like a checklist…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… of like duties rather than look at the team effort of we’re a family and we have these shared goals and we’re each chipping in to work on those goals. Yes, an easy way to get closer to that is to have the sort of list of to-dos, but there’s also times to be flexible. THere’s also times to like see a need and just work on it. That’s hard for me because I am a very list-oriented person, so that’s sort of what I’ve been working on is how to be more present, frankly, for my family. That’s the new hotness.

Maurice Cherry:
Same, same. Right now, I was just talking to my Mom recently because Mother’s Day just passed. Her and I were talking and she’s telling me like, “Oh, I’m finally thinking about moving.” She lives in Alabama. We’re from Selma, Alabama, and I grew up there, moved out when I was 18. I’ve been here in Atlanta ever since. She’s lived there her whole life. Now she’s talking about moving to Dallas, and the first thing in my mind was like, “I’m about to project manage the shit out of this move because, one, I’m like, “I have been waiting for you to leave this town forever, and you are finally going to do it. We are making this happen.”

It’s also about being in the moment of like why she wants to do it now. She’s been retired for, let’s see, she retired at 62, she’s been retired for eight years now. She just turned 70. I’m like, “Now you want to move? Sure, yeah, let’s talk about it. Let’s do it. Let’s try to make it happen.” I have to resist my urge to try to really plan this and make sure this goes off without a hitch, but also make sure that I’m present for her feeling behind moving because, I mean, she grew up there just like I did, but she’s just lived there now her whole life and now she’s like, “It’s time to get out of here.” I’m like, “Okay, let’s make it happen.”

David Dylan Thomas:
Just for a second, can we just talk about the South? Because…

Maurice Cherry:
Sure.

David Dylan Thomas:
… being born “in the North,” I was born in Maryland, which is technically the South…

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

David Dylan Thomas:
… and is the South in a lot of ways. I grew up with this fear of the South, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
I see like… When I think of the South, I think of Mississippi Burning, right? Like that’s…

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

David Dylan Thomas:
… at the same time, I’ve been to the south a lot of times. I never really had any problems, and that’s where 80% of us are. Black folk live in the South. That’s where we are.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
I talk to people who have lived there their whole lives, or who lived in the North and are anxious to move to the South and I’m just like trying to get my head… I don’t even know what my question is, but it’s just sort of like when I hear, “Oh, she’s moving from Alabama,” I get that, to Dallas. Oh, that’s…

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… Texas isn’t awesome right now, but okay, you know?

Maurice Cherry:
Well look, her other choice was Florida, and I was like, “Well, that’s definitely…

David Dylan Thomas:
Ooh…

Maurice Cherry:
… not happening…

David Dylan Thomas:
… ooh.

Maurice Cherry:
… so…

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah. No, Dallas is better.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Well, I’ve been to Dallas. It’s better than all of Florida.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
The entire state.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh my God. Yeah, it was either Florida or Texas and I’m like, and even talking to her about it, I think honestly the main reason she wants to move is because her brother lives there, so her older brother-

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
… lives there with his family and he is extremely well-off. It’s like…

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
… “Okay, well, if you move there, if you move in with him or even in the vicinity of where he is, at least you’re together, it’s family. The main thing I’m excited about is that she’ll be in a city that is served by a major airport because I don’t drive and I don’t have a car, so me trying to get from Atlanta to Selma takes like a bus, a pack mule. I probably have to hitchhike part of the way. It’s not easy to get back home and I was like, “Heaven forbid there’s an emergency and I can’t get to you quickly.” If you’re at least in a city served by an airport, I can hope on a plane and take an Uber or a Lyft to get to where you are. That’s not a problem, you know?

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, it was either Texas or Florida and I was like, “Well, it’s not Florida, so Texas it is.”

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, and I’ve been to… I actually like Dallas a lot, but it’s just this… I don’t know how many Black people hold this special relationship with the South or hold… I feel like Black people just have a feeling, it may not be the same feeling, but have a feeling about the South, and it’s just endlessly fascinating to me.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m curious, what’s the fascinating part?

David Dylan Thomas:
Well, it’s just like I think I grew up with this myth in my heard that once you hit the South, it’s all Klan. You know what I mean? Like… How can you live there? I do. I get genuinely surprised. I have a brother who was living in Maryland and was like, “Oh yeah, I want to move further south.” Or I’ll meet someone else who’s sort of like, “Yeah, I was living in San Francisco, but I want to move back to North Carolina.” I’m like on the one hand, I kind of get it. Again, it’s one of those things I’m learning more about now, but on the other hand I’m like, “Yeah, but you know about the South, right?” You know?

Maurice Cherry:
Right, right.

David Dylan Thomas:
I think the part that’s fascinating to me is that as I interrogate that, there’s no real evidence that the South is any safer or more dangerous. If I think about all the shootings that have happened with Black people, they’re all over. They’re not just in the South. There’s plenty in the North, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
I do think… I don’t know. It’s me dealing with my own fear of white supremacy, and when I think of white supremacy I associate it far more at the South than I do with the North, even though there’s plenty of it in the North.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, I can only speak on the South because I grew up here. I’ve lived here all my life. I do know that there is that perception, certainly because I have cousins that live in the North. Most of my Mom’s side of the family is in Detroit. My Dad’s side of the family is in Cleveland, and they’ve always kind of treated us as like the country cousins, you know?

David Dylan Thomas:
Mm-hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
Like for whatever that means, but i think there is that perception. Granted, I mean, I grew up in Selma, which, I mean, I think now certainly within the past maybe like 10 to 15 years has started to become something that’s in the regular zeitgeist because presidential candidates go there and there was a movie about it and all this stuff. I can tell you, when I first came to Atlanta in ’99 from Selma, people thought that I meant Salem, Oregon, because they had never heard of it.

David Dylan Thomas:
Wow.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah, which is weird…

David Dylan Thomas:
Wow.

Maurice Cherry:
… because like when you grow up in Selma, you are not divorced from the history of the Civil Rights Movement at all.

David Dylan Thomas:
Right.

Maurice Cherry:
It is present. It is not just something that you learn about. It is everywhere. You are a byproduct of it. I’m the first generation outside of Bloody Sunday. Like it’s everywhere, I remember, oh God, was this fourth grade, fifth grade? When did I have my social study teacher? I think this was fourth grade, my social study teacher Mrs. Manz had shown me… Well, it was like a field trip. She had shown us a spot downtown where her blood was spilled because she got hit by a police officer 20-something years ago. You’ve never divorced from it.

It’s always around you, and even growing up in Selma, I mean, I’m using Selma as kind of a bit of an outlier here, but you are fully aware of the gravity of racism and the Civil Rights Movement and all that sort of stuff because you’re in it. You know, “Don’t go to this part of town after a certain time, don’t go to this grocery store.” You just know that, and even as politics change and you see how people change because of politics, and Selma’s another good example of this, we had a racist white mayor from Martin Luther King, Jr. Times like the ’60s up until he died right around 2000, Joe Smitherman. He famously called Martin Luther King Martin Luther Coon, like…

David Dylan Thomas:
Hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
… and like the fact that he still got elected year after year after year is strange in a city like Selma, particularly when Black people are the majority, but he died, and so the city got its first Black mayor. Many of the white citizens were so incensed by that that they closed businesses, moved roughly about five miles up Highway 22 and started their own city called Valley Grande.

David Dylan Thomas:
What?

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds like something out of The Simpsons, you know? Like…

David Dylan Thomas:
This is why I’m afraid of the South.

Maurice Cherry:
… but I mean, it’s one of those things where you are cognizant of it and aware of it and you kind of just… I don’t say you kind of just deal with it, but it’s because you are aware of it and it’s such an ever-present thing that you know how to navigate within it.

When I left Selma and came to Atlanta, I mean, came to Atlanta, went to Morehouse, the school that King graduated from, and being in and around all of that history and everything, it’s like you’re just aware. You just know this is the world you live in. I think sometimes when people think of HBCUs, there’s this perception that you’re in a bubble in some ways, and in ways you kind of are. You’re in a bubble of being around only Black people and certain aspects of the diasporic African experience because it’s not just African-Americans that go to Morehouse.

Then, you get out in the real world and you meet other people and you know that it’s different. It’s just hard for me to describe it, I think, in a way because it’s just something that’s been ever-present. You just know how to deal with it because you see it in so many different ways. I mean, just racism in general, sometimes it’s super overt, sometimes it’s covert. It’s just all this kind of a thing that you recognize. It’s a cognitive bias to put it… to kind of like, I guess, bring it back to your book and everything.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s just something that you know about, you’re aware about, and because you know about it and you’re aware about it, you know how to effectively work through it, work around it, or work to include it in some way. I mean, even what I do with this show and in the design industry is very interesting, we’ll just put it that way.

David Dylan Thomas:
Hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
I would say my time growing up in the South and in Selma and everything has taught me to deal with a lot of the stuff that I deal with in terms of just discrimination from this show that it’s just like, “Okay, I know that’s going to be a thing. I can work around that.”

David Dylan Thomas:
Right.

Maurice Cherry:
I can deal with that. I’m not going to let it stop me or bog me down or get me down in some way. It’s just a general awareness of it to the point that I know this is a thing. I’m just going to have to kind of work through it, work around it to try to make it better or to try to circumvent it or something. You just… It’s just always a thing that’s present. You just know that it’s always there. Even your mentioning about like the Klan, I mean, Selma has a Klan hall. One of our housing projects is named after the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan…

David Dylan Thomas:
What?

Maurice Cherry:
… Bedford Forest. One of the… It’s not an all-white school, but it’s pretty much an all-white school. One of the schools there is John T. Morgan, which is also named after a Klansman. It’s a thing that you know about. Even one of the cemeteries has a Klan monument in it. You know that it’s there so you don’t fuck with it. You don’t deal with it. You know like this is a thing not to deal with, so you just work around it or don’t deal with it. It’s kind of hard to describe, but

David Dylan Thomas:
No…

Maurice Cherry:
… but yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… no, I think I see, and what it reminds me of is I talked to a guy from Singapore…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… and Singapore does not have free speech.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
You talk shit about the president, you are not necessarily going to go to jail, but you’re going to get sued into oblivion. I was asking him about it and it was this thing where it was difficult for him to answer because it was sort of like asking a fish about water. It was just sort of like, “Of course they are.” You don’t fuck with it, but you also don’t necessarily… It wasn’t really affecting his day-to-day. It wasn’t like every morning he wakes up and thinks, “Oh God, I wish I could say shit about the president.” That’s just not a thing, and I don’t know, it’s interesting, but what you said makes perfect sense.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Even that sort of description you mentioned about asking a fish about water, that’s just how it is. Sometimes things happen and you’re like, “Well, that’s just how it is.” Some of it is unfair. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that you just deal with everything and just sort of shrug your shoulders about it, but at least you are cognizant and aware of the fact that it is happening. You know why it’s happening, you know the cause from which it stems. It’s not just like out of the blue. You know this is how people are like. I mean, I can give you another example. Now, we’ll bring the interview back to you, but I know you asked about me, but…

David Dylan Thomas:
No, that’s cool.

Maurice Cherry:
… but I mean, when I was graduating high school, my guidance counselor was doing everything in her power to not want me to go to college. She wanted… The one white guy that was in our class, all-Black class and one white guy who happened to end up becoming valedictorian, but that’s a whole other story, but was doing everything to get him into college, giving his applications and all this sort of stuff.

Then, she’ll turn to me and be like, “Well, why don’t you think about learning a trade? You could go to the community college. I know your mother works there. My husband works there. You could go there and learn a trade. People always need air conditioning. We live in the South. What about HVAC?” I’m like, “Ma’am, I have a 4.5 GPA. What are you talking about? Are you daft?” I mean, this is also at the time when computers really started to be put into libraries and stuff like that, so I just did a lot of research on my own, but she was actively not wanting me to go to college like…

David Dylan Thomas:
Hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
… not helping with applications. She would give… The guy’s name was Gary. She would give him application vouchers for application fees and stuff and…

David Dylan Thomas:
Wow.

Maurice Cherry:
… then she would tell me about, “Have you thought about welding? Welding could be a good trade for you.” “Ma’am, I’m taking AP Calculus, what are you talking about?” Welding, so it’s just stuff that you deal with and you’re like-

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
… “Whatever.” Yeah, that’s a tough nut to crack, but let’s bring it back to you since we’re talking about beat. Let’s talk about your upbringing and your backstory.

David Dylan Thomas:
Uh-huh.

Maurice Cherry:
You’re right outside of Philly right now in Media. Is that where you’re originally from?

David Dylan Thomas:
No, so I was born in Columbia, Maryland. It’s the city that’s basically right in between D.C. and Baltimore, and I grew up… My mother and father split when I was very young. I didn’t really get to meet him, get to know him until I was like 25 years old.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
That’s very formative, and my mother was amazing. She really always made sure that we knew, like me and my sister, we knew we were loved and we knew that we could be whatever we wanted to be. Nothing could stop us, and she also really, really went to great pains to make sure we were educated, so for all of those things and much more, I’m always eternally grateful to her. She passed in 2011. From a very young age, I was writing, I was reading at a young age. Very smart, doing al of the smart Black kid things, and having to sort of like… It’s interesting. My earliest experiences of racism were actually coming from Black kids who didn’t-

Maurice Cherry:
Hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… understand why I talked the way I do, why I didn’t talk Black and that was… I think every Black person has the story of when they realized they were Black. That was it for me. It’s like the way I was talking was different from the way the other Black kids were talking. Weirdly, that’s how I found out I was Black because I wasn’t talking the way I was supposed to with this flat, not African-American vernacular we would call it now, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
That was also sort of an interesting wrinkle for me growing up, but I was always interested in filmmaking. I still do it today and I did it ever since high school, and that’s the sort of content in my content strategy trajectory really comes from that storytelling aspect. I went to Friends School of Baltimore, very prestigious school. Again, my mother went to-

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… great pains to make sure I was able to get in there, went into debt for that, and then ditto for Johns Hopkins University, which I originally went for electrical engineering, and then found out I was bad at that and switched to writing seminars and kind of got a concentration in theater and film.

I’m there, this is like the mid-’90s, and I’m armed with this like really solid… Basically I know how to think now that I’ve been through college. I know how to think and I know how to write, and for four years I’m just working in a record store because if you remember in the mid-’90s, there was like yet another recession slump. Nobody had any jobs-

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… so for four years I worked in a record store, which was actually kind of fun, and I just worked on whatever independent movies came to town. Then, after that, I finally got a job that more or less had to do with my major, which was being a online writing tutor for a CTY, Center for Talented Youth’s online writing courses, basically giving junior high and high school students these college-level narrative nonfiction courses on CD-ROM. That’s how long ago we’re talking.

Then, they go into an online forum to submit their work and to their workshopping, workshop those things. That’s when I really kind of fell in love with the web because what I was seeing the web do was take people, students who lived all over the world and might never meet each other in person, and they get to talk about sports and homeschooling and all these other things. That was amazing to me. That was just… The potential for the web to bring people together was where I really fell in love with it, and I’ve worked in tech in one form or another ever since.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, just to kind of give an idea, I’m trying to sort of place this within the context of history, I’m guessing this is roughly around like early 2000s?

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, so I worked at CTY from 2000 to around 2004.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Yeah. The web was really, I mean, it’s hard, I think, probably for people now to really know about this or think about it because, I mean, it’s been 20 years, but the web back then was just exploding in terms of new experiences, new things to discover. The technology itself with browsers and such were growing at such a rapid pace. I think about that time so fondly. I mean, I was in college right around the time I graduated in ’03, but that was such a magical time to be into the internet and the web because the big agents that are around now did not exist. It’s hard to think of an internet without social media, without Facebook, without Twitter, but I don’t know, maybe it’s rose-colored glasses. I don’t know. I think about that time so fondly with just the web being a fairly idyllic place. I might be romanticizing-

David Dylan Thomas:
No, I think-

Maurice Cherry:
… it a bit.

David Dylan Thomas:
… I don’t think you are. Actually, my new talk, I start out talking about personalization and how today it is almost impossible to find a website that doesn’t have a login, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
You go back to the early web, zero websites had a login. It was just this big art gallery-

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… and you’d have things like Homestar Runner, which to this day has no login option. The Homestar Runner you see is the Homestar Runner I see-

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… but every other website, you see a different version that’s personalized to you, and there are real psychological stakes for that because it basically makes it seem like the entire world revolves around us.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
You could be forgiven for believing that because on the web it does. Literally, every website you go to is custom-made for you, so that was not always thus. The early web was just a place where a lot of weirdos were just putting up like, “Here are my opinions about Star Trek. Here is this weird animation. Here is a bunch of things about badgers that’s like saying, ‘badger, badger, badger over [inaudible 00:48:23].'” It was sort of like if you think about the creativity you see in a place like TikTok where people… Some people are there being very money-minded and trying to do a business, but some people are just putting up weird, fun shit, you know?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
That’s the early web, it’s just here is… Yeah, there’s a definite difference there, and there was a gold rush that came where people started realizing, okay, they can make a lot of money off of this by taking what was like the open web, something like an mp3, which is a format for music that isn’t owned. It’s free. Anyone can use it and changing that into a format that’s proprietary so, “Oh, if you want to play that movie, you have to do it on this browser, in this website, using our technology, and if you try to copy it, God help you.”

That was how we moved into the web we have now, which is much more capitalistic, much more predatory, and it’s basically, “Every way we can possibly make a buck off of you we will.” The early web was more like, “Hey, look at this new toy. What can we do with it?”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. The early web was also just a place where you could play, I guess play… I mean, I’m using play in sort of a broad sense, but you’re playing without consequence. Like you said, there’s no… Aside from there also not being any logins back then, there was no tracking really. Google Analytics wasn’t a thing. The way that you found other people were visiting is if you had a hit counter on your website, or if you had a…

David Dylan Thomas:
[inaudible 00:49:46]-

Maurice Cherry:
… guestbook-

David Dylan Thomas:
… web counters. I’m like-

Maurice Cherry:
… and someone signed it, you know? You didn’t know.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
There wasn’t all this sort of stuff to sort of track your movements across the web and like, “Oh, you went here? Where did you go next? Where did you go after that? What purchases did you make?” None of that existed, and you could really… The thing that I… It’s funny. I tell this to my… I have two goddaughters, they’re nine and twelve, and I tell them that back when there was Windows 95, how when you logged off there would be this message that would pop up that would say, “It is now safe to turn off your computer.” There was a time when you could turn things off.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
TV had a stop time.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
At 12:30, those test bars came on and you went to bed. There was nothing else to sort of keep you up. You know what I mean? It’s so different now with everything being so tracked and analyzed and stored and sold to other companies. It’s just the web now is so different, and I think about that a lot in the context of “creating content.”

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
You’ve been writing, you’ve been making podcasts, you’ve done web series, et cetera, and I do want to talk about your podcast work, but you’ve been creating content online for over 20 years. How have you seen content online change during that time?

David Dylan Thomas:
There’s a dichotomy there because the original sin of the OpenWeb, and Anil Dash talks about this in a talk called The Web We Lost.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
The original sin of the OpenWeb was that it was very, very privileged. If you did not know how to code at some level, it was very difficult to create content on the web. What Facebook did, what Twitter did, what all these walled gardens did was make it easy to create content, make it easy to put it on the web.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
In exchange for that ease, we gave up data. The plus side of that was a lot of poor people got to make content. I don’t know another way to say it. If you look at Vine, back in the day before it collapsed, there was some amazing BIPOC content going up there, especially BIPOC humor. There was so much like I would say sort of innovative work being done, and some of that has bled over into TikTok as well. There are people who are creating content today who could not have made it otherwise because of Facebook, because of Vine, because of Twitter, because of TikTok. The trade-off was, “Oh, now we have your data. Now we can track you everywhere.”

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
I don’t think it had to be that way. I think that governments could have stepped up to say, “We think it’s important that people who aren’t privileged are able to make content. I think that different business models could have arrived that were better than that, but I don’t think any of that was likely because we live in America. We live in capitalist country in a largely capitalist world where people are incentivized, are told from a very early age your highest value, the best thing you can do is make money, so the likelihood of having a web that is sort of built on the idea of lest as many people responsibly make content as possible is not likely. This is not going to happen. The way I’ve seen content change over time since I started doing it is it is way easier than it ever, ever, ever, ever was-

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… but it has come at the cost of data. It has come at the cost of misinformation. I will always, if I have to choose between a privileged few being able to create content and a whole lot of people being able to create content, I’m always going to choose a whole lot of people, even if it means the odds of disinformation going up. The fact of the matter is, the odds of disinformation don’t go away if it’s only a privileged few. In fact, depending on who those privileged few are, the odds of disinformation skyrocket.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
You know what I mean? So-

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, I think we’re definitely seeing that now with Twitter’s recent change in ownership.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, so that’s a lot of why I talk about what I talk about now is this idea of I want people to understand what that balance is like and that it is good for lots of people to be able to create content. We don’t know how to deal with that yet. Somebody was pointing out so people talk about these unprecedented times, and I always get kind of like, “Really?”, when people say something like, “Yo, we’ve had.” There’s a lot of people who’ve been living in precarity for a long time now. It’s just more middle class people. More white people are having to deal with black people shit than ever before and they’re calling that unprecedented. I’m just…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… [inaudible 00:54:26] that, like poverty and health problems and all these other things. Other people have had to deal with that before, but what I do think is unprecedented is two things.

One, we have never, ever, ever, ever had 8 billion people on the same planet at the same time. Just hasn’t happened, and two, they have never all been able to talk to each other at exactly the same time. We’ve never had many too many communications at scale instantly ever, like ever, ever, ever. That’s never happened, so why should we be good at it? Why would we expect we’d be even remotely good at it? Especially if it’s all being done through a capitalist lens. It makes sense that we’re fucking this up, but I think we need to focus up on, how do we do this? I think it’s important to preserve our access to each other. I think it’s critical, but I don’t think we know how to do it yet.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, you mentioned something here just about the fact that we’re dealing… I mean, I think the unprecedented part of what you’re saying is just that, yeah, we don’t really have those mechanisms available, even though communication now is easier than it has ever been just because of the technology. You can text, you can FaceTime, you’ve got WhatsApp and Instagram and all these sorts of things, but I don’t know if the tools are necessarily facilitating the conversations in that way.

David Dylan Thomas:
Well, and I think it’s really, really important to understand that the societal work has to come first.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
There’s a great Twitter thread where someone talks about how this comes from actually an episode of The Orville, I guess, but there’s a character… The Orville is kind of like a Star Trek kind of show. There’s this character from an impoverished planet that asks the Federation, basically the spaceship, “Hey, why don’t you give us all replicators?” A replicator, for those who aren’t geeks like me, basically just a device that can just make anything you want. It just out of thin air it just makes it, so food, clothing, whatever. It just makes it. “Why don’t you give us all replicators and then we can be as peaceful as you are?” The guy from The Orville explains, “That you got it backwards. The only reason we were able to develop the replicator technology in the first place was because we got over our shit.

We were able to actually support each other to the point where we could coordinate to make something like that. The guy goes on, the Twitter thread goes on to say, “Look if we had replicator technology, if Twitter developed replicator technology, they would license it. They would make it so that if you don’t keep paying your subscription fee, or give us data for advertisers, it would stop working. Different companies and then different countries would be like, or different political groups would be like, “Oh, replicated meat is ruining the meat industry, so we’re going to say that replicated meat is bad and evil and I’m going to run on that platform so I can get votes.”

He basically breaks down all the ways that the greatest technology in the world can be ruined by people. People have to get their shit together first. Then, you can do good things with the technology. Yeah, we’re going to keep using social media for shit because we the people have shit that we need to work out. We have trauma that we need to get over. We have all these sort of agreements we need to actually make with each other before we can even have a hope of actually using the technology in a positive way.

Maurice Cherry:
Amen to that, amen to all of that. Society has to work through their own biases and other shit before we can really start to have the technology serve us, hopefully in a positive and constructive way. Just to kind of bring it back to the earlier conversation we had around content, to you, what does content strategy mean now? I mean, you’ve been a content strategist since before the title really came to be in this industry, and like I said, you’ve been creating content online in many different media for over 20 years and across several different fields, I should mention. To you, what does content strategy mean now?

David Dylan Thomas:
Organizational change. I was talking to a friend of mine who’s doing some work with the G20, and long story short, she was talking to someone about trying to get more buy-in around content strategy with her stakeholders and the person was like, “Don’t call it content strategy. Call it what it is. It’s organizational change.” Even from day one, so like 10 years ago I get my first official job. I’d been doing content strategy before, but I get my first official job where it says, “Content Strategy” on my business card. Within a week, I turned to one of the strategists at the organization and I ask then, “How much of our job is just doing interventions?” Hey says, “90%.” I’m like, “Oh, okay, I get it now.”

Yeah, I do content audits and I do this and that, and I built content models and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I make these artifacts, but at the end of the day, none of that means anything if I can’t work out your political problems, your organizational problems, your biases, all of the stuff, half of the examples in my book come from real-world experience I had working with clients, which is why I think it’s valid, frankly.

I’m glad I went through those experiences because I don’t think my book would make any sense otherwise, but yeah, it is people stuff. It’s messy people stuff, and content strategists are at a great position to witness and document the outcomes of the messy people stuff. If you have no taxonomy, if you have paths that don’t make any sense, if your language only makes sense to certain people in the organization with certain seats of power, all of that is just the outcome of people stuff, messy people stuff.

When you’re really… I’ve never seen a content strategy work lest there be organizational change that preceded it. If you did not fix the organizational problem, the best content model in the world isn’t going to help. I mean, the same thing with UX, same thing with dev. I think content strategists in particular get exposed to that first if they are kind of looking because they’re kind of the first ones under the hood looking at, “Okay, let’s take a look at your content inventory. Let’s take a look at your… Let’s do an audit.” You get to see those outcomes firsthand…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… but yeah, so I think call it what it is, organizational change. I spent 10% of my time as a content strategist creating these like artifacts like from an effort perspective. I spent 90% of that effort trying to convince you that it works.

Maurice Cherry:
Right.

David Dylan Thomas:
That’s what I’ve seen is a shift toward understanding that, or at least personally what I see, and that’s the other thing. I don’t feel comfortable commenting on content strategy like per se because I haven’t worked with a client in three years. It’s like, “Don’t ask me, ask the people on the ground what content strategy is.” My observation is that it is becoming clearer and clearer that content strategy is, in fact, organizational change, and to varying degrees, absolutely UX, absolutely design, absolute… There is no service industry in terms of like, “I am building you a website,” or, “I’m helping the organization do X, Y, or Z.” That is not on some fundamental level organizational change. That’s the shift I’ve seen.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, as I mentioned, you’ve done a lot in your career, events, web series, talked about podcasting. I have to ask about the podcast because you’ve done several. You’ve been host, you’ve had your own podcast. When did you really start getting into doing that?

David Dylan Thomas:
I was in podcasts before it was cool. Do you remember Odeo?

Maurice Cherry:
I remember I was on Odeo.

David Dylan Thomas:
Do you know what Jack Dorsey was up to before Twitter?

Maurice Cherry:
I remember. I do, I do. I remember Odeo in like 2004-2005. Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
My friend, Kevin Smokler, wonderful author and filmmaker in his own right, convinced me or we partnered up. Basically he’s my best friend, so we partnered up and said, “Hey, let’s do a podcast about movies.” We’re just going to talk about it because we’re both huge movie buffs. We called it Talking Pictures, and our first episodes, I believe, were posted on Odeo. Then, we moved on to other things later. That’s back in 2006 or so I started doing podcasting. I’ve never done it with any sense of like, and again, this is that arc. The early days of the web, you just did stuff because it was fun. You weren’t trying to get followers. You weren’t trying to make a fortune. You were just, “Hey, I can post something, and like hundreds, hundreds, hundreds of people could potentially see it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Wow. You have to understand, that was new. The only way to hear your voice on the air was to go on the actual radio. There was no like… The idea of just putting something online and having other people witness it that you will never meet was just a totally new thing. It didn’t matter if it was five people or 5,000 people. There just wasn’t as much a thing as it is now where it’s like, “Well, if I don’t get a million followers, what’s the point?” Yeah, and then many years later, I did The Cognitive Bias Podcast because basically I had been reading up on cognitive biases ever since I saw a talk by Iris Bohnet called “Gender Equality by Design.” It blew my mind, and she was the first one to start connecting the dots for me around here is this bias and here’s this impact, and here’s how design influences that.

It lit a fire under me to learn about cognitive bias, so I literally went to the The Rational Wiki Page of Cognitive Biases and just looked at one bias a day. I would pick a bias and I’d learn about it. Next day, go on to the next one. This turned me into the guy who wouldn’t shut up about cognitive bias, so my friends, and I remember one friend in particular who worked for Ted at the time was like, “You should do a podcast.” When someone who works for Ted is like, “You should do a podcast,” you listen. I’m like… Okay, at the time, I had a job that I only worked four days a week, so I had Fridays off, and so I was like, “I’ve already studied all these biases. What if I just do a podcast where I talk about one bias? Then I just would kind of reacquaint myself with a bias, make some show notes, and then just turn on the mike and talk.

I could wrap that up within an hour, and one hour every Friday was super manageable, so yeah, I just started posting it. Again, I wasn’t with the intent of like, “Oh, I’m going to grow this big audience.” It was more like, “Hey, this would be a fun thing to do,” and people tell me that they’re interested. Yeah, and it just grew and grew and grew and grew. It was never like… I never got to the point where I was like, oh, getting advertisers, or anything like that because frankly I’m too lazy. I just don’t have the energy to… I don’t care about that enough to build a whole business around it, but I care enough to do this thing, and it led to all these other things like giving the talk in Copenhagen, like writing the book. My experience from career perspective is that that’s how it works.

You may have a plan, you may not have a plan, but if you are diligent and lucky, and I stress the lucky because I don’t want people to think, “Oh, some people are just better than others and the ones who have all the hustle get the good shit.” No, the ones who have the hustle are persistent and that helps if the lucky thing happens, but there’s also luck. There is privilege, like I was born lower middle class to a mother who really cared about education, which put me in a better position to be able to get education and so on and so forth. There are people in my life who have cared about me and supported me…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… so that wasn’t something I planned and then happened because I’m so fricking awesome. No, it happened because of just all of the chaos theory things that happen in life-

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… but when those things happened. I was prepared to say, “Yeah, I will do a hundred episodes of this podcast. I will go out and give all these talks.” I’ll… I think it’s a mix of those two things.

I always stress that because I won’t want people to forget about privilege. I don’t want people to forget about privilege. I don’t want people to forget about the social structures that limit our opportunities, and I really, really, really don’t want people to fall into the trap of thinking some people are just better than others. That’s one of the most horrific doctrines…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… in the history of the world. I’m not even a little bit overstating it. I always stress that, “Hey, I’m not here because I’m so fucking awesome, I’m here because I tried really hard. I care about these things. I was passionate about these things. I did it in a context where very fortunately these other people were in my life and I was born in this particular place at this particular time.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
There are a lot of things that I didn’t have control over that played in my favor, as well as some that played against me, but it isn’t just don’t think that some people are better than others. That’s the thing I really try to avoid when I’m telling my story.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I’m so glad that you mentioned that just kind of in the context of the work that you do and how that places you with where you are now. It’s a combination of things. This wasn’t something that was just handed to you. I mean, we’re talking about privilege, too, but also it’s kind of by privilege, I don’t want to say by privilege, but it’s also by fact of just being early, being around at the time that this technology started to pop off in a way where people could really take advantage of it and make livelihoods out of it. I think about some of the early projects that I’ve done, the Black Weblog Awards, and in 2015 I did a whole podcast about tea for a year. I just did like…

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh wow.

Maurice Cherry:
… short bursts, less than five-minute episodes about tea, one episode a day. I called it The Year of Tea…

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh.

Maurice Cherry:
… because I only did it for a year, and I could do that now. Maybe people would pay attention to it, maybe they wouldn’t. I hate the fact that content creation is now under not just the filter of algorithms, but also the lens of like how many likes or shares or whatever it gets.

The early web was just so much about doing things because you could do them and no one else was doing them, so you’re like, “Well, I’ll just do it and maybe it becomes something, maybe it doesn’t, but I’ll also not doing it for it to try to become something. Like…

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
… it’s… I don’t know, it’s hard, I think, to explain in the current context because so much of what’s done now is just filtered through engagement.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s as you kind of said earlier about fuck engagement, but everything is like, “Well, are people paying attention to it?” Who cares? Are you doing it because you like it? You know? Like… oh yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Who is being helped? I think that’s the other sad truth about the early web is it wasn’t particularly, I won’t say exclusively, but it wasn’t necessarily… It wasn’t helping people, I think, necessarily in the way that there’s the potential for it to help people now. Some of the early shit like Ushahidi was awesome where it was like this tool for helping people know where to avoid violence during the Kenya elections of 2007. It became this disaster relief tool. I think people… I wanted to see more of that out of the early web. I was perfectly happy to see us just kind of fuck around and do cool shit, but I also wanted to see us, and I think some of us were, and I think it got harder in some ways after the web got commoditized. I want a web that where the metric isn’t how many people are looking at my shit, but how many people am I helping?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
That’s the web I want to see. That’s the metric I want to see.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, that’s something with Revision Path, I’ve certainly… I don’t want to say I’ve come to terms with it over the years because when I started this, it really was just honestly as a continuation of a project that I did back in 2005. I started the Black Weblog Awards in ’05. In ’06, we had a category that was Best Blog Design. I was a blog designer at the time, designing movable type and WordPress sites. I was also working at AT&T at the time. I had other friends who were designers that were Black designers, and I just thought we weren’t getting any recognition in the industry. The magazines at the time, the conferences, we were not there, period. I wanted to do something about it, but couldn’t do it then.

It took me seven years until I started Revision Path, and now I’ve done that for 10 years as of this year. I’ll still run across people that think like, “Oh, this was just a fluke.” Like, “Oh yeah, you know, you’re just an overnight success.” Yeah, overnight since 2005. Come on, you know? I think about it in that context of like, “Is Revision Path ever going to be as poplar as, say, like Design Matters or 99% Invisible?” I don’t even look at the success of the show through that lens.

David Dylan Thomas:
Mm-hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
I don’t. I mean, I could and then I would be like, “Oh, the show is failing.” I don’t think about it that way because we haven’t reached that level of, say, audience or general I would say design community knowhow or knowledge or penetration, largely because people, honestly, they see the word Black and they’re like, “It’s not for me. I’m not interested. Whatever.” Which I’m fine with, but the impact that the show is having on the design industry, I know that there are teachers that teach the class in their schools, so there’s a new generation of designers learning about current Black designers, that those current Black designers that I talk to never encountered other Black designers.

I’m helping to change the conversation around who can be a designer, the visibility of what a designer looks like, where a designer can be, what a designer can do, et cetera. I have to look at it in that sort of lens of this is the impact that it’s having and less about whether or not it’s getting a hundred thousand downloads or something like that.

David Dylan Thomas:
We never know truly the impact we have, and you’re reminding me of this little Twitter contest that happened at least a decade ago where Ashton Kutcher and Wil Wheaton basically said, “Okay, we’re each going to ask our followers to do some kind of charitable thing.”

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
I think the way it broke down was… I don’t know, Kutcher had a much, much bigger reach than Wheaton, but Wheaton, a higher percentage of his followers actually did the thing, so it may have been technically more of Kutcher, a larger number of people did the thing from Kutcher’s clan, but if you did it by percentages, maybe 50% of Ashton’s people did something. Whereas, like 90% of Wheaton’s people did something. It’s sort of like if I had to pick, right?’

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
I’m not sure. I feel like maybe I’d rather be Wil Wheaton in that scenario because the people who are following you mean it. You know what I mean?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
It’s this tighter relationship, and increasingly I find myself defining success through relationship rather than through numbers. I’m working on this movie right now and I’ve decided the number one metric for success for the film isn’t going to be how much money it makes, it’s going to be, what are the relationships like during and after? Do I get to meet more people and form these new relationships? Do I get to strengthen existing ones? Because, A, that’s people I can work with again, and most of the experience making the movie is going to be working with people, so why would I not want that to be pleasant? B, I would much rather have that than have the movie just kind of fizzle versus have the movie be a huge success and we all hate each other when it’s over. That is not interesting to me.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Where I’m at now, that’s just not interesting to me. Yeah, I feel you in terms of trying to not fall into the trap of it just being about the numbers and comparing yourself to other podcasts. I mean, my latest podcast, I’ve done two seasons of my new podcast called Lately I’ve Been Thinking About, and it’s nobody. There’s like… it’s like five people have heard it. The people who have heard it love it, but it’s sort of like compared to… Even compared to myself, it’s a failure in the sense of I don’t think it has nearly as much, as many plays as my Cognitive Bias Podcast, but I don’t care.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
I actually am in some ways more proud of it because it’s the first podcast I’ve done that’s actually accessible. I’ve got a transcript now and I paid for the transcripts and I’ve got good… There’s certain things that I’m doing as a podcaster that I think is better podcasting than what I did with the first one, so…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… to me, it’s not as cut and dry as like, “Am I getting more likes than Joe Rogan?”

Maurice Cherry:
Right. I’m hoping to get to that. I mean, I don’t want to say I’m hoping to get to that. I still am in the mind of creating things just to make them, and if it does, well, it does well. If it flops, it flops. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was a bad idea. Maybe it’s bad timing, you know?

David Dylan Thomas:
Mm-hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
We did a design literary anthology we started in 2019 called Recognize, where we wanted to sort of cultivate like BIPOC design voices, et cetera. We did that in 2019. I think it went pretty well. The pandemic happened in 2020. That pretty much killed it, so we did one more year in 2020. I think I tried to do it in 2021 and it wasn’t working. It did not have the impact that I wanted it to have. I’m going to bring it back one day. I’m going to find a way to do it again because I still feel that it’s super important, especially as I start seeing more Black designers and Black creatives like writing books and stuff. I still want to do that because there was a time, and not too long ago, I’d say maybe roughly, I don’t know, maybe five, six years, maybe a little bit longer than that, but I feel like there were prominent design voices online. Not necessarily authors, but like you have venues like A List Apart. I remember when Designer News used to be a thing before it turned into a graveyard, but there used to be places where you could read writing about design.

David Dylan Thomas:
Mm-hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
There was AIGA, had Eye on Design. I think there might have been a couple of others. Now you see things and they’re mostly just glorified tutorials, which is not to say that’s a bad thing, but who’s the next generation of design writers? The current generation is either, I mean, not to be morbid, but they’re either dying or nobody’s paying attention to them anymore. Who’s going to be the next generation that are going to be talking about the things that are important? I feel like it’s going to be us and our generation, like you, of course, with your book and the works that you’re doing, hopefully me with this podcast, but there are more design voices out there that need to be cultivated. I feel like it’s going to mostly be designers of color that are the ones that do that.

David Dylan Thomas:
Mm-hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
How do we bring back Recognizing the Future? I don’t know. I’ll have to noodle on it some more, but I still think it’s important because it’s just important. I still think it’s something that needs to be out there. You know, did it do well the first time we did it? No. It’s just a timing thing. I’ll find a way to bring it back.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, and I hope you do, and frankly, I think that the… I’ll say women and people of color are going to be like the new design voices, and I think they’re Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Eva Penzey Moog, Sheryl Cababa…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… all these folks are doing great work, but I think that the new design voices are also going to be political. I think that’s the difference. I think that’s…I think it’s going to be increasingly difficult to tell the difference between good design voices and political activists. I think…

Maurice Cherry:
Oh yeah. Hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… that is… and frankly, there are periods in design history, like look at Bauhaus, there are periods in design history where that has been the norm where… I mean, design has always been political and sometimes it’s more pronounced than others. I think, I hope, we’re entering into a time where it is this thin, thin line between kind of activist voices and design voices, especially as we come into this period where we’re really realizing racism is designed, sexism is designed, transphobia is designed. All this injustice is designed-

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… and can be undesigned. Social equality can be designed. People treating each other humanely can be designed as well, but that there’s this, I don’t know, increasingly, and maybe this is just the voices I’m listening to, but increasingly I’m seeing design and discourse becoming more human and less technical.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I’m definitely starting to see that as well. I mean, I look at what I did for… I mean, I’m trying not to keep bringing it back to me, but I’m seeing it with things like, where are the Black designers? Which was kind of an offshoot of a talk I did in 2015. Mitzi Okou ended up doing a conference around it for two years starting in 2020. Now, it’s sort of grown out to be its own thing. They’re partnering with agencies and stuff, so I’m starting to see the byproducts and the effects of the work, and that to me is how I measure the success of what I’m doing or the impact that I’m having is that it’s reverberating out into the industry in other ways.

If I do something and it doesn’t go well, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the idea was bad. Maybe it was just the execution or the format or the timing, like those… Again, with the way that the modern web is and everything being geared around algorithms and numbers and such, just because something isn’t seen doesn’t mean that it’s not in some ways a success.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What keeps you motivated and inspired to keep going?

David Dylan Thomas:
A couple things. I mean, people mostly. I have a wonderful wife, a wonderful son, I have wonderful friends, and just seeing them thrive or meet challenges helps. I think what also helps, frankly, is once you study things like cognitive bias in the human mind, you start to get a really great respect for uncertainty. Uncertainty can be scary, but it can also be invigorating, and so one thing that makes me hopeful about the future is that I am terrible at predicting the future and that, in fact, everyone is terrible at predicting the future. That’s just something we know. We’ve looked. People suck at it. I used to fancy myself a futurist until 2020, and then it was like, “Oh, it was adorable how much I think I could predict about the future.”

Now, I’m like, “Oh, something happens, Ron DeSantis will do some ignorant shit in Florida,” and I’ll be like, “Oh my God, we’re all doomed.” I’ll feel my feelings, but then I’ll remember, “Oh, right, I have no fucking clue what’s going to happen.” I don’t. I really don’t, for better or worse. I cannot accurately predict the dystopia and I cannot accurately predict a utopia. All I can do is what I can do, and what I can do is I can go around and get people fired up about inclusive design, get people fired up about treating each other like humans. That’s something I can do. I can go make my art, make my movies that I feel are going to have an impact and express these things and that might even bring me some healing. I can treat my family well. I can support my friends. Those are the things I can do. What I can’t do is predict the future, and that means I have just as much right to hope as I do to despair. I have equal access to both of those things because neither of them are accurate.

Maurice Cherry:
What advice would you give to someone out there that they’re hearing your story, they’re hearing about your work, and they sort of want to try to go into that direction? Not necessarily following your footsteps, but they want to be a more active designer as it relates to the issues and the things that you’re talking about. What advice would you give them?

David Dylan Thomas:
I would give them the advice that I give at the end of my newest talk, which is say sit down with a piece of paper and write down what you believe in at the level of like for me, it’s compassion, creativity, curiosity, connection, open-mindedness, spirituality. I just write these things down. Literally, I have them in a Trello, like straight up they’re in a Trello. Then, I look at them from time to time pretty regularly, actually, and I remind myself what I believe in. When I have to make a decision, like a hard decision, I look at that and I say, “Well, which course of action is more compassionate? Which course of action favors creativity?”

It’s not always an even mix. Sometimes it’ll be like, “Okay, well, this decision would be more compassionate, but less creative or whatever.” I have to… It gives me a framework for approaching the world and it reminds me that it isn’t all chaos, that there are things I can control because when you sit down to write those values, that’s you. You get to decide what you believe in. You may not get to decide how much you get paid, you may not get to decide how other people treat you, but you get to decide what you believe in and that the degree to which you want to strive for those things. Honestly, everything else I’ve done aside from the just chaos of it all that I couldn’t control began from those things. I would say that’s the best first step.

Then, after that, I mean, if you want to know what I did, what I did was I doubled down as much as I could on the things I was passionate about to the degree that I could and I chipped away. I basically reached a point where rather than think about my day as, “Here’s my day job and here’s the time I spent doing what I love, and here’s my hobby or whatever, or my passion.” Instead, I broke it down into, “How much of my time am I spending doing what I love?” There were times during my work day I could, in fact, do 5% of that work day was doing something I love. Okay, maybe next year it’s 10%. Maybe next year it’s 15%. I chipped away, chipped away, chipped away until now, I’m at the point where I’d say 90% of my day is spent doing things I love, and then there’s laundry. That’s a 20-year journey, by the way, at minimum, so don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t happen in a week.

That, I’m speaking about that abstractly because I don’t have a path. There is no like, “Oh yeah, Dave, that’s who you follow if you want to become a podcaster/speaker/filmmaker/workshop-giver, I guess author.” That’s the thing, right? No, it’s just a bunch of shit I do and I love it and I’ve worked very hard at it, but it’s like no, there’s no… I didn’t sit down one day and say, “Oh, well, first I’m going to do a podcast, and then that’s going to get me some talks, and then that’s going to get me a book deal.” No, I didn’t know any of that was going to happen. I seized the opportunity when it did happen, but I didn’t know it was going to happen. I just knew I really care a lot about this, so I’m going to start talking about it.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What do you want the next chapter of your story to be?

David Dylan Thomas:
I mean, in terms of impact, it’s like I said, I want people to treat each other better and anything I can do to make that happen, but concretely, I’ve got this movie I’m making. It’s based on a true fact, which is that beneath Washington Square Park in Philadelphia and Urban Park in Philly there are buried the bodies of hundreds of enslaved people. What if they came back one night as zombies, but they only ate white people? Movie is called White Meat. I have finished the screenplay. I did a table read-

Maurice Cherry:
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… I want you to keep going. You completely have gagged me by talking about the zombies and called it White Meat. Oh my God. Continue, continue. Please continue.

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh no, no, so I did a table read in December with professional actors and an audience. It killed, and I’m now putting together a budget, maybe a pitch deck, so I’m moving forward with that. That is one of those if it takes me until my dying day, I’m working on it kind of thing, but I’m hoping it’ll only be like five years, so that’s one piece. When I’m done that, I kind of maybe have another book in me because this new talk, it keeps getting longer. It’s like this actually might be a book or one-man show, so I’m going to keep doing that, and I’m going to keep doing what I do. I’m going to keep going out and giving these talks and these workshops, but yeah, that’s where I see my energies focused over the next few years is really do what I do on the daily, but I really want to make this movie. That’s the number one creative priority for me right now.

Maurice Cherry:
A zombie flick that kills. I like that. Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, about your work and everything? Where can they find that online?

David Dylan Thomas:
The one-stop shopping for me is daviddylanthomas.com. You can buy my book there. You can sign up for my mailing list. You can hire me to speak. All the good stuff is there.

Maurice Cherry:
All right, sounds good. David Dylan Thomas, it has been an honor and a pleasure to have you on the show. I had a feeling that we were going to have a great conversation. We had, I think, a tremendous conversation. I just want to thank you for the work that you’ve done, the work that you’re continuing to do around not just helping us designers, people, et cetera, to uncover our biases, but also find ways to take that knowledge and then put it into action and to service to help make the world a better place. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

David Dylan Thomas:
Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for all the hard work you do with this podcast. Appreciate it.

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