Kevin Tufts

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

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

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

Interview Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin Tufts:
That’s right.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

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

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

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah, definitely. Absolutely.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay, enough pontificating on my part.

Kevin Tufts:
Love it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin Tufts:
Right. Oh, wow.

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

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

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

Kevin Tufts:
Right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin Tufts:
Well summarized.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I was going to say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

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

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

Kevin Tufts:
No.

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

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

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

Kevin Tufts:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
I appreciate it.

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

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit

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

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

Natalie Marie Dunbar

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

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

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

Interview Transcript

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Wow, that’s a lot.

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Innate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Yeah, it does.

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
That like some Black mirror shit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, yeah. I think so.

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice.

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

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. What did your dad play?

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
He played jazz guitar.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
I remember that.

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

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Wow.

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

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Oh, wow.

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

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Wow.

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

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Oh, yeah.

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

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
It was.

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

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Oh, wow.

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

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Nice.

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

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

Natalie Marie Dunbar:
Yeah, thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Rudy Manning

Agencies play a critical role in ensuring that the next generation of creatives reflects the world we live in, and Rudy Manning takes that responsibility very seriously. As the co-founder and chief creative officer of Pastilla Inc., he is dedicated to not only providing services for a diverse range of clients, but also for making opportunities to get more people of color working in the design.

Rudy starts off talking more about Pastilla, and showing the ins and outs of what it takes to operate an agency. He also spoke about growing up in Panama and Germany before coming to the U.S., shared some stories of his early days designing DVD magazines, and how the combination of these experiences brought him to founding his own creative agency. Rudy also talked about teaching the next generation of designers at ArtCenter, being board president at Art Division, and gave some great advice for anyone looking to start their own agency one day. Rudy’s passion for all things design and his drive to help uplift others truly makes him a design leader worth following!

Interview Transcript

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

Rudy Manning:
My name is Rudy Manning and I am a creative director. My title is the Chief Creative Officer for an agency that I started about 18 years ago or 19 years ago now, called Pastilla based out of Pasadena or Los Angeles, California.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow, that’s pretty good. So you’re coming up on 20 years of that.

Rudy Manning:
Yeah, yeah, I know. We’re getting excited. We put a big event together for everybody who’s been a part of this journey. So yeah, it’s a big milestone.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It feels like the milestones sneak up on you. You’re so busy sometimes in the work and doing it that you look up and you’re like, “Wait a minute, I’ve been doing this for 20 years?”

Rudy Manning:
Yeah, I’m telling you, it goes by… When you’re in it, sometimes it feels like it’s treading along, but then you look back and you’re like, wow, awesome. Yeah. Super grateful to still be in business and have it continue to thrive. So super excited.

Maurice Cherry:
How has 2023 been going so far?

Rudy Manning:
Really, really good. There was a lot of things shifted in the agency about five years ago. I merged with another agency that was one of our partners. They were doing a lot of development for us and probably for most of the time at the agency, up to that point, they were the main development partner for anything we did that was digital base. We decided after a long relationship to just come together, it just made sense. And that really shifted the trajectory of the agency the past five years. We’ve matured, we’ve grown substantially in that time. Really, really just have a little bit more of a focus.

2023 is, I think, really excited because, although a lot of things in the economy are uncertain, I feel like we’ve done some pretty smart things that have kept us afloat and kept us strong. Definitely the kind of work that we do in those years of the pandemic really ended up helping out for us because we’re a creative branding agency, really branding led, but we do a lot of digital products. So obviously there was a lot of investment in things digital. So that really helped out and now we’re positioned for a very steady growth of 2023. So, so far so good.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, were there any big goals that you wanted to accomplish this year?

Rudy Manning:
Well, last year one of the big goals we had was growth. I’m going to go a little bit into agency talk. This might go a little bit deep, but I think if somebody’s out there listening and has an agency, I think this is really important. Every year is different. Sometimes it’s like revenue, sometimes it’s profit, sometimes it might be people. There’s the goal, growing. And last year it was a lot about refining the team, making sure that the people who we had were working well together. Not only just processes, but the personalities and the right roles and the right balance of folks that really can help continue to lead and build the company and service our clients.

So that was a really huge goal and we owe huge testament to a lot of people in our agency, but definitely our HR team and we really refined a team. At the end we started off the year now knowing that the staff that we have is solid, they’re working together, a really well oiled machine and I feel like we’ve achieved that last year and this year now it’s becoming about really working. I’m calling the title for this year, nurture the details, which is about going a little deeper into the relationships that we have with our clients and not just servicing them, but really understanding their needs from a full 360 to be able to deliver as much value as we can. Not necessarily growth from growing clients, but growing the clients that we have currently.

So that’s really what I’m focused on for this year, and so far so good. We’ve already in the first two months have been able to do that pretty well. So I’m looking to continue to foster that in the team. And from the creative, the same thing. Being able to push the creative further and further, be able to deliver the best at every single thing that the client sees and making sure that they continue to stay with us, continue to come back and continue to see us as a strong partner to be able to service them in other things that maybe they didn’t even think we can help them with.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, let’s jump more into talking about Pastilla. You’re the co-founder and chief creative officer. You’ve already given a little bit of background about the team and the services and stuff. What really sets Pastilla apart from other agencies?

Rudy Manning:
It’s funny, when I was in school, in design school, I graduated and a lot of people during that time were like, “Oh, I’m going to jump into web. I’m going to work in motion. I’m going to work in print.” But really at that time, you had to know a little bit of everything, but I really liked having to cross-discipline position and I was working everything from packaging to environmental to doing film titles, commercials, apps, even back in 2003, 2004. I’ve always been in this cross sector of creative where it didn’t matter what discipline it was.

Now, that’s been really fun. A really, really exciting 20 years. I’ve learned a lot. It wasn’t easy because you do have to, to continue to sell, there is a certain pattern and you want agencies or you want clients to have that one thing that they think about you. And when you’re working and building the agency, it’s really tough to figure that out because you’re just taking things as it comes. And especially if I’m the kind of person that’s excited about a lot of different things, it’s been tough. It was really tough, I would say the first 12, 13 years. We were doing motion one year and the next year we’re doing the launch campaign for Microsoft Surface Tablet in 2012 or ’13. So very, very different projects, but exciting nonetheless. But made it difficult because when you tell the story of who your agency is, you really want to have the repeat factor. Even if it’s a different story and positioning, you do want to have this focus. So that was tough.

Around that time, 2013, I decided what we really do well and what I really like to do the most out of everything we did was branding and really looking at every client that came to us from a branding perspective, whether it was a brand new client where it’s a brand new company where you’re doing strategy, naming, identity system, and then executing that, which makes sense because we had that full service. That was something that finally, I would say at that time, we were able to start really honing down who we are as a branding agency. But at the same time, what made it interesting is we also had a deep understanding of how to put that company or that brand in action. So how it applies in digital, how it applies in motion, how it applies in print, and being able to do the full picture after we do the identity system.

It took a long time to do that and to get to that point, but I feel like that was one huge defining point at refining who we are, that made us stand out, at least let’s say in 2013 to 2016 or so. Then, I would say around that time, 2016, I started feeling like I wanted to do work that mattered a little bit more. Not that any of the work that we did didn’t matter, but something was in me that felt like I want to be able to be a part of the communication and deliver creative to projects and initiatives that had some kind of social impact through some different situations.

I ended up learning a little bit about the government work and how to approach it. It took a very long time, but I really got interested in being able to service the same kind of level of high end creative, the same kind of level of thinking and focus that we give to the private sector clients, but give it to more civic, public or nonprofit clients. And I would say it was specifically public sector. So we won one project, for the city of Pasadena we did a anti-tobacco campaign. That went really, really well and that’s when I got the bug of like, “Wow, I really like this idea of designing for the people directly, designing for communities.”

And now looking at eight years later or so, just last year rebranded… Well, this year, we actually just finished rebranding a city, the identity, the strategy and we’re going to continue to serve them. It was a really amazing experience to be able to put all that we’ve learned this first 18 years into branding a city. One of the reasons they picked us was because we weren’t a typical public sector type of agency. They said it right in the first town hall that they had. They chose us because we were not the typical public agency that spoke government and so forth. They felt like we were a little bit more on the ground and had a fresh perspective. We commend them for that as well because I know that often we lose because there’s other agencies that know how to speak that.

So I would say we have this well-rounded full service agency that’s branding focused, most of our clients come through us for that. And that we’re civic minded, civic social impact minded. We do things in sustainability and so forth. And sometimes some private sector clients come to us because of that. We also have that passion for doing work that matters and that directly affects people and communities.

Maurice Cherry:
I would have to imagine that city branding project was a lot of fun. When you think about the scope of what that entails, it’s not just, “Oh, we’re going to make a logo and a style guide.” There’s so much that has to go into that level of branding because a city is more than just a company, it’s more than just a brand. It’s not a society but I say that to say that the scope of something like that is immense.

Rudy Manning:
Yeah, absolutely. We underestimated some parts of it. The discovery and the research that we had to do, especially because we’re not based in the city. It was the city of Corona and we’re maybe about an hour away from them. One of the comments in the beginning when they first introduced us to the city council was like, “Oh, why didn’t you guys go with a company that was in the city of Corona, or from the city?” We had to invest a lot of time into proving that an outsider, an agency that comes can have a fresh perspective, can do just as good if not a better job than somebody who’s really close to the city.

So the discovery and the strategy was a lot of work, a lot of workshops, a lot of meetings, a lot of popups that we had to do to get engagement and really validate the messaging and the final outcome of the identity.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s tough to get right, because so many people that are in a city, it’s not just business, it’s not just commerce, it’s everyday citizens. It’s so so hard to get right. I guess the reason I’m speaking about this so passionately is because I’m in Atlanta and we were known for a spectacularly bad city branding campaign back in the early to mid 2000s. I happened to be working in the city, working in tourism. So I got to see it unfold from the inside about how bad it was. But yeah, we were known for a spectacularly bad branding campaign called Brand Atlanta. I was working in the city in tourism at the time, and just seeing it unfold from the inside was horrible because you could tell that the people that were putting this together, and I think they got a local agency to do it, but what can happen, and I think you probably know this too, is that the client can get so held up in what their vision of it should be, that it’s hard for the agency to do the necessary research and work that needs to happen in order to really provide good work.

And so basically we just had all these suits that were in our tourism board. There were like, “Atlanta is this,” and as someone who… I’m not from Atlanta, but I’ve lived in Atlanta, I’m from the South. I was like, “Atlanta is so much more than these things that you think it is.” They thought Atlanta was the zoo and the baseball team and all the very family friendly, squeaky clean sort of stuff. But I’m like, “Atlanta is also hip hop and strip clubs, it’s all of that. And you’re trying to sanitize this vision of what the city is, because at the time they were trying to get more conferences to come to the city, which was the main point of them doing the rebrand is to make the city seem more appealing.

They did it. They rolled it out. We had, I think it happened at a Falcons game where they did the whole Brand Atlanta rollout. They had the symphony and they wrote this song. They had this song that was written with T.I. and Usher and it was all horrible. People hated it. It was so bad. It was so bad. There are very little, if any traces of it still around in the city because they quickly covered it up after it went out. So city branding is tough. It’s so tough to get right.

Rudy Manning:
That would be our worst nightmare. And actually, there’s one project that we had pitched a couple years ago. I can’t name the university, but we came in very close to winning it. We ended up losing it to another company who had a lot of experience in higher ed. One of the main things I pitched that got us very close is I said, “This is not a logo identity we’re doing. We’re really doing a political campaign in a sense. We have to approach everything we do to get people, the students, the instructors, to believe in the direction before we even go in that direction. So we have to really understand what it is that the students and the faculty need and what do they believe to then be able to communicate an identity system.”

But what happened is at some point it seemed like they jumped the gun. We didn’t get it. Three years later, they end up reaching back to us saying, “This was a horrible experience what happened to us, everybody hated the logo. There was political nightmare, PR nightmare, communication nightmare in the school.” And obviously it was too late at that point, but they’re like, “Definitely we should have gone by you.” There’s literally an email saying, “We regret going with this other agency. We should have gone by you because the direction that you were pitching was exactly what we needed.”

One of the ideas was the students at the school, the graphic design students, they need to be a part of this identity for the school. They need to have their hands in it in some kind of way. All of that just really gets people to feel that this came from within. It has to feel like that with anything like that. If not, it’s really, really hard. So I don’t know. It’s crazy.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Rudy Manning:
[inaudible 00:18:34]

Maurice Cherry:
When new projects come in with you sitting at the head of the company, do you get to work hands-on with them?

Rudy Manning:
I do. We’re about 35 or so people with some contractors definitely goes up to maybe even close to 50. The design team, we’re pretty nimble. So I’m the creative director. We have an art director and we have a few graphic designers and UX designers and so forth. But I still am, as the acting creative director, at least maybe for the next couple years, I am potentially looking to bring in a creative director.

So that means that basically I don’t design, but I review. I give critiques. I give from either my art director or my lead designers, senior designers. They will go and do the work themselves and then come back, present to me. I give them feedback, I give my thoughts. They present to me, I give them feedback on how to present, what kinds of things to say. And every now and then I’ll have to present. But seldom, less and less. I think my team’s gotten to the point where they’re pretty good at understanding my vision and so forth.

Sometimes in the beginning I set some parameters, I would say, around the direction of where we should go based off the strategy or whatever it may be. But often they’ll come to me with some ideas and then I’ll take those ideas and give them some feedback on refining them, even if it’s just general higher level concepts.

Maurice Cherry:
So you’re not, like you said, working hands on but you’re still pretty close to the project in that you get to see it unfold, kind of step by step.

Rudy Manning:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I do a lot of other things. My partner now rents most of the operations, but I’m still really responsible for a lot of the business development, the relationship of our clients and overseeing all the accounts, not just from the creative, but managing the entire perspective of the direction of that client.

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

Rudy Manning:
Lot of calls. I think these days, we’ve had an office for probably the first 15 years of our company and just after we merged with Kremsa, is the name of the company that we merged with. Just after that, we decided, you know what? Let’s go remote for a little bit. We were trying to figure out how the two companies were going to come together. We did that for about a year, year and a half. We started looking for an office. Then the pandemic hit. So it was frustrating for me working remote, but I literally learned to adapt. We all have adapted pretty well for it. Sometimes we obviously meet, and I say that because one of the drawbacks now is on a lot of meetings because we have to force those kind of interactions between people. So that means my days are pretty booked up with calls.

I would probably say I spend about at least five to six hours a day on calls. I would say half of it is internal things, whether it be operational meetings or looking at something we’re doing internally to market ourselves or project stuff, account managers presenting to me where we’re at with the client, the margins, what new projects are coming along and so forth. So I do that and then probably 10, 20% of the day might be some creative meeting that I have with the team where they’re presenting some ideas or so forth. But most of it’s operational business meetings. Yeah, I would say that’s basically my whole entire day.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Business development’s important though, because you got to bring them in, you got to bring the client work in.

Rudy Manning:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s always been something I’ve done forever, just naturally, it’s been something that I’ve always just somehow understood. So it’s the thing that probably, from a financial point of view, that’s the biggest value right now that I bring to the company is the business development. Most of the projects come through something of my relationship or some doing of our content or so forth. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Is it tough balancing the creative and the business sides of running an agency?

Rudy Manning:
It is, and it’s getting harder and harder because I talk about how we’re now remote and how many hours I’m on calls, because so much of it is that higher level strategic thinking of the business, the client, operations, who do we need to hire? What’s happening with this hire? Do we need to bring in another person for this? Hey, there’s an issue with this client, this is what we need to do, or here’s some cool things that we can do or new projects, pitches, proposals. All of that really takes up most of my time.

So staying creative is really, really important for me. I try to do that as much as I can. I sort of time box it. So one of the things, we just moved into a new house a year and a half ago, two years ago. So I’ve had a lot of fun just doing interior design and designing the space and just remodeling the house and not just hands on, but the actual design part of it. So I’ve had a lot of fun doing that and bringing my design into that. It’s been something I’ve been enjoying. At least right now, that’s definitely a way I’m getting my creative output. Also teaching is really great as well. Hearing students work and giving feedback at that level as well, that also feeds me tremendously.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I want to talk more about your teaching later, but before we get to that, I want to learn more about you. I want to learn about how you got to where you are now, where you’re running an agency and you’ve got it staffed with all these designers and things like that. So tell me about where you grew up. Are you originally from California?

Rudy Manning:
No, actually I’m Panameno. I was born in Panama. Yeah, I came here. We immigrated with my parents here when I was seven or eight years old. We came here. My dad joined the Army. He thought this is probably the best way for us to make a living for him and provide for us. Immediately after that, I would say about a year after we moved here, he got shipped to Germany. So I was basically, that’s where I learned English was in Germany.

Maurice Cherry:
Interesting.

Rudy Manning:
I only spoke Spanish, so I was there for about almost four years, I think. Then we came back to United States when I was 11. We were basically in Los Angeles, and then we moved to Rialto. So basically from 11, 12 up, I’ve been in Southern California area. I went to high school in Redlands. After my mom and dad divorced, my mom moved towards that area and that’s where actually I ended up meeting somebody who gave me a little bit of a hint about me wanting to maybe study graphic design at the high school. So I went to Redlands High School and then from there I graduated, went to Cal Poly Pomona for a couple years, and then ended up transferring to ArtCenter, which is what brought me to Pasadena.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, back before you went to Cal Poly Pomona and everything, as you were traveling between these different countries as a kid and then eventually settling in California, did you always have an interest in design and creativity and stuff like that?

Rudy Manning:
I think it was mainly just drawing. I loved to draw since I was a little kid. My brother as well. We both used to just draw together, and he’s a graphic designer too. My dad studied architecture for a little bit in Panama, but he’s always drawn and painted his whole life. We have a pretty artistic family. So my dad, since we were little, always was drawing and we’d copy his drawings and he’d go one by one and then we’d follow what he was doing. We’d do that all the time, in front of the TV. We’d sit down and he’d be talking, he’d be showing us what to do. Did that for many years and my mom, a little bit after, my mom and dad divorced, my mom started a business. So then got to see that part of it. She’s been really successful at it.

So got to see the benefits of owning your own company and your own business and what kind of freedom that gives you, and the satisfaction and seeing her in it, that drove that part of it as well. So I think those two things combined is what got me the framework of thinking of building an agency.

I would say, I remember I stopped drawing at 11 or 12 years old. I don’t know why.I think I just ended up playing baseball. My focus was different and I was just playing baseball all the time. And then one day, I don’t know why, I just remember, I was 14 and I was just like, “You know what? Let me draw a baseball player.” That’s what I loved. And I remember I drew Orel Hershiser. I had it in my art class and I took it to school. I remember that feeling of everybody like, “Oh my gosh, you drew this? How did you…” That reaction, you kind of had a similar background as an artist, you’re like, man, there’s this feedback that you get that’s a little bit of this high. I’ll never forget that. So I just kept on drawing and then that went to painting, and then I was just taking art and painting classes. And eventually that took over my passion for baseball, and that’s all I wanted to do, was draw on paint sports figures.

I wanted to be like Leroy Neiman, who’s a very famous sports fine artist painter. And then until I was in one of my art classes, I think I was a junior or something, it was a student in there who was a really good artist who was going to graduate. And I asked him, “Hey, what are you going to do after school?” And he’s like, “Oh, I’m going to go to PCC, Pasadena City College, and then I’m going to transfer to ArtCenter and study graphic design.” I’m like, “Oh, what’s that?” And he’s like, “It’s like doing things for MTV.” And I remember going, “Dang.” That was the days of MTV, MTV, the real MTV. And I was like, “That is amazing. Graphics for MTV.” I didn’t even know the word graphics actually. I just thought art for TV that people could see. So I remember that, and that always stuck with me.

So when I graduated, I was just looking for a school that had graphic design, which wasn’t that many. And Cal Poly ended up being one of those schools. So that’s where I dove into graphic design for the first time there.

Maurice Cherry:
How was your time at Cal Poly Pomona?

Rudy Manning:
It was interesting because I think in high school I was pretty kept in. I didn’t do a lot of stuff. I feel like when I got to Cal Poly, I was in the dorms and I just got this freedom of like, “Oh my gosh, I’m on myself.” So I went down that, it was a lot of fun, but it was like I probably didn’t know what to do with all of that energy. So one thing is I would say my focus wasn’t there as it should be those first couple years. I want to say, despite that, I struggled a bit with graphic design there. For whatever reason, I didn’t make the connection.

There was a lettering class I remember. The lettering class that we had, it was all about craftsmanship. You had to draw, let’s say the letter E with Prisma color, and it was like a five-inch height type and you have to draw it so it literally looks like it’s printed. It was very difficult that class for me, not because I couldn’t do it, I could do it, but I didn’t have the patience. I wanted to design. I wanted to draw. I remember the instructor saying, “If you get a C or under in this class, I highly suggest you don’t continue in graphic design, ’cause graphic design is really tough.” And I remember as, not to say fine artist, tough as well, but in terms of, I think what he was saying is, “You really have to love this to really continue in this direction.” It was one of the first classes in graphic design you were suppose to take.

So towards the whole class, I was just like, I’m struggling. I think I’m going to get a C. The final project was you get to draw something and use letter form and typography and visuals together. So I got to do this book cover. I remember I did a Malcolm X book cover and you put it up to class, the final, and everybody was just looking at this project, looking at my project, and the teacher was like, “Who did this?” It was the first time out of the whole entire term that I felt any kind of positivity in that class. All the time, it was just like… I remember going, “What’s happening?” And so I walked out of class and the instructor, said, “Hey, I know I said you shouldn’t be in graphic design, or if you get a C or lower, I think you’re going to get a C.” I’m like, “Yeah, I know.” And he’s like, “Well, I think you should stay in graphic design though.” So I was like, “Oh, huh, okay.” I walked away, still struggled, still was a tough time in the other classes.

Somebody had told me, “Hey, you got to take a class at ArtCenter. You’d be really good at it.” I’m like, “I don’t know what you see, because I’m struggling in every graphic design.” I did great in the painting classes. Those are the ones I really loved. So I took a night class. She ended up just convincing me, and I was nervous because I thought, man, back then I thought ArtCenter’s this sort of mecca. I took a night class, like an extension class while I was still at Cal Poly.

The first day you go and you present your ideas for a logo. I was just drawing and sketching and concepting stuff, put it up. I knew the moment the teacher started talking, the first, not even to my project, another student, I thought this, I’m in love. I literally felt like this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. And I just never took another class at Cal Poly. Again, Cal Poly, this was early on in Cal Poly for their graphic design. So they really were working things and some amazing designers came out of this. So that was just me at that time. But I just fell in love with graphic design at ArtCenter. I eventually finished my foundation at Cal Poly. Then I got a full scholarship actually after a couple classes I took at ArtCenter. I built my portfolio, some from Cal Poly, some from the ArtCenter, and I got a full scholarship, a James Irvine scholarship.

That was it. Kind of changed my life. The only hiccup during that time is a girl that I had been dating ended up getting pregnant. So I ended up having a child pretty early on. So I was starting ArtCenter while learning to be a father at the same time. So that’s another story.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Rudy Manning:
Definitely all came all at once, but definitely matured me and I think eventually was all for the good, of course.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I’ve heard from a lot of folks on this show that sometimes when they go into school having a lot of this artistic ability and love, sometimes the school can almost effectively snuff it out of them through the professors or the courses or anything like that. So it’s good that you still had that spark and decided to continue it by going somewhere else that was probably more focused in the direction that you needed to go, which of course now, based on where you’re at right now, that was a good direction to take.

Rudy Manning:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It’s crazy. You never know. Those little moments. I remember thinking like, “Oh gosh, the classes are at night and this and that.” But yeah, I loved those classes. I wanted to spend all my time in the ArtCenter at night classes then. So, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Now you’ve graduated, you’re out there as a working designer. What was your early career before you started Pastilla?

Rudy Manning:
As I mentioned during school, I definitely like to get my hands in everything that was design. I think it’s one of the reasons I mentioned earlier, I like even just interior design. I have a passion for anything that is where you’re taking these elements of your artistic being and putting into some physical space or visual space or designing a city. So I definitely can see how all those things combining works together. And I did the same thing at school. And so when I graduated, I wanted to work somewhere that didn’t want to push me into one direction. I didn’t want to work in an agency that only had me do print, only doing web, or only doing motion. So the best place was a company then called… I had a couple different companies, but I think towards the end it was called Quick Band Networks or DVD Mags, which was you basically are designing a DVD magazine is what they call it.

So every month you would get a subscription of a DVD. One of them was short films. You get one DVD of short films, another one was music. So you get to have these music videos and all this content on these DVDs. I got to design basically the editorial, but the interactive part. So I got to do the identity of each of the magazines. I got to do the interactive part of the DVD. I got to do the animation of the DVD. I got to do the ads. So that to me was perfect. I got to get my hands in all of that. That’s really where I started for the first couple of years. I started freelancing a little bit after that. And that took me to Nokia for about four years. I worked there really as a freelancer.

I had a feeling at that time that at some point I’m going to start my own company just because I really enjoyed working with my own clients. So in between that, I took freelance projects at night and weekends, and I really enjoyed having full control of like, I’m presenting to the client, I’m giving them my vision, and I’m able to directly connect with them to be able to persuade them of the concept that I think is right. Rather than, here’s a bunch of ideas, now you have somebody else pitching it for you. So I really love that. So I thought, I’m going to start my own studio. But I needed to build up enough momentum as a freelancer.

So I really freelanced for about six years. Then when I was at Nokia, I said it was a time of my life, I got divorced in my late 20s and I thought might be a good time for me to do this now for a lot of different reasons. So I told Nokia, “I’m going to start my own company. If you guys would like to hire more of me, I’d be happy to take the work and continue as my own company.” And so Nokia was my first client. So I’m super thankful for that. For the first couple years, a lot of the work we did was Nokia. And so that was the first momentum of Pastilla, which was then called Pastilla Studio.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s amazing. You must have made some really great relationships at Nokia in order for them to entrust you with that. Say, I’m going to go out on my own. And they’re like, “Okay, great. We’ll still toss some work your way.”

Rudy Manning:
Yeah, definitely. I worked really hard for them, was really great people, a lot of them, some of them I knew from ArtCenter. I got to meet people from all over the world there and really was a time where technology was in a bit of transition. Imagine that was like 2000, a couple years before that. The iPhone definitely hadn’t come out. But before that, Google had just come out a couple years before that. It’s really early on. So I think I came with that diverse background of motion, interactive and print, and being able to cross-discipline. I think that really, the design director, Gerardo, liked that so I was able to really use my diverse background and experiences to Nokia and help the team out for those four years. So yeah, we did some great work.

Maurice Cherry:
Honestly, coming with those skills at a time when as soon as you said DVD magazines, I was like, oh, I already know when this happened. This is turn of the century or turn the millennium, whatever, like ’99, 2000. I remember those DVD magazines vividly. But yeah, coming with all those skills at a time when technology and design and the web were growing at this rapid pace, the stuff that you were doing didn’t really even exist 10 years ago. The advent of the personal computer and the internet becoming something that was no longer bound to DVDs or CDs that you get in the mail. The fact that things were growing at this rapid pace and you’re coming in with all these skills, especially at a time when companies are trying to decide, “How do I become a part of this new thing? How do I have a website? How do I take orders online or do all this stuff?” And you show up to the scene well-equipped like, “Hey, I’ve got the skills if you got the work.” Sounds good.

Rudy Manning:
Yep, exactly. Exactly, exactly. It was a really fun time.

Maurice Cherry:
And now while you were building Pastilla, it sounds like there were other ventures that you were doing as well, right? You did some work with an app, you founded a film company, I guess. Tell me about those other ventures.

Rudy Manning:
Obviously from let’s say 2004, those first 10 years were extremely busy for me. Continues to be anytime you’re a business owner. But those first 10 years I was basically raising my kids. I have a boy and a girl from my first marriage. And so I was raising the kids while starting this company essentially. We have 50-50 custody. So they got to share that experience. So those first 10 years was extremely busy. I would say around 2014 maybe, 2013, a friend came to me about an idea that he had for a startup, and he wanted me to look at it and see if I was interested in being his partner. He presented to me, did this whole pitch. And basically what it was is, to be honest, it’s not that different than what Instagram Reels is, what TikTok is now. The only company that was doing something sort of similar was musically that ended up becoming TikTok back then.

But even then it was very different, the UX. So basically at the end, what it was is you select video clips from your phone and it strings a video edited to music together. The thing that it did a little different was it took the music patterns and did the edit based on the pattern of the music, the rhythm, the beats per minute. There were 5 second ones, 15, 20, 30 I think it was. And so we built the app, we started it, we got some funding.

I learned a lot. Number one, I was able to use all of the tools and experience that I have learned, not just from owning an agency, but also working with clients as well. So it was really great. But it was tough. It was tough because it was at a time where we saw Instagram really starting to, I hate to say it, but just copy what everybody else was doing, so see what’s happening. And so like, “Oh, I like discovery. I like how Snapchat’s doing. Okay. Yeah. All right, let’s do this.” And then they bought the music catalog of Universal then.

And that’s where, okay, this is going to be really tough to… Even though the technology was different and interesting, it was not going to be able to compete because it had to be a platform. So it was more like a tool and a feature. So after I would say couple years, we got some awards and things out of it and definitely some really good recognition. But we decided to close that. Around that time, I got married in 2014, so we’ve been married about nine years. And my wife is actually a filmmaker. She has always wanted to be a director. And during that time, she was building her career. So she started making brand films. She’s an amazing storyteller. It was perfect because obviously I had done motion, I had been part of doing BFX for films and so forth.

So we started… It’s her thing. This is what she runs to this day now. It’s been maybe five years, but we took some of the experience that I had in motion and put it into what now it’s actually called Fe Films, Fe Brand Films or Fe Films. So she does brand films, she does motion graphics work, but really the thrust is she’s looking to have it be a full-fledged feature film company. So she’s doing some short films and some narrative work on that. She’s got a couple scripts that have been optioned and she’s been working with. So that’s, when you saw Fe Brand Films, that’s what it is. All of the motion parts that were Pastilla or most of it got diverted into Fe Films now.

Maurice Cherry:
And now also you’re board president of Art Division. Can you tell me a bit about that?

Rudy Manning:
Yeah. About two, three years ago, let me back up a little bit from that because, say about 10 years ago I had this thought and I had mentioned to my wife, “Wow, our studios are empty on Saturdays and Sundays. Wouldn’t be amazing to go out and bus students from the different areas in Los Angeles and different groups and be able to teach kids graphic design?” I’ve always had a passion for kids. And at that point I had just started teaching as well. So I thought, yeah, this could be really interesting to do. And so I had it in the back of my head, but with everything else, this was really busy and I never really was able to put the gas on that.

And then about two, three years ago, somebody recommended me, introduced me to Art Division, which was a school in Rampart District of Los Angeles that was teaching fine arts, visual arts to kids specifically in that area, primarily of Latino immigrants. Me speaking Spanish, being Latino, I felt like, I wanted to get to know a little bit more about the school. So went in, heard a little bit about it. Definitely saw some potential for me from my background coming from teaching at ArtCenter. Also, some of the things I have been thinking about in the past and learning from what they’re doing, seeing if that could be something I can learn from and be a part of something that was really giving kids who have graduated high school, have amazing art talent, be able to give them the ability for another chance to develop a career in arts. And then me maybe be a part of introducing design to their curriculum.

So after six months of being on the board, I was selected as the board president. And for the past year and a half, that’s been my role. What I’ve been doing is slowly trying to find ways to include graphic design into the curriculum. And we hope, hopefully by this fall, we have at least a couple classes that we start to teach. We’re developing that right now. We’ve done some graphic design workshops where kids have come in to hear a little bit about who I am. I’m also looking to introduce some of the designers from Pastilla also potentially to even go there and do some teaching and so forth and be able to give back to these kids. Because some of them, they’re artists, they have a passion for art and design, but who knows? That art background could end up becoming a design passion and graphic design passion and can end up having a career. It’s really tough and really expensive to go to school these days, especially art school. So giving them some of these opportunities I think could be really interesting. So I’m looking forward to how this develops.

Maurice Cherry:
Now along with this community work, which by the way sounds amazing. I would love to have been a part of a program like that when I was a kid. But you’re also an instructor at ArtCenter College of Design where you went to college. You’ve taught there now for almost nine years. Tell me a bit about what you teach.

Rudy Manning:
Yeah. I started teaching in the product design department, which is industrial design, we call industrial design, product design at ArtCenter. I was brought in to teach graphic design to the product design students essentially. And then that turned into me teaching the students, there was a class that helped the product design students or industrial design students how to brand themselves as they get ready to graduate, how do they position who they are and so forth. Those first classes, I would say that first year, year and a half, which for me to just get my feet wet and see do I like teaching period, how can I fit into my schedule? Does it work for me? And what are we getting out of it myself personally? And also am I being able to deliver and be good at it?

I loved it. I really, really liked doing it. I got as much out of the students as they get as much out of me. It’s definitely a very symbiotic relationship and I think that really helps my perspective in how I teach. And so I taught in that department and immediately obviously, I wanted to teach in the graphic design department. I was a natural inkling. It’s kind of tough to jump into teaching, especially ArtCenter because you have some of the top designers in the world and artists in the world teaching there and everybody wants to teach there. So I ended up getting asked to teach a branding class. They knew the work and stuff that I did. So I started teaching what now, the bulk of those years, up until maybe last year, I was teaching what was called Transmedia, which is basically a branding class that looks at what I mentioned, the cross sector of how branding and identity systems get implemented into and go into action when it comes to digital, motion, space, environmental.

So that was my class and I absolutely loved teaching, it was called Communication Design Five, Branding for Trans Media, I think. I did that for about six, seven years. I took a pause on that class. I was teaching two classes a week while I was still running the agency, still with this transition of the two new companies. Well, last summer I took a pause for two terms because teaching remotely and being remote as an agency was taking a toll on me. The classes at ArtCenter are about five hours. So if I was teaching two classes, that’s two days that I’m on class for five hours on screen. And then as I mentioned, my work is screen time stuff. So I ended up feeling after six, seven years, I don’t know if I have enough bandwidth.

Things started opening up obviously in the fall, but I started now with Art Division and my focus on there, I’m started to rethink a little bit of my long-term strategy in teaching and am I going to continue teaching at ArtCenter? So currently, I’m still teaching now. I’m back to teaching in the masters program, a branding futures class, which is I’m teaching with another instructor about strategies of future casting, how brands could future cast either their audience, either the business models, any kind of future strategic thinking of a brand. So I’m teaching that class now and I’m going to be teaching one more during the summer. But I think that after that I’ll be taking a pause for a while to do some art work and thinking with Art Division and put my time into that.

Maurice Cherry:
Look, you got to fill up your own cup first. It sounds like with everything you’re doing with Pastilla of course, and then also with teaching, you can get depleted very quickly.

Rudy Manning:
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. It all kind of works together in a way. So it is definitely a lot to juggle, but it all works for the greater good, really, ultimately also of Pastilla because when I do things for Art Division, not only am I helping feed ourselves, but we also tell that story of how we’re involved in Art Division when we work with some of our other clients. So that’s really a important part, shows that our agency isn’t just working directly with clients that have social impact, but we are actually volunteering our time as well.

And then for ArtCenter, the same thing. I’ve learned so much from teaching, communicating your thoughts of visuals. I’m sure you know this, it’s very, very underestimated how difficult it is to be able to say, communicate in words what something should be visually. I don’t think we think too much about that, but it’s extremely hard and it’s definitely an art to that. I learned a lot of that through teaching and different personalities of creatives and designers and so forth that I think has also helped Pastilla. And also just teaching at ArtCenter as my brand, my personal brand has definitely just validates the agency, validates me and so forth. So it all works together in my head for a bigger vision.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, no, it makes sense. It all feeds into each other. I don’t mean this in a bad way, but the work you’re doing teaching, of course, that informs how you talk to clients or how you present the business to clients. But then you also say, “We’re not just an agency, we also give back to the community.” And so that is where Art Division comes in, where you’re saying, “I’m doing this to help out students that are interested in design or kids that are interested in design.” So it does all feed into each other, but I think what it does overall is it shows just how passionate you are about design, just outside of a client-vendor relationship. This is your lifeblood. You live and breathe this stuff.

Rudy Manning:
Exactly. Love that. That’s exactly it. Yep.

Maurice Cherry:
What do your students teach you?

Rudy Manning:
Patience. I think, number one, it absolutely keeps me on the cusp of the, I hate to say design trends, but how culture is affecting design. How each generation takes what we’ve done and reinvents it, takes what they see in their environment and mixes it up to have this new creative aesthetic and how that continues to evolve. Absolutely, I always want to make sure that I am not blinded by my past or my history of what I always thought the design aesthetic was. I always want to feel like I’m at the edge of what’s happening, if not what’s also how things are changing and looking even ahead of that. So the students definitely keep me on my toes when it comes to that.

Second is understanding different design, creative mindsets or personalities. Different students take feedback completely different. And how you have to be very agile and nimble in how you communicate things. It could be how direct you are. It could be how open you are about a direction. Some students are really great at giving, they need very prescriptive directions on something and they need to develop that. They need to know things aren’t going to be so prescriptive. You need to connect the dots yourself, but you still have to be somewhat prescriptive. And then other students, if you’re too prescriptive, they literally will get stuck and confused because they don’t really understand exactly what you’re saying. And there’s everything in between.

So being able to read, pick up on how a student is reading you quickly, that’s really important, and being able to adjust your communication style. And that’s the same for our design team in-house and also clients as well. Communicating to clients, like you mentioned, we’re all creative to some point and when we’re communicating visuals, I take those little tools that I’ve learned in communicating to the students and I borrow those things to communicate to clients as well when I need to.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you are at a really unique vantage point, I feel. One, you’re an agency owner with Pastilla, you’re also an instructor, so you’re teaching the next generation of designers. How has being a design instructor informed how you approach Pastilla?

Rudy Manning:
It’s funny because we ended up changing the name of Pastilla from Pastilla Studio and in 2012 to Pasta Institute. It was supposed to be this sort of cheeky way to institutionalize something that isn’t really institutional and formalize it when it really isn’t formal. It was a very small studio then still. But there was something that made it feel like it’s established, but then at the end you’re kind of like, no, they’re a very buttoned down agency. So the one thing is that it was funny because the kind of person that I was and the designers that I would get, was naturally sort of a mentor and people would say, it’s kind of like a school where I saw designers really grow when they came to work at Pastilla and go and do amazing things, even after Pastilla.

And so that teaching part, I think was a part of Pastilla from the beginning, just naturally, I guess, maybe it just came from me or maybe just because I had to. Because I needed help and I needed freelancing and I had different people from different points of view, and that’s just my communication style. So that institute, I remember that now, it’s just Pastilla, obviously. We simplified it, but that part is still there. And for I would say a good eight years, every quarter at least, we had a different intern. I wanted to make sure that the designers that we have respect the interns and part of the work is that they do have to mentor. I’m mentoring as a creative director, the student, and also our design team that’s also working with the mentors is also teaching.

Teaching, it’s absolutely critical to any leadership. You can’t have a leader, not be a good teacher. You have to have somebody that can have that empathy of understanding that how to communicate to do something is an important part of being a leader and that not everybody takes or understands the same words or receives the same kind of communication the same way. And I think that’s an important part of being a good leader. And I felt like that’s an important part of Pastilla. And the creative team, the account team, the management team, and I try to continue to infuse that. Sometimes probably, I would say maybe the designers are like, “Oh my gosh, there’s too much work. I’m teaching and designing.” But I think in the long run, they’re going to see that this is some important tools that they learned.

So in short, before I was teaching at ArtCenter, I think we had that part embedded into our culture, that teaching impact or that element. Then I started teaching, that just got elevated, and then I just literally created with Pastilla, I would just have internship programs. So the students would come from ArtCenter. They’d intern at Pastilla for three months, continue getting taught there.

Maurice Cherry:
Now you mentioned with the education work you’re doing with ArtCenter, that part of what you’re teaching is about future strategic thinking. From your perspective, what do you think agencies can do moving forward to ensure that the future of creatives reflect this world that we’re in right now? Of course we hear a lot about diversity and inclusion. There’s always going to be some new bleeding edge tech, which right now is what AI, Chat GPT, et cetera. How can agencies start to move forward, making sure that this next generation of designers, creators, et cetera, really reflect the world that we’re communicating and creating for?

Rudy Manning:
I think one of the things, along the line of teaching, I feel like at least that was a feeling when I was in school, was that if you don’t come with a absolutely impeccable portfolio, you cannot work at some of these big larger agencies. This was the case. Thankfully, I went to ArtCenter, I had that experience, I had that portfolio at that time. But not everybody gets those opportunities. Not everybody finds those paths. Maybe they might have the opportunity, but they somehow didn’t have that one person that said, “Hey, take a class here,” or whatever. There’s lots of amazing schools in the world, in the country. But I feel that a lot of it starts in looking, when you’re interviewing somebody, agencies and design companies need to look farther deep into who that person is that they’re interviewing, way past their physical, where they’re at, at that moment with their portfolio.

Because for us to start developing or having the agencies and creative agencies, digital agencies, every kind of agency, reflect the real world, the designers that we have, the copywriters, the creative directors, the animators, the programmers reflect the world that we actually live in. We have to know that not everybody is getting the opportunities that everybody who’s working currently in the agency’s got, period. And to do that, we have to take some risk and we have to take initiative. I think the number one thing is to open our eyes to giving opportunities to people who are not at that moment fully polished to be working at that company. And there’s portfolio schools, there’s lots of different ways that somebody can advance themselves, but most of it is about the work. But you can get that experience sometimes working at an agency. If you have just a little bit of the excitement, the passion, the energy, and that natural creative tendency, even without having a finished portfolio, if you’re given the opportunity at an agency, you can develop that portfolio quick.

I know it’s not easy. It is not easy, and it’s expensive because the design teams, everything we do is labor. So things will take longer, the people. But I think in the long run, we have to give people the opportunities to, especially underserved, people of color when they come knocking at our doors as an agency and you see their work, you see where they’re at, not turn them down or away just because their portfolio isn’t fully finished. There is space for them to grow. And those, sadly, a lot of the opportunities that come are because of that network. And I understand, you get portfolios come at you 24-7, but every now and then I’ll get one and I’m like, huh. Their portfolio is not fully fleshed out. And they don’t have the ArtCenter, art school, art design, design portfolio, but there’s something in their personality, something in their CV, something in their work, one project, it could be that can show some kind of interesting perspective that you could look at. And if we’re looking closer, we’re able to maybe find some talent that just hasn’t had the opportunity.

I’ve seen that with Pastilla. One of our top designers that we have, I would say one of the top designers we’ve ever had at Pastilla didn’t go to art school like that. He went to a two-year school, it wasn’t a really fully flushed out program, didn’t have that kind of portfolio at all. We gave him that opportunity and he’s an amazing designer. So I think agencies need to be open to giving more experiences like that. That’s what I hope to do with Art Division is take that with the designers that go there, is find those ones that have that passion, be able to connect them. If the student wants to be connected, connect them to some of these other agencies. Just a simple, “Hey, check out this person’s work. I thought this. I thought this was interesting.” And giving them an opportunity.

Maurice Cherry:
I highly agree with what you’re saying. I was just talking to a colleague of mine, Ricardo Roberts. He has a agency in New York called Bien, B-I-E-N. They do an apprenticeship type program where they bring in designers, maybe they’re junior designers or maybe they don’t have a fully polished portfolio, but they help to give them that experience that they need in order to then get out there and really work, whether that’s with agencies, whether that’s directly with brands in house, more of those types of opportunities need to be available.

I agree with you, as I’ve talked to folks here on the show that have worked in advertising and such, agencies can be pretty stuck in their ways about the type of people that they want and the type of experience that they have to have. They have to have followed almost a particular script in order to just get in the door. This is even at smaller boutique agencies. So it definitely sounds like that whole world needs a bit of a paradigm shift, I think.

Rudy Manning:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I love that. I would love to hear more about his program. I think formalizing something like that is awesome.

Maurice Cherry:
I will connect the two of you after this interview. I will most certainly do that.

Rudy Manning:
Yeah. That’s awesome.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you stay creative and inspired in your work? With everything that you’re doing, I feel like you have a lot of input coming at you.

Rudy Manning:
I’ve always been a pretty curious person and I hope that I continue to be until my last days because I feel like that is the thing that hopefully will keep me up to speed on everything that is design at that moment. I would say design’s going to be completely different the next 30, 40 years. And I hope to know what’s happening and not be like, I would always say when I was in school with some of the older instructors, everything that we were doing was like, “Ah, everything looks the same.” And it’s like now I see some designers say the same thing to people in their early 20s. We have to understand things evolve, things change, and I want to be able to have that understanding. So staying curious and questioning and being, like I mentioned earlier, teaching and having young designers is a really important part of understanding that, how things evolve.

And so that definitely always keeps me fresh. I always have that curiosity of what is new, what is next, definitely keeps me fresh and excited. Right now obviously, everything happening with AI is really, really interesting to me. It’s something that we’ve always known is coming and we’ve seen it coming. And now tools are just more in front of us and the potential to be now in design where we’re going to see a total evolution of, and even fast forward of how we think and how we can be more hyper-focused in the creative and not so much of the doing. How we create is going to change as well. Even how to take simple things like a logo, what does that mean now in AI? Can a logo be so dynamic that it’s absolutely never static? Can a company have a logo where every customer has their own version because it’s that dynamic? Asking these questions I think are going to be super interesting. So always being on top of what’s happening, combining that with my experiences in the past, taking that in, I think that excites me.

Maurice Cherry:
What advice would you give for aspiring creative professionals out there? They’re heard your story in this interview. They see everything that you’re doing in the community. What advice would you have for them?

Rudy Manning:
Wanting to be, let’s say, own a design agency or just jumping into graphic design?

Maurice Cherry:
We’ll say wanting to own an agency because I feel like a lot of folks that I speak with now are definitely leaning towards more entrepreneurial efforts. Even folks in-house are trying to strike out on their own. So yeah, approach it that way.

Rudy Manning:
I would say, number one, you need to be extremely patient. We hear that. We know like, “Oh yeah, you got to be patient. Things come to those who wait.” But it really does. In that patience, you’re going to have a lot of times where you feel like you can’t continue. I remember the first 10 years when I started Pastilla, there was about three moments that I thought… Okay, I remember the first time was in the financial crisis. I thought, “Okay, crap, this really sucks. I don’t like this feeling. I don’t like this uncertainty. I don’t like this weight that’s on me.” And I thought, “If I make it through this and something like this happens again, I can’t continue.” And then four or five years later, boom, another blip and you’re like, “Crap. Dang it. No, I’m going to continue, but you know what? This is it. After this one, that’s it.” Then you get one more, boom.

And what’s crazy is that over time, you learn that those blips, those bumps, you just learn how to deal with them. You’re smarter behind dealing with them. It’s not that the blips go away, you just aren’t scared of them at all. You’ve faced everything and every single time you’re a better entrepreneur, you’re a better planner, you’re more strategic. You know how to handle the downturns. That tends to scare away people. I know because I had those thoughts and I thought like, “That’s it.” But every single time you have to have that faith of, “You know what? I’ve got to believe in myself. I think I can do it. I love this.” You have to love this design industry. You got to love what you do. You got to love your clients and who you work with, and being creative, that definitely has to drive everything because if not, you could just be a banker or investment banker or something because there’s other ways to make money.

But this definitely is a combination of a lifestyle. And yeah, obviously there’s financial reward with it as well, but it definitely isn’t easy. Then I would say consistency. It’s not a sprint, it’s definitely a marathon. And there’s I would say in that marathon, there’s a bunch of small sprints. It’s one sprint and then you go into one phase and you got a marathon, marathon, marathon, another sprint. But it’s the consistency, the compounding effect of all of those moments of sprinting and marathoning and sitting and waiting and moving that all compile together for the good.

I would say in terms of, I think probably the biggest thing is people always ask, “How do you get clients?” And things like that. I think for me, one of the things that I learned early on, and I learned this as a freelancer, and this might seem super simple, but to this day, it’s probably the main thing that continues to feed our business, which is show people the work that you do. You finish a project, show it to people, tell the story. In the beginning, one on ones. I remember I was freelancing. I’d finish a project and then I’d have seven or people that I wanted to share that work with. And I’d say, “Hey John, how’s it going? I haven’t seen you for a while. We should have lunch, da da da. Are you still working at blah, blah, blah? I just finished this project. It’s down around where you live. It’s a new identity. It was a lot of fun, da da da.” That’s it. It was like a PDF or jpg in the email.

That was the first five, seven years of that I continued to freelance work that then got to start the company. And to this day, that’s exactly what I do. Now, it’s more formalized. And we do more of them. It’s not just projects, it’s articles, it’s stories. It’s the same thing everybody does. But I was doing it very early on where I didn’t really have anything to say other than sharing my work. And it was very intentional and very sincere as well. Because this business is about relationships. It’s a lot about relationships.

So you treat people good, you do really good work. You do everything you can to make sure the client’s happy and that will pay for itself. And from there, you share the work with those people, they’re going to tell other people about that, about you. And that continues to build more and more and more.

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

Rudy Manning:
The past five years, we’ve grown exponentially. I feel that things are a lot more, I would say self-running, automated. The agency and the team is much more structured than it ever was. There’s some positive and negatives to that. The positive part is that it’s less weight on me. The positive part is that we can grow necessarily, not directly with me having to be on the ground every single second. There’s things that are built that can continue to feed the company on its own even without me. So those are the good things.

The downside is that there’s a lot of weight, or the downside I would say is that I do less creative than I did before, and I do more strategic thinking of the company. There’s been great things and I have to continue doing that. And I know in the next five years with that growth that’s happened, we have had some interest in people acquiring us, purchasing us. But I think we’ve contemplated a lot of those things in the past, especially last year and we continue to. But I think this kind of growth in the next, I would say five to seven years, is probably going to continue.

But what we’re going to do is, it’s a hard question because I think we’re in the middle of pivoting a little bit, but I would say potentially doubling or tripling in size to then have a bigger creative team, to serve more of the same kind of clients that we do, that we have right now. And where I feel, and that by note means we’re going to be a hundred million dollar agency or anything like that, but that’s going to be able to scale us to the point where I don’t have to do the kind of operationalizing, the strategic business work that I do on a day-to-day. I think that’s the goal. Where I then focus my time is on more of the relationship parts of the company, my relationships and how to continue to foster that and less being on the ground for the business right now.

To do that, we’re probably going to find maybe more partners to do that growth or maybe do some larger hires. We have to see. There’s some different strategies we have and options we have to do that. But I think double, triple in size than where we are now and me being less of those… Let’s say if we had another talk, Maurice, like in five, six years, I’m not telling you that I’m on a call six, seven hours a day, maybe three. And then the rest of the time I’m maybe meeting people or maybe more involved in Art Division or have some other nonprofit that’s maybe a part of not Pastilla or part of Art Division that is involved in the same kind of topics that we’re talking about, bringing art and design to youth to create more opportunities. Something like that.

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

Rudy Manning:
Our agency’s website is pastilla.co, so pastilla.co, P-A-S-T-I-L-L-A .co. You can also find our agency on Instagram. And our Instagram is, it’s Pastilla, P-A-S-T-I-L-L-A, Agency, A-G-E-N-C-Y. That’s her Instagram. And my Instagram also is Rudy, R-U-D-Y, M, V, so upside down A, V-N-N-I-N-G. So again, Rudy, R-U-D-Y, M-V-N-N-I-N-G. You can find me there as well. Yeah, those are my main channels. I’m also on LinkedIn. You probably just search me there. I don’t know what the exact profile name is there, but probably search Rudy Manning, you could find me on LinkedIn as well.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, we’ll find it. We’ll link it all down in the show notes. Rudy Manning, thank you so much for coming on the show. I think it’s definitely evident from your story, from the work you do out in the community, your education work, Pastilla, like I alluded to earlier in the interview, it’s clear you live and breathe design, but outside of that you have this sort of fiery passion to give back to the community and to also push the industry forward.

I think you’re doing it at a pace and a rate and a breadth that is inspiring for me to see. I hope it’s inspiring for our audience as well, for them to see what more can they do to try to really advance and push things forward. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Rudy Manning:
That’s awesome, Maurice. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it. Awesome podcast. So thank you so much for having me again.

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Breon Waters II

The past few years has been a testing ground for a lot of creatives. For Breon Waters II, he’s used this time to dive deeper into design across the digital world and the real world. And the results have been paying off!

Our conversation began with a look at his line of letterpress greeting cards, which are a fun mix of old-world printing techniques and cutting-edge technology. We also talked about his work at DEPT, and Breon shared how he came into product design throughs his earlier explorations in visual design and UI/UX. Breon has been steadily building his career brick by brick, and that’s given him a strong design foundation that will serve him well into the future!

Interview Transcript

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

Breon Waters II:
Hi, I’m Breon Waters II. By day, I’m a senior product designer at an agency called DEPT. By a later part of the day, I’m the founder of Holiday Free Of, a company that creates weird but memorable experiences that merge print and augmented reality.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, I remember when we met a few years ago, you were sending out these letterpress Christmas cards. That’s where Holiday Free Of sort of grew out of, right?

Breon Waters II:
Yep. It started back when I graduated from ArtCenter, so back in 2011, which is wild to think it’s been that long. It was just a way back in before times, having in-person meetings or interviews and having to leave behind something for people I was doing interviews with to remember me, hopefully help me get a job. I’m not exactly sure how the hell I thought of Christmas cards. The whole idea is being not about Christmas, so it’s a Holiday Free Of these weird things happening for me. I think the first one was wishing me a Holiday Free Of a Christmas tree filled with renegade ninja squirrels. So really kind of off-the-wall, bizarre things, but really showing my personality. But also gave me a chance to really do the type of things I’m going to do creatively and really just get out of my comfort zone.

Maurice Cherry:
The cards are great. I have the one that you sent me last year right here by my desk. It’s great, really thick paper stock, of course, because it’s letterpress. And it’s so fun to interact with. It’s really a great idea.

Breon Waters II:
Oh, thank you. I’m glad that people don’t just think I’m some weirdo and just people actually enjoy it and not just me laughing like a little schoolgirl while I make these, so I really appreciate it.

Maurice Cherry:
So, how has the year been going so far? How’s 2023 been treating you?

Breon Waters II:
It’s been fast. I know I’m not the only one, but it seems unimaginable that we’re basically almost, I guess, a quarter of the way done with the year already. My son just turned two. My daughter’s about to turn five. I’m going to turn 40 next month. So just a whole lot of milestones are happening. But yeah, definitely blessed. Things could have definitely been worse in the pandemic, but thankfully we have a roof over our head, haven’t really had to have much pain or strife or whatnot. But all is good, just working and then trying to actually launch Holiday Free Of this year. That’s my third baby, if you will, is just seeing if there’s a market for that.

Maurice Cherry:
I definitely think there’s a market for that. I mean, it’s funny, I think about the last place where I worked, and one of the things that I was helping them with was getting together their swag. Because, you know, people think of tech startups, they think of T-shirts or maybe some little glossy pamphlet that you might get at a trade show and that you’ll throw away later. I find a lot of tech startups, like SaaS companies, et cetera, are always looking for unique merch.

So, at the last place I was at, I know we were looking at socks, we were looking at custom one-by-one keycaps for mechanical keyboards. I think those cards could be great. And I say this also because we did dabble in doing some print. We did a legit print magazine. That could be something great if you want to tap into that. The swag markets doing custom AR letterpress cards for companies. That’d be great. That could be a good way to do it.

Breon Waters II:
No, thank you for that, Maurice. I’ll definitely keep that in mind because that’s a damn good idea. I’ll have to [inaudible 00:06:24] on to that one for sure.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you come up with the ideas for the card? I know you mentioned the name of it being Holiday Free Of. Do you keep a running list of stuff?

Breon Waters II:
Yeah. It always happens last minute, unfortunately. I think maybe one year I had the idea done maybe by September. But last year I was basically working on the design in November, a couple weeks before Thanksgiving. I have sketchbooks since starting design in college and I keep onto them and just writing word stuff. And sometimes, I think actually for this year’s, I was looking back at a sketchbook, it was a couple years ago, and just the idea of rock, paper, scissors. I was like, “Huh, there’s something kind of interesting there.”

It starts with a theme and just trying to figure out, “Okay, what’s the story from that theme?” And I can’t reveal the story fully yet, but it’s pulling inspiration from old school wrestling posters, boxing posters, patch show print-type posters and things like that for inspiration. I remember just being a kid, too, watching old school WWF back in the day. And just taking those memories, and what would happen if that fell in this world?

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. I could see something like that, that could be pretty fun.

Breon Waters II:
I was lucky to get a really talented 3D animator and illustrator, Mr Lubo Designs, to collaborate with him, and just really took my silly idea and really made it possible. Because I wasn’t sure if I could even make it move with animation. I thought it was going to be static. He was able to make it move, and knocked it out the park. Really proud of it.

Maurice Cherry:
So let’s talk about DEPT, which is the agency where you work at. You’re working there as a senior product designer. Tell me a little bit about your work and how you found out about them.

Breon Waters II:
Well, when I joined them, they were called it Rocket Insights. They were acquired by DEPT, I think five or four years ago. We’re officially known as the digital products US arm of DEPT. So, we basically design digital products for DEPT on the state side here. And how I found them actually was reached out, I forgot the name of the actual site, but you know there’s job placing sites, recruiters. But this one was basically by AI. And so I was working actually with another East Coast agency, funny enough, and I left and got approached by DEPT and the rest is history. I’ll be working with them two years in April.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Congratulations.

Breon Waters II:
Thank you.

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

Breon Waters II:
There’s not really a typical day. We’re kind of weird. We’re an agency, we work as consultants. But depending on the client, we could really be almost working an in-house counterpart to their company. So right now I’ve been working with FIFA for NFT projects. I joined it in November right before the World Cup started, which is the craziest time to join the project. But also learned a ton though too, because the project was going on way before that in preparations for all that goes into World Cups and big events like that.

So for this, basically, there’s two designers, a team of developers on our end and a project manager. And we have two different clients on behalf of the other side. And really just working with them for new features, figuring out what are things need to be included. One big push is the Women’s World Cup is coming up this year, and so we’re working on initiatives and features specifically for that. So that’s been basically the start of this year has been all focused on designing for the Women’s World Cup for this.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you mentioned the team. Are you working between different clients or do you just focus on one client for that specific project?

Breon Waters II:
Yeah, thankfully it’s just been one client. In the past I’ve had multiple clients. I’m trying to think back. Actually, before this project, I was on a design sprint and we were working with a mom and pop jewelry that’s looking to explore NFTs, and really seeing if they were to decide to create something within NFT world, what would it be? Is there a market for it? Who would it be for? And so that was basically a two-week sprint, just kind of along with the client learning what the hell NFTs are. Like what they’re all about, what’s Web 3.0?

And really just talking with them and potential users, just seeing what makes sense for them. What’s the story to tell? What would be their version of NFT? And it was really eye-opening just because NFT’s a real buzzword now. You hear the CryptoPunks and Tiffany’s collab’d and made millions of dollars. And people think, “Oh, it’s so easy, I’ll do that.” But every artist wants to be Picasso, or insert famous… or Basquiat. But there’s how many different artists and how many Basquiats? It’s not the same. It’s not as easy as that. So it’s really all about value. How do you really show that people should care or buy what you’re selling?

Maurice Cherry:
This might be an odd question to ask, but do people still care about NFTs? I mean, I ask this because a year ago, I swear you were seeing success stories about NFTs, and Adidas was making NFTs, and people were designing NFTs and making all this money. And now it’s like you barely hear about NFTs. Have they fallen out of favor?

Breon Waters II:
Right. No, I think there’s something to that. I remember last year the Super Bowl was everything about crypto. And all those companies basically are bankrupt or out of work. I think there still is, but I think we’re still so early in NFTs and Web 3.0 that it’s kind of like looking back in the first websites, where it’s just wild, wild west, crazy colors, rainbows everywhere. But it’s kind of matured. And I guess the trails of social media were there before, but it’s more mature now. And even still, trying to figure out what that’s going to be moving on forward. I think it’s kind of same for NFTs. NBA Top Shot is still popular, but it’s weird though, where it’s like you watch a game, it’s copyrighted by ESPN or Fox or insert whatever big broadcasting company.

And so it’s not even really clear. They own the rights to play it, so how’s it work you owning a highlight? I’m not sure exactly how that works. But even in that workshop I mentioned earlier, they mentioned NFTs for buying houses or for even for the contract sides, for if you’re working with artists. And having basically Web 3.0, big word, but basically it’s receipts. So basically capturing from the first person that bought it to fast-forward endless in the future. And so something like that, it’s not big and exciting and sexy as a Ja Morant NFT. But I think something that’s transaction-based, that could be a huge thing for it, but we’re still early for it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I still don’t know if NFTs… I don’t know. I don’t think they’ve really penetrated the mainstream yet. I know why brands are jumping on it now. It’s all about that perceived value. Just like folks were really bang on about the metaverse a year and a half ago and stuff. I think people probably still are, but not to the fervor that it was back then. I attended a conference… When was this, was this in 2020? Might have been 2021. I attended a conference about the metaverse in the metaverse.

Breon Waters II:
Oh, okay.

Maurice Cherry:
Like, I have a Meta Quest, one of those helmet things or whatever. It was an interesting conference. There were some sessions that were, I don’t know if there was intentionally supposed to be that hokey and sales pitchy. There was one where this guy had bought some virtual real estate inside of the metaverse during a talk.

He bought a 800 square foot piece of land for, I don’t know, $10,000 or something like that. Probably more than that. 25,000, that’s what it was, he bought it for $25,000. And I’m like, why? It only exists in this particular metaverse subdivision, which is the best way that I could put it. Because there’s still a big interoperability problem with the metaverse. And I think this extends to NFTs too, where you can use an NFT maybe in Horizon World, but can you use it in Solana World or can you use it in another metaverse? Are you really able to take it with you? But speaking of things to take with you, after the conference, they gave us an NFT.

Breon Waters II:
Oh, okay.

Maurice Cherry:
They sent us an email, they’re like, “Here’s your NFT.” And then they’re like, “This is how you claim it. Get your hardware wallet and do this, this and this.” I was like, “I’m not doing that.” First of all, I have no idea what that is. Do I have to buy that? It’s all good. I’ll just tell people I went, it’s not that big a deal.

Breon Waters II:
Yeah, that sounds like… I imagine it wasn’t the same as actual attending a conference in real life. It doesn’t seem like it’s on par with that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. You attend the conference in real life, you get a badge. I keep all my conference badges. You get something like that. But this was something called POAP, Proof of Attendance Picture or something like that. I’m like, “Is this like a Foursquare badge? What do I do with this?” I don’t know what it means for me to have that, or how to obtain it or why it’s useful. So I think I let it lapse because they kept sending me emails like, “Don’t forget to claim your NFT.” I was like, “I don’t know how, nor do I care, but thanks.”

Breon Waters II:
That’s a bad sort of a gift when you have to repeatedly ask that person, “Hey, you want to open the gift? Hey, you want to open the gift?”

Maurice Cherry:
But I think it’s cool, though, that you get to work with of new technologies with clients. So then you as an individual get to find a way to get your own understanding around it.

Breon Waters II:
Yeah, definitely. Even DEPT, our CEO, Dimi, there’s been a huge push and they’re all in for all things Web 3.0 and AI. Just like you said, being at the forefront where of course there’s a lot… Just like the experience you mentioned for the conference, where it’s not the greatest, but for the ones that do figure it out early on, being well-versed to really design and tell stories within this, it really will be a huge thing. But just early on, it’s going to be really rough and wacky. And a lot of bad things are… Hopefully not bad things, but bad experiences happening. But yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I’m looking at the DEPT website now. You all have a Web 3.0 division, it says, “With a global team of over 300 specialists, including solidity engineers, ethicists, economists and game designers, we have been building for Web 3.0 And the metaverse since 2015. Our pioneering work is fueled by patented and proprietary technology.” Okay. I didn’t know the Web 3.0 was a thing in 2015, but that’s cool. I mean, I’m not doubting y’all, I’m just saying, I’m looking through it like, “Okay, that’s cool.”

Breon Waters II:
I agree. [inaudible 00:17:34] my paycheck.

Maurice Cherry:
What would you say is the most satisfying thing about what you do?

Breon Waters II:
I think really, and it’s going to sound sappy or cheesy, but when a client comes and they have an issue, or they’re working on something not sure of, it’s a really good feeling of helping people actualize, not their dreams, that’s too big and broad, but helping them get past their hurdle or issue or their problem. I think that’s really cool. Even for things like design sprints where on day one you have this big issue, you don’t know what the hell you’re going to do. It’s a whole mystery. And day by day everybody’s learning from it. And on that Friday, you do five user tests and just learn so much. And just that feeling of going from not knowing to, “Hey, there’s some [inaudible 00:18:28] here.” That’s a really good feeling.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you approach that process of designing a new product or a new feature? I know you’ve mentioned the team that you usually are working with, but what does that process look like?

Breon Waters II:
It definitely varies on what we’re doing. But a lot of times we have a lot of really talented strategists that during the sprint doing the work together with us or sometimes doing it before our project or our phase of the project starts. So, really getting insights from that. And I think it sounds cheesy again, but some of the biggest skill sets for designers, not just product designers, but designers in general, just listening and just asking questions, just trying to learn as much as you can from your client.

They know it better than you do, but they’re coming to you for your expertise to actually how to visualize and build this. And a lot of times, too, people aren’t able to really say what they’re trying to say. And be able to decipher between that what are they really trying to say? And even user testing, talk with users, really listening, paying attention, getting out of the way and seeing what they’re doing. And taking all that together and helping it to inform your designs.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s learn a little bit more about you, about how you got to where you are now. You’re originally from California, is that right?

Breon Waters II:
Yep. A city called Rialto, California.

Maurice Cherry:
Rialto, where’s that?

Breon Waters II:
That’s in the Inland Empire. I like to say, if you’ve seen Friday After Next, it’s where Day-Day and his dad moved to, Rancho Cucamonga. So, next door to that.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. All right. So, outside of LA, but it’s not quite a suburb I would say, right?

Breon Waters II:
Right. It’s not quite the desert, but desert adjacent. And yeah, it’s a big bunch of different cities where basically you’ll go through it if you drive to Palm Springs, or if you’re looking to drive to Vegas, you’ll have to go through it. At least from going through LA.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. What was it like growing up there?

Breon Waters II:
It was cool. I loved it. Basically, imagine like most kids, you play out in the streets, playing tag or football, basketball, hide and go seek and whatnot. Where basically, it’s old school, but once the street lights came on, okay, you better bring your ass inside before you get in trouble. But yeah, just having friends around the neighborhood, just hanging out there.

Maurice Cherry:
Is that where you first got exposed to a lot of design and art and stuff?

Breon Waters II:
Thinking back, the first design or art was from my dad. And he wasn’t a classically-trained artist or anything, but I remember growing up, there’s a big portrait of my mom he painted. And there’s also, he did some different scratchboard pieces. They’re hanging up and just always remember seeing them as a kid. And so I’d always see that. And I was always sketching stuff. My thing was being a baseball player and designing airplanes, which are a perfect pair, right?

So, I would always draw that. And when I was in middle school, back when you would take shopping paper bags and wrap them around your books, I would draw Jimi Hendrix and baseball players on it. So never really blatantly had someone as a kid say, “Hey, this is designer art.” But from that and my dad really artistic in drawing, that’s where I really got my first dose of it. Or dose is the wrong word, but first learned about it.

Maurice Cherry:
And so you kept with that imagination of drawing and getting into it enough to the point where you decided you wanted to study it in college. I’m curious about this, and I know we talked about this a little bit before recording, but you went to college in North Dakota.

Breon Waters II:
Yep, that’s correct.

Maurice Cherry:
Which is, I mean, it’s not far from California, but you got to tell me-

Breon Waters II:
[inaudible 00:22:17]

Maurice Cherry:
It’s far? Okay. Oh, okay. I mean, I’m thinking it’s not on the other coast. But what brought that on? You went to Minot State University. That’s in North Dakota near the Canadian border, so you’re up there.

Breon Waters II:
Yes, sir. [inaudible 00:22:31]

Maurice Cherry:
Why? What brought you to Minot?

Breon Waters II:
You sound like you’re my therapist, which I don’t have, Maurice, so maybe I should have you be my therapist. Young Breon thought he was going to be a major league baseball player, playing first base for the Angels, and so I was hell-bent on playing baseball. After high school, I went to Cal Poly Pomona, which is a really good college for different engineering disciplines and especially aerospace. It’s in Pomona, California, actually, not far from where my folks live. So I was there, and excited being in college. But well, I didn’t just learn then, but I was terrible in math. I’d forget equations, especially on finals day. When you move into the senior level of classes, you do really cool stuff. They have partnerships with Boeing, working on airplanes and different things like that. I imagine now they’re probably working on drones and stuff. But I was bad at math. I thought, “Okay, I’m going to play baseball there.” I tried walking on and tried out for the team two years and didn’t make it, but I was still… The desire to play baseball, I wanted to do that.

And it was funny, a family friend of ours was working in the career center at the time. And she had me do a career placement test where you answer a series of questions. Whatever you pick, it’s kind of like, “Hey, you should do this,” or, “Hey, you should do this.” And so, one of the results was graphic design. I was like, “Huh, I never really heard about that.” I took some art classes in high school but didn’t really think too much of it. And so after that it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to switch to graphic design, but I still want to play baseball.” So I looked online and looked for colleges that had a baseball team and graphic design programs and just emailed a bunch of their coaches and whatnot. And I heard back from Minot State University and a school, Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa or Sioux Falls, Iowa.

Maurice Cherry:
Iowa’s Sioux City. I think Sioux Falls is in North Dakota.

Breon Waters II:
Okay, thank you. So, Sioux City, Iowa. And so my mom, God bless her heart, I told my mom and dad, “I was going to major in aerospace engineering and you’re paying for college. So yeah, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to go move to the Midwest and play baseball and do graphic design.” [inaudible 00:24:48] my dad, but my mom is just… And I get that too, my dad, you want your kid to be having something secure, not the whole starving artist kind of visualization. So I definitely get that now, being a dad. But my mom was really just supportive, “Okay, yep, we’re going to do this.”

And so we flew out to Minot State. I visited the school, tried out, and we rented the car and we drove from Minot to Sioux City, Iowa. Tried out there too. And just so happened where I got a chance to meet the team in Minot, it was during their tournament days, and just hit it off with them and just wanted to be a part of it. And that was how I went to being from California to moving to North Dakota, never having seen snow in my life, and being in blizzards there.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, of course, weather-wise that’s wild. But I mean, baseball and graphic design, that would’ve been an interesting Venn diagram intersection.

Breon Waters II:
Yeah. And it doesn’t make sense either, where California is one of the best parts for baseball. And I moved from there to North Dakota, which is not known for baseball. So, on hindsight, not the wisest decision, but it did lead me towards that graphic design path, so I’m grateful for that. And that was the right path for me.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So, while you were at Minot, you studied art, you focused on graphic design and marketing as well. How was your time there? Do you feel like you got a good foundation as a designer?

Breon Waters II:
Yeah, I think it was a good entry level way. Whereas, I actually was playing baseball there. I couldn’t play my senior year, which was at the time devastating, but it really worked out because I actually did my own senior solo show instead of… That wouldn’t have been possible at all if I was playing baseball. So basically, there, they introduce you, you have a class on typography, photography. I forgot what level of Photoshop or Illustrator it was, but it was back when you had the fifties looking MacBooks, or not MacBooks [inaudible 00:26:52]. So that was the time of that. So it did give me that sense, but I think one of the best part was the art side.

I had a lot of good professors there. Bill, and Walter Piehl was really amazing [inaudible 00:27:07]. He does these really amazing abstract rodeo paintings. And I remember he was the first person that put me onto Basquiat, was like, “You should check out this artist.” And really just was amazed, of course, rightfully so. Basquiat was an amazing artist. But I think that being an artist, getting your hands dirty, the first time doing screen printing and stuff like that, I think looking back it did set a foundation of having that kind of different approach to things.

Maurice Cherry:
What position did you play?

Breon Waters II:
I was first base but didn’t hit a lot of home runs and couldn’t hit a curveball to save my life.

Maurice Cherry:
I don’t know. I think that’s just really cool that you were able to pursue this design degree and you were effectively also a college athlete. We’ve had college athletes and designers on here before, maybe not at that exact intersection. That’s pretty unique. I mean, out of the hundreds of interviews I’ve done, you are the first one I could say that has done baseball and graphic design. So that’s pretty cool.

Breon Waters II:
Oh, thank you for that. Yeah, it was NAIA, which is basically division two. But one cool thing, though, is that we actually did play, in spring before we started league play we played in the Metrodome. They knocked it down years ago to build the new arena where the Vikings play. But playing in a Major League baseball stadium was cool. So that was really something I’ll keep with me for the rest of my life, even though we got destroyed and we actually were playing wood bats for the first time. So we’re playing wood bats against metal bats, so as you can imagine, we lost, and it didn’t work out so well. But it was still fun, though.

Maurice Cherry:
And I mean, I’ve met you, you’re tall, so it helps to be tall as a first baseman.

Breon Waters II:
Right, yeah. No, definitely.

Maurice Cherry:
So after you graduated, did you stay in North Dakota? What was the game plan after that?

Breon Waters II:
Oh no, once I graduated I got a U-Haul. Had a truck at the time, put all my stuff there and drove back. And I moved back home to my folks and just trying to get a job but found it was really hard to actually find a job. Actually, couldn’t find a job. When I was in Minot, I first heard about AIGA and spent a lot of time in Minneapolis for it, and just loved the city there. I think I went to my first portfolio show there. And so, okay, I’m going to go to a portfolio show. I went to one at USC at the time and I believe Ed Fellows was the actual speaker at the time. Does amazing work.

And I remember when I was getting my book reviewed and one of the persons there was like, “You know, you really need to go to a place that’s going to teach you design.” They’re like, “If you develop that eye for design.” And he mentioned a couple different design schools. And so I researched it and was thinking about, I think, actually, Creative Circus and Portfolio Center. But I think I got a booklet or something from ArtCenter. And funny, living in Rialto, never actually heard of it before that time. And just visited the campus, fell in love. You know where they have the bridge, it’s this 1950s-style architecture and just all the amazing work that students did there. And I was like, “Okay, yeah, I want to be here.” Decided to attend ArtCenter.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. ArtCenter out in Pasadena. It’s a beautiful campus. I’ve been there once. I know the bridge that you’re talking about, though.

Breon Waters II:
Yeah, it’s weird now, though. They actually have bought… So there’s South Campus in South Pasadena, and so a lot of, I think… Graphic design has a big building there, illustration. So there’s still stuff on the bridge, the Hillside campus, but not as much as it used to be. But still really talented folks go there.

Maurice Cherry:
How was ArtCenter different from Minot? Did you feel like because you had that four-year education already that it was easy?

Breon Waters II:
No. It was really intimidating. In other words, I remember in my initial class, people whose parents were designers, had done designs, had their own T-shirt companies and stuff like that. I’m sure like most folks you have imposter syndrome in your life, and you’re like, “Oh, how am I going to cut it?” But a blessing was Jay Chapman is a creativity coach there. And I will always be in debt and love Jay for the rest of my life. Just an awesome person and he’s really all about just helping you get out your way and have a sense of play in your work. And just would visit him at the time. I remember would visit him for a project and it clicked for you. You think of ArtCenter, it’s great design but it could be kind of stuffy, I guess, in a way.

Think of Bauhaus. It’s really kind of beautiful design but sometimes inject some life into it. So Jay is complete opposite, where it’s ArtCenter, this amazing school, but surrounded by a bunch of rich houses. And you basically, most folks just stay on there and design and work and work and stress out. And where you have LA and all the different cultures and cities that make up LA right around you but don’t even experience it. So really just enjoying life and experiencing different things and then injecting that into your work. Once from that just really did that and that really helped open the doors for me there. Just really, okay, it’s not worrying about other’s story, but what are my experiences? What does my perspective look like? And really just going well with that.

Maurice Cherry:
So it sounds like the combination of Minot and ArtCenter probably gave you a much stronger foundation once you got out there and worked as a designer. Because of course you had this foundational knowledge from Minot, but then as you mentioned, with ArtCenter, you’re learning about this sense of play as well as also probably learning about some different techniques and such that you didn’t get from a four-year college that you’re now getting at an arts college.

Breon Waters II:
Oh, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
What was your early career like?

Breon Waters II:
After ArtCenter?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Breon Waters II:
That’s a great question. It’s funny thinking back. It’s funny, in design school, and it might be for the majors too, you’re taught basically the world’s your oyster, right? Designs going to save the world and work on these amazing projects. And so it was funny, my first actual project, at ArtCenter, they have what’s called, as part of your last day is speed dating. So different companies come to your spot where you’re presenting your work. Basically, you’re showing off, “Hey, this is the work I’m proud of from my time at ArtCenter. Hire me.”

And so, one of the people that did was someone from Saputo Design, which is an agency in Westlake LA. Or not Westlake LA but Westlake, California, excuse me. They’re a small ad agency and they were working on a pitch for K-Swiss. And I had some collage work in my portfolio from a project for my senior year. And they basically had me work on a freelance project with them for a little bit from that. So that was my actual first one. So that was cool, just like, “Hey, you liked the stuff I did for a class and able to use it for a pitch for a shoe company.”

Maurice Cherry:
So you started out doing visual design, right?

Breon Waters II:
Yep. After that, I was there, moved on to another place where a professor worked. And actually it was my first time being fired on the spot. And that was-

Maurice Cherry:
Whoa.

Breon Waters II:
Yeah. Of course, at the time I was not laughing at all. I remember basically was working on a branding project. I forgot what I did, but made a mistake and basically the person’s like, “Yeah, thank you for your time, but kindly pack up your things and go.” I’m paraphrasing that. So, by the grace of God, I managed to say thank you, shake hands and head down to the lobby and that’s when I burst into tears. And I remember the security guard or someone down there, like, “Hey, are you okay?” And me just melting down, where it’s fresh out of ArtCenter, have, what, six figures in student loans?

I’m still living at my parents’ house. And how am I going to tell my parents and also my girlfriend, my now wife, at the time girlfriend, that, “Hey, I got fired.” Just feeling like a complete failure. But looking back, it’s one of the best things that happened to me just really because it really was my first lesson, a big lesson, that there’s no such thing as security. Things could change in the instant. Not in a way of being afraid of, “Oh, this could be gone,” but there’s some freedom of, “Okay, this happened but I’m still surviving. This is not going to end me. Yeah, it sucks right now, but I’m going to keep going forward.” And that’s definitely something that’s really helped me along the way, just because it’s tough finding a job at times. The design world especially is really small and it can seem like everything’s turning against you and things aren’t going to turn around. But if it’s not like being any smarter or talent makes you “successful.” But just sticking in there, getting back up and that’s really helped me in my career.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m really glad you said that because I think designers now, particularly during this wild period of layoffs that’s happening in not just the tech industry but the design industry and others as well, I think it helps to just hear that. When this sort of stuff happens, it’s not the end of the world. It certainly can feel that way. But you have to find a way to bounce back from it. And I think it also helps, and maybe in this particular instance, to know that you’re not alone when this stuff happens. I mean, yes, it’s the ending of one thing, but it also has the potential to open up into new opportunities that you can do. So, after that happens, how did you pull yourself out of that?

Breon Waters II:
So, funny enough, you mentioned you’re not alone, and that was something that actually helped too. A friend of mine at ArtCenter, Megan, was working at a company called Guess Clothing Company. And so she mentioned me to her boss Hiro, and basically I forgot, it might have been a month or two after that. I’m wondering what the hell’s going to happen next. And Megan hits me up saying, “Hey, would you want to work at Guess?” I’m like, “Of course,” so I actually ended up working there for a little bit. And I went on from there to Live Nation/Ticketmaster. And Hiro’s been a boss that I’ve… He attended my wedding, someone I consider a really good friend and kept in touch with and still keep in touch with now and just helped, advice. It’s really just like you never know when things are going to change, but having those people around you that are rooting for you really helps you out.

It may not happen exactly then, but along the way in a little bit of time, things will really pan out where it’s like, oh, okay. I’ve actually worked with when he joined a different startup and was looking for work. And yep, “Hey, Breon, looking for work?” And “Hell, yeah, I am.” And so I joined that too. So I definitely think it helped later on.

Maurice Cherry:
So for you, keeping that community in line is something that was really a good asset for you.

Breon Waters II:
Definitely. I know I’m not alone in this too where just I hate asking for help. And it’s just being stubborn. Just, “No, I’m going to do it myself.” But you need help and asking for help is not a sign of weakness. And I think one of the best things too is turning it forward when you actually are in a position to help people out, be able to do that too.

Maurice Cherry:
What inspired you to pursue product design? I mean, you were doing visual design and I see just from looking at your LinkedIn, you did UI/UX design. What brought you to product?

Breon Waters II:
So, back when I was at ArtCenter, there weren’t product design classes, or at least not for what we mainly consider it now. Product design as I knew it then was basically designing shoes or physical products or physical objects. So, I was actually, my specialization was in branding. So basically the idea of once you know, you do your research and your strategy and figuring out who you’re designing for, you can design whatever the hell you want to design. Whether that’s a logo, traditional stationary assets, things like that, or packaging, websites, you name it. So it wasn’t until I was working out in the field. I worked at Ticketmaster for about a year and just wanted to move to the Bay, where it still, it’s like that now, but it’s kind of awesome design place. It’s kind of like Starbucks, there’s one on every block pretty much.

And just wanted to really try to make a name for myself in the Bay. And so moved there. First learned about UI and then UX design and then later product design. And it was really from a point of trying to have more ownership on the project, where I went to the place, I was working as a UI designer. And it was the first time, once I moved back down to LA after a couple years. And it was the first time in my career where it just basically felt like it was a complete wrong fit. The design team overall was nice, friendly and whatnot. But the actual team I was working on seemed like basically didn’t really care, value my contributions to the team. And also from the company standpoint, the things we’re working on, we’re basically the red-headed stepchild of the company.

We’re not really having the funding or developmental talent to work on what we’re doing. It was basically like that, where I was working as a UI designer, but basically just it’s like, okay, the UX person does the UX, does user testing focus, all that stuff, does even some mockups. And, “Okay, here you go, Breon. Make it look pretty.” And just not what I got into design for. So I ended up leaving and I did an online class at General Assembly on product design, or UX design, rather. And just wanted to see, is this something that I do? And I had worked alongside some in-house teams, really great UX teams, UX designers, and learned a lot during that. And really found out this is all stuff that I could do, just all the things I took from them and be able to apply it from there.

And so I did that online course, it was basically a month long. And after that, Hiro, my boss from Guess earlier in the years actually reached out, because he had moved to the Flex Company as a creative director there and was looking to build a design team there. And so he hit me up and that was actually my first UI product design-type role after that General Assembly class. So it kind of all snowballed there where I was working there, really great company, they’re really small, tight-knit. Got to know the head of marketing, Maytal there, a really great person. And she put me on to someone who she knew who was an entrepreneur, has his own company, is looking to actually rebrand the logo, the website and app. And so that was another project where actually applying what I applied from that General Assembly class to that. So it kind of all just, unbeknownst to me at the time, lit and connected to each other and just slowly but surely evolving to being able to apply what I was looking to do.

Maurice Cherry:
And now that you’ve been working as a senior product designer at DEPT and you’ve been doing this work, do you feel like it’s been a natural evolution of your skills over the years?

Breon Waters II:
Yeah, I think so. There’s things from the branding side I definitely take in. As a product designer, you have design patterns you leverage. So think about, you open up your smartphone, buttons typically look the same, or different interactions or swiping and things like that, where they make sense because they’re something we’re all used to or trained to use. But there’s still a lot of design, a lot of digital products look the same. If you cover up a logo, it’s hard to tell what’s what.

And so I think from the branding side, that’s where it’s a chance to inject personality and experience into things. Not sacrificing the overall experience from a usability standpoint, but from a personality standpoint, how can you make an experience that really feels like this? So if you think of Apple products, where if it’s opening up your iPhone, the physical packaging to it, or looking at your iPhone or looking at the website or looking at things like that, it’s different things but it all feels the same. It feels like an overall same experience, so that kind of idea to it.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, looking ahead, how do you see the field evolving in the years to come?

Breon Waters II:
That’s a good question. I think rightfully so, there is some hesitation or the sky is falling there with ChatGPT or we’re talking about AI before. Where those things are real, but thinking about it, having read some stuff, it seems like that’s the natural order of things. So I imagine designers before were working with their hands, like calligraphers, when you have the setting presses, type presses were kind of the same thing for that. Like, “Oh no, what’s going to happen for us?” And then after that, fast-forward to the computer. And so thinking that same thing too. But it seems like all those things, yeah, they did take away some jobs, but it seems like the bulk of the jobs they took away were things or actions that you don’t like to do, the more repetitive things.

Where it feels like more of these being our assistants of sorts. Maybe if it’s for ChatGPT. ChatGPT, I know I use it for coming up with ideas for the copy for the website for Holiday Free Of I’m generating for copy. I’m not a copywriter, but at least, it’s not perfect, but having a place to start from or even really refining ideas I have. So, in that sense, almost a old school ad idea like the partners, you have a copywriter, AD paired together. So a team where it’s helping you generate ideas and work towards a common goal.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I use Chat GPT now, and I mentioned this before we recorded, I use it a bit like a writing partner. It’s good to give some prompts on some things and maybe help guide you in the right direction, but it’s certainly not a magic bullet. Although I feel like that’s how the media is certainly reporting on it. They’re sort of anthropomorphizing Chat GPT and similar types of things like, “Oh, they can think, they can hallucinate.” They can only do what they’re trained on based on the data that we give them. That’s just how it works. I mean, we taught rocks how to think and now we have computers, so what’d you expect?

Breon Waters II:
No, it’s spot on where they could do things, but the soul of what makes people people, that personality, at least not yet, it’s not easily repeatable by AI or machines. So, at least we got that going for us.

Maurice Cherry:
What is it that keeps you motivated and inspired these days?

Breon Waters II:
Really just experiences. I think now when you typically think of a product designer, you think automatic like a phone or websites and apps and things like that. And that’s great, but I’m more interested in things that span mediums. Like going back to the cards, how do you create something that’s in experienced physically in your hands, but also digitally. But it may be slightly different, but carries along the actual same storyline you’re trying to tell. So things like that. Things like AR and VR, virtual reality, augmented reality. How do you really create meaningful experiences with that? I think that’s, at this point in my career, is really fascinating to me. Not so focused on the devices or the mediums, but more of these experiences or touchpoints for you.

Maurice Cherry:
What is the best advice that you’ve been given about design?

Breon Waters II:
I probably want to say it’s not even directly design related, but more of… And I’m not sure who I heard it from, but basically the point where it’s at one point in time everybody was a novice, or basically no one has all the answers. And I think that’s been really eye-opening just because when you’re coming up or just moving to something new, you think, “Oh, okay, they may have their ish together.” But a lot of times they don’t, or even at one point they didn’t. Even thinking about Web 3.0 or NFTs and all that stuff where no one has all the answers for it, so don’t feel like you have to be a “guru” or so much experience to know what’s going on there. Just having a sense of curiosity and playing around, asking questions, eager really to contribute to things. So it’s like there’s not this one elite path to doing anything it seems like.

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

Breon Waters II:
Just my family. It’s wild even thinking of being almost 40 and having a family. And you can have bad days and just have things of being an adult, what makes being an adult tough, but still hearing my… My kids are still young enough where they’ll call for me and actually want to be around me and my wife. I know that’s going to change, especially when they’re teenagers, but that’s the most awesome thing where just people are super happy to see you and just that sheer look of happiness.

And just their laughter, their personality is so infectious too. I love to create things. I’ll create things till my last breath. My kids will be the most inspirational, best part of something I had a part of actually creating. And so that’s really a humbling and also a daunting challenge, but also just so rewarding, though, too.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, your kids are also, at least the oldest one, probably, you say the oldest one is five, right?

Breon Waters II:
Yep.

Maurice Cherry:
Is she at that age where she’s interested… I want to say interested in design, but I feel like kids, just the way that we structure things for them, they have so much time and freedom to just play and do creative stuff. Are you finding that she’s into painting and drawing and stuff like that?

Breon Waters II:
Yeah, it’s funny. My daughter Essie and my son Mackaye. Essie is super in singing and dancing. She loves to draw. Like Jackson Pollock work, just wild and chaotic with making marks and things like that, but also that freedom for it. So I’m not really sure what she’s going to do, but I think she’ll be a lot better at it than I am, just because just how passionate she is and just loving to sing and dance and just that freedom that she has. For my son, McKay, I’m not sure. He’s like the Tasmanian devil. He loves books. So I think they’ll do something maybe in the creative world somehow, or at least have those hobbies and things like that. I definitely won’t pressure them to do that, but I think there’s something there that they have from me, which I got from my dad.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, you can pass on the legacy of design in a way.

Breon Waters II:
Yeah, we’ll see. It’s wild, too, I wonder will there be a point in time in their lives when they’re older, will there still be jobs? Just how automated things are, it seems it’s not out of the realm of possibility where these things called jobs aren’t a part of our lives. But if that’s the case, what the hell’s going to fill that? So, I don’t know.

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

Breon Waters II:
I think in a perfect world, if Holiday Free Of is something that catches on, and not even just that, but I think to a point where just I could survive off of my weird ideas and creating experiences and building a team potentially around it. Or actually, in January, last month, we’ll figure, I started teaching for the first time. And I had wanted for the longest time to teach, and just like a dummy feeling, “I have to be at a certain level of my career to actually teach,” which doesn’t make sense. And it’s been early, but I really get a lot of pleasure out of teaching. Early to see how, it’s a cheesy saying, but just if you want to learn something, teach. And just there’s so much that you have to do and learn just to be able to know what the heck you’re actually trying to teach.

It’s like how do you actually communicate your ideas, and knowing enough to actually try to teach something, but knowing that you’re not going to know everything? So I’d love to do more of that. And just really too would like to be, when I think about my career, what I want to be, ultimately, I really think of a conductor, or just having an idea, but assembling talents to actually help them do their best by helping to overall steer the goal for it.

When I was working years ago back on my senior art show, I first heard about Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Amazing talents, but had these amazing bands built around them. And now if you think of Robert Glasper and the work he’s doing, I’d love to do something of that ilk where it’s maybe me creating my creative type of interests, like maybe a Nick Fury type of person, I guess, I think. Just really designing different things, even if it’s more like a sociological type study or things like that. Really just thinking about things or experiments and things like that.

Maurice Cherry:
The Design Avengers, I could see that. You could pull it off, though. You could pull off Nick Fury with the iPads. You could do it.

Breon Waters II:
Luckily, he doesn’t have hair, right? So I got that [inaudible 00:52:03].

Maurice Cherry:
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?

Breon Waters II:
By the time this comes out, Holiday Free Of will be out. So I’m launching that. So you can check out Holiday Free Of on holidayfreeof.com. On Instagram it’s @HolidayFreeOf. For my personal portfolio, it’s breonwatersii.com. Personally on Instagram, I don’t do it that much, but [inaudible 00:52:35] politemanliness.com. And really just trying to do more things, really just more storytelling with that. So look out for some interesting things and experiments, explorations on Holiday Free Of.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds good. Breon Waters II, I want to thank you so, so much for coming on the show. Like I mentioned at the top of the episode, I think you had reached out to me several years ago and asked for my address because you wanted to send me a Christmas card. And I was like, “Yeah, sure, go ahead and send me a Christmas card.” And I mean, we’ve kept in touch since then. I’ve seen how your career has grown since then.

And also I think just hearing your story now and seeing the path that you’ve taken to get here, you’ve always struck me as someone that really has their eye on the prize, like you know what it is that you want to do and you’re steadily working and going towards that goal. So, I could see in five years, the cards really taking off and being a success. And I just want to thank you so much for the work that you’re doing, for continuing to blaze a trail in the industry, and just for being, I mean, to somebody like me, just being a positive influence in the industry, family man, doing the work that you’re doing. It’s just good to see from this vantage point, somebody that’s really out there making their dreams happen. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Breon Waters II:
That means the world, Maurice. Thank you so much, and thank you for your platform. Like I was saying before, the work you and Cheryl Miller, all different platforms that came out during 2020, like Where Are the Black Designers? It’s been a huge blessing for us, just knowing we’re not alone, there’s others like us. And just thank you for giving us a platform to share our stories and connect, so thank you so much for it.

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.

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Kirk Visola

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

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

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

☎️ Call โ€ช626-603-0310 and leave us a message with your comments on this episode!โ€ฌ
Interview Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk Visola:
Oh, wow.

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk Visola:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds about right.

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

Maurice Cherry:
You blew your own mind there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
There you go.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk Visola:
Snitch.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk Visola:
Have you played the game by chance?

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

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

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

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

Kirk Visola:
Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kirk Visola:
What made you get in the podcasting?

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

Kirk Visola:
The OG.

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

Kirk Visola:
No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow.

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
A violent tap, a long press.

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
No, no, no, no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk Visola:
First of all…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Or that you’re just Black.

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

“No.”

“Have I ever done a bad job?”

“No.”

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk Visola:
Thank you, Maurice.

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