Phillip J. Clayton

We’re ending out the month of November with the second part of my conversation with the one and only Phillip J. Clayton. (If you missed the first part of this interview, check it out here.)

After sharing his thoughts on brand purpose, we started discussing our experiences with art and education, and he spoke about facing limitations in school due to dyslexia and feeling misunderstood by teachers and other authority figures. Phillip also talked about his experiences working with renowned brands (including PepsiCo), judging creative work, the evolving nature of packaging design, the need for a holistic view of design.

Big thanks to Phillip for such a wide-ranging conversation!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

All right, so we’ve spent a lot of know time, you know, talking about the work that you do through your studio; a lot of your brand identity work and such. But I want to kind of shift the conversation so we can learn more about you. Like, what’s the Phillip J. Clayton origin story? So…you’re originally from Jamaica, is that right?

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yes. Born and grew here.

Maurice Cherry:

How would you describe growing up there?

Phillip J. Clayton:

I grew up on a high point of a mountain — like a cold area. A cold part of the country, in a parish. So I grew up in a small town where it was a lot of mostly religion. So for me, I grew up in religion, Christianity specifically. There’s this traditional kind of way of doing things, and I felt kind of trapped inside myself. That’s what it was like for me, artistically, creatively, it’s more traditional for me. It was very frustrating growing up, honestly.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, your father, from doing my research, your father was in advertising, and he was also sort of a fine artist. Was that kind of a bit of a dichotomy between this sort of difficult growing up?

Phillip J. Clayton:

Part of my childhood, I think, was spent trying to be this great artist like my father, then learning about his profession in advertising, trying to become that as well. A little pressure I guess, I placed on myself. That was an outlet, for sure. Spending time with him in his office and watching him do what he does and then mimicking him. It was an outlet where I could express everything.

Then he started teaching me how to do. My first lesson in art was drawing was a tonal scale. So he taught me how to use one pencil to create from dark to light. It’s a gray scale, basically. So that’s where I started. And, oh, music. He’s also a classical guitar player, so I learned that as well, each day with practice. So I had my outlets. My mother did embroidery, so I was surrounded by art books and design. And my sister, she also was a great writer. So I got all of this stuff around me. So they were in the house. It was great.

It’s when I left the house, that’s when I had my challenges. I wasn’t like most of the children I knew, my cousins included. So I guess I had this big dream of what my childhood should be. But I was still on a massive property. But at the same time, I wanted to maybe a lot more creatively. I wasn’t really into games and stuff like that. I just cared about being really good at art and design.

That’s the summary of my childhood, really. Everything I did was in art or design. Sports didn’t really work out for me.

Maurice Cherry:

So you had this, really, sounds like super creative home life. Did that kind of influence you once you went off to college?

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yes. When I got to college, that was interesting. I felt like I knew so much already. That might be ego, but when I got there, it was definitely because of my childhood. And at that time, I still didn’t know if I wanted to be an artist or not. I was just doing it. It was a question of whether I was conditioned to do…to be creative or am I really someone who likes creating? So college was that journey for me, but I was mostly bored there because it was like, again, I want more. And what I was doing is what I did at home.

I learned techniques. I won’t put it all down. I learned new techniques, but it was too academic for me. It didn’t feel like a creative environment. It felt more academic.

Maurice Cherry:

What all sort of things were you doing there?

Phillip J. Clayton:

After my first year? You do everything in the first year and then you choose second year. I went into painting, and then I moved from that to sculpting. And then…what do you call them? Not majors, like your secondaries. I don’t know what they’re called.

Maurice Cherry:

Your minors?

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yeah, like minors. So I did photography, printmaking. I did not get to do graphic design. I was not even allowed in the class because I guess the teacher didn’t see me as a graphic designer. But ironically, though…so it was all fine art. It was photography, sculpting, painting, and printmaking.

Maurice Cherry:

The teacher didn’t let you in the class? Like, you couldn’t even enroll?

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yeah, they give you this test, and to this day I hate that. And when I was…any job I went to and they said, “there’s a test”, I turned it down and said, “I’m not interested in that.” Because of that experience, most people saw my work that I did for this test, and they said, “but you’re really good at this!” But whatever the reason was…this lecturer there, he didn’t see me as a valid candidate or something. And the same thing happened with architecture. For me, in terms of high school, I’ve been experiencing these kind of things, so again, I’ve been forced into art.

So I had to really decide what I like, but I wasn’t allowed to do anything technical for some reason. I don’t know if it caused my dyslexia, or I don’t know if I was presenting myself the right way. So I can never be sure, but I was turned down essentially, so I just stuck to art. Design was something I was really in love with as well, but for some reason, I just couldn’t get into design. Architecture is something I love, but again, I wasn’t in high school, I wasn’t allowed to do the technical drawing class, whatever the reason was. I do not know to this day. Industrial design, all these things fascinated me. But the art school didn’t have that.

It was art and graphic design, and I found it quite mundane. I was like, where’s the intrigue?

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Phillip J. Clayton:

So that was the experience for me. It didn’t work out well in the end. It’s a joke around my friends that I was asked to leave the art school. So, I think I can conform well — I think that was it, actually. Yes, I remember that statement. I think he asked me a question. He said that, the graphic design teacher. He said, “I don’t appear to be the student that will do what he asks.” So that was my experience constantly.

I don’t think they knew how to relate to me or relate or engage me. I was very dyslexic, and I have a lot of other cognitive stuff going on, and I guess I just didn’t fit into that mold that they wanted. So my entire college experience was me always feeling challenged to live up to some expectation, which I couldn’t because it’s not in my personality to do that. But I wasn’t being rude or anything. I just couldn’t fit into what they wanted. I was very expressive. My fine artwork was very dark as well, so there’s some personal stuff there. And I guess they couldn’t see beyond that.

But I did all my work. But if I may share this on here — when I was asked to leave, I don’t know why, but I found out some years later that it was for drug abuse and being a threat to the school. I was told all this is false, and I never did any of that there. There’s a lot of details to that whole process, so it was very insulting. I felt demotivated after that for a while, but today, it’s not true. Just want to make that record clear. I don’t know where it came from, but nobody asked my opinion on it. They just asked me to leave the school. So that was that college experience.

Maurice Cherry:

You know, as you describe that, that reminds me so much of my own high school and college experience in a different way, but I think in the same feelings of authority, not being able to know what to do with someone like you. And so because they don’t know how to handle — handle is probably not the right word — they don’t know what to do! That’s kind of just the best example that I can give.

I mean, when I was in high school, my teachers — especially my senior year — my teachers, my guidance counselor were like, actively not only trying to fail me because I was set up to be valedictorian, and they didn’t want that. This was a whole race thing in the South. There’s that. But then also my guidance counselor not allowing me to get certain applications to schools or to get application fee waivers, saying things like, “well, why don’t you…have you thought about learning a trade? Have you thought about going to the community college and learning HVAC or welding or something like that?”

And then in college, I mean, it wasn’t as similar as to what your experience is, but certainly…I started out in computer science, and didn’t like it because I wanted to be a web designer. My advisor literally telling me, “if you want to go into the Internet, that’s just a fad. So if you want to do that, you should probably change your major”…which I did. I changed it to Math, and I kind of sailed through on that. But it sounds like it’s just this textbook case of authority not knowing what to do with someone who doesn’t fit into their kind of rigid standards. And I feel like — and maybe I’m grossly generalizing here, please stop me if I am — but I wonder if part of it also was the fact that you said you grew up in this really religious environment, and that there’s sort of this kind of staid structure that comes with that. I mean, I grew up in a really religious town, too, so I know what that’s like.

Phillip J. Clayton:

Well, I mean, according to things I’ve heard in my own family, not my parents, like my relatives, I’m the only person like me in the entire generation. And we go way back. Chinese and European mix. Right? But everything you said is actually all my academic experiences. It’s everything you just said. And are you familiar with Frederick Nietzsche?

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Phillip J. Clayton:

Right. So the will to power, which Hitler misused grossly, is what, in my adult age, that I discovered that, hey, this is the problem. And I love Jamaica, don’t get me wrong, but how I speak about [the] country professionally and academically, a lot of people don’t like it.

Well, I won’t say if you agree, but if you understand the concept of replacing managers with employees who want to be managers, was something I heard, that no employee hates the manager. They hate that the manager is doing what they’re doing to them. So basically they want to be the manager so they can do it to somebody else.

Jamaica for me, is very prudish, and that’s what I think leads to the academic experience we do have. High standards in terms of other courses or disciplines in the academic area. A lot of people do very well because we have this; I think we’re in Cambridge or something, I can’t remember. But at the same time, when you get into the professional space or the creative space, what my perception of it was, oh, you just replaced the Europeans with yourselves. So [you] use the same rules, same approach, same everything. Nothing’s changed.

The managers have changed. They’re now Black Jamaicans, and Jamaican is not even race. It’s an ethnicity. So you just replace the managers. It’s the same rules. So I’m supposed to not live up to my true potential by Frederick Nietzsche. I think it wasn’t even his originally. But anyway, the will to power, where the philosophy or the belief that society limits great thinkers from living up to their full potential. I was considered a rude child in my early school days, or not rude, or not paying attention, one of those two, because of my dyslexia and that knowledge of what dyslexia was, I guess, wasn’t that common back then.

So, yeah, the entire education experience was not great for me. I’ve helped put schools on the map regarding competitions I entered. I either won them or came second or something. I usually get one of three; first, secnd, or third, but the school was proud of that. And I’m not saying a lot of people…I’m not saying I was treated horribly by teachers or anything, but in terms of learning, they didn’t know how to teach me. And I’m probably one in the whole class that has this problem, or maybe more, or they didn’t know. So it was like, if you didn’t fit into this thing, you’re on the outside. And we know all the stories of successful people who have the same stories of teachers berating them, and they literally coming out in the exact opposite of what a teacher said they would be.

I’ve had that experience, and I guess that’s what my journey is on. But, yeah, everything you said about what you experienced is my entire education experience. And I had to leave to discover who I am and all that. Because sometimes these things come in disguise, right? So being kicked from college wasn’t…at first, it was demotivating, and I felt I didn’t feel valuable, which was a common problem with my childhood as well, not feeling smart, intelligent and valuable. I think all the experiences I’ve had forced me to discover myself and my strengths. So I guess there are blessings in disguise in spite of how horrible the experiences were.

Maurice Cherry:

I mean, as you tell me all of this. It starts to make perfect sense as to why you started your own studio back in 2001. If all of this is going on and you know in your mind that you can do this and you strike out on your own and do it, it makes perfect sense.

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yeah. And then keep in mind that I’m only starting with the little knowledge I knew then, right? I’m trying to sell a creative service or my talents. And without the business knowledge I have now, it wasn’t as great, but, yeah, I had to. I was like, “I can’t be these people. I can’t be that good student, that good employee, that anything. I need to show my value.” And that’s what I did. As you rightly said, I was forced to do that.

But it did help me get 9-to-5 jobs after, when I needed my sustainability sorted out. It was the freelance work that I did that got me the jobs, not my qualifications.

Maurice Cherry:

I didn’t go to design school. I got my degree in Math, and I worked jobs after I graduated, and I couldn’t get anything with a Math degree. I mean, one of my jobs –actually, I was still in school, but this was right after I graduated. I was working at the local symphony and art museum and stuff, like selling tickets. And I remember the day that I graduated. I had to go to work that evening. I still had an evening shift. And they had taken the calculator away from my station, because they have these little stations where people come in lanes and that’s where you sell tickets at. And they took my calculator away, and my manager was like, “well, you got a Math degree now, so you don’t need this.” And it’s like, just rub the salt deeper into the wound.

And the jobs I had after that were all, like, customer service type jobs. I did telemarketing for the opera. I was a customer service agent for AutoTrader, which is sort of like this used car marketplace kind of thing. And I was doing design stuff on the side. Like, I was going to the local Barnes and Noble bookstore and taking pictures because I couldn’t afford to buy the books because they were too expensive. I was, like, taking pictures in the books and then taking them back home and using my cracked version of Photoshop to try to teach myself how to make gradients. You know what I’m saying? How to do all this stuff. And my first design job was off of that. It wasn’t because I went to school for it or anything.

Yeah, it takes a lot of guts to strike out on your own like that. Especially that young. So my hat goes off to you for that.

Phillip J. Clayton:

I appreciate that. And just like you, I sort of learned design through jobs or freelancing because my father didn’t grow up in a time of…didn’t do work in a time of computers. So the first time I got a computer, I didn’t think Photoshop was even out yet. But when Photoshop came out, I dove right in. And this is the artistic knowledge that helped me with design. My knowledge of lighting and shadows and stuff like that. It helps me with design.

Some of the best designers actually studied art first. Whether they graduated or not is irrelevant, but they studied art first or they knew art first. But like you, it’s something I learned as well in my teen years, and said, put the best foot forward. I’m sure you’re familiar with that. So what you’re doing in terms of jobs, I consider that survival. But what you put up front when you get the opportunity is, I’m a designer, and that’s kind of what I did.

How I got into professionally doing design is like, yes, art, I’ll do whatever I need to do to survive. But when I’m really selling? I’ll never tell people I’m trying to work with that I’m an artist.

Maurice Cherry:

Now. You’ve worked with a ton of different clients, I’m sure, over the years. I mean, starting in 2001, you’ve worked with, I’m sure, dozens to hundreds of different clients. What are some of the projects that you’re the most proud of?

Phillip J. Clayton:

When I was in production entertainment, that was the first time I understood management, because the team left me in charge of an entire comedy tour for three days, meaning there’s no other management person there. They said they have to do another show, so they trusted me to do this one, and I did it. That was my first time, and I felt really proud of that because…I don’t know if you know Red Stripe Light, not the original red Stripe beer. They had created this light beer, and they were promoting it through this comedy tour. So I was literally traveling around with all the people that worked on the show, and I’m representing the creative side, the art team. So the set design, all of that, I had to ensure we had our plans and everything. I had to follow that three times, morning and evening. So set up, pull down for three days. I had to ensure that that show went on not just for live performance, but for television as well. So that was my first time.

My second one, which I think I’m most proud of, is how I got into brand design, was I helped to relaunch…I was one of the people that helped to relaunch the PepsiCo identity. 2008, Arnold Group Identity, here in Jamaica. I believe Guatemala had got the ownership at that time, so it was on their directive. But I left printing and went right into relaunching this new identity for PepsiCo America through PepsiCo Jamaica. And at first I was like, “can I actually do this? It’s intimidating.” But I was working with an agent, a small design house at a time, so the director there got a contract and we launched it off. But then I became the key person to maintain the brand standards, to make sure that everything went out. So now I’m learning about brand and understanding the value, financial value, and the value to the company, the importance of the brand. And we also rebranded a local Pepsi Jamaica water brand here. It was a full stack, like nine years. Whole nine years, we did it all. And that was the first time I really embraced this idea of brand design.

I was all around brands, but that’s when it moved from graphic design and, “oh, this thing is here, this is interesting” kind of thing. That was kind of the experience for me. So that’s my most proud career moment, I would say. It was a big responsibility and we did achieve the objectives. Yeah, to this day it still looks, when you look back at the work, it looks really good. And just to be part of that, I think just to say I worked on that, that’s something we’re proud of. Being in Kingston, Jamaica, that I actually worked on something, an international brand like that.

I’ll only mention one more. There are a few others. I can’t remember them all, there’s so many because I don’t have favorites. By the way, it’s very difficult to pick a favorite. My idea of favorites is that it’s too partial, I think, because every project I worked on, if I’m going to pick something that was really proud of, it had to be on the value and impact it had. So that’s why Pepsi is one of those. But every product I’ve worked on, when the solution comes together, that’s great for me. And I think they’re all great products, but in terms of magnitude, PepsiCo is one of those. The Guinness, I don’t know what year anniversary we had to wrap an entire entertainment location for the Guinness anniversary some years ago, so we wrapped it all in black with the gold logo, standing out and curated experience for the guest. From the dishes all the way up to the music. That’s another impactful project. But I guess more on the event side, less on the consumer experience side. But, yeah, PepsiCo is one that stands out to me this day. I think it was the launching pad for me.

Maurice Cherry:

Red Stripe. PepsiCo. I mean, those are two huge brands. It really sounds like those helped to…I think whenever you get a really big project or you get a really sort of visible project, it really cements personally that you’re on the right path. You know what I mean?

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yeah. It’s an acknowledgement that you are capable or you’re knowledgeable about this thing. And the fact that they even spoke to me or asked me, was something — was acknowledgment that I can actually help them. And I think that’s the most important part of any profession, is that you are not needed as much. So much so you’re wanted. I think wanted even in your personal relationships, when you’re wanted, is way better than being needed. And that’s what happened, is I was introduced. I’m often recommended for stuff. So that was a recommendation as well. I didn’t apply for it. I wasn’t looking for it. I didn’t know it even was happening. I was recommended for the project. So that was a great feeling for me.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice. Now, it’s funny you mentioned that about sort of how it’s this kind of validating thing, because now what you’re doing is probably a lot of validation for other creatives and creatives teams, which is you’re judging. You’re a brand and a marketing judge with PAc Global for their Leadership Awards. How did you first get involved with them?

Phillip J. Clayton:

I was invited; again, another form of acknowledgment. I was invited through LinkedIn by the CEO, actually, in 2018, I believe, which is also happening this year. Again, I think I mentioned that off. I’m currently judging designs right now, but I was invited. Interestingly, I wasn’t thinking about being a judge, but I used to give my own critiques. I didn’t want to share things on any social media platform alone. I wanted to actually give my view on it, and I started to do that so I’d write my review of the thing I shared. Whether it’s a package design or brand identity, I actually write my perspective on what was done, the goods, anywhere that fell short.

I think just because I did that consistently and still doing it today, is that it got his attention. And I think we connected before, sometime before. And he invited me to be part of the commission, which is a global commission, and PAC has been around since 1950. I’m the only Jamaican on there, by the way.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice.

Phillip J. Clayton:

I’m not sure if I’m the youngest. I’ll be 41 in December, so I don’t know if I’m the youngest, but I’m the only Jamaican on there. And I guess in many ways, everyone there is one person from their own countries as well. But because of the context of design and art in Jamaica, where it’s either traditional, there are some great people here, but you don’t really see it because everything dominates it. So being the only Jamaican in there, a small Caribbean island that’s really business-oriented, if I’m being honest with you, we’re known to be creative, but we’re mostly business. I think it’s a great stage for me to be on. Most Jamaicans don’t know that I have them on international stage just by being a member there. It’s a very proud moment.

I was invited on and I accepted, and it’s just been a great journey. But you learn from it. You have to be very objective. And I like to make sure that creative people understand that when you’re looking at design or art, you have to be. Critiques are supposed to be objective. Your subjective parts are there, but it’s really supposed to be an objective view. And that’s what the judging experience is, because you’d see something really amazing. And if you’re not careful, you end up giving that particular project really high marks, and then you realize “but then this other thing is here.”

So how do you judge these two things? They’re both great. So you have to really get into the objectivity of the design and the purpose behind it.

Maurice Cherry:

I was just about to ask this. It sounds like you’re kind of segueing into it. I’m also an awards judge, and I don’t think a lot of judges really talk about how they approach judging creative work. So I’m glad that you mentioned that objectivity. When you’re looking at work, especially now, since you’re in the middle of this judging process, how do you approach it? Do you have like a rubric, or are there certain things that you take into account as you’re judging creative work?

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yeah, generally as a professional courtesy, it also helps you with client work as well. There are criteria that you have in mind of what makes this project a great product or this design a great solution. The good thing is PAC, and I’m sure other judging commissions, they have their criteria listed out as well. And you’re really looking for these projects that meet. They’ve already narrowed down the entries anyway, so you’re judging what you’re given and you’re going to basically see if these projects meet these criteria. Outside of that, you also have to use your own judgment on how they meet the criteria. You’re allowed to write your review of the project so you can rationalize the decision in the context of maybe it met one criteria, it didn’t meet the other one, or maybe it did in a way that is not as upfront, but it actually meets the criteria. It’s actually achieving the objective it stated it was supposed to achieve.

So it’s always approaching it based on, for me personally, it’s about the design. For me, it’s function and then aesthetics is part of design, but it’s more on what I call emotional responses. The aesthetics is used to wrap up a design solution to make it appealing the human response, but the design has to function as intended. Or unlike art, where it’s subjective, design has to actually work. If it doesn’t work, then it just failed. So I use that as one of my criteria.

In terms of packaging design, I always look for shelf positioning. That’s the first point of contact a consumer has with the design is before they even touch it, what got their attention, what will get them to go and interact with this design. So I look for shelf positioning in terms of packaging design. And I guess you could translate that into other forms of design where…how do you get people to interact with this? I always look for the function. I understand things like simplicity is often misunderstood with minimalism, but it’s not. Minimalism is a philosophy, a way of thinking, and simplicity is the functional side. So my favorite types of designs are the ones that are the simplest. If they’re really simple and have great impact. I love that one. I actually use the word love, not in my critique, but I’m saying it here. The simpler design with a greater impact, that’s a great design for me. So I look for those things. But the commission has its own criteria that we use.

Maurice Cherry:

What do you gain from being an awards judge?

Phillip J. Clayton:

Professionally, the learning never ends, and I’m always looking to learn more, add more knowledge to what I have already. But there’s also a professional status with it. The fact that you’re judging designs mean that you’re somebody worth talking to. I think it’s a big responsibility that you should never take for granted. I mean, anybody that’s put in charge of judging anything should never take that for granted. But it should also mean that you are a worthy conversation regarding knowledge and teaching, passing on that knowledge.

The lessons in judging design is you have to separate yourself. Detachment is a great thing that you can learn from design, from judging. You have to detach yourself, your personal assumptions. It’s invaluable regarding your client work. The same experience of judging can be applied to client work, and that’s how it has helped me in a lot of ways. I can detach myself from my assumptions or what I like. I can also speak to the client differently. I can listen more, to listen and observe before and respond appropriately. I know this is the right way and this is how you should do this and do that. But when you’re judging things, none of that really comes into play.

Because now it’s not about you. And in your client work, it’s not about you. It’s about understanding what the intent of the client is regarding speaking to you. And they have to trust that you are somebody who can help them. You don’t have to know all the answers, but you should be able to, in a very short space of time, through a conversation, be viewed as an expert, a professional that can actually solve problems, that you learn that a lot from judging other people’s work. That comes from art school as well. Judging art, critiquing art is the same process. When you’re critiquing art, it’s not about what you like or don’t like.

It’s always about objectivity. And I think a lot of that’s missing from the client process. So that’s what I’ve definitely gained from know.

Maurice Cherry:

It’s interesting that you mentioned that about objectivity, because sometimes what will happen, and I don’t know if this is such the case with PAC Global, but sometimes awards are just sort of an extension of marketing for companies. Like they’ll just build it into their budget. Like whatever project they’ve got going on, they’ll just automatically submit them, not necessarily whether or not they fit within a particular category or they meet a certain standard level or things like that.

I often find that when I am — it depends on the competition I’m judging — but I’ll always see the same studios producing the same work, and then sometimes I’ll know the studio just from viewing the work. Like, I won’t even have to look at who it’s from. I’m like, “oh, this is from such and such because they use this exact same template with four different clients.” They just did a color swap and switched out typography or what have you. So, yeah, it helps to try to be objective about it, even when you can see what looks just like a lot of repetition, because for companies, they may not even be looking at the acclaim that they get from awards as something that has any other merit aside from just getting them more business.

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yeah. One of the reasons that I absolutely love packaging design is that it’s an extension of the brand, and it’s often one of the first point of contact for consumers. The unboxing experience for consumers is also a very tangible part of that whole design process. Technology, and I guess molds and stuff like that, can limit your packaging design capability, but creativity is found in the limitations, right? So if this is what you have to work with, then you find a creative way to leverage what you have. And that’s what packaging design. Well, great packaging design.

That’s what it does. It finds ways of making this mundane thing very interesting. It can be little changes, whether it’s the actual graphic design on it or is the type of cap, but it’s the same bottle. You can use the same container and do amazing things. And I know exactly what you’re talking about regarding templates because I’ve seen it outside of packaging. I don’t know all the judging. I’ve never been part of anyone. But in terms of designs that are shared on social media or case studies, there are some agencies that stand out, or some designers, because you cannot be so unique.

But it doesn’t look like anything you’ve seen before, or they’ve leveraged something you’ve seen before in a much more interesting way. Packaging design with PAC, the submissions are always unique in that context of being unique, and that’s one of the best parts about it for me. The agencies, the clients — even clients submit their own packaging designs, or the agency submits it on behalf of them. So you get a diverse group of people submitting designs. We do have the big brands, obviously, and they may improve on something they already have out there. And you judge that, and that’s also a very valuable thing. But in terms of…my favorite part is either improvements on existing packaging designs from established brands or new products being launched from smaller agencies. They are very experimental on that side because they’re not as known as the big brands, but they submit some really interesting designs and it’s just exciting to see what they’ve done. Like, “oh, I didn’t know you could do that with this thing.”

And then we’re in an age of technology now, right? Packaging design is changing. We have the brand extensions moving beyond the package itself. What’s the consumer shopping experience like? So the ultimate goal in the end is to have the consumer have a great experience. So packaging design, for me is a great place to understand a lot about design, a lot about art, a lot about craftsmanship.

I only say this because you’ve mentioned that some of these agencies, the templates, you can tell who they are. Because if you have a style in design, I think you have a problem, because every strategy is supposed to be different, right? So if you have a style, it kind of means that you haven’t really giving different clients the same thing, doesn’t it? So, yeah, I like packaging design because it’s very difficult to be the same there. It’s just more difficult to stand out, more challenging. I don’t like saying hard. Difficult is a better word because hard probably means it’s never going to happen, but difficult means there’s a challenge to overcome there.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, I think you also just have more opportunities for innovation with packaging design than you do for the web. For what it’s worth, it’s a kind of staid medium. That’s not to say that there isn’t innovation that exists, but I judge the PRINT Awards from PRINT Magazine. And I am amazed every year —

Phillip J. Clayton:

I love PRINT.

Maurice Cherry:

— at the new stuff that comes through. I mean, things that I never would have thought about in terms of how people have packaged certain things. And the good thing with PRINT is that it’s not just packaging design, but it’s also experiential design. So you can see how people have designed spaces like a gym or an office building.

And to me…I just really love it. I also judge podcasts, and if you want to talk about repetition and podcasting, I’m not going to say any names, but there’s a certain company that rhymes with “water bowl” that sweeps every year, and I’m just like, it’s the same stuff over and over. You got some celebrity to get behind the microphone and interview other celebrities. Like, where’s the innovation?

Phillip J. Clayton:

I’m hoping to get into podcasts at some point. Maybe I’ll do something innovative there. But I love PRINT Magazine, by the way. That’s such a great experience to have. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

It’s an opportunity to just see what other people are doing outside of, I think, you know, what people…. It’s interesting because design in and of itself is such a broad field, but depending on who you talk to, they may have a very narrow view of it. Like, if I tell people I’m a designer, it depends, I could ask five different people. I could tell that I’m a designer. They’ll think five different things. For a long time, when I would tell people I’m a designer, they thought it meant, “oh, so you do UX?” “No, yeah, I don’t do UX. I’m not a UX designer.” Like, I have to sort of qualify that, what that means to me, because I’ve dabbled in so many different types of design, and it’s all design, but the viewpoint is skewed, I think sometimes.

Phillip J. Clayton:

I think you need, I think, I hope I have it because I support it or advocate for it. A holistic view on design is required. A wider perspective, and then you narrow it down based on the purpose that you need it for. That’s when you get graphic design and UX design all these things. A graphic designer, for example, should have the understanding of animation as much as they do stills. I guess what you’re hired for is completely different, but you pay a graphic designer well who understands those two things. They’ll do it.

But if you want somebody who does animation specifically, hire an animator. But for some reason, when you say design, you’re a graphic designer. Everything on the two-dimensional plane comes to you, and it’s unfathomable to say, “oh, I don’t know how to do that.” Right? And it’s okay to not to know how to do that. It would be nice if you did. But design is, it’s a plugin. Most people see it as a plugin.

It’s like, let’s get something and plug it in here. So let’s get the graphic designer to do these ten things, because they are a designer, and design is a process. What makes a difference is the purpose, the intended purpose of going to a design process. Evidently, if you’re doing print, you want a graphic designer. Or if you’re on the execution side, you might want a print technician, but that technician might not be a designer. But they may understand design, and they may do a lot of why I like print, by the way, which is why I’m such a big fan. I worked in printing as well, is that the things I used to do, because of my artistic knowledge and design knowledge, I didn’t print nothing amazing. That’s all over the top.

But there are little things that I learned about the machines and ink levels and the pigments that I was able to achieve when I’m printing. And then the experimental side of it is like, how about we just not do it the way it’s supposed to be done, for example? Well, you don’t damage a machine. But what if I could turn something off here? And I did that and I got different results. So, of course, my dream at the time was to have my own machine so I could go experiment at home, right? But it’s pricey. But it was like, yeah, printing machine is supposed to print this and print that, but how do we use it in a creative way? What if I wanted to do an entire exhibition and printing? How can I make it interesting? That’s how my brain works. So the machine, I was always trying to experiment with it. What happens if I…because some machines actually recognize the layers in Illustrator, for example. So you get a different result depending on how much percentage of ink you put on it.

Because the machine that I was using anyway, it automatically printed layers and layers of color depending on what I have on the artwork itself. And then if you print a rastered image, like a JPEG or a TIFF file, it would do something completely different because the colors are not layered anymore, which was amazing to me. I’m like, how does a machine know that difference? By understanding those things, it’s an advantage, I think, in design, and that helps me. And I’m sure with your knowledge as well, even your customer service experience, you can actually do marketing. A lot of people started in door-to-door sales, like David Ogilvy, and then now he has his own agency.

It’s three, four things I look for is business, authority, opportunity, and time value. Four things, right? Yeah, I said four. Those I learned from a business, from somebody who does business. And I apply to my creative development as well and processes. It has to be a business. You have to have authority of it, and there must be an opportunity, and then you don’t want to waste your time on something that doesn’t meet those three things. So for me, design is just a holistic thing of value, process and impact. That’s how I look at it anyway.

Maurice Cherry:

So on your website, you mentioned — and I thought this was really interesting, especially given how this conversation has went. You said that you’re not a self made man. Who are some of the people that have kind of helped you reach your current level of success?

Phillip J. Clayton:

Oh, wow. It’s a very long list, but I can think of some key people. My very first professional experience while freelancing was when I went into production entertainment. My friend, she worked in the entertainment. She’s an architect, but she started a production company, and she used her knowledge in architecture to execute some brilliant event projects, and she became popular for it. What I learned from her was work ethic. She’s very meticulous about process, and I fell in love with process because of her. And I think my work ethic to this day, I would always give to her by working with her.

I learned from her other people. My last agency boss — or he’s a CEO now. I know his father’s around. At the time, I don’t remember his position, but he was essentially my boss. I learned from him how agencies are managed and how to handle client conversations.

And then there are the people that I never worked with, but just being around them. Michael Beirut said something. I think that’s why I did what I did was he said “hijack your mentors.” Because honestly, if I’m being honest, I didn’t know who to go to to get mentorship from, because what I was seeing was not anything that I wanted to necessarily learn from people. But when I got into the older I got, I realized I need to understand a lot of things, a lot about business and how agencies work. And I started hanging around people. A lot of my friends are way older than me because I learned from them, whether they’re bosses or project managers, that I was a part of a project. I learned from people like that. I learned from clients. I learned from going to unknown territory with clients, learning about their industry, learning how they manage their employees, learning how to have the client conversations with their clients. So I observed them talking to their clients. You learn from different people. It’s just that we don’t often don’t pay attention to it. And everybody goes to this self-made thing. I just one day said, “well, that doesn’t make any sense.” You can’t really be self made. You may put a lot of effort in yourself. Yes, because nobody’s there. You’re doing the work.

But what happened to me was that I said I don’t think I would be anywhere I am and where I’m going without the people that I worked with or the relationships that I’ve made over the years. When I looked at the value that I’ve learned from all these people, I said, there’s no way I can be a self made man. And I started to detest that statement. I guess I can’t say for sure if there’s actually no one out there who’s self made. I don’t know. But I think even entrepreneurs get help along the way. And I guess that help isn’t acknowledged. But I believe that you cannot be self made.

And I guess I just applied it to myself. My website is a bit of satire in terms of narcissism. It’s not seriously narcissistic, but at the same time, I wanted to have people understand how I perceive the professional space and my knowledge. So I put it up there. But it was mostly people I’ve worked with. That’s why I said that.

And I obviously put my father in there. My mother, I learned from both of them. My mother was the one who really gave me that drive that I have now. I think she is a trooper. She’s not somebody who gives up easily. So she taught me as well about discipline. And she told me, any job I’m doing, I should always do my best, even if it’s a horrible job, because you never know who’s watching. So stuff like that stuck with me.

Maurice Cherry:

It’s funny, when I saw that on your site, it reminded me of…this was way back in high school. I had a…I guess it’s like a senior book. Like, there would be these organizations like Jostens or whatever, right? They try to sell you all this stuff leading up to graduation. Like, buy these invitations, buy this tassel. But I have a senior book, and I went back and looked through it recently, and I was…God, I was so angsty in high school. But there was a quote that I had in there that was like, “I’m a self-made man. Who else would help?” Or something like that. So when I saw that on your site, I was like, “you’re not a self made man. What’s that about?”

Phillip J. Clayton:

When we’re in the challenge, or the journey? It’s easy to say that because I deal with depression. And I’m only saying that to create and illustrate something. When you have an episode of any mental challenges, mental health issues that you may have when you’re in an episode, it’s not that you don’t know what to do. You just can’t seem to find that will or ability to get up and do what you need to do to get out of it. So no matter how somebody tells you to do something: “You need to start doing this. When you’re depressed, try these things.” All these things take practice. But no matter how much they tell you, you just can’t do it until you make the first move to do it and you start to do it. And what happens is that over a period of time of learning things and doing them and becoming proficient at them, you cheer yourself because it was difficult, right? And in your context, I’m assuming in high school, that being great, your great experience, you probably wrote that because you had to do a lot of stuff yourself.

I think that’s what happens. And we tend to block out the external forces, whether good or bad. Even some bad experiences contribute to your progressive movement. Right. It’s at least, at very best, it tells you, oh, I don’t want that experience. So you make different decisions, right? So I look at everything. I look at the good and bad. I don’t believe in trying to kill fair. I think that’s illogical. I think negative and positive energies are supposed to be balanced. You can’t really get rid of one or the other. When one is given more power or energy, it throws off the balance. So these things is what I think about. So I was like, there’s no way it’s after a maturity. Of course, this is something that you need as well. So I guess my maturity came into play here and I said, “what does it mean to be self made?” And you started to process that and you started to think and you’re like, “yeah, I got help with that thing.”

Should I be grateful for the jobs I had? Would I be here? I don’t know. I think about these things all the time. But I have to kind of…should contextualize it because you just said something that, yeah, when you’re in high school or along your journey, especially when you’re younger, you’re probably putting a lot of effort in trying to get what you want out of this world. So it does feel like you’re self made because sometimes people don’t see your vision and what you’re trying to do. But at the same time, I believe in being fair. And life isn’t fair, unfair: it’s indifferent, or it just is. But we can decide the fairness of that experience. And I think to be fair, we would have to start acknowledging all the people that has helped us along the way.

They may not have helped us build our companies or build our careers, but even my college experience, it was great. But I did learn some things from it. I have to be fair about that. I learned how to critique, for example, I never learned critiquing at home. I think it’s giving the chair to the things that help you to get where you are. And I’d go too extreme and say, on a bad day, if a store was open on a public holiday and I was able to buy something that cheered on my day, I’m going to thank that person.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. So what keeps you motivated and inspired these days?

Phillip J. Clayton:

Reading philosophy. Gratitude. Each morning I wake up, I always make an effort to spend a few minutes with my mind, whether it’s meditating or a prayer of some kind. I think it’s just a tone for the day. My mind goes into a place where I can deal with any challenges that show up. And it’s always easy but it’s really starting each day with gratitude. I’m reading a lot of books on…I guess I could call them the schematics of living. So I found this balance where it’s setting a vision. That’s what drives me.

I have a vision of what I want to achieve each day and the months in the years and so forth. So I think setting three goals at least each day, is what I do, and that motivates me to get things done because it induces fulfillment, I think. Is it a Chinese philosophy somewhere there? I can’t remember the exact philosophy, but it’s something about not trying to do everything all at once and setting smaller objectives, not try to achieve the big ones unless you can.

So reading is part of my objective each day, to read at least a chapter of something, to review work, to have a conversation with somebody, just setting daily objectives, waking up gratitude, setting daily objectives. And the reading definitely helps. I’m motivated by my vision mostly though, that’s my biggest drive, is I would endure great pains to achieve it, I think.

Maurice Cherry:

What do you think you would be doing if you weren’t doing this kind of work?

Phillip J. Clayton:

Wow. I’d love to have been in the sciences because I did pretty well in it. I like developing theories and experimenting with things, understanding how they work. I would hope that if I was able to be in the sciences, particularly biology or neuroscience, I’m an explorer. Archaeology was on the list at one point too. Yeah, my first desired job was as a child was to work with a Red Cross actually, but I didn’t know how to even do that. And I think I found out that you had to fund yourself part of it. I don’t remember. But yeah, I would like to be doing something that has impact on our society, I guess. Or humans.

I’m hoping design is doing that in some way, but yeah, science in some way or some humanitarian thing, as long as I can sustain myself. I like to definitely be involved in something like that.

Maurice Cherry:

To that end, where do you see yourself in the next five years? Like, what do you want the next chapter of the Phillip J. Clayton story to look like?

Phillip J. Clayton:

I’d like to be recognized or acknowledged as an authority in my disciplines or the field that I’m in. I’d like to know that I’ve had great impact through that discipline, whether it’s our society, whether through technology or something I’ve written just being conversations that are larger, that are beyond my skill sets. I like my thinking to be beyond everything that I do because I think that’s the ultimate point of self awareness and enlightenment is to be someone that people recognize as some kind of philosopher. I guess I would say I just want to be an authority in my field. I don’t know if authority sounds very aggressive. I’m not trying to say like this egotistical authority. What I mean by authority is that I have contributed something as an expert to the industry that’s worth something to a lot of people, that they would also come to me as a source of voice, of knowledge or something. What that means, obviously, is not just, I’m not going to go sit on a chair and counsel people.

What I mean is being an authority means that even my work should be reflecting that in a different way in five years. The type of work I do, type of conversations I have, I think being an authority establishes your prowess, professional prowess, in any industry you’re in.

Maurice Cherry:

I hear that. I mean, I think it’s certainly something where…and it’s funny, I think you definitely are at that point already. Like I’m wondering because you’re judging and you’re doing all this work, what do you think it would take for you to reach that sort of level of authority that you’re talking about?

Phillip J. Clayton:

Definitely through the work. I’m trying to do different types of work now, work with different type of clients. You’re right. I’ve been told that I am in an authoritative position at the moment. My value is strong and high. I guess it’s what Bruce Lee said: “be happy, but don’t be satisfied”…or something like that. Meaning that you should always deserve to be greater than you are, but be happy with what you have. I guess that’s where I’m coming from. It’s not greed.

It’s like, as long as I’m alive even if…I have a question. You asked about what else would I be doing if I wasn’t doing this. I make statements like this, and I don’t mean to be extreme, but I do make statements like this to my friends. And anybody that asks, is that if I can’t get to do what I want to do, I’d rather be dead. And I don’t mean that from a…I hope I’m not putting the wrong words out there. It’s not that if I can’t do it, I’m going to go die. It’s just, what is the point? If I’m not doing this, if I’m not doing what I’m doing, then why live? So it’s kind of like, be useful.

I think every human being desires to be useful in some way. And then when they don’t have that use or purpose, it’s hard to live. You start figuring out how to survive and you just never leave that place of survival. It’s like you’re always trying to find a reason to live. And I think purpose gives you that reason to live. So that’s my purpose, is to achieve that kind of level of authority where I don’t even have to go look for clients anymore. I would like to be in innovation, some R&D kind of process. If NASA had a creative department, for example, I’d probably want to be there.

I guess I would say this professionally. I like to be in a place where there’s a seamless process of innovation, R&D and innovation that leads into the brand design process and ultimately contributing to advertising and marketing output, adding meaning to the consumer — the consumer experience; people — the experience people have shopping or engaging in government services or anything. I like to innovate those things because the end user for me is always something important in our process. That’s who we’re creating for. Design is supposed to be having positive impacts on the lives of people. No matter what form is in. The only reason you’re doing it is because you’re trying to change something for an end user somewhere. And I guess that’s the kind of authority I want, is where I can develop something that changes the industry also, I guess, in how we work with people, I’ve been told, actually I’m a thought leader.

I’m not really clear on that definition yet, because I hear it used a lot. I think of myself as a practicing philosopher more than a thought leader, but maybe it’s the same thing, I don’t know. But somebody once called me a thought leader.

Maurice Cherry:

I think the difference between that and this may be something that you’re already doing, but if you’re thinking of how to take the next steps to try to get there, it’s really all about — and this is, I mean, from a design standpoint, it sounds silly — but it’s all about writing and sharing your work.

Phillip J. Clayton:

That’s so…that’s well said.

Maurice Cherry:

Like people…I think of folks like Frank Chimero, Steven Heller, etc. I mean, they’re well known as designers, but they’re also well known as sort of just writing and talking about the craft. You know, Mike Montero is another one, for example. That sort of…I think to me, when I think of thought leader, and I think also just in terms of how your work spreads beyond the visual medium, how it spreads beyond, you know, a campaign or some sort of a visual project: writing is the way that I think that happens.

Phillip J. Clayton:

That is absolutely correct. I think even Blair Enns — not think, I know even Blair Enns shares that. He actually says in his book that the expert should write. And I started writing. I’m sure you think I probably shared that with you. You see them on my website. I’ve written articles and I’ve written other things, but writing, being somebody dyslexic, I didn’t see myself writing this much or reading this many books.

I used to detest both of those things growing up, but it was because I didn’t think I was smart enough to do it. But now I buy so many books and read them, and I don’t just read them, I actually put them into practice and I write. And you’re absolutely correct on that. We should write. That’s what professionals should be doing. That’s how you establish yourself. That’s absolutely correct. You have to write a thesis or theory or opinion we should be writing.

And that’s why I like to do case studies. I like to write out the experience. Everything else that follows that really is just the know, oh, we developed this philosophy, and here is the brand identity from that philosophy, that kind of thing. So you’re absolutely correct in that we should write.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, just to kind of wrap things up here, Phillip, where can our audience find out more information about you, your work, your writing? Like, where can they find all that online?

Phillip J. Clayton:

So the first place, I guess I’d say, because I have all the social media links I believe on there is pjclayton.com, my primary website. Outside of that, you can go directly to LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. And it’s always Phillip J. Clayton. Phillip with two L’s. J. Clayton. And I think if you hashtag it too, somewhere there, I have hashtags for them too. PJClayton. Phillip J. Clayton. P-J-C.

Maurice Cherry:

All right, sounds good.

Phillip J. Clayton. Thank you for…I mean, such a wide-ranging and expansive interview. I feel like we went in like a dozen different places from your first interview, talking about branding, to this interview, which is certainly more just kind of personal about you and your upbringing and how you got to where you are now. I really do feel like that level of thought leader that you’re talking about. I think you’re already there, and I hope that this interview will help to elevate you to get further to that, because I really think that with everything that you’ve talked about, with everything that you’ve done, you’ve got all the components. Like, you put in the work. I think we’re right around the same age. You said you’re 41, right?

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yeah, I’ll be 41 in December.

Maurice Cherry:

I’m 42 now. So we’re right around the same age. So I know the work that goes into it to sustain yourself this long in this creative industry. And you said one thing before we started recording, that you have sort of these six rules for a quality life experience. You were like: disciplined, patient, kind, acceptance, forgiveness, and letting go. Look, that can be your philosophical bent to taking yourself to that thought leader status. But I’m really excited to see what else you come up with in the future, man. So thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I appreciate it.

Phillip J. Clayton:

Thank you so much. I enjoyed it. It was, I think, my deepest conversation on a podcast. Most of it’s really about work, so I really enjoyed it. I appreciate the compliments and the chair. I do look forward to what’s next. And likewise, same to you. This is a…I don’t know if a lot of people know it, but since you’ve shared it with me through the invitation, being part of the Smithsonian Archives is a brilliant position to be in from a content perspective. I never knew that was something that could happen, and I want to celebrate you for that.

Maurice Cherry:

Thank you. I appreciate that.

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Phillip J. Clayton

Phillip J. Clayton is a design voice that you need to know. The Kingston-based creative is a strategic advisor, an international design judge, and an expert on branding. We talked for hours about his career and his philosophies on branding and life, so I split this episode into two parts just to make sure nothing got lost. If you’re interested in branding, then get ready for a masterclass!

Our conversation started off with a check-in on this year, and then Phillip shared his goals about being seen as a facilitator and about tackling complex problems and making a meaningful impact. We also talked about how he started his own company PJClayton & Co., the client-vendor relationship, and Phillip dropped a ton of knowledge about his creative process, brand purpose, and the power of extracting valuable information from conversations. (Kind of like what you’re doing with this episode!)

Tune in next week for Part 2! Happy Thanksgiving!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

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

Phillip J. Clayton:

I’m Phillip J. Clayton and I’m a brand consultant, a strategic advisor and an international design judge. I focus on brand design and development. I’m a writer. I write articles, copywriting, etc. I focus on art and design holistically as a foundation for advertising and marketing. And I’m usually hired as a creative director. I do have a consulting company called PJClayton and Company.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay, we’ll talk about all of that, certainly. But if you could use three words to sum up what this year has been for you so far, what would those words be?

Phillip J. Clayton:

So…agony is definitely part of that. I did agony…awareness. And enlightenment.

Maurice Cherry:

Agony, awareness, and enlightenment. That sounds like the hero’s journey.

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yeah, well, I’m hoping it will be.

Maurice Cherry:

Have you given thought to what you want to accomplish next year?

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yes, I have. That’s the awareness part. I’ve discovered things about myself personally and professionally. So next year I would like to actually be more focused on becoming what I label a fixer, not necessarily a facilitator. I went into consulting for that reason. I would like to be more on the consulting side and looking at complex problems. They’re usually very impactful. So I like to focus on complex problems with larger corporations, I guess.

And the reason for that is the impact it can have both in this, like in their specific industries or on a societal level, regarding the thinking and the approach to sustainability and marketing behind that internal change. Right? I’d like to focus more on that regarding innovation — R&D — there are a lot of things out there, and the unsolved. Most of them that I can think of, they’re unsolved. They’re worth a lot of money as well. So it does benefit me to sustain that focus if I’m able to sustain myself doing it.

Maurice Cherry:

In your eyes, how is a consultant different from a facilitator then? Because you really sort of try to make that shift.

Phillip J. Clayton:

For me, a facilitator? Well, generally, to my knowledge, a facilitator would normally broker two parties together. I guess the ideal between two parties or to facilitate one party to another, or they find a way to accommodate something else, to align it with another thing. The consultant to me is more of a fixer. And that was something. The word fixer in this context I learned years ago, I think it was on a movie or something. But it intrigued me because I always had this desire to be someone so important that I’m only called when I’m needed. And it’s usually for something that nobody can solve. No, I’m not the only one, obviously, on the planet, but it’s kind of like that being the only one kind of thinking behind it, where you get called in because you are the only person who can fix this problem.

And a consultant, to me, is that because consulting is a form of therapy, in my opinion, where we have to…the execution is the last step of everything. The consultant listens to people, a client I guess you could say, and they have to diagnose a problem and make a prescription to that problem or symptom. A facilitator doesn’t really do that. The consultant…actually, this is why the time is so important that they spend with each client. That’s why if you’re really narrow in your focus, you probably don’t have as many clients as a company that’s serving a wider market. You’re probably working with very few clients. But those clients are really valuable, not just in the work they do, but also in the financial gain that you get from it and they get from you helping them. It’s really a form of therapy because a lot of times the problems that they come to you with are not what is not what they say it is by listening to them and allowing them to speak and asking specific questions, great questions that lead to answers, because we don’t always know the answers either. It’s just the information that we can extract from the conversation that builds trust. And then the client reveals themselves to you and you realize, “oh, there’s either a personal issue here or there’s actually a deeper company problem here.” And what most company owners will do is because there is this cliched response, especially in brand. Our brand is a solution, is that they will come with a list of requests that they believe will solve the problem for their company. And this could be anything from a little new logo or website or rebrand, something aesthetic or surface level, I call it. But those things are results of deeper processes.

So that’s kind of how I view the consultant regarding a fixer as opposed to a facilitator.

Maurice Cherry:

I want to talk about your company, which you mentioned earlier, PJ Clayton & Co. And I think it’s important to note that you started that 22 years ago, which is fascinating. My hats off to you for your longevity of keeping it going all this time. What made you decide to start your own company?

Phillip J. Clayton:

Irony is the life experience. I actually didn’t want the company. I just wanted to be recognized when I was younger.

Well, let me rephrase it. In my mind, a company requires employees. That’s what I knew back then. I didn’t really want that, but I said, I need to be respected as a professional, and I need a name for that. And during my college years, which started in 2001 — if remember I that correctly…yeah, 2001 — I was freelancing before college. You’re doing side projects. I just left high school like a year before, and I’m just getting hired by people who knew I could do graphic design or art or anything creative that I could do. People are hiring me to help them. These were really small jobs, but I always had this thing growing up in the house I grew up in, which was with my father being my first door to the world on design and all that.

At a very young age, I had this image of myself, even at that age I fell in love with, like, movies and advertising, or anybody, if it is an advertising agency, or architecture or some kind of design firm. I was fascinated with that thing, not necessarily the movie itself. And I always had this perception of myself that I wanted to become someone so valuable.

And that’s where it started. I said, “well, one day I would like to have a global firm.” I think my name, PJ — the J — is important. That’s how people find me. So I added the J in there. I’m talking like twelve years old here. I’m writing. My first logo was done around that age, too, which was hand drawn, because what, my father? That’s the era he’s from. Everything was hand done, not computers. I learned from him. I didn’t know what a logo was. I didn’t know what graphic design was. I just saw him doing stuff, and I’m like, “he’s getting paid. This is fun.” And I started at that age, sketching out my logo, which was PJC. I didn’t think about the Phillip J. Clayton part of it yet. I was just like, “PJC represents me. That’s my name, my acronym.” What’s that word for that again? It’s not an acronym. What do you call it? Yeah, no, something more language related, I can’t remember. Initials. Is that what we call it? Initials?

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, we can call it initials.

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yeah. Right. So that’s what I knew growing up. My initials. I didn’t know what a logo was. My father used to sign his work with PJC or PJ Clayton as well. He has a J as well. But he’s Paul and I’m Phillip, so we had the same initials.

As I got older, I started to discover all these things about design. And then Letraset. He had Letraset books, art history books. And I’m just reading through — being dyslexic, when I say “reading through”, I’m really looking at what I can understand. And I realized that there is the typography and this thing called advertising. And he used to do mockups that he presented to clients by hand. He’d build the actual billboards, miniature versions of them, and he understood color separation, for example. That was a manual process back then. And I just started falling in love, and I said, “I want to be the person who knows all of this stuff.”

I wanted to become an admin. This is before I even knew about David Ogilvy. I said I want to be an admin. I want to be some kind of…I don’t remember if I used the word “consultant” at that age. And by the time I was in my teens going to college, that’s when I started to freelance, I guess you’d say, officially, while I’m in college under Phillip, it used to be Phillip Clayton. And I added the J because I said, I need to stand out a little bit here. The more I got involved in projects, I started to have this awareness of how the world works. And I said, “I need to have a company.” It wasn’t a company at the time. It was just Phillip J. Clayton Creative. I think I had it at the time. And it was short of PJ Clayton Creative and worked with that for a while.

And then this one that you’re currently looking at, Phillip J. Clayton. I mean, PJ Clayton and company. That one happened last year when I was pivoting myself. When I finally said, “this is it”. I think I know who I am now and what I want to focus on. And so PJ Clayton and company is the newest iteration of that.

But it’s always been PJC. It’s always been something of that. I have logos. I have, like, I think six versions of this logo. This is the most current and pleasing one for me. I wanted to have something that represented me professionally, and I still wanted to maintain my individuality as a person, where I should be able to walk into meetings in corporate offices without having to become what people expect me to become, I guess, for those meetings. So it wasn’t very important that I maintained Phillip in some way.

And I think it was like five years ago, someone saw that name that Phillip J. Clinton on LinkedIn, actually. And they said, “oh, that’s a very prestigious name.” And that’s when I said, “oh, I’m changing this company. He’s going to be PJ Clayton & Company now.”

Maurice Cherry:

Hey, other companies do it all the time. They change up logos, they change their names around. So it sounds like you already sort of had that foresight.

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yeah, from childhood, like I said, I was always thought highly of myself, but I was dyslexic. So even thinking of myself as smart and intelligent was not my strongest attribute. I guess the self confidence, well, externally was low, but in my head I was very confident, and I knew what I wanted from a very young age. It was “you’re going to be a famous artist or you’re going to be in advertising” — that much I knew.

Maurice Cherry:

What were those early days of the company like? I mean, you started back in 2001. You were still in school. What were you doing?

Phillip J. Clayton:

It was just me. I had no concept of hiring people for help at that time. It was just me and some friends of mine. They work in production, the production entertainment industry, and I started working with them. It was mostly on our art direction and set design. I basically helped them with the graphic side of things. I get paid for that. And then I slowly worked my way into becoming into the management side where they start asking me to manage a whole production by myself: stage, set up, everything. Making sure everything looks good for either the TV screen or a concert. Also worked on music videos. So there’s a lot of art and graphic applications from my side. That’s why they wanted me to work with them.

I was doing all of that as myself, and that’s really the foundation of the company where I was known as, or I was dubbed as, a great graphic designer or an artist. So it was a lot of projects like that. It was either logo work or some kind of art consulting thing where I would use my artistic knowledge to help on something. On a visual. As a visual component.

Yeah. So that was the early days, but as a starting point of my official professional career.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, if you look from then to now, what are some ways — and I mean, you’ve sort of already talked about your personal journey growing as a creative — but what are some ways that the company has kind of changed from then to now?

Phillip J. Clayton:

There’s a dramatic change. I have partners now. I’ve narrowed myself into brand consulting. The clients are different. I mean, I’m between corporate startups and the industries are diverse. It’s fintech. So I’m actually solving business problems now. That’s a big difference there, as opposed to then being a creative service, as opposed to a company that has a creative service.

It’s flipped around now. What’s happened over the years is that I now focus on actual business problems. So I’m a business that offers creative services, but I align it all to a business objective or problem. So it has more impact now as a company and myself as a professional. The partners that I have, or people…clients that I work with, are way more, I guess, grown up. You’d say there’s an adult version of the company now where we’re having serious conversations, having fun about with what we do. Yes, but it’s really trying to have that impact on someone’s company who’s asking for help becoming an industry voice.

As someone once said, I’m speaking on behalf of the company when I communicate anything online. And now there’s this responsibility. It’s like you feel responsible now in regarding or accountable for anything that you say and do. There’s this thing behind me that I need to protect. And I guess that’s the big difference now from then, back then it was, “oh, I want to be creative and make a lot of money” and that’s it.

Maurice Cherry:

Let’s say like you have a new project that’s coming into you, like a new branding project. What does your creative process look like? Because I imagine there might be steps that you have to take to sort of transform that client’s vision into a brand identity.

Phillip J. Clayton:

Oh, absolutely. This is a diagnosis, part of the whole process that, well, once anyone engages me of interest, I have to ensure that one: I can actually help them. I can actually solve, or at least I have a process of how to solve it and then I have to align myself if it’s something that is where we are good fit. But once that happens, let’s say it goes well and we are actually going to work together. That process starts with assessing the company, the business development, product development and management. There’s usually probably a brand audit as well where they are in the market and are they okay in the market, should we point them in a different direction? But we have to start with assessing the company and what it offers. And process mapping is part of that, where we identify what happens when a customer is engaged on what happens at that point and then when the engagement ends, what happens after. So you identify these points, pain points or points of leverage. And a lot of times the process of helping that client is not necessarily always going to be on branding.

They may come for that, but it turns out that they need to redo their marketing or we need to do their business management. But in terms of creative process, it’s going to start with. I try not to, first of all, do research until I’ve been given the information or because I don’t want to taint that perception. And then once I have that, I observe that thing, whether it’s a product or the company itself, whatever I receive, I try to observe that from an ignorant place where I have no idea what this is, but who would buy it kind of thing or what’s the value of this thing that I’m looking at. So you have to understand how it works. And this is why I look at a company, you have to understand how the company works. Then you can go into the strategy of how to represent that value and leverage it as on the brand side. So the process is usually going to start with business.

It has to, in my opinion…I always start there. There’s conversation therapy. That’s the part where I am…it’s where I sit with the client and we have these conversations that lead into the development process. I mean, of course, you have to make sure your agreement is mutual regarding timelines and objectives. And I tend to ask this, by the way, I learned from my lawyer, “what’s your pain threshold” and “what’s the results you’re looking for?” Those two questions are really very good questions to start with.

Maurice Cherry:

Your pain threshold. Yeah, talk to me a little bit about that. What do you mean by that?

Phillip J. Clayton:

It’s a way of identifying what that client is willing to do to get the result they’re looking for. Because a lot of times people try to charm me for some reason. You know what I mean? They try to impress you with how much money they have or money is not an issue, or “we want to be different and bold.” Oh, I love that one. They always come with that one.

Maurice Cherry:

Everybody wants to be bold. Everybody. Every client wants that.

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yeah. And there’s this unique thing and it’s like, what I’ve learned is that no matter how complex a problem is or how unique it is to the client, it’s not that unique on a wider viewpoint or industry viewpoint, but it’s unique to that client. No matter how similar, it’s always going to be unique to that client and that company. But bold and different, distinctiveness, differentiation, fine. But when they say they want to be bold and different, it’s not a well thought through statement, because there’s risk to that. And unless you’re willing to take that risk, you can only be so unique in this sea of sameness, right? But you can definitely stand out with distinctive marketing and branding and all that, or how you represent yourself. If you have something different about a product in a competitive market space, then, yeah, you can differentiate that, but it’s to be bold.

Boldness. I love boldness. It goes against fair, which is different from being brave. I think bravery is a product of boldness. But when they come to me like that and I look at the company, this is why I assess the company, I assess the market, I assess their thinking. You’re learning about the management, the owners, you’re learning how they think, what they like, what they don’t like. That’s what conversation is about. So the pain question is to find out or identify what they’re willing to do to achieve it.

And they can tell me when it’s a pain threshold, like, well, they’re willing to do whatever it takes or, yeah, we don’t want to rock the boat too much. You get those things when you ask a question, right? You start getting the real answers, right? Then based on that you say, well, what’s the result you’re looking for? By the way, I learned it from a divorce lawyer. That’s what she asked, because she said, you’d be surprised. These two parties are, when they really go in with that aggressive approach and they want this and they want that and they realize, well, you’re not willing to do anything for this because relationships, it’s complex, right? So yeah, they want to hurt the other person, but what they really want is justice. In the end. They both want justice, right? That’s where the question came from. So what do you want in the end of this? What are you hoping to achieve at end of this process? And once the pain is threshold, what are you willing to do to get it?

Maurice Cherry:

When you look at a brand or a brand design, are there key elements that you try to put into this design that really make it memorable? I would imagine those probably stem from that conversation like you talked about before.

Phillip J. Clayton:

Always. The value of the brand is really what it represents or who it represents. So what you put into that is meaning. People add meaning to things. When it’s symbols, so that’s what a philosophy is for; what I call brand philosophy. I didn’t come up with it; that don’t mean I called it that way. I need to have that information, that knowledge that helps me or the team working together to develop a philosophy. This represents the thinking inside the company or the ownership. For people to feel valuable on any team, they need to have that accountability that without them, this won’t work. So there has to be a philosophy for this company that the brand now would express as the philosophy that this is their belief system. Right? That’s what people buy into a lot of times, whether it’s in religion or not.

I use religion a lot in conversation because it’s a great example of what a brand is and the belief systems are and how people buy into it, getting vested interest. So I have to have a brand philosophy. And then what you do is you make a declaration, so the manifesto comes out. You make a statement as a company and a brand, or you make a statement that this is who we are, this is what we’re about, and it’s based on this philosophy. So when I look at brands and I’m observing them, yeah, you’re going to see the aesthetic stuff first, service level stuff.

These are functional assets, I call them, because the very good ones are usually from a really deep philosophy. And the results of that is something so simple and powerful. When I see too much effort in the visual, I’m not usually very impressed with that because it means that you’re trying to convince something that’s probably not there. When I see a simple symbol and a really distinctive, confident visual language and architecture to a brand, I know that this company is something that I need to pay attention to.

For example, and that’s what happened, as an example I could give you was when PepsiCo, Mauro Porcini did the PepsiCo design innovation. I think it was 2012, they never had that before. That changed PepsiCo completely as a corporation. How they go about their business and their marketing. Design innovation at PepsiCo added deep meaning to the brand itself because it tells me what their focus is, it tells me what their thinking is or how they perceive their market and the customers in that market. So I look for those things. I look for deep meaning behind the logo, I look for deep meaning behind the communication. And I think that’s because of myself. I think I tried to say less and speak more. I hope I’m doing that now. Sorry. I like to speak less and say more. That’s what I meant to say. Because I think that’s one of the most powerful positions you can have when you don’t have to explain anything, urge to explain anything. If a company can do that, then, I mean, if the brand can do it for a company, then you’re really powerful. So I look for that. I look for less communication, more visual communication, less explanation, less wordy. And visual means typography as well, but less wordy, less explaining everything to me. I just want to see it because the logo is what I’m supposed to see. I’m supposed to see your whole story.

And then the logo is supposed to intrigue me enough that I want to know more. And that’s where we pour meaning into brands, because the brand actually forms when that experience ends. Anything that you have in your mind now after that experience is what the brand does to you.

Maurice Cherry:

How have you sort of seen brand design evolve, like over the past 20 years? I mean, we of course now have AI, we’ve got machine learning and all these sort of things, the way that technology has sort of infiltrated a lot of the creative industry, but then we also have changing consumer behaviors. I’m thinking particularly in the U.S. — I’m sure this is different internationally, just based on economies — but there’s been ups and downs and waves of how people spend money, what people spend money on, what people even value from a brand. How have you seen things evolve over the years?

Phillip J. Clayton:

I’ve seen both sides of that. Good and bad, I guess, or horrible. I know it’s bad or good, there’s pleasant and there’s this horrible experience I’ve seen over at least ten years, is that with automation, the objective changes.

For some reason, the brands that are paying attention, their core values didn’t change, their philosophy didn’t change, what they did was change how they interacted with their consumer and society in a whole. For example, the shopping experience, waste management, these things also all add up to what the brand represents because the company has to do these things. So that’s one, I guess, favorable experience on the brand side. The other side is that it has opened up a whole new services on what a brand is and what the process of brand design and development is. Because I rarely if ever use the word branding as a process.

I specifically say brand design and development because branding for me isn’t actionable — it’s under that process of brand design and development. Branding is a stage of the process where you start to develop these assets that represent and communicate for the company. But because of technology, what’s happening now is that…I’m sure you’re aware of a lot of on-demand services are out and what they’re doing is titled branding. Visual design. Visual identities, for example, have somehow become a separate thing from the brand design process. I don’t know how that happened where people are actually doing visual design as a service and I’m thinking, “how do you get there without the brand design process?” So when you go into on-demand services, what you’re doing is…I can pay you less money because clearly you’re billing by time, which I don’t do, but you’re not really providing a valuable solution.

Now I’m not saying that smaller companies or startups who don’t have a big capital can’t start like that. Sometimes you just want to get the company out and if you focus on doing good business, the brand will form anyway. If you’re going to go into brand as a service and you’re expecting a certain result, then it’s probably not the best move to go on-demand. It’s probably better to focus on your business and just hold off on the development of the things like logos and whatnot. You can just register a company name and communicate as a company. Your brand will form and then obviously you made some money at this time and you can do it now you have a proper process, you have an understanding of what your company does and how people perceive you. But what I’ve seen with brands is that…I won’t say the entire brand landscape is like this, but there are some brands that are aligning themselves with deep and meaningful experiences for the consumer. They’re looking into how to make the seamless process of shopping and acquiring their products in a more sustainable way. Obviously there’s financial incentives there once a consumer buys into your thinking. The other side is that there are brands who are aligning themselves to trends. And we saw this when the pandemic came, when everybody started changing…well, a lot of people started changing their messaging. You’re now changing your core value. This is a philosophy — again, you have to have a philosophy that you stick to. It has to be something that you can adapt to environments in, but it doesn’t change your philosophy.

You’re only adapting how you do what you do, but not the philosophy of it, not your core values. That’s what I have seen happening regarding most brands is that they’re aligning themselves to trends and the consumer is dictating a lot about how they do things, and that’s fine. But at some point you have to stick to what you believe in and the consumer gets over it. We saw that with Nike and Kaepernick where Nike just stuck through, right? And I think that’s the most important part, is not to adjust the brand to fit with these trends, whether — and I mean this on a deep level — whether it’s with social movements or activism or anything, do not change your brand to fit that.

If I’m selling shoes, that’s what my company does, then my brand represents a company that sells shoes. And the background, I can support these organizations, but I should not be marketing them up front where I have a company with a brand that supports, I don’t know, some social movement and that has nothing to do with my business unless you build it into your brand like Patagonia. I think they are very open and upfront. It’s part of their brand philosophy. So unless you have that, I don’t see a hardware company to not sell certain tools, to align themselves with some kind of trend. A hardware company is a hardware company. The more tools or lumber they sell, the more money they make. What they can do now as a brand is that they can use that money, I guess, from your profits or whatever they used to choose to use to support some kind of social cause.

Do that, but don’t label it as your brand purpose, is what I’m saying. Don’t get up and say “our brand purpose is to support this cause.” Your brand purpose is to represent your company. That’s what a brand purpose is. That’s what has changed; brand purpose is not a new thing, and the brand no longer serves the purpose that it’s supposed to serve. It’s now serving human social causes or needs, or it’s not representing the companies effectively because they’re changing the meaning behind what a brand’s purpose is to represent your company. So your company is the one who should be doing the social support. The brand is only supposed to represent your company so that when you see it, you think of the company and what a company does for society. That’s what it’s supposed to be.

Maurice Cherry:

They’re starting to become synonymous these days, especially, I think with, not to put this blame on social media, but I do think because social media has allowed a channel of communication between the consumer and the company that probably didn’t really exist that transparently before. What you end up having is a lot of companies having to, in some ways, sort of change their brand values or put something on their brand values that do stick with a specific social thing that might be happening.

Of course, the one thing I’m thinking about that has to do with this is regarding the summer of 2020 here in the U.S. where a lot of people were protesting and they were out in the streets. That was George Floyd. And you had so many companies kind of posting black squares on Instagram and making vows to do this specific social change or whatever. And now three years later, all of that stuff is non-existent and cut. And I mean, people try to hold companies to try to hold them accountable for that sort of stuff. But to your point that you’re mentioning, brand purpose has now gotten…it’s changed and evolved to now include how the company feels or has a stance with or against particular social issues.

And I can imagine that’s like a really difficult place to be.

Phillip J. Clayton:

Yeah, you don’t want to make your brand too human. It’s patronizing. It’s like, okay, so everybody has this human-centric buzzword now, and everybody has this brand purpose buzzword. It’s like, what is your brand purpose? And they’re going to tell you, I don’t ask that question. I don’t ask what your brand purpose asks. What’s your company’s purpose? When people try to make the brand very human, you have to understand what that means. The human being is a contradiction and a paradox. We’re subject to change. So unless you’re willing to put your brand through that constant change, that’s what it means to be human.

So yes, you can have values like you’ve mentioned there that you can add things to, you can build on it. This can be a foundation, and you can build on that foundation. But if you don’t have a foundation to build on, what’s going to happen is that you’re going to put up a black square, and then it’s going to mean nothing afterwards. But if you’re a company that has a foundation and a core value, and you express that core value — and this is what we do — but we are going to show support for this thing. That’s fine. But don’t make these bold statements as if you’re going to change the company now for the next ten years because of what’s happening.

I’m still a company that sells ice cream. My brand is whatever I write on…it’s Phillip. I sell Phillip’s ice cream, so that’s my brand. But my company sells ice cream, and I would like to donate money to this cause I like to do this, and I like to do that, but that’s not the brand. That’s a company. The brand represents the thinking and philosophy inside the company, the type of people that work at the company. So a company that used its brand to put up that black square, and then nothing else followed that, was either a company that’s just saying, “we do support, but we’re going to get back to work” or a company that gave the wrong message out there and made some kind of promises to the Black community and hasn’t delivered on it, now they’re accountable. That becomes a marketing problem for you.

So you don’t want to make your brand do that. What you want is to remember that company management or business management and brand management are two different things. I don’t know if I’m saying it in a way that people understand or if I’m making sense to them, to anyone listening, but brand purpose — if I’m going to be grammatically correct, I’d say your brand’s purpose — is to represent your company. Your company is what you do and the people that do it or help you to do it, right? The company is a group of people. So it’s about your thinking. It’s about what you find important. It’s what you value as a company. The brand represents that.

And I love using Batman. It’s a very great example of what a brand is. All you see in the skies is his logo. That’s it. But the logo represents the promise he made to the city. That’s all it is. So your brand upholds the promise that the company made. Quality products. Quality service. These things. The logo is the symbol that represents the brand and the company all at once. It’s your identifying mark.

Just develop a good core value system, a belief system that you can uphold next 10, 20 years on average — most companies, I think, they last 30 years, unless they pivot or do some kind of innovation. Like Amazon did innovation. I guess you could say Facebook, because all of these companies, their lifespan was, I think, expected to be 30 years before they closed. But they innovated. So yeah, what’s the brand in that? If they’re going to, they didn’t change. They just adapted to a new environment, made product innovation, service innovation, better customer experience. I just want to make that part clear about the brand purpose because I think it’s very confusing and muddy right now with what a brand is.

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Ethan Baldwin

It’s no surprise that designers like working on projects that allow them to fully display their creativity and talent. For Ethan Baldwin, those projects just happen to revolve around what might not be considered that exciting by others — banking and finance. That outlook is one of the foundations behind Slash and Structure, his new brand strategy and visual identity design firm.

Ethan spoke about his passion for “making boring stuff less boring”, and how it’s been important for him to balance his artistic skills with other aspects of a career in design. We also talked about working in-house vs. being an external vendor, and Ethan shared how his education at Oberlin and his work in the agency and financial world in NYC helped shape his perspective as a designer and an entrepreneur. For Ethan, being involved in the creative process is about more than just making something look good — it’s about providing value, trusting the process, and staying connected to your craft!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

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

Ethan Baldwin:

I’m Ethan Baldwin. I am a creative director based in Brooklyn, New York. And this year, I have started a new brand strategy and visual identity design firm called Slash and Structure. So, say hi to me. I am a founder, entrepreneur, creative director, lover of all things beautiful and design forward and eye catching. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

How has the year been going for you so far since starting the business?

Ethan Baldwin:

It’s been pretty good. I always tell people that the only downside has been kind of like the demons inside of my own head and trying not to get into my way. But within all the situations where I’m able to push forward and really focus on what I’m trying to accomplish, it’s all been pretty successful. It’s been such a joy to work on crafting something that I’m building from the ground up. And I’ve been working with some amazing clients so far. I’ve got to work on some very cool projects and it’s nice just being able to, what I say, raise this baby from birth. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

Is there anything that you want to try to accomplish before the year ends? I mean, this could be business-wise or not.

Ethan Baldwin:

I would say from a very business specific standpoint, I want to basically up my monthly run rate. We don’t need to necessarily talk about specifics of numbers, but I do think having that kind of like, business financial goal in mind is incredibly important. And really I want to have an established four to six clients by the end of the year that I can see that longevity with. Like really kind of like…I will say the partnership feels like a family. It’s all still very new. We’ve got some great relationships. So it’s all about building those connections outside of the work itself.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, you know, since you talked about your studio Slash and Structure, let’s dive more into that. What was behind the idea of you starting the studio?

Ethan Baldwin:

Yeah. So I worked as a visual designer for many years now. I got my start in advertising and then after freelancing for quite some time, I mainly started working on the client side of things, working either for design teams or designing for marketing teams. Also a little bit of product work, but after my last job, that job fell through. Got let go. Kind of like that post-pandemic…I’ll say, like, that post-pandemic bubble kind of burst. I realized I didn’t want to be in an office anymore unless it was the group of people that I really felt that I could build a team or family with. There was a product that I was super passionate about, but really I just wanted to create something that really tapped into my design methodology, like the way I run projects and the way I see the world.

And given all the places that I’ve worked in the past, I knew there was something that I can tap into based on the way I do think that could be of service to people, and I could be of better service doing it from my own firm versus trying to do it and change things from inside another corporation. So that really was the impetus to start the company. And the name Slash and Structure. Slash has always been in kind of like my artistic forward usernames for many years now. And it always kind of stemmed from…I do this, I do design programming, I do print, digital. And there is always that push that I got from people, like, “you really need to niche down. You really need to focus on serving one particular audience.”

And it was a lot of figuring out how I can do that. Again, you want a good business to serve a specific audience. But just being me and having this brain that wants to pick up on so many things, my experience got me to where I am by being able to pick up a whole bunch of different skill sets and talents and interests. So having that slash in there, being able to see a whole bunch of different either types of mediums or types of industries to really get people to focus on what their goals are and what their content is and how I can then put visuals on top of it, I guess that kind of became the throughline for all of my work. It’s really about helping people figure out what it is that they want to do or build or sell, and I can apply a number of different mediums or modalities to help them achieve that.

Maurice Cherry:

So you’re bringing basically to their project…slash structure?

Ethan Baldwin:

Yeah. (laughs) In my business, the slashing is going through whatever they have so far. So usually when I’m working with the client, it usually starts like, “I want a website,” or “I want a motion graphics piece,” or “I want this set of collateral.” I’m like, “okay, that’s all well and good, but we need to figure out who you are, what you’re about, what you’re trying to say.” And so that’s another play on the slash part. We take all of the stuff that you’ve kind of set up for yourself. We slash it all apart. We look at what all the individual pieces are and we figure out how to put them back together in a way that makes sense for you and for your audience or for your desired customers.

And then the structure comes after. The structure is building those systems in place, giving you the platform that you need and then giving you a way forward that’s scalable. Because at the end of the day, while I want to keep all of these partnerships, my biggest thing is I want to build solutions — design based solutions — that clients will use on their own if they need to update their content on the website. I make sure that the sites that I build have a robust CMS so that they can update their own content, they can change their own pictures. Because it’s always those little things that clients tend to get so wrapped up about. And I’m like, that’s the least important part of all of this process. That’s the least important part of your growth.

I want to make those things as easy as possible. Clients can focus on building their business and talking about themselves and really figuring out who they are and getting that out there.

Maurice Cherry:

How’s business been going so far?

Ethan Baldwin:

Pretty good. A bit of a, I would say…there’s like that standard slowdown in the summer. And to be perfectly honest, a lot of that was mainly coming from me. I needed to take a break physically and emotionally. As I was talking about, I had a nice little vacation this summer, went away for three weeks, and now I’m kind of getting back into the swing of things. And it’s weird because as much as I needed that break, I have missed that energy of bringing in new clients and working on multiple design projects simultaneously. It’s an ebb and flow with the business. So this fall is going to be picking back up pretty…I would say pretty steadily pretty soon.

Maurice Cherry:

Are there specific types of clients that you prefer to work with in a particular area, like healthcare or business or something like that?

Ethan Baldwin:

I would say I like to focus on, in terms of client size, I like to focus on solo entrepreneurs or like very small teams that are just building, or larger companies that have a bunch of systems in place that they’re looking to improve upon. And I mainly focus on SaaS platforms, technology, anything that usually tends to have a whole bunch of data points, whether that be tons of customers or tons of product segments. But anything that tends to have a lot of data points that need to get organized and that usually falls inside of the tech and digital product space.

Maurice Cherry:

And I’d imagine that probably draws on your background too. I mean, prior to you starting Slash and Sructure, you were at Clear, which you mentioned earlier. So it’s kind of feeding into that in a way.

Ethan Baldwin:

Yeah. The majority of my experience really has been kind of working with a product or a platform that at face value can seem like very boring or everyday and figuring out ways to make it appear more luxury or make it more accessible to a wider audience, or just provide some clarity for people to understand it better. And in all of those places that I’ve worked with my clients now, it really goes to what I always call “what is your flag in the sand.” What is the one thing that you’re trying to say? What is the one person that you’re trying to reach? And finding that flag in the sand is hard because we naturally want to get as many audience — people in our audience as possible — reach as many people as possible, make everybody happy. These [are] things that I struggle with as well. The more that we find the specific person that we’re trying to reach and improve and serve, the better reach we end up getting, because the connections that we create in our business end up making more sense. We find the people that fit what we do.

Maurice Cherry:

What are some dream projects that you’d love to do through the studio?

Ethan Baldwin:

I would love to do a platform rebrand for some boring banking product or something in, like, I’m thinking of…these aren’t boring breaking products, but these new products that are coming out in the financial space like Chime or Rocket Money — these things that are finding, I would say, contemporary ways to do very boring tasks like bookkeeping. What is a way that those products can be packaged and presented in a way that gets people more excited about doing their monthly bookkeeping keeping or doing their taxes and not having this weird aversion to having to do all the boring stuff? I’m always trying to find ways to make boring stuff less boring because that’s how I have to function as a designer. If there’s a tedium, it is always hard for me to get started. So always looking for those types of projects — there’s that end. It sounds real weird, but I love doing annual reports; again, anything where I get to play with large amounts of data, making charts and making graphs and making those things move and ways that we can provide more understanding through visuals. Those are things that I really get behind.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, you know, I’d also say the other thing about even if you’re in the market for doing not necessarily annual reports, but things like that, you can really find a way to become a part of a company’s design budget or marketing budget. Back when I had my studio and I was really doing a lot of design work with clients, my main goal was I wanted to be a line item on the budget, because then that way every year, you know, you’re getting some kind of work as a retainer or something like that. But annual reports, email newsletters, like any sort of thing that you can do continually and build that relationship with them, it ends up being really lucrative for the business. But also it provides you as a creative a lot of stability in what can be a very unstable…I mean, striking out on your own is never easy. You got to find clients, you got to do all the admin work and stuff like that. But having that level of steadiness allows you to then explore other things either through your studio or outside your studio. But you always have that rock to come back to.

Ethan Baldwin:

Exactly. And it’s interesting that you mentioned the retainer model because that’s something newer that I picked up for my business and I’ve discovered in the past year that it really works for me. Part of it is exactly what you mentioned. Kind of like having that stable repeatable income coming in makes it easier to focus on growing the business or growing different projects in or out of the business. But from a client perspective, I like the retainer model because it allows me to grow with a client and really help them see and understand the creative process and specifically the identity creative process. Like getting into brand style guides, going like “this is why this purple shows up in all of these places”…having that ongoing design relationship with someone, you get those aha moments where they are starting to realize that “oh, that’s why you did that” as a creative. And so that’s how I kind of divide up my business.

I have kind of like the brand strategy, brand building side of things which is project-based and those are usually focused with smaller business or solo entrepreneurs that are looking to grow something from scratch. And then I have the retainer model, and those usually go with larger companies that are kind of like “we need someone to do X number of banners” or “do this video.” And what I’ve seen is that through that retainer process, it usually helps clients see we don’t need a lot of the dumb stuff that we ask for. It teaches them how to use more templates. Yes, you have me on a retainer and I will do whatever that you want me to do, but you probably don’t need me to do PowerPoint graphs all of the time. Once they see everything that’s capable and how things can be templatized and automated, they then start to focus on more of the big ticket projects that are going to give them more ROI. And that works for me because then I get to work on more interesting things.

Maurice Cherry:

I don’t want to say it’s a magic trick, but it’s kind of a magic trick in a way because sometimes companies don’t really know what they need creatively until they have a creative on staff. And then, as you’re able — that’s even in a freelance capacity — but then once you’re doing that work for them, they’re like “oh wait a minute, you can do this” and “we could do this” and “maybe we don’t need to do this.” They’re going to trust you also because you’ve built that relationship over time and it’s less of kind of this one off sort of thing that you have to try to win them over about.

Ethan Baldwin:

Exactly. And piggybacking off of that. One thing that I’ve noticed on going off on my own and working as a vendor for clients versus working in house. There’s this weird, I don’t know, mindset that when you’re working as an outside expert, there’s a heightened level of understanding or at the very least, respect for what it is that you do. Because for a lot of the things that I’m doing now, they’re the exact same things that I did at places working in house. But because to a certain extent, people are now coming to me to solve very specific problems versus just me being there to just, quote, unquote, “do things,” I’m able to get people to shift their briefs a bit better so they’re improved, or they’re like, “maybe you don’t need to do this. Let’s do this.” There’s more opportunity for rapport, and it’s weirdly because I’m not on their payroll, or I’m a line item, but I’m not on their payroll. It’s weird.

It’s like a mental shift where they feel like they can get more out of having this vendor relationship, like, more value from it. I haven’t been able to figure out what that is, but it’s one of the biggest things I’ve noticed after making this shift.

Maurice Cherry:

Value is good. I mean, never discount that at all.

Now there’s more about your career I want to get into. Of course, you’ve had a very prolific career, and we’ll get into that a bit later. But before we do that, let’s kind of learn more about Ethan. Let’s learn more about you as a person.

You’re based out of Brooklyn currently. Is that where you’re from originally?

Ethan Baldwin:

No, So I’m originally from Washington, DC.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Ethan Baldwin:

And my whole family is from deep “dirty south” Aiken, South Carolina. But I’ve been in New York since I left college in 2006. So I feel like I can officially say that I am a New Yorker now.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay. Now, did you sort of always have this interest in design and everything growing up? Like, was it something that your family cultivated or anything like that?

Ethan Baldwin:

So, strangely enough, my mom is also a visual artist, so she was a photographer for the Smithsonian basically her entire career. She just retired about a year ago, and she’s also a fine art painter, ceramicist, and she does a lot of tapestry work, so she kind of like the idea of having all of these artistic hobbies, I would say, came from her being a multihyphenate, so to speak.

But in terms of a line of study, I actually started as a theater kid. Ever since I was little, I did theater. I did dance. I went to school. I joined the theater program and did that up until halfway through my junior year. And there was just a shift of, like, I’ve always wanted to create things, but I’ve realized I wanted to be more behind the scenes, and I wanted to create either physical things or things that just had a bit more, I would say, staying power that weren’t as ephemeral as a stage performance.

And I always had an interest growing up dance. I always had an interest in dancing, choreography, and my main goal I always wanted to do music videos.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay!

Ethan Baldwin:

That was kind of like the biggest thing that got me into the visual arts and why I jumped into advertising. I’m going to be that person who makes the next Gap commercial. And so that’s when I made that shift in college. And we didn’t have a marketing program at Oberlin, but I wanted to focus on making beautiful images. So my studio art focus was photography, and my senior thesis was a coffee table book called Ego Boost, and it was really just editorial photography for my friends. And the point was, I truly feel that everyone should deserve to feel like a celebrity for at least an hour. So I made this coffee table book, and then we made all these posters with all of my friends who modeled, and we put the posters around the school, and then we made these little collector cards that people could pick up. And then instead of having the thesis show in the museum, which was kind of standard, I had it in the student union and ended up making this huge white party, like Puff Daddy style white party.

And then I built these translucent, lit up walls to house all of my photography. And my friend from the dance group I was in, he had the DJ, and we had a bar. And it was the art world, but in a way that was fun and fit, like the community that I’m from. It had that performance piece to it, but it still focused on photography. It was very hip-hop focused, very focused around dance, but at its core, it was fun. The whole point is that all of this stuff is supposed to be fun.

Being a designer, being a creative, we have these jobs that make no sense. Think about it. But we’re able to tap into something that’s really kind of magical, especially in our clients, because we’re able to make those connections with things that people can’t necessarily verbalize or we can see something out in the world or can hear a piece of music or see watch a movie and have that be the foundation to build a whole bunch of new ideas. And we somehow made that into a job. It’s wild, but that’s what’s fun about it.

Maurice Cherry:

So while you were there, you majored in visual arts, and certainly this sounds like it was a visual art production in some capacity. How was your time there overall?

Ethan Baldwin:

It took me a while to appreciate Oberlin for the school that it was. I mean, it’s a great school, very hippie dippy school, but it’s also a school that has such a rich history, especially when it comes to what they’ve done for marginalized communities, what they’ve done for specifically Black people in America. And it’s also a school known for having this amazing conservatory. So even if you’re not a musically inclined person, you’re always surrounded by music and opera, great dance, theater. It was a great place to be specifically for the arts, considering that it’s not an art school. So, yeah, I fully appreciate being at Oberlin until I made that switch from doing theater and going into visual arts, because that’s where I really found that my creativity aligned with who I was.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Ethan Baldwin:

I tell everyone “everybody should go to Oberlin.” It was a great school.

Maurice Cherry:

So Oberlin kind of pushed you in this other direction then, sounds like.

Ethan Baldwin:

Yeah, I would say Oberlin gave me the space to find that other direction because I didn’t know that I wanted to go into advertising. I can’t even really say that I wanted to go into advertising. I knew I wanted to dance, and I wanted to make videos. Like, when I was a kid in middle school, I would make behind the scenes music videos of the musical cast. So almost like Behind The Music before the High School Musical. I just wanted to do some sort of upbeat music media that, I don’t know, got people moving, got people dancing, and Oberlin gave me the space to figure that out. There wasn’t a marketing program. There’s a studio art program, but it wasn’t like a fine art program that you’d get at an art school or a design school. It really taught us how to find what our voices are, find what it is that we want to do, and then do that successfully.

I got a good amount of fine art training for photography while I was at Oberlin. Shout out to Professor Pipo [Nguyen-Duy]. He was the absolute best. But the biggest thing that it taught me was how to prepare a show, how to work on an outline, how to sell an idea, like how to fund all of the stuff that you’re trying to build. It strangely taught me a lot about the business of being a creative.

Maurice Cherry:

I mean, I think that’s a great thing to get in college, especially because from other people that I’ve talked with on the show that have went into design or they discovered design in college, business wasn’t really an aspect of that. I think there might have been one or two folks that I’ve had on where there was some sort of business component along with their design, but they ended up having to sort of pick up those skills later in the real world. Not in a very sort of, I would say safe — I mean, I think college is a safe environment to learn and to grow, in that aspect — but it sounds like Oberlin really provided that for you, though.

Ethan Baldwin:

Yeah, I would say as part of the senior thesis program, I think they pick it’s like 10 or 15 students. And one of the biggest projects is we do a big trip to New York, and you get kind of, like, fully immersed into the art scene, but really, like, the business of the art scene. So we visited all of these galleries throughout Hell’s Kitchen in Chelsea and met with all of these kind of curators and gallery owners. And it was really to teach us how to learn how to pitch. Like, how do you take whatever your artistic, creative idea is and make it so other people will want to fund it, someone will want to put it up, how to get your own ideas out of your head so that someone else can comprehend them. So we each had to — it was basically like a pitch challenge — we each had to learn how to pitch inside of the environment of an actual New York museum. It was scary as hell, but that was more important in the long run than any kind of fine art training, I would say. And I’m eternally grateful to the arts program at Oberlin for that, because anyone can pick up an artistic skill, a fine arts skill; but if it’s something that you want to make into a career, I always tell people 80% of my job now has nothing to do with me designing.

Maurice Cherry:

So once you graduated, you started working for an agency, working for DDB as a junior art director. Knowing that you had this sort of business skill that you had acquired from Oberlin, how was your time there? Like, what do you remember from that time?

Ethan Baldwin:

DDB was one of the best jobs I ever had, mainly because of the network that I built. The people that I met on that job, I’m still friends with a lot of them to this day. One thing I do want to shout out about that job is I got that job through the MAIP program or the Multicultural Advertising Internship Program. And MAIP is part of the 4A’s Foundation, and they just do amazing work with bringing awareness of the marketing advertising industry to students of color throughout the nation. So I owe a lot to that organization for helping me land that job. I got the internship through that program, and DDB hired me after the internship. And at DDB, I learned a lot about who I was as a creative. It was a very kind of standard house.

I worked on some very cool clients. I got do some storyboards for Diet Pepsi. My favorite project from that time was making a bunch of billboards for Subaru and then getting to see them get put up over the PCH. That was, like, one of the coolest things because something that I created was now 50 feet in the air. But I learned that there is a big difference — and it seems to be more apparent now — there’s a big difference between the design side of things and the art direction side of things. And I don’t necessarily think that there should be.

But I knew after that job, I think I was there…I was there for almost two years after that. I knew I wanted to focus more about how to find my design voice, and that’s why I jumped into this long phase of freelancing. After that, I got a job at the Apple Store working late nights and then would just take different freelance jobs throughout the day. I recommend every creative go through a phase of just picking up freelance projects. If I was to say one thing that everyone should do, it is that the best way to figure out what your design voice or what you love doing is to really just try out a whole bunch of different things.

Maurice Cherry:

I want to go back to what you said about sort of the difference between art direction and visual design that you just mentioned. Can you unpack that a little bit?

Ethan Baldwin:

Yeah. It’s funny. One of the things I discovered after doing a bunch of freelancing and then kind of wanting to settle into a full time job, that having been out of the advertising game, so to speak, it was harder to get back into it. Because in most advertising firms, your design function, like your design talent, usually ends up being part of a production team. And your art directors and your copywriters, they’re the ones who are coming up with the ideas for campaigns, print campaigns, motion graphics, commercials. A lot of it kind of started with the ideas of making the commercial or the print ad, but the art director would kind of come up with the visual ideas, but they weren’t necessarily illustrating or drawing or building the site for a multimedia campaign. They were kind of like coming up with the ideas with the copywriter partner and then eventually that would go to production. And there was something about that that I missed.

I want to push the pixels and do some of the illustration, and I don’t really do that now. There are people who are much better illustrators than I am, so I’m obviously going to farm that work out. But there was such a divide between the design and the art director. That’s where the slash originally came from. I have a very close friend of mine that I met at DDB and she said to me, “at this point, you need to decide, do you want to be an art director? Go down like, the art director to creative director to chief creative officer path down an advertising journey, or do you want to be a designer going to being a senior designer, working for a design firm, working for a production house?” And I couldn’t agree with either of those options. There has to be something that has both, because I always knew I wanted to work on the big ideas, but I also wanted to have a hand in how it was crafted. That craft is, again, like the fun part.

And I’ve seen with a lot of kind of people at the director level that it’s very easy to get jaded and you lose sight of the thing that made you want to do all of this. Like pulling out crayons, pulling out markers, getting on a whiteboard or a sketchbook and drawing out ideas or figures or little stick people or landscapes. That connection to the craft is still incredibly important to me, and especially like when working with my clients, I would say that’s one of the things that I offer. I am going to help you work through your ideas, your high level ideas, to build your campaign or build your website or build your next video piece or whatever the project is. But I also want you to trust that I’m going to make something for you with you that is also going to be pretty. It’s going to be beautiful. The content is always more important, but creating something that is beautifully designed and constructed and illustrated is just such a great feeling.

And so I wanted to make sure that that divide of being a creative director and being a designer didn’t really exist for me. I don’t really see the need for that divide. If you have a larger company and you can section out those functions, then great, good on you, but that’s not what I want. For me, I wouldn’t want to be either or. I think having both allows me to serve people better.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, it sounds like you didn’t want to have that, I guess you could call it…a restriction in a way. You wanted to be able to do it all.

Ethan Baldwin:

Yeah, and that was kind of the moment where I realized I probably wouldn’t work for an ad agency again. And not necessarily because I didn’t want to, but because it’s like talking with hiring managers. They want to see that you’ve worked on X number of commercials or X number of campaigns. And I was like, “well, I’ve worked on plenty of campaigns and I’ve worked on tons of video pieces, but not necessarily in the context of an ad agency.” In all of the places that I’ve worked, I’ve been able to work on long form video and full website builds and beautiful out of home print work and big event installations. I really just started to love working in house because the idea of that divide was less apparent.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, you’ve done a lot of, you know, freelance work. You’ve also worked full time at some pretty prestigious places. You were at Dow Jones for a number of years. You were at PulsePoint. You were at qbeats. Earlier you mentioned being at Clear. We don’t have to go into those particular ones individually unless you want to, but I’d love to know, when you look back at those experiences as a collective, what sort of stands out to you the most? And it can be multiple things too.

Ethan Baldwin:

Yeah, I would say for all of those jobs, my biggest thing is I wanted to do something that would somehow leave a mark. And it doesn’t have to necessarily be my mark, but something that’s going to change the way, whatever place that was thought about how they did business, or they did design or they went into a website build or thought about branding. And if anything, I would say I’ve been able to achieve that throughline in all of those places, Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal…that was a particularly weird but fun and exciting experience because it was one of those places — and this goes back to the idea of in house spots being a bit less restrictive on what your experience is and where you’ve worked. I got hired there. My title was multimedia communications manager. Who knows what that means? And it was within the HR department.

And I remember my interview…one thing that stood out to them was the fact that I told one of my interviewers that I tap dance. And I remember there was at some point where someone asked me to do a shuffle step in an interview and I was like, “I will do this once.”

Maurice Cherry:

Oh no! Noooo….

It was pretty far along.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay….

Ethan Baldwin:

I was like, this is…we’re treading.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I mean, there’s tap dancing metaphorically for an interview and then there’s that…

Ethan Baldwin:

…literal tactic. (laughs)

Yeah. But that job taught me so much again, about crafting what it is I want to be doing and what the things I love doing can be of service for who I’m doing it for, because there was no precedent for my job in that function and inside of the learning and development team, but what I got to work on was building a whole bunch of internal campaigns, and it really actually brought out my love for learning and development in particular and building training programs and building curriculums for other employees.

One of the biggest things there was being able to help start the DJ program or Digital Journalism at Dow Jones. And it was all about bridging the gap between kind of print journalism and digital journalism. And so we did multiple versions of this week long training program in New York, Princeton, London and Hong Kong where we talked about the business as a whole. But we also got to do very specific trainings. Like this is how you can use your iPhone to shoot footage on the fly for a smaller piece. Or here are the rules around photo licensing so you don’t get sued. It got into very specific trainings and that was just so fun for me because we immediately got to see the results from our efforts. And I knew from that that part of what I want to do as a designer, as a creative is help teach people how to do things better or how to make a process easier.

This goes to working for Clear, and one of the big things there was revamping the website and eventually moving to the Webflow platform. I will talk about Webflow all day long. I absolutely love that. But one thing that was really important to me was getting everybody, like all of the stakeholders, on some sort of system that they could start focusing on their own content and inserting their own content where it needed to go versus always being dependent on a developer or on me and the design team within marketing to do something like make a new blog entry or insert a new airport location.

You don’t need a team of designers to do something like that. So my goal was to build a system in place and then teach people to kind of do those content updates for themselves. And it makes the working relationship so much easier. And there’s always that aha moment where I’m like, “oh, no, you updated that web page. You updated a web page. You just built a new web page.” Of course, me and my team, we do all the stuff on the back end to make those templates and whatnot. But you now see that it wasn’t about how beautifully is it designed, or “am I going to break something if I enter in this bit of tech?” No.

As designers, one of our biggest goals is to create solutions that help people do things better. If you’re designing a chair, you want that chair to be beautiful, but it also needs to sit someone’s butt. Design without function is just art — which has its place — but function in, again, serving someone and making their life easier is always at the forefront of what I do now.

Maurice Cherry:

Is there anything different about how you do business now as opposed to when you first started freelancing? Because you mentioned you were kind of working at the Apple store, you were also freelancing, so I would imagine even just kind of trying to juggle work and freelance work was a bit hard. But outside of that, what do you do different now that you did when you first started?

Ethan Baldwin:

Well, when I first started freelancing, it was a little bit different because I mainly worked through placement agencies, so it was like people would often find work for me, and I would work on those projects on whatever basis that they have. And now I pretty much do all of finding clients through word of mouth or through my own lead generation. So that’s one kind of logistical difference. And at some point, I may jump back to using a placement agency. I have absolutely nothing against them. It’s just not something that I’m doing right now. But in terms of knowing more about myself and how I operate as a creative, I would say the biggest change is I will not work on a project if I know I just absolutely don’t want to do it. It’s one of the biggest things I tell younger designers.

I had one job — we don’t need to go into who it is — but it was a job that I was incredibly excited about. It was a big name and great for a resume. But working there? No one’s happy and none of the products are particularly interesting. And at its core, it was just a job and the pay wasn’t that great. It really just was a bad stepping stone, I would say. But all of that is to say that when you’re starting out, there’s always this pain in your chest about making sure you have enough money, making sure your rent gets paid, and making sure you have enough coming in so you don’t have to just keep focusing on work. But I’ve learned now that if the work itself is not either fulfilling and enough to make it worthwhile to work on, or they’re just paying, you absolutely extravagantly, finding a job just to find a job as a creative usually is not worth it.

As a creative, you’re not going to perform your best if you don’t want to be there. Your clients are not going to be served in the way they should be served because you don’t want to be there. And it’s just going to be miserable for everyone involved. And at all of this, at the end of it, you probably won’t even get a good portfolio of it because you’re not exactly proud of anything you’ve done. So I would say it’s better for me to sit and work on some back-end stuff than just jumping into a job just because the job has presented itself.

Maurice Cherry:

Outside of that, how would you say you’ve just grown creatively? Like, how have you grown as a creative over the years?

Ethan Baldwin:

I’ve definitely become more efficient. I would say I just developed a lot of processes to help get to an end product faster. And I would say I’ve also learned to give myself a lot more grace and knowledge that not everything is always going to be perfect. I can definitely say that I am a very good designer, but I am not the best. And I’m not going to be the right choice for every single client that comes my way. And being able to say, “oh, I’m not the right fit for you, let me recommend somebody else,” or “I’m just not the right fit for this project” because secretly I just don’t want to do that. It’s not going to give me anything outside of the paycheck. And being okay with that, that took a lot of growth.

It’s okay to say no. And I’ve learned that we as creatives, we can have more stock in ourselves. We think about other service industries, think about mechanics, you think about electricians, and they have this very specific skill set. They’re able to do this thing amazingly well. And for whatever reason, I’ve noticed that as creatives, we tend to not think about ourselves in that same way, because the thing that we do isn’t necessarily as tangible, but the results that we provide to people are. And so we focus on, like, “I built this website, but that website increased conversions by X” or “this social media campaign increased this company’s Instagram followers by Y.” There are tangible results, tangible business results to the beautiful, weird idea connections that we make as creatives. And I think we need to start giving ourselves more stock in ourselves because of that.

That’s another thing that I’ve learned.

Maurice Cherry:

Who are some of the people that have really kind of helped you out in terms of mentorship or anything like that over the years throughout your career?

Ethan Baldwin:

I would say one of the biggest people I follow, and this is everyone kind of [inaudible 49:01] follows this person, but Chris Do of The Futur has always been like one of those people that…if there’s a conference, I may or may not go, but if he’s there, I likely will go, because he has a very no nonsense, matter of fact approach to not just being a creative, but really how to be a creative business, how to run a business and how to get through the day of running a business in a way that isn’t confusing. It kind of just is what it is. And he keeps it kind of, like, “follow what I say or don’t.” There’s a level of confidence there that I find so admirable because that is also, again, that’s eventually the level of confidence that I want to be at. That’s the level of confidence that I want to give to all of my clients. Everyone should feel that good about what they do and what they provide to the people that they do services for.

And then I would say a more personal mentor is actually one of my old — technically technically, she’s still a current client — but one of my old bosses at PulsePoint, Maria Simeone, we’ve had such a weird working relationship, and I think it’s just a matter of fact, we work really well together. But she’s very much a marketing brain from the strategy and the business side of things.

And I learned so much about marketing from that standpoint, from her, because that’s not how I approach problem solving at all, but just watching her work while we’re at PulsePoint and then watching her grow within the company and even grow further. Even after I left, she always kind of looked back to see what I was doing, would always give me really good advice. She’s always been open to critique me on our work. And she also has a very similar no nonsense way of, I would say, gathering me together, which I appreciate. I’m very much a tough love type of person because it shows me that you care and that you’re invested, but you’re also not going to let me fall completely on my face.

Maurice Cherry:

So what does success look like for you now? I mean, you’ve got your studio. You’re out on your own. What does success look like at this stage in your career?

Ethan Baldwin:

For me, success is being able to do what I want, when I want. And that’s really to say if there’s a day that I’m not feeling well or I just need a break and I just need to go walk in a forest — I really love camping — but to be able to just go do that and make sure I have rapport built with my clients to say that I’m not going to be working or to have enough of the work done and a system in place that I’m not needed 100% of the time or being able to travel as I see fit and work as I travel…I try to keep a very, I would say, like, lean tech profile so I can really do what I do from anywhere. Like, I have just like one small MacBook Air and then I have one larger Pro for video work, but I mainly just work on laptops because some days I want to go work in the middle of Central Park and so I can do that. That’s what success looks like for me. Because for some people, success might be a number amount, like a number of clients or revenue goal, and I have those goals from a business perspective. But success really looks like being able to take a vacation and not have to sit there and tally up the number of vacation days I have left or not feel guilty about taking a sick day.

It’s always wild to me. I would always tell my team this back when I worked in an office: “if you’re sick, go be sick and get better.” I don’t need you trying to…you’re not showing that you’re any more of, like, a badass because you’re working while you’re dripping snot all over your face. Get out of the office, go home, go rest. But there’s this weird…we’re in this working society where every one of those things are tallied and counted for and often used against you. And that’s something I just cannot stand for personally. And I’m sure that will get me in a lot of trouble with a lot of places, but I’d much rather see people do what they need to do to take care of themselves so that when they do work, they are working at 100% of their capacity and 100% of their joy. Again, if you don’t want to be here, don’t be here. That’s how I run my business.

If it’s something I don’t want to do, I’m not going to do it. It’s not going to make me happy, it’s not going to make a client happy. No one’s going to be happy in this. So, yeah, success is being able to do what I want, when I want.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. To that end, where do you see yourself in the next five years? What sort of work do you want to be doing?

Ethan Baldwin:

I would say in five years I want to have some big national tech brands under my belt. I want to work on some internal rebrands. I’m thinking of something like…I recently got to meet someone who worked on Chase Sapphire and working on this luxury sub brand inside of this big financial institution. And that would be a dream project for me, taking all of these kind of boring things like credit cards and points and really building this almost lifestylish brand around that very boring thing. So more of those within the next five years. But really it’s just scaling what I do now to just hit maybe a couple more clients each month. But I actually really enjoy how lean things are and being able to work with freelancers as needed. But as of right now, I don’t really see growing employees, too many employees inside of the business. I like the flexibility of building a network, so to speak, versus building another office.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Ethan Baldwin:

You can find my personal previous work at ethanbaldwin.com. You can find and sign up for an engagement with the business at slashandstructure.com. That’s no spaces, no underscores, just slashandstructure.com. And there you’ll learn a bit more about how the business functions and some of the clients that I’ve been working with. And you can also find me on Instagram at instagram.com/slashandstructure. Really, if that double slash doesn’t work as well when you’re saying it out loud. (laughs) But yeah, instagram.com/slashandstructure.

Maurice Cherry:

All right, sounds good. Ethan Baldwin, I definitely want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I like that you are someone right now that’s sort of striking out on their own, especially at this time when there’s so much happening in tech and design. I think also there’s just kind of this instability with working at companies at the moment. It feels like a really good time for a lot of people to kind of strike out and you certainly not only have the professional experience with the places you’ve worked, but you’ve freelanced before as well. So I’m really interested to see kind of where Slash instructor goes in the future. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Ethan Baldwin:

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a blast.

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Carmelle Kendall

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

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

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

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

Right.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

Nice. Do you have representation yet?

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, why is that?

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, wow.

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

Oh wow.

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh, interesting.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

Yes, February 2020.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

Was it only twenty? Oh, my gosh.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

How was Howard?

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah, that’s important.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh!

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

Right.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, absolutely.

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

Right.

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

I went to the Atlanta campus.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, really? Why is that?

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

Oh, no.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

Right.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah. I mean, you don’t have clients.

Maurice Cherry:

That’s true.

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Maurice Cherry:

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

Maurice Cherry:

I appreciate it.

Carmelle Kendall:

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

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit

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

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

Kirk Visola

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk Visola:
Oh, wow.

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk Visola:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds about right.

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

Maurice Cherry:
You blew your own mind there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
There you go.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk Visola:
Snitch.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk Visola:
Have you played the game by chance?

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

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

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

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

Kirk Visola:
Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kirk Visola:
What made you get in the podcasting?

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

Kirk Visola:
The OG.

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

Kirk Visola:
No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow.

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
A violent tap, a long press.

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
No, no, no, no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk Visola:
First of all…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Or that you’re just Black.

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

“No.”

“Have I ever done a bad job?”

“No.”

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk Visola:
Thank you, Maurice.

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