Agyei Archer

When I tell you I have wanted to have this week’s guest on the show for years? LISTEN. I’m so glad to bring you this conversation with the one and only Agyei Archer — typographer, design director, and all-around creative powerhouse.

We touched on a number of different topics, including his brilliant type design work, and how he built two businesses during the pandemic. He also shared how his motivation to succeed comes from his connection to the Caribbean, and talked about how he balances design, tech, his work with Unqueue, and exploring new type design projects. There are a lot of things to fix in this world, but if you’ve got skills like Agyei, then that just means your next project is right around the corner. Get on it!

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

Agyei Archer:
My name is Agyei Archer. I am a designer and entrepreneur currently based in Trinidad. My work extends in a few different branches, one of them is in making typefaces. So I work on typeface design, but primarily with a focus on typeface design, to support the cultures and spaces of the post-colonial slash new world and the global south. And I also, I’m an entrepreneur in my home country of Trinidad, where I run a design company called Unqueue, where we help small businesses sell online. And we also have a studio called the Unqueue Studio, where we help other startups and institutions, such as government bodies and large corporate entities build their own digital products, to move towards Trinidad’s digital transformation.

Maurice Cherry:
I believe your type design was how I first heard about you, like years and years ago. How’s the summer been going for you so far?

Agyei Archer:
In the type design world or just in general?

Maurice Cherry:
Just in general.

Agyei Archer:
It’s been good for me, I started off. I mean, I think it would’ve been probably in the start of the American summer at Facebook. So I did a talk for Meta’s OpenArts team. So I gave a talk as part of their visionary series and that was really good, but I think that kicked off my summer. And then I also gave another talk at a conference, called the Eyeo Festival in Minneapolis, that’s long ago. And those have been really good, I’ve been really enjoying this particular summer, because I’ve been so face down in dealing with Unqueue stuff, especially because Trinidad was so locked down for as long as it was. This summer feels like that I’m becoming an international person again.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice. So with that in mind, what’s coming up for you for the next few months?

Agyei Archer:
Right now we have at Unqueue, which is my startup at home we are working, pretty hard and growing. So we’ve just started working on connecting a lot of our local population with our local farmers. So we have a massive food import bill in Trinidad, which is wild because we’re a tropical country that can grow fruits all year round. But we have a massive challenge with people on the ground in Trinidad, purchasing produce from people who are making it in Trinidad. And we have recently built in an addition to our software, that allows local farmers to connect with the general public. So we are currently helping people sell vegetables, and helping farmers direct more organic produce to their shoppers.

And that for me has been my hugest kick, it’s not as great as writing a massive Python script or anything. But I think that I’ve been really appreciating recently, especially with Unqueue how much technology can help people on the ground. So that’s been what I’ve been mostly excited about, I’ve been working on that, and I’ve been working on a new typeface project with Darden Studio.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice. Can you talk about that typeface project?

Agyei Archer:
Sure. Oh, I forgot, it’s not recent anymore. So a few years ago, I started working on a typeface that was based on and inspired by the writing styles, that signed to be pervasive across post-colonial spaces. So there was this energy that sign painting and post-colonial spaces came with, that I was trying to see if I could capture into a typeface. And when I say post-colonial spaces, I’m not just talking about the Caribbean, but I’m also talking about post-colonial spaces like Ghana, and Nigeria, and India. And the really ferocious energy that a lot of those sign painting designs have come with, have been really inspiring to me for a lot of years. I’ve been obsessed with sign painting in Trinidad, and then beyond Trinidad for a lot of my life.

And I think that the project that I’m working on with Darden Studio right now is, trying to distill that hand painted sign energy into something that we could use for text, which has been a really interesting, challenging, not interesting challenge, but also really fulfilling. I’ve been really enjoying it, I’m working with Darden Studios designer [inaudible 00:07:59] on creating it, but it’s been really nice. It’s also frankly, nice to be building work for a studio that was founded by a Black typeface designer of whom there are so few.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s true. I mean, I know that you were known as Trinidad’s first typeface designer.

Agyei Archer:
Yeah. I mean, I’m not even sure that I’m… I think that there was a typeface that was designed before me in Trinidad. I think, that what I meant was that I am Trinidad first typeface designer, who is doing it for a living. But I think that even the idea of being the first, for me, is a lot less important, than it is the idea of being somebody who is making things that are culturally specific. I do think that there is a distance between who is making the work and who is the work for. And I think that who is the work for, is always a more interesting question, but who is making the work tends to be the question we ask. Which is something that I’m navigating, because I think that as a Black person who is making type in the world, I feel like that’s, yes, that’s a momentous occasion. Because up to 20 years ago, Black people were not making type.

But I also think that the reality is that, it’s far more about for whom the type that I’m making is than it is what I look like. Because to be frank, if there were a white man who were making typefaces that was inspired by post-colonial creativity, I would be as excited. But I do think that, that’s also because a lot of the work that I’m making right now, I am hoping that it does well commercially, but it’s not that it’s not for commercial consumption. But for example, with the typeface that we’re working on at Darden Studio, that typeface has a language support that is relatively rare among the type world. So it supports every single African tribal language in Latin, which is a rarity. But for me it was a little bit weird or inappropriate, to be developing a typeface that was inspired by these spaces, and not let that type face support the languages of the people by whom it was inspired.

Maurice Cherry:
I had Tré Seals on the show, goodness, that was years. I think there might have been 2017, 2018 before his typeface design, really started blowing up. And I see his typefaces everywhere, and it’s interesting that you say like, “Who it’s for.” Because granted, there’s a historical context in which Tré bases all of his designs, but I’ve seen them used in movie trailers, in yogurt commercials, I’ve seen them used everywhere.

Agyei Archer:
Yeah, for sure. I think that Tré’s work is really important, and I mean, I’m saying this as a non-American, right? So I don’t have the same relationships that Americans may have even to oppression. But I do think that Tré’s work is, I feel like you can make work that is really on the pulse of the moment that you’re in, and his work feels really responsive to the moments that we’re living through. And I feel like there’s a particular beauty to that for sure.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Totally. Let’s talk about Unqueue, which you started a little over two years ago. Tell me about that.

Agyei Archer:
Well, I had just come back home from, I think maybe New York, and I had in a way closed my design studio. So I had a design studio for about 10 years in Trinidad, and we were doing a lot of work in the web, we were doing a lot of work in the branding space. But it wasn’t that I didn’t love that work, but it was that I loved making type a lot more. And I was starting to phase that phasing, branding, and web work out of my career, and basically trending toward being a full-time typeface designer. But when COVID hit in New York, I had just left New York, and then I came to Trinidad. And when I was in Trinidad, because we used to have this studio that provided design services, we ended up in this place where a lot of my old clients would call and say, “Hey, Agyei, are you still working. We need a website, we need to sell stuff online. We can’t keep the business open, we can’t have people in the store or whatever.” And this was a massive influx for me.

And there was this decision that I had to make of, okay, well I can take on this business, and it’ll be probably good money or whatever, but it’s not necessarily scalable. And also there was this problem that was really clear to me. Because I grew up as a very, I would say, proudly working class person from a working class background. And the amount of money that it would’ve taken people to get online, in that time would’ve been prohibitive to the working class. And I wanted to be part of making something that can help people who didn’t have the, how much of a thousands of dollars it was going to cost to hire us.
I wanted to give them the same ability to get online, do business, sell their stuff, as my other clients who would’ve been supporting my career however long, and I felt like the pandemic was a good opportunity. So I was working then with my studios lead developer, his name is Andal. And I called Andal, what do you think? And I was like, “Andal, do you want to make an app?” And he thought I was joking, and three months later we released Unqueue’s first version to the App Store. And since then it’s been something that has changed a lot, about how I see the value of the work that I’m making. But it’s also something that I’m really quite proud of it, because in a space with relatively low tech adoption, in which it’s a big circumstance in Trinidad, that we don’t have a huge amount of trust in technology.

So we do have one of the highest mobile penetrations probably globally, like relatively. So in the Americas, we have 110% mobile penetration, in Trinidad we have 142%. So we’re very online, very mobile society, but that transition of doing business digitally, didn’t really happen until we got forced into it by the pandemic. And something that I’ve been really happy about, is being able to be part of that transition and part of that change. So a lot of the work that I’m looking at with NQ is, not just about helping people sell things online, but there’s this movement of digital transformation that’s happening throughout the Caribbean. Yes, triggered by COVID, but also very necessary to help meet our sustainable development goals, necessary to reduce food import bills, et cetera. And as soon as I was able to realize, wow, we are building this thing, and not only is it’s a cool product to work on sure.

And I think that there aren’t product development studios in the Caribbean. So it’s not I think that a lot of the methodologies that we would’ve been importing, maybe even from Silicon Valley, we had to retrofit to work in our space, et cetera. So it was really exciting, but I think that for me, when Unqueue got kicked off, I started it as this thing that I thought would be able to help some people. And now I think that there’s this larger vision around, being able to guide the direction of the Caribbean. Because a lot of technology in the Caribbean isn’t made here, a lot of it is made for example, in Russia or in China. And angel investors bring software into the country, and try to retrofit it to the cultures. And we are the only people that are making the software that we’re using on the ground.

And there’s a particular magic to that because we are able to be responsive, but we’re also able to develop solutions that are tailored to our experiences. We have 80% cash dependency in our country, where 80% of the transactions happen on cash, and that’s not going to change anytime soon, our banks aren’t going to facilitate that. So we, for example, had to build an e-commerce software that was also able to facilitate cash payments. But things like that I’ve been really, really exciting, and I think that Unqueue has probably been one of the most fulfilling professional experiences on my life. But it’s also been something that in a material way, we’re able to help 200 plus vendors, we’ve connected them with 20,000 plus shoppers. And I mean, it’s a small country, so that’s like those actually important numbers. But I think that for us, and I say us now, because Unqueue is way more than just me. But for us Unqueue has been this very transformative project that we’ve all worked on, and discovered a lot more value than we initially wanted. Well, initially we’re expecting to.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, it sounds like it really came about at a very opportune time. I mean, you have this quote unquote perfect storm of a pandemic and things getting locked down, and people not being able to have that regular access to places that they usually had. And now you’ve got this app, that now facilitates a lot of that.

Agyei Archer:
100%. Yeah. That was really huge for us. So because that looked in people’s eyes of, I didn’t know we could do this. I feel it’s part of that mentality, has a lot to do with being from a traditionally disadvantaged post-colonial space like the Caribbean, and not really not seeing a potential for yourself that is better. And I think that, what our work has been able to do is to show people, “Hey, you deserve technology.” This idea of design and technology, have been classically relegated to large business in the Caribbean. And what I have been able or wanted to be able to do, is to create something that could be democratizing and something that could be accessible across the board.
So I mean, Unqueue Studio, our tagline or motto or pedal driving principle is, design and technology for everybody. But that for everybody really is our big key thing, because the amount of change that we can make in one particular sliver or society, maybe a lot. But the reality is that if all I’m doing is helping rich people get richer, I probably would just go to work on Apple or something.

Maurice Cherry:
Fair enough. That makes sense. So let’s talk about Unqueue Studio, because that is something different from the app itself, right?

Agyei Archer:
It was. Yeah. So I started on Unqueue two years or two years plus ago. And something that really stood out to us maybe about, I would say less than a year ago, was the fact that we had won a bunch of awards. So that’s one thing, so we’ve won awards every year for design and user experience since we’ve launched. So we’ve won a total of five Addy Awards, which are the American Advertising Association Awards, we’ve won five of those over the past two years. And the reason that we’ve won them is, largely because we’ve been making good design. But I think that’s something that we had to acknowledge is that, we are one of the few providers that are able to do this in the space that we’re in, but we’re also the only people that are building the products that we design as well.
So I saw it as an opportunity for us to not just, yes, diversify how we build income at the company. But I also saw it as a real need, because this idea of design and tech being for everybody and this idea of design, I feel like it’s almost technology should be a fundamental, right? Just the ability to write or access to water. And I feel like companies like Unqueue Studio are there to help facilitate that, because there needs to be somebody between the general public and business interest. That can rip business interests, and their objectives into something that the public wants. And I think that I started the Unqueue Studio so that we could address that, but also so that we can make our contribution to the Caribbean technology sector and industry. Because we have so much in our tech world and industry, that is really good business man like a lot of pitch decks, hell of pitch decks.

But the reality is that, when it comes to materials substances products, getting made products, getting put into the world, we actually don’t have a huge legacy of doing that well. And I wanted to create a company that could change that narrative, among people in power in the Caribbean but also on the ground. And I do think that it has to do with a lot of post-colonial self hate. But I do think that there is this belief that we can’t do things properly on our own. So it has to get imported if it’s good, and I’m trying to make this case that actually it can be just as good as the imported stuff, if not better, if you make it here.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Walk me through what a typical day is like. Because I mean, it sounds like a lot to balance between the app work and the studio.

Agyei Archer:
It’s a lot. Yeah. But I mean, unfortunately they have a synergistic relationship, or they can because it’s the same teams. So the app for us is our social impact project and, yes, we do work with larger businesses to help facilitate their e-commerce. But the large part of our business is this idea of small entrepreneurs, and say small in terms of following of money that they’re making, but small businesses moving through and helping their businesses grow. But the studio is doing that, but for other businesses essentially. So I think that in a day typically, I try to wake up and start work by 8:00, 9:00. And I would say, I spend about, let’s say 40% of my day Unqueue App, and then another 40% of my day on the Unqueue studio, and then another 20% of my day working on type stuff.

But the Unqueue App and the Unqueue Studio work are really synergistic, because a lot of the methodologies that we’ve developed at the studio, are the things that we use to run the app. But also a lot of the success that we’ve been able to have professionally, is because of how well the app has done. And also because we’ve spent so much time and money building this app, we also now have a lot of software infrastructure that other startups are using. So a lot of the work that we’re doing now is in diversifying the work that we’re doing. So a lot of my days are half entrepreneur, where I’m writing a pitch deck for somebody. And then I stopped doing that and I’m reviewing someone’s design. And then I stopped doing that and I’m reviewing someone’s performance for example. But I think that in a way I feel more comfortable doing as much as I can, than I would feel like I’m not doing enough, which is probably something to talk about with my therapist.

But for me, that is a really huge thing. I think, that I have spent a lot of time wanting my work to be meaningful and purpose driven, and the Unqueue Studio and the Unqueue App have given me that capacity to do it here. Because I do think that the work that I do in typography and in language support, especially since a lot of the work that I’m doing, is for people who have classically been ignored by the type world. A lot of that work is really important, but they are all along the same vein of, I want to use the abilities that I have to make an effective positive change in the world.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It sounds like that’s been a new discovery for you. Would that be accurate to say?

Agyei Archer:
I think so. Yeah. I think that when I got into type, and maybe it was just I had finally become a real adult or something. But I do think that there was this realization that I had, because getting into type can be a really, really fun experience, maybe if you’re not Black. But I think 10 minutes and when you’re Black, you start realizing, hold up, firstly, nobody here looks like me. Secondly, every single language that I am being taught to value, and all of the little accents that I’m taught to pay super close attention to. And respect everybody’s language, only language respect that are being taught is about European languages, right? So they’ll tell me, “Hey, you need to make sure if you’re supporting Polish, you need to have Polish diacritics.” Or maybe you should just lean on the side of drawing a diacritics to support Polish, but it’s like, “Okay, I get it. I get it. I get it. But who’s going to be supporting Twi or Fante, right?”

And the reality is that those languages aren’t thought of, and it’s not because of their population sizes, it’s just because the people who are making type are from Europe. And I think for as unfortunate as it is, it’s understandable to be able to see why you won’t want to look past these spaces that you’re in, when you’re meeting the work that you’re making. But I do think that if I’m not from these spaces that you’re in and I can see a gap, then I can either rail against the system and get mad at you for not doing something about it, which I have done to relatively negligible effect. Or I can choose to acknowledge that, “Hey, your limitations are around, how much you can see in the world, and your whiteness your privilege insulates you, from having to see a certain side of the world that may not be as comfortable to you.”

But the reality is that I don’t have a choice. People in Africa look like me, how could I be making type and not supporting their languages, it’s really basic stuff. And in the same way, I grew up really working class, people like me after the pandemic were mostly unable to make a living. Like this service industries were shutdown, hospitality industries are shutdown. There were a lot of people who looked like me that couldn’t do anything, but a lot of them probably had the little side hustle, that they could have advanced to a full-time hustle if they had the right infrastructure. So for me it was, well, let’s see if we can make the infrastructure, but it’s really about what can I do? And if I can do it, I should do it.
And I’ll figure out how I’ll get paid for it, getting paid has been always a thing that I think about secondly, but fortunately I’ve always made that work. But I think that for me, I think maybe for the past few years, a lot of the work that I’ve been making has been around, not necessarily a settlement or writing of any wrong. But I do think that the work is about seeing where I can fill a gap, and placing my energy there instead of wherever else. Because I don’t not acknowledge, that I could probably go and make type for a large company somewhere. Or I also don’t acknowledge that I could spend most of my type design work building brands, for example.

But I do think that if we think about what people need in the type world right now, it’s probably greater accessibility. Africa is one of the most exploding economies in the world, in 10 years that’s actually going to be really necessary that you support continental African managers. And while that opportunity is there, I also would be doing the work, if that wasn’t the case. Because I feel like there is a certain amount of accessibility, that people will get written out of in the design can, just because of how white it is.

Maurice Cherry:
You know, even as you say that they’re reminds me of some conversations I’ve had, over the years on revision path with other type designers. I think one of the first type designers I had on was episode 24, was this young guy named Kevin Karanja out of Nairobi, who had designed a typeface called Charvet. I don’t know if he kept it up, I remember when he designed it, I remember he got a good bit of international news for it. I don’t recall if he had kept it up, because he really was, I mean, when I was talking to him, he was 21. He was like, “I was just messing around and made this typeface.” And it wasn’t really, I guess, for a utility, he just did it to see if he could do it. But also I think he was leaning more into doing fine art, so I don’t know if Kevin is still even doing type design.

Agyei Archer:
Yeah. I have not actually heard of him. You said, episode 24?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Agyei Archer:
Have to check that out.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. The other person and I haven’t had him on the show yet, I would love to. But he’s got me thinking about the work of [inaudible 00:26:22] out of Zimbabwe.

Agyei Archer:
Yeah. He’s a huge influence. But yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. His book African alphabets, which took me forever to try to find.

Agyei Archer:
Yeah. It’s like [inaudible 00:26:35].

Maurice Cherry:
It is. Because it’s out of print and everything. But it’s such a great work in terms of just the anthropological, just meaning of showing what African alphabets are. And how different that is from what we would know as Roman alphabets or something.

Agyei Archer:
Yeah. One of my first type design projects on the project, that I gave my pep talk on was Surinamese language, that he had actually documented in his book. And if he hadn’t documented that I wouldn’t have found it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So you talked a little bit about growing up. Tell me more about your origin story, you were born and raised in Trinidad?

Agyei Archer:
Yeah. I was born in Trinidad, I grew up with my dad alone. And I think I had a relatively traditional growing up experience, which is that my father wanted me to be something, I’m not an artist. And what that means, is that I think I was quite good at all of these things in school, but I was just really unfulfilled. So I was a good student but a bad teenager, if that makes any sense. And I think that by the time I was ready to graduate out of what Americans would call high school. By that time I was so determined to do my own thing, that I already decided this is going to be tough but I’ll do it. When I got out of school, I had walked away from engineering path that I was focusing on, and I decided to be a bartender.

And while I was a bartender, I was also making software. I had learned a few programming languages in school, and my first job was actually as a software developer. And while I was making software, I learned I like making these layouts for these interfaces a lot. And I started getting into interface design, and this would’ve been old school, this is pre-cloud, pre-material. And I realized, I quite liked that, and then I realized, “Oh wow.” I was looking on a website one day and it needed a logo, and I just told the client, “Look, let me just take a stab at that for few you birds.” And I did. And as soon as it was done, I was like, “Oh my fucking God, I love this shit.” And I decided to be a graphic designer essentially.

So I got out of software and became a graphic designer. And I think that I basically got into software, became a graphic designer and was freelancing for a couple years, and then decided to go to school at the University of Trinidad and Tobago, because I wanted to get better. And I did okay slash great in school, but I was living with parents, who just didn’t understand a lot around why anybody would want to do design, which he would call art. And in his head it’s like, “I don’t want my child to be an artist, they stop.” So there was a relatively unsupportive environment at home then. And during that I decided, well, I want to be a designer and I don’t want to have to quit studying design. So I’m just going to move out and I moved out, and studying and living on my own was a difficult thing to navigate. So I just decided I would just start working, and I was always working while I was in school, just because I had a culture of getting classwork before.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm. And so, I mean, going to the University of Trinidad and you’re studying and working at the same time, did you end up finishing up or no?

Agyei Archer:
I didn’t graduate out of UTT, I got into the program and dropped out almost at the end twice.

Maurice Cherry:
Twice?

Agyei Archer:
Yeah. The first time was really just because I didn’t have a choice. And then the second time was because I went to school to finish my associates, and my lecturer at the time was like, “Hey Agyei, happy you want to be in school, love that for you. But you’re working toward where you already are.” Not necessarily in terms of my skill but in terms of professionally. And a lot of these schools in Trinidad are there to help you get a job, far less than they are to actually educate. And I think that it just felt like a right time for me to get out on my own. And I started working at an agency after, which I was fired from that agency a couple months after, but that was where I got my start, basically. That was when I decided I was really going to do this for the rest of my life.

Because when I dropped out to school the second time I decided… Well, but I could do a bunch of things, I could probably go learn how to do math or something. But I think that for me, it was way more important than at the time, that I do something that was passion driven. And all of the things around my life had coalesced around me doing design for a living. And it was the first time that I did something and, yes, it paid my bills, but it was also the first time that I was able to do something. And look at the effects of it, and look at the effects that it had on other people and be like, “This is a good thing that I’m doing.”
And I feel like that feeling has been in a way, what I’ve been chasing, but chasing is the wrong thing, because it implies more satisfaction than there is. But I do think that what I’ve been doing is working toward working, in pursuit of my understanding of the fact that design can actually positively affect people’s lives. And if you know that it can then let it, and the only way to let it is to do design.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And I would say that your points, if you were already working, I mean, why stay in school? And I’m not saying this for people listening is like, you should drop out, but-

Agyei Archer:
Yeah. No, stay in school kids.

Maurice Cherry:
… based on the environment that you said you were in, if you were already working, what is the degree really helping you for at this point, you’re already making a living?

Agyei Archer:
That was it like, I was paying my rent, but I was paying my rent and barely sleeping, because I have a career where I’m on the laptop and I’m building identities, and then I’m going to school. And I’m having to cut out pay stops.

Maurice Cherry:
Right.

Agyei Archer:
It was something where it is like dissonant. I feel like I’m getting prepared for the thing I’m doing.

Maurice Cherry:
So what was your early career like, you mentioned this agency, was that Abovegroup that you were working at?

Agyei Archer:
It wasn’t, it was not Abovegroup at first, Abovegroup was my dream agency. I applied to work at Abovegroup six times.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow.

Agyei Archer:
Yeah. They will admit for me being in the Caribbean and being a lover of design, and seeing the work that they put out for me was massively influential. Because Abovegroup it was founded by these two men, Alex Mills and Gareth Jenkins. Well, both had Trinidadian roots, but weren’t necessarily squarely based in Trinidad, but they were in Trinidad during the Abovegroup era. And something that really stood out to me was this, I mean, I don’t like this term, but it’s the best one that I have right now. But this internationalized approach to making design, which felt like it could stand up anywhere in the world. And for me, I was so inspired by that work that I told myself, I’m going to make work this for a company, or I’m going to make work this on my own, or I’m going to starve to death. But I’m not doing bullshit, you know what I mean?

And I think that after school, a lot of the work was struggling, but struggling, not necessarily because of any reason other than not wanting to produce, what felt to me the role to mechanicalized output that people are. I think in Trinidad, we have a culture of advertising is all big thing, so that’s what designers make most of their money doing. But the advertising culture in Trinidad has really flattened expression, and I think that for me, looking at that work was always really demoralizing. So I was telling myself, I don’t want to work for these people, while also needed to make a living. So my employment history has been shaky at best, I think I maybe was employed for my longest stint, my longest job lasted eight months. Everything else was freelance in the middle of that.
But I worked at a few agencies in Trinidad, and I think I would say that unhappy is a good way to describe how I felt. Just because I unhappy not necessarily because, I mean, the bosses were assholes, but bosses could be assholes everywhere. But it was more so I know that I’m not doing what I want to do, you know what I mean? I’m getting up, I’m making this artwork for these people, but I know that at the end of the day this isn’t how I want to… I don’t want to be known for this, I don’t wanted this to be what I’m carrying through in the future. So it was always in the back of my head, and then after many attempts I actually just got a job offer from it from Abovegroup. And Abovegroup was the first time that I was able to work as part of a team, and make the work that I wanted to make.

And I worked on Abovegroup for, I would say maybe a year or a little bit less than a year, but it was the most formative job experience that I’ve had, because here I was on a team of people attempting to make world class work, with world class, in my opinion, intentions and objectives. And eventually the company like design as a business internal that is hard to do, and it’s hard to make sustainable. And at some point in time, they had to realize that, “Hey, this isn’t going to work.” And they had to shutter their doors.

And when Abovegroup closed down for me, it was really demoralizing because I know I could have my own freelance career and stuff like that. But I think that what I learned from Abovegroup, is one how much you can do with people, as opposed to just yourself. But also I learned how much I enjoyed being part of a thing. And it’s only now that I’m able to look at the empty studio, and reflect on how much of the Unqueue Studio experience that I’m having, I took away from Abovegroup.

Maurice Cherry:
I know exactly what you mean about working at a place, and feeling like you know that you’re… And maybe I’m saying this wrong, but you feel like the work that you can do is better than this, like I’m better than this place in terms of-

Agyei Archer:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:35:59].

Maurice Cherry:
… the work that you know that you can do, but you’re still stuck in this. I know what you mean, I know exactly what you mean.

Agyei Archer:
Yeah. And I feel like it’s also… And I don’t say from a place of ego either, it’s almost from a place of desperate frustration. It’s like, “Guys, why don’t we care about our clients?” Those kinds of things are those were always questions that remained so unanswered, that it was hard to feel comfortable in a space, where I shouldn’t feel more concerned about my clients than my boss did, you know what I mean?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Agyei Archer:
And it felt like a lot of the timely work was this act of compromise, and lot of active compromise because we have to get it out, or because the clients is on a deadline. It’s always the compromise comes from, well, we don’t want to have another conversation with our client. And I was always in my head, well, okay, clients actually hire us to be the experts, they hiring us because they need somebody to tell them, when they’re fancy full ideas might not work.

And I think that the culture that we’ve had in Trinidad around business in general, and around the customer is always right quote, unquote, just didn’t allow for that kind of thinking. So when I wasn’t about group, it was the first time that I heard my boss say, “Yeah, I told our client, they could go fuck themselves, dude, they asked us to do some bullshit.” And for me that was huge because I didn’t even know we had that power in Trinidad. I knew we had that power elsewhere and it was nice to look at designers elsewhere, but at home it was wild for me to see that. So now even at the studio, we are probably one of the few studios that tells clients, “Hey, we’re not sure that your business model is really aligned, to what the kind of work that we’re trying to make.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It’s a more gentle way of saying that.

Agyei Archer:
Yeah. I had to think that they may have not been able to.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I know for me, I mean, I’m not going to lie, there was some ego in it. I was working at AT&T, essentially a production designer, just working on an assembly line with a team of other designers, just cranking out these boring websites for small businesses. And I just knew that I was better than this, I was like, “I can do better than this.” And it pained me how the other designers who I worked with, a lot of them who happened to be Black designers were just okay with this very sort of… To me, it felt like this is boring pedestrian station in life. I’m like, “You like this. You like these 15 minute lunch breaks, and then we have to go back to work for six hours, don’t you want better for yourself than this?” And for me, it was 100% ego. I get what you’re saying about kind of, especially with an agency, you would think that agencies would hopefully be more, I guess, appreciative of clients. And maybe, I mean, it sounds like this was your first agency type experience, and maybe that’s why it was so jarring.

Agyei Archer:
Well, I’ve had a few agency experience, and I think that one of the realities in Trinidad, is that we have what you would call like franchised ad agencies. So a local business interest would get into a partnership with, let’s say Saatchi & Saatchi, and they would bring a Saatchi & Saatchi to Trinidad, but the only parts of the Saatchi & Saatchi brand that they’re using on the name. So there’s nothing that’s going to be reflected in terms of the work ethos, or the creativity or anything like that. And that industry of design being production, and I think maybe just how they built the industry in Trinidad. I think it’s way more about getting the work done, so that we can get a new client in than it is about making work that gets us our next client.

So a lot of these agencies have 10 year, 15 year relationships with clients. And yes, they’re making underwhelming work every year, but they’re making underwhelming work at a understandable unexpected budget. So it’s not going to be a huge problem for the client. And I think that I was always really wary of ending up in that trap, because I felt like the reason that those companies were successful, is that same post-colonial shame of where from. So we’ll work with the Saatchi & Saatchi because they can guarantee that it won’t be shipped, because it says Saatchi & Saatchi in their name.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, okay. I see what you’re saying.

Agyei Archer:
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the work is going to be good, it just means that there’s a implied client confidence. And I think that I knew that, I mean, in Trinidad we may have white people are a minority here, but they’re still the powerful group. So I was never under this illusion that I could start my own company, and just run it on the name of it, it would have to be about work.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, it sounds like you’ve always done your own thing, whether it’s Unqueue, whether it’s your earlier entrepreneurial ventures that you touched on. For you, what have been some of the pros and cons of working like this?

Agyei Archer:
Yes, I have done my own thing for better always, but I think that as far as pros, I can really settle on the biggest pro of being. This idea of working on what you want to work on, is huge because if you can work on what you want to work on, and you can get paid doing it, and you can get paid enough to pay your bills. And buy some Prosecco on the weekend, in my world, that’s the literal best your life can be, right? So for me, my biggest pros is that I get to live a purpose driven life. And that doesn’t mean that my work is my life, but that does mean that if I am going to be spending eight to 10 hours a day doing something. That it doesn’t feel like I’m just doing something to help someone else achieve some random goal around the money.

So in terms of, I think that I can make a way bigger impact way things by myself, because are the obvious cons, but not just security, huge fucking terrible, like now I’m fine until recently it was tricky. I think also in these spaces that I live in, there is a particular challenge with going on your own when you look like I do, even though most of the people from Trinidad Black or extended descent. I think that the challenge comes with believability. So I walk into my room, I have free-form dreadlocks, I don’t wear socks, I walk into the room and I’m like, “Hey guys, this is the design.” And while I’m saying that, I know I need to fight against all of the perceptions that are coming with me in the room. And in a way, the career that I was able to establish for myself in the states, was the thing that helped me to get past that here. Because when I tell people, “Oh, Google is one of my clients.” There’s a lot of shit that gets smoothed over, you know what I mean?

A lot of skepticism that leaves you room, they’re like, “Oh, okay, cool. We thought you were a fraud because of the hair, but you said Google so it’s fine.” And I think that for me, one of the biggest cons is that idea of, for me, and I mean, I’m seeing specifically, if you are a sole trader Black entrepreneur. Doing the things that I do in Trinidad, one of the cons is definitely going to be, walking around and through that pervasive doubt that your potential clients and payers will have of you. Just because they are in a way programmed to doubt you and to doubt your capacity to do things, I think that’s one of the hugest challenges.
One of the huge challenges is just, having the best product in the room, but screaming, please somebody, listen to me. And in this invisibility, just because of where I’m from and what I look like, that again, I’m being really clear about, is way less now than it was back then. But I think that you’re a young Black boy in a Caribbean, and you want to start to design business. One of your biggest challenges is going to be credibility, and how do you get people convinced of your talent. Because it’s not going to be on how good your layouts are, it’s going to be about something else.

Maurice Cherry:
I feel that, I mean that respectability politics kind of thing is so pervasive. I mean, it’s something that I’ve had to deal with. Also I mean, I’m a big dark skinned Black dude with an Afro from the south, I walk in the most places, especially with some of the places that I’ve spoken at, some of the places I’ve done work for and everything. And I know how unassuming I come off and I play into that a little bit, like I went to Morehouse College.

And so Morehouse has its own reputation of suit and tie, and you’re this well red, well traveled person, blah, blah, blah, all this kind of stuff, that actively buck against. I’m not a suit and tie wearing person at all. And so I come up in most spaces and I tend to be pretty unassuming and I play into that a little bit, because I like people to be surprised like, “Oh, wow.” But I know what you mean about having to fight against that. Because oftentimes those perceptions will come from people who look just like you.

Agyei Archer:
Yeah. It’s mostly to be honest, most of the middle management is people who look like me, and middle management is who I need to get through. But I think that a lot of the people who look like me are really wanting to hire, and make connections, and relationships with a white man with an accent.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Absolutely.

Agyei Archer:
And I am not like, I don’t provide them the opportunity for growth that they’re looking for, because you can’t grow unless you have connections with white businessmen.

Maurice Cherry:
Whoo man. That’s…

Agyei Archer:
That’s heavy.

Maurice Cherry:
No, that’s real. I want to shift a little bit, and talk more a little bit about your type design work. We touched on a little bit earlier, but in 2017 you were part of the Type@Cooper Design program. Tell me how that experience was.

Agyei Archer:
It was well. Because I didn’t know I was going to get in, and I sent my application and then I got in, and then I had to take a loan, because I didn’t know I was going to pay for it and I got. And I remember really clearly, I’m saying all of this because I remember on my first day, I got into class and I got in there, and there were like three white kids, and I got into the class and none of them said anything to me. And then another white kid came into the class, and then a couple Asian kids came into the class. And at some point in time we were getting close to 9:00, and I had to acknowledge, okay, it’s not going to be another Black people here and that’s fine. That’s okay, don’t trip out, it’s fine, you’re in a place where Black people are minority, that’s, okay, right?
And then my professor at the time whose name is Hannes Famira, one of my biggest influences as a designer. Came into the room and he looked at me, and I knew he looked at me with this look of, huh, all right. And I looked at him for the same look of, okay, this is what we’re going to do, huh. And for me, a lot of it was on one hand being in a classroom of people, who were from a space, and I’m saying a space, not necessarily America.

But they’re all from what I would say, larger more cosmopolitan spaces, that actually have some history around type design, or some understanding around type design, or some typographic history. And here I’m from the Caribbean where we don’t have any of that. And I’m staying, I think that for me, my type of group journey academically was a struggle, because I just wasn’t as quote unquote good as a lot of my peers, but I was a hard worker. So moving through the program for me was really fulfilling, because I mean, I would basically go to class, I would spend 12 hours a day at the Cooper Union, and then I would go to my shitty Brooklyn Airbnb and spend three hours of drawing again.

And I think that one of the things that I had to leave with was, I kept waiting for the experience that would help me validate my Blackness inside of all of that, and that never happened. And I had to acknowledge that the reason that it didn’t happen and wasn’t going to happen was, because I was getting ready to work in a space where there weren’t any other Black people. Because it was only when I was at the Cooper Union and I asked, “Wait, where the fucking, where the Black guys at, where’s somebody Black at.” And they had to be like, “Okay, sorry to break this to you, but we have one guy, Josh Darden, that’s it.” That’s the whole type industry Black people is Josh Darden. And I don’t know how much you know about Josh, but he’s a massive recruit. So while I was at Type@Cooper, I’m emailing Josh and Josh is like, obviously not fucking replied to my email. And I’m like…

Maurice Cherry:
I’m only laughing because I have tried to get Josh on the show for a while. And I think one of his white business partners stepped in, and just put the stop sign down, like “stop messaging us.” And I was like, “Okay.”

Agyei Archer:
Yeah, that sounds about right. I mean to all of their credit, that’s Josh’s instruction and Josh’s desire. But, but Darden Studio is currently now run by a white woman. Her name is Joyce. I mean, great, she’s one of Josh’s best friends, but on…

Maurice Cherry:
That’s the person who told me that.

Agyei Archer:
Probably, yeah. She told me the same thing, [inaudible 00:48:37] we’re friends though I love her. So I can say that, I emailed and I was like, “Hey,” with so much milk in my fucking eyes like, “Hey, [inaudible 00:48:44].” I’m really hoping to get to this [inaudible 00:48:48], she’s like, “Listen, she’s not seeing anyone, good luck.” She’s like good luck with Type@Cooper, that’s it. But, no, we’re good friends now and, unfortunately publishing with them. But a lot of the experience for me was jarring, because I had to acknowledge where Black people were any type design spectrum. But I also had to acknowledge that gentle Eurasia of your experiences so that can happen, when you’re in white dominated spaces. It is an active thing, it isn’t like there’s normal malice, but there’s just a casual, not understanding, not relating to your circumstances that can feel really targeted after enough time.

That was how I would probably summarize my experience. I would summarize my experience as one that was really fulfilling in terms of how much I got to learn. But one that was also in a way, a little traumatizing in terms of how much I learned about the rest of it. So not the drawing part, not the Python part, not the understanding white space part, but just the cultural implication. And who’s making type, and who’s making type for whom, and where the type come from, type the whole. Like type design is the thing that facilitated commerce in the 15th, 16th, 17th century, that means slavery you know what I mean? So I think about that and I was like, okay, I’m also learning type in the Dutch fashion, from people who learned Dutch style type design. Which would’ve also been exploding in terms of its theoretical output, as a offshoot of the Dutch benefit from slavery.

Because I think that one of the greatest markers of a society’s progress, is if they started drawing type of art. You can tell a society’s appetite for conquest when they start printing their own letters, because you need to print their own letters to take over a space. And I feel like those things are the things that really… I think I could have learned a lot about drawing type on the internet, but I could never have learned about types place in the world and cultural context if I didn’t go to a school for it, because part of the curriculum was also learning about types history. So there was a lecturer called [inaudible 00:50:51], and he was exceptional in terms of his understanding of type and the evolution of type, obviously in a European context. But I learned so much about how… Because you go to enough history classes and you realize, okay, we’re not talking about Black people ever, that make you ask other questions around why we’re not talking about Black people.

So for me, Type@Cooper was culture shocking, but it was also really necessary because I learned a lot theoretically about making type, but I also was able to make amazing connections. I mean, Hannes who was my lecturers, one of my favorite people in the world, I was also able to from that lecture, or from that education experience, get in touch with people like my mentor DJR or my mentor Darden. Those were the entry points to get into a lot of where my life is right now with type. So I’m not mad at it, but it was really traumatizing.

Maurice Cherry:
Yikes. I hate to hear that. I mean, but it sounds like you were able to at least extract some good things from it.

Agyei Archer:
Yeah. I mean, good traumatizing is weird, but what I do mean it was, is not traumatizing because anybody was out to get me or anything like that. I think it was traumatizing because everybody they’ve been building this curriculum and I don’t mean just type of group. I mean, white people have been building type design curriculum for a hundred years now. And this idea of, “Hey, Black people use language too.” Like that question didn’t come up. And I think that’s not the fault of your school, that’s the fault of the society that we’re in. And in a way, the education system can only ever be a strong reflection of the society that you’re in. And I think that you can learn a lot about the society and the culture, around type design might be part of its education system.

Maurice Cherry:
So knowing all of this, and I guess also the fact that you really pull a lot of inspiration from the Caribbean as a whole, how do you bring all of this to your work?

Agyei Archer:
Well, I mean, I think that a lot of the work now for me is, I think that I’ve given up on making beautiful typefaces, and I don’t mean aesthetically beautiful, I mean, the idea of aesthetically beautiful. I think that there are things that be dominant culture has taught us that type design needs to have, we need to have super tight joins. And a lot of the trendiness is left my palette in terms of what I want to make, I want to make work that is so deeply accessible and utilitarian and basic, because we’re not in a space where if we’re supporting Pan-African Latin languages, that we have expressionism.

The languages that support these… Sorry, the sponsor support these languages are what you would call the most white bread, boring, vanilla, Arial, Helvetica, type things. And that’s because most of the time you’ve needed supporters languages, is because you’re releasing it on a OS, or you’re releasing it on a… There’s these context where you almost have to support everybody, and that’s when it gets done. But it’s not getting done by the commercial types of the world or shop types of the world. And again, that’s not a hit out against either Christian, or Lucas who run commercial and shop type perspectively, but that is a reflection of the industry that we’re in.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm. Let’s talk about Design Objectives. That’s something that you co-founded, I should say, with one of our past guests, Ayrïd Chandler, who we had on a couple of months back. Talk to me about that.

Agyei Archer:
Well, Design Objectives started off as, it was this plan that we had while I was working at Abovegroup. So I was working at Abovegroup at the time, and myself, Ayrïd Chandler, and another designer, to whom I’m not related, but I’m good friends with named Melanie Archer. We started Design Objectives because there’s that same idea of not being a very nutrient culture, or not having a very nutrient culture around design was there. So we didn’t feel facilitated, we didn’t feel like designers were encouraged to do anything other than make ads. And I think that for all of us, it was the same deep desire to affect a positive change. So for us design objective was helping designers be better, but not necessarily from new perspective of giving them lessons about the stout or about color competition. Because you can make your way through that, but we wanted to give designers empowerment tools. So we wanted to show you how to make a contract, here’s how negotiation should work, this is how you should probably price your work.
So a lot of the efforts that we were putting in were around, empowering designers to do their jobs better. Unfortunately, the pandemic pushed, because so much of Design Objectives was meeting oriented and socially rooted. We lost a lot of our traction during the pandemic, and I think since then we’ve released a slowed down the operation. For as much as we’re still doing things to connect design to people, I think that for each of us individually, we’ve moved past Design Objective as a nonprofit that we were founding, that we were running ourselves on.

I’m hoping that there’s a future evolution of that, that can probably be in the same space that we started it, in terms of supporting people and allowing them to really improve their practices. And again, not from the perspective of the aesthetics of the work that they’re making, because Caribbean people are very creative and very talented. But I think that there has been a culture of designers not being respected, and then thus not respecting themselves that we start to Design Objectives to try to fix for. I don’t think we’ve met up in a couple of years now, even though Melanie is also one of Unqueue’s showrunners by the way.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh.

Agyei Archer:
Yeah. I mean you should probably interview her off the record. But she’s one of the more influential designers, not just in our space, but in terms of the contemporary art world in the Caribbean as well.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. I mean, it’s pretty clear to me that you like to stay busy. You’re doing a lot between the studio, the app, and other things like, what are you doing for you? What are you doing for self-care with all of this?

Agyei Archer:
Unfortunately, I used to party really hard when I was younger. So I would say maybe between 17 and 25, I was just piles of drugs, just a lots of booze, I’m saying that all of those things are now boring to me. And what I do now for fun is I have an orchid collection, so I take care of about a hundred plus orchids at my apartment. Wow, I can’t believe I said that out loud. I do a lot of baking and cooking, I’m such a Saturday stay at home guy, I am Mr. Yogurt on a Saturday morning. And that’s what [inaudible 00:57:13], I try my best to just enjoy the life that I built for myself, because I think that there is so much in the work that I’m doing now, that can be in a way I’m busier than I’ve ever been. And if I don’t make sure to separate myself, my whole life can be about the work that I’m doing.

And I think that there was a period in time when I was really comfortable with that, with making my life about what I’m doing. But I think that now I want to make my life about how much I’m enjoying my life, and I do enjoy my life in making the work that I’m doing. So there’s that, but that’s just part of my enjoyment. So I take care of my plants, I have a beautiful dog, his name is Baxter and I spend as much time with him as I can. And I’m trying new fried chicken recipes, I’m trying new bread recipes. I wish I would say that ice skating or going surfing and stuff, but I’m not, I am a bridge to the water, I live in the Caribbean, but I’ll go look at the beach.

But I just feel like, a lot of what I’m doing for myself right now, is stepping away from work being my everything. Because it was my everything for a serious period of time, and I think that a lot of my substance abuse was driven by mitigating against that. So work is taken over my life, I’m just do some drugs so I can make it through, and now work is taken over my life, I need this weekend.

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

Agyei Archer:
I think that if I think about dream projects, I think about… A lot of my current drive is around the Caribbean and facilitating entrepreneurship, and development in the Caribbean using the software that we made, but also the methodologies that we developed. So if I think of dream project, we are currently right now working with the government at Trinidad and Tobago, to help with the same farming project. We’re trying to scale it across the nation, but we’re also working with them on building software tools for financial inclusion. In my opinion, being able to help people on the ground in that way from the space that I’m in. It couldn’t get more dreamy than that.

Maurice Cherry:
Who are some of the mentors that have really helped you out throughout your career?

Agyei Archer:
Definitely Gareth Jenkins and Alex Mills from Abovegroup, huge influences. I think that they were the first people to teach me that, you could stand up for design and people won’t hate you as much as you think. DJR, David Jonathan Ross, who is a American typeface designer has been one of my rocks, and one of the most encouraging designers that I’ve ever met. He was the first person that I sent my work, who didn’t just tell me something patronizing. So I would share work with people and they’d be like, “Oh, this is amazing.” But he was the first person to be like, “Hey, got your font, here’s a PDF for all of the mistakes.” It sent it back to me, which I think it was one of the best things from my career as a designer, because I think that there is a lot of white guilt that can get in the way of productivity, when it comes to giving people feedback on my work.

Especially, you see a young Black guy making type and its like, “Well, I don’t want to break a spur.” But actually I was far more concerned in positive feedback than I was in validation, and he was really good. I think he saw that and he was really good at that. And I think I feel the same way, what Eben Sorkin, who is a designer, who works for Darden Studio, and has also made the Merriweather font, which is pretty popular on the internet. But I think that those two typeface designers have been really influential to me. There’s also Hannes Famira and Just van Rossum, who are German and Dutch type designers, respectively, and used to work in programming really changed my outlook on whether or not programming had a place in my design practice.

And Hannes outlook on typeface design, really helped me and still helps me now when I’m making work, remind myself that it’s as good as you want it to be and you can make it better, but the reality is that some of the decisions that you make will have to be personal ones. And I think that in a world that has so much rigidity like typeface design, those two people who are… I would say typeface designers with a very strong [traditional 01:01:15] sense of output, the ethos that they’ve been making that work with has been in a way radical, and I am really inspired by that.

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

Agyei Archer:
Oof, legacy, yikes. I think that in five years I hope that Unqueue’s infrastructure is more pervasive in Caribbean, and we’re helping facilitate even more lives being built and transformed. I’m hoping that for my type design practice, that I’m able to find even more time to draw and even more time to produce. And I’m hoping that by in five years my first font with Darden Studio would’ve done relatively well, because it would’ve been out for a few years. But I think that what I want for myself, I mean this is not just in five years but also in five years, I would like the work that I’m making to see its potential through in terms of the impact that it can make in other people’s lives.

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

Agyei Archer:
My best place to find me online is on Twitter. But I also have a website at agyei.design. The Unqueue Studio has a website, it’s unqueue.studio check that out for sure, especially if you’re interested in tech in the Caribbean. And we have the Unqueue marketplace, which is unqueue.app, which is what we use to help small businesses right now. If you can get on any of those platforms and you can’t find me, then I just didn’t want to be found.

Maurice Cherry:
All right. Sounds good. Agyei Archer, I want to thank you just so much for coming on the show. Like I said, this is been a long time coming, I really wanted to have you on the show for a while and you didn’t disappoint. I mean, I think first of all, just hearing about your work ethic and how you’ve built Unqueue I think is super inspiring, particularly in this weird flux state we’ve all been in since the beginning of 2020. But I think also just the fact that you are someone who looked and found a void in the market or a void in the world, and you’ve actively worked to use your skills and your talents to fix that. I think that’s something that all of us can walk away from learning just about you, but also just about the best ways that we can use the skills that we have to create a more equitable world. So thank you so much for coming on the show, I appreciate it.

Agyei Archer:
Thank you, Maurice. I’m really grateful as well for your patience, and waiting as long as you have to get me on. But also I feel like the work that you’re doing is really valuable, and I hope you get to keep it up.

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Ron Bronson

If you’ve had any sort of interaction with government services on the Web, particularly at the national level, there’s a pretty good chance your experience in some form was designed or conceived by this week’s guest — the one and only Ron Bronson.

Longtime fans will remember Ron’s first appearance on the podcast seven years ago, and our conversation starts off with a quick recap of what lessons he’s learned over the past year. From here, we talk about his career shift from education to civic tech, the emergence of consequence design, and even a Finnish sport akin to baseball known as pesäpallo. Ron’s story is a testament to the power of reinvention, and hopefully it convinces you that whatever it is you’re imagining, it’s possible!

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

Ron Bronson:
Hi. It’s Ron Bronson. I’m based in Portland, Oregon and I’m a design director in civic tech in the government.

Maurice Cherry:
How has 2021 been for you so far?

Ron Bronson:
Interesting. Obviously, we’re all coming out of COVID slowly. So that’s obviously been a thing. And ascending to this role, I’ve been a manager of a team of seven before and now I’ve got over 30 direct reports, obviously some managers who report to me, but there’s the whole department now. So that is definitely a different set of expectations and challenges. Trying to work on a book, trying to stay involved. So 2021 is interesting to try to remap all the stuff that you lost from being in the house for a whole year.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What lessons did you learn in this past year? When you look back, how do you think you’ve changed?

Ron Bronson:
Wow. I think momentum doesn’t necessarily have to stop. I thought last year was, in my mind, when it started and things started to shut down, I was like, “[inaudible 00:03:38] a wasted year,” all the stuff I had mapped out for myself, career-wise, thinking about work, and it turned out that wasn’t true. Opportunities still came and I was still able to do things and write stuff and read stuff and speak at events, obviously virtually.

Ron Bronson:
So that was interesting to me and surprised me, but I think maybe I got a better sense of the things that motivated me a little bit. I don’t know that I necessarily … Like I said, I was operating with my outlets … not autopilot, but kind of just doing stuff and taking for granted that every day was going to be, “This is what you do. You go to these events and you go to nonprofits or you go to work and you see your friends,” until have all that taken away and realize that some of those things fueled you, that you liked doing that stuff or it inspired you in some way. To not have that is crystallizing. It also means you appreciate it more. So it taught me a lot about myself. Maybe the times when somebody calls and says, “Oh, let’s hang out,” and I’m like, “No,” now I’m probably like, “Hey, yeah. We should hang out. Let’s do it.” So it’s a big lesson for me.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It’s been interesting how … I’ve noticed this trend among friends of mine, even from guests that have been on the show. I feel like we’re at this point where everyone is reevaluating what their next step is. We’ve been in the house or in some form of lockdown or restriction over the past year and a half and, now that things are starting to open up again, everyone’s like, “Well, let me think about what I want this next thing to be. Do I still want to go ahead in the same manner that I have with work or with my schedule or do I want to change things?” I’m seeing that everywhere now, which I guess is a good thing.

Ron Bronson:
I think so. I think it’s cool that … not cool, but I think it’s important to have these conversations because we weren’t really able to take stock of them before, been able to see the world for what it was maybe a little bit.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. Now, I know you can’t talk directly about the work that you’re doing because it is a government agency, but can you give just a broad overview about the work that you do?

Ron Bronson:
I think, at the core of the work I’ve been doing, for years, really, even before I became [inaudible 00:05:49] in federal service and was working in state government, is trying to identify problem spaces that exist, working collaboratively with teams to identify problem spaces, big problems, small problems, murky problems, and trying to operationalize a way out of those problems and doing that in a way that’s sustainable.

Ron Bronson:
It’s one thing to go into a place and say, “I’m going to help you solve this,” and then solve it and leave. It’s like, when you break something and you fix it, you don’t know how they fixed it. So now they’re gone, so you’ve got to call them every time, instead of doing it where you’re like, “You’re going to help us. You’re going to work with us. You’re going to be our eyes and ears [inaudible 00:06:26]. You’re going to be part of the team that helps us figure this out.” And the way, you know how we did it so that, when we’re gone, you can do it. And not only can you do it, you could teach other people to do it, too. And so I think, at its core, that’s the work that I do, that we do, and it’s pretty rewarding. I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but it’s definitely rewarding.

Maurice Cherry:
What makes it rewarding?

Ron Bronson:
I think it’s fun to see a murky situation that doesn’t necessarily have an explicit answer. And maybe a thing I learned from, say, when I started to now, is where I identified a problem, like, “Oh, I know exactly what the problem is here. Do a little research and we’ll just confirm what I knew the problem was. You get on this team and you work together to answer … Do some [inaudible 00:07:07] research, talk to some users or stakeholders and get some answers.” It turns out, not only were you wrong, but what they asked you to do was maybe the wrong [inaudible 00:07:16] problems. Now you need to revisit it or you got a prototype of a thing or idea and you talk to the people who actually use the thing and they say, “No, no, no. You’re missing the point. What you actually need it something completely different,” and now you’ve got to revisit and reboot and rethink.

Ron Bronson:
And so it’s fun to go through that, not initially. What’s fun about it is, if you can go through that and you do it in this way that’s thoughtful and you bring [inaudible 00:07:39], bring the people along, then at the end of it, the end result of what you get is more sustainable and it’s fun to see the fruits of that labor. I know, gosh, you build things. Some people who build stuff … It’s one thing when you build a thing and you’ve got to do all the work yourself or your work on a team and then, when you go away, it collapses, but it’s fun, even at my non … I started Indianapolis Design Week and then, when I left, somebody else took it over.

Ron Bronson:
It’s cool when you can see a thing that you started, somebody else takes it over and they put their own spin on it. And that’s sustainable and it has a legacy. And so to have that in my professional work, as well, is super rewarding. Even if it’s, like I said, a longer process to get there, it takes a long time, it’s nebulous, the answers aren’t as clear, that’s super fun.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I like that part about you saying that it’s sustainable because I think, certainly if you’re a designer or a developer at … I’m just naming companies here, like a Dropbox or something like that … No shade to Dropbox. I love Dropbox, but if you’re at a product-based company, the work that you do may really not even be seen. It can easily be overwritten. It’s kind of ephemeral. And also, you don’t really know if your service is going to be around in the next five years, 10 years or whatever, whereas the work that you’re doing, you know that it has a home, almost.

Ron Bronson:
Exactly. 100%. Yep. And I think that … You talk about public sector, working [inaudible 00:09:05] or working in, say, civic tech where maybe you’re adjacent or something. By being able to do work that you know … Again, it may also be [inaudible 00:09:12] and no one will see it, but at least you know, at the end of the day, who you’re working for, either for the people in front or the folk behind the scenes [inaudible 00:09:20] people in the front. And I think that’s a cool cycle of life to have.

Maurice Cherry:
What’s a typical day like for you?

Ron Bronson:
It varies. It varies dramatically. And it’s varied, obviously, when you talk about being in sales, for instance, leadership in this situation versus maybe when I was [inaudible 00:09:35] contributor or even a couple years ago when I’m working at, say, local or state situations, but I’d say that [inaudible 00:09:41] we have a lot of meetings, obviously, but it’s a lot of content switching. So there’s meetings, obviously, to deal with just the things you would deal with in any kind of leadership role. There’s also kinds of some project-related stuff that happens, as well. In my case, right now, lots of strategy and trying to figure out how to build resiliency into teams and supporting people where they’re at, but it’s really variable. Other than, say, there’s a lot of meetings, I don’t think any two days are alike.

Ron Bronson:
The content of each day is very different because it’s so responsive to what’s happening, not only in the world, but individually or organizationally or whatever. So it can be really very variable, which is cool. Obviously, if you’re a control freak, not that I am, but maybe a little bit, it can be a little discombobulating because sometimes you don’t know what’s coming, like, “Oh, what’s going to happen a month from now?” I don’t know. It could be anything, but as long as you can relish in and embrace that sort of mystery, it’s kind of fun.

Maurice Cherry:
How have your responsibilities changed over the years? I guess, aside from going up to the ranks to where you’re at as a director, but how have your responsibilities really changed since you’ve been there?

Ron Bronson:
The scope and the size. Actually, when you talked to me years ago, I was a director then, too, but I had [inaudible 00:10:57] only a few direct reports and I was leading statewide strategy, but it was a different sort of … scale was different and also the purview is different, the responsibilities are different. And then I go to a smaller government and, obviously, I don’t have any of that kind of responsibility, more principle designer kind of work.

Ron Bronson:
And then, over the last couple of years, going from IC and doing more information architecture and content strategy work, but [inaudible 00:11:19] more strategic work, in general, to leading projects to staffing people to projects to, again, now just trying to shape an entire … figuring out how you move a team forward in an industry that wasn’t really a thing, designers working in the public sector, much less entire teams. Maybe it’s one or two people, okay. We’ve always been around, but to have the scale of, let’s say, a small agency of design type people and [inaudible 00:11:49] definitely alike. It’s a lot of making things from scratch, trying to invent it as you sort of fly the plane as you build it kind of thing.

Ron Bronson:
So for me, I think the work is similar. I think I’m doing similar kinds of things, a lot of similar kind of thinking. I think it’s just, over the years, playing a video game and going to different levels and taking the coins you get from level three and now you use them at level six because you’ve got a lot more coins in your pocket or you got [Selixir 00:12:14] on level four and you put that in you and now you’re on level eight and you’re like, “Oh, I’m ready. I got that. That wizard gave me that thing.” I mean, it’s a funny metaphor, but that’s kind of what it is. I don’t feel like it’s that different. It’s just that the other experiences prepared you for, A, more meetings and it prepared you for nebulous things and having to answer questions that are not …

Ron Bronson:
Also, you get to choose sometimes the things that you get to decide. You’re working with other people, but at the end of the day, the buck stops with you, at a certain point for certain things. And that’s weirder than when you’re … I joked before I did this with, oh, well, it was really cool being the person that you could talk to people about the work and the problems, but it’s like watching your favorite sports team on TV and being like, “If I was the general manager, I would do this, this, and this,” and then now you’re the general manager of the baseball team. Turns out there were things you didn’t know about the problem space he was in. You didn’t know that the budget was here or you need to do this or do that. So that metaphor, I think, matches very well to my existence now, where it’s the things you just don’t know until you’re in the seat and you’re like, “Oh, maybe I was wrong about that other lens I had before.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Has it changed, I guess now with things being more remote? You’ve always been remote in that role. Right?

Ron Bronson:
I’ve always been remote. So for me, no, it has not changed anything about anything. I think the scope of the work is different, maybe a little bit, but no, it’s the same. Nothing changed in that way at all, which is great. I mean, I’d say this, that across government, across public sector, civic tech, whatever, it was definitely a sort of … especially when you get down to state and local levels, certainly a resistance to remote work to this kind of thing for a bevy of reasons. I know when I worked in local government, we had a heck of a time trying to get even a day where you could work remote. Well, they had to change that last year [inaudible 00:13:56]. Right?

Ron Bronson:
And so I think that, now, you deal with people and you see this and now people have a level of … it’s not savvy, but they certainly have more experience with it now. So the resistance they used to have isn’t there like it used to be because folks have had to adapt to this new reality. And so I think that takeaway has been great because it was such a difficult thing before. I think, again, you get down to these lower levels or certain, whatever, agencies, whoever [inaudible 00:14:23] maybe. I don’t know. So that part has been, I think, great to see, is just people’s comfort level with it changed in ways that you never saw before.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Do you think that an interest in civic design has changed over the years?

Ron Bronson:
Yeah. I mean, I was actually talking to a friend about this, a friend who left the country for awhile and wants to come back to the country and was like, “What should I do?” And I’m like, “See, when you left, it was really just a few things you could do, a few places you could go, [inaudible 00:14:49] digital service or an ATNF or something or places like Code For America.” [inaudible 00:14:55] New York City, but you didn’t have the options.

Ron Bronson:
Now, there’s tons of cities that have these digital service teams, different states like Colorado that have them now. Local governments are starting these. San Francisco has their own teams. There are lots of private sector companies, of course, that are doing this that built in very similar models that use a lot of the same tenents. And so I think that, yeah, there’s a ton of opportunity for people now to be able to get involved in using their skills for good and for helping move things forward and helping accelerate conversations that maybe were harder before. You wouldn’t have gone to work for the IT department in your local town before. You wouldn’t have wanted to do that, but now maybe you would because of all the different ways that civic tech conversation has elevated and proliferated.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, I’ve had a few service designers and designers working in government on the show over the past few years. And I think, certainly, all of us have seen how design and technology can have a profound effect on how people process information. I think we can clearly look at the last five years and see how that has been the case.

Ron Bronson:
Right.

Maurice Cherry:
If you had to give a pitch to say, I don’t know, current designers and developers now about going into civic tech, what would that look like?

Ron Bronson:
So I think people [inaudible 00:16:14] to a lot of the other things that I work on, personally. It’s one thing to be upset about systems and structures and processes and things not working well. It’s another thing to actually try to figure out how you can not only leverage your skills to make things better, but to be on the inside, at least to see … You’re not going to do it forever, but at least to see how it operates, see where the problems are, see where the issues are, see how you can solve those. Don’t just complain about the problems. How do we fix some of the problems? And you’re not going to fix all of them, but you can fix some.

Ron Bronson:
And also it’s a nice proving ground for being able to leverage … especially people who are hybrids. You’re an interaction designer who likes research or you’re a service designer, but turns out you’re really good at product design. To be able to leverage your content strategist who also does PM stuff, to leverage those sort of skills because, in a lot of [inaudible 00:17:04], especially the lower you get down in government, they’re not going to have these massive agile teams. So you’re going to deploy those multiple skillsets. I did that when I was in local government. I really liked it, personally, because it gave me a chance to sharpen some skills. My [inaudible 00:17:17] skills got way better, being in that situation, because they had to get that way. Maybe in a bigger place, that simply would never happen.

Ron Bronson:
So I think my pitch to people who are considering this kind of work is that, if you care about community, you care about your technologists who cares about the work, it’s good way for you to give back and be involved, but also to grow skills that’ll serve you well moving forward, beyond where you are in your career right now.

Maurice Cherry:
We’re all digital citizens, in some way.

Ron Bronson:
Agreed. 100%. Yep. That’s it.

Maurice Cherry:
Actually, that even, in some way, we totally are all digital citizens. With social media and such, you really can’t escape it.

Ron Bronson:
So true, so true.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, when you and I first spoke back in 2014, and you’ve alluded to this earlier just now, you were in Kentucky, I believe. What do you remember from working back during that time?

Ron Bronson:
That job was [inaudible 00:18:08] all I want. That job was the state headquarters for the community college system. And so it was higher ed, but it really wasn’t. And actually, that was the first job that I’d had that wasn’t on a campus, at that time. So for me, it was a little weird at first to be in this [inaudible 00:18:25] higher ed, but what it really was was a government job. You’re a bureaucrat and you’re making policy and you go to 16 different colleges and you’re setting digital strategy for the entire state and working with an internal team. A lot of the processes and things didn’t really exist before we built them, when I had that job.

Ron Bronson:
So it’s why I’m here, frankly, in many ways, even though I don’t know that that was my favorite job, but it gave me a great glimpse and lens of how to manage a big team. How do you manage people who don’t report to you, but you still set policy for them and your decision impact your work? I had to learn that and develop that skill over time. How to develop training for a massive internal team, public-facing stuff. So it was a great trial by fire. People [inaudible 00:19:11] what you see on Twitter a lot. Folks will say, “Oh, if you’re qualified for a job, but you’re not sure and you’re nervous, apply anyway because you might learn something.” Well, that job is [inaudible 00:19:21], but you feel a little in over your head, a little bit.

Ron Bronson:
I wouldn’t recommend that all the time, but in that situation, the pros for me in terms of what those lessons taught me after … And a lot of them were bad lessons. It was people-related lessons, but still … So I remember that time very vividly. I’m not going to get into all of it, but y’all have to DM me and I’ll tell you all the dirt.

Ron Bronson:
But any case, the positives of that were the lessons that I learned really allowed me, moving forward, to be a much more incisive designer, a much more compassionate leader, better communicating, to own what I know. So yes, there were some really great lessons from that time that have served me well, even to this day.

Maurice Cherry:
And now, you first entered into civic designer just right after you left Kentucky, went to Indiana.

Ron Bronson:
Right.

Maurice Cherry:
You were principal service designer for the City of Bloomington, Indiana.

Ron Bronson:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Was it a big shift going from education to now civic design work?

Ron Bronson:
It wasn’t, partially for two reasons; one because, again, that job in Kentucky was pretty much a state job. I mean, it was state related. So everything we did was bureaucrat-level state stuff. That job and my job now, they’re different, but it was a lot of the same kinds of economies of scale. So that prepared me pretty well for being sort of in a faceless situation. Local government was fun. I really enjoyed it, especially at a sub-100,000 size city level. In a big city, it’d be probably similar to what I do, but in a city where [inaudible 00:20:56] 80,000 people, folks have problems with the website, they print a thing out and bring it to City Hall and say, “Ah, I went to this page. It didn’t work. Can you fix it right now?”

Ron Bronson:
I really enjoyed that. I thought that was really cool. You go to parties and folks tell you that they found a thing. So much of the work that we do as technologists in any part of the space that you’re doing, and I’m being very broad about this, you don’t really get to … You interact with users in user interviews or stakeholder things, but you’re not dealing with your users in this very retail way. The same ways that, if a thing breaks, I can go take it back to the store.

Ron Bronson:
You can’t do that with a website, but in local government in a city of that size with the team that we had … That was an amazing team. I want to shout out Bloomington, Indiana [inaudible 00:21:37] open source development team. All the stuff they had built was in-house. We transitioned the site from our in-house CMS that we had to Drupal. So it was a whole process, multiple things that went on there, but it was really, really cool, actually, to get to do that.

Ron Bronson:
So no, the transition wasn’t weird. I think the hard part for me was going from being director and doing a lot more leadership stuff to going back to being hands on. I did that on purpose. It was a deliberate decision for me to … I was in an IT shop, so doing a lot more front-end development and doing design and building the design system initially, but also doing a lot of service design stuff. I did all the service design. They never had a service designer before.

Ron Bronson:
All the user research … [inaudible 00:22:20] was a collaborative effort with some other folks, but leading that UX design, writing tons of content, so wearing a ton of hats, but I wanted that experience. I missed it. For me, it was really great to get to do that while also doing strategy, while also shipping an actual, physical thing. They needed a new site app. It had been 10 years old and we shipped it. So I loved it.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, through the work that you’ve done, there’s this phrase that you’ve coined I’ve seen come up called consequence design. Can you talk about how you came to that idea and what exactly does consequence design entail?

Ron Bronson:
I used to always joke with anybody who asked me about consequence … I feel like I have a better answer now, but I feel like every interview I do about this [inaudible 00:23:00] changes. So you just [inaudible 00:23:02] all us together at some point. We’re going to figure this out together, as a community. But really, what it is is … I feel like consequence design is really born out of a lot of the conversations that are happening right now around … I think there are several conversations. There’s some that are around any patterns or dark patterns, for instance, which I don’t like saying, but people know what I’m talking about when I say it, so I just say it, or [inaudible 00:23:26] some of the hostile patterns that you see online.

Ron Bronson:
And I feel like a lot of these conversations, well, one, they’re not calling a spade a spade. We already have words for what deception is. We already know what … something that’s fraud, but we don’t want to call it that. So instead, we call it, “Ooh, it’s a dog pattern.” No, this website is trying to scam your grandmother. That’s a scam and we should call it what it is. It’s fraud. We should call it what it is.

Ron Bronson:
But through doing talks about these topics over the previous couple of years all over the world, people would ask me, “Okay. Well, what do I do about it? I’m just a junior designer at a bank. What am I supposed to do about this? How do I fix it?” And so I felt like all the conversations that we have around ethics and ethical design and so forth is a philosophy washout. I didn’t like those conversations because, one, they triggered me to thinking about [Hagel 00:24:18] and not doing great in philosophy. And I’m being funny right now, but also … which is true. I didn’t do great at that.

Ron Bronson:
But the other reason I don’t like it is because it takes the agency out of the hands of individuals. Yes, you’re not going to fix certain structures and systems, but there are things that you can do, that you can impact at your level or have a conversation about with your colleagues and eventually impact through glacial change, through iterative change. So I wanted a term that was, how do we take the areas [inaudible 00:24:48] policy, service design, the user experience, how do we merge these things together and how do we take real-world experiences, things like kiosks in public spaces that have really terrible UIs? That’s not divorced from the work that you and I do every day, but people act like it is, how we foist these experiences on people.

Ron Bronson:
And so I wanted to bring all that together to have an industry-wide [inaudible 00:25:12], practitioner-wide conversation around, “Let’s identify these are problems and let’s talk about how we might be able to fix some of these things.” First, we need to identify that they’re actually problems. And I didn’t just want to keep talking about the individual pieces of it. I wanted to be able to have a way to encapsulate it. And that’s how I got to consequence design as an idea. It’s still very fuzzy. The book is not out, will not be out until next year, but I’m trying to get there.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, that’s right. You are writing a book. I saw online-

Ron Bronson:
[crosstalk 00:25:41] very slowly.

Maurice Cherry:
I saw parts of what you’ve been putting together online and we’ll link to that in the show notes so people can take a look at that, but it’s not your first book that you’ve written. You wrote a book back in 2017. Right?

Ron Bronson:
Yeah. That was really more of … You know how people do … when you write your blog for years and you put all the blog posts into a book. And so that’s what that was.

Maurice Cherry:
That counts.

Ron Bronson:
The web management guide. Yeah. It was fun to get all that stuff together, mostly because all those blogs are dead now. So I’m kind of glad I got a few of those things together into a piece, but this is going to be the first time I’ve published a real print book. We did that online and you could go on GitHub. It wasn’t anything too fancy, but this will be a real thing you can put in your hands and, hopefully, use the reference guide. So I’m pretty excited about that. I’ll be more excited when it’s done, but I’m excited about getting further down the path.

Maurice Cherry:
So I read Web Management for Regular People because this was right around the time I was sort of … I mean, I was coming out of doing Lunch. I was coming out of doing my studio and looking for work, looking for something else, and really was trying to almost brand myself more as a strategist and less of just a designer because I had been a designer and I had done the studio for so long. And honestly, having a team that did the large part of the actual building and construction meant that I sort of fell behind in my skills. Yeah, I could still get in Photoshop and whip something up if I need to, but I’m nowhere near the production level work that I used to be in terms of speed. I wouldn’t say in terms of quality, but certainly in terms of speed. I’m nowhere near that.

Ron Bronson:
I hear you.

Maurice Cherry:
Not to mention, with even web design, I mean, all the stuff that went on in the mid-2010s around CSS preprocessors and stuff, I was like, “Okay, now you’ve lost me. Now that you’re introducing JavaScript into CSS, I’m out.”

Ron Bronson:
Right.

Maurice Cherry:
And I remember reading parts of your book because I was really thinking of how I would rebrand myself and eventually ended up doing that as becoming a digital strategist. And even where I work at now, I’m a content strategist, but reading what you had to say about strategy and how to design a strategist and things like that … I’d even talked with other people I’ve had on the show, like Douglas Davis, really helped me to form an idea of where I wanted to take my career next. So I want to just thank you for that.

Ron Bronson:
I appreciate that. That warms my heart. That’s really cool because I didn’t know anybody cared, but I appreciate it. That’s why when you asked about it, I’m like, “Oh, right. I don’t want to talk about that,” but that’s really cool. That’s really, really cool.

Maurice Cherry:
But it’s something that is certainly important now. It’s funny, I see so many strategy roles now that I certainly didn’t see a few years ago.

Ron Bronson:
Yeah, there definitely weren’t any back then. Right.

Maurice Cherry:
And I think, initially, they kind of were more in the purview or the domain of advertising, but now tech startups are looking for strategists and different web agencies are looking for strategists. They’re looking for someone that can sort of bridge the gap, I suppose, between the design and the business or at least has been in the trenches enough, I should say, to be able to give an overview of what should be done, where we should go, what pitfalls we should look out for. But yeah, strategy is an interesting field now in design because you’re kind of a professional generalist, in a way.

Ron Bronson:
So true.

Maurice Cherry:
And certainly, at a time in the industry when things were so heavily skewed towards product design, and I would say they probably still are-

Ron Bronson:
Still are, right.

Maurice Cherry:
… to a fault. Strategists occupy a really interesting role in the design industry. So yeah, I want to definitely thank you for that.

Ron Bronson:
I appreciate that.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, one thing that I’ve noticed, looking through your history and everything, is that coaching is a really big constant in your life. It’s something you’ve done since you were a really young man, a teenager. Mostly tennis, but you’ve coached debate, as well. What does coaching do for you?

Ron Bronson:
It’s really fun to, especially coaching tennis because you just see it … I mean, debate, too, but it happened then, too. That moment where somebody goes from a thing you talked about, oh, same thing you keep telling them over and over again … You’re like, “Look, you’re going to build on this.” I remember it happens every season, all the time. These kids, you start them off early and it’s really hard, whatever it is you’ve got them doing. Maybe you’ve got them playing people that are better than them because that’s what you need them to do that week or maybe [inaudible 00:30:07] and they’re not doing as well. And then, by the end of the year, there’s this moment when they play and it comes together for them and then they win something that you didn’t think they’d win or whatever and it’s always fun when …

Ron Bronson:
I was the worst player on a really good team in high school. There were four D1 guys on my high school tennis team. I was definitely not D1 quality. I played D3 tennis, but seeing how good players prepare, seeing how they work, and also trying to figure out how to fit in in that environment. My way to fit in was to basically be the second coach. I was a scout. So I could tell my guys, “Oh, yeah, the number one guy. Yeah, Kenny, you played that guy last year. You beat him two and one.” That was really useful to him. He appreciated that information. And so it’d go from them being curious about me saying that to them to, “Hey, Ron. Hey, did I play this guy? How did it go? Calm me down. Help me out.”

Ron Bronson:
And so I’m in high school and I’m doing this. I’m a high school junior, I’m a senior and I’m doing this for my better players because I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be on the team. And so, as I got older … I didn’t like practicing as a kid. I liked to work on my own, but I didn’t really enjoy the way practices were set up. So I’m like, how do I create an environment where players want to get better and they want to come, they want to belong, irrespective of where they are in terms of their talent level? All you need to do is be hungry and excited about it.

Ron Bronson:
So how it ties to my everyday work is the same kind of thing. You come in with energy. You come in excited. I come in trying to help you get better and it’s not transactional. I’m not trying to make you better to get something out of it for me. I mean, we benefit from it, but I don’t care about that. If it means you getting better, it means you leave and go make more money, shout out to you because you did that. You made that happen. I didn’t.

Ron Bronson:
And so coaching is that and it’s fun over the years. I’ve been to camps over the years. I’ve been coaching high school tennis now. To have this arc of seeing kids from 1998, the first time I coached, to this year … I mean, I’ve taken years off, of course, but I coached this season. Basically, in theory, there were kids in ’98 who probably could have kids now, who could be kids of mine. Right? I’ve done a generation of this, in a way.

Ron Bronson:
And so it’s fun to be a little relevant over the times and you get to see how people evolve and grow and change and how you need to adapt your methods to resonate with a different generation. I’m almost washed, but I’m not quite there yet. I’m getting there. I’m not going to be coaching at 60. Then I’ll be super washed, at that point. So I’m not going to be one of those coaches you see, like … Oh, no, no. I’m nearing my end, but it’s been really fun and it’s … You work online. As somebody who spends a lot of time on a laptop, a lot of time on a computer, it’s very, very nice to have a time where you don’t do that and somewhere you’ve got to show up and be accountable to people and not just a … to be somewhere every day.

Ron Bronson:
And it’s different than a nonprofit or something. This is different. It’s in-person. It’s every day. There’s an ebb and flow. It’s pretty simple, but it’s not. You build the culture, but you’ve got enforce the culture. It’s a lot of lessons in it. I learned so much just from this season of coaching. I learned so much. And it’s stuff that I think applies to my everyday work. So it’s super, super cool.

Maurice Cherry:
What are you obsessed with right now.

Ron Bronson:
Oh, man, Finnish baseball. I mean, it’s true. Pesapällo, Google it, friends, but I really want to know what’s next. People tease me, friends of mine. Even second-tier friends will tease me about, “Oh, your Twitter bio changes all the time.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I’m just AB testing,” but also I just want to [inaudible 00:33:28]. But one of the things I always put in there … It’s not in there right now, but it may be after we hang up, “Thinking out loud about a post-service design world.”

Ron Bronson:
And so I’m really obsessed right now with thinking about, as it relates to the work, anyway, is thinking about what does a world look like that doesn’t involve always just expecting folks to get on the treadmill? How do we build experiences that then involve people getting off? How do we build humane experiences that allow people to say, “Well, you used the thing, but you’re not using it anymore. Thanks for using it,” instead of guilt tripping them because they were going to unsubscribe from your stupid newsletter. I wonder about that. And I think COVID has helped a little bit with that, but I still think we’re still very embedded in the CRM, always be closing mentality of every … It’s permeated everything that we do.

Ron Bronson:
So I’m really obsessed with how do we … especially in terms of human-centered design, what does the next thing look like? How do we ideate paste this world that is very dominated by selling and buying things? Because I don’t like it. I just don’t. So I’m very obsessed with trying to figure that out, not because I want to invent something. Maybe I want to absolve my own guilt for being involved in this, tangentially, but that’s what I’m obsessed with, other than Finnish baseball, which I’m very obsessed with, is this topic.

Maurice Cherry:
Please go more into Finnish baseball.

Ron Bronson:
Long story short … This is your 90-second version of the story. [crosstalk 00:34:53] play a version of baseball. It’s the version they play now, since the 1920s. It’s a really cool design story, Finnish guy. He’s a Finnish Olympian, actually, in track, though. They played a bat and ball game in Europe that, basically, it was one base, whatever. He came to America twice and saw some baseball games. It was like, “I like this, but I can make it better.” So he went home and over 20 years, partially because of the way Finland became a country 100 years ago and so he was able to do this at the time when the country was becoming a country. So they sort of build this national pride over their own sport.

Ron Bronson:
And so he was able to iterate this sport called pesapällo, which is basically a Finnish version of baseball. There are nine players, there are four bases, there’s a bat, there’s a ball, there’s a field. Everything else is different. The rules are a little bit … It gets weirder. I found it online years ago … I invented a sport years ago and so I found it in the midst of doing that, but it wasn’t until about 2016 or so that I, through the internet, through magical Twitter, sort of went mini viral in Finland. It was an article about me in a newspaper. I ended up at the Finnish Embassy in New York. I’ve been to Finland since then. I’ve been on TV in Finland. It’s a whole thing.

Ron Bronson:
So anyway, I just enjoyed the game. I think it’s a really cool design story. It’s mostly a rural sport. You get more nanoseconds. It’s mostly a rural sport. There are some city teams, but it’s evolved into being a pretty rural sport. There are kids that play it from when they’re little. There are adults that play it. I just love the community and the culture around it. It’s a very specifically Finnish thing and I just think it’s a fun story to me. I think it’s been really fun to get immersed in it and you can … Now, I can watch all the games online. Back in the day, when I used to get into this, you couldn’t do that. It was three-day-old videos and there were no commentary and you didn’t know what was going on.

Ron Bronson:
Now, I just think I [inaudible 00:36:42] podcast. So it’s been a really fun way to get immersed in another culture through a thing that we all … many of us appreciate sports. Right? So, yeah, that’s the story.

Maurice Cherry:
Interesting. I’m looking it up now and I like that Wikipedia calls it a fast moving bat and ball sports.

Ron Bronson:
Yeah. It’s way faster than baseball. It’s definitely not boring. It’s not boring. A baseball game, you can go get a hot dog, come back and you won’t miss anything, maybe. In pesapällo, you would do that, you might miss a lot. It’s pretty great.

Maurice Cherry:
Is it played here in the States or is mostly just a European-

Ron Bronson:
No. It’s literally only played in Finland.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, okay.

Ron Bronson:
It’s literally only played in Finland. I mean, there are a few pockets of places where Finnish expats have brought it. So there’s a small community in Switzerland, there’s a small community in Germany, there’s a smaller community in Sweden. There are probably eight people in America that might play it. And as it turns out, the outreach that they were doing, it’s actually a community of people playing in Bangladesh in India, weirdly enough, and Pakistan. So there’s a [inaudible 00:37:48] trying to go … not global, but a little bit, some growth going on.

Ron Bronson:
There’s a major league for the men’s [aliment 00:37:55] sport for both, but it is entirely a Finnish exercise right now. So yeah, nothing in the States.

Maurice Cherry:
Fascinating. I’m looking it up as you’re talking about it. I’m seeing all these articles and things about … I’m going to have to watch some pesapällo on YouTube. I’m interested now.

Ron Bronson:
Yeah, there’s some good stuff on YouTube and Twitter. You go to Superfaces, you can look it up. You follow me, unfortunately. You could see my [inaudible 00:38:23]. You can unfollow me after this, but it was a good run we had. It was a good run we had, but you can see all my annoying tweets about it in half Finnish, half [inaudible 00:38:32]. [inaudible 00:38:32] at Finnish. I’ve gotten better, but it’s still pretty bad. But yeah, it’s some really fun stuff, just to highlight. They’ve gotten way better at social media in the past 10 years. So you can actually follow the game fairly well online. It’s pretty neat.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. What advice has stuck with you the longest, throughout your career?

Ron Bronson:
I don’t know that it’s specifically advice. I think it’s more modeling. Having had so many good bosses over the years, good managers, people who … or even people that weren’t managers, who just looked out for you. Having that model so much in my life has made me [inaudible 00:39:07] level of empathy and care and consideration that I never would’ve. I think it’s funny how you actually talked about 2014. The lesson is is that that experience taught me that, if that had been first job and that had been my first situation with a manager, my entire career would be different, and not for the better. And so it’s wild how one person or one situation can completely change the trajectory of your situation. So you need to choose carefully the places you decide to start your carer, move your career or whatever because people, unfortunately, have an outsized impact on where you go and how you move forward and how you get to brand yourself and so forth.

Ron Bronson:
But it made me very appreciative for the people before that in ways that I wouldn’t have that. It made me so appreciate for people that looked out for me, who empowered me, who propelled me, who gave me the room to fail, who gave me chances, helped me grow and put me in positions to be successful. And so I just try to pay that forward all the time, anyway I can, because I’m just so grateful for that.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, when I look at your past interview and then, of course, when talking with you now and just seeing all the things that you have accomplished in life, aside from career-wise, you also just have very interesting personal pursuits. You’ve sort of glossed over inventing a sport, but you’ve invented a sport, you’re into pesapällo, you’re doing all these … You had a T-line for awhile. I remember the T-line.

Ron Bronson:
Dude, yeah. You go way back.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What haven’t you done yet that you want to do?

Ron Bronson:
I do stand up, too. That was cool. I got that out of the way. Never doing that again. It was fine. It’s just you can’t … I want to win a state title next year. That would be cool, if we can do that, only because my high school coach never got to. My high school coach meant a lot to me and then we never got to do it. Through the way schools work, a lot of the players who train end up going to private schools. So we were good, but I wouldn’t have been on a high school team if we had the players that should’ve been on the team, but we were [inaudible 00:41:06] of our state title. So I’d love to win one for him. So that’d be cool.

Ron Bronson:
Besides that, I don’t know. It’s actually a good question and I don’t have a good answer for it because I’m not sure. It’s a question I’ve wondered, myself, is, “Cool. You’ve gotten pretty far. You’ve done some stuff. Wow. What a run you’ve had. What’s next?” Getting this book out would be cool, things like that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Ron Bronson:
I’m really curious to see, myself, what the next bucket of milestones and goals, myself, are. I’m not sure. A lot of my work right now is focused on trying to build a better world, I guess, which is hokey, but it’s true. And personally, I’m not even sure. Honestly, I really don’t even know.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I guess this is sort of a related question to that, but where do you see yourself in the next five years? What would you like the next chapter of your story to be?

Ron Bronson:
I want it to be intentional. I want the next chapter of my story to be intentional and I want there to be a level of care involved in it. It’d be cool if I could get out of America for awhile and go live somewhere else for a good while, maybe not come back. That’d be rad. That’d be the end of that. So [inaudible 00:42:14] embassy, call me, but something like that would be cool. I think maybe, as it not relates to that, thinking about the work, it’d be cool to see what other kinds of stuff I could do. It’d be fun to help a state scale up their own digital team and go run one of those. I love fixing [inaudible 00:42:33] problems and solving them. And I’ve got some longevity in that now. So I really enjoy that kind of work. So it’d be fun to find a bigger problem space and solve it and help [inaudible 00:42:42] work with a team of people to fix these problems and none of this stuff is done alone. So that could be fun to set those kinds of goals.

Ron Bronson:
I like being behind the scenes. I don’t need anything super, super visible. I don’t want to aspire to anything ridiculously visible, but I like solving problems that other folks don’t necessarily want to solve. But I think, much like when we talked seven years ago, I didn’t know what the future had in store. I didn’t know what my stealing was. And I think that, if I wanted people to get something from this, if you get nothing else from my interview, other than [inaudible 00:43:15] pesapällo, which is amazing, you should all love it, is don’t put a governor or a ceiling or a cat on your potential. Don’t let your own imposter syndrome or something your parents said when you were 11 or something a teacher said when you were 22, don’t let … or a boss said to you when you were 30, don’t let those things, those individual, isolated situations put a cap on where you think you can go.

Ron Bronson:
Obviously, you have to do the work. Obviously, you’ve got to show up. Obviously, you’ve got to have some luck, but if you can position yourself, the opportunities can come. The things can come. You’re patient, but you’re also doing the work. And be willing to reinvent yourself, but I think that that’s the biggest lesson from, say, when we talk to now and thinking about the future, is as long as you don’t put a cap on it prematurely, then who knows what doors can open, what ceilings can be there because I don’t know. I didn’t predict this. I didn’t see this coming. I really didn’t. I’m past where I thought I was trying to go, which is really cool, but also kind of frightening.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to wrap things up here, Ron, where can our audience find our more about you and about your work and everything online?

Ron Bronson:
Definitely always at Ronbronson.com, definitely on your Twitter machine. Your Mileage May Vary There at Ron Bronson and also Consequencedesign.org. I’m trying to throw things up on there, as well. And since Maurice encouraged me to do this, I’m probably going to take that [inaudible 00:44:40] and stick some of that stuff on there, too.

Maurice Cherry:
The strategty book is really good. If people want to check it out, I can link to it in the show notes. It’s a quick read and really I came across it at a time when I needed to think about what my next step was going to be because I had sort of wound down my studio and I was doing interviews and, I mean, the places I was interviewing at, I was like, “I don’t want to go and just be a designer. I can bring more to the table than that.” And so reading just what you wrote about strategy and everything really changed my mindset going into all this. So hopefully, people will check it out.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, Ron, as always, thank you so much for coming on the show, for really giving us an update on what you’ve been working on. It’s been so great to hear about all the work that you’re doing, helping out our government, as whole, with the work that you’re doing. I know we’re not going directly talking about stuff, but just being able to-

Ron Bronson:
[crosstalk 00:45:39] [inaudible 00:45:39].

Maurice Cherry:
Well, yeah, that’s true.

Ron Bronson:
Yeah. Y’all can look and see. You’re smart.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, but I think just, one, being able to do that work and then also how you’re encouraging and paying it forward to other people, whether it’s in civic tech, whether it’s coaching or what have you. I can definitely tell that you have that sort of spirit of paying it forward, which I think will take you very far. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Ron Bronson:
Appreciate you, too, always for all the work you’ve been doing and doing these thankless tasks. It’s a lot of work and a lot of energy and amplifying people, especially back in the day. I’ve given you your flowers while we’re on the show. I was just a guy buried somewhere and I think I tweeted at you and you were like, “Yeah, come on the show.” That is seriously the coolest thing in the world. You didn’t have to do that. You could’ve been like, “Ah, all right, buddy. That’s fine. I’ve got a long list,” and you did. So super grateful for you, not only for this, but for all the things you’ve done over the years, your different projects you’ve put on and amplifying black designers, specifically, but also people of color and just really … not just talking about the work, but doing the work and being intentional about that, and inspiring others to do that, including me.

Ron Bronson:
So just as much as you just said, “Ah, whatever I did,” it goes back to you. Your body of work speaks for itself. So super grateful for you, for now and always.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

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Brevity & Wit is a strategy and design firm committed to designing a more inclusive and equitable world.

We accomplish this through graphic design, presentations and workshops around I-D-E-A: inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility.

If you’re curious to learn how to combine a passion for I-D-E-A with design, check us out at brevityandwit.com.

Brevity & Wit — creative excellence without the grind.

According to Kim Williams, it takes real grit to be in the design field. She serves as the group manager for the UX core team at Indeed, where she leads a interdisciplinary team of designers, technologists, writers, and researchers working across the globe.

We talked a lot about design leadership — what it takes to not only build and lead a team, but also how to enable them to do their best work and make sure they have what they need to succeed. From there, Kim shared her journey as a designer, starting from her humble roots growing up in Jamaica to leading design efforts at Ogilvy & Mather, eBay, and now her time at Indeed. It’s important as a designer of color in this field that we own our narrative, and Kim’s definitely someone who is doing that! Get inspired from listening to her story today!

Revision Path is a Glitch Media Network podcast, and is produced by Deanna Testa and edited by Keisha “TK” Dutes. 


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It’s been a while since we first had Bobby C. Martin, Jr. on Revision Path, so I’m glad to have a chance to really sit down and talk with him to kick things off for our final month of interviews for 2018.

As the co-founder and founding partner of the Original Champions of Design, Bobby’s identity design system work sets him in a class all his own. Whether he’s handling rebranding for the WNBA or creating an identity system for the Girl Scouts, Bobby has helped elevate companies around the world.

We started off by talking about the business of OCD, including how it’s changed with the times, how they find clients, and what it’s like working with and building a team. From there, we took things back to Bobby’s early days in Virginia, and he shared the inspirations and memories which influenced him as a designer, and we also talked about design curriculum, as well as what it feels like for him to occupy space as such a well-known designer. Bobby wants everyone to know that you can make a living from being a designer, and putting everything you can into your work is the key to success!


Revision Path is sponsored by Facebook Design. No one designs at scale quite like Facebook does, and that scale is only matched by their commitment to giving back to the design community.
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As a creative, Delanie West contains multitudes. She has over 20 years of experience in the design industry across product development, packaging, experience design, and creative global sourcing. She’s lead creative teams, served on executive committees, and has been influential in mentoring designers and developers from all over.

Delanie is also the brains behind BeSuperCreative, a consultancy that helps people and organizations bring their creative ideas to life. We talked about how she got her start in design from an ad in The New York Times, what she looks for when hiring for creative teams, her time at Hampton University, and a lot more. Delanie’s goal is to help designers evolve their career past just delivering on a creative brief, so make sure you pay attention to her advice in this week’s episode!


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Revision Path is sponsored by Facebook Design. No one designs at scale quite like Facebook does, and that scale is only matched by their commitment to giving back to the design community.
fbdesign_logo_75
Revision Path is also sponsored by Glitch. Glitch is the friendly community where you can build the app of your dreams. Stuck on something? Get help! You got this!
glitch_75
Revision Path is also brought to you by Google Design! Google Design is committed to sharing the best design thinking from Google and beyond. Sign up for their newsletter!
Revision Path is brought to you by MailChimp. Huge thanks to them for their support of the show! Visit them today and say thanks!
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