Eric Thompson

You’re in for a great conversation this week with creative technologist Eric Thompson. Eric staked his claim in the Atlanta tech space through his entrepreneurial work through Georgia Tech, and is now helping support the next generation of makers and creators through his work at Spelman College.

We talked a lot about the Spelman Innovation Lab and how it functions as a third place, and Eric shared his journey from construction and mechanical engineering in New Jersey to studying user experience and human computer interaction in Atlanta. He also spoke about the thriving tech scene here, working with his partner on a food startup called Eat Unrestricted, and the lessons he’s learned along the way.

This conversation is packed with deep insights, and I love how Eric is pushing the boundaries of innovation of creativity!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

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

Eric Thompson:

Hi. Yes, I’m Eric Thompson. I’m the assistant director of the Spelman College Innovation Lab. And I’m the co-director of the Blackstone Launchpad at Spelman College. I’m also a strategic advisor for my partner’s business, Eat Unrestricted, where we make vegan cheddar cheese sauce. And I’m also an entrepreneur and innovator in my own right.

Maurice Cherry:

That’s a lot. That’s a mouthful.

Eric Thompson:

Yeah. A couple things there, for sure.

Maurice Cherry:

How did last semester go at Spelman?

Eric Thompson:

It went really good. It was a whirlwind. We ran a ton of programming in the Innovation Lab last semester, including one of our signature programs from last semester was our HBCU Game Jam spearheaded by J.C. Holmes. Basically, we had a hackathon where I think we had like 23 HBCU schools sent teams to the AUC and built games over a 24-hour period. They used everything from RPG Maker to Unity to put together concepts, games, functional games over that time period. And we had a competition at the end, and it was really empowering just seeing what these students could create in such a short amount of time. Everything from story and game theory into 3D and 2D assets and putting the mechanics together in the game engines. It was really impressive. So game development is one of the verticals that we’ve developed in Innovation Lab that came out of the pandemic because we needed something that students could innovate and create with that wasn’t an in person maker space. So that was one of the things. And then, you know, entrepreneurship has grown quite a bit at Spelman over the past few years as well. You know, I’m the advisor for the Entrepreneurs Club and our Blackstone Launchpad. We took some students to Battle of the Brains in Austin during SXSW. We had our Spel-preneur competition. We have been kicking off with the Center for Black Entrepreneurship, which is a collaboration between Morehouse and Spelman to kind of bolster all the entrepreneurship programming and ecosystem and get our students beyond just the four walls of the schools and into the community, into the broader entrepreneurship ecosystem. Just our standard kind of situation at the Innovation Lab where we have students making everything from future fashion to eco-friendly packaging for cosmetic products and students who are graphic designers and animators and everything under the sun. We’re kind of like a one stop shop. That’s…one stop shop is like the worst thing you can say as a designer, but we’re the one stop shop for creative and innovative entrepreneurial endeavors on campus, and we try to make sure that everybody feels at home in the space. So workshops relating to everything from laser-cut business cards to building your own interactive robots, to working with emerging AI tools to further your artistic filmmaking animation journeys. So we do a lot.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow, that is a lot!

Eric Thompson:

It was an exhausting semester.

Maurice Cherry:

I mean, I feel like I have like a dozen questions that I want to ask just from that. But I’m curious really about the game jam. I mean, 23 HBCUs sent teams to Spelman. Was that the first time Spelman had done a Game Jam?

Eric Thompson:

Yeah, this was the first time the program was run. So this was kind of like the brainchild of J.C. Holmes, Dr. Volcy, and basically it’s an event to kind of build the profile of what HBCUs are doing in these spaces. I think so often when people talk about gaming and HBCUs, it defaults to eSports. And don’t get me wrong, especially in a place like Georgia where the entertainment industry is such a big part of the local economy, eSsports is a huge opportunity space for students, right? But we also want to make sure that our students are on the creative side of the funnel here, actually developing the games, developing the assets, writing the stories. And that’s something that we’ve been focused on in the Innovation Lab is kind of building students up as creators, upskilling them, writing code, learning how to do 3D modeling, learning…. We even have a game theory class, you know? We have a professor who’s a lifelong D&D DM and teaching game theory to students so that they understand what really are the core components of a good game — of a good interactive story. This is what the game jam was kind of raising the profile for. And we have several classes also associated with this vertical. So we have a game design class. We have a class called interactive storytelling. We have creative coding. Students use p5.JS to create interactive games and stories and experiences of all sorts. And then, like I said, the game theory class. We have a mixed reality club, which kind of works with anything from Unity to RPG Maker throughout the semester. And we have research students who work on projects that involve virtual reality training, mixed reality, even projects, you know, some of these students work on collaborative projects with other departments like literature and the creative writing department, and even experiences to tell the history of Spelman and so on, right? So we have projects with Georgia Tech. It ranges, but all things in this space, Unity being a very central software to a lot of what we do in these. So that’s a big push right now in the Innovation Lab. And it fits in because, like I said, Georgia is very big into these creative industries, whether it be video games…but even, I mean, on the film side, the skills are very transferable from what we’re already doing, right? So that’s something that personally over this summer, I’m kind of putting together a framework for what that might look like of getting some of these same students who are doing this work in Unity, who are learning how to create these stories, who are developing these assets, how to get them more involved in the film industry locally as well. So that’s something we’re working on as well.

Maurice Cherry:

I have to say this as a Morehouse alum, it does not surprise me that Spelman is like light years ahead. I don’t know if I could even say light years ahead of Morehouse, because I don’t really know what they’re doing at Morehouse, but I just know…I remember when I was a student in, yikes, 1999, Spelman was it. Spelman had the Sun Microsystems computers. I think we had some also as well. But we took all our programming classes at Spelman. I came in the summer as part of the Project S,P.A.C.E. program, which I don’t even know if Morehouse still has that. But I think Spelman had it, too. It might have been called something different, but it’s when if you’re a STEM major, you can intern at two NASA facilities for two summers. And then afterwards, I think the goal is like, oh, you could go and work for NASA. Unfortunately for us, this happened right before 9/11, so that did not happen for me. But we took all our programming classes at Spelman, and Spelman had, like, the decked out computer lab, and I was just like, “why don’t we have this at Morehouse?” It was like, going to Spelman, and it was the future, and then we would come back to Morehouse, and it’s like the projects in Good Times, Like, what is happening?

Eric Thompson:

I don’t know. I can’t speak to it exactly. A lot of students do come into the Innovation Lab, and especially Morehouse students, the way I have the Innovation Lab structured, it’s supposed to be like chairs, like the bar. Everybody knows it’s a third place. That’s how I organize it.

Maurice Cherry:

Right, okay.

Eric Thompson:

I want it to be a place where students feel welcome and like, they want to be rather than they’re just there for a class. Right. But Morehouse students always come in. They’re like, “yo, Spelman’s always got the stuff.”

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Eric Thompson:

“How do y’all have this space and we don’t?” But I have some really great colleagues over at Morehouse, obviously, Tiffany Bussey over at MIEC, the Morehouse Innovation Entrepreneurship Center, but also Brian [Lawrence, Ph.D.], who was running the Morehouse MakerSpace, they have put in a tremendous amount of effort to rebuilding their makerspace on campus. So I think that that should be ramping up this coming semester. I think they just opened at the end of last semester.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Eric Thompson:

And they’ve come and talked with us, folks from their makerspace, who even some of their students are our regulars. Right? And they’re taking a lot of notes and applying some of those same things to how they’re building out their space, because traditionally, their makerspace was really focused on STEM engineering students. And, you know, as I just mentioned, the Spelman Innovation Lab functions like a third space where students of all disciplines can come in and feel like they can just hang out and have discussions at our big table, where we host our informal Innovation Lab podcast that’s never recorded but always involves good conversations. So they’re building out the capabilities over there. And I think that’s important because we want to kind of decentralize out some of the things that we do out of the space and let some of the best practices that have worked for us go other places, even if they have to be adapted to different populations.

Maurice Cherry:

See, I didn’t even know Morehouse had a makerspace. So you put me onto something there.

Eric Thompson:

Yes. The Morehouse Maker Exploration Lab. I want to say that’s what it’s called. But yeah, it’s coming on. It’s coming along. They’ve had it, but they’re really trying to revamp it and rejuvenate it now. So I think that’s good. I think it’s important.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay, so you mentioned the Innovation Lab being this third place, and I absolutely love that concept, especially now as we’re sort of emerging out of this pandemic, and I think we’ve seen a general erosion of third spaces. Why did Spelman decide to create this kind of lab?

Eric Thompson:

The initial motivation, and to be frank, I wasn’t there at the very beginning when it first came online, but it’s taken many iterations because it’s moved. Like, this is the fourth location. It’s going to be moving again soon to our new building. Okay, but the initial motivation was that interdisciplinary work is important. It was even eight years ago, it was kind of apparent that the world where a student kind of gets one career and stays in that career their whole life and retires, that is not the reality for everybody anymore. Students, especially at a liberal arts college, are already encouraged to have a broad exposure to a variety of different areas. Dr. Volcy and his colleagues in the art department and some of the STEM departments, I guess they felt like it was necessary to create the space where maker could come together and work on interdisciplinary projects no matter what their background is. I feel like it should be a natural occurrence at a liberal arts school right, where broad collaboration is already encouraged. Well, why not apply that to making and technology and innovation? So I think that was a lot of the initial, you know, obviously personalities involved are a big part of the initial kind of mandate.

So Jerry, he’s obviously a creator, a maker, he’s a Georgia Tech PhD and worked at Bell Labs. And so this was his natural playground, being able to take some of the stuff, know, starts and stops in the classroom, but take it out of the classroom and make it a place that students can do it in a co, curricular fashion. Yeah, I think that was a lot of the initial then, you know, when President Mary Schmidt Campbell became president of the college, that just kind of got boosted, like turbocharged, because she’s coming from running the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and working with the ITP program over at NYU. So she’s seeing that, okay, we have kind of this nascent innovation collective starting. Let’s just put more effort into growing that, because in her mind, that’s also the future. Art, technology, STEAM. It just makes sense. It’s where things are going. So that was also a big help. And so she just retired last year, so she was a great advocate for our space as we tried to grow it over the years.

Maurice Cherry:

I mean, I think it’s really great to see this type of expansion on curriculum, and even this expansion on just, like, interdisciplinary space for students at HBCUs. And I mean, I’m pulling from my own personal experience here. I mean, when I came in in ’99, I was a dual degree major. I was computer science/computer engineering. And the only reason — well, it was two reasons. The first reason was because I wanted to be like Dwayne Wayne from A Different World. That was the first reason. But the second reason was because I had already started learning — or teaching myself, I should say teaching myself — HTML in high school. So by the time I got to college, I already knew how to make a web page. In 1999, I remember making the first Project S.P.A.C.E. website for the scholarship program. And in my mind, because I didn’t know, I mean, I was 18, I’m like, “oh yeah, you do web design on a computer, so why not study computer science?” Thinking that it was just like a direct path to take. And I remember my advisor at the time, Dr. Jones, who’s passed on now, but I remember him saying, “if this is what you want to do, you should probably change your major because the Internet is a fad. This isn’t going to be around. If this is what you want to do, you should probably not look at computer science because that’s not what we do here.” But at the time, it was like programming and Assembly. It was doing a lot of, I guess you could call it hardcore computer science work, but it was doing work on SGI boxes and Java and all that sort of stuff.

Eric Thompson:

And I’m guessing this is like right after [the] dotcom crash, right?

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, this is like the Fall of ’99. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the Fall as in the autumn, not “the fall,” you know what I mean? But it’s in 1999 and I did I change my major that next semester in 2000 to Math because I was like, I do really like web design, but if I’m not going to be able to pursue it in any sort of fashion, then why am I sitting in this class trying to learn C++? This is not going to get me any closer to where I want to go. Not that Math did either, but I liked Math better and I had more credits and I was like, I did the math. I literally did the math and was like, “oh, I could graduate like a semester early if I just switch over to Math.” So I did and I did, but I wish that that kind of stuff was around then. Although that was really just, I think, a consequence of the fact that the Internet and technology was still in such a nascent space that you couldn’t have this type of environment to learn unless you went to a more specialized school.

Eric Thompson:

And that may be also a big part of it. Right? Just kind of a realization that especially right now, I mean, it’s very apparent, but where students are going is changing so much. And maybe those were lessons learned, seeing that maybe that was something that the folks at Morehouse say, like, “yo, this was a missed opportunity. We could have been ahead of the game on this. We had the infrastructure to be ahead of the game on this.” There was like a secret VR research lab that was heavy in existence in the 90s at [Clark-Atlanta University]. They were doing work in VR, basically the equivalent of VR training and metaverse in the late 90s…mid and late 90s. And their lab spaces are still there, but it just hasn’t been touched. But I was just saying the schools might have looked at this and been like, “hey, these are missed opportunities, and it might be helpful to have an engine on campus that is not just a space for innovation for the students, but also kind of a driver of thinking differently about where our students are going for faculty and staff on campus.”

So for instance, like the Innovation Lab, it’s not purely a student-facing space. It is open to staff and faculty and we actively encourage staff and faculty to come and participate. And one of the advantages is that we have staff and faculty that are experts in their own fields, but maybe not experts in everybody else’s field, and there’s an idea exchange among them. And then we also the people who are staffing the Innovation Lab can suggest trends and things that are informative to staff and faculty on campus. What ends up happening is the third place effect doubles, not just for students, but for faculty. And the students sometimes jog ideas to the faculty, and the faculty jog ideas to the students outside of the typical classroom context where it’s a respectful but still more kind of peer-facing relationship where ideas are exchanged at the big table. And overall, the hope is that this brings people up to what’s going on in the world. And this has been more very apparent now with the AI stuff or even the mixed reality stuff, because we have, for instance, that same physics professor that teaches our game theory class is using Unity to teach. He’s putting together modules in Unity that will demonstrate and teach physics to students. He had never worked in Unity before. Not only is now he exposed to this game creation engine, but he’ll probably expose his students to it as they’re learning physics. So it becomes an engine of staying up to date with the latest actions on campus. So I think that’s also kind of, it’s kind of an indirect but very important effect of why these kind of spaces are necessary on campuses. Because obviously campuses are always centers of innovation, but internally even a campus can become stagnant in its approach to education and academia. And I think more than ever we need to be considerate of how technology and how cultural shifts are changing the way we teach or the way we have to teach.

Maurice Cherry:

I went to Morehouse in the late 90s and early 2000s, so I know about a stagnant…I know about what it is to be on kind of a stagnant college campus with respect to that sort of stuff. So I think it’s fascinating that this place is also somewhere that staff and faculty can be a part of. So now it’s almost like this forum where there’s this exchange of ideas, and it’s facilitated by the technology and stuff that’s in there. That’s fascinating.

Eric Thompson:

Yes, that’s how I like it. That’s what I’ve always wanted, that space. I’ve always enjoyed those spaces the most. Those are spaces that inspire me. In undergrad, we kind of had it a little bit when I was at Rowan. We had a space where it was a machine shop and a projects lab for the mechanical engineers. But it just felt like a community. We had a small class. It was only like, thirty of us. We in there making our stuff, figuring out our problems. “Hey, I don’t know why this isn’t working.” “Here, let me show you.” “Maybe re-cut this lever arm, right?” Playing music, sharing memes. It was informal, but it was good. I’ve always enjoyed those places. I feel like those are places that inspire me the most, and those are places where I’ll spend the most time.

Maurice Cherry:

There’s more stuff that I really want to touch on about the lab. But since you mentioned Rowan, let’s kind of shift the conversation and learn more about you. So tell me about where you grew up.

Eric Thompson:

Yeah, so I grew up in New Jersey, central Jersey, down the street from Rutgers University, actually. Piscataway. I grew up near a college town, but it was a great place to grow up. I always describe, like when people ask you, like, describe your neighborhood growing up. I always say, like, imagine Alabama. But like, if you put Alabama in New Jersey. But Alabama in New Jersey in the middle of like Ahmedabad, India.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Eric Thompson:

My neighborhood was like…it was a suburbanizing, formerly rural Black neighborhood surrounded by a lot of Indian enclaves.

Maurice Cherry:

Interesting.

Eric Thompson:

It was a very diverse ethnically and socioeconomic town, which I thought was really cool growing up. We all went to the same high school, so it created, like, I feel like there was a lot of equity there. Yeah, and it’s right next to Rutgers University, which is also, like, a super diverse university. So, kind of, it puts your worldview, even in high school, you know, but even like growing up, I was always interested in inventing since I was young. I wanted to be an inventor. So I guess this is like, my keystone. It’s just like, creating. [I] wanted to create and make things. And so even in high school, I took electricity and electronics class, which was a vocational technology class because it was teaching students how to become, like, electricians. But the professor, the teacher, who was one of my favorite teachers, he really taught a lot of electrical theory as well, like, stuff that most electrical engineers wouldn’t learn until freshman, sophomore year of college. And so it was interesting because the class was like a weird mix of students who were really hands on vo-tech students and then honors AP Physics type students in the same class. So I took that class for three years, and then I did orchestra my fourth year. And then that was…did I sum up K-12 real quick there?

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like you definitely had an early interest in tech. I mean, I feel like you would have to end up going to study mechanical engineering, which is what you did at Rowan.

Eric Thompson:

Yes, and it’s funny. I was talking with Jerry, my colleague the other day. We were talking about like, yeah, I did mechanical enginering. We both did mechanical engineering. He was like, “yeah, mechanical engineering is like the liberal arts of engineering field.” I was like, “exactly. That’s why I did it.”

Maurice Cherry:

I was like, how so? How is it the liberal arts of engineering?

Eric Thompson:

Yeah, like, mechanical engineering is the broadest of the engineering fields…of the four major engineering fields, right? There’s electrical, computer, right? Chemical, mechanical, and civil engineering. Mechanical engineers have to learn a little bit of all those other engineering fields, whereas you won’t normally expect electrical or chemical engineers to learn mechanical design. Mechanical engineers have to learn electrical design. So we really touch on a lot of different subjects. More so. I mean, in my opinion, more so than, like, a chemical engineer, right? So mechanical engineers really can diversify into any engineering field kind of more easily than I think any other things or doing other things, like managerial positions and so on. So basically, I was trying to decide between whether I would do electrical or mechanical engineering because obviously I had this big pre kind of exposure to electrical engineering work via those classes, and I loved robotics and so on, but I was like, I can do robotics with mechanical engineering. And being, as I’ve always been, a person with a ton of different ideas and interests, I always pick the fields that give me the broadest array of options as far as stuff to do. I picked mechanical engineering. I was like, yeah, this will give me the most options of things I could go into. I like keeping as many options on the table for me as possible. I’ve always leaned into that jack-of-all-trades title, even. Like, I remember doing that on my college essays back in the day, and my mom was like, you know that’s not a good thing. Right? When people say jack-of-all-trades, they usually mean, like, master of none.

Maurice Cherry:

That’s the other half of that. Yeah.

Eric Thompson:

And after that point, I was like, I always thought this was, like, a good thing. I thought people liked jack-of-all-trades. And she was like, no, that’s not really what it means. It’s usually meant disparagingly, but I think that’s changing now. Obviously. I think people are going the opposite direction of that right now. So I think maybe I was ahead of the game on that.

Maurice Cherry:

It’s funny you mentioned the jack-of-all-trades thing because I’ve gotten that as well. Actually, one of the first writing gigs I had online, that was my like, we all had different handles that we would have, and mine was “jack-of-all-trades” or something like that. But that phrase about jack-of-all-trades, master of none, that’s not even the full phrase. Like the full phrase is “a jack-of-all-trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”

Eric Thompson:

Ah, the secret truth comes out!

Maurice Cherry:

So being a generalist helps to have all that sort of broad body of knowledge as opposed to being specialized to maybe one particular thing.

Eric Thompson:

Yeah, exactly. And I think it goes in cycles, too. I feel like for a long time, yeah, it was valuable to be a specialist. And I remember going into college and going even up until grad school, people were still preaching specialization. It makes it easier to find jobs. It just makes it easier for you to navigate your career path. Specialization. But like I said, I think that’s going back the cycle is going back the other way right now, going deeper. I just feel like humans naturally tend to be generalists. We’re trained out of generalizing, but I think we naturally tend to be generalists, right? Because we’re multifaceted individuals who have lots of different interests to explore. I think that’s the natural state of things. We’re kind of trained to ignore those and focus, and that has its place, but I don’t think it’s always the optimal course. So anyway, but that’s why I chose mechanical engineering. This will let me continue not making decisions.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. Now, after you graduated, you stayed in Jersey for a while. You worked as an engineer. What ended up bringing you to Atlanta?

Eric Thompson:

I started working at a construction outfit as a capital projects engineer, which after I stopped working there, I realized this is basically the closest thing you get to R&D in the construction industry. You’re basically the skunk works for that construction firm. So I got to work on all their newest cranes that they were building out, like equipment projects and so on. You know, be innovative. And it was cool. I think I just felt like because while I was doing that, I was still at home playing with Arduinos and trying to build up products and so on. And so I always kind of felt like I was probably going to go back to grad school to do something like super innovative, cutting edge technology related, even though, you know, after having a six month stint on twelve hour night shifts.

Maurice Cherry:

Ooh, that’s rough.

Eric Thompson:

It was longer than six months, actually. Twelve hour night shifts. Yeah. That was also a motivating factor to do something different than what I was doing. So I still really am prideful about some of the innovative work I did as a capital products engineer. Working on some of these really famous cranes and rebuilding them. But it just wasn’t, like, my passion as far as I didn’t want to be pigeonholed into just doing that. So I decided I wanted to go to grad schools. And I applied to four or five, and I applied to mechanical engineering PhD programs, which I wasn’t really excited about them because knowing me, right? PhD is like the ultimate pigeonhole. Like, focus on one thing. And I was like, oh, no. And then there were other programs like ITP at NYU and Georgia Tech’s HCI program. The MIT Media Lab. And I tried to get into Media Lab, didn’t get in. And I was looking at similar programs like the Georgia Tech program. And I was on a forum like, somebody said, oh, this is kind of similar to Media Lab. They were like, you know, if you want to do, like, user experience, like, UX. I didn’t even know what user experience was at that point, right? Because I remember even searching for jobs at that time, I was like, I know what I want to like, I have a feeling, like, product development. Every time I would search product development, it would always be like the job descriptions on Indeed will always come back as, like, UX and wireframes. I’m like, what is this actually? Mechanical engineer? I’m like building things with wire and frames. I was like, what is this thing? I just was like, I don’t know what this is. I don’t think this is what I’m supposed to do.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Eric Thompson:

And so I got into these PhD programs. I think it was CMU and Virginia Tech. But, like, I remember looking at some of the projects coming out of the Georgia Tech program, the HCI program, particularly, like, their interactive products lab, but just projects in general. I was like, these things seem cool. I’ll do that. I’m going to do that master’s degree. And then I could always go into a PhD afterwards if I want. But I was like, these projects look cool. They were speaking to me; the work. I didn’t really know anything about HCI or UX at all, but the projects coming out of the space were like, things that I felt like, that’s the type of stuff I want to make. So I decided kind of to come down to Atlanta and Georgia Tech. It was kind of on a coin flip type of whim. I was like, let me give this a try and see how it goes. That’s kind of how I ended up down here.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay. I mean, I think you came down here at a time when in terms of just, like, the tech and the startup industry and things like, I mean shit was popping down here by the time you came. And you’re at Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech has the ATDC, which is the Atlanta…I forget what the acronym is for. Something Technical Development Center, but yes, technology development.

Eric Thompson:

Center, something like that. Yeah, like, the oldest accelerator in the country. Like I said, I had only ever been to, like, through the airport before. I was very much like a Northeastern kid playing in the area between New York, Philly and DC. That was kind of my comfort zone. So I didn’t know I knew very little about Atlanta when I came down here. But my kind of personality is, like, whenever I go somewhere, I really try to be in that city. I want to know more about it and get involved quickly. So I came to the HCI program, and immediately I was like, this is very different from engineering school, right? There are people who are, like, artists. People coming from journalism and psychology and computer science. These are all my classmates now. And that was refreshing. I was like, this is cool because art and engineering was so separate in my experience. And to be in that space where having all these people together in these classes was really cool. And I was learning stuff that I hadn’t learned before. Like the first class that they teach you, that they have you learn in Georgia Tech HCI is like, user research methods, which is basically like a psychology class. And I never took any psychology in engineering school. And so it was just new information, new personalities, people, a lot of international students. So that was nice. Nice change of pace. Kind of reminded me more of the environment I grew up in at home. And so I learned a lot of things in that program, and it was really fun. I had a really great time in grad school. And at the same time, like you said, Atlanta around 2016, 2017, things were really apparently starting to pop off. You felt like there was an energy.

Maurice Cherry:

Absolutely.

Eric Thompson:

I was like, I came here, I was like, I didn’t feel this up in the Northeast. Things were really moving. And I remember one of the turning points for me being me attending, because I was at Georgia Tech and HCI program is in Tech Square. And I remember going to events at Tech Square Labs back in the day. Do you remember Tech Square labs?

Maurice Cherry:

I do, yeah.

Eric Thompson:

Being in a space where I was like, all these are Black innovators, I was like, this is something I’ve never been a part of before. This is cool. Yeah, this is cool. Because just by circumstance, it’s not that I haven’t met Black innovators before. One of my best favorite professors in undergrad was a Black innovator. But it was just like, the amount and the culture that came with it. As I mentioned before, I love those spaces that are kind of lit and innovative, right? And I was like, this is lit and innovative. I was like, this is what I want. This is it. So for me, that almost kind of sold the city on me. I was like, this is a place I need to be. It feels like a small town, but it has big city opportunities. It feels like a place where my ideas would be encouraged. I could go and try and pursue them in Real. And so, yeah, I kind of started getting involved. That was my first foray into the know, hanging out over there, going to Startup Battle.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Eric Thompson:

All the CreateX at Georgia Tech. That was kind of the start for me. So, yeah, that was what really kind of sold Atlanta to me to a point where when it came to the end of grad school and most of my peers were going to New York or the West Coast, right? I could have gone home and made a lot of money and saved some money, too, going back to Jersey. But I was like, I feel like I need to be over, you know, I feel like I need to be here for what’s going on and be a part of this. That’s why I decided to stay. And it wasn’t always the easiest path, but I just felt know, it was what I wanted to do.

Maurice Cherry:

Tech Square Labs, co-founded by Morehouse grad Dr. Paul Judge. Yep.

Eric Thompson:

Yeah, there was a lot of people that I work with regularly or more now that I let them know, you know, that event that you put on six years ago or whatever, that was a big part of me staying around in Atlanta. So it just goes to show that you never know who you’re influencing when you do these things because I feel like that encouraged me to stay and then also be a value add to the ecosystem.

Maurice Cherry:

No, the whole just like…I mean, Atlanta itself already has this really rich history of — I’m loathe to use the term “Black excellence” — but I feel like that kind of does apply with Atlanta because, I mean, one, you have this very rich history of entrepreneurship, but also like a super rich history of political activism, civic engagement, et cetera. You can see Black people at every level of social strata in Atlanta and it feels normal. It feels to a Black person, it feels right. It feels like this is a place where you could come and really make some kind of dream that you might have come true, which is probably why a lot of people move here, which is probably why now it’s getting so expensive here. But certainly back then that energy was so palpable. Well, no, but I mean, that energy was so palpable, particularly in tech and within and around Georgia Tech, Tech Square Labs, et cetera, there were so many startups popping up and things of that nature. And for me, who had been like, I’ve been doing startup work here since 2008, it was just so great to see the city feel like it was finally starting to come into its own as a place that was not Silicon Valley, was not. Because, you know, I can tell you, for a long time, people did not look at Atlanta as any kind of a tech city. I mean, there was Georgia Tech, but they didn’t look at Atlanta, the city as a whole, as like a place where we want know, start a business here or we want to open an office here. They just thought, I don’t know, we were all down here barefoot, blowing on brown jugs or something like that. They just did not look at Atlanta as a city for innovation, a city for that kind of stuff. And it has grown, I want to say, gradually. And I think a lot of that is because of the infrastructure that a lot of Black people have created here, as well as just like an influx of honestly, an influx of money from tourism has really helped a lot as well to just kind of bring people here in general and then to see what opportunities are available is another thing. I talked to so many folks who just not moved here on a whim, but they came here, and then all of a sudden they’re doing something else or they found another lane or avenue to venture into that might have been different from what they did back home. But because of the ecosystem here, they’re able to kind of branch into something new and be successful doing that.

Eric Thompson:

Right. It’s a wonderfully diverse economy, and I think that has helped it so much because it attracts a lot of talent. So people come here for work or for school like myself, because of certain hallmark industries. But then what’s changed is the culture is keeping people here more so it’s making it once people come, they see this is — “I see Eric down there. He seems like he’s thriving. He’s living, you know? I came to visit him. Oh, I didn’t know it was like this. Now I want to be down here too.” Right? So it’s a domino effect when you have something like that. But that kind of goes back to my point, is the things that made it work and made it accelerate so fast. Pre-pandemic was a lot of grassroots ecosystem development, people doing the work on the ground to create these programs. So I feel like we have to keep that in mind, that that’s a big part of what makes the place feel real and feel good. Like, tonight is one of my favorite events in the city. I haven’t been to it since before the pandemic, but have you heard of Controllerise?

Maurice Cherry:

No, what’s that?

Eric Thompson:

Controllerise is this event. There’s a couple of offshoots now, but before the pandemic, it was like this event. And one of the first events where it was like, hey, you’re into anime, you’re into video games, you’re into lo-fi hip-hop, you’re into freestyling and DJ culture, you’re into art. Come to this get together. Monday nights. And it’s grown. It’s huge now, but it was this place where I met a lot of people there did networking there. It was another third place where people come hang out, they play games, they get drinks and food. They have every video game set up on the side that you can imagine.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

Eric Thompson:

And that was kind of part of it. That was another thing. I was like, this is a place, I used to go there and network. This is the networking events that I like to go to. People freestyling, dancing. A lot of technologists would go there and hang out. So you would always inevitably run into somebody who you could collab with or give you some advice.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow. I’m looking it up now. Controller. It’s like controller, like a game controller? Controllerise, yeah.

Eric Thompson:

Wow. Yeah, it’s real cool. It’s a really cool vibe. Happens at Monday Night Garage. But it started out small. Started out as a small thing. A couple of video games, some lo-fi hip-hop, food and drinks, maybe a vendor or two. And it’s kind of grown into this force to the point where there’s a lot of offshoots of it. Now there’s like, Trap Sushi. There’s an event called a LAG because people realize this is like Black nerd heaven.

Maurice Cherry:

You said it started at Monday Night Garage?

Eric Thompson:

It started…no, it actually started years ago. It started back, maybe 2017. 2018?

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Eric Thompson:

At like smaller restaurants. They eventually settled at this place called the Deep End, which used to be across the street from Ponce City Market and they were there for a while and then that place closed and they moved to Monday Night Garage. And now the event is so big that it takes up the whole gGarage. I mean, I don’t know. I haven’t been since the pandemic. They just started again for the first time in like two and a half years.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, wow. Monday Night Garage is literally right around the corner from me.

Eric Thompson:

Oh, nice.

Maurice Cherry:

I had no idea. Wow. I’m going to have to check it out. Wow.

Eric Thompson:

Yeah, it’s super cool, man. It’s a really cool spot. Really cool vibe. The people who founded it, like I said, it started off very grassroots and now it’s just kind of this very unique cultural force that’s like it’s very unique to Atlanta. I would bring people there from out of town and they were like, yeah, I’ve never even seen anything like this outside of maybe in like…Spider-verse.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh man, don’t tell me that. Now I definitely got to check it out. Wow, that is amazing. So to kind of, I guess move things a little bit forward because you’re talking about startups. In 2018, you started a startup called Walimu, which is around eSports tech, and now you’re also part of another startup now called Eat Unrestricted. First tell me about Walimu and tell me about how you may be able to use lessons from that with Eat Unrestricted.

Eric Thompson:

So Walimu was kind of like my, you know, I was in grad school and I was creating in ways that I had never really thought to before, right? A lot of my creative work was based on inventions like physical products, right? But being in an HCI program, I was learning really more about human-centered principles and I was also away from home and my cooking skills have always been okay. I oftentimes would call my mom while I was cooking on the phone and I would have her on WhatsApp video or whatever and be like, “yo, can you walk me through?” And basically she would take the video and let me ask “hey, let me see what you’re doing. I’ll add this much, stop, okay, put another piece in this and that,” and kind of walk me through on video through these processes, and same thing if I was doing something and I needed my pop’s help and he could come on video and help me out. “Oh, water heater, let me take a look at this.” And I was know, not everybody has these resources, this ability for live help. People will go on YouTube or forums or Reddit or whatever, right? But not everybody can have somebody who they can talk to in live to coach them through whatever they’re trying to figure out in the moment and ask their specific questions and get encouragement, right?

So that was kind of like what the idea was born from. So I was like, this would be a live help marketplace. A marketplace where people can kind of get that mom or dad kind of type of assistance, whether they’re trying to change a tire or they’re braiding their hair for the first time. And so I was really into that idea. And I applied to CreateX and I applied to Ascend 2020, which was being run by Morehouse Innovation Entrepreneurship Center. And so this was my first real foray into entrepreneurship and it wasn’t physical product based. I was like, this is a really compelling problem, I feel like. So I started doing that startup. But something they told me during the process of building this startup is that I needed to focus my marketplace on one particular topic area.

And so back to Controllerise. I was going to that pretty frequently and so I kind of was just like, that’s why I was doing customer discovery a lot too. I was just kind of out in the field, lots of strangers, I was just asking people if I could interview them. It kind of ended up focusing on eSports coaching. I was like, “oh, you know what, let me focus on eSports coaching for this marketplace.” eSports was starting to kind of get some momentum, so people were really into it. It was a trendy topic. And so I started doing eSports coaching workshops with some of these eSports houses around town. Like there’s a Black-owned one 404 eSports up in Doraville. Another Black-owned one was Versus Realm or eSports Arena. So I started doing eSports coaching sessions for kids. And it was like a marketplace. And I was building a new website for people to book coaches on the platform. Basically the idea was that, hey, you can train with actual coaches and get better at the games that will allow you to become competitive in leagues or win competitions or even get scholarships, which was like a new thing, like schools are giving away eSports scholarships, right? eSports was a sanctioned sport in high school. This is all in 2018, 2019, so it was still very new that all this was out there.

So I was doing these things around town, but like around the…it was growing, but growing slowly. I think it was kind of maybe ahead of its time in a lot of ways. And once kind of the pandemic hit and I kind of got into developer snags with developing the new website, momentum for it kind of shifted. And I think a large part of that was that not momentum, just momentum on the side of things, taking their time to finish, like the website. When I made the switch from this platform that was built around helping people with whatever their needs were to eSports, I think a little bit of the passion went out of it. Not because I’m not a gamer. I do like playing video games. I’m a big fan of Civilization, okay? I love Super Smash Brothers, but it’s not my passion per se. I met people, even people who I would call my friends now in that world, in that ecosystem, and you can tell when they talk about video games, their whole soul lights up. And that wasn’t it for me. And I felt like I just wasn’t passionate about the topic area. Coaching kids in eSports wasn’t what really lit me up versus the original idea where I was kind of just helping people in a really human to human connection way, figuring out things that they may not have been taught by parents or people who are like mentors. So momentum for that kind of slowed down and then the pandemic hit and it really slowed down.

And the biggest lesson I learned, I guess, about entrepreneurship is that you really got to trust your gut. At the end of the day, a lot of it is risk taking, right? You can do customer discovery and you can minimize risk as much as you want, but I think at the end of the day, you can’t predict the future. And if you feel strongly about something in your gut, you kind of have to go with it and live with the results of that decision. That’s kind of like a deeper lesson that listen to your mentors, listen to advice, take it in, but then listen to yourself and make a decision. At the end of the day. It’s hard to teach that, but people are always there’s always going to be a million people who can give you advice. I remember somebody even told me that that concept that I was pitching was obviated. I was like, really? Because I don’t see anybody else doing it. They were really like, no, you shouldn’t do this. And I was like, especially later in the pandemic. I feel like if I stuck with that original idea, this would have been perfect timing for it.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Eric Thompson:

So that was kind of like a hard lesson. The other lessons I think you learn from entrepreneur. There’s a lot of intangibles. Doing entrepreneurship is like one of those things where three months in, six months in, you’re like you don’t even realize it, but you could teach a class.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, yeah.

Eric Thompson:

You’re, like, giving people advice, and you’re like, “whoa, where did that come from?” I wouldn’t have known to give this it’s like a business degree, but on the slick, you’re learning all these things that you wouldn’t have thought you were going to learn, and then all of a sudden, you can teach people how to be entrepreneurs all of a sudden, just based on the mistakes or the things that you picked up in the process. So it’s hard to say a lot of specifics, but the deepest thing is that gut decision making aspect. Yeah, but there’s so many things that I learned, I couldn’t list them all. It’s just I try to be a good advisor to my partner for Eat Unrestricted, who is my significant other, and we didn’t start dating immediately, but we had met for the first time doing interviews for CreateX at Georgia Tech.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, wow.

Eric Thompson:

Yeah, we were both there waiting for our interviews. And we like introduced…like, what are you, tell me about your company. And so that’s how we met. And so she’s really passionate about food and food inclusivity. That’s something we kind of connected on. And we were both working on different projects during the pandemic and decided to help out. Help out as much as I can with the unrestricted that’s going on. Wow. Three years now.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow. And how’s it been? I mean, I looked at the Instagram, and I can see, like, you’re at farmers’ markets, and I think even you got some students at Spelman to taste test and everything. How’s it been going?

Eric Thompson:

So, yeah, it’s been going good. Basically, the food industry is harder than technology, I think, personally. Oh, I think it’s harder because it’s the ultimate tangible product. It doesn’t just have to…you make it, and that’s it. It has to taste good, and it has to commit with people emotionally. And so it comes with all the emotional struggles that a digital product consumer would go through with a digital product and all the overheads that come with an actual physical product that you make in a factory. So it’s capital intensive, so it’s really hard. But we’ve grown steadily over the three years, so that’s been a positive sign that people like the product. Everybody who tastes it really enjoys it. And so, yeah, we go to farmers’ markets. We’re in stores, independent grocers all over the country. A couple here in Atlanta, of course, where we started out. Right. But we have stores in L.A., New York, Philadelphia that carry our product. And right now, talking about doing a lot of things, we’re kind of very similar. We both overtax our schedules. Basically, my partner, she works on Eat Unrestricted, but she’s also a product manager at GTRI.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Eric Thompson:

And she’s getting her MBA.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

Eric Thompson:

We realized that we can’t keep cooking the cheese in the kitchen, not our kitchens at home, but in our shared kitchen. Making this product is very time intensive and energy intensive. So we’re like, in the process of switching to an outside manufacturer and making the product in bulk so that we can kind of just streamline our whole supply chain and provide like…you’d be able to basically by streamlining our supply chain, we can probably get larger accounts to buy our product. So that’s kind of where we’re at right now and what we’re trying to grow into. But things like the brand turned out really good. Shout out to Veritas for doing our branding. Like, it looks really professional, and so we feel like we’re moving in a really good direction right now.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice.

Eric Thompson:

So, yeah, that’s the story of Eat Unrestricted, currently.

Maurice Cherry:

Now I’m curious how you balance all of this entrepreneurial work with the work that you do at Spelman, because it sounds like the work that you’re doing with the Innovation Lab — we didn’t even really talk about the Blackstone Launchpad — but all this work that you’re doing and then you’re also doing these entrepreneurial efforts outside of, like, how do you keep all of that in some level of balance?

Eric Thompson:

Yeah. Very difficult. There’s no way around that one. Life balancing is very difficult for the both of us. We just try to do our best to practice self care and just kind of run our own race because it’s a marathon, not really a race. So that helps the most, I think, right now, trying to keep mental and physical health as best as we possibly can, work on that from time to time, rest, take rest, and then not worry about beating anybody to completion or to a certain milestone because that’s just going to ramp up the anxiety levels too much. As far as the balance with my job, I find it has always actually been super symbiotic. So me coming into my position at Spelman with entrepreneur experience, I’ve been able to really help a lot with the growth of the entrepreneur programs at Spelman. Before I came, Sonya Rush had started Spelpreneur, and it had been going on for maybe a year or two, but outside of that, there was nothing for entrepreneur really on campus. Then we started getting some classes. One of some of my students in Innovation Labs started the then, you know, I was part of the committee for kind of helping figure out how to get the center for black entrepreneurship off the ground. We have an entrepreneurship minor now, now co directing the Blackstone Launchpad, which basically helps boost some of the entrepreneur stuff on campus, including what we have in the Innovation Lab, our fellowships for each of our verticals. So we have a game development fellowship, we have a maker fellowship, and then we have an entrepreneurship fellowship. And so we basically pay students to work on their own projects.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

Eric Thompson:

Yeah, so it’s a pretty cool program. So we run that program. So basically, entrepreneurship has taken off. And one of the benefits of the personnel in the Innovation Lab, the team that I work with, is that we all bring our personal connections and networks and knowledge of the ecosystem to the students. So I think it’s been very beneficial to the students. It kind of was always destined to be this kind of symbiotic thing, because, like I mentioned before, a lot of the events that really first sold me on Atlanta, I look at some of the shirts I got from those events. Morehouse Innovation Entrepreneur Center was one of the sponsoring presenters of those events. When I started working at Spelman, right? I was transitioning; I was working as a service designer prior to that, or right after. Around that same time, I was working on Walimu, and I was in a pre-accelerator called Ascend 2020, which was meeting at the Morehouse Leadership Center. So I was, like, going there weekly for meetups with the cohort, and then all of a sudden, I’m working across the street. So it all kind of worked out symbiotically. And so I think the stuff that I do on the side as far as entrepreneurship, has always felt like it’s been kind of a natural benefit to what I do for work and vice versa. The things that I learn at work and the connections…sometimes the connections that I make through Spelman are beneficial to entrepreneurship endeavors. So it works out really well. I think it should be kind of a model to how I personally think we should encourage more faculty to be entrepreneur on the AUC campuses. I think it only benefits the college personally. That could be debated, but I think it definitely is a big benefit to the schools.

Maurice Cherry:

I feel like you have a lot of advice to give. I’m sure you probably give a lot of advice to students. It’s clear you have done a plethora of things projects, studying engineering, now doing the Innovation Lab, et cetera. What advice would you give to somebody that’s like hearing your story and they want to sort of follow in your footsteps, like, maybe they, too, are a jack-of-all-trades and being told that they’re a master of none? What would you tell them to kind of keep them motivated?

Eric Thompson:

I think, man, for motivation wise, I think one of the biggest motivating factors is just that. It seems just like that’s how the trends of our economy and our ecosystem are leading to valuing people who can be flexible into different roles. So for a person, I guess starting out is even though for me, I talked about not wanting to be pigeonholed and this and that, right? But part of being a jack-of-all-trades is being open to picking up all these different experiences. My girlfriend jokes about this to me, but when I was growing up with my dad, my dad worked and had a construction company and one of the things we did was we built out or helped renovate food manufacturing plants. So that was like one of my core memories. Growing up, it’s like working in these manufacturing plants that make some of our favorite foods and being like, this is dirty, I’m never going to work here again. I never want to be in this situation, working in the roofs of these warehouses. And now I’m helping my girlfriend make food. Manufacture food. I’ve learned so much about the food industry from the manufacturer standpoint, distribution, lead times. It’s a whole ecosystem. It’s a whole thing. Now that’s knowledge in my banks that I can share with somebody else or I can apply it to consulting or whatever, right? I have that tangible knowledge and time experience because I’ve been working with Erm restricted that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Right. I never thought I would be making cheese at 2:00 a.m. In the morning and the next day have to go in and critique a student’s painting and then help somebody with Python code.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Eric Thompson:

That’s part of what gets you these experiences, right? You’re just being open to all these different worlds. So my advice with them would be be open to these weird directions that life could take you. Make sure you document where you’ve been and build networks wherever you go, because that also allows you to be a connector and to be that person at the nexus of all these different silos that can connect people who never probably would have been connected before. I consider myself like a nexus because I play in academia, but a lot of my friends are still heavily into the design world, whether it’s service design or the local IxDA, right? So you get to play in a lot of different worlds. So it’s just really about being open to different experiences and then leveraging the connections and the knowledge that you’ve gotten from all these different experiences to create new connections and new things. I think that’s really my advice to anybody who’s interested in following, I guess, my path.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Eric Thompson:

Oh, Maurice, I’m trying to figure that out, man. I’m trying to figure that out. So I’m working on a company called IO Toys and I feel like this is my first self-driven entrepreneur endeavor since Walimu. I’m excited about it because I think it’s more at the core of what I like making, which is, like, crazy, interactive, cutting edge technology. So I’m working on this one product that I’m trying to do, haptic feedback for holograms. That’s something that I’m really excited about. And so I want to announce it and then maybe, I don’t know, try to get into some accelerators or I’m not really sure how I want to run this business. I just know that I do. I have these ideas and I want to put them out there and see where they go. I’m always going to have new ideas, but this is one of the, I think, the most core to my passion. I want to pursue and see where it goes. So right now, the way I’m kind of organizing my mental plan is I’m going to see where this IO Toys thing goes, and then after that, I might just try to get into consulting or something like that, something simple. Because I think one of the things, like, with the person with as many ideas as I have, you can always be working on something new. So you could do that forever, but it can get tiring, too.

Maurice Cherry:

Yes.

Eric Thompson:

If we’re being real about it. Right. There is a limited amount of energy that you can really put into every idea that you have. So right now, I think I’m going to put my energy into seeing where this goes, and then after that, I might try to simplify a little bit while still doing things that I like. Yeah, I’m excited about this. I did a logo for it that I think came out really good. Let me paraphrase, I have never been a good visual designer, good user researcher. I think I’m good at designing customer journeys. I think I’m good at designing concepts, strategies. Visually, though. Nah. My best user interfaces that I designed were the ones that I screenshotted other user interfaces into sketch and picked them apart and made my own. And those were mid at best. But I did a logo for IoToys that I’m pretty proud of. I did incorporate somebody else’s design work. I mean, I redid it and made it my own, but I’m going to cite them in the logo. Somebody off of Dribbble, but I incorporate some of the elements that they used into the logo. I’m really proud of it. I think it’s, like, one of my best logos that I’ve ever designed.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice.

Eric Thompson:

So I’m excited. I’m excited about this.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice.

Eric Thompson:

We’ll see where that goes. That’ll be the next step. And then obviously see how Eat Unrestricted goes.

Maurice Cherry:

Got you.

Eric Thompson:

And then seeing how the Innovation Lab. See how all the other…a lot of irons in the fire.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I was just about to say that. See how the other irons in the fire will keep going.

Eric Thompson:

Yeah. And I bought a house, so I’m like, that’s a whole monster in and of itself, man.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice! Congratulations.

Eric Thompson:

Thank you. Lots of juggling going on right now. It’s cool. I definitely had an exciting time in the city.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Eric Thompson:

I would say I’m active on LinkedIn, so I try to document the stuff I do there. It just becomes kind of a repository for me at this point of the stuff that I do. So if I ever forget, I can just go back and look through my posts. Pretty active on LinkedIn. The Spelman Innovation Lab Instagram is @SpelmanIL. So I post what we do in the lab there. I try to document a lot of the work so that people have a really good idea of the feels of the lab and the vibe and so on. My personal website is pericthompson.myportfolio.com, and you can get to that from my LinkedIn as well. Yeah, I mean, I have a personal Instagram, but it’s more casual. It’s @et.llamacasa. So [E-T]-L-L-A-M-A-C-A-S-A. So those are the channels that you can find me. That’s pretty much where I mostly post all my stuff. I think that’s it. And then @EatUnrestricted is the company, the vegan cheese company.

Maurice Cherry:

All right, I’ll make sure that we put all those links and everything in the show notes. But Eric Thompson, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I know we had first met, like, back in 2019 doing I did a podcasting workshop, a two day workshop at Spelman through the Innovation Lab once. It’s great to catch up with you again, but then I didn’t know that your story was so rich, I guess is kind of the best way to put it. Like, you’ve done so much stuff. I feel like you’re like an idea factory. Like, there’s also just a lot of things that you can do, but just the fact that you’re also in a position where you’re giving back to not just the students at Spelman, but also to just the entire Spelman community, staff, faculty, and then continuing to do stuff here in the city. These are the kind of success stories I think more people really need to hear about, especially from people like us that are like jack-of-all-trades. You’ve managed to take all of your disparate interests and form them into this career and life, and it all is working for you. And so for me, that’s super inspiring, and I hope for people that are listening that it’s inspiring as well. So thank you for coming on the show, man. I appreciate it.

Eric Thompson:

Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure being here. And yeah, keep doing what you’re doing. This podcast is great, you know, we appreciate that.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit

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

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

Ashley Fletcher

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

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

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

Interview Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Fletcher:
Thank you. Thank you.

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

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

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

Ashley Fletcher:
Yes. Okay.

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

Ashley Fletcher:
Yeah, I definitely will.

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
How’s that been for you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Fletcher:
Yeah, it definitely was.

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

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

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

Ashley Fletcher:
There might be two, right?

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, yeah, I remember that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

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

Chris Dudley

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

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

Interview Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice.

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

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Congratulations on that.

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

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

Chris Dudley:
Gotcha.

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

Chris Dudley:
Oh, nice.

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

Chris Dudley:
Gotcha. That’s awesome.

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Dudley:
Yes, sir.

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yup.

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

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

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

Chris Dudley:
Oh, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
No, no.

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

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Dudley:
Okay, yeah. Yep. Yep.

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly, yeah.

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

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

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

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

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

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, AOL.

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

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

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

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

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

Chris Dudley:
PageMaker.

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

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, QuarkXPress.

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Right.

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

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

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

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly, exactly.

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

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

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

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

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

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

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, yeah, definitely.

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly, exactly.

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly, exactly.

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

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
$20.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

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

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

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

Chris Dudley:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Dudley:
Yes, it is. It is.

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

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

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

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
What’s the point? Yeah.

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Congratulations.

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

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

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

Chris Dudley:
Wow. Wow.

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

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

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly, exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, you have to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

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

Chris Dudley:
Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Awesome.

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit

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

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

David Tann

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

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

Interview Transcript

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

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

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

David Tann:
Oh, man. I appreciate that.

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

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

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

David Tann:
Appreciate it.

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Any plans for the summer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Nice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Tann:
Directly.

Maurice Cherry:
Directly after?

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

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

David Tann:
No time. I was super focused.

Maurice Cherry:
What was the Portfolio Center like?

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Very true. Very true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Do you think that perception is changing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Tann:
Absolutely, man.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit

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

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

Victor Ware

What does it take to be an art director? For Victor Ware, it’s a combination of three things: talent, hard work, and maybe…never sleeping. Victor has over a decade of experience and has done everything from working on legacy media brands to doing full-scale brand overhauls.

Our conversation began with a look at Victor’s current gig at Wide Eye, and he talked a bit about how future tech like AI and machine learning play into the work he does. He also talked about growing up in the DMV area, cutting his teeth in the design world at AOL and Vox Media, and balancing 9-to-5 work with starting his own design studio. Victor’s drive for excellence is evident, and I think we’ll be seeing a lot more from him in the years to come!

Interview Transcript

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

Victor Ware:
All right. My name is Victor Ware. I’m an art director at Wide Eye Creative currently. And yeah, I was specializing branding. I’ve been doing that for about six years now, specialing in branding. And yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing, what I’ve been focusing on.

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

Victor Ware:
2023 has actually been really good to me. I just transferred to Wide Eye coming from another job, so this has been my first time being a full-fledged art director. And it’s been really successful. I feel like at home at this agency. Yeah, it’s been going so far really good, and we’ve created a lot of projects in the advertise… Not the advertising space, in the political space. We have some other creative agencies that we’re working for. It’s just been really, really good.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I saw that Wide Eye, I think this might have been maybe a year or two ago, was recognized by Fast Company as one of the best agencies in the country.

Victor Ware:
Yes, yes. And I can say that is not an exaggeration. The people there are super talented, they are very driven and just kind. I think wherever you work, that’s one of the biggest things you look for. At least me, I look. I look for actual people caring about people. The work is super important, the work is always going to have that importance, but I think how you treat people is far above, beyond more important than that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, aside from the change over to Wide Eye, have there been any other things that you’ve noticed this year that’s different from last year? Have there been any changes for you?

Victor Ware:
Oh yeah, actually, personally, I moved to Baltimore a couple years ago from DC and bought a house. And I’m living with my partner, and we’re really coming into our own and trying to build a life. I don’t know, it’s this leveling up my career, my personal life, and it’s been good so far.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Congratulations to you.

Victor Ware:
Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s talk more about Wide Eye. I’m curious, what is a typical day like for you there?

Victor Ware:
Yeah, I think a typical day, I’m managing others designer, so I’m checking in with them, I’m checking on projects. Usually I’m on two to three projects, branding projects, either making sure we’re getting deliverables out the door for our clients. We also have retainers for clients, and then checking in on those projects. There’s always that balance between things that are due right now, things that will be due later in the week, and then things that are due in a month. Always checking and making sure I’m on top of things.

And then, yeah, I have time to design, so that’s either building a new logo or brand guidelines. A big part of my job is maintaining brand guidelines and creating those so that when we hand those over to clients, they have the best shot of executing their brand that we put all this energy into and they put all this energy into to make sure it will be useful and work for many years to come.

And then the other thing as meetings. I feel like a lot of designers hate meetings, but we really try to make sure our meetings are purposeful, that we have an agenda, that we know why we’re having a meeting. And that usually helps a lot. Yeah, that’s my typical day.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s good that you get to have some hands on time with the work.

Victor Ware:
Yes. I love being a designer. Like I mentioned before, this is my first time being a full-fledged art director and having more of that strategic or managerial role. I don’t want to lose my skills as a designer either, so I’m building both of those skills at the same time. But yeah, I love creating. This is why I got into this originally.

Maurice Cherry:
I’ve had other art directors and other folks working at agencies on the show, and it’s hard for them to get that time to be able to do that because, yeah, you are managing projects, you’re doing a lot of checking in, like you mentioned, you’re doing meetings, but it sounds like things are structured at Wide Eye where you still get that opportunity to get hands on with the work. You mentioned that you’re managing another designer. What does the team look like that you generally work with?

Victor Ware:
We have a pretty small team. We break it down to we have interactive side, we have our branding side, and we have a couple of designers specializing in motion design as well. We’re really a small and nimble team with designers. We have engineers, project managers, and then also operations folks that help keep the business running.

I would say there’s about 30 to 40 people working total at Wide Eye right now. And yeah, it’s like a perfectly oil machine. Everyone that comes on board just fits. I think they’ve done a really good job of creating a team that is optimized to really do the best results. And then, like I mentioned before, people that are just good people, I think that makes it even more special.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, I’m curious, with Wide Eye having the reputation that it has, even some of its clients like the White House, Democratic National Convention, et cetera… And I know that Wide Eye is not specifically just about progressive politics in that sense. A couple of episodes ago, I had on Rudy Manning. He’s an agency owner. He owns Pastilla Inc. out in Pasadena. And we were talking about the future of agencies. What does it mean to be an agency in the world that we’re currently in? Particularly when you think about the rise of AI technologies and stuff like that. I’m curious, is that something that you are dealing with now in your work? Are you having those conversations?

Victor Ware:
Yeah, it’s something that has come up a lot. One of our creator directors is very interested in technology and how… I would say we all are to some extent, how that changes design, how it could benefit design, and what that means for the landscape and for our careers. We’ve started experimenting with adding either ChatGPT into writing copy or using it for brainstorming.

I think the way I look at technology is throughout design history, it’s always changed how we work. If you go back from type setting and using the printing press and letter press all the way to now everything’s digital, I think we just learn and grow with the technology and use it to our advantage. And so that’s what I’m hoping happens. I know there’s a lot of fear that this will devalue design or it will make designers obsolete, but I think the opposite. I think designers, we’re always at the forefront of technology, we’re always trying to use that to communicate better. And so I’m hoping and I’m hopeful that the rise of AI technology will just help us communicate better if we use it right. And that’s the key. Are we using it correctly? And so that’s probably the biggest question.

Maurice Cherry:
What would you say is the correct way to use it?

Victor Ware:
As a tool and not as a replacement. I think we should never forget that all of us are people. At the end of the day, we’re talking to people, we’re designing for, people are using our products, and they’re interacting with our websites or our brands or whatever. We shouldn’t forget that. We shouldn’t just think of people as commodities or as tools of themselves. No, we’re building these for other people like ourselves, we should use our tools, whether it’s AI or just regular dumb tools to help and make the world better. And yeah, it is a challenge because there are always those people who aren’t focused on doing the best, so I think it’s up to us who are interested in doing good to push that agenda even more.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s interesting, I’m writing a book right now, I’ve mentioned this on the show before, and I’ve been using ChatGPT, not to, well, to help me write the book. I use it as a good assistant. If I need to find a lead or something that I need to pursue in terms of research, it’s been really great for that, especially for specific figures I may not know or people I may not be super familiar with. There’s only so far, I think, that you can go with just strict internet research. And what ChatGPT helps me to do is at least send me partially down the right path. Now, I will admit it’s not-

Victor Ware:
It’s not perfect.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s not perfect. And in some cases, it’s not even correct. It’s-

Victor Ware:
That’s true. It’s funny, I’ve seen a lot of examples where it’s just got things totally wrong or just makes up stuff. And so I think that is also the thing that we have to be wary of. It’s like, we can’t give too much control over it, we have to make sure we’re still living in the real world.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I was doing research on one person. I’m not going to mention who it is because they’re in the book, but I was doing research on this person, and I asked ChatGPT, I’m like, “Okay, assume that you are a world renowned civil rights scholar. Tell me in two or three paragraphs who this person is, or whatever, and where I can find more information on him.” And one of the things that said was, “Oh, you can go to the University of Chicago’s daily library.” No, I think it was University of Illinois in Chicago. You can go to their library, and they have a whole section of his letters and all this stuff. I was like, “Oh, okay. I didn’t know that.”

Victor Ware:
That’s exciting.

Maurice Cherry:
Right? It’s exciting. I go to the website, I go to chat with the librarian, and I tell them, “Yeah, I’ve heard you’ve got this archive of letters and things. And how can I gain access to it?” And the librarian was like, “We don’t have that. Where did you hear that from?” I’m like, “Sorry.”

Victor Ware:
ChatGPT. Because a computer told me.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. “The computer told me that you had it,” and they don’t have it. I’m like, “Well, shit.” But it was good because at least it didn’t send me too far down a rabbit hole that wouldn’t have went anywhere. Now I’m like, okay, that was a wrong lead. Let me pursue something else. And research, I think, can be like that; sometimes you get sent on these wild goose chases. And I guess what ChatGPT at least helped me to do in this particular instance is cut it off at the pass. Oh, don’t do that.

Victor Ware:
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I think just like we had to learn how to use Google, for instance, I think we have to learn how to use AI tools. I remember the first time I used Google, I was in the 8th grade. No, I was younger than that, I was probably in the 4th grade trying to research a project. I had to go to the public library, and they had to show me how to use the Google. It is weird now because now we all use all these tools daily. It’s on our phone, it’s on our work computer, it’s on our personal computer. It’s so ubiquitous, we don’t think about it. And I think that’s basically how AI tools will evolve; it’ll become part of our life without us really knowing. And that sounds scary, but it’s also something that we’ve seen before. For example, autocorrect. Autocorrect, we use it all the time. It’s the most helpful thing. We don’t have to remember how to spell long words like expialidocious or something. And yeah, it’s those little tools that are helpful, that are ubiquitous that we don’t notice until it becomes that part of our life.

Maurice Cherry:
I remember… I don’t know, maybe this was about five or six months ago when people started rolling out the AI avatars. And one, there were people that were saying, “I can’t believe you’re paying for that. You’re paying for that?” Blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. Which I think gets into a whole other conversation around people that are using these sorts of things and then going to humans, expecting them to alter or change or make corrections on what the AI has done. That’s a whole other conversation.

But the thing is that we’ve been so used to face app and face tune and some form of digital retouching and all that stuff that AI avatars are not that much of a stretch to the imagination past that. And because these models are trained on pictures that, honestly, we are putting online, people putting immense amount of personal data online-

Victor Ware:
There’s so much data, yes.

Maurice Cherry:
… through social media. We’re feeding the machine that’s making this happen, so can we really be that mad at it? I don’t know. It’s a really tricky conundrum. I think the ethics around it are still something that folks were trying to iron out even just on a personal level. I’ve had to tell people, even for the show, “If you’re going to send me a picture, send me a picture, don’t send me an AI avatar.” I prefer it to be you because we’re talking about you, we’re not talking about your avatar or whatever. But, yeah.

Victor Ware:
Yeah, amorphous representation of you. Yeah, it does. And that’s where I say it’s that scary part because I think we’re always pushing this line. And when I say we, I mean humanity as a collective, we’re always pushing this line of technology and what the next new thing, and we’re blurring this line between real and the virtual. It’s just going to get more confusing. But I’m hoping that we figure it out as we continue to do. I feel like in this time in history, it feels like technology is, by and large, a benefit. And I’m hoping that remains for the foreseeable future.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, that’s a good point. What would you say is the best thing about the work that you do?

Victor Ware:
I would say that the best thing is really being creative, is getting to work on new and exciting problems for a variety of people. And this is not just for where I’m at today, but throughout my career I’ve gotten to work on new things and that challenge me and allow me to think about problems in a different way and be creative.

I’ve always been a creative person, even since I was a really young kid and loved doodling and drawing cartoon characters. I would tape Dragon Ball Z, and I would pause it so I can draw the characters. I don’t know, it was a way to express myself and a way to just have fun. I’m grateful to be in this field because I can still have fun, even in my daily job. Even though it’s still a job, it’s still hard, it’s still days where I’m frustrated and burnt out, but at the end of the day, I’m grateful that I can do what I love.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. There’s some saying about how even when you think about what you’re going through right now, think about who you were 10 years ago. You would’ve wished to be at the place that you’re at now. It’s helpful to put it in perspective.

Victor Ware:
Yeah, I think that’s very true. I think about myself 10 years ago. 10 years ago, I was just graduating or I was probably still in a design school. And I don’t know if I would dream I would be in this exact position. Yeah, I am lucky in that regard. And even if you’re not where you think you should be or where you want to be, I think there’s so many different possibilities of where you could be, and it could be worse, or it could be better. But I think we have to be grateful for our situations and not lose sight of what we’re striving for but also be in the moment; this is a good moment, or this is a bad moment, and be grateful for it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Let’s get more into your background. You mentioned being really creative at a young age. Tell me more about that. Were you introduced a lot to art and design growing up?

Victor Ware:
Yeah, I think my mom, she raised me and my brother, actually, she was a single parent. We grew up in DC. My mom’s from DC, my grandfather’s from DC so we go way back. And she always encouraged us to paint or draw. She would spend time with us and make paintings. She loved to draw as well. I remember she would draw characters. And I don’t know, we had a lot of fun as a family doing that. She would take us to museums, we would go to parks. We had a lot of time to explore the world in a really positive way. And she encouraged me to be creative, she encouraged me to express myself, so I’m grateful for that as well. It really helped me just pursue what I wanted to do.

I was also really interested in science as a kid. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a scientist or be an artist. I really wanted to be an artist. And I feel like I met somewhere in the middle because I feel like design is very analytical, it’s very logical, but it also is very creative. I found a happy medium in the end.

Maurice Cherry:
When did you know that this was something that you really wanted to study and get into?

Victor Ware:
Yeah, I figured that out in high school. I took art for all four years. It was an elective at my high school. And I just loved it. I started looking up colleges. I was like, “Okay, I can actually go to school for this.” I really want to be an illustrator. That was my initial goal. And I got accepted to a few schools in New York and Chicago and DC, and so I chose to stay in DC. It made sense financially. The Corcoran College of Art and Design is where I attended. But they didn’t have an illustration program, they had a design program, so I said, “Okay, I’ll try this out.” I had already been experimenting with Photoshop. Or not really Photoshop, the free version of Photoshop. I don’t know if you know about GIMP or-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, yeah, mm-hmm.

Victor Ware:
… you know about Inkscape. I didn’t have any money, I didn’t even have a laptop at the point. When I first went to school, I didn’t have a laptop for the first year. And I struggled so hard because you’re majoring in design and you don’t have a laptop. You’re going to have to spend extra hours at school working. I did that, and it was difficult. But yeah, I learned on the free software.

And I was just having fun. I was really into music. I still am. I really love album art, and so I was designing my own album art, I was designing album art for my brother, who’s also a musician. And yeah, that’s how I got into it. And I was like, “Oh, okay.” And I started learning about the fundamentals in school, and I was like, “Okay, I can do this. This is not that bad.” I know I wanted to be an illustrator, but I’m good at this design thing. And now I made a whole career out of it.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s interesting how there’s such a connection between design and music in that way, I guess, because they’re both just these pure forms of creative expression. But I remember cutting my teeth on doing fake album designs and stuff. I didn’t use GIMP and Inkscape, though. I’ve heard of them, but I used… Well, this was back in the day, I was using basically a cracked version of Photoshop that didn’t give my computer a virus or something.

But I would do that, and I would go to a bookstore, like a Barnes and Noble. And you know how they had those Photoshop tips and tricks books and all this sort of stuff, and those.

Victor Ware:
Yes, yes. No.

Maurice Cherry:
And they would have these big magazines, these $10 or $15 magazines that always came with a CD. I would copy the tutorials out of there and then go home and try to recreate stuff. That’s how I taught myself how to use Photoshop, how to use Illustrator. And I guess in the process of doing that, I’m also teaching myself about typography, negative space, color, things like that. And a lot of it was making fake album covers for groups that don’t exist, for artists that are not real people. Just taking a stock photo and being like, “What can I do with this? How can I change this around?” It’s interesting in that connection between those two.

Victor Ware:
Yeah, I was doing the same things. I watched so many tutorials online like psdtoots.com. I remember going in there and just like, “Oh, this is a new thing I’ve never tried before.” And it was just a lot of that. I was excited to learn and just having fun with it, not with any intention of, “Oh, I’m going to be this kind of designer, or I’m going go…” I just wanted to have fun. And like I said, I really love music. I was making my own music and making the album mark for it, and that was fun. And I saw that connection between them. But I’ve noticed there’s this weird percentage of designers who are also musicians. And it’s really scary because I honestly, maybe, I want to say two out of three designers in a room, and you’re like, “Oh, okay. You make music. Okay, of course you do.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I was a musician before I started getting into design. I played trombone all through middle school, through high school, in college, out of college.

Victor Ware:
[inaudible 00:26:00].

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Did you play anything? Were you a singer? Or what did you do?

Victor Ware:
I sang. I was in choir for a very long time. I taught myself the piano. I’m not a good piano player by any means, but I learned a little bit. And I could produce my own beats and things like that. And yeah, that was my outlet. After school, I would come home, rush home and spend hours making music, and then I would do some design tutorials. And that’s why it would always intertwine for me, you know?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, tell me more about the school, about Corcoran. Do you feel like they really helped prepare you for the design world while you were there?

Victor Ware:
It was the oldest design school in DC. Very, very famous gallery. They’ve been around for a long time. And I feel like the education was very traditional. There was a lot of focus on print. A lot of my teachers had been working in design field for decades. I got a really good basis on theory, on history. We had just amazing teachers, even on the technical side. But I would say it had nothing to do with what I ended up doing. Like I said, there was a lot of focus on print design, which is good though, because I think you learn all the fundamentals, the gestalt, you learn color theory, you learn how to layout type, and so I think having that basis was really helpful.

When I graduated, I straight went to doing UI and UX design, which really, I hadn’t learned a whole lot in school. I had to learn a lot on the job. But I had that foundation that really helped me just get a kickstart, so I didn’t floundering. But I had to learn a lot about UI conventions. I had to learn about HTML and CSS and how those things work, and I had to learn what UX design was. Product design wasn’t a title yet, really. It was [inaudible 00:28:08]. And so there was a lot of new stuff. I was learning how to design for iOS apps and Android and what the difference was. But yeah, it was exciting, it was an exciting time. But yeah, I would say school prepared me to learn more, if that makes sense.

Maurice Cherry:
You were in school during the time when the web was really exploding in such a massive way. We’re talking about the rise of HTML5, we’re talking about the huge move away from table-based layouts to CSS. And yeah, UI and UX weren’t really even talked about as a thing yet. And that’s not to say they didn’t exist. I don’t think the terminology was really there.

Victor Ware:
Just wasn’t formalized.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it wasn’t formalized in a way where people could learn about it. And schools, I can tell you schools were not on it at all. A lot of places were still catching up. I taught design for two years in, I think it was 2012 to 2014, something like that. And when I started, they were still teaching table-based web design. And I was like, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, this has to be CSS. We can’t be teaching these students this kind of stuff, and then they go out to try to get a job and nobody’s going to hire them because all their designs are dated. We got to teach them what is actually being used now in the industry.”

And that was such a massive change, just even from a department standpoint, because they’re like, “Well, we have to change curriculum, we have to change tests.” I was like, “Well, you’re going to have to do it now, because the industry is…” Not only is the industry changing in terms of what is being done in terms of the languages and stuff like that, but even the browser itself is shifting from being something that used to be strictly presentational to now being a workspace; cross browsers compatibility, all these different frameworks and JavaScript libraries and all this stuff. The things that you’re able now to do in a browser you really could not do 10 or 15 years ago. It’s a massive shift.

Victor Ware:
Oh, no, no, unimaginable. Yeah. The way we work in browsers now was unthinkable. One, no browser can handle what we’re doing now, even close to… The speed of everything that’s developed since that time is lightning. Everyone talks about the shift from Web 2.0 to 3.0, but we’re talking about the shift from 1.0 to 2.0. And that was a big, big, big jump. I think the big players were just solidifying their stance in the playground, the Googles, the Facebook. That’s when they really became these big behemoths. But yeah, before that there was AOL and Netscape and Yahoo. But yeah, and no one had seen these Goliath companies, the Amazons of the world before. And yeah, it just happened really, really quickly.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Speaking of AOL, oh, you worked there-

Victor Ware:
I did.

Maurice Cherry:
… for a little over four years. This was after you graduated from Corcoran. Tell me about that. Because first of all, I didn’t… I was doing my research, I was like, I didn’t even know AOL was still around. I remember getting the CDs, the American Online CDs in the mail as a teenager.

Victor Ware:
Oh, we had those, we had those, yeah. No, in the office they were still there.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow. Okay.

Victor Ware:
One of my professors at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, he was creative director at AOL, and he was like, “There’s this internship. Apply.” Because I was a junior at the time. Yeah, that’s how I got my first job. And then after he left AOL, I ended up staying. I was just there for four years. And like I was saying, I learned a lot about UI and UX design. My first job was working on the AOL homepage. We also worked on AOL’s first news app that went in the iOS store and Android store. They hadn’t had… Which was crazy, they not had an app before.

And yeah, I learned so much in that job. As I was mentioning before, most of my education was more print focused, it was very traditional, and now I’m designing webpages, which I was like… I don’t know. I thought I was going to be working on a magazine or something. It was really fun. We had a really small and nimble team, and I just learned so much. It was fun. And the only reason I left AOL is one thing, they were notorious for laying people off, so I hanged in there as long as I could. And I did get laid off, but it was fun. Like I said, I really learned a lot.

And yeah, it was weird being at a place that I remember from my childhood and the dial-up tone and just seeing all that. And they had this huge campus in Virginia near Dallas Airport. You can see how big AOL used to be. It was weird to be in a company where it’s not at its heyday, it’s slowly becoming less relevant. But we were still working, we were working on things. We were still bringing out new products. We were still trying to compete with the other players in the game. I do enjoy the people I worked with and the time I spent there.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, it’s interesting about those old companies. We still have EarthLink in Atlanta.

Victor Ware:
Yeah. Really?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That threw me for a loop because I remember when EarthLink used to be in Midtown, it was a pretty big deal when it first came about. Now it’s a little bit further out in town. But I didn’t even know they were still a thing just in terms of it being an internet service provider. I was like, “People use EarthLink on purpose?” I did not know it was still around because a lot of those older Web 1.0 companies just either faded into obscurity or they just-

Victor Ware:
Yep. Or got gobbled up.

Maurice Cherry:
Right, exactly. It was just very few from that era that still were around. You mentioned this art director at AOL was actually a mutual colleague of ours, Ted Irvine.

Victor Ware:
Yes, Ted Irvine, yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Tell me more about working with him. What was that like?

Victor Ware:
He was my instructor at Corcoran teaching after effects. He was very good at teaching. I’m not a motion designer, so he made it easy enough for me to understand. That was good. Working for him was really fun. He wasn’t at AOL super long by the time I joined. It was good to work with him. There was also a few other people I knew from Corcoran and that worked there. And it was just a good environment. We knew each other, we knew each other’s backgrounds, so we knew where we were coming from from a point of view. And it was very collaborative. He was a good mentor. He actually ended up moving to Espy Nation, which became Vox Media. And then I ended up joining him in Vox Media not four years later. It was just good to see him again then, and it was good working overall.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It’s a small world. I think people who have been longtime, longtime listeners of Revision Path remember that we used to do some stuff with Vox Media back in 2015. I think, I want to say 2015, 2016. I was doing some consulting with their product team, and then Vox ended up being a sponsor of Revision Path for a little while so I got to go to the office and sit down with the team. Actually, I can tell this story now. I interviewed for a job there. Didn’t get it, but-

Victor Ware:
Honestly, I’ll tell you this. The first time I interviewed there, I didn’t get the job. I interviewed there twice.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, really?

Victor Ware:
Yes, yes. Yeah. I went to work on the website, and I didn’t get that job. The job I did get the second time I interviewed was working in advertising, their custom ad, what they call Rev Ex. And then after a year doing that, they moved me to the brand team, which I worked on for five years.

Maurice Cherry:
I went through six rounds of interviews for I think it was the product team coordinator position. And didn’t get it, but after I ended up consulting for a year. I think you probably were there when Ashley was there, right?

Victor Ware:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Because she was the product team coordinator.

Victor Ware:
Yeah. I was there.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Yeah. Ashley’s great, by the way. This is no slight to her.

Victor Ware:
She is, she is, she is amazing.

Maurice Cherry:
But I went through six rounds. And I was so pissed, I was so mad I did not get that interview because after they were doing the consulting, a lot of the consulting I did was around DEI stuff. They were like, “Yeah, well, how do we get more Black people to work here?” And I was like, “Gee, I don’t know. How do we get more Black people to work here? I wouldn’t know anything about that.” But-

Victor Ware:
It’s interesting that you mentioned that. Actually, one of the last projects I worked on before leaving Vox Media was around their DE and I initiatives. And what we did is revamped it, rebranded it, amplifying voices to make sure that, one, we’re focusing that message of how we are incorporating more diversity into the work, and then two, making sure that’s loud and clear too, both internally and externally. And that was a very meaningful project to me. I work with who’s the head of DE and I. I think he’s still there, Chris. Very, very inspirational person. And yeah, I think they really took it serious.

But yeah, it is very important to make sure you don’t just have one type of person in design field and in the tech field in general, and have that opening up for doors for people like me who probably traditionally, we didn’t get those opportunities/ or I didn’t even know design was an option really growing up until I started looking. And that was just by happenstance that I ended up in graphic design because, like I said, I was going to go a whole different route. But yeah, I’m hoping that projects like that continue to open the doors for people who don’t get those opportunities normally.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I think the person you’re talking about is Chris Claremont, right?

Victor Ware:
Yes. Chris Claremont, yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And for folks listening, not the X-Men Chris Claremont, though it is spelled the same. But yeah, no, I don’t think I knew Chris. Chris might have been a little bit after the time that I worked with them, but I do remember, and this was something… Again, I can talk about this now because the NDA is up, but at the time I remember going in talking with the product team, and they had nothing in terms of diversity and inclusion stuff. They didn’t even no have a survey, didn’t know how many people of color worked in the product team. I was like, “Okay, let’s start there. Let’s do that first.”

Victor Ware:
We had our own Slack channel just for the Black people that worked there. And we kept count; we knew exactly. But it was a problem, it was a problem, I have to say that. And I think it took them time to recognize that. Vox Media is one of those companies that, especially because they have Vox, it was one of those progressive companies, you knew, okay, they have these values. And I think what happens with sometimes is that they don’t see their blind spots. You know what I mean?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Victor Ware:
It’s hard because you’re like, “Okay, we’re doing all this great work, we’re progressive.” But it’s like, no, we still have work to do. Just because we’re pushing these progressive ideas and we’re moving forward doesn’t mean we don’t also have work to do. I think that’s what we all have to remember no matter where we’re working, no matter what we’re doing is that we all have work to do. We still are not where we need to be.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, absolutely. A lot of companies back then during that period, that was a very common thing. Because I think the Clarion call was really starting to go out in the tech community around that time about diversity and inclusion, but in a way that made everyone accountable. You started to see statistics about the percentage of people of color on workforces and things like this, and companies were really trying to find ways to implement different programs or things of that nature to really increase that. Yeah, that was really emblematic of that time. And speaking of which, and not to go too much more, I know we’ve talked a lot about Vox and I don’t want to skip this part, right before you left AOL and before you went over to Vox, you started your own studio called Studio Never Sleeps. What made you decide to strike out on your own like that?

Victor Ware:
I actually always wanted to be an entrepreneur. And this was a dream that I had from when I was a kid, so it was partially that. It was also partially because I needed some money. Like I said, I grew up poor. I didn’t have a lot of money growing up. Even after design school, I had bills to pay. I was in debt. I wanted to be more self-sufficient. One thing about being laid off of a job, you realize, oh, nothing’s permanent, nothing’s permanent. Nothing’s really guaranteed unless you build something for yourself. Partially, that was a reaction to that.

And then also, like I said, I really wanted to have my own vision and do things my way. It was a good run where I was doing freelance. I was doing really small projects. After a while, I started building regular clients, I started working on larger projects, on web design. A lot of the projects I was doing back then was web design. And it became a thing. After AOL, I had to find more employment. I ended up working at USA Today as a freelancer under the Studio Never Sleeps moniker, and as a contractor. That was also a very great experience of running a business and having other projects, but it was really great to have one client also that I knew I could count on that continual check. It was something that I’m grateful for that I took a chance and learned a lot about how to manage books and how to write proposals, how to put together presentation decks. It was hard. It’s not easy being a freelancer, so I applaud anyone that actually runs a creative agency or runs their own business. But yeah, it’s still a goal of mine to be able to one day have a fully fledged business and be able to hire people, be able to create opportunities for other people.

Maurice Cherry:
How was it balancing full-time work and doing these freelance works at your studio?

Victor Ware:
it was a lot of working at night. I had a full-time job working at a day, and then meeting with clients at night. I had a business center at my apartment complex, and I would have clients come by, “I need this logo for this thing.” And it was crazy, looking back at it. I think I was just hungry. I was a lot younger, and I was like, “Okay, I can do this. I can stay up. I can do 12-hour days, I can do 15-hour days.” But it did take a toll. It’s not easy keeping track of all that stuff and constantly trying to find clients and working around deadlines. But I made it work, just a lot of sleepless nights. That’s the joke in the name of the-

Maurice Cherry:
Of the name, Studio Never Sleeps?

Victor Ware:
Yeah, yeah, because I was not sleeping.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. I remember those early days when I had my studio trying to… I would tell people, “The great thing about being an entrepreneur is that you always work half days, any 12 hours you want.” And it’s true. You sometimes just get so into it. And you’re doing everything yourself until you manage to get a network or build out a team. It’s a lot to try to pull together.

Victor Ware:
Yeah, it is.

Maurice Cherry:
And now you’re at Wide Eye. Now you’re doing this great work as an art director. What advice would you give to someone that’s listening to this, they’re hearing your story and they want to follow in your example and become an art director? What would you tell them?

Victor Ware:
Yeah. I would say there’s no one path to getting to this field, to this job, or even my role specifically. I think a lot of people are trying to… When they see someone in a place they want to be, they want replicate it exactly. And I would say that there’s so many routes to this. I think the main thing is dedication to learning and to growing. And when I say learning, I don’t mean you have to go to design school, I don’t mean you have to go on online and look up tutorials. There’s so many different ways, whether it’s a bootcamp, whether you’re just drawing and teaching yourself or you’re just playing around on free design programs like I did. Some of the best designers I know didn’t go to design school. Some of the best designers I know went to graduate school, or some of the designers I know we’re doing something totally different before they decided design was their passion. There’s no one road.

And I think that can be freeing a little bit because to know that you can carve your own path is, for me at least, I think a great thing to know, that you don’t have to do this one way. You don’t have to go to design school and then go intern at this agency, and then get this child at AOL. No, you don’t have to do all that, you can start today and decide you want to be a designer. Or if you want to shift careers, you can do that and start. I think the most important thing is starting and being humble and saying, “Okay, I have to learn,” and being happy to learn.

Maurice Cherry:
Who are some of your influences for your creative work? Who inspires you?

Victor Ware:
I would say a guy I work with, Alex Medina, he is a super talented creative director. We work together at Vox Media. I love his work. A lot of people that I went to design school with or art school with are working artists now, and their work is amazing. I really love just seeing what’s coming up. There’s a young designer, Josiah, who’s been doing a lot of stuff for music industry, album art. I love seeing that type of stuff. I gather an inspiration from all the up and coming designers, people who are just hungry and willing to try something different and new. And so that gives me a lot of energy and makes me want to just do something different.

Maurice Cherry:
At this stage of where you’re at in your career, when you look back over the past 10 years from Corcoran to AOL to Vox to now, do you feel creatively satisfied?

Victor Ware:
That’s a hard question. I think yes and no. Yes, I feel satisfied that I’m able to create and I’m able to express myself and solve these creative problems, but I think part of being an artist or a designer is a little bit of that never feeling completely satisfied. You’re always like, “There’s more that I could do. There’s another level I can reach.”
I think about painters who’ve painted the same subject over and over again but never really feel they’ve captured the essence of it. That’s how I feel like. I’m satisfied in the moment of creating, but after it’s done, I’m like, “Okay, what’s the next thing?”

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

Victor Ware:
At this stage, I really want to continue growing as a design leader and helping the next generation of designers grow and find their own creative voices and become the best that they can be. And I really want to keep putting out great work. I want to make a positive difference in the world. That’s something I truly believe in. It’s one of the reasons I’m at Wide Eye is because they, all of them, everyone that works there truly believes in design for good. And I think that’s where I want to be. I want to keep doing design that will be a positive net good on the world.

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

Victor Ware:
victorware, so that’s just my name, first and last name,.co. Don’t go to.com. That’s that’s a software company that I’m still trying to get the domain for. But yeah, that will have all my portfolio and links to my socials. That’s where you find me.

Maurice Cherry:
All right, sounds good. Victor Ware, I want to thank you so, so much for coming on the show. Thank you.

Victor Ware:
Thank you, Maurice. I appreciate it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Thank you really for just sharing your journey and design. It’s always good to see people’s progression and how they’ve gotten to where they are. That’s in part why the show is called Revision Path is to show the different sorts of ways that people can get to where they are, and so that’s why we have people from all over the industry. And I think it’s really important for folks to see how your hard work has paid off over the years, even starting your own studio and doing this while juggling the 9:00 to 5:00. I can see at each level of your story how you’ve progressed to get to where you are now, so I think it’ll be really exciting to see where you are in the next five years, see if you get to that point.

Victor Ware:
I appreciate it. Yeah, it would be great to check in five years from now just and see where I’m at. But yeah, I appreciate talking with me today. This was a really great conversation.

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