Justin Shiels

How are your plans for this year going? Good? Not so good? Luckily, it’s not too late to reset, break any unhealthy patterns, and get on track so you can live a life rooted in passion and purpose. And guess what? This week’s guest, Justin Shiels, is just the person to help you make that happen.

We talked about his theme for this year — intentional growth — and Justin spoke about the big life change that inspired him to not only take a break, but to write a book to help others experience their own breakthrough. Justin also shared what it was like coming of age in New Orleans, how his stint as a creative director in the advertising agency shaped his current work, and talked about how he finds joy and maintains his creativity. Justin is a real ray of sunshine, and his energy for changing hearts and minds is what we need more of in this world!

Interview Transcript

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

Justin Shiels:
Hey there. My name is Justin Shiels and I’m a creative consultant, a speaker and an author. Honestly, what I love is solving complex problems using the lens of emotional intelligence. And so a lot of my focus is on how to use empathy and design and illustration to create cultural moments.

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

Justin Shiels:
Ooh, 2023 is a good year so far. I feel like 2022 for me was my year of the pivot. There were just a lot of changes. I got a book deal, I switched to a new job in marketing, and I feel like through that time of working on the book, finishing the book, writing and illustrating, I changed as a person. And so 2023, I stepped into this new year focused on intentional growth. That’s kind of my theme of this year. How can I be centered in my vision as a creative professional and continue to grow in a sustainable way?

Maurice Cherry:
In what way does that intentional growth look like?

Justin Shiels:
Intentional growth for me is really focusing on delivering incredible content via social media platforms. This was my year of embracing video and not being afraid to show my face on camera. That has always been a little bit of a scary part of my creative process. It’s been opening myself up to new speaking opportunities, and it’s been teaching workshops around emotional intelligence and how to reset your life as well as how to be a better creative professional.

Maurice Cherry:
And so let’s talk about this book deal that you mentioned. The book’s coming out later this year, right?

Justin Shiels:
Yes, that’s correct. In December 2023, my upcoming title, The Reset Workbook will come out with Spruce Books, which is an imprint of Penguin Random House.

Maurice Cherry:
Can you tell us a little bit about it?

Justin Shiels:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, as much as you can. I mean, we want people to buy it, of course, but tell us a bit about it.

Justin Shiels:
The Reset Workbook is a guided journal that utilizes emotional intelligence to help readers discover their inner magic. It includes some original content created by me, lots of beautiful illustrations and really meaningful questions that help you on your self-reflection journey. I like to say that the book really came from my experience of having a total life reset.

In 2016, I went through a really intense breakup, and that breakup was profound for a number of reasons, but the reason that I think it changed my life is that it opened me up to the idea of going to therapy for the first time, and therapy for me was transformational. Reading books, journaling, creating new habits around how to be a healthier person all came through this experience, this transformational life experience, and I wanted to take the things that I learned along the way in that journey and build it into something that is meaningful and useful for people.

Maurice Cherry:
So with that in mind, what do you want readers to take away from the book?

Justin Shiels:
The biggest thing that anyone should take from The Reset Workbook is that you can break free of unhelpful patterns and live with more passion and purpose. I like to think of this as a gateway for people that maybe aren’t used to journaling regularly, that want to do some internal reflection and some self-discovery and learn more about themselves. And for some people that end up purchasing the book, my hope is that this is your gateway to trying therapy. I know that in my past experience and especially with my family, the idea of going to therapy was controversial, and I’m trying to normalize the idea that mental health and mental wellness is important specifically in the Black community, in the LGBT community, and it’s a tool, a useful tool for us to grow and change and develop.

Maurice Cherry:
I feel like a lot of conversations around therapy now are, I think they’re starting to become a lot more commonplace. I hear about it in videos and podcasts, et cetera. It’s starting to become, I should say, a pretty common talking point from what I hear that folks are like, “Are you in therapy? Are you going to therapy? You need to go to therapy,” that kind of thing. So it sounds like your book is going to help really facilitate that. That’s good.

Justin Shiels:
Oh, 100%. I feel like millennials we’re much more open to doing that deep reflection and understanding how we can grow and change. I still feel like there’s the opportunity for more people to explore therapy, and I am very thankful to be an advocate in this space, encouraging people to step outside their comfort zones and open themselves up to some new opportunities.

Maurice Cherry:
Now the book comes out in December. Do you have some things that you’re doing leading up to that?

Justin Shiels:
Yes, absolutely. Leading up to the book launch, I’m hosting a number of workshops and doing speaking engagements with the variety of organizations, and my hope is really to just spread inspirational stories, give encouragement and also to teach people how to make meaningful change in their lives.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s talk about your overall work. You said something earlier about last year kind of being this pivot, and part of that was going into marketing and how this whole process of doing that with the book changed you, and it sounds like one of the outcomes of this was creating your own company, your media company called SoCurious. And you wear a lot of hats in that. You’re a creative consultant, you’re a speaker, you’re an author as you mentioned, you’re a coach. Tell me more about that transition.

Justin Shiels:
Yeah. I think so much of being a creative is learning how to wear many hats. For me, my creative journey started in advertising, and so I started as a graphic designer at an ad agency and was able to work my way up to being a creative director at an ad agency. That was an incredible experience, very, very stressful, very, very intense. But what was beautiful about it was that I learned how to become an incredible storyteller as well as have the capacity to work under intense pressure. It also was useful in learning how to manage teams and how to be an advocate for my employees. I feel like working in advertising was really my first step in learning emotional intelligence. So I transitioned from my position at the ad agency and started a job as a creative director for a tech company.

What was different about this experience was that it was much more of a marketing role, and so my focus instead of just coming up with the creative concepts, I did that as well as ran the ad campaigns or utilized agency partners to run ad campaigns and other freelancers, and it’s like the culmination of all these skills come together to kind of help me become the person that I am today, someone that loves storytelling, that loves to create, and that also loves marketing. And so I’m using all of those skills now trying to spread this idea that emotional intelligence matters and that we can reflect and grow and change.

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds like from the name of the company, curiosity is a big part of the work that you do.

Justin Shiels:
Yes, 100% curiosity has followed me at every step of my journey. As a kid, I stayed in the library. I love reading books, and I as a child would just sit and read and read about anything that I could. Similarly, I feel like creativity has always been at the heart of the work that I do. So learning to draw as a young person, focusing my attention on learning skills like Photoshop and other animation programs, it’s all been a part of who I am as a person from the very start.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you mentioned with your time being a creative director in the advertising field, how that taught you certain skills with running a team, et cetera. What are some important lessons you’ve learned on this leg of your creative journey, creating this inspirational content for curious and thoughtful people?

Justin Shiels:
Yeah. I feel like we live in a time where people are overwhelmed by the amount of information that we get in the day, and specifically, we receive so much negative information in our day, primarily from the news, sometimes from our social feeds. It just comes from a variety of ways, and I wanted to focus my energy and my intention on creating positive content that encourages people. My focus with everything that I do is how can I give just a tiny little spark of joy to someone’s day and encourage them to think about the deeper questions of what it means to be a human being in this world.

Maurice Cherry:
So you’re currently in Austin, right? Austin, Texas?

Justin Shiels:
Yes, that’s correct.

Maurice Cherry:
Tell me what it’s like there for you. Are you tapped into the creative community there?

Justin Shiels:
Now, I’ll tell you one thing that I am loving about my experience in Austin is that it is a wonderful city that has encouraged me to get outside and do things. I have never been an outdoor person at any point in my life, and I moved here and now I’m going on hikes and exploring new outdoor terrain in ways that I have never done. It’s actually pretty incredible. Another really great benefit of living in Austin for me is the people here are genuinely incredible, and I’ve been able to connect with a lot of like-minded Black creatives primarily that work in tech, but that also are doing their own set of interesting projects. And so being able to cultivate a community in a new city, I’ve only been here three years, it has been great, and I feel actually pretty proud that I was able to do that, especially with the constraints around living through the kind of strange and unusual times of the past few years.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, the pandemic, I feel like really threw a wrench in a lot of people’s just general social activities, but we’re starting to get out there and do things again. I haven’t been to Austin since… God, when was the last time I was in Austin, Texas? It was for SXSW, I know that. It might have been. Yeah, that was the last time. It was 2015 was the last time. I was supposed to go in 2020. The company that I was working for at the time, we had a presence at SX [South By] and we were going to go, but then Coronavirus.

So then all of that got canceled and we were all waiting to see if it was going to happen. I already had my tickets and everything and then just all got canceled and shut down, so I need to try to make it back. Austin’s a lot of fun. It’s a lot of fun, especially during SXSW, but then there’s just so many folks and it’s just mad crowded. I think it came back last year. Right? Last year was the first time it was in person for a couple of years.

Justin Shiels:
It did come back last year. And you are 100% correct. It gets so crowded here in Austin during SXSW. It is packed, but definitely make your way down. You got to come back and enjoy some of this music and food and just some of these outdoor experiences I was telling you about.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I need to come during the non-SXSW season. It’s a nice conference. I mean, I used to go really back in its heyday when it was really something, but now I’m just like, I’m old. There’s too many people. Like y’all need to. It’s a lot, but I need to come during the off season. So you’ve been in Austin for three years, that’s not where you’re from originally I would take it.

Justin Shiels:
No, I’m actually from Memphis, Tennessee originally. Grew up 901 proud, but I left when I turned 18 to go to college in New Orleans. I went to Loyola University, a Jesuit institution, and I ended up staying in New Orleans after I graduated for 16 years. And so New Orleans is one of those places that just is still very, very near and dear to my heart. I literally just got back from a wonderful one week vacation there where I got to catch up with all of my old friends.

I’m not going to lie, I miss New Orleans. I miss New Orleans a lot, but I feel like a lot of the significant life changes occurred because I was confident enough to move away. Honestly, I feel like stepping outside of my comfort zone pushed me to become a better creative and encouraged me to push myself in some new and exciting ways.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, taking it back to Memphis for a second, I mean, you grew up there. You went to high school and everything there. Were you really a creative kid into design and illustration back then?

Justin Shiels:
I’ve always been a super creative person for sure. I learned to illustrate very, very young, and as a kid, my mom got us a computer. I think I was in the fourth or fifth grade, and that computer was incredible. I don’t know if you remember AOL days.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, yeah.

Justin Shiels:
We got that CD in the mail with AOL, and it opened my mind up because it went from, oh my gosh, my entire world is Memphis to, oh my gosh, my entire world is the world. And so way back then I started an email newsletter before email newsletters were a thing. It was called Iconoclast. That was the very first kind of side hustle project that I had as a little person sending out this monthly email about art. And so creativity, developing content and doing storytelling has been a big part of my life. In high school, my focus was really on visual art. I did a little bit of theater, but I feel like the computer was really their turning point because I loved Photoshop and building little tiny animations during that time period, too.

Maurice Cherry:
So you were a real pioneer back then, sounds like.

Justin Shiels:
I don’t know if I would’ve thought of myself as a pioneer, but I feel like the ideas around communication and media have always been central to my identity.

Maurice Cherry:
So like you said, you ended up moving from Memphis, going to New Orleans, went to Loyola, like you said, studied graphic design, but then later after that you went to the University of New Orleans and that’s where you got your master’s degree. When you look back at those times, what do you remember the most? What stands out to you?

Justin Shiels:
Yeah. What I think is beautiful about the city of New Orleans is there are no barriers of entry. Every single person in this city is one degree of separation from the mayor probably.

Maurice Cherry:
Really?

Justin Shiels:
So if you have an idea, you can start it. There is nothing that will stop you from starting it. During my time in New Orleans, a lot of my core focus was on building brands around culture. So I ran an online magazine called InvadeNOLA for six years. That was a passion project of passion projects, and it kind of came from, there was an article in a local magazine that said that all these invaders had come and they were ruining New Orleans, and I was a transplant to the city that fell in love with the city.

I moved to New Orleans before Katrina. I of course evacuated but came back after Katrina and stayed, chose that place as my new home. And so I felt really passionately about the local culture as well as our capacity as transplants to create positive change. So I focused my content on the millennials living in the city, doing creative projects that were interesting, and I was able to build it into a pretty popular and successful organization, writing regular content, sending out lots of email newsletters and publishing a few printed books and magazine issues.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow, look at that. So what’s you’re describing with InvadeNOLA… That’s what it was called? Invade New Orleans?

Justin Shiels:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, it sounds a lot like, and I don’t know if this even still exists, but do you remember, or does the phrase Not For Tourists sound familiar?

Justin Shiels:
Oh, yeah. Yes, yes, yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Not For Tourists had something like that in some major cities where they would… It was almost like a guide to that city in every city, almost like Frommer’s, which I guess is old school. I don’t know if they still make those, but they’re like these city guides, but it’s written by the people that lived there, the locals, so they can tell you what’s good, what’s bad, do this, don’t do that, that kind of thing.

Justin Shiels:
Yes. Actually, the book that I published during that time period was called The Invader’s Guide to New Orleans, which was a tourist guide for under the radar things to do in the City.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice. So you were, again, another pioneer in publishing, email, books, magazines. And just to give a sense of when this is, so people know, this was what, mid 2000s?

Justin Shiels:
Yes. This would’ve been, I think I started the publication in 2010.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Justin Shiels:
Actually, it would’ve been 2009 to 2015-ish. That should be the right timeframe.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. All right. Yeah, no, that’s thinking of what all else was going along culturally during that time. So after you graduated, you’re big in this project, Invade was one of them. Another one that you created was called Venture Pop, right?

Justin Shiels:
Yes. So actually as I decided that I wanted to step away from the event culture, I as the founder of Invade, I ended up having to do so many local events, and a part of it was that I wanted to cover it for the magazine. A part of it was because I had made all these great connections and friends and wanted to support them, but it was actually taxing, right? I was going out almost every single night, and that just was not a sustainable lifestyle, especially because even though I’m an extrovert, I need a lot of time to recuperate, and my favorite way to recuperate is through my creative practice.

And so I was like, I really want to lean into my creativity more, and it was just the perfect confluence of events. I went to a conference in Texas and ran into a woman that I knew from New Orleans at that conference, and we spent that weekend together going to all these really great speakers and seeing these really incredible workshops. I was so encouraged by that experience that I was like, we need to have this in New Orleans. And so I partnered with two women to start Venture Pop, and we successfully held three live conferences. They ended up being regional conferences that invited a lot of incredible creative talent to the city of New Orleans, and they were fun informational experiences that allowed people to grow in their creative journeys.

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds like there used to be this conference in Ohio in Cleveland called Weapons of Mass Creation Fest. It sounds like it was similar in scope to that where it’s not necessarily a design conference, it’s more like a creative conference, so it’s people of all kinds of creative stripes coming together and learning from each other and networking and fellowshipping and stuff like that.

Justin Shiels:
Yes, that is 100% true. While my experience has been in graphic design and web design and then advertising, I think instead of having it focus on any one specific discipline, a big part of our goal with Venture Pop was to create experiences that allowed people to push their creativity to its limits, to learn new skills, to create new things. In many ways, we were kind of a part of that content creator movement that we’re living in right now.

Maurice Cherry:
In what way?

Justin Shiels:
I think in many ways we were bolstering the idea that in order to become an incredible creator, you have to find and define your own creative voice and share that message with the world. I feel like that actually encouraged me on my journey of having a public facing persona that spreads positive messages on the internet.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you’ve worked for some agencies as well. You alluded earlier that you were a creative director in the advertising industry, so you’ve worked for FSC Interactive, you worked for Springbox, you worked for Fragment Media Group, and we don’t have to spend a lot of time talking about them because that was in your past, but when you look back at those experiences, when you think about them, what did they kind of teach you that you really still carry with you to this day?

Justin Shiels:
Through my time working in advertising, I had the opportunity to work with a variety of incredible clients in New Orleans. I actually was fortunate enough to do a rebranding of the City of New Orleans, the New Orleans Tourism Focus campaign where we did a full rebranding of the visual identity as well as creating commercials. I also had the opportunity to run the social channels for Visit New Orleans and here in Austin as a creative director, I worked with really awesome B2B clients, the most notable one, being Amazon Business.

As a full-time creative director, a lot of my focus was on how do you tell a compelling story through advertising and how do you communicate that information effectively? But the value of that experience more than anything is that it really exposed me to emotional intelligence. Naturally, I am kind of a chill guy. I have resting smiley face. I tend to be a little bit of a people pleaser. And so the experience of being a manager of people challenged me to learn about myself and grow. I had to recognize, understand, and manage my own emotions, but then I needed to also do that for other people, and that’s the heart of emotional intelligence. I really had to focus a lot on building my own self-awareness so that I was prepared for the relationship management that goes into managing a team of people.

Maurice Cherry:
I can imagine just in the advertising industry, having to do all of that on top of working with multiple clients and deadlines and changes, that’s a lot to pile on.

Justin Shiels:
It is so much hard work to create consistently under those circumstances, but it also is incredibly profound and awesome. I became a creative director, and this is crazy to say, because I saw the movie Boomerang. Have you seen this movie with Eddie Murphy?

Maurice Cherry:
Of course. Of course. Of course. It has been a constant… I mean, for me, it’s been a constant inspiration, but there’s so many people I’ve had on the show, and I plan to write an article about this one day about the impact of that movie in the Black creative industry. But no, go ahead. Go ahead, go on.

Justin Shiels:
Well, I mean, on rewatching, it’s incredibly problematic for a number of reasons. But eight-year-old Justin saw Boomerang, and I knew that I wanted to be a creative director before I knew what a creative director actually did for a living. I only knew if I can learn how to do the art for commercials, I can become a leader of teams. And so it put that bug in my ear that it was possible for someone like me, a Black man in America, to be able to lead advertising campaigns for big companies.

Maurice Cherry:
But of course not to be a Marcus Graham type.

Justin Shiels:
I am definitely not a Marcus Graham type at all, but it was such an influential movie because it just exposed me to the idea that that was even possible.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. How have you seen the creative industry evolve over the years?

Justin Shiels:
I feel like the biggest thing that has shifted and changed is the way that we disseminate information. I feel like early in my career, it was heavily focused on TV commercials. TV commercials, and print media were at their height when I graduated school in 2007, and then by 2008, the magazine industry was essentially shuddering because of the proliferation of internet media, new blogs, as well as the introduction of social media. So early in my career, I was like, there’s something special about social media, and I worked to be a part of that early on. So I’m signing up for all the services, making sure that I’m regularly posting content, and made that a big part of how I grew InvadeNOLA and how we worked with Venture Pop. I think the biggest change that we’ve seen over the course of the past few years is that it went from very few voices being able to control the narrative, to now it’s literally endless voices controlling the narrative.

Now, with that, I feel like there are some interesting challenges that have popped up. And so for example, when you look at how Instagram was five or six years ago versus how Instagram is now, not many people see the content that an individual produces. It’s just like, you can have, like me, nearly 10,000 followers and you’ll have a video that only a hundred people actually get to see. That is insane to me. It kind of takes away from the beauty of that platform, but I feel as though there is still this democratization of information, and in many ways it feels like everyone can have a voice and share their message to the world, even if it is being slightly dampened by these kind of changing norms on the platforms.

Maurice Cherry:
First of all, let me step back from what I was about to say. I hate how these different creative fields have been condensed into the term content creator. I hate that so much, but I say all that to say I see so many creators, and by creators I do mean podcasters, folks that make TikTok videos, et cetera, expressly saying that they’re doing what they’re doing or that the pitch that they’re doing for their audience is to appease the algorithm.

If you watch YouTube videos, it’s like, “Make sure you subscribe and hit the bell to get notifications,” or if you’re on TikTok, they’re like, “Could you please comment? Because I’ve been shadow banned.” It absolutely sucks how telecommunications has evolved to the point where we can take a message, broadcast it across the world, and yet we’re still beholden to these weird algorithmic things to get the message out to people. I mean, I understand it. I just don’t like it.

Justin Shiels:
Yeah. I think at the heart of that is we are always in a consistent battle between humanity and technology. I think as we continue to develop and grow, I’m obsessed with artificial intelligence right now, partially because I think it has the potential to upend the creative industry in many ways. But the only solace that I have is that people want to connect with people. They don’t want just information. And so it’s how can I be a real human being that shares parts of myself with the world as a way to connect with the people in my audience?

Maurice Cherry:
What I’m starting to see now, especially on some of these platforms that people have built, I wouldn’t necessarily say built content on, but certainly have built a following off of are starting to erode. Facebook ain’t what it used to be. Twitter for damn sure ain’t what it used to be. And so now people are having to go back to email, hey, there you go, go back to email or live events or other ways to try to connect with folks, because as you said earlier, there’s just so much information out there and it’s hard, I think, for people to try to really, I don’t know, grasp all of that, but I also think a lot of that information is pushed to us. There’s certainly information that we go out there and see and obtain on our own, but so much of information… I don’t even want to say gathering. A lot of stuff is just pushed to us.

I think I noticed this particularly this year. I mean, it’s not a new phenomenon, but I’ve started turning off my phone on Sundays. Saturday night before I go to bed, turn my phone off, I turn it back on Monday morning when I wake up, and that Sunday is so peaceful. I get stuff done, I cook, I catch up on a show. It is so peaceful. But it reminds me of how much information is constantly pushed to you and notifications and Twitter feeds and Instagram feeds, and so much stuff is coming at you in a way where you’re like, it’s relentless. You’re kind of bombarded with it.

Justin Shiels:
Yes. I feel like so many of us are addicted to doomscrolling, sitting on our couches and just absorbing information, absorbing information, absorbing information. I feel like so many of us actually need opportunities to create, and I tend to believe that everyone is creative. Sometimes that can be a controversial statement because many people are like, oh, I’m not creative. I work in accounting, or I work in tech and I don’t know how to be creative. But to me, creativity is using the skills that you have to come up with interesting solutions for problems. You can be creative while cooking or cleaning your home, or you can do it in the traditional forms like writing or illustrating or simply doing tiny doodles on the edges of your notebooks. That creativity is the impulse that I think we need to bolster in order to have a more beautiful world. That’s why I’m doing the work that I’m doing.

Maurice Cherry:
I imagine you’re also going to continue to explore that in the book that’s coming out.

Justin Shiels:
Absolutely. Right.

Maurice Cherry:
See how I tie that together? See how?

Justin Shiels:
I feel like so much of why I published The Reset Workbook was around how can we go through these life changes that we’ve had and come out of the other side with hope and inspiration. I think it’s really about pushing people to find new inspirations, pushing people to step outside their comfort zone, and really it’s focused on how can you design a life that you love.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you’ve mentioned though a lot of your journey as a creative and even I think growing up and always being into drawing an illustration how that’s really shaped your current path. What do you find to be the most rewarding part about what you do?

Justin Shiels:
The most rewarding part of what I do in my career and in my communications online is that I’m able to connect with real human beings by sharing parts of my story with the world. There is nothing more profound or interesting to me than to say something that feels like is totally niche and just me and have somebody connect with that on a really, really deep level and reach out to me via DM and message me saying, “Oh my God, you mentioned that you love Christmas movies on the Hallmark Channel because you can fall asleep during them and wake up and still know what was happening.” I always do that. That’s why I love them so much.

It’s like that kind of direct connection with people is just so profound and interesting to me. I would say though, the thing that is underscored throughout my career and specifically my persona online is that we are empowered to change our lives as frequently as we want. We can all have resets whenever we see fit. And I really want to underscore that idea that change is possible and it’s a good thing. It’s okay to embrace change, it’s okay to learn new things, and your life doesn’t have to be in total shambles to kind of need to reevaluate where you are in order to continue to be on a path of joy.

Maurice Cherry:
Speaking of that, how do you stay creative and inspired in your work so you can keep on that path?

Justin Shiels:
I am incredibly disciplined when it comes to my creativity. I try to either write or draw every single day no matter what. I have been doing this for the majority of my career, and so it started very early on. I would wake up before work and spend one hour of just creating for creativity’s sake. That has continued for years and years and years. Now that I’m working for myself, I don’t have to wake up as early. I can wake up at 7:00 and kind of get going, but the very first thing that I do every day is I journal. While I’m drinking my coffee, I read a little bit, and then based on what I read, I either write a reflection on what I read or I will create a piece of art related to how I’m feeling that morning. And that practice has been transformational in that it allows me to come up with new ideas and it serves as kind of the impetus for the content that I ultimately post on my social feeds.

Maurice Cherry:
So for people that are listening and they aspire to become creative professionals like you, what you’re doing, what advice would you give to them?

Justin Shiels:
If you want to be a creative person, you have to invest in the actual activity of creating. That’s all. It’s really that simple. If I see myself as a writer, all I have to do is write and I am a writer. The hard part is you have to figure out how writing fits into your schedule. We all are busy, busier than we’ve ever been and everything in our life is competing with our creativity. In order to commit to your creativity, you have to be willing to practice. And so that practice should be daily. If you can’t do daily, it should be every other day. If you can’t do every other day, it should be once a week. If you can’t do every week, it should be once a month. But the more that you flex those muscles and commit to practicing, the better you get. A part of getting better in my journey, at least, it’s being confident enough to share my work. And so you make regularly, you share regularly, and then through the course of that, you become the thing that you say that you’ve always wanted to be.

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds like it’s just this continual process of working till you get to that point. I mean, I don’t want to say fake it till you make it, but you’re kind of continually pushing yourself forward towards that goal.

Justin Shiels:
Yeah. I mean, it’s really a question of outcomes versus inputs. In many ways, when we’re setting a goal for our life, we always will focus only on the outcome of the goal as opposed to the things that we need to do in order to achieve the goal. And so following that same realm of as a creative professional or as a person that aspires to be, in this case, a visual artist, how do I become a visual artist? Well, the only way that you become a visual artist is by painting every day. When you paint every day, suddenly you are a visual artist.

Maurice Cherry:
It kind of sounds a little bit like the old, well, it’s not old, but the whole 10,000 hours thing that sometimes gets kind of tossed around. You have to do something continually to kind of build up to that.

Justin Shiels:
Yes, yes. I love that concept that if you’re willing to put 10,000 hours of effort into something, you will become an expert in that. It’s interesting because I don’t know that it… 10,000 hours seems arbitrary of course.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Justin Shiels:
It’s sticky. That’s why it’s so popular, but that’s arbitrary. I think it’s committing to daily practice, putting it out there regularly, and then through that process, growing and developing and changing. I feel like even over the course of my own career, I have had moments where I was creating things that I liked but I didn’t love, and I’m finally in a stage in my creative process where I’m like, “Wait, the things that I make are pretty dope, and I came up with this myself. It came from my brain specifically.” That has not always been the case, but I think it’s because I’m willing to put in the daily effort to continue to maximize my skillset, find my own voice, and also to just regularly develop new takes on things that I’ve made before.

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

Justin Shiels:
At my core, I am an artist and I am a teacher. Those are the two most important parts of my year of intentional growth, and so my focus is to continue to make great content to come out with a bestselling book, The Reset Workbook coming out in December, 2023. And I want to continue to teach both through workshops and through speaking engagements where I can help people amplify their lives, find joy, find peace, and encourage people to step into building their own version of happy.

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

Justin Shiels:
You can find me online on most platforms at justinmadethat or at Justin Shiels, but the best way to connect is really to visit socurious.co. That’s socurious.co. From there, you can see many of the articles that I’ve written and you can sign up for my newsletter that I’ve been sending out since 2019 called The Weekly Reset. It helps people live a more intentional life, and it kind of pairs my personal philosophy with illustrations that I’ve created that give you a little bit of a pep talk during the week.

Maurice Cherry:
And the man writes some email newsletters. He’s been doing it since he was a teenager, so you know it’s good. You know it’s good. Justin Shiels, I just want to thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for just sharing your authenticity. I mean, I can really sense and feel the passion that you have for this behind your work, and I think that certainly in this time that we’re in, I’m sort of waving my arms about here, but with all the stuff that’s going on in the world right now, it’s good to have some sort of a way to know that while things may feel out of control, at the end of the day, what you can control is how you react to them. So whether that’s having that life reset or breaking unhealthy patterns, I think it’s really important to always know that, and I’m glad that the work that you’re doing is helping to get that message out to more people. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Justin Shiels:
Maurice, thank you so much. I really appreciate this opportunity.

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Domonique Brown

If you’ve been at your local Target lately, then there’s a chance you’re familiar with illustrator and entrepreneur Domonique Brown. She’s the founder of DomoInk, a contemporary lifestyle brand including apparel and home dรฉcor, all with art by Domonique. Pick up some of her products in Target’s Black History Month collection and bless your space, y’all!

Our conversation began with Domonique giving me a behind-the-scenes peek at her business, and she outlined some of the unique challenges she’s faced as her work becomes more popular. We also talked about breaking out from your 9-to-5 job to do you own thing, her aspirations to go into fine art, and we discussed Black art and mainstream exposure through other Black creatives. Domonique is a woman on the rise, and I know we’ll only be seeing more and more of her work in the future!

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

The DomoInk Collection at Target

Interview Transcript

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

Domonique Brown:
Hi, I’m Domonique Brown. I’m an illustrator and founder of DomoINK.

Maurice Cherry:
How have things been going for you so far this year?

Domonique Brown:
It’s been going really well. I started the year off with my new collaboration with Target for Black History Month, and also I have a collaboration within the same store of Target with American Greetings, where I am selling greeting cards.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, that’s big. That’s big. I’ll make sure that we have links to those in the show notes, so people can check those out. I saw on TikTok, which is actually how I first discovered you, I saw a TikTok from Tabitha Brown. She was picking up your stuff in Target. She was like, “Oh, I got to get these coasters and I got to get this.” And we’ll talk about how that all came about. But it really seems like last year was quite a year for you, and now you’re starting off this year with this big collaboration. Are there any other things you really want to try to accomplish this year?

Domonique Brown:
I really want to get back into the fine arts. I think right now with all these collaborations, there has been a huge focus on my digital work. I’ve been lucky with Target, and I guess I could say also with American Greetings, that they kind of have been, I guess, touching more on my, I guess my artwork on paper. So I really want to build value towards my original artwork. Because before I started doing digital designs, I was just in class drawing with pens and markers. So I think I really just want to get back into, I guess, back to basics and try to get into some more art galleries. My huge dream is to get into art to cell and yeah, just really just get back into just being a fine artist. The digital design work is cool, but I want to have both. I’ll say, there you go. I’ll just say I want both, to be a digital artist and be a fine artist at the same time.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Let’s jump right in there and talk about DomoINK, which is your company. I’m looking at the website here, and you’ve got art, you have home decor, you have apparel, and it’s all your artwork, which is amazing. Tell me about how you got started creating DomoINK?

Domonique Brown:
Yeah, I think DomoINK really just came from me just wanting to have art for my own space. When I first started DomoINK, I had just moved into my first home and we just had a lot of empty walls. So I was like, okay, let me just go to the store and see if I can find something that spoke to me. I would go to all these different stores and I would see nothing. And say, if I did find Black art, I felt like it was very generic, it may be just an African woman sitting there. But I was like, okay, I want something else. I want each space to say something different. This room could be filled with abstract art. This room could be line art. I just wanted more variety. So I just started drawing from my own space and posting it on social media, and people were like, “I want this.” And I was like, okay.

So I decided to create my own store and just build it up to offer a variety of just unique products that will connect to people who are also going through the same thing as me. I think as a Black woman, it’s so tough to find art and decor, or even apparel that represents you. So I wanted to have it to be like DomoINK is a one-stop shop where you can find Black art, Black cultured products 365 days a year, instead of having to wait for a retailer to offer a Black History Month collection in order to be able to get something that’s Black.

Maurice Cherry:
And I mean, speaking of social media, I love how you’re using social media to kind of provide a glimpse, not just into your artistic practice, but also where your work is at. Like I mentioned, I saw you on TikTok, but you’re on Twitter, you’re on Instagram, you have your own TikTok. How does social media help out with what you do? Does it just help you get to a wider audience?

Domonique Brown:
I feel like it allows you to build your own destiny, I feel. I feel like before, let’s say in the nineties where there’s no social media, you just have to get discovered from someone walking into an art gallery. But I think with social media has allowed me to make my own art gallery at basically no cost to where I can reach hundreds of thousands of people, and especially if a video goes viral. So with me being able to post on social media, it has allowed me to connect with you, like as you said, you saw me on social media. But then also even for brands, brands come across. Recently, for Bleacher Report, I had did an illustration for their social media platform. They found me because of a viral video I did of me drawing Martin Luther King with crayon. So I think it’s just social media is so powerful to where you can really build your dream out through it.

Maurice Cherry:
I saw that video too. That’s a really good illustration.

Domonique Brown:
Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you approach creating a new piece of art or a new design project?

Domonique Brown:
I think when I first started, I honestly was drawing for the trend. Like if I saw, let’s say a celebrity’s birthday was coming up, I’ll illustrate really quick for that. But I think I was like, okay, I don’t want to just be drawing celebrities. I really want to draw something that’s meaningful to me and also could relate to someone in their own home. So I think with me having my own store now, I’m trying to think in a perspective of, I guess you could really say what’s marketable and also just connects with people. So that’s why I’ve been going more in the direction of drawing the everyday man or everyday woman, and they’re just living life. I think my artwork is all about positivity and just joy. You’ll never see me draw anything negative. I just really want it to be, when someone looks at my piece, they feel like that could be them. That could be their aunt, that could be their uncle, something that they want to bring into their home and feel good about.

Maurice Cherry:
Is there a particular design that you’ve done that really took off that you weren’t expecting?

Domonique Brown:
I think it was when I did my Black hair series. I really wanted something that was very abstract, but at the same time, you can look at it and be like, “That’s a Black woman. That’s a Black man.” So it’s basically people, their hair is black, their skin is black, and if they have any accessories, their accessories will be in gold, their sunglasses, their earrings, but their apparel is basically African textures and tones. And I just did it one day and I just made a whole series out of it, and I posted it on social media and people were just like, “I want this. I want this.” And I was like, okay. I’m like, I understand now. I think before me, I was just thinking very about myself of, okay, I really want art that looks like me, that looks like my family and my friends. And when I posted it, everybody else was like, “That’s me or That looks like my grandpa.” I’m like, okay.

Maurice Cherry:
So you didn’t have anyone particular in mind when you created that?

Domonique Brown:
No, it was really for myself in a sense of me just, I guess from me just dealing with never finding artwork that looks like me when I go shopping, and I just posted it and it just took off.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, are there any sort of unique challenges or opportunities that you faced doing your work or exhibiting your work as a Black designer?

Domonique Brown:
Oh, I will say, I think that there is still a lack of, I guess, companies wanting to utilize Black art. Sometimes I’ll feel like maybe, let’s say if I didn’t just draw Black figures and I just drew, let’s say white figures, I might be able to get more publication. I might be able to get more views on videos. As you see, I think when you are watching, I guess the trend with TikTok, as you’ve seen with Black creators, they have such a harder time being able to get the same amount of money for brand deals or the same amount of views. So I do feel that same kind of maybe oppression in a sense as a Black artist.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I hear that a lot on TikTok, and in a way it makes me wonder why people even, well, I wouldn’t say why people, why Black creators still mess with the platform, considering how unfriendly it seems to be. But I guess it just has a great reach?

Domonique Brown:
It does have a great reach. And then I feel like if this is with TikTok, why wouldn’t it be the same with Instagram or any other platform? So I think it’s just something, just an overall, I guess the thing that one day I hope whatever end, it’s going to be a really appeal battle to end discrimination. But I guess for me, I’m on TikTok because there’s nothing I can do about it, but what I can do at least try to reach the people who would be interested in having my art in their home.

Maurice Cherry:
That makes sense. And I’d imagine you’re also reaching people there that you might not reach on your other platforms. Maybe they’re not on Twitter that often or Instagram or something, but they’re on TikTok.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah, that’s why I try to post everywhere. I’d be posting my artwork on LinkedIn and people are on LinkedIn just trying to find a job, but I’m like, hey, you never know who could be watching.

Maurice Cherry:
Very true. Look, a lot of people get jobs off LinkedIn, so-

Domonique Brown:
They do.

Maurice Cherry:
… there is no problem with posting there at all. None.

Domonique Brown:
Right? And then at the same time, you might be able to find a job on LinkedIn by posting art, so you never know. So I just try to post everywhere I can and just see what could come from it. It doesn’t hurt. I mean, it doesn’t cost anything to pose, so might as well.

Maurice Cherry:
I need to adopt that mentality. I need to think about it that way.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Your collection with Target, like I said, I saw that on TikTok. I saw that on Tabitha Brown’s TikTok. How did that come about? Did that partnership happen?

Domonique Brown:
What’s so funny is that I didn’t even talk to Tabitha. There was nothing. It was just all of a sudden I wake up in the morning and people are in my DMs sending me the video, like, “Do you see Tabitha Brown posted this?” And I’m like, what? And I look and I’m like, oh my God, this is so cool. I was sitting there texting my friends, writing people, “That’s my cousin. I’m Domonique Brown. She’s Tabitha Brown. Don’t play.”

Maurice Cherry:
See, I didn’t even think of that. I didn’t even think of that until you said it, so.

Domonique Brown:
Right? I was like, “That’s my cousin, y’all. I’m sorry I didn’t tell y’all.” No, but it was something really, really cool and it just felt good to see. She could have just went in that store and just bought, or just basically just highlighted her collection. She has her vegan food collection this year. So it was really nice that she went over to the Black History Collection, she highlighted a few creators and then she walked to the back. Or she could have did it in reverse, she could have highlighted her collection first and then threw us at the end. But it was just so sweet that she started off by highlighting small businesses.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. How did you first get to working with Target?

Domonique Brown:
Honestly, they found me through another brand collaboration. I had a brand collaboration with Jiggy Puzzles. And for that deal, I had created a piece where it’s literally two sneakers walking through California, and it was called Cali Views. I reached out to them, I showed them the art piece, and then Jiggy Puzzles put my artwork on their next puzzle collection. And someone, a Target buyer, saw it, bought the puzzle and fell in love with it and decided to reach out to me and see if I was interested in doing a collection with them.

Maurice Cherry:
Now I see the items that are on Target’s website now. You’ve got two pieces of wall art, you’ve got an art kit, there’s some coasters, there’s a wall calendar. We’ll make sure to link all of that in the show notes, so people can go ahead and grab those if they’re not able to get them from their local Target.

Domonique Brown:
Okay.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you maintain a sense of authenticity and individuality in your work while it appeals to such a mass audience? Target is mass market, it’s as big as you can get. How do you maintain yourself in your art through that?

Domonique Brown:
I think what helps me a lot is that my artwork, I guess what makes it so authentic is that I am a Black woman and I’m literally just drawing from my own experiences and basically just illustrating what I would want to see. And I think with my background in marketing and also just studying PR and advertising design, I feel like I kind of have that idea of always trying to create something that is marketable to a wider audience instead of just creating just for me. I feel like if I was just drawing for myself, it probably wouldn’t be as clean, I will say. It would be more of me just doodling or sketching something out. But with me having that mentality of I’m designing something that will literally make someone happy and feel like they’re represented. I’m always trying to illustrate that. And at the same time, the work that I’m putting out, I guess, speaks to me as well.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, earlier as I was doing my research for this, I thought it was super interesting that you were running this mega business of DomoINK while also having a nine to five. But as we started recording, you told me that’s now changed, is that right?

Domonique Brown:
Yes. That has now changed. I think what really pushed me to create DomoINK was that I had the ability to work from home. By working from home, it takes away the whole commuting, you getting dressed from work, you taking that long drive home for. My job, it was based in Orange County, that’s like an hour drive or two hours in traffic. So I mean, just being at home, it gave me so much more free time than I ever had when I was just working in an office.

I mean, it’s bittersweet because it was, the opportunity for me to work from home came from the pandemic, but you’re stuck in the house all the time. So with me being stuck in the house all the time, and then also the workload had kind of decreased as well because of people just calling into… I guess from my job, it was just less work to do because there wasn’t much to do because of the pandemic. So it gave me it lot of time to really just figure out how can I run a business? And I just went forward. I’d never run a business before, except having an Etsy store where I’m selling pens and earrings a couple years back. But I didn’t know what I was doing, and I just was just going along. I’m like, okay, I’m going to start selling artwork. I’m going to start selling apparel. Now I’m going to start selling plates, I’m going to start selling puzzles. And it just blew up into what it is now.

Maurice Cherry:
Was there a particular moment that it blew up for you?

Domonique Brown:
I will say by 2021, it felt like it really took off was because I started getting published in different articles for BuzzFeed and just doing a lot of brand collaborations. I think with me collaborating with different companies, it brought a lot of awareness to DomoINK. And also just brought trustability towards it. Just basically, I think people started to believing in what I was pushing out. You can go on Instagram and see someone has a shop, but you’ll be like, “That’s really cute.” But I’m like, “Am I actually going to get the product?” All the time.

So I think with me just getting so much, I guess brand awareness, it really just took off from me where people were buying all the time from me, especially around Christmastime when I did CNBC Make It. I had so many sales every single day. My original artwork was selling and I sell my original artwork up to $5,000 and just to wake up and see that, and my account was just absolutely insane. So I guess if I had to pinpoint a certain moment of where I felt I really made it with DomoInk was CNBC.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. That is amazing. That is really amazing. Sounds like that big press really kind of helped out because it got your work out there nationwide, probably worldwide.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah, it really did. Because I was getting orders from Australia and United Kingdom. I’m like, you guys want to pay that international shipping? It just felt really good because it was like, there’s so many artists in this world, and for someone to sit there and just want my artwork in that small space of their bedroom or large space behind their couch. It was just a really good feeling to know, okay, what I’m creating is meaningful out here. It’s not just something I’m just throwing against the wall. So it just felt good.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, let’s learn more about the artist behind the art. I mean, we spent this time talking about DomoINK. And we’ll get into more of the brand collapse and stuff you’ve done later, but tell me more about where you grew up? You’re originally from Pomona, California, is that right?

Domonique Brown:
Yes, I am from Pomona, California. It’s a cool city. There’s nothing to do in Pomona. I will say that Pomona is known for the LA County Fair. I would say that was the big highlight of it. But I think what shaped me as an artist to want to illustrate more, I guess be more of a Black like… oh, I guess I’ll say I’ll draw more Black art, was that when I was growing up, it wasn’t that many Black kids where I was growing up. Pomona is Hispanic. It’s basically the majority of Pomona is Hispanic. So for me, I was growing up, my best friends were all Hispanic. But I think I guess my first culture shock was me being around… basically being a majority of Black people was when I worked at the Post Office, surprisingly. That’s when I started working out in LA. So that’s when I did my shift.

I think it was very educational too, in a sense, because before I’m always around Hispanics. I guess I’ll say my culture was Hispanic in a way, when I’m out at school and everything, but obviously when I’m at home, that’s Black culture time, me spending time with my cousins in LA and stuff. So I’ve always kind of just been out in LA really most of my life. I grew up in Pomona, but I spent a lot of time in LA working or hanging out with family.

Maurice Cherry:
Now were you doing a lot of drawing and stuff as a kid too?

Domonique Brown:
I was doing a lot of illustrations. I think for me, drawing was my escape from school. Even though I have a masters, I never was a school kid. I will say I don’t know how I did it. I look back and be like, how did I do that? I never focused, I will say. I could look at my college notes or my elementary notes and there’s always a drawing on the side of it. That was literally my escape from having to be bored in class or just be bored, just anywhere was, it could be a long drive from my home to Vegas for vacation and I’m drawing in the car. So art was definitely an escape, and it was just fun for me. I never really thought about being an artist when I grew up. It was just like, oh, a little passion project, I guess, I’ll say a hobby.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay, so it was a hobby, but you didn’t necessarily think, oh, this is something that I could do for a living?

Domonique Brown:
No, because I guess for me, it was like, okay, how do you even be an artist? How do you become, I guess now the huge artists are Kerry James Marshall or Bisa Butler, how do you get to that level? I just thought it was just like, you have to know somebody. And I’m like, I live in Pomona. There’s nothing going on out here. Am I supposed to get discovered at the fair? Where am I supposed to get discovered? So I felt like where I was, there was nothing for me. So I was like, what I’m going to do is I’m going to study into the Plan B options of, okay, I could be a graphic designer anywhere. I can do marketing for any company. But to be an artist, I don’t understand how to do that. So I’m going to focus on something that I can easily go on Indeed and apply for.

Maurice Cherry:
I gotcha. I gotcha. I mean, I grew up in a small town too, smaller than Pomona, but I grew up in a small town. And I know what you mean, when you have this kind of creative aptitude, it’s hard to tell, if you don’t see it around you, if you don’t see examples around you of how can I turn this into something? Is this just going to be a hobby that I do because I don’t know how I could do this for a living? So I get exactly where you’re coming from there.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Now you’ve mentioned your MBA. You went to Cal Poly Pomona, majored in public relations, and you said you have an MBA, that’s in marketing from CSU Dominguez Hills. How has your education in marketing and PR helped you out as a design entrepreneur?

Domonique Brown:
I think it helped out a lot. I think with me going to school, while I was in school for, I was in school from 2011 to 2019. So I think of me just always constantly working on, I guess, campaigns for my homework, my presentations, I’m always trying to create ways to, how do you… I think one of my class projects was like, how do you save Chipotle? When they had that whole E. coli PR crisis. We had to make a fake campaign, create fake ads, how to bring a customer base back. So I think with me just always loving how to build a brand has led to me doing it with DomoINK to where I have full control of it in a sense. I’m not working with some other company’s logo or anything. It’s me. Everything is me.

Maurice Cherry:
When you look at your body of work, I mean of everything that you’ve done so far, is there a particular project or a piece of art that you’re the most proud of?

Domonique Brown:
I would say my deal with Target is probably my biggest one, I will say. Because for me, I always grew up going to Target. I worked at Target, so it’s a full circle.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
That is a full circle moment. Yeah.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah. I used to work at Target. And I think it was just funny because when I worked at Target, I didn’t care. I started working there, I was 18. Yeah, I was 18 years old when I worked there. It was like my second job I ever had. And I just came to work. I didn’t care. I was a cashier, I was just ringing up people. And I didn’t even show up my last week. I was a seasonal employee, and they were like, “Okay, you’re done with your seasonal time.” And I was like, okay. And I just never came back. They were like, “Oh, are you going to come back for the last week?” And I was like, “No, I’m just going to just go.” So I left on a bad note. It was just so bad. So it was just funny. So when Target reached out to me and I told them my story about me working at Target, I was like, they’re probably going to say no to me. They’re going to look at my record and be like, “She never came to work. She didn’t even show up her last week of work. She’s terrible.” But I’m a new person now. That’s how I looked at it.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, we can’t be held responsible for those early jobs in our career. I mean, yeah, charge that one to the game. You’re good with that.

Domonique Brown:
We got to, yeah, I was like, that was 10 years ago. Now I’m older now. But I think that probably even helped me too with me getting to deal with Target was just me just talking about, I used to work there.

It was definitely a full circle moment for me. And then also I like Target so much because the product line is a representation of the variety of styles that I do. Like the coasters, the line art. The art prints is my artwork that I did on paper that has just been converted to art print. The mugs is my fine artwork. And the calendar that they sell has more of my digital artwork and different styles. So it was just really nice to just have the full representation of me and then just have DomoINK to be inside a Target. It wasn’t just like, oh, they just through my artwork on something and then it’s just my name on the corner. If you look at the packaging, it says DomoINK. It has my name. It has a picture of my face. It was just really cool to just see how far my business has grown since the pandemic.

Maurice Cherry:
Now a lot of artists I’m seeing now are wrapped up in a bunch of different kind of, I guess, tech intersections. I guess that’s kind of a good way to talk about it. I know last year there was a lot of talk about artists making NFTs. And then this year, well also last year, probably going into this year too, a lot of talk about AI generated art, stuff like that. Do you think about the future of the art and design industry and how it might be impacted by tech? Do you see your work in those capacities?

Domonique Brown:
Yeah, I guess the first thing will be like NFTs. I wish I was ahead of the game with that. I have a friend who recently made $100,000 in one day selling NFTs. And I’m like, how the heck-

Maurice Cherry:
Woo!

Domonique Brown:
… Yeah. I was like, dang, what was I doing during that time? But I feel with, I guess when the economy probably gets some stability, I think NFTs will probably definitely grow. I went to DesignerCon a few months ago, I think it was in November, and people were just standing in line just trying to get them a rare NFT. So I definitely think it’s probably something that will stick around once the economy gets back together, as you see with Bitcoin dropping or if you got your money in stocks, it’s on the negative right now, the economy.
But I think with the AI generated thing, I think it sucks because in a sense that let’s say that person was going to buy a digital portrait from someone, but then with this AI generated art, they can just make their portrait for free or just download an app and pay $8. So I think it definitely hurts artists who their business is based off of commissions. And then also this whole AI generated thing is also stealing people’s art to make those art, I mean the little AI thing. So definitely, it’s cool, but it’s definitely hurtful to artists overall.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. One interesting thing that I saw from that, I think it was late last year, is not just people of course sharing this art widely over social media, but also just how many people, and I’ll be blunt, how many Black people were like, “I can’t believe y’all are paying for that. You paid money for that?” The gross devaluing of creative work is mind blowing to me, first of all.

Domonique Brown:
Oh yes.

Maurice Cherry:
I don’t know. Did you see that? Did you see those kind of things going on?

Domonique Brown:
I did. I did see that. I think it is definitely true, even for, let’s say, even for me as an artist, someone asks me to draw them a picture, and I’ll tell them, let’s say they want something super crazy, they’re like, we want a three-foot drawing or something. I’m like, “You know that’s going to cost a couple thousand. That’s time.” And they’re just stunned by it. It’s like, you’re paying for my time, and also you’re just paying for me just having to use my supplies. I’m shipping it to you. You have to think about it. Just because I draw for fun doesn’t mean I want to draw you for free.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. And also just with materials and stuff like that, and time? All that costs money.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah. And then I think people have taken the fact that it is your time. And also you’re paying for the person’s past too. The person spent 10 years to get to this level. So you’re paying for that experience as well. Because I mean, yeah, you can go to a college and maybe get a kid to draw something for $50, but will it look that great? And then even if it is really great, how do you feel good ripping them off? They still spent a good amount of time doing that. You wouldn’t want to work for $5 an hour. So why would you want an artist to do so?

Maurice Cherry:
Right. One thing that I’ve been telling some artists is that inevitably people are going to still, I mean, they’re still going to use this AI generated art. Because to me, this is just the next step from people doing Facetune or a little FaceApp or Photoshop, whatever here and there, this is kind of the next step from that. Because you’re already seeing people use them for avatar pictures and stuff like that. I’ve seen them on dating apps, so people are already-

Domonique Brown:
Oh my God.

Maurice Cherry:
… Yeah. People are already going the distance with this. But I told some artists, especially ones that do commissions, I’m like, look, if anybody brings you AI art, just don’t do it. Because somebody’s going to come to an artist and be like, “Yeah, I made this with Lensa or Midjourney or whatever, “Can you change this? Can you touch this up?” And I’m telling them, don’t do it. Just say no.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah. And also I guess too, I guess a lot of this AI art is from stolen artwork. So you don’t want to attach your name to something and then someone comes out and says, “You just stole my artwork. All you did was change the color of the hair. You want to get involved in it.” And also you’re just basically supporting people getting their artwork stolen.

Maurice Cherry:
I heard that Getty Images is suing Stable Diffusion and I think another AI art maker. I think it’s Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, suing both of them because their system scraped some Getty Images stuff. And now when people try to generate the images, they’ll come out with a mangled Getty Images watermark. Because they put that big watermark my on all their pictures. So I think it’s certainly something that, I don’t know what legislation’s going to do with relation to that, but I mean, I kind of feel like the cat’s out of the bag, people are still going to use it. Now, whether or not they value it? That’s a whole other story.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah, I don’t know it will be valuable if you became an AR artist, but I don’t know. It’s so new. For me, I haven’t really dabbled with it too much because every time when I tried, I do not how the portrait looks. I’m like, I don’t know who this person’s supposed to be. But I definitely see where it’s going to be a lot of, I guess, issues with it. But I don’t know. I feel like people are using it for their profile pictures. It kind of reminds me of back in the day where people would use the cartoon filter for their pictures.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. Or the Snapchat filters or stuff like that. Yeah.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah. I think it’s more of a little trend for right now. And then once eventually people just get over it.

Maurice Cherry:
Which, it’s actually interesting, the week that we’re recording this, Snapchat is actually discontinuing one of their apps. It’s called Snap Camera. You can download it for your laptop, so you can use Snapchat filters on your webcam. They’re discontinuing that. They’re like, we’re not doing this anymore. I think part of it is because they fired thousands of people last year. But I’m wondering though if we’ll start to see some companies pull back on AI for art purposes. I mean, I think AI is already being used in a lot of stuff anyway. Photoshop has been used in AI for years now with Content-Aware Fill and stuff like that. But yeah, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens in the future, especially as more companies start to throw legislation, or throw lawsuits, I should say, behind this stuff.

Domonique Brown:
Yes, it is going to be interesting.

Maurice Cherry:
Now we’re starting to see a lot more Black fine artists in their work kind of being exhibited to the mainstream. I’d say this has really picked up over the past decade or so. We have Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, they painted the Obamas. You’ve got television shows that feature Black art. We had a fine artist on last year, Dawn Okoro, her work was used in, I think it was The First Wives Club on BET, I think it was used for that show. You’ve collaborated with a show. You collaborated with FX Networks to do some work for their show Snowfall. What do you think about this kind of exposure?

Domonique Brown:
I think it’s amazing, I think, especially for the artists, because shows will pay you to have your artwork in their show. I think for me personally, my artwork was in HBO’s Insecure. So in one of the episodes Issa Rae walks right past, it was an illustration I did of Nipsey Hussle, or even for-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice.

Domonique Brown:
… Another show I had done was A Black Lady Sketch Show. So first season three, my artwork is featured throughout the show. So it was definitely cool because a lot of people reached out to me because they recognized my artwork. They’re like, “Oh my God, your artwork’s in this scene right here.” And I was like, okay. Like I had said earlier in the interview, is that with your artwork being in so many different places, it starts to just build awareness towards you to where people can understand the value of your work. It’s just very helpful, I’ll say.

Maurice Cherry:
I can imagine, like you said, your artwork’s all over the place. Do you just find out about it when it’s shown or do they give you a heads-up?

Domonique Brown:
They do give you a heads-up because a lot of times… I knew that my art artwork was going to be in Insecure. I didn’t know which episode it would be. I never got that kind of information. I mean, I watched Insecure anyways, so I would just sitting there watching it the whole season and it was literally, I think the artwork appeared in the second or third to last episode. So all that whole season, I’m just looking everywhere. I’m like, where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Or for Black Lady Sketch Show, I was just looking around too, where is it? I want to see a piece. Because they had bought a lot of my artwork for it as well. So it’s really cool. I think it feels good that people can recognize your artwork. It’s just weird in a sense of, wow, you know my piece that well? You can just see it blurred in the corner and you know that’s me. It’s a feel-good moment.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, that’s got to be a great moment. I mean, your work’s on TV, your work’s in Target. That’s major. That’s major, major, major.

Domonique Brown:
Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
Who are some of the folks that have really motivated and inspired you over the years? I can imagine doing all this, you’ve probably got a great support system behind you.

Domonique Brown:
I will say my dad definitely, I will say, as my day one motivator, I think. Especially when I was in high school, I had did a program called Ryman Arts. So every Saturday I would go to USC and do classes. So he would drive me from Pomona to LA, it was an hour drive. And also even my mom too as well. They would just drive me to LA and back. So they always pushed for me to be an artist. Because I was taking time out of their day. That’s their weekend from work. And they would just take me down there and then they would stay down in LA for three to four hours as I did my class at USC and then took me back home. Because that was when I was in high school. Also, they’ve always, for my mom, for Christmas every year, she would always buy me, I guess an artist kit they would sell and it would have crayons, markers, color, pencils, and this big old, I wouldn’t say a booklet, but it was a big old cassette kind of thing. And you picked it up and-

Maurice Cherry:
I know those art kits, they’ve got all the waxy color pencils and stuff in them.

Domonique Brown:
… Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I used to always get every single year, when I was growing up, my mama bought me one of those. And so I think they always pushed me to always be an artist. But they definitely were always very pushing me to basically have a career somewhere. And then I’ll say now with me having a fiancรฉ, I think when I met him, I think I wasn’t thinking as big scale. But having him around, I was able to set up my own booth. I had to a booth at 626 Night Market. That was before I was DomoINK. I think I just threw a banner up, it was like Art by Domonique. Come through. I was selling art friends, earrings and pins and stuff. But if I didn’t have him, I wouldn’t of had nobody set up a big old booth for me. He had made the booth by hand. He had bought some pipes and connected them and boom, we had a tent.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah. He set up all the whole everything inside of the booth. And I’m not crafty, no one in my family’s that crafty, so it would not have came out as well without him.

I will say my family has been a huge force behind me just being an artist. Even when I had my first solo art show in 2018, my dad and my fiancรฉ, but he was my boyfriend at the time, they were there all day just hanging my artwork on the wall, putting the hangers on the back of the pieces. So me just having, I guess a whole village behind me. Or even from my extended family, my aunts, they’ve always come out to my shows, buy pieces. And also my friends just posting my artwork on their Instagram or sharing it. Or even from my Target collection, it just felt really good that took the time out to drive to their local Target and just buy a mug, just buy something to just show support behind me.

And also just me just being on social media. A huge support system is just people, followers, they’ll send you a sweet message out of nowhere. I look at my DMs and see someone just write me and say, “Thank you for posting the things that you’re doing because it inspires me.” So that is a huge motivation just overall of people just telling me, keep going.

Maurice Cherry:
I’ll say this to anybody that’s listening that has a friend that is an entrepreneur. Buy their stuff. That is the best way that you can help support what they do. I mean, I think social media posts and things like that is great, but actually putting some money in your pocket, best way to help out.

Domonique Brown:
Oh yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Such a great way to support.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah, no, it is. When I did my solo art show, it was my first art exhibition. It was in Pomona, which was cool. I had friends from high school just come down and just buy a print. I was selling little small prints for $5, just starting off. And they just came down there and bought an art print just to say, “Hey, keep doing it.” And it does, it means a lot to you. Even it’s go small purchase. It’s just really nice to feel like, dang, I made a connection in this person’s life that they came out here and bought something. They might not even like it, but they’re just doing it just to basically push your dreams forward.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What advice would you give for any designers out there that are listing, they’re hearing your story and they want to break into design entrepreneurship and work with brands like you have, what would you tell them?

Domonique Brown:
I will definitely say be okay with the answer of no or rejection. I think when I first started out, I was just posting my artwork and getting no likes on it, when I first started. It used to bother me at first. I’m like, why am I even posting it? It made me want to give up. Or let’s say a brand does reach out to me and they say, “Hey, we want to use your artwork for this billboard.” And two weeks later you don’t hear nothing from them no more. So you got to be okay with the rejection at first. It’s definitely not going to be like you post your artwork, that one piece, and it just blows up and you’re drawing for Target next. You may get lucky, I mean, that’s like a 1 billion chance, but you definitely have to be able to handle the slow growth. That’s the hardest part.

I think that’s what makes people give up is that first part of you’re selling… For me, I started off on Etsy and I was telling my art prints, I didn’t get no sales for months. And I could easily just shut it down, but I was like, I’m just going to keep my listings up and something has to hit eventually. I just kept drawing and drawing and stuff. But what really helped me too a lot was when I first started out, I had a nine to five. So that kind of kept me grounded to where I didn’t become desperate for my business because I had a steady income coming. So I think that helped me a lot with just being able to handle that slow movement.

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

Domonique Brown:
I think I just appreciate me just sticking to my passion of just marketing and design and art has led me to having my own home in California. I think I’ve just been really just taking a moment to just appreciate how far I’ve come. When I first started drawing or maybe just looking back at me, when I was in college, I didn’t have no money. I would buy one burrito and eat off of it all day, when I was in my [inaudible 00:44:40]. It’s just weird right now with me trying to do a careers transition to where I want to go into more of an entertainment and tech field of doing marketing or being an art director, it’s a really good feeling to know I’m being sustained by my art. It’s super weird to just be at this point and still be in, like I said, I have a house in California. I always said to myself, California is really, really expensive and it just seems weird to get this far and be able to have these kind of accomplishments and accolades under myself. And this year I turned 30 and it’s a good feeling to know I got this far knowing where I came from.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s the journey. It’s the journey.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah, it’s the journey. And you to definitely have to appreciate every step of the way. I think it’s really easy to get caught up in what you want in front of you, but you’re not thinking about what you have right now is what your past you was dying to have.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Do you have a dream project that you’d love to do one day? I think you kind of alluded to one earlier.

Domonique Brown:
Oh my gosh. I think my passion project right now is, well, I guess what I’m really trying to build up to is being in art museums. And a big one is Art Basel, I really want to get in that. I just really want to just get my artwork in front of some people in the gallery. That’s just a really good feeling when I go into gallery and have my artwork in there and I see people just standing there looking at it. It’s kind of cool. And so I really, really want to get back into the fine arts, that’s my thing.

Maurice Cherry:
Have you exhibited any art locally in Pomona?

Domonique Brown:
I have, when I had my first solo art exhibit. And then also I had my artwork in the Chaffey Museum of Art out in Ontario, California. That was recently, so I exhibited eight, nine pieces there. Well, my latest one was in Ontario, that made me really want to get back into drawing more on paper to be able to get into more museums. Because it was a really good feeling because… And also it led to a lot of people reaching out to me interested in buying my work. So I was like, oh, this is another place to keep building brand awareness towards me. And also even for DomoINK, because I always try to make sure to throw that in my bio, that I’m a founder of my own home decor business. So I definitely just want to just kind of, I guess get my hands into everything that I can that’s within my education and skills.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, gallery work aside, where do you see yourself in the next five years? Is there any particular kind of work you want to be doing or anything like that?

Domonique Brown:
Yes, I really want to, in the long run, eventually I’ll probably get out of the, I guess corporate space and really just focus on DomoINK. I really want to also just start my own marketing firm too, with a lot of people reaching out to me, trying to find out how they can do the same thing and how do they monetize their art. I really want to be able to become a mentor and offer courses and just educate people. Because there’s so many people who just don’t know where to start. Like for me, I didn’t know where to start, but somehow I was able to make it work. But I just try to think about the people who don’t have that aha moment just by sitting there. So I just wanted to be able to offer more resources and help people just like me be able to get some money and just be able to have financial freedom, because everyone deserves to be able to afford shelter, food, everything. So if I can help someone have their own place, I’m happy.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, your work and everything? And of course we’ll put links, like I said, to the Target collection in the show notes, but where can they find out more about you online?

Domonique Brown:
To find out more about me and my artwork and also shop for my artwork in home decor and apparel, you can go to DomoINK.com. It is D-O-M-O-I-N-K.com.

Maurice Cherry:
All right, sounds good. Well, Domonique Brown, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. Really thank you for sharing your story. I think it’s one thing to see the success on social media and people can kind of have one perception about it, but I hope that from people listening to your story and hearing just how upbeat and authentic are about the work, that they’ll see that this is something that maybe they can achieve too. I mean, the success that you’ve gotten over these past few years is really inspirational, I can’t wait to see what you do next. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Domonique Brown:
Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me. Thank you.

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Nakita M. Pope

We have all had to change things up in one way or other over the past few years. But if you’re like this week’s return guest, Nakita M. Pope, there’s power in pivoting! (You might remember her from my recent talk with Jordan Taylor, or from our 2016 interview.)

Our conversation started with catching up on what’s happened over the past few years, and Nakita spoke about some of her recent projects, including launching a business course and a subscription box turned online community — Bella Boss! We also talked about her work as a design educator, the recent closing of The Creative Circus, being awarded as an AIGA Fellow, and she shared how her passion projects have impacted her career. Nakita’s love for community and giving back really shines, and I think you’ll get really inspired by this interview!

Bella Boss

Branding Chicks

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

Nakita M. Pope:
Hi, I’m Nakita Pope. I am a designer, creative director, studio owner, and professor. I’m the chief chick at Branding Chicks, which is a boutique branding agency here in Atlanta, Georgia. And I specialize in brand strategy and brand development for women owned businesses and femme focused brands.

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

Nakita M. Pope:
Oh, man, the year has been a little bit of a whirlwind. I was just talking to someone the other day and telling them that during the pandemic, everybody, well, a lot of people kind of slowed down. Everything got a little bit slower. The pace wasn’t as rigorous. For me, everything sped up a little bit. It was super busy. And so I feel like 2022 has been about wrapping up that kind of frenzied level of work and of coming back to center a little bit. So it’s been some ups and downs, but it’s been a good year. I can’t complain. It’s been a great year.

Maurice Cherry:
Is there anything in particular that you want to try to accomplish this year, before the end of the year?

Nakita M. Pope:
Oh, man, get some rest. That is my goal by the end of this year. I am wrapping up some things right now, and that’s my goal is to take this last quarter of the year, I don’t know if it’ll be the whole quarter, but I definitely want to take some time at the end of this year to just sort of recenter myself and get some rest.

I’m always doing so many things at once. I kind of like it that way, as a creative, it keeps me from being bored. But I’m starting to realize that it’s been a very long time since I stopped everything. And so I’m looking forward to taking some space to do that.

Maurice Cherry:
Good. Definitely, take that space now before, say, oh, I guess before the winter really starts. But it kind of feels like any time between Thanksgiving and New Years is sort of a down period for everybody. You know what I mean?

Nakita M. Pope:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
So-

Nakita M. Pope:
That’s true.

Maurice Cherry:
… hopefully, you’ll get a chance to get some of that rest. I think we all probably need that.

Nakita M. Pope:
Yeah, indeed. Indeed, more than we think.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Let’s talk about Branding Chicks. Now, you’ve been in business now for what, over 12 years, now, right?

Nakita M. Pope:
Yeah, it’s been a while. It went by so fast. That sounds crazy, 12 years.

Maurice Cherry:
How has your business changed since we last talked? That was back in 2016. How has your business changed?

Nakita M. Pope:
It’s changed quite a bit. A lot of it has stayed the same, but so much of it has changed. I think part of what has changed… Well, I’ll start with something that’s stayed the same. So one of the things that stayed the same is I kind of always worked remotely, because I have sort of a niche sort of brand. I feel like I end up working with people all over. And so it’s not specific to Atlanta, necessarily. And so that was always kind of how I worked. But now since the pandemic and all that stuff, I find that it’s expanding even more, because other people are now looking outside of their geographic locations even more.

And understanding that they can do really robust and deep work with people, even if they’re not necessarily in the same place or able to meet face to face. So I feel like that has both stayed the same and also changed. I feel that I’ve also been able to work with some amazing organizations that are doing really great work that I feel really strongly about, personally. I’ve been able to do some deeper dives with some brands, and do some larger projects with some of those brands. And to me that’s growth, to allow me to do more of what I want to be doing, and more of where I feel that I can have the best impact. That’s how I measure success. So in that space, I’m really happy with the direction that things are going in.

Maurice Cherry:
Have you seen a change in the market with respect to the things clients are looking for? Have things shifted or changed during the pandemic?

Nakita M. Pope:
Oh, yeah. I think some of it, from a brand strategy standpoint, I’m noticing more and more that organizations and companies are starting to understand that even if they were already committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, they are looking to build that and bake that into their brands a bit more. Which I love to see, because that’s something I’m passionate about as well. And I know that in some cases we see companies doing that, and we’re not sure if it’s going to stick.

But from my perspective, when I see companies that come to me for that and they are looking at the foundational parts of their brand and their brand personality and their core values and things like that, if they’re baking it into those things, then I find that they are more deeply passionate about it and more committed to it. So I see a lot of that happening on my end, which, like I said, I’m really happy to see. And it allows me to work in some of those spaces that I work in outside of my business, also, in my business. So it gives me a chance to bring some of that knowledge in, and also, help people build brands that they feel like really represents them in every way. So I see a lot of that shifting.

Maurice Cherry:
When did you first see that shift? I’m curious.

Nakita M. Pope:
I think 2020. I think when George Floyd happened, and so much of the conversation got so much louder. A lot of us have been talking about this for a long time, working in this space for a long time, both at the front lines and behind the scenes trying to make some of these things happen. But I think overarchingly after the nationwide, worldwide conversation got so much louder, I think that some of these companies are realizing that they need to change their ways. And/or if they were already committed to it, then they need to be even more vocal about their commitment. So I feel like that was the catalyst for a lot of it, to be honest.

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

Nakita M. Pope:
Oh, man, it’s all over the place. Most days I am working on client work. Two days a week, I’m usually teaching as a professor. But other than that, some days I’m also consulting or I might have a public speaking engagement or doing things like this, doing a podcast interview. So it really varies quite a bit from day-to-day. But I kind of like that, it keeps me from being bored, and it gives me a chance to dive deeper into the things that I care about and the spaces that I work in a lot of different ways. It’s all connected. It doesn’t feel disjointed to me. It’s all connected in some way, but it gives me a chance to touch it in different ways.

And they all feed each other. So all the things that I learned with my client engagements brings me into the consulting with other clients. All of those experiences I can bring to my students, and give them a more robust education about how we work with clients and things that I’m working on, and what the industry looks like and all that stuff. And when I’m doing industry stuff, then I learn some other things and then bring it back to some of those other things. So I feel like it’s all connected, but it does allow me to have a different day, every day.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m curious, has the pandemic changed business for you in any way? I know we talked about sort of have you seen a change in the market, but since the pandemic has started, has that shifted how you do business?

Nakita M. Pope:
Not particularly, to be honest. I think just in terms of my processes and my creative process and stuff, that hasn’t changed very much. Like I said, I think more people are willing to work remotely. So that’s changed a little bit of the opportunities that I’ve been getting and people that are reaching out to work with me. I think from a logistical standpoint, I think more people want to be on video these days.

Like I said, I’ve worked with people all over the country for a while now, and most times people were completely fine with just a phone call. But now that everybody’s kind of been forced to work remotely, I think that video calls are now the go-to instead of the phone call. So from a logistical standpoint, that is something that I’ve seen that’s changed. Which I don’t mind most times, but it is definitely interesting to see a shift in that. But then I saw the uptick in it and then I saw the fatigue that came from it.

So now I’ve gone back to giving people a choice, “Listen, you don’t have to be on video if you don’t want to. Let me know what works best for you. I don’t want to make it more uncomfortable for you or make it more of a heavy lift to have this meeting.” So I try to be respectful of that too.

Maurice Cherry:
I say that also when I have meetings, I actually have two separate booking links, one is for phone, one is for Zoom. And I’ll only give the Zoom to people that I like. People that I want to see, I’m like, “You can get the Zoom call.” If you just hit me up out the blue and want something, a phone call is fine. It’s the same information. So I get what you’re saying though about having that option though. Because even I think with the fact that everybody’s getting on video, folks still have not really gotten used to it. We’re-

Nakita M. Pope:
No.

Maurice Cherry:
… what, two something years in and people are still like, “Oh, sorry about the background,” or the lighting is bad or whatever. And I’m not expecting studio quality video here-

Nakita M. Pope:
No, right.

Maurice Cherry:
… even though we are very much in the future. I’m not expecting that. But I don’t know, sometimes it’s different. Plus, there’s all these different video platforms. There’s Zoom, there’s Google Meet, there’s WebEx. What else do I have installed? I have BlueJeans. I have Teams. I’m like, Just pick up the phone.

Nakita M. Pope:
It’s too much.

Maurice Cherry:
Right, just pick up the phone. It’s the same information. It’s the same information.

Nakita M. Pope:
I’m going to have to steal that one. I might have two separate links too, now. Because mine was already set up, just the default was phone. And then I realized that all the instructions said, “I will give you a call at that time,” after they book. But I still get emails, “I didn’t ever see a link to a video call.” And I’m like, “That’s because it wasn’t really supposed to be one.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, they’ll say, “I didn’t see a link.” Or sometimes what’ll happen with people is they’ll say, “Oh, well I’m in the car going somewhere and I’m not going to be…” Just call me. Just call me.

Nakita M. Pope:
Yeah, it’s fine.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s fine.

Nakita M. Pope:
It really is.

Maurice Cherry:
The phone still works. It did not go away in the pandemic. It still works. I see that one thing that you’re offering now is a course. You’re offering a course called Building a Business Brand. Talk to me about that.

Nakita M. Pope:
That was something that I did in collaboration with Small Business Invoicing Company. And they were looking to just build a library of resources for their small business audience. And so I was able to do that with them and it was really great. It was a series. I think there were three modules. But we just talked about the benefits and the value of being able to build a brand for your business. Whether you’re creative or not, regardless of what type of business you have, I think most of us start a business because we’re really passionate about what it is that we do. We’re passionate about whatever that skill set is, whatever product or service that we are putting out there in the world. And so that tends to be for most people where your area of expertise is.

But that doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily an expert at being able to brand yourself or market yourself. Even creatives that are in these spaces every day struggle with that, because it’s hard to figure out what your personal brand is or your business brand is. Sometimes it takes having some help from outside. But we just talked about the fundamentals of that, and how much of a difference it can make to distinguish you in your category.

I hear all the time where some people are getting ready to start new businesses or they come to me and they’re like, “I’m starting a business that’s this, fill in the blank. And people are telling me that I shouldn’t start a business in this, because it’s oversaturated and there’s already so many people doing that thing.” And I was like, “Well, that’s really where branding comes in. The fact that you can establish a personality or some value-add or some way of talking about your product or service that’s different from everybody else is what’s going to stand out.” So it was really kind of built around that and it was super fun.

Maurice Cherry:
Have you thought about expanding into doing other courses?

Nakita M. Pope:
Oh, for sure. I’ve done lots of workshops here and there before, both under the umbrella of other organizations, and some independent ones on my own. And I don’t know when I’m going to tackle this, because like I said, I’m trying to take a little bit of a break, but I’m looking at, one of the things that I see is that, for me, I really care so much about what it is that I do. And teaching is something that’s really close to my heart.

So I’m always looking like, what do people need? What is it that people are struggling with? Or where can I have the most impact? And one of the things I see, especially for designers is that, and not just designers, actually people that are in marketing, for instance, some people who have design backgrounds or even people that are in coming from sales, often I hear people, “I want to talk about brand strategy. I want to get into that, but I have no idea how to make that transition.”

And for designers, especially going from strictly the visual identity and the creative side of things to talking heavily about strategy sometimes is a challenge. And it’s not because they’re not already doing it. Because that was my situation, in retrospect, I realized that I was always a strategic designer. That was always a big part of my process. But I didn’t necessarily put it out there. I didn’t explain all of my process to my clients necessarily. I didn’t build it into my proposals. It just wasn’t at the forefront. But it was there underneath all the time. Before I designed anything, I did all the research. I looked at their competitors, I did all these things. But I realized that for most designers, it’s hard to make that transition, because they don’t know how to reposition themselves in the market in that way.

And they don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know what they need to know to be able to take those parts that they may already be doing, and be able to go deeper with that and really make it a big part of their practice. And because that’s part of the process that I really love, I’ve always been looking at how can I do more of this? And then of course at some point I had that fork in the road, where I had to decide, am I going to position myself in this way? Or am I just going to make this a bigger part of my design process?

And so when I started Branding Chicks, that was the pivot for me to decide that I was going to make brand strategies the thing that I led with. And I still do a lot of design for my clients, but I also am now in a place where, probably, about half of my clients, I’m only doing strategy for, I’m not necessarily creating any deliverables on the design side. So it’s kind of the best of both worlds.

Maurice Cherry:
And I feel like we’ve started to see designers probably over the past maybe four or five years, start to lean more into that strategy. Because it’s been pushed a lot to say-

Nakita M. Pope:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
… “Yes, you can know how to do design, you can know the programs and the tools and the methods, but until you’re able to apply that in a business sense, then that’s when you’ll become truly effective.” Douglas Davis, who we both know, has a whole book about it. So it’s something that we’re starting to see a lot of designers try to go into. The thing with the courses, though, I’m really interested about, because I feel like courses are something that, and I’m dating myself here, I’m thinking way back to 2010, probably, even a little bit earlier than that, but do you remember CreativeLive? Does that sound familiar to you?

Nakita M. Pope:
Yes, I do.

Maurice Cherry:
CreativeLive used to do these multi-day courses with entrepreneurs would come in and they would teach. And I mean for the time it was pretty novel. I actually don’t even know what CreativeLive is doing now. But I know that something that is pushed on a lot of entrepreneurs, it’s like, “Oh, take the knowledge that put it into a course, and then sell the course.” Which is always an option, but are your clients going to be the same people that you want to sell your course to? It feels like it opens up a separate revenue stream, potentially. But then unless you’re just not a great salesman, that’s skills you have to tap into.

I tried to do courses when I had my studio, and even though I’ve taught before, I was like, “I don’t want to sell the course.” It didn’t feel right for me to sell the course. And I know that people do, this was actually a little bit before Skillshare, but people would do Skillshare and things like that. I taught at Mediabistro and I sort of did my courses that way. And it was easy because it was just like you had a PowerPoint, you had a microphone, you spoke all through the lessons and stuff like that.
And it works, but it did add on, for me at least, it just added on this extra dimension of sales that I have to do. And I’m like, “It’s not worth it. For the money that I’m getting from it, it’s not worth it for me trying to hustle on these courses. I’ll just get some more clients.”

Nakita M. Pope:
Yeah, I totally get that. And I agree with you. I don’t think that any of the courses that I’ve done previously or the one that I’m going to be doing about brand strategy isn’t really targeted towards clients. It’s much more targeted to other creative professionals more than anything else. So I look at it as a form of professional development, I mean, because I did the one that you’re talking about in partnership with someone else, that was meant to be an evergreen course, so it was fully recorded and all that kind of stuff. And so they’ll have it for a while and their audiences can access it whenever.

The way that I’m approaching my brand strategy course is I’m looking at it as sort of a masterclass. I want it to be hands-on and I want it to be small and I want it to be in real time, because I enjoy that part of teaching. And I feel like there’s so much so to learn, there’s so much to share, and there’s so many questions that people always have that this is born out of my day-to-day, and people that ask me these questions or they send me emails and those kind of things. So I’m looking at how can I help them in real time? I want to answer your question, not a general question like yours. I want to answer your question.

So I feel like, for me, I’m looking at sort of a masterclass kind of thing more than an evergreen, pre-recorded course. I think there’s a lot of value in those as well, but I don’t know if that’s what I really want to do. I just like the hands-on so much more, so that’s the way that I’m looking at it. Yeah,

Maurice Cherry:
I gotcha. So while we’re talking about teaching, I have to ask you about The Creative Circus. The Creative Circus is where you’ve taught for, how long have you been teaching there?

Nakita M. Pope:
I think this is my 13th year.

Maurice Cherry:
13 years. It’s closing its doors. Jordan Taylor, who I had on a couple of episodes ago, we talked about that. How do you feel about it?

Nakita M. Pope:
It’s a set of mixed in motions. It really is. Other than some workshops here and there and some guest lectures and things like that, this has been my most continuous experience with teaching and it’s something that I truly love. So it’s always going to be something I truly love. I’ve seen so many talented people come through those doors, and it’s such an amazing alumni network. And so many people, I’m still connected to both that are still in the building, people that are graduates, former instructors, and things like that. So it’s a mixed set of emotions.

I’m excited about what my next chapter looks like. I know that frees up some mental and emotional space, and also some time to do some other things. So in some ways I’m excited about that, but I’m going to miss that place. I’m going to miss my students. So it’s definitely been some emotional times, up and down, over the last six months or so.

Maurice Cherry:
When you look back at that time, because you not only were there as a teacher, but you were advising, especially along DEI and stuff like that, what feelings in particular come to mind? Are there any sort of memories that you have specifically about your time there?

Nakita M. Pope:
Oh, so many. I think the things that stand out most to me is, as a teacher, the thing that you want the most is to watch someone’s light bulb go off. And they’re like, “Oh, man, I get it now.” And I’ve seen that happen over the years in multiple ways. Sometimes it’s about a course that I’m teaching, sometimes it’s about the DEI training that I might be doing, or it might just be those life conversations that I have with my students. I just love connecting with the students more than anything else.

So many of those moments are the ones that I hold close where they trusted me to tell me something about their lives or to ask for advice. I was able to help them with something that really made a difference for them in their professional careers or their academic careers. Those are the things that I’m going to keep close to my heart, because those are the things that let me know that I was having impact and made it all worth it.

Maurice Cherry:
When you step back and just look at, I guess, Atlanta as, I don’t know, I guess you could say a design education city, I feel like over, I’d say maybe the past 20 or so years, I mean, we had Atlanta College of Art, and then that went away. Now, there’s The Creative Circus that’s going away. I’ve heard there’s been some changes at The Portfolio center, which I think it’s now just called Miami Ad School, I believe.

Nakita M. Pope:
Mm-hmm. It is.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you feel about just the state of design education in the city? I mean, I feel like we’ve had these specialized colleges for a while that taught them, and then over the years they’ve sort of changed and went away in some way.

Nakita M. Pope:
Yeah, lots of changes over the years. I think some of it… Well, one of the things, like you said, this is definitely a design education city. When I was on the board with AIGA, I was running the education committee, and we have seven design programs in metro Atlanta. That is unheard of for even most other metropolitan cities. So even the more niche schools that you’re talking about, there’s still, Georgia State has design programs, Georgia Tech has design programs, University of Georgia, which we kind of still count. There’s other schools as well that have designed programs even outside of The Portfolio School, and more specialized schools and things like that.

So it was just such a breadth of education in that space. I think that some of the changes are good. I think some of them are going to have some ripple effects. I think one of the things that has always been a struggle, and I think with the changes in the programs it’s going to add to it, is that even though so many people have been educated in design here in the city or around the city, they tend to not stay in the community for their professional pursuits.

They get their education in this space and then they move to another place. Which nothing is wrong with that, but that has been part of the challenge is trying to retain that talent here. Because I think sometimes, especially for those students who might move into the city specifically to go to school, they don’t necessarily always have time while they’re in school to dive into the creative communities here in a real way. So they only see the little bubble that’s created for them by their programs. So they don’t necessarily get a chance to see all that’s available and what the real Atlanta creative community looks like. So when it’s time for them to look for a job, they don’t always consider staying.

Maurice Cherry:
I feel like there’s an ongoing trend in Atlanta about not being able to retain, or I would say appreciate creative talent.

Nakita M. Pope:
Nope.

Maurice Cherry:
Not just in design, I’m thinking specifically about music, but music, art, design, I feel like that’s an ongoing thing, where, and I mean we’re speaking of the city as it’s a person, but I don’t know if the city appreciates what it has and what it cultivates here to the point where people would want to stay here. There’s been several musicians that have blown up elsewhere, but when they were here in Atlanta, nobody would give them a chance. I’ve certainly had folks on the show who were from Atlanta, and they may have gotten their education here, but they had to go elsewhere to find opportunities or to do big things.

I’ve had other Atlanta folks that are, I would say, other educators and other business folks to ask, like, “Why do you think that’s the case? What is it about Atlanta that’s not making these people want to stay? Is it the workforce?” I would imagine there are other factors, just cost of living and traffic and stuff like that. But I even think about when I was in my 20s, I definitely, at one point. Wanted to leave. I was like, “I feel like I’ve hit a ceiling.” This is well before I started Revision Path. But I was like, “I feel like I’ve hit a ceiling in my career. I don’t know where else I can go from here, unless I move away.” Maybe that’s what plays into it. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Nakita M. Pope:
I think there’s a lot of factors. I think some of them, you’ve already tapped into. The other side of it, my experience is a little different from yours. I came here for grad school. I came here to go to Portfolio Center, which is now Miami Ad School. And I was going to finish my two years and I was going to just leave it open. Where do I end up? I don’t know. But everything is wide open for me. And so by the time I graduated, I was actually looking at moving to Seattle, but I graduated in the middle of a recession. So I shot my book all over the country, and people are like, “We love your work, but we’re on a hiring freeze. We’re not hiring anyone.”

So that meant that I ended up staying here. I mean, it took me a little longer to find a job and all those things. So I was like, “Well, I guess I’ll just stay here for a while.” And so I ended up getting my first design job here. And I think, honestly, that’s the best thing that could have happened for me. The other thing I’m aware of is that my situation also isn’t everybody else’s, is that because I’m independent and I’ve been independent for so long, I never really went through the process of trying to move up in a creative agency completely.

I worked in agencies. I worked in in-house. I’ve done a lot of those things, but on the short term, or I did them for a little while. And so I did a lot of that moving around in the beginning. But for the last 12 years, I’ve worked for myself. And so for all of the things that come along with being an independent creative, and there are many, both positive and negative, I think one of the biggest positives, and I can say this in hindsight now, is that there is no ceiling when you’re on your own. When you’re on your own, you create your own path, for better or for worse. You might make some mistakes. Whatever those things look like, you’re on your own. So I feel like, for me, I don’t know if I’d have been able to do all of the things that are available to me now had I stayed in a traditional agency environment for my entire career.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow.

Nakita M. Pope:
And I don’t know if that’s the truth for everyone else. I know other people have taken that path and it’s worked out extremely well for them. I don’t know if it would’ve for me, and it’s hard for me to know, because I don’t have the opportunity to do both. I did some in the beginning, and now I’m here, and I think everybody’s path is their own.

But I do think about that often. What would that have looked like? And would I have gotten to a place where I was like, okay, like you said, I have to move away if I’m going to move up, or I have to go do this if I’m going to move up or whatever those things look like? So I think it’s different for everybody, but the landscape of what it looks like for different people and what your personal commitments are, and what kind of lifestyle you want to live and all those things really play into whether this is a good fit for you or not.

But on the flip side, I do think that Atlanta is a lot of creatives here. And I do feel like it’s a very supportive, creative community. So I don’t know, like you said, if the city itself does everything that it can, but I feel like once you find your people here, I feel like that network is amazing.

Maurice Cherry:
I agree. I agree 100%. Once you get into that niche and you find those folks, you find your tribe, your people, whatever you want to call it, there’s no limit to the things that you can even work on. And to speak to what you said earlier, I did have to leave. I had to leave where I was AT&T, strike out on my own, and then that’s when I started to really… Well, first of all, I could never have pictured staying AT&T. There are people who I used to work with back then in 2008 that are still there. God bless them, because it couldn’t be me, could not be me. I say that to say, though, I mean, everyone has their path, for some folks staying in that very comfortable, crucible of being a production designer, if that’s what they want to do, that’s what they want to do.

I just knew that I could do better than where I was at. And this is not a slight on the people that are still there, but I could do better. And I just didn’t know, when I think about Atlanta in 2008, I mean this is pre SCAD. This is pre a lot of larger tech companies setting up offices in such here.

Nakita M. Pope:
True.

Maurice Cherry:
This is pre Uber and Lyft. I was like, “I don’t have a car. Where am I going to find a good job? I got to catch MARTA somewhere, it’s wild.” So now I think the city is definitely different in that aspect. We do attract a lot of people that want to come here for, I think, just creative art stuff in general, not just for maybe design. But over the past 10 years, we’ve really blown up with television and entertainment.

Nakita M. Pope:
Sure.

Maurice Cherry:
And that opens up a lot of roles in the creative space. So the environment here has just gotten a lot more rich since then.

Nakita M. Pope:
Agree. Agree, wholeheartedly.

Maurice Cherry:
Now speaking of the sort of Atlanta community, you mentioned AIGA. I just want to congratulate you on your recent AIGA Fellow Award.

Nakita M. Pope:
Thank you. Thank you so much.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, talk to me about that.

Nakita M. Pope:
Such a great honor. AIGA, for those of you out there that don’t know, it’s sort of the national body of professional organization for designers. And so we’ve got chapters all over the country. The Atlanta chapter has been active for a really long time. And each chapter has the opportunity to award fellow awards to people in their community that they feel have really moved forward the area of design or made impact on the local, regional, and national level.

And I think our chapter has honored 32 people, possibly. No, 16 people. It’s a very short list, so I was honored for 2021. We just had the celebration a couple months ago, because of the pandemic and everything. But I was given the honor in 2021. So that was a magical moment for me. It gave me an opportunity to really celebrate my community and celebrate all the things that I’ve been able to do and touch, and people that I’ve been able to meet in this community. So it was really a great night.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. I’m glad that the community has come around you to recognize all of the great work that you’ve been doing, and to have their support for you. So that’s great.

Nakita M. Pope:
Yeah, it was a great honor. It was a great honor.

Maurice Cherry:
And now speaking of other projects, I see that you have this project called the Bella Boss Box. How did you come up with the idea for doing a subscription box?

Nakita M. Pope:
So we talked about having your people. I feel like, I don’t know about you, but my friends are the ones that always get me into stuff, especially my creative friends. They’re the ones that call you with a bright idea and be like, “So this is what I’m thinking.” So it was kind of similar to that. One of my good friends, Nekeidra Taylor, and actually we met through a client. A client of mine introduced me to her because she was like, “I think you guys should meet.” And so this was years ago. And so we’ve been friends and professional colleagues for a while.

She’s in public relations. And so during the pandemic, we hadn’t done our normal check-ins or have coffee here and there, kind of thing. And so we finally had a check-in call, and we were just catching up and talking. And we just ended up talking about our journeys as entrepreneurs and what the pandemic had been like and our support systems and things like that. And the fact that without those support systems, we wouldn’t have been able to do half of the things that we’ve been able to do.

And so from that conversation, we started thinking about what must it be like for people, especially women, who are starting businesses or running businesses who don’t have that support system. I think that I’ve been lucky, personally, because of my network and people who’ve introduced me to other people or just friends of mine who I’ve been friends with for a long time, but who are now also business owners as well. And even if your friends and your family support you in what you’re doing, and sometimes they won’t, sometimes they just won’t understand.

But even if they do, if they’ve never done it before, they still don’t know what it’s actually like. And so sometimes it helps to have someone that you can pick up the phone and call and ask a question, and feel like it’s a safe space to ask a question. Or to just vent and be like, “Look, I’m about to go work at Popeye’s.” That used to be mine when I was really frustrated with being an entrepreneur. I’m like, “Yep, I’ll just go and work at Popeye’s. I like chicken. It’ll be fine.”

And you need those people that you can call and say that, and they totally get it. You don’t have to explain it, you don’t have to do anything. They’re just like, “Oh, it’s that day, huh? Mm-hmm. So what happened?” And so that’s kind of how it was born. We talked about it and she’s like, “No, I think you should do…” We talked about a subscription box. How could we build a community of women that would be able to connect with each other in that way? So we came up with the idea for a subscription box, and I was like, That would be really cool.” And she’s like, “You should definitely do it.” And I’m like, I should do it. Why, I got to do it?”

And so she’s like, “I don’t have time to do it.” And I was like, “Well, I’m not doing it if you’re not doing it.” And then next thing I know, we’re setting up an actual call to talk about it. And that was October 2020. And so we planned this whole thing and launched the whole thing during the pandemic. We launched in April 2021. We hadn’t seen each other in person until March 2021. So this was all done on Zoom, during the pandemic. Even though she lives here, we were still kind of staying away from everybody and stuff. So it was kind of crazy.

But it’s been awesome. I feel like we’ve connected with some really amazing women all over the country who have a multitude of different types of businesses and things like that. And then just this summer we decided that we were going to pivot a little bit. The subscription box was going really well. As a designer, it was awesome. It gave me an opportunity to create things specifically for that community. We had a zine. I was designing products for the boxes, and I did all the branding for the boxes themselves, and all that stuff. And she’s in PR. She did a lot of the writing and things like that. So we really were a good fit to compliment each other.

But this summer we looked at everything and kind of like we tried to have those moments where we stop everything and start working on the business instead of in it. And okay, where are we? And where do we want to be? And we felt like the community part of it wasn’t getting as much shine as we really wanted. That was why we built this thing in the first place, so we decided to take a break and regroup and relaunch just the community.

So we’re still kind of working on that. We’re taking a break. She’s busy. I’m busy. We both have separate businesses on top of this one. So we’ve decided to just take a break for a little while, really get grounded in what we want, and then relaunch again. Preferably, we want to do an online community so that we have a chance to provide deeper relationships for the women that are our subscribers. So that’s what we really want to do.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. So you’re pivoting from the subscription box to an online community. So just sort taking that notion and deepening it, I guess.

Nakita M. Pope:
Yes, exactly. Exactly. Because I think what we heard from our subscribers was that they love the items in the box, and they love so much of that stuff and the magazine and all those things, but they really love the idea of being exposed to other women who were doing amazing things and hearing about people’s businesses. And we would do this series called Respect on Our Name. So we would do interviews with black women entrepreneurs on Instagram. So people really responded to those kind of things a little bit more than the items in the box. And so much of the stuff in the box was also about providing resources and information. So we felt like we could wrap that all up and also bring the community to a higher level if we pivoted a little bit. So that’s what we’re looking at doing.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you interviewed me back in 2018 for Design Observer, and during that interview you had asked me how passion projects have impacted my career. Now I want to flip the script and ask you that question. How have your passion projects impacted your career?

Nakita M. Pope:
Lots of different ways. I think Bella Boss is definitely one of those passion projects. I probably would’ve done that even if it wasn’t a business. That’s just something I’m passionate about. I’m passionate about seeing Black women shine and succeed and women in general. And I think running a business has been such an adventure for me in so many ways. And I think that I know what it’s like even when you have support. I can’t imagine what it’s like when you don’t have support. So I always try to be that support or give people resources wherever I can. So I think Bella Boss is definitely something I would consider to be a passion project.

Mentoring is another passion of mine. Almost everything that I’ve done has come from something that holds a special place in my heart. Teaching is just more of mentorship for me. So mentorship and teaching are very much tied together. I’ve done a lot of public speaking, and I used to be terrified of public speaking. But the thing that shifted public speaking for me was looking at it as a bigger classroom. And because I love teaching so much, I’m like, “Well, you just get a chance to share knowledge with more people.”

So I feel like those aspects of my career have come out of the passion of wanting to share with other people. Branding is so much about being creative and solving problems and all those kinds of things. And I think all of those things are core to my personality and core to the things that I care about.

One of the stories that I love the most about when I was a kid is that my mom told me that I used to love puzzles. And so she would buy me all these different puzzles. So because I had so many, I got to a point where I would literally dump all the pieces out in the middle of the floor and solve them all at one time. And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s pretty much what I do every day. Mm-hmm. That’s pretty much the life that I’ve built for myself.” So when I think about things like that, I feel like all the things that I care about or that’s fun for me, or that’s interesting for me has been the foundation of every single thing that I do every day.

Maurice Cherry:
How have you built your confidence over the years as a creative professional? I mean, you’ve been doing this for a very long time. That longevity obviously has to come from somewhere. What fuels you as a creative professional?

Nakita M. Pope:
I try not to stop learning. As a teacher, I feel like you have to learn all the time. But even outside of that, I think I’ve always been naturally curious. And so for me, I want to ask more questions. I want to learn more. I want to talk to all the people that know the things that I don’t know. I want that, that’s what feeds me. And so I feel like confidence for me comes from knowledge and it comes from experience. And sometimes you have one without the other or vice versa, and then sometimes you have both. And I think over the years, I’ve just tried to learn as much as I possibly can on a day-to-day basis. And because of the years behind me, now I have the experience as well. But in the beginning, I didn’t have all the experience. I just had the knowledge and I had the willingness to learn.

And I think, if nothing else, I feel like those are the two things that has allowed me to grow the most and to be willing to take a chance. I can’t stress that enough. So many of the things that I’ve been able to do or that I’ve done that I can look back and be the most proud of are the things that terrified me in the beginning. If it doesn’t make me want to vomit a little bit when I say yes to it, then it is probably not going to make me grow. And so going back to our previous conversation just about being an independent and how that looks so different for me, I think the flexibility to try a bunch of new things and different things and to take on new challenges, I’ve had the flexibility to do that for the last 12 years, and I’ve taken full advantage of that.

If someone comes to me and says, “Hey, I really think you should do this thing.” And I’m like, “I’ve never done that thing before. I don’t know much about that thing. Let me go learn some more about that thing and then decide.” And then if I decide, “Well, it’s going to be a challenge, but I’m going to do it anyway.” I feel like that’s where all the growth comes from. And those are the things that have allowed me to be more confident. Not just because of what I already know, but because of the fact that I’m willing to take a chance and willing to take on the challenge.

I know that I’ve done that before and I didn’t die. And I made some mistakes, but most of the time it went pretty well. I’m like, that just gives me more confidence to do it again to something that’s unknown that I’ve never done before. I was just like, “Okay, I did that. Everything was fine. Okay, let’s try it again.” So I think so much of that is just taking chances too.

Maurice Cherry:
Whose work are you inspired by right now?

Nakita M. Pope:
Oh, quite a few people. Some of them are visual, of course, and then some of them are just community-based kind of things. I love what Kenny Thacker is doing with a 100 Roses from Concrete in the advertising industry. I think the programming that they’re putting together and the resources that they’re providing for young Black people are just amazing.

Visually, I am a big fan of Bisa Butler and her work, and right now I just can’t get enough of it. My best friend bought me one of her coffee table books for Christmas, and it’s like one of my prize possessions right now. But I get inspiration from so many different places and I’m like discovering new people every day, truly every day. That’s why I tell my students all the time that I use social media as a curation tool.

So I usually don’t care how many people follow me, but on any of my platforms, if you go look at them, I probably follow three times more people than follow me, because I’m just like, “Ooh, I want to see what this person is doing.” “Ooh, what is this person doing?” Ooh, I didn’t know about this artist. Let me follow them.” Or, “Ooh, that agency’s doing that. Let me follow them.” So I’m just like, “I just want all that good stuff coming in my feed when I log it on.” So I find new stuff and new people and new agencies and organizations and artists all the time. And that’s part of what feeds my creative process too.

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

Nakita M. Pope:
I want to travel the world. I do travel. I don’t travel as much as I would like to, but I would like to hit the majority of the countries before I leave this Earth, so that’s one thing. Another is I need to finish my book. I think the last time I was on with you, I might have talked about my book and it has been sitting in a dark closet for a long time. I did the first draft of it, and then I just kind of let it go. In retrospect, I think I might’ve just gotten scared and was like, “Oh, I can’t do this.” But I definitely want to revisit it. I’m going to pick it up again. I still feel like the subject matter is important. I think it’s still relevant and I still want to do it.

It’s a book about branding, and I just feel like there’s not enough resources out there that make it plain what branding really is. And I think especially for entrepreneurs who are trying to build a brand and don’t know what that means, or even for individuals who are trying to build a brand for themselves and don’t know how to do that, I think that there’s a lot of insight, hopefully, that I can provide. So I definitely want to tackle that and get it back up and running. I just hate that I didn’t finish it, so it’s got to get finished.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, I think if you go back and take a look at it, especially with all the knowledge you’ve gained now, you’ll probably see some things in there that you can update, that you can maybe add to-

Nakita M. Pope:
For sure.

Maurice Cherry:
… or something. So take your-

Nakita M. Pope:
Definite change.

Maurice Cherry:
… time with it. Take your time with it. I mean, the thing with books, I mean, I’m finding this out myself as I’m working on a book, which I guess is a sort a scoop. I mean by the time this comes out, people will know that I’m working on a book about Revision Path. But-

Nakita M. Pope:
Ooh, I’m excited.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I’ve been working on a book about Revision Path and it has been a journey. Because at first I was like, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to do it about the show or whatever.” And I was talking to my editor and he is like, “No, you have to go deeper.” And I’m like, “There’s not really that much to it. I wanted to do the show, and I did the show.” He’s like, “No, you have to go, go back further. Where did the seed start?” And it’s taken me all the way back to my childhood. It’s like a therapy session-

Nakita M. Pope:
I love it.

Maurice Cherry:
… trying to get through this book. I mean, I don’t know when it’s going to come out because I’m still working on… Well, one, I’m working on the proposal, but then just even all of the thought to go into how I’m going to approach the story and talk about it and everything, it’ll be good when it comes out. It’ll be sort of parts autobiography part about the show, but-

Nakita M. Pope:
Oh, man. That sounds awesome.

Maurice Cherry:
… it’s a lot. It’s a lot.

Nakita M. Pope:
Yes, it is.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s a lot.

Nakita M. Pope:
It is a lot. And I think it is a major undertaking. So I feel like even when I started it several years ago, I told myself that even being willing to take on a project that big, is a victory, period.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, yeah-

Nakita M. Pope:
Full stop.

Maurice Cherry:
… absolutely. Absolutely.

Nakita M. Pope:
Regardless of what happens after that, that is a victory.

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

Nakita M. Pope:
To be honest, I’m kind of leaving it up to the universe a little bit. I think part of this break that I’m taking is just about getting some rest and giving myself a chance to take a break and be able to hear my own voice about what I want next. The benefit of all the work and the thing, the people that I’ve been connected to and done stuff with and collaborated with, it’s such a blessing that I have several opportunities to do things next, but I want to make sure that I make the right move. I want to make sure that what I’m doing next is going to be fulfilling, that it’s going to allow me to grow, because that’s always something that I want. I never want to stop growing. So I’m really taking a break just so that I can hear my own voice and decide what’s next.

But also I’m taking my hands off of it a little bit and sort of letting things unfold the way that they should unfold. I think sometimes, and I’ve had to learn this the hard way, because sometimes I just want to plan everything, but so often when we try to make plans, the plans that we make are coming from our perspective. You can’t plan something that you don’t know about to some degree. But I think that sometimes you need to let there be some divine intervention, some universe to step in, because sometimes the things that we think we want next isn’t big enough, because we can’t see it yet.

And so I feel like I don’t know what it is, but in my heart, I feel like that’s where I am. I’m at that kind of space where it’s time for something big, but I don’t know what that thing is, yet. So I’m just going to center myself and take some time and figure out what that is. Branding Chicks, of course, will still be part of the equation, at least for now, but I feel like there’s so much more to do and so many more people to have fun with and create with. So I’m excited about whatever it ends up being, to be honest. I just don’t know all of what it is yet.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. I think that’s a good place to be though. To know that you have this possibility or all these possibilities ahead of you and just be excited for what that could be. That’s a great place to be, because a lot of folks are stuck if they don’t know what or whatever they think might be coming next is just more of the same thing. So to have that, I guess, opportunity to dream in that way, that’s priceless. That’s great.

Nakita M. Pope:
You have to believe it first. That’s what believing really is, right? If it was already concrete and set in stone, then you don’t have to believe in it. It’s just there. So sometimes you have to just believe that it’s going to be great and that it’s coming and that it’s yours, and that you’re going to have what you’re supposed to have, period. I believe that. So I don’t know all of what that’s going to look like. I don’t know all the details, but I do believe that I’m going to have what I’m supposed to have and I think it’s going to be good.

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

Nakita M. Pope:
You can check us out at brandingchicks.com. That’s where you can find all of my work there. And Bella Boss is bellabossbox.com. The site is on hiatus right now while we pivot, but you can still find us there. And also on social media, you can check out Branding Chicks, both on Instagram and Facebook, and for Bella Boss Box, also on Instagram, Facebook, and I don’t think we’re on Twitter, no, but Facebook and Instagram.

Maurice Cherry:
All right, Sounds good. Well, Nakita Pope, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I feel like every time that I see you, and I know that you and I haven’t seen each other in a while, because of-

Nakita M. Pope:
I know.

Maurice Cherry:
… the pandemic, but every time I see you, you are such a just bright light of just like energy and positivity. And I know that the Atlanta community, of course, knows this, that’s why you have that AIGA Fellow Award. But when I think of somebody that is always such a positive, just, influence in the design community locally and otherwise, I think of you. So I’m just-

Nakita M. Pope:
Thank you very much.

Maurice Cherry:
… so glad that you’re still doing your thing. I’m excited to see what you come up with next. And thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Nakita M. Pope:
Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you so much for that. And thank you for always supporting me. And I love these conversations, whether they happen on the podcast or not, where we’re just catching up. So thank you so much. I appreciate it.

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Rebecca Brooker

We’re closing out Pride Month with the second part of my conversation with Rebecca Brooker! (If you missed the first part, check it out here.)

We talked about Rebecca’s relocation to Argentina (after a stint back in Trinidad), and how she’s adjusted and found community in Buenos Aires. Rebecca also went in depth about Queer Design Club, the Queer Design Count, and the upcoming Queer Design Summit taking place on July 7.

Rebecca is proof that building community and staying true to yourself is a surefire way for personal and professional success!

Transcript

Full Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
Now for this week’s interview. This is part two of my conversation with designer, art director and community builder, Rebecca Brooker. Let’s start the show.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. That’s a lot. I mean, from –

Rebecca Brooker:
It’s a long story.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, it’s a long story, but I mean, there’s goodness. I mean, having to leave the country like that that quickly because the employer forgot to notify you and now you have to move back home, but then now you might be moving to another country, to Argentina. Oh my God. I guess I’m curious. Once you got to Argentina, what was that like?

Rebecca Brooker:
Yeah, I mean, I’d never been to South America at all before, so this was a completely new experience for me. I had studied a little bit of Spanish in Trinidad, but never used it in practicality. And so I was nervous. I ended up meeting two of my bosses, my would be bosses from that team in New York and they were telling me, “Eh, it’s a cool place. It’s beautiful. It doesn’t snow. You have so much fun. It’s a great nightlife, very young culture. The agency is growing.” So I was like, “All right, this is a totally new opportunity. What else am I going to do with my life?” I felt so beat down having to return to Trinidad and not know should I think about opening my own agency here? Should I think about getting a job at somewhere here?

Rebecca Brooker:
And then this job kind of just fell into my lap and I was like, “All right, we’re going to go on another adventure. We’re going to see what’s in store.” When I moved to Argentina, I was just in shock. I was like in a good way too, in a good way. I was in shock in a way that I was so open to every new experience, Maurice. I really had to put myself in a mindset that I’m moving to this place. I just lost a whole life behind me in the states. All my friends back there, my partners back there, all my coworkers, everybody. But I have to look ahead and I have to be open to whatever comes next, and I think that’s just the mindset that I had to keep going with.

Rebecca Brooker:
And for the first time in my life, it was like I was living in a studio alone. I would go out to eat at a restaurant and I’d sit alone. And I spent just so much time in the beginning of my move by myself, just having not made any friends yet outside of the people that I work with in this office. I think that was a turning point in my life where it was the first time I really had to do that in an environment where, it was different when I moved to St. John’s because I moved into the dorms and I was immediately put into a group of people that I could be friends with. And now I’m 20… God. How old was I? 24, moving to Argentina, by myself, don’t have anybody there. You go to a restaurant, you order for one, you take a book, you read something. And if I heard people speak in English, I would literally turn around and be like, “Did you just speak English?” Like “Where are you from?”

Rebecca Brooker:
And that was really how I started to make my friends. I would just be this like curious, observant person. If I heard people speak in English, I’d be like, “Tell me about you. What are you doing here?” And that was how I started to find my community. I ended up finding an English speaking gym. It’s run by an English guy and he wanted to create a community for English speakers to come together and train. And so I met these people and that put me into a new circle of English speaking people in Buenos Aires that led me to my own network now. In addition to this, the agency I was working at, I had a… I wouldn’t say I had problems at the beginning, but I had anxiety because I was one of the only native English speakers, right.

Rebecca Brooker:
Everybody at the agency could speak English, but we were usually trained to speak English for professional use. So in a meeting example, like we would send our clients communications in English, but everybody in the office would talk to each other in Spanish. So, they would say something and someone would be raising an issue and everyone’s talking in Spanish meetings in Spanish and I was just lost. I could not pick up anything that they would say. And especially also because Argentine Spanish, it has a little different of a dialect than Mexican Spanish or Spain Spanish. So I couldn’t even make out what they were singing. And so many times in my first year, I wouldn’t get the joke. People would be laughing. I’d be like, “I didn’t get it.” And it just made me feel othered. But when I started to learn Spanish and my coworkers, bless them, they made a concerted effort to keep me looped in.

Rebecca Brooker:
We would have a meeting in Spanish and then I had a coworker who would come over and say, “Okay, I’ll stay with you and explain everything we just said in English.” And I’m like, “Thank you, thank you so much.” And it was just a lot of awkward moments like that until I got better and I learned, and now I’d say I’m not fluid, but I could understand a lot. I can respond. So it was definitely a moment of growth in my life, I think. A moment of solitude, a moment of acceptance that sometimes things happen and you just have to go with it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Wow. I mean, I can’t help, but think now, also in the midst of all of this happening, you also co-founded Queer Design Club, which is also about helping to bring together a community while you were also, like in your own life, trying to find community. Talk to me about Queer Design Club.

Rebecca Brooker:
Yeah. I think Queer Design Club on introspection is a manifestation of me looking for a lot of things in my life. And you just named it where I felt motivated on one hand to make this community because I was in a real moment of my life of solitude, where I had my online friends. I had people that I could reach out to from New York, but I spent the majority of my nights, I’d go to the office and I’d come home and I’d be by myself. And I was just like, “There must be something I could be doing with my time right now, right. There must be something I could be doing.” And at the same time I was looking to connect with other queer African designers, right. Because I think the other side of my life, not to go back too far to the Trinidad thing, but not having that community in Trinidad, not necessarily having that community at St. John’s either, it kind of left me wondering, where are my queer friends?

Rebecca Brooker:
I don’t have enough queer friends. And I actually want to meet queer friends that I have something in common with. So maybe queer designers. And I started to Google and I started to look for spaces online for queer designers. Was there a community? Was there a place? And there was nothing I could find. I found Out In Tech, I found Lesbians Who Tech, but when I joined those communities, they felt huge, right. They felt like there were tens of thousands of people in there. And I don’t know who would be my friend. So that was really what drove me to have this initial idea of like, “Why don’t I start a queer community online?” And I’d started putting together some ideas, just very loosely. And one day I went on Twitter and I saw a different person had created a handle for LGBTQ People in Design, or something. And I was like, “What? That’s my idea.”

Rebecca Brooker:
I wasn’t really like that. I was like, “This is cool. Someone else is also thinking about this. I’m going to message them and let them know that I have the same idea.” And that’s how I met John, John Voss. And we began chatting. I shared my deck of ideas with him. He shared his idea with me and we came together to form QDC. And at the time John and I were not friends, we were just two strangers that met on Twitter. We began co-working. He’s in San Francisco, I’m in VA and working towards let’s make a Slack, let’s make a directory. And let’s see if other queer people will join. And we didn’t know who would join.

Rebecca Brooker:
I had a handful of friends that I knew were LGBTQ. He had a handful of friends. We knew some people on Twitter, but everybody felt really disparate and disconnected. So when we formed the community, it was really just a place for us to have a clubhouse to hang out in and talk about the experience of like, “Oh, I’m the only queer person on my team and I don’t know how to bring my partner to the work event,” or “I don’t identify as CIS and my boss keeps misgendering me.” We saw people having these experiences and we wanted to bring them together to talk about them some more. So that’s kind of how we founded QDC. And I think over the years, one of the things that I’ve really ,really noticed about the community is just that, this was not something that just John and I were looking for.

Rebecca Brooker:
This is something that many, many people needed maybe much more than I did. And the growth that we’ve had over the years, the constant commitment from our members to keeping the space fresh, giving each other advice, helping each other, just general resource sharing and like this communal online living, I think has really just changed my perception of what QDC is or what it should be. What started as just a side hobby for John and I has turned into a lifeline for some people. And I think that was when it was a turning point for me that I was like, “Oh shit, we did something. We got to do right by our people. Now that we’ve gathered them all here in this community, there’s thousands of them. They’re looking at us and I’m like, what are we going to do?”

Rebecca Brooker:
So I think that was the real question that we had is like, “Okay, now that we formed this community, what value are we going to bring to their lives?” And one of the early questions, well, we were like, “Okay, there’s all these people in our Slack.” We actually don’t know anything about them because when we let people join the Slack, we just ask them their name and their email. We don’t know anything about where they are, who they are, what titles do they have, how much money do they make? Who is our community, really? We know the people exist. We know that. We have proof of concept, but who are they in their identity? Right. And if we’re going to position ourselves to serve a community of people, we have to first find out who these people are and what are their needs. So that was the things that John and I were mulling over and so we decided to formulate the Queer Design Count.

Rebecca Brooker:
So the Queer Design Count is the only survey in the design industry that is specifically for LGBTQ people in design. And the reason we did that was because when we were looking for data about our own people, we couldn’t find any. There was no data out there about the community. The AIGA Design Census asked one question and it’s, “Are you LGBTQ?” And from that data, you can make a few inferences with the percentages, but there just wasn’t anything deeper than that one question, that one check box. So we decided to formulate our own survey. And in the first year at 2019, which was also our first year as a community, we ended up with close to 1,500 responses. And John and his loving partner, Lori, who is a data analyst, thank God, lovingly went through these thousands of responses and wrote the first iteration of the Queer Design Count, where we made a lot of interesting insights about the community.

Rebecca Brooker:
I think one of the things, the differences about our survey was while… It was both qualitative and quantitative. We got some hard facts, we got some data, but we also had opportunities for people to write in their own responses about why they felt certain things or why they chose a certain answer. And some of the written testimonials are just so powerful. I think that that was one of the things that really showed us the need for this space within the community and how we had a lot of work to do if we were going to plan to change anything in the design industry, it was not a singular problem. It was not any one person’s problem. It was a structural problem that LGBTQ persons were making less than non-LGBTQ people. They were leaving the industry much faster and much younger. So they were not making it to seniority levels.

Rebecca Brooker:
And they were experiencing more bias on a daily basis than other groups out there, especially when it comes to having an intersectional identity, right? So Black queer trans people were most likely to be discriminated against, left out and having to point out design decisions that went against their existence. A really great example of this is like when you are a product designer and your team may be designing some forms and they put options on a form for male female, there’s no inclusive lens. There’s no inclusive perspective to this that would include a trans person. Now a queer person working on that team has to point out and say, “Hey, this is not inclusive towards people who identify as LGBTQ. We need to change this form.” And I think there are a lot of instances of that nature that happen prevalently on a daily basis throughout the design industry, where people get misgendered, people get mislabeled and we can preach about it as much as we want.

Rebecca Brooker:
It all ladders back up to like, we need more diverse teams to bring lived experiences and unique perspectives to the work. And that is part of why we believe LGBTQ designers have a great opportunity to become champions in the workplace and they’re not currently given that opportunity.

Maurice Cherry:
That is fantastic. I mean, I think even just the fact that this Design Count that you’re doing is, in one way building, I don’t want to say it’s building on research that others have done, but it’s like you saw what AIGA was doing in terms of their sense of saying, you’re like, “Yeah, this isn’t enough. We need to do something that’s more for our community that we’re building here.” And so you did this Queer Design Count, and I guess what are some of the lessons you learned while building this?I mean, I know you mentioned that this community came about because you discovered that other folks wanted this community too. But even in building the Count and looking at the results from it, what are some of the findings or some of the things that you just learned throughout this process?

Rebecca Brooker:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I think that one of the major things that I learned is that even within the queer community there’s discrimination. White gay men still make more money than people who identify as lesbian, right? So even within the queer community, we still have hierarchies of the patriarchy and gender wage gap and things that are prevalent outside of the LGBTQ community. They’re also happening within the LGBTQ community. So that was something that was a little bit surprising to us. But probably shouldn’t be because it exists on all levels, regardless of your identity. I think one of the other things that we found was just that people were so eager to participate in this Count because there was no other place that they could share this information. So I think this was especially true in 2021 when we did the second iteration of the Count in a pandemic world when we released it and we actually added a special section of the Count that year for COVID because we wanted to understand what the pandemic has changed about our data, right.

Rebecca Brooker:
So a great example of this is, we found that in 2021, 41% of transgender designers lost employment due to COVID-19, in comparison to 29% of CIS designers. So this is a huge gap, right? 41 versus 29. And on first glance, we didn’t know what that stat is really telling us, right. On one hand, is it telling us that trans designers got fired more than CIS designers because that could be one way to read it. The other way to read it could be, did trans designers due to the pandemic gain more autonomy in being able to work for themselves? Did they participate in quote unquote “the great resignation” and walk into this power of being able to work for themselves and make their own decisions? Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. But this was where now we would look at some of the responses and testimonials that we got as an answer to that question to try to make a better analysis, right.

Rebecca Brooker:
And one of the things that we found is that when we look at these testimonials, people are pouring their heart out to us. It was the first time that people wrote paragraphs of what they were going through. And I think for a lot of queer people, this survey was relieving and like an outlet, almost like therapy, because they didn’t have another place to talk about getting fired from their job. They didn’t have another place to talk about losing all of their clients and having to move back in with their homophobic parents. This was kind of a space. And I think this is important and why we do this work is because we want to create a space for queer people to feel seen and heard and understood. And we want to be able to take those findings and use that as a benchmark in the industry to say, “Hey, every single year you all corporate companies are talking about supporting LGBTQ people, right?

Rebecca Brooker:
You put up all these Pride parades, you put up all these Pride flags, rainbow your logos and when we survey the people that you say you’re impacting, the stats aren’t changing, LGBTQ designers are still making less than non-LGBTQ designers. We want to be able to use this survey as a biannual post check on the industry to really understand if we’re meeting our goals of improving and bettering ourselves as a space. And like I said, I don’t think it’s anybody’s one problem to fix. But as a design industry, we have to come together to hold hands, not just with Queer Design Club, but with all these different communities and movements that are advocating for their own rights, right? Where are the Black designers, [inaudible 00:24:19] design.

Rebecca Brooker:
All of these different, if you want to call them, affinity groups, are all going after the same thing. And it’s changing the industry to be better for those who have been constantly seen as other. And we want to flip that narrative together, not just for LGBTQ people, but for people who really live at these intersections because our data and our research has showed us that people who have multiple marginalized identities are the most likely to be left out and left behind. So how can we gather together and all do this work together of changing the design industry for something that is substantial and not feel like we all have to target it in our silos. So that’s something that we recognize we need to do. We’re here to research and champion LGBTQ rights, but that is one part of someone’s identity, not everything. So we have to find ways to be intersectional. We have to find ways to continue to work together and elevate people who don’t have that voice right now, or are given that space to use their voice.

Maurice Cherry:
And I mean, I think it’s also worth just putting this in a greater context, like you’re also pulling this information together at a time where at least here in the United States, the rights of LGBTQ people are being stripped away through legislation, et cetera. So to really have this quantitative information, that’s not just… Because I think sometimes what can happen, and this certainly is the case, I think, with what I’ve done with Revision Path and talk with Black designers is that, a lot of the anecdotal evidence just gets swept under the rug as like individual experiences. And it can be hard to really put, I don’t know, I guess confirmation to what’s happening without numbers, without some concrete statistics to say, “This is happening. Here’s the study that shows that.”

Rebecca Brooker:
Exactly, exactly. And I mean, one of our goals, I think now in 2023, we’ll be going into our third year of the Queer Design Count, one of our goals is to make this an industry benchmark, like I said, biannually. So we want to do exactly what you said is align ourselves as the knowledge resource of that information and for people to know that we are here to understand research and advocate for the rights of LGBTQ people in design, because like you said, our rights are under attack federally on a high level, but also it trickles down into your every day, right? When you can’t be yourself outside in the world, how can you be yourself at work? How can you bring your best self to your job every day when your life is under attack? That’s not even just a queer thing.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s true. That’s true. And now this year, actually next month, since this’ll be airing in June, you’re going to be continuing this with hosting the Inaugural Queer Design Summit. This is happening on July 7th.

Rebecca Brooker:
Absolutely.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Talk to me about that.

Rebecca Brooker:
Yeah. Well, like I said, so this is our second year doing the Count and the first year we had a great response. The second year we wanted to go a little bit bigger. So we were really thinking about, how can we get this information on a larger stage? How can we have this information reach the people who may have the ability to change it? And in my opinion, that’s recruiters, corporations, people who do the hiring, people who do the firing, all of the people who have the power to be able to change the experiences that queer people have in design. Even queer people, because you’ll be surprised that when you’re dealing with your own shit, when you’re an executive leader and you’re not out, and you’re struggling to come to terms with your own identity, that trickles down to the rest of the queer people in your company who don’t feel like they have a safe working environment.

Rebecca Brooker:
It’s all of these things that we want to be able to reach. And we decided to do the summit as a way to bring this data to a bigger stage. And we wanted to, for the first time, really hear from other LGBTQ voices, other LGBTQ designers, and have them discuss some of the statistics that we found in the report and shed their own experiences on that. So we’re going to have a few panels that are based on sections from the report. So one of the panels that we’re going to have is about trans perspective in design. We basically found that trans respondents were consistently overrepresented in facing discrimination in the workplace. So we want to be able to talk through what are some solutions we can put forward to change this in the future? So the goal of all the panels is to really talk about some of the statistics, but also just share your experience as an LGBTQ person and have that feel, seen and heard.

Rebecca Brooker:
So we’re really excited about the speakers. I’m not going to drop some names yet, although they’re probably going to be out by the time this is confirmed this goes live, but I’m super excited. And I think it’s really the first time that we’re putting on an event for the community where they can see all of themselves reflected because all of our community participated in the survey and even people that were outside of the Queer Design Club community, people who aren’t members, per se. So we’re excited to bring it to a wider audience. We’re excited to bring it to a wider stage. And part of my secondary goal of the summit is to really align the organization as a research focused and mission based organization that is doing this work, not just today, not just tomorrow, but we’re going to be doing this work for our people for a while.

Rebecca Brooker:
And we want to be able to find a like-minded organization that will help us do that work. So we’re not professional researchers. I do this because I’m passionate about our community. I’m passionate about finding out who they are. I’m passionate about making sure that we have these data points to leverage when people talk about improving conditions for LGBTQ people, but I’m not a researcher. So maybe there’s a better way we could be doing this. Maybe there is a smarter way we could be doing this. So I think as we grow the study, we want to be able to align ourselves with a research based organization that can also help us and guide us to making this study even more sound than it is right now. And I think that would be our ultimate goal is to have this study be something that’s continued, something that is super serious and ask the right questions, a lot of questions, and helps people really understand the problems that we have in the industry.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I know that we have a lot of companies and a lot of people that work at big companies that listen to this. So my hope is that once this interview comes out, people get a chance to hear it, that you’ll start to get some interest around that because I think what you’re doing is super important from a research perspective, but also just from a general community and society perspective, not just even the design community, LGBT community as well, to be able to not only put the statistics behind the incidents and things that are happening, but to really quantify it and then keep the work going to sustain the work. So people know that this is something that is like an industry benchmark to understand what the queer experience and design is and how, I guess people in general can bring more visibility and representation is super important. So I’m excited for the summit. I’m excited to see where Queer Design Club goes in the future. I feel like you’ve really tapped into something here.

Rebecca Brooker:
Thank you. Thank you, Maurice. I just want to say thank you to you. I know you’ve been a sounding board for us over the past couple years as well, just like in running a community and this being my first time being a community leader. It takes a village, it really takes a village.

Maurice Cherry:
It really does. Yeah. Now, even aside from all this, you’re working at Ghost Note, you’re doing the Queer Design Club with the Queen Design Count, with the Queer Design Summit. You also have your own freelance practice called Planthouse Studio. Tell me about that.

Rebecca Brooker:
Yeah. As if I wasn’t already doing too much. No. I think one of my goals for myself just personally has always been to run my own design studio and I just feel like there’s a level of freedom that I get to have when people want to work with me. I am my own boss. I love to take the projects that I want to work on. Say ‘no’ to the projects that I don’t want to work on. And just generally be able to design things with no constraints of, what do other people think? So I was always a freelancer on the side of any full-time job. It started really after college because I was working at BAM and it was a nonprofit. So I was making some money, but I thought, “Okay, I could make a couple logos on the side and make a couple hundred bucks more.”

Rebecca Brooker:
And it started just doing that for some extra cash. And over the past five years, it’s really grown into just a consistent stream of people mentioning me, sharing my name, sharing my portfolio and getting people wanting to work with me. So it wasn’t until about three or four years ago now that my partner, LG and I had come together and decided we kind of wanted to formalize this business. And my partner at the time, LG was figuring out how they would plug into the business. I was doing all the design and they were handling all of the client management and it’s just grown over the years. So at the beginning of the pandemic, we saw an uptick in people wanting to work with us. And we had a really janky website at the time and nothing was super professional, but we saw this uptake in work.

Rebecca Brooker:
A friend of mine, who I was working at the agency was leaving at the time. And he said, “If you want a freelancer I’ll work with your studio.” And I said, “All right, sure.” So now we have another person working with us and I was able to give him some direction and do less more creative direct and he was producing the work. LG was managing the clients. So we started there and then more requests came and another friend of mine was like, “I’m looking for a job.” I was like, “Do you want to freelance with our studio?” She was like, “Yeah.” So then we had two designers working with us and now it’s become a full-time gig for everybody, right? So LG’s running it full-time. Our two designers are still working with us full-time and my goal has shifted to learning how to run a business and then wanting to do it for Planthouse on my own.

Rebecca Brooker:
So my short term goal is, like I said in the beginning, this is a hustle year for me, where I’m working at Ghost Note, one, to work on some of the awesome projects and the clients that they have. But two is to really also understand how to run a business. And that’s one of the things that I feel really grateful to Ghost Note for is like from the time I joined, I was very upfront about like, “Listen in five years, I’m going to be running my own agency. So I’m here to learn the business facts of what you all are doing. I admire your work. You all are about six years ahead of where I feel like I am. How can I absorb my time at this agency to really learn how to run an agency?” And at the same time, LG and our other two designers are working on client stuff in the background and I’m moonlighting and taking the knowledge I learn at Ghost Note, bringing it home and saying, “We have this process that we implemented at work. I think we should try it in the studio. It could really help.”

Rebecca Brooker:
So, I felt like I had to put in the time and learning how to run a business before jumping into running a business for the first time, right, because like, and I think that’s a thing that at times it’s tiring, at times it’s rough. But I feel like if I stay on track, hopefully in 2023, I can leave my full-time job and just pursue Planthouse if the clients keep coming and going the way they’ve been. We feel very grateful and lucky that people want to work with us. And I feel really grateful and lucky that people want to keep giving us great opportunities to grow. I think we’ve had a few contracts this year where they were bigger shoes than we were prepared to fill, but we stepped into them and I think we’ve grown into them a lot.

Rebecca Brooker:
So it’s given me a lot of confidence to say, “Okay, I’m doing Planthouse part-time right now and it’s doing really well. If I do this full-time we could be doing excellently. I just need to harness the knowledge of how to run this business full-time, because it’s not just full time by myself, right? It’s full-time with three other people as well that we’re sustaining. So I’m in my hustle year. I’m doing three jobs. However, I do feel like it’s really important right now for me to be a sponge and really learn how to do it right so that when I step into it, I can make, hopefully, a little bit less of the mistakes and go into it with some kind of knowledge.

Rebecca Brooker:
So that’s part of one of the things I love about Ghost Note is they’re very supportive of my own hustle. They’re very open and transparent about the workings of the company and how to write an extra W, how to make sure things stay on track. And I feel like I’m really learning the business angle of it alongside the art director part of it and making the fun stuff. I’m doing both things. So I’m excited for that.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s good. I mean, I think it’s good that Ghost Note is transparent in that way to let you all know this is how the business is. This is how it works. So it’s not just of course showing up and doing your job, but also you’re kind of gaining this almost secondary education in a way.

Rebecca Brooker:
Yeah. And that’s something that I think doesn’t really exist in our design industry right now is like, there’s no course to go learn how to run your own studio. There’s no course to say, how to found your own agency. It’s all about you got to fumble your way into figuring it out. And that’s what Ghost Note told me as well. They were like, “We’ve been doing this for eight years and we’re just now figuring it out.” And I’m like, “Okay, so what can I learn that you can impart that knowledge on me and I can maybe not take years to figure it out?” And I really love that about just a community culture is that resource sharing is so important because I would love to help any other person who’s thinking about founding their own business, their own agency. We don’t have the resources out there. So we need to be in community with each other more and figure that out.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now it takes a village to do all this, as you said. Who’s your village? Who have been the mentors and the peers who have really helped you get to where you are now?

Rebecca Brooker:
I have a list of them. One, I would say is one of the first people that I met in the design industry was a designer working at [inaudible 00:39:35] at the time. Their name is Kyle Richardson and they are an incredible designer and a friend of mine still and just someone who brought their authentic self to work. And me being a young, bright eyed, bushy-tailed intern, I was like, “Oh, you’re my role model. I like what you’re doing. All of your work is fire. Your personality is so dope. I want to be like you.” And it was really the first person who showed me that I could show up to work and be myself, be a little crazy, be a little funky, be funny with your coworkers. And Kyle always just gave me a sense of ease and the ability to just be you.

Rebecca Brooker:
Another one of my mentors, I would say is someone that has always helped me open doors. And this is a person named Liz, Liz Oh who used to be the head of design at Compass is now the head of design of Grammarly and Liz has always been someone who will give me an opportunity that I can grow into. And I think it’s really people like that who are in positions of power, who can see potential in you and open a door that will change your life. And Liz has done that for me a few different times. And I think that’s important to acknowledge people who are willing to take a chance on you.

Rebecca Brooker:
Another one of mine, a close friend of mine, Amรฉlie Lamont. I love Amรฉlie. She’s someone that has helped me navigate just the space of being a community leader and running a community and like navigating the world out there. And with someone who I really met online and we connected in real life for the first time at XO XO conference, where they invited me to be part of the POC House and I was just honored to be included in a space that like, there were so many amazing creatives and thinkers and people who were just so themselves. And I think that’s something that I’m really drawn to. I’m really drawn to people who can be unapologetically themselves, recognize that, and use that as their superpower and use that as the thing that can open doors for other people. So those are my three mentors.

Rebecca Brooker:
I can probably name a million more, but I can’t remember at the moment. But I guess something that I try to do is I try to learn a little bit from everybody. It may not be in a technical way of like, “This person taught me design,” or “this person taught me this,” but it’s more in a, what is it about you that makes you you? Is it your ability to show up and be yourself? Is it your ability to stand up for what you believe in? Is it your ability to take no shit and let people know that? I try to really learn some of these qualities from all of the people that I think are doing it right. And like I said earlier, I just want to be a sponge and learn about what I should be doing in my future what I think is right. So that’s how I approach the people that I look up to.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. We had probably on the show… Oh, that was a while ago. I think she was episode 148 or 149, something like that. It was in the 140s. I remember that. You mentioned XOXO. Was that in 2018?

Rebecca Brooker:
It must have been 2019, the year before the pandemic. 2019. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Year before. Okay.

Rebecca Brooker:
In 2019.

Maurice Cherry:
I went to XO XO in 2018 and I remember, Amรฉlie and Kat doing the POCs [inaudible 00:43:05].

Rebecca Brooker:
Yes. Also another person that I love and is an icon and a role model for me. Kat’s a person who champions game developers of color and has been running that conference in that community for a long time. Just amazing people, amazing people that are out there, like showing up as themselves and making dope shit.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. She’s great. I love Kat. We kind of just talk over email, I guess maybe about a couple of weeks ago or something, because she’s about to make a big move. I’m sure it’ll probably be announced by the time this interview comes out, but she’s making big moves now because she just left Asana and is about to announce where she’s going next. So I’m excited to see.

Rebecca Brooker:
I could believe that.

Maurice Cherry:
What does success look like for you now?

Rebecca Brooker:
I think success looks like being able to feel confident in the things I want to pursue. I feel like I always have this yearning to be super secure before I make a big move, which is probably why I’m still at Ghost Note and not doing my full-time thing yet. But I think success looks like having the confidence to do that, make those decisions and live the life that I want to live, find balance between my work and my personal life and my free time and feel satisfied and nourished by the work that I am doing at work. So I think that is what success looks like for me.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? I know you’ve given some sort of benchmarks for where you want Queer Design Club to go and I guess even with where you want Planthouse to go. But if you could forecast five years from now, it’s 2027, what’s Rebecca Brooker doing?

Rebecca Brooker:
Well, hopefully Rebecca Brooker is no longer the only person running Queer Design Club because then that wouldn’t be nice. But I think Rebecca Brooker will still be a fierce advocate and speaker or someone who is called upon to help champion LGBTQ rights. I want to be known for helping people show up as themselves, even helping myself show up as myself and I want to still be in the creative seat making amazing things that have impacts and that have the ability to change lives and change perceptions and make the world a tiny bit of a better place. So I hope in five years from now I’m doing that.

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

Rebecca Brooker:
So you can find me at rebeccabrooker.com. You can also find me on Twitter @Becky Brooker or on Instagram @Becca Brooker. And you can find Queer Design Club at Queer Design Club on all channels. And I’m an open book. So anybody who ever wants to reach out, feel free to email me. I would be happy to connect with anyone who wants to talk.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds good. Well, Rebecca Brooker, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I had a feeling that we were going to have a really deep, wide ranging conversation. I’m so glad that we were able to touch on. I mean, just so many different things, talking about representation, entrepreneurship, building community. I feel like you’ve done so much already. You’ve already had this very prolific career and I just want to see where you go from here. I hope that people are listening really support the work that you’re doing and really can help put some real velocity behind the plans that you have, because I feel like we’re going to be talking about the work that you’re doing years and years from now. And I’m just so glad to have had you on the show to really just explain like this is who I am. This is where I came from and this is the work that I’m trying to do. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Rebecca Brooker:
Thank you for having me, Maurice. It’s been an amazing conversation. It’s been an amazing time. Thank you for creating this space so that we could continue to have these conversations with myself and other people who are doing good work.

Queer Design Summit - July 7, 2022, 10am PST

The Queer Design Club is hosting their inaugural #QDCSummit on July 7! 🌈✨ Join the queer design community online to discuss two years of rich data. The goal of the Summit is to bring the community together and use it as a breakthrough for the industry as to why events like the Summit and groups like Queer Design Club are important. Be a part of it!

Tickets are available at QueerDesign.club/Summit

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Rebecca Brooker

Sometimes, the conversation is so good and so wide-ranging that I can’t contain it in just one episode. For the first time in over five years, we have a two-part episode on Revision Path, and it’s with the one and only Rebecca Brooker. She is perhaps most well known as the co-founder of Queer Design Club, but Rebecca is also an art director at Ghost Note Agency and founder of her own freelance practice Planthouse Studio.

In the first part of this interview, Rebecca talked about her “year of hustle”, including her work at Ghost Note Agency and the rewards and challenges that come with that. She also talked about growing up in Trinidad, LGBT representation in the Caribbean, and moving to NYC to attend college and study design.

Tune in next week for Part 2 of our conversation!

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

Rebecca Brooker:
Hi, Maurice, I’m Rebecca. I am a queer graphic designer and art director from Trinidad and Tobago, and I’m currently living in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Maurice Cherry:
I have been trying to get someone in South America on the show for years. You are the first Black designer in South America that I’ve had on the show, so I’m really excited about that.

Rebecca Brooker:
Yeah. Thank you. I’m excited. It’s actually kind of funny, because I feel like you don’t see that many Black designers in South America, in Argentina, at least. Maybe in some of the more Northern territories, maybe, but in Argentina, I feel like you rarely get to meet other Black designers. I’m not even from here, so even doubly so.

Maurice Cherry:
How has 2022 been going for you so far?

Rebecca Brooker:
It’s been going well for me. It’s definitely been a year of hustle. I have been grinding, working towards a few dreams, and really, just trying to figure out where I want to set myself up for the next couple years. I have a few really good gigs going on and trying to figure out, is this a hustle year and heads down and just do some work, and then next year can be a relaxing year? But 2022 has been very positive so far.

Maurice Cherry:
Are you seeing any big changes this year from last year?

Rebecca Brooker:
Yeah. I think one of the biggest changes is just my personal confidence and value, really. I feel like for the past few years and throughout the pandemic, I was really trying to figure out where I wanted to spend my time, spend my energy. Is it in my organization? Is it in my job? Is it in something else? So, I would say that the biggest shift has just been in that decision-making of what I want to do and how I’m going to move forward with the things on my plate.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, I definitely want to talk about Queer Design Club, which I think most people that are listening to this know you from, but before that, I want to ask you about your current gig. Right now, you’re the art director at Ghost Note Agency. Can you tell me about that?

Rebecca Brooker:
Yeah. So, Ghost Note is a Black-owned agency based in Washington, DC. I met them about a year ago because their creative director, Veronica Corzo-Duchardt, is actually in Queer Design Club. So, at the time I was working at a different agency, and Veronica had posted in our job postings channel and had said, “Oh, this amazing, Black-owned agency that I’m running the creative team at is looking for a senior designer to join the team.” I thought to myself, “Oh damn, that sounds like a cool opportunity.” I looked at their work and I was like, Oh, this is sick.” And so, I messaged Veronica being like, “Hey.” Veronica and I had probably had a digital coffee once before and we were acquaintances, but I messaged them just being like, “Hey, would love to learn more about Ghost Note,” and they were like, “Let’s hop in on informational with some of the team.” When I went into that first interview with them, it was just amazing, the energy in the room, the vibe, just it felt different to any of the other agencies I was working at.

Rebecca Brooker:
I had been, at the time, working at Media.Monks, which is a huge agency that was just a very different culture. So, it wasn’t until I had that first interview at Ghost Note that the potential of going to a different agency entered my mind, and I was like, “Oh wow. This is a really different vibe, it’s a lot cozier. They seem to be growing rapidly. For the first time, it’s a place that I feel like, really, you could bring your culture to.” The reason I said what I said in the beginning about Black designers being in Argentina is because when I moved to Argentina, I felt like the work environment that I was in was very homogenous. The majority of people in Argentina are white, and I wasn’t working with other… Probably just a handful of other people of color in an agency of 100s. So, I was finding it really hard to find diversity and find any semblance of culture, and along comes Ghost Note, which was just the complete opposite. They were all about the culture, which I thought was great.

Rebecca Brooker:
I did an in an initial interview with them for that role, the senior designer. Veronica said to me privately after, they said, “I think you were great, but you should be applying for an art director role. We’re going to open one up, if you’re interested.” I said, “What? I didn’t even start working and y’all going to give me a raise? Damn, okay.” So, I had a second interview and I met more of the team, I met the partners, I met the people who working there at the time, and everyone was just very chill. The day after the interview, Veronica phoned me and said, “I just want to let you know you got the job.” I was just like… This happened over three days, Maurice, it was so fast.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Rebecca Brooker:
My jaw was on the floor, because I wasn’t even really thinking about leaving my job, but now I was really thinking about it, because I was like, “Oh, the opportunity is in front of me. Okay, okay.” So, that was how Ghost Note came around, and I’ve been there for the past year. They’ve gone through incredible growth themselves. The partners are three Black friends that they have been friends since childhood, they have baby pictures together.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh wow.

Rebecca Brooker:
So, they grew up together in DC and all went on to three different life paths, and then later in life reunited to start this agency. They’ve been around for almost 10 years now doing this work. So, it feels really great for the agency to be in a spot where they can really see their growth, we’re getting a lot of bigger clients. Most recently, they actually announced a strategic partnership with Godfrey Dadich Partners, which is… I don’t know if you know that agency, but they have aligned with that and entered the kyu Collective of companies, which I think really turned a new chapter for the agency, as well, just in the potential that we have to create outstanding work. So, it’s been really great to work with people that are like me and people that… Our entire creative team is queer-led, which I think is amazing, we’re majority people of color on staff. It’s just been a total 180 of what I was used to, so I’ve been really enjoying my experience there.

Maurice Cherry:
I like that you refer to it as cozy. You often don’t hear that word when people talk about their work experience.

Rebecca Brooker:
Yeah. I always stray away from using the term like, “Oh my coworkers are my family,” because I don’t like to think that way, but this is one of the first jobs that I would say where I feel really close and a real bond of friendship, more than any other place that I’ve worked, with the team that we have now. I think it’s because we all are striving towards this goal of… We want to work at Ghost Note because we believe we have a unique voice and a voice that not a lot of agencies get to have. So, I feel like we all are bonding by this experience of like, “What is the Ghost Note lens? What is the Ghost Note angle?” They’re hiring Ghost Note because we have a different perspective and we can talk about topics and things that other people can’t.

Rebecca Brooker:
I think that just brings a level of genuineness and authenticity to the people that work there. I feel like we’re trying to build a culture that’s really rooted in our humanity and not necessarily just in, can we make cool stuff? Can we get the biggest clients? We want to do that stuff, too, but it’s really more about bringing our humanness to the work.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It’s a superpower, really, to be able to bring that perspective to the work.

Rebecca Brooker:
Yeah. I definitely see it. I think that we’re smart in the way that they don’t necessarily bill themselves as a social justice agency. It’s not about that at all, but it’s really about using our collective voice and this unique voice that we’ve crafted to be able to create impactful work that benefits other people. For example, one of the recent projects, actually, my first project at Ghost Note, was actually rebranding the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, DC. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, but ACM is actually the United States’ first community museum. It was the first one that was ever established, and it’s one of the only museums I think, if not the only, to be founded in a historically Black neighborhood of Anacostia, Washington, DC.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh wow.

Rebecca Brooker:
So, when I was first put on this project, I had never heard of ACM. You hear about all the other museums in the Smithsonian’s collection, but never ACM. It was a really unique challenge, because it’s not in Washington, DC itself. It’s not on Capitol Hill on the museum route with the rest of the Smithsonian museums. It’s out of the way, and it’s a different type of work that they’re showing, they’re always showing community-based work. So, a lot of the pieces that we got to interact with were actual historical documents from the community of Anacostia. So, the first baseball that was thrown on their community pitch, photos from families that lived there. ACM has been around and was founded by John Kinard, who had a very unique vision for the town of Anacostia. It was just such a unique project to be able to really meld all of that history and all of that deeply rooted culture of Black history, too, and work on that with a Black team.

Rebecca Brooker:
The strategist that I worked with, Georgie Arimah, who also works at Ghost Note, both of us really had to put heads down and say, “How can we really bring the story and the history and all of these years of deep-rooted community value into the work? How do we turn that into brand equity for ACM?” That felt like a really unique project that I don’t know if I would be able to do with everybody, so I really appreciated just having people who understood. Georgie, actually, at the same time, was moving to Anacostia, so it felt really personal for her. I think that it was just that Ghost Note gets unique opportunities like that because we have that unique skill, superpower, as you put it, to create impact where not every agency could.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. I think it’s also about the fact that the culture really makes the work personal to the people that are working on it in a way that it probably wouldn’t with any other type of agency, so that’s amazing. I did hear about the investment recently from Godfrey Dadich, I’ve heard about them. So, I have a, I guess it’s a funny story, I don’t know. I ran across them… How many years ago was this? This was back when I was working at Glitch, so this was back in 2019. Yeah, this was 2019. We were looking at studios because we were building this lifestyle vertical website or whatever, and I remember I had reached out to them. I reached out to a few places, like them, Pentagram, Ali, a couple of others, just to get quotes and just see what might be available. I remember they had hit me back because they were like, “Oh my God, Jabari’s chair, we’ve heard of you from Revision Path.”

Maurice Cherry:
I was like, “Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s great.” But I’m really interested in like this quote, and they mentioned that they had recently done, I think, creative work for Abstract, which is the series on Netflix where they do-

Rebecca Brooker:
Design.

Maurice Cherry:
… it’s documentary episodes of designers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was so funny, because this was before the second season came out, and the person there was like, “We’re about to have the second season come out,” and she was like, “And you’ll be surprised about this, we’re featuring two Black designers this season.” I’m like-

Rebecca Brooker:
Oh wow.

Maurice Cherry:
… “Wow. That’s amazing.” Telling me? I don’t know, I thought that was a weird thing to relate to me, like I would be impressed by that. But I’m like, “Wow. You talked to two Black designers, really? That’s great.”

Rebecca Brooker:
Yeah. So, I also hadn’t really known a ton about Godfrey Dadich before the investment. I had heard their name in passing, maybe seen a few things that they produced here or there. I think Abstract is one of the more notable things that they are produced for. But that’s such a wild thing to say, I can’t believe that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So, with the agency joining the kyu Collective, has that impacted your day-to-day work in any sort of way?

Rebecca Brooker:
Not yet, I think that it’s still… So, they only made the announcement of the investment and the joining a couple months ago, I think in April, early April. So, it hasn’t affected my day-to-day yet. We actually are still, I think, figuring out how best we integrate. But Q recently, actually this week, held this internal collective conference that brought all of their agencies together, so I attended a couple sessions and got to meet a couple people from other agencies, SYPartners, ATร–LYE. It was an interesting experience. In one of the main sessions that I went to, they had over 300 people joining, so it was definitely a big work group. I think we’re still new to the Collective and trying to figure out what are some of the best ways that we could work collaboratively or side-by-side, or really partner with some of the other minds in the kyu Collective. I think that there’s a lot of great companies and probably a lot of really smart people working at those companies. So, I’m excited to see what happens, it’s definitely an unknown path right now, I would say.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So, what does a regular day look like for you when work comes in? You come in on projects as the art director? Talk to me about that.

Rebecca Brooker:
I feel like this is really beneficial information because before I started as an art director, I thought I knew what an art director did, but I feel like we don’t have enough resources out there to tell people exactly what the job is about, so I think this is a great convo. But basically, my day-to-day really looks like, I’m probably on about two to three projects at the same time, it depends on how heavy those projects are. My role right now is half executional and half managerial, so I’m usually talking to clients, making decisions, but also working with the designers, our senior designers and our mid-level designers, to produce work for our campaigns. So, for example, we are, right now, working on a couple campaigns for Nike Chicago, and I am leading the art direction, so I will put together the look, the feel, talk with the client and understand, from the brief, what they’re trying to convey, what assets do we have to work with? Is it a new design system that we need to make? Is it something that we’re picking up from?

Rebecca Brooker:
I, basically, get the work to a place where it is ready and executional for some of the other designers to take it into production. So, a really great example of this is on this Nike project that we’re working on, we’re going to be producing some reels and stuff for the Nike social handle on Instagram. Part of what I’m proposing to Nike is that we’re going to create a GIPHY sticker pack on Instagram, so people can go search Nike Chicago, and they get the stickers on GIPHY and they put them on their stories or whatever. I will probably put together a deck, along with some of my other ideas, pull some references of what those stickers will look like. My job is to really sell that idea to the client before it gets produced, so that the client buys into it. I prep it for the team, we’ll probably have a kickoff and say, “Okay. The client loves this idea of the stickers. Let’s put these into production.”

Rebecca Brooker:
Maybe our senior designer, who is also an amazing illustrator, he’ll help us draw out some shapes, he’ll help us draw out some stuff, maybe we pass it to a different designer who’s going to add some typography to it. It really depends on the project, but my role is usually a little bit higher level, a hybrid of client management and coming up with the overall look and feel of the work before handing it off to some of our other team members to bring it to life.

Maurice Cherry:
What would you say is probably the most challenging part about what you do?

Rebecca Brooker:
That’s a great question. I think one of the most challenging parts is really finding new inspiration all the time. I feel like sometimes when I’m working on multiple projects at the same time, sometimes my ideas tend to blend together, so all three of those projects may end up looking similar. So, I feel like finding inspiration and ways to keep things really distinct and unique in their look and feel of each campaign or each identity is a challenge, because you constantly have to be looking at inspiration, not just on the internet, but, really, all around you and in your world, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Rebecca Brooker:
I’m constantly thinking about how can I take some of the things I see in my everyday, whether it’s some graffiti on the street, whether it’s an old street sign, how can I take things that I see in real life and bring them into my project, so I’m not just lost in this world of Pinterest and Arena and Behance and looking at what’s already out there. I think trying to keep your work original when you’re working at speed and scale is really difficult, sometimes. It’s easy to lean on the internet to just see what else is out there, but I feel sometimes, it could make the work all feel really homogenous.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Rebecca Brooker:
So, staying inspired, it’s always a challenge.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s so interesting you mentioned that, I was just talking about that a little bit with… At where I work now, we have a creative director, and one of the projects that we have worked on for the past few months is creating a print magazine. So, we’re creating a print magazine from scratch for the company, coming up with the name, the brand, talking to printers. I joked, “I feel like Khadijah James in the first season of Living Single trying to put flavor together,” wrangling contributors and stuff like that. It’s a quarterly magazine, so we have a little bit of breathing room in terms of going from issue to issue. But right now, our first issue came out a couple of months ago, we’re currently in design on the second issue, and we’re starting planning on the third issue.

Rebecca Brooker:
Third issue, that’s great.

Maurice Cherry:
I’ve already mapped out themes for the next six issues. So, up until issue 6, I’ve mapped out themes for that. Even looking at that, we’re looking at these covers and thinking, “Well, do we want this to tell a story?” Because even as we look at the themes itself, so far, the themes are usually around propulsion. The first cover has a jet on it, the second cover, when people see it, it has a city rising up through the clouds. So, everything that we’re doing here is not only about propulsion in some way, but also could tie into a theme of discovery or exploration, which ties into the theme of what we’re trying to do with the tool. Even as we look at that, because the company is named Orbit, so there’s a lot of space imagery and terminology and things that we can pull from, this next issue that we’re doing is all about Web3, which is a bit of a departure, just in terms of it’s a very new topic. Well, I’d say it’s a very buzzy topic.

Maurice Cherry:
I don’t know if it’s necessarily super new, but it’s a pretty buzzy topic, because it’s all wrapped up in the metaverse and Dows and cryptocurrency and blockchain and all that stuff. It can be confusing to just think, “Well, how do we depict something like that?” It’s funny you say looking at inspiration, because we just did a working session recently and we’re looking at creative inspiration and we’re like, “We see this octahedron symbol everywhere, and I want to use that in some kind of way.” I’m like, “Eh, I don’t know. I don’t think we should use that because it’s used everywhere.” It turns out that it’s actually the logo for Ethereum, which is why it’s used so many places, because the person who came up with Web3 is also the founder of Ethereum, so it’s a branding thing, for them, at least.

Maurice Cherry:
But the theme that I think we’re going to settle on, we may change this by the time it actually goes to print, is actually going to be a retrospective from the 1920s to the 2020s in the theme of the movie Metropolis. It’s going to be about the… I forget what the name of the Android is in Metropolis, it’s the Metalnmensch or something like that.

Rebecca Brooker:
Oh, I don’t know.

Maurice Cherry:
So, it’s going to be like a human, but we’re going to have… Well, we’re taking inspiration from that and we’re also taking inspiration from RoboCop, so-

Rebecca Brooker:
Wow. Very different.

Maurice Cherry:
… so it’s going to have a helmet that’s a Oculus helmet, it’s going to have a shoulder plate that’s blockchain, it’s going to have another shoulder plate that’s… So, we’re thinking the person is whomever is on the internet, because Web3 is also very user-centered, and so we’re thinking of all these different aspects of what make up Web3 coming onto a person as an Android thing. It’s interesting, because when we were trying to think of inspiration, a lot of what we saw just all looked the same like, “Oh everything’s purple and blue and there’s the Ethereum logo.” We want to do something different from that, that stands out a bit. Trying to find an inspiration is tough.

Rebecca Brooker:
It’s tough. The thing I’ve been struggling with lately is when you work at an agency sometimes, and this is maybe what I miss about working in-house sometimes, but when you work at an agency, I feel like the speed at which you have to produce ideas, sometimes it’s exhausting. Every month is a different campaign, maybe two campaigns, and you’re constantly churning out ideas. And then what happens when you can’t be creative on demand? What happens in that moment when everyone’s like, “This is your sixth campaign this year, and sorry, but this idea sucks”? You’re like, “Yeah, I’m tired and burnt out.” So, I think that’s something that we’re also just trying to, as an agency, as a world, I guess, I don’t know if this is in other agencies, as well, but I think we’re just trying to find balance sometimes, where we have some downtime to rest and recuperate and generate some new creative ideas. And then other times, we’re working really hard and producing at volume. I think it’s a balance of both things, and part of why I feel like we’re in this moment of the Great Burnout where every…

Rebecca Brooker:
Burnout is a buzzword, and everyone is burning out, everyone is over Zoom, over being on the computer eight hours a day. I think people are right now just looking for some sense of balance in their life, and I think for designers, that can be draining when you have to wake up and produce a new idea every day. So, that’s something I’ve been noodling on for the past couple of months, is just how do we continue to have jobs that require us to exert creative energy, while still being able to find a refill and recuperation for that same creative energy? Is there answer, is there a solution? I don’t know. I feel like we’re all equal [inaudible 00:28:37] capitalism.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Look, it’s hard to pour from an empty cup, especially with everything else that’s going on in the world, political issues, we’ve had an ongoing global health crisis for the past two, almost three years. So many things have taken a toll just on people’s psyche that it’s tough to always try to come up with stuff, whether you’re in a highly creative role, I think, or not. But certainly with what you’re saying, as an art director, it probably is super tough to always have to pour from the well of imagination when the well is running dry.

Rebecca Brooker:
Yeah, yeah. I think that’s not just art directors. I feel like, even as a creative strategist yourself, you probably could relate to that at some level, where just idea generators, I guess, have to constantly be figuring out a way to continue generating ideas or having thoughts about these things. I think it touches everyone on some level. I don’t think it makes my job any different from a creative director’s job or a creative strategist’s job. But I think, generally, it’s a tough world out there to be creative right now, in the midst of everything.

Maurice Cherry:
Absolutely. Well, let’s switch gears here a little bit and talk more about your origin story. I know you were born in Trinidad and Tobago, tell me what it was like growing up there.

Rebecca Brooker:
Yeah. So, I was born in Trinidad, in San Fernando, to be exact. I lived in Trinidad until I was about 18, before I went to college at St. John’s University in New York. I love Trinidad, I love my home. It’s my people, I will always care for them and always support my people. But I think really early on, when I began exploring my sexuality and just my awakening reality that maybe I’m not like my friends, maybe I’m not straight and I don’t know what that means. I think something that still hurts me to this day is just that there is not a lot of LGBTQ representation in the Caribbean. There’s a culture of homophobia, and there’s a culture of very religious-based homophobia, as well, that I think really scarred me. I came out when I was 16 to my parents, and my parents sent me to talk with a nun.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Rebecca Brooker:
At the time, I didn’t have the words to describe that. I guess, in 2022, we would probably describe that as conversion therapy, to some extent. But I remember having this conversation with this nun and going for a couple sessions. One of the things this nun said to me was, “You are feeling this way,” this way being gay, “Because you’re a child of divorce.” That stuck with me all my life, and it always made me feel like as much as you are Trini, this place is maybe not for you. So, it wasn’t until I left Trinidad and went to New York that I felt this ability to own that part of my identity, really, in a culture and a way that didn’t feel harmful, it didn’t feel unsafe. So, growing up in Trinidad as a queer teen was tough for me. I felt like I had to fit in a lot. I felt like I had to wear dresses and wear heels and flat iron my hair and do my nails and my makeup. It all felt like I was just doing this to be friends with my friends.

Rebecca Brooker:
I think now, years later, I don’t feel like any relationship to that part of my identity anymore, this part of myself that needs to present in a more feminine way or be more ladylike to be loved by my people. I think it’s taken me living outside of Trinidad for 10 years to really come to terms with that acceptance that this is a place that made me feel a little bit small in who I could be. So, that is always something that has stuck with me. I would love to return home one day and really find a way or find resources to change that mentality. I have a lot of friends in Trinidad who are doing work to create a space for LGBTQ people, and I want to be able to contribute to that work in the future, because I do think it’s important for people to feel safe when they’re growing up and feel like they can explore who they are and be themselves and not feel like, whether they’re religious or not, that they’re going to get judged. So, that was one of the major reasons that I wanted to leave home.

Maurice Cherry:
I think it’s really important, this point you mentioned about you had to leave in order to see the rest of the world and experience who you are outside of the confines of being in, not just, I would say, a small town, but also just a very closed-minded environment, overall.

Rebecca Brooker:
Yeah. It’s not just a Trinidad problem either, it’s really a Caribbean culture problem, I would say. I know other Caribbean countries also have large percentage of homophobia, Jamaica is rampant with homophobia. You hear it in dance hall, you hear it in the music, you hear it in all different places. It’s almost casual to be homophobic, people joke about it, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Rebecca Brooker:
So, I think that it’s a huge culture shift that we have to make as a society and as a people to be more accepting. It’s funny, because there are a lot of cultural ties to Trinidad that are inherently queer, it’s so funny how we’re selective in the way that we see it. I feel like there are just a lot of different spaces where it’s more okay, then it’s not okay, and then it’s okay in the way that we want you to be. So, it just feels like a culture that is accepting when it’s entertainment, but not when it’s your real life. You could go up on that stage and you could cross dress, you could sing about, you could do what you want, we’ll laugh, we’ll dance. Okay, great. You’re a great performer. But if you went on that stage and actually brought your partner, no.

Rebecca Brooker:
So, I feel like it’s very much a culture of where you have to present a certain way, you have to act a certain way, you keep your business private. That’s how you survive, and that’s tough. I don’t think any LGBTQ identifying people, anybody who feels like they can’t be who they are, should not have to live that way.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. So much of that, as you mentioned, just reminds me of… I grew up in a small town, I grew up in Selma, Alabama. To that point that you mentioned about how queer people are celebrated when there’s a certain presentational aspect to it, in a way. I remember, in high school, we had gay men in high school and one of them was our head majorette, ironically. One was, he was, I think, in the class above me, he and his sister… Well, sorry, me and his sister were in the same class and he was a class above me, but he also wore a lot of women’s clothes to school. I can’t presume to know what their individual experiences might have been like outside of school, but I know when they were at school, they were always celebrated because of that. It almost in a way felt mocking, I don’t know, but-

Rebecca Brooker:
Mm-hmm. Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
For example, the guy who was the head majorette had his own suit made and everything that was just like the suit that the girls had. At least from what I could tell, nobody said anything, but then I wasn’t close to that person, so I don’t know what other sorts of discrimination or things they might have received. But to be in that small town and to try to express yourself in that way, I can’t imagine how just stifling and confining that can be, and you have to break out, eventually

Rebecca Brooker:
You have to, you have to. I think that was one of, like I said, one of the things that I’m so grateful for is the opportunity to break out. I have so many friends in Trinidad who do identify as LGBTQ, but don’t have, one, the privilege or, two, the resources to get out of that situation, too. I think that’s an important thing to acknowledge here, is that I feel like I got to embrace and explore that part of my identity because I was given this opportunity to leave the country, and travel the world, and find myself, and not feel unsafe with presenting the way I want to present. But there’s so many people in Trinidad who don’t have that same opportunity. I have a really dear friend of mine who I grew up with, know their family, they are super religious. For years, this person has been telling me, secretly, “I’m queer, I’m actually trans, and I want to identify this way, but I live at home and I can’t do that. I can’t dress the way I want to. When my parents go out, I try on different clothes.”

Rebecca Brooker:
It just reinforces this culture that not everybody has that opportunity, so that is part of why I feel really moved to find ways that I can contribute or ways that I can change the narrative about what queer Caribbean culture is, because it’s important that we redefine the context of what queer Caribbean culture is. It’s always been so tied to God and like, “You’re going down the wrong path and God doesn’t like that. Why do you want to change your body when God gave you this beautiful hair and this beautiful, feminine body? Why do you want to identify as a man?” It’s never come from a perspective of this is not a choice that I’m making. My identity is not a choice. I’m not choosing to wake up today and say, “I’ve decided I like girls,” or, “I’ve decided I like boys.” It’s something that you come to that discovery, it really is. It’s there all along, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not, it’s who we are, it’s something that we’re born with.

Rebecca Brooker:
So, I feel that in the Caribbean, there’s always been a sense of homophobia is equivalent with the devil is equivalent with breaking the law of God. It’s never been looked at from a perspective of this is a biological thing that is present in all living beings, to some extent.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Rebecca Brooker:
So, I feel like it’s just a huge culture shift that we still have to make. Like I said, I think that’s something that we have to accept and work on as a community, not just the queer people, but we need allies and we need people coming together to be able to advocate for those rights.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s talk about St. John’s University. You mentioned moving away from Trinidad, going to St. John’s in New York City, and you studied graphic design there. Tell me what your time was like there, because I would imagine from the environment that you just described, going to New York City was a complete culture shock.

Rebecca Brooker:
Exactly. Yeah, it was. So, context. People are probably like, “If she’s so against religion, why did she go to a Catholic university?” Well, I can tell you a couple things about that. So, I went to Catholic school all my life, actually, from primary school to secondary school. When I was applying to universities, I had actually, coincidentally, visited St. John’s a couple years before at a conference that I was attending in the States. This wasn’t my first time in New York, either, my grandmother at the time was living in New York, so I was always traveling between Trinidad and New York to visit and was fairly familiar with the city. But when I was applying to universities, I applied to St. John’s just because it was one of the only US college campuses that I’d ever visited. I was like, “All right. I kind of know that place, let me just apply and see what happens.”

Rebecca Brooker:
The other schools I applied to were SCAD and other design schools, because I was like, “I need to go study design and I want to go do it at SCAD. I don’t know what St John’s program is about. They have a graphic design program, but whatever, that’s a throwaway option.” St John’s, coincidentally, came back with almost a full tuition scholarship. On top of that, they were like, “Oh, you’re a Catholic? We’re going to give you an extra scholarship for being Catholic.” I was like, “Damn. For the first time, it came in handy,” I was like, “Okay.” So, that was how I ended up making the decision, because while I did get into SCAD, it was four times the price, my parents were paying this out of pocket. Just the opportunity to go to St. John’s almost for free versus pay money that we definitely didn’t have to go to SCAD and possibly take out loans, it didn’t make sense in that way. So, reluctantly, I chose St. John’s, not knowing.

Rebecca Brooker:
I was like, “Okay, I’m going to have to put my best foot forward, because I don’t know what type of design program they have.” I’ve never heard anybody say, “I got a graphic design degree at St. John’s.” They’re known for law, they’re known for all different other things. So, I was a little bit skeptical, but like I said, it was a new opportunity. In Trinidad, we didn’t have a ton of tertiary education to pursue design. We had a field of art that you could study, but there wasn’t a huge design industry, and there still isn’t a huge design industry in Trinidad to have made it worth staying there. So, I knew that if I wanted to study design, I had to leave. This is sexuality aside, I was just thinking about career-wise, how was I going to pursue design? I had really even gotten into design in high school because I had a cracked version of Photoshop on my computer, and just started making posters. In high school, they asked me, “Oh, do you want to make our school yearbook?” I was like, “Yeah.” Maurice, I designed an entire yearbook in Photoshop.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Rebecca Brooker:
They sent it to the printer and the printer was like, “We cannot print this file. You need to use InDesign,” and I was like, “I don’t know what that is. I’m a graphic designer, I use Photoshop.” The school ended up having to pay the printer to redesign the thing I had designed in a principle way. But I was so convinced, I was like, “This is amazing, I’m a designer. I’m going to do this for the rest of my life.” That was really where my inspiration started, just playing on Photoshop making posters, doing design tutorials from the internet, and teaching myself how to design. So, fast forward, I get into St John’s, start there. I’m honestly really surprised by the design program, I had no expectations. It was a small program, there was no more than 20 of us in my classes, but some of the professors changed just what I thought I knew about graphic design. I knew nothing about graphic design.

Rebecca Brooker:
Here I was, making my yearbook in Photoshop, and you get into your first graphic design class, and I realized, I was like, “Oh wow, I am starting from scratch. I know nothing.” That was an amazing feeling, to be able to go to school and have just the time and the ability to just play and do what you want and learn so much, different techniques, learned from other people in class who were making cool stuff. It was just an eye-opening experience for me. I feel like that was when I really fell in love with design, was when I started really learning it and learning the concepts, learning how to not just make something, but how to really bring an idea to life. To think about a concept and to then bring that to life through design blew my mind, it blew my mind in 2015 when I started school. That was my experience, St John’s was four years, and I came out of it with a ton of connections.

Rebecca Brooker:
My professors were working in the design industry in New York. We were always going to visit different studios and museums and galleries in the city. So, I felt like being in New York really helped me to make the industry connections and the network that I didn’t know I was going to have.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. You were there at the right time. In college, not just being a fish out of water coming from another country to the States, but then also relearning what you knew about design, what you thought you knew about design in this program. College is always touted as a time where it’s really transformative, but for you, it really sounds like it was a good starting point for you to build the career that you have now.

Rebecca Brooker:
Definitely, definitely. I think that was part of… Something that always drove me in college, was I think I knew that I didn’t have another option. My backup plan was going back to Trinidad and really figuring out how would I be a designer in Trinidad when I don’t know anything about design, I don’t have any industry contacts, I don’t even know where to begin to do my own design thing, even as a freelancer? So, I feel like it was really a transformational moment for me, where I had to push myself to be some level of successful so that I could stand on my own two feet and I could make this career that I doubted myself, I didn’t even know if I could do. I think that determination, that drive, really, is what gave me the confidence, Maurice, to just ask people anything.

Rebecca Brooker:
I feel like it comes across as outgoing, but I was always just so curious to, “Why did you do that? Why did you make that decision? How did you meet that person? How can I meet that person? What do they do? How do you know them? Is there an idea here?” So, I was just constantly hungry, and I think that hunger is really what led me to getting my first job at BAM as an intern.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I see that after you graduated, you worked as a curatorial assistant at a couple of art galleries and such.

Rebecca Brooker:
Yeah. So, at the time, I had an on campus job at St. John’s in the student art gallery. I took that job because it was a unique opportunity, not just to learn about the art, but one of the early assignments that I would do was design some of the vinyl and design some of the material for an exhibition. So, that was a lot of like, “Okay, we’re going to do an exhibition, let me design the wall text, let me design the logo, let me put together the postcards, the flyers, put these around the campus.” So, I took that job because I wanted some hands-on practice of making stuff that wasn’t just for my classes. I started at the art gallery at St. John’s and I met a contact there, someone who came in once, and this guy was a friend of the curator at the time. He said, “Oh, I have an art gallery in Bushwick,” and I said, “Wow, do you need an intern?” He said, “Yeah, why not?” So, I got this internship at Outlet Gallery in Bushwick and, really, I became the curatorial assistant.

Rebecca Brooker:
It started just like, “Watch the gallery, talk about the work if someone comes in. We have a new show coming up, can you design the poster? Can you design the catalog?” So, I was getting a little bit of design experience, but I was also really, at this time, really into the art, and just learning a lot about art. I felt like there was a lot of similarities between the art world and the design world, just in the way that you present ideas on a page. So, I spent a lot of time in my senior year of college really going to a lot of galleries and really immersing myself and learning a lot about the art world. At one point, had another doubting moment where I was like, “Damn, do I want to become a curator? I don’t know,” and thought about that for a little bit. But art has always had a special place in my heart. I get a lot of inspiration looking at art and finding ways to translate that into design.

Rebecca Brooker:
I think that the two have a lot of overlap and it was something that I just really enjoyed looking at, generally. So, I did the curatorial assistant gig for a couple years, both at the St John’s gallery and the internship in Bushwick, and then I got this internship at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which was the perfect melting of the two worlds. Now, I was working at BAM and I was actually designing the programming for some of the opera shows, some of the festivals, and the programming that they would have at their venues. That was definitely the first job that I was working on a team with, and I was starting to learn the dynamic of being a designer in the design world, and working with a creative director, working with other designers on the team. I was the intern and just learning even the process of working in a studio, they’re like, “Oh, we have all these softwares, and I’m going to assign you a ticket, and we’re going to change the status.”

Rebecca Brooker:
For the first time, I was like, “Oh my God, you don’t just want to email me the file that you need? Damn, okay.” So, that was really my first experience, as well, with formalized design in a professional sense, outside of the classroom. That was an incredible learning experience for me, just being able to work with some of the best creatives. I think BAM was a great exercise in finding ways to be creative in a design system. They have a very tight design system that they use, and it was the first time I had to learn a design system, it was the first time I had to understand how to be creative within these constraints of the same logo, the same type base, the same everything. I felt like that just unlocked a whole new world for me. So, I worked there. Unfortunately, at this time, I was starting to think about my post-student visa status, and I had to get a job that would sponsor me a work visa.

Rebecca Brooker:
So, after talking to my boss at BAM, he said, “We’re a nonprofit, I don’t think we’re going to be able to sponsor your work visa. I have a friend who runs a team at this company called Compass, and they’re hiring a lot of designers. They’re growing really fast. Why don’t I send your portfolio?” So, I said, “Sounds good, do it,” and he sent it over. The guy from Compass called me and he said, “I’d love to bring you in for an interview.” I met with them, the recruiter that I met there was actually Trini, and she was like, “Oh no, this is a great place to work.” I was like, “Okay, okay, okay. I’m going to work there.” Surprisingly, they gave me an offer. So, I worked at Compass and things were going really well. That was a huge switch, because I was at a nonprofit where budgets were tight, and then I went into this new startup tech company, beautiful building on 5th Avenue, overlooking the city. It was just a different world. I was, again, a fish out of water.

Rebecca Brooker:
I was just not sure what to do and going along with it, but it was a great paying job, it was a bunch of new contacts, and the design work was pretty cool. So, I worked at Compass for a year and they agreed to do my work visa, we got that in place and started moving. In about July of 2018, I hadn’t heard back about my work visa status. A friend of mine at Compass, actually, who we applied at the same time, she had come over to my desk and was like, “Oh, I got my acceptance of my H-1B, did you get yours?” I was like, “No, didn’t get mine at all yet.” She said, “Oh, I’m sure it’s going to come. I’m sure it’s going to come.” So, I emailed my manager, I emailed the lawyers that are handling the case, and I don’t hear back for about two weeks. They come back and they say, “Unfortunately, your application wasn’t picked in the H-1B lottery, and you have three weeks to leave the country.”

Maurice Cherry:
Whoa.

Rebecca Brooker:
I said, “Wait a minute, but usually when you get the denial, you have 60 days to leave the country. Why is it three weeks?” They said, “Oh, I’m sorry. We forgot to inform you earlier-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh God.

Rebecca Brooker:
… that your application had been denied.” So, there was all this time that was just lost between the time of the notice and the time I was notified that I could have been preparing to leave the country. By the time I got the news, they were like, “You basically have three weeks left. You have to leave by the end of August.”

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Rebecca Brooker:
I was like, “Oh my God.” That was my whole life turned upside down, Maurice. The next day, Compass was like, “You’re no longer employed here because now that we found out your H-1B is denied, you have to stop working.”

Maurice Cherry:
Damn.

Rebecca Brooker:
I had just signed a new lease a couple months ago with my partner and another roommate, so I was like, “I’m on the hook for at least another eight months on this lease,” just a lot of big life changes. I was like, “Okay. So, I have to go back to Trinidad. What am I going to do? I have $4,000, $5,000 saved in total. I don’t know what that’s going to get me in this next life, but we’re going to find out.” So, I left the States, I went back home to Trinidad. My parents at the time were actually on vacation in Europe. It must have been two or three weeks, maybe a month after I got back to Trinidad, my old boss at Compass called me and he said, “Hey, I want to let you know, we’re about to sign a deal with this agency in Buenos Aires. They need a designer who knows our brand to go down there and help them build a team of 15 production designers.” I was like, “Okay. So, you’re saying I should go do the job?”

Rebecca Brooker:
They were like, “Yeah. We put your name in to go do that, and they’re going to call you.” I was like, “All right.” [inaudible 00:55:14] are done, just a really lucky break and a real opportunity, where my boss from Compass, shout out Jeff Lai, he threw my name in the hat. I was still just one year working there, there were people working at the company years who could have probably done that job, but he took a chance on me, proposing me for that gig, and I ended up getting the job. So, that was the thing that moved me to Argentina at the end of 2018, was this new opportunity with Media.Monks to help them build a team of designers for Compass in Buenos Aires, and help lead that team to understand the brand.

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