Rob Martin

Running your own design studio is no small feat, but design professionals like Rob Martin make it look easy. As the founder and creative principal of Majorminor, he and his team have done branding and digital work for a number of clients for over a decade, including ICA, Complex, and Sony. On top of that, Rob is a talented musician and producer who goes by the name RCA. That guitar you see in the photo ain’t just for show!

We started our conversation with a quick 2022 check-in, and from there Rob talked about the ins and outs of running Majorminor, working with clients, and the types of projects he wants to branch out and tackle. Rob also spoke about growing up in the Bay Area, attending Sacramento State University and working for a few companies before striking out on his own. We even chatted about his music and his upcoming gig at SXSW this year! Rob is proof that being true to yourself is the real key to success!

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

Rob Martin:
Hey, so my name is Rob Martin. I run a studio called Majorminor. We’re based out of San Francisco, California. I act as the principal owner and a creative director here. Yeah, we do branding agency work. We do brand strategy and graphic design identity systems for a different range of clients. B2B, small local bakery or some more enterprise-level international enterprise. But basically we work with clients and people that are really trying to do something good for people. So we try to do good work for these people at the organization to support them and their vision.

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

Rob Martin:
It’s been doing okay. Definitely not a banner year for us or me in person or anything, but it’s one of those years where we’re looking back so we can see how we can move forward, right? It’s a lot of reflection on how we’ve been running the company, our past clients, what we can learn from those experiences and start to implement things into our workflow, our processes to make it better for us to work, whether it’s a work-life balance kind of thing, or even just how we’re serving our clients. How can we get, “Better clients?” We just work less to do more.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, because you just hit the 10-year mark not too long ago, right?

Rob Martin:
Yeah. I think 10 years was… I forget what year that was, but I think we’ll be turning 13 this year.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow.

Rob Martin:
Yeah, it was 2019. So yeah, it should be 13 years. 2009, we started.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Rob Martin:
And then yes, we should be 13 this year. July 20th is our birthday.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. Congratulations.

Rob Martin:
Thank you. Yeah, it’s been a long ride.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s talk about the design studio Majorminor, which first off just for those that are listening and might be wondering, where did the name come from?

Rob Martin:
Yeah. So the name actually goes back when I was in college in Sacramento State, our last class was a portfolio building class. We actually have a portfolio to use once we got out of school. I took it upon myself to actually treat it as if I was doing a studio for myself. Actually, since I started school at Sacramento State, one of my friends in school really put me on all the cool studios like Pentagram and Turner Duckworth out in San Francisco. That was my first real exposure to something like that. Even the idea of owning a business, something I’ve always wanted to do as a kid, but that was like I was a kid in the ’90s, so it was going to be a store, a 7-Eleven/import video game studio or a store/rollerblading store.

Rob Martin:
It was a very juvenile idea. That has always been inside of me. So once I had the idea like, “Hey, I can actually run a studio. I’m really passionate about graphic design. Here’s my chance to kind of get that idea realized.” So in this portfolio class, we start coming up with names and I’m really digging into myself about who I am, how that reflects my work. And it actually came from the parallels I see in design, in music and also even just myself. So I’ll kind of explain the names. I think it’s really interesting. This will help me make sure that it still makes sense years later. So basically when you have a visual, right? There’s a rhythm between light and that contrasting that creates the form, right? So you remember doing line studies in your first graphic design class. You’re doing these strips and then see how this black and white can make rhythm or how it can make a form.

Rob Martin:
And then even with sound wave, it’s a up and down wave. But the contrast between those ups and downs and the speed that they’re going at will make it sound. So those parallels are really interesting to me too. And then even thinking about myself. People thinking about different people like, “Oh, that person is X, that means they like Y.” I feel like I was in the middle of all these things like, “Oh, you’re a black dude, but you grew up around South Bay around a bunch of Asian folks. So you don’t fit that mold in that way.” So I always kind of saw myself in the middle.

Rob Martin:
And then bringing it back to the whole music thing, Majorminor the way I see it as being in the middle of these ups and downs and kind of existing there, even again with the whole balance between form and my shape and color, all kind of making these things. That’s kind of where I came up with the name Majorminor to then represent myself and the practice that we have at the studio.

Maurice Cherry:
So tell me about the Majorminor team.

Rob Martin:
Yeah. So the Majorminor team currently, our core team is there’s three people; myself, my producer, Vincent, and then my other project manager, account manager, Michelle. One of the cool things about Majorminor is that everyone at kind of the leadership-level, you want to call it, they’ve always been people that I considered my best friends in life. I’m very lucky to have people that I call my best friend or a best friend that I could then actually work with and work alongside with in a really healthy, non-toxic kind of a way.

Rob Martin:
And this current iteration they’ve been on the team for the last, two years now. During COVID I took a break. I had a really bad panic attack in 2020, I think it was right before COVID hit. So I took off pretty much that year from COVID or the year that we first had the shutdown. When we started to come back together or when I decided I was ready to get back to work, I brought them along to kind of reshape the team and move forward with a more healthier feel.

Rob Martin:
And it’s been great so far. They’re really, really sensitive to that kind of stuff. And just paying attention to that for even our clients. How are they feeling about this? How are we feeling about everything? Making sure we’re not working too much, but know that when we do need to pick up the pace or something, we’re doing that in a way that’s not toxic or berating of anyone. Really considering, “This is about the work and not the person, but the people here, they need to be in a certain place to able to do their best work.”

Maurice Cherry:
What are the best types of clients for you to work with?

Rob Martin:
I’d say our best type of client is and this is something that we’ve only recently started to identify maybe in the last year, maybe even two years, but really kind of taking a hypothesis and trying to see if that actually makes sense, which it has. But basically, it’s a company that has some kind of product they’ve been able to vet their business. They’re probably making at least a million dollars a year revenue, but they don’t have a real brand system or even a strategy. They’ve just been just doing their thing. And they want to become competitive on either a larger regional stage or a national stage.

Rob Martin:
And so usually that means most of our clients have never paid for a design or worked with a strategic design team before. So we already know there’s a lot of education that comes with that relationship and a lot of handholding, but not like… It’s just like, “Hey, this is the process. And it might feel unintuitive to you in certain ways, but let us walk you through it.” And we’ll explain why we’re doing all this stuff. So we kind of see ourselves as being the stepper for them to get up the mountain. Sometimes people climb mountains, but they never climbed ever. So they need someone that’s done it before, see how they move and then bring them up the mountain in a way that facilitates their best experience.

Maurice Cherry:
So when let’s say a company or an individual then contacts you about a new project, what does that process look like in terms of bringing them in, working with their idea? What does that look like?

Rob Martin:
Yeah. So first off, I guess we get some kind of initial email from them, “Hey we’ve got this project we’re thinking about, we got referred to you by whomever.” We’ll just hop on a really casual conversation and just talk to them. They can say, “We need a new brand system. We like this and like that.” But again, this is their first time actually working with a strategic team. So we want to uncover what that really means for them. And then help them understand what that really is for them. They might need an identity system, but how agile are you expecting it to be? What places will the main touch points, the core brand expressions actually be? And then once we have those conversations, it enlightens them onto what they’re actually about to get from us, what they actually need. And just the whole thing, just more are detailed and articulated for them.

Rob Martin:
Then from there, we’ve kind of uncover all those things. We call it a discovery session. Once everything is uncovered during that discovery session, then we’ll actually go and write a proposal with a number in there for them, go back and forth. Maybe they can’t afford it, or maybe they have to get more money, but then we can cut things out of it, put things in there that might have been revealed to them during some kind of board review of the proposal. And then from there, everything is sign the dot line. And this is actually something we’re about to do, to have a second session after the contracts are signed, going through all the terms of the engagement with them very clear. So everyone’s on the same page on how the process will move and why we only want you to have six stakeholders and no one else can chime in, why we’re doing that because we don’t want too many cooks in the kitchen.

Rob Martin:
People giving feedback out of context, or even giving personal feedback that isn’t irrelevant, but it then messed up the flavor in the pot. You know what I mean?

Maurice Cherry:
Right.

Rob Martin:
Really trying to get… And not to be strict, but just say, “Hey, if you want this to move efficiently, when you want to get done, then we have to move in this way.” It serves both of our parties, not just us, not wanting to deal with other people. But for us to get that product for them, we need to make sure we’re all in agreement with the way we all have to move. It’s like I sign a disclaimer for you to jump out of a plane or something like that, I guess.

Maurice Cherry:
So aside from clients and everything you mentioned that’s been going on now for 13 years almost, what’s been the secret to keep the things going?

Rob Martin:
I don’t know if there’s a secret, if there is, I’m still trying to figure it out. So if anyone hears anything from the stuff I’m saying, please feel free to pull my coat. Let me know what the secret could be. I think if anything, it is really just building. I think the biggest part of it is building and maintaining relationships because people the best way word-of-mouth or word-of-mouth is the best way I think, to get new projects. And even I feel like people see your work, that’s not what they’re buying necessarily. So if they come to you like, “Oh, that was really cool that you did that.” And their whole traction leads off of your work. It’s usually, you got to turn that back around because they’re not really paying for the work.

Rob Martin:
While the work is obviously important as the product that they’re getting at the end of the day, the relationship and the way that you both move, how the designer leads you through this, I think is what really, the biggest thing is. If they’re efficient, they’re working right, they’re being professional, they’re hitting their timelines. Those are the things that I think you’re really paying for because you get anyone to do any kind of design work. That’s why I don’t get hire people like, “Oh, I can just go on Fiverr and get someone to do this.” I’m fine like, “Fine, if that’s what you want to do go, but it’s going to be a way different experience and end product than what you’re going to get from us.” And that’s fine. If you want to go there, I’m not mad at you because that’s probably stuff I don’t want to work with if they’re going to have that kind of mentality.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Rob Martin:
Or maybe they don’t really know the difference. I have to educate them to show them the value of what they’re actually getting versus a different studio or even another designer or even a Fiverr guy.

Maurice Cherry:
And I mean that education part is important. One, that’s kind of in a way what they’re paying for, hopefully they’re paying for the education because they’re paying you to do something that they can’t do. So the hope is that you’ll be able to kind of show them like, “This is how it should be done.” But then also, they’re also paying for just your expertise. If you’ve been doing it for this long, clearly you have a track record for knowing what you’re doing. So it would take, hopefully I’m thinking on the client end, it would take me less time to hire a professional than for me to hire someone on say Fiverr or some marketplace that I may have to do a whole bunch of explaining towards, I don’t know the verbiage or the terminology to really talk to them the way they did in order to do the work. It ends up becoming just a lot more work that way.

Rob Martin:
Yeah. And that part, especially with the clients that we have, where it is their first time paying for this large of an effort strategic with design, they don’t know what they’re getting into. And there’s actually even a moment I want to say it was about a year ago where this woman approached us for some work. We already knew we didn’t want to work with her because of her tone of voice. But we still took the time to let her know, “You have no idea where you’re about to get into and this is what it should look like. And that’s why it costs X hundred thousand dollars.” Just because you don’t think it’s worth that much. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth that much. If anything, you really need to understand what you’re about to get into because you’re going to have a world of hurt as you try and do everything you’re trying to say for $15,000.

Rob Martin:
And we’re not trying to be mean, it’s just like, “Yo, this is actually how it is.” If anything, it should probably cost more because you’re going to be one of those people that don’t get it and don’t want to get it and it’s going to make more work for everyone. So yeah, I’m sharing information because I want people to understand what we actually do and take the veer off because it’s kind of… If you’ve never done it before, it’s kind of nebulous, what it really is and you learn along the way. And that’s the kind of the fun part about it for our clients too, is them seeing and having those aha moments and say, “Oh, that’s why you guys wanted to.”

Rob Martin:
One thing that we do that we’ve been doing for the last few years and we do identity systems. We don’t just do the logo and then the colors and then the tie, we do the whole thing at once. So they see a very good representation of where we want to take this direction for the system. So they’ll see the logo, some colors, it’s a very detailed mood board. And we even mock up like, “Here’s a poster or a campaign idea within this.” So it might only get two directions, but these two directions are thought out and vetted all the way to the point where they can just say, “We like that one or we like this one or maybe can we try this one with the other colors?”

Rob Martin:
And we cut down a lot of the really big reviews because we’re not doing everything one at a time. We’re showing everything in context. So if you can see this image that we’re trying to create for them, what the system looks like and how agile it is, how it can scale, what other pieces we think might need to be invented. Maybe they didn’t think about, “Oh, we never thought about doing this thing because we never saw the need for it. But we do see the need for it in this image mock up that you’ve done for us.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Like I said, that education is really important for them to kind of see what goes into it. Because oftentimes they don’t really know. Especially like you said, if they haven’t hired someone before, they don’t know what the creative process looks like. They just think you go in there and punch a few buttons and there you go. There’s the logo. But when you show them all the thought and the care and the psychology and everything that goes behind it, the hope is that they have that appreciation.

Maurice Cherry:
I had someone contact me recently that was like, “Oh, I need a logo for my organization.” And usually the first question I’ll always ask is, “What’s your budget?” Because for me that can be the indicator as to whether this is going to be a good project or a bad project. I hate to say it, but that’s true.

Maurice Cherry:
And so they had a pretty low budget and I said, “Well, you probably would be better off going to a marketplace just based on what you are willing to spend on this.” And it was pretty much a full brand identity for a nonprofit organization. They’re like, “We need a logo and this and that and the third.” Because I was like, “If you really try to hire the services of a designer, it’s going to be much more expensive than that. And I don’t know how much more expensive, it’s definitely going to be more expensive than your budget.” So you kind of have to ask those qualifying questions and stuff too. And especially when you’re starting out on your own, you may not know that. You may take those low gigs at first just to kind of have some skin in the game and you realize years and years later, you don’t do that.

Rob Martin:
Yeah. You know what’s even kind of crazy about that. They’re not crazy, but another piece of that is like, this is what I learned a few years ago too, was you might bid the pie and the sky project for them. But really they might not even be able to support that. It might be just be too much. And they spend all this money after you’ve educated them on it and they can’t even support it, and the identity just falls apart. Sometimes you’ll see this new brand comes out there, they wouldn’t be on brand new or something like that. But you’ll see the whole, “Oh, this is really cool. This is really great.” The way it’s represented on the designer side looks awesome. Then you go back a year later and it looks nothing like that because the internal team on the client side could not support something like that. Either their designer that they had in staff was whack or the brand guidelines you made them were trash.

Rob Martin:
But you also have to be able to make something that people can actually use and support over the length of however long they need it for. So that’s part of it to consider too. So they might be able to get the money for, but if you don’t think they have the support system to use that work and make it of even more value for them, then it’s kind like that’s another place you got to pause and be like, “Hey, you know what? Maybe we can just do a smaller scale of this or you should just to go somewhere else and just do something basic until you have the infrastructure to do something more. Just do something bigger to get you to that level, but I don’t think you’re there yet.” That’s something we’ve had to do a couple of times, but it’s a good thing to be able to identify as we’re kind of going through the bidding process.

Maurice Cherry:
No, that makes a lot of sense, actually. I didn’t even think about that. You can do this big identity and things for them, but if they can’t support it moving forward, then it’s like, “Do they really need that? Are they going to contract you to do that work for them?” There’s all these other questions that end up coming into play.

Rob Martin:
Yeah, yeah. And because just me personally, I to do the most and that always nips me in the bud a lot. So I’ve had to temper myself with trying to do everything I want to and would like to for them to what they actually need, what can they actually use? So that’s been, I guess, more of a learning for myself but that has been for other people. But we’ve had multiple times where we’ve had to encounter that and make a decision.

Maurice Cherry:
Now you’ve mentioned doing a lot of branding and identity projects. Are there other types of projects that you want to do in the future through the studio?

Rob Martin:
Retail stuff is always really interesting because even getting into the graphic design. I remember my mom, she worked at, I don’t know, some place. It was a big white building called Sintex or something and over by Stanford in California and she would go to work every day and then come back and tell me what she did, it was data research or something. But there’s never any physical thing to show for it. And I also thought it was weird, at least for me because even as a kid, I liked to make stuff. I was either drawing or arts and craft, lanyards kind of shit. Everything I did, I had something to show for. Even when I was playing video games if I beat the game, I then make a drawing of the game as a certificate for myself like, “Hey, I did this thing.”

Rob Martin:
So for me, having some kind of artifact of your accomplishments or things that you do has always been really important to me. So the retail kind of thing, having a product that we then get to design and then package and someone I can point to it on a shelf like, “Yeah, me and my team did that.” That’s always been a really important to me to do more stuff like that. But even with websites, “Yeah, we made that thing.” But the physical thing is actually really interesting too. So even with the music that I put out, I put that on vinyl. So I have a record, literally a record of it and-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice.

Rob Martin:
… it’s like a piece I can look back on. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s pretty dope. I want to definitely talk more about your music. We’ll get to that I think later in the interview. But let’s switch gears and talk about your origin story. You mentioned, or you’ve alluded to that you’re from in and around the Bay Area, is that right?

Rob Martin:
Yeah. So I grew up in Sunnyvale, California, and that’s in the South Bay Area of the Bay Area and that was really cool being out there. Again, it was a cool mix, melting pot being around all these different people, even the tech and stuff out there. I really would say, I am a product of Sunnyvale, really into video games. Nerdy kind of guy, but cool enough where I could still get around and not get punked or anything. It definitely had an impact on the person I am in good ways, I think. I’m very proud to be from there.

Maurice Cherry:
It definitely sounds like you got into art and design and stuff pretty early on. You mentioned sketching the video games after you beat them and stuff like that.

Rob Martin:
Yeah, yeah. Video games was one of the gateways into art and design. Skateboarding was another really big one too. I was never, ever good at skateboarding, but I always like the art on them, the culture and the way people dress. That was a really big part of it for me. And then even with skateboarding, getting into punk rock music, I played in punk bands and stuff when I was in high school, sky bands, metal bands. But all those things, they all kind of… One thing I got into took me into something else, took me into something else. But they all stemmed around the art and the music part of it and the culture too, just the people that built it, seeing how they operate.

Rob Martin:
And especially even thinking about, I won’t say there was a counter culture necessary, but there’s just alternative lifestyles, the way people get down in there. Some of the crusty punk dudes, I used to kick it with. I would never want to live like that, but I respected the fact that they wanted to live that way. That’s what they did. And there was very authenticism or authentic part about it. They’re being themselves, doing what they want to do and whatever you’re “supposed to do,” they weren’t really worried about that because that’s what they wanted to do.

Maurice Cherry:
When did you know that design was something that you wanted to study?

Rob Martin:
Well, so I’ll say this, I always wanted to do graphic design, but I didn’t really know what graphic design was from a theoretical kind of practice until I got to Sacramento State.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Rob Martin:
Before that, I really just wanted a job where I didn’t have to do any math and I got to sit in front of a computer all day. I guess I wanted to be a production designer at that point. I didn’t know that’s what it was. I just wanted to make stuff on the computer and not have to stand all day.

Rob Martin:
So once I got Sacramento State, the first class was all about theory again, how we’re seeing light becoming sense of the form and color. I was like, “Oh, this is actually kind of dope. There’s a whole science to it.” Even the degree that we got from Sacramento State was a Bachelor’s of Science, not an art degree. I really like that they fought to get that kind of definition around the program because this is all theory. Yeah, you are making something. You’re making a “beautiful thing,” at the end of the day. But there’s a lot of science, psychology, anthropology, even that goes into the foundation of the algorithm that we used to make whatever we make, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And now prior to Sacramento State though, you started out at a art school, right? At Academy of Art University.

Rob Martin:
Yeah, yeah. So I don’t know if you knew this, but in the Bay Area where Academy is based out of, back in 2000s, they would run commercials late at night when all the anime stuff was on.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah.

Rob Martin:
Show, “Hey, if you want to draw anime, you can come over to art school over here and we’ll help get you a job and all this.” It was very romantic in that way. Trying to play up getting an art degree. That obviously looked very attractive to me. It was very expensive, but I like, “Mom, I really want to do this. Can you help me get there?” So we worked over the summer to get me signed up over there. It was a pain in the arse to get signed up there. And I was still living in my parents’ house in Sunnyvale. So getting up to San Francisco to be there for four days a week, a little bit of a stretch being… I don’t know how old I was, so I think I was maybe 20 or 19 then.

Maurice Cherry:
Were you driving or were you taking Caltrain?

Rob Martin:
So I’d stay at my friend’s house in Berkeley. He was going to UC Berkeley and I would stay up there for a day or two and then take BART across and then come back on the weekends.

Maurice Cherry:
Gotcha.

Rob Martin:
So I could work and just be home.

Maurice Cherry:
Because that’s a commute from South Bay to get up to San Francisco. I remember I interned out in San Francisco for a summer when I was in college and I was like, “It’s a trek.”

Rob Martin:
Yeah, yeah. If I had a good car, it wouldn’t have been that much of a problem, but just the logistics. So I’d be there till 7:00. I had to get there 9:00 AM, be there till 7:00 and then have to do homework. My friend was like I could just stay with him for a little bit.

Rob Martin:
Yeah, so I started school there, just the whole commute thing, the amount of stuff I needed to buy, the work I needed to do. I wasn’t ready for it. I think I dropped out halfway through the first semester. It wasn’t what I thought I was going to be. I wasn’t ready for that. It wasn’t what I expected it to be, which it ended up being more or the theory stuff. They start you out with all these foundational drawing classes, which are important.

Rob Martin:
But in hindsight, I don’t think that was absolutely necessary for the type of designer that I ended up being. So I’m glad I didn’t stick with that, especially for the amount they were charging. It was incredibly expensive.

Rob Martin:
Oh, yeah. I was going to continue with the little bit, the origin stuff, right? So I dropped out of there and I went back to community college and I decided, “You know what? I’m going to go to a state school. I would like to get out of the Bay Area slightly.” So I started working towards going to Sacramento State, doing some painting and drawing classes at the end of community college and then went to Sac State. I think I started in 2003 there and I was at Academy, I think 2002. Yes, maybe like a year. I had an in between just because we had to sign up for the whole school transfer and everything to go to a state school from any other school.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It sounds like Sacramento State was just a much better environment for you overall.

Rob Martin:
Oh, across the board. I swear I’m so lucky that this worked out for me because it was like one of those things was like, I don’t know what I’m going to do if I don’t do this, I have to do something like this because I actually got diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago. And in hindsight that explained my whole entire life up to that point. And because usually if I’m not in it, I’ve been saying this thing recently. If I don’t fuck with you, I don’t fuck with you. And that’s kind of, if I’m not into it, then I literally can’t do it. My brain won’t let me. It won’t be stimulating enough for me to engage with it at all. I didn’t know that was an ADHD thing until recently.

Rob Martin:
But looking back, I told myself, I was like, “Yo Rob, you got to make this work.” Luckily the program at Sac State is top-notch. I highly recommend it to anyone trying to save money, but still get a very solid design education. I think their education there is better than Academy’s. It’s all theoretical. Although the professors are super Swiss old school trained, but they’ve been able to be agile and keep up with the times in a way. That really shows how much the theory and the practice of the foundations like becoming sensitive to the way you’re looking at things and having a critical eye and not personal preference or anything like that. They’re able to shape someone that’s maybe not naturally good at design and get them to a place where they can’t be competitive in the workplace.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Let’s talk about your early career. So you graduated from Sacramento State, you’re getting out there in the world, working as a designer. Tell me what your early career was like because you were kind of working at a few different places here and there, right?

Rob Martin:
Yeah. Actually, so maybe I should take a little step back. So before I graduated, I went to Dallas for a student design competition and I won my first award there, but I also met a lot of people. I met Armando Simmons out there. This guy, Matt George, I was working at VSA in Chicago. I almost actually ended up working at VCA a few months after that, but I wanted to graduate first and they were trying to get me to get over there before I graduated. I’m like, “I got to get the degree due. I’ve been working on this for three years. I can’t leave a month early and not get the degree.” So passed on that. And then I graduated and then I think immediately after that, I started sending out stuff for internships and I was able to land one at Chan Design in San Francisco, one of my favorite studios.

Rob Martin:
So back in the day, they were very influential on me. I was back again to commuting. So I’d be taking the train or driving to San Francisco from Sacramento at least three days a week for this internship. Super long commute.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Rob Martin:
And eventually it was a pain, but for me it was worth it because that was a place I always admired and I really looked up to. So for me that was worth the commute. Plus I got to listen to podcasts and music all day on the way up and down. So those two and a half hour drives weren’t too bad back then.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice.

Rob Martin:
And then from Chan, I was able to get a full-time designer spot at Volume. I was there for about a year, I think. For the first half of that, I was commuting every day now, but this time I take the train, which took longer, but at least I wasn’t driving so I could sleep on the way there and back. I did that get commute for a little bit then I moved back to my parents’ house in Sunnyvale. I just drove from San Francisco every day to back home. Then from there I got a spot at this place called Duarte Design. They’re the PowerPoint keynote specialists for Apple. They did Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth stuff. They’re a heavy player. They are the PowerPoint people. You there’s no one else that’s messing with them in any kind of way.

Rob Martin:
And I was there for a little bit and this is where my snobbery and the me thinking I was hot shit really came into play because I didn’t really… Cool. Working on PowerPoint stuff but I didn’t know I’d be working a Windows machine. I got really uppity about that. I think just culturally I wasn’t a good fit there and we all knew it, but they were trying their hardest to make it work just because they’re investing in the people and everything that they have. So I guess they kind of short, I am getting fired the day that Obama was elected.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow.

Rob Martin:
But yeah, I saw it coming, but I get a little more symbolic on that day of all days. So I left there and I worked at Punchcut for a little bit and then I got laid off there because I was right when Obama got elected was when the recession started to hit. And it hit pretty hard right after that. So I got laid off there and then I was like you know what? I was going to start my studio. I’m living at my parents’ house. I said, “I need to make a little bit of money,” so they let me pay for food and gas and hang on the weekends. So I’ll be able to do that while I’m kind of getting my whole process together and actually figure out how I’m going to do this.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I want to interject there for two things. One, when you were at Duarte, I’m curious. Do you know Jole Simmons? Does that name sound familiar?

Rob Martin:
It sounds familiar, but I don’t have a face.

Maurice Cherry:
He’s a presentation designer. I don’t know if you and he worked at Duarte at the same time, but you mentioned him. And that made me think of when I interviewed him a while back.

Rob Martin:
Oh, you mean Armando Simmons or Jole Simmons? I said Armando.

Maurice Cherry:
I know Armando Simmons, Jole Simmons, J-O-L-E Simmons, Hampton grad. I think Joel is still out there in the Bay now, but he does a lot of big presentations like Apple, Microsoft, et cetera. So you mentioned Duarte and I was thinking, “Oh, I think I know him. I don’t know if you all had crossed paths or not.” But it sounds one interesting parallel that kind of came up to me as you were mentioning that is you left right when Obama got elected, like you said, that was kind of symbolic. And I remember I was working at AT&T right at that time as a senior designer and I quit my job the day Obama got elected. I was going-

Rob Martin:
Because of that or just you got hyped up?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I think I just got hyped up. It was all in the moment because I’m not going to get too much into it. Folks who have listened to the podcast have probably heard this story. But I was working at AT&T, I was a senior production designer. It was just a lot of work. And they were scaling things to the point where we were doing… All the work that we did had point values to it. And so they would lessen the point value of the work and increase the number of points you had to hit every week to make your goal or whatever.

Maurice Cherry:
And then on top of that, I was also getting paid less than other senior designers there, despite the fact that I had more experience and I had sort of lobbied to not my manager because I was a contractor working there, but my contractor manager telling her what happened and she managed to get all of my back pay. There were six months of back pay that was owed to me and the back hit that morning because I remember I went to go vote. I came back to the office and my contractor manager pulled me into her office, told me that the money had hit and everything like that. So we should be all squared away and things like that. And it was like as soon as she said that, and then a little bit later on we were watching the votes and everything in the office and stuff like that. And we had a big team meeting near the end of the day and I just quit. I quit in the team meeting.

Rob Martin:
Yo, props for that, though. Even during the team meeting too, that’s a hard mic drop thing.

Maurice Cherry:
But I’m curious for you, you had kind of these short stints at these different design agencies and studios and stuff, what was going on during that time. Did you just feel like you weren’t fitting in anywhere or what was going through your mind then?

Rob Martin:
Yeah, this is actually kind of a personal thing for me, right? Again, with the ADHD thing, I didn’t know I had that until later in life. So first two spots to Chan and Volume just being contract designers out here, you kind of come in and out, that’s just how those worked out. At the same time, I think the person I was, my social skills were not where they are now. I’m way more socially inept or I’m better as a social person. I fit in with people. I can talk to people now more comfortable with doing that. Before I was really shy. I’m very awkward on top of me just not being into certain things. At Duarte, I just looked like an asshole pretty much I think to people. Not intentionally, but I was though.

Rob Martin:
Again, in hindsight I could see how the way I was behaving would look to someone for me outside in. And then even just starting Majorminor and having to now get in of people and sell myself, that really helped with all this being comfortable and being able to approach people, being able to talk to people in a certain way. All that really helped and it started to happen once I started getting my feet on the ground, started campaigning to get work and stuff.

Maurice Cherry:
So that feeling was kind of what made you want to start the studio?

Rob Martin:
Well, I wouldn’t say that feeling necessarily, but I guess that was a part of it was just, I need to be able to do things in my own terms in order for me to do them at my highest level. Just like the personal investment. Do I really want to do this? Do I care about it versus kind of what you were saying with AT&T just throwing stuff in front of you and you’re just trying to churning it out. I can’t do that necessarily, at least for a sustained amount of time, after a while I just start to drift off and daydream in my head and think about other stuff I’d rather be doing. So I figured why did I just do that stuff in the first place so you never have to feel like that or make someone feel a certain kind of way about you because you’re treating their work in a certain way.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What were those early years of Majorminor like?

Rob Martin:
Very interesting. I’ve ever encountered anyone else that had this kind of path, but I didn’t have any clients that I brought with me or anything like that when I left any of these places or even freelance clients. I literally just went on Craigslist every 20 minutes and refreshed a page and sent out my little cold email to all the people that were looking for stuff. Sometimes it’d be a little $150 logo. Sometimes it’d be like, “Hey, I need a magazine done or something like that.”

Rob Martin:
That experience was really critical because it helped me to build my process for any actual real work, getting my contracts together. Having that experience is where things go wrong, and I now learn not to do certain things. Understanding how to approach people and not just say yes to everything, but like, “Hey, I can do this, but I can do this. Well, you only have this amount of money. Well, I can’t do that then, but I can do this for you.” The negotiation thing, being able to meet people where they’re at with what they’re trying to do and really understanding and hearing them and what they’re trying to do and not just be a factory.

Rob Martin:
The beginning years of just chilling on Craigslist was pretty, pretty significant that way. I didn’t know that at the time, but looking back that was my master’s program was the first two years of Majorminor, just trolling on there. But the thing is once I was doing that because I started off solo, right? So I’m doing this just on Craigslist as often as I possibly can, looking for other avenues to get work without having any work to show or any other contacts that could put me in front of someone else. It really built me up in that way and got my process to a place where I can actually run a business.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m glad you said that because I think that way of starting out is a lot more common than people think. I know that-

Rob Martin:
Yeah, I hope so.

Maurice Cherry:
No, no, no, serious because that’s how I started out. My first year after I quit, I didn’t have… See, this was my thing. I thought I would have clients lined up. I had been telling friends of mine like, “I’m thinking about starting my own studio or something like that.” And they’re like, “Yeah, well you got such and such. I’ll have some work for you.” And I quit. And those first, I’d say probably those first three or four were lean. I mean they were rough. I wasn’t necessarily going on Craigslist, but I was definitely taking super low paying jobs, anything just to get something in the bank account.

Maurice Cherry:
I was going to a lot of meetups because meetups were big. I’m in Atlanta to kind of give a context. But here at Atlanta, meetups were pretty big in 2009 or so. So I would go to all these web design meetups, which I quickly found out is the worst place for a designer to try to get a job because there’s other designers that are trying to get jobs. So you all are all competing for the same scraps essentially. Everybody’s trying to get something. It was rough those first few months.

Maurice Cherry:
I had went to one meetup and some guy had contacted me. He was a business graduate from UGA, this white dude. And he was like, “Yeah, I’d love to meet up with you. I have some questions about design because there’s this project that I might be working on and I’d like your help on.” And I was just like, “Okay, fine. If you buy me breakfast.” Because at the time I was like, I got $5 off to my MATA card. I can take the bus up there and then walk back to the station and take the trains, so I don’t have to pay twice or whatever.

Maurice Cherry:
I went up there. It was a Panera Bread up in Buckhead for folks that know Atlanta. Went to Panera Bread, met this guy and he was telling me, “Me and this other friend were thinking of starting this business because we’re trying to… ” They were basically trying to cash in on the, it’s funny because Obama kind of ties into this, but trying to cash in on the trend of politicians now wanting to run their campaigns like Obama. So this is early 2009. Everything Obama did in his first run for presidency with social media and graphic design and stuff was really unprecedented.

Maurice Cherry:
And so this is one of the first slates of municipal races after that. It was like the mayor’s race essentially. And so everybody running wanted the Obama sheen to their campaign and it’s like, “Well you can’t hire the Obama folks because now they work for the administration or they’re going to be super expensive.” So he had knew this guy and they knew a candidate that was running and they were basically going to put a company together to pitch to that candidate. But they were like, “We need a designer.” And so he’s asking me to basically tell him how to design. He’s like, “Should I learn HTML or should I learn Dreamweaver? And I’m like [crosstalk 00:40:09]. I was like, “You know what? I’m sympathetic to your plight. I really need work. Let’s just kind of do this as a trio.”

Maurice Cherry:
And so the three of us had met up and we came up with a name for the business and we had ended up getting onto the campaign of this woman. She was the city council president and she had ran for mayor. She dropped out because her parents got sick and she was about to jump back into the race. So we’re talking to her campaign manager at this lavish mansion. And I was like, “This is the fanciest shit I have ever seen in my life.” I knew people in Atlanta were rich, but I was like, “I have never seen no shit like this.” Huge-

Rob Martin:
Yeah. Rich, rich.

Maurice Cherry:
… 10 foot round solid marble table that we’re meeting at like King Arthur. And we meet the candidate and she’s told us about we’re running for everything and she’s like, “I like the three of you all,” because two of us were black and one of us was white. And she’s like, “I like the three of you all. This is real diverse like Obama. You got you a white guy? This is real diverse.” Because she was black.

Rob Martin:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
And so she kind of was, ask us about where we went to school and all this kind of stuff. And so is like, “Yeah, I’ll take a chance. I’ll take a chance on you.” So we ended up becoming the new media team for her campaign essentially. She got back in the race and ran from, I think April of 2009 to November. She didn’t win. She came in third place. But that whole experience set me up basically to continue running my studio for almost 10 years after that. Because if I didn’t have that experience of that campaign, I wouldn’t have been able to meet other people.

Maurice Cherry:
And honestly, like you said, get your process together. The crucible of working inside a political campaign is rough. It reminded me a lot of working as a production designer. You got to crank out stuff really fast. You got to respond to things quickly. There’s no time to kind of sit and iterate. You got to really come up with something super quick. It was a lot, it was a lot. And actually that’s where I first met Stacey Abrams because that was who our campaign manager was.

Rob Martin:
Oh, okay. Cool.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, so that was pretty cool.

Rob Martin:
That’s what I said. They all comes around full circle.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Those early years, I mean kind of to the point I was saying earlier, you kind of have to get out there and scrap. The hope is that you’re going to have these clients and people that come over. But the reality is, it’s a jungle out there. I’d say probably even more so now than that because the learning curve to design, I’m using air quotes around design, is so much shorter now because people can learn stuff on YouTube and they can take these courses and stuff. And there’s people half a world away that are doing this for pennies on the dollar. And how can you compete with that?

Rob Martin:
Yeah. It’s just all the bureaucracy that goes into that, everyone’s looking at it, everyone’s got something to say, but you still got to make it in two minutes just really quick. And did you even have a system that you were working with or were you just making stuff on the fly and [crosstalk 00:43:09]?

Maurice Cherry:
No, I was just making up stuff as I went along. I had no problem process, I had nothing. And like you said, it takes a few times you get burned by… I was fortunate that with the political campaign, everything worked out as it did. But even the clients I had after that, I didn’t have a contract. I eventually learned about AIGA’s design contract and I sort of used that.

Maurice Cherry:
I had a client that was a lawyer who used to work with the campaign. And so I bartered my service with him. I’m like, “I’ll do design work for you. If you write my contracts.” And so that’s how I got good contracts, proposals, templates and stuff. I started thinking like, “Who do I need to do work for to try to upgrade how I do my business?” But that process had to come along through a lot of trial and error. Nobody was sitting me, I didn’t have a business mentor or anybody that sat me down that was like, “You have to do this.” I was out here fucking up and just trying to recover from it.

Rob Martin:
The contract thing’s actually kind of funny. So we’ve always had problems with people running late or not paying us. Actually, we had a really bad one about a year ago. They’re still paying us. It’s been a year since the job was over. I’ve actually found the contracts to be kind of ineffective because if you don’t enforce them, whether it’s like, “Hey, this happened according to our terms, this is what’s supposed to happen.” If you don’t enforce them, they’re not going to.” If you do enforce them, you might not get anything. It’s kind of like a damned if you do, damned if you don’t kind of thing.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Rob Martin:
So yeah, the whole contract thing, we’ve been trying to figure that out. Yeah, we have a good contract here. It is “legal” because they sign it. But, “Okay, cool. They’re not doing anything. Do we now want to spend the money that we don’t have to pursue the thing legally?” We can’t just flash the piece of paper in their face and like, “But you signed the contract.” “All right. I still don’t have any fucking money for you. What are you going to do?”

Maurice Cherry:
The one thing that I would do with clients is I would never let them sign the contract alone. So I would set up a contract meeting with them and we would go over each clause in the contract and make understood it and then we’d sign it together. And then they knew kind of moving forward, this is what you’re being held to.

Maurice Cherry:
And I was lucky that even with the lawyer that I had, he wrote the contract in pretty plain language. So it wasn’t a lot of PR24s and the party of the first part and all that kind of stuff. It was pretty straight forward. But I would always have a contract meeting. I would never let them sign it alone because one, the client’s never really going to read it. They’re just going to sign it so they can try to get the project started.

Maurice Cherry:
And the hope is that they read it. You hope that they read it. I’m like, “No, we’re going over this like you’re five years old. We are going over it clause by clause so you understand what this means. This is what scope creep means. This is what a termination fee means. This is what a kill fee means. I hope we never have to institute these things, but if it gets to that point you know because we’ve had this meeting.” I would sort of point back to that meeting if things started to go a little wonky during the process like, “Well, we had the meeting and you said this and we signed it together.” And they’re like, “Oh, okay.”

Rob Martin:
I think we are going to start doing something like that now. But I think even more so signing it in-person versus talking over the phone, which I think is what we’re about to do, but that was actually really good. I like hearing that. That was really smart.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, something that you had mentioned to me before we had started recording was the parallels in your design career and your music career. I’d love to hear more about that.

Rob Martin:
Oh, yeah. So I think more of that is just around the process of my approach. So I feel like all these things are kind of the same as far as the way that they’re made, right? You have layers in Photoshop and your music software, you have layers of instruments of tracks, right? The way you’re blending them, the way you’re using levels or curves or whatever. The same thing you do with mixing EQ, adding saturation to something, even the words, the semantics are similar in some cases.

Rob Martin:
So historically I’ve never done both of them at the same time up until maybe the last few years where I’ve really taken the design and my music career as seriously as I am. But even outside of the actual creative part, you got to start making relationships. The way you’re talking to people about your design work and trying to sell them is a similar kind of passion and trust is being built when you’re trying to get gigs or just talk to people about your music.

Rob Martin:
I’ve noticed as I do one more, I get better at the other one too. So they kind of lift each other up in separate ways. Well, separate ways, but they do the same thing. When do you do outreach or something like that, you’re campaigning yourself or your music stuff. When you start doing that in your design field, it’s a similar process. You’re running business, the concept of running a business is the same everywhere. You don’t need to know how to do that certain thing to operate the business so that you can scale it, right?

Rob Martin:
I never realized that until recently, but just all that stuff it’s very similar, even if you know how to use Final Cut, you probably know how to use Ableton or Logic or something like that. But the way they use softwares and the process, the workflow to use them are all very similar.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Rob Martin:
The buttons might be a little bit different, but if you get the concept behind how to use it, you’ll be able to apply it elsewhere.

Maurice Cherry:
All right. The thing is for those graphic tools, a lot of them borrow their UI from music tools. So the layers [crosstalk 00:48:26] and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, it’s all the same. So what is it that keeps you motivated and inspired these days? What keeps you going?

Rob Martin:
I guess there’s a couple things, I guess first off, just my personal interest. I love what I’m doing. I love the fact that I can make money from my first two passions, even starting Majorminor and becoming successful with that. I feel blessed I’m able to do that because I need to be able to do something like this to wake up in the morning, and not become bored or anything like that. So I’m glad I’m able to be self-sufficient as a man, as a person in society doing the thing that I love.

Rob Martin:
So I used to tell people, “Oh, I got my second dream running the studio and we’re good.” But now I want to get my first dream and that’s to have a successful music career, at least doing music to a certain point. I don’t want to become famous or anything like that. But just being able to release music and work on it and have people make memories to it. I always have this idea where someone sees me on the street, “Oh, you’re that dude RCA. Hey, you made that beat. I met my girl that almost playing at the club or whatever. And we listen to it all the time, it’s a memory of ours now. I just want to say, thank you for that.” I was like, “Oh, I didn’t know, man.” But that makes my day. It makes my whole life right there, hearing stuff like that. That’s from a personal kind of place. So my personal drive, that’s where that motivation comes from.

Rob Martin:
I think the other part of it too specifically to design, and this is funny because this has changed a lot over the last, since I’ve been a student, but just having see another black person run a studio. I think a lot of times people just like the diversity and design. There’s people out there’s doing everything. But in certain places, I only know maybe three or four other studio heads that are black. And I know there’s more than that, but just personally know or have actually seen on the wild. It’s just good to see that because I’m always surprised when I’m on a company’s page and I see career director, black dude. Oh, cool. If we’re getting out there, not just as a team designer, but doing strategy or being the leadership part of the team.

Rob Martin:
When I was a kid, I saw none of that. I was always the only black kid in my class historically. So it’s cool seeing all that change, even just giving back to the community in that way. Just being, not like they need to be the face of anything, but just having people see me in certain ways always feels really good. So that’s a big motivator too. And just doing kind of talks for kid’s school or portfolio reviews. I always try to show up to those whenever I can just to give back in the first place, but also represent that we’re out here like that.

Maurice Cherry:
Did you have any mentors or other peers that helped you along your design journey?

Rob Martin:
Not so much. I could call it mentors, but Armando Simmons, he was the first black student I had ever met. I was still in school and we talked a little bit after I met him when I was in school, but I wouldn’t call him mentor, but he definitely was a source of inspiration, just like, “Oh, shit. He’s doing and he’s been doing it for a minute too. And that stuff’s tight.” I don’t know, that was the first glimpse I got. And he was always really nice to just hang out and talk or whatever.

Rob Martin:
But as far as mentors, not really. Maybe my professor’s like Gwen Amos and John Forrest at Sacramento State, they were really positive to me in that way. I always tell them whenever I see them, “You guys changed my life. If I hadn’t met you, I don’t know what I’d be doing. I’d probably be working at Target or something like that.” They put the effort, they saw the effort I was trying to put it in, and they put the effort back into me and they knew there was something there. So I really appreciate them taking the chance on me like that and just pouring some of my extra effort into someone that they felt was deserving of it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Is this how you imagined your life would look like when you were a kid?

Rob Martin:
Absolutely not. And I’m glad because when I was a kid, my later life, I was always very nervous to get older because I had no idea what I was going to do. And that’s even from being a small child. Like, “I don’t know what I want to do. I just want to make stuff, I don’t know what that means, making money, being a person in society and all that kind of stuff.” But then even as I got closer to becoming an adult, I’m like, “Oh, shit. I need to figure this out. I’m getting to a point where I’m going to be 20 years old. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Rob Martin:
So I’d say maybe actually in the first time in my life, in the last 10 years, I’ve actually felt like, “Cool. Things didn’t work out the way I thought they were as a kid.” I’m super glad I’ve been able to do that for myself. And now it’s just sustaining that. What’s going to keep me going? What’s going to keep me excited in the same kind of rhythm that I have now, be able to do the things I would like to, and then still be able to make money from it, but then also add to other people’s lives? I can’t do this all on my own, so I hope whatever people that do get on the ride with me, they’re getting something out of it and are doing it not for just money, but there’s personal investment. That’s why I usually end up hiring a lot of my friends that are really close to me because they seem to be into what we’re doing. Yeah, it just feels good being able to contribute to their lives because they’re contributing back to me in that way by team and up.

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

Rob Martin:
That’s a good one. That’s what we’ve been talking about internally with the team and just even me thinking about it myself. One thing I’ve actually been doing, this is kind of like I guess one of the parallels with the music and the design stuff is doing more concert visuals. So I’ve been working on my own personal show, learning how to do visuals whether it’s a video synthesizer or software synthesizer or with after effects and premier and integrating that along with the music, whether it’s programmed and able to live or it’s just a movie that plays in the background or something with Resolume. And I guess that’s kind of the marriage of my two passions, as I’m saying it out loud is how can I bring these things together? And then also now start to offer that as a service and be able to do it for myself as well, too.

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

Rob Martin:
Yeah. The best place to go. And we’re working on this now we’re on a new website, but you can find our stuff at majorminor.co. There’s a little bit of work on there, but if you’d like to see more, just feel free to email me, rob@majorminor.co. As far as the music stuff, you can go to rcawhatsgood.com. All the links are on there, IG, YouTube and just see what we’re all about and what I’m all about. The music stuff too. I think there’s a lot of parallels as far as the aesthetics and just how we approach design. You can see both those things on there. But yeah, if you have any other questions, feel free to hit me up on any of those platforms too. I’m always very responsive. I love talking to people.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Rob Martin. I want to thank you so, so much for coming on the show. We kind of had talked a bit before we had started recording, but it’s amazing how much our journeys as entrepreneurs and even kind of as musicians in a way have kind of paralleled each other. I think it’s great that you’ve really been able to carve your own way and find your own way in the design industry really through hard work, luck and determination and just doing it.

Maurice Cherry:
As a musician, it’s always about practice makes perfect. We always hear that. But with business, oftentimes you don’t have the opportunity to do that because especially for your own business, everything that you do has to be contributing hopefully towards progressing the business. But it really sounds like with Majorminor going for 13 years now, you’re doing something good. You’re putting out good things out there in the world. You’re supporting the community as well. And I’m just so glad to have had you on the show to tell your story. So thank you for coming on. I appreciate it.

Rob Martin:
Right on. Thanks, Maurice. And just for you too, thank you for doing all of your past stuff. I remember we talked a lot back on the Slack channel. I don’t know if this still exists or not, but that was really great for you to support or just put out there for the community and everything you do. I’ve always seen it from afar, but I really got a lot of appreciation of what you do and just the fact you’ve been doing it for this long too, so right off for having me. I really appreciate it. I’ve been waiting to be on this for a minute too, so it finally happened.

Manuel Godoy

It’s no secret that stories from comic books and graphic novels have dominated the pop culture landscape since the early 2000s. However, the heroes in those stories that you see often don’t represent the true diversity out there in the real world. That’s where Manuel Godoy comes in. As the CEO of Black Sands Entertainment, he is the engine behind one of the most exciting and barrier-braking publishing houses in the nation. And with over 5,000 investors and over 200,000 books sold, it’s easy to see why!

We started our conversation fresh off of Manuel’s recent Shark Tank appearance, and he talked about how his company stands apart from other indie publishers, and how he’s leveraged social media to build a massive base of supporters and investors. Manuel also spoke about his time in the military, how he’s scaled Black Sands Entertainment over the years, and where he wants to take the company in the future. Hollywood, watch out — Manuel has created a movement that has no signs of stopping!

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

Manuel Godoy:
My name is Manuel Godoy, the CEO of Black Sands Entertainment. I am a writer, I am a publisher, and I also run an animation studio, so I have a lot of things going on. But my goal is to make black history before slavery a relevant thing, and we’ve been doing that pretty well over the last five years. So I’m thankful for you having me today.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. How has this year been going for you so far?

Manuel Godoy:
It’s been going pretty good. I mean, we started the year off with a Shark Tank episode so momentum is definitely on our back right now.

Maurice Cherry:
I want to just go ahead and just jump right into Black Sands Entertainment. I spent a lot of time yesterday and actually over the past few days just checking out the app, checking out the titles and everything. For those of who are listening who may not be familiar, can you give an introduction to what Black Sands Entertainment is and what it’s about?

Manuel Godoy:
Yes. Black Sands Entertainment is a comic book publisher who also does different mediums. So we also have digital content on BSE comics. We have animations and stuff like that. But our bread and butter is comic books, and most of our comic books are about black history before slavery. We have plenty of titles about that. We expanded significantly last year from three or four different titles to about 16 now. And we’re just on the move, like constantly moving forward, trying to tell the story about our people that’s not always negative. I felt like there’s too much negative content out there for black Americans to consume and that we need to have something more on a positive side, some kind of legacy that we could live up to. So even if you have very humble beginnings, you can still see a great path forward in your life.

Maurice Cherry:
I love, love, love that whole message of doing that. And I mean, in a way that’s kind of what’s… I mean, I don’t want to say that what we’re doing is the same, but I think in terms of trying to make sure to uncover the history that people may not know about, I totally completely vibe with that idea. What does a typical day look like for you? I mean, it sounds like you’re juggling a lot of stuff.

Manuel Godoy:
Oh, it’s chaotic. There’s no typical day. That’s why I need to hire some staff, right? I’m currently looking for an editor-in-chief. Well, not an editor-in-chief, but a lead editor for our company so they could take that side of the publishing side of my life off my hands. But yeah, we’re definitely looking for ways to break up my days, because my days are purely chaotic. I think I spend maybe 10% of my time actually making content because I’m in charge of so many things. So I would love to get that to 40% if possible. But my typical days are purely chaotic. We have a lot of press, we have a lot of scouting and recruiting and negotiating. Of course, I have to be very relevant on social media, so that’s also a big factor in my life.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, I see you are super active on TikTok. I watched probably most of the videos that you’ve got up. How has social media helped you as you build Black Sands Entertainment?

Manuel Godoy:
Well, it just gives me independence. One thing is it’s a new age nowadays, that’s why I don’t really knock companies like Milestone Media, right? It’s like I’m not a fan of their business model, how they originally started, but I don’t knock them for it because there was limited options in the 90s. It’s not like they had much of a choice, right? But to work with the industry. Social media nowadays allows us to completely circumvent the traditional gatekeepers of this space. And so we can make our own customer bases, we can get our own investors without having to basically go through the…

Manuel Godoy:
Also, big shout out to Barack Obama for allowing Regulation CF to even exist in the first place, because prior to that, you had to be basically rich and white to invest in any small company. You weren’t going to get investments from people unless you had significant connections already. And now with Regulation CF, companies like ours and even other businesses, black-owned, can actually go out to the community and raise capital through unaccredited investors, right? So that’s a huge thing that happened recently. So I think the technology, the ability to go directly to your consumers, gives people with the drive to really scale and grow and make a difference without having to basically change their fundamental beliefs in order to be successful. You know what I mean?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And just for folks that are listening, Regulation CF is Regulation Crowdfunding. And one of the rules for that is that you can raise, I think it’s like a maximum of $5 million through crowdfunding over a 12-month period. I know that’s one of the rules of it, right?

Manuel Godoy:
Yeah. That’s for unaccredited investors. So after that you go into Regulation A and then you have to do only accredited investors, right? That’s a lot of money for most people. Companies that are raising $5 million rounds, they tend to be ready to go at that point. They’re not struggling anymore. Now they’re in market and they know what they’re doing and they’re trying to scale. You know what I mean?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean the advent of crowdfunding overall I think has really helped a lot of independent creators to get their ideas out there in the market. I remember… And I mean, this didn’t start with Kickstarter, but I know Kickstarter was probably one of the more prominent platforms that was really trying to build on this sort of… I guess, build on this idea that creatives can fund their own ideas through their fans and Patreons and stuff like that. But I remember when it came around 2009, 2010, it was hard to get people on board with even the idea of crowdfunding. And now it’s pretty common to use Kickstarter or use similar platforms to be able to raise money like that.

Manuel Godoy:
It’s definitely something that just gives us freedom. So I think that’s what was the downfall of Milestone Media. I think they had great IP. They probably had great numbers: sales, but it wasn’t to the liking of DC and Diamond, so they killed them, right? DC and Diamond said, “Die.” And they had no choice, they had to die because they had signed deals with them, right? And now they’re trying to revive them because of the Black Lives Matter movement, right? So they’re like, “Hey, this is a great time to have a black imprint,” right? But at the end of the day, they let them go away for 30 years. So why should you believe them now and their generosity, I mean and their genuineness for the revival of Milestone?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I just heard recently, Milestone was supposed to have like a black history comic that came out during Black History Month and now they pushed it back until June. And I’m like, “Well, that’s not Black History Month, but whatever.” But yeah, when you’re beholden to like these larger corporate interests, it does stifle innovation in that way.

Manuel Godoy:
Absolutely. Yeah. So we’re lucky that we never have to deal with that. And as a result we’re pretty much not only successful, but now we know our customers. So the big part about it is with social media is you know your customers, right? It’s not like it’s some, “Oh man, I wonder what kind of customer I have?” That’s something you have when you go to someone like Diamond Distribution or go to comic book shops, you still don’t know who the heck your customer really is. But with social, you know exactly who your customer is, so you can refine your acquisition over time. You know how to sell, you know who to sell it to, right? You know how to message. It’s all powerful just because you’re doing the right distribution.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, this feeds into my next question which I feel like you may have just sort of answered, but how are you ensuring that Black Sands really distinguishes itself from other indie publishers out there?

Manuel Godoy:
Well, one thing is I don’t feel like we’re in the indie publishing space anymore to be considered another indie publisher at this point. Last year we did 1.2 million in sales, sold 120,000 books, right? And we’re just bringing online a whole bunch of new titles from our creators. So it’s going to be a huge year for us. Our main niche is history before slavery. We don’t do superheroes much at all.

Maurice Cherry:
Really.

Manuel Godoy:
That’s not our thing at all. I think we have like one superhero title and that’s it. Only because the creator has a sizable audience already, so we gave him a shot. We were like, “Hey, you a got a sizable audience. Let’s see if we can make your comic into a reality. And see if your audience will tap in.” And they really have been tapped in, so that’s a good one.

Manuel Godoy:
But for the most part, we wouldn’t try to do superheroes because that market is closed with Marvel and DC. It’s just closed. There’s no point even trying to compete with them. That’s them. They own that genre. I wanted to go for a genre that was 100% ours to own, and that is history before slavery. So mythology, fantasy, history, drama, all that stuff in an ancient setting or an ancient location or something like that is what we do. It’s not just Egypt, we have stories about Madagascar, the Mali empire, Moorish Spain, the Inca, right? The Malaysians, right? We just got a whole bunch of anticolonial rhetoric. That’s our power. That’s where we make our content, and that’s why everybody buys our stuff because it’s more of the good stuff, right? When they buy our books, they know it’s not going to be different or a different kind of vibe. It’s more of the stuff they want to have. More exposure to indigenous people, to people from diaspora and their actual culture, as opposed to the indoctrination of European powers.

Maurice Cherry:
No, I really like that. Years and years ago… God, I’m trying to remember when that was. Maybe 2015, 2016, we had an African comic creator from Cameroon who was making a… He had, I think it was a line of comic books, as well as a video game that was around African traditions and African mythology and stuff like that. And I remember him giving a similar reason as you just had in terms of like, it’s a lot more relevant to the audience that they’re trying to serve to talk about it in terms of history or to talk about history, than to create some superhero kind of aesthetic, which I think at the time he was saying was really more rooted in the west. Again, this is coming from an African perspective, but yeah.

Manuel Godoy:
Yeah. Well, that’s the one thing about it. It’s I know for a fact that it’s a good thing for us to have this stuff, right? Without nobody messing up our power. We got to have our power and people really underestimate how much it matters for us to own the narrative and stuff like that. I mean, there’s too much crap they add to our stories just to go and control the narrative. One of the biggest examples I have is the recent movie that’s probably going to be played all across America. In every single school in America there’s probably going to be Harriet coming on. They’re going to be like, “Hey kids, let’s watch Harriet. It’s so great.” Talk about Harriet Tubman, right? They’re not going to use any other content for Harriet Tubman. They’re going to use the movie Harriet as the example, and that one is 100% fictional.

Manuel Godoy:
They had a black man who was the main villain of the story, a bounty hunter armed to the teeth in the South, because I guess they didn’t just Lynch black people who had guns in the South, right? Who’s the mythical villain that’s the main threat to Harriet Tubman. That’s some wild… They get 1,000 pitches a year for Harriet Tubman films, and they’re like, “You know what? The one that we’re going to spend $10 million to produce is this one,” right? And you just got to be like, “Wow, this is probably the only one that had that situation in it.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I remember there being a big criticism of that movie. For folks that are listening, it’s the Harriet movie with, I think Cynthia Erivo plays Harriet Tubman. I heard that was a big criticism of it, that the part you just mentioned about having a black antagonist as well.

Manuel Godoy:
Yeah, and it’s not even real. He’s not real.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, they manufactured him for the movie.

Manuel Godoy:
Yeah. It’s like what is that? That’s them sabotaging a very… Like to me, even my fans, right? And a lot of people, there’s a reason why Yasuke flopped on Netflix, right? It’s like, all you had to do is tell the story of Yasuke. You didn’t have to make it about mecha robots and supernatural aliens. You didn’t have to do all that. Just tell the story of Yasuke, it would’ve been great. You know what I’m saying? You know what I’m saying? It’s like they go so far over like we just can’t have history connected to black folks, right? In a positive light. We got to make it different. We got to make it more marketable.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, there were…. That’s funny because I remember when that came out and a lot of people were like, “Oh man, this is so good.” And I remember watching and being like, “Really? It’s not good.”

Manuel Godoy:
That was media hype, right? But once you actually got people who actually watched, they were like, “Why are we doing this?” They were like, “He’s not even the main character.”

Maurice Cherry:
He’s the main character there. There is like you said all these weird supernatural elements to it. And then I also think it was just too short. They tried to put too much into six episodes and it just… I don’t know. I didn’t think it was good at all.

Manuel Godoy:
And the littlest part was the actual historical parts.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Manuel Godoy:
Where there was flashbacks of his time with Nobunaga. It was like, “Oh, that’s amazing.” And then all of a sudden it’s back to, “Okay, trash story.”

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I would imagine probably one benefit of you using these historical stories and mythology and stuff like that is it takes out that comparison element. If you’re doing superheroes, for example, people might look at this and be like, “Oh, well this is just like, blah, blah, blah from Marvel.”

Manuel Godoy:
You can’t do that. And that’s a huge power to us. They can’t compare us, right? So the critics have to actually make a well-informed decision. They can’t just say, “Oh, this is just like this except you…” Or something like that.

Maurice Cherry:
I’ll tell you a story. I think I told this story on the show before maybe like, I don’t know, hundreds of episodes ago. But when I was younger, when I was a teenager, I really was into… I mean, I’m still into comic books now, and maybe not in the same fervor, but I was really into comic books and was like, “Yeah, I’m going to make my own comic books.” And I was in rural Alabama just drawing stuff up or whatever. And this is back when Yahoo had these user groups online, like Yahoo groups. And they had one that was dedicated to black comic books. I think it was called Black Comix with an X, like B-L-A-C-K C-O-M-I-X. And I remember going in there and I was showing off my stuff like that. And one of the people who had responded, one of the people who responded was the Dwayne McDuffie, had responded back to it and trashed it.

Maurice Cherry:
But he trashed it, I mean, not in a good way, but certainly trashed it in the way of like, “Oh, this is just like, blah, blah, blah from Marvel.” It was that sort of comparison, which honestly I was literally basing it off of that. I was looking at Marvel comic books and trying to make the Black Cyclops or whatever. You know what I’m saying? He trashed it. I was like, “Oh, shit. I can’t believe I was trying to do that.” And then I didn’t really know who Dwayne McDuffie was then. Of course people know who he is now in terms of his contributions. But yeah, I can see how not going that superhero route is a definite unique selling proposition and advantage for you in the market.

Manuel Godoy:
Yeah. You definitely don’t want to get caught in that bubble where you end up basically doomed from the start.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Manuel Godoy:
It’s like you can’t get market cap because it’s already taken up. And what we’re trying to do is the exact opposite. We’re trying to basically develop a market from the ground up and then dominate that to the point where if you make anything they’re going to be like, “Oh, like Black Sands or like this title from Black Sands Entertainment.” And it starts being like we’re the gatekeepers, right? So they’ve been avoiding this topic for 50 years, so nobody better complain at all when we dominate this space and then gate keep. “Oh, man, listen…” “Nah, bro. Y’all had 50 years to do this. Y’all ain’t never did it, so we got to gate keep.”

Maurice Cherry:
That’s true. That’s true. Let’s switch gears here a little bit. I know we’ve talked a good bit about Black Sands, and we’ll talk more about it later, but I want to know about your origin story since we’re in the vein of comics here. Tell me about where you grew up.

Manuel Godoy:
I was born and raised in New York, right? Queens specifically. And also some time in Alabama as well. Pretty cool. At the end of the day, New York is a different kind of place, man. You got to really embrace new ideas. Everything changes in freaking two years in New York, nothing stays the same, right? So that was always a huge thing for us was that times change a lot faster in New York than anywhere else. I was also in the military for a while. So I spent about six years in the military army. Just been a pretty crazy ride. Not really knowing what the heck you were trying to do in life, so I went to the military early, like right after high school.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Manuel Godoy:
And it was good for me. I probably would’ve stayed in the military if my knees didn’t blow out. But at the end of the day, destiny calls. Things changed. I did some high, big brain stuff outside the military. I was a freaking, oh yeah, a telecommunication engineer. So it was a really big brain job, very lucrative. And then it got all outsourced to India, right? This was the Great Outsourcing in 2010. Everything started getting outsourced. That field just disappeared off the face of the earth. I moved around to San Diego to get a degree. Finished it up in New York, Queens College as a economics major. And in about 2016, I finally got my first comic done: Kids 2 Kings and that’s when the actual business started happening.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Let’s bring it back to, again, those early days, when you said growing up in New York and you spent some time in Alabama. Were you so rounded by a lot of comics and comic books growing up?

Manuel Godoy:
No, no, no. I was a big anime guy. So me and all my friends and stuff were anime dudes. So we were the old Toonami peeps watching Dragon Ball and Yu Yu Hakusho and all the other stuff. That was my vibe. Also, video game fanatics. We were huge video game fanatics back then. That was our thing though. I wasn’t really a comic guy at all. Still ain’t to this day.

Maurice Cherry:
So back then, were you thinking, did you want to start your own anime series or anything like that back then, because you were around it all the time?

Manuel Godoy:
I wanted to make a video game series, a video game franchise based off Black Sands.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Manuel Godoy:
That was always my goal over time. In fact, I tried to do that first, get a degree in video game design. Didn’t work out for me, but that’s what I wanted at first, right? And that’s what the original idea was made for. And then I realized it was so expensive to make a video game and pivoted toward comics.

Maurice Cherry:
And now when you say you wanted to go into that, was this when you were looking to go to San Diego State?

Manuel Godoy:
Yeah, because I was going to the Arts Institute in San Diego first.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Manuel Godoy:
That was the first place I went and that was for video game programming or something like that. I think it was video game programming or design or something. And it wasn’t for me. It wasn’t for me, so I switched up, went into creative writing at San Diego… Yeah, San Diego State. And then eventually ended up in economics. I did the smart thing. I didn’t do all the writing classes up front. I went to all my general studies so I could transfer over. So I didn’t waste too much time when it came to changing my degrees and stuff.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, it sounds like you were at least building that foundation, and then I think even that trial and error part with first studying games or going into game development and realizing this wasn’t what you wanted to do and then going into something else. I mean, college is the time where you can figure those things out, where you can decide what the path is that you want to take. Even if it may not suit the goal then, you’re still building that foundation, at least from what we can see now in hindsight is to where you are now.

Manuel Godoy:
Yeah, for sure. Definitely was. But probably the biggest important thing was the economics, right? It’s like I can’t build a freaking chart or graph to save my life nowadays, right? Because I haven’t used it in so long, right? But the fundamentals of economics is what led me to the success I am today, right? Because I always think of things from a supply and demand perspective. I was never trying to do things in oversaturated markets. I knew how to get my proper price points, right? To figure out… Because the thing about it is I mean, the logic doesn’t even make sense of how I do business. I avoid comic bookshops as a comic book publisher, right? I avoid them like the plague. Don’t market to them. Nothing I care about that.

Manuel Godoy:
That right there is a conundrum unless I have some kind of evidence behind it, right? It makes no sense if I’m doing that from an outside perspective, but that’s what I do. I have the most expensive books in the black community. My books are just straight up more expensive than everybody else’s by far, yet I sell 10 times more than the next person up. So I sell more units than everybody else while also having the most expensive books. And these are all decisions that I’ve come to based on the actual field. For me, from the economics perspective of this community is that black people have no problem supporting things that matter to them. So that part of it is people think that black people are all poor, and it’s not true at all. There’s a whole bunch of wealth in our community and they buy very expensive things for their families. When they do it, it’s to make sure that their kids have a great upbringing, right? That they have a legacy built for them and everything else.

Manuel Godoy:
So what we’re providing for them is really high luxury products that they can be proud of, both the parents and the kids, and we could price it out to match that and they have no problem with that. And it kind of reminds me of I don’t know if you’ve had time in New York, but there’s a restaurant in Jamaica, Queens called Margaritas Pizza. Their cheese slice is like $3.50 for a slice of cheese. Everyone around them in the entire area has dollar slices. They’re like, “Hey, these poor black people, they can’t buy anything. This is a poor community.” Whatever, right? The one place that always has a line out the door with all the black people is the one that sells for 3.50 and everybody else won’t listen to the evidence. They won’t see the evidence saying, “Just make a superior product, that people will support you.” They don’t see that. All they simply do is just focus on their preconceived notions of what is the proper thing for the market.

Maurice Cherry:
There’s an interesting word that you used as you were describing that, that I’d like you to maybe talk about a little bit more, just in terms of how you’re viewing your product in the market. You said luxury, which I don’t think when people hear about comics or really anything like of this sort of caliber in this realm, they don’t really think about luxury.

Manuel Godoy:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, I’m just curious. Talk about that a little bit more.

Manuel Godoy:
I’ll expand on that. I’m sorry. I just saw something from my wife.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh.

Manuel Godoy:
Basically, what I mean by luxury is at the end of the day, we do hard cover. We do hard cover anthologies of our books. They are library-bound. So in other words, you can’t break them apart if you wanted. It’s really tough to damage to them permanently, which is great, right? Especially if you give it to younger kids. They’re so easy to destroy things. The paper quality is very thick, so it’s very hard to crease. Even if you’re turning the pages like a crazy man, you won’t crease the pages. The art style is absolutely phenomenal, and that’s across the board in our entire company. You look at all the titles and you’ll be like, “Wow, these are all super high level professional stuff,” right? Basically we’re like Shōnen Jump. Shōnen Jump is basically the elites of Japanese Manga, right? If you’re in Shōnen Jump, you’re not going to be a bum. You’re not going to have basic stuff. You’re going to have the best content in the entire Japanese market. And that’s basically what we’re doing with our brand. And we price ourselves as such. We’re the best.

Manuel Godoy:
So people, they price what they think they should be at. I see people making comics for $5. $5 to sell a book for $5, because that’s what the comic bookshop does. But I’m like, “Our customers don’t shop at comic shops.” The overwhelming majority black consumers don’t shop at comic bookshops. They start at Target or whatever. $10 book is normal to them. $20 hard cover is normal to them.

Maurice Cherry:
I know you just said earlier, you were like, “I don’t go to comic shops.” You avoid comic shops. And I would imagine part of that reason is because of what you just said, that’s not where your target market is going to be. But then also I would imagine talking to those comic shops, that’s probably what some other publishers would do just in terms of just trying to get their books on the shelves.

Manuel Godoy:
Absolutely. That’s their only way of knowing how to sell, right? That’s the thing, they just don’t know how to sell any other way. So they use the traditional means to sell. And the thing about it is you got to deal with pricing and stuff, right? Why should they buy Black Sands for $10 when they could buy Black Panther for four? And I’m like, “Because Black Panther is not about history, how about that?” But they still… There’s that preconceived notion of what the market is. Why should you worry about a middle man when you could do it yourself? Just cut the middle man out because they’re already out of touch.

Maurice Cherry:
Did your time in the army help influence you when it came to just the idea of building Black Sands Entertainment?

Manuel Godoy:
Mostly the management side. So I’m a big believer in having subject matter experts, people who actually know what they’re doing and can handle operations without my guidance. So over time I’ve gotten employees or officers that really knew how to take things on without my help while I just do minimal amount of information to get the product done. And that has significantly helped us to scale compared to other people.

Manuel Godoy:
We’re very hands off in productions, and the people who are in charge, they know what they’re doing. They have a lot of skin in the game, and as a result, they really know what they’re doing. They learn the principles of management through me. And I might help in the initial recruitment of their team, but once that’s it, all I got to do is cut some checks and comics come out. I don’t want to have to think about what they’re doing. As long as our standards are up-to-date, right? But I’m not trying to figure out their story. If the fans like it, good. That’s all I care about, right? I’m not here like, “Well, I don’t think this story should go this way.” That is not my responsibility. You know what I mean?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, I think also like you said with the number of titles that you have and that they focus even on different cultures and stuff, and forgive me for this reference, but you can’t Tyler Perry it where you’re like, your name is over the whole thing and you’re overseeing and micromanaging every part of the production.

Manuel Godoy:
Yeah, you can’t do that. You got to let people do what they want. Just as long as they’re in the ballpark, you’re good to go. Because at the end of the day, this field is completely open, so it’s not like you have to be super freaking precise, right? You just make good stories. For instance, I’ll give you some examples. Grenada’s Shadow, that’s our Moorish title that’s coming out very soon in the next month or so. It’s already done. And that one is about an assassin who’s a Moor, who’s basically trying to undermine the Crusaders. When Spain was basically… When basically European powers and the Pope specifically was trying to take back Spain from Moorish occupation, which has gone on for 400 years. So this guy who got killed by… His whole village and stuff got killed by Crusaders is now an assassin taking out really high level leaders of the Crusaders. It’s dope. It’s a dope story, and it’s very different from what you would normally expect when people make these titles, right? No superhero powers, nothing, just straight up Assassins Creed type joint.

Manuel Godoy:
We have Lion’s Game: Masters of Mali, where it’s a martial arts tournament in ancient Mali. We have all these fighters from all across Africa coming together to fight in the capital. And one of the fighters is somebody who was the great grandson of a previous Mansa who was basically assassinated and usurped. So he has a legacy he’s trying to reclaim in secret, so he joins this martial arts tournament. And it’s crazy, it’s like one of those… It’s just like Baki or something like that. It’s really freaking hardcore, hyper masculine, martial arts tournament type stuff. And it’s a different vibe, but it’s still the same thing. We’re showing culture. We’re putting stories that will be dope in modern day settings and just putting it in an ancient culture. So you can always have a good connection to great ancient civilizations prior to slavery. That idea that Rome wasn’t built in a day. Everybody in America says that Rome wasn’t built in a day. Whenever we have any type of adversity. “Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Where’s our Rome?

Maurice Cherry:
Of the titles that you have now, is there one that really stands out to you as a favorite?

Manuel Godoy:
Out of the ones that are not made by me, right? I would say Lion’s Game is probably my favorite just because the story is crazy, first of all. You’re going to have a lot of martial artists from all across Africa, with their own cultures, their own martial art style that’s real. And a lot of characters that people may have never known before, but actually were real people in the old times. It’s just culturally fun. I mean, it’s just culturally amazing and while still being a hit for the parent, for the fathers specifically. This is not a title for the kids. They’ll probably watch it. The teens will probably watch it anyway, but the parents, specifically the dads, them 30 to 40 year old dads are going to be like, “This is the best comic I’ve ever read in my life.” It’s going to have that vibe.

Manuel Godoy:
Super hyper masculine, forget your feelings. This is raw. And we haven’t done any titles like that at Black Sands, but this is one that I felt like it would definitely work. And even though it’s written by Kevin Brown, it was originally my idea because what I do is I do competitions in my Patreon community and I have like a topic. I’m like, “This kind of topic would really sell well to my fans.” I automatically know what kind of topic it is. And I’m like, “Who’s going to give the best possible pitch for this story?” And then I judge them and I say, “The one that does the best, who has the best possible pitch, they’re given an opportunity to get published by us, and we do everything,” right? We mentor them. We get them the artists. We pay for their production. We give them royalties on the book sales.

Manuel Godoy:
They’re starting their career on the Black Sands all because they won a competition. But the competition has 100, 200 applicants. So it’s not like they’re just a random guy with an idea. They had to beat out a whole bunch of other people who had the same marching orders. You know what I’m saying?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Manuel Godoy:
So this story was heavily curated before it ever got a chance to start being written and this guy killed it. So I was like, “Yeah, this one right here has super longevity. This one is probably going to get to screen very fast in the future after comic books come out. I think this one’s going to be very quickly picked up as a, either a live action or a show of some sort, because it’s never been done. It’s perfect for the time we’re in now. The Bakis, the Syngins and all these other martial arts tournament type shows are very in right now. So this is going to fit perfectly.

Maurice Cherry:
Talk to me some more about this Patreon community. How did that come about?

Manuel Godoy:
Well, it’s always been something that we’ve always had. A large community. Our community wasn’t that big, maybe two years ago, but once we started raising capital, it ballooned out of control like really big. The way we give back to the community, besides the comic books that we make and stuff like that is we give them opportunities. Opportunities is what we do. So voice acting opportunities, publishing deals through competitions. They do a competition, they get in there. Early access to investment rounds, so when we do our investment rounds. Patreons and the previous investors always get two weeks or more of the exclusivity where they get to buy up as much stock as they want before we open it up to the public. And that can make a huge difference in the world when we have early bird specials.

Manuel Godoy:
Most of our Patreons are actually investors already, so they have stock. They get a 10% discount on their stock. So if you were investing $5,000, you got $500 worth of stock for free. So it makes a huge difference if you’re on the higher side of investors. If you’re investing $100, it ain’t going to matter much if you get early access or not. But when you’re investing thousands, it matters a lot.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Manuel Godoy:
And so that’s been the huge reason why people join us. The future opportunities that we give them is like the call. And usually what happens is when we’re raising capital, we have a downtick, so we lose a lot of Patreons over time when we’re at raising capital. And then when we’re no longer raising capital, and now we’re preparing for the next round, we drastically increase in Patreons. So it’s like a huge ebb and flow. Everybody’s basically flowing into the investment round, the one that wants that’s done. Everybody who didn’t make it into that investment round is like, “Dang, I can’t miss the next one.” So they start flowing back into the Patreon, right? It’s like it’s just the way the ebb and flow of the Patreon community is now.

Manuel Godoy:
So right now we’re about 1,500 members in and we have over 20,000 a month in donations. So it’s pretty big. It’s a pretty big community, much bigger than other people for the same amount of Patreons. If you go on the website, Grafion, you’ll see that in our category, most people’s average pledge is 2.50, something like that. $2.50. Our average pledge is about $14. While we might have much less subscribers than some people on the list, we still collect way more than them, even though they’re higher on the list, just because our community is in. They’re like super in.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Okay, so you built this on Patreon. Okay, I was trying to… As you were sort of mentioning that, I was like, “What platform are you using?” But you’re using Patreon. Okay. All right. Yeah, Patreon has been, I think really for a lot of artists and creators, Patreon has been a pretty good platform for them to be able to at least have those kinds of different tiers and things like that. But if you’re bringing in that much per pledge, that’s great. That’s great. I had Revision Path on Patreon for years and it was not that good. We ended up getting off of there, but –

Manuel Godoy:
The main thing about growth of Patreons is it’s not a monthly thing. I think the whole preconception of Patreon is bad because it messes up the way people should be strategizing growing Patreon communities, right? It’s all about opportunities. So in other words, let’s say you’re a video game… Video game companies do great on Patreon. One, here’s why. They get betas. Betas all the time, right? Beta access. “Hey, this is what we developed this week. Download it.” Boom. But two, “Oh, you want to be a side character. You want to write a line for certain characters who’s a side character in the story. You want to write a paragraph, right? Submit your stuff.”

Manuel Godoy:
People are getting opportunities to be a part of the production all the time, which is why those communities grow so fast, because they’re saying, “Hey, next week we’re going to be getting some designs. We’re going to put some Patreons in the community into the game. If you’re active at this date, you’ll be able to apply.” And then people flood in, right? Because they want their opportunity to shine. Or, “We’re about to have voice acting for our thing. We’re about to do some casting. It’s going to start on January 1st. So if you’re a Patreon on January 1st, you’ll be able to apply,” right? Don’t even do no open casting, just straight up only Patreon casting. Boom, hundreds of people sign up.

Manuel Godoy:
This is the way to get… Converting people to sign up on Patreon is super freaking hard. So you got to give them a very high incentive to do the first month. They’ll stick around. About 60% of all the people who sign up for some kind of special event even if they don’t make it. About 60% will stay long term. So 40% will die off pretty quickly when they don’t get the job or whatever the heck opportunity is happening. But about 60% will stay because they see that there’s always a new opportunity is coming eventually.

Manuel Godoy:
That’s the idea. Pump and… It’s not pump and dump. It’s pump and freaking like pump and hold. There you go. Pump and hold, right? It’s like you try to hold on to as many people as you can after you pump it. And then the next pump, you got to get another push. It’s never monthly. Some months I’ll just lose 50 Patreons and I won’t gain a single Patreon that month. It’ll be a net negative 50. So I’ll gain Patreons, but it’s not at the rate to replenish the people that left. So I’ll have negative 50 on that month. And then some months I’ll have 400 new Patreons.

Maurice Cherry:
So that’s a nice, I mean, for folks that are listening, hell, for me too, that’s a nice lesson on how to man manage doing some sort of like a Patreon type of a community like that, if you’re using Patreon. But no, that’s good information to know. I mean, I think certainly, you mentioned having this background in economics, that’s probably something a lot of independent creators don’t have when it comes to approaching the mechanics of how you build equity and build money for the company in order to do the kind of things you want to do.

Manuel Godoy:
Yeah. I just don’t think people understand that. I mean, they don’t even take the examples that are clearly in their face. Netflix doesn’t get subscribers by having a whole bunch of shows they can watch. Netflix gets subscribers because Squid Game is the number one talked about series in the country and it just came out. Because Bird Box is the number one story in the country right now and people want to see it and they can only see it through Netflix, so they sign up and that’s the first time they ever sign up and then they might stick around. You understand? But they got to have some big win to get people to sign up because people aren’t just signing up. They aren’t signing up because they have a service, right? They’re signing up because of a specific thing they absolutely have to see. And then they’re like, “Eh, might as well stick around.” You know what I’m saying?

Manuel Godoy:
So, but people don’t look at that and say, “That’s the business model for subscriptions.” It’s what’s going to get people to sign up? World of Warcraft spends $100 million on just expansions because they have to get those people who might have lapsed, those people who are not subscribing to resubscribe or become a new subscriber. They got to have some big, giant ridiculous event. They can’t just be, “Hey, we’re the number one freaking MMO in the world.” That’s not good enough to get new subscribers. It’s good enough to keep them, but it’s not good enough to get them. You know what I’m saying? So you got to have big, over the top things in order to get people to be motivated to subscribe, because subscription is the most difficult purchase in the world. They’re in a contract. So it’s not like, “Hey, I just bought some food, right? People have no problem giving you a $100, right? But if you said, “Hey, just give me $15 a month, they’re like, “Ooh, wait. Whoa.”

Maurice Cherry:
That is the truth. That is the truth. Absolutely.

Manuel Godoy:
They’re like, “Wait a minute, a month? Can’t I just give you a $100?” They’re like, “Yeah, but it’s going to take you seven months, eight months to…” “Yeah, but 15 a month though, I don’t know.”

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s talk about Shark Tank because you did mention at the top of the show, starting off the year with the Shark Tank appearance. Please, I want to know how did it come about? What was it like facing Kevin Hart? Tell me all about it.

Manuel Godoy:
He’s brutal, man. He’s brutal. He’s a lot taller in real life, and I don’t mean height. He’s a very dominant dude. And that fight went on a lot longer than what y’all saw. People were like, “Man, you should have countered for this.” I did. I did. I did. There was other offers on the table. But at the end of the day, Kevin Hart knew he had veto power. He just knew it, right? It’s one thing about you got to know who you are and what you’re worth. So he knew he had veto power, right? And even the other Sharks admitted it too during the debate.

Manuel Godoy:
Like for instance, Kevin O’Leary, he accepted my counter. He said 10% and a 25 cent royalty on books. He was like, “I’ll take that deal for 500,000.” He was like, “I’ll take that deal.” But he understood that the more we talk is like Kevin Hart is Kevin Hart. He’s saying he’s going to make this show. If he’s saying he’s going to give you this, that and the other, that’s not a normal resource that you’ll ever get. That’s like you’re saying this and he said… That’s a lot different from what… That 30% you’re paying, you’re not giving up 25% equity for $500,000. That’s not what you’re doing. You’re not giving up more, 25% more equity than you came in for, right? For the money. The money doesn’t matter at all. In fact, you didn’t even need the money. The reality was you were doing that for Kevin Hart’s specific direct involvement in all of your productions from now until the end of time, and that’s a very strong person. Plus mark Cuban, right?

Manuel Godoy:
Plus mark Cuban and his resources. But specifically Kevin Hart, who’s like a top five paid actor in the world, like independent productions and businesses that he’s just straight up done himself who understands the idea of owning as opposed to, “Hey, let’s give this to Hollywood and have them make a show.” He’s like he doesn’t believe that. He believes in owning. He’s already done all that. It’s time for him to own it himself. So this is huge when it comes to what it means on the deal side. So a lot of people look at it, they just think 25%, you got robbed. And you’re like, “Do you know how much it costs for Kevin Hart to endorse your company?”

Maurice Cherry:
Right?

Manuel Godoy:
“The real dollar implications of that endorsement.” He said, and then Chase’s like, “Hey, check out the new card,” right? When Kevin Hart does the commercial, that’s $3 million minimum. That’s $3 million minimum for, to use a commercial with Kevin Hart doing it. That super bowl commercial probably cost them $10 million minimum. It was like a 30 second commercial, right? It is like that is the reality of just the endorsement side. Not even his actual real like work. His real actual involvement in productions. So the implications is way more than 25% is what I bought.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. How have things changed since the Shark Tank appearance?

Manuel Godoy:
Well, one, we’re getting a lot more publicity. We’re getting our verifications and stuff like that. We’re starting to get that. Sales has jumped. We still haven’t gone public with the deal yet just because we’re still negotiating. But we’re about done. We’re very close to making announcements on our actual go-to-market strategy. But once that happens, that’s when the stuff will really hit the fan. We have a huge amount of major press things happening right now, so that’s going to be coming out for the next two weeks. We’re going to have stuff like that happening. So it’s going to be huge rolling success. The idea is don’t lose your 15 minutes of fame. He is like, “Get on it and keep getting the press. Keep getting the things. Keep staying in front of the camera as much as you can in order to stay relevant. Be the top story.”

Manuel Godoy:
So that’s what we’re doing. We’re lucky that we’re still capable of doing that even though a lot of other Shark Tank companies don’t have this kind of follow up, right? They don’t get on the big major shows or anything like that. So the fact that we are is freaking huge for us. We’re doing that before Kevin Hart says, “Man, Black Sands is like the best thing ever. We’re about to make billions,” right? Once he starts saying that publicly, that’s when it really will start becoming like an unstoppable force. You know what I mean?

Maurice Cherry:
Because you’ll have that endorsement and then coming from him like that, a lot of other people are just going to check it out from there.

Manuel Godoy:
Yeah. Not just an endorsement, but big money people will start gravitating towards you. Not everything has to be made by us. Black Sands is clearly going to be made by us. We want to control it and we want to own everything of it, right? But there’s some titles that we just don’t have the manpower for, but we don’t want to stop these creators who are under our brand from having their own shows. So we might have more traditional deals out there for some other IPs in our company, which makes like three, four, five, six different shows all being under direct development at the same time, all because of Kevin Hart’s HartBeat Productions and everything else. So that’s the crazy thing about it, right? Is this is about to be a black Renaissance when it comes to content and ownership because I have investors, regular small investors.

Manuel Godoy:
And this is the thing I always tell people too, if we get to a billion dollar valuation in say five years, which isn’t impossible, it’s not impossible at all. Two seasons of Black Sands would’ve already came out. Licensing and merchandising deals with Walmart and everything else would’ve already probably happened by then. And these are like really big licensing deals.

Manuel Godoy:
So if this is already happening within five years and we get to a billion dollar market cap, right? And go IPO. Somebody who invested $5,000 at my $5 million valuation back in 2020, they’ve maxed out, that was the max that the government said they could do, because they’re unaccredited. So they $5,000, the max you can give. And they gave 5,000 because they just were hardcore believing in Black Sands. They’ll be able to flip that 5,000 for a million dollars, 200 times return because that’s the valuation we’re at now. We’re at a million dollar market… I mean a billion dollar market cap, and they invested at five million, they basically are getting 200X roughly around there if they sell their shares. That’s huge, that’s real generational wealth. And there’s a lot of people who did it. There’s a lot of people who invested at the max in the first round.

Maurice Cherry:
What would you say has been the toughest thing that you’ve had to deal with since starting all of this?

Manuel Godoy:
Fighting my own personal frustrations not blowing up. I mean, online, they see my bravado, right? And my toughness, but I hold a lot back. I hold a lot of my hating back. I’m a huge hater, right? I just don’t let problem go. But I believe if you’re not a hater, you ain’t really… You don’t really care about life. You got to be mad when somebody else gets an achievement that you didn’t get, especially if you’ve done more than them. So I’m a huge freaking hater. Holding that energy back, not to disparaging other colleagues, even though I know that their claim is completely bogus or their achievements should have been my achievements, I should have been on certain list or whatever. That was the thing that I felt was the hardest thing to do over this entire time. Because you can really make yourself as this super negative force in this space if you wear your emotions on your chest. And I try to, even though people see me all the time bashing Hollywood. Hollywood’s not a person, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Right.

Manuel Godoy:
I used to always articulate things to not make it personal, not try to burn any specific bridge. So if you still were hurt by what I was saying, the main thing was you probably were somebody that I didn’t want to be in colleagues… I mean ever work with in the first place because you’re one of those people. So that was the hardest thing, controlling that, because like I said, we’ve probably been the best independent publisher for three years now, yet we were never on a top 10 indie black mangas or indie black comics you need to read, right? We never got any kind of accolades or something like that, regardless of what the numbers said. They just didn’t care. They didn’t like any research. You Google black comic books, you’d find us. So how the hell did you avoid us?

Maurice Cherry:
I’ll tell you because I’ve been doing this now with Revision Path for nine years, and I share that frustration that you’re talking about with you put in all this work and you don’t feel like sometimes everyone sort of recognizes that or gives you the credit that you feel you deserve for it. That’s just, I mean, unfortunately that’s just the media. The media’s always going to glam on to whatever the newest thing is, whether you’ve been in… Especially like if you’ve been doing this for a while and you have longevity, they really only care about the new stuff. They’re like, “What’s the new thing that’s coming out? What is it that is keeping you motivated to continue? I feel like I might know the answer to this question, but I’d love to hear you sort of. Where does this drive come from?

Manuel Godoy:
I just want to see Rome burn. Like that’s it. I just want to see Rome burn to the ground. I’m Hannibal at the gates. I always think of that whenever I think of what my mission is. I’m not here to be successful. I’m not here to tell my great story. People always trying to make it so indifferent. “Oh, I’m just trying to tell a great story. I just want to be a creative person. I love this and I’m so humble.” No, I want to see Rome burn to the ground and that means we have to have absolute veto power and control over our own stories. It’s the only way we’ll ever be able to stop Hollywood from dictating what is acceptable black history, because we don’t need 10 new black slave and civil rights stories a year. I don’t need to see the new ways of lynching people like, “Oh man, I just need to see that. I need to see a new way.”

Manuel Godoy:
“Oh, we’re about do a Emmett Till documentary.” “Yeah, I definitely want to see Emmett Till die again. That would be great.” “Oh, you know what? You know what? This black history we’re deciding we’re going to talk about the Black Wall Street Massacre. Yeah, we’re going to do a whole series on the Black Wall Street Massacre.” I said, “How about do a series on Black Wall Street before the massacre? How about that?” It was like but we don’t control the budget. We don’t control the means. We don’t control any of it. So if we don’t take that control and show that we can actually do numbers with that control, then they will always be able to dictate what is acceptable and what isn’t acceptable for black people to consume. And I’m tired of it. I want to see that entire infrastructure burn to the ground. And the only way that’s possible is if we dominate this space and be complete tyrants once we get there.

Maurice Cherry:
Who are some of the people that influence you?

Manuel Godoy:
There’s three, right? And I said this in a previous interview. There’s three that influenced me. You’d be surprised, one of them was Kevin Hart, which was kind of ironic. Tyler Perry and George Lucas. Those three people. What I respect is not success. I don’t care about success, because you can be successful and a complete tool at the same time. Your whole career can be canceled out. Everything could happen overnight because you are still a product of the system. So boldness is the stuff that I respect more than anything. People who’ve risked a lot in order to be successful.

Manuel Godoy:
For George Lucas, it was holding onto his IP rights, making moves to make sure that he never lost them. Over decades of freaking negotiating with Hollywood elites and stuff like that, he was like, “No, I’m not giving up these rights no matter how much y’all pay me.” And that made him the only billionaire who wrote a story. There is no other billionaire who wrote a story in the world. Period. Everybody who’s written a story don’t even have $100 million to their name. The creator of Naruto, Kishimoto, he’s worth $40 million today. If you believe the highest estimates of his net worth. But the man’s IP: Naruto, has brought in $15 billion, so he is not even worth 1% of his brand. Stan Lee died with less than 1% of Marvel’s brand.

Manuel Godoy:
This is the reality of all these people. They simply they’re considered successes by the world’s standards, but at the end of the day, they got robbed. They made everything. They worked nonstop for their entire lives and they didn’t even have 1% of the thing that they created. And only George Lucas was the one that ran the table. He basically kept 50% of everything Star Wars ever made. And that’s power.

Manuel Godoy:
Tyler Perry, everybody hates him in the industry because he’s going to make his stories whether you like it or not. You can say, “Am I a fan of Tyler Perry’s movies?” Eh, sometimes. For the most part it doesn’t really matter what I think. All I know is if Tyler Perry feels like making a movie, he’s going to do it. You can invest. If you don’t, he’s going to make it anyway and release it right on your freaking network whether you like it or not. He’s going to do whatever the heck he feels like. He’s going to cast whoever he feels like. He’s going to buy whatever he feels like, and you can’t stop him. And the reason why you can’t stop him is because he did all this. He was rich before you ever met him. Before Hollywood ever gave him a chance, his shows were already generating millions of dollars locally through the fans.

Manuel Godoy:
Build the infrastructure, and then these people in Hollywood can’t dictate nothing to you. When they were like, “We want to buy Madea.” They were like, “No. You can fund some of it, but you ain’t owning Madea whether you like it… I’m just not giving it to you. I don’t care what you offer me. I already make millions of dollars.” That’s the grind. And Kevin Hart, he said, “Why the hell am I going to get less than 5% of a tour or 3% of a tour or 3% of a tour’s proceeds if I’m the fucking main attraction. If the tickets are being sold because of me, why do I get only 3% of the total amount of money? Everybody else is making money off of me. So how about I pay for everything? I hire everyone. I get the venues. I do the marketing. And then if I sell out, I keep freaking 80% of everything made.”

Manuel Godoy:
He went into massive millions and millions of dollars up front. You can’t do that stuff after the show is already done. You got to book tours half a year in advance. So he had to go real deep into the red before his first show. So that’s power to me to make plays like that and just trust it. Say, I trust myself to make this happen. I believe my fans truly believe in what I’m doing. And I’m going to finally flip this industry. I’m not going to be an actor for the rest of my life. I’m not going to let people dictate my career and if they feel slightly offended by what I did, they can cancel out my entire career. You can’t cancel them now. You can’t cancel Tyler Perry. You damn sure can’t cancel George Lucas. You can’t cancel them no matter how much you care, you can’t do nothing to stop them. And that’s the people that I really respect, people who have done enough, built enough of their own fan base that they cannot be stopped by conventional means. You can’t stop them.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? Where do you want Black Sands Entertainment to be? Where do you want to be personally as a business owner? Talk to me about that.

Manuel Godoy:
Well, I just want to be in the top 10 animes in the world, period. So top 10 animes in the world for Black Sands, maybe some video games down under our belt as well. But the idea is if that happens, we’re basically going to dominate the entire space, right? Because we’re independent and that’s never happened before. It’s never happened before. An independent production get into the top 10 in the world and do massive licensing and merchandising. It’s never happened. And when I prove that model, it proves that black consumers are no longer something that can be measured by Hollywood, because they’ve never seen it before. They’ve never seen somebody just do it without any of the metrics they normally would use. And that is where I would like to be. I would like to just be a king maker in this space, I decide what’s hot, what’s not.

Manuel Godoy:
And because of that, they all have to work with us. Not just me, but all the other creators under my umbrella and give us the best possible deals or they don’t work with us, period. Because we’re just automatically the king makers in this space. If you want to do anything in this space, you have to come through us, right? So that’s the idea of what I want the company’s position to be in, right? That’s the idea of where I want Black Sands, the anime to be in, right? And for me, I’d like to relax a little bit in five years. Probably can’t but it’s very intense right now.

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds intense. Yeah.

Manuel Godoy:
Yeah. But for me, I’m in my Thanos mode right now, right? I’m trying to get the stones. I’m trying to get the stones and I don’t care who I got to crush to do it, right? I just can’t wait for the day when I finally rest. “He’s done what he was supposed to do. It’s now broken. The system is broken.”

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

Manuel Godoy:
Yeah. So follow us on all platforms: black Sands Entertainment. Manuel Godoy on LinkedIn if you want to work with me. Blacksands.com is my store, right? So you want to buy some books, go ahead and get them from there. BSP Comics is my app. So you can download a whole bunch of freaking black comic books there. You don’t actually have to download it. It’s server side. So it’s about 70 megabytes for the app. So you don’t have to worry about that. It’s 45 different titles from all types of creators. Really cool stuff. And lastly, if you want to be an investor. Investor round is over. We just raised a million dollars for BSP Comics. Our next investment round is for the Black Sands Anime. In order to participate, it’s probably best that you just sign up for Patreon at patreon.com/blacksands, because they’re going to be the first investors. And that investment round should happen in the summer. So there you go.

Maurice Cherry:
Manuel Godoy, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I mean your passion and your drive behind what you’re doing with Black Sands Entertainment is super infectious. I’m hyped up just listening to you talk about this. This just felt like a masterclass in how to build an empire. So I hope for people that are listening, they definitely will check it out and will get behind you. I mean, it sounds like you already have a very strong community behind what you’re doing, and I hope that with what we’re doing here with Revision Path by having you tell your story, we can get this out to even more people. So thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Manuel Godoy:
Thank you. Appreciate it, man.

Xalavier Nelson, Jr.

In the early 90s, there was this show on ABC called Phenom about a tennis prodigy. If Hollywood were to reboot that for the digital age, Xalavier Nelson Jr. would no doubt be the star of the show. His body of work rivals those of people in the gaming industry for decades!

We kicked off our conversation talking about his studio, Strange Scaffold, and he spoke about several of the games he’s either worked on or created, including An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs and the popular 90s Internet nostalgia title Hypnospace Outlaw. Xalavier also talked about his newest game, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, and he shared how his work as a pre-teen game journalist helped him become a narrative designer. Xalavier’s prudent vision for finding better, faster, cheaper and healthier ways to make video games is so important, and I think that if he’s making waves like this now, just imagine what he’ll do in the future!

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
Hello. I’m Xalavier Nelson Jr., I’m a studio director at Strange Scaffold, a frequent writer, narrative designer, collaborator, working on dozens of things. I’ve worked on over 60 games in the past five years. And now my current mission is not just finding new and exciting ways to collaborate with people at my own studio and at the studios and projects of others, but also finding ways to advocate for making games better, faster, cheaper, and healthier than they are currently assumed to be made.

Maurice Cherry:
How has 2021 been for you? Have you learned anything about yourself over the past year?

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
I think one of the primary things I learned over the past year is just how much I cared about production. I do love telling stories. I do love of putting things into a video game. I love creative content production. Writing a killer page or scene is a thrilling experience, but when I look at the things that consistently get me out of bed in the morning, that make me passionate about waking up and getting to work and collaborating with other people, it’s getting into the nitty gritty of how something comes together.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
The scope of a project, defining, reducing, and defining that vision of a project and how it’s accomplished in very calculated ways. The exercise of finding new and interesting formats and arrangements for artists coming together to build things together, that makes me feel alive. And so exploring those paths myself, sharing what I find along the way, and as much as I can, opening those doors for others is something that I’ve discovered I love. Now my mission is finding ways to do that again and again and again, as consistently and healthily as possible.

Maurice Cherry:
Have you thought about what you want to accomplish for this year coming up for 2022?

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
I think the big thing I want to accomplish is, we’ve talked about this in a few forums thus far, but Strange Scaffold is moving into publishing and to have at least one of our published signed projects come out. And the exact thing that the developer wanted to bring into being hopefully substantially de-risked and shipped at a scope and form that made the project better while also making it something that they could accomplish without destroying themselves in the process. That’s something I’m really excited to do.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
If we establish ourselves by the end of 2022, as having a perspective that allows us to not just develop intriguing things in unexpectedly small or efficient packages, but provide those resources and that perspective to others on a consistent scale and timeline, I’ll be very happy. And it’s by all indications that were well on our way to already accomplishing those goals.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s good. Congratulations on that.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s talk more about your studio, Strange Scaffold. First, I want to know how you came up with the name, but like, I just want to hear more about how you started it, how it’s going, things like that.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
I started Strange Scaffold primarily as an engine for exploring what happens when your explicit goal for a studio is not to build a dream project, but instead to bring as many things into the world as possible in a healthy, consistent and efficient manner. So exploring how, defining the structure of your game ahead of time and considering that to be set in stone and improvising within those lines and constraints that you’ve set, essentially putting a strange scaffold in place. And then making an interesting thing in between that foundation, that was the starting point.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
And it pretty quickly evolved from bringing that perspective to the projects of my clients, to bringing that into projects that I originated and directed, and now sharing those resources that we built to make games in that very specific way with other developers who also want to make incredible things, but not ruin their lives in the process. Because we have so many examples of the desire or dream of what a thing could be running someone into the ground as they pursue a path towards it.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
And I feel like game creators and really creative professionals of all forms deserve the right to pursue and contain the same joy in their working processes that they seek to deliver to their player, users and audiences on the other side of that creative process.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, I’m looking here at the Strange Scaffold website. I see you’ve got three games that are showing here.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
[crosstalk 00:08:31] finished by the by.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. All right. I see you’ve got El Paso Elsewhere, you have An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs. I think I heard about that also on Kotaku. And then Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator. Those are some pretty interesting names for titles. And I like that each one of them is very different. You’re definitely trying to, I guess, tell different stories with each of these games, it looks like.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
Yeah, the idea is, again, nothing that we bring in into the world will be perfect. We are flawed human beings doing the best we can to bring encapsulations of our souls into being, that process is going to get a little messy. So coming from the starting point of none of these things is going to be perfect, but how can they be interesting? How can they be built in a way that is itself joyful? And how can they deliver and experience you couldn’t get anywhere else, is something that we want to explore in as many ways as possible.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
So sometimes that takes the form of an inherently joyful universe, a first person open world comedy adventure game like An Airport For Aliens Currently Run by Dogs. Sometimes it’s a sci-fi body horror market tycoon like a Space Warlord, which at the time of this publication will have come out pretty recently on Xbox Game Pass and Steam. There’s a lot of ideas pinging around our heads and finding the shortest point from A to B to express those things and move on to the next project that allows us to deliver the next piece of our souls is my priority.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, the first time that I heard about your work was through a game that currently out. I played it on the Switch called Hypnospace Outlaw. And that is such a unique… I’ll put it like this, the Switch often has very unique games. That’s one reason why I really like the Switch over say PlayStation or Xbox. But Hypnospace Outlaw really for me, just hit that sweet spots for early internet nostalgia, like the late ’90s, early 2000s Web 1.0 aesthetic, just like, “Oh, I loved it. Love it so much.” How did you get involved with that game

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
As a teenager actually. I met Jay, as in Jay Thole, the creative director of the game when I was a teenager playing an early version of one of his previous games. Dropsy. Dropsy is a game about a misunderstood, horrific-looking clown who wants nothing more than to bring joy and love into the lives of the people he meets, no matter how much they despise and/or fear his initial appearance. And playing that game, delivering feedback that he took into consideration, and I saw coming to being in the next versions.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
And coming to understand how myself and Jay Thole are both Christians. I’ve been raised around a lot of Christian media, which tends to have mixed results, and finding something that was such a perfect encapsulation of what is intended to be the spirit of the faith, sacrifice and deep unconditional transformative love. And how that could be conveyed in a game about something else entirely different, when all I’ve been raised around was for the most part art, where the only thing that justified its existence was that it had a Christian label or would uphold dogma.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
That changed my life, changed my perspective, had a huge impact on me. And we stayed in touch, continued to bounce off each other creatively. And when he revealed Hypnospace Outlaw and continued to go down the path of developing it, eventually he was kind enough to bring me aboard and I got to directly collaborate with him and the rest of the team as a narrative director to serve a double purpose. The first being, writing a whole lot of stuff and doing a lot of narrative design to convey the themes and stories that they wanted to tell in that world.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
But also how to structure those stories in the game flow and progression such that it delivered those themes and made a game of infinite scope. Because when you’re simulating the internet, you can just keep going forever, finding a way of taking existing material and material yet to be created in creating a flow that made it to where we could make all of these things within a human lifetime, in a way that was faster, cheaper, healthier, and more efficient than we originally considered in my it even be possible to do so. We ended up pulling it off.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
It got rave reviews, it got nominated for a lot of awards. I’m still friends with the team and we still talk about potential collaborations in the future. So as much as you can judge a collaboration be successful, I certainly am happy with what happened coming out the other side of that.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m glad that you unpacked a bit about what narrative design is, because that’s what I was about to ask. But as you put it, it’s not just, “Oh, we’re writing the dialogue,” but you’re also looking at how that fits into the overall structure. So it’s like writing and almost producing and directing all wrapped up in the one, it sounds like.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
It depends on the role, when you’re a narrative lead, it certainly gets more into the structure and vision of the overall project as well as potentially managing elements to accomplish that. But narrative design, being the practice of looking at all aspects of a games experience to tell a story. And then collaborating with people to bring that into being as opposed to a writer, which in many teams can also hold narrative design duties, but their primary job is to write dialogue, write things that will be depicted as text on the screen.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
It’s a big part of the ambiguity here, because there is a lot of overlap, but there’s very distinct ways in which if you have a killer writer or a out of this world narrative designer, and you put them in a position to focus on their particular intersection, it can genuinely transform the way in which a game comes to life.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, the game that you’ve been working on that just came out recently, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator. I love have to hear the inspiration behind that. Just from the title alone, it sounds a lot to digest at once perhaps. No pun intended.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
The pun is very much appreciated though. The inspiration point, it’s twofold and there’s a lot of different rabbit holes that can be taken. But at its basis for warm, I was sitting in a doctor’s office, a man not wearing doctor’s clothes walked in, closed the door behind him and said, “Well, I’d like to see my insides.” And in that moment I had one of two decisions. The first was, do I run and get out of here and start screaming? Or two, do I keep going along these lines because whatever happens, I’m going to get an interesting story out of it?

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
And I ended up going the story direction and I didn’t end up getting murdered. Turns out this was a nurse practitioner, someone who was in process of doing their rounds and I guess accomplishing their residency and they needed practice with ultrasound machine. So I got to watch my heartbeat, my lungs breathe in and out, my liver function, and being connected to the tangible reality of the invisible processes that made up my life. Every moment of every day was such a point of perspective, of being exposed to something bigger than yourself.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
It sounds odd, but looking inward can be as perspective-broadening as looking outwards. So looking at this marvelous, complicated fleshy machine that we are and seeing it working had a big impact on my perspective. So, years later, that ends up culminating in a game about buying, selling, and trading the one thing everyone has and needs in a strange and evolving universe, organs. Because if there’s anything that is as large as space or the universal language of commerce, it is how much our equations of value or inherent value change as soon as you slap a dollar sign on something.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
It can be a plush beanie baby, it can be a green piece of paper that says one on it, or it can be a human heart. But as soon as you assign and agree upon a shared belief and value, the world changes in some small and inexplicable way that is very hard to reverse once it happens. And exploring those implications has been a very fun and hopefully compelling… Has been a very fun process that I hope has resulted in the compelling result.

Maurice Cherry:
I don’t know why for some reason, when I first heard the name and then I saw it on Steam, and we’ll have a link to it down in the show notes so people can check it out. I saw that and the first thing I thought of was Spaceballs. Have you seen Spaceballs before?

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
I am familiar with Spaceballs, but I’ve never properly seen it.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. That’s your homework, you have to see Spaceballs. I want to see what you think about it-

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
Got it.

Maurice Cherry:
… after you watched it, but-

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
Putting it on the list.

Maurice Cherry:
… I don’t know. I saw it and for some reason it got me to thinking about that movie for some reason, even though I’m sure the game is not… Spaceballs is clearly a parody of Star Wars, but your game is not a parody of anything, but for some reason my minds made that connection. I guess, because it’s space and it’s trading and all this sort of stuff. But what does your process look like when you’re creating a game? Because as you’re explaining both this game, as well as the games that are currently on the Strange Scaffold website.

Maurice Cherry:
It seems like you put a whole lot of thought into like the ethos and the soul of what the game is about and less about maybe the final product with graphics and all that sort of stuff.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
Yeah. Going into the process of how a game or any creative production comes into being is potentially very complicated, but I do try to think of any creative work, which I embark upon. I’ve worked in comics, I’ve worked in other mediums, sometimes in forms that I can’t talk about because of NDA. But I’ve worked in a lot of different mediums, communication styles, genres, and the thing that binds my approach to all of them together is a sense of what brings this to the finish line? And how does every piece of this experience reflect the perspective which birthed it?

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
So the term I like to use for this idea is a prism. Ideally, at least when you’re working on tightly scoped projects, filtering every element of the game through a central prism or perspective. Following those logical conclusions, those leaps of perspective that are grounded because they remain in the same foundation. That drives everything in terms of how I at least approach the directing process. So in An Airport for Aliens Currently Run By Dogs, the question emerged inside of the team at the beginning of the project, how do we handle currency?”

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
How does the player get more money? How do they spend money? How is money and currency represented? And at that moment, I took a step back and I thought about it for a moment and I said, “There is no money in this game,” because the prism, the perspective of the game world is what does it look like for a truly utopian society run by stock photo dog? A universe that is inherently joyful and cares about you specifically. A game that’s playing with you as much as you’re playing with it. How does it communicate with its players?

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
What are the elements of its world? What is the logic it runs upon? There’s a lot of interesting things you can do with currency or money in that world, but for me in that moment, the truest reflection of the world we wanted to create was one where dogs don’t care about money. A dog isn’t going to not give you a ticket to a FOBO just because you’re $1 short. If anything, they’re just going to give you the ticket or they’ll give you 50 tickets, just because you asked for it. Because they want to be helpful, because they want to see you happy.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
Because your joyful existence is more important than exchange of goods and services. Following decision processes like that, of what is this world attempting to express and how is it communicated through every layer and element of the game has become an essential piece of any of my work whether I join as a director or as a contractor. So I really value at this point, the idea of cohesion and how much agency I’ve been allowed in my different assignments to bring that perspective to bear, because sometimes you don’t have that ability.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
You can run into a project or string of projects or a career of projects where not only are the products disjointed, but your ability to bring any unity to them is nearly absent. So there’s a mixture of skill and execution here, but I’m also just deeply thankful that I’ve been given the opportunity and specific scenarios in which my skill in this area has been allowed to shine.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s interesting when you say that about the dogs not needing money, because I guess, yeah, that makes sense. But to have no currency, what about treats? I don’t know. I guess it’s your game, but I’m curious when you said that about the money, that does make sense now that you’ve pulled back and really explained it in that way. Because what are they going to spend it on? Is there also a supermarket run by dogs? How does that all work? So I get that.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
And the dogs would just give each other stuff at the supermarket if they have it [crosstalk 00:23:27]-

Maurice Cherry:
Right.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
There’s different tree treatments you could do of this definitely. There is a world where there’s much harsher dogs. There are dogs who do demand things in the game. A lot of it is a straight up barter in the project as opposed to using an abstract concept like money. But all in all, yeah, at every single step we ask, “How would this work in a joyful universe? How would this work if dogs were deciding how this should function?” And in many cases, the solution was one that was more kind and more interesting than anything that existed in the real world.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
And that caused a moment of reflection, at least for myself, whenever that occurred in the project for even how rarely we get the opportunity to imagine a better world. It can be very cathartic to create work that allows you the opportunities to explore that because Lord knows with the 24-hour news cycle, it can be difficult to bring yourself to that point when you’re scrolling through Instagram and it feels like the world is on fire.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, that makes sense. So I want to switch it up here, but of course we’re hearing about you as a game developer, studio owner, narrative designer, but I want to know where this all originated from. So tell me more about like where you grew up.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
I grew up all over the place. I was a military brat and that perspective in itself traveling so many different places seems so many different perspectives and cultures, has been in a massive contributor to me becoming who I am.

Maurice Cherry:
Can you talk about some of the places where you grew up?

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
Yeah, I was in South Korea, I was in Italy, I was in Germany, I was all over the United States. And I’m now based in the Southwest, El Paso, Texas, so been a lot of places.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Now I guess while you’re of course traveling all about with your family because of being a military brat, did you get to experience just a lot of different design and tech and all that sort of stuff growing up?

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
Yeah. And to top it all off the fact that my dad was so interested in tech when I was growing up, had no doubt a massive impact. One of the earliest photos that exists of me is I am an extremely chubby baby sitting on my dad’s lap with a unplugged controller in my hand, wrapped attention towards a screen that isn’t in the frame while my dad is looking towards the exact same thing, because I thought in that moment that I was playing the game right with him. And in a sense I was, and now, I send him free video games. So, it all works out.

Maurice Cherry:
Do you know what game it was that your dad was playing?

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
No, but I do remember certain games for my childhood in a lot of different contexts.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, like what are some of those games?

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
One of the big ones was Morrowind.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
My dad played it on the original Xbox, the first console with a built-in memory. And he played hundreds of hours of that thing. And I would watch him be enthralled by this world and I, of course wanted to be like my dad. I was like, “Can I play? Can I play? Can I play?” He finally let me do it. And I was like, “Yes, I’m in the world of Morrow ind. I have read this manual from cover to cover dozens of times.”

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
And I make a little bit of head way through the game, not really understanding it because it’s a more classic RPG and still having a good time with it, but not really understanding what I’m seeing. I save my game and I log off, a few hours later, I hear this on earthly moan. I walk into the front room and there’s my dad just staring at the screen, because I have overwritten his hundreds of RSAs with all the armor and all the weapons and [crosstalk 00:27:36]-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, no.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
… with almost half of his own everything with my misspelled main character in his underwear in the middle of the town square that you first get to. And he was like, “Did you do this?” And I was like, “I do what?” And he explained to me, “You deleted my save.” I was like, “Oh, oh no.” So he went back to it, and if anything, he went back to it harder than last time, it was like the Rocky training sequence, I was so proud of him. He put a blanket over his head, he put a blanket over the TV, he went for it.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
He’d work, he’d come home, he’d get it in because he is a good dad. At some point he says, “Yes. Okay. You can play again.” And I start a new game and I get a little bit of weigh in, and I meet an elf who I really hate. He’s just a real son of a bitch. I close the game and I come back out, and it’s very rarely that I’ve seen my dad look defeated, just deflated as a human being nothing inside of the husk, that is his body. But he was sitting, he didn’t even, there was not even the sound or really a conversation, he says, “Was this gone?” And he just like Sisyphus was rolling the boulder up the hill again. And he-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, what, you saved over it again.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
Yes. I believe [crosstalk 00:29:03].

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, my God.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
The third time he didn’t go for it as hard, I think he knew what was coming. Eventually, I asked him, “Hey, can I play the game?” And he is like, “Are you going to delete my save?” I was like, “No, I know how to do it this time. I’ve seen you save, I’ve been watching. I know how to do it.” I didn’t know how to do it. I deleted his save again. And when he stopped playing it in defeat, he’s never turned to that game ever since. I lost interest because it was cool because my dad was doing it. So lesson of the story here is, one, this is on him because he shouldn’t have kept letting me play it. And two, it’s even more on him because he never showed me how the save menu worked. You can tell a five-year-old how games saves work.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
You can explain the concept. I’ve thought through this for years now, there is a way five-year-old me could have been told about how save games worked. But that process was not undergone, and so consequences were followed and I do feel very bad about it. Every time I can’t log onto my Xbox because he is using the console profile in a different location to have access to my game pass. I’m doing my little bit to pay back the horrible price I incurred by destroying his dreams early on.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s a good son, that’s what a good son should do. That’s good to hear.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
Absolutely.

Maurice Cherry:
Although now I feel completely old now that you mentioned Morrowind. I was like, “Jesus.” I was in college when Morrow ind came out. I remember the game though, I probably didn’t get as far as you did though. When did I start playing? Not in 2002 certainly. Probably like in maybe ’05, I think I had an Xbox then. And I don’t know, I could never get out the first town. I kept getting killed by rats and I was like, “Eh, forget it.”

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
Yeah. Because it had a D and D chance to hit. So you would hit it and you wouldn’t know, you’d have to look in the bottom left corner of the screen to be like, “You missed. You missed, it’s before.”

Maurice Cherry:
Exactly. That’s not all my fault. So no, I.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
What we’re learning in this episode is that abdication and responsibility is good actually. It was my dad’s fault, it wasn’t your fault. It was Morrowind’s fault. We can always find someone to blame and that’s the real takeaway of today’s show.

Maurice Cherry:
All right. And speaking of that, when it comes to games, you first got into, well, it sounds like you first got into the gaming industry as a games’ journalist as a 12-year-old. Is that right?

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
Yeah. Pretended to be an adult.

Maurice Cherry:
You got to tell me how that happened.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
That’s the story in a nutshell, I was 12 years old. I found out that games journalists get games for free. I thought, “Oh wow, there it is. It’s the perfect job, free video games.” And I, as a very driven and precocious young man, pretended to be an adult and somehow I got away with it, and that started what has now been a… Oh, it’s been over a decade in the industry. And people I met back then I have since worked with, and I’m now colleagues with, and everyday I am thankful for not just that journey, but how clearly I can see the journey at every step in my life. I can see the impact that God has had in directing that path, whether it was good or bad, everything came together to produce the person I am now, and the perspective I have.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
And so much of what I’m trying to do is without having to go through similar pain in part, any of the things that I’ve learned or discovered along the way to the people that I meet, if I manage to… I think it’s really important to put on your own air mask before you assist other passengers to use an airline reference or metaphor. But I also think none of this stuff really matters if it only goes to benefit me. If I just, even if I make hits, if these games come into the world and all they do is make money.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
Money is important, it pays bills, it allows for agency and freedom and a quality of living that’s important and aspirational. But if I work with someone and they don’t come away having learned something, if I come away from working with someone and haven’t learned something, if I am not through my working processes, enabling the people around me to do their best work in the healthiest environment possible, it doesn’t matter what we’ve produced, because the purpose of making that thing has already been lost. What point is a perfect game, If you lose your soul along the way? Or if you never make another thing again.

Maurice Cherry:
I was curious to know, as you started out so early in this industry writing about it, reviewing games and such, did any of your colleagues know that you were that young?

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
From what I understand, most didn’t and I don’t know what that says about either my skills for disguise or about my industry in terms of maturity level, but yeah, I somehow skated by.

Maurice Cherry:
Do you think that your work as a journalist really helped you out as a narrative designer?

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
I think the work I did as a journalist helped me as a narrative designer in a few ways. The first is, I did all of my professional bad writing very early. I got all the bad words out, hopefully, so now I can write good stuff. But the second major thing that I think about in terms of journalism is, when I got older and really leaned into attempting to understand artistic intents and artistic processes and how and why things came to be, or when the creator intended something, why that didn’t emerge onto the screen. And the things that led to that course of events, that gave me an inherent empathy for the people I would come to work with as well as an ability to examine, what was something trying to communicate?

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
Like reverse engineering, what was something trying to communicate and how, and what pieces of an experience didn’t contribute to that process, led to me now attempting to bring those things to life myself in as cohesive a manner as possible. And I certainly won’t claim to get it right 100% at the time, but I can see how my history as a journalist coming to treasure these things and learning how to form these opinions and thoughts in such a way that I could share them with others and have them be disagreed with or agreed with or spark interesting discussion. It was an incredible training ground, and I’m so thankful that I had the opportunity to come up through that direction.

Maurice Cherry:
What do you ultimately want to accomplish as a game developer? It certainly sounds like, one, your faith factors a lot into your work, just in terms of how you approach the games and it sounds like even the mechanics and the whole ethos behind it, but then also you’ve mentioned earlier about wanting to provide just a more holistic game development experience. At the end of the day, when all is said and done, I’m using a bunch of different metaphors here, but what do you want to accomplish as a game developer? Is there like a bigger goal or message at play here?

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
The average game developer career lasts about three years. If there’s anything I accomplish in my lifetime as a commercial artist, as a creative professional, I want to see the average career length for someone working in games to be 20 years, 30 years just like Martin Scorsese, says he can be 70, 80 years old, still making interesting films. I want to see games professionals have the same ability to discover what their next story is going to be, what the stories they could deliver if their careers just lasted a little bit longer.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
If they had that ability to hit that next rung in the ladder, if they had that ability to fashion their craft that much more. The fact that we get the games of creative potency that we have now, given the relative lack of seniority, we have the ability to crew in, in the industry because our mentors, our elders are few and far between. I treasure and look forward to a future where we find out what breathtaking things can come into being when people have been making these for 30 years instead of three.

Maurice Cherry:
So overall, what are you excited about at the moment? Of course, you got a new game that just came out. Of course, congratulations to you on that, but what are you really the most excited about right now?

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
I think the thing is I’m most excited about are honestly the projects. This sounds corny, but it’s the projects made by my friends and colleagues and peers in the industry right now. Games is legitimately a more vibrant, diverse, creatively executed and broad communicator of artistic intent than it’s ever been. The golden age of games is happening right now. And it’s because of the people I often find myself having the ability to work with, no major end point to that other than, “Dang I’m thankful.” And wow, I can’t imagine what it’s going to look like 10, 20 years from now, especially if we can create working conditions to where the folks who are doing this amazing stuff now can continue to evolve their craft and be making things that far into the future.

Maurice Cherry:
Now for people that are listening to this that want to also get into developing games, what would you recommend to them? Any resources or any kind of course of action that they should take?

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
The most important thing I would recommend is make games or make anything really with the resources you have right now. If you don’t have money, find out what kind of game you can make with no money. It’s possible. That’s to where I started. If you are a fantastic artist, look at how a game can uniquely leverage your art. If you’re a musician, look at how within the resources you have, you can express things that no one else would think to do.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
Or frankly could if only because they have more resources, we tend to forget how sometimes having more resources can be a limitation in itself because it forces the solutions you are finding to take pretty similar forms to things that are successful right now, or that have been done in the past, depending on the environment and which you’re working. So yeah, wherever you are, whatever you have, look for how you can be making something right now, because not only will that advance your portfolio, but whenever you bring something into the world, finish and release it, you learn something about yourself, you learn and what to do, you learn what to not to do, you learn something about who you are. I say you deserve to learn as fully as possible who you are, wouldn’t you?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, sure. Why not? What do you think you would’ve done if you hadn’t gone into game development? It sounds like you had such an early start. Was there anything else that you had in mind even?

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
My very, very first job was doing landscaping for a cult. Do not recommend it.

Maurice Cherry:
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, landscaping for a cult?

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
We’re going to move on from that.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
But after that, what I got into and what I loved was librarianship. Library science, the practice of serving customers in a community through libraries. I found opportunities with the resources I had and the place that I had in the communities that I was in to end up being a children’s librarian, not just one time, but multiple times. And I loved it. I love what libraries represents. I practically grew up in libraries. The role libraries have in society, the continuing relevance they have, as well as the impact you have on patrons in that environment.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
Sorry, I’m getting a little bit emotional in this end, but I loved every single one of those kids who walked in through the door. I loved every single person who came in and didn’t know what they were looking for and came out with a book that ended up changing their lives. I loved every single one of those ridiculous ass romance novels that ended up being, this is a fun fact. Romance novels are the most checked out thing in a library, at least in my experience. Romance readers read voraciously, they’re constantly cycling through those books, same books going in and out, in and out. They’re the secret lifeblood of any library circulation.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
And yeah, every single one of those books and the joy that they brought the people who read them. I loved those books and I loved every single one of those people, and I loved everything about that profession. If it didn’t require that master’s in library science to become a quote unquote proper librarian, I might have still even having started my career in games so early, I might have still done librarianship anyway, because if it’s not creative production, if it’s not making games or comics or something in linear media, like film or television. I’ll tell you what feels like home to me, it’s the walls of a library.

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

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
Aside from in a library?

Maurice Cherry:
Sure. Why not? I’m sure there’re more games out down the horizon. I’m sure.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
Yeah. In five years I see Strange Scaffold as a vibrant constellation of projects and people that are sustainable, healthy, and unexpectedly ambitious and well positioned to remain so for the foreseeable future. If I could do exactly what I’m doing now for the next five years and the rest of my life, I would be very happy indeed.

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

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
You can find my ridiculous Twitter at twitter.com/WritNelson. When I’m not posting puns, I am talking about our projects and how and why we bring them into the world. We have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangescaffold where you can get early access to our work, as well as do things like get pictures of your dog, into the games that we’re bringing out now and get custom content into some of the projects we’re still developing, such as Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
And lastly, I work on a lot of games. So if you look on a PlayStation or an Xbox or a Nintendo platform or on Steam, running into something that I’m working on is, or have worked on, there’s a better chance than not that you’ll find it pretty quickly. So Strange Scaffold is the name for a lot of my collaborations, but for a step outside of that, like Skate Bird or Hypnospace Outlaw, if you like one thing we’re doing, there’s a vibrant thread of work to be followed.

Maurice Cherry:
Xalavier Nelson Jr, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show, one, thank you for sharing your really unique look into game development and your very, I think honestly inspiring story about how you even just got involved into games. I love that you really are thinking about not just the stories that you want to tell throughout games, but also how you can make the industry better as a whole. I think that’s something that probably, I don’t know if many other game developers are doing that, but it seems like that’s something that you really tapped into and are trying to put forth. And the games that you’re creating are fun and unique, and I just want to see more of what you’re going to accomplish in the future. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.:
The kind of words mean an immense amount. Thank you.

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

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

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Alanna Flowers

2021 has been quite a year for us all, including this week’s guest Alanna Flowers. This year, she became a full-time creative and launched her own business, AGF Design Studio, and I had the chance to talk to her in the midst of her very busy holiday schedule.

Alanna gave me the rundown behind why she started her studio, how she plans to expand her services next year, and also gave some insight into her creative process. She also talked about growing up in NYC, the pros of art licensing, and how she builds her brand through social media.

Thank you all for listening to Revision Path this year — onward to 2022!

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

Alanna Flowers:
Hi, my name’s Alanna Flowers. I’m a lettering artist and illustrator, based in Brooklyn, New York.

Maurice Cherry:
How has the year been for you so far?

Alanna Flowers:
Wow. This year has been unlike any other that I’ve had. Professionally and creatively it’s been really refreshing and really a big learning experience, I would say.

Maurice Cherry:
In what ways?

Alanna Flowers:
Well, I’m a new freelancer. I started freelancing January 1st of this year, so-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh.

Alanna Flowers:
I just jumped in feet first and, yeah. I’ve had so many rewarding experiences and I think, because I’m still so new, I’ve learned a lot along the way.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, congratulations on striking out on your own like that.

Alanna Flowers:
Thank you so much.

Maurice Cherry:
If you don’t mind me asking, what was the catalyst behind you deciding to do that?

Alanna Flowers:
I mean, everyone knows how things have been for the state of the world. So, the pandemic hits last year, and at that time I was a full-time in-house graphic designer/graphic design manager. I was reporting to work every day, working in downtown Manhattan. New York City’s a hotbed, but I reported to work. So, that was a challenge for me definitely. Then I guess as the whole year went on, I was really evaluating. I’m like, how can I start doing what I’m actually really passionate about? Because at that point I had already thought about maybe I want to strike out, even do something different, even if it wasn’t necessarily freelancing on my own. I knew that I just wanted something different. So, the pandemic was a humongous catalyst for reevaluating on all levels. So, yeah. I decided, I think midway through 2020, I’m just like, all right. I’m going to start saving this money that I’m making, and try to figure out something on my own.

Maurice Cherry:
And you did, and you struck out on your own.

Alanna Flowers:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Since this is coming up at the end of the year, do you have any early plans or resolutions for 2022?

Alanna Flowers:
Yeah. Geez. I’ve been thinking really hard about next year actually, because now I have something to base things on, because everything was very, well, we’ll see how this goes. So, now I actually have quantifiable metrics to base things off of. So, I have big goals for next year. I want to expand my services definitely, and just continue working with great brands and clients.

Maurice Cherry:
So, let’s talk more about your studio, which is called AGF Design Studio. You started at the beginning of this year, how has business been, just establishing yourself?

Alanna Flowers:
Yeah. It’s been really great. I’ve been very fortunate honestly, to have worked with all of the brands and people that I’ve gotten to work with this year. I’ve gotten to work with Adobe. My first client was American Greetings.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Alanna Flowers:
It’s like, how does that happen? I’ve had a very fortunate year and experience going out on my own. I think if we can keep that momentum, and it seems that we are so far, going into next year, I think that would be great.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Those are two big names just right off the bat for your first year.

Alanna Flowers:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
So, what is the process like when you’re… Say you have a new project come in, or there’s a new design that you’re working on or something like, what does your creative process look like when you’re starting something new?

Alanna Flowers:
That’s a really great question. It really definitely depends on what the client’s needs are, and they give you a creative brief and you review it, and I start thinking about what exactly is it that they’re asking me to letter? Because as a lettering artist, I’m usually illustrating some sort of quote or phrase, so I start thinking about stylistic treatments. Sometimes the origin of the quote is historical, so maybe it’s from an actual figure, so I do a little bit of research on that person. From there, I just follow the steps of my process, which are basically establishing some kind of hierarchy for the piece, so that it communicates in the best way possible to the intended audience.

Maurice Cherry:
It seems pretty straightforward then.

Alanna Flowers:
Yeah. It’s not too complicated. I think where things start getting complicated is maybe how long the phrase is, and the composition, creating for social media. I’m usually given some sort of dimensions and constraints, so my compositional approach for something that’s supposed to be a square will be completely different than something that’s supposed to be a poster, for example. So, it just depends from project to project, I think.

Maurice Cherry:
Are you currently working on any projects that you can talk about right now?

Alanna Flowers:
That’s a good question. I can vaguely describe it, I guess. Yeah. I actually just started a project that I’m really excited about, and it’s actually going to allow me to incorporate lettering and a little bit of animation actually. It’s a marriage of my interest in filming and video and editing, with lettering and animation. I’m pretty excited about this one.

Maurice Cherry:
That sounds pretty cool. Wow. So, you mentioned Adobe, you mentioned American Greetings. These are both very visually strong companies. American greetings with greeting cards, Adobe of course, with everything they do with the Adobe Suite and stuff. Are there specific types of clients that you’ve found that you work best with?

Alanna Flowers:
I’ve been fortunate to work with Adobe for a few projects this year, each one was so different. I think what I’ve seen from the clients that I’ve gotten to work with is, it’s always best when the vision is as clear as possible, I guess. And when we can just establish that we’re on the same page as much as possible. Things pretty much sail smoothly from there, as long as you can have a nice, clear line of communication with the client, I find that those project go over the smoothest and the best, from beginning to end.

Maurice Cherry:
So, even with those types of clients, I’ve got to imagine you’ve probably had a bunch of different people just try to hit you up. And with it being your first year, I’m probably guessing there’s been some clients that you’re like, “You know what? I don’t know if this is the best one,” because sometimes in your first year of business, you want to take on everything, or you try to take on as much as you can because it’s your first year and you want to try to do all the things. But have you found the flip side to that?

Alanna Flowers:
Yeah. I’ve definitely had some interesting things come my way, and it would just meet me right in the middle of me working on something. And I’m just like, I could say yes and rush through this and it not be that great. Or I could just politely decline at the moment. It’s great they found me, they have my contact information and I have that contact from them, so those doors could more easily be reopened. Just like, “Hey. I was busy then, but my schedule’s open now.” But, yes. There’s definitely been a lot of temptation to say yes to everything, but thankfully, so far so good, and timing seems to have been on my side for most of the time.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I was going to say, it sounds like it’s more of a timing thing than the actual work itself. I guess that’s pretty good. It’s good to know.

Alanna Flowers:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s switch gears here because I really want to learn more about you and how you really came into all of this. Tell me about where you grew up.

Alanna Flowers:
Yeah. I grew up in White Plains, New York, suburban kid all the way. Even though I’ve been Brooklyn now and I’ve been here for a few years, I definitely was not a city dweller all my life. So, yeah. I grew up in White Plains and that’s the only place I’ve known.

Maurice Cherry:
Were you exposed to a lot of design and art and stuff like that growing up?

Alanna Flowers:
Yeah. I would definitely say, that as a kid, I was always very enthusiastic about the opportunities during class to color and do arts and crafts, and art class and stuff like that. And then, just from, I guess, a personal side, I always enjoyed musical theater, and my family would be able to go to Broadway shows every now and again for the holidays or something. So, just being exposed to even different forms of art, even if it’s not visual or digital art, just being exposed to all different kinds of artistic expressions was definitely a thread throughout my upbringing.

Maurice Cherry:
And now you went to the New York Institute of Technology, in Old Westbury. Can you tell me what your time was like there?

Alanna Flowers:
Yeah. My time there was so great. It was so interesting because I went there and I applied there even, on the recommendation of my old high school art teacher, Dr. A. So, he was an alumni of there, so he’s like, “Oh, apply there,” because that’s where he went. The art program there was very small because NYIT is actually more of an engineering school. So, the art program felt very intimate. Everyone who had some sort of art major, whether you were graphic design or motion design, or what have you, everyone knew each other. So, it felt like a very close knit little family and community, and I really enjoyed my time there.

Maurice Cherry:
Do you feel like they really helped prepare you to go out there in the world and work as a designer?

Alanna Flowers:
In some respects, yes. Where you’re thinking about working for a company, or an agency, or working in-house. Yes, thinking about, okay. I could have a job after this in a creative field, but not necessarily in the thread of a, this is how it looks if you want to work for yourself idea. So, definitely preparation was there, but definitely in the traditional sense.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I haven’t found that there have been a lot of schools, maybe some of the art institutes, only because I know that they do take a lot of input in from people in the community, basically just about what they should be teaching. But, yeah. There’s not a lot of design focused schools I’ve seen that give you the tools for entrepreneurship. It is about pushing you into that… I don’t want to say pipeline, but pushing you into that realm of, are you going work for an agency? Or you could work for a design focused tech company, or something like that. It’s not really about, how can I take these tools and strike out on my own because a lot of that is… I mean, yes. It’s your technical skill, but there’s also just so much business stuff that you need to know to run your own business and deal with contracts, and all that sort of stuff.

Alanna Flowers:
Yeah. Absolutely. Any kind of inkling of what it was like to be a freelancer came from the one off, maybe you have a semester with an adjunct professor who happens to also be a freelancer on the side, or something like that. I mean, they might show us some of their client work as examples and stuff like that. But definitely not completely focused, like you said, where it’s dedicated to teaching you the ins and outs of the business aspect that goes into freelancing.

Maurice Cherry:
Why do you think that is?

Alanna Flowers:
That’s a great question. I feel like there’s more attention on the creator economy, and maybe it’s because now I’m in it directly, but I don’t recall it being talked about as much, even amongst me and my peers. The power that social media could have in transforming someone’s creative career in that trajectory, and being able to go off on your own. So, there might have just been an unknowing of the potential of these platforms. When I was going to school, Instagram was king, but now there’s so many competitors and so many different avenues that you can take. I don’t know. I think, as more people do it, the more shine it’ll get, and more people will talk about it.

Maurice Cherry:
What were those early years like after you graduated?

Alanna Flowers:
It’s pretty interesting actually. When I first graduated, I was very bright-eyed and was super excited to just jump into my field, but I actually had an opportunity fall through, that I wanted to take to be a designer. I was down on my luck a little bit, and I told my friend, I was like, “I just need income please,” anything. I ended up actually taking a job as a receptionist for a year right out of college, before I was able to secure my first graphic design job.

Maurice Cherry:
A receptionist, huh?

Alanna Flowers:
Mm-hmm (affirmative) I gave myself one year because I was just like… And I was a great receptionist.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Alanna Flowers:
I was very efficient and they’re just like, “Yeah. You’re great.” And I’m just like, and with all this stuff comes complacency and comfort, and you know this was just a very temporary thing so you need to move on. So, I had my exit strategy, and after that experience, I was able to get an associate design job in-house.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, that’s something good to know, that you had a plan to get out of it, because sometimes you fall into those gigs where you’re doing the work as you have to do it, it keeps a roof over your head, it keeps food on the table, but it’s not fulfilling. It’s not what you really want to do. So, at least you had a plan to get out of that, and eventually start somewhere and really work on your design career.

Alanna Flowers:
Yeah. It’s very interesting thinking about it now, but it’s just like, well, it’s part of my story. It is what it is. It’s not always red roses, but I’m grateful for the way things happened anyhow.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, I noticed that you’ve been doing a lot with social media. You can go to your website and really tell that you’re very active on these other platforms like YouTube and Instagram and Pinterest. How has, I guess, exhibiting your work through those channels helped you out as an artist and an entrepreneur?

Alanna Flowers:
I think it has really challenged me to think about one, I guess how much one person is capable of. So, you’ll see a lot of people who do content creation full time, and you’re just scratching your head and just like, how are they doing all of this content? And just like, well, there’s a strategy behind everything, and a lot of content is actually strategically recycled and scheduled and all this stuff. So, once I was able to break that formula down in my head, I was able to be like, okay. I’m just going to put my work in multiple places, because you never know how someone will find you or come across you, and shooting as many shots as you can is always, I think, good. Especially if you’re entrepreneurial like me, or just trying to increase your chances of someone coming across your work. I think it’s always best to be in as many places as possible.

Maurice Cherry:
And also, by doing that work and showing off what it is that you’re doing, you’re attracting other people, which for your first year in business, I mean, that’s the best marketing that you can do, is to really show the work that you’re doing so other people can find out about it.

Alanna Flowers:
No, definitely. It’s definitely a whole process of show and tell. Your social media quickly becomes your portfolio, or your YouTube becomes a reel of the things that you can do. I’ve had so many people tell me, it’s like, “Oh, I watched some of your YouTube videos,” and that exhibited that you can speak about this topic, and you know about video editing. It’s interesting also the way that people will break down, “Oh, I’ve seen your content in this place, this place and this place,” and from that I can deduce relatively the kind of skills that you have, and the interests that you have. I think it’s just a great way to showcase everything that you can do.

Maurice Cherry:
Do you find that different social networks are better, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish?

Alanna Flowers:
Yeah. I would say so. I think it depends, because a lot of people have been saying, especially this year, that video content has really taken over platforms that were previously photo based, like Instagram. Where TikTok and Snapchat have… Well, mostly TikTok, but I guess Snapchat really did it first, where people are creating video content, and using that as a way of exhibiting a tutorial. It could be for anything. I use a lot of my platforms to use as tutorial based posting, so I think that’s a great way to engage with my community. It’s not always about, oh, this is the finished piece that I did. I like to share educational content, so I’ve found that anything that really has videos on it, which is everything, can really be used in that way, which I’ve tried to leverage a lot this year and has been pretty successful.

Alanna Flowers:
And then, other platforms like Twitter, I found are just great for building community and just getting out there, and just talking with people who are really like-minded, and in your same creative sphere. Maybe they don’t do lettering, but maybe they do type design and other kinds of illustrations. So, it’s really interesting to hit that follow button on someone and see them follow back, and be surprised maybe the people who are just willing to talk to you about the stuff that you guys already know that you’re interested in from your bio or whatever.

Maurice Cherry:
So, even with all that, you’re on these different social networks, you’re doing these things. I see that you have a section on your site about art licensing. Talk to me about that, because that’s something that I haven’t really seen on a lot of really designers or illustrator sites, is about licensing.

Alanna Flowers:
Yeah. That’s definitely one of the areas that I knew that even if, quote unquote, I was maybe slow out the gate to get some clients, I could definitely build a licensing portfolio. I’m personally, I think I’ve collected probably almost every greeting card or holiday card, birthday card I’ve gotten since I was, I don’t know, 10 or something. I’ve just always loved the illustrations, and just the look of greeting cards. I’m just like, that’s art licensing. I could totally do that. I was able to actually get an art licensing course that I purchased at the top of the year, and it was really helpful for me getting some licensing clients. That’s just a little bit of recurring income that I get, which is nice, and it’s completely passive. Once I’ve done the designs, they just generate that little bit of income for me every month. So, it’s really nice.

Maurice Cherry:
So, have companies already reached out to you to license some of your work?

Alanna Flowers:
Yeah. I actually did a little bit of… I think I’ve actually done probably all of the outreach maybe, I think, for all of the companies that I’m licensing with right now. The first one I did was a mobile app called Felt, and they actually do digital greeting cards. So, you have the app on your phone, you can design the greeting card, you can write it on your phone and they’ll mail the card out to whoever is in your address book. So, they have a hybrid approach, where it’s like you do the process digitally, but they’ll still mail the card. So, that was interesting. I don’t… Honestly, I think I just Google searched like crazy, just art licensing, seeing other companies that fellow lettering artists have licensing deals through, and just collecting contacts and doing the research, and just sending out cold email. Got a few good responses this year.

Maurice Cherry:
And is that… I mean, I would imagine that’s probably pretty steady income too, with licensing, because you’re doing along certain time terms, maybe monthly or annual or something like that?

Alanna Flowers:
Yeah. Exactly. It just depends on whatever your contract agreement is, the terms of your royalty payments. But it’s cool because I can expand my portfolio, if I want to add 10 new cards to a collection, I can, and just have those go in circulation and see how they perform. And then you just get your little monthly commission reports, so you can see how your designs are performing, and maybe where you want to make some improvements, maybe add to different categories or something like that.

Maurice Cherry:
Who are some of your inspirations, either as an artist or as a business person? Who inspires you?

Alanna Flowers:
Oh, geez. Well, I definitely was inspired from the very beginning by Jessica Hische, because she was probably the first name that I heard attached to lettering. I think that happened when I was in a typography class that I took in college. My professor had shown her daily drop cap project as an example of lettering, and I was just like, “Lettering?” And then, from there I just fell down the rabbit hole, so to speak. I was pretty much hooked from there. Other than her, Martina Flor definitely, has all also been a huge inspiration. I actually took her freelancing course when I was first getting started this year, learning the ropes of freelance from one, a seasoned lettering artist, but also someone who’s been running their own lettering business for 10 plus years. It was a huge inspiration for me.

Maurice Cherry:
What advice would you give to someone out there that’s listening to this, and they want to follow in your footsteps? They want to maybe learn lettering design, or they’re looking to strike out on their own as an entrepreneur. I know those are two separate things, but what advice would you give to someone that’s listening, and they want to go in either or both of those routes?

Alanna Flowers:
Yeah. Well, when I was first thinking about it, I think I was first listing all of the talents that I had, I guess, like these are all the ways that I could monetize the skills that I already have. I’m a trained graphic designer, I can do that. I taught workshops before, I can do that. Just listing out those skills and talents was, I think, the first thing, because I’m just like, okay. These could be my services hypothetically for freelancing. And then, I think it just from there went to following this passion that I’ve had for a long time. I think that first exposure to Jessica Hische’s work was probably 2013, 2014 or something like that. So, from there I just had lettering as a hobby and a creative outlet while I was sitting at my receptionist desk. I think being a graphic designer full-time made it harder for me to nurture that creative hunger, I think, for lettering.

Alanna Flowers:
I knew that what I wanted to buy myself was more time. So, from there I saved money. I’m just like, I’m completely new to freelancing. I never truly envisioned myself freelancing in my career. So, I was just like, I know one thing that I need is a little bit of a cushion financially. I definitely took a risk quitting my job, but I didn’t just do it without any logistical understanding of my expenses and stuff. And then, I think from there, it’s just really go with your gut. I did have the financial cushion, but I did not have a client history. I didn’t have referrals from other people that I could take with me in my little email address book or something.

Alanna Flowers:
I took a risk definitely in that aspect. But because I’ve been nurturing this skill and this hobby for so long, with the hopes of somehow making this my profession, I think a lot of the things that I’ve encountered were that whole luck, where it’s opportunity meets the preparation. So, yeah. If you want to do something, make sure that you’re already doing it in some capacity, even if it’s just on the side to begin with. As long as you’re feeding into that, whatever that thing is that you really want to be doing, that’s definitely positive as well.

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

Alanna Flowers:
Wow. Right now, success looks like being able to sustain and continue from places of passion and genuine excitement and interest, and not from the place of, I’ve got to take this client on because I need to pay my rent this month. I think just continuing with that feeling of excitement and passion, I think, because even when you’re doing things that you’re really interested in, after a while you might get a little burned out. I’m hoping to not, to not reach that burnout point, and be able to be responsible with my time and with my emotional wellbeing. I just want to keep doing this and maintaining,

Maurice Cherry:
Do you have a dream project you’d love to do one day?

Alanna Flowers:
Oh, geez. I have many, and it’s great because some of them even happened this year. But I am definitely setting my sites out for large scale projects, like murals. I am definitely looking to get my lettering painted outside somewhere in New York City. I think that would be the coolest thing, and have people take pictures with my work outdoors. I think that’d be really awesome.

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

Alanna Flowers:
I appreciate the privilege that comes with being able to take a risk, like the one that I took, and in some ways I’m still taking. I really appreciate that. And I appreciate the luxury of time. I’ve bought myself a little bit of time with a little bit of the planning that I did before, I ended going freelance, but I’m abundantly grateful for those things.

Maurice Cherry:
So, given where you are now, where do you see yourself in the next five years? Is there certain work that you’d want to be doing at that point or anything like that?

Alanna Flowers:
This year has been a lot of seed planting. It’s like I have to start working from somewhere. So, I started my YouTube channel this year, started with zero subscribers just like everyone who starts anything. In five years it would just be nice to see these communities that I’ve started, investing and grow. I really love lettering and I love working with clients. It’s such a rewarding feeling, being able to help them. But it’s also really rewarding to help other people who are interested in lettering. So, that’s why I definitely knew that as a part of my freelancing that I wanted there to be some sort of educational aspect, with workshops or tutorials and stuff like that, like I do on YouTube. So, yeah. Just expanding my reach and having that allow me to reach back as well to others.

Maurice Cherry:
Reaching forward and reaching back, I like that. So, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you? Where can they see your work and everything online?

Alanna Flowers:
Yeah. You can find my work at agfdesignstudio.com, but you can find me on YouTube at AGF Design Studio. That’s my channel name, that’s also my name on Instagram. And then, also on Instagram and Twitter. I’m Alanna_ Flowers.

Maurice Cherry:
All right. Sounds good. Well, Alanna Flowers, I definitely want to thank you so much for coming on the show and really one, I think telling your story, but then two also, giving us a little bit of a peak behind the curtain of what it’s like to a new freelancer. There’s been all this talk this year specifically about the great resignation, and people leaving jobs and striking out on their own. It seems like you’ve really… I mean, well, one, you have struck out a lot on your own. But two, it seems like you’ve really hit a stride and you’re making great work. You’re promoting yourself out there on social media. I wish, when I started my studio, that I was half as prepared and put together as you are with how you’re doing everything. I think you’re doing a great job, and I’d love to see where your work goes in the future. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Alanna Flowers:
Thank you so much, Maurice, for having me.

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Janessa Robinson

Summer is over, y’all. As we head into a new season, it’s a perfect time to pause and reflect, gain some clarity, and reassure yourself about your purpose. That’s exactly what this week’s guest Janessa Robinson is doing, particularly now that she’s at the beginning of a new adventure — moving to Los Angeles!

Our conversation began with Janessa talking about the recent move, and she spoke a bit about her day job as a content creator. We also dived into the backstory behind her company Artistry Land, and Janessa discussed how she works as a creative with Asperger’s, and how she cleverly uses design thinking as a way to manifest success in her life. Big thanks to Steven Wakabayashi of QTBIPOC Design for the introduction!

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

Janessa Robinson:
I am Janessa Robinson and I’m an artist and an entertainer.

Maurice Cherry:
So how are things going for you right now? What’s on your mind?

Janessa Robinson:
Oh, well, things are going great. I just moved to Los Angeles a month ago, actually drove down here from San Francisco.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Janessa Robinson:
It was an interesting experience. That’s the first road trip that I’ve taken by myself before. It was amazing because as I pulled into Los Angeles, it really hit me that I live here, that I’m moving here as a resident. Each other time that I came to LA, it was to visit. I stayed with a cousin once who lived in east LA, she’s a screenwriter. Every time before that, it was like I came through LAX Airport on my way somewhere else. So I just wanted to stay. I’m very happy that I’m here. It’s a very significant change for me because I spent three years living in San Francisco. And ever since I was a small child, I’ve always wanted to live here, and not just live here, but be a leader in the community here to contribute something. I just saw that my life is here. So it’s an amazing experience.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. It sounds like you’ve had a pretty transformative year then, especially with this move.

Janessa Robinson:
I would say COVID is interesting. There’s a lot of change for everyone. For me, I went from, oh gosh, spending four hours in traffic, just commuting between San Francisco and Santa Clara to staying at home. And me being like, okay, great. Well, now I can spend all the time I want on my art because we were essentially confined to our homes in the beginning. I decided that I would start dancing every day. I was recording myself and posting these videos on Instagram. I actually made a very intentional decision that I would turn my Instagram page into like a television channel. It’s like a show. It’s like an entertainment show. I called it Variety Nessa. [inaudible 00:06:08] dancing and rapping and singing and just shooting really interesting content in ways that would engage people since we were at home. I was like, “Hey, check this out.”

Janessa Robinson:
That led me into doing music actually. I was producing, writing, singing, taking singing and song arrangement lessons, piano lessons, mixing and mastering my own music. I used an algorithm actually to master my music. Yeah, it was really interesting. And sharing it on Bandcamp. My first project, I actually worked with a producing partner where he did the mixes and masters. So I just spent the last year growing tremendously, artistically, getting in FTs and graphic design, just blossoming, just honestly blossoming. It’s an amazing, amazing year.

Maurice Cherry:
And now you’re also breaking a bin into Hollywood too, right?

Janessa Robinson:
Yes. Yeah. I actually literally live in Hollywood. That’s my community.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice.

Janessa Robinson:
That’s where my home is located, which is really cool. Yeah, I am training at two Hollywood acting studios right now. One is Shari Shaw Studio, which is physically located in Hollywood, although I haven’t gone there yet because of COVID. And then the other is Leslie Kahn & Co. Both of these studios are very special to me. The instructors there, my classmates, the energy and the way that we all invest into each other, it’s just very special to me. Then I’m very happy because for me, Hollywood, physically, and more metaphorically, the Hollywood community, which is spread out across the world. There’s Hollywood the location, and then there’s Hollywood the industry, which is just, it’s a bunch of us who are very, very fond of entertaining and see a lot of value in it.

Janessa Robinson:
For me, something that over the last year I was really reminded of is my family history in Hollywood. I have a great, great grandmother named Eva Wheatley Jones who danced with Josephine Baker. She’s one of the first “tan girls.” Meaning that she’s light-skin, brown, but not dark-skin brown, but at that time it was considered progress, I suppose.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I guess they all just call it colored back then, right?

Janessa Robinson:
Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. I think that didn’t even come on mind. Yeah. She’s one of the first tan girls to dance with Josephine Baker. She is married to a comedian and he was a part of a comedy dance duo, same as Butter Beans. Then I have a great uncle, Arthur, who played in a jazz band for Al Capone at the Copacabana in Chicago. There’s just a lot of people in my family that have really contributed to make the Hollywood entertainment industry what it is today. The inclinations that I have for all of these different forms of art, I just love art, I just love design. For me, it’s about the process and the experience. Whatever the tools are, I’ll just use them to just make something magnificent. I don’t really care what the tools are. I want to do cool stuff.

Janessa Robinson:
It occurred to me when my mom was sharing all this information with me, that was shared with me in my childhood, but this is now, I’m in my adulthood, and now it resonates more to understand, oh, I see. These are the giftings that my family, that my ancestors, recent and much further back, that they’ve bestowed on me. So I feel very, very blessed and very grateful and appreciative to be in the position, to know that, to see that, and to activate on what it is that they have deposited into me.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. It sounds like it’s literally in your blood to be an entertainer. You come from that lineage. That’s great.

Janessa Robinson:
Yeah. It is. It’s in my blood. That’s what my mom says. She goes, “This is who you are. This is in your DNA. These are your genes.” That’s what she tells me.

Maurice Cherry:
So let’s talk about one of the things that you’re currently doing. You’re a content creator for a company called News Break. Talk to me about that.

Janessa Robinson:
Yeah. It’s interesting. So, News Break is a news publication that is available as a website, newsbreak.com, and as a downloadable mobile application. So people can go visit their App Stores or Google Play Store and download News Break. It is interesting because it solves a problem. It solves the problem of gathering local news over, gosh, I don’t know, the last, you could say 20, 30, 40 years. It depends on how far you want to go back. But we know that for some time, there’s been a trend of investment into local news dwindling. News Break prioritizes local news on the app and the website based on the geolocation of the user. It also pulls in national news. But the thing is that national news, it’s pretty repetitive. [crosstalk 00:11:37] the news wires. So it’s the same story over and over. It just has a slightly different, it depends if. It’s a news wire, it’s just going to be the exact same thing.

Janessa Robinson:
But in most cases, it might be a slightly different tone based on the writer’s style or it just has a different mass head that it’s under. But national news, now that we have Twitter and YouTube and all these things that help us communicate one story to billions of people instantaneously, it’s just pretty repetitive. So local news is pretty cool because it’s specific to what’s happening in your community, in your neighborhood. Like what’s going on. I first started writing for News Break just as I was leaving San Francisco. I was writing stories there, and then as I moved here, I switched to writing local stories about Los Angeles. Honestly, I like to report on really interesting people, local businesses. I love reporting on food. I’m a pescatarian and I’m allergic to dairy. So I like to go out and see, well, where are the best seafood tacos? Because I love seafood food tacos. Where can I get a really good salmon sandwich? Just write about that. Also, I like to eat those things.

Janessa Robinson:
I like to be in that moment and just allow my palette to be dazzled and then take all of that energy in and write about that so that I can recommend to people where to go. I’ll say that LA is LA. There’s no place like Los Angeles. Reporting here has been very interesting. I just did a story on a luxury experience service company called the [inaudible 00:13:27]. I hope that people do not, the French people do not criticize French accent, but I do speak a bit of French. I’m sure it’s mostly accurate, but yeah, I got to report on this luxury experience company and meet the owner who’s a very private person. So I’ll respect his privacy.

Janessa Robinson:
But it’s the fact that I’m talking about luxury experience company that we will, if I say, Hey, I wanna fly to Monaco for a private shopping trip tomorrow, they’ll put that together right now. They’ll have a driver come pick me up. They’ll have a private jet waiting for me. There’ll be food, snacks that are on the way, all these things. It’s just this amazing company that in comparison to my time in San Francisco, it’s not to say that that doesn’t exist there, it’s just maybe not as ingrained into the culture like in San Francisco. It’s more like, where’s the best vegan place to eat or what’s a really good mountain to climb, is what draws people there more so than LA, which is how fabulous can I live?

Maurice Cherry:
That sounds very LA, something like that.

Janessa Robinson:
Yeah, I think so.

Maurice Cherry:
LA was the last city that I visited before all this pandemic stuff. We did a live show there back in Jan… Well, it was January or February. It was February. Yeah, it was February of 2020. We did a live show down in Leimert Park. That was pretty good. I didn’t get to see a ton of LA. I just remember LA being so big. I stayed in Koreatown and the event that we did was in Leimert Park. Then I was in another part of town, not too far from Koreatown. Because I was also there for a work conference. People that were there were like, “Oh, you should go to the beach.” And they’re like, “Oh, but it’s going to take about an hour to get there.” I’m like, “Well, that doesn’t really sound like something I want to do if it’s going to take that long to get there.” It’s still in the city, I guess I didn’t realize the enormity of Los Angeles until I actually got there and was like, this place is huge, really spread out.

Janessa Robinson:
It is, it is very large, honestly. First of all, I hope that you come, that you return to LA and do another live show so that I can be on it. What I was going to say is that before I moved here, the last time I visited was just before the pandemic. I don’t know if it was around the same time that you were here, but it was just before the pandemic, where the Los Angeles Clippers flew me out here for an interview. I was interviewing for a job there and they flew me down from San Francisco. And oh my gosh, when I got to LAX, I had about, I think like maybe 45 minutes or an hour between landing and the time of my interview. I was like, oh, that’s plenty of time [inaudible 00:16:27]. I was like, oh my God, am I going to make it? What is going on?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Janessa Robinson:
It was just so stressful and I almost missed my flight on the way back. Because I was in those interviews all day and then I was like, I don’t think they know what time my flight [inaudible 00:16:47]. No one’s paying attention. So apparently I have to tell them, “Hey, I have to go catch this flight.” I almost missed it. When I was in the process of traveling back to San Francisco, I was like, wow. Yeah, it’s been a long time since I’ve lived in a city that’s really large. I’m from Chicago. I lived in New York for a bit. Then I started to wonder, I was like, a city with eight million people? LA, do I want to do that? I don’t know. But then I do. I was like, I don’t care. I’ll deal with it.

Maurice Cherry:
Right, right.

Janessa Robinson:
So now it’s like, sure, it’ll take an hour to get to Santa Monica. That’s fine. I’ll just listen to some good music and chill in the car. It’s no big deal.

Maurice Cherry:
I was surprised by how much traffic there was. I live in Atlanta, which is notorious for traffic, but Los Angeles has Atlanta beat it hands down. The traffic that I would see, or that actually was stuck in on the one on one was hellish. It was ridiculous.

Janessa Robinson:
Yeah, it’s tough. I’ll say, I don’t have my only comparison points for being in traffic or me being a passenger because this is the first time in my life that I’ve ever driven regularly. This is the first car that I’ve ever owned. [inaudible 00:18:03]. I don’t know. When I was growing up, everyone drove me around for the most part. Even when I got a license, that was still the case. And then when I graduated high school, I went to undergrad. I studied at St. John’s University in New York, where very few people drove regularly around there.

Janessa Robinson:
Then by the time, I transferred and graduated from Tulane University in New Orleans, so by the time I did that, Uber was a thing. It was not yet an app, it’s text-based, but you could just text this number and a black car would pull up. I thought it was sketchy at first. I was like, [inaudible 00:18:47] kidnap me. Who’s in the car? But yeah, so then I just Ubered around for almost eight years. Now I own a car and I’m like, oh, traffic, this is what it’s like to drive in traffic. So yeah, it’s interesting.

Maurice Cherry:
I missed those early days of Uber when they just had the black cars. But for what I remember, I would take them in different cities, but the one thing that I remember is how much the drivers hated it. Because for them, they’re used to, I guess if you’re a black car driver, like a Lincolnton car or something like that, there’s a certain, I think, clientele that you’re used to in terms of decorum and all that stuff. Now they’re picking up drunk kids at the bar and driving them three blocks and then having to clean up vomit from the back seat.

Maurice Cherry:
I remember talking to, I did it for an article, this was back in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Jesus, maybe 10 years ago, I think. God, wow, [inaudible 00:19:48] services have been around that long. But I remember talking to some drivers and them being like, “Yeah, I hate it. I don’t know what this Uber thing is, but it’s some extra money. But I don’t like the fact that we have to pick up these folks and they give us attitude. And it’s just a different thing.” Now of course, ride sharing is a pretty, I think, common thing because now folks can even use their own cars. But I remember in the beginning though, just taking those black cars and it just felt so official. Like, oh, this is nice. I felt wealthy.

Janessa Robinson:
Yeah, it is. I would agree. I’m sure they’re used to a very specific persona for clientele. I remember when I was in D.C., I was out with some friends and we ordered, this is when Uber was an app, but I think we got Uber black, because it was so many of us and we’re like, “Let’s get a SUV or whatever.” I had this friend who was giving the Uber driver directions, which is already like, I don’t know why you’re doing this, he has a map, what are you doing? He tells the driver, he was like, “Yeah, bang a right right here.” And the driver drove straight through the intersection.

Maurice Cherry:
Whoa.

Janessa Robinson:
He doesn’t know what bang a right means. He was like, “I don’t know what that is.” He was like, “Bang a right, what is this?” And just kept going straight. I think also, he maybe didn’t like that this guy was leaning over the seat, giving him directions. But yeah, there was some clear maybe mismatch of energy there. So, those funny.

Maurice Cherry:
I want to talk to you about this term, content creator, because it’s certainly one that I think has popped up, I don’t know, maybe with over the past two years or so. We’ve been seeing this generalization of people that maybe before have done specialized stuff, like they’ve been writers or illustrators or whatever. Now it’s just this generic term, content creator. When I hear it, I feel like it’s mostly associated with video. But I’m curious, when you hear that phrase, content creator, what does that mean to you?

Janessa Robinson:
Honestly, I don’t know what… I don’t know. It could be in a lot of things. I have Asperger’s. One of the characteristics of that is a person might see a word or a phrase and their mind starts to run through the multiple meanings or ways that it could be used, the etymology, at least for me because I’m a linguist. Honestly for me, it’s like a placeholder, just some words, just some letters, some syllables that go there to describe the way that someone moves through the world. It’s used in a lot of ways, I agree. Like sometimes it’s used for writers, sometimes it’s used for people who run podcasts, sometimes it’s for video people. I think in the context of News Break, it’s [inaudible 00:22:45]. I think it’s because they use content creator because in a lot of cases, they’re looking for someone who’s more than a writer.

Janessa Robinson:
Being a writer is great. It’s an excellent skill. But in the digital space, when you’re developing articles, unless you have a full editorial staff where you have photographers and art directors and video producers that are their own individual team, then the writer, the journalist becomes the person who wears all those hats. So I’m that person. I do interview people. I develop sources and relationships, I interview them. I shoot photography, I edit photography, I shoot video, I edit video and I polish it all up and I drop there. So for me, I guess that’s what I associate with now, is if I’m a content creator, I’m someone who I create any kind of content.

Janessa Robinson:
It’s like the same thing where I’m like, yeah, I can make my own music from end to end. Whatever the content is, it’s something I can create. It’s [inaudible 00:23:48] the way that I see it, but I don’t know. I think it can be one, is that now going to be the expectation. Our specialties no longer going to be as prized being a really excellent writer. I think for some people that might be maybe all they want or maybe they only want to do photography. I don’t know. I feel good about it because I can do all those things and I like doing all those things, but what about someone who doesn’t want to do all those things? But if they have a very strong interest in one area, I hope there’s still space for those people.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It sounds like it’s a new way of looking at Jack of all trades. That’s how, I guess, it used to be called, where you did a lot of different things. You just brought a lot of different skills to the table. I had a friend that, actually, he really explained it to me in a way that made sense. It’s like, he says, “Content these days is water and whatever the medium is or the platform is the container that content can fill.” So for example, let’s say, oh, so there’s this guy, he’s a chef. His name is chef John Kung. He was mostly doing stuff on TikTok, I think. But the concept is him cooking, which can be extrapolated to any number of different platforms because he’s using video.

Maurice Cherry:
So in that video format, yes, it could go on TikTok, but it could also go on Instagram. It could also go on YouTube, but you could see how these different platforms would have different audiences, different levels of engagement, et cetera. But someone could also take that and take the video out, and now you just have the audio and that could be a podcast. Or someone could transcribe that audio, and now that’s an article. Or someone can take that article and make images of it, and now it’s an infographic.

Maurice Cherry:
So content ends up being this, it’s the idea and then whatever that medium or platform is, is how it can trickle down and filter down. But yeah, that’s if you want to do all of that stuff. For example, I consider myself a podcaster, but I have had people call me a content creator because I can do video dah, dah, dah, dah. I mostly just do podcasting because that’s what form this particular idea is in. But yeah, Revision Path could be video and articles and all this stuff. I choose for it not to be, but it could be. I hear that term, content creator, and it’s like, I was bristle at it a little bit because I’m like, be specific. But then maybe that’s just me being older thinking it has to be in one of these finite categories or whatever.

Janessa Robinson:
That’s interesting. I think I like it because it is flexible and broad. For me, today I might want to write articles, tomorrow I might want to shoot a film. I don’t like figuring out the way to label myself in regards to the way that I contribute artistically. I don’t know. I end up with a lot of words. If you go to my website right on Janessarobinson.com or artistryland.space, there’s an area in both places to read my bio. And it says Janessa Robinson is a publish journalist, a writer, an actor, a photographer, a this, a that. There’s so many, what would I call this? I was like, I don’t know what to… I like when there’s something that’s flexible or broad enough. The word artist, I love it because you could be a performance artist, you could be a singer, you could be a poet.

Janessa Robinson:
It’s flexible enough in a way where someone who creates art at this point is not just a singer or not just a poet. If you’re an artist, it means that you have a particular artistic vision, artistic gaze and artistic process and you apply that to whatever medium. The medium at that point isn’t as relevant as it is to maybe whatever the message is that you want to communicate. The question that becomes, is this the best medium or is this the proper medium or the best way to reach people? What’s the goal? So with content creator, I like it because otherwise, it’s like, well, am I a writer, video producer or this? And it’s like, it becomes this long list. In Hollywood when someone is multi talented that way, we used to call it a triple threat. Like Jamie Foxx, he’ll sing, he’ll act, he’ll produce like comedy, whatever. You call this person a triple threat. Today, we call it a multi hyphenate because triple is not true.

Janessa Robinson:
At that point, it’s less about the specific activities, like what it is that someone’s doing and more about who they are and what they bring to whatever they touch. That’s how I identify. It’s like if you give me a camera, I’m going to start shooting things. If you give me a microphone, I’m going to start singing. It’s more this artistic energy. So with content creation, I feel very similar. Whereas my content creation might be NFTs and graphic design today. It might be videos and editing, cutting together audio the next day. I like that.

Janessa Robinson:
When I formed my company, Artistry Land, you have to fill out this business paperwork and articulate, well, what are the products of the services? One of the things that I put is digital and physical content. Then I put some examples. I said, including but not limited to, because it’s Artistry Land, it’s a land of art. It’s just going to be whatever I need it to be. I don’t know, I’m figuring that out every day. I love that exploration. I think that’s amazing. I get to learn a lot and connect with people in ways that are relevant and timely to the present.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s talk about Artistry Land. This is a company that you started a few years ago. Tell me more about it. What are some of the projects and things that you’ve done through Artistry Land?

Janessa Robinson:
Yeah. I was already operating as an entrepreneur since maybe 2014. I began freelance writing and I was gaining all of these opportunities to be published in really great sources and publications like Huffington Post and Salon and Ebony and WAC, [inaudible 00:30:21], The Crisis Magazine and The Guardian. I just thought that was a cool thing to do on the side. And then maybe two years ago, I think, it was occurring to me that I could formalize this business. I could formalize this business into something that grows beyond just freelance writing. My father is an entrepreneur. He’s been an entrepreneur for a long, long time. He actually is a former professional basketball player. He was drafted to the Utah Jazz and then he went to play in Europe for about eight years.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Janessa Robinson:
Yeah. Then when he came back, he did some sales stuff while he still had entrepreneurial things going on, and then I just grew up with watching him build businesses. So I thought to myself, well, you know what I really like about my dad’s entrepreneurship, that it allows him to live, to be fully human, to not be tied to someone else’s schedule, to make his own decisions about where he needs to be, and when particularly as it relates to him living his purpose. So with Artistry Land, I did these brainstorm exercises and I was like, well, what is my business? What does it do? Who does it serve? Before I came to a name, by the time I went through my research, I was like, okay, well, who’s Janessa? Janessa does love to write, but Janessa is so much more than that. Here I was dancing on Instagram and I was like, yeah.

Janessa Robinson:
At this point I had also had a short film. It’s a 30 second film featured in Time Magazine and Ava DuVernay’s Optimist issue, [inaudible 00:32:10] Optimist issue video project. I was like, I do love film. I studied cinema and I grew up in theater and I did do some acting classes in college. I was like, here I am, I want to do music. I was like, well, what is this company? So I just formalized it into Artistry Land as I developed my own artistry. I operate a blog at artistryland.space, where I do produce content. It’s mostly written, something I started doing. But this year, I think in the summer, was just highlighting artists because Artistry Land is really focused on the intersection of art and wellness. I see these things as so intrinsically tied together. I don’t know a single artist whose mental health or physical or otherwise holistic health isn’t impacted by their art or their ability to produce their art or the reception of it.

Janessa Robinson:
Every artist I know has some health related experience to practicing their art. And for many of us, I’ll speak for myself, art is healing. I love the idea of artists who are doing well and living well. And that’s exploring what that means, what it means to do well for yourself and to do good in the world and to live well. What are the practices that you do that cultivate that experience? I’ve begun interviewing artists who do good in the world and they live well. I ask them questions about what artistic projects are most meaningful to them, what art they practice?

Janessa Robinson:
I interviewed a friend of mine who’s an opera singer. She lives Japan. She’s a black woman. She’s an opera singer. It’s the year 2021 and she lives in Japan. She’s a rarity by definition. She talks about her time studying Buddhism, particularly while living in Japan. For just discussing how important it is for her to be a black woman, opera singer in this very old, traditional art form, I get to learn a lot. I think it’s really important that artists continue to learn from each other. There’s a lot of folks who talk about the need for artists to support each other, which I agree 100%. I just find that it is maybe more motivating if it’s clear in terms of what we’re learning from each other. If I’m learning something, I’m going to show up. If you just go, “Hey man, you should support me.” I’m going to be like, “I would like to, but this is like you’re asking me to hug a porcupine right now. You’re not being super endearing about this.” So if you go, Hey, this is what we’re learning together, then I’m very motivated to show up.

Janessa Robinson:
That’s my approach with Artistry Land, is to say, well, I want to learn from you. I hope that people, by reading your interview and being introduced to your art, by following you on Instagram or Twitter, or checking out your website, that they learn from you as well. I think that’s what’s really important. Something else that I’ve done with Artistry Land is I’m developing relationships with clients. I do design work under Artistry Land. Graphic design, brand strategy, brand design work. So I have some business to business clients. One of them is called, Where is My Meeting, which is a digital video production company. I think most recently they ran a press conference for Muriel Bowser in D.C. about COVID and vaccinations. But they also did, I partner with them on this, it’s like a virtual talent show in February, which feels like a really long time ago. I was like, is that last year? It was definitely [inaudible 00:36:07]. It is called Celebrate Black Voices Talent Show. Where is My Meeting did the video production for, and we gathered all of these black artists to spotlight. So there’s poetry and there’s rap.

Janessa Robinson:
I shot and edited my own music video and aired it in that talent show, which is really cool. Then I also, I’ve just been searching for organizations to partner with and invest in. One of them is, oh, you probably know this, it’s the Queer BiPAP Design.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:36:47].

Janessa Robinson:
Exactly. I saw what they’re doing in terms of promoting design, thinking, empowering queer BiPAP people with resources to be designers professionally. And I said, “Oh, I would love to contribute.” So I decided to donate after our call that I had with Steve to just learn more about who they’re serving, how they’re serving people, what the offerings are. And then another organization that I decided to donate to is one that I used to, it’s a theater that I used to train at when I was in Chicago, it was called the Chicago Beverly Arts Center.

Janessa Robinson:
When I was in high school at Morgan Park High School, I participated in an off-campus drama program at the Sphere. Because every Thursday, I was done with classes, maybe like, I think halfway through the day. Then I would go to the theater and we’d be in class all afternoon to the evening. It was me and a small group of students. The staff at the Beverly Arts Center trained us one theater. They took us into the theater onto the stage, which is not the first time I’d been on stage because I did do stage plays in elementary school. But they go, “This is downstage. This is upstage. This is what happens behind the curtains.” And then we went and we started to replays and then they had us write our own play, produce it. Do costume design, then we get to act in it.

Janessa Robinson:
It was the most amazing experience ever. I called the Beverly Arts Center a few weeks ago and I said, “Hey, do you still have this partnership with Morgan Park High School?” The artistic director at the time said, “Yeah, I actually need to write a grant for scholarships.” I said, “Okay.” So I donated some money for that purpose so that students there would have a scholarship to help cover their classes at the Beverly Arts Center, because it now dawns on me that someone did that for me at some point. I didn’t know. I just was there having fun, but I didn’t know that someone paid for it. Now something that I’m exploring with the Beverly Arts Center is as someone who has Asperger’s and has learned in my adult life in the last maybe year and a half, two years about it.

Janessa Robinson:
When I look back, I see how much growing up in theater camp and drama class really helped me understand social settings, social norms and expectations and experiences. Because when you’re reading a play, whether it’s a table reading or you’re performing, you could be off book, whatever, you have this concept of setting and characters and relationship and subtexts under the dialogue and action. It just broke down things to me that were somewhat confusing. So I thought, Hey, maybe I can talk to the Beverly Arts Center and see if they’re interested in doing something that focuses on empowering people on the autism spectrum through this particular medium, through theater and acting.

Janessa Robinson:
It’s something we’re having a conversation about. It’s something we’re exploring. I hope that we’re able to come up with something because I just know the impact of that on my life. People have all these conceptions about, if they’re aware of autism or Asperger’s to begin with, then they might have conceptions about the way that it presents itself or what the person looks like. Generally speaking, people seem to think that I don’t “look like someone with Asperger’s,” which is like, whatever. [crosstalk 00:40:32]

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, what does that mean?

Janessa Robinson:
I don’t know. I cringe, but then I’m like, I just listen. Thanks for sharing that. Thanks for being open and honest, but I agree. There’s not a look. And then the second thing they’ll say is, well, also I can’t tell. You don’t seem awkward or whatever. And I’m like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Because, one, I studied communication. I work in that field. So I was like, this is a very intentional set of choices of media. And two, I’ve spent my life in acting and theater and speech class and all these things that I guess at this point, people, they have no idea. But when I was a child, I remember being sent home a lot because I would go play with friends and then something would happen.

Janessa Robinson:
I don’t really know what it is, but they would send me home and be like, “I don’t know, sometimes she’s not getting along with the children. She won’t apologize.” And I’m like, “What would I be apologizing for?” I just didn’t understand. They’re like, “Are you sorry?” I’m like, “No.” And they’re like, “You’re supposed to say you’re sorry.” I was like, “Why would I say something I don’t mean?” It’s not that I don’t have a problem with remorse or regret. I’m a human. It’s just that whatever the social norm or expectation that I broke, I didn’t understand the concept of it. I was like, what is it that you’re expecting? Because you haven’t stated it directly to me. And if you haven’t expressed it verbally to me or in writing, that’s preferable. If you put it in writing, then I don’t know what’s going on. I was like, I just don’t…

Janessa Robinson:
Simple things like… A friend was mentioning to me the other day, he knew a child on the spectrum and he sat down as a child on the sofa and started talking to him and the kid was just locked gazed on the television and wouldn’t look my friend in the eye. And I was like, even that, I don’t get that. If you came over to sit down next to me and I’m watching television, you’re now disrupting me. I was like, [inaudible 00:42:38]. I don’t understand. So anyway, I like Artistry Land because it gets to explore these different aspects of art in the way that it shows up in people’s lives. It’s typically connected to someone’s early childhood experience or some transformative life change that they’ve made in their adulthood, but people that I talk to feel drawn to it.

Janessa Robinson:
I see Artistry Land as a publication by an artists for artists and also this house, this art house of content that I am developing as I grow my business. At some point I want to hire people. I’m just trying to figure out how to go about that. The whole thing about being a business owner with employees, that seems intimidating, but it’s really important because I want to employ artists. So I’m figuring it out along the way.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I think LA certainly is going to be a great city for that. To me, I always see it as this destination location for people that are trying to strike out on their own. I think that’s just part of the, how am I going to say part of the American story of moving out west, manifest destiny, going into parts unknown and that sort of thing? But LA in particular, when it comes to creativity, it’s one of the few cities people really look to make a name for themselves. They’ll do that in LA or they’ll do it in New York. It’s one of those two places.

Janessa Robinson:
I agree, 100% agree. So funny you say that because what led me out here at this point in my life is a series of very mystical metaphysical experiences that drew me to say, I was working in policy in Washington, D.C. at the time, which is if you work in DC, you pretty much work in policy. What else are you going to do there? Yeah, I enjoyed the work in that it’s so impactful. I worked with an environmentalist organization, human rights organization. I met community leaders and organizers from Guatemala, from Brazil. People were literally fighting for their land rights, for their homes, for their access to food and water. Yet as an artist, I was not being fed. I don’t know what the bounds are of this podcast, but I’ll just mention that I did [shrooms 00:44:59].

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Janessa Robinson:
Okay. It was a very, very interesting experience that led me to being reconnected with these aspects of myself that weren’t being fed. So art and being an artist is one of those things. I had all of these moments in meditation, where I saw myself living in Los Angeles as an artist and doing so in a way that’s incredibly meaningful. Because I had built up all of this awareness about politics and the intersection of race, gender class. And these are all things that I was writing about. Yet we were looking at Hollywood at that time like, why is it not getting what’s going on in the world? Why does Hollywood not understand that some of these pictures are not going to do well or that some of these narratives are no longer acceptable?

Janessa Robinson:
Basically, it just came to me that I’m going to be moving here and I’ll be someone to contribute something of significance in the area of progress. It all happened very quickly. I found myself quitting my job. I was in a relationship, breaking up with my boyfriend, breaking my lease and just all in two weeks, everything changed. I actually traveled around the country for a bit at that time. I visited LA, where I stayed with my cousin in east LA and I spent time walking around. I visited Vegas and Arizona and I went to concerts and then I spent all my money and I had to go back to Chicago.

Janessa Robinson:
I had to go back to Chicago. I actually went to take care of my grandfather because he was in his late age at the time. And then I worked at my father’s basketball program called In the Paint Basketball. I had to go back to Chicago, not just because I ran out of money, because I had $70,000 in student loan debt at the time. So I needed a lot of money, and that’s where I rebuilt myself. I spent about eight hours in meditation per day just getting to understand what most fulfills me and allowing my subconscious to open itself up to my super conscious mind so that it became very clear to me about what to do and how to do it. So I went through the process of job seeking. I did some temp work for a little bit and I was interviewing.

Janessa Robinson:
Then I landed a job at Greater Good Studio in Logan Square on the north side of Chicago. It was a really amazing experience because when I got there, I was introduced to design thinking. I had been curious about it, heard about it, but when I got there and I learned about design thinking, I learned that there are some elements of it that I had already been using, which helped me find that job, like this idea of developing product features. So sometimes designers will write whatever product is or what it’s meant to do at the top of a page or they’ll use a board and use post-its or whatever. And then they’ll write down its features. Like what does the product do? How it does it feel like physically? What color is it? If it makes sounds, what are the sounds it makes, what do those sounds indicate? Where’s the product use?

Janessa Robinson:
You have to think about designing this. And it could be a physical product or it could be software, it could be artistic project. But I was stunned because I had already written down on a sheet of, excuse me. I had already written down on a sheet of paper, “Janessa’s ideal work environment and Janessa’s ideal job.” Then I wrote down all these characteristics, which as a writer, is the word that [inaudible 00:48:55]. Like these are the characteristics that make up this experience. As a designer, you go, these are the features. I wrote down that it has to have sunlight and people were really kind. I wanted something that had an industrial feel and it was open air and I needed it to be near places I could eat at. So when I showed up for my interview at Greater Good Studio, I was like, this open air office with exposed brick had these huge windows and across the street is this vegan place. I was like, “Oh my God, this is the place. This is so cool.”

Janessa Robinson:
I got to work with people that were very artistically and creatively inclined, as well as people that are very research driven. I worked on a project where our client was the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. And the name of the project is called Raising Places. It’s basically a community design project where we went to communities across the United States, those six communities from the west coast to the east coast, and we taught them the process of design. So we had workshops and design sprints and research fronts. We just helped them map their community challenges. Some of the challenges that came up were street lighting and safety, safety for bikers on the streets, like people who are bicycling across the road and they want to feel that there’s enough space for them, food security.

Janessa Robinson:
I spent time on a native American reservation, it’s Crow Nation, reservation in Montana, and they have one grocery store on the reservation and it didn’t carry very many fresh foods and vegetables. And there are so many systemic reasons about what created those conditions. We could look at policy, we could look at legislation, we could look at the land grabs from native Americans, colonization overall. These were very, very heavy, serious conversations. Yet there was a lot of fun because the people are, they’re just families, they’re just people.

Janessa Robinson:
We got to get to know people and share a bit about ourselves and do as best as we can to empower them through that process. It was a very good experience. It was a lot of traveling, is what I’ll say. I did 18 trips in six months across the country. Some of those flights were from Jersey to LAX or [inaudible 00:51:35]. And it was like, when I got on the plane, I was eating dinner. When I got off the plane, I was like, should I eat breakfast? Because I don’t know if my food is digested. It was very confusing. It was just [inaudible 00:51:49], but it was an amazing experience. I hope that there is some lasting impact overall that really improves the conditions that people experience.

Maurice Cherry:
There’s a post that you had up on Artistry Land, where you wrote about using design thinking to help manifest. I’m curious, how has that practice helped you as a creative? Because I’m pretty sure our listeners might be able to learn about how they can do that themselves.

Janessa Robinson:
Yeah, it’s interesting. Some of that gets into the example I gave with Greater Good Studio, where I was as a writer, writing down characteristics. I was like, oh, Janessa really loves politics and photography and writing and she loves traveling. I was just writing down all of these lists of things about myself. I was doing that as a manifestation tool. So I meditate in a space that’s very open and honest and vulnerable. That might be physically, it could be anywhere. I just mostly sat on the bed or laid on my bed or sat on a yoga mat. But when I closed my eyes and began to breathe very intently, I did so with the intention of being vulnerable and being honest and being true to myself. Because previously living in Washington, D.C., I ended up there because I basically decided not to go to law school.

Janessa Robinson:
I’d spend all this time applying to law school again and got in to Loyola in Chicago, decided not to go and move to DC. Wasn’t really happy with my life there, and it’s because I wasn’t being honest with myself. I didn’t really want to go to law school either. I wasn’t being honest with myself. So I had to sit down and go, what do I want? And find this intersection of what do I want with what is very meaningful to contribute to the world? Because the thing about manifestation is sure, people can manifest objects or experiences. However, I believe that the point at least for me, is to do so in a way that is contributing to my purpose. So I’ve come here with a life assignment. So I would just visualize what is most meaningful to me. I have allowed these visions to pour into me.

Janessa Robinson:
Sometimes they’re very sharp and clear and sometimes it was like a little bit of light in a room full of darkness. And in any case, I’ll be come out of meditation and then go and write those things down on a sheet of paper. Then as I was job searching or apartment hunting or meeting strangers, I just found that the things that I have written down on a sheet of paper with a pen, it’s not like, no one can see this, just me, just me in the universe. Those things manifested before me. It just happened. So there’s a particular frequency that I was operating on that is beyond myself though. I think that’s really important to say that the intention for me was to move beyond my own ego. Because if it was just ego, it would have been like, I probably would have gone to law school because lawyers make a lot of money. [inaudible 00:55:01].

Maurice Cherry:
Pay up those student loans. Yeah.

Janessa Robinson:
Yeah, done. But that would have made me happy. I think the issue with that is that it not making me happy means that my contribution to the world wouldn’t have been from a place of love. So even as an attorney, I may have thought that I would have been helping people, but how much would I have been helping people if I wasn’t operating from a place of love and compassion because I wasn’t being loving and compassionate to myself? So finding some balance between, this makes Janessa happy and this is what Janessa contributes that also makes people happy and is compassionate. So it decreases their suffering. There has to be balance there. So yeah, the design studio, I became more trained in design and I’ve since worked in Silicon Valley and completed a product design bootcamp in addition to that. Now I use design thinking and manifestation. I don’t know, they’re the same thing to me at this point.

Janessa Robinson:
What I do is I’ll write at the top of a page the year, like 2021, and then I’ll sketch things that come to me. At one point I sketched a studio, and in the studio there’s a microphone and a camera and a whole desk set up. Then maybe nine months later, I realized that I was living in a place that I sketched on that book. And I didn’t even [inaudible 00:56:30]. I didn’t go out and say, oh, let me match this sketch. It was just, it happened. So I think that when it comes to design thinking, design thinking is about understanding a problem and you apply these phases of design thinking to the process. So there’s a point where you’re only focused on the problem. And for me, that was, well, I just blew my life up. I was like, I really need to understand what’s going on here.

Janessa Robinson:
So I spent months just focusing on that. It doesn’t have to be months, but you do have to focus on the problem so that you can be clear about what solutions you can develop. My solutions were, it’s pretty simple, what area of my life do I want to focus on? Personal life, family relationships, intimate relationships, career, home. I can find solutions in these three areas. And those solutions would be, well, what is that balance between Janessa’s happiness and increasing happiness in the world? Going to work in a design studio is one of those things. Because I knew I’d learn a lot of things that I could use in other aspects. Moving to Los Angeles, moving to California in general, it’s very sunny and there’s a lot of nature and I’m surrounded by people who also value those things.

Janessa Robinson:
Then also, it is important to me to have economic security and to develop wealth because in order to do the things that I see myself doing, where I see myself contributing, I have to have some resources. So for me to say, Hey, I want to donate to the Beverley Arts Center because that place helped make me who I am, I have to have money to do that. I can donate my time too, that’s a thing. But I was specifically wanted to donate money because that’s what got me the time to be there in the first place when I was in high school. Well, someone somewhere got a grant or developed a relationship with a funder, and that pulled me to the Beverly Arts Center. So for me, it is really important to look at the intention behind whatever is desired to manifest and to be very clear and honorable in that intention.

Janessa Robinson:
Once there’s clarity about that intention, I use design thinking as a way to align my physical reality with my metaphysical reality. I think sometimes with manifestation, I’ve learned that someone might be seeking to manifest something and they’ve created, say a vision board. Maybe they stop there. So they’ve gone to the metaphysical reality by using intention and finding things that represent these experiences or objects they desire. And in the physical world, they’ve gathered magazines or cut them out. But then they stopped. Where I think it’s important to look at is to say, well, how do you continue to align your present physical reality with the metaphysical? And metaphysically, all things exist simultaneously. But the way that we experience them in a physical reality is a bit different. We have this perception of time or limitation. Metaphysically, there are no limitations. Everything is infinite.

Janessa Robinson:
Yeah, sure. In infinity somewhere, there might be a version of you that has whatever you put on this vision board and this reality, what are you going to do? What steps are you going to take to actualize that? Now, design thinking can say, let’s research it. If you want to manifest a trip to Paris, well, let’s research that. What does it take to get to Paris? I would add, and this is my secret sauce in manifestation and design thinking, is who do I need to be? Who is that version of me that’s living in Paris? What am I doing there? Who am I meant to meet? Whose life am I meant to contribute to? What lessons do I bring back with me? Those are the things that make it very clear about what I meant to do. If I know that I’m living in Paris one day and I’m there as a filmmaker, and I’m telling the stories of people who otherwise might go unheard, then I know, okay, I need to be someone who is somewhere contributing to a community that needs me. Otherwise, I don’t become that person.

Janessa Robinson:
So, design thinking can say, okay, let’s research it and let’s ask questions about, well, if it could be very basic, what do you need to get to Paris? Passport, all these things. But what types of people visit Paris? What are the choices those people make? What are the problems they’re looking to solve or the solutions they bring if they’re business people? What person might be an expert there? How do I become that type of person? What version of myself is that? And it becomes very clear once you’re doing persona-based work, what the decisions are that someone’s making, but it’s important to be clear about the desired outcomes.

Janessa Robinson:
So is it just to live in Paris? Oh yeah, I would love to live in Paris. Is it to cultivate a sense of culture there so that I can translate? Because I do speak French and I want, personally, I’d like to increase my proficiency so that I could be a translator in a way that’s very diplomatic and I can particularly communicate amongst French-speaking countries and English-speaking countries across the world. I think it’s really important to think big and to be specific about what can I do for where I am right now? So if I want to be a translator, a diplomat who translates and deals with issues and builds alliances between French-speaking and English-speaking countries, well, where can I learn more about French-speaking countries? I can research that for my computer. It doesn’t stop me from doing that. That’s simple.

Janessa Robinson:
It’s something that I use in a way that at this point it’s very intertwined. I think I need to find my own name for this approach because design thinking is a very specific thing and manifestation can show up in a lot of different ways. There are folks who do have approaches and particular rituals and ceremonies that they use. A vision board is a great example. It’s just that it has a title and I don’t have a title for my process yet. So I’ll add that to my list of things to do.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Where do you see yourself in the next five years? I know you’re, it seems like throughout your creative career, you’ve been on this never ending Odyssey in a way. And now you’re here in Los Angeles, you’re about to start off with this new, really this new chapter of your life. Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What do you want to accomplish?

Janessa Robinson:
I see myself as continuing to lead innovation. I don’t just mean from a technical standpoint or innovation and business. Innovation and business, of course, innovation in the way that we experience our human lives. That would be leading in Hollywood in the area of diversity, inclusion, equity. I’m looking at things that would create system change and practices change, particularly when it comes to people on the autism spectrum. But also people generally, that identify to have disabilities, people of color, queer people and women. Because when I was in Silicon Valley, I got to lead, I got to advocate for and develop the existence of employee resource groups at a publicly traded company. And then I became the co-chair of a specific employee resource group or employee belonging group is what they call it there. So I want to apply those learnings to Hollywood and develop ways of working with people to grow our consciousness awareness and to shift our habits and behaviors to reflect our values.

Janessa Robinson:
Then simultaneously, I see myself continuing to build relationships more broadly across the business to make it more collaborative and to make it more reflective of a community oriented mindset. That may be the millennial in me, where for me what’s really important is to collaborate with people and yes, be inclusive. I think that competition is somewhat innate to us as humans, as human beings. There is some sense of an animalistic side where there’s competition. I don’t think that we need to over-rotate on that, particularly given the circumstances of climate change or a public health pandemic. I don’t think that we need to over-rotate on being competitive. I think it’s a time where it actually behooves us to be more collaborative. That’s something I see myself approaching through content development, through my choices in who I partner with business-wise, through working with different organizations to see how do we embed those values into the way that we practice our work, whatever that is?

Janessa Robinson:
I’m interested in seeing Hollywood be more dynamic in the stories that we tell and how we tell and what we do with those results. And when I say results, I mean monetary results in this sense. I would like to see that Hollywood is contributing to the communities of the stories that we’re telling and that we’re telling stories that are broad enough to represent all communities because people show up. Well, most of theaters are closed or limited, but people show up to the theater to watch stories. They’re watching those stories either in their own community or in a community that’s adjacent to them, but someone across the world or across the country might’ve produced that picture. I would like to see that all of the parties that are participating and contributing to that picture are compensated well. Additionally, that the communities, it’s not enough basically to have black folks in your movies. That’s what I’m saying.

Janessa Robinson:
I want to see that these communities who are having their stories told are, one, having those stories told in a way that’s justified and respectful. And two, that they get to benefit in some way economically from having their stories told. I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but basically it’s to say it’s not enough to commodify someone’s story and be like, oh, but I told your story. It was like, okay, yeah, you walked away with all of the material benefits of that. I want to see that communities are being reinvested into, and that people have the chance to develop their own content and their own stories. And that the way that the system operates is in a way that’s more integrated and collaborative. That may be, I don’t know, I don’t know if that’s a new idea or a repackaged idea. I’m not sure.

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

Janessa Robinson:
The audience can find out more about me at janessarobinson.com. They can find out more about me also on social media. So on Instagram @JanessaE.Robinson, it’s here I’m often hanging out, is on Instagram. And then folks can also find out more about Artistry Land at www.artistryland.space.

Maurice Cherry:
All right. Sounds good. Well, Janessa Robinson, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for really, one, describing where you’re at right now in embarking on this new journey in your creative career, But also really diving deep into how the sum total of your other experiences, whether it’s been traveling or working in other industries and such have brought you to where you are right now. I hope that when people listen to this, they take away that they can have these divergent paths that can lead them towards what their goals are, Because it certainly seems like you’re doing that for yourself. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Janessa Robinson:
Thank you for having me, Maurice. Thank you. I love your show. I love the work that you’re doing and I’m very excited to be a part of it.

Sponsored by Adobe MAX

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Support for Revision Path comes from Adobe MAX.

Adobe MAX is the annual global creativity conference and it’s going online this year — October 26th through the 28th. This is sure to be a creative experience like no other. Plus, it’s all free. Yep – 100% free!

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Explore over 300 sessions across 11 tracks, hear from amazing speakers and learn new creative skills…all totally free and online this October.

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On the weekend of October 8-10th, join the Harvard Graduate School of Design virtually for the Black in Design 2021 Conference!

This year’s theme, Black Matter, is a celebration of Black space and creativity from the magical to the mundane. Our speakers, performers, and panelists will bring nuance to the trope of Black excellence and acknowledge the urgent political, spatial, and ecological crises facing Black communities across the diaspora. You don’t want to miss out on this weekend of learning, community, and connection!

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