Ashley Fletcher

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

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

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

Interview Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Fletcher:
Thank you. Thank you.

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

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

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

Ashley Fletcher:
Yes. Okay.

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

Ashley Fletcher:
Yeah, I definitely will.

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
How’s that been for you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Fletcher:
Yeah, it definitely was.

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

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

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

Ashley Fletcher:
There might be two, right?

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, yeah, I remember that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit

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

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

Morgan Bissant

I had to connect with Morgan Bissant after seeing a few of her images of 90s sitcoms make the rounds on Twitter. Her work definitely captures to the richness of the Black experience, and she’s done everything from editorial work for Comcast to children’s illustrations and book covers. But that’s not all!

Morgan and I talked about some of her big freelance projects, and she spoke on how Black pop culture, especially animation, is a big source of inspiration and her creative process. We also discussed how she stays up on trends in the industry, how she handles burnout, and she gave us a look into her current art journey and creative process. Morgan’s experiences and raw talent are a unique combination, and I think we’ll definitely see more of her amazing work in the future!

Interview Transcript

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

Morgan Bissant:
My name is Morgan Bissant. I am a graphic designer and illustrator. I do a lot of branding work. I do a lot of layout design, I do web design, but something that I’ve always been more passionate about is illustration and I’ve been doing illustration work since I was old enough to hold a pencil. Currently, I’ve been doing a lot of illustration work for different companies and publishers. I’ve been working on children’s books, I’ve been doing promotional material. That’s something that I’ve really enjoyed doing. I enjoy being able to actually use my craft, I guess, in bigger spaces.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. It sounds like it keeps you pretty busy.

Morgan Bissant:
Yes, it’s a lot. It definitely takes up a lot of time.

Maurice Cherry:
How has this year been going so far?

Morgan Bissant:
So far it’s been going pretty good. I’ve actually started a new full-time job probably a couple months back, I want to say. I started a new full-time job doing graphic design work and I work at a marketing agency called OrthoSynetics. It’s been nice being able to do a lot of different things. In my previous job, we designed a lot of baby products, and in this job we do a lot of different marketing products. So, we’ll do flyers, we’ll do social posts, we’ll do websites. I was able to work on a major branding project for a new doctor that we picked up for our agency, and that’s all been pretty exciting. It’s really different from what I’m used to doing. It’s a much faster pace than some of my earlier jobs and projects, but it’s been a lot of fun. I like being able to do a lot of different things.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice.

Morgan Bissant:
Keeps me interested.

Maurice Cherry:
Congratulations on the new job.

Morgan Bissant:
Thank you so much.

Maurice Cherry:
Do you have any plans for the summer? Anything coming up?

Morgan Bissant:
Not necessarily. I’m just seeing what may be over the horizon maybe. So, I’ve currently been working on doing some freelance projects and I’m just always trying to keep myself open to seeing if I could get some other things, follow up with those. I’m always trying to see what other opportunities that I may have and other work that I can take on.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, I saw back in September last year that you had did some work for Comcast for their Black History Month series, which ran this year. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Morgan Bissant:
Yeah, sure. So, actually it ran last year. I ended up reposting it because I’m pretty proud of it, so I’m going to keep sharing it. So, this was something that we worked on last year. It was a partnership that they reached out to me for. I had initially gotten their attention because I had seen one of their ads on Twitter and it was something for the Olympic Games, and I saw there was this little black girl and she was looking at the screen in awe and seeing the black athletes doing all kind of stuff, and she was just so amazed and everything. And I just thought she was just so cute and I was like, “I just have to draw this little girl because she’s adorable.” And so I went ahead and illustrated how she looked in the ad and I figured out I would just post it and tag them, because why not?

And they ended up seeing it and they really liked what they saw. And so I want to say a couple months down the line, they reached out to me and they said, “Hey, we’re doing this campaign for Black History Month, and we really loved the artwork that you tagged us in on Twitter. So, we wanted you to do something actually in partnership with us this time in celebration of Black History Month.” And that was pretty exciting. So, they asked me to do a couple of different illustrations. The first two that they asked for, they wanted some illustrations of Erin Jackson and Elana Meyers Taylor for the Winter games.

They followed up and they said that they wanted to do something else, something I guess a little bit more Black History Month specific. They wanted to do the McDonogh Three. I know a lot of people aren’t exactly aware of who those are, and that is three little girls that desegregated McDonogh 19 in New Orleans in the 1960s. And that was something I was really excited about doing, because being from New Orleans, that was something a bit more personal for me. Them doing that, desegregating schools is what gave me the opportunities that I had growing up, and that was something that I really was excited to do.

So, I was over the moon about that part of it, and I went through everything to put the illustrations together and they wanted two separate illustrations, so they wanted to show, I guess, a parallel of the past and show them as little girls, and one in the present. So, just showing them how they are now and I guess illustrating how far they’ve come over the years and what their sacrifices meant to people, and also to show that these women are still alive today. And a lot of people always think that, “Well that happened so long ago, and everybody that was involved in that is probably gone and all of that is over,” but they’re still here. They’re still here to tell the stories, and they’re still here to push a lot of the, I guess I want to say, push a lot of what was hidden, a lot of the things that were lost historically because a lot of people know about Ruby Bridges, but a lot of people also don’t know about them.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean there’s a lot of layers to that, that I think is really cool. One that Comcast saw an illustration that you did and they were like, “Oh, this is great. Can you do some work for us?” I feel like you hear those sorts of things sometimes is being discovered out of nowhere things, but I think that’s really cool that they just picked up on some work that you put online and they really wanted to keep working with it. I think that was great, but also the levels of being able to do something that’s tied to history, especially civil rights history in this country as people from this podcast.

Now, I’m from Selma, Alabama, so I grew up in that cradle of the civil rights movement, and there are so many stories about things that have happened that we knew about, the bigger things we knew about the March to Montgomery, as you mentioned, we know about Ruby Bridges, but we don’t know about some of these lesser known stories and struggles and triumphs that have happened.

And so I think it’s great that you were able to create some work that shone a light on that and to let people know that while this is “history,” it’s also the present. Like you said, these women are still alive, so the fact that they are still here and that they fought for these rights is something that we should all be aware of.

Morgan Bissant:
Yes, it’s always good to make sure you’re informed. And it’s always good to be able to put more things out there and shine light on things that we don’t know about, because there’s just so much stuff that we didn’t learn in school and just so many things in general that just get overlooked in favor of just those little three big figures like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. I mean nothing’s wrong with learning about them obviously.

Maurice Cherry:
Right.

Morgan Bissant:
But it’s sad that that’s all most people really know about and they barely know about them either.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I think it’s also telling that, in the past, media was really the thing that brought the whole civil rights movement to the nation. I mean because a lot of these things were happening in small southern towns, et cetera, and it wasn’t, I think until the incidents of, I think it was Bloody Sunday that happened in Selma. It wasn’t until those incidents where there were actually cameras and then that footage got broadcast across the nation that people saw about it. So, in a way, you can see how there’s a lot of stories and things that happen that we just don’t know about. Parts of history that get covered up.

I think people are just starting to really know about, for example, Bayard Rustin or Claudette Colvin, and people have mentioned Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, but not these other people that were behind the scenes maybe, or that did the work that they did before they did. So, a lot of those stories, it’s interesting, are now also being uncovered through media. I think within the past, I’d say at least in the past 10 years, I’ve seen so many black creators unearth a lot of these stories through animation, through illustration, et cetera. I think it’s really great. It’s really great.

Morgan Bissant:
Yeah, that’s always something exciting to see.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Let’s talk more about your work as a freelance illustrator. You mentioned that you’re also working full-time at this agency OrthoSynetics. What does a regular day look like for you right now?

Morgan Bissant:
With working full-time, that gets a lot of my time. Basically what we do is we have a certain amount of projects that we have to get done throughout the day, and it’s generally a nine to five situation, and so we’ll have certain things that we’ll work on. We might have banners that we might have to do, we might have billboards, but it basically varies from day-to-day what we might have to work on. The things that we do are mainly for orthodontists and dentist, and that’s just a lot of what we see.

We might have flyers advertising different prices for dental work or different offers or things along those lines. So, that’s basically what we have our eyes on throughout the day. Now, as far as doing any freelance work, I have to put that, I guess, on the tail end of my day or reserve that for the weekends because we’re generally just so busy with doing graphic design work at the agency that sometimes it can be a little tough to juggle. But generally speaking, when I do get freelance projects, I’m given a sufficient amount of time to complete them. So, it’s not like I have to do everything at work and then come rush home and then just rush and get a book cover done in five minutes.

So, I’ll have months and months to work on things and get things done, and I’ll do that in my free time that I have. Sometimes I’ll work on things while I’m listening to music or while I’m watching a TV show that I enjoy to motivate me or I guess help me to get into a groove. It just helps to do it when I have, I guess, some breathing room to do so, which again, with the deadlines, it does help to give me some breathing room to actually get a lot of these projects done, and I try not to take on too much at a time so that I won’t be overbooked.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean that’s a good thing. I know that you’re represented by an agency, which we’ll talk about a little bit later. I imagine your agent knows that too. So, when you’re getting booked for things, you can’t do something last minute, there has to be some buffer time around it for you to be able to get it done.

Morgan Bissant:
Yeah. They have different industry standards on what is appropriate for different projects. Now sometimes people will come and be like, “Hey, we need you to get this done in two days,” which I mean, it’s really ultimately up to you on whether or not you want to take it with not enough time to get it done. But generally speaking, for larger projects especially, you definitely need a sufficient amount of time to finish things. And especially in a creative space, you don’t want to be pushed to the limit and be getting yourself burnt out when you’re trying to come up with ideas that look good and are executed well. I always try to do things that are within my means. Now, if it’s something like maybe smaller and it might be a little bit of rush, I just feel like I have time and I feel like I might be able to do it, I might grab it. But usually if it’s a little too tight, I might ask for more time or I might have just have to pass on that one.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. Now, I’m looking through your website now. I see of course you’ve done illustration work, but there’s logo design work here. You’ve done book illustrations, character designs, all of it is really great, and I mentioned this to you right before we started recording that I saw your work on Twitter because you had done this character lineup of the main cast from Living Single. And I mean the style of it was so good. I was like, “I have to reach out to her to see if she can come on the podcast.” Are you influenced a lot by TV and pop culture in your work?

Morgan Bissant:
I am. That actually is what pushed me to start drawing, and that’s really what made me want to do it more seriously. Pop culture is a huge part of it, especially things that are immersed in black culture. Obviously me being black, that’s my own culture and it’s something that I can pull inspiration from my personal experiences. Things like anime and cartoons, they’ve always fueled my desire for illustration. I’ve always been influenced by things like Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z and things like that. Growing up, I was very small and watching a lot of these programs, and that’s what made me want to draw. I started copying things that I saw while I was watching TV. I would be watching Sailor Moon in the mornings and I’d said, “Well, I want to draw Sailor Moon.” And so I would be working until I got her to what I felt was right and was an accurate depiction of what she looked like on the screen.

And as I got older and I started cultivating my talents and working on my skills, started trying to branch off and do other things. And I’ve always tried to start creating my own concepts and characters, and nowadays I am still heavily influenced by anime and animation in general, but a lot of other things that I was exposed to like different black sitcoms and cartoons, that also had an impact on my overall style. Bruce W. Smith has always been one of my huge inspirations for illustration work. I’ve always liked his style since The Proud Family and Bรฉbรฉ’s Kids, Happily Ever After, Fairy Tales for Every Child.

That always was a draw to me. And I’ve mimicked some of my style and my character designs around some of the things that he’s done, and I mean he isn’t one of the only influences that I have, but that’s always something that I’ve seen growing up, and I’ve always liked his style and I’ve always wanted to, I guess, put a little bit of that into my style. And so nowadays I have this, I guess, combination of all of these different influences that have created what I have today.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, talk to me about how you approach a new project. What does your creative process look like when a new project comes across your table?

Morgan Bissant:
So, for basically any new project that I have, whether it just be freelance or something personal, I always try to brainstorm first. I might write down ideas or just sketch things down, and I just try to just do things and just get my brain going. I don’t always have something in mind before I start sketching, so I have this approach where I’ll just start doing anything. Well, not anything, but I’ll start trying to draw different things and just see where it takes me and then try to give myself a couple of different options and variations in what I might want to do with it, and then just see where it goes from there. This is especially true for larger projects, because I definitely have to see where I’m going before I start tackling something so huge.

So, I always have to sketch things out first. I always have to get ideas down first, and if I have any troubles or bumps in the road, I might go online. I have my Pinterest, I have all these bookmarks and stuff on Instagram. I have all these bookmarks on Twitter of different photographs or screenshots or fashion or just whatever, and I might use that as a way to, I guess, give myself a little bit of inspiration so I can push myself in the right direction. Because sometimes I can’t always come up with things just immediately from the top of my head.

So, it helps for me to look at some things. It helps for me to continuously draw things until I can get some ideas to come out that I like. I always try to keep things in my back pocket that I can always pull up later in terms of references and images that I might have saved that I think that I could probably use going forward for my creative process.

Maurice Cherry:
Was there ever a really particularly hard design or illustration that you had to create for a project?

Morgan Bissant:
I think that probably one of the hardest things that I have worked on in recent years would be probably the illustration that I did for the Crescent City Sneaker Ball. It was both illustration and it was a graphic designed invitation, and I’m really happy with how it came out, but there was a lot of thought that had to go into it, and there was a lot that I had to consider like, “Okay, how is this going to work? How can I fit this in here?” Because it was a little bit different from what I usually do. Everything was a collage and I had to make sure all the pieces fit together and flowed together and had to make sure things didn’t look too cluttered or too structured. So, it took a lot of working around with that one and playing around with it to make it work.

But I think ultimately all things considered, it came out pretty cute. It was a lot to think about. It was a lot to figure out how everything should go and everything should work together. I’m also really not too fantastic with buildings, or at least I personally don’t feel like I’m all that great with them. And that had a lot of structures in it. I like drawing people more. That’s always been my thing. I’ve always liked drawing characters, so structures and boats and street cars and stuff, I’ve never really done a lot of that. And that added to the challenge. So, executing that, it was a lot for me, but ultimately I’m glad I took that on. I thought it came out pretty nice, all things considered.

Maurice Cherry:
Do you have any upcoming projects that you can talk about? Anything you’re excited about?

Morgan Bissant:
I don’t know if this would be considered upcoming, but the book that I have recently illustrated for Lamar Giles that is going to be coming out next month, and I’m actually pretty excited about that one. So, I mean, I don’t know if I would call that an upcoming project because I’ve already finished it, but we haven’t gotten the printed books yet. And so I’m honestly very excited to see how it will come out on paper, because I’ve seen what it looks like on my computer, but I want to see it in book form. It’s just an entirely new feeling you get when you actually see your work just tangible and you can hold it in your hand and on a professional level, because you can print out your own stuff at Office Depot or something, but it’s not the same as this is a book that’s going to be in Barnes & Noble.

It’s almost so weird because I never thought that I would ever get to this point in my life where I would actually be seeing my name on the cover of children’s books or seeing the book actually in store somewhere. So, that’s pretty cool and I’m excited to actually get some copies of it.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. I mean I think it’s always an accomplishment when something you do makes it on a book or a magazine or something like that, because it’s so finite. Things that are on the web can get redesigned or deleted or moved or stuff like that. But a book or a magazine or something like that, that’s permanent.

Morgan Bissant:
It’s exciting. Like he said, it’s not the same. I mean you can post all your stuff on Instagram and I mean nothing’s wrong with that or anything. It’s great to have your stuff out there, but it’s totally different to go outside and see your work there at the store and other people actually see it. And people that might not even have Instagram or Twitter, they can see your work, and people that are working in these industries, they can actually see your work. And that’s almost like an out of body experience sometimes thinking about it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It’s a really big deal. It’s a big deal. I think it’s a big deal. I want to get more into your work and your career, but before that, I want to learn more just about you. As you mentioned earlier, you’re a New Orleans native. Tell me about growing up in New Orleans. Did you do a lot of creative stuff as a kid?

Morgan Bissant:
I did. I don’t know if that necessarily had to do a lot with me living in New Orleans, I did have a lot of opportunities to be creative growing up. We did have a lot of stuff at our schools where we could paint murals and things on the walls. I had this one art teacher in elementary school, Mr. Baldwin, and he had all of the art students paint this, I guess, prehistoric scene of all the dinosaurs on the cafeteria wall, and I thought that was so much fun. I wish I could do more things like that. I just always liked collaborative types of projects and things that were always, I guess, larger than life, at least to me. Because like I was saying before with the book, it’s different when everybody can see it like that. And I think as a child, that really pushed the importance of artwork to me because it didn’t just trivialize it as this little hobby that kindergartners do when they draw with crayon on paper and things like that.

It actually took our craft seriously and it encouraged us to pursue what we were doing. It gave a credence to art, and I think that that’s always important for little kids that enjoy that stuff. I think that it’s always important to encourage what they’re doing because that’s something that needs to be fostered, that’s something that needs to be developed. And if it’s something that they really enjoy and that they want to go forward with it, I don’t see why you shouldn’t encourage it and give them opportunities to push them and put their work out there.

Maurice Cherry:
Was your family really supportive of you going in that route?

Morgan Bissant:
Yeah, they always have been. So, like I was saying before, I’ve been drawing since I was able to pick up a pencil. I don’t remember this, but this is what my mom told me, so this is what I have to go off of. So, I have just always been drawing things and I guess the things that I was drawing were a little bit more developed than what the average toddler would do, and I guess I was showing that I was able to pick up different forms more than somebody that would have that natural inclination. As I got older, my drawings started getting a little bit more developed, and as I was watching cartoons, I was drawing the cartoons that I saw on TV, and they weren’t exactly stick figures. I always tried to get them as close as I possibly can with the skills that I had at three years old.

And as I got older, my parents, they noticed what I had and they put me in different programs. They tried to get me in talented art classes at school, and they always wanted to give me a chance to grow as an artist, and they always encouraged what I did. They always saw what I had, they saw the talent that I had, and they always wanted to encourage me to continue doing it and to pursue it. And eventually I ended up pursuing that as a full-time thing. Now, graphic design is different from a illustration, but it’s still a form of art, and that’s something that they never stopped me from doing it. They were like, “No, don’t do this. Be a lawyer.” They wanted me to do what I enjoyed doing, and I’m really grateful for that, that I always had a supportive family that always pushed me to do what would make me happy.

Maurice Cherry:
And I mean, graphic design is a gateway into I think a lot of different just visual designs. I mean back in the day I think it was all just called communication design, and then it splintered off into advertising. And then I think especially with the advent of the personal computer and Photoshop and stuff like that, it became desktop publishing and then it was graphic design. So, it’s a gateway into a lot of different things. I mean, as you mentioned, you really wanted to do it enough to the point where you ended up studying it. You went to Louisiana State University, majored in graphic design there. How was your time there at the school?

Morgan Bissant:
I really liked the time that I had, because they gave us a lot of time to explore a lot of different things. So, with the curriculum that we had, which it was basically called fine arts, the entire degree itself, they gave us opportunities to do a lot of different mediums of art. Your primary major would be graphic design, and that was what was ultimately the focus. But we had classes where we could illustrate, where we could paint. If we wanted to, we could explore photography, we could explore welding and print making.

So, they gave us a lot of different mediums and avenues that we can dip our feet in and see how we liked it, or we could even use those things to apply them to graphic design in a way. So, myself, I’ve always been interested in illustration. I always wanted to put illustration in my graphic design work, and so when we took a lot of illustration classes there, it also helped me to develop my style and pay attention to a lot of things that maybe I might have been overlooking.

So, it helped me to improve my craft overall when I took illustration classes. And I could always bring that back into graphic design where I could maybe draw characters and now my characters look more refined, or I could draw different symbols, and now everything looks a little better, it looks sharper and it looks more professional. And that’s something that I’ve always liked. So, I don’t know exactly how every other school tackles this degree, but I really did like that about it, because it gave us a lot of different options to go in. You weren’t exactly forced to do all of them. So, I was never really huge on photography. So, I didn’t do photography, but I had another option.

If instead I wanted to do painting, or I wanted to do sculpture making, I could do one of those. And that’s something that I really appreciated. It gave us a lot of different things that we could go into, and I felt like that helped me in the long run because while it gave me a graphic design degree, which helped me getting a full-time job, it also helped me in terms of art in general, because all of those illustration classes, they helped me in terms of anatomy and in terms of composition and things like that, that you can use that in graphic design, but ultimately you could use that in illustration too, because that’s a lot of what I do.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean it sounds like the program was really expansive to allow you to just try out a lot of different things and see what you liked the best.

Morgan Bissant:
Yeah, they gave us a lot to work with, and that was just a lot of, I don’t know if you would call them collectives, but they weren’t exactly our core classes. They were just things that you can pick to add on to what you were doing. And even within graphic design, we still had a lot of things that they gave us that we could explore, like typography and making different graphic symbols and things like that. So, we always had a huge variety, which that was great, honestly, for all of us. Because a lot of people, they branched off and did other things and they found that taking this drawing class, it’s like, “Well, now I want to do books.” Or “I took this photography class and now I want to do photography and I want to do events.” And that was always something that I felt was influenced by the fact that we had all of these options.

And I always thought it was really great, and it made the curriculum a lot more fun. I always liked drawing. I always had fun drawing. So, being able to take all these drawing classes, it was nice. And then it gave me a little bit more of an outlet, because graphic design isn’t always about drawing. Sometimes it’s about laying out things, and sometimes it can get a little bit monotonous, especially if it’s all for school projects and things. But if you have time to go on the side and go draw a polar bear or a bowl of fruit, and that’s something that you enjoy doing, it can make your time in school more enjoyable.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So, when you graduated, did you have an idea lined up about what you wanted to do next?

Morgan Bissant:
I honestly was not exactly sure, but at the same time, I actually already had an opportunity lined up for me before I even graduated.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, okay.

Morgan Bissant:
So, a couple of months before I graduated, me and a few other students had gotten recruited by a local business called Impression Works, where we did photo books and greeting cards and things like that, and we could basically do whatever we felt like worked. So, it didn’t always have to be layout stuff. If we wanted to put illustrations in them, we could, and it gave us a little bit of creative freedom. And that was nice to be able to have during school, because it was a bit of a safety net in terms of having a job when I graduated. But then on top of that, I had a little bit of income coming in while I was in school, and it was flexible because we could do most of our work from home.

So, I was able to just work on projects for work in my free time, and we were still interns/part-time, so we weren’t totally overloaded with things where we couldn’t balance homework and senior projects and work work. And that ended up working out for a little while. And then it was a contract job, so once the contract was up after that, I had to try to turn around and try to find something else as soon as I could. And I wasn’t exactly sure how that was going to work out, because with me being pretty illustration oriented, I wasn’t sure how I would’ve liked something that didn’t really allow me to do that. And I know that a lot of graphic design jobs don’t really have a heavy focus on that. And so I was always wondering, “Well, will I be able to fit into another job somewhere or at a real firm?”

Because I really didn’t do a whole lot of layout at the time, and I didn’t have a whole lot of that in my portfolio outside of a couple of school projects. So, I was wondering how that was going to work out. And I ended up landing another full-time job at a company called Sassy Baby. That was a place where we got to design a lot of baby products. So, we would draw the little characters that were on bibs and bath products, and there were a couple little toys and stuff, we designed teethers and things like that. And that actually worked out in terms of capturing the, I guess, the niche that I am in, because being a graphic designer and an illustrator isn’t always… it is I guess. A lot of people who are graphic designers, they’re not illustrators, and a lot of illustrators are not graphic designers.

So, I guess I felt like I was different in that sense. But that job that I found, it ended up working out pretty well because I got to draw cute little characters. And we also had to do a lot of graphic design, we had to do a lot of layout things, we had to do a lot of presentation materials. So, graphic design of course helped me in those aspects. But being an illustrator helped me in terms of being able to capture different likenesses of little bears and bunnies and things like that. That was a pretty nice job, because we got a lot of tangible products out of it. You’d go in Walmart and you’d see the bibs that you designed. You’d see the little patterns of characters and things that you did, and you could go to Target or Meijer or wherever, and you could see the work that you’ve done, and you’d see it on full display for people to buy. And that was always cool. And it was always rewarding in a sense, to see your work.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m so glad that you said that about a graphic designer’s not an illustrator. Illustrator’s not a graphic designer, because I feel like sometimes, and this is really from the company standpoint, they just think it’s all the same. They think as long as you can do something in design, that you can do everything in design. So, I’m glad you qualified that by saying that.

Morgan Bissant:
Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of mix ups with that. I will see a lot of illustrators that I follow get all of these requests for, “Hey, can you do logos?” And I’m just like that’s not the same thing. Just because they can draw Goku does not mean they can give you a professional looking logo for your law firm. This is two totally different forms of art. It’s an important distinction.

Maurice Cherry:
No, it’s an important distinction. And I think it’s good to stick by that, because I think early in your career you want to be able to do any work that comes your way because you want to be able to prove yourself as a creative. So, even if you are, say for example, really good at illustration and someone says, “Well, can you do a logo?” You’re thinking, “Well, I mean it’s a drawing. I can do that.” But I think it’s good that you’re sticking by saying, “No, I only do illustration. This is what I do. I can’t do this other thing that you’re asking for.”

I mean you probably could technically do it because the skills are transferrable, but I think it’s good to stick by that because what it does is it strengthens your particular craft in that area. So, people eventually don’t get it confused. But I feel like that’s pretty common early on though. You try to do a little bit of everything, one, to see what you can do, and two, because the work just comes your way.

Morgan Bissant:
Yeah. And I get that, especially if you’re just starting out and you’re like, “I don’t have any projects and this guy is asking me for a logo, so I’m just going to take it because I need the money.” But if that’s not what you do, you don’t want to end up getting saddled with that your whole life, trying to struggle to do something that you know you don’t enjoy doing and you don’t exactly, I guess, have the equipment for. Because you can definitely do a logo that’s a drawing. But I mean if this super corporate firm is asking you for a super corporate logo and you draw just characters or buildings and things like that, it’s not always going to transfer well.

You don’t exactly have, I guess, that same know-how or that same eye to capture what they might want. So, I like to make sure people know that there’s a difference, because every illustrator that you try to ask for a work from is not going to be equipped to give you what you need, because illustration and graphic design aren’t the same thing. And I feel like a lot of people just think, “Oh, art is art,” but that’s just not how it is.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. Now you’re represented by Inkyverse, which is a agency. They rep a lot of animators, artists, authors. How did you go about getting representation? Did they come to you? Did you seek them out? How did that work?

Morgan Bissant:
They actually came to me. I believe they found me on Instagram, I want to say. So, it was, I think not too long after I had posted this graphic that I did. It was the Salt Girl, the Salt of the Earth thing that I did. And that went viral, and I think that’s what got me noticed by the agency. They reached out to me, they actually sent me a text because I had my number on my resume and they were like, “Hey, this is Inkyverse and we are looking to see if you would be interested in commercial art representation.” And then I followed up with, “This is not a scam, this is real?” Like okay.

I was like, “Well, thank God for clarifying.” I sure was about to just block the number. They said that they would keep in touch with me, and we ended up having a conversation over the phone. The agent that I was speaking to, Katrina, she was going over everything that having an agent entailed and how having an agent can help you find high profile clients and they can help you to establish rates for yourself and they can basically just manage you. And I was like, “That sounds pretty good to me. So, I mean I don’t see why I would say no personally.” I mean I never was really good with managing everything that I had. I was always really bad with trying to figure out rates that I wanted to charge for myself. So, I mean I was like, “Well, I’ll go for it.”

I mean the worst that could happen is that I might not like it and I can just say I don’t want to do it anymore. So far it’s really been a blessing to have an agent and work with Inkyverse, because having a lot of these major companies reach out to me, not having an agent would have been terrifying because I would not know what to say. I would not know what money to ask for. I wouldn’t know how to fight back against that, because especially if you’re pretty green, it’s like you don’t want to say the wrong thing and be like, “Oh my gosh, I just ruined this entire opportunity because I have asked them for the wrong amount or I said the wrong thing, or whatever.”

So, it really helped to have somebody, I guess, go back and forth on my behalf that actually knows the industry and actually knows the standards and actually knows what to ask for, what is fair. That’s been a huge help in getting me fair rates for projects, for getting the amount of time that I would get for things. I mean it’s been good to have somebody to look over contracts and things and make sure nothing weird is in them before I sign them. And that’s something that I really like having and I would definitely recommend other artists do so if it is at all possible to have somebody to, I guess, be your help where you need it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I mean I’ve had other illustrators on the show before that are also represented by agents and they’ve talked about how it just helps them to focus on the work. They don’t have to handle all the administrative emails and contracts and all this stuff. They can just focus on doing the work when it comes in, and it’s just such a big benefit for them. And it’s really cool that they reached out to you, they saw your work and wanted you to be a part of what they’re building.

Morgan Bissant:
Yeah, and I was honestly really blown away by that. I was, “Really? Me? How did you even get here?” It was really exciting. I was like, “I can’t believe you would want me to do this.” And then even more so with the random text, I was like, “Are we sure this isn’t a scam and you’re not going to ask me for my credit card number next? I feel like this is too good to be true.” But it was really nice to be able to have somebody who works in that industry say, “Hey, we think your work is so good and that it can make a whole bunch of money, so we want you here.” Not to say that my representative is just like, “Hey, we just want you for the money,” because I didn’t want it to sound like that, but it’s nice to know that your artwork is appreciated in a professional sense.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. How do you stay up to date with the latest design and illustration trends? Like you mentioned pop culture being a big part of your work, pop culture and television. How do you stay up to date with trends in the industry?

Morgan Bissant:
I personally would say that I try to do somewhat of a research. I don’t know if I could 100% call it research. Well, I guess I could, yeah. I try to research some things when I have time to do so. At my previous job for graphic design, we always used different magazines and publications and even Pinterest to stay up to date with what was trending and what was up-to-date and designs that we can pull from that won’t look dated. And I do use that to a certain degree when it comes to illustration work, but I also do like to look into a lot of fashion.

I follow a lot of fashion bloggers and I’m always looking at things on TikTok and stuff like that, because that’s always been an influence on my style as well. I like drawing illustrations that incorporate a lot of fashion. I like looking at different, I guess, design when it comes to fashion on TV or in movies or things like that. I try to pay attention to those things and pay attention to, I guess, what is out now and what I could probably see in the future.

Maurice Cherry:
What would you say is one of the newer trends right now?

Morgan Bissant:
You mean in terms of fashion?

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I mean like, yeah, I guess in general, as you look at it as to how you might apply it to your work, do you see any trends that you’re like, “Oh, I might want to try that out?”

Morgan Bissant:
Honestly, I’ve been looking at a whole lot of fashion.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I mean fashion could be that inspiration, it sounds like.

Morgan Bissant:
Sometimes I look at a lot of just things that I see just online, and it doesn’t have to be anything in particular, but if I feel like something is particularly striking, I might pull some inspiration from it, from what I see on there. I guess as of right now, I’ve been liking a lot of, I want to say suits and things in that general area. That’s always been something that’s been drawing my attention. I don’t know if that is exactly the trendiest thing overall now in terms of I guess business and things like that. I’ve seen a lot of people doing those kinds of things on TikTok and whatever. That’s always something that I wanted to incorporate in some of my illustrations as well. Now, in terms of now, I wouldn’t say a pulling a whole lot of things from now in particular, or some things that are trendy now.

Maurice Cherry:
How would you say that your style as an illustrator and a designer has evolved over the years?

Morgan Bissant:
I have definitely gained a better understanding of composition, and I want to say anatomy and layout. Basically everything that I worked on, I feel like it has elevated. I feel like I’ve really grown to have a better understanding of what works and how things should look, how I can utilize the different spaces of things and create, I guess, a better and more fluent composition. I also feel that I’ve grown in the sense where I’ve been able to refine how my characters look. I went really back and forth with a lot of different styles and trying to figure out what worked and trying to figure out how I should paint things and should I do things that are really stylistic? Should I do things that are realistic? It’s always been experimental and trying to figure out how I want things to look overall and what I felt worked for me.

And I think I’ve found, I guess, a good middle ground of how I want my illustrations and how I want my designs to look. But I think just having more of a knowledge of shapes and color and growing in those areas has really helped my design and illustration work to flourish. And I have also accepted the fact that everything is not always going to look the same. So, I know a lot of artists have a particular style. I know a lot of people, including myself, have always felt like you should just have one style and that should be it, and you shouldn’t really do anything else. As I’ve grown, I’ve learned that you could just do whatever you want. I mean if I want to do something realistic one day, I can do that. If I want to do something stylized another day, I can do that.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t have a style, and it doesn’t mean that I don’t know what I’m doing. It just happens. You might want to experiment, you might just want to do something different. I mean I think that that really just shows that you just have a lot to offer as an artist. I mean it just shows that you have the skill to be able to go back and forth and do a variety of things. And I don’t think anything’s wrong with that, which unfortunately a lot of people still feel that way. But I think that I would always encourage artists to just do what you enjoy doing. If you want to do a lot of different things, I say go for it, as long as you’re not burning yourself out.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I guess speaking of that, how do you handle those periods when you might be burnt out or you might just have low motivation? How do you handle that?

Morgan Bissant:
So, overall I try to just take breaks in between my work. I try not to rush things, and I always am pretty careful about not overbooking myself, especially keeping in mind that I do have a full-time job and I’m trying to juggle freelance and whatever else I have. I always want to make sure I’m trying to gauge my time properly and see what I actually have room to do, because I don’t want to get to that point where I’m just like I’m completely just worn out and I just can’t do anything. I think that it’s very important to take breaks when you can. I always try to set aside some time or a day or whatever to just do nothing or just have fun or maybe watch a movie or play a game or just something, something not work related. But there have been times where I just didn’t have a choice.

I just had to power through something. And I felt like what just motivated me to get it done is just to try to have as much fun with it as possible. There’s been projects that I’ve worked on and I just try to, I guess, put a little bit of myself into it and just use that as a way to express myself, which wasn’t exactly discouraged in the project. And that helped me to, I guess, think of the project that I had to work on or something that was just more fun, something that I could enjoy. Not thinking about it as, “I have to get this done right now because the deadline is tomorrow, and if I don’t, then the whole project is ruined.”

I thought about it as this is something that I’m enjoying doing and I just want to do it. And in times where I am just getting a bit pushed, that’s what I try to think about. I try to think about it as something enjoyable. I try to just take my time with it as much as I can and have fun with it.

Maurice Cherry:
What do you hope people take away from your work when they look at it?

Morgan Bissant:
I would hope that they could see the beauty in a lot of these different characters. I like to do a lot of black girls and black women, and I’m sure you’ve seen, because you have seen my portfolio, but little black kids. I like to draw a lot of that stuff. And growing up, I had issues where I want to say I had lower self-esteem than I should have had. I never really felt like I was cute. I didn’t think that I was pretty, because I would see a lot of the cartoons, like the heroes and the love interests on a lot of cartoons, and they wouldn’t look like me. And that is what made me want to put a lot of black features and characters into my artwork, because while we did see a lot of that growing up, I felt like we didn’t exactly see as much as we probably should have gotten.

Black characters were always like the sidekicks sometimes, and they didn’t always get time to shine. And that’s something that always impacted me growing up. And so I like to put that into my work. I like to show people, like anyone that we are beautiful and nothing is wrong with our features. Our features are beautiful. They make us unique, they make us who we are. And I think that that’s something that I wanted to put in my work, because I want everybody to be able to embrace that. So, I always hope that little kids and adults alike can take that away from what I do.

Maurice Cherry:
What advice would you give to someone, they’re out here listening to your story, they’re hearing about your work and everything. What advice would you give them if they want to follow in your footsteps?

Morgan Bissant:
The advice that I would give to anybody that might want to pursue a career in art or graphic design, I would say that don’t be afraid to do what you know you want to do. Have fun doing it. I would say that if this is something that you really enjoy and you really see yourself doing this in the future, and you know you really want to go into these different arenas where you can use your art for animation or books. So, I mean I would encourage anybody that wants to pursue art to just go for it. I don’t think that you should let anything scare you from doing it. If it’s something that you enjoy doing I say, why not do it?

I mean it’s something that it’s always been fun to me. I could never really see myself doing anything else. And so I felt like this is what I had to pursue, this is what I was going to do. And I know that there’s other people that feel that way and I feel that they should go forward with it, because I mean why keep yourself from doing something that you enjoy doing and that you can make a living off of it. And I know a lot of people feel that it’s harder to actually make a living off your work than doing other things, but I believe that we have so many examples out that shows that that’s actually a possibility. You can work in animation, you can do books, you can even do things like ads and partnerships with brands.

You can do flyers, you can design things for brands, branding or whatever. There’s so many options that you can explore, things that you can put your talents toward. There’s so many options that you can look into that you can use your skills to make it tangible and make it real. So, I would say that you shouldn’t limit yourself and you shouldn’t hold yourself back if you’re afraid that you might not be able to get different opportunities, or you are afraid that you might not be able to get into this certain arena so there’s nothing you can do, because there’s a lot of things that we, as artists, we don’t really think about how many opportunities that they really have out there.

But there’s a lot. It’s just the possibilities are endless. And on top of that, I would encourage people to always have fun with what they’re doing. Never be afraid to experiment and do different things. Just have fun. Just enjoy it. Take time to perfect your craft. Take time to practice. You always want to take time to pour into it, because if this is something that you’ll enjoy doing and you want to put yourself out there and you want to continue to grow, I mean you always want to keep doing it. You always want to keep those, I guess, creative gears turning.

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

Morgan Bissant:
I’m honestly not 100% sure. I honestly never thought I would even see myself where I’m at now five years ago. It’s different for me. If there is something in particular that I could be doing down the line, I’ve always been interested in animation of course, because it’s always been a huge inspiration for me. And I’ve always wanted to work maybe in an animated series, maybe like creating some characters or concept work or visual development or something along those lines. So, here’s hoping that maybe at some point in my career the door may open for that. I’m just here to see where life takes me as of right now.

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

Morgan Bissant:
So, I am on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok at morg_city. Also on Facebook at Morgan Bissant, all one word. I have a website, morganbissant.com, and you can basically see most of my portfolio on there, and you can find links to my social pages at the bottom.

Maurice Cherry:
All right, sounds good. Well, Morgan Bissant, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you really for talking about I mean, one, your journey as an artist, as an illustrator, as a designer, and how it’s brought you to where you are now. But I really think it’s good that you talked about your process, you shared your inspirations, you shared your experiences. My hope is that when people listen back through this interview, and especially once they get a chance to really look at your work, they’ll be able to get a good overall view of who you are as an artist and the work that you’re bringing into the world. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Morgan Bissant:
Well, thank you so much for having me. This is definitely a pleasure speaking with you.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit

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

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

TTK

We all know there are several ways to achieve success as a creative, but sometimes it takes inspiration from others to set you on the right path. That’s definitely the case with the multitalented TTK. His work as an art director, painter, designer and illustrator have taken him far, and now he can add another title to his roster — filmmaker!

Our conversation began with a quick year-end check-in, and then TTK talked about “Just Like Me”, a short documentary he created with Havas to educate and inspire the next generation of Black creatives. TTK also shared more details of his life story, including growing up in Florida, serving in the Navy for 10 years after going to art school, and more. Hopefully TTK’s story and documentary can help inspire you to rise to greater heights!

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

TTK:
My name is TTK. What I do, I’m an artist, I’m a designer. Currently, I work in advertising. I’m a director, I’m a painter. I wear a few hats.

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

TTK:
The year’s been good for me so far, man, the year’s been very, very good. How I measure if the year is doing good, I measure if I’m doing something this year that I didn’t do the previous year or if I accomplished something this year that I didn’t in the previous year, that determines for me whether it’s good or not. We’re going into the fourth quarter right now, so the accomplishments and what I’ve accomplished so far in this year, I’m really proud of myself. I took a few punches, but that’s life right there. I hop back up and take it on the chin and take it as a lesson learned. But all in all, this year’s good for me. It’s been going great.

Maurice Cherry:
Is there anything in particular that you still want to try to do before the year ends?

TTK:
Paint more. A friend of mine jokes and it says once I learned how to do digital work, it made me lazy with painting. And I don’t want to admit it, but he is right because painting is a process. Well, everything is a process, but whenever you’re painting, you got to wait for the paint to dry, come back to it and work into it some more, then work into it some more. It takes much longer.

And you would think with me being traditionally trained before I even learn how to do anything in Photoshop or any software, I was doing this first years before I knew how to use any software. You would think I would be conditioned for it. But learning how to work in digital just made me just work faster and have less patience maybe because working in the industry, working the agency, working the companies, I’m on a timeline where I got to turn this stuff around fast. It can be very competitive, whereas with painting, this can take… Because I’m so meticulous with the details and everything when I’m painting, it can take anywhere from weeks to a month. Depends on how much time. Well, I try not to take breaks in between, but I wind up doing that. Anyway.

All that to say I just want to paint more, knock out more pieces. Because I got a solo show coming out in 2023, a solo art show. It’s the first solo show that I’ve done in, oh my god, probably 12 or 13 years with all original pieces, so I’m on the clock right now. It’s next year in the spring, but time catches up real quick so I got to start really cranking out pieces. Teah, all that to say I want to paint more.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I find when visual creators, particularly when they get further along in their career, they often want to go back to some sort of physical, tangible way of creating. Like you said, doing it digitally does make you faster, but there’s a craft in the visual art that gets lost I think sometimes when you’re relying too much on digital tools.

TTK:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. People will ask me, “Can I get this? Can I commission you for this piece?” And I’m like, “Truthfully, it’ll be probably easier for you on your budget to commission me to do something digitally.” Because paintings, it takes a while. Well, for me it takes a while because there’s a certain level of quality that I want to put out. And there’s no command Z to go back when I make a mistake or it doesn’t come out the way I want it to look. I got to wait for it to dry and then I got to go back and rework it, or I’m mixing these colors, and the tubes of paint ain’t cheap. You know what I’m saying? You can buy the cheap stuff, but you going to get cheap results. It really adds up. But all in all, this is always my first love right here. And I always go back to that.

I was just working on this piece that I’m currently working on. I’ve been working on it about two months now. I just think working in it, I forget about how I used to feel painting before I was doing anything digitally. How I would just put a album on, put a CD on, put a record on, just rock out for hours on. And I miss that feeling of seclusion and just painting.

I was watching something, one of those shows that come on Sunday, one of the Sunday weekly news shows or whatever, but they were talking about… This is a few months back. They were talking about George Bush, how he put out a book, maybe it was last year. It was a book about people across the nation or people in this community or something like that. But it was his paintings and these people. And it was like, we don’t really rock with George Bush. You know what I’m saying? We don’t rock with George Bush, but his paintings weren’t bad. You know what I’m saying? Man, this dude actually isn’t that bad. He was on his ranch just painting or whatever and everything. I was like, I never would’ve guessed that from this guy. But I’m like, man, I would love that life just to be in a loft somewhere just, I don’t know, in the middle of nowhere, just painting. I don’t know, man. One day, one day. I’m going to speak into existence.

Maurice Cherry:
I think you’ll get there. You’ll get there, absolutely. Let’s talk about your day job, what you do. You’re a senior art director at Havas, which is ad and PR company. Talk to me about that.

TTK:
Yeah, so I’ve been at Havas for about three years now. It’s been good, you know what I’m saying? A lot of opportunities have come from me being there. What I do, I work on clients. The main client that I’ve worked on since I’ve been there is Michelin and doing stuff for Michelin social. And I got a chance to kind of be… Not kind of be, I got a chance to be very creative with their brand. I worked on stuff for Mike’s Hard Lemonade, worked on a few other projects, but… My mind is blank right now, but Michelin is probably the main one that comes to mind because I’ve been on the brand pretty much 80% of the time I’ve been there.

One thing I can say about working on stuff for Michelin is that I’m blessed it. Everything I touch, I’ve been able to add my own personal touch or flare to it that they probably wouldn’t have done, whereas I push the limits where I can bring my personality and my style of creativity to a brand like that that has so much rich history and it’s been doing something a certain way for so long. But I’ve been able to bring my look and feel to it and explain to them why this works. And they’ve been open and they’ve been receptive to it. Sometimes we get pushback, of course, that’s just how it goes. But for the most part, I think with me working on the brand for so long, I know the do’s and don’ts and know where I can push it and where I can’t. But the areas where I can push it, I really try to flex and really do something where if someone’s scrolling, if they’re scrolling on their phone or whatever and they see this graphic like, “Oh, this is pretty dope right here,” it would make me as a consumer want to check out more about this product right here. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
And now, you started there in October of 2019, which it feels like… With this pandemic, that feels like a lifetime ago. But how did the pandemic change up how you work?

TTK:
It’s funny you say that because I was doing… Right now I worked out of the Chicago office. And prior to me working out of the Chicago office, I was in New York, I was in Brooklyn. I was doing freelance work for them, and then they gave me a full-time… offered me a full-time role. And I was like, “Hey, I’m already doing freelance for you guys out here and I’m delivering what you’re asking me for. Can I just stay out here in New York?” It was like, “Yeah, we want to have you in the office.”

I move cross country, and then a couple months later everybody’s working from home. You know what I’m saying? My partner, Chevon, she was working remote as well at the time for a nonprofit, and she had been telling me, yo, everybody in her nonprofit is all over the country. You know what I’m saying? Working. You’re doing the same thing.

Working from home thing, it definitely… I always say as messed up as the pandemic has been and COVID and all of that, it was a big reset to show some of these jobs that we do the way we do them is outdated. And this is just my opinion. And going into office every day, five days a week, sometimes six, and sitting there for eight, 10 hours just to say that you’re here, we can do the work everywhere. You look at people on… What’s the site? Fiverr. You know what I’m saying? You don’t know where these people are at, but they’re still delivering stuff for you or whatever. And that’s what this pandemic showed. In my opinion, what it showed is thankfully the type of work that we do, the digital creative stuff, we can do it from anywhere. It definitely opened up my eyes and everything because I feel like I was… Like a lot of us, we were programmed to just come and to go into the office, just sit there and just look watching the clock waiting for 5:30, 6:30 to come, paying $15 for lunch every day, all of that right there.

I don’t mind working remotely at all, man. You know what I’m saying? I don’t mind it, truthfully. I know me personally, I can be extrovert, I can be reclusive as well. When I’m creating, sometimes I just like to be alone. We can collaborate, but I like to be alone. I’m able to execute the way I really want to execute and execute my best way sometimes when I’m alone. I don’t mind working remote. I actually love it.

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

TTK:
I juggle a few things, man. It depends on the workload sometimes, man. A lot of times, like when I was working heavy on Michelin, when we had a lot of deliverables for the brand, it would be coming up with all these different creative pillars of ways to how the brand incorporates into travel or how they incorporate with food, how they incorporate it in their heritage, coming up with creative ways to display this stuff right here, like getting things ready for a client meeting.

Basically, the day starts, we get briefed on what’s due, what everyone’s working on. And that’s pretty much it, thankfully for me. I’m in a space where I can just do what I need to do and no one really bothers me, I guess because maybe they know that’s how I operate best. That’s pretty much my work day.

As far as doing side projects or painting… Well, the paintings more so of recent things. I take breaks in between that. But sometimes I might work on little side project here, do little brush strokes on the painting for maybe about, I don’t know, 15 minutes, come back to it a couple hours later. My day is basically just me being creative. I’m thankful to say that. I enjoy what I do, and I have fun doing what I do. And it’s how I envision my life. No stress. I’m not working in the cold. I’ve been there before. I’ve done a lot of things, man.

I’m thankful that right now every day when I wake up, no two days are the same, but every day when I wake up, man, I can honestly say I’m not stressed about what I’m doing. And I’m doing what I love to do. It may not be the exact project that I want to work on, but at least I can say that my day consists of me being creative. And I’m getting paid to be creative. You know?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. No, that’s a good thing. I think especially agencies tend to get the reputation… I don’t know if they get the best reputation, I’ll put it that way, sometimes because you’re often working from client to client so you don’t have a lot of time to spend with maybe a particular brand to do something before you’re put on another project or put on another campaign or something like that. But it sounds like with what you’re doing, especially because you mentioned earlier you’ve been on the Michelin brand for so long, you’ve had time to grow into it in a way.

TTK:
It’s cool because I’ve had access to all of their assets and their personal login site where it’s so many assets, so much history. And that’s a cool thing about working on a brand like this right here that’s been around for over 100 years; there’s so much that you can pull from. A.And not to sound cliche, but a lot of times with working on this brand, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Everything is there already, you just got to figure out how to repurpose it. I’ve worked on… What’s the faucet brand MOEN. I worked on MOEN briefly. I worked on Yellowstone National Park.

I don’t know if I said it before, but Mike’s Hard Lemonade. That was cool working on that. This was pre-pandemic. We had a cool, very, very dope idea and campaign for Mike’s Hard Lemonade, but didn’t see the light of day because the pandemic happened at the time. The pandemic happened and everything shut down so we had to redirect the direction of where we wanted to go. And it was a much, much, much more scaled down version of… It wasn’t even scaled down, it was a whole new direction. Everything that we created, the hours that we spent, no one really will ever see this out into the world. But that’s the nature of the game, you take it how it comes, man.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, you’ve worked before as a graphic designer, and we’ll talk about that a little later, and now you’re an art director at an agency. How would you describe the difference in those two?

TTK:
I don’t think there is any difference, man. Personally, I don’t. Maybe on paper where it says what the roles are, what the responsibilities are. On paper, it probably says certain things, but from my personal experience, I was doing the same thing coming up with ideas, coming up with ideas, coming up with ways to execute this thing, thinking of ways where we can… places where we can place these ideas so people can see it and engage with it.

It’s similar to what I’m doing now. I worked in music, working at Mass Appeal. I worked on the record label side of the house. And sometimes I would work on the agency side as well. But it is the same thing, just one’s more culturally hip hop based, the other one’s more very American and reaches a broader audience and selling products.

But selling music is like selling products as well, man, so it’s the same thing. The way I see it, I think the only thing probably change is the company that you’re getting to check from. I always joke and I say this to people, and not to sound like a Debbie Downer or nothing like that, but you pick your poison. What are you able to accept and what are you able to deal with and whatever role or company or agency that you’re with? But I don’t find it any different at all.

Maurice Cherry:
Is that the most challenging part about what you do? What you just mentioned?

TTK:
I think the most challenging part about this right here, that working in design and advertising, from my experience, it’s a revolving door. I don’t know too many people that’s been in one spot for over five years. I just don’t.

Early on, it was shocking. Not necessarily shocking to me, but it affected me emotionally. Damn, am I good enough? Or what could I have done differently? But then I understand it’s never personal, it’s business. And sometime business is up, sometime business is down. And when business is down, you might get cut. And that’s just the nature of the game.

And I think that’s where it just comes in. In trying to figure out too what do you love? You know, could work on one thing where the money is great, but you don’t really care about the work that you’re putting out. You’re not really in love with the brand or product or whatever that you’re working on. And then it could be something where you’re all about the mission that this one company or agency has, or you love what you’re working on but the pay isn’t the greatest. It’s all about trying, well, for me, trying to find that middle, that medium where, okay, I can get the best of both worlds.

But in all, back to what I was saying it’s a revolving door from, just from my experience, and a lot of my peers, not too many people I know stick around for a long time. And I don’t know whether it is because us being creative, you want to do your own thing eventually, or… I don’t know. I don’t want to make it a race thing or whatever, but it goes back to how do we see ourself? Well, for me personally, how do I see myself in a place where there aren’t many of people that look like me, you know?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

TTK:
And cannot coexist and naturally be myself in these spaces, you know?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Do you think it might just be burnout or something?

TTK:
Yeah. It’s a few things. I feel like with junior people, when they don’t have the support or support from senior leadership, you got somebody might be fresh out of college and they got all these dreams of, “I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this award-winning stuff.” Of course everybody’s got those thoughts in their heads or whatever. But I feel like you take someone junior and you put them in a position and you don’t give them the support that they need to grow, it can be discouraging. And people will, “Yo, this ain’t for me right here.” You know?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

TTK:
Or resourcing or whoever, they may not know a person’s… What’s their skillset? What’s that person’s strength? And the only thing they see is the person’s name and a title. And then, “Okay, well let’s put this person on this right here.” They might not even be the person that’s equipped for that. It’s like playing basketball; you can’t have the center playing the point guard position. You know what I’m saying? It don’t work out like that. You know what I’m saying?

Maurice Cherry:
Right.

TTK:
Well, you could, but you’re not going to get the optimum results.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s switch gears here a little bit and talk more about you, talk about your personal life. Tell me about where you grew up.

TTK:
I’m originally from Jacksonville, Florida. That’s where I’m originally from. That’s where my early years were based out of. I moved away years ago, years ago. But I went to high school down there. And I was thankful to be in an art program going to an art school, Douglas Henderson School of the Arts, which at the time when I was going there, it was prestigious art school and everything.

But my father, when he went there, my father went there back in the ’50s or the ’60s or something like that. And at the time when he was going to that school, I think it was a school for Black students. You know what I’m saying? This is when segregation and all that stuff was going on. He went to that school decades before me. I just think it’s ironic that I ended up going there, but it’s a whole little different school at the time when I went.

But yeah, I got introduced to the arts there. Well, what’s the old TV show from back in the day? Fame?

Maurice Cherry:
Fame. Yeah.

TTK:
It was like that, you know what I’m saying? Yeah, so it was a school like that and everything, man. Shortly after I graduated high school, a couple years went by, I tried to dabble in fashion for a little bit, but I couldn’t so I realized there wasn’t for me. I could design the stuff, but I couldn’t sew. And then going to college for… I went to Artist Studio Ft. Lauderdale only for one semester. I’m like, “Yeah, I can’t sew then.” But it was cool though, it was cool though. I’m like, it’s more than just drawing, illustrations and everything.

Some years went by in between me having a child. After graduating high school, I just joined a Navy. I joined a navy cold turkey one day. I went to a recruiter and I was like, “Yo, I need a job.” You know what I’m saying? I need a job I can’t get fired from, maybe because the jobs I had at the time, life put me on a path where I wasn’t doing what I really wanted to do creatively, creatively, I was just working jobs. I’m like, “Damn, this ain’t it right here, this really ain’t it.” I’m 21, 22 trying to figure life out. I went to a recruiter one day and I was like, “Yo, let me just hear what you got to say.” I didn’t even think I was going to sign up, but they hustled me like a car salesman, like a used car salesman.

Maurice Cherry:
Of course.

TTK:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And at the time, they told me, “Yeah, you can get a sign on bonus for $7,000.” At the time when they told me that, $7,000, I had never seen $7,000 before. When they said $7,000, I’m seeing a million dollars in my head. You know what I’m saying? I was like, “Yo, yeah, let’s do it.” I joined the Navy in September 2001.

Yo, it’s crazy. I went to a recruiter station on a Friday. September 11th happened that Tuesday. Two weeks later, I was in bootcamp. You know what I’m saying?

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

TTK:
I was in bootcamp. Yeah. And I was in the Navy for 10 years. I’m a ex sub mariner. I was on submarines. There’s not many brothers on subs. At the time when I was on in the early 2000 and everything. And with me being in the Navy and being mostly in the north or whatever, the bulk of the time I was in the Navy, I started planting my roots in New York and in Brooklyn. A lot of people think I’m originally from Brooklyn, you know what I’m saying? That’s my second home. But I’m originally from Florida, from Jacksonville, man. I got roots down there as well. We’re all over the place right now. What else you want to know?

Maurice Cherry:
I’m just curious about this 10 years in the Navy. First of all, my dad’s a Navy man, so I understand what that’s about. But the whole time that you’re doing this, were you also still pursuing creative things during this time?

TTK:
Yes. Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Or how did that happen?

TTK:
No. Mind you, at the time in my early 20s, man. I look back on it now, I was a kid doing adult shit, you know what I’m saying?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

TTK:
I was trying to figure it out, man. And I was a parent as well, you know what I’m saying? I was a parent trying to take care of a kid. I’m like, I don’t really know myself just yet. You know what I’m saying?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

TTK:
But I just know I need to provide some kind of way. And so the first couple of years of just me being in, it was just me just trying to figure out this thing, figure out this system, figure out what I got to do to not get in trouble and still keep some funds in my bank account and still perform and learn all the things that I need to learn, man.

Like I said, I was on submarines, and that’s… Aw man, that’s a whole nother world within itself and so much stuff that we have to know, from physics to… It’s so many things that I had to remember, being around top secret stuff, having a security clearance, working around nuclear weapons and things like that, man. It was a lot.

I was always doing drawing or whatever the whole time during those early years, drawing little tattoos for people and stuff like that. But it wasn’t until probably around 2004, the end of 2004, the sub that I was on, we left Norfolk, Virginia and we went up to Kittery, Maine. Kittery, Maine is on the border of New Hampshire, so Maine/New Hampshire. It wasn’t until I got up there that I wasn’t going out to sea, I’m just going to work for a couple of hours every day then going back to my barracks room. That gave me time to really do my art the way I really wanted to do it because I hadn’t done any art for so many years outside of high school. And by this time, I’m out of school for maybe seven years now, so I wasn’t really doing anything besides maybe sketching in my sketchbook. Seven years of not producing any work, it was really eating away at me. You know what I’m saying? I’m like, I know it’s more to life than this right here, there’s more to life right here. People tell you like, “Oh man, you do your 20 years, you’re going to get your retirement or whatever, and you still get out. You be young, you still be able to pursue other things.” But I knew deep down inside that that wasn’t me, that wasn’t for me.

But going back to, like I was saying, in 2004, a good friend of mine, he was from the Bronx. And around this time in early 2000, he was like, “Yo.” He knew that I like sneakers a lot. This is the early days before everybody… The sneaker app and all this other stuff like that. I was always one of those guys that had mad sneakers, you know what I’m saying? Before everybody knew me for my clothes and my sneakers and stuff, and he knew I could draw as well. A good friend of mine at the time, he was like… I guess he had went home for the weekend. He was from the Bronx. He went home for the weekend one time or something. He comes back, he was like, “I see these dudes customizing sneakers and everything. Why don’t you start doing that?” And I was like, “Yeah.” I’ve always thought about it, but I never really tried to pursue it.

And I started searching on lunch, trying to figure out what paints and stuff I need to get. And once I figured out the right paints and everything, I think that’s when it really, really took off, where it really began for me as being an artist and putting my work out into the world through sneakers. This is the early days too. This is around ’05, ’06, going a little forward, the MySpace days, me just putting my stuff upon MySpace at the time and people checking for it. And it was like I was running a business out of my barracks room up in Maine. Nobody knew who I was, you know what I’m saying? No one knew who I was, they just knew the name TTK. That was my tag that I went by. My real name is Michael Harris. It’s a very generic name. There’s always another Michael Harris everywhere I go, you know?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

TTK:
I was like, I got to do something that makes me stand down or whatever, so TTK. I was always into graffiti and stuff, man, so TTK was the initials that I like to tag. And I just like just it looks, the two T’s together and the K from a design point, I just like the way it looks.

Yeah, so everybody just knew, “Yo, this guy named TTK is customizing sneakers.” And this is the early days so there wasn’t a lot of people doing it how it is now almost 20 years later. That really opened my eyes. While I’m doing what I love to do and I’m getting paid to do what I want to do, this is what I want to do right here. I don’t know whether it’s going to be customizing sneakers or working for Nike or whoever one day, but I’m being creative and I’m getting paid to be creative. This Navy thing, this right here is going to be my way out.

Maurice Cherry:
I was just asking were you still doing design and stuff or interested in design this whole time while you were in the Navy? And it sounds like you turned it into a profitable side business almost.

TTK:
Yeah. That led to me doing a bunch of other things. I went to high school for visual arts, traditional means in the ’90s, man, like painting and things like that. I knew I wanted to paint, but I knew I couldn’t carry a big canvas with me everywhere. And I know not everybody has an appreciation for, I don’t know, fine art or the graphic design. Even though graphic design is isn’t everything that we see and interact with, most people don’t even realize that. But I was like, “Wow, how can I get my skillset, show what I want to bring out to the world and how people buy it?” Put them on sneakers. You know what I’m saying?

The first year of me customizing sneakers, I wind up being featured in a book, I can’t even think of the name of it right now, but it was a book about custom sneakers or sneaker art from the early 2000s. But I was featured in this book. I wind up winning some contest with Finish Line at the time. I wind up having my two solo art shows at the time, and I wind up doing some freelance work for Timberland, the brand. And this is within the first year of me doing this. And I was like, “Wow, you know what? I got something right here. I’m onto something.” You know?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

TTK:
And what I was doing then, it’s very… I don’t know, I call it maybe it’s… It wasn’t on the skill level that I’m at right now, but I saw, you know what? I got something right here. You know what I’m saying? I got something right here.

And then shortly after that, I wind up meeting a good friend of mine who’s like a brother to me, Justice Hall. He was a designer at Timberland at the time. Because Timberland’s headquarters is in New Hampshire. I forget the town that it’s in in New Hampshire. But Justice saw my work on display at this skateboard shop. He saw my custom sneakers. And when Justice saw my work, he reached out to me. And he didn’t know who I was, he just saw the name TTK and he saw the work that I was doing. And it was like, “Yo, this person’s dope. I need to find them.” And he found me and we connected.

And he calls me up. It’s funny, I tell this story all the time. But when Justice, he got my information from the guys at the skateboard shop in New Hampshire. And they didn’t tell him who I was or anything like that. He was like, “Yo, this is this guy, this is TTK. Call him up, man. He’s dope.” When Justice calls me up and I answer the phone, I said, “Hello,” the first thing he says is, “Oh shit, you’re Black.” And I’m like, “Yeah.” And I was like, “What you thought I was?’ I was thinking the same thing too because when they said designer, I didn’t think it was going to be another brother, someone the same age as me. You know what I’m saying? That’s into the same things that I’m into. It was like we were shocked to meet each other. And it was crazy because up there in New Hampshire/Maine, there aren’t many brothers up there. You know what I’m saying?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

TTK:
At the time, whenever it was like you see another Black person up there, you were like, “Oh man, you’re from up here? Oh man, where you from?” Or whatever. “Man, we should hang out or whatever.” You know what I’m saying?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

TTK:
Because I really didn’t see many of us up there or whatever, man. But anyway, so whenever me and Justice connected, it was like he put me onto so much. And I talk about it all the time. He showed me that everything that I wanted to be, I could be it. This guy’s the same age as me, similar interest and everything, come from similar backgrounds, and this guy is doing all the things that I wanted to do in life at that point. He just encouraged me.And at the time, I didn’t own computer, I didn’t own anything. The only thing I knew how to do was to paint and just hustle and just do art. And he told me, he was like, “Bro, you’re a brand and you don’t even realize it. You created a brand in a barracks room and people are buying your work from all over the world.” He’s like, “You’re special, man.” He was like, “Yo, you really need to get out the Navy, man.” He’s like, “Yo, I can get you a job right now.” I’m like, “Well, I’m under contract.” He’s like, “You can’t break it?” I’m like, “Nah, I can’t break this contract. I get out in…: At the time, I think I had five more years left because I had just reenlisted.

Yeah man, I owe a lot to Justice, man. He credits me for giving him a breath of fresh air and inspiring him as well, but I thank him all the time, man, because if I never met him, I think I would’ve got to where I needed to go eventually, but it would’ve probably taken a little bit longer. Like I said, at the time when I met Just, this is 2006. He’s showing me his portfolio. I didn’t even have a portfolio at the time, I just had some photos of my work that I took. And I took him to the pharmacy at the time to get the photos developed [inaudible 00:37:03] or whatever, man. Like I said, I didn’t know, I was very, very green. You know what I’m saying? I didn’t know. I knew I got a good product and I just know how to hustle. That’s the only thing I knew.

He’s showing me all his credentials and everything, he’s telling me about, “Yo, I work with Kanye.” This is during the Touch the Sky era and all of that, man. He’s showing me this. He’s showing the brands he’s worked on. I’m like, “I did this cool sneaker for my man right here.” You know what I’m saying? He was like, “Don’t even worry about the credentials. It’s going to come, man. You trust me. You got it.” Once I met him and I saw what I wanted to be, it was no turning back after that. I was like, “Yo, I’m getting out. I’m getting out. I’m going to figure it out one way or another.”

Fast forward, I don’t know, I can’t do the math right now, 15 so years later I’m here talking to you, bro. There’s a lot of stuff in between that I’m jumping over, but, yeah, I’m here, I’m here. And I think I’ve done a lot of great stuff. My name is in places where I only dreamed about, or I’ve worked on things where when I was a teenager only dreamed about working on or thought it would be cool if I got to work on this or connect with this person and work on this project. And I did it. I’m still doing it. Sorry for the long rant, yo.

Maurice Cherry:
No, no, it’s all good. Let’s hop forward to 2011. That’s when you got out of the Navy. You had been in the Navy for roughly about a decade. And then right afterwards, you enrolled in City Tech, which is a university in New York city. Talk to me about that time.

TTK:
It was interesting, man, because I was so hyped to get out and just be a civilian again because… In fact, most people didn’t even know that I was in the Navy because I was doing so much my artwork, putting my work out there. By this time, I’m not really even doing sneakers anymore, I’m painting, and people know me for my paintings. It was an interesting time. But I knew just from my first time going to college in the late ’90s, I’m like, “All right, things are getting… It’s digital now.” I just can’t see myself going to school to pay to be a fine artist. Nothing against people who do. You know what I’m saying? But for me, like I said, I had bills. You know what I’m saying? I still had some kids to support. I’m like, “All right, how can I be creative and get paid to be creative?”I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I knew the process of applying for art colleges just from the past, but I’m like, damn, I don’t really have any work that represents what people are looking for in this current state of the world, 2011. And I was like, “Man, I know I got the skills, but I don’t necessarily have the work to show it.”

A good friend of mine, he told me, he was like, “Yo, why don’t you go to City Tech?” I’m like, “What’s City Tech?” He was like, “You can get the same education there at a fraction of a price.” He was like, “A lot of the teachers that teach there, they teach you the big name schools as well.” And he’s like, “Yo, dude, you don’t even got to do a portfolio, you just go and you show up. Just apply.”

I went to City Tech, I applied, I got in. And within maybe, I don’t know, two weeks of me getting out the Navy, it’s my first day of class. And the first year or so I’m trying to figure out, all right, what do I want to do? I didn’t feel like I was being challenged. And then maybe almost around the first year of me being there, I was in a class with this professor named Douglas Davis. Whether he knows it or not, he’s the person that really inspired me to stay at City Tech because I met him in the first day of his class. I saw he was speaking in a language that I understood. And I just liked the way he just came across in the room. You know what I’m saying?I’ll never forget this. This is over 10 years ago, but the first day of class, he comes in, he looks… He’s not much older than me so he looks young, he looks like he could possibly be a student at the time. He comes in and he says, “My name is Douglas Davis.” He’s like, “What I do, I get money.” He said, “You listen to me, you’ll get money too.” And he says something, I think he says, “I’m surprised. I remember it was yesterday.” He said, “My wife, she don’t got to work. I bring home enough money to support my family doing what I love.” He’s like, “You listen to me, I’m going to give you everything that I got. But when I ask for it back, you better give me 100%. I’m going to run this class like it’s an agency. If this ain’t going to be for you, I’m not going to judge you. I’ll help you get to where you need to be. But if you here for the ride, let’s work.”

And I was like, oh, man. I never heard no professor in the classroom talk like that. And I was like, wow. His whole presence. He’s saying what I want to hear. Yeah, man, and that really put me on the path of going the route of learning about advertising and the stuff that I’ve been seeing for my whole entire life and just wondering why, wow, I like the way this ad looks, but I can’t explain why I like it. Being around him and other professors as well, but that really… I guess I feel like it cemented me in at City Tech where it’s like, all right, I’m not going anywhere because I like studying under this guy right here, I like studying under this other professor right here. They’re talking in the language that I want to, you know what I’m saying? That I want to hear. And they’re telling me the things that I need to know to apply to what I do already. Yeah man, that’s how I ended up at City Tech.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, shout out to Douglas Davidson who we’ve had on the show twice now. That’s the first time I’ve heard his classroom style, though. But as you described it, I was like, “Yeah, that’s 100% him.”

TTK:
Yo man, I tell you, he’s a great guy. No joke, man, when I was in his class, I felt like I was on… What’s the one show? Making the Band or something like that, you know what I’m saying? Because I didn’t want to mess up, you know what I’m saying? I didn’t want to mess up.

The nights leading up to the days when we had to present, he was like, “Yo, when the door is shut, the door is shut. If you not in, you not in.” I would make sure I’m on the train early, that way I’m not late to class that day and everything. I have everything set up, staying up all night just trying to get it right and just going up there. Because he didn’t hold any punches or whatever like that, he really ran it, his classroom… He didn’t run it like a classroom, he ran it like it was an agency, like it was a business. He’s a great guy, man. You can tell he really cared about what the people that… The students that he was working with. And he was there. He’s a real special person, man, he’s a real special person. And he’s someone that I’m very happy that I was blessed to meet in my journey along the way.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Speaking of that journey, you documented a lot of this in a recent project that you released called Just Like Me. You directed it, you put the whole thing together. Douglas was in it as well. Talk to me about the documentary. First of all, why did you decide to do a documentary?

TTK:
With the documentary, that came about… Well, actually it’s a idea I’ve had in my head for many, many years but I just never really talked about it. I didn’t really talk about it to anyone; maybe one person. But it’s just something that I had in the back of my head. I was like, if the opportunity presents itself, it’d be cool to make this thing. It’s just something like a passion project.

And the opportunity came sooner than what I thought it was going to come in life. But around the time… In 2020, summer 2020, everybody’s in the house, the pandemic, COVID, all that stuff, and then the incident with George Floyd, all these agencies and companies having, I don’t know, a coming of age moment. We didn’t know. You know what I’m saying? What can we do to support Black people? Or whatever like that, man.

That was a moment in time where someone said to me… A real good friend of mine, a mentor as well, he said to me, “This is a moment in time where you need to use this opportunity to make what you want to make and do what you want to do, because I know you can do it.” And when he said it to me, I’m just thinking from a point of having anxiety and just fear of what’s the worst thing that could happen? This could happen, this could happen. And I just brushed it off.

And he came to me, he was like, “Yo, look man, make what you want to make.” I’m paraphrasing right now, but he said to me, “Your story is a very, very special story. How does someone go from working on nuclear submarines to knowing all the people that you know and working on the stuff that you worked on? You really have an interesting story.” And he said, “I’m not telling you what you should make or whatever, but you got something.” And I was like, all right. He was like, “I’ll help you get to a certain point with putting the pieces together, but after that, you running the show.” Because I’m like, “I’ve never directed a documentary. I’ve been around when documentaries are being made from my time working at Mass Appeal and I saw how much work goes into making a documentary. I know it’s a lot of work. He was like, “Don’t worry, you have what it takes.”

And I was like, “All right, I’ll put some days aside.” I wrote up three paragraphs, three, four paragraphs. I talk about basically the moment, this particular moment in time about how people were talking about the state of Black people in America with all the whole George Floyd’s things and the police incidents. It’s nothing new, it always happens, but the spotlight was on it in that moment in time.

Like I said, plus these companies are talking about, “Yo, we need to bring in more diversity,” and all this other things like that. I thought about why is it that there aren’t many Black people and there aren’t many brown people in these spaces of creativity?| And I’m like, “Why is that?” And I start thinking about my own personal experiences, about how we don’t really hear about them. And it’s like, I know a lot of Black creators, but the average person don’t know who these people are. But they’ve done a lot of great things and they’ve contributed to a lot of things that are historic now. And I’m sure you know, with you doing your podcast, you know we create a lot of great things that everyone knows and a lot of people benefit from, but a lot of times people don’t know who the wizard was behind the curtain that created this thing.

And I thought about too about why there aren’t many of us in these spaces. And I thought about a lot of us don’t know that this path exists until maybe much later in life when people got bills, they got families to support and they give up on being a creative. They give up on it because there’s always this narrative of being a starving artist. And that’s not true.

Going back to something Douglas David said to me once, and I always quote it, he says, “This thing called design is like the Matrix.” You know what I’m saying? “It affects all of us. We all work, operate in the Matrix and everything, but you’ll never know the Matrix exists until someone points it out to you.” And that’s like how design is. Everything is designed, everything, but most people don’t think about the whole process of that and how it interacts with us. And I thought about, wow, more of us, more Black people knew about this at an early age and were aware that you can make a living off of this, you’re not going to be a starving artist, I felt like you could see more of us in these spaces. And in order for me to try to educate more people on it, I wanted to show people who were influential to me. There are many people who are influential to me, but I wanted to show a few Black men and women who I’m blessed to cross paths with them in my journey and what they meant to me.

And not only just show who these people are, show their work because a lot of times I feel like when it comes to designers and things like that, or just anything… I’m losing my train of thought. But I feel like we will show a person and we’ll have the title, but a lot of times you don’t know the work that they’ve done.

I think about if I was 16 or 17 years old, I might not know what a creative director is. I might not even understand what a ad agency is, but I know this Nike shoe right here, I know this commercial right here, and now I can connect the dots like, oh man, this is the person to help put this thing together right here. You know what I’m saying? Show the work. That’s what I wanted to do with the project. I wanted to show some people who that were like me and the work that they’ve done and the work that have had impact on so many other people. And I pretty much wanted to make something that I would’ve loved to have seen when I was younger.

Sorry for the long spiel, but I wrote up a short paragraph explaining that, about how representation is very important, representation is very important. You need to see examples of a roadmap of people that have done things before you that can hopefully inspire you to want to go down that path.

And I also told a story in the pitch about when me and Justice met each other, when mt man Justice hall, when me and him met each other in the early 2000s, why were we surprised that we were both Black? We were surprised because we don’t see many of us so it’s a shock whenever we do find it, you know?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

TTK:
At that time. And I pitched it and I got the green light, you know what I’m saying? I got the green light. And I reached out to everyone from St. Adams to Douglas Davis to Julian Alexander, Aleesha Smalls Worthington, Dana Gibbons, John Petty III, and Justice, Justice Hall. I reached out to them, and they were all on board.

I connected with my man… He’s a creative director, he’s a director as well, my man, Ben Hype. And me and him came up with the whole creative look and vision, and we put it together. I just knew working on this right here, I knew that I wanted to make something visually appealing, visually, visually dope. The message is dope, but I want the visuals to be engaging as well where when someone’s watching it, they’re not going to want to look away because it’s just a beautiful piece. And I thought about what’s the series on Netflix? Abstract.

Maurice Cherry:
Abstract. Yeah.

TTK:
You know what I’m saying? Out of what two seasons, they may feature one Black woman or person of color.

Maurice Cherry:
They had Ralph Gilles in the first season, and then in the second season they had… Oh God, they had Ian Spalter, who’s head of Instagram in Japan, and they had Ruth E. Carter, the costumer. They had her.

TTK:
Right, right. This is just my opinion. I feel like that just an afterthought, like, “Oh, we got to check a box,” or whatever. You know what I’m saying? And Abstract is a great series, but if you go off of that, you would think Black designers don’t exist. You know what I’m saying? Don’t get me wrong, we’re rare, but it’s not as rare as how that series made it seem. You know what I’m saying? There’s a lot of us. But that’s what I wanted to show. Yo, we’re walking in plain sight every day, and we put a lot of things out into the world that you seen but you probably didn’t know that, hey, I’m the person behind this right here because…

And not even to sound the cliche or stereotypical, but whenever you… A lot of times when they think of basketball courts or sports, you think of a Black man. You know what I’m saying? When you think of entertainment or whatever, you think of Black people. But what about all these other roles and titles out there that we’ve contributed a part of, been a part? And I wanted to show this right here. But not show it in a preachy way or like I’m giving a lecture, I wanted to do it in a way that’s conversational.

And I credit my man, Brandon Coleman. He’s a designer. He’s another one of the first Black designers I ever met when I met Justice at the time. But he gave me the inspiration to go that route because like I said, I never done this before, I never directed anything before. I know what I wanted to see and I know that I want it to look good, I want it to be visually appealing. But he asked me a question early on. He said, “How do you want tell your message? Do you want to have a lecture or do you want it to be conversational?” And I was like, “I don’t know, a lecture?” He was like, “No, you want to have a conversation. Put yourself back into the 16, 17 year old version of you, TTK. Did you like when people were preaching to you? Or did you like when when people were having a conversation back and forth?” He said, “I don’t know how you’re going to do it, but think about that whenever you’re trying to put this story together.

And that helped me with the whole creative direction. Whenever Ben Hype was filming it, I told him, I was like, “Yo, I want you to show the people, show their hands, show them moving around, show closeups of them.” I want you to feel like you’re in the room with these people. I want you to feel like you know them. And even though if you may not know them or whatever, but you konw their work. But I want the people, when they view this, I want them to feel like it’s an intimate moment, like you’re close with these people, like you’re talking to a cousin or someone who’s a part of your family or a friend that you’ve known for years. And I think I was able to accomplish that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, the documentary is really great. And we’ll put a link to it in the show notes so people can check it out. We’ve had Julian on the show too. Julian is episode 250, I believe.

TTK:
Oh, wow.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. But no, it’s a great documentary. I hope everybody will get a chance to check it out. When you had the idea and you put it all together, like what we talked about I think before we started recording about you never know how it’s going to be received. What has the reception been like since the documentary’s aired?

TTK:
It’s been good, it’s been very, very good. It’s slow, you know what I’m saying? It’s slow or whatever. But so far I haven’t had anyone say anything, “I wish you could have done it this way or whatever, this and that.” The response is always the same, “This is amazing. I never seen anything quite like this before. And it’s very real, and I feel inspired.” I did it. That’s what I wanted to do.
Like I said, when I initially pitched the idea, I said I wanted to make something that’s meant to educate and inspire. Whatever comes after that is just a extra benefit. I wanted to make something that lives beyond this particular moment in time where if you watch it a year from now, two years, five years, whatever, it’s the educational piece. And I want people to be inspired by… I want to hopefully inspire the next generation of Black creatives out there to show, hey, these are people that are alive right now and they’re doing it versus I’m hearing about somebody who did some great things back in 1970. I’m like, wow, I’m hearing about it from someone else’s perspective versus hearing it from the person when they’re alive right now.

I’m going off on a rant right now or whatever, but I think about how Cey adams that’s featured in a documentary, why isn’t he taught about in schools? You pay this money to go to school for design and everything, you learn about all these other designers, and they’re great people and they’ve done great things, man, I love the work, but Cey is on that level of, in my opinion, the Paula Schers and all those other people out there because he’s done so much stuff that people know. They know his work but unless you’re into this thing called design, you probably wouldn’t even know who Cey is. And I feel like he’s someone who should’ve probably been on the Abstract series. This man was around in the ’70s, New York, going from graffiti on trains to his work in the ’80s to the ’90s, to being in, what, the National African American Smithsonian Museum. Come on. You know what I’m saying?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

TTK:
And I’m skipping over 40 years worth of work right here because it is too much to talk about that he’s accomplished in his lifetime. Why isn’t he taught about in school? And it goes back to what I was saying, when you think of design, they don’t think of us. And I was like, “Yo, I’m not making this to ask for a seat at the table, I want to make this to just educate us and show us, tell these stories from a real perspective versus someone years later to tell the narrative a certain way.” I’m like, “I want you to hear from the people while they’re alive, people who are heroes to me, people who, whether they know it or not…” I took a little bit from all of them to get to this point right here. I want other people to be inspired as well to accomplish things that I didn’t accomplish or we didn’t accomplish, but a lot sooner.

Maurice Cherry:
I feel you 100%. I can liken it to what I do with Revision Path, with having folks on here. I’ve been able to have people on here at different parts of their career journey. There’s folks who I’ve had on maybe in 2014 that now I can bring back seven or eight years later and be like, “Let’s talk about how things have changed,” or something. You know?

TTK:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
I totally get that. Actually, I have a funny story. Well, I don’t know if it’s funny, but I have a story about Abstract. This was in 2019 I think was when the second season was about to come out. And I had watched the first season. Well, I’m not going to lie, I watched Ralph Gilles’ episode on Abstract for the first season and that’s it because I was like, I don’t want to hear about everybody else. I was like, I’m going to watch his.

And the place I was working at the startup at the time, and we were looking for design firms for a project that we were going to do, this lifestyle vertical. And so one of the agencies we reached out to was Godfrey Dadich, which is in San Francisco. The Abstract series came from Godfrey being Scott Dadich, who was the former co-founder of Wired. And I didn’t talk to him directly, but I talked to someone at the agency because I was like,” Yeah, my name is Maurice Cherry,” blah blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. And they were like, “Oh, we know who you are.” I was like, “Oh, okay.” I wasn’t coming to them in a personal capacity, it was a professional capacity. And not even for the show, it was for my employer at the time.

They were talking to me about the second season of Abstract. They’re like, “Oh yeah, the second season of Abstract is coming out.” And they were like, “I bet you’re really going to be excited about this because we got two Black designers for this season.” And I’m like, “Why would I be excited about that?” Yay, you found two, but I’ve found hundreds. I mean, I don’t know if they were saying it to be solidarity or something. I don’t know, I just thought that was weird that they brought it up in that way. We ended up not going with them, not for that reason. But I was like, “Okay, I’ll check it out when it airs on Netflix.” They’re like, “Yeah, we managed to find two great Black designers. I’m like-

TTK:
We managed to find.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, we managed to find, which is funny that they said that, because I was like, one, I’ve known Ian. Actually, I did an event here in 2017 back when he was… Well, he still works for Meta and everything with Instagram. But I met him at a live event here in Atlanta for Revision Path. And then Ruth, I don’t know Ruth, but I’ve had Ruth’s goddaughter on the show, Courtney Pinter. She lives in Switzerland. I think at the time she was doing flavor design for this company called Givaudan. Now she works for Fifa. But I’ve also had Hannah Beachler to give the Black Panther connection. I had her on the show for episode 300.

Your overarching point around the importance of being able to have people give their own history in their own words is super important because when I started Revision Path, and this was almost 10 years ago, that’s not to say that these stories weren’t out there, but they were really hard to find. And one of the few places that I found them was at AIGA when I started volunteering there with the diversity and inclusion task force. Because they would do these design journeys things and they would talk about folks. But even the way that they… The imagery and everything almost memorialized them. And keep in mind, these people are not dead, but they memorialize them in this way like they’ve gone on to greater things. And I’m like, these folks are still alive. What are you talking about?

TTK:
And they’re active, too. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, and active. Michelle Washington’s one of the first people that I had met through that. Her and I are working on the book together. Maurice Woods, who’s been on the show before, Maurice Woods of the Interact Project. I think he’s episode 12 or 13. Emery Douglas from the famous former Minister of Culture from the Black Panther Party, AIGA medalist, he’s been on the show. That was episode 15. But I didn’t find out about those folks until I volunteered and did that. And the way that even they just put it out there made it seem like these are not living people still doing work, it was almost like in memoriam. Nah.

TTK:
Yeah, that’s like when we was putting the pieces together for Lust Like Me, Douglas Davis, he connected me with Cheryl D. Miller. I don’t know if you know her.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, yeah.

TTK:
Yeah, oh man.

Maurice Cherry:
She’s episode 248.

TTK:
I felt like I was sitting with royalty talking to her. You know what I’m saying? Me and Davis had some questions to ask her. Man, once she started talking, man, the questions just went out the window. She was just dropping so many jewels and so much history and stuff, man. And it’s like, wow, how come I didn’t know this woman’s story? I’m happy that I spoke to her while she’s alive saying, you know what I’m saying? Hear it straight from… It’s from the source.

And she said something. Well, I don’t know if you remember, but at the very end of the documentary, Just Like Me, there’s a quote from her at the very, very end before the credits. When we were talking, she said something, “It’s sad that your generation has to experience the same thing I experienced 50 something years ago around the time when Dr. King died.” She was like, “Yo, all these companies had an awakening moment for about a year or two, maybe less than that.” And she was like, “And this is what’s happening right now because of George Floyd. These companies are having an awakening moment, but it’s going to fizzle out,” unfortunately, man.

When you say we can have all the different programs, DEI, all this, whatever, if you want to change it, change it. And she said something too. She was like, “Yo, if they try to tell you that we didn’t exist, that’s a lie.” She’s like, “I’m fortunate that I got all of this stuff because I was alive and I archived it.”

Like a magician, she pulls out a issue of Communication Arts from 1970. And I ordered it because of her. She was like, “This is one of the first…” This is what from 50 years ago, she just pulls this magazine out. She was like, “This right here on page whatever, 90 something or whatever, you see the Black designers right here? This is 1970 right here, so if they try to tell you that the only person that was out doing things is Milton Glazer and all those guys like that,” she was like, “nah, he was just the only person that was getting the work. That’s why you knew about him. But these other people were out here as well. And here, this is their work right here on.” And she said, “I got it in the archives right here, so nobody can ever try to pull the wool over my eye.”

And when I got that issue, I was able to back order it online, and I saw Ms. Dorothy Hayes, she was a Black designer as well. And I used to see she was a professor at City Tech. And I never knew that this woman was one of the first Black designers ever published. You know what I’m saying? I had no clue. I never had any of her classes, but I would just see her in passing. And I’m like, wow, there’s so much history that we have. And that’s why I feel like we got to tell our stories before… Tell them in real time and tell them authentic and speak to the people who needs to hear it because you already know how it goes, man, years later, the narrative, it gets switched up and it gets watered down. That’s not how it really was. Yeah, man, salute to you for what you do, man. I’m honored to be a part of this right here.

Maurice Cherry:
Thank you. And yeah, Cheryl is 100% right about that. When I ran across Cheryl, this was in 20… Now you got me here telling stories. This was 2014, and I had just started doing volunteer stuff with Revision… Not Revision Path, with AIGA, started doing volunteer stuff. And that’s when I learned about her thesis that she did in 1985 when she was at Pratt about Black designers and their viability in the industry and how that became this 1987 print article, and then there was this AIGA symposium.

And I’m doing all this research trying to find… Well, one, doing the research on what happened from that thesis, but then secondly, I wanted to put it into this presentation that I was putting together that I was going to present called Where Are the Black Designers? And I was like, is Cheryl still alive? And I remember asking folks at AIG, and they were like, “Well, we don’t know what happened to her.” I was like, “Let me find her.”And I found her. How did I find Cheryl? Oh, I know, I found her on Amazon. Wow. She had written a book about her mother. It wasn’t even about design, it was about her mother and the relationship she had with her mother and everything growing up. I just found her book, eventually did some more searching, found a website, reached out on a whim and was like, “I’m Maurice Cherry. I’m doing this research. I’m putting this stuff together. I’d love to talk to you about this kind of stuff.”

When I first encountered Cheryl, like I said back in 2014, she had put design behind her. She had had her design work and stuff. She had, I wouldn’t say retired, but she raised a family, became a theologian. She was living a totally different life. And then since then, of course, doing the presentation and then more people finding out about her work, now she’s Dr. Cheryl Miller and has given lectures across the country and doing all amazing stuff and is still here doing this stuff.

TTK:
That’s beautiful.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s beautiful, it’s beautiful. And so with Provision Path, I’m certainly fortunate to be able to share that story and to bring more awareness to people in general about what Black folks are doing in design everywhere. I just had this year my first Black designer in South America, which is something I wanted to have for a long time. I was like, I’m going to hit every continent. Couldn’t hit Antarctica, but I done talked to a Black designer on every continent so far start with 2022 this year with someone in South America. Yeah, I just want to keep going and keep telling more stories and getting more folks on here to tell their stories so folks know that we did exist.

To that end about the whole black squares thing, in 2020, that summer, I was looking up a bunch of old Ebony and Jet magazines and stuff. I think Google has the full archive, the full digital archive of Ebony Magazine, and so I was looking at issues from when Dr. King was assassinated. And when I tell you it was the exact same thing about companies posting black squares, exact same thing people were doing back then when King died, sometimes even the same verbiage. I’m like, this is wild, this is wild.

TTK:
And that’s one thing Ms. Miller was saying, she was like, “Just change it. You want to make change? Do it.” These people that have positions to do it, they don’t want to do it. This right here is a moment in time. Like she said, I’ve seen it before. I’m not even thrilled by it. You know what I’m saying?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

TTK:
I’m not thrilled by it at all. Just from her telling me… Hearing stories that I’ve never heard before. One day, thankfully, you’re doing what you’re doing so people will have,… We’re able to control our own narrative more so now. It was great, but at the same time, it’s bittersweet as well, you know?

Maurice Cherry:
Right, right.

TTK:
Because wow, man, I’m experiencing the same thing my elders experienced. How come I don’t know about Cheryl Miller, the woman who created the original BET logo? You know what I’m saying? Something that’s a part of my childhood. Why more people don’t know about who this woman is right here?

I’m honored that I was able to speak with her and basically just sit and listen to her talk, you know what I’m saying? Just sit and listen to her talk. And to have a quote from her in the documentary, I was like, man, that was a great book end on it. It was a real book end to the project. Like I said, when you watch it, in the very beginning it says how it started, and at the end it says how it’s going. And you see her quote at the end, someone who’s been around that predates all of us. She predates even Cey, you know what I mean?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

TTK:
Who has 40 something years of work. She predates him. To have someone like a OG basically, a vet, to have her to be a part of the project, man, I’m thankful. I’m thankful for everybody that was a part of helping me put this project together, Just Like Me. Man, I’m thankful for everybody, man. But yeah, Cheryl Miller’s amazing.

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

TTK:
I want to be known as a painter more. I want to be known as that. I want to do gallery shows, more of them. Because in the past where I was just doing art shows myself, and I was just happy if I was able to fill the room with friends and stuff like that and create a memory. I want to sell my work on a high level. I want to work with more brands, but I want to be working with brands because they want to work with me, not because I need a job. I want to bring my personal creativity and my expertise to the table. “Yo, we want to collab with you. We love your story.”

And I want another opportunity to make a project, another project like Just Like Me but bigger. I know when you watch the documentary, it looks like it was… Yeah, it’s put together very, very well, but oh man, we were building the car while we were driving it, making this thing right here. We were really making something out of nothing, but it looks like it’s on a high level so I would really like to have a chance to make something maybe… I don’t know if it’s the same type of topic or something completely different. I wouldn’t mind directing another project.

All in all, I just want to continue to be creative, continue to make a living, and live comfortable using my imagination, man. I don’t know where it’s going to go in the next five years, but I’m speaking into existence right now what I want. And truthfully, I feel like I can’t even fathom what’s going to be for me because it’s going to be something that I’m not even expecting. You know what I’m saying? Just this documentary, just like…

We didn’t mention it, but working on a project for Nas, you know what I’m saying? Well, I worked on a few project for Nas but having my name and the credits next to Nas and Kanye, you know what I’m saying? Wow, you can’t erase my name from this project. You know what I’m saying? I’ve worked on this right here. You know what I’m saying? If you would’ve told me at the time 15 years ago that, “Hey, you’re going to work on this project. You’re going to be the person who designs and put this thing together,” I’m like, “How is that going to happen?” I couldn’t… I’d imagine it, but I was like, wow, it seemed like a fairytale. But the have, I did it, and it’s a thing of the past now, I’m onto something new, wow, that’s great.

And if you would’ve told me three years ago that I would direct a documentary, I’m like, “How would I do that?” And that’s going back to what I was initially saying, five years from now, I just want to be doing something great and making a living and just putting the best stuff out into the world, man.

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

TTK:
Multiple ways. You can check out my site artbyttk.com. That’s A-R-T-B-Y-T-T-K.com. You can check my IG as well. It’s instagram.com/gottkgo. You can pretty much find me anywhere online with that, Go TTK Go.

And if you want to watch the documentary, Just Like Me, it’s on my site as well, man, but it’s also you can go to the actual micro site. The site is justlikeme-havas, that’s H-A-V-A-S, .com. jsutlikeme-havas.com. And you can read a little bit about the project, a short description of it and the creation of it. And you can watch the documentary. The documentary’s only… It’s just in the 30 minutes, but it’s strong. It’s a very powerful piece that I’m really proud of. I always say that project is my magnum opus project at the moment. Yeah, that’s where you can find me at.

Maurice Cherry:
TTK, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show, one, for sharing your story, which again, I hope people will check out the documentary so they can get a chance to see it for themselves, but also just your whole story about perseverance and pursuing your creative passion. I think that’s something that hopefully a lot of people can get inspired by. And I’m excited to see what you do next. If this documentary is any indication, I’m pretty sure what’s coming up next is going to be great. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

TTK:
No, brother, thank you for having me on here. Thank you. Also want to thank my partner, Chevon, because she was very vigilant about trying to get me on your show. Thank you to Chevon as well, man. And she’s @chevonmedia on IG and on Twitter. Yeah, thank you to Chevon. I’m honored to be a part of this. And maybe, I don’t know, five years from now, maybe you’ll reach out to me to revisit what’s going on in my life for whatever project I got going on, man.

Maurice Cherry:
There you go. All right.

TTK:
Yeah.

Sponsored by Hover

Hover

Building your online brand has never been more important and that begins with your domain name. Show the online community who you are and what youโ€™re passionate about with Hover. With over 400+ domain name extensions to choose from, including all the classics and fun niche extensions, Hover is the only domain provider we use and trust.

Ready to get your own domain name? Go to hover.com/revisionpath and get 10% off your first purchase.

Reggie Tidwell

It takes a lot of drive and determination to chart your own course, and no one embodies those qualities better than this week’s guest. As the creative director (and founder) of Curve Theory, Reggie Tidwell has provided beautiful and effective design, branding, photography, and videography work to clients for over 20 years.

We talked about the secret to Reggie’s longevity as a creative entrepreneur, and he shared his story about growing up in St. Louis, studying graphic design, and his early post-grad career as a Flash designer in the beginning days of the World Wide Web. Reggie also spoke about what brought him to North Carolina, and about his work in bringing an AIGA chapter to Asheville. Reggie is a prime example of what being a steward of design and giving back to your community looks like!

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

Reggie Tidwell:
Hey, I’m Reggie Tidwell and I am a graphic designer and a professional photographer as well as a videographer, which I do on occasion as well. I tell stories.

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

Reggie Tidwell:
Wow, it has been a great year. Bought a house.

Maurice Cherry:
Congratulations.

Reggie Tidwell:
Thank you. I also have had my best financial career last year. Everything has culminated to that, and this year seems to be on track to even beat that, so that’s super exciting.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, that’s real good. That’s real good. I mean, even with all of that, is there anything in particular that you want to try to accomplish before the year ends?

Reggie Tidwell:
Yeah, I mean, once you own a house, there’s always house stuff that you want to accomplish, but professionally, man, things have just been falling into place and sort of a beautiful way that I feel just very excited. I’m going to be doing all of the photography for… So I’m a huge fan of the outdoors and nature landscape photography. I do a lot of that for Explore Asheville, which is our big tourism division here in Asheville, and the Gray Smoking Mountain Association has reached out and they’re going to have me do all the photography for their new book on Cade’s Cove, which is a really beautiful spot in the Smokies. So if you’ve ever been to Great Smokey Mountain National Park, it’s our biggest and most visited national park in the country and it’s absolutely gorgeous. But I’m super excited. I’m going to be doing all the photos for the book, so I’ll get a book cred.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice. Congratulations on that.

Reggie Tidwell:
Thank you, sir.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s talk about your company Curve Theory. Now, Curve Theory has been around for over 20 years, which I definitely have to tip my hat to you. I ran a studio for nine years and I know how much goes into that. So 20, over 20 years, I think. What, 21 now, right?

Reggie Tidwell:
21 years. 21. I’m in my 21st year. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What’s been the key to your longevity?

Reggie Tidwell:
Quite honestly, it’s building relationships. I’ve never advertised. It really is a combination of building relationships and being passionate about the work that I do. I love designing photography, I love being a creative, I love people. And so it just makes sense that I would be able to maintain this business because it’s all the things that I love and things that I would be doing anyway. I’m always building relationships. I always tell people, and I always think it’s a funny little bit of a factoid about me. I don’t typically just add people on Facebook that I don’t know, and I’ve got 3000 plus connections on Facebook and every single one of them is someone that I know. I had either a meaningful conversation with and align somewhere, or they’re friends in real life or I served on the board with them, or whatever the case may be. They’re all real connections and when you think about that, that’s a lot of… Exponentially the more people, the sort of more you can grow your network. This business for me is really about being present and available.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s really good for Facebook. I think Facebook and probably a lot of social media networks now have really enabled this way to just collect friends, almost like you’re, I don’t know, collecting trading cards or something like that without really having any intentionality behind it. The way that you’re about connections on Facebook. That’s how I am on LinkedIn. I’m really, unless I’ve worked with you or I know you personally or something like that, we met at a conference or something, we’ve had a conversation. That’s usually the only way that I’ll add people. Although now, lately I have gotten a little lax and well, partly because I let them stack up. So I’ll go months without adding anyone on LinkedIn and all of a sudden I’ve got a hundred connections. I’m like, “Oh, I should probably go through these and see who I know.” And I tell people, write a note to let me know how we know each other. And I mean some of them are just sales calls and what have you, but…

Reggie Tidwell:
So many of those.

Maurice Cherry:
But in terms of the power of the network, I got laid off recently and I posted I think two posts on LinkedIn about it and I was flabbergasted by how my network showed up and spread the word and put me in connection with other people. And I’ve had some great conversations and such, so…

Reggie Tidwell:
That’s amazing.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, there’s this author Porter Gale who says your network is your net worth. I totally believe that. Absolutely.

Reggie Tidwell:
Totally. Yeah. I get so much business from those connections on Facebook. I mean, quite honestly, it’s just doing stuff, especially from the photography side of my business. I’ll post a photo and I’m constantly posting photos and I do also on LinkedIn. Ultimately what ends up happening is because you’re constantly putting content out when someone thinks a photography and someone says, “Hey, do you know a great photographer?” You should be in someone’s very short list of their mental Rolodex. And that’s what happened. I get calls all the time. Hey, so and so… I mentioned on Facebook that I was looking for a drone photographer or a lifestyle photographer, a commercial photographer, whatever, and they mention you.

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

Reggie Tidwell:
So for me, it’s nice being a designer and a photographer because on any given day, I never know it could bring me being out in a field on a photo shoot, it could bring me in a brand strategy session with a client, or a discovery session with a new branding client, whatever it is. It’s nice because my days aren’t always the same. I get to travel, I get to, for instance tomorrow I’m going to be in another area of North Carolina for a commercial shoot for pretty much much of the day, starting at Golden Color. And it’s nice. And then Friday I’m in the studio all day, probably editing photos from that shoot and rounding out a logo for another client.

Maurice Cherry:
So you include your photography as part of your design service, so I guess company services, I should say?

Reggie Tidwell:
Kind of. Occasionally the two will intertwine, usually the two intertwine when I’m doing web designing. So if I’m designing a website for a client, a lot of times because I know exactly what kind of images the client needs, I can add it as part of my service to do a lifestyle shoot of their company or their clientele, and then that can get baked into their website. And I’m working with my own images. I can control a lot more effort that way. But yeah, it happens. It doesn’t happen as much because I don’t do as much web design as I used to. I’m probably doing about two or three sites a year where I used to do quite a bit.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Back when I had my studio, I wound things down from the design end, I’d say roughly around in the mid 2010s because there was certainly a market for bespoke web design. They want, people wanted a particular website theme or something like that. But now with all these website builders out here, people are taking the design element, or at least the modular parts or the design process into their own hands. And it’s like, yeah, I don’t really need bespoke anymore. And so I ended up doing more consulting because you were able to shift like that. So it’s interesting now because I’m looking for work at the moment and people are like, “Oh, okay, you redesign a website?” I’m like, Ah. I mean I haven’t done it in a long time maybe.

Reggie Tidwell:
Right.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, I’m probably not your first choice for that, but I get what you mean. People, they hear design and of course if you have an online presence and a website, that’s the first thing they think about is, “Oh, can you design a website or can you redesign a website?”

Reggie Tidwell:
I think depending on the client, I do still see value in bespoke. I feel like ultimately I’ll end up doing a completely custom website where I’ll get to work with a developer and I’ll design the front end and we can work beautifully and make something really amazing. But that doesn’t happen as often as I would like. But I do find the builders have actually worked for me because especially if you know them, there’s Divi and Elementor, there’s a handful of other ones I’ve been using Divi for a while, and though it can be a little bit verbose in it’s code, I find that the flexibility of me being able to do something completely custom using mostly you doing custom CSS to some of their built in modules.
So I can build the content and lay out the content really quickly, then go in with CSS and really start to fine tune and make it exactly what I want it to be. That’s a nice, because I do work with very large clients and also small clients, that’s a really nice option for clients that don’t have six to 10 grand in their pocket to do a website. It’s just nice to have that as an option and for them to still get something that’s custom.

Maurice Cherry:
Speaking of which, what are the best types of clients for you to work with?

Reggie Tidwell:
Quite honestly, I’ve got a soft spot for the mom and pop shops, either they’re startups or they’ve been around for a while and it’s time to change things up. I love that transition of being able to help them renew their own passion in their business through that process. I’m working on the branding right now for an auction house that’s been around for decades. They’ve been on Antique Roadshow, so they’ve got a presence, but their brand look is a bit dated and they’ve started resting on their laurels a little bit because everything is just so tried and true. It is what it is. It’s been what it’s been. And they realize this time to shake things up a little bit. They want to expand their market a little bit, they want to… And so going through that process with them, it’s so rewarding because they’ve been living with the same logo for 20 years, or longer.
And to be able to see them embrace something that’s different, and it’s a fun process too with this particular client because they were like, “Yeah, we want some completely modern and avant garde.” And I went there, they were like, “Oh no. We love it, but we’re not ready yet.” And so, okay, that’s good. At least I know what your comfort level is. And so now I can dial it back and land exactly where we need to be. And then feeling them working through the resistance but then initially, not only acceptance, but oh my God, this is amazing. This is going to be really great for our company. We’re excited. That’s a great feeling.

Maurice Cherry:
So when a project, let’s say, comes in your inbox or something like that, what does your process look like when it comes to starting on new work?

Reggie Tidwell:
So I usually have a quick little meeting with the client just qualify whether or not we’re going to work well together and whether I’m the guy for the job. But then once that decision is made, I set up a discovery session where we really actually start to dig deep into the typical discovery questionnaire where you learn a little bit more about their business, their aspirations, what’s working, what’s not working, so I can better provide exactly what they’re looking for. I feel like, for me anyway, I feel like the key to being a good designer that makes happy clients and solves the right problems or solves problems in the right way is asking the right questions at the very beginning. So I’m all about being inquisitive. I want to know everything. And if you feel like it’s too much, it’s not.
Because at the end of the day when I’m digging into sketching out logo concepts or I’m coming up with a tagline or whatever that information that I’m going to be so thankful that I have it because I can go through and dig in for inspiration to recheck the direction that I’m going to make sure I’m headed in the right way. But yeah, it’s all about the Q and A, at the beginning.

Maurice Cherry:
So I see here on your website that you do a lot of volunteer work. You worked also with Leaf Community Arts. Can you talk to me a little bit about that?

Reggie Tidwell:
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So, Leaf Community Arts for me was a big part of, I did service work before that, but it probably to date was probably one of the biggest chapters in my life in terms of giving back. Leaf Community Arts is a nonprofit here in the Asheville area that they have teaching artists that go into the public school system and the neighborhood centers and basically recreation centers and they work with youth, teaching them poetry, dance, how to play the Djembe, how to do different types of art, visual art. It’s pretty amazing. And it gives kids this sense of ownership of something which I think is quite necessary, especially for the age range of students that they work with. But then they also have this other part that I was actually more aligned with was they do cultural preservation in First Nations, third world countries like [inaudible 00:16:38], and Uganda, and Rwanda, and Cuba, all these different places where there are cultures that have been around for ages and First Nations tribes that as the youth are becoming more westernized and the elders are dying off, these cultures are just vanishing.
There’s no evidence of their songs, or instrument making, or costumes, or any of it. And so what Leaf Community Arts did what they were partnering with an agency on the ground that was trying to do that cultural preservation and help raise money to do things like build recording studios, or hire artisans that know the native language to native songs, the instrument making, the dances. And they actually make it really cool for the youth where they’re putting their phones down, and totally engaging, and dancing, and singing. And I found that particularly interesting. I love the beauty of cultures, and how different cultures are, and how you can learn something completely and different from a culture that you never had experienced before.

Maurice Cherry:
And now are you still doing work with them? I know that now you’re also the new president of AIGA Asheville, the founding president, but have you waned your work with Leaf Community Arts?

Reggie Tidwell:
I have still a supporter of it. I worked all the way up to my presidency in 2017 and then my term ended. So I’m now board president emeritus. I’m still, the Leaf Community Arts people are family, they actually put on a huge music festival three times a year. I’ve met Arrested Development, Speech. Now we know each other by name. I’ve met, gosh, we’ve had Angelique Kidjo, and Mavis Staples, and Indigo Girls, and all these amazing bands that have come played. The Family Stone. But they put on this music festival in the spring and in the fall and this really beautiful place out in Black Mountain called, Black Mountain, North Carolina, called Lake Eden. And then they do one in downtown Asheville in the summer. And that basically raises money for all of the work that I mentioned before that they do with cultures and with the youth.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice. Nice. And we’ll talk more about your AIGA Asheville work a little bit later on in the interview. With everything that you do through Curve Theory, what gets you truly excited about your work?

Reggie Tidwell:
Man, I love to solve problems. Quite honestly. I love working with clients and trying to find out exactly what’s not working with them and helping come up with solutions that one, inspire and excite them. But then also they continue to propel me forward in my love of the work that I’m doing.

Maurice Cherry:
Now let’s dive a little bit into your personal story. You talk about this I think a bit on your website, but you grew up in St. Louis. Is that right?

Reggie Tidwell:
Born and raised?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Tell me about that.

Reggie Tidwell:
So I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. I was raised mostly by my grandmother, an amazing dad too, that was also in the picture. But most of my time was spent with my grandmother, who was an educator. She taught for 36 years and she was a huge supporter of education. And so in the summers where all my friends were out playing and running around, I had to do homework before I could go out and join them.
And of course I hated it then, but on some level I understood the importance of it and it would come into play in many periods throughout my life, just being someone that is studious. I ended up testing the highest in the seventh grade in language and math in the entire school that I was in seventh.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Reggie Tidwell:
In seventh grade. Which that said a lot about my grandmother’s dedication and how she worked it with me, but it wasn’t with a heavy hand. She just understood that she wanted me… I grew up in a very, I would say mean, just put it bluntly. It was a poor neighborhood, lot of gang violence, a lot of break-ins and theft. And I saw some pretty horrific things in my own neighborhood, just in my own alley. It wasn’t a place that I wanted to definitely grow up and grow old.
And so education for me was the key of being able to get to a more ideal situation. So I wouldn’t say I was a first generation college student. My mother had a degree music, actually two. She had wanted music and art, possibly three maybe in education. But my grandmother, of course was educated. And so it set me on my path to discover who I really wanted to be in the world. I think you had mentioned very briefly what was it that made me choose this path of design? But all that didn’t come quite easily.
I ended up pretty much blowing away my first couple years in St. Louis at a junior college called Florissant Valley. I think I had a 1.9 GPA because I wasn’t inspired. I picked business administration because I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. But you’re asking a 18 year old, 17 year old, 18 year old kid to decide what they want to do for the rest of their life. And yeah, of course I want to run a business. Oh yeah, business administration, that’s what you should do. But that’s such a broad topic. I wasn’t inspired.
I actually went from that student, at one point I was the student in the back of the class nodding off, not very inspired. The teacher would call on me and not only did I not know the answer to the question, I wouldn’t even know what the question was because I was probably asleep. So I ended up taking a break after four semesters of that, I said I got to do better. This isn’t going the way I wanted to go. So I ended up taking a semester off and really doing some deep diving and soul searching. I talked to my counselor at the school. I really thought long and heavy about what I liked and the things that I knew I liked were being creative. I was always drawing from the time I could hold a pencil, I was sketching and doodling. And so I always loved art. My mom was an artist, is an artist. And so that was an inspiration.
And so I went back to school. I decided at the time that I wanted to be an interior designer or a architect. And the path to both of those were mechanical drawing and a lot of drafting. And so that was all I needed to be inspired. I went from that student that I mentioned before to the student making the top score on every test in every class until I graduated. I went from a 1.9 GPA to a 3.2 GPA, graduated with honors and got my general transfer studies to go on to a four year college.

Maurice Cherry:
I know there’s that saying that goes, sometimes you have to do things that you don’t necessarily want to do to try to get to do the things that you do want to do. But I think also to that end, just from what you’re mentioning, that whole period of high school going into college, there’s so much pressure to try to decide exactly what it is you’re going to do. And I mean we also, I think have to put this in the context of just where the world was at this time. Because I’m guessing this is around early nineties. Early nineties.
And there was just this push, and I was mean I was in elementary school then, but I mean still there was this push to know exactly what it is that you’re going to do with your life at fairly early age. Look at the state of the world with what’s going on, what is it that you want to do? And for a lot of people it’s tough. I mean, even when I started out in college, I ended up switching majors because I thought I wanted to do one thing just based on societal norms and such. And then I was like, eh, I don’t really like it.

Reggie Tidwell:
I know. That’s a big part of it. I mean, thinking about it nowadays students take what they call a gap year. I am a firm supporter of that because I do feel like somebody that young needs to go out into the world a little bit and understand who they are. I mean, up to that point, they’ve just been a student studying all the basic electives. There’s nothing in that that would potentially produce career inspirations. Maybe you like math and maybe you like biology, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you want to be a mathematician, or a scientist, or a biologist.

Maurice Cherry:
Right.

Reggie Tidwell:
So yeah, I feel like that would’ve served me well. But thankfully I was able to make that comeback and find that inspiration.

Maurice Cherry:
You ended up going to Maryville, University of St. Louis and there you studied graphic design. Talk to me about that time.

Reggie Tidwell:
So yeah, actually Maurice, I started, remember I said I was interested in just interior design or architecture. That’s what got me to Maryville because they actually had a nice interior design program. And I got there in those first two years I thrived. I was still inspired and I was still being a great student and loving the experience. But at one point I got, so the way Maryville’s program was set up at the time was you did all your art electives and got all those out of the way, and your art electives as well. You got those out of the way the first two years and then you dove into your concentration.
Right as I was about to make that transition, I talked to my counselor, Nancy Rice, at the time and I was like, I don’t know if I want to do interior design. I like the sketching part, I like the conceptualizing, but then it’s all floor plans and elevations and it gets super technical and that’s the part that’s where I get lost. And this particular teacher who, it is funny because I’ll tell you this in a second. She basically told me, Reggie, you’re great at computers. You love computers. I’ve been working on computers since I was 15. My grandmother bought me a Commodore 64 and I was programming in basic, I was playing games. I became very comfortable in that computer world. The nerd, the invention of the nerd. I took that as a compliment. She’s like, yeah, you’re big in the computers. And then she said, and you also love art, so you should consider graphic design.
And for me that was a new term. I hadn’t thought about it. And once I did the exploration and thought about it and understood what graphic design was and understood that I’d already seen it all around me all the time already and thought about how I could be someone contributing to that. Yeah, I was like, you’re exactly right. This is exactly what I want to do. And that’s where it started. I feel, I feel really fortunate that I’m someone who got a degree in something that I’m actually still doing.
I guess it was a few years ago, I reached out to her because we’re friends on Facebook. I thanked her. I didn’t remember if I’d ever thanked her, but my whole career came from that decisive moment where she told me about something I didn’t know about. And then I ran with it.

Maurice Cherry:
And I’m trying to think, I’m trying to place this in time because we talked earlier about early nineties. So this is mid nineties or so.

Reggie Tidwell:
So this is mid nineties. Yep. Mid nineties. Actually…

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. When you said…

Reggie Tidwell:
…ended up graduating with my BFA in graphic design and December of ’97.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Tell me what it was studying design back then, because you also have the big advent of the personal computer. You’ve got the coming of the internet as we know it. What was it studying design during that time?

Reggie Tidwell:
Man, it was wild. I mean, first and foremost, we’re working on Apple Performs 4500s I think was the model number.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Reggie Tidwell:
And I mean these things were tanks and dinosaurs. You could have Photoshop open, only, or Illustrator, but not both. And if, we’re talking 32 megabytes of RAM and I mean lots of crashes, so you had to frequently save your work. We definitely did some cut and paste stuff because that was just not too far out of the rear view mirror that people were still making the migration to computer. So there was still a lot of manual cut and copy and paste, cut and paste design, lot of assemblage, a lot of that stuff was still going on. So of course it was part of our curriculum.
And I’ll tap into my photography side as well. I always find it a little bit of a, for me, I paid my dues. It was a rite of passage that I actually got to do photography. I got to take photos using film and understand the value of the frame and not just take in 450 shots and hoping there’s a good one in there. And then actually developing my film in the dark room, all that stuff was happening around the same time, which all feels of course very archaic now. But that was the start. That was what it was like back then.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean it sounds like it was just really hands on because the computer couldn’t do everything. I mean, it could do some things, but you still, like you said, have to do copy and paste, or cut and paste, or you still have to take photos and develop them yourself. It’s so wild now when I think about digital cameras, because I remember in high school having Fun Saver cameras. You go to the party, you have your Fun Saver camera, you take all kind of shots, you don’t know what you’re going to get back until you get it back from Eckerd or wherever that you got them developed at. But yeah, and I took a photography course back then too, so I know about developing in the dark room and stuff, which now seems… It’s funny. I’ll watch a movie or something and they always paint it as this, I don’t know, old school way of doing things. Developing. And it’s not that far away from now.

Reggie Tidwell:
No. No. And honestly it’s become of a niche for some people. I know a lot of people that actually I say a lot, but a handful of people that are still shooting film and still developing in that handful of dark rooms that are left. And it’s something, I think maybe they embrace it, not because they’re too stubborn to switch to digital, but it’s a craft for them. Some of them are people that have embraced digital, but they also still really love film. I admire that. I think it’s great. I don’t miss it. I don’t miss the smelling the smell of fixer and then and not knowing what you’re going to get until you are dropping it into the developer and hoping that you nailed it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I could imagine even doing design back then because computers were changing and software was changing and everything. Were there trends back then? I’m just curious because I feel like a lot of stuff still carried over from print, but were there specific graphic design trends that you remember from back then?

Reggie Tidwell:
Yeah, I mean I think there was a time where decorative fonts were really starting to become prevalent. And you started, I mean this was quite honestly, I think this was when fonts like Hobo were actually still being used.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh wow.

Reggie Tidwell:
Oh yeah, yeah. Papyrus. Yeah, I feel like there was a exploration… Fonts just exploded. And with the advent of the computer, fonts started off trickling in and then they exploded. And I think designers had to be really disciplined to not, I feel like most designers were going really far out and using all these crazy decorative fonts and still having their design disciplines about them. So they may only use one decorative font and a nice San Serif that balanced it. But those fonts were not elegant, at all. And it of course, depending on what you were trying to do with it. And I think what has happened, we’ve seen from a time where people were trying to get away from using the tried and true fonts, the Adobe Garamond, the Futura. People were feeling like those were overused or they were too basic and so they had to expand their typeface horizons. And then I find these days, man, some of the best brands go back to basics and are going back to some of those tried and true fonts and looking for things that are a little more elegant.

Maurice Cherry:
I didn’t even think about the proliferation of typefaces as something that was part of design back then, but it was. I mean really because you had, of course, greater displays that were coming out and you could just do more than what you could do with print in terms of the types of typefaces. You just had different things.

Reggie Tidwell:
I think that was it. I think it was so many people were used to doing manual print design and then all of a sudden you’ve got access to 3000 fonts. Hold me back.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Reggie Tidwell:
That’s exactly what it was.

Maurice Cherry:
So you graduate from Maryville. You’re out there in the real world as a designer. What was that early postgrad career like? Talk to me about that.

Reggie Tidwell:
So the first thing I did, so going back to that whole wanting to be an entrepreneur thing, that still was in me. I still definitely wanted to have my own business and I started actually working with clients before I graduated. I worked at Office Depot, so I met a lot of people and there were people coming in that needed business cards, but they were really awful designs that they had or they didn’t have one at all. And I said, “Well this is what I do.” So I started developing a clientele before I even graduated and then spent the first year postgrad being an entrepreneur, working in the basement of the apartment that I lived at in at the time, it was actually a townhome, doing branding work. And it was mostly just branding and identity systems that I was doing early on. But about a year into that, being someone that’s super social, I started to get that cabin fever and wasn’t around people as much as I’d like to be.
And so I had a side job working at Circuit City. On one particular day I was venting about, man, I really think I want to work in an agency or a company. And there was a guy by the name of Mike whose dad headed up a division of Lid Industries, which Lid is a Fortune 500 company and they had a division in St. Louis called PRC. The acronym got dissolved, so I don’t know what it ever originally meant, but it was in PRC. Anyway, they were hiring a resident graphic designer and at the time, you’ll appreciate this, in terms of historical relevance in the design and web design world. They had a Macromedia authorized training facility and I got the interview, got the job. They wanted me to teach Flash and Fireworks.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh wow.

Reggie Tidwell:
So I ended up being the only guy in St. Louis teaching Flash through a Macromedia authorized program. And so that really just kicked off all kinds of just awesome awesomeness in my career.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, I know you were in high demand back then. Cause Flash was everywhere. Everywhere.

Reggie Tidwell:
Everywhere and everything. And that was right at the onset of its popularity. So I stayed with that company for about a year, ended up, gosh, being in a big metropolitan area, teaching Flash was awesome. So I ended up getting hired away by a information graphics company called Xplain. And I ended up being their interactive team leader. That was pretty exciting. Did that, ended up teaching at Washington University while I was there because the Art and Design faculty at Washington University wanted to learn Flash. I did a summer workshop for the Art and Design faculty. They loved it so much they invited me to create a multimedia class as part of their visual communications curriculum based on Flash and other video and other multimedia applications. And that was amazing. And I ended up partnering with a lot of design agencies in the St. Louis area, fairly large agencies because they didn’t have a web team or division.
So that was cool. I ultimately got laid off from Xplain. They went through four rounds of layoffs. I went in the last round and because they still needed the work that I did, they became my first client. So that’s how I started Curve Theory in 2000, and or in 2001. It was just one of those things. I was still popular, the work was still necessary, the company was needing to make some pivots. And that was a blessing on my end because I always wanted to have my own business business. And that’s how it happened. I started, I launched Curve Theory with them as my first client 21 years ago.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. I mean, I can’t think of a better way to roll into entrepreneurship like that. You were already super highly sought out for your design work in another medium. The company you’re working with goes out of business. You start your own business. That’s perfect. That’s a perfect handoff.

Reggie Tidwell:
Yeah, it was. And they didn’t go out of business, thankfully. They did go back to their original, I think they grew to like 45 employees at one point, but they went back to the original 13 and they’re still around a day and they’re still thriving. But yeah, it’s getting kicked out of the nest but then given a nice little mattress to land on.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Reggie Tidwell:
It was great. And I really love St. Louis, but I definitely knew that at some point I was going to want to leave St. Louis.

Maurice Cherry:
So what brought you to North Carolina?

Reggie Tidwell:
So at the time, the woman that I was dating was also in that same head space that she was ready to leave St. Louis. I was still teaching in Washington University and then actually had just been encouraged by the design chair, the Art and Design faculty chair to apply for this tenure track position that was opening up in the Art and Design department. And so I was at this crossroads where in my heart I knew I really didn’t want to stay in St. Louis that much longer. Things… I had envisioned leaving St. Louis almost as soon as I graduated but things kept falling into place career wise, which was great because those things were setting me up. But at one point my partner and I, ex-partner and I, were having these frequent conversations about where we would ever relocate to and at one point I mentioned that a good buddy of mine had in passing talked about moving to North Carolina.
And so I asked her, “What do you know about North Carolina?” And she said, “Oh my god, Asheville. Asheville is absolutely amazing. You would love it. Check it out.” And of course, since we had the web then, I looked it up and I mean, I think within 20 minutes I knew it’s where I wanted to be. It wasn’t landlocked. There’s a four hour drive to the ocean. Mountains, waterfalls, streams everywhere. Hiking trails, mountain bike trails, you name it. That’s the kind of guy that I was. I mean, thankfully had a father who raised me. In the time I spent with him, we would go camping and hiking. And so early on I garnered a love or appreciation of the outdoors.

Maurice Cherry:
And so you had the job that allowed you to do this work from anywhere. So why not go to a place you really want to go?

Reggie Tidwell:
Absolutely. I actually, I had to finish that first semester at Washington University and then I had the whole spring semester. So this was in 2023. Loved that semester, loved my students. Finished that semester, turned in my grades in May and the following weekend was Memorial Day weekend. I’d literally moved a week after I turned in my grades and never looked back.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. And you’ve been there ever since.

Reggie Tidwell:
And been here ever since.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. You’ve been a part of the Asheville design community now for such a long time. You mentioned your community work earlier and you’re the founding president of AIGA Asheville, a new chapter. What was behind bringing an AIGA chapter to Asheville?

Reggie Tidwell:
That’s a great question, Maurice. So for me, one of the things I did mention that I was on the board for the St. Louis chapter in the mix there. I think I joined the chapter while I was, might have been while I was still at Lid in PRC, but I know I did two or three years on the board as their web chair for the St. Louis chapter. And I really love that community of design, the comradery, the people that you surround yourself with understand your day to day trials and tribulations, they get it. So that was, I really appreciated that as it pertained to the design community in St. Louis. And I got to Asheville and we didn’t have that. As a matter of fact, I was trying to find designers just to connect with, just to network with and they just weren’t around.
I think I had maybe three or four design friends at the time, but we knew there were more designers in and around the area, there just wasn’t anything in place to help bring them out. Out of the woodwork. And so we had a lot of early conversations about, I would reach out to these other designers that I knew in the area and tell them how much I wanted to have a chapter in Asheville, because the closest chapters were in Knoxville and Charlotte. It’s a couple hour drive each way in either direction. And so for me, just selfishly, I’m like, God, I want that here. I don’t want to drive two hours to have community. It took a while. Originally you had to have 40 sustaining members just to even be considered to have a chapter. And I think given the fact that we were having a hard time finding 20 designers in Asheville at the time, that was a tall order.
So we ended up creating this thing called Design Salon, which ended up being a hang for designers in the area. And the more people gathered, the more the work got spread out, and the more designers you realized were here. The more you understood that there were some really talented people that were in Asheville. And because Asheville is such a draw for people all over the world, somebody that’s here now probably wasn’t here two weeks ago. That’s how’s how it works. There was a woman named Jamie Farris who’s also a really good friend of mine that took Design Salon and started adding programming to it, and that made it even better. And so the more program she added, the better. The more it had an actual format instead of just being a creative hangout, the more I saw that we were there, it was time.
And so 2019 was when I had a feasibility meeting. I just called a bunch of people that I knew and they invited other people and I said, “Hey, I think it’s time to finally start a chapter.” I didn’t actually know the requirements had changed in my mind. I was still thinking 40 sustaining members. So half the way through, we learned that it was only 20 sustaining members, but we actually turned in our petition to become a chapter with 43 sustaining members, I think.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh nice.

Reggie Tidwell:
Just because we are a little bit of a smaller city and I wanted to show how bad we really wanted to be a chapter.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Reggie Tidwell:
And from that first meeting I was able to build our first board of really awesome and engaged founding board members. So yeah, we started literally the year before the pandemic and have thrived through the pandemic and we’re still kicking it.

Maurice Cherry:
That is amazing. That’s amazing to hear that. And now when you say sustaining members, is that members at a particular membership tier? Because I feel like they had that at one… I feel like sustaining was one of the, if not the top, but one of the top tiers you have to have.

Reggie Tidwell:
Yeah, I think Design Leader was the one after that. I think the sustaining member was at the $250 giving level and then it went to Design Leader, which doubled to 500.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Reggie Tidwell:
And so that is, especially for a professional association, that was a lot to ask, but I was just elated that many people wanted it to and believed in us having a chapter that much that they signed up. We still have a tremendous amount of sustaining members. We probably have more sustaining members than we have in any other giving level. And they have changed the price structure and the names of the giving levels a bit. And so it’s, I think easier now than ever to join the AIGA and I feel like that was part of the reason behind just sort making it a little simpler, especially after the pandemic. But yeah, it’s quite wonderful to be in a city that now has a chapter. We have great programming. We’re putting on our first design weekend, which is a mini design week that’s coming up at the end of the month.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh. Very nice.

Reggie Tidwell:
Yeah, first weekend of October, so it’s September 30th through October 2nd. Super excited about that. We got David Carson coming to speak at our annual meeting in November. That’s going to be pretty cool, Mr. Masterclass himself. So yeah, we’re happy to have a chapter and we’re happy to be able to have such a positive impact on our design community and that means everything for me.

Maurice Cherry:
When you look back at your career and all your experiences, is this how you imagine yourself when you were a kid in St. Louis?

Reggie Tidwell:
No, not at all. And it’s funny because I think being a kid in St. Louis and growing up where I grew up, I feel like my grandmother knew and saw my potential, but I didn’t see it because it’s hard. I’m surrounded by the things that I was surrounded by. And I think it’s hard to see the forest through the trees when you’re in that scenario. And for me, I don’t think, honestly, I still get surprised. I think at some point in your life, Maurice, when you’ve accomplished a lot, when you’ve done a lot, when you’ve had this longevity of experiences and learning, at some point you start to realize that people see that in you and they see all the experience and all the leadership and the guidance and they start to seek it out.
I get called to be on boards, I turned down probably seven board positions last year. I’m publicly a leader. And so I think it still surprises me sometimes where, and I think it also surprises me that sometimes somebody asks me a question and I think I’m still that 25 year old in school and still on his path figuring things out, and learning, and discovering. But then I start to answer, I hear the question and then my head just gets filled with all of this relevant information that you don’t even really think about. You’re not just sitting around thinking about all the stuff, but when someone calls and asks for mentoring or it’s a colleague you’re just shooting a breeze with. You start to realize how much of that stuff is in there and it’s quite amazing.

Maurice Cherry:
What gives you purpose to keep doing the work that you do now?

Reggie Tidwell:
I think for me it’s those relationships and experiences. I’ve always said that if I won the lottery and had all the money that I would ever need, I would still be a designer. I would still do design, I would just do mostly nonprofit work, and do it pro bono, and just take a select number of projects a year. I love the work, I’m passionate about the work, and I’m passionate about the people that I get to work with. I’m very particular about the clients. If a client doesn’t seem like they’re the right fit or I’m not going to have a mutually enjoyable experience, then I’ll pass on a project. And I’m pretty thankful to be in a place in my career where I can do that.

Maurice Cherry:
What advice would you give for someone who, they’re listening to this interview, they’re hearing how you’ve come up throughout your career. What advice would you give somebody that wants to follow in your footsteps?

Reggie Tidwell:
I would say, and I talk to young people all the time, I actually mentor. And the thing that I feel like is the most important is to really keep exploring who you are and what you like, and don’t follow the money. I feel like it’s very easy to, I’ll talk back to a time in my life when I worked at Office Depot when I was Florissant Valley in Junior College, I was asked to get into the managerial track at Office Depot where at the time I might have made, once becoming a manager, I may have made $35,000 or $30,000, which at the time seemed like a lot of money. And that’s a very easy distraction. That’s a very easy temptation. And I had a friend at the time who also was a really, really talented artist. He also was wanting to go to design school.
He ended up getting in that track and hated it. It just completely dominated his life. He wasn’t fulfilled. The money at some point wasn’t even relevant because he never had time to spend any of it because he worked so much. I turned it down because I knew, I think at this point I was already at Maryville University, so I was already in the graphic design program. I knew that that’s what I wanted to do. So in order to get to that point, you have to do some self exploration. You have to understand who you are, what it is that you really value and set your sites on being able to do that for a living. And don’t waiver.

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

Reggie Tidwell:
Man, I would love to retire in five years. I’m 51. So that’s definitely a tall order, but in a perfect world, I might completely crush it for the next five, six years or so and retire early, or at least partially retire. But I do see myself in leadership. I do see myself still trying to bring positive change to communities in whatever way I can. Through social justice, through design leadership, through, I’ve hinted at the thought of being, it’s been mentioned and it’s been a internal conversation and conversation I’ve had with colleagues about the AIGA trajectory, and perhaps maybe serving on a national board at some point. I have friends on the national board. I love the organization and I love what the organization provides to the design community. And I always see its potential is limitless and to be able to serve in that world at a higher level, definitely. But yeah, that’s probably something that I would look to within my five year trajectory. And more than anything, I always want to make sure that the work that I’m doing continues to be meaningful.

Maurice Cherry:
I think you should definitely consider it. I mean, I’ve done work at the volunteer level, at the national level, and it’s great. It’s been great. I highly think you should do it. And I’m sure other people have probably mentioned this to you as well, but there’s a book in your story. There’s a hundred percent a book in your story.

Reggie Tidwell:
Yeah, I don’t know if anyone’s outright said that, but I definitely know there’s stuff in there that I always find it intriguing to look back in my past and see where I’ve been, and where I am, and how I’ve been inspired, and how I’m now able to inspire. That all is important to me. But yeah, thanks for saying that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, no, there’s a hundred percent a book in your story. I mean, one, I think just because of how you have managed yourself through how design and technology have changed, but then also I think your personal story added in as a layer on top of that. And with the work that you’re doing now through volunteering and giving back, that’s the best seller. You might want to think about it. You might want to think about it. I’m just saying I’m putting it out there.

Reggie Tidwell:
Thanks. You’ll get their first copy for sure.

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

Reggie Tidwell:
Absolutely. So curvetheory.com. C-U-R-V-E-T-H-E-O-R-Y dot com is my commercial website. There is a link to my print work on there, which yeah, prints are great, but if you want to see the bulk of my commercial photography, landscape stuff, nature, and cityscapes, that’s a good place to go. I also am on Instagram Curve Theory on Instagram. And there I don’t really put a whole lot of design work on. I do have a separate account that I’m hoping to start building up my, putting all my design work on, but really photography… Years ago I had a mix of photography and design and it always just felt all over the place for me. And one of the things I always noticed when I go to other Instagram accounts and I see these really nicely curated feeds that everything just, there’s something nice about the continuity and you’re like beautiful landscapes, and then there’s a logo. It just feels odd placed. And so I took all my design stuff off of there and it’s just my photography on my Instagram account. But those are the best places to find me. And I’m also on LinkedIn. Reggie Tidwell on LinkedIn.

Maurice Cherry:
All right, Sounds good. Well, Reggie Tidwell, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I mean, of course, like I just mentioned about there’s a book in you, your story and the passion and the service that you’ve given back to the design community is something that I think is really inspiring for a lot of people. Certainly your local community. But I hope that people that listen to this interview also pick up on that as well, because you mentioned being raised by your grandmother and her being a teacher, those values that she instilled in you, you’re continuing to give those back out to the community, which are really the basis of your success. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Reggie Tidwell:
Hundred percent agree about my grandmother, and thank you so much for having me on, Maurice. It’s been a pleasure talking with you.

Sponsored by Hover

Hover

Building your online brand has never been more important and that begins with your domain name. Show the online community who you are and what youโ€™re passionate about with Hover. With over 400+ domain name extensions to choose from, including all the classics and fun niche extensions, Hover is the only domain provider we use and trust.

Ready to get your own domain name? Go to hover.com/revisionpath and get 10% off your first purchase.

Jordan Taylor

If I had to give an award for “Most Chill Revision Path Guest”, Jordan Taylor would win the prize with no competition. But don’t let the relaxed vibes fool you, because his skills as a designer and creator are anything but laid-back. And even better, he has roots here in Atlanta. Keep listening to learn more about this hometown hero!

We started off talking about his recent move to NYC, and he gave a peek behind the curtain of being a designer at the world-famous design firm Pentagram. From there, Jordan talked about growing up and attending college in Atlanta (taught by past Revision Path guest Nakita M. Pope!) We also touched on a few other topics, including Atlantaโ€™s design scene, and what Jordan wants to see more of from the larger design community. Jordan is a uniquely talented, and I think weโ€™re going to see a lot more of his work in the future!

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

Jordan Taylor:
I’m Jordan Taylor. I’m a graphic designer at Pentagram. I work on a lot of different projects, mostly branding, but a fair share of editorial and motion design, a few websites here and there.

Maurice Cherry:
How has the year been going so far?

Jordan Taylor:
My year has been pretty great. I recently moved to a new place for the first time. I’m now living out in Brooklyn, New York. I moved up here for work and it’s been a chance to go on new adventures, see different things, meet new people. It’s been pretty interesting. A lot of changes.

Maurice Cherry:
When you sort of look at the year in general where we’re at now, we’re recording this right now in mid August. Is there anything that you want to accomplish before the year ends?

Jordan Taylor:
Oh, I’d say that right now I’m in a place where I’m trying to figure out what my next thing is. One of the things I really want to accomplish for the years over is starting to make those steps toward whatever that looks like, whether it’s an expression of self or new business endeavors. Just starting to really get back into more self-activated things. You know how they say you are always going to need to fall a couple times when you’re on your journey somewhere. I’m ready to start taking those baby’s first steps toward whatever new horizon I’m heading toward. I feel like I’m in that kind of place.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Now, you’re at Pentagram, which is a extremely, extremely well known design consultancy. Talk to me about that.

Jordan Taylor:
Yeah. Pentagram is so many things. I’m there now. I’ve been working there coming up on two years in September. When I started, it was as a remote position. I started as an intern, but I was working from home still down in Atlanta. The journey there was just so unexpected. I just didn’t think that it was a place I was going to get to. When I started really diving into design, you get introduced to different ways of doing things and what brand design looks like and who the kind of designers to know are. You find out about different names and you end up finding out about Pentagram.
It just is a crazy experience to walk in there and actually see these people in person and not from even a crowd for some sort of forum that they’re putting on. It’s been really interesting just even beyond the partners, you have all the people working there on the different teams and you find out how a team works and how they approach projects and different ways that people think. It’s like a big incubator. It is really been… The way I got there was so much so of just putting my head down because it was the middle of the pandemic and just trying to get to the best place I could after leaving school.
So in a way, I don’t always fully take it in, but in those moments that I do, it just really hits me and it’s like, “Oh, I’m actually in here every day,” if that makes sense. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of just like air of ridiculousness to me. It’s actually worked out to this level.

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds like it’s hard to put into words. I mean, I’m listening to you stabber to talk about it. But I mean, I can imagine you’ve got such design heavyweights like Michael Beirut and Paula Scher and Eddie Opara whom we’ve had on the show episode 234 if people want to check that out. But I can imagine having that much, I guess, the weight of it all is probably a lot to think about from your perspective.

Jordan Taylor:
And then at the same time I still have work to do every day. I still have four or five projects to work on. So it’s a balancing act. You try to make yourself known and get to know people. But at the same time, you’re still trying to keep the main thing, the main thing, and I guess do the work that got you there.

Maurice Cherry:
And you’ve done that. I mean, you’ve done the work that got you there. It’s not like you just walked in off the street into Pentagram. Like you said, you had your head down working and we’ll get more into your background or your story, but you deserve to be there.

Jordan Taylor:
Absolutely. Yeah. I say all these things about how it feels to be there, but I don’t think I ever really felt I didn’t belong, maybe just that I didn’t expect for anybody to actually figure that out, if that makes sense.

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

Jordan Taylor:
A typical day for me when I first started there as an intern, one of the big things that I was really aware of was that I was probably not going to understand how anything worked. So I would reach out to my mentors, one of which was Louis Mikolay. He used to work at Collins. Now he’s at Apple. I reached out to John Ferguson and McCoy Smith. I just asked them, “You all are professionals. You all are in this design world. How do you actually keep track of all the things that you’re supposed to do in the day? How do you know how much time to allocate to a project? If you got multiple projects going on, how do you know when to start the day or when to end the day?” Because it was working from home and starting out. Everything was a little too soft for me.
Long story short, I got into making to-do list to start the day or sometimes I make one to fill out the whole week. If I knew what the week had, coming ahead of me. After that, it really depends on the day to day what point I’m at in the week. But I’ll usually try and get the smaller projects out of the way or the little things, or just check my emails and make sure that nobody is kind of hitting me with a curve ball before I really get my day started.
And from there, I collaborate with my team to make sure that I know what their expectations are for the day. And then it’s working things out. If I am on a magazine project like Netflix Queue, it may be a lot of concept. And so it’ll be like, “We’re building a deck to introduce to the client. And then from there you might break away from that side of it and go to the print side and you’re coming up with different concepts and directions.”
So you’re doing a lot of art directing, but then right after that, I might have to create animation assets for a branding project where we’re trying to activate the brand for a presentation. So it’s a lot of flipping switches is what I call it. It’s a lot of flip this on, flip that off, go over here, do this. And then you just end up at 6:00.

Maurice Cherry:
And that’s the day.

Jordan Taylor:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
You, I guess, touched on some of the projects you’re working on. You mentioned this magazine, Netflix Queue. What kind of other projects and stuff are you working on?

Jordan Taylor:
The projects I’m working on right now, I can’t really speak about. Some other projects I have worked on before, we did a wonderful rebrand for a college out in Pennsylvania who that was transitioning into university status called Moravian university. I worked on tech brand who was building out a whole kind of workspace system along the blockchain. So you really had ownership of your information called Skiff. I also work on the ACLU magazine that comes out twice a year. So it’s a wide range. And then there’s things that I help out with in spots here or there.

Maurice Cherry:
So you’re doing print projects, digital projects, kind of a little bit of everything, it sounds like.

Jordan Taylor:
Yeah. A lot of flipping those switches and within those, the Netflix magazine has a digital arm and a print arm. So I’m on both of those.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Sometimes we might have to create a cover animation for the website and then you also have to create print stories. I mean, build out those assets. So your vision for the brand in all these different formats and it’s all happening at the same time. Whereas with the ACLU magazine is strictly print, but it involves a lot of art directions.
So I’m commissioning illustrators. I’m commissioning photographers. I mean, we’re like staying on the pulse of what’s going on with the Supreme Court to find out what their rulings are going to be before the next issue. And then with something like Moravian, you just got old fashioned branding. So you’re building out color systems and typography and things like that.
I mean, it sounds exciting to be able to use your skills to bounce from project to project in that way. One of the last big creative projects I worked on actually was also a print and digital magazine for my former employer, because I just got laid off. But for my former employer, I was putting together a print and digital magazine. The first issue is out. Actually the second issue was ready the day they laid our whole team off. So I don’t know if the second issue will even see the light of day, even though it’s literally at the printer on the shelf. Don’t know if anyone’s ever going to see it.

Jordan Taylor:
Sounds like Limited edition.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. And the third issue we were in the middle of working on, which was actually going to be on Web3 stuff. We commissioned illustrators. We had all the same things you were mentioning, writers, all that kind of stuff. Don’t know if that one is ever going to happen. I love the magazine thing because it was my first time ever working on something like that. I would love to do more things like that.
It just seems like two things with Pentagram. One, you get to work on so many different types of projects. And two, I guess, because Pentagram just has this like… To me, maybe not to other people, but to me it has this untouchable… I don’t want to say cult status because its name happens to be Pentagram, but it’s one of those things like, “No, don’t apply to us. We will choose you to work for us.” Like that sort of thing. I don’t know if that’s just part of the mystique of Pentagram, but I like that.

Jordan Taylor:
Yeah. I mean, I conflict on that. So a bit of how I actually ended up finding the position, I had joined Where are the Black Designers slack channel. [inaudible 00:14:28]

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, Mitzi.

Jordan Taylor:
Yeah. One of the project managers at Pentagram posted the opening and I was like, “Oh, this is crazy. I don’t even know they did this.” And the week went along and I was like, “Oh, should I do it, should I not?” I applied through there, but that’s not usually how it happens and it’s something that Pentagram is trying to get better about is like casting a wider net and bringing in more perspectives.
I don’t know. The idea of that exclusivity, it creates the mystique you know, but I feel like in a world where we’re starting to just keep reconsidering these ideas of diversity and inclusion, when you’re at the top and you think you know what’s best, you don’t really allow anyone else to come in from the outside and influence and keep you there, you’re just moving off of… I don’t know. I feel like it makes it easier for you to lose sight of what’s actually going on around you if you’re not actually interacting with the people, so to speak.

Maurice Cherry:
I get what you’re saying. I totally get that because I think a lot of agencies probably have that same sort of problem. Yes, they want to have a level of exclusivity with the work, but I guess they don’t want to appear like they’re for everybody I suppose.

Jordan Taylor:
Yeah. It’s a tough balance, which I get. Look, just as a person who felt like they were on the outside, looking in and very much based on what I have come to find out just being in the workplace is not a common way of finding out about openings there. I just would hate to for the other person who’s in that same position and just wasn’t on the slack channel that day or that week.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. They just missed out.

Jordan Taylor:
And they’re just as good as I am. I just think about stuff like that and I’m like, “Oh, it conflicts me a lot.”

Maurice Cherry:
Well, let’s switch gears here a little bit. I want you to remain conflicted in the interview, but because this is about you and about your skill. Like I said, you deserve to be there certainly. Let’s switch gears here. Let’s talk about you. Tell me where you grew up.

Jordan Taylor:
I grew up 30 miles east straight down Act 20 from Atlanta, Georgia in Lithonia. It’s a Black suburb. It’s a pretty decent place to live. It was a lot quieter until Atlanta’s always constantly growing and expanding. So people started moving out there a lot more. But I was out there since I was two years old, like ’96 and then I moved out of the Atlanta area last October.
I spent a long time out there, just deep in that culture, moving around town, making friends. I was a part of the Atlanta public schools system throughout with a little bit of DeKalb County Schools in elementary. I feel like a country bumpkin sometimes being in New York now. But I feel like my experience in my kind of neck of the woods was just so interesting. I just got to see so many different things and so many different ways to live out my Blackness, I guess. My whole family is from the Atlanta area. So it just was a really warm, just loving experience the whole time. I miss it a lot. I think about it every day.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, you grew up in Atlanta during a time. I mean that to me feels like peak Atlanta like the Olympics Freaknik ’96, that whole time. I came to Atlanta in ’99. So right after that. But I’m from Alabama, I’m from Selma, so I’m not that far from Atlanta. I’m roughly about three hours. We would always come to Atlanta, honestly, every summer or every time, I don’t know, our class did well on the SATs or something. It was always like, “We’re going to Six Flags. We’re going to Six Flags.”
So I’ve always been in and around Atlanta and then finally moved here when I was 18. But I know exactly that feeling that you’re talking about. And it’s something that I’m sort of exploring a little bit, because I’m working on a book proposal. And as I’m working through it, there’s such a positive thread of Blackness throughout Atlanta that I don’t think a lot of people really get.
I think people see Atlanta, they see the entertainments, they see the music. They see, “Oh, it’s a really Black city.” But it’s a warmth, I think that a lot of people don’t really understand unless you’re either from there or you’ve really lived there for a long time. I mean, I feel like I got it a little bit just from visiting so much, but certainly my formative years and my teens… Not even my teens, but really my late teens and my 20s in Atlanta is just irreplaceable. It’s hard to put that feeling into words about the… It’s not even so much of a positive Blackness, but as much as every example of excellence that you see around you is Black.

Jordan Taylor:
Right.

Maurice Cherry:
I think sometimes that can be hard even for other Black people to see depending on where they grew up. But Atlanta really sort fosters that and it’s not in any sort of weird supernatural extraordinary way. It’s like excellence is just all around you.

Jordan Taylor:
Yeah. A very casual Blackness.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. That’s such a good way to put it, a very casual Blackness. That’s such a good way to put it.

Jordan Taylor:
Yeah. For me, people are constantly on this notion of Blackness is not a monolith. That’s what I mean, what we’re both talking about with that casual Blackness. I wouldn’t put myself in a certain frame. I always talk to my friends like we all played sports, but we all like anime. We all ended up doing different jobs. I have friends who were in the arts, but I also have friends who are paramedics, and I also have friends who are party promoters.

Maurice Cherry:
There’s no division.

Jordan Taylor:
Yeah, there’s no division.

Maurice Cherry:
I a hundred percent know exactly what you mean. I mean, I went to Morehouse, so I absolutely know of what that division can definitely look like. But yeah, man, I mean, you grew up here in a great, great [inaudible 00:20:49]. I can tell why you miss it. I can definitely tell why. Was art and design kind of a big part of you growing up here?

Jordan Taylor:
I would say it was, but it was more from a sense of… It was something that I was just always interested in. You get older and you look back on your life and you realize you were doing things the whole time that were preparing you for something you didn’t even know you were preparing yourself for. So it wasn’t more so that design or the arts was constantly around me.
Nobody in my family is like a designer. My mom is a school counselor. My dad works at the EPA. It was just constantly something that I was interested in. I watched a lot of TV, a lot of Cartoon Network, a lot of Nickelodeon, a lot of Disney, a lot of anime, a lot of Toonami. Those kind of things are what introduced me into the arts and made me appreciate art a lot more.
So I think the first thing I ever tried to draw was Goku on one of my school notepads. And from there, I kept drawing and drawing and doodling. But it wasn’t something that I really embraced as something that would ever be a part of my future. It was more so just something that I enjoyed and it was an outlet for me. It helped me express something that I really cared about. And then I got opportunities later on in high school to express those things in different ways. I knew I had that drawing talent and my mom would put me into these art programs over the summer to learn more about the technical side.
I did one in old Fort Worth at this summer camp where we had to choose a discipline. So I went with the drawing one, because it was the one that I was the best at. I got those things, but it was never something that I thought that I was actually ever going to be doing with my life. When I was about to graduate high school, I planned on doing engineering. Focusing on that is part of my college curriculum. Because like I said, I was preparing myself for things that I didn’t actually know were available to me. I was like, “Okay, well I’m good at math and science, but I also want to create things.”
I didn’t know how to express that completely. So my dad was working at the EPA. I was like, “Oh, he’s an engineer. Maybe I’ll be an engineer and maybe I’ll get to tinker on things or build something one day. But it wasn’t something that I was fully embracing. I definitely went to the high museum way more during my college days than I ever did during grade school.

Maurice Cherry:
But it sounds like your parents though, at least supported you in that, I guess you could say at that point was a hobby, was you really liking art and drawing. They didn’t try to dissuade you from it.

Jordan Taylor:
No, they never dissuade me from anything. I think I get a lot of my laid back kind of attitude from them because they’re very much… They were very much always, as long as I handled what I was supposed to be doing at school or whatever, then they would let me do whatever I wanted to in the peripheries. They never really tried to shut me down from anything and I always appreciate them for that.

Maurice Cherry:
So you ended up going to Georgia State University. And Atlanta’s got some well known design schools here. I mean, let’s see. If you were… I’m trying to think was it… No, Atlanta College of Art wasn’t around during that time. But I mean, we had Art Institute of Atlanta. I think SCAD was just maybe starting to have their campus here. I don’t recall. But there’s also things like the Portfolio Center, et cetera. I don’t know if Georgia State really is ever in that conversation of great design schools or curriculums in the city. How was your time there?

Jordan Taylor:
I really enjoyed my time there. So my introduction to Georgia State came a bit later in college. I transferred there. I first off went to Fort Valley State University. It’s a HBCU like an hour south of Macon, I think, near Warner Robins.

Maurice Cherry:
Yep, I’m familiar.

Jordan Taylor:
Yeah. Oh, you know about Fort valley?

Maurice Cherry:
I know about Fort Valley.

Jordan Taylor:
That was where I went because I thought I was going to be engineers. My mom was like, “Okay, go to this agricultural school. They have an engineering program. You can do that.” And while I was there, I found out more about graphic design. I would hear about it here and there on the internet, but I didn’t know how it worked. I found out what Adobe was. I was like, “Okay. Well, my laptop is not good enough to do any of that kind of stuff.”
But I ended up taking an elective my second year there and it was for graphic design. I think our first project was that we had to create a fake brand and then we had to make envelopes for the brand. Our teacher taught us how to use the blend tool. We could use the blend tool if we wanted to, but otherwise we had to just come up with something else. Long story short, I got an A in the class and I was like, “Wait a minute. I just made something and it felt like art.” I got an A and I don’t really want to be an electrical engineer. That’s fourth floor.
I called my mom right before I was about to go back home because the semester ended and I was like, “Hey, I looked it up. Georgia State has graphic design program.” Because I think I looked into all those other schools, but like I said, my mom never stifled me from anything, but she always made me very aware of what she could and couldn’t do. So I knew she wasn’t about to pay for me to go to SCAD.
I called her, I was like, “Hey, I got an A in this graphic design class. I want to transfer up to Georgia State.” I’m going to major in it. They have a program up there. She was like, “Wait a second. It is the first semester. Could you at least finish the next semester and make sure you want to do this?” I was like, “No, I got to go.”
But she made me finish that next semester. I spent that whole semester in my free time learning how to use illustrator. When I finally started, I was so eager. I started taking classes at Georgia State over the summer because I wanted to get in there because I couldn’t use my laptop. I was using the school stuff at Fort Valley to design. I was like, “Okay, I don’t want to spend a whole summer not working on this because I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t know how good any of these people in these classes are about to be when I start.”
So I spent that whole summer in the Georgia State computer lab, just working on Illustrator. Photoshop, I was kind of like, “Ah, there’s kind of too many different ways to do things on there. I’m just going to keep doing Illustrator.” I mean, I had a great time in Georgia State’s graphic design program. I would say to anyone that’s thinking about it based on our conversation right now that it really helped cement a lot of the basics and a lot of the fundamentals of what design is, how do you approach it? What does it mean to create a creative identity?
I took a lot of the introductory classes because it’s broken up into two different sections. So you take the intro classes and then you have to go through a portfolio review to get to the final stage and actually graduate with a design degree.
I didn’t make it to that second part because I was missing a project. I learned so much from the experience that I knew I could design. They even said it. They were like, “Some people might not make it. That doesn’t mean you’re not good.” There’s plenty of people that don’t make it. Because there’s so particular and they have such a hard cutoff in terms of the numbers because of the size of the program right now.
They really encouraged you to keep going and that’s what I did. I was like, “I know what I’m doing. I know how to build a brand. I know how to use Illustrator and Photoshop. I made all these projects. I didn’t do all this for no reason.” So I just stuck to it after that and stayed in contact with all my teachers from all my introductory classes because they continued to keep their doors open for me. I would definitely recommend it.
Anybody thinking about going to SCAD or those other art schools, I would say to look into Georgia State because their program is really great and they really supported me the entire time.

Maurice Cherry:
I was going to say, it sounds like they really kind of helped prepare you to get out there and be a designer. Even though, as you said, you didn’t go through and do the project portion of it, but you still came out with enough know-how to know how to be a designer.

Jordan Taylor:
Yeah, absolutely.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you enrolled at The Creative Circus a couple of years after you graduated from Georgia State. What made you do that?

Jordan Taylor:
I enrolled there because after I didn’t make it to the second portion of the design program, I continued to work. I started trying to find different outlets for what I could do. So I was like, “Okay. I’m not in the program.” So I would do things for people here and there. I got a intern position at the APEX Museum, which was right down the street from the Georgia State campus. It’s a Black history museum. They really gave me a great chance to try and do my things in actual application and step with their own identity.
There was just something in the back of my head, as I kept learning about design and learning about Eddie Opara, and Michael Beirut, and Paula Scher and those kind of people. There was something beyond that, that I didn’t really know how to do yet. So along with those other things that I was doing in terms of working, I was also trying to meet more people that were also designing.
So I joined the AIGA student chapter in Atlanta and I ended up meeting one of the teachers at The Creative Circus because the meeting I went to was at The Creative Circus. So I got to see little bits and pieces before I walked into our meeting space. I was like, “Hey, is this an art school?” Because I didn’t even know what it was. It was like off a Cheshire Bridge off of a back street.
She was like, “Yeah, this is an art school.” I was like, “Do you all have a design program?” And she was like, “Yeah, we have a design program.” It was a Nakita Pope.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, Nakita. Love Nakita. She’s been on the show before.

Jordan Taylor:
She’s like, “Yeah, we have a design program. I’m actually one of the instructors for it. If you ever want to come back, I’ll give you a tour. You can sit in on one of my classes.” She let me walk around for a bit before I had to leave. And they have all the work on the walls from previous students’ projects. I saw that stuff and I was like, “I don’t know how to do any of this.” I was like, “I thought I was good at it and I don’t know how to do any of this. But if they know how to do this, I think I can figure it out.”
Long story short, I talked to my mom. I was like, “Hey, thinking about going back to school. It’s going to cost yada, yada, yada.” She’s like, “Wait a minute. [inaudible 00:32:11] stick with me.” That took some discussing because my parents had already paid for four years of school. So I went there. It did what I expected it to… It took me to a whole nother level in terms of understanding. What it really helped me with was concepting, being able to build an idea and then flush it out graphically in a multitude of ways.
So what I learned from Georgia State in my introductory classes was that what makes a good logo, how to pick out typography, things like that like the building blocks. And then when I got to The Creative Circus, they really pushed those different levels of self expression and leaving no stone unturned when you’re trying to tell the story of something. So it all came together to put together the picture.

Maurice Cherry:
And for folks that don’t know or haven’t heard of The Creative Circus, it’s this private for-profit college recently closed its doors, which is such a big loss to the Atlanta design community. I hope they come back one day, but The Creative Circus and Nakita Pope who you mentioned as an instructor there. I think I’ve been there a couple of times. I know, I remember seeing, I think it was Douglas Davis had given a talk there when he was doing his book tour for his book about creative strategy and the business of design.
Nakita and Douglas knew each other because they both went to Hampton. Although, I don’t know if they went at the same time or not, but yeah, The Creative Circus, great, great resource to the city. Sad that it’s closed. But no, it sounds like you got what you needed from there. And you also have interned at a few places in Atlanta. You mentioned Apex over on Auburn Avenue. You interned at the Mammal Gallery, which is downtown Atlanta. You interned at MetroFresh Uptown. These are three somewhat different types of design experiences, it seems like. What did each of those places really teach you?

Jordan Taylor:
Yeah, they were so interesting looking back on them. It was very much, I was still in that phase of trying to scrounge together different experiences any way I could. I was out of college and I just had to dive into things that I was interested in. I was like, “I love my people. Let’s go to the Apex.” I was like the Mammal Gallery back then. I’m not even sure if the Mammal Gallery is still open, but they used to put on concerts where they would bring in these underground performers or these emerging artists. I was really into that because that was the mix tape era and SoundCloud era.
So I was like, “Hey, I love this place. Let me ask if they need a graphic designer.” Because everybody needs a graphic designer. And then with MetroFresh Uptown, that was taking something that I needed and trying to bring something that I wanted into it.
So I got the job because I needed a job because I was working. At The Creative Circus, I made it past the first quarter and it was time for me to try and figure out how to keep paying to be there. I’d done a lot of food service jobs. I picked that one up because I had heard about… I don’t even remember how I heard about the opening, but I’m not going to dwell on that. And because I was working at a new location for them, I was like, “Hey, do you all need signage? Do you need somebody to draw murals? Do you need somebody to make pamphlets for you to pass out in this office building? I could do all that stuff.” And it worked out from there.
But it prepared me for what I would do like the next internship that I was in for a really long time because it gave me a chance to be a part of something and know what the identity was and how to bring that out in that graphic language.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And that other place that you’re talking about, that’s Atlanta Contemporary. You were there for pretty much, almost five years. That’s a really long time. Talk to me about what that experience was like.

Jordan Taylor:
I love the Atlantic contemporary. I talk about the place all the time. For anybody who’s listening and is in the Atlanta area, it’s free every day. I think they’re only closed on Sundays. They might be closed on Mondays now, but they’re definitely closed on Sundays. It’s a contemporary art space, but it’s also an art center. So they do a lot of events where they bring in the community and they have children’s events. They do weddings, all that kind of stuff.
But it was that kind of last step in finding things that I was interested in. I was like, okay. So I worked at a Black history museum. I’ve done things for music space. I’ve done things for restaurants. What else am I interested in? If I could ever get a job at a museum, that would be really cool. I was like if I could ever actually make graphics for something based in the arts, that would be incredible.
So I went around to all the spots that you can think of. I went to the High Museum, I went to MOCA, I went to the Atlanta History Center. I was just Googling these places and then I would spend the day and go to them. And eventually, I went to the Atlanta contemporary. I was like, “Oh, do you all have any openings?” They were like, “No, we already have a graphic design.” I was like, “Oh well, okay. Do you do internships?” They were like, “Yeah.” I was like, “Do the interns do any graphic design?” They said, “No.” I was like, “Well, if I intern, could I do some graphic design?” And they were like-

Maurice Cherry:
You were trying. You were trying to get in there.

Jordan Taylor:
Yeah. And they were like, “I mean, maybe. Sure.” So I just took those opportunities wherever I could get them. It was a chance for me to interact with the community because people would come in for different exhibit exhibition openings and people would have the artist talks there and things. They had a whole pavilion in the back where they housed certain artists within their studios. So I got to interact with there. That was cool.
But then here and there, if they had an event, they were like, “Hey, Jordan. Could you make some signage? Hey, Jordan, could you make a flyer? Hey Jordan, could you do the vinyl descriptions for the artwork this month?” It would trickle in slowly. I built up a rapport with everybody that I was capable of doing these things. And then it turned into a full time position after that. When I got that chance to do that because the previous graphic designer had actually moved to New York because I had been there so long, I recommended different ways of going about how they express themselves with their social assets and things like that.
I was like, “Hey, I feel like this could speak a lot more clearly to what you all actually have going on here.” It’s so interesting and fun here. I think that this could be expressed a different way. So it was a chance for me to build a proposal. And then from there, it really bled into a lot of things. I was creating their monthly social posts. I was creating special animated assets whenever they had a special event going on.
I was doing their event graphics. I was doing the way finding within the museum, or within the art space, excuse me. And then I was also still doing the vinyl descriptors for the exhibitions also. And then I even got to help with one of the art pieces one time. They had this mantra that they wanted to put on the wall, but the guy walked in with just… It typed out from a typewriter on a piece of paper and he was like, “I wanted to look exactly like this, but on the wall.”
I was like, “Well, aren’t you the artist? You don’t know how to do that? But that was a chance to really collaborate with the artist and get their vision across, but then also I had to collaborate with the more practical people, the vinyl makers and figure out how I could create his vision and make it sense to them as the go between. So it was a lot.
I mean, I met a lot of incredible people. Just an invaluable experience. It pops back up every time I’m trying to do something. Earlier when I talked about flipping those switches, that was the first place where I really had to flip switches. I might animate, but I might be doing social stuff, but I might be making a visitor’s brochure.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds like you really spread your wings there creatively. You got to do a lot of different things.

Jordan Taylor:
Yeah, because of the nature of the space as a contemporary art space, it was very open to new ways of doing things or new approaches. They had their shareholders or their investors that you had to run things by in the final round. But all in all, it was very, like you said, a great experience to spread my wings and figure things out on the fly.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you’re currently in New York. Of course, that’s for work for Pentagram. But I’m curious when you think of your time here as a designer in Atlanta, what was the design community and scene for you? How would you describe it maybe to someone outside of Atlanta?

Jordan Taylor:
I would say the design scene here… Or in Atlanta. I’m not there anymore. It’s a lot broader than you think it is. There’s a lot of incredible people just kind of like… You got to get in there, but once you get in there, there’s a lot of amazing people out there doing their thing, making their way. What makes it different from what I’ve encountered so far up here in New York, New York is very much a design city. It’s like, “Oh, the subway system and this and that.”
But in Atlanta, what I really liked about the community out there is everyone was very much so making a way for themselves and finding their pocket or their niche and figuring things out. And the community comes together for different things like AIGA events and stuff. I would say the a G is a good way to find out what people are doing and find your group or what you’re most interested in. But everyone out there was being really resourceful or everyone out there had found their groove. They knew how to work it through all the ups and downs. One of my mentors, his name was Joe Price.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, I know Joe.

Jordan Taylor:
You know Joe?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Jordan Taylor:
Great. He was freelance, but he had been freelancing for so long when I met him. He just was constantly like… He’s so good at rolling with the punches. Even during the pandemic, he just knew how to figure things out. But at the same time, because it’s such a more kind of non-mainstream thing to be a designer, I guess, he’s so quirky. I don’t think he thinks he is. Joe has pet squirrels in his workspace. It’s a little nook in his backyard. Just full of different design ephemera just all over the place. Just stacks of books on books, on books. It’s really incredible. I think it’s pretty great, but you got to get in there.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Jordan Taylor:
You’re not just going to get swept up in it, you got to get into it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Joe gave me the coolest piece of, I guess, design swag or ephemera that I’ve ever gotten from anyone. But I mean, I’ve been to conferences and I’ve talked to people all around the world. This was years and years ago. No one else has ever given me anything this cool. You’re going to laugh at this. It’s a beverage koozie like you put on cans.

Jordan Taylor:
Yeah. But it’s a paper bag. You see folks on the corner get a 40 or whatever and they’re drinking it right out the paper bag, it’s a paper bag koozie. And it’s actually a bag like you put the can like a regular 12-ounce can. You put it in the bag, and it’s got his logo on it. It is the coolest thing I have ever gotten from any designer anywhere. And I’ve gotten posters, books, figurines.
And the thing is, I can’t find it anywhere. I don’t know where Joe got those from. I don’t know where he got those printed, the website of the bottom of it no longer exists, but I still have it. It’s in my silverware drawer, in my kitchen. It is the one coolest piece of design thing I ever got. It’s just a paper bag koozie. It’s paper bag on the outside, but it’s insulated on the inside. You just put a drink in it and then you feel like you’re drinking out of a paper bag. It’s the coolest thing.
No, that sounds amazing. I never heard that. I’m going to have to ask him about it because that sounds incredible. It’s all crinkled and you put a paper bag and it’s like… All that.

Maurice Cherry:
And from a distance, someone will think you’re just drinking out a small paper bag or something, but no, it’s a beverage koozie. It’s so cool. It’s so cool. Did you feel like there were any sort of particular challenges that you had to face here as a designer that you might not be facing in New York?

Jordan Taylor:
I think the main one is just that… Like I said, it’s not a super… It’s just not as popular of a career path, I guess in Atlanta. So when it came time for me to find a career path or find a job or a gig, it was a little difficult. I found myself ending up at the same spots whenever I would try and find different avenues. The amount of times that I applied to Turner Broadcasting, it would shock and appall you. I applied to play so many times throughout college.
After college, I was constantly Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, TNT, blah, blah, blah. It was so many times. And then as I got more into the design community, I found out more about different places that were available or even design shops like Matchstick and so forth. But I just think that there just aren’t as many options as there might be up in New York.
But like I said, when you meet more people in the community, everyone has figured out their way and found their kind of niche and how to move and the space. But for me starting out, it was a little… There wasn’t as much of a depth of options as I thought they were going to be.

Maurice Cherry:
Did you ever get an interview with Turner?

Jordan Taylor:
No. I never got past the video interview part. I did the submitted questionnaire and then one time I got to do a video interview, but never actually got to go there in person and sit down with anybody.

Maurice Cherry:
You’ve got a line in your bio that says your approach to design is similar to one of your patented long walks around town. What does that mean?

Jordan Taylor:
Okay. It’s not like long walks on the beach type of thing. It’s actually a connection.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Yeah, unpack that for me.

Jordan Taylor:
Like I said, when I moved back to Atlanta after Fort Valley and I decided to become a designer, I would have to go into the city. So for five years I was going into the city every day from my house in Lithonia. So I was taking public transit. I was taking MARTA every day. I would get on the bus. This might be too granular for your wide audience, but I would go to Indian Creek and then I would take the train into the city. And then I would either have to walk or take another bus wherever else I was going.
So doing that constantly is what I mean by those patented long walks. And what I mean when I say that my design is similar to those is that if you spend enough time on the ground, just walking everywhere, you’re going to see some interesting things. You’re going to appreciate more of what’s going on around you because you’re transitioning from a more forest area because there’s so many trees in the Atlanta area to like you go through the urban areas and you’re passing by restaurants, you’re passing by clubs, you’re passing by all these different things.
You see a lot of weird stuff. You see a lot of interesting things. You might see some not so great things. But it all leaves an impact. I think that’s what I mean when I say it’s my patented long walks on the beach. So things might get a little weird. I might try and take some interesting left turns here or there, but it’s all for the sake of giving that impact.
I want you to feel like you’re actually a part of the journey. I want you to feel like a story is being told to you. I want you to feel like there’s a lot of meaning and purpose behind what’s going on here. Because I wouldn’t be here right now if I didn’t have that sense of purpose to get up, leave my house and go do all these different things every day.
When I was going to find my different internships, I walked there. When I was going to school at The Creative Circus, I walked there. And by walking, I mean it included public transit, but my feet were on the ground. I was like-

Maurice Cherry:
I hear you.

Jordan Taylor:
… back and forth. It’s weird. It’s fun. It’s got a lot of purpose behind it. I feel like that’s how I design.

Maurice Cherry:
As you started saying that, for some reason that just reminded me of the first verse of Elevators from Outkast where you’re talking about taking MARTA through the hood, trying to find the hookup caught the 86 Lithonia headed to Decatur.

Jordan Taylor:
I rode to 86. That was my bus.

Maurice Cherry:
My bus was the 13 because I went to Morehouse and I was living in the west… Oh, well, I wasn’t living in the west end when I was at Morehouse, unless it was on campus. But I used to live in Buckhead in the Darlington before the Darlington got run down and now it’s like multimillion dollar condos or whatever. It used to be the 23, now it’s the 110. But I take the 23 to Art Center. I take Art Center to Five Points. I take the 13 from there. And it puts you off at the strip of Fair Street and Brawley, James P Brawley, which is the Clark Atlanta strip. That was class every day. I remember it finally. I have not ridden the 13 in years, but I remember that very fondly.

Jordan Taylor:
Yeah. I feel same way. Whenever I go back home and I see that bus when I go visit my mom or whatever, it’s a very funny feeling. Just like, oh, that used to be my life. I spent plenty of days running that thing down.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, me too. Running down to 13. People that are not in Atlanta don’t know this, but the buses are terrible. There’s only a few that are fairly reliable. The 13 is pretty reliable. The 23, which is now the 110. The six to Emory is pretty reliable. I would imagine the 86 is probably pretty reliable too, but a lot of in-town buses, good luck. If you miss it, you’re waiting 30, 40 minutes for the next bus. It’s ridiculous.

Jordan Taylor:
No, absolutely. I mean, the 86, it came, but I wouldn’t say it’s super reliable because I would have to show up 10 minutes early or I’m going to be an hour late because like you said, it might show up on time. It might show up 10 minutes early. It might show up 10 minutes late. But either way, if you miss it, you’re waiting another 40 minutes until the next one. No, definitely.

Maurice Cherry:
I remember taking the 23 and sometimes what happened is… I don’t know if this happened on the 86, but the driver would get out and go into McDonald’s and get something to eat. Just leave the bus, people on the bus waiting to get where they got to go, but they got to get a McGriddle. They got to get their food and come… You better not be mad about it either because they’ll put you out.

Jordan Taylor:
No, thanks. But my bus driver would always… Well, it didn’t happen all the time, but he stopped. I had a few bus drivers stop and get out and walk and go get some chicken wings and they come back. They would walk to the gas station.

Maurice Cherry:
Yep. Oh, man. That’s a very particular just Atlanta transit thing that, that’s funny. I think about that and I just get a warm feeling like nostalgia.

Jordan Taylor:
But like I said, it’s ridiculous. It just is Atlanta. It just is that journey.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given about design?

Jordan Taylor:
I would say for where I’m at right now, the best advice I was given was not too long ago. I was talking to Eddie Opara, just trying to take advantage of the situation I’m in. I’m like, “Okay, I’ve got to meet this man.” I was like, “Okay.” We just had a conversation. I told him where I was at like where I was talking about earlier, how I feel like I’m just in this space where I’m trying to figure out what’s next. What do I want to keep doing? Or how do I keep moving forward? What he told me was that what you got to do as a designer is kind of figure out what your voice.
You spend all this time learning the building blocks, learning the technical things like, “Oh, how do I use After Effects? How do I use InDesign?” And all this kind of stuff. But sometimes you can get lost in that and not realize that you have a way of expressing yourself. You have a voice. I feel like I do those things, but I don’t have my own world that I built out a vision for how people just immediately are like, “Oh, Jordan made this. This speaks to his sensibilities.” I’m very much more so in the production stage of where I’m at right now.
So I think that was something that, “Oh, was really helpful to me.” He was talking about how you have to pick what means the most to you. Is it about paying it forward in which case maybe you do a lot more kind of teaching or instructing? Or is it about expressing the essence of what we do. In that case, you might do a lot more forums and TED talk type things.
But it was really helpful just figuring out what means the most to you and how do you make that known to people? What is your identity as a designer?

Maurice Cherry:
That’s really good advice.

Jordan Taylor:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Next time you talk to Eddie, tell him I said what’s up.

Jordan Taylor:
Okay. Yeah. I should see him soon, so I’ll tell him.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What is it that keeps you motivated and inspired these days?

Jordan Taylor:
I think what keeps me the most motivated is just… I know there’s so much more coming. There are a myriad of things that have gotten me to this point like the music I love, the artwork I love. I’m constantly making mood boards on Are.na or Pinterest of things that I think other people are doing and that are cool and they push me forward. But I think the things that keeps me the most hopeful for what’s coming in the future is that I know I have a place and I know that I’m in control of it ultimately. I just have to keep going forward and seeing what’s next, looking for those new opportunities.

Maurice Cherry:
What more do you want to see from the design community? I feel like you are at this very unique place as not only just a young designer, but also a young designer at a place that has such a storied reputation, I would say. What do you want to see more of from the design community?

Jordan Taylor:
I want to see more of Black people. I want to see more of me, more of us. I just want to see more of it. I think that we’re such a creative people. Our influence is so ridiculous. I think that when you think about that in the grand scope, the statistics around how many people of color are like, or how many Black people are designing is so disproportionately low when I’m thinking about the kind of impact we have on the sway of things in the American culture.
I think that also something that I want to see more of is just based on my background and I guess a little bit of just being around my mom all the time. I want to see more people designing at earlier ages. I want that kind of stuff introduced to kids earlier and earlier. I think with the onset of the internet and TikTok and all those kind of things, I think it’s becoming a little more standardized at earlier ages and younger and younger kids are getting into it.
But I did a talk for my mom’s elementary school a few months ago, just introducing them to what design is and the amount of feedback I got from not only the kids, but the teachers that didn’t know that it was an option and were just so blown away about the possibility of what design is and what it can do. I think that just needs to continue happening.

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

Jordan Taylor:
In the next five years, I want to be doing more work that speaks to who I am. I wanted to speak to my interests. I wanted to impact the people that I care about the most. I wanted to continue to be as proud of my work as I am right now. I feel like I’m really proud of what I do, but it also isn’t a hundred percent mine. So I think that’s where I see myself in five years. Just really taking more ownership of my designs and applying them to what means most to me.

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

Jordan Taylor:
You can find me on Instagram, @jiggyjordan. It’s J-I-G-G-Y-J-O-R-D. I have a website. It’s a keywordjord. K-E-Y-W-O-R-D-J-O-R-D. Other than that… I mean, I have an Are.na page. I enjoy that a lot. I’ve been really getting into that. Do you use Are.na at all?

Maurice Cherry:
This was back in 2019, 2020, I worked with a designer, this really cool student named Perjohn. We used to work at Glitch together. He kind of turned me on to Are.na at first, because he was using it kind of as a sketchbook of sorts. I’ve never used it outside of that though. What is it like?

Jordan Taylor:
So to me it’s a cooler Pinterest. I find a lot of design inspiration on there visually, but I see all kind of people doing different things on here. I’ve seen entire mood boards that are just full of random ideas. I’ve seen tons of people making video references, motion references, entire mood boards that are just free type faces. I mean, I enjoy it a lot. It’s a little grungy and underground, but that speaks to the stuff I like.

Maurice Cherry:
I’ll have to check it out. What’s your name on Are.na?

Jordan Taylor:
It’s just Jordan Taylor. I think that’s the best way to find me on here. That’s the other thing. It’s a little hard to discover people on this thing, but I’ll message you. And if anybody else has any trouble finding me, they can let me know, I guess, on Instagram or something.

Maurice Cherry:
All right. Sounds good. Jordan Taylor, I want to thank you so so much for coming on the show. I really wanted to have a young Atlanta designer on the show. I know you’re not in Atlanta anymore, but I think just your story of quiet perseverance and drive from growing up to going to school and even pursuing these internships, I think that’s something that a lot of people out here need to see, because I think we see enough of the alternative, which is I went to this fancy art school and now I went to this fancy agency or whatever.
I think people see enough of the alternative and don’t see the folks out here that they’re quietly grinding. And I get the sense that you’ve really been quietly grinding, building your portfolio, improving your skills. And that’s gotten to where you are now at Pentagram of all places.
I can’t wait to see what you do in five years, man. I’m really going to be keeping an eye out for you. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Jordan Taylor:
Oh yeah. Thank you so much. I mean, this has been incredible. I appreciate it.

Sponsored by Hover

Hover

Building your online brand has never been more important and that begins with your domain name. Show the online community who you are and what youโ€™re passionate about with Hover. With over 400+ domain name extensions to choose from, including all the classics and fun niche extensions, Hover is the only domain provider we use and trust.

Ready to get your own domain name? Go to hover.com/revisionpath and get 10% off your first purchase.