Alleanna Harris

A common sentiment shared by a lot of the guests I’ve had on the podcast is that you can’t be what you don’t see. That starts at a young age, too — think about the book covers and other visuals you saw as a child and how that’s shaped you to where you are now. Luckily, there are dope illustrators like this week’s guest, Alleanna Harris, who are creating images that captivate and inspire kids so they can truly see themselves.

Alleanna and I went over some of her recent projects, including a portrait of Will Smith she drew in front of The Fresh Prince himself. She also shared her process on how she conveys a book’s story through pictures while also making them stunningly appealing. Later, Alleanna talked about growing up in South Jersey, attending UArts, spoke on the benefits of being represented by an agent, and told me what she appreciates the most about her life right now. Alleanna is a rising star, and according to her, a career in the world of illustration is possible! (So keep drawing!)

Interview Transcript

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

Alleanna Harris:
I’m Alleanna Harris. I’m a freelance illustrator from South Jersey. I mainly illustrate picture books, but I also do editorial, commercial, advertising, chapter books. I illustrate a lot.

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

Alleanna Harris:
It’s been going pretty well. It’s kind of different than last year. Last year, I took on a lot, and the year before that, so I’ve been trying to just chill a little bit and take on less just so I could align myself with projects that I really want to do.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I find that a lot of creative folks I’ve talked to just on the show and off the show, they really started the year off kind of slow. Like, they’re really kind of easing into 2023.

Alleanna Harris:
Definitely, definitely. That’s what I’ve been doing my best, just picking things that I really, really like that I’m really, really into.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, based on all that hard work that you talked about before, I hear that congratulations are in order. There’s a book that you illustrated that won in the Black Kidlit Awards, is that right?

Alleanna Harris:
Yep, yep. It won best biography in the first Black Kidlit Awards ever. It’s called Marvelous Mabel. It’s about the life of Mabel Fairbanks. And she was the first Black figure skater, just the first Black famous figure skater. She came up in 1930s, 1940s, New York City. So it’s basically about her early life and all the things that she went through while trying to learn how to figure-skate, and it actually won. And it was the biggest surprise ever. I just went on Instagram and people were like, “Hey, Alleanna, you won,” and I was like, “What?” And I looked and it said, “Best biography,” and I was like, “Oh my goodness, I can’t believe I actually won.”

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, congratulations.

Alleanna Harris:
Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
I also saw, just from peeking around through social media, you also recently did some work with Pentagram, which is a extremely well-known agency. How was that project?

Alleanna Harris:
It was pretty awesome. They emailed me and they said that they wanted some work done in the picture-book style for an animation for the Gates Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And basically, they said that they wanted me to illustrate a character named Abeo, and she was about six or seven, and they wanted a good representation of a kid in early elementary school just so that they could show it to policymakers. And it was up to me to come up with the character and what she looked like and how she moved around. So I actually ended up illustrating a lot of the key frames for the animation and a lot of the assets, the things that she’s holding, like her books and pencils and different formulas. And it was a really amazing process. I got to work with the great folks at Pentagram and another animation studio named Kong in the UK, so that was really, really awesome.

Maurice Cherry:
How long did that project take, just overall?

Alleanna Harris:
You know what? Animation… Well, actually, that would be more advertising. Those kinds of projects are really, really fast-paced, so that took about, I would say, under a month, maybe about three weeks. So it was-

Maurice Cherry:
Wow, it was fast.

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah, it was really, really fast, but it went really well. It was pretty straightforward.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, since we’re already getting into your work, I want to keep going down that road. We talked a little bit before we started recording, and you mentioned that you started professionally as an illustrator in 2017, but prior to that, you were, I guess, testing the waters, maybe, on Etsy. Is that right?

Alleanna Harris:
Yep, that’s right. I started right after college in 2015. And it was funny because my mom, she said, “Well, if you’re right out of college and you want to do this illustration thing, then you know what, I’m going to give you two years so you could figure it out. Do your best to figure it out in two years, and if not, then you could go right into probably, like, a master’s program.” So I was like, “Okay, I really have to figure this out.” And the best thing that I could think of was to just sketch and draw what’s around me or things that interested me. So I did a ton of sketches of places in Philly, and I also did a ton of illustrations of different Philly foods, and different pop-culture things, like living single in a different world. I ended up putting them on a Etsy shop, and it actually did well as soon as I started offering those prints. And that’s where I got my start.

Maurice Cherry:
How was Etsy like? Was it a good platform for you to, I guess, test out whether or not you had a market for your work?

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah, it was really good. I was really surprised, actually, because when I put them on, I was pretty convinced it would take a long time. It’s crazy, but it was a week, only a week that someone first bought one of my prints. And I actually think it was a Ferris Bueller print that was my first sale. And then around that same time, I started sharing my illustrations on Instagram, too, so I started building an audience on there.

Maurice Cherry:
Is that the one where they’re at the Sears Tower and they’re leaning over and their foreheads hitting the glass?

Alleanna Harris:
Yes. Yep, that was the one.

Maurice Cherry:
I love that one. That one is so good. It’s so good.

Alleanna Harris:
Thank you. Thank you. That’s the one I did. That one, and then I did different ones of Cameron’s… I think it’s Redhawks jersey, Sloane’s white leather jacket, and then Ferris’s shirt/vest combo, and that did well, too. So, that was kind of my start on Etsy.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you mentioned earlier, when you were working with Pentagram, that they wanted, quote, unquote, “a picture-book style.” What does your process look like for illustrating a picture book? I would imagine it’s probably different from working with an author than it is working with a company or a nonprofit.

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah, definitely. Well, for picture books, it can actually take a long time. It could take a year or more. Because I don’t actually work directly with authors; I usually work directly with the publishers. So I usually get those projects through my agent. My agent, Alex, she usually emails me with a manuscript and she’s like, “What do you think about this? Do you like how it sounds? Are you interested?” And then I look over it and then I say yes or no. And then if it’s a yes, then I look over the manuscript again, and then they might send me these thing called art notes. Usually they’re within a template for the book, so usually they place the text within the book so that I have a place to sketch everything. And then they give me art notes, which basically tell me what to draw.

But lately, they haven’t been giving me art notes. They’ve just been saying, “Okay, here’s the manuscript, and go for it.” So, I just sketch things, whatever comes to mind, whatever I think fits the story best, and then I send it back to them. The editor and the art director go over it, and then they come up with feedback and notes, and then I revise. Usually it’s a bunch of revisions, just a cycle of revisions. And then I go to final art, I start to add color. Sometimes I do rough color, I just place colors around, and then they give me the “Go ahead,” and then I fix that up. And then it’s another cycle of revisions. And then after I finish the final color, I usually go over it again. And then that’s it. It’s a long process, but it’s totally worth it.

Maurice Cherry:
And you mostly work with the editors, that’s interesting. For some reason, I thought you’d be working more closely with the author since it’s their words and everything.

Alleanna Harris:
I know, and usually… Well, when I started, I thought that would be the case, too, but no, I work directly with the art director and then the editor. Usually it’s both of them together. For my last couple of books, I talked to the authors after the process. It’s really funny. I usually don’t talk to them, not unless it’s through the editor.

Maurice Cherry:
And I would imagine the authors are… I mean, do they like that process, I guess? I don’t know. I guess that’s not really for you to decide, huh?

Alleanna Harris:
Not really. Usually, I guess they rely on the editors for that. If they have things that they want me to include, if they have reference photos or other things like that, they send it through the editor, and then I work from there.

Maurice Cherry:
Interesting, interesting. Well, I guess if the author’s writing the book at that point, they’re like, “Look, you got it from here.” No, I mean, I guess it sounds like the authors are happy with it. I would imagine that would be kind of awkward if you do all this illustration for the book and the author’s like, “I don’t know if this is really what I wanted for the book.”

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah. Oh, no, that would be so awkward. But I mean, I would work with it and then I’d get it to a place where we’re all happy. But yeah, they leave it up to the editor and the art director. I’d say for one of the books, it was actually a early reader, and it was about Geoffrey Holder, the actor and Broadway star. I actually had to go through a lot of revisions for that one just to get it to a place where the author was happy with it. It wasn’t that she wasn’t happy with the art, but it was just a certain kind of feeling that she wanted, because he’s from Trinidad and she just wanted it to have that homey, bright feeling, just, like, Caribbean feeling. It took me a few revision cycles to get there, but I got there, so she was happy with it.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, to that end, when you’re illustrating for a book, is it more about trying to accurately convey the story, or is it about making something, like you just mentioned, making it more visually appealing?

Alleanna Harris:
It’s both because you want the reader… And usually the reader is a kid. You want kids to want to know what they’re looking at, and two, to feel something from the book. So it’s usually my job to get it there, to get it accurate enough where they know who they’re looking at just by their parents, but also, it’s up to me to make it look good enough in terms of color and mood so that it really affects the readers.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, yeah. I mean, you said it’s a picture book, so the picture has to be sort of the primary focus almost, it sounds like.

Alleanna Harris:
Right, right.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Aside from that Geoffrey Holder book you mentioned, was there ever a particularly challenging illustration you had to create for a book, whether it was technical or just getting the look and feel right?

Alleanna Harris:
Oh my goodness, yes. It was actually my first picture book called The Journey of York. I’d say it was more like a oil painting-type style. It was way more realistic. And it had a lot of different landscapes, and all the people had to look really real. So it took a lot of work to get it to a point where it looked right. It had all these different locations in the Pacific Northwest and all this vegetation and all these people. And it was just a lot of going back and forth with my art director, Laurie. It took a lot of research, too. They actually sent me a book, and I do not remember the name of it, but it’s somewhere in my bookcase at back of me. But they had to send me a book, and it had a lot about the clothes that they wore during that time. It also had some examples of the places that Lewis and Clark went, because it was basically about the enslaved man that went along with them, and it was basically the brains of the operation alongside with Sacagawea. So, it was just a lot to that artistically.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, I want to get more into your work and your career. There’s some really dope things that you’ve done that I want to talk about. But before we get there, let’s learn more about you. Now, you’re originally from Philly, but you were raised in South Jersey, is that correct?

Alleanna Harris:
Yes, yes. I’m Philly born. My parents are both from Philly. And I was raised in South Jersey, about 20-30 minutes away, Northeast. So, Philly is really important to me. Yeah, just raised in South Jersey and in a very, very close-knit family. It was a pretty cool upbringing. The town where I was raised in, it’s predominantly Black. I mostly went to Quaker schools growing up. And for those that aren’t familiar with Quaker schools, it’s basically Christian, but they believe that the light of God is in everyone, and they don’t have worship services. They just sit in silence for a little bit of time weekly. They’re known for just very rigorous academic programs. So, I went to Quaker schools for K through 12, kindergarten, all the way through 12th grade, and it was really a awesome experience.

Maurice Cherry:
Did you do a lot of drawing as a kid or as a teenager?

Alleanna Harris:
Oh, yeah. I’ve been drawing forever. When I was little, when I was a toddler, I would just scribble in all of my mom’s legal pads. Every single page, I’d just scribble. Like, turn the page, scribble, turn the page scribble. And then she’d go to work and then take out her legal pad, and then all of them were just covered in scribble. When I got a little older, I would always doodle in the church programs. By the time I got to middle school, I would keep a sketchbook with me. And my mom and my grandma were super supportive because they’d always be like, “Did you remember to bring your sketchbook? Always remember to sketch.” And I would just sketch everything that was around me. In high school, I was more of an academic-type kid. I was very math and science-y. So I didn’t really take a lot of art classes, but I always kept that sketchbook next to me.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, that’s interesting. You mentioned that about being more math and science-y, but also into drawing and art. Is that kind of what initially pushed you into architecture at Temple?

Alleanna Harris:
Yep, that was it. Because I was into math and science, but when I was trying to decide what to do, I was like, “I need something with a artistic bent,” and I thought that would be architecture. So, I got into Temple. I was in their honors program, actually, and I was also accepted into their architecture program at their Tyler School of Art. It was a really, really great program, but I did not enjoy it one bit. I thought that’s what I wanted to do, but I got there and I was like, “I don’t really enjoy this like I thought I did.” I mean, I did well, but I was like, “No, there’s got to be something other than this I could do.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I can imagine… I mean, when I went to school, for example, I went to study computer science, computer engineering at first because I wanted to be a web designer. Now, granted, this was late ’90s, early 2000s, so web design was not… I don’t want to say it wasn’t a profession, but it certainly wasn’t one that you could, I think, really study in a lot of schools. Most schools just didn’t even have a curriculum for it. And I remember taking it that first semester and talking to my advisor about it, and he was just like, “Oh, the internet’s a fad. You don’t want to get into that. Nobody’s going to be interested in that.” And he’s like, “If that’s what you want to do, you should change your major.” So I did change my major. But you went even further. You completely transferred schools.

Alleanna Harris:
I did, I did. I’m pretty sure everyone thought, I don’t know, maybe that I was a little bit crazy, because they’re like, “You’re at Temple, you’re at a great art school. What are you doing?” I had a really chunky scholarship that I was just not throwing away. But yeah, I need something more creative, so I actually ended up looking up other schools, and I found University of the Arts. And it happened to be on the other side of Broad Street. Temple University is on North Broad, and University of the Arts is on South Broad, on the other side of City Hall. So, I looked them up and I saw that they had an animation program, and I was like, “I think this would be really great.” I sat my mom down, I was like, “Listen, I have something to tell you.” And she’s staring at me, like, “What is wrong?” And I was like, “I want to go into animation.” She’s like, “Oh my God. Okay, that’s fine. Just figure out how to apply and we’ll just go from there.” So, I went to the Open House, I applied, and I actually ended up getting a bigger scholarship there than I had at Temple.

Maurice Cherry:
Whoa, look at you.

Alleanna Harris:
I know. Thank you. But it’s like, who knew? So, I ended up at University of the Arts as an animation major, and that’s where I graduated from.

Maurice Cherry:
How was your time there?

Alleanna Harris:
Oh my goodness, I loved it. It was different from Temple because, number one, it’s smaller. It’s private compared to Temple, which is public and it’s bigger. But it’s smaller, but it’s right smack dab in the middle of Center City, so right on the Avenue of the Arts. It doesn’t have a campus, it’s just within everything. This is within Center City. So, when I got there and I got to the dorm and everything, which is basically like an apartment, it was kind of culture shock because you have to learn how to navigate. It is kind of like “living as an adult,” quote, unquote, even though you’re in college. So it was just interesting having to meet people again because… I transferred, so I didn’t get to go to orientation, so I had to meet people.

It was really great because I always liken it to Fame, the school in Fame, because UArts has so many different majors. It’s just such a comprehensive arts university. It has musical theater, and fine arts, and film, and photography. And then I tell people it’s like Fame because we would sit in the dining hall and then people would just start singing and dancing and everything and just be in the midst of that. But it was a really great time. Just so many creative people, so many things to do, so many great professors. It was really awesome. I enjoyed it. I made a lot of great friends, still friends with them today.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, do you feel like it really sort of prepared you once you graduated and got out there working as a creative?

Alleanna Harris:
Yes, definitely, because it allowed me, just going there, to take different types of classes. I had my animation… my core classes, but I was also able to take film classes, and I learned a lot in those. And just the things that I learned within my film classes, it directly applies to how I see illustration, just my point of view. I also took illustration classes. And actually, my illustration classes, that made me realize that I really wanted to go into illustration more than animation. So for sure, definitely. Definitely.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I can imagine that kind of environment because, one, there’s so many different creative disciplines happening at once, but then also, like you mentioned with that lunchroom example, you’re getting to see people exhibit their craft. You have the possibility and the potential to go into anything else just by getting inspired from being in that environment, which I think can sometimes be a lot different when you’re at a traditional liberal-arts school because you’re so locked into your major.

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah, definitely. I agree.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And then as you said earlier, after you graduated, for your early career, you started out with just, I guess, freelancing, starting out on Etsy, seeing if you had a market for it, and then that’s sort of where things took off. But you said you started professionally in 2017. So what were those first two years like after you graduated from UArts?

Alleanna Harris:
They were really interesting because I did things on Etsy. I was starting to build an audience on social media, but I was also doing commissions for friends and family members. So there’s some people who were like, “Hey, can you do this cover, because I have a book coming out,” so I do stuff like that. So, I did a lot of commissions. I even taught senior citizens how to paint. I would go to assisted-living places and we would have little paint-and-sip nights. And that was fun. That was interesting. I also do stuff like that. And actually, closer to 2017, I illustrated a book. Well, my cousin worked within the Philadelphia School Board. And she was working with someone who had a company that had to do with the school board, and she wrote books. So she was looking for an illustrator, and my cousin was like, “Hey, my cousin is an illustrator. You might want to check her portfolio out.” So she did, and she checked my portfolio out and she liked it, and she was like, “Hey, can you illustrate this book for me?” So, that was actually my first experience illustrating a book, and I absolutely fell in love with it. And actually, that was the main experience that made me want to illustrate books.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice, nice. Now, you’ve said that… We talked about this before we recorded, but you said there are a lot of different paths when it comes to illustration as a career and that you can make it lucrative. It sounds like for you initially, you tried out a bunch of different things, like you were teaching senior citizens, you were doing Etsy, you were doing commissions. What are some of those paths that people can take if they’re looking to pursue illustration as a career?

Alleanna Harris:
There are a ton of different paths. I guess just thinking about my major, I was an animation major, so most of my classmates, they ended up going the animation route. They also illustrate, but they’re within story of the animation. So they come up with the storyboards, they come up with the plot points, they do stuff like that. And then I also have friends that are animators now. So, you can definitely go that way.

Within illustration, I know people who illustrate commercially, so they do different advertisements or they work with brands like Google or Apple or Adobe.

I know people who work within art licensing, so they do the patterns that go on clothes or that go on different products.

There are just so many different ways you can go. Or, like me, you could go into picture books, or you could do comic books, and there are just so many different ways you can go.

Maurice Cherry:
And it sounds like, I guess maybe once you get further along on one path, you can maybe bounce between others. Like, if you’re doing picture books, maybe you can also do editorial illustrations or something like that.

Alleanna Harris:
Exactly, yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot of leeway. There’s a lot of leeway because some people can look at your work and be like, “You know what? That will work over here. Do you want to try it out?” That happened with me. Someone from… I think it’s called the Phoenix International, they’re making a graphic novel about Ida B. Wells, and they’re like, “Do you want to work on this? I know it’s a comic book, and I know that you do picture books, but do you want to work on it?” And I said, “Sure.” And I ended up doing a graphic novel. But yeah, that’s definitely how it happened. You could just kind of jump from style to style.

Maurice Cherry:
And I would imagine your process probably still mostly stays the same, even if you’re doing these sort of different types of illustration.

Alleanna Harris:
Yep, yep. Yeah, it pretty much stays the same. You’re right.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, I’m curious to get your take about AI-generated art. That’s a discussion that has really popped up, I’d say, within the last, I don’t know, I’d say, four to five months particularly, once people started using… what was the app called? Lensa?

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
And they started making those AI-generated avatars and putting them out there and everything. I don’t know, the discussion around it, I think, has been so interesting because I’ve heard from artists that are like, “I hate this. This is theft. I can’t believe this is happening,” that sort of thing. And then I hear it from the average layperson that is surprised for two things. One, that the art looks nothing like them, which, I mean, yeah, you had a computer do it, that makes sense. But then secondly, they’re more perturbed that they had to pay for it.

Alleanna Harris:
Oh yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Like, you paid money for that? You gave them how much money? And I would see people on Twitter and stuff searching around, trying to find a free alternative because they didn’t want to pay Lensa. I think it was $8 or $10 or something like that. So they’re like, “Well, I found this Chinese app called Meitu, and I can do it there for free,” and da, da, da, da, da, and all this stuff.

From your perspective as an artist, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, all these AI-generated art’s algorithms and apps and stuff like that, what are your thoughts on all that?

Alleanna Harris:
I have so many thoughts. First of all, well, just, I guess, the bottom line, I’m not a fan. I’m not a fan because some people want to use it to replace working artists. I saw this big thread on Twitter with this guy who used… I think he used Stable Diffusion to make a picture book, and everybody was getting on him about the picture book because all of his characters, they weren’t consistent. It just didn’t look right-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, yeah, I saw that, I think because he also used ChatGPT to write the book.

Alleanna Harris:
Yes, that’s it. That’s it. Yeah, I’m not a fan because it is theft because it needs other people’s work, at least Stable Diffusion does. It needs other people’s work to create art. So why don’t you just actually pay an artist to actually do the art instead of stealing the work to make something out of it? Also, I feel like using AI, you’re not really being an artist, you’re more being a client because AI is doing the work. You’re telling it what you want it to do instead of you actually actively doing it. I know it’s less work to tell software to do what you want, but the process is the biggest part of making the art, and you’re taking all the process out of it.

Maurice Cherry:
There’s a friend of mine, he’s an art director at an ad agency, and he’s been learning Midjourney and been posting the results on LinkedIn and stuff. And it looks nice. I find that the AI art has a particular style-

Alleanna Harris:
It’s a look.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, it’s a particular look. Very stylized, heavy shadows, all the art kind of looks the same regardless of who the subject is. But he’s been taking a class. Apparently people have written classes about how to ask the right prompts to get it to do the right thing. It’s so interesting seeing how far people are willing to take it, I think, just to see what the possibilities are.

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah. Well, there are so many ways that we could use AI that would help or make our lives easier, but I just don’t think that that’s the best way to go about it. It’s like, why don’t we use AI to figure out our taxes or do the work that we don’t feel like doing, having to do bookkeeping or something like that. But the actual art part that really takes a human to do, you’re taking that away. I’m not really a fan, but hey.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, it’s so interesting, at least from what I’m seeing people trying to do. I think it does unlock some people’s creativity that doesn’t necessarily have the skill-

Alleanna Harris:
It does.

Maurice Cherry:
… to maybe take the idea that they have in their head and really draw it, or even spend money to get someone to draw it. So they’ll say, “Oh, well, let’s see what AI can do.” I saw… I think this was on TikTok. Someone had done a Racebent Addams Family, where the Addams Family is all Black, so then they had all of the… Gomez and Wednesday and Morticia, et cetera. It’s like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” And then you look at all the comments that are like, “Somebody needs to take this to Netflix.” I’m like, “Netflix already has both the movies and the new series.” Not saying that they couldn’t do this, but what is… I think when people see that, one, I don’t know if they’re under the assumption that the person created it, but two, if they were to take it to that extra level, that’s when you got to get humans involved.

Alleanna Harris:
Exactly. And you were talking about the level of skill. That’s so true, because I think people want to avoid, I’m going to say this, but the ugly phase, when your work doesn’t look that good, when you’re still learning. But you can’t avoid it. To make good art, you have to make bad art first. That’s also why I’m not a fan, but yeah. You kind of skip over that phase where you’re just learning the materials, learning… If you work on a computer, you’re learning the software. You skip over that to try to make art that’s presentable. And you can’t.

Maurice Cherry:
I do have some writer friends that are using it just for character sketches. It helps them to take the character that they’re writing about to visualize it. So they’ll do it for that purpose, but they’re not going to take that and then go to a designer or an illustrator and say, “I made this on Midjourney. Can you touch this up,” or “Can you do XYZ?” I would imagine some people will go that route. Don’t do that. But I can see some useful applications of it, as long as it doesn’t get too… The person creating the picture book, I mean, come on.

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It’s like, if there is a way to do it without stealing other people’s work and styles, then that would be interesting to see. But I just don’t like that a lot of the different programs are stealing other people’s work, and not even paying them for it. They’re just taking it, “Oh, I like this person’s style, so I’m just going to plug it in.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Well, I know Getty is suing… I think they’re suing Stable Diffusion-

Alleanna Harris:
I heard.

Maurice Cherry:
… because one thing that Stable Diffusion does, and I guess all of these algorithms or AI things do it, is, they’ll take the watermarks, too. Getty Images always has that big rectangular watermark across their picture. And so there are AI-generated images that have malformed versions of that, and Getty’s like, “Ah, ah, I don’t think so. You got to pay us for that.”

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah, exactly. And there’s this thing going around on Twitter. People were saying, “Oh, maybe you should plug in Disney and see what happens.”

Maurice Cherry:
Because yeah, you can feed stuff to it to make it better. But to what end is this going to come from? Because I’m starting to see applications of folks using AI for music, for example. I think Google has this beta program out now where you can give it a couple of phrases and have it generate music in a particular style, which I know musicians will hate that. But it’s interesting how far we’re trying to take artificial intelligence in a way that subverts human creativity.

Alleanna Harris:
Exactly. Along with creativity, it makes you think of ethics, too. Like, where exactly do we stop? When is it okay, and when is this not okay? It’s a bigger conversation.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, educators now are already having to deal with that with ChatGPT. I’ve been talking with a couple of educators now that are just like… Some are still trying to wrap their heads around it, others are already changing their syllabi to say, “Don’t do this.” And we’re starting to see school districts and stuff crack down on it because students… And this is to a point where, in an educational perspective, this is really dangerous. Students don’t know the difference. They don’t know the nuance or the particular human parts of this. They just see it, it’s like, “Oh, this can do my homework for me.”

Alleanna Harris:
Yes. Yes, you’re so right. It’s really something to see. It’s so many new developments in such a short amount of time. Technology.

Maurice Cherry:
I saw this while going through your Instagrams. I was doing research, but you even got to draw Will Smith in front of Will Smith.

Alleanna Harris:
I did. I did. I did. It was crazy because the folks at Harriett’s Bookshop, they contacted me and they were like, “Hey, we’re having this book tour stopping in and we were just wondering if you’d work with us in setting it up.” And I was like, “Oh my God. Of course.” So as I was working with them and getting everything set up and working with possible drawings, I was like, “Okay, something’s up because, one, this project is really rush. It’s going really fast. So I feel like this is someone important, and I don’t know who this is.” And then I emailed them and they were like, “Yeah, we figured we’d let you know. It’s actually Will Smith. And this is a Will Smith’s book.” And I was like, “Oh my goodness.” So, they were like, “Okay, so people from Westbrook-

Maurice Cherry:
Westbrook, Westbrook, yeah.

Alleanna Harris:
Yes. They’re like, “Westbrook is going to call you and they’re going to ask you to do a portrait, and you’re going to say yes.” And I was like, “Okay. Okay, I’ll say yes.” And I actually had to meet with them and send them past sketches to see if they approved. And then they told me, “Well, we’re going to show this to Will, see if he likes it.” And I was like, “Oh my God, you’re going to show it. He just [inaudible 00:39:17] to be Will Smith as just Will. Okay.” So, they showed it to Will Smith, they showed it to Will, and he liked it, and I ended up sketching him in front of him at the event.

It’s funny because I didn’t get to finish the sketch because the whole day was actually pretty hectic, but I was able to give him a drawing that I did. And I actually have the process video up on my Instagram, too. I was able to give that to him and he’s like, “Wow, that’s definitely me.” And I was like, “I know.” But it was great to just be able to say hello and shake his hand and say thank-you. And just to see how it went in person, it was just amazing. That was an amazing day.

Maurice Cherry:
Is he Philly royalty?

Alleanna Harris:
Yes, without a doubt.

Maurice Cherry:
I’ve always been curious about that because, I mean, so much of… Of course, his early story has been about in West Philadelphia, born… We all know that. But then I think so much of his professional career has been wrapped up in Hollywood and California. I was just curious about that.

Alleanna Harris:
Oh no, he’s definitely royalty. And actually, before he got there, it’s just tons of people. There was even a guy dressed up like him in his Fresh Prince days. Like, the striped shirt on, the sideways cap. These would people that are like, “Oh, we walked so far to be here.” And there are people from the Carolinas, I think, they were just waiting for hours. And he pulled in and people were just losing… 6abc was there. They’re like, “Fresh Prince returns.” He’s definitely Philly royalty, no doubt.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow, nice. Now, you’re represented by The Bright Agency, and The Bright Agency reps, a ton of animators, artists, and authors. How did you go about getting representation, and what are the benefits for you as an artist of being represented by an agency?

Alleanna Harris:
It’s funny, it was actually pretty serendipitous. My friend Loveis Wise, they’re a illustrator. They’re really amazing. We went to college together. We both went to UArts. They were a illustration major. And they told me, they said, “You should join Women Who Draw. It’s a really great website. It’s basically a database of women illustrators. You just put a piece of your work there and you say your name and different things about your identity, and then people go there and look for artists.” And I was like, “Okay, cool. I’ll do it.” So I uploaded my info. And not too long after that, I’d say months, my first agent, James Burns, he said, “Hey, I like your work. Is there anything that Bright can do for you?” And I was like, “You got to be kidding me, because it’s…” Actually, Bright was the agency that I was looking at when I was starting to plan, sending out my artist postcards. And the fact that he found my work on Women Who Draw and then reached out to me was absolutely amazing. So, from there, I said yes, and I’ve been represented by Bright ever since.

Maurice Cherry:
What are artist postcards? What’s that? Is it, like, a calling card of some sort?

Alleanna Harris:
Basically, yeah, you put a strong piece of art. It could have different themes. It could be seasonal or just whatever piece of art that you like most. And you put that on one side and then you put your information, your name, website on the other side, and you send it to art directors or agencies. Basically, if they like them, they keep them and they keep you in line for projects.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. So you use that to sort of shop yourself around a little bit.

Alleanna Harris:
No, I didn’t even start. I went on, I put my stuff on Women Who Draw, and he found me there-

Maurice Cherry:
And they came to you.

Alleanna Harris:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Okay. What are those benefits of being repped by an agency? I would imagine it sort of just takes a lot of the admin stuff off of your plate.

Alleanna Harris:
It does. It really does. That’s what I like most because contract stuff that goes through them, they have people who specifically work on contracts. So I could go to my agent even about payments or deadlines, and they could talk to the publishers and the companies on my behalf. It’s just great having someone in your corner who knows the field better than you do.

Maurice Cherry:
And then all you can do is just draw and get paid.

Alleanna Harris:
I love it. It’s so much help.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I mean, that’s the dream for all creatives to be able to have the freedom to do that. Like, just do your work, get paid, and not have to worry about all the in-between stuff. So that’s great.

Alleanna Harris:
Yes. Yes, yes. It’s definitely a blessing. I’m definitely grateful to work with them. It’s really awesome.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you’ve got a couple of books that are coming out a little bit later this year, right?

Alleanna Harris:
Yep, yep. I have two. The first is Good Things by Maryah Greene, and that’s a picture book about a boy named Malcolm. Lives with his dad, and I believe it’s in Harlem. [inaudible 00:44:33] grandma, and his dad actually passes away, so he has to learn how to take care of the plants that his dad left him. And it’s a really good book about grief, and about plants, too. I got to illustrate a lot of plants because Maryah is a amazing plant doctor in New York City. So, there’s that book. These books come out in August, I believe, the 1st of August. There’s also Recipe for Change, which is by Michael C. Platt. And he is pretty young. I believe he’s in his late teens or his teens, but he’s a chef. It’s a cookbook. And I illustrate different foods in different scenes, based on the civil rights movement. And each of the recipes align with the scene. So you have a recipe and a story and a portrait, and it’s really, really educational. So, I have those two coming out in August.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Are they both available right now for pre-order? Because I want to put links to them in the show notes so people can check them out.

Alleanna Harris:
They’re about to be. Recipe for Change is actually about to be open for pre-order in the first week of February, and I am still waiting on word for Good Things.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Well, hopefully by the time this comes out, which will be right around mid- to late-February, we’ll hopefully have links to both of those, but we’ll certainly mention them, as well.

Alleanna Harris:
Awesome. That sounds great.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. How do you stay motivated and inspired with your work?

Alleanna Harris:
You know what, I just think it’s a part of my personality. I’m really self-directed. I have a lot of family support, especially from my mom. And there are certain things that I just want to see on the world, and I want kids to be able to see themselves in books. And that drives me. That’s always the thing that pushes me. So I have no lack of passion or drive. That always pushes me.

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

Alleanna Harris:
Oh my goodness. I feel like I have a lot of dream projects. I’m always into little-known stories of figures that we definitely should know about, but we don’t. So I love picture books that have to do with subjects like that. But I’m also interested in going back into animation. I’m not leaving picture books, but going maybe into the visual-development part of animation, maybe character design and maybe, one day, art directing, that would be amazing, for a animated series. That would definitely be a dream for me. That would be amazing.

Maurice Cherry:
Is this a series that you’d create yourself?

Alleanna Harris:
Ooh, I’m open to it. I didn’t even think of that, but now that you say it, yeah, that would be great. It could be existing, too, but any way that I could art-direct or do character design, that would be a dream.

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

Alleanna Harris:
I just appreciate being able to use the skills that I’ve worked on. I guess I could say gifts, too, just to be able to use them to help people learn and just give them material to look at, just new books and being able to help kids read and learn new things. That’s just a blessing, and I never would’ve thought that this would be what I do as a career, but I absolutely love it. I love being able to sit down in my room and just draw and then actually have it turn into a book, into things people see on bookshelves. That’s just amazing to me and I’m just forever grateful for it.

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

Alleanna Harris:
Definitely more picture books. I guess, along with the animation thing that I just mentioned, I could actually see myself working on a series. But other than that, I could see myself doing more commercial work, kind of like what I did with Pentagram. Actually, last year, I illustrated a gift card for Target. It was a Christmas gift card. I can see myself doing more of that, more brand work. But yeah, those are the things I could see in the future.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice. We just had Domonique Brown. She has a company, a lifestyle company called Domo, Inc. And she has a collection… Yeah, part of her collection’s at Target now for Black History Month. She also did a few cards for American Greetings, I think it’s a card company. She did some cards for them, too. So, I could totally see your work in that vein. That would be great.

Alleanna Harris:
Thank you. Thank you. I would love it. That would be so great.

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

Alleanna Harris:
Sure. Well, you could go to my website. It’s alleannaharris.com, A-L-L-E-A-N-N-A-H-A-R-R-I-S, .com. And I’m also Alleanna Harris everywhere on social media, so you can find me on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, even Tumblr, TikTok. You can find me all those places. Alleanna Harris.

Maurice Cherry:
All right, sounds good. Well, Alleanna Harris, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I think that just the work that you’re doing is so inspired and really, I think, driven by your own particular creative passion. I mean, as a kid that grew up reading a lot, reading competitions and all that stuff, there is just such an importance on children’s books that I think sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. And so the fact now that we have so many Black artists, especially like yourself, that are creating the books with authors that children are going to read, that are going to help shape them into becoming the people of tomorrow, I think is just such an amazing and inspiring thing. And your work is just so beautiful, and-

Alleanna Harris:
Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
… I’m so excited to see what you do next. And like I said, we’ll put links to your books in the show notes. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Alleanna Harris:
Thank you so much, and thank you so much for having me. This was great. I really enjoyed this.

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Domonique Brown

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

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

☎️ Call ‪626-603-0310 and leave us a message with your comments on this episode!‬

The DomoInk Collection at Target

Interview Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Domonique Brown:
Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Domonique Brown:
They do.

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

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

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

Domonique Brown:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Domonique Brown:
Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Domonique Brown:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Oh.

Domonique Brown:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Woo!

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

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

Domonique Brown:
Oh yes.

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

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

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

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

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

Domonique Brown:
Oh my God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice.

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

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

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

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

Domonique Brown:
Thank you.

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

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

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

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

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

Domonique Brown:
Oh yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Such a great way to support.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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George McCalman

Y’all are in for a real treat this week, because I got the chance to catch up with the extremely talented and accomplished George McCalman. He is well known for his work a studio owner and creative director, and he recently published his first book, Illustrated Black History: Honoring the Iconic and the Unseen.

George shared how the idea for the book came about, and he spoke about some of the surprising and interesting things that came up during his research on who to include. He also talked about getting his start in the magazine industry as an art director, shared what convinced him to eventually start his own business, and elaborated on how his style has evolved over the years. George is a master of his craft and a true inspiration to aspiring creatives everywhere!

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Interview Transcript

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

George McCalman:
Well, number one, thank you for having me on, Maurice. My name is George McCalman. I am an artist and creative director based in San Francisco. I live part-time in the Caribbean, the country of Grenada. And I run a design studio, which affords me the privilege of doing a lot of creative things at the same time. And I’m also a fine and commercial artist, and I’m often the artist of projects that I am designing and am the creative director on. I do a lot of other things, but that’s it for right now.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s a lot.

George McCalman:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, first off, happy New Year to you.

George McCalman:
Happy New Year.

Maurice Cherry:
We’re recording this right near the start of 2023. How have things been going so far?

George McCalman:
It’s been great. I’m in a very different realm than I was even a few weeks ago. I just had a couple weeks of a break from a book tour that I have been on and a press tour in support of my book Illustrated Black History: Honoring the Iconic and the Unseen. And so I’ve had a little bit of a reprieve, and so for the first time in many months, I have had the opportunity to really synthesize and make sense of the whirlwind that has come from the second half of this year of this book being out and me going out on a book tour and a national book tour. So I’ve just been really reflective for the last couple of weeks, and so this conversation is really timed well because I’ve been just thinking a lot about my experience of being a published author and people interacting with this book and having their responses and what I have learned from their response to this book. It’s been really incredible.

Maurice Cherry:
And I know you’re currently recording in Grenada. I would imagine having a Caribbean paradise at the finish line of a book tour is a pretty good motivation.

George McCalman:
Well, it’s actually just a reprieve. I start back on the book tour in February. So this is actually not even the midpoint. I’m going to be on tour for this book most likely another year just because I feel really passionately that this subject matter should be revered every day of the year and not just localized to a month or a period of time. So I am taking the message of that to the streets.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. When you look back at last year, is there anything that you want to try to change for 2023?

George McCalman:
Yeah. Expansive. I don’t know that I would use the word change for myself. It’s expand. I learned a lot and I was involved in all aspects of the making of this book, which is a really unique place to be. Most authors are not involved with all of the backend, the making and the design and the marketing. And so it’s been a really comprehensive experience too. And if I would say any adjustment, it would just be more, basically.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I’ll make sure that we have a link to the book in the show notes. Yeah, let’s dive more into it. Tell me about the book. I think the name is self-explanatory, but tell me more about the book, what was your idea behind it, all of that.

George McCalman:
The book came from the word … The first sentence of the introduction of this book is I had a curiosity, and that is the very simple truth. I was just curious to know more about black pioneers. And I was just coming to a point where I started realizing that there was an artist inside of me, and so I decided to merge these twin curiosities of, I want to test out the parameters of me as an artist after basically not making art since I graduated from college 20 years before. So I’m a classically trained artist. I’m a painter and a drafts person and a sculptor and a photographer. But when I went out into the professional landscape of being a magazine art and creative director, I didn’t think there was any room for me to be a fine artist. And at the time, there just weren’t people who looked like me in this realm.

And so I knew that would be a hard road, and I decided to go with the convention of working in the corporate world just to establish myself financially and it was an adult decision. But I came to a point a few years ago where I started realizing that there was more that I was interested in. It felt like there was an ocean that I had not touched. And I decided in a flash of inspiration to make this project my first assignment as an artist. And so I researched and wrote and painted a different black history pioneer every day for a month of February, and it just started ballooning. I think that’s the right word. It started expanding from there.

Maurice Cherry:
How did you go about researching and selecting the people to feature in the book? Because as I’ve looked through the book, I have the book actually, you have a wide range of people that you feature.

George McCalman:
I really know that the person that I am personally and professionally has really been framed by my time working at magazines because it’s basically, I got both military and library training at the same time, if that makes sense. There’s a rigor to when you are working under deadline, you have to really be sharp, you have to have your focus, you have to know what the context is of what you’re doing. You have to be really communicative with the people around you. And you have to make sure that what you’re writing is all the time. And so it really trained me to know some of the shortcuts of researching and trusting my instincts around that. And for me, I was interested in people I didn’t know that much about. Even if I knew their name, even if I knew some of their story, there’s always more to learn.

And that’s the thing that I’ve learned in my 15 years as a magazine person before I opened my studio, that even when you think you know everything about a public figure, there is always more. And so it was a trust in the information I was learning, but it was also a trust in myself. And so I was always just looking at the periphery, looking at the fringes, asking myself questions. Who is Edna Lewis? What was Gordon Parks thinking as he was moving through the world? I found myself asking intimate questions to myself of the people I was researching. And so I found myself drawn to aspects of their story, and I was always looking for not just their accomplishments, but their personality. So many of our pioneers were always looking through a contemporary lens, but life was just so much harder then.

And so I can’t imagine what Gordon Parks’ everyday life was. He was always the representative, and there’s always a burden placed on black people in America that we have to represent our community. And I can’t imagine what that was like 50 years ago, what that was like 75 years ago, 150 years ago. How much harder it was to be seen as an individual when your community is always being judged against the majority white community. And so it’s always this push, it’s always this burden, it’s always this pressure. But then you look at these accomplishments and so many of these people, publicly anyway, were really graceful. And so you have to develop this superpower when you’re out in the world. And I found myself thinking, what did these people have to compromise? What did they have to give up? Who did they have to be to be the people that we know and sometimes take for granted?

I was always looking for the hidden messages of who these people actually were, and that just always sparked my interest. It just made me hungry and curious. And even as I was painting them, I found myself drawn to nuances of personality. Gordon Parks was really charming, and so the portrait that I did of him, there’s a twinkle in his eye. I was looking to bring out the anger and the jokingness and the sadness and the power and the force. I really wanted to capture human personality in these paintings and really individualize them.

Maurice Cherry:
Aside from just how poetic that is, that is extremely profound of you as an artist to want to approach it in that way. Even as you mentioned that, I’m thinking of my personal experience, but I’d say maybe a couple of years ago, this was right around the summer of 2020, I was doing a lot of research looking at old issues of Ebony Magazine and Jet Magazine from the ’50s and the ’60s. And one thing that stuck out to me that I thought was really interesting, I saw an ad for … It was some kind of alcohol, maybe gin or something like that. But it was Langston Hughes.

George McCalman:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Langston Hughes was selling alcohol. And I don’t know why that broke my brain for a second because in a way you think of, oh, Langston Hughes, Harlem Renaissance, profound poet. Why is he selling alcohol in Ebony Magazine?

George McCalman:
Yes. We don’t often think of our pioneers as whole people. People who have made mistakes and people who have had different lives and weren’t always doing the things that we focus and categorize them in terms of their professional accomplishments. And you start seeing people are just flawed. Every human being is flawed. We have complicated relationships with our icons in that we have to place them on a pedestal to basically show ourselves and to show the larger community how great we are. And so we always have to work harder to show these things. And then when you see Langston Hughes out of context, it’s confusing.

Maurice Cherry:
It caused me to pause for a minute. Not so much the why behind it, but it made me think … I don’t know. I wouldn’t think of him as a spokesperson for an alcohol company. I’m thinking of him as the poet. And not even thinking of like, oh, well, what are the circumstances that brought him to do this? Because I’m not looking at him being in Ebony in that way as a negative, but it just surprised me to go through the pages and I’m like, “Oh, Langston Hughes is selling gin.” It was gin or something. I don’t know.

George McCalman:
Because Langston Hughes had to pay his bills too.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

George McCalman:
Homie had to pay his bills, and so lots of people did lots of different things to survive.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What would you say is the most interesting or surprising thing you learned while doing this research? Aside from what you just mentioned, which I said is extremely profound.

George McCalman:
Oh gosh. I learned so many things it’s hard for me to pull out. If anything, it just broadened my fascination with basically how we think of our cultural figures. Back to your point of the kind of artist I was at the beginning of this process that I was looking to render a kind of wholeness of people. I was just always interested in the emotional language of portraiture and even how we as black people render each other is going through a current renaissance because we have not always … We haven’t been given the room and encouragement frankly, to render ourselves. And so I knew it was maverick of me to basically not flatten everyone and not render the same style. That would’ve been easy for me to do, but I knew that that was not the right thing for me to do for this project. I really wanted to make sure that I was showing the complexity of who these people were and I was also trying to show the humanity and make that as important as the historical details. That I was basically equating the emotional parts with the historical facts.

Maurice Cherry:
What do you hope people take away from the book? I mean, aside from buying a copy, what do you want people to take away from it?

George McCalman:
Well, I honestly think, Maurice, that we’re super casual about this subject. Not that we don’t know how important it is, but at the time that I started this project, I realized that there wasn’t a book like this and that I wanted people to have it because I thought that we all deserved to have something like this, that we deserve to have this resource. Even though we as black people, we carry our history in our bodies and we have a very particular way of an oral history of passing information down to each other that has survived the ravages of time and racism. This book in and of itself, I didn’t feel comfortable thinking about it until after the book came out and several people have told me that this book is in and of itself a pioneer. Because we just don’t have this information accessible in this way. That there wasn’t a book outside of historical, academic and children’s categorization, that there wasn’t an accessible book just to buy and share about American black history. And so that’s what I want people to know, that this is still a rarefied thing. This is not an everyday thing. This is a pretty amazing resource that we now have. And I made this book for myself as much as for anyone else. I wanted a book like this. And so that’s partially why I did it.

Maurice Cherry:
I also love that the typography that’s in the book for the titles as well as on the cover is from a black typographer.

George McCalman:
There are two black typographers in this book. And because I’m the designer of the book, I was clear that that aspect had to be represented. That I didn’t just want to talk about it, I wanted to show it. It was more important that people knew that that sensibility … There’s this reductive conversation that came up during 2020 again that was like, where are all the black designers? And I was like, “Screw you all. There are plenty of us around. You just need to stop being lazy and do your research to find them because we’re all here.” And I know tons of black designers, and so that’s not a thing. There should be more of us, certainly. But this idea that somehow everyone just woke up and started looking for us, I was genuine. I was like, “Fuck you.” I wanted to know. The two black typographers, one has been in the game for over 30 years, Joshua Darden, and he has a very successful … Which he sold a number of years ago.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Darden Studio.

George McCalman:
Darden Studio. And the other one is a more recent designer and typographer by the name of Trey Shields. A vocal type. And Trey’s hook, and it was a hook that he has just expanded beautifully, was to honor the civil rights protest signs and digitize them and make them accessible to everyday people. And so the book is filled with typefaces. There’re three or four typefaces in this book that both Trey and Josh designed.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Yeah, Trey’s the homie. I’ve had him on the show before.

George McCalman:
He’s amazing.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

George McCalman:
He’s amazing. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s switch gears here a little bit and learn more about you. Learn more about your origin story. Are you originally from Grenada? Is that where you grew up?

George McCalman:
Yes. I was born and raised here. The first decade of my life I lived here, and then my mother and I moved to Brooklyn. I grew up in East Flatbush in a West Indian neighborhood. And all my formal education was in New York. I went to Marine Park in Brooklyn and then Midwood High School, which was a medical science high school. Webster attended Midwood High School. That’s my one celebrity, useless factoid. And then I went to St. John’s University and graduated and then started working in the publishing field.

Maurice Cherry:
Did you always have an interest in illustration and design growing up?

George McCalman:
Always. I was that kid who drew in the margins of every page of every notebook I’ve ever had in my entire life. And it was just raw. It just came out. I had no formal training until college, but I was just obsessively drawing. And I drew superheroes and I made up characters and it was all very detailed, and I would just create these worlds and I would be lost in them to the eternal frustration of my mother. And it just came from me. It came from me and it came for me. But I had no encouragement into this world, and I didn’t know enough of it to realize that I could make a career out of being an artist. I saw no road into it. And so it made sense to me to just walk away from it when I graduated from college.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, let’s talk about college. You mentioned going to St. John’s University. We had another guest on recently, Sharon Burton, who also told me about her time there. Yeah. What was it like for you?

George McCalman:
My college education was a dysmorphic experience. I didn’t know what I had until it was in the rear view mirror, as is perfect parable of youth. We have no context to know what it is that we’re learning until life crashes into you when you have something to compare it to. And for me, I had an education that I was constantly frustrated with because it felt that it was out of step with the cool art schools that were in Manhattan. Number one, I was in Queens, which felt so far removed from the center of the art world, which was Manhattan at the time. And so I’d go into all these galleries in Manhattan, and I had friends who were at Parsons and SBA and Pratt, and it just felt like I was at this Catholic university that had a tiny fine art and graphic design department, and I just felt like my education sucked.

And it wasn’t until I graduated school and started working, I realized how amazing my education actually was and how unique it was in the landscape of how people are taught fine art and graphic design. And one of the main things that differentiated my education is that I learned philosophy and theology alongside art history, fine art and graphic design. It was one of the most comprehensive educations I could have received. And it took me a few years to realize that I was actually ahead of the curve and I’m actually really happy that I did not go to a more prototypical fine arts school. I got a fantastic education at St. John’s.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. How’s that saying go? Hindsight is 2020?

George McCalman:
It sure is.

Maurice Cherry:
I’ve heard that personally because I didn’t even study design. I went to a liberal arts private college. I went to Morehouse. And I initially went there because I wanted to … And this was late ’90s, early 2000s. Because I wanted to be a web designer. I had started learning HTML in high school. I taught myself HTML in high school and learned Photoshop. I designed my high school’s yearbook and the paper, and I really wanted to go into it but the scholarships that I got weren’t for art school. I actually never even applied to an art school. And then I got to Morehouse, majored in computer science. And in my mind I’m thinking, oh, well, it’s all the same, right? It’s all computers and design. It’s all the same. And I quickly realized after the first semester, it was not. I switched my major to math, which is what I got my degree in. But I know what you mean about looking back at the education and seeing how it served you versus the time that you’re there and you have this comparison on what your peers are doing, on what others are doing or what you think they’re doing that you feel like you should be getting at that formative stage.

George McCalman:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
So after you graduated, you talk about going and becoming an art director. Did you go right into that right after you graduated?

George McCalman:
I did. It’s pretty common now, but it was a little more unconventional back then. This was the mid ’90s. St. John’s had a internship requirement that your final year of school was spent in the field the entire semester as if you worked. And so the entire semester, I ended up having three options. I remember being going to interview at these three distinctly different locations, and it was kind of a sliding doors. And even then I knew that I was basically deciding my path with these three. One was an ad agency, one was a magazine, and the other was a small boutique design firm. And I remember being confused about which direction I was going to go in. I really did not know. And I walked into the Office of Money magazine, which is where I ended up interning. There was just a vitality. The office was a newsroom and there were people walking around and talking and gossiping and stuff being put up, and I could see layouts, and it just felt alive. It felt like an organism. And in my early 20s, I was just kind of like, yes, I think this is the environment that I need to be in. And I didn’t know anything about magazine design at that point, but it just felt like I needed to be there. And so I said yes to it, and I think it was one of my first really adult decisions.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s really interesting that senior year you got to have that choice. That’s something that I know that a lot of students now don’t get. They don’t get to see the working world-

George McCalman:
They really don’t.

Maurice Cherry:
Before they graduate like that.

George McCalman:
They don’t. Yeah. Because I teach also. I’m a professor of graphic design. And one of the big issues I have … And it’s not an easy problem to solve. I am critical of it while knowing that I don’t have the answers myself. One of the fallacies of school is that it doesn’t really prepare you for the real world. It’s like one of the last bastions of this purity of education. And it often is counter to how the process of the professional world runs. I quickly learned when I started Money Magazine that there was no graphic design class I had that prepared me for how the magazine world worked and how the design process actually worked. I realized how luxurious school is. It’s a place where you can sit and think and talk and show your work, and there’s no real disruption. There are no real crises. There’s nothing for you to solve outside of the assignment that has been given to you that you have months to ponder and to ruminate on.

And so the idea of instinct is just absent in the school diaspora. And so when I teach now, I teach differently than I learned, and I try to infuse as much of a real life sensibility. The other issue with schools is that a lot of people who teach don’t practice. And so you have a completely different and often very dissonant where the education is rigorous and it is really valid, but it is outside of basically the professional norms of how you would actually solve problems. But then the people who are in the field don’t have time to teach because they’re working. And even for me, teaching was a really difficult thing for me to do with the entrenched deadlines of my studio process. And so I understand that it is a very difficult thing to do. I recently took part in a review of students at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard a few weeks ago at the end of the semester in December.

And this was an active conversation that I was one of six jurors, and we were all in different strata of the professional world, and we were really debating and having this conversation about how what best serves the students. If you’re only learning from people who are not practicing, I’m sorry, the education is only so valuable. But then if you’re only learning from people in the field, you don’t learn what being spacious in your thinking and being intellectual and being academic, you don’t learn the value of that in the design process also. And so the answer seems to be a balance between the two, but that is not always the case depending on where the school is and at what stage the professors are and where the students are. So it’s a very complicated metric to figure out.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s interesting you say that because I’ve certainly encountered that even with some … Honestly, some schools that have interacted with Provision Path in different ways. You name a top design school in this country, they’ve reached out to me in some capacity about the show. Which is great. They like what the show is about. It’s filling a gap in their curriculum in some way that they’re not. But then if it comes down to me lecturing or teaching or something, it always seems to boil down to the fact that I don’t have a design degree. That they’re like, “Yeah, but …” I’m like, “Well, stop wasting my time.”

George McCalman:
Stop wasting my time. And those kind of rules and terms don’t really serve anyone anymore. I mean, just the landscape has changed and design, because of technology, is just so accessible. And I know lots of brilliant designers who did not go to art school, and I don’t believe that you need to have a design degree to be brilliant at what you do. There are lots of people who have defied the convention of formal education and produced really entrancing, relevant, resonant work. And to me, that’s what it’s about. And so I don’t subscribe to this hierarchy of academia. I mean 30 years ago it was used to be exclusive and keep a lot of people out, and that was seen as a value, but I don’t think it serves anyone right now. Culture has changed and education has changed. And because of technology, everything is just more accessible. And so it’s really about what you are doing with the technology. It has nothing to do with did you go to school or not? That’s just such a reductive argument.

Maurice Cherry:
I agree. I agree. This actually is making me think of a question that I do want to explore more on the show this year. And since you’re one of the first guests on this year, I’ll ask you. I’m curious what you think about the future of the art and design industry and how it’s going to be impacted by technology. I think we’ve seen in at least the past year, maybe two years, talk about web three and NFTs and most recently AI generated art and things like that. How do you think these industries are going to be impacted by tech?

George McCalman:
I think it already has been. What we call entrepreneurship is actually just hustlers. That’s what technology has given us. It’s given smart hustlers who are pulling and stretching and tweaking and bending the rigidity of so many of our institutions and our disciplines. The word I use a lot is it has expanded the notion of what design is, who it’s for, who it’s not for. And technology has brought so many things to people who would not otherwise have them. It just brings an aspect of the world to your doorstep. Technology for me, because I grew up outside of it and I was an adult … People who were born into technology, that’s what they know. That’s the real world. To me, it’s not the real world. It’s an aspect of the real world. And so I think of social media as tools.

I don’t think of it as real life. I think it’s a facsimile of real life. And so the language of how I talk about it has given me clarity in that I’m not confused about its place in my life. I started learning graphic design before we got our computer labs. And so I had two years of playing with typography, playing with a lot of the conventions of what is now basically archivable materials because nobody does it that way anymore. But because I learned design with my hands, that is how I continue to interface with it. I still draw out everything I do first. And that dexterity, frankly, has made me a better designer. I don’t rely on technology as a starting point for anything that I design. I bring it in to help move the process forward.

Maurice Cherry:
Good answer. I like that. You started talking about tech and that question just popped into my mind to ask you about that. But to go back to your career as an art director, you have a very storied history as an art director for several magazines. You mentioned Money Magazine, but you’ve also been an art director at Entertainment Weekly, at Mother Jones, at ReadyMade, just to name a few. When you look back at that time being a director for all these magazines, what stands out to you the most?

George McCalman:
I can’t give just a simple answer. I can give a collective answer. Because I learned a lot. I learned a lot of things. And I don’t think in terms of best or worse because I think life is too complex for that. But what I did learn was agency. The word agency. Meaning that I am not stuck when I don’t know how to solve a problem. That there are ways and there are many paths to telling a story, and there’s no one way to do anything. And depending on the context of what you’re doing, I learned how to be a better communicator. Because when you’re working with a lot of people who are reliant on you, you learn that you are a cog in a wheel, but that your role, nobody else working with you has that. So everyone is really important to the process at different times.

And so you learn the economy of collaboration. That collaboration can be a really beautiful thing. And that there’s an excitement when you are working with people who are really good at what they do and that want to tell stories as well as possible. And that telling stories is one of the most unique aspects of being a human being. And that that is basically how we thrive and survive as people. We share information and we share stories with each other. And that’s where I learned that. I’m not sure I would answer this question in this way if I hadn’t worked at magazines. And I utilize magazines also to learn. And I did. I used them for two things within myself. To learn the process of what I was doing. And I moved around a lot.

I never worked at a magazine more than two years because I always wanted to learn what I was doing through a different landscape. There are lots of people that get a job and stay there for decades. I am someone who I learn what I need to learn and then I move on. I have always been that way. And so for me, it was what can I learn about the subject matter? I learned about the financial world, honestly, working in Money Magazine. I learned about the inner workings of celebrity culture, working at Entertainment Weekly. I learned about the wellness world at Health Magazine. I learned about technology working at Wired, working at ReadyMade, working at Afar. I really immerse myself in the subject matter to learn more about how these stories focused on this particular field. What was the combination, what was the metrics, what was the engineering of the subject matter? And so I was always kind of process nerd, if that makes sense. And that’s what I was always looking for. And with magazines, the process can become repetitive because you’re doing the same combination of things. And so the first year I was learning about the magazine and the second year I was learning about the subject matter. And then like clockwork, I’d come to the end of the two years and I’d move on.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, was this sense of agency the inspiration behind you starting your studio?

George McCalman:
Yes. I reached a point where I realized I wasn’t learning anything more. I wasn’t learning anything new. And I had all these skills that I wanted to apply in a different way. And it was working at ReadyMade that gave me the inspiration to open up my own studio, which was the second to last corporate magazine job that I had. And ReadyMade was a magazine about do-it-yourself design. It’s basically recycling. What we now call upcycling. It’s taking something that is at the end of its road as it’s being used and refashioning it for something else where it has an entirely new shelf life and you can use those things. And it was really just clever. It was just really clever design solutions. It’s taking cloths and making a kite out of it, or taking old jeans and turning it into place mats. Just stuff like that that is seen as quaint now, but was really at the vanguard of this recycling movement that is just more every day and more common.

It was recycling before recycling, even in California, was as ubiquitous as it is now. And I got to work with a lot of makers. People who just made things and who were just passionately, quietly … And not starting businesses, but just people who were making things for their own edification, for their homes. And I was honestly just really inspired. And I was just kind of like, oh, I know a lot of people who are working for themselves. And when I started thinking about it, I would talk to friends and contemporaries and professional acquaintances and everyone said, “Do it, do it. Do it. When you work for yourself, you will never go back to the corporate world.” And they were right.

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

George McCalman:
It has both changed and remained the same. My interest is in culture. The identity of culture. And so I have coined a phrase just internally in my professional world that I am interested in culture clients. And in the early days it was … I live in San Francisco, so there are lots of artisans. There are people who are making small batches of things. There are restaurant owners. I was always working with clients who were working for themselves and needed help with the language and the messaging around branding. And so I worked with restaurants and I designed products and chocolates and tea, but I was really kind of more comprehensive. It was less me coming in to just design a package and it was basically working on the whole branding from the logo to the identity to the strategy to the messaging to the website, just the whole thing. And I realized that I was drawing on my editorial background to tell the whole story.

And so it expanded to … I started working with the tech world and then quickly stopped. Because I realized that they … I remember having a meeting with Uber. This was like 10 years ago. I was working with TripAdvisor and Uber. And these are big names, big clients at the time. I can tell you, TripAdvisor, I consulted with them for almost two years. They didn’t know how to assign photography. And so I worked with them comprehensively working with a photo editor to basically get them a library of photographers, come up with a system of rate assignments. Just basically the basics that one of the largest companies in the travel world had no awareness of. With Uber, it was they had been focused on the service for so long and they were starting to atrophy some of their customers because there was no story. There was nothing.

And the people who started Uber did not think that that was important until suddenly it was. And I remember having a meeting with them where I was like, “Oh, they’re just taking my ideas. I’m just here speaking to them.” And I was like, I don’t trust this field. I don’t want to have my intellectual property just ripped off and I’m not on the inside, so they’re not going to value what I’m doing. They’re going to treat me like a vendor, and I’m not anyone’s vendor. And I was really clear about my value to myself. And so I stopped working with the tech world for a few years and really just focused more on the one-on-one. And I worked with larger companies, but it was still where I had direct access to the founders and the CEOs so that I could thread continuity between what I was doing. I didn’t want to work with any intermediary people, so I had to be conscious of the scale that I was working in just to make sure that the projects didn’t get away from me. And I was also clear with myself that I wanted to keep my studio small, because I wanted to keep it manageable and basically control and frame the quality of the work that I was doing. I didn’t want to be embarrassed by anything that I was doing if it got too corporate.

Maurice Cherry:
I like that idea of culture clients because yeah, working with tech companies, they will just relegate you to vendor status and-

George McCalman:
And they will just steal your shit.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, they’ll steal it.

George McCalman:
No compunction about it. And it’s the people who don’t know what they’re doing that want to steal your shit.

Maurice Cherry:
And I know in my instance, when I have worked with tech clients, it felt like … Or at least I entered into it thinking it would be more of a partnership. We would maybe bounce ideas off of each other or things like this. And in some instances, they just wanted to just cut the check, which I mean, look, I’ll take your money. I don’t have a problem with that. But I was really thinking that it would be more based on how the initial conversations went, why you sought me out, et cetera. And then it just ends up not being that. They just want to have it to be a bullet point on a DEI presentation.

George McCalman:
It is rarely that. And this is even before DEI so there was no representative of that. And that was the other reason. That I was often the only black person. And I was like, “No, I don’t want to do this.” I left publishing because I was tired of being the only black person. And for me, the tech industry has just become the new media publishing industry. I can see the corollaries and a lot of the people, a lot of my contemporaries have gone over and taken our playbook into the tech world. I mean, Apple very much has snapped up a lot of the most prominent magazine editorial art directors in the field in the United States. And so many of their campaigns, I’m looking and I can see the editorial strata of how these stories are shot and presented. It’s all going in that direction. And it should, because it’s the best form of storytelling. Advertising as a medium, as a typical form, I think is not very good at storytelling.

Maurice Cherry:
No, they are not. In addition to the work that you do through your studio, and you alluded to this earlier in the interview, you’re a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. How did that come about?

George McCalman:
Well, it came about the year that I started the original 29 day project of Illustrated Black History. I tell you, Maurice, it was just a year where I just lost my mind and just began drawing and painting obsessively, just everything. I was just manic for it. And it was like it had been bottled up and it all just came out. And so that year I took a sabbatical, which means that I stopped taking on work. And when I tell you that I had no money, I mean I had no money. I was just living off of my savings. It was a really reckless thing to do, and I’m a pretty cautious person. And I knew that it was the right thing because it just came so easily to me. I fired all my clients and just started everything from scratch. And so I gave myself the time to do that, and I was also trying to figure out how to make a living with it.

And so I ended up doing a series. A series of series. And that is also a playbook from my magazine days. You tell a story in multiple images, threading a narrative and a continuity from beginning, middle to end. And so I did several series on my family, on Illustrated Black History, and then I started documenting the visual identity of San Francisco. And I was really fascinated by the human ecosystem of the Bay Area. And I’d been working on another series about how the tech industry started in the Bay Area and how it could not really have started anywhere else and just all of these threads were coming together. And I had this epiphany one day where I knew that I wanted to do a culture column on the makeup, on the genetic makeup of San Francisco and the Bay Area.

And I had been inspired by a morbid thing. It was when Bill Cunningham, who used to be a columnist for the New York Times, and he was a style photographer and he documented black style in Brooklyn and Harlem, and he equated black style with high fashion, which is something the fashion industry did not do and still does not do, even though they think they do. I was just like, “Oh, I think this is what I should do.” And I remember writing a pitch and deciding whether I was going to send it to the New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle. And because of my magazine background, I outlined everything to myself and I wrote a pro and con list about the San Francisco Chronicle versus the New York Times and how much creative freedom I was going to have. And the whole idea for the column was that I would be writing, illustrating and designing this column, documenting various events that gave you a larger sense of what the Bay Area was all about and what made it unique and special and also frustrating and just all of the things that just brought all the complexities in.

And I sent that to the woman who became my editor, and she wrote back immediately and she said, “This is brilliant. We’re going to do this.” And I remember thinking at the time, “Holy shit. I didn’t think she’d respond this quickly, and now I have to do this on a monthly basis.” And it was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. I would go out to cultural events several nights a week, and I just became this man about town for years. And I would show up as a reporter with my notebook and my pens, and sometimes I would live draw and sometimes I would draw later on and I just drew this column every month and designed it for the style section of the Chronicle, and I did that for years.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. When it comes to work between what you do in your studio and what you do for the newspaper, is your approach different for each one?

George McCalman:
I work in parallel lines, as I’m sure my answers are starting to illustrate. I’m always on the inside and outside of what I do, and I’m looking at both sides of it at the same time. And I think I developed that skill as a magazine person because there’s not just the story that you’re working on, it’s the process of how the story is being made that is as important as the story that you’re making. And as a designer, you are at the intersection of words and images, and so you’re never just looking at one aspect of anything. And it has just expanded my brain, I think, where now I can’t help but think of everything through this parallel thread of thinking. And so in terms of making this column for years, I knew that I was training myself to do basically all aspects of what I was doing.

I was always an art director, so I would have been the designer of the column, but I would’ve been working with a writer and working with an illustrator. But in combining all of those skills, I was sharpening my capabilities, but I was also training myself for this kind of repetitive monthly grind where it just became less of a grind. I remember the first year I was just stressed out all the time, and then suddenly it settled and it was not a stress anymore. And the column used to take me several days to do. And towards the end of that initial run, it would take me 24 hours to do the whole thing. And it just became a little more fine tuned. I really was able to pace myself. I knew what I needed to do. I knew what I needed to accomplish. And so you just anticipate what you need and then you do it.

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

George McCalman:
To answer your previous question, I do … And I’m answering both at the same time. I think I have developed a way of backing into the style. I often don’t know what style I’m going to do when I start something, and this book is evidence of that. I really just feel my way into what I was doing. The original column had a lot of different styles, but I basically invented a newspaper style because I wanted it to be stylized. I had to do things quickly, it had to be out of a economy of time. So I developed a shortcut of illustrating that for the longest time my contemporaries thought was my style. And then when I started working on the book, even close friends were like, “Oh, this is totally different from what you have been doing with the Chronicle.”

And I was like, “Yeah, this book is actually what my work is actually.” But I’ve been doing this shorter version of it for a while and it has just become what I’ve been known for. But the truth is I tend to start from scratch every single time, and I do it in my design world and whether I’m designing something, whether I am illustrating it, fine art, it is a brand new thing every time I’m sitting to do it, even if I’ve done it before. And so I’m considering all of the layers. I was like, what is best going to serve this story? Is it something that’s in pencil? Is it something that is in paint? Is it typography? I just think freshly about everything that I’m doing, and I throw out what has come before. I honor what has come before, but I don’t get stuck in the nostalgia of what I’m doing. I will throw everything out and start it up again if I think that that is the right thing to do.

Maurice Cherry:
Who are some of the people that have really helped motivate and inspire you over the years?

George McCalman:
There are so many hidden figures in my life. The truth is, it’s not a lot of artists. The artists who inspire my work are not contemporary artists. They’re people that I grew up admiring. And where I find my inspiration is not really in other people, it’s in nature. The natural world really provides a lot of my motivation. But in terms of the people who have inspired they’re close family friends, they’re people I consider mentors in my life that have just always been many times the last few years where I’ve just admitted to my internal community, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just literally making this up. And there have been many times, there were many times that first year of launching out as an artist where there wasn’t a month that went by that I was like, “I don’t think this is going to work. I think I need to stop doing this. I don’t think I’m going to figure out how to make a living. I don’t think this is working.”

And no one person would let me do that. Everyone was just like, “Nope, nope, nope. Keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going.” And I’m grateful for that because that the first year I was absolutely flabbergasted how I was going to make this thing work. And I could see the talent and I could see that there was something there, but how all the pieces fit together in terms of continuity and financial stability, I didn’t see it. And then I got the column and the column I didn’t give the context for. I started six months after I started being an artist. And that was the first light bulb where I was like, oh, I think I know how to package this work.

And then I started getting more assignments and then it just picked up from there. And there were many stages of the process where something else would happen and I’d think, “Oh, okay, yes, that’s how this fits in.” And, “Oh, right. And then I can do that.” And then when I got my book deal, I realized that my column had been training me to do this book and that I had certainly designed lots of books, but this was the first time that I was all things and that I’d been doing a version of that for the last few years. And so I had been prepping myself for this larger project that I think it would’ve been much harder to do if I had not been doing it. So I just started seeing how all the pieces were fitting together.

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

George McCalman:
That I get to do what I love. I am happy. I am as happy as a pig in shit. I feel really fortunate that I am passionately in love with the creative world that I’ve given myself. I get to work with all of the things and the skills that I’ve been given. And there’s so much I’ve learned over the years that I get to relearn and apply in a different way. And I’ve learned that I get bored really easily and I’m not bored by anything that I do right now, which tells me that I’m doing the right thing. Learning is an absolute essential part of what I do, and I place myself on the ground floor of everything that I do because I see myself as a student also. And so I remain energized by what I do. I have a genuine love of what I get to do on a daily basis.

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

George McCalman:
I have to say I’m already doing what I see myself doing in another five years. I’m going to be making a lot of books. I’m designing a lot of books. I am making a lot of books. My next book is actually on the publishing industry. And I’m also starting to expand into three-dimensional spaces. I’m finishing up my first stint as an exhibition designer. I’m designing a museum show that is premiering in another few weeks in California and it’s a major show for a major artist by the name of Mike Henderson, as a black artist who is having a renaissance right now and he requested a black designer specifically. And the cultural aspects of design is something I’m really keyed to and always representing the black perspective so the people know that design is not neutral. I went to school and grew up hearing this fallacy that design is objective and neutral, and I know that it is not.

And so I teach in that way, I design in that way, I educate in that way, I work in that way. And so I just see more three-dimensional spaces. I see designing interiors, I see designing fully comprehensive experiences where you can see the two dimensionality of the design process in terms of type and art on the walls, but also the three dimensional aspect. The mood and the tone and the feeling of what you should be feeling, of what the average person can walk into a space and experience. That is what I’m going to be doing a lot of in coming days and weeks and years.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, your work, the book? Of course, we’ll put the book in the show notes, but where can people find out more information about you if they want to follow you?

George McCalman:
Well, the book itself, the book was published in late September of 2022, so it is everywhere. And the book, I’m really happy to share, has gone into its second printing.

Maurice Cherry:
Congratulations.

George McCalman:
Thank you. Thank you so much. The response has just been … It has been a very emotional few months as people … Because you make a thing as you know as a designer, but then you don’t really know how people are going to respond to it. And so I have just been amazed and rendered mute many times by the messages that I’ve received and the responses of the people that I’ve met out on the tour. And so this book is everywhere. You can get it at any bookstore, anywhere, all over the country. Of course, I always tell people to support their independent bookstores, so if you are buying it, you don’t have to buy it from the devil, Amazon. There are lots of local bookstores that would love to have your support. And as far as just my social media feed, all of it is the same, whether on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. It is McCalman.co. M-C-C-A-L-M-A-N-C-O, McCalman.co.

Maurice Cherry:
All right. Sounds good. Well, George McCalman, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show for-

George McCalman:
Thank you so much. Thank you, Maurice.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. One, for just sharing your story of how you come into art and really studied it and then going on as an art director, but then also the process of the book. And I think to me, what is probably most important about this conversation is how you’ve taken that flame of creativity and found a way to really expand it out as far as you can into as many different places as possible. Like you’re teaching, you’re doing client work, you’ve got the book, you’re a columnist, and now I feel like this expansion into 3D space, even as you mentioned, definitely seems like the inevitable next step for where you’re going. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

George McCalman:
Your questions were incredibly thoughtful. I’m really grateful for your interest in talking to me, and thank you. That’s all I’m going to say. Thank you so much.

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Lauren Brown

If you saw the Google Doodle earlier this month of gaming trailblazer Gerald “Jerry” Lawson, then you’ve gotten a sample of the amazing work of this week’s guest — art director and illustrator Lauren Brown.

Lauren talked to me about the ins and outs of her current role at Wizards of the Coast, which includes doing art direction for the popular Magic the Gathering game series. She also spoke about growing up in New Jersey and attending undergrad there, getting her MFA at Savannah College of Art and Design, and shared how she started her career in animation and gaming from there. Lauren is also a podcaster, so we talked shop a little bit about her show Painted in Color, and she delved into what the podcast has taught her over the years. If you’re interested in getting into animation, then I hope Lauren’s story inspires you to follow your dreams!

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

Lauren Brown:
Hi, my name is Lauren Brown, and I’m currently an illustrator and art director working at Wizards of the Coast.

Maurice Cherry:
How has this year been going for you?

Lauren Brown:
It’s been a very interesting year, because it’s been a year of a lot of change. I think that I have probably had the most tumultuous year that I’ve had. No, I guess I can’t really say most tumultuous because the pandemic did just happen. But this year, it’s very tricky because I just moved back to Atlanta from Austin, Texas, and lost a job that I really believed in the day before I moved down. And then got another dream job. So it’s been a big year of ups, and downs, and a lot of a big journey, so to speak. But it’s also been a really good year because I’ve learned a ton and I’ve been able to do a lot. So it’s been a roller coaster a bit, but in a good way

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds like it. I think this has been a kind of rebuilding year for a lot of folks, especially I don’t want to say coming out of the pandemic, but certainly as we are now more normalized to just the way the world is now. People are starting to get back into some sort of a familiar rhythm. So it sounds like that’s what you’ve been trying to do also.

Lauren Brown:
Yeah, that’s what I’ve been trying to do. But I’ve been disrupted from really reestablishing myself. Because during the pandemic, I’ve really been in my head a lot doing a lot of internal work and doing a lot of self-centering and growing. I also got diagnosed with ADHD in 2021, so it was also a lot of coping and coming to terms with that. And working from home and having that pandemic environment exacerbated that. But from that, I learned a lot about how to master myself and learning how to be in better control of my own inclinations and my own tendencies.

And so I’ve been growing a lot over that course of the pandemic. Because weirdly, 2020 was a good year for me. Even though obviously stress wise and world wise it was awful. But because I’m an introvert and because I was able to be internal, I was able to do a lot of work towards my personal growth and my career that I think I may not have been able to do if not for that crazy, awful year. And a lot of it was the product of a lot of horrible things like the protests and all that. But that’s when people started to really take notice of Black creators and really wanted to elevate them. And so therefore, I had a good year because of that, even though it’s like a double-edged sword, obviously. Yeah, it’s weird to say always.

Maurice Cherry:
No, I’ve heard that from people too with the events that happened during the summer with folks protesting and with companies trying to I guess come to some level of recognition of what people of color, particularly what Black people are going through in both professional and personal capacities. I know a lot of people got an influx of work, so I completely understand that.

Now you sort of alluded to this. You have a really long history as an art director and an illustrator. But I want to start with where you’re at now. You mentioned you’re at Wizards of the Coast. Can you tell me a little bit about the work you’re doing there?

Lauren Brown:
Yes. I just started at Wizards of the Coast in October, late October. So I am the art director on Magic: The Gathering on the marketing side of things. So that means that I get to work on trailers and online content, and art direction with commissioning artists as well for key art. It’s a really exciting opportunity because it’s a chance to work with amazing artists all across the industry, and also impact the fantastic trailers that Magic does. And I’ve also been a huge Wizards fan for probably about over 12 years now. I started playing Match at the Gathering with my best friend, and then I started playing D&D eight years ago while working at Floyd County Productions, which I’ll talk about later.

But both of those games have really changed my life in terms of just making more friends, being more social, and just giving a very enriching, inspiring experience. So it feels really good to be able to work at a company that has directly influenced my life.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. How is the work going so far?

Lauren Brown:
Right now I’m just onboarding. So I think you’ll probably hear a lot of people say this. When you first start at a studio, you have to learn how the systems work and you have to learn how the communication styles are. All of the acronyms, all the people that you’re going to be working with. So I haven’t really gotten to dive deep into things yet just because I’ve been doing onboarding for the past few weeks. But I’m really excited to see the work that I’m going to eventually start on and which project I’m really going to be able to impact. Obviously, whatever project I work on won’t come out for a little bit. But I’m looking forward to seeing that first trailer that comes out that I’ve gotten to have a hand in, and see people react to it.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, of course people know of Magic: The Gathering as a card game. Of course it’s expanded to more than that. But is it different doing art direction for a card game versus say like a video game?

Lauren Brown:
Absolutely. Because when you’re working on a game that already has mechanics and already has such a big following, and also for the fact that it’s a physical card game, there are a lot more considerations of various different teams that you have to collaborate with and communicate with when you’re doing video games. Because you’re handling technology, and you’re handling a player experience and how the player is going to engage with the art in a completely different context.

Obviously there’s similar considerations. It’s very parallel to a card game, because you have to still consider how the player is going to look at the card, how they’re going to interact with it. How they’re going to feel when they experience it and what the story they get out of it is. But in a video game, that story is much more immersive. So you really have to think about a video game on a moment to moment basis, and how the player is going to interact with these different objects throughout space, rather than just a physical card that you hold in your hand. But with a card game, you have to figure out how to think about the whole set as a cohesive unit, and as a whole story. So it’s a different way to think about stories and a different way to think about how the art is going to impact that experience.

But I think from my purview being on the marketing side of things, most of that figuring out is already done. And I have to figure out how the audiences are going to engage with it once it’s out into the world. It’s a completely different sphere I think, of art direction than video game art direction is. So the differences are pretty glaring, but I really enjoyed both so far. I enjoy seeing how players interact with the content that we create, and I get to see that one in both aspects. And that’s really rewarding for me.

Maurice Cherry:
So it sounds like some of that art direction also includes I guess some play testing also, right?

Lauren Brown:
Absolutely. On the wizard side, I won’t be play testing anything because again, I’m not working on the core game. However, in video games, there’s a lot of play testing that needs to be done to make sure that everything that we are creating is coming across as intended for the players. There’s a whole team dedicated to play testing. They’re the QA team, quality assurance. And they’re the ones who really make sure that they’re catching all the bugs and catching all the errors that we might have, or anything that shouldn’t be as intended. But the team is also required to play test the games to make sure that everything that we have created is coming across as intended.

It’s my job to make sure that the art is reading as it should be, that nothing is going to be difficult to understand from first read. Is the main character blending into the background? Are these elements standing out? Will the player understand that they have to go through the store? Is that door bright enough or apparent enough?

Things like that are things that video game art directors have to think about, as well as just generally managing the team and making sure that everybody has a clear vision to aim towards. It’s a really collaborative experience with your full team, because you’re talking to everybody who’s making that game. Engineers, designers, producers, tech artists. You have to make sure that all the pieces are coming together. Because again, it’s a massive collaboration. And you want to make sure that everybody understands what everybody else is doing, so that everything is going to come together as a whole. Cause that’s very, very important. There’s a lot of things that can go wrong in video game development.

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds a lot like, and maybe this is maybe an abstraction, but it kind of sounds a lot like production work in that you’re really kind of herding a lot of cats almost.

Lauren Brown:
Absolutely. And usually, you want to be able to trust your team to make sure that they know what they’re doing. And hopefully you have hired them because they have skills in these areas. Obviously there’s going to be more junior artists or more junior people who need training and need to learn more. But everybody has something to bring to the table in game development. There shouldn’t be anybody who is sitting idle and not able to contribute to a certain part of the project. And so really, you have to trust that your team can do what they’re setting out to do.

But I really enjoy being more of a guide as an art director rather than a straightforward manager. I like to be a mentor, and really sit with my artists and work with them on growing their skills. And making sure that they’re excited about what we’re working on, and make sure that they have buy-in about what we’re working on. So a lot of the decisions that can be made are made without the input of everybody who’s working on the team, and you can feel like you lose your agency. And so as an art director, I like to make sure that everybody knows what’s going on. Even if they can say something and maybe it doesn’t work for the game, but at least they have the chance to speak and be able to contribute to that.

But I really enjoy that collaboration because it teaches me a lot. Especially working with different teams like engineers and design, because they all have different perspectives of what to bring to a game. And I’m a longtime gamer. And so being able to contribute actively to the process of making a game is really rewarding because you get to see why all these decisions are made. When I see players complaining about a certain aspect of other games that I am a fan of, I just have to shake my head because I generally know why those decisions were made, and why they had to be the way they were. A lot of the requests are things that are completely unreasonable. So being a part of that process is really illuminating, and was eyeopening for me when I first joined the game industry back in 2016.

Maurice Cherry:
So you kind of have to think about the whole experience. You’re thinking about it from the player’s end, you’re thinking about it of course from your end as the art director. And you’re really taking all of these considerations into account at every step of the process.

Lauren Brown:
Absolutely. Because again, there’s a lot of moving parts to a video game. So when you’re art directing, you can’t just say, “I just want it this way, and that’s it.” It’s like no, you have to really consider how that art is going to follow the game play, how it’s going to follow the story. How it’s going to work with whatever the engineers can actually code into the game. There’s a lot of art that you can create that’s not going to be feasible to fit into the game engine even, or be able to run on certain devices. Because I worked in mobile when I first started my career in gaming, and there’s a lot of considerations that you have to take for what a phone can handle versus what a console can handle. So you really have to be careful as an artist to not overload the engine so that people can actually play the game.

But you also have to make sure that if you’re working under a license product, does the art look like the license product? Because the licenser will tell you if it doesn’t. And you have to be very careful about that. You have to be very careful about trying to put your own point of view in where a specific style has already been established. Because a lot of artists can have the tendency to do that, especially when they’re more junior.

There’s a lot of considerations to take in art direction. But ultimately, it’s a lot more technical than working in a field, like say animation would be. And so you have to learn a lot more about what engine requirements there are if you’re working in Unity or Unreal, what implementation looks like. There is so much to consider. But it’s been a really fun experience and I’m already starting to miss it a little bit working on video games proper, even though I haven’t really gotten to dive deep into my side of things yet at Wizards. But I’m looking forward to that too. But I think I’ll always want to make video games.

Maurice Cherry:
Now will you have an opportunity to also contribute artwork as well?

Lauren Brown:
I think I might be able to contribute artwork, actually. I don’t want to say too much, but I’m pretty sure that I will have an opportunity to be able to do that. Which I’m really excited about.

Maurice Cherry:
Now you mentioned having to consider all of these different parts. And it actually is reminding me of the last job that I had. I was working for a tech startup, but one of the projects they had was that they wanted to make a print magazine.

And I had never made a print magazine before, but I was like, “I could do this. I’ve done enough kind of creative-ish projects to get a sense of what this is.” And I’m not saying that making a magazine is like making a video game, but I think very much the overall sort of creative direction of putting something together from start to finish, so it can be a singular experience is kind of the same.

With the magazine, I was considering not just the articles that we were publishing, but what’s the order? What’s the journey that I want the reader to take from cover to cover? What do we want to have for illustrations? Do we want to have these full page illustrations that mirror the article? Do we want to have maybe a center spread or something like that? So all these considerations, not to mention the size of the magazine, the paper, all of that coming into the experience.

I really think a lot of people do not understand just how much goes into art direction and creative direction in terms of crafting an experience. Cause because just get it at the end and they’re like, “This is it. They don’t consider everything that has to have been done to get to that point.”

Lauren Brown:
And because that process again, is so involved and collaborative. Like I said, there’s so many things that can go wrong. And people don’t understand the sheer amount of content that they will never see, because there’s so much that I’ve worked on animation and in gaming that has never seen the light of day, because there’s so many things during the process that can just mess up the works. And the machinery will fail in terms of just the process of what it takes to make a game. And then that project will never get picked up again.

And so the fact that anything is out is a miracle to me, because I’m pretty sure that people see about probably 1% of all the content that actually has been made behind the scenes. There’s just really so much. But being able to see it start to finish becomes all that more rewarding, because it’s so hard to create.

And there’s smaller snippets that you can make too. Anybody can make a game. And sometimes what we would do when I was working at EA and Zynga is that we would do game jams, which you would break up into smaller teams over a very limited course of days. I think the shortest game jams I’ve worked on was actually one day, but usually it’s about two or three.

And just five of us who would work together for a few years would come together and make a video game that was playable. It was a requirement that it was a playable game. And I think those experiences out of everything was the most rewarding to me because it was a really focused vision, and it had to be from the beginning because we had so little time to make it. And I was so proud of those little projects, because it was that full collaboration that happened in such a condensed amount of time. And so you really got to see the process from start to finish within that course. And you got to concept it together. You got to brainstorm. You got to come up with our style, and what that’s going to look like, and how the game is going to play and be coded, and what the experience is going to be like, what the core loop is. And you come up with all that in such a short space.

And then coming out of probably not sleeping for a little bit or staying at work late, and then you get to see people experience your game that quickly is so rewarding and so special. Because you get to see it and it’s like, “Wow, we had a nugget of an idea and we really made it happen. It actually came to life.”

And that’s usually how I feel at the end of any big project, not just with gaming, but in animation, and illustration, and personal projects. I always feel that sense of accomplishment in a sense of, “Yeah, we made something. We had an idea and it happened.” Because again, people have no idea how often it just doesn’t happen or it just ends up as a work in progress. So it’s really special to be able to play any game. So I want people to appreciate that experience a little bit more because it’s so hard to make one.

Maurice Cherry:
Is that the most difficult part? The fact that you could do all this work and then it just not even be released or something like that?

Lauren Brown:
It’s not the most difficult because it’s not up to me whether or not a game is released. But it is the most heartbreaking experience when something that you’ve worked on really hard or worked really hard doesn’t see the light of day. This happened in animation as well. There’s been several projects where I’ve worked on that I never got to really show anybody. And that was really sad because a lot of us believed in those projects. Same with gaming too. I’ve worked on at least I think three different games that never got made. And so it was a really heartbreaking experience. But we could also see the writing on the wall very often where we’re like, “We don’t know if those things are going to get made because there’s too many miscommunications and things that are not really working that we thought was going to work.” And after a while, there’s money that’s spent on these things. And so you have to consider how much the company is willing to invest in this idea that may not pan out, that may not be profitable. And again, it’s not up to us. It’s up to the company ultimately.

So I think that’s why it’s special to be able to make a game jam because that one is up to the team who’s making it. And so the fact that the team can come together and agree that this is going to be good enough to create is something that’s very special.
I think the hardest parts of game development is honestly the starting of it. The pre-production. Because it’s funny because it’s also the most fun. Most of the games that I’ve worked on have actually been live service mobile games. The Simpsons Tapped Out, Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells, and Words with Friends. And those games had already had a preset cadence with which they were releasing, which is very fun and comforting because you kind of generally know what the player’s going to expect and you can add new things to it. But the process has been already established.

But when a game is just starting, you have to establish the full process, how the production is going to run, what engine you’re going to use, what art style you’re going to use, which is really hard. What the game design is going to be, which is also very hard, and how the code base is going to be set up.

And so building the game initially is difficult because you need to make sure that you can maintain that game, or whatever you’ve committed to in the beginning can be scalable. Because if it’s not scalable and you’re trying to add more things to it, things are going to break really quickly. And it’s going to be really difficult to update, and edit your game, and add more things to it, and have it be playable on all these different engines. So there’s so much that has to go into when you’re first starting the game in pre-production or I guess in prototyping, because you’re throwing a bunch of stuff at a wall and you’re just hoping things stick. A game jam condenses this because you don’t have enough time to consider and mull over the details, and you don’t have the time to noodle over whatever could be. You just have to decide on something and make it happen.

But when you’re working on a full game, I mean it’s your playground, but it’s also difficult that it’s your playground. Again, that brainstorming collaboration comes into key. Because people can have buy-in, but they also can say, “Well that’s cool, but what if this?” [inaudible 00:22:24] last forever and ever. And you could end up not making anything because you’ve done what if this too many times.

So getting people to agree on a vision is really, really difficult. Especially when you have time to disagree. And so that’s really I think the hardest part for me. But it’s the most fun because you get to be the most creative. And if all the roles are correct and if people have their wheelhouses that they’re entrusted to, that can go really smoothly. I’ve had it go really not smoothly too. So it just really depends on what kind of team you’re working with and how much everybody trusts each other. It’s really an exercise in trust I think as well.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I 100% agree with that. Just to go back to the example I talked about earlier with the magazine, the company sort of had an idea like, “We want to start a magazine.” But they didn’t know what they wanted to call it, what they wanted it to look like. They’re just like, “We want to start a magazine and we want to publish it in four months.” It’s like okay, so I’m building it from the ground up, like Khadijah on living single. I’m trying to build flavor.

And even the initial ideas we had for, it kept changing in that pre-production process to the point where it took us longer to eventually get the first issue out because there were like, “Well, we want the cover to be this, and we want to do this.”

And all this sort of stuff. And even getting the internal buy-in from people to write for the magazine, because initially they’re like, “We want community members to write.” And then they switched it and said, “We want employees to write.” And employees were like, “That’s not in my job description to write articles.” And it during the holidays and someone would write an article and then say, “I’m taking the rest of the month off for Christmas.” And I’m like, “What? I need my edits. Where are you going?”

Lauren Brown:
But I think that’s the whole thing too with understanding what your roles are supposed to be on the project. It was something I had mentioned because when that happens, when people were like, “But you can do this, right?” That’s when things can really start to get a little bit… Again, depends on the team that you’re working with. But if people were like, “That’s not in my job description. Why am I doing this?” Then it’s going to be really hard to make something that’s cohesive because all the lines are blurred. If you are not expecting that to already be the process. If you are to come into a studio with the idea that you’re going to probably wear a lot of hats, that’s probably fine. You’re more of a generalist. But if you’re not inclined to doing various different things, that’s going to be really difficult to get adjusted to.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh yes. Oh yes. And even most of the team that we had for the first issue, we kind of changed it up for the second issue. And I felt like okay, we’re getting on a really good rhythm with this. I’m excited about the third issue. We were in production getting it ready. And then they laid off the entire team and it’s like…

So to that point about working really hard on something, I was working hard on the third issue of the magazine and they laid us off. And I’m like, “Well, is the third issue even going to happen?” And the company’s like, “I don’t know.” So disheartening would that happens. They claim that they’re going to release it maybe by the time that this interview goes out. They said that they’ll release it in December. I don’t know if they’re going to do that.

But also this has happened, and I don’t know if you maybe feel like this too, but sometimes you just have to take the L. I’m just sort of like, “Well, it’s above me. I can’t do anything about it. Oh well.”

Lauren Brown:
No, I have a lot of experience in that. Because a lot of those decisions that were made, we don’t have any control over as a development team. So we had to take the L a lot and not by choice.

I think an essential part of the creative process though sometimes is learning how to take that L. Because you can hammer it away at something and sometimes it’s really not meant to work. And I think the difference between if it’s meant to work or if it’s not meant to work is the amount of effort that you’re willing to put into it and the amount of effort that you have the budget to put into it, if the project is dependent on budget. But I think anything can be made. It’s just if it actually gets finished or not. But any art is not finished. You just say, “I’m done.” There’s no such thing as finished. You can work on anything for an infinite amount of time. But when you say, “I’m done,” that’s when the project is finished.

And so it’s just like people have to learn when walk away from something, and sometimes the effort is futile, and you have to accept that, and move on to something that is better. Because what you do is you take that learning that you got from that last project and you apply to something that could work.

And so taking the L is not always a bad thing, but it is a heartbreaking place you consider all the time that you put into it, and you consider that somebody could have seen this and enjoyed it. But ultimately, you take that experience to go to the next thing and hopefully that next thing can get made. Sometimes it never gets made and that’s really frustrating too, but it’s all a part of the process.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s true. Very true. Let’s kind of switch gears here a little bit and learn more about you. I know that you’re here in Atlanta, but did you grow up here?

Lauren Brown:
No, I actually grew up in New Jersey. I was from a little town in South Jersey called Willingboro, New Jersey, where there was not really much going for it in terms of culture, or art, or anything. Yeah, that’s where I grew up. It was essentially right outside of Philadelphia where most of my family is. But yeah, my hometown is in Willingboro, New Jersey.

Maurice Cherry:
Were you exposed to a lot of design and artwork as a kid?

Lauren Brown:
Actually, yes. So my dad used to be a fashion designer. He’s always been an electrical engineer for 35 years, but on the side he did fashion design. And I would sit with him as he was picking out his ties, and I would help color coordinate his ties because he was colorblind, which is pretty funny. And I was always really good with color.

But he also designed a lot of dresses, and he did fashion shows for people around the neighborhood and in Philadelphia. And I think that’s essentially how my mom and dad had met was because he used to be in that fashion industry in Philly. And so I would help him design some of his outfits too. And really getting to see him doing that process of drawing something, and then creating it, and bringing it to life was really inspiring for me.

But I had the inclination to draw ever since I could hold a pencil really. I was unstoppable. I’d draw on everything. The walls, on homework, just anything I could get my hands on. Because I had a very, very creative imagination. And I always had stories in my head, and I just desperately wanted to get them out. And watching cartoons, anime, Sailor Moon, Pokemon, all these ways that stories could come out was super inspiring for me. And I just wanted to make my own things that made me feel the way that those things make me feel. But my creativity was highly encouraged at home because my dad was creative. And my mom understood what it was like to be creative, even though she wasn’t a creative. My parents kind of made an effort to make sure that my talent was cultivated, and they enrolled me in art classes, and made sure that I wasn’t really tamped down.

Because I was a weird child. I was real weird. I grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood, and I was very, very different than everybody else. And no one really understood me. Which was fine by me because I found my little corners to draw on. And I found a best friend when I was seven years old, who was also really creative. And so me and her would just spend all our time together just making crazy stories and characters, and bringing a lot of our stuff to life. So it was a very inspiring kind of childhood even though it wasn’t a very inspiring town or culture to grow up around, just because no one really understood what we were doing. But we forged on forward regardless of that fact. So that was really cool.

Maurice Cherry:
And now eventually, you ended up going to college and studying illustration and animation first at Montclair State University. And then from there, you went to Savannah College of Art and Design. What was your time like at those schools?

Lauren Brown:
Oh man, it was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Because when I went to high school, it was a vocational school where they had career majors. And I was in the advertising, art, and design career major. So I really got to work with other artists then and start to dive into what it was like to kind of work as a professional, do a graphic design and doing illustration.

But at Montclair, I feel like that’s where I really started to understand myself as a person. Because for the first time, really for the first time, people started to accept my weirdness for what it was. Just this creative, artistic child. I guess not child anymore, but this person who just wanted to express themselves. And I was surrounded by all these people who really wanted to express themselves, and was fully accepted for that. Not just accepted, but appreciated for that. And I made some really amazing lifelong friends at Montclair. And I actually went to Montclair with my best friend, that same friend who I met when I was seven.

I really got to explore a lot of different areas in art, sculpture, and ceramics, and painting. I didn’t do photography, but a little bit of photography and graphic design. And got to see what all these different areas in art had to offer and be very tactile with art. Because I was doing digital for a lot of the time in high school. And so that was a really great learning experience.

But the problem was, is that I was really interested in animation. The aforementioned shows that I used to love to watch. I thought I always thought I was going to be an animator in some regard, but Montclair didn’t really have an animation program flushed out yet because they just started their animation curriculum. And so when I went there, I was hoping that I could learn about animation and that was kind of opposite from the case. So I ended up rerouting my course and going full into illustration instead.

And so when I was a senior in college, SCAD, Savannah College of Art Design had come to North Jersey to do a kind of seminar about what the school entailed, and they gave me a brochure. And when I read that brochure, I saw that they had all these different majors like sequential art, which was comic books and illustration. And animation and game design. And they were like, “As a part of our sequential art program, you get to go to Japan for two weeks and you get to learn about the studios that are in Japan.” And I was like, “Well, this is everything I wanted to do in the first place.”

So I remember that there was a London trip that I could have gone to that I chose not to because I wanted to work on my portfolio to apply and get into SCAD. And so I spent those full two weeks just heads down and making art for that because I really, really wanted to get in. And so after I graduated that next year, I applied for SCAD and got into their grad program for illustration. And that was a really crazy experience as well. Yeah, I really wanted to go for that because I think that even though Montclair gave me so much in terms of personal growth, I really wanted that professional side of things too, because I was starting to get more focused in terms of what I wanted to do.

Maurice Cherry:
And I would imagine it was probably just a different city environment too. Montclair State University of New Jersey is going to be a lot different than Savannah College of Art and Design. You went to the Atlanta campus, right?

Lauren Brown:
No, I actually went to Savannah.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, you went to Savannah campus. Okay. So I would imagine even just the creative community around you was different because it inspired you in different ways.

Lauren Brown:
So Montclair was interesting, because everybody was really talented there. But I felt like I was very on par with the high ceiling of talent. I was like, “Okay, I can run with most of these people. This feels good.” There was some people who were above and beyond for sure. But I still felt like a fairly big fish in a medium pond. I know it sounds cocky to say, but that’s really how it was. And I think a lot of us felt that way. When I went to SCAD, I was a really little fish in a really big pond, and was surrounded by incredible talent. And all of my friends were just rock stars, and people who could make some amazing things like crazy illustrators. And I’m like, “I don’t think SCAD told you anything because you were naturally this gifted. There’s no way anybody could have given you this. You’re amazing.” And animators who I was like, “They’re destined to work at Disney and Pixar. They’re just crazy good.”

And so the fact that I was suddenly surrounded by a high ceiling of talent, a space high ceiling of talent. It was both really inspiring and really intimidating. I actually kind of went through a little bit of an artistic crisis when I went to SCAD because I started to try to make work that was everybody else that was in the illustration curriculum. And I didn’t really have a well-developed personal voice when I was at SCAD because I kind of rerouted myself to try to fit into the mold, fit into what I thought people had expected of me.

But when I went over to animation, my first year, I was solely really in the illustration department and really just learned from all my peers there and my friends there. But two of my really good friend, my best friends came to SCAD the year after I joined scad. And so they were animation majors and I hung out in a mission building a lot more. Which the ammunition building is a renovated coffin factory with no windows, which is really funny. It’s also open 24 hours, sorry SCAD Savannah.

But it was an environment where we all were really heads down and worked really hard on our projects. And it was the first time that I really got to experience collaboration at school as well, because illustration is a very independently focused type of field.
Animation relies on a team. And not every student opted to do this, but some students built teams of up to 60 people that were full scale productions. They had actual producers. They had storyboard artists, and layout artists, and background artists, animators, compositors, 3D modelers. They had everything. And they ran it just like you would when you were in the industry, which I would find out later.

But when I would go into animation and work on my illustrated projects, people would come recruit me. They were like, “We like the work you’re doing? Come work on my film. You want to do character design for my film?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure. That sounds like fun.” And I got to meet a lot of people that way, but I also got to learn a lot about how the industry actually ran and how it functioned. And so I feel like that experience out of anything, because it wasn’t even a class I was taking. It was just extra stuff that I was doing outside of my classes. That taught me the most I think about what it looked like to actually work as a professional in the field.

And then I also did the Japan trip that was aforementioned in that brochure. I went to that Japan trip, and that was amazing too. So I got to meet a lot of friends, I got to go to Japan, I got to see animation studios up close. And that was just a really incredible experience. So SCAD gave me a lot. It’s also a very expensive school, so I can’t recommend it to everybody. But it really taught me a lot about what it looked like to work in the field. But also just that networking that I got from SCAD in particular was very, very valuable. Because a lot of those people cropped up in the future, and still are lifelong friends today.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. And I’ve heard that SCAD has a really robust alumni program too, just in terms of not just the people who went there of course as alumni, but getting in touch for other opportunities and things like that. I’ve heard SCAD is really good about that.

Lauren Brown:
Oh yeah, they’re really good about it. But I haven’t even tapped into the surface of those alumni programs yet. I have done their alumni Gaming Fest and Animation Fest, and I’ve done the alumni panels on that and talked about my experiences as a professional to the students.

And I actually had applied to teach SCAD. And this summer, I mentioned at the start of the episode that I had just went back to Atlanta. I had lost my job. And I knew that even before I had lost my job, I wanted to go teach eventually at SCAD Atlanta. It’s funny because they actually got back to me right after I got hired at Wizards so it was too late. I was like, “No, you got me just too late.” But yeah, that environment is like nothing else like that. Very creative, just very focused. And it reminds me why I love art so much, just being around students and being around all that creativity.

I felt the happiest at SCAD because really when you’re a student, you’re in a bubble. And you’re in a bubble of all this creativity and all this positivity. And so as an alumni, I do want to tap back into that, and find those resources, and meet my fellow alumni who are tapping into those programs too. But yeah, ultimately I also want to go back and teach, because you can take classes too, and I just want to learn more.

Maurice Cherry:
So you mentioned that part of the SCAD experience in terms of how they set up working on projects and things like that was very similar to how it was in the industry. So once you graduated from SCAD and you got out there in the field, you were working for Floyd County Productions. That was sort of right after SCAD?

Lauren Brown:
Yes. So after I graduated SCAD, I opt to stay in the city because I didn’t want to go back to New Jersey. I love my family a lot, and they’re awesome people. But the environment of Jersey is not a creative environment at all. And I was like, “I don’t think I want to go back to Jersey where I’m leaving all these people and all this creativity. I want to really build my portfolio and cultivate my professional appearance, and what I’m going to be.”

So I stayed in the city at Savannah, which is an awesome city by the way. Everybody should visit it. And really got to hang out with my friends and develop my portfolio. And I started to post on various different freelance websites and got a few small freelance projects as well. But because I had put my portfolio on all these websites, I was also noticed by a background director at Floyd County Productions, which is a studio that makes Archer in Atlanta, Georgia.

The manager had reached out to me and she said that, “Hey, I saw your work on freelance.com. I really like what you do. We would like you to take an art test for us and I want to see if you would be good to work as a background artist here.” And I was just like, “What?” My mind was blown. Because I didn’t know what I was going to do after I graduated. It’s weird because I didn’t remember having a bunch of anxiety around it, but I also just did not know what I was going to end up doing. I thought I just needed to develop more skills. But I was really fortunate to be able to get that email.

So she sent me an art test. It was a 24 hours to work on this art test. I took that to mean you do this art test in 24 hours right now. I used all 24 hours at this time too. I made sure that that thing was bomb. And it’s funny because it was like you had to treat a background like a bomb went off in it. It was already painted and then you had to really mess it up. And so I had a lot of fun doing that. I got critiqued from my friends and made sure that it was looking good, and submitted it. And I was like, “Okay, I hope I did a good enough job. I hope I did it.”

And also, I was going to have a trip over to Atlanta for Dragon Con. So that still happened to fall around that same time. And so I messaged her all shyly and I was like, “Hey, I might be in town in two weeks. So is it okay if I visit the studio too?” I didn’t want to say it was Dragon Con because I didn’t know if that was acceptable or not. And she messaged me back and she was like, “You’re going for Dragon Con. Yeah sure, absolutely. You can come to the studio.”

I was such a little baby. It was really funny to think about me around that time because I just did not know. Because as soon as I walked into that studio environment when I got to visit, I was like, “This looks like just all of my classmates. This feels like college again.” Because everybody had toys on their desk, and everybody was really cool. And everybody was again, creative.

When you’re a student, you think that professionals are this different breed of people. You think that they’re on this elevated, very buttoned up on this pedestal. And we’re really not. We’re so not. We’re not corporate, we’re artists. And it’s just like working with artists that you would work with as a student. We’re all creative and we’re all nerdy. We all have our own interests that we nerd out about and geek out about, and we get really obsessed about certain things. And so everybody really had that just laid back, chill kind of personality. And so it was very easy to get along with everybody because I’m like, “I don’t feel like I’m out of my element actually at all. This feels like SCAD.” And so I ended up getting hired after that trip two weeks later. And packed all my stuff, moved over to Atlanta, and found that the animation production cycle was exactly like how it was on films that I worked on at SCAD, where everybody had their different roles, there were different departments. It was a really collaborative environment there as well. And you had your team. That’s how I got over to Floyd County.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean it sounds fun. Even the environment that you mentioned, like working with all those artists and creatives is fun. I’ve mostly been a creative at tech startups. Not fun. They’re not fun. I mean if you want to nerd out about code or whatever, which I don’t really care about. But I remember I worked at one startup, and we would have our weekly all hands. And I mean these nerds would just go in on code for two hours straight. I’m like, “I have work to do.” And they’re excited about it talking about containers and frameworks and I’m like, “I have work to do.” I don’t know. I’m still looking to for that working with creatives experience like that, because it sounds like it would be a lot of fun.

When you look back at your experiences with studios though, I would imagine it probably wasn’t all fun. I mean after Floyd County Productions, you worked for four years at EA Mobile. You worked for two years at Zynga. What were those experiences like?

Lauren Brown:
Yeah, I can get into those. But first I just want to address something too. It was definitely fun to be able to work in that creative environment with a bunch of creative peers, but it’s still work and you still have to show up and do the work. So after a while you’re just like, “Oh man, I’ve been working on the same background for two weeks now. I just really want to move on.”

And also the hours can be a lot because you’re in animation. You’re in a strict production cycle, especially for TV. And so sometimes, I think I’d worked once up to 80 hours one week. So it can be crazy. Yeah, I know. So that part’s not fun. It was my first experience becoming a lead, and a manager, and a director. Because I was promoted to background director shortly before I had left Floyd. I really wanted to protect my team from a lot of the brunt of that work, of the editing and of the long hours. And so I took on a lot of that myself with my lead. And that was a lot.

Then also after a season ends, you go on hiatus, which is basically laid off for about two or three months, which can happen in a lot of animation studios. And so you had to understand how to fend for yourself too during that time. And so it was really fun to work in an environment like that, but it can also be very stressful. And so that’s something to consider as well. I don’t want to sugarcoat what it’s like to work in animation, because there’s definitely drawbacks to certain studios and certain environments. Other studios that have union, you don’t have to deal with that as much. But I’ve never worked under a union studio before, so I can’t speak to that as well. But it’s just something to look out for and something that people have to determine whether or not they want to go into.

I felt like I could handle it because I was young. I can’t handle that now. I’m too old for that. I really can’t. But back then I had the stamina to deal with it, but there was also burnout. And so I was kind of thankful for hiatus because it was an opportunity to really recharge my batteries and do personal work as well. Because when I was working full-time, I couldn’t really dedicate that much time to personal work. So there’s definitely a lot of give and take.

I will say I do miss the people and I miss the kind of work that I did. Because when I went over to EA, it was my first time going into game development. I decided to leave animation just because I was ready to explore something new. My friend told me, he went over to EA a year prior and he told me how the environment was, and what they were working on, and that I would be a good fit.
And so when I interviewed there, I realized that the experience was very parallel to what I was already doing in animation. And so I was like, “Okay, I think maybe I don’t fill all the qualifications for this, but I fit most of them. And I might as well go for it anyway.” And ended up getting hired at EA.

So I left Atlanta, which I was really sad about. I was not ready to leave Atlanta. I loved the city, and that’s why I came back. I realized that I’d fallen in love with it right before I left. So I was like, “Oh no.”

But I went over to Austin and Austin is also really cool, but it was a lot of change as well. I went over to EA, which was so much more of a corporate environment. Because EA is a huge studio and it has a lot of systems in place, and process in place, and a lot of very clear defined roles, and clear defined things that you’re supposed to do. And you can’t say everything that you used to say in a very informal environment like an animation, and you have to make sure that you’re careful about following all the rules. And so it was an interesting adjustment. It was a bit of a culture shock at first, but I found that I could roll with that as well.

Also, the people that I worked with too. Again, really awesome people. Gaming nerds, which I am also a gaming nerd. But like you were saying about your tech startup, it’s a lot more technical. And so there were a lot of things at first that really went over my head. I didn’t know what Scrum was. I was like, “What is agile? What is code base? What is all this stuff?” Working in an engine for the first time, and understanding that you had to make art a certain way to fit into the engine, and you had to optimize stuff. I’m like, “What is all this integration?” I’m like, “What does all this mean? I don’t know what any of this means.” But I learned all of that probably within the course of three months. And just letting you know, even what I learned is different from game to game. So a lot of that experience can translate and a lot of it doesn’t.

I was really determined to do a good job at EA and to really work hard because I was a senior and lead environment artist. And so I had people to manage as well. And so I was learning a lot, and they were teaching me a lot about the process as well. But I really loved working with my fellow artists and my team.

And the games that we were working on, I can’t talk about the first game that we worked on, but we started working on The Simpsons Tapped Out shortly after, which was a live service mobile game that had been out for a while. And so being able to meet the people who had made the game and then understanding what it took to make a live service and talking to a licensor for the first time. That was just a lot of new learning experiences.

But it was also the first time where I really started to see the disparity of the industry, and the fact that it wasn’t very diverse. I started to really feel that in the city of Austin in general, and my environment reflected that. And I was working in Atlanta. So before, it was a very diverse place. And now I was like, “I feel at times, very isolated.” And I wanted to work to change that.

So I think at EA is really where I started to develop my professional voice as well as my sense for advocacy, and really started to want to actively work to make change in the game industry. Because I wanted to see more people who look like me, doing what I was doing.

Because I felt very fortunate, but I don’t feel like I’m that special. I feel like everybody can do what I’m doing if they really work towards it, and they really go for it. I feel like again, I’ve been fortunate to be able to get these opportunities and to be able to make these friends. But I wanted to start teaching people how to get to where I was.

So what EA has are things called employee resource groups where there’re groups to advocate for a certain underrepresented group of people. So there was a pride one, there was a Latin one, there was a Black one. And there was a disabilities one as well. There wasn’t an Austin chapter of the Black ERG. And so I started it with a few coworkers. And we made a Black EA Team Austin, BEAT Austin, and started to do advocacy work around the city, around the industry. And that’s when I really started to do mentorships and started to do work like this where I actively did panels at Dragon Con and other conventions, and started to really talk about my experiences and be visible as one of the people who was a leader in the industry.

Maurice Cherry:
How did that experience go?

Lauren Brown:
It was really interesting. Because at first, I felt very shy. I said this story on a SCAD panel, but I feel like I started my end career very quiet because I was a Black woman, and now I’m leading it loud because I’m a Black woman. Because I really had the sense that people didn’t quite know how to handle me. One of my managers had told me that he felt intimidated by me. And I feel like I’m the opposite of an intimidating person. I’m a very huggy, affectionate, just dorky person. And the fact that he felt intimidated by me, I was like, “It’s probably because I’m Black.”

But also, if I am going to have somebody feel intimidated by me and he expects me to be intimidating, then I’m just going to be intimidating and ask all the questions that I really want to ask, and start saying the things that maybe I wouldn’t have said if I was feeling a little shyer. Because with that intimidation, I was like, “He must respect me a little bit too. So maybe I can just say some things.” And in a professional way always, of course. But maybe I can start to speak my mind a little bit more and start to talk about the things that I’m observing. And I started to do that. And it was actually well received.

And so that experience was really enlightening for me because I was like, “I actually have a voice now.” At Floyd, I was a young creative. I just started, so I didn’t really want to express myself. I didn’t really want to be a contrarian, because I was just afraid of what people would say. I just didn’t have the confidence yet. I started to build the confidence at EA and started to really start to call people out and, “Hey, why are we not thinking about these things? Why are we not thinking about what this Black character is doing or saying, or the fact that we’re even having Black characters in this game?”

The designer that I started doing the ERG with, we used to do a Valentine’s event for Tapped Out every February. And he was like, “This time we should do a Black history event.” And I was like, “We should do a Black history event. Let’s do it.”

And so things like that are things that I would’ve never thought to advocate for when I was working in animation. And I really started to advocate for it and started to really gain my identity too as a Black creative, when I started in the game industry. And it felt very empowering. And I really felt like I could really use my voice, because there were so few people who looked like me. There were no other Black female game developers at the time I was working at EA. And also when I moved on to Zynga four years later, there was still no other Black female game devs except for, I think there was the VP art director, which was really cool to see a woman like that in management and leadership. But that was the first time I had really seen someone like that. And it shouldn’t have taken that long. It shouldn’t have taken five years for me to see that. So I really wanted to work to change it.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, good on you for really stepping into that. Stepping into that sort of, I guess vacancy that you saw. And being an advocate not just for yourself, but for other Black people, Black women particularly in the industry.

Lauren Brown:
It wasn’t easy because I also had to deal with people not understanding why things were important, not understanding why I prioritized the stuff. I didn’t let it get in the way of my workload. But we actually started to advocate at EA for all of our advocacy work and all of the things that we were doing to actually count towards our year end reviews and performance, and to be an actual positive mark. And so it actually became a company mandate. Through all of our being vocal, it became a company mandate for ERG work to be considered as a part of our performance review. And so it encouraged more people to join ERGs, and more people to advocate. And I think that it ultimately funneled up to become something really positive.

And so it worked in spite of any pushback that I got and any misunderstanding that it received, because then the company started to really back it. And that was really, really rewarding. So I feel really grateful to have a voice that was respected and had been a part of that change. But I still want to continue to do that in my work at Wizards as well.

Maurice Cherry:
What gives you purpose to keep doing the work that you do? What is it that keeps you empowered and motivated?

Lauren Brown:
I think when I was talking to a student at an event that I was doing, this was when I was still at EA. I was talking to him and he was like, “These are the things that I’m interested in, but I don’t know if I even fit in the game industry or where I could go.” And he was like, “I really like engineering, but I also like doing art.”

And I told him, I was like, “Hey you know, there’s a whole field just for you called tech art, where you get to be an engineer for artists.” And to see his eyes light up in that moment was the takeaway for me, because I got to help somebody realize that there’s space for them in the industry, and that there’s somewhere that they can fit. And so something that I love to do is to see, and mentor people, and give them reviews and give them advice. And then see them sometime later, actually break into the industry and do the job that they always wanted to do.

So being an influence for people to go for something that they would not have previously thought they could go for is such a rewarding experience for me to be able to give somebody that, because I feel like I’ve been really fortunate in the people who have supported me, and my parents being a support for me, but also my friends standing by me and advocating for me, recommending me to these things. I wanted to be able to provide that helping hand for other people. I wanted to be able to give back. And so that’s what really keeps me motivated is to be able to give back and see it really come to fruition.

But I also really want to make a more diverse game industry. I grew up playing games where very few people in those games look like me. And the more people we have behind the scenes making these games, the more diverse it’s going to get, and the more inclusive it’s going to become. And then the more accessible games will be for people who look like me. And so maybe we won’t think of it as an impossibility once we start to see faces to these games, and see people on the stage talking about what their experiences were making these games. And I think eventually, we will start to see that more and more. We’re already seeing it more and more.
So if I can get at least one Black person in the industry, or one Black woman in the industry, or somebody who didn’t believe in themselves to believe in themselves to do it, then I’ll have succeeded at my job. And I think it’s already happened a few times, so I feel like I’ve succeeded at my job. But I want to keep that going. Because I really believe that paying it forward is really our step to a better future in gaming, but just in the world in general. So I want to be a part of that change.

Maurice Cherry:
And speaking of paying it forward, I have to bring this up that you’re also a podcaster as well. You have a show called Painted in Color. Tell me about that.

Lauren Brown:
Yeah. So we started Painted in Color in 2020. And previously, I kind of always wanted to start some kind of YouTube show or podcast, but I was always too afraid to do it or I was like, “What could I say that anybody would even listen to?” But after doing all that advocacy work in the game industry, I realized that I do have a point of view that people don’t get to hear that much. And so I really wanted to take the opportunity to share that.

Around the time we started Painted in Color, this is in 2020 right after the protests were happening. And people started to really take notice for the first time, some for the first time that Black game devs, or Black animators, or Black creatives in the industry were really not getting their dues. Started to really reach out with different opportunities. But I found myself both feeling pleased at this, but also frustrated that it took this long. And there was also a show that I was on, like a podcast. I’m not going to mention them by name, but they had run for six years, and I was only the third Black person on the show. Yeah, I know right?

And they interview people all the time. And I’m like, “Why did it take this long?” I actually called them out on the show about this too. It was live, so they couldn’t do anything about it. It was something that really needed to be called out. But I really thought about that and took it to heart. I’m like, “Why was it that I was only the third Black person on the show?” There are so many Black creatives out there, and so many people who have great stories, and people who are highly talented, who haven’t really gotten a platform to share it.

And so when all these things were happening, we had a female fantastic art group about fantasy art. Somebody was talking about, “We want shows that are really uplifting, like women, and minorities, and creatives.” And I commented in that post saying that I really wanted to start something like that. And one of my friends who I had met at a convention had also commented on that post saying that she wanted to start something like that. Until she reached out to me on Facebook and said, “Hey, I saw that you commented that you wanted to start a show. Do you want to start a show together?” And I was like, “Heck yes I want to start a show together. That sounds awesome.”

So we started it with Esther Wu, Mia Araujo, and ended up pulling Eric Wilkerson, who’s also a fantasy artist, amazing painter, into our show. But we wanted to make a show that was dedicated to uplifting underrepresented artists in the industry. And we wanted to tell their stories, and interview them, and really get them to talk about the true experiences of what it was like to be an artist. We didn’t want to run it like a typical art podcast where people tell you, “You have to do this to succeed. You have to be like this.” Because it often comes from a white male perspective, and that’s not everybody’s perspective. And people can also feel very down on themselves when they can’t do all the things that people are prescribing them.

So we wanted to talk about all of our nuanced perspectives, and we ended up talking about a lot of mental health aspects as well. Because we were all going through it. Obviously it was the pandemic. It was a really hard time mental health wise for each of us and everybody. And it kind of ended up becoming that too organically, even though that wasn’t a part of the goal. But I’m happy that it became a part of the show, because it really showed a perspective from professionals that were still struggling in some kind of way. So we wanted to talk about our struggles and talk about how we were working to gain better mindsets around those struggles, and better perspectives around it. And a lot of the artists that came on our show also talked about those perspectives as well. And we got to hear about so many different journeys, and it was so inspiring to be able to get their sensibility and how they learn and grow. And so we started in 2020 at LightBox Expo Virtual. We had a panel discussion about what it was like to be a creative in the industry as an underrepresented group.

And we kept going from there. So we air biweekly on Mondays. We’ve been doing it for two years now. We’re about to air an interview soon with somebody amazing named Michael Uwandi, who started something similar, 9B Collective, which is a creative group over in LA that employs underrepresented artists and Black artists who work in the film industry, which is really awesome. We got a chance to really start to exercise that voice and grow our presence over time. And it’s been really, really fun and rewarding, and super inspiring. So that’s what I’m currently continuing to do now.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I’ve definitely checked out the podcast, and I’ll make sure that we put a link to it also in the show notes. I know 100% that feeling of being on a show that has not had a lot of Black guests, and you ask them. And then there’s all this hemming and hawing and, “Well, we tried.” Yeah. Okay, sure.

Lauren Brown:
A lot of the excuses too from recruiters as well and from shows is, “We don’t know where to find them. It doesn’t seem like there’s that many of them.” There are a myriad of us. We are everywhere. It’s really sad what’s going on with Twitter right now, because Twitter was actually how a lot of places had found me to interview me. I didn’t an article with Apple on the App Store. And so when people opened the app store, they saw my face. And that was because of Twitter, because there’s hashtags called drawing while Black, Black and gaming, I am POC and play. All these hashtags that really elevate the presence of underrepresented artists and minorities in the industry. And I hope that we don’t lose that platform because that was a really big presence for us. And so it’s a shame that has happened, because it was proof that we were out there. And we were present in droves, and a lot of really amazing talent too.

And so that excuse was really invalid. It was just because companies and people didn’t want to put the effort forward to look in different spaces than they were used to looking. If your spaces are only netting a certain kind of artist, then you probably need to change up the spaces that you’re looking in.

So I really want to emphasize that a lot in the show and as well as all the panels that I do, because I really do think it’s a matter of effort. There’s a lot of excuses that go around about it, and people, they’re not used to making that effort.
And we’ve had to make that effort for years. We’ve had to code switch, we’ve had to be twice as good, four times as good in order to get into the industry. So if people don’t want to make that effort, it’s time to start now. Because we’ve been doing that for a long time, and we know what it’s like to go above and beyond constantly. So we would like to be met halfway a little bit please.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. Listen, I did a whole presentation called Where Are the Black Designers in 2015. Because so many companies were asking me that. They had found out about the show, and they would be like, “Where are you finding all these people?” And I’m like, “On LinkedIn, on Twitter. I’m just reaching out and talking to them. Are you not doing the same things? My melanin doesn’t grant me any special search powers. I don’t have Black spidey sense or whatever. I’m just talking to people. Are you not talking to people?” And they’re not. They’re not putting forth even the baseline amount of effort.

Lauren Brown:
The minimum amount of effort. Yeah, and my LinkedIn started to also get very diverse because I just started to follow more people who were talking about these things. And that’s really what you have to do. When you follow people who discuss these issues, people who are in the industry will respond and comment. It’s very easy, in fact, to find these people. Just follow a few DEI experts on LinkedIn to start with if people are listening to this and wondering how. Follow people like Crystle Johnson who talks about DEI issues in the industry all the time. And people will comment and say like, “Hey, this is what my experiences are.” People share their stories in these LinkedIn posts. And so that’s a great way to start finding more Black talent and Black creatives. Or maybe make a post yourself and be like, “Hey, I’m doing a search for Black creatives. I just want people to comment and see who I find.” I’ve just done that on Twitter as well.

I do several times a year when these hashtags start to go around. I’m like, “Hey, drop your portfolio in the comments. I would love to be able to follow these artists, and be able to follow you, and see what you’re creating.” So there’s so many different ways, like the hashtags I dropped earlier, so many different ways to find Black creatives or just creatives of color, diverse talent, underrepresented artists, people with disabilities. Any group that you’re looking for, you will find them. We are around, and we talk about these things all the time. So it really, really isn’t that hard. You just have to know where to look. You just have to do some research, find places to look. And then you’ll start to open up your dashboards and broaden them. And you’ll learn something along the way too. So please do that. Cannot tell you how many times I’ve had to tell people this, too.

Maurice Cherry:
What have you learned along the way from the podcast? What has it taught you?

Lauren Brown:
I can’t even go into all the things that it’s taught me. But I think one of the most important things that it’s taught me to be curious. Always be curious about learning something new, and growing, and being self-aware of who you are, and what it is like to work in your own mind, and how to work with yourself to be the best you.

Because again, a lot of shows will talk about, “Here’s what you have to do to be successful.” But if being successful means that you have to get up in the morning every day at 8:00 AM and you know you’re not a morning person, you’re not going to do that. You’re forcing yourself to do something that you hate doing. So what do you do instead? If you’re a night owl, then maybe do the bulk of your work at night where you know that your brain is awake during, and that you work with your own body. You know you get bored about working out? Then maybe switch up your routine every now and again. The fact that you’ve fallen off of a routine is not a failure. You just need something new to mix it up.

It’s the same way with any kind of aspect. Know yourself and work with yourself to be your definition of success, because success means something different for every single person. You can’t follow one set prescription of success. And so work with yourself the way you need to in order to get to your brand of success. That’s what I’ve learned about the show the most, because every single person who’s started to do the things that really make them happy has followed not the rules of society, but their own rules of how they best function and what makes them happy. And that’s what I’ve taken away the most from the show.

Maurice Cherry:
How have you worked to stay your authentic self throughout your career? I get this very strong sense of one, I think determination. But also, it’s coming from a very earnest place. It’s not grand-standing or anything like that. It’s coming from a real, genuine place. How have you worked to keep that authenticity?

Lauren Brown:
I learned not to compromise myself anymore. Not just in my art, but just personally as well. If there is something that I feel very strongly about, I know automatically that it is not for me, or it is for me. And I pursue it, or I reject it however I need to. But I’ve learned that the person who I am will attract the people who I want in my life. And compromising myself and being inauthentic is going to bring around the wrong people that I don’t want to be involved with.

And even though I’m an introvert, I thrive around people who understand me. And in order to be understood, I have to share myself. And I have to really share who I am as a person, not just a veneer of myself. And so I think that’s what keeps me authentic, because being authentic just makes me happier. And sharing my point of view makes me really understand who I am. even more.
So I have a little anecdote. There was a convention called Gen Con that it was a prestigious convention. And they had amazing fantasy artists that had been in the industry for 20, 30 years. And I got in somehow. Somehow.

And I was so intimidated by this convention. I was just like, “Oh my God, I don’t have art that looks like anybody else’s. What am I going to do? I don’t know what to create.” And I psyched myself out so hard that I didn’t make any new work for this con, and I was meant to sell my artwork there.

And the last few weeks before this convention had started, I was like, “Oh my God, I haven’t made anything. What do I do?” And I was like okay. I had a moment with myself. I was like, “I got in not because of what other artists looked like, but because what my art looked like. They accepted me for me. So why would I not make anything that looks like me? Why would I want to make anything that looks like anybody else’s, if they asked me to be in the show for what my portfolio looked like?”
And so what I ended up doing was making the most self-indulgent piece ever, which was the Mushroom Queen piece that’s on my website if anybody wants to look at it. But it was just fully 100% my authentic viewpoint. And I was like okay. I went to the show. I set it up. I was like, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but it’s going to happen.”

And that was by far my best show that I had ever done. I’d been doing conventions for about 10 years at this point, and it was the most successful, the most positive experience ever. And that piece that I made was the most sold print. I sold out of that print. And it went to show me that being authentic is really what is going to get me that far. Because people are there for my voice, and so my voice I will give them. And that’s why I’m authentic. That’s why I try to be authentic.

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

Lauren Brown:
Yeah, there’s so many things that I want to do. I am ADHD, and so I want to bounce around between many different things. But what I’ve always wanted to do is make a video game, and an animated pitch, and a comic, and a graphic novel, and an art book, and a tarot card deck. So I have so many different dream projects.

Because I think the thing about dream projects is that once you’re done, you have to find a new dream. And so I have several dreams, and I want to pursue each of them one by one. And so the tarot deck is coming first. I’m going to be making a deck called the Avant Garden, which it’s a part of the Mushroom Queen series and the Rose Queen that I’ve made. They’re all different plant queens that have their own gardens. And I want to make a full deck based off of those, that project.

So that’s what I want to do first. I would really love to make a small game with a small team. But something that is meaningful, and special, and beautiful. And many different stories I have in my head. So I want to just work towards each of these different goals as I go forward in my journey as an artist. But I have several dream projects that that I want to work on.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? I feel like there’s this sort of wellspring of creativity that you could really just dive into.

Lauren Brown:
Yeah, there’s so much that wants to get out of my head, and I really just think it’s in the doing. But with the podcast Painted in Color, I really want to create it as a community in the future, and start to do live events, and start to have art retreats, and create classes around the podcast so that it’s an actual active learning experience for students. Where a lot of the people who are on the show can mentor and we can mentor as well. And really create something that is a positive environment that starts to cultivate talent of color and underrepresented talent for the industry.

I also would love to eventually start my own studio. I would like to say at Wizards for a good while, but eventually my old hermit plan is to start my own studio and to draw together a bunch of wonderful people who I’ve worked with in the past who I know are amazing and are good people. And start to create products that really inspire and uplift the next generation of gamers or animators in the industry. So that’s where I start to see myself. But in the next five years, I really want to make my podcast a really good, strong network, and a strong presence in the industry.

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

Lauren Brown:
Yeah, I’ve tried to make it as easy as possible. So I have a Linktree. Everywhere online is LAB illustration. Labillustration, that’s my initials, Lauren Brown. And so labillustration on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Patreon, Etsy. I have an Etsy store. Everywhere you can find me, it’s labillustration. I have a Linktree to make that easier. So it’s linktr.ee/labillustration. That’s where you can find all of my links.

Painted in Color is on YouTube currently. We’re looking to expand it soon, but right now it’s only on YouTube. And that is youtube.com/c/paintedincolor. And so that’s where our channel is. And so that’s mainly where you can find me. So I hope that you do.

Maurice Cherry:
I hope people do too. Sounds good. Lauren Brown, thank you so, so much for coming on the show. Thank you for just really sharing your story of being a Black woman in illustration, in art direction, and sort of giving I think a really good behind the scenes look at what it looks like to not just be in this industry, but also to be an advocate for underrepresented voices in the industry. I mean, you’re doing that not just in the media you’re making, but also with your podcast. I’m really looking forward to seeing what you do in the next five years. I’m definitely going to keep an eye out. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Lauren Brown:
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate this, Maurice.

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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.

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