Maya Gold Patterson

What a difference a few years makes! When we first had Maya Gold Patterson on the podcast back in 2016, she was a product designer in Chicago. Since then, she’s moved out west and has held down design leadership positions at two of the most well-known tech companies on the planet — Twitter (now X) and Facebook (now Meta). And after a recent stint as VP of Design at Riverside.fm, Maya’s facing one of her biggest challenges yet: quitting her job and embarking on a journey of self-discovery and career exploration.

We caught up and talked about her recent decision, and about how it’s left her feeling about Big Tech and about her future. But we also spent time looking back at her tour of duty at Facebook and Twitter, and she spoke about the lessons she’s learned, the products she’s built, and the importance of making choices that align with her personal goals and values.

Maya is proof that taking a chance on yourself is never a bad idea, so if you’re feeling burnt out or unsure about your career direction, then this episode is a must-listen!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

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

Maya Gold Patterson:

Hi, Maurice. I am Maya Gold Patterson. I’m a designer and I recently quit my job on a good note. I’m doing good, so it’s good. But what I do traditionally is product design and I’ve worked in big tech companies — Facebook, Twitter — and small tech companies. Riverside, a startup most recently, has filled up most of the time of my career.

Maurice Cherry:

You know, you dropped this on me, like, the day before we were about to…I mean, first of all, I’m always excited when someone decides to quit their job because I just feel like that’s just such a great opening up to new experiences and new opportunities and stuff like that. And we’ll get to that, we’ll talk about that. But I’m just curious so far. Leading up to this, how has the year been going?

Maya Gold Patterson:

The year has been rough. Oh my gosh. Well, it’s been highs and lows. It’s been yoyos. So just to give a little bit of context, like starting out the year, I’m a new mom, maybe not as new as I was at the start of the year. So my son is eleven months old. But at the start of the year, I was on maternity leave, but supposed to come back and I was supposed to come back to Twitter, where Elon Musk had recently acquired the company while I was on maternity leave. So that was kind of terrible. I was dealing with post weaning depression, which people don’t talk about often. It has to do with breastfeeding and all of that, and then using all those emotions and trying to figure out what was next for me, I was doing job hunting and soul searching, and so that was a rough start to the year. But then I met these two incredible founders, the founders of Riverside, and we had some awesome working sessions, sort of informally, that escalated into a full time role as a VP of Design, in which we all knew it would be kind of an uphill battle. They were based globally, so it was going to be a ten time zone difference between me and them. And yeah, so I was waking up at like 5:00 a.m. to get on calls between 6:00 to 11:00 a.m., essentially. And at first it was really working and I was really excited. And eventually, for a lot of reasons, it wasn’t right. And I’m like, smiling while I’m saying this, not because of what has happened there, but because of the state that I’m in now. I’m so excited for the next half of my year and the six months after that, but the first leading up to now, it has been rough but also amazing and incredible. And to watch my son grow up and I just turned 30, there’s a lot of newness and experience and learning that I’m taking in, and I feel like it all just sort of, like, came to a head in the last six months.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow. Well, congratulations on your son. That’s amazing.

Maya Gold Patterson:

Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:

I’ve done the ten hour time zone thing, too. The last company I worked at was headquartered in San Francisco…or co-headquartered in San Francisco and Paris. So I would sometimes have to meet whatever was happening in the West Coast. But then we had people, I think as far out as, I want to say as far out as India, maybe not that far. I know we had people into Africa, we had people throughout Europe, but it was roughly like a ten time zone kind of gap. And it’s rough, it’s hard. I know remote work has made it so we can work from anywhere, but time zones are time zones. And it’s rough.

Maya Gold Patterson:

Yeah, it is. It really is. And the most challenging thing, honestly, wasn’t for me, like, getting up early. I had already learned how to not sleep so much with the baby, so he trained me well for this. But it was the type of impact that I know I want to have on a company and on a product and for customers through my design work was just super challenging with that time zone gap and the nuance of what I was dealing with in comparison to what I had come from. Like at Twitter, we were all remote. That was the nuance. Everyone was remote versus in this scenario, at Riverside, I was the one that was remote and everyone was local and they were locally ten time zones away.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh…wow.

Maya Gold Patterson:

Right. So there just would be a lot happening. A lot happening that I would never just get to pick up on in terms of context and decision making. And it’s a startup, so it moves fast. And so there’s only like that three hour overlap where I’m actually getting to meet with the team and different people at the company. And so if a lot of that time is spent just catching up, when is the time spent to do the work? And it was tough to find that rhythm, honestly, but everyone was really committed to it, so I commend us for that.

Maurice Cherry:

When you were last on the show, this was November 2016. We were talking about this a little bit before recording, but you were a bonus episode because we ended up doing this right after I think it was the week Trump was elected in November 2016. And I went back and revisited that conversation and listened through it. And you mentioned talking about when you’re nervous about something or there’s something that you want to do that you’re not sure is the best thing, you kind of have this knot in your chest of nervousness. Did you have that feeling when you decided “it’s time for me to quit, it’s time for me to move on”?

Maya Gold Patterson:

Yeah, I did, but yes, for two reasons. One was because I genuinely really liked working with everyone I was working with at Riverside. So it was hard to come to the decision. Like, I needed to walk away. So just deciding to walk away gave me the ick. It was really difficult. But also the other part of me quitting was me committing to not taking another full time job and to not interview. And that’s something I’m even just exploring within myself, like what I really mean by that. But I really mean it. I’m committing myself right now to a year of not just jumping into another tech role, and that’s a statement to make for myself. I’m always the one to go and figure out what the Plan B is. So if I were to quit and then go to the next thing, I wouldn’t be that scared and that nervous, but I’m quitting and not immediately jumping back into Big Tech or any type of tech. I’m kind of exploring a bunch of different paths. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

When you emailed me yesterday, you told me that you were pulling the plug on Big Tech and that is something that you’ve wanted to do for a few years now. What does pulling the plug on Big Tech mean to you at this moment?

Maya Gold Patterson:

I’m such a drama queen. I am pulling the plug on Big Tech right now because it was taking too much of me, and I’m at a time where I need to invest in myself and explore myself a bit more. So I don’t know if I won’t even be as ignorant to say I’ll never go back into tech. That’s probably unlikely, but right now it’s a no. So that means I am going to start turning down interviews that I was ramping up on and being clear with them and hopefully leaving on really good and open terms with those hiring managers that wanted to take a chance on me. And it’s nerve wracking, right? Because I got into this, and I don’t know if I touched on this in my first interview. I cringe listening back on myself, but I was a self-taught designer, and I was a Midwestern girl. I didn’t have a lot of exposure to what Silicon Valley was. So to decide to walk away from something when you’ve built so much progress and you’ve put in so much work for the last ten years, like putting in so much work to make it to where I’ve made it. To then say “I’m going to walk away.” I don’t know what it looks like, if people will open, receive me again if I want to come back. And I had to decide that that was okay with me. If that ended up being the case, that was okay with me, and I will figure it out.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, yeah…I mean, when you were on the show, you were in Chicago, you were a product designer at Trunk Club, and I think it was maybe about six months after that is when you ended up leaving and then going out to California to work there. And as you mentioned, you’ve worked for two of the most well known tech companies in the world. You were at Facebook, which is now Meta. You were at Twitter, which is now just a single letter X. How was your time at Facebook? Like, we actually met in person in 2017 for the first time. Revision Path did that event here in Atlanta with Facebook.

Maya Gold Patterson:

Oh, that was so fun. I almost forgot. I was like, “I know we’ve met in person,” but I couldn’t remember what was the context.

Maurice Cherry:

You surprised me because you had came up to me over like, “hey Maurice.” And I was like “who is this?” because we had only talked on Skype. And I was like, you didn’t look like your photo. You had short hair then.

Maya Gold Patterson:

Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

And the photo you sent me, you had like, this long, curly hair. I was like “oh, oh…okay. yeah.”

Maya Gold Patterson:

I know, the hair will really do a number on you. How was my time at Facebook? My time at Facebook was awesome. Oh, my goodness, like, I would not be where I am today without Facebook and the unique experience I had at Facebook. So the way that I transitioned out west, first of all, I wanted to be in Silicon Valley to start with, but I wasn’t ready for it. I didn’t get any job offers originally, but I found a really cool company in Chicago, so that was really good for just arming me with the tools to eventually try again for Silicon Valley. It did happen really organically where I was recruited into Facebook. I hadn’t reached out yet. I was preparing to. Dantley Davis, who was a deep mentor of mine, and I’ve worked with him now for many years. he found a piece of writing that I did for AfroTech that went, like, semi-viral at the time. That was “Five reasons why UX design and Black people go together” or something like that.

Maurice Cherry:

I remember that. It was on Blavity.

Maya Gold Patterson:

On Blavity. It’s not Afro Tech. Yeah, this is at the time, you know, when UX was still kind of fresh to people’s minds, like, what that even meant. I guess he saw that. He saw a couple of other pieces that I had done, and he was like, “yo, you interested in, you know, my team?” I was like, “I’m interested in anything. Please. Yes.” And I really wanted to work at a social media company, so I got the experience of working for a Black director, first of all, so that’s already new. A Black director that was really pushing the culture and doing so in an authentic way. Awesome experience. My direct manager was also Black, which is already…it’s a bit abnormal than probably your typical Facebook experience. And then there were not a lot of Black people in product at all at Facebook. But because it was so big, there were tens of thousands of people even just having 1% of us, there was a lot more than what I came from in Chicago, which was like, I knew one person who did UX design that looked like me in Chicago. So now I had access to incredible women and men who came from experiences like mine and cultural contexts like mine that were IC6’s and 7s and 8s and directors. And I’m like, oh, my gosh, and people are getting money and things are happening, and they’re talking in different languages, and you’re immersed in this incredible culture because Facebook Design, I really feel like, was leading a lot of the sort of education on what design organizations could look like and best practices. They were putting out a lot of content on Medium. Julie Zhou was, like, doing a ton on Medium and, like, I would religiously read everything that she put out. Like, I just felt blessed to get to work within this in the space that I had dreamt about.

I learned a lot, technically. Like, I was up against and working with some of the top prototypers who became good friends of mine, top visual designers, top strategic thinkers and storytellers. And I got to sort of see through their own craft, okay, what of this do I like to do? What could I be good at doing? And then they also sort of taught me how to implement that at scale through working with cross functional partners like PMs well, PMs and engineers I was already used to working with. It was working with people even bigger than that that really impacted the full customer experience that I first got to immerse myself with. So that was like, product marketing managers and data scientists and a formal user research team, like all of those people that are so important to the product you put out that I got to be introduced to at Facebook. So that was super cool. The offices were super fly. First of all, this is when Facebook, they were giving money, so they relocated me from Chicago to theBay. So they moved my car. I remember these movers came into my apartment, packed up my house, and set me all up.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

Maya Gold Patterson:

Yeah, really nice stuff. I don’t know how else I would have moved to California or afforded it. I mean, the offices were just super luxurious. They had seven, ten, I don’t know, fifteen different cafeterias and vending machines filled with Apple products and just ridiculous type of stuff. And then you were expected to travel around the world to sort of meet the customers that you were building for. So you’re flying like first class, essentially, to these different countries that I probably would have never been able to visit. So you’re having all expenses paid by Facebook to go learn and do research, do the thing that you like to do. It just…it was a really fast and fun time. That also was really challenging too, because, again, not a lot of people that looked like us. Sometimes the decisions that the company made was not vibing with, and it was a huge ship, and you’re ultimately like a cog in a bigger ship. And I definitely made impacts in the way that I wanted to, but not as fast always as I wanted to, or in the way that I wanted to do it. And that ultimately led me to start looking elsewhere.

Maurice Cherry:

Were you working out of MPK 20 out of Menlo Park?

Maya Gold Patterson:

Yes. So I started there right when they opened MPK 20, I think like a year or two prior to me joining. It was really new.

Maurice Cherry:

I was out there, oh, I remember it was October 2016 because Facebook was doing their design lecture series and they were supporting Revision Path. And so I was like, “well, I would love to do some interviews on Facebook’s campus.” I was like, joking, like, “ha ha”, you know, “we could do it. And they were like, “okay.” And they paid for a first class ticket, flew me out, flew my equipment out and everything. And I remember going to the building and just…it’s kind of hard to describe how tremendous the scale of just that one office was.

Maya Gold Patterson:

Yes.

Maurice Cherry:

Because it has like this…it’s almost like an indoor track or like a loop where you can sort of walk around the whole building and yeah, they have all of these different cafeteria stations or food stations or whatever, and people’s desks are just kind of out. Like, it didn’t feel like a cube farm at all. It just felt like almost like a department store. But people worked here in a way because it was just that big and massive.

Maya Gold Patterson:

I had a love/hate relationship with it because to actually do work in that office was terrible, but like, there’s so much going on and there were so many people, and open floor plans are just really ridiculous for the creative process sometimes, because everyone just comes up to you and they’re just looking at…you know, it’s just obnoxious. But yeah, the lifestyle of Facebook at that time was…I don’t know what it’s like now, but it was really cool, at least for someone who was like 23. I think I joined when I was 23. 23, I had no responsibilities…

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, yeah, you were living it up.

Maya Gold Patterson:

I was living it up! I was like, “yeah, I’ll be here all day, all night, whatever.” You’re taking the shuttle. Because I lived in Oakland, you would take the shuttle with the WiFi. The shuttles for Facebook are like the most beautiful Greyhounds you’ve ever seen in your life. Like, not actual Greyhounds. And oh my, you do all your work, get in at 11:00 [a.m.]. I remember the first day I showed up like 9:00 [a.m.] and no one was there, which is the opposite of Chicago, where if you were there at 9:05 [a.m.], you were in fucking trouble. Sorry, you’re in trouble. This was not the case. People were showing up late in their flip flops and sweats, which I didn’t love, but whatever. And then they leave on their shuttle at like 3:00 [p.m.], and they’re just living it up. Yeah, it was good. And we did some really…I got to work on some really cool stuff. The best projects were working on like a Fenty Beauty AR project and working on Facebook Music, which included some AR stuff and really cool effects, and just the whole vibe of it was, like, really fun, honestly.

Maurice Cherry:

We’re talking about one building when we say MPK 20, but it’s almost like a town. It’s almost like Facebookville in terms of the scale, and there’s even an internal transit system to get you to different buildings and stuff.

Maya Gold Patterson:

Free Uber.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I was so blown away. That was also, I remember, because you know Tory Hargro, We know Tory Hargro.

Maya Gold Patterson:

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

Tory was giving me a tour and we had went to the Instagram building and he’s like, “Oh yeah, you know, this is the Instagram building where we do Instagram,” and they had these little stages as soon as you walk in the building where you gold take pictures for Instagram, he’s like, “oh, yeah, give me your phone and I’ll take some pictures for Revision Path’s Instagram.” And I didn’t have an Instagram for Revision Path. I was like, “oh, yeah, I don’t have Instagram.” And I’m saying that in the Instagram building. And it was like you could hear a pin drop. Needless to say, I was on Instagram by the time the day ended. But the scale of that place is just so massive to think about. And yeah, I could see how you were saying you felt like just a cog in the whole ship of everything, because it’s huge.

Maya Gold Patterson:

It’s huge. And Facebook was definitely a place driven by data, and it was pretty top down. Like, they say it’s bottoms up. Yeah, you could decide your roadmaps with the PMs and such, and that’s a skill that you learn. And there are certain initiatives that I got to be part of that definitely influenced what we worked on. But your impact, which translated to, okay, your performance review, which happens every six months, which is tied to your bonuses, whether you’re going to get promoted or not, your impact is tied to data, like, what metrics did you move? And so that kind of started to incentivize not kind of it incentivized everyone to work in a way that was really not necessarily what I defined for myself as building the best user experience always, or even the way in which I like to go about product development. And so the promotions felt real good, the raises felt really good, the equity refreshes felt really good. But over time, it’s like, I want to try something else. I want to try something else just for now.

Maurice Cherry:

So you made the jump over to Twitter, and that was right before the pandemic began, is that right?

Maya Gold Patterson:

Yeah, my timing is just really interesting, so I coincide everything that I do in my career with major stuff happening out in the world. Dantley had moved to Twitter maybe like two years — I can’t remember — prior to me joining. He was pitching me on a team, or rather an opportunity area that he thought I might be good at. Now I’m fresh off of what was like the Facebook Sharing team and then the Facebook Watch team. So Sharing is a really ruthless team to be on at times at Facebook because it’s always the most impactful to the bottom line, but it’s really hard to get the metrics up. And again, Facebook was oriented around metrics, so if you can’t move the needle there, it just was really stressful. So I was really burnt out by consumer facing sharing products, like Creation products. So that’s like creating things on a newsfeed, creative things in any sort of social media app. And this opportunity that he was describing sounded like Sharing to me. It wasn’t Sharing, but it sounded like some of that same sort of stuff, but it was vaguely like, okay…”we want to build something in audio, we don’t really know what it is. The team needs that sort of design vision and design strategy and some of the velocity that you probably would bring…if you’re down.”

I was like thinking about it, and Twitter I loved as a consumer. Twitter was my social media of choice. I had always loved Twitter, and I built a really strong design network on Twitter and found a home there. I never was interested in joining the company because I had heard through the valley, it’s just very white. The way things were run. Didn’t feel really fresh and innovative and they weren’t shipping a lot of products. I pride myself a bit on being able to ship products. That always was my sort of thing as a designer. I don’t get stuck in la la land. Like, I really will deliver something by the end of it. And with Dantley moving over there, he was changing the culture along with some other bigger cultural changes too, happening at Twitter. He’s like, “no, things are changing, and we’re hiring talent too, to help with those changes.”

I ended up taking that role.

It was incredible. Twitter was really incredible. I joined Twitter in January 2020. I went to their One Team. It’s called One Team, which was a time where everyone across the globe gets together in person to have this big conference that was in Houston. It was like the first week of January, or second, and it was lit. Oh, my God. Oh, it was so lit because Twitter was just that sort of more hippie tech company, you think Jack Dorsey versus Mark Zuckerberg. It just had that sort of vibe. And then they really leaned into, quote unquote, “the culture.” There was like Black people doing stuff. It just was cool. We were there partying and hanging, and the vibes were just right from start. And it was a much smaller company than Facebook. So I’m going from I think when I left Facebook, it was like 40 or 50K, at the time, employees, and Twitter was like 7,000. So it already felt much smaller, easier to navigate. We get back from One Team. I’m working with my team, which is three guys that were jamming on a very ambiguous scope of audio. And then we are about to head to a user research session in, I think, Houston actually, again, and I get a call to say to cancel my flights because Twitter is going to shut down, probably. Twitter was the first company, I think, in tech to shut down and go remote when 2020 happened. So I get that call. I had to cancel my flight. And I remember asking, I was like, “it’s not going to be that long, right? We’re not going to be locked up for that long, right?” And they’re like, “I think it’s going to be a bit” and I’m thinking to myself, okay, three weeks to say I never went back into the office again. Like, three years later, and only three months in was, yeah, I just wouldn’t have expected that. So from there on, it was like a fully remote position. And we were all working remotely, everyone in the globe, obviously. But yeah, my entire time at Twitter was remote, which was interesting. It was really important to have that one team experience. So I think that made me feel much better about the situation.

Maurice Cherry:

And now one of the products you were working on while you were at Twitter ended up becoming Twitter Spaces. We won’t go into that. You actually did a whole episode with this podcast I produced called Happy Paths. I’ll put a link to that if people want to hear about your journey with sort of helping to build that product. But there were some other features that you worked on as well. You worked on voice tweets, is that right? Some other things as well?

Maya Gold Patterson:

Yeah, I worked on voice tweets, the first commerce/sort of beta approach which turned into a whole organization. And then I transitioned from Spaces because I was just ready for something new. And I was working on our crypto — sort of like very ambiguous crypto space — I was second trimester pregnant at the time. A couple of months prior to that, Jack Dorsey left. They let go of Dantley and a couple of other really important leaders, Kayvon, and those two really were the ones that were driving a lot of the positive change on the product side. So Twitter was quickly corroding from my point of view. And I also just didn’t care about work like that because I cared about my baby and myself and whether I was going to be able to deliver. There were bigger questions I had for myself, right? Yeah. But I did get to work on a couple of interesting things by the end of it, like some interesting concepts for crypto, but those didn’t really get to see the light so much. And then a couple months after that, Elon bought the company and the rest, I guess, is in the news.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. I mean, it sounds like with all these sort of things changing as quickly as they were, it sort of kind of put that idea in your mind that it might be time for you to go then as well, right?

Maya Gold Patterson:

Yeah, for sure. And I think Spaces was such an incredible experience. voice tweets and Spaces really were like a one-two punch together. I loved the team I was working with and I loved how we built that product and even how we approached it. Everything just felt so good. But it was really hard too. There was some really not cool stuff that went down as well. And we went from a team of three, four to a hundred, and I realized I just didn’t like that part of the job so much. Maybe in the future I will, but the scaling to an org, I did not like it. Well, I didn’t know why fully I didn’t like it, but I knew I didn’t like it in the context of this bigger tech company where you have the KPIs and the roadmaps and the vision planning, like all that stuff. And it just was a lot of politics. And so I was really burnt out after Spaces and needed a break. And honestly, with all the drama that like, I got that, like people really weren’t checking for me after Jack Dorsey and them left because no one knew what their job was. Everyone was running around with their heads cut off. And I was like, “well, I’m pregnant. I’m just going to lay up.”

Maurice Cherry:

Well, it sounds like it was also just a big career shift in a way, because you had went from being an IC as a product designer. It sounds like you were mostly an IC while you were at Facebook and then at Twitter, you’re now, like, managing a team. You’re on management. How did you approach that shift?

Maya Gold Patterson:

Yeah, that’s good context. Just to be super transparent, when I joined Facebook, I was IC 4, got promoted, was about to get promoted, left before that and went to Twitter, and I still was on the IC track. I went from staff to senior staff. So that’s just like going up the IC sort of career ladder. And during that senior staff transition, which I think translates to an [IC] 8 at most companies, that was at the same time that Spaces had gone live as a beta, the company decided, “okay, it’s our number one priority. Maya, Alex, Remy, all the people that were like, the leads of the team, what do you need to make this make product market fit?” And that included bringing on a lot more designers. And so there was a point where I was getting coaching from Dantley, where I was telling him, I was like, “I don’t know how to do this.” Like, I’m not a manager, and I never went into management at Twitter. It wasn’t my goal. But he wanted me to essentially move into a design lead role, which was undefined at Twitter at the time, even though they were starting to try that out with me and a couple other designers. And he was like, “you’re essentially like the mass editor of Spaces, and you need to orient the team, the design team, to be able to create the product that we all see could happen.” So I internalized that, and I also knew for myself what type of culture and environment I wanted to work within, and that mattered to me. So while it wasn’t my actual manager, I wasn’t a manager. I also paid a lot of attention to the team culture, and I worked with my direct manager, and he was awesome. He gave me a lot of support in doing this. I worked with him to sort of set a culture and different activities, put those in place so that the team could not only create the best product, but it felt good getting there, ideally, even though the pressure was high. So, yeah, going from being the sole designer to leading seven designers — super talented designers, too — that was an incredible learning experience. But, man, that was really fun. Really fun, really hard.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, it’s good that they sort of were also kind of giving you the sort of support to support that team. Like, they didn’t just say, “okay, now you’re leading. Good luck.” It sounds like you sort of had help and support along the way, as you were kind of navigating all of this.

Maya Gold Patterson:

Yes and no. So I got the support and I definitely got help. But it usually happened at a major junction point where I just completely was burnt out. One of the ways in which we even realized I needed so many more designers than I originally thought. I remember a new design director leader in the industry, Halli, had just joined. I had never met him. Big fan of his Twitter presence and everything he did with Ueno, they had just been acquired. He and I were going to sit down and have a conversation. Spaces was like…oh, my God. I was just so stressed out by it. And I couldn’t figure out how to essentially meet the leadership team’s ask, which was like, “okay, figure out how to do all of these things and what resources you need.” I just didn’t know. And he and I get on a call — and he’s so good at reading people; he and I had never met — and he was like, “how are you?” And the most embarrassing thing happened. I just started bursting out crying to this man that I’d never met before. It was, oh, my God, it goes against everything that I want to be. I’ve cried twice in front of people at work, and I always hate myself afterwards, but I could not help myself. I was so distraught. And through that, that’s when we really got to the essence of what I needed, and that was more support, more designers, and then also the sort of go ahead from design leadership. Sometimes people are really…I find that managers and leaders sometimes are really nervous about saying, “no, this designer is who you need to listen to.” Usually they’re like, “oh, everyone’s opinion is sort of like, equal, and the best one will come out.” But that’s not always true. Sometimes you need a decision maker. And so it was a combination of getting those resources and being everyone explicitly knowing, like, Maya is the decision maker. That empowered me to really lean into that role and then sort of transition in that situation.

Maurice Cherry:

And so now, after Twitter, you joined Riverside as their VP of design, which is where you were most recently. I know you were only there for a short amount of time, but can you just sort of sum up what it was like there for you?

Maya Gold Patterson:

Yeah, yeah, yeah…and even why I chose it.

So after leaving Twitter, I was curious still. I had some questions about my career. Like I mentioned, I had gotten to a pretty senior level of IC path, but I had been leading a team of designers. Several managers of mine had pitched the idea of me going into management. I knew that I wasn’t really that interested in doing it at a big tech company, just based off of what I was witnessing was the role of a manager. But I was curious about it, and I kind of thought that at a startup maybe that would be the way that I could both still keep my hands in the product making and product strategy and all of that while also getting to trial management. So I thought that this VP role would be like the sort of best of both worlds and I probably downplayed the challenges.

I knew it was going to be challenging to work in the ten time zone difference and I knew even just the cultural differences might be a challenge but I wasn’t too concerned about that type of stuff. But yeah, that ten time zones and even just the nuances of the startup world, right? Like I’m coming from big tech into startup world. It is different. Even though Spaces liked to brand itself as a startup within a big company, no, it’s still different. It’s really different.

What I really loved about Riverside is that they just moved really fast, but from a place of curiosity they would always be observing what’s happening out in the world and where their competitors are moving. And they weren’t afraid of scrapping a roadmap and just redesigning one or reprioritizing it. Sometimes we did that probably a little bit too much and I think honestly through our work together we started to get a little bit more consistent with our priorities, and that was great. But some of that even was a bit of a headache to just navigate just how rapidly things could change in terms of priorities.

What I found with Riverside was people were really just genuinely down to create and hopefully create a really solid product for customers. And I know everyone says that, but I don’t know…people just seem to be really curious to do that and really open to receiving wherever that idea gold come from. So they’re all taking a bet on me too. I’m in L.A. and they now have this new leader who’s all the way over here and they kind of have to listen to, like, they kind of embraced that with open arms and that was cool. And I think the startup world in general, I really am still fascinated by. But one thing I learned was I probably want to be…to create it myself. I have so many skills at this point and I have a way of working where actually startups aren’t that different from big tech companies. If you have a boss, the boss is still the boss and what their vision is and how they want to do work. That is the way in which you have to do work. That’s not a bad thing. And it wasn’t even bad how Riverside did it. It just at this time in my life, I was realizing that’s not what I’m looking for. Like, I was actually trying to get away from that sort of, I don’t know, like company-first mindset. I want to build something. I want to build something. I don’t want to push forward something that’s already been built.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I mean, that sounds like a natural progression, though. I mean, going from these larger companies to smaller companies, but you’re gaining more and more experience just as a designer, as a person, you’re just gaining more experience. So I feel like that’s a natural progression.

Maya Gold Patterson:

Yeah, I hope so. It’s a messy journey. I think it’s even messier now that I’ve pulled the plug on big tech, apparently. But I think it’s going to shake out to something really beautiful, hopefully.

Maurice Cherry:

I think it will. I mean, one of the beautiful things about this show and having done it for so long with these conversations, it can kind of show people that your career path isn’t always a linear thing. Like, it can have ups and downs and highs and lows, et cetera, as long as you kind of at least have a sense of what it is you want to do and where you’re going. And it sounds like you’ve kind of weathered that in your own career.

Maya Gold Patterson:

Yeah, 100%. Oh, man, you hear it when you first start out. One of my best friends who originally was just a colleague of mine, she just would always tell me, “your path and your journey is your path. In your journey, you make the decisions that are right for your career.” And at first you’re like, “oh, yeah, of course.” And you kind of can get taken away in the career paths that these companies have sort of set out. Like IC 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, then you go into VP and then you go into C-suite, or you can start your own. There’s these very set paths of what success, quote unquote, should look like. And they’re attached to money and they’re attached to potentially notoriety and all those things. And what I found myself doing was going through that path, making a couple of choices that were uniquely Maya, but not enough. Not enough of those uniquely Maya choices and ones that only I could answer.

I think, you know, you really have to put in the hours and the effort. Like, the last decade of work was really important to get me to where I am today, where I feel comfortable being comfortable and confident being like, “actually, it’s a no right now. Right now I need to go do something different.” And I believe in what that difference is. And I have the skills to go approach that difference and turn left on this path instead of turning right, even though right is maybe what everyone else would naturally say I should go. And I think when people are able to do that — and what you and I were talking about a little bit earlier — was just like, I think a lot of us, a lot of millennials, and definitely people, you know, and other generations, too, are just kind of waking up and realizing, like, “oh, I don’t know if I want to do this path in the way in which it’s been laid out for me. I don’t actually know if I believe in this work for 30 years and then get to go do the thing that I love to do or that I want to explore within myself. I don’t even know if I love to do it because I haven’t been able to do it.” Do I want to wait until I’m 60 to do that? Do I need X amount of money to be able to go do that? I think what I’ve been doing, what I decide to do, is figure out what those constraints are that I’ve applied to myself; what I’m missing to be able to go and do that self-exploration through my career path. I don’t know. And then see, I guess, where the cards land after it. I’m now not willing to wait until I’m 40, 50, 60, I guess, to go figure it out. Like it needed to happen now. That’s what I learned.

Maurice Cherry:

So when you look back at kind of the experiences that you’ve had, you look back at your career, and I would say even, like, looking at what the current landscape is now in tech and design — I should say we’ll put tech and design together — what do you think it means to be a designer these days?

Maya Gold Patterson:

What does it mean to be a designer these days? I feel like designers are typically multidisciplinary, like the best designers are, but there is a singular part of their design skills that they can get paid to do or paid really well to do. And so we kind of lean into that. But I’ve seen people, whether they’re product designers or really honestly, outside of product designers, like interior designers, stylists, just creators in other ways. I’ve seen when they leave their corporate structure, and they just take that bet on themselves because they’ve put in the time and the work and gotten the network and gotten the resources that they need to go do that, amazing stuff blossoms.

So what does that mean for design? I think design is still messy. As messy as it was back in the day, it’s still messy now. Yes. We have more understanding as an industry of maybe the different types of designers, like what exists and what types of design work we need. But we’re not yet good at helping designers blossom in a variety of design skills. Like, are you going to be a tech designer? Are you going to be a graphic designer? Are you going to be an agency designer? Are you going to be a fashion designer? It’s very limiting. There are people that push outside that box, and what I assume is happening is they’re finding some interesting happiness and making stuff that can be really impactful on the world in a unique way. I’m kind of hopeful that that same thing happens to me. I don’t know if it’s actually their reality or not, but that’s what I’m interpreting.

Maurice Cherry:

Are you where you kind of want to be at this stage in your life? Maybe that’s an easy question. I don’t know.

Maya Gold Patterson:

Yeah, I am, actually. That’s why I think I was comfortable walking away, right? And what does that mean?

So for me, honestly, since I was a little girl, I knew that I wanted to be successful and that meant money and being able to do whatever I wanted to do. So having the financial means to be able to do whatever I wanted to do, have a loving partner, have a family, probably. And so by choosing this career path and then going all in on it and having a lot of luck along the way, I was able to sort of achieve enough to be able to check the boxes on a lot of my childhood dreams. And I think because that happened, I’m now in this state where I’m like, “so then why am I still doing that? Why am I still in the rat race in that way?” One good answer is I need healthcare. My family needs healthcare. But honestly, again, we tucked away a good amount of money and it’s not enough for us to just retire retire, but it is probably enough to stop, get out of the rat race, look at it from a different vantage point and maybe go invest in ourselves or myself. Me and my husband are both on our self-employment journey now, and kind of see where it shakes out.

And corporate America is always going to be there. That’s like the backbone of this. You know, I don’t know if I’ll be able to enter back into big tech shiny roles when I’m done with this self-exploration, but I’ll be able to feed my family. And I think being able to distance myself from the keeping up with the Joneses mentality enabled me to sort of make that call. And a good example of this is like, me and my husband bought a house and that was like a really proud moment for us. And I remember one of the things that happened after we bought this house was like, a lot of people were like, “oh, this is your starter home. You’re going to move into a bigger house immediately.”

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

Maya Gold Patterson:

I know! And they didn’t even say it coming from a bad place at all. At all. I understand why they said that, but I just was like, “wow, shouldn’t we just be satisfied with what we have?” Because I immediately started thinking like, “okay, yeah, I need to go get like, a bigger tech bag so then I can go get the bigger house.” And I’m like, “I don’t want the bigger house.” Like, I have enough house problems. I have enough house problems with what I have. And I like my home. I like designing my home. Like, I don’t need more. So because I’m in this space, I’m like, okay, so then I don’t need a job that has these super high dollar signs attached to it and benefits and stuff. Like, maybe I will in the future. Maybe my son or myself or our health will require it. Okay, then we’ll saddle up and go do that. But if right now my family doesn’t need it and it doesn’t bring us ultimate joy, then I’m not doing it. I’m not going to do it.

Maurice Cherry:

I’d be interested, like even, you know, I think you’ve sort of alluded that you were kind of taking a year off in a way — I’m using air quotes here — but you may not even want to go back into big tech after that. I’d be interested just to kind of see what your priorities are at that point.

Maya Gold Patterson:

Me too. Yeah, I leave the door open on big tech just because I know myself and I know also how beneficial big tech can be when you need it, and maybe there’ll be a right time and right place for it. But this year for me is definitely not going to be a sabbatical. I actually don’t want that right now. I think I’ve done a lot of resting and rebirthing and actual birthing over the last two years. I’m just, like, ready to go after it. Me and my husband talked about it actually yesterday. I want to balance my time really well, where we’re explicitly saying, “okay, if no money comes in, that’s scary, but okay, we’re just going to do that. That’s fine.” If you’re spending your time investing in your passions, that maybe could lead to making money. And then so, like, the first six months, I’m hoping is just investigating what I like to do, how far I can go with that sort of sorting out can it make me any money, and if so, how much? Okay, out of those five things that I might want to do and could maybe make me money, let me pick one that actually, like, is drawing me. And now if I really invest all my time there, what would happen? That would be maybe the next six months. Can you tell, like we’re type A, so we’re planning already. Very structured, in a very structured way, but that’s kind of how I see it going, is like, I want to go and I want to maybe reopen up my vintage shop. I want to maybe go and start some stuff with my husband. I’m going to do some design advising on the side because I’m interested in that and I have friends building cool stuff and I know a lot now, so maybe I can be helpful, explore all of that, see what feels good or not. I can say no at any time because I’m not beholden to anyone but myself and my family. And then hopefully success to me would be like, by the end of the year. I’m not rich or anything at all, but maybe I found a business that just speaks to me or is mine and I’m loving and also could earn enough for us to continue letting me walk this path. That would be incredible if that happens, but I don’t know if it will.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, there’s one project that you started recently called Recshop, is that right? Tell me about that.

Maya Gold Patterson:

Oh, man, that was a really cool project with my brother. So I love all things vintage, so I love vintage clothes, vintage cars. My dad was and still is as a DJ. He was, like, a DJ in the 80s. So he spun vinyl and we always grew up with a ton of vinyl in our house. And recently me and my brother have been getting into it and we decided to open up a record shop. Honestly, it was just like a creative passion project to have. And I think after shutting down my clothing shop, I was looking for that again. Quickly we realized the used record shop business is just not a business and it just wasn’t sustainable. And I had just had a baby and it was just like too much. So I think I want to do more of that type of stuff, though, because it teaches you so much. I learned about that business and there’s unique problems for the customer in that business. That was a learning, and even just what I enjoyed about it or didn’t. And it was a cool outlet. Like, we got to design a brand and a customer experience that was all about music and curating these really important pieces of artwork to the American music landscape. We got to curate that sort of stuff for people; that was really cool. And so maybe I do a couple more things like that that sort of get me closer to understanding what my actual purpose is.

Maurice Cherry:

What do you want your legacy to be? And again, I feel like asking this now is maybe a bit premature because you’re right off the heels of quitting. You’ve got this freedom. The rest of the year has opened up to you. But have you thought about that?

Maya Gold Patterson:

I had not thought about that until you asked it a little bit before the podcast. But it’s such an important question. I do know from a gut sense what legacy for me, and I think my husband shares this, but one of the drivers of me quitting and quitting tech for a little bit was just I want my legacy to be the imprint that I have on my son in the type of woman I’m proud of and he’s proud of me for being. So I want him to see that he can make radical choices that are okay and can be honored and enable you to be your best self. And best self means like, showing up as a better partner, a better mommy, a better…just individual in general, making choices that go against the grain if it means it’s right for you is okay. That’s the type of legacy; like him approaching those intersections of life head on and not being scared of that and really having that sort of gut sense of like, “no, this is right for me. I’m going to try that. I’m going to work hard. I’m going to go try that. I’m going to go do something kind of crazy and feel good about that because I know it makes me a better man.” That’s the type of legacy that I think about. And if I leave some cool projects in my wake as I do that, that’d be awesome too.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, I feel like that’s a good place to wrap up, but I guess before we do that, is there anything that you wanted to talk about that I didn’t ask you about?

Maya Gold Patterson:

No. I think though, if anyone’s doing some cool work in any cool work, honestly, I’m obviously open. I have some free time, believe it or not. So I guess I would just share that. Maybe I’ll leave my email for people to reach out directly if they’re working on anything cool, especially any cool collaborations in the vintage space, any cool design product startup stuff. I’m just here to sort of understand what people are trying to do and see if there’s some synergy, and if not with me, then maybe with somebody else. So I am open and more accessible than ever, I would say, right now. And yeah, just leave that.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay. Where can people find you online?

Maya Gold Patterson:

I know that’s a good question because I kind of am off socials, but my accounts exist. So I’m on Twitter @mayagpatterson, and then I’m on Instagram @mayapatterson. I’m not super active there. Maybe I’ll become more active. I don’t know. We gotta see, but usually there.

Maurice Cherry:

I feel like we’re sort of at this time where people are maybe trying to wean themselves off of social media.

Maya Gold Patterson:

Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

I don’t know if it’s…well, I think what it is, honestly, is that Twitter has lost its damn mind. And then all these other Twitter clones kind of popped up, and folks are like, “oh, well, now I’m on Threads, now I’m on Spill, now I’m on Spoutible,” and I’m like, I’m not going to be in six different places. I’m going to wait like a year and see if any of these still exist. And then maybe I’ll see like, okay, if I decide to migrate to somethin, because people have asked that about Revision Path. They’re like, “well, why isn’t Revision Path on Threads?” I’m like, “well, I’m squatting on an account, but I don’t think I’m going to ever really use it.” But we’ll see how things work out.

Maya Gold Patterson:

I know. It’s interesting. It’s in a really interesting space. I don’t know where it’s going to net out. I think because I’ve worked in social media now for a bit, I know that it’s not good for us. I know mentally it’s not good for us. And so that’s why I had to make the call for myself to quit smoking, which is like quit social media. Realistically, when you have a small business like you do, or any sort of project, using social media is really one of the best tools you have to get your work out there and make connections and stuff. So I think now I’m going to have to probably re-investigate my Instagram or something like that. But yeah, it’s just yuckily…I don’t know, it’s just not good for us to be consuming people’s lives in that sort of way that frequently. And I know I feel much better since I’ve been off. And when I do go on, it’s like through my desktop for like five minutes. I don’t think that I’m going to be on Twitter for much longer, which is so sad because like I said, I loved Twitter, but I don’t believe in anything that’s going on there. So I probably got to delete that, I guess Threads is kind of left or Spill.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I’m going to just wait and see. I mean, I talked about this on another episode, but I was like back in 2006, 2007, a bunch of Twitter clones popped up and there was like Yammer, there was Pownce, there was Jaiku… there were a bunch of them. And then within like a year or two’s time, they all either looked at other markets — like Plurk is, I think, huge in Taiwan — or they got bought out by a bigger company and then got closed down, or they just shut down. I don’t wanna…I think the way I said it in the last interview, I said, if Elon Musk is the problem, I don’t know if Mark Zuckerberg is the answer.

Maya Gold Patterson:

Oh, I know that’s right.

Maurice Cherry:

So maybe there might be just an option to divest altogether.

Maya Gold Patterson:

Maybe I think that there should be. I actually have thought about this as like a potential project, but more on that later. But yeah, get ourselves out of it. You know what I’ve been doing though, instead of scrolling? You know what I’ve been spending my time doing recently?

Maurice Cherry:

What’s that?

Maya Gold Patterson:

I’ve been going to the public library.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay!

Maya Gold Patterson:

I’ve been going to the public library, which is an incredible resource that is actually inspiring and gives you a lot of content for free that is not destructive to your mental wellness and health. And it’s been so…I like go there regularly and check out books and I spend so much time reading now, it feels really nice. I would encourage people to do that.

Maurice Cherry:

You heard it folks; support your local library. Maya Gold Patterson, thank you so, so much for coming on the show. One. It’s just great to have you back on the show, but then also just to have seen your glow up over the years, to see how you have grown as a person, as a designer, I mean, I’m going to be really excited to see what is next for you. And I’m so glad that you were able to come on the show, especially on the heels of such a big life change, to talk about sort of what that means in the greater context of your career and everything. So thank you so much for coming on the show.

Maya Gold Patterson:

I appreciate oh, thank you, Maurice. And thank you for creating this safe space. I mean, I am so happy. Like, you’re essentially the first place that I get to even share this news with. So just thank you for that and being always so warm and open, keep doing what you’re like. Your type of energy is what this world needs.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, thank you. Thank you.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit

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

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

Carl Bogan

Artificial intelligence has been a running theme on the podcast this year, and I couldn’t think of a better person to talk shop about this with than the one and only Carl Bogan. Through his studio, Myster Giraffe, he’s created viral mashups that have racked up millions of views across social media.

Carl spoke a bit about his experiences as a visual effects artist, and then we went into a deep discussion about all things synthetic media — generative AI, deepfakes, media literacy, government regulations…you name it. But we didn’t just geek out about that! Carl told his story about how he got interested in visual effects, what motivates him, and where he wants his work to go in the future. This episode will definitely give you some food for thought!

A selection of Myster Giraffe’s work:

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

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

Carl Bogan:

My name is Carl Bogan, and I am a digital creator and VFX professional living in Los Angeles.

Maurice Cherry:

How’s 2023 been treating you so far?

Carl Bogan:

2023 is…every year is a bit different. This one is no different from that. Starting out, very interestingly, more inbounds from Myster Giraffe. The VFX industry is a bit slow right now. The strike isn’t making it much better, but of course, always optimistic, looking for new opportunities in every single direction.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I’ve been hearing from friends of mine in L.A. and other folks in the entertainment industry how the strike is kind of…I guess it’s reverberating throughout the industry. Because it’s one thing when the writers are striking, but then that affects production, it affects actors, et cetera. So, yeah, I mean, we’re recording this now as the strike is going on. I have a feeling it might still be going on by the time this airs. Given that, what plans do you have for the summer?

Carl Bogan:

Lots of family traveling time, creating new projects, coming up with new ideas, new ways to create new ways to engage with people. And so sort of never stop creating is one of my mottos. So the strike doesn’t really stop that.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. Is there anything in particular that you want to try to launch by the end of the year?

Carl Bogan:

I’m still working on a list. I have a long list, I’m turning into a short list, but Myster Giraffe is always sort of near the top of that list. It tends to act as a calling card in general, and so I keep creating every — I don’t know — every six weeks or so, maybe every eight weeks of a new piece in order to keep the beach ball in the air.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, you’ve mentioned Myster Giraffe a couple of times now, and I think listeners have probably seen your work a lot on social media. If not, I’ll make sure to link to a couple of clips in the show notes. But yeah, talk to me about Myster Giraffe. Like, I’m really curious on where that name came from.

Carl Bogan:

So Myster Giraffe is an online handle I created in April of 2019 as a way of honing my deepfake skills in a world that was very much pre-deepfake, generally speaking. And so the name Myster Giraffe was sort of a flippant reaction to wanting to put something out there, seeing if it had any value, and so it just sort of stuck after the first video went very viral. So now I was married to it, so it didn’t matter if I didn’t like it or not at that point.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Carl Bogan:

But I do like it.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I mean, it’s a pretty unique name, Myster Giraffe. And also, I guess the spelling of it probably also calls into a bit of mystery as well.

Carl Bogan:

Now, that was on purpose, namely because Myster Giraffe was born out of not seeing any…I had seen deepfakes to date at that point, but not any deepfakes that I could identify with in terms of Black culture or pop culture. And so I wanted to be that voice, but at the same time, knowing that history has told me, for good or bad or indifferent, you can be marginalized as a Black creator. If you show your work and then put yourself next to your work, the work may not stand by itself. So the M-Y-S — the mystery in Myster Giraffe — the goal was to be sort of more of a Banksy character, and that did work for many, many years and it really stoked the interest of many media outlets and people. Like, I wanted the work to stand by itself instead of having to say, “oh, well, that’s good for a Black creator,” or for that, sometimes people can put an asterisk next to your accomplishment.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, brother, you do not have to tell me about that. I know that all too well. I mean, it’s one thing…yeah, you put your face or your likeness or something next to it, and then people will automatically kind of either discount it or buy into it. But when I was doing the Black Weblog Awards back in…I did that from 2005 to 2011. And even though it was, like, gaining notoriety, like NPR had reported on it, et cetera, I knew that people would not even pay attention to it just because it had “Black” in the name. Like, it would just go in one ear and out the other. And that was also when Obama was running, and so everything was post-racial. So if you mention anything with “Black” in it, you must be racist. So I know that feeling all too well and kind of being able to stand behind a bit of a pseudonym or just to kind of obfuscate your personal self from the work helps the work stand out on its own.

Carl Bogan:

Absolutely. Not to mention, I was thinking about having a clear delineation between me and Myster Giraffe, in case I get into a bit of trouble. You know, deepfakes are still sort of new, and so I didn’t know what I would create that may or may not get me in hot water. So I wanted to be able to put up a firewall just in case. So I can go get a sandwich and not get attacked.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, it’s interesting you say that, because I thought about that as I was looking at some of the clips, and one of the last clips that I remember seeing from Myster Giraffe was — you probably know the one I’m talking about — is Jonathan Majors and Michael B. Jordan, you know, doing the Dennis Edwards and Siedah Garrett, you know, “Don’t Look Any Further”. And I think that came out and then maybe it was like the next month or so, those allegations about Jonathan Majors dropped, and it was like, ohhhh.

Carl Bogan:

Mm-hmm. You never know.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. And it was in that media time where he and Michael B. Jordan were doing a lot of press together for Creed III and everything, and people were kind of speculating on their friendship or their bromance or what have you, and then that happens, and…yeah. I get what you’re saying. I get what you’re saying.

Carl Bogan:

Yes. You can’t always control the narratives when they leave your mouse click.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. You mentioned wanting to do the studio to kind of hone your talent, but what was the other inspirations behind starting your own studio?

Carl Bogan:

When I first started doing Myster Giraffe, I got a lot of inbounds from different people who wanted to work with me. This is even before I was really ready for the attention. I had been in freelance visual effects for maybe fifteen years at that point, so I was very familiar with freelance work. And so the demand kept growing and growing and growing and growing and working more and more brands, more and more music artists. And so it just made sense to launch an entire effort in order to take advantage of the inbounds.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay, so just sort of have one place to kind of funnel everything into.

Carl Bogan:

Sort of. That’s correct.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. Now, do you have a team that you work with or is it just you?

Carl Bogan:

Generally? It’s just me, unless thee job is too big and I need to scale it. And so if I have to do production onsite, I have to scale the team. I have people I go to and I hire, and we work very well together. Friends of mine, colleagues of mine. But for the most part, the Myster Giraffes online as far as the social media effort, that’s just me.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay. How do you come up with the ideas? I think some of them probably certainly are just inspired by, of course, Black culture. A lot of them are. But like…Steve Harvey as Megan Thee Stallion? Where do these ideas come from?

Carl Bogan:

There’s an instinct that only shows up during certain times. There’s maybe about 10 out of the 40 that I’ve created, I think around 40 or so, that I knew what they were going to do before they did it because there’s a little tickle that you get. There’s a little sort of…where you can’t stop giggling. You’re working on it and you watch it 37 times and you’re saying, “this is a good one. This is really good.” So I allow myself time in between creations. That way I don’t wear that muscle out. I wanted to always be able to recognize the funny before it shows up. Some of them I do them for me. Some of them I do as an experiment. Some of them I do as tributes. But there is a certain section that I have an idea for what’s going to work well within the demographic that I’ve sort of created or taken home in.

Maurice Cherry:

I mean, some of them certainly are really fun. I mean, they’re all fun. I don’t want to say some of them aren’t, but I think the one that really sort of stuck out to me and I was like “wait a minute, who is this?” I think it was one for Insecure…for the HBO show. And Issa Rae singing Luther Vandross.

Carl Bogan:

That’s one of my favorites. Well, because that one’s fun. So what normally I like to do when I first started out, it was a bit more cheeky. Man over woman, big difference over here, big difference over there, chasm in the middle. That’s where the joke is. But then pretty quickly I realized, “oh, you can really tell stories with this and sort of come up with alternate realities.” So that was before the term metaverse had really — or multiverse had really — sort of come to fruition. And so I had the idea of Rick and Morty’s intergalactic cable mixed with what Myster Giraffe sort of became. And so each of these sort of are their own reality and their own channel in a multiverse somewhere existing in simultaneous fashion. And so that one was all about the love triangle between Issa and their two male interests on thee show. And so it lines up with the lyrics of the song. Who doesn’t love that song? It’s an iconic song. Who doesn’t love Issa Rae? She’s fantastic. And so you put them together, you cut a trailer around it to help the story get sticky and then you put it out.

Maurice Cherry:

Now when you put that out, was it for HBO and the show, or were you just doing it just to release it through the studio?

Carl Bogan:

That was spec, but I wanted it to look as if it was commissioned because why not? I have no doubt in my mind they would have commissioned it or asked to repost it had it not been a day before they launched the next season. I just kind of got to it late because I don’t rush through these things. It’s like, oh, let me sit down, I’m ready to create again. And so Luther Vandross actually reposted the video — or rather his team — and most people from the show reposted it minus Issa. I’m not sure if she liked or she didn’t. I guess that’s not really the point. It’s to make art that I like and then see if others can appreciate it.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. What does the process look like when you’re working on a new project? Like, you have an idea for one of these deepfake videos, or if it’s something from a client, like, what’s the process behind going from idea to conception?

Carl Bogan:

I would say if it’s for me, the process is 80% concept and that is a very passive process initially, whether that’s daily Twitter usage or Instagram usage or TikTok usage. It’s a sort of…collecting things, collecting daily life into your brain. And then I sit down when I’m ready to create. I just kind of feel like, you know what, I’m ready. I sit down and it takes about three to four hours of just kind of going through, combing through what I want to say. I think… I want to have an idea. I think I want to do something with 70s African-American hair care products. I think I want to use this person. This person’s sort of been of the zeitgeist lately. Let me see if I can work them in. And so I kind of have this rolling list of people and topics in my head over in between the pieces. So then when I sit down, that three or four hours, I march, march, march, march, march and then I eventually end at a singular point which is a video. And then I back into it. So I always choose a person second. So I always choose the video first. It’s easier, I found, to not have to force a person into a place. So the people…if I wanted to do a person right now, I wouldn’t really be able to because I haven’t found the piece of media that fits yet. So finding the media is much harder than finding the subject. But if it is a studio, they normally come with thee concept [of] what they want to do. So that’s the easy part. Then they say, okay, great, they have an idea. I’ll either go on set and VFX supe it to make sure they’re shooting it correctly, because there’s a lot of things you can get wrong. We do a data collection of the person that you want to put in what they just shot, you know, we use a stand in. And so I’ve also created a very unique process of data collection for the subject. So that takes about half an hour, maybe 45 minutes, and then I take all the data back to my workstation, my home office, and I make a data set of the data. I get the plates from the studio and it takes about an hour to pre-process everything. And then I start training. It takes about a day and a half or two days. Then the compositing takes about a week, depending on how long and short it is, how perfect they want to be, how much they’re paying me to be perfect. So for the Myster Giraffe stuff, I purposefully don’t spend more than a day on the compositing because it’s not about how perfect it is, it’s about the story that it’s telling. If I do that, I’ll never get done because of my VFX background. I know too much in order to make it take less time.

Maurice Cherry:

Right.

Carl Bogan:

That’s about it. That’s sort of the broad strokes.

Maurice Cherry:

So it sounds like with Myster Giraffe, at least for your self initiated stuff, you kind of want to be a little bit more and this is not a diss by saying this, but it’s kind of rough and dirty, like you want to go ahead and get it and get it out there and get a reaction from people.

Carl Bogan:

Absolutely. I didn’t want to chase the pixel perfect deepfakes that some people chase, which is fine. I want them to push the technology forward. But I also realized, like I said, from being in visual effects, the goal is to have it be so good it disappears. Good VFX are invisible. And so since putting different faces on purpose, on different people, the goal is to create cognitive dissonance. So being perfect there is sort of working backwards. And so I do a good job of blending skin tones, face sizing matting and masking around the faces. Yada, yada, yada. So I get a lot of praise on how well integrated they look, but nothing past that because if they can’t see the job that I’ve done for this particular world, then I think it goes against the work that I’m doing. So sometimes I see an error and I just leave it in.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Carl Bogan:

Because it’s not worth the three hours to fix it.

Maurice Cherry:

Right. I’m curious also…when you put it out I’m imagining people aren’t coming back to you saying “oh, between this timestamp and this timestamp it’s a little off” or something. They just like the concept.

Carl Bogan:

Correct. I have yet to hear anyone complain about the compositing or the face generation because the story generative is so enthralling that it doesn’t really matter that it’s not 100% perfect. I will take 85 to 90 for this since it’s just for social media.

Maurice Cherry:

And I think that’s probably just an important thing that creatives listening can kind of apply to their own work. Like don’t let perfect get in the way of good. I don’t know how that saying goes. It’s something like that. But done is better than…

Carl Bogan:

Done is better than perfect.

Maurice Cherry:

Done is better than perfect. Thank you. Because you can spend a lot of time trying to get something to what you think is perfect. But the reality is that once it’s out there in the world, the person that sees it already thinks it’s perfect as it is. I mean there’s going to be some that will scrutinize, but for the most part, just put it out there and get feedback. You can always iterate on your own time but don’t let that stop you from releasing the thing, you know?

Carl Bogan:

Absolutely. Put the work out. Don’t worry about it. You can always go back and fix it, but put the work out. I remember the very first one that I did — very first piece was a Will Smith and Cardi B that he ended up reposting. I’m going to believe, to date, it’s still the third highest viewed post on his social media account. And I remember getting ready to really get granular and get into each pixel, make sure it’s perfect. And I stopped myself and said “you know what, this is good enough.” And I know sometimes you hear that, oh, “good enough is never good enough.” Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is good enough depending on the place you’re sending it and what you want to use it for and the time that you have and the effort that you have. And so I would say that examine that before you really spend a lot of time on something that may not matter in that context.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I think that’s good advice. Now you’re working in…the area that you’re working in is known kind of generally as synthetic media, which I feel like is the talk of the tech industry these days. Generative AI, personalized media, deepfakes, like you said, with some of the social clips that you’ve done. And I’m sure that you’ve got thoughts on all of this. So I do have some questions. I’d like for us to chop it up a little bit and talk about some of this stuff. Now, the most obvious thing is synthetic media has the potential to kind of blur the line between what’s real and what’s fake. When you’re working with synthetic media, are there sort of ethical considerations that you think are completely essential for doing this work? Like, when a project comes in or when you’re working on your own project, what are sort of the ethical considerations that you have around creating something?

Carl Bogan:

So I will start with saying deepfake porn is a scourge on society, and they need to legislate that into the ground. It’s not okay. And I say that because that’s where all of this started.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Carl Bogan:

I say a lot of the tech industry is born from video games and porn. Well, this is no different. And actually, as quiet as it’s kept, a lot of creators would use a forum on a deepfake porn site because that’s where all of the information was on how to do this, how to do that. It was sort of an oddly placed forum in sort of a deep, dark place on the Internet. Sort of, I would imagine, in the same way that YouTube was created and how to get compression rates down and so on and so forth. So I don’t know how it still exists. I won’t list the website because it’s not important. But the sites that do indulge in that practice, I think they should be held to a much higher standard and shut down, so to speak. Because permission and consent in synthetic media is extremely important. Which is exactly why I and many other creators do not do work or use anyone’s likeness for money where they did not consent to it. And so if someone came to me and said, right now, “hey, I want you to put Steve Harvey in a commercial, I’ll pay you money,” I have to say no, because I did not get Steve Harvey’s permission to do that. And so when it’s all fun and games on the Internet, I’m not getting paid for it. It’s fine. It’s parody. As soon as you take money for it, it steps outside of parody and it’s paid for hire. And now you’re infringing on his likeness. Now, that being said, here’s where it gets tricky. You take Steve Harvey’s likeness, you put it into the machine, it turns those pixels into numbers. The numbers turns into whatever goes into the latent space of the training, and it spits out something that looks like Steve Harvey, but legally, is it Steve Harvey? Because I always ask sort of this thought experiment: if you have two twin brothers who are identical, one is a senator and one does pornography, what happens? It hadn’t happened yet. But is the twin brother who is in pornography, is he allowed to practice his pornography as well as next to his brother who’s running for Senate? And so that’s sort of, at least from where I’m standing — how do you handle likeness and what [someone then] does with something that looks like you, right? And so we’re kind of reaching this grey space of what to do with that and I don’t think anyone really has the answer right now. But I will say that having ownness over your likeness, not in the way that it has been done for the last 20 or 30 years, but in a new way…that hasn’t yet been created, I believe that’s going to become very important.

Maurice Cherry:

Last year, right around this time, I was working with a startup. We were doing a magazine and we were doing this issue on Web3 and it was really like my first time diving into, in a deep sense, learning about a lot of these issues. And it was amazing. Like, just hearing about the concept of digital twins and people considering licensing or putting some sort of restrictions around their voice, because someone could take like…someone could take this podcast and the hours of audio that I’ve done and put that into some type of, I don’t know, whatever sort of generative AI type of thing and spit out something that I’ve never said, but they’ve cobbled it together from the words that I’ve said over the years and stuff like that. It was fascinating in like a Black Mirror sci-fi kind of way. But I could see there being some really heinous implications if that is used for nefarious purposes.

Carl Bogan:

Five years ago I was talking to several generative audio companies, and none of them were really that good, if I’m just being honest. But something happened the last six months, because in AI, six months is like six years. And now, all of a sudden, from this one podcast, my voice can be cloned. Your voice can be cloned. And we can be singing Frank Sinatra or saying really inflammatory things about different races and cultures. And so where is it going to be in six months from now? I don’t know. But I will say the technology is allowing for less data to do better impressions visually and audio wise. The future of that I believe is going to…someone’s going to come out with a way to identify or there’s going to be some protocol that everyone’s going to have to adopt if they want to seem as if they are with the time. Sort of like the Truth campaign which got rid of a lot of smokers or stopped a lot of people from smoking. It was a social movement and if you were seen smoking, you were seen as sort of a disgusting act. And because of that, many people do not smoke. And I don’t think the Truth campaign or the Truth company get enough credit for doing that, but I believe it’s going to take that sort of social movement in order to prevent people from being ripped off. Or I think you’ve heard of the kidnap scam where people take your voice and they say, “oh we have Maurice. Maurice, say something.” And you’ll say, “help me, help me give them whatever they want,” just that little bit. And it triggers your family to then go into their banks and their coffers and pull out whatever money they have to satisfy the demands of the would be kidnappers. But little do they know you’re just on vacation in Hawai’i.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Carl Bogan:

And so that is a real thing that will also happen. And not to be too dystopian or anything, there’s so many other good things that are going to happen.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, yeah.

Carl Bogan:

But these are just the immediate things that are sort of the low hanging fruit. Especially because we’ve been in the media lately and we’re making tools and we’re using tools but we’re not really getting ahead of them fast enough. But not necessarily saying that these things will happen, it’s just that they can happen. But oftentimes things that can happen will happen.

Maurice Cherry:

That’s true. That’s true.

Carl Bogan:

I forgot. Is it? Occam’s Razor. No, I think it’s something it’s one of the laws.

Maurice Cherry:

It’s probably like Murphy’s Law or something like that.

Carl Bogan:

Murphy’s Law. That’s what you have. Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:

I mean, to that point, you know, you’re right. I mean, I even think about, you know, some technology that we have now that we take for granted, like cell phones and things like that. Those were inspired by science fiction. So you kind of have this interesting, almost symbiotic relationship of how the technology can be influenced by fiction and then that ends up influencing what people actually do with it in real life. It’s a weird sort of process and I think you’re right; it is going to have to get to some point where there’s some type of protocol or regulation. I know the government has been talking to Sam Altman from OpenAI about artificial intelligence and how it can be used. So I can see the government trying to put some guardrails around this. But in the meantime, what do you think? Actually before we do that — side note, you mentioned Truth. I was on a Truth street team in 1999.

Carl Bogan:

Thank you for your service.

Maurice Cherry:

No, you mentioned that and I was like is the Truth campaign still a thing? It’s still a thing. It’s been around for 25 years. Damn.

Carl Bogan:

Absolutely.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

Carl Bogan:

Now little did we know that they would go from cigarettes to vaping which I think depending who you ask is better or worse. But at least we don’t have to smell it.

Maurice Cherry:

Right.

Carl Bogan:

So maybe that was the goal. I’m not entirely sure.

Maurice Cherry:

But to go back to that whole thing about protocol in the meantime, what do you think we can do to sort of cultivate some literacy or some critical thinking around how folks can sort of, I guess, navigate and discern between what’s synthetic media and what’s authentic media? Like we’re already starting to see political campaign ads use kind of this generative video or generative AI for some things of course. I think probably earlier this year you were starting to see people do those AI avatars and stuff like that. And I know one way that people were sort of saying, like, “oh, well, you can tell this is fake. Look at the hands, because they could never get the hands right.” But now they’re starting to get a little better with the hands. But in the meantime, until this sort of protocol is implemented, how can people start to spot the fake, I guess?

Carl Bogan:

Well, for video, it’s easier right now. So for fully generated, like, prompted video, the data is not there. The computational math hasn’t really been done yet on the full models to make them fully realistic. Yet six months ago, it was much worse. Six months later, it’s much better. Six months, it’ll be even better. And two years from now, it’ll be almost impossible to tell. Sort of like Unreal Engine. And they got really, really good at generating rock formations and trees and landscapes because they’re using scans of actual rocks and trees and landscapes. Science plus computing power plus data equals reality, essentially.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Carl Bogan:

And so eventually, we won’t be able to tell. And so I actually work with a larger group put on by MIT. It’s sort of like a disinformation panel of people all around the world, and we get on a call once or twice a year. We talk about where things are, what can we do to help usher in a safer future, a more honest future, and a more ethical future for everyone, so that we don’t end up in a Black Mirror episode, which we’re rapidly racing towards. And so one of the easiest things, I believe, that always comes up is just an identifier, whether that’s a logo or a bug in the bottom right corner or somewhere on the screen that lets you know what you’re looking at has been generated. That’s it. It’s nothing terribly difficult to do, but there just has to be one commission or one protocol that everyone signs up for says, you know what? I’m going to be a part of the winning team in terms of wanting to make sure that disinformation is not spread, whether that’s innocent or whether it is really damaging. There was a person who went to the Met Gala. Allegedly, she wasn’t there. Someone posted her in a beautiful gown on thee red carpet, and she was at home in her pajamas, so that’s not a big deal. But then you see, like, you’re saying, the political information where you see Trump kissing Fauci.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Carl Bogan:

And that’s a big deal. And so these are just images, or the images where you see Trump running from arresting officers.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, I remember those. I remember seeing those. Yeah, yeah.

Carl Bogan:

Which is weird because you would imagine with the video capabilities of deepfakes and whatnot, and especially with voice generation, you can do a much better fake, but the more data points you have, humans are really good at spotting things that are not real. And so with images, they say a picture is worth 1000 words, but people are generally pretty bad at noticing what’s fake about one single image just because of the way we’re wired. Ever since we’re born, we open our eyes, we start collecting data about what’s real and what’s not, about what does a human face look like, what proportions, what are the microexpressions, so on and so forth. But you can’t capture any of that from a single image.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, you know, what you mentioned there is sort of an interesting corollary to what I tell people all the time about design. I often have encountered people over the years that are like, “oh, I’m not creative, I’m not a designer,” that sort of thing. But I tell them that everything that they have used or encountered in the world is a byproduct of design. Like the clothes you wear, the chair you sit in, the car you drive. Someone had to really think about that and cater that to a human’s usage or what have you. And so we know when something has been designed poorly. We don’t have to be a designer to know that, but we have enough just sort of like tactile experience with designed objects to know when something is poorly designed. So it’s kind of a corollary to what you’re saying with we see and know enough as humans to know when something is just not like maybe it’s in that uncanny valley, but something is just not quite right about the image that we’re seeing. Like the Pope in a white puffer jacket or something like that. Is that real, you know? That kind of thing.

Carl Bogan:

Exactly. I was reading a book about that, about design. I believe the author called it the Norman Door. Have you ever gone up to a door and you didn’t read the push or pull sign? But it had a handle, and handles generally mean grab and pull.

Maurice Cherry:

Right.

Carl Bogan:

But you grab the handle and then you push in where you’re supposed to push. And so you feel kind of stupid. You grab the handle and you pull toward you and it goes and then you see the word, it says push. Well, that’s not your fault, right? That’s bad design. Yeah, flat surfaces are for pushing and pulling gives you a handle and there’s no two ways about but, you know, depending on where you stand.

Maurice Cherry:

Like I like that analogy. That makes sense. One thing that I love what you’re doing with Myster Giraffe, and you talked about this earlier, is kind of…you’re using synthetic media to kind of amplify otherwise, I think, marginalized voices and faces. Honestly, looking ahead, what developments or advances do you see in synthetic media, and how do you plan to kind of contribute to that through Myster Giraffe?

Carl Bogan:

So what I would like to see, for one, is I’d love to see the world’s first synthetic host for an awards show. I think you can really get away with that for an awards show because the stakes are low.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Carl Bogan:

Or like a Dancing With The Stars or something where it’s purely entertainment. There’s no real weight on it. And then what I’d also like to see is…I’d like to see someone take the reins, if they haven’t already yet, and design a show specifically to allow you the choice of who you want to be the main character. So let’s say you have three identical body types. You have 5’10”, brown skin, clean shaven. There are several actors that can fit in that category. And so if you take three of those actors and you have one sort of dummy body, if you will, run through the scenes, run the acting, and still tell a good story. Right. And then let’s say, much like Bandersnatch on Netflix, you could choose your own adventure. I would love to be able to sit down and choose who I want to see in that role for that film and then watch it three different times to see how I feel about it. Because a lot of the times how we feel about actors changes how we feel about the film. And so if Jim Carrey was Vin Diesel in Fast and The Furious, the whole movie would feel different.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Carl Bogan:

Even if he wasn’t being funny in the moment, he would feel funnier because of who we know Jim Carrey to be. And so sort of experimenting and playing with that juxtaposition I think will be cool to see. I think also allowing us to…there’s no reason why when shopping online, we shouldn’t be able to see ourselves in the clothes that we want to wear. Why do we have to buy the clothes and send them back? We should be able to see how we look in them before we waste the fuel and polluting the environment, not knowing how it’s going to look on us. So we should be able to deepfake ourselves pretty much wherever we want to, whether that’s in a…I’ll give an example. Let’s say Cardi B comes out with a new music video, but she comes out with a version where you can put yourself in it and then everyone can put themselves in it as a means of creating another viral sensation. I mean, there’s so many different flavors of ethical ways to engage with people, allowing them to have fun with it instead of it being all sort of doom and gloom and, “oh, no, they’re gonna come get you.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. You mentioned that about the shopping, and that immediately made me think about what Snap is doing with augmented reality. Like, I think it’s like a Snap…I think it’s called like Shop Suite or Shopping Suite or something like that, where you can do just that. You can sort of use augmented reality to see how clothes will look on you before you buy them. So you can get a sense of like, “oh, this might work for me.” I think Target does this, Amazon does this, for some products where you can use AR to see how like a piece of furniture or a plant or something might fit in your space before you actually buy it. Because you know, if you go to the store, you got to measure, then you got to go to your spot and measure and make sure that it fits and all that kind of stuff. Whereas now you can just use AR to kind of approximate for the most part how something will look on you or in your space. So I could see that being fleshed out more certainly as technology kind of gets better.

Carl Bogan:

Absolutely. I’ve seen them for shoes. I’ve seen people…I just saw someone was just acquired or started working with Amazon for putting, trying shoes on, which is great because the hardest part about trying on shoes is that you have to go there and they don’t have your size, so on and so forth. But being able to see that the shoes are on your feet now, you still can’t feel them, which is the other half of that, but at least you’re halfway there. But I think there’s a lot of ways to use the technology and use your own face. Or my favorite one, or actually two of my favorite ones — one of them is…there’s a quote that says, “today is the youngest you’ll ever be ever again and tomorrow you’ll be older and older and older. So for online creators whose faces are their money or their investments, they spend a lot of time on skincare and wellness products and Athletic Greens to make sure their skin is glowing and they never bank the data. They never bank the data. And so right now you could take 30 minutes out of your day or every year 30 minutes and bank your data and keep…and sort of put this version of you in carbonite. So in five years from now, gravity, sun, wind takes us all down eventually. Why not be able to call on that older version of you to essentially freeze a digital version of you in time and have that be your Internet facing version forever?

Maurice Cherry:

I like that.

Carl Bogan:

That cuts down on having to get plastic surgery if you don’t want it, having to get Botox if you don’t want it. Just having an independent version of you that only lives online. Sort of like a Max Headroom that never changes. And I believe that’s going to be a way we’re going to interact with the Internet sort of in the near future. Sort of like a Ready Player One way where you just have your avatar and you can choose to show up how you want to show up because you should have freedom and individuality on the Internet.

Maurice Cherry:

Right.

Carl Bogan:

And the second one is — and I’m really passionate about this and I haven’t found the right candidate yet because I don’t know if I’m approaching it correctly — is that I would like to offer a burn victim the chance to restore their face digitally for use on the Internet, depending on how severely they were burned and so on and so forth. But if they have enough data of their face before the accident, you can restore their faces if they so choose.

Maurice Cherry:

If they choose, yeah.

Carl Bogan:

There’s so many different use cases that have yet to be seen that I’m really excited about either Myster Giraffe creating them or other people creating them.

Maurice Cherry:

You know, you mentioned the thing about the digital host, and immediately I was like, if there’s any media entity that I think that could probably pull that off and it would work, it’s probably BET. Like, BET had “Cita’s World” back in I was hoping you would like early 2001, but not only that, they brought Cita back. I think it was in 2021. BET had a reality show called “The Encore” that had these like it had like, Black girl groups from the it had like 702 and Total and I think Kiely Williams and some other folks and they were like all in a house, like, trying to make a hit or something like that. And Cita was the host. I mean, granted, it was only like, on a television, but it was like a more updated version of Cita that would be the so, like, if anybody, I think, could pull it off and at least has a precedent for it, BET, I’m putting that out there.

Carl Bogan:

You know, I’ve used that example and depending on the room you’re in, they won’t know it. They don’t know who Cita is. They’ve never heard of Cita.

Maurice Cherry:

Right!

Carl Bogan:

Cita who? Cita who? But that was ground– And this was 20 years ago. Yeah, actually, I was reading the story behind that and it was a couple of brothers out of Atlanta, I believe, that came up with the idea. And it was very popular and it fell out for whatever reasons. But I think you’re right about that. I think they definitely have the prestige in order to bring that back or to be the first. Let’s just say…let’s hope Tyler Perry gets to buy BET and puts it up.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, speaking of Atlanta, I want to kind of shift the conversation because we spent a lot of time, you know, just kind of talking shop, But learning some more about you as I was kind of doing research for this interview…you’re from Atlanta originally?

Carl Bogan:

I am from Atlanta.

Maurice Cherry:

Tell me what your time was like here.

Carl Bogan:

So I’m from Atlanta and I went to elementary school through high school and college. I started out going to…I got a band scholarship to go to Clark-Atlanta University. I was in the drumline, like most of the people in 2001 who played an instrument at the time. Only stayed there for a year, went to Georgia State for a couple of years for a graphic design foundation. Wasn’t really thrilled with the program, wasn’t really into graphic design as much as I thought it was. I was more into the motion. And so I left Georgia State after two years and went to AIU for the last year and a half to focus on visual communication, where I really dug into 3D, specifically Maya and After Effects and whatnot. Graduated, did an internship at Riot Atlanta, which I believe was absorbed by Company 3, and got my start. Left there three months later, worked in graphic design and motion graphics for the next six months, then I said, “you know what, I’m just going to go for it.” So I left to go to Los Angeles.

Maurice Cherry:

And so for your time here in ATL at Georgia State and then at AIU — I’m kind of trying to place this in terms of the time frame. I’m guessing this is like right around late 90s, early 2000s kinda?

Carl Bogan:

I graduated college in 2005.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay. So a little bit later. Okay. But I was trying to think of what the curriculum might have been, because what it sounds like is what you wanted to learn, there might have just been maybe just a limit in terms of how much the school could teach you.

Carl Bogan:

Absolutely. Everything was still books. YouTube didn’t really exist in the way that it did now. I believe They just got started and everything was 240p. And so if you wanted to learn it, you get a book and you get a DVD and good luck. So that’s not my preferred way of learning. Neither is most people’s based on the success of online courses. But I would say I didn’t really learn what I needed to to be competitive until I left Atlanta. Unfortunately, I had to come to Los Angeles, which at the time, and I think before the pandemic, they were still the number one market for motion graphics and visual effects. Now it’s much more global, so I don’t know if they’re still number one, but I do know that a lot of filming still happens in Atlanta, but rarely, if ever is there any post-production done in Atlanta. It still comes back to Los Angeles.

Maurice Cherry:

I mean, you know, we talked about this a bit before recording. You were like back then, the only places you really could have gotten a job was, like you said, TBS. What was the other place you mentioned? I forgot already.

Carl Bogan:

TBS, The Weather Channel…

Maurice Cherry:

The Weather Channel! That’s right. The Weather Channel. Or if you’re lucky, Cartoon Network.

Carl Bogan:

Correct. That was sort of it. It was sort of a one horse town in terms of post-production. Now it’s maybe a three horse town, which is great. I’m happy to see them growing, but there’s still not a lot of shops and certainly not — I know Method Studios opened up an office there, maybe a couple of others, but it’s definitely not a booming industry there yet.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. Atlanta, I feel like, has always been…and God bless them. I was working in the tourism industry like in 2005 and 2006. And I got to tell you, Atlanta was kind of as a city, and I say this only from, like, a tourism perspective, not from a cultural perspective, but from a tourism perspective…Atlanta was kind of failing because we had lost as a city…we had lost this really big convention. I think it was the Home Builders show. And that was like something that brought in like a billion dollars worth of revenue into the city every year, and then they just chose another city. Hurricane Katrina happened in…I think it was 2005. I think Katrina happened, and Atlanta picked up a lot of their convention business, and that really kind of turned things around, I think, for the state to the point where they were able to lobby to state government. And then state government started putting in these tax credits for entertainment. And then that’s how these production studios started coming here and filming. I’m curious as to what Atlanta would have looked like if we hadn’t…I mean, benefited is probably the wrong word, but if we hadn’t benefited from being able to pick up that business from New Orleans, because a lot of people, at least back then, really didn’t want to come to Atlanta. They had a really negative perception of Atlanta, partially from Freaknik, that just carried over into the next decade, but then also know people would come downtown and there was nothing to do. Like, they come downtown, and after five o’clock, everything is dead. And conventioneers would often be angry about thee fact that they can’t walk from their hotel to the restaurant without getting accosted by homeless people. And I don’t want to bring my family here, and there’s a whole bunch of strip clubs, there’s a lot of Black people. I just don’t know what to know to do…that whole thing. And the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau was really trying hard to, like, we need to find a way to brand the city. Like, we need something like Milton Glazer’s “I Love New York” or something like that. And they paid this agency like $8 million to put together this Brand Atlanta campaign. Were you here when Brand Stlanta happened? I think you might have been maybe on the way to L.A.

Carl Bogan:

Might have just left. I left in 2007.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, they did this whole Brand Atlanta campaign, and they paid for this really bad logo that was like a combination…like, if you took the Target logo and the Ubisoft logo and put it in a blender, it basically just looked like a bullet hole, which probably was not a great visual for the city. It’s like ATL in this red bullet hole. And they had produced a song called “The ATL” with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Ludacris, because I remember being in the [Georgia] Dome when that happened, when they premiered it, I was like, “this is really bad.” And granted, people still come to Atlanta for the music, and the entertainment and stuff, but they wasted so much money on that branding campaign, it was ridiculous. I say all of that to say that Atlanta really sort of benefited from that in some ways in the creative industry. But like, I think in other ways, you know, it took a while for the schools to catch up because Atlanta is pretty unique in that we have so many HBCUs, but then we also have kind of some top tier schools like Georgia Tech or Emory or something. And there’s also like art schools here. There’s [The] Art Institute [of Atlanta]. Well, Atlanta College of Art got absorbed into [The] Art Institute [of Atlanta], but the Portfolio Center, SCAD now has a campus here, but they didn’t back then. And now the city, I think, is known for its creative output. But for creatives that are here, and I can tell you this from trying to do the show, it’s been so hard to try to get Atlanta people on this show. They don’t want to do it. Or there’s always some excuse, or…and I mean that this is probably neither here nor there. But I say that to say I think Atlanta outputs a lot of creative work. I think it’s tough to be a creative and stay here because the infrastructure is just not supported from the business end. It may be from the community end, but not from the business end. There’s a lot of folks, a lot of really talented folks I know that have had to pick up and leave because the opportunities aren’t here.

Carl Bogan:

The opportunities aren’t there. I would agree with you. I just shot a music video in Atlanta maybe five weeks ago. Hopefully it’s going to release soon. And shooting the music video there with a small budget and three days of prep would have been impossible in Los Angeles, be completely impossible. I was able to show up on a Friday afternoon with nothing, no talent. Well, I had the main talent, but no supporting roles. It was a two day shoot, had zero locations, and in a day and a half I had everything. So I had the warehouse location that had proper lighting and had the white psyche and they had the robotic arm. I had the people who knew other people. I mean, it’s a very small community. The people working in post-production or production in Atlanta is a very small, insulated community. But I was able to find one person who let me into that community enough for me to get the resources that I needed. And so as much as I say Atlanta is not ready, it is ready if you have that one person. But if you show up to Atlanta and you know no one, you’re going to have a really hard time with trying to make it happen.

Maurice Cherry:

That is true.

Carl Bogan:

So, you know…it can be tricky, but they kind of saved my bacon. So I do want to say that. Now, that being said, all the post-production went back to Los Angeles, but in terms of getting stuff shot, finding makeup artists who actually know what they’re doing, B-camera operators, producers. Those people do exist in small amounts. There’s no strike going on there right now, so I think they’re okay.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I’m pretty sure there might be some strikes here. I haven’t heard of anything but then I also haven’t really been looking, so I’m not sure. Now, right before you started, Myster Giraffe, you joined Aliza Technologies as their chief technology officer. This was in 2019. Tell me about that experience. How was that?

Carl Bogan:

So I had been freelancing for about a decade at that point, and I was looking for a new opportunity, and I really wanted to build something instead of just being the hired mercenary to solve this problem, which I really like doing, and I’m talented at it, but I just wanted to sink my teeth into something. So I reached out to a buddy of mine who has a company — shout out to Zerply — who does a lot of hiring for the VFX industry, and he connected me with someone who was looking for someone to build a team to create digital avatars. And at the time Lil Miquela was coming out, she was making a lot of noise being the first big one, the first American influencer to be an AI robot, and people didn’t really know what that meant, instead of just I don’t know. It’s sort of like a weird time. Anyway, Brian Lee of the League of Zoom Company, the Honest Company, and ShoeDazzle, had this big idea to have a universe of influencers, and he needed someone to help build the team and get the influencers created digitally. So I was hired in 2018 to facilitate that as a consultant. So I hired people from around the world working from home and getting those sort of…this quarterbacking that process, getting the designs from the concept artist to the sculptor to the renderer to the look of that person. When everyone was created, he said, “all right, we want you to come in here and lead the team and get everything going in person.” So April 1, 2019, got in the office, and besides building computers and setting up networks, asked, “where can I provide the most value?” And he said, “I want you to figure out how to animate these characters.” Prior to that, two months prior to me starting, I talked about deepfake, and they didn’t know what it was, so I told them about what it was and how maybe we can use it to animate the characters, because initially I gave them a budget, a VFX budget, and it was very expensive. And I said, welcome to VFX. And they said, can you make it cheaper? I said probably. So I told them about deepfakes. It was open source code out of the Eastern bloc, so from day one, I start specing out a machine to start learning on, and I don’t have a machine learning background. But what I do have is a method of solving problems from working in VFX, so I didn’t have to have a machine learning background or to solve a problem, so long as I would approach the problem methodically and chart my progress, so on and so forth. So three months from April 1, we were seeing really good signs of progress, and the task was to turn 3D data into a data set that could be used for machine learning to make animation 80 times faster and cheaper. And so three months later, we’re seeing some progress. Six months later we started filing patents. We got granted five patents, and those patents still hold. And that was sort of my role at Aliza was many things, but mainly focusing on the animation of these characters and how to get them, how to use a real human to drive the character, replace their head with a CG character in order to save time and money.

Maurice Cherry:

I’m curious if that work kind of helped feed into what you were sort of doing with Myster Giraffe. Not to say it’s like on-the-job training, but I’m curious if that kind of helped you out in that aspect.

Carl Bogan:

It was absolutely off-the-job training because I would do it on the weekends or in the evenings, because I was trying to, as a person who was not a deepfake artist at the time, I was just practicing. And so what Myster Giraffe started was it was really just scratch paper. I have this idea, I want to know what happens if I use less data for this, or I want to know what happens if I use three different types of data here. And so each of the first, I would say ten or twelve videos was just me trying different things. And then it became, well, I wonder how people are going to respond to this sort of thing. And it just became this sort of social experiment of how are people going to respond to this? Whereas it started as, I wonder how this is going to look if I do this XYZ, how much data do I have? What kind of data do I need? How big does video have to be? So on and so forth.

Maurice Cherry:

So it sounds like that was just a really good, I think, like you said, you had to have something where you could focus on building one thing as opposed to kind of doing these off, I guess, freelance type work, like working, doing one thing here, doing one thing there. You kind of had some stability, it sounds like.

Carl Bogan:

Yeah, I had some stability. I had now had a full time job for the first time in a decade, which was odd because I had not been in that role, but at the same time, I wanted that role so I could sink my teeth in. And so when everyone was settled and in the bed on a Saturday night, I’d show up to work at 8:00 p.m. and stay ’til 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. Wow. And just experiment, experiment, experiment. So there’s a lot of bloods and tears on intimate draft. I would say out of everything I’ve posted, that’s only about 10% of the work I certainly that’s only about 10% of the work I show. The other 90% is in a graveyard of stuff that is either too inappropriate to show because of it’s funny when you try to tell a story sometimes and you’re also trying to use comedy. Sometimes you try to toe the line, but you accidentally fall over to one side or thee other, and if you get lucky, you’ll stay on the good side. But sometimes thee experiments end up on the not so funny side and then you have to bury them or the data doesn’t work out. Like, I’ll give you an example. Some of those videos I’ll sit on for two or three years, and I’ll know I want to use them, but because I don’t have the right data, it doesn’t work out. So Michael B. Jordan, I’ve been trying to get the data of him for two years, and when he was with Lori Harvey and when he was doing different press campaigns and so on and so forth, I couldn’t get the right data. But because of this newest run for Creed III, I was able to get the right data, which made that video happen. So it wasn’t really up to me when I got the data. It just had to sort of arrive and now I could move forward with it.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, interesting, because yeah, like you said earlier about consent, you couldn’t just put this together if the footage didn’t really exist or you didn’t get that permission from them. But now that he’s doing this press work, he’s out there. You’re now able to sort of gather these sources and then use that to put together a clip like that.

Carl Bogan:

That’s correct, yeah. There’s tons of people I would love to do, but I just can’t get the right data for them. Like Prince. He’s gone now, unfortunately, and he looks so different every time you would see him. But it’s hard to really nail down a good data set of him. So it just may never happen. But that’s okay because that’s how it should be.

Maurice Cherry:

Personally, over the years, how would you say you’ve evolved as a creative?

Carl Bogan:

I would say I’ve become more thoughtful in what I create. I also spend less time creating and more time thinking. I used to create for the sake of creating, which scratched a different itch. But I think as I’ve gotten older, I want my creations to have a bigger impact with less effort. Because I believe that’s…when you’re creating a painting of a Campbell Soup can, you know, it seems like student work, but yet that’s one of the biggest American pieces. And so I think the more and more I do Myster Giraffe or anything for that matter. I try to spend more time thinking than time doing. That way I can do it correctly the first time without having to make a lot of changes to end up at the same place.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, this work with synthetic media, I think is only going to improve as technology improves. What kind of keeps you motivated to continue with this?

Carl Bogan:

I would say the storytelling aspect of it all. There are so many stories that need to be told. Whether they’re in still format or whether they’re a full video, whether it’s found footage, whether you have to go on set and shoot something. There are so many stories to be told. And I think that to be Black in this country is to have your culture cherry-picked for what it’s worth. But rarely do we get a chance to be at the forefront of technology and to tell the stories that we like to tell. Which is why there are so many slave biopics we don’t need anymore. Yeah, we want afrofuturism and afropunk to see the newest Spider-Man and to see the character that was the British punk character, but he was Black, was mind blowing for a lot of people because most people have never seen a Black British punk character in their lives. And while that was an entire movement, maybe the 70s, 80s, and 90s and in Europe, we never saw it in the U.S. And so I think just being able to see something and tell a story around it just because we want to, I think that is important and powerful because we’ve never been able to do that before. So now that the technology is being more democratized, I think is the best time to do it now.

Maurice Cherry:

To that point, I’m pretty sure that there are listeners that are hearing what you’re doing and they might be interested in wanting to try to get involved in synthetic media creating it or something in some way. What advice would you give them if they want to try to delve into this deeper?

Carl Bogan:

I would say to start just by absorbing as much knowledge as you can. Everything you ever wanted to learn is now on the Internet. Everything, every single thing. And if you don’t want to learn it, you don’t have to. But if you want to, just go read, go watch a TikTok video, watch a YouTube video, read a Reddit entry, go on a forum, ask someone. But there’s no more excuses for not doing. Everything is available right now.

Maurice Cherry:

Where do you see yourself in the next five years? Maybe this is a little hard to kind of see because of how the technology is changing so rapidly, but what kind of work do you want to be doing in the future?

Carl Bogan:

My immediate goal is to produce the very first deepfake leaning entertainment show. That’s my first goal. There’s a deepfake show that has not been created in the U.S. Yet. There’s one in the U.K. that didn’t do so well. But I would like to create the first deepfake entertainment show in the US. And then from there have a slew of game shows, talk shows, so on and so forth, proving that you can use the technology in an ethical way and have sign off on everyone who watches it.

Maurice Cherry:

I love that. I think you can make it happen too. I really mean it. You’re in L.A. You’ve got skin in the game clearly for doing this. I mean, you’re a pioneer as far as I’m concerned when it comes to this. So I feel like that’s definitely going to happen for you.

Carl Bogan:

Well, I appreciate that. From your mouth to God’s ears.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, just to wrap this up, where can our audience find out more information about you? Where can they see the clips, the studio? Where can they find that information online?

Carl Bogan:

Sure. So you can find me online on Instagram at @mystergiraffe, which is M-Y-S-T-E-R. Giraffe. G-I-R-A-F-F-E. Or you can just send me an email at carl@mystergiraffe.com.

Maurice Cherry:

All right, sounds good. Carl Bogan, I want to thank you so, so much for coming on the show. Like I mentioned before we started recording, I was super excited to talk to you and this conversation did not disappoint at all. I mean, like I just said earlier, you’re a pioneer when it comes to this. You’ve had skin in the game for years. You’re making work that is one I think showcasing and celebrating Black culture. But you’re doing it in a way that is fun, it’s informative. It’s not like you’re not trying to incite anarchy or anything like that. I mean, really, you’re at the forefront of this as far as I’m concerned. So I really am interested to see how far you can take synthetic media in the future and I really do see that show for you in the future. So thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing your story and everything. I really appreciate it.

Carl Bogan:

Of course, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the time together.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit

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

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

Breon Waters II

The past few years has been a testing ground for a lot of creatives. For Breon Waters II, he’s used this time to dive deeper into design across the digital world and the real world. And the results have been paying off!

Our conversation began with a look at his line of letterpress greeting cards, which are a fun mix of old-world printing techniques and cutting-edge technology. We also talked about his work at DEPT, and Breon shared how he came into product design throughs his earlier explorations in visual design and UI/UX. Breon has been steadily building his career brick by brick, and that’s given him a strong design foundation that will serve him well into the future!

Interview Transcript

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

Breon Waters II:
Hi, I’m Breon Waters II. By day, I’m a senior product designer at an agency called DEPT. By a later part of the day, I’m the founder of Holiday Free Of, a company that creates weird but memorable experiences that merge print and augmented reality.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, I remember when we met a few years ago, you were sending out these letterpress Christmas cards. That’s where Holiday Free Of sort of grew out of, right?

Breon Waters II:
Yep. It started back when I graduated from ArtCenter, so back in 2011, which is wild to think it’s been that long. It was just a way back in before times, having in-person meetings or interviews and having to leave behind something for people I was doing interviews with to remember me, hopefully help me get a job. I’m not exactly sure how the hell I thought of Christmas cards. The whole idea is being not about Christmas, so it’s a Holiday Free Of these weird things happening for me. I think the first one was wishing me a Holiday Free Of a Christmas tree filled with renegade ninja squirrels. So really kind of off-the-wall, bizarre things, but really showing my personality. But also gave me a chance to really do the type of things I’m going to do creatively and really just get out of my comfort zone.

Maurice Cherry:
The cards are great. I have the one that you sent me last year right here by my desk. It’s great, really thick paper stock, of course, because it’s letterpress. And it’s so fun to interact with. It’s really a great idea.

Breon Waters II:
Oh, thank you. I’m glad that people don’t just think I’m some weirdo and just people actually enjoy it and not just me laughing like a little schoolgirl while I make these, so I really appreciate it.

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

Breon Waters II:
It’s been fast. I know I’m not the only one, but it seems unimaginable that we’re basically almost, I guess, a quarter of the way done with the year already. My son just turned two. My daughter’s about to turn five. I’m going to turn 40 next month. So just a whole lot of milestones are happening. But yeah, definitely blessed. Things could have definitely been worse in the pandemic, but thankfully we have a roof over our head, haven’t really had to have much pain or strife or whatnot. But all is good, just working and then trying to actually launch Holiday Free Of this year. That’s my third baby, if you will, is just seeing if there’s a market for that.

Maurice Cherry:
I definitely think there’s a market for that. I mean, it’s funny, I think about the last place where I worked, and one of the things that I was helping them with was getting together their swag. Because, you know, people think of tech startups, they think of T-shirts or maybe some little glossy pamphlet that you might get at a trade show and that you’ll throw away later. I find a lot of tech startups, like SaaS companies, et cetera, are always looking for unique merch.

So, at the last place I was at, I know we were looking at socks, we were looking at custom one-by-one keycaps for mechanical keyboards. I think those cards could be great. And I say this also because we did dabble in doing some print. We did a legit print magazine. That could be something great if you want to tap into that. The swag markets doing custom AR letterpress cards for companies. That’d be great. That could be a good way to do it.

Breon Waters II:
No, thank you for that, Maurice. I’ll definitely keep that in mind because that’s a damn good idea. I’ll have to [inaudible 00:06:24] on to that one for sure.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you come up with the ideas for the card? I know you mentioned the name of it being Holiday Free Of. Do you keep a running list of stuff?

Breon Waters II:
Yeah. It always happens last minute, unfortunately. I think maybe one year I had the idea done maybe by September. But last year I was basically working on the design in November, a couple weeks before Thanksgiving. I have sketchbooks since starting design in college and I keep onto them and just writing word stuff. And sometimes, I think actually for this year’s, I was looking back at a sketchbook, it was a couple years ago, and just the idea of rock, paper, scissors. I was like, “Huh, there’s something kind of interesting there.”

It starts with a theme and just trying to figure out, “Okay, what’s the story from that theme?” And I can’t reveal the story fully yet, but it’s pulling inspiration from old school wrestling posters, boxing posters, patch show print-type posters and things like that for inspiration. I remember just being a kid, too, watching old school WWF back in the day. And just taking those memories, and what would happen if that fell in this world?

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. I could see something like that, that could be pretty fun.

Breon Waters II:
I was lucky to get a really talented 3D animator and illustrator, Mr Lubo Designs, to collaborate with him, and just really took my silly idea and really made it possible. Because I wasn’t sure if I could even make it move with animation. I thought it was going to be static. He was able to make it move, and knocked it out the park. Really proud of it.

Maurice Cherry:
So let’s talk about DEPT, which is the agency where you work at. You’re working there as a senior product designer. Tell me a little bit about your work and how you found out about them.

Breon Waters II:
Well, when I joined them, they were called it Rocket Insights. They were acquired by DEPT, I think five or four years ago. We’re officially known as the digital products US arm of DEPT. So, we basically design digital products for DEPT on the state side here. And how I found them actually was reached out, I forgot the name of the actual site, but you know there’s job placing sites, recruiters. But this one was basically by AI. And so I was working actually with another East Coast agency, funny enough, and I left and got approached by DEPT and the rest is history. I’ll be working with them two years in April.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Congratulations.

Breon Waters II:
Thank you.

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

Breon Waters II:
There’s not really a typical day. We’re kind of weird. We’re an agency, we work as consultants. But depending on the client, we could really be almost working an in-house counterpart to their company. So right now I’ve been working with FIFA for NFT projects. I joined it in November right before the World Cup started, which is the craziest time to join the project. But also learned a ton though too, because the project was going on way before that in preparations for all that goes into World Cups and big events like that.

So for this, basically, there’s two designers, a team of developers on our end and a project manager. And we have two different clients on behalf of the other side. And really just working with them for new features, figuring out what are things need to be included. One big push is the Women’s World Cup is coming up this year, and so we’re working on initiatives and features specifically for that. So that’s been basically the start of this year has been all focused on designing for the Women’s World Cup for this.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you mentioned the team. Are you working between different clients or do you just focus on one client for that specific project?

Breon Waters II:
Yeah, thankfully it’s just been one client. In the past I’ve had multiple clients. I’m trying to think back. Actually, before this project, I was on a design sprint and we were working with a mom and pop jewelry that’s looking to explore NFTs, and really seeing if they were to decide to create something within NFT world, what would it be? Is there a market for it? Who would it be for? And so that was basically a two-week sprint, just kind of along with the client learning what the hell NFTs are. Like what they’re all about, what’s Web 3.0?

And really just talking with them and potential users, just seeing what makes sense for them. What’s the story to tell? What would be their version of NFT? And it was really eye-opening just because NFT’s a real buzzword now. You hear the CryptoPunks and Tiffany’s collab’d and made millions of dollars. And people think, “Oh, it’s so easy, I’ll do that.” But every artist wants to be Picasso, or insert famous… or Basquiat. But there’s how many different artists and how many Basquiats? It’s not the same. It’s not as easy as that. So it’s really all about value. How do you really show that people should care or buy what you’re selling?

Maurice Cherry:
This might be an odd question to ask, but do people still care about NFTs? I mean, I ask this because a year ago, I swear you were seeing success stories about NFTs, and Adidas was making NFTs, and people were designing NFTs and making all this money. And now it’s like you barely hear about NFTs. Have they fallen out of favor?

Breon Waters II:
Right. No, I think there’s something to that. I remember last year the Super Bowl was everything about crypto. And all those companies basically are bankrupt or out of work. I think there still is, but I think we’re still so early in NFTs and Web 3.0 that it’s kind of like looking back in the first websites, where it’s just wild, wild west, crazy colors, rainbows everywhere. But it’s kind of matured. And I guess the trails of social media were there before, but it’s more mature now. And even still, trying to figure out what that’s going to be moving on forward. I think it’s kind of same for NFTs. NBA Top Shot is still popular, but it’s weird though, where it’s like you watch a game, it’s copyrighted by ESPN or Fox or insert whatever big broadcasting company.

And so it’s not even really clear. They own the rights to play it, so how’s it work you owning a highlight? I’m not sure exactly how that works. But even in that workshop I mentioned earlier, they mentioned NFTs for buying houses or for even for the contract sides, for if you’re working with artists. And having basically Web 3.0, big word, but basically it’s receipts. So basically capturing from the first person that bought it to fast-forward endless in the future. And so something like that, it’s not big and exciting and sexy as a Ja Morant NFT. But I think something that’s transaction-based, that could be a huge thing for it, but we’re still early for it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I still don’t know if NFTs… I don’t know. I don’t think they’ve really penetrated the mainstream yet. I know why brands are jumping on it now. It’s all about that perceived value. Just like folks were really bang on about the metaverse a year and a half ago and stuff. I think people probably still are, but not to the fervor that it was back then. I attended a conference… When was this, was this in 2020? Might have been 2021. I attended a conference about the metaverse in the metaverse.

Breon Waters II:
Oh, okay.

Maurice Cherry:
Like, I have a Meta Quest, one of those helmet things or whatever. It was an interesting conference. There were some sessions that were, I don’t know if there was intentionally supposed to be that hokey and sales pitchy. There was one where this guy had bought some virtual real estate inside of the metaverse during a talk.

He bought a 800 square foot piece of land for, I don’t know, $10,000 or something like that. Probably more than that. 25,000, that’s what it was, he bought it for $25,000. And I’m like, why? It only exists in this particular metaverse subdivision, which is the best way that I could put it. Because there’s still a big interoperability problem with the metaverse. And I think this extends to NFTs too, where you can use an NFT maybe in Horizon World, but can you use it in Solana World or can you use it in another metaverse? Are you really able to take it with you? But speaking of things to take with you, after the conference, they gave us an NFT.

Breon Waters II:
Oh, okay.

Maurice Cherry:
They sent us an email, they’re like, “Here’s your NFT.” And then they’re like, “This is how you claim it. Get your hardware wallet and do this, this and this.” I was like, “I’m not doing that.” First of all, I have no idea what that is. Do I have to buy that? It’s all good. I’ll just tell people I went, it’s not that big a deal.

Breon Waters II:
Yeah, that sounds like… I imagine it wasn’t the same as actual attending a conference in real life. It doesn’t seem like it’s on par with that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. You attend the conference in real life, you get a badge. I keep all my conference badges. You get something like that. But this was something called POAP, Proof of Attendance Picture or something like that. I’m like, “Is this like a Foursquare badge? What do I do with this?” I don’t know what it means for me to have that, or how to obtain it or why it’s useful. So I think I let it lapse because they kept sending me emails like, “Don’t forget to claim your NFT.” I was like, “I don’t know how, nor do I care, but thanks.”

Breon Waters II:
That’s a bad sort of a gift when you have to repeatedly ask that person, “Hey, you want to open the gift? Hey, you want to open the gift?”

Maurice Cherry:
But I think it’s cool, though, that you get to work with of new technologies with clients. So then you as an individual get to find a way to get your own understanding around it.

Breon Waters II:
Yeah, definitely. Even DEPT, our CEO, Dimi, there’s been a huge push and they’re all in for all things Web 3.0 and AI. Just like you said, being at the forefront where of course there’s a lot… Just like the experience you mentioned for the conference, where it’s not the greatest, but for the ones that do figure it out early on, being well-versed to really design and tell stories within this, it really will be a huge thing. But just early on, it’s going to be really rough and wacky. And a lot of bad things are… Hopefully not bad things, but bad experiences happening. But yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I’m looking at the DEPT website now. You all have a Web 3.0 division, it says, “With a global team of over 300 specialists, including solidity engineers, ethicists, economists and game designers, we have been building for Web 3.0 And the metaverse since 2015. Our pioneering work is fueled by patented and proprietary technology.” Okay. I didn’t know the Web 3.0 was a thing in 2015, but that’s cool. I mean, I’m not doubting y’all, I’m just saying, I’m looking through it like, “Okay, that’s cool.”

Breon Waters II:
I agree. [inaudible 00:17:34] my paycheck.

Maurice Cherry:
What would you say is the most satisfying thing about what you do?

Breon Waters II:
I think really, and it’s going to sound sappy or cheesy, but when a client comes and they have an issue, or they’re working on something not sure of, it’s a really good feeling of helping people actualize, not their dreams, that’s too big and broad, but helping them get past their hurdle or issue or their problem. I think that’s really cool. Even for things like design sprints where on day one you have this big issue, you don’t know what the hell you’re going to do. It’s a whole mystery. And day by day everybody’s learning from it. And on that Friday, you do five user tests and just learn so much. And just that feeling of going from not knowing to, “Hey, there’s some [inaudible 00:18:28] here.” That’s a really good feeling.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you approach that process of designing a new product or a new feature? I know you’ve mentioned the team that you usually are working with, but what does that process look like?

Breon Waters II:
It definitely varies on what we’re doing. But a lot of times we have a lot of really talented strategists that during the sprint doing the work together with us or sometimes doing it before our project or our phase of the project starts. So, really getting insights from that. And I think it sounds cheesy again, but some of the biggest skill sets for designers, not just product designers, but designers in general, just listening and just asking questions, just trying to learn as much as you can from your client.

They know it better than you do, but they’re coming to you for your expertise to actually how to visualize and build this. And a lot of times, too, people aren’t able to really say what they’re trying to say. And be able to decipher between that what are they really trying to say? And even user testing, talk with users, really listening, paying attention, getting out of the way and seeing what they’re doing. And taking all that together and helping it to inform your designs.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s learn a little bit more about you, about how you got to where you are now. You’re originally from California, is that right?

Breon Waters II:
Yep. A city called Rialto, California.

Maurice Cherry:
Rialto, where’s that?

Breon Waters II:
That’s in the Inland Empire. I like to say, if you’ve seen Friday After Next, it’s where Day-Day and his dad moved to, Rancho Cucamonga. So, next door to that.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. All right. So, outside of LA, but it’s not quite a suburb I would say, right?

Breon Waters II:
Right. It’s not quite the desert, but desert adjacent. And yeah, it’s a big bunch of different cities where basically you’ll go through it if you drive to Palm Springs, or if you’re looking to drive to Vegas, you’ll have to go through it. At least from going through LA.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. What was it like growing up there?

Breon Waters II:
It was cool. I loved it. Basically, imagine like most kids, you play out in the streets, playing tag or football, basketball, hide and go seek and whatnot. Where basically, it’s old school, but once the street lights came on, okay, you better bring your ass inside before you get in trouble. But yeah, just having friends around the neighborhood, just hanging out there.

Maurice Cherry:
Is that where you first got exposed to a lot of design and art and stuff?

Breon Waters II:
Thinking back, the first design or art was from my dad. And he wasn’t a classically-trained artist or anything, but I remember growing up, there’s a big portrait of my mom he painted. And there’s also, he did some different scratchboard pieces. They’re hanging up and just always remember seeing them as a kid. And so I’d always see that. And I was always sketching stuff. My thing was being a baseball player and designing airplanes, which are a perfect pair, right?

So, I would always draw that. And when I was in middle school, back when you would take shopping paper bags and wrap them around your books, I would draw Jimi Hendrix and baseball players on it. So never really blatantly had someone as a kid say, “Hey, this is designer art.” But from that and my dad really artistic in drawing, that’s where I really got my first dose of it. Or dose is the wrong word, but first learned about it.

Maurice Cherry:
And so you kept with that imagination of drawing and getting into it enough to the point where you decided you wanted to study it in college. I’m curious about this, and I know we talked about this a little bit before recording, but you went to college in North Dakota.

Breon Waters II:
Yep, that’s correct.

Maurice Cherry:
Which is, I mean, it’s not far from California, but you got to tell me-

Breon Waters II:
[inaudible 00:22:17]

Maurice Cherry:
It’s far? Okay. Oh, okay. I mean, I’m thinking it’s not on the other coast. But what brought that on? You went to Minot State University. That’s in North Dakota near the Canadian border, so you’re up there.

Breon Waters II:
Yes, sir. [inaudible 00:22:31]

Maurice Cherry:
Why? What brought you to Minot?

Breon Waters II:
You sound like you’re my therapist, which I don’t have, Maurice, so maybe I should have you be my therapist. Young Breon thought he was going to be a major league baseball player, playing first base for the Angels, and so I was hell-bent on playing baseball. After high school, I went to Cal Poly Pomona, which is a really good college for different engineering disciplines and especially aerospace. It’s in Pomona, California, actually, not far from where my folks live. So I was there, and excited being in college. But well, I didn’t just learn then, but I was terrible in math. I’d forget equations, especially on finals day. When you move into the senior level of classes, you do really cool stuff. They have partnerships with Boeing, working on airplanes and different things like that. I imagine now they’re probably working on drones and stuff. But I was bad at math. I thought, “Okay, I’m going to play baseball there.” I tried walking on and tried out for the team two years and didn’t make it, but I was still… The desire to play baseball, I wanted to do that.

And it was funny, a family friend of ours was working in the career center at the time. And she had me do a career placement test where you answer a series of questions. Whatever you pick, it’s kind of like, “Hey, you should do this,” or, “Hey, you should do this.” And so, one of the results was graphic design. I was like, “Huh, I never really heard about that.” I took some art classes in high school but didn’t really think too much of it. And so after that it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to switch to graphic design, but I still want to play baseball.” So I looked online and looked for colleges that had a baseball team and graphic design programs and just emailed a bunch of their coaches and whatnot. And I heard back from Minot State University and a school, Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa or Sioux Falls, Iowa.

Maurice Cherry:
Iowa’s Sioux City. I think Sioux Falls is in North Dakota.

Breon Waters II:
Okay, thank you. So, Sioux City, Iowa. And so my mom, God bless her heart, I told my mom and dad, “I was going to major in aerospace engineering and you’re paying for college. So yeah, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to go move to the Midwest and play baseball and do graphic design.” [inaudible 00:24:48] my dad, but my mom is just… And I get that too, my dad, you want your kid to be having something secure, not the whole starving artist kind of visualization. So I definitely get that now, being a dad. But my mom was really just supportive, “Okay, yep, we’re going to do this.”

And so we flew out to Minot State. I visited the school, tried out, and we rented the car and we drove from Minot to Sioux City, Iowa. Tried out there too. And just so happened where I got a chance to meet the team in Minot, it was during their tournament days, and just hit it off with them and just wanted to be a part of it. And that was how I went to being from California to moving to North Dakota, never having seen snow in my life, and being in blizzards there.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, of course, weather-wise that’s wild. But I mean, baseball and graphic design, that would’ve been an interesting Venn diagram intersection.

Breon Waters II:
Yeah. And it doesn’t make sense either, where California is one of the best parts for baseball. And I moved from there to North Dakota, which is not known for baseball. So, on hindsight, not the wisest decision, but it did lead me towards that graphic design path, so I’m grateful for that. And that was the right path for me.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So, while you were at Minot, you studied art, you focused on graphic design and marketing as well. How was your time there? Do you feel like you got a good foundation as a designer?

Breon Waters II:
Yeah, I think it was a good entry level way. Whereas, I actually was playing baseball there. I couldn’t play my senior year, which was at the time devastating, but it really worked out because I actually did my own senior solo show instead of… That wouldn’t have been possible at all if I was playing baseball. So basically, there, they introduce you, you have a class on typography, photography. I forgot what level of Photoshop or Illustrator it was, but it was back when you had the fifties looking MacBooks, or not MacBooks [inaudible 00:26:52]. So that was the time of that. So it did give me that sense, but I think one of the best part was the art side.

I had a lot of good professors there. Bill, and Walter Piehl was really amazing [inaudible 00:27:07]. He does these really amazing abstract rodeo paintings. And I remember he was the first person that put me onto Basquiat, was like, “You should check out this artist.” And really just was amazed, of course, rightfully so. Basquiat was an amazing artist. But I think that being an artist, getting your hands dirty, the first time doing screen printing and stuff like that, I think looking back it did set a foundation of having that kind of different approach to things.

Maurice Cherry:
What position did you play?

Breon Waters II:
I was first base but didn’t hit a lot of home runs and couldn’t hit a curveball to save my life.

Maurice Cherry:
I don’t know. I think that’s just really cool that you were able to pursue this design degree and you were effectively also a college athlete. We’ve had college athletes and designers on here before, maybe not at that exact intersection. That’s pretty unique. I mean, out of the hundreds of interviews I’ve done, you are the first one I could say that has done baseball and graphic design. So that’s pretty cool.

Breon Waters II:
Oh, thank you for that. Yeah, it was NAIA, which is basically division two. But one cool thing, though, is that we actually did play, in spring before we started league play we played in the Metrodome. They knocked it down years ago to build the new arena where the Vikings play. But playing in a Major League baseball stadium was cool. So that was really something I’ll keep with me for the rest of my life, even though we got destroyed and we actually were playing wood bats for the first time. So we’re playing wood bats against metal bats, so as you can imagine, we lost, and it didn’t work out so well. But it was still fun, though.

Maurice Cherry:
And I mean, I’ve met you, you’re tall, so it helps to be tall as a first baseman.

Breon Waters II:
Right, yeah. No, definitely.

Maurice Cherry:
So after you graduated, did you stay in North Dakota? What was the game plan after that?

Breon Waters II:
Oh no, once I graduated I got a U-Haul. Had a truck at the time, put all my stuff there and drove back. And I moved back home to my folks and just trying to get a job but found it was really hard to actually find a job. Actually, couldn’t find a job. When I was in Minot, I first heard about AIGA and spent a lot of time in Minneapolis for it, and just loved the city there. I think I went to my first portfolio show there. And so, okay, I’m going to go to a portfolio show. I went to one at USC at the time and I believe Ed Fellows was the actual speaker at the time. Does amazing work.

And I remember when I was getting my book reviewed and one of the persons there was like, “You know, you really need to go to a place that’s going to teach you design.” They’re like, “If you develop that eye for design.” And he mentioned a couple different design schools. And so I researched it and was thinking about, I think, actually, Creative Circus and Portfolio Center. But I think I got a booklet or something from ArtCenter. And funny, living in Rialto, never actually heard of it before that time. And just visited the campus, fell in love. You know where they have the bridge, it’s this 1950s-style architecture and just all the amazing work that students did there. And I was like, “Okay, yeah, I want to be here.” Decided to attend ArtCenter.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. ArtCenter out in Pasadena. It’s a beautiful campus. I’ve been there once. I know the bridge that you’re talking about, though.

Breon Waters II:
Yeah, it’s weird now, though. They actually have bought… So there’s South Campus in South Pasadena, and so a lot of, I think… Graphic design has a big building there, illustration. So there’s still stuff on the bridge, the Hillside campus, but not as much as it used to be. But still really talented folks go there.

Maurice Cherry:
How was ArtCenter different from Minot? Did you feel like because you had that four-year education already that it was easy?

Breon Waters II:
No. It was really intimidating. In other words, I remember in my initial class, people whose parents were designers, had done designs, had their own T-shirt companies and stuff like that. I’m sure like most folks you have imposter syndrome in your life, and you’re like, “Oh, how am I going to cut it?” But a blessing was Jay Chapman is a creativity coach there. And I will always be in debt and love Jay for the rest of my life. Just an awesome person and he’s really all about just helping you get out your way and have a sense of play in your work. And just would visit him at the time. I remember would visit him for a project and it clicked for you. You think of ArtCenter, it’s great design but it could be kind of stuffy, I guess, in a way.

Think of Bauhaus. It’s really kind of beautiful design but sometimes inject some life into it. So Jay is complete opposite, where it’s ArtCenter, this amazing school, but surrounded by a bunch of rich houses. And you basically, most folks just stay on there and design and work and work and stress out. And where you have LA and all the different cultures and cities that make up LA right around you but don’t even experience it. So really just enjoying life and experiencing different things and then injecting that into your work. Once from that just really did that and that really helped open the doors for me there. Just really, okay, it’s not worrying about other’s story, but what are my experiences? What does my perspective look like? And really just going well with that.

Maurice Cherry:
So it sounds like the combination of Minot and ArtCenter probably gave you a much stronger foundation once you got out there and worked as a designer. Because of course you had this foundational knowledge from Minot, but then as you mentioned, with ArtCenter, you’re learning about this sense of play as well as also probably learning about some different techniques and such that you didn’t get from a four-year college that you’re now getting at an arts college.

Breon Waters II:
Oh, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
What was your early career like?

Breon Waters II:
After ArtCenter?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Breon Waters II:
That’s a great question. It’s funny thinking back. It’s funny, in design school, and it might be for the majors too, you’re taught basically the world’s your oyster, right? Designs going to save the world and work on these amazing projects. And so it was funny, my first actual project, at ArtCenter, they have what’s called, as part of your last day is speed dating. So different companies come to your spot where you’re presenting your work. Basically, you’re showing off, “Hey, this is the work I’m proud of from my time at ArtCenter. Hire me.”

And so, one of the people that did was someone from Saputo Design, which is an agency in Westlake LA. Or not Westlake LA but Westlake, California, excuse me. They’re a small ad agency and they were working on a pitch for K-Swiss. And I had some collage work in my portfolio from a project for my senior year. And they basically had me work on a freelance project with them for a little bit from that. So that was my actual first one. So that was cool, just like, “Hey, you liked the stuff I did for a class and able to use it for a pitch for a shoe company.”

Maurice Cherry:
So you started out doing visual design, right?

Breon Waters II:
Yep. After that, I was there, moved on to another place where a professor worked. And actually it was my first time being fired on the spot. And that was-

Maurice Cherry:
Whoa.

Breon Waters II:
Yeah. Of course, at the time I was not laughing at all. I remember basically was working on a branding project. I forgot what I did, but made a mistake and basically the person’s like, “Yeah, thank you for your time, but kindly pack up your things and go.” I’m paraphrasing that. So, by the grace of God, I managed to say thank you, shake hands and head down to the lobby and that’s when I burst into tears. And I remember the security guard or someone down there, like, “Hey, are you okay?” And me just melting down, where it’s fresh out of ArtCenter, have, what, six figures in student loans?

I’m still living at my parents’ house. And how am I going to tell my parents and also my girlfriend, my now wife, at the time girlfriend, that, “Hey, I got fired.” Just feeling like a complete failure. But looking back, it’s one of the best things that happened to me just really because it really was my first lesson, a big lesson, that there’s no such thing as security. Things could change in the instant. Not in a way of being afraid of, “Oh, this could be gone,” but there’s some freedom of, “Okay, this happened but I’m still surviving. This is not going to end me. Yeah, it sucks right now, but I’m going to keep going forward.” And that’s definitely something that’s really helped me along the way, just because it’s tough finding a job at times. The design world especially is really small and it can seem like everything’s turning against you and things aren’t going to turn around. But if it’s not like being any smarter or talent makes you “successful.” But just sticking in there, getting back up and that’s really helped me in my career.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m really glad you said that because I think designers now, particularly during this wild period of layoffs that’s happening in not just the tech industry but the design industry and others as well, I think it helps to just hear that. When this sort of stuff happens, it’s not the end of the world. It certainly can feel that way. But you have to find a way to bounce back from it. And I think it also helps, and maybe in this particular instance, to know that you’re not alone when this stuff happens. I mean, yes, it’s the ending of one thing, but it also has the potential to open up into new opportunities that you can do. So, after that happens, how did you pull yourself out of that?

Breon Waters II:
So, funny enough, you mentioned you’re not alone, and that was something that actually helped too. A friend of mine at ArtCenter, Megan, was working at a company called Guess Clothing Company. And so she mentioned me to her boss Hiro, and basically I forgot, it might have been a month or two after that. I’m wondering what the hell’s going to happen next. And Megan hits me up saying, “Hey, would you want to work at Guess?” I’m like, “Of course,” so I actually ended up working there for a little bit. And I went on from there to Live Nation/Ticketmaster. And Hiro’s been a boss that I’ve… He attended my wedding, someone I consider a really good friend and kept in touch with and still keep in touch with now and just helped, advice. It’s really just like you never know when things are going to change, but having those people around you that are rooting for you really helps you out.

It may not happen exactly then, but along the way in a little bit of time, things will really pan out where it’s like, oh, okay. I’ve actually worked with when he joined a different startup and was looking for work. And yep, “Hey, Breon, looking for work?” And “Hell, yeah, I am.” And so I joined that too. So I definitely think it helped later on.

Maurice Cherry:
So for you, keeping that community in line is something that was really a good asset for you.

Breon Waters II:
Definitely. I know I’m not alone in this too where just I hate asking for help. And it’s just being stubborn. Just, “No, I’m going to do it myself.” But you need help and asking for help is not a sign of weakness. And I think one of the best things too is turning it forward when you actually are in a position to help people out, be able to do that too.

Maurice Cherry:
What inspired you to pursue product design? I mean, you were doing visual design and I see just from looking at your LinkedIn, you did UI/UX design. What brought you to product?

Breon Waters II:
So, back when I was at ArtCenter, there weren’t product design classes, or at least not for what we mainly consider it now. Product design as I knew it then was basically designing shoes or physical products or physical objects. So, I was actually, my specialization was in branding. So basically the idea of once you know, you do your research and your strategy and figuring out who you’re designing for, you can design whatever the hell you want to design. Whether that’s a logo, traditional stationary assets, things like that, or packaging, websites, you name it. So it wasn’t until I was working out in the field. I worked at Ticketmaster for about a year and just wanted to move to the Bay, where it still, it’s like that now, but it’s kind of awesome design place. It’s kind of like Starbucks, there’s one on every block pretty much.

And just wanted to really try to make a name for myself in the Bay. And so moved there. First learned about UI and then UX design and then later product design. And it was really from a point of trying to have more ownership on the project, where I went to the place, I was working as a UI designer. And it was the first time, once I moved back down to LA after a couple years. And it was the first time in my career where it just basically felt like it was a complete wrong fit. The design team overall was nice, friendly and whatnot. But the actual team I was working on seemed like basically didn’t really care, value my contributions to the team. And also from the company standpoint, the things we’re working on, we’re basically the red-headed stepchild of the company.

We’re not really having the funding or developmental talent to work on what we’re doing. It was basically like that, where I was working as a UI designer, but basically just it’s like, okay, the UX person does the UX, does user testing focus, all that stuff, does even some mockups. And, “Okay, here you go, Breon. Make it look pretty.” And just not what I got into design for. So I ended up leaving and I did an online class at General Assembly on product design, or UX design, rather. And just wanted to see, is this something that I do? And I had worked alongside some in-house teams, really great UX teams, UX designers, and learned a lot during that. And really found out this is all stuff that I could do, just all the things I took from them and be able to apply it from there.

And so I did that online course, it was basically a month long. And after that, Hiro, my boss from Guess earlier in the years actually reached out, because he had moved to the Flex Company as a creative director there and was looking to build a design team there. And so he hit me up and that was actually my first UI product design-type role after that General Assembly class. So it kind of all snowballed there where I was working there, really great company, they’re really small, tight-knit. Got to know the head of marketing, Maytal there, a really great person. And she put me on to someone who she knew who was an entrepreneur, has his own company, is looking to actually rebrand the logo, the website and app. And so that was another project where actually applying what I applied from that General Assembly class to that. So it kind of all just, unbeknownst to me at the time, lit and connected to each other and just slowly but surely evolving to being able to apply what I was looking to do.

Maurice Cherry:
And now that you’ve been working as a senior product designer at DEPT and you’ve been doing this work, do you feel like it’s been a natural evolution of your skills over the years?

Breon Waters II:
Yeah, I think so. There’s things from the branding side I definitely take in. As a product designer, you have design patterns you leverage. So think about, you open up your smartphone, buttons typically look the same, or different interactions or swiping and things like that, where they make sense because they’re something we’re all used to or trained to use. But there’s still a lot of design, a lot of digital products look the same. If you cover up a logo, it’s hard to tell what’s what.

And so I think from the branding side, that’s where it’s a chance to inject personality and experience into things. Not sacrificing the overall experience from a usability standpoint, but from a personality standpoint, how can you make an experience that really feels like this? So if you think of Apple products, where if it’s opening up your iPhone, the physical packaging to it, or looking at your iPhone or looking at the website or looking at things like that, it’s different things but it all feels the same. It feels like an overall same experience, so that kind of idea to it.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, looking ahead, how do you see the field evolving in the years to come?

Breon Waters II:
That’s a good question. I think rightfully so, there is some hesitation or the sky is falling there with ChatGPT or we’re talking about AI before. Where those things are real, but thinking about it, having read some stuff, it seems like that’s the natural order of things. So I imagine designers before were working with their hands, like calligraphers, when you have the setting presses, type presses were kind of the same thing for that. Like, “Oh no, what’s going to happen for us?” And then after that, fast-forward to the computer. And so thinking that same thing too. But it seems like all those things, yeah, they did take away some jobs, but it seems like the bulk of the jobs they took away were things or actions that you don’t like to do, the more repetitive things.

Where it feels like more of these being our assistants of sorts. Maybe if it’s for ChatGPT. ChatGPT, I know I use it for coming up with ideas for the copy for the website for Holiday Free Of I’m generating for copy. I’m not a copywriter, but at least, it’s not perfect, but having a place to start from or even really refining ideas I have. So, in that sense, almost a old school ad idea like the partners, you have a copywriter, AD paired together. So a team where it’s helping you generate ideas and work towards a common goal.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I use Chat GPT now, and I mentioned this before we recorded, I use it a bit like a writing partner. It’s good to give some prompts on some things and maybe help guide you in the right direction, but it’s certainly not a magic bullet. Although I feel like that’s how the media is certainly reporting on it. They’re sort of anthropomorphizing Chat GPT and similar types of things like, “Oh, they can think, they can hallucinate.” They can only do what they’re trained on based on the data that we give them. That’s just how it works. I mean, we taught rocks how to think and now we have computers, so what’d you expect?

Breon Waters II:
No, it’s spot on where they could do things, but the soul of what makes people people, that personality, at least not yet, it’s not easily repeatable by AI or machines. So, at least we got that going for us.

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

Breon Waters II:
Really just experiences. I think now when you typically think of a product designer, you think automatic like a phone or websites and apps and things like that. And that’s great, but I’m more interested in things that span mediums. Like going back to the cards, how do you create something that’s in experienced physically in your hands, but also digitally. But it may be slightly different, but carries along the actual same storyline you’re trying to tell. So things like that. Things like AR and VR, virtual reality, augmented reality. How do you really create meaningful experiences with that? I think that’s, at this point in my career, is really fascinating to me. Not so focused on the devices or the mediums, but more of these experiences or touchpoints for you.

Maurice Cherry:
What is the best advice that you’ve been given about design?

Breon Waters II:
I probably want to say it’s not even directly design related, but more of… And I’m not sure who I heard it from, but basically the point where it’s at one point in time everybody was a novice, or basically no one has all the answers. And I think that’s been really eye-opening just because when you’re coming up or just moving to something new, you think, “Oh, okay, they may have their ish together.” But a lot of times they don’t, or even at one point they didn’t. Even thinking about Web 3.0 or NFTs and all that stuff where no one has all the answers for it, so don’t feel like you have to be a “guru” or so much experience to know what’s going on there. Just having a sense of curiosity and playing around, asking questions, eager really to contribute to things. So it’s like there’s not this one elite path to doing anything it seems like.

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

Breon Waters II:
Just my family. It’s wild even thinking of being almost 40 and having a family. And you can have bad days and just have things of being an adult, what makes being an adult tough, but still hearing my… My kids are still young enough where they’ll call for me and actually want to be around me and my wife. I know that’s going to change, especially when they’re teenagers, but that’s the most awesome thing where just people are super happy to see you and just that sheer look of happiness.

And just their laughter, their personality is so infectious too. I love to create things. I’ll create things till my last breath. My kids will be the most inspirational, best part of something I had a part of actually creating. And so that’s really a humbling and also a daunting challenge, but also just so rewarding, though, too.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, your kids are also, at least the oldest one, probably, you say the oldest one is five, right?

Breon Waters II:
Yep.

Maurice Cherry:
Is she at that age where she’s interested… I want to say interested in design, but I feel like kids, just the way that we structure things for them, they have so much time and freedom to just play and do creative stuff. Are you finding that she’s into painting and drawing and stuff like that?

Breon Waters II:
Yeah, it’s funny. My daughter Essie and my son Mackaye. Essie is super in singing and dancing. She loves to draw. Like Jackson Pollock work, just wild and chaotic with making marks and things like that, but also that freedom for it. So I’m not really sure what she’s going to do, but I think she’ll be a lot better at it than I am, just because just how passionate she is and just loving to sing and dance and just that freedom that she has. For my son, McKay, I’m not sure. He’s like the Tasmanian devil. He loves books. So I think they’ll do something maybe in the creative world somehow, or at least have those hobbies and things like that. I definitely won’t pressure them to do that, but I think there’s something there that they have from me, which I got from my dad.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, you can pass on the legacy of design in a way.

Breon Waters II:
Yeah, we’ll see. It’s wild, too, I wonder will there be a point in time in their lives when they’re older, will there still be jobs? Just how automated things are, it seems it’s not out of the realm of possibility where these things called jobs aren’t a part of our lives. But if that’s the case, what the hell’s going to fill that? So, I don’t know.

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

Breon Waters II:
I think in a perfect world, if Holiday Free Of is something that catches on, and not even just that, but I think to a point where just I could survive off of my weird ideas and creating experiences and building a team potentially around it. Or actually, in January, last month, we’ll figure, I started teaching for the first time. And I had wanted for the longest time to teach, and just like a dummy feeling, “I have to be at a certain level of my career to actually teach,” which doesn’t make sense. And it’s been early, but I really get a lot of pleasure out of teaching. Early to see how, it’s a cheesy saying, but just if you want to learn something, teach. And just there’s so much that you have to do and learn just to be able to know what the heck you’re actually trying to teach.

It’s like how do you actually communicate your ideas, and knowing enough to actually try to teach something, but knowing that you’re not going to know everything? So I’d love to do more of that. And just really too would like to be, when I think about my career, what I want to be, ultimately, I really think of a conductor, or just having an idea, but assembling talents to actually help them do their best by helping to overall steer the goal for it.

When I was working years ago back on my senior art show, I first heard about Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Amazing talents, but had these amazing bands built around them. And now if you think of Robert Glasper and the work he’s doing, I’d love to do something of that ilk where it’s maybe me creating my creative type of interests, like maybe a Nick Fury type of person, I guess, I think. Just really designing different things, even if it’s more like a sociological type study or things like that. Really just thinking about things or experiments and things like that.

Maurice Cherry:
The Design Avengers, I could see that. You could pull it off, though. You could pull off Nick Fury with the iPads. You could do it.

Breon Waters II:
Luckily, he doesn’t have hair, right? So I got that [inaudible 00:52:03].

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

Breon Waters II:
By the time this comes out, Holiday Free Of will be out. So I’m launching that. So you can check out Holiday Free Of on holidayfreeof.com. On Instagram it’s @HolidayFreeOf. For my personal portfolio, it’s breonwatersii.com. Personally on Instagram, I don’t do it that much, but [inaudible 00:52:35] politemanliness.com. And really just trying to do more things, really just more storytelling with that. So look out for some interesting things and experiments, explorations on Holiday Free Of.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds good. Breon Waters II, I want to thank you so, so much for coming on the show. Like I mentioned at the top of the episode, I think you had reached out to me several years ago and asked for my address because you wanted to send me a Christmas card. And I was like, “Yeah, sure, go ahead and send me a Christmas card.” And I mean, we’ve kept in touch since then. I’ve seen how your career has grown since then.

And also I think just hearing your story now and seeing the path that you’ve taken to get here, you’ve always struck me as someone that really has their eye on the prize, like you know what it is that you want to do and you’re steadily working and going towards that goal. So, I could see in five years, the cards really taking off and being a success. And I just want to thank you so much for the work that you’re doing, for continuing to blaze a trail in the industry, and just for being, I mean, to somebody like me, just being a positive influence in the industry, family man, doing the work that you’re doing. It’s just good to see from this vantage point, somebody that’s really out there making their dreams happen. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Breon Waters II:
That means the world, Maurice. Thank you so much, and thank you for your platform. Like I was saying before, the work you and Cheryl Miller, all different platforms that came out during 2020, like Where Are the Black Designers? It’s been a huge blessing for us, just knowing we’re not alone, there’s others like us. And just thank you for giving us a platform to share our stories and connect, so thank you so much for it.

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Anthony D. Mays

It’s no secret that the tech industry has weathered the last few years better than a lot of others, and many people are trying to ditch their current jobs and start their careers in tech for big opportunities (and even bigger salaries). But working for companies like Google and Microsoft take more than just talent — it takes the helpful hands and heart of this week’s guest, Anthony D. Mays. As the founder of tech career coaching firm Morgan Latimer Consulting, Anthony uses his 20 years of experience as a software engineer and developer to help his clients to ace tech interviews and get real results.

We start our conversation with a quick check-in, and he talks about starting his firm and finding a good work life balance. He spoke about growing up in Compton and learning BASIC on a VTech PreComputer 1000, studying computer science at UC Irvine, and shared how looking for growth opportunities, and his faith in God, helped him succeed throughout his career. So if you’re looking to work in tech, then Anthony is just the person to make that happen!

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

Anthony D. Mays:
Sure. I’m Anthony D. Mays. I’m a former software engineer at Google, and I am presently founder and career coach at Morgan Latimer Consulting.

Maurice Cherry:
How has 2022 been going so far?

Anthony D. Mays:
It’s been an adventure for sure. I left Google on February 1st of this year and I have dived head first into full-time entrepreneurship. Whatever I thought it was going to be, it seems like it’s just a bit different than that, but it’s been for the good and for the best.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow. Congratulations on making the leap.

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah, thanks. It’s been quite a ride. And I thought that my time at Google was an adventure and a ride, and it just seems like entrepreneurship has made that escalate. It has escalated that ride even faster. I feel like I don’t have guardrails either, so I’m really holding on to my seat, my family and I.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s talk about your firm. Again, it’s called Morgan Latimer Consulting. For folks who might be interested, that comes from Garrett A. Morgan and Lewis Latimer. Right?

Anthony D. Mays:
Yes. Yup. Garrett A. Morgan, Lewis Latimer, two of my favorite inventors from Black history. They were innovators during a time when it was neither expected for them to be innovators. They weren’t encouraged to be innovators. No one was willing to carve out room. There was no DEI program. There was only racism, discrimination, slavery, things of that nature. But they weathered all of that in order to innovate in this space. And because of the innovations and their contributions to society, we live in the world that we live in today and benefit from the privileges and technology that we enjoy.

Anthony D. Mays:
And so, with my firm, my aim is to renew, I think, an understanding or to introduce an understanding that Black people being innovators in the tech space isn’t anything new. We’ve been doing it. And similarly, other underrepresented groups, the same can be said for them as well. And I want to help connect that next generation of talent, wherever they come from, no matter who they are, whether you’re underrepresented or well-represented, connect that generation of talent to the companies and organizations that are interested in leveraging and harnessing that talent.

Anthony D. Mays:
So I work directly with candidates, but I also consult for companies and help them to understand their hiring processes, their practices, through the lens of someone who’s come from a different background and provide just that insight and wisdom.

Maurice Cherry:
What inspired you to start your own firm like that?

Anthony D. Mays:
I’ve always been attuned to this idea that entrepreneurship is important, especially in America. And when I was in middle school, I attended a very special charter school that was funded by none other than the National Football League. And as part of that middle school experience, I was exposed to entrepreneurship and this idea that I could go and start a business and begin an enterprise and take the risk and dive in. And so, I felt like that sowed the seeds for me to be thinking about entrepreneurship and independence and just making my own moves.

Anthony D. Mays:
I only kind of realize this now, but my career journey has always been set up for this. I think one of the reasons why I wanted to work at a variety of places, spend time doing professional consulting, and then ultimately get to Google is just to establish the credentials and build a network that would allow me to strike out on my own one day and try to carve a different path towards the success that I was looking for.

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah. So hindsight 2020, I can see where everything all fit together, but it wasn’t immediately clear even when I got into business, when I got into the working world, that my path might take me to entrepreneurship 20 years later. But I’m glad to be here.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It’s having that kind of social proof, I guess, as you might think about it with working for these other places and then striking out on your own. I think it helps with clients certainly to know that, “Oh, well, you know what you’re talking about in terms of the work that you’re doing.” And there’s some level of vetting in place because you’ve managed to have these other experiences first before starting your own thing.

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah. That’s absolutely right.

Maurice Cherry:
So one thing that you do with your clients, you sort of help them gain the confidence to work in tech, and these are people that either have an interest in tech or maybe might be early career or mid-career, I’m assuming, and you do a lot of prep with them for coding interviews. Tell me about that process, because I’ve heard that Google specifically, their coding interviews can be pretty unusual.

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s important to really call out that word, confidence, because I think that my job as a coach or my unique contribution is really helping someone to see themselves in the role based upon their experience and their willingness to put in the work.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Anthony D. Mays:
And a lot of people can study on their own. There’s tons of resources out there. There’s academies and boot camps and free courses and all that stuff. But there’s this recognition that taking all that stuff in alone may not be enough for some people. And not only that, but there’s these additional challenges and burdens that you may have, especially if you’re from an underrepresented background, where you may not have a network of people who can help you to connect your own life and experience and your own journey to the tech space.

Anthony D. Mays:
And so, what I aim to do is to talk about that and to help people understand how to have the right framework and preparation so that you can begin building that confidence and know that you’re the right person for the job. And that takes a little more effort. That takes me really getting to know my clients. It takes exercising them, paying attention to their problem-solving, making them think through their own problem-solving, arming them with the right frameworks of thinking, so that as you’re tackling different kinds of interviews, you know what you need to do and when you need to do it. And I talk to my clients a lot about building something called muscle memory. It’s the same kind of thing that athletes rely on in professional sports.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Anthony D. Mays:
People see them playing the game, but they don’t see them spending the hours of doing repetitive motions and different kinds of exercises to get prepared. They’re able to have confidence at game-time playing at the highest level in front of millions of people because they have that muscle memory. And so, part of what I seek to teach to my candidates and help them develop is that muscle memory so that they can go into an interview knowing that they have a great chance and not hindered by doubt and fear and uncertainty and those kinds of things that often stop very talented people from being successful.

Maurice Cherry:
So you’re kind of like part consultant, part psychiatrist in a way, because you’re kind of helping them to build that internal confidence so, like you said, they see themselves in the role, and I think that is super important. I mean, I’ve worked at a couple of tech startups and I’ve been in the position to hire, and one thing that has been a big thing over the past few years has been inclusive language for job listings.

Maurice Cherry:
And it’s now even a thing to put in job listings, particularly for tech and design positions, to say like, “Even if you don’t have all of these requirements, you should apply anyway,” or “If you only have 50%, apply anyway,” which I think is a way to kind of help people to see themselves in the role because, oftentimes, you may look at the job listing and look at all those different bullet points, and instead of seeing where you’re strong, you see where you’re weak, like, “Well, I don’t have this. Well, I don’t have this many years experience,” and then you end up not applying when, in actuality, what you need to have is the confidence to say, “Well, I’m strong in these things, so I’m going to apply just to kind of see what happens.”

Anthony D. Mays:
Right. And I also want to help you look at that same job description and maybe realize that it’s not for you, that this isn’t going to help you achieve your goals. There’s a lot of people who come to me because they want to crack those top tech companies, those FAANG companies, the Googles, the Amazons, the Microsoft, et cetera, et cetera.

Anthony D. Mays:
And sometimes, I’ve got to look at them and say, “Based upon the goals that you just shared with me, you don’t really need to crack a FAANG company. What you actually need is to consider this startup or maybe think about something mid-tier. Maybe not even a tech company. Maybe you just need to get your foot in the door, and instead of looking at a tech company, you need to look at a non-tech company that has an IT department but also has the framework and infrastructure to help you grow and develop the skills.”

Anthony D. Mays:
So depending upon where you are, you may not understand how to correctly map your specific goals to the opportunities that are out there. If you come away from a conversation with me realizing, “I wanted to do this thing, but I realized that that’s actually not the best fit. Maybe I need to think about entrepreneurship,” then I’m like, “All right. Great. Fantastic. I’ve saved you some time. I’ve saved you some trouble.”

Anthony D. Mays:
And I think that, especially as an entrepreneur now, I realize that my own path was about making it to a place like Google and operating at that level. That’s not everybody’s path. Some people don’t need to pursue that journey. That was my journey. That may not be your journey. And there has to be that conversation. There has to be somebody asking those questions, because I think right now, especially in the tech interviewing, tech prep career coaching space, everybody wants to get you to a FAANG company. They’re pointing you in that direction. They’re talking about those salaries and all that stuff. But you’re not really serving candidates well because you’re selling them this dream and this bill of goods that isn’t going to be helpful for them.

Anthony D. Mays:
I care about my clients and the people that I work with because I think that there’s tons of transformative opportunity out there and available, but you need somebody to come alongside with you to educate you on how to best put a plan in place, helps you get to where you’re trying to go.

Maurice Cherry:
I’ve started seeing companies, even the big ones like the Microsofts and stuff, they’re doing outreach on TikTok. I probably spend too much time on TikTok. But there’s a lot of people on TikTok that are really like, “I want to find the high-paying, six-figure tech jobs. How do you find those jobs?” Because there will be people that have those jobs that are on TikTok, and they’re saying, “These are the perks that I get. I get free lunch here. This is my ride to the office.” And they sort of paint this very idealistic picture of what it means to be in tech through these kinds of perks.

Maurice Cherry:
And I’ll never forget… I interviewed Kristy Tillman. She’s been on the show twice, but Kristy now works at Netflix, and I’ll never forget how she told me to look at perks at companies as filters that just because something may look good in that way, it could also be something that’s used to filter people out. So I do see a lot of… I guess you could almost call it propaganda where people are really painting this very idealistic picture of what it looks like to work in tech in these fancy offices, and you get a free MacBook Pro and all this, but not really showing them what it means, not just to work in tech from day to day, but even the process, like you said, to interview to be a part of a company like that, because it might not even be that they need to be there. They probably just need to start out somewhere smaller maybe.

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah. No, absolutely. And here’s the deal: You want success and you want the paycheck and all that stuff. You get that by being good at what you do. You get that by being excellent at your craft. And that has more to do with you and how you move and how you develop than it does on the place that you work. And certainly, when you’re working at a company, there’s an expectation that they’re going to play some part in your development, in your growth, and in your assessment, and provide useful feedback, and all those things.

Anthony D. Mays:
But ultimately, you’ve got to take your career and your craft and your responsibility and put in the time and work to be effective and to really be thoughtful about how to make the right plan to get you to where you’re trying to go. And so, I think that a lot of people are looking for shortcuts and they’re trying to circumvent the process, and it’s important that I remind people that there aren’t shortcuts to this. It’s just the same hard work. It’s the same hard work that my ancestors poured into being who they were and accomplishing the things that they accomplished, not letting excuses or things of that nature get in the way. And because of that, they were able to do what they were able to do. And they faced a lot of unfairness. They faced a ton of unfairness.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Anthony D. Mays:
And just like we face, to certain degrees, unfairness in today’s processes, some of that just comes from natural imperfection. We’re not perfect at what we do as companies or as individuals and applicants. So there’s that, but then there’s also these other biases and even discrimination or racism, to some lesser extent, that we’ve got to combat. And I sometimes struggle with the approaches that I take because I’m very focused on the individual regardless of the surrounding circumstances.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Anthony D. Mays:
But the circumstances, those could use some changing as well, and it’s important. And that’s why I want to tackle this from both sides of the bridge. I want to help clients and candidates to understand what they need to do, but I also want to talk to companies and say, “There are some things that you need to change because the talent is ready. It’s not a pipeline issue. It’s a you issue. You need to change what you’re doing and the pipeline will come. The people will come. You just haven’t built a room for them.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. That’s a really good point, to let the companies know that sometimes, there’s things that they’re doing wrong or things that they may be doing, even just in the language in job listings, the way they’ve talked about perks, et cetera, that might set them up in a bad light. It’s funny, speaking about startups and things like this, startups can be a really good place to cut your teeth on working in tech. But they have their own issues too, particularly depending on the scale of where the company is at, and even with diversity and inclusion.

Maurice Cherry:
At least I’ve started to see, on the startup level, it’s becoming less and less of a factor than it has been at larger companies. I don’t know if that’s just because of time or DEI fatigue or whatever. But I remember in the early 2010s when those reports started coming out about Google and Facebook and such about their single-digit workforce numbers for Black employees and what does that mean, and stuff like that.

Anthony D. Mays:
Right. Right.

Maurice Cherry:
And I feel like those companies have started over the years to improve that, certainly. Startups are under no obligation to do that. I just know from working at a couple of them. They do not care.

Anthony D. Mays:
It really depends because… I agree with you that when it comes to the larger companies, there’s an interest to change, but in many respects, it’s almost too little, too late to make the kind of change that you need to make as quickly as you want to. Right?

Anthony D. Mays:
So for some of these larger companies that have been around for 20 years, 40 years, 50 years, whatever that may be, you’re talking about a deeply ingrained culture. There’s a lot of rot that you have to get rid of first before you can even start talking about doing the right things, very carefully guarding that small little flame, that little spark that turns into a fire that then leads to change. So there’s a lot of momentum that you’ve got to slow down if you’re a big company so that you can begin shifting gears.

Anthony D. Mays:
But when you’re a startup, you are in a better position because you’re new, because you have the opportunity to learn from those mistakes and, from the very beginning, think about the right things to do. My latest client right now, I just signed with Karat as a tech advisor for their Brilliant Black Minds program. And what I love about Karat is that from the beginning, they’ve made this very early commitment to increasing the number of Black engineers in the business and really thinking through how they can play a role in that. You can go visit their website and read the statement and the thinking and the resource that they’ve done.

Anthony D. Mays:
I love that they’re small enough and nimble enough to really tackle this problem at a speed that other companies can’t do. And I think that there are similar startups that have that opportunity. And to your earlier point, there are some startups that really did get this wrong in a big way. Most notably, I remember learning about the mess at Uber, and I know that they went through some strides to turn over a new leaf. And from what I understand, things are better, much better than they were back in those days.

Anthony D. Mays:
But you could see that where… When some of today’s startups started making those mistakes, they got called out on it a whole lot faster. It’s a lot harder for those companies to grow and develop without having that scrutiny, whereas 10 years ago, nobody really cared. 15 years ago, 20 years ago, nobody cared. You could do whatever you wanted.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Anthony D. Mays:
So I think that for those in the audience or for job seekers or candidates who are looking for companies who may have stronger commitments, who may be making better progress, looking at those smaller firms, those startups, those growth phase companies, that might be the better play if that’s something that you care deeply about.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. I agree. I agree and I disagree. I mean, I’m disagreeing from my own personal experiences, but I do agree that there are some startups out there that are doing it, particularly because you’re starting to see a lot of POC-owned, Black-owned startups. So of course, they have diversity and inclusion in mind because they started it. So that’s something that’s important to them. So I get where you’re coming from. Absolutely. What is a typical day like for you? I know you just said you kind of struck out on your own, but have you started to achieve a work-life balance with the firm?

Anthony D. Mays:
No, I wish. Every day is different, and that’s been great and it’s been challenging at the same time. I woke up today and I was like, “What am I going to do? I know I got to do a podcast, but other than that, what else am I going to do? Should I go put some meetings on the calendar? Should I work on a thing?” And so, I would like to say that I’m a lot more intentional and wise in terms of how I’m planning my time. But each day has been a little bit different, and I find myself in infrastructure-building mode a lot.

Anthony D. Mays:
So I think as I work through some of these beginning things as a new entrepreneur, I’ll get more of the consistency and the regularity out of my routine. But right now, I’m still, I think, figuring it out. I’m trying to be patient with that as well. I don’t want to rush into completely filling up my schedule with things. I want to make sure that everything that I’m committing to is intentional and thought out and is going to serve, in some way, the mission that I’m pursuing.

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah. From that perspective, it’s been fun. And the other part of this too is that my wife is the co-owner of Morgan Latimer Consulting. So I’m working here at home and my wife is a key partner with me in this effort, largely working behind the scenes. But I’m also getting the kids involved too and having conversations out loud and in the open as they’re doing school.

Anthony D. Mays:
And so, it’s been interesting to expose the whole family to entrepreneurship and to this lifestyle and to be open and honest with my kids about the challenges and opportunities. And so, I think what happens more than that is, I’ll find a learning opportunity in the middle of the day and put everything on pause and talk to my wife or talk to my kids about what I’m thinking and where things can go and even getting their advice and input, and that’s been a lot of fun.

Maurice Cherry:
A true family business. I like that.

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah. Absolutely. The only other challenge that I’m contending with right now is just needing to travel a little bit more as things thaw out with regards to the pandemic and travel resumes. Now I’m needing to be in more places crossing the country. And so, I try to look for opportunities to bring my family with me so that they can experience that part of it as well.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Speaking about family, let’s switch gears here a little bit. You grew up in Compton. I know that because it’s on the hat that you have in all your photos.

Anthony D. Mays:
Well, I could be faking it. I could be-

Maurice Cherry:
No, I don’t think you’re faking it. I don’t know anyone that would fake and… Well, let me not tell that lie. I do know people that would fake and say they’re from the hood. Let me not say that.

Anthony D. Mays:
Right.

Maurice Cherry:
But you’re from L.A. You live in L.A. Tell me, growing up in Compton, was tech a part of your childhood?

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah, it was, amazingly enough. And that may come across as unexpected for some of your listeners. But growing up in a poor place, in a place like Compton that was renowned for things like gang violence, drugs, poverty, all that stuff, now, well, it turns out that having rich people in the area means that we receive some investment and support from very notable people. And I think it was Magic Johnson who, in the early ’90s, donated a non-trivial sum of money to my elementary school. As a result, we got a basketball court, but also a computer lab.

Maurice Cherry:
Hmm.

Anthony D. Mays:
And it was in that computer lab when I was in the second grade that I had the opportunity to use a computer for the first time. And it profoundly changed my life because that’s when I realized that computers were cool and this might be something that I want to keep doing, whether I get paid for it or not. And so, I remember asking my parents for a computer and they said no, and I didn’t understand at the time that computers were $5,000 or more to get something decent. But my foster parents, as well as my birth mom, they both bought me toy computers, which were super cool. And when I was about eight years old, I used one of those toy computers to teach myself how to code.

Maurice Cherry:
Mmm.

Anthony D. Mays:
And I remember, at the time, I was being bullied for a variety of reasons. And so, I became somewhat of an introvert out of necessity and would pour focus and time and attention into computers and programming. And I just remember feeling this sense of empowerment and agency and control using computers that I didn’t have in other aspects of my life. I failed to mention this, and it’s pretty much common knowledge now, but I grew up as a foster kid after my first grade teacher or kindergarten teacher had found signs of physical abuse.

Anthony D. Mays:
And so, losing your whole family and being moved out of your home is a very transformative and traumatic experience for someone who’s four years old. And I found that interacting with technology allowed me to reclaim control and power and just to have a space to be me and to be a creative thinker and an innovative thinker. I wasn’t building apps and all this stuff, but it was enough to whet my appetite and get me engaged, and I would just continue to pursue computers throughout middle school and throughout high school where I was fortunate in both cases to meet mentors who saw that early love and decided to invest time into developing my knowledge around technology and the internet.

Maurice Cherry:
Hmm. Something you mentioned there, I think, we have in common in terms of growing up in… I don’t want to say small towns. I don’t know how large Compton is, but certainly growing up in towns with dubious reputations.

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m from Selma, as most people-

Anthony D. Mays:
Hey.

Maurice Cherry:
… know from the show, from Selma, Alabama. Kind of like the first generation out from Bloody Sunday. And so, now Selma is like a pit stop on every politician’s tour throughout the country. They stop in, they go to Brown Chapel AME, they walk across the bridge, yada yada yada. They do all that stuff. But because of that general perennial attention on the city, you do have people that will come in and there’s like an influx of cash to one of the local schools or… You know what I mean? So we had a computer lab in high school, which is how I learned about the internet. That was my first foray with Netscape Navigator 1.0.

Anthony D. Mays:
Oh, wow. Let’s get it. Yes. Yeah. I’m right there with you, brother. We learned that the same time.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. That was in my… I was in, I think, ninth or tenth grade when they installed the computer lab and got to see what the internet was like back then. But even as you mentioned learning and teaching yourself how to code with these toy computers, I’m super curious, what was the computers that you were using?

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah. So the one that I used specifically to learn coding was called the PreComputer 1000.

Maurice Cherry:
Get out! Oh, I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Anthony D. Mays:
Oh, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
No, no, no. No, keep going. Sorry. Sorry. I had that same computer. I had that same… The blue one with the handle?

Anthony D. Mays:
That’s the blue one with the handle. Absolutely.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Anthony D. Mays:
So I’ll tell you a funny story real quick. I would talk about that computer when I would go to schools during my time at Google and all this stuff, and I had lost the computer. I didn’t have… I don’t know what happened with it. Things get lost, as they do, over decades. And one day, this Christmas present was sitting on my desk and I opened it up, and it’s a PreComputer 1000. A co-worker had bought me a PreComputer 1000 off of eBay or something because they knew that I had grown up on that computer and they knew-

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Anthony D. Mays:
… how passionate I was about sharing technology with the young people. And so, I would take that computer with me on tours and flip the switch where you’d hear the little (singing). And I would take out the big old fat D batteries on the back and say,-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh man.

Anthony D. Mays:
… “This is it.” That’s what I had. And one of the reasons why I’m passionate about supporting underrepresented people in tech specifically is because out of scarcity comes innovation.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Anthony D. Mays:
Out of scarcity and challenge and struggle comes some of the best ideas and some of the greatest opportunities to do things that haven’t been done before. And for me, growing up under the scarce conditions of the hood and with the family that I often describe as middle-class poor, that led to me doing things like teaching myself how to code and learning about the internet and all these other kinds of things. For an industry that’s looking for talent that knows how to build technology under those kinds of circumstances, what better place to look than the hoods and ghettos of America?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Anthony D. Mays:
Why spend all of this time going overseas looking for that kind of talent when we have our own neglected neighborhoods in the backyards of America?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Listen, these kids don’t know how good they got it now. When you have to teach-

Anthony D. Mays:
They really don’t.

Maurice Cherry:
… yourself how to code on a one-line dot-matrix screen…

Anthony D. Mays:
That’s right.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, come on. So my older brother had… And this is when I was younger. I probably might have been about seven or eight or something. He had a… It was also a VTech, but it was a Laser 50.

Anthony D. Mays:
Mmm.

Maurice Cherry:
And so, the Laser 50 is about the size of a standard, regular keyboard that you would get now, but it had a one-line dot-matrix screen at the very top and you would use that to code. And I remember… The Laser 50 was particularly interesting because it had all these peripherals you could get for it. You could get a tiny dot-matrix printer. You could get a tiny-

Anthony D. Mays:
Oh, wow.

Maurice Cherry:
… storage thing. And storage back then were cassettes, because you didn’t have flash drives. You didn’t have…

Anthony D. Mays:
Yup.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, you had floppy disks, but you certainly didn’t have… But it was a cassette. And so, I would often be mistakenly putting data, like taping over somebody’s radio mix, because it used this…

Anthony D. Mays:
Oh, no. Not the radio mix.

Maurice Cherry:
Trying to explain to someone that like, “Yeah. We use cassettes for music and for data storage.” They’re like, “What? I don’t get that.” But yeah, I had a PreComputer 1000. I think I was in probably fourth or fifth grade. I remember that spiral-bound flip notebook. I taught myself how to type on that thing.

Anthony D. Mays:
There it is.

Maurice Cherry:
I taught myself music on that thing. I’m sure my mom wanted to launch it into space because I was making all kinds of noise on that thing. Yeah. And it’s funny, you mentioned getting one off of eBay. Someone gifted one to you. I got one off eBay also-

Anthony D. Mays:
Hey, there it is.

Maurice Cherry:
… a few years ago. I got a Laser 50 and I got a PreComputer 1000 just to have them as artifacts of like, “This is how I got into technology.”

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah. And I wish that I had the opportunity to meet the product managers or project managers who worked on that because it would be so great to just give them a personal thank you for thinking about a product like this. Again, to your earlier point, I’m hard on this generation of technologists that are coming up because, as you said, they don’t realize how good they have it. And I do understand that there’s a challenge. There’s so much information that it can be hard to pick through what’s reliable and useful from that, which isn’t.

Anthony D. Mays:
But I had to go to a library that had books that were five, 10 years old out of date, trying to teach myself coding and programming, just kind of growing in that. That was a tough challenge, and that was… It was enough to make me give up programming until I got out of high school when I would go get my first job as a developer.

Anthony D. Mays:
I remember feeling so frustrated because I would pick up these old books and I would try to apply what I was learning, but I didn’t understand it all the way and I didn’t have someone that I could lean on to explain. I remember this one time in middle school where I typed out this whole program. I must have spent a couple hours just typing out this whole program into Notepad on Windows.

Maurice Cherry:
Whoo! That takes me back.

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah. And so, I saved… I just saved this text document as an exe thinking, “Well, all I have to do is just save it and then change the extension to exe and I should be able to double-click and run it.” And I spent an hour just trying to get that to work and it wouldn’t work, and I was so frustrated because I didn’t understand that you needed a compiler in between that’ll produce the actual program. And so, I remember those kinds of moments.

Anthony D. Mays:
And then I think about the fact that my son can watch a YouTube video now that tells him exactly what tools to install and how to make it all work and have all the sample code and then he could put that up on GitHub and all this other stuff. And so, I reflect on that and I try to… I have to kind of take a step back and just not yell at people, not get gangsta at them.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Anthony D. Mays:
What do you mean? What are you talking about? You ain’t got no struggle. What are you talking about you can’t do this? What are you talking about you don’t have information?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Anthony D. Mays:
Get over it.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh man. I remember we… Our public library had one book on BASIC. It was like this green and white book. And I mean, I check that thing out every two weeks till the cover came off, taped the cover back on. And because Selma is like a… It’s a small town. It’s like 20,000 people maybe.

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
No mall or anything. So the nearest bookstore was 50-plus miles away in Montgomery. So if I was like, “Oh, I want to go get a book,” that’s a whole trip. That’s a field trip, pretty much.

Anthony D. Mays:
Right.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh God, I think I got my first HTML book, I might have been in high school or something, but I remember getting it at the Montgomery Mall because we were at some trip in Montgomery and I got it. But there’s… Also during that time, I spent a lot of time in the computer lab by myself. My mom worked at a college. And so, I had access to Windows computers. And I just spent so much time looking at source code, writing stuff down, trying to figure out how it all worked, because I could only do it at the computer lab. I would do that and then have to go home and write a paper on a typewriter.

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah. Right. Right. Right.

Maurice Cherry:
Because I could only use the computer either at high school or I could use it at my mom’s work at the college. I didn’t get my own personal computer until I went off to college in ’99. But yeah, kids, they don’t know how good they got it. I’m saying kids in a general pejorative sense, but just like, people that are learning technology now, there’s so much at your fingertips. It’s astonishing.

Anthony D. Mays:
I mean, and that’s the thing is… One of the things I try to impress on this generation is the importance of making things and building things and being public about that.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Anthony D. Mays:
So as you’re learning and as you’re growing, assemble that gallery, assemble that portfolio, and make it external and use social media to your advantage. These are things I didn’t learn till later on, but it was partly because of those reasons that I was able to even get the attention of a Google in the first place. And I think that… I ponder what my path in tech might have looked like had I had the tools that I had. And another part of this too, because having a son and daughter, my son is 15, my daughter is 12, I look at them and I realize that they just don’t have the same gumption. They don’t have the same motivation that I did, my drive and my wife’s drive.

Anthony D. Mays:
We came from a place where you had to find a pathway to success. You needed the struggle. You needed to overcome a lot and be intentional about figuring out where you wanted to go to avoid all the little traps that come with growing up in the hood. And so, we were sufficiently motivated to take advantage of every possible resource we could find and get our hands on to succeed. My kids benefit from a great deal of privilege. And without much effort at all, they have access to tons of information and tons of resources, but not necessarily having that drive.

Anthony D. Mays:
And I think that there’s time for them to develop that and to grow on that. There’s a sense in which I want them to just enjoy ingesting knowledge and doing it carefully, but just being slow. They don’t need to build an empire now. But I’ve got to push them a little bit to put in the work to really realize what they have so that they are being producers and not just consumers of technology.

Maurice Cherry:
Mmm. I want to go back to… You mentioned, in high school, you had this aptitude for technology after learning about it so much. And then for college, you went to UC Irvine. Tell me about that time. What was it like there?

Anthony D. Mays:
That was an interesting and difficult time for me personally, and I don’t mean difficult just in terms of challenging. Yeah, it was challenging, as education should be, but there was also this aspect where I think I had to deal with difficulty that maybe other people didn’t have to experience. The first thing is that I didn’t see a lot of people who look like me and who came from where I came from in classes with me learning about computer science.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Anthony D. Mays:
I looked at the population of students that I was surrounded by in the computer science program versus in other places of the university and would sometimes think to myself, “Am I in the wrong major? Is this really a pathway and a world built for me?”

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Anthony D. Mays:
And I had to struggle through that. I didn’t have the best study habits. Well, let me put it another way. I was a lazy bum when it came to school. I think part of it was that I didn’t understand how I learned and how I would best ingest information. And so, that was one thing. But the other part of it was that, in school, I had to conserve energy a lot. I wasn’t one of those kinds of people that could just go to school and focus on my studies. I also had to work. I had to earn income to make sure that… And I had scholarships, but I didn’t have a full ride.

Anthony D. Mays:
And so, there was a lot of context switching between being devoted to school, but then also making sure that I’m taking care of bills and other concerns associated with being an adult on your own. And so, I think in the craziest time of college, I would go to school at UC Irvine. I would drive to downtown L.A., which took about an hour and a half, to go work part-time on my job. And then I would sometimes come back to school, which was another hour, finish off classes, and then drive 30 minutes home. And that was a real grind for, ooh, a couple of years throughout my college education.

Anthony D. Mays:
When I talk about providing the perspective of someone who’s underrepresented, there are a lot of people who want to get into tech who have very challenging life circumstances, where they struggle just to either support themselves or their family or whatever that may be, and they’re trying to get their leg up and study and learn all these things, and it’s a challenge. But by God’s grace, even in college, I had a lot of good support and that I had summer internships through the INROADS program. That was fantastic and really helped to root my education.

Anthony D. Mays:
And then during the year, I had the opportunity to work for City National Bank to work as a developer in real life. And so, in addition to what I was getting in the classroom, I was also, in some respects, playing that out in the working world. And so, it was good to have that reinforcement there. And there were a community of folks that I could lean on and talk to. I think there was a good community of Black folks on campus.

Anthony D. Mays:
I did other strategic things. I took gospel choir three times in college. I don’t even know if I got credit for the last time I took it because I think there was a limit, but I would take gospel choir because I grew up in the church and I grew up as a gospel music musician from the time that I was, I don’t know, nine years old, 10 years old, and I’ve been playing every Sunday at church ever since then. So gospel choir in college was a safe space for me, if I can use that phrase, for me to just be around something familiar and around something that really encouraged and gave me hope. So it was great.

Anthony D. Mays:
And ultimately, I left the University of California, Irvine with a 2.87 GPA on the five-year plan. I had gone to a charter school for high school as well and had great education opportunities. I really should have gotten out of college in three years because I came in with college credits. It took me five. And I reflect on how challenging that was and how that experience impacted how I saw myself as a professional after I graduated, because I didn’t have a lot of confidence when I graduated high school, even though I would go on and get a job and all that stuff. I certainly didn’t see myself as big tech material, as Google material. Just walking across the stage with a diploma was a generational accomplishment, if you know what I mean.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Anthony D. Mays:
And so, when you’re coming from the perspective of survival, any success is big success. And so, it didn’t take very much for me to feel satisfied and accomplished after graduating college. And I had no idea the amount of headroom I had to work with in my career. If I would’ve known then what I know today, I think that would’ve drastically changed my career trajectory and path. I didn’t have those examples. I didn’t have that network of people that I could look to and say, “Hey, I want to be like this person.” I see that they kind of have a path like mine’s and they’ve had some struggles and they’re able to do what they’re doing. I might be able to do the same thing. Let me apply myself. Let me work even harder. Let me take advantage of these opportunities that I was too scared to take advantage of.

Anthony D. Mays:
And I think that’s why I’m so public about my own journey, my own trials, and really kind of getting in the face of other folks who might be like me or might have come from where I’ve come from to let them know that I am that living example of what they can accomplish if they’re willing to take the risks and to step out on faith, as it were, and really own their journey, their path, their growth, and their development.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, once you graduated from UC Irvine, what was your early career like?

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah. So I transitioned from being an intern to a full-time employee at City National Bank. The experience was a little jarring in that when you grow up in a computer science education, you kind of expect that you’re going to see theoretical things playing out in the real world. And for the first several years of my career, I really didn’t see that happen, and it’s because I didn’t understand that a computer science education is really designed to position you well for working at a tech company or working at a tech-focused organization. And at the time, I was working for a bank. Banks aren’t tech companies.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Anthony D. Mays:
They see IT as a cost center. They see IT as a… You want to spend the least amount of money possible to get the bare minimum so that you minimize the cost. And so, they just didn’t care a lot about making things fast or quick or really applying, at that time, good UX principles and stuff like that. And so, it was confusing. I’d say, “Hey, we need to do this and have these kinds of practices,” and it was always seen as a burden and as something that kind of slowed down the process.

Anthony D. Mays:
And so, I was confused by this and eventually began to fit into the more corporate IT way of thinking about software development and all those things. That’s useful. It was useful for where I was moving at the time. I learned how to engage with my craft in that kind of environment and find success, but I became detached from what I was learning in school.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Anthony D. Mays:
And I didn’t really connect with that again until the Google interview, where I had to dust off the Data Structures and Algorithms book and reacquaint myself with the big O and with some of these other formal concepts that I learned in my computer science education. But the upside of working in the corporate environment that I worked in during those times is that because of what I perceived as chaos and disorganization, I got to learn a crap ton of stuff. It’s kind of like working at a startup that just hasn’t figured it out yet.

Anthony D. Mays:
You do 10,000 things, because there’s nobody else to figure it out. And so, you’re just kind of throwing mud at the wall to see if it sticks. That was kind of my experience early in my career. And so, that made things fun. And I would often say yes to things, even if I didn’t know what it was or how it worked. My boss says, “Okay. Who wants to tackle this thing?” “Yeah, I’ll tackle it. I don’t know what this is, but if you give me time, I’ll figure it out.” And I’ve just began to develop and grow that muscle of figuring things out, going from knowing nothing to knowing something to then being effective. Repeating that process over and over again really helped me to develop good, solid problem-solving skills that I would take later into my career.

Maurice Cherry:
And you were at City National Bank for a long time, like almost nine years.

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
And even after that, you worked at a couple of other places for a pretty long time. You worked at Slalom Consulting. You worked at Junction eCommerce On Demand. When you look back at these experiences collectively, what do you remember?

Anthony D. Mays:
I definitely remember leaving City National Bank and making that decision. What caused me to leave… For me, money isn’t everything. And what’s more important to me, or at least what was more important to me at the time, was growth opportunity and learning. I felt like I needed to learn and grow or at least get paid really good money to stay in my seat. And at the time, I felt like I wasn’t really growing in the way that I wanted to grow and stepping into opportunities that I wanted to step into.

Anthony D. Mays:
And part of that was because I was working for a bank in 2008 in the middle of something called a financial crisis and a Great Recession. So I was not in the best industry for that kind of stuff anyway. And so, I decided to leave at the time to pursue growth in my development. And so, I remember going from this non-technical company to a tech company in JunctionEOD and all of a sudden connecting with some of these things that I talked about learning in my computer science education.

Anthony D. Mays:
I was like, “Oh, okay. That’s where this really applies.” And so, I got to learn a lot of cool stuff and to do some things that would set me up again for success later on. Got to work with a… I’d worked in a large company with thousands of employees, and then ended up working in this department where there were just five of us. And so, it felt very much like a startup or a startup in growth phase. It was interesting to work with… to have a technical manager and someone who was a manager, who was also an engineer. My previous manager wasn’t an engineer. I have experience coding before, but really didn’t dabble in the technical.

Anthony D. Mays:
So to go from that to someone who is technical and having those discussions, I just found that to be cool. And I really learned a lot from my boss at the time, Mike, who was just a great engineer, double-majored in physics and math, I think it was, or actually had a master’s degree in physics and math. So just really a smart guy. I just remember growing and develop… Honestly, Mike, if you’re listening, sorry, wasn’t necessarily the best manager at the time. And so, I perceived that I needed to get myself into a position where I could find even more growth and learning.

Anthony D. Mays:
But again, a lot of what motivated me to move from one place to the other was the learning and the growth, not necessarily the money. Now, as I move from one company to the next, I found myself getting $15,000 raises each time, so that was nice. But it wasn’t something I was looking for.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Anthony D. Mays:
I felt like it was just necessary for me to keep growing and keep getting better. And if I didn’t feel like that was happening, then I wanted to move. And so, by the time I got to Slalom Consulting, I had the opportunity to work with consultants in past jobs and past roles, and I really loved looking at consultants and watching them work and seeing the kinds of opportunities they got to dive into. And so, when I had the chance to become a consultant, I really enjoyed that, and working on a variety of customer projects in a variety of different contexts and seeing how the same skills I’ve been using for over a decade at that point could be used in a variety of different contexts. And that was very helpful. Very, very helpful.

Anthony D. Mays:
And again, I love this idea of being hired to be an expert in something that I didn’t know or understand yet, being entrusted to just kind of dive in and start solving problems using brand new tools and processes, and I really enjoyed that. And I enjoy Slalom as a company. I think Slalom continues to be a great company and I hear nothing but good things, still, from folks who have worked there in the past and have gone on to other things. I might still actually be at Slalom today if it hadn’t been for Google knocking on the door.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, let’s talk about Google. I mean, I’m sure that folks that are listening have heard about how tough it is to break into Google, their interview process, et cetera. Tell me about what your Google experience was like.

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah. So I connected with Google as a young man in college, my first and second year of college actually. So Google Search showed up on the scene, and you probably remember Infoseek and AltaVista and Ask Jeeves and those earlier search engines.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Anthony D. Mays:
And I remember Google Search coming on the scene and just changing the game. All of a sudden, I felt like I had this world of information at my fingertips where I could find exactly what I was looking for with just a few keystrokes. Then I remember Gmail, this free mail service. And people take advantage of, then neglect to appreciate free email. You had Gmail, which is free email service. I could put attachments in and schoolwork there and use it, and it was amazing.

Anthony D. Mays:
And I thought Google as a company name was a weird name. The first thing I said was, “Look at this Yahoo clone. Google. Who do they think they are?”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Anthony D. Mays:
But they were interesting and innovative, and they were dabbling in a bunch of these different spaces even in the early days. And then they went public and made millions of dollars for folks who had joined the company early and been part of that process. I was attracted to Google as a company and to Google technology. And even today, post-Google career, I still love Google products and services. And I forgot to turn off the device, and so there might be something that… The Assistant might chirp in and interrupt me at any time now. I’ve always loved the technologies and things they built and their ambition as well.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Anthony D. Mays:
And so, even though I love the company, I never saw myself being worthy of being employed there, being considered amongst the ranks of software engineers there. And so, when I encountered a recruiter in college, I think it was my third year of college, they gave me an application, asked me to fill it out for an internship. I walked away some steps and threw the application in the trash, because I knew-

Maurice Cherry:
Whoa.

Anthony D. Mays:
… that they weren’t going to hire a Black dude from the hood. I just knew that. They weren’t going to hire a Black man from the hood who’s a former physical, sexual abuse victim. I’m like, “No.” So that was my early interaction with Google. And then some years later, 11 years into my career, a recruiter reached out to me over LinkedIn and said, “Hey, I think that there’s a place and a role for you at the company. You should consider applying.” And it felt different because the recruiter used my full name. They singled me out on LinkedIn.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Anthony D. Mays:
And I had 11 years of career experience under my belt at that point. And so, I felt emboldened to go through the interview process. Yeah. I didn’t have a friend, cousin, uncle, brother, whatever, that had worked anywhere near a big tech company. And so, I had to do what any self-respecting engineer would do in my position. I googled it. “How do you succeed at this interview process?” And I came across some good information but I also came across some bad information. I didn’t know how to disambiguate the two. And so, I ended up studying brain teasers for two weeks and went into this interview process and not a single brain teaser was asked.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Anthony D. Mays:
And I fought as hard as I could with the information that I had and worked very hard. It wasn’t an issue of work ethic. It was an issue of information and not being connected to the right network. And ultimately, I was saddened to hear from the recruiter that they weren’t going to move forward. And I remember reflecting on that “no” and thinking that I had let down myself, my family, my community, my church, all Black people everywhere, because when-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow.

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah. I mean, when I’m coming into the space as an underrepresented person, I know that the people that I’m talking to, I might be one of the very few Black folks that they ever talked to, one of the very few people from Compton. Maybe the only person from Compton that they’ll ever meet, and that they’re forming ideas about who I am and about what I represent. And so, I was aware of that burden and I was deeply impacted by that.

Anthony D. Mays:
So when recruiters would reach out the next year and the year after that, I think three times total, after I had failed the interview, I was very confused. I was like, “Y’all know I’m a Black man, right?” Right? Everybody says they’re going to call you back if a position is available. No one ever does. And these recruiters called me back, I think, three times. And my last recruiter understood that I was very hesitant to reengage with the process.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Anthony D. Mays:
It kind of babied me, kind of coddled me in the conversation. And I kind of walked away from that thinking, “She thinks I’m a punk.” She’s calling me a… That’s really what’s going on here. She’s calling me a punk. I can’t go out like that.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Anthony D. Mays:
And so, after talking to my wife and getting her support, I realized that I wanted to try again. And so, I picked up Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell, bought a whiteboard and some markers, really committed myself to studying the right information this time. And as a result of a month and a half of studying for, I don’t know, three or four hours a day, except for Sundays because I’m closed on Sundays, I was able to go through the interview process and get the job.

Anthony D. Mays:
And you would think that after that, everything is happily ever after, like, “Yay, you did it. You accomplished this amazing feat. Now you can rest and ride off into the sunset.” Well, as soon as I got to Google, I felt uncomfortable. And it wasn’t because of anything specific that people were doing. It’s that I just… I couldn’t sit in my seat. I was unnerved and restless. I would sit in this cafe surrounded by free food, free snacks, free beverages, by games and pool tables and really smart people, and my attention would be directed to the basketball court on the first floor as I’m watching these dudes duke it out on the basketball court.

Anthony D. Mays:
And I’m like, I understand that part. I understand basketball. I understand that struggle. I understand that life. I don’t understand this. I don’t understand tech, this new privilege. And there’s this culture shock. I’m forced to dress different than I had ever dressed before. I start off my career in a bank, suit and tie, and everybody’s now wearing jeans and a T-shirt. The whole thing is jarring. My bosses… My co-workers are telling me that I’m doing a good job, and I don’t believe them because I know I’m the diversity hire. Right?

Anthony D. Mays:
You ain’t got to lie to kick it. I’m the diversity hire. You hired me because you don’t have that many Black folks and you just want to make sure that your numbers look good. So I knew all those things, even though it wasn’t necessarily true. And it wasn’t until 2014 when Google released their diversity numbers that I realized what I was dealing with. It wasn’t just impostor syndrome. It was this awareness that I’m this underrepresented person put in this culture that wasn’t built for me.

Anthony D. Mays:
And I felt like, at the time when Google released their numbers, if they were making a commitment to bring visibility and light to this problem, I needed to take a role in helping to solve that problem and using every means at my disposal to bring positive change to the industry using my own experience and journey. And so, I started to write about my journey and experience and share interview tips and talk about things that I did well and things I didn’t do well. I tried to be very public about the failure that I had during the first interview and the successes during the second one, and just be open and honest about the struggles and all that. And as I did that, people would reward me with recognition and with support and encouragement.

Anthony D. Mays:
And I thank God that, at Google, I had the opportunity to start off as an engineer, just heads down writing code, but then eventually become this DEI advocate, this speaker, this consultant within the company, and even outside the company, talking about this experience in recruiting and what it means to be an underrepresented person in tech. And so, I really enjoyed the fact that not only did my boss support me in that work, but my boss’s boss and my boss’s boss’s boss, they all said, “Listen, you do your thing. Keep speaking, keep writing, keep supporting, keep providing value to the tech community, and we’ll make sure that your performance reviews reflect those contributions positively.”

Anthony D. Mays:
I felt like it was a unique time, a unique team, and a great time for me to be involved in the work and growing. And I credit the influence and the things that make me who I am today in part to Google and the people that I had the opportunity to work with. So I think because of that, I know that a lot of people are doing the work. I don’t know that many companies are doing it better than Google is at least in some respects.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, it sounds like you really found yourself there, not only as a professional but, in a way, almost as a person. You had these early times of impostor syndrome and self-doubt, and you were able to overcome that through your time there.

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there was so much self-discovery for me, partly because of all the bags that I brought through in my life and the time that I was a kid. I mean, I really had to confront my whole life in that whole journey when I got to Google. And I don’t know why it was that it took me getting to Google to do that, but I really went through a crisis when I got to Google.

Anthony D. Mays:
There’s this thing called survivor’s guilt where, when you feel like you’ve survived trauma, you feel guilty and ask questions like, “Why is it that I wasn’t shot and killed when I was 19 like some of my early friends had been? Why is it that I wasn’t being funeralized? Why is it that even though I saw other people who were working harder than me and who I thought were smarter than me, why did I make it to this level and they didn’t?” And I really had to grapple with that. And it took me to some very dark places personally.

Anthony D. Mays:
My wife, my family can tell you that I really found it difficult to bear with that stress. And I told my boss, I said, “Listen, have you ever managed someone who’s a physical and sexual abuse survivor to the best of your knowledge?” Said, “No.” I said, “Well, have you ever managed someone who’s a foster kid from the hood?” “No.” I said, “Okay. So we’re both new at this. We’re both going to figure this out. But my commitment to you is that I’m going to work as hard as I possibly can to contribute to this team, to do excellent work, and to pay attention to my craft. That’s my commitment to you, and we’ll figure the rest out.” And I believe that my manager was very great and understanding in coming alongside with me for that journey and just being open and honest. So I appreciate that to this day.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see diversity in tech now, from your perspective?

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah. It’s still… I feel like it’s still burgeoning. We’re still in the early stages in many respects. I can remember when… Even just a few years ago, we were still struggling to figure out terminology, and that’s one of the frustrating things about working in DEI, is it seems like the glossary’s changing every single year. New words to use, new things to add to the language.

Maurice Cherry:
BIPOC.

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah, exactly. I think, a month ago, I was like, “What’s that?” And I had to ask somebody, “What’s a URM stand for?” because I forgot what it was. Even when I joined Google, I was just like, “Do I call myself Black or African American?”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Anthony D. Mays:
I was asking myself that. And so, there’s still a lot of newness in this space. And part of… I think there’s also a conflict between the academic understanding of DEI and things like critical race theory and all that stuff, thought leaders who are on that level. But then you have people who are just trying… who are experiencing what it’s like being in the workplace rubbing up against people that you may not understand, who have experiences that you may not be familiar with and just trying to figure it out on an emotional level.

Anthony D. Mays:
I think those two perspectives sometimes come into conflict and companies are trying to figure out what to do in the middle of all of that. A decade ago, maybe even five years ago, you wouldn’t hear about love being talked about in the workplace, unless you’re talking about workplace romances. But there’s this notion that tech companies are trying to figure out how to love their employees, which is really weird even when I say that now. But I’ve had to expose more of my life in big tech in the past several years than I ever had to before, and that’s because tech, I think pre-2013, 2014, was very much color-blind. We don’t see race, we don’t see gender, all those other kinds of things.

Anthony D. Mays:
There was this big emphasis on an extreme side of the spectrum where you just pretended to ignore these differentiations between people of different backgrounds and whatnot, then tried to typecast everybody as this one thing. And that was harmful, I think. I don’t think that was helpful. To a certain extent, you want to make sure that you have a culture where everybody feels like they’re working on the same mission and going in the same direction. I don’t want to negate that, but there’s also disservice when you are pretending to be color-blind.

Anthony D. Mays:
Last time I checked, color blindness is considered a disorder or a disability or whatever the right word is for that. It’s not something helpful. And so, I think we’re starting to open our eyes and see color for the first time and see some of these other things for the first time and are still figuring it out. And like I said, there’s a lot of things that are happening both at the big tech company and at the small tech company level to correct and chart a new path forward. But it’s messy work.

Anthony D. Mays:
And even that, it’s refreshing to be able to admit that nowadays because back in the days, DEI was a bunch of people who look different, holding hands, singing Kumbaya, sitting in the middle of a park, high-fiving each other. That was kind of the ideal some years ago, and I think we’re realizing that that’s not what the work looks like. The work is grimy, it’s messy, it’s hard, it’s difficult. There’s a lot of disagreement. There’s agreeing to disagree.

Anthony D. Mays:
But at the end of the day, the hope is that all of these different perspectives will inform a culture that fosters innovation and creativity and new ways of thinking about old problems. And so, there’s clearly business opportunity here. I think the research bears that out, and I think companies are understanding that there’s a lot of money to be made by having these discussions and thinking through these things. And that’s not bad.

Maurice Cherry:
What’s something that perhaps not many people understand about you? I mean, I feel like you’ve put so much of your life story out there, not just with the work that you do, but also at the places where you’ve worked.

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
What’s something you think people still don’t get about you?

Anthony D. Mays:
My faith, absolutely.

Maurice Cherry:
Mmm.

Anthony D. Mays:
Hands down. It’s the fact that I think about all the things that I think about from the lens of someone who’s a Christian and is saturated in the Christian Bible and in the scriptures. I’ve told people countless times, “If you ever want to figure me out, go read that Bible, then you’ll have me dead to rights.” That’s it. I mean, I do what I do because my hero, my Savior, Christ Jesus, was someone who gave himself up for the world. That style of servant leadership, that sacrificing for other people is very core to what I do.

Anthony D. Mays:
Also, just in terms of my work ethic and how I engage, I want to make sure that I’m a good reflection of Christ. I want to make sure that I’m moving in wisdom. Proverbs, I grew up on the Book of Proverbs when I was growing up and learning about everything from how to manage money wisely, to how to have conversations with people that are going to be positive and good, to how to win friends, and how to avoid the traps of street life.

Anthony D. Mays:
A lot of that I learned from the Bible, from Proverbs, and from looking at these exemplary figures, these historical figures, who have to overcome a variety of different circumstances and challenges and trials with their faith rested on God. And that’s how I move today. So much of what I do is also gospel-focused too. I think one of the things that helps me to be a DEI practitioner, talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion, is my faith. Seeing people as made in the image of God.

Anthony D. Mays:
For me, it’s not about just helping Black people or just helping brown people or just helping women, whatever that is. It’s about helping anybody in the space that wants to be successful. And then there’s this other aspect of like, “I know how evil I am in my own heart because the Bible teaches me that.” And so, I can have a conversation with someone who maybe is an overt racist and talk about their viewpoints and talk about why I might disagree with them and call them to have hope in Christ and to see that their thinking is evil.

Anthony D. Mays:
But I also know that I’m a bad dude. I have done things over my own career and over my own life that I’m certainly not proud of because they were wrong, and that means that I can have compassion towards other people who I disagree with and have those calm conversations. One of the things that I tell people all the time is, “You can ask me about anything with regards to race, gender, my life, whatever. I don’t care. My promise is that I’m not going to get angry with you. You’re going to get nothing from me but love and compassion as we talk through very difficult things,” because that’s the way my Savior moves. That drives so much of what I do and how I think about the things that I think about.

Anthony D. Mays:
I’m glad that I’m able to reflect the goodness of God, reflect the grace of Christ in what I do. And hopefully, people see that. Hopefully, people perceive that. And hopefully, people are curious about what drives me to do the things that I do with the level of excellence that I try to pour into those things.

Maurice Cherry:
What are you excited about at the moment?

Anthony D. Mays:
So I’m very excited about the work that I’m doing with my client, Karat, as the newly signed technical advisor, senior advisor, with the Brilliant Black Minds program. I love the Brilliant Black Minds program because what they’re attempting to do is provide free interview practice to HBCU students. If you know anything about interview prep in these days and times, it can be very expensive. There are some companies and organizations out there that are just charging obscene amounts of money to provide candidates… to kind of prey on the hopes and dreams of candidates who are looking to crack FAANG companies.

Anthony D. Mays:
But Karat wants to provide free interviews to Black HBCU students and to help them level up in their careers. And I love that because I remember how difficult it was for me to connect to good and reliable resources, and I think this is such a wonderful opportunity for our students to finally get feedback and support that they may have been lacking before. And so, I’m really excited about that program. I’m really excited to see it grow and expand.

Anthony D. Mays:
I think that this is one of those things that if we get this right, it will really take off and be a substantive force in the industry. So that’s what I’m excited about, and I’m really excited to continue to partner with them to grow and expand the impact of that program so that, though we may be focused on supporting Black engineers today, that this is something that will be opened up for everybody in the near future. Yeah. That’s what I’m looking forward to.

Maurice Cherry:
When you look back at your career and you even look now to where you’re at with your firm and with your family and everything, what does success look like for you now?

Anthony D. Mays:
For me, the measure of success has remained constant. It’s how well do I reflect Christ in my life, is really what it comes down to. And I think that being able to continue to support for my family and take care of their needs while also providing transformative impact on the industry in which I’ve grown up and become accustomed and have grown in, that’s key for me. And so, I want to continue to amplify and multiply the impact that I’ve had in tech to help more people get in and succeed.

Anthony D. Mays:
My hope is that, by doing that, I can leave a good example and legacy for the generation that’s following after me, because I’m not just an observer of Black history. I’m a participant in it. And I’m continuing that legacy so that future generations will benefit.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What do you want the next chapter in the Anthony D. Mays story to look like?

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah. That’s a really tough question. That’s been on my to-do list to answer that one. I haven’t quite gotten around to it in the two months that I’ve been a full-time entrepreneur. But I think just real quickly, I hope that in five years, I’ll be reading a news article about how my efforts has transformationally changed the tech interviewing landscape, that I want to be able to, in five years, read that article, that I want it to be said that, through the work that I did, I was able to help this industry almost leapfrog in terms of how we deal with and grow and develop underrepresented talent in the business. So that hopefully will be my contribution, but we’ll see.

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

Anthony D. Mays:
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll make it easy for all of your listeners. Anthony D. Mays, D as in diversity. Anthony D. Mays, M-A-Y-S, on all the things, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn. Feel free to connect with me. I’m also at anthonydmays.com and that’s a great place to find articles that I’ve written about tech interviewing, working in tech, being underrepresented.

Anthony D. Mays:
If you want to book me for speaking, I’m also there. Yeah. You can also connect with Morgan Latimer Consulting right through that page. So it’s all there. Just visit anthonydmays.com and connect with me. I’d love to chat with you and figure out how I might be able to help you in your journey and your career.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds good. Well, Anthony D. Mays, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I mean, I had a sense, from doing my research, how the interview would go in terms of your story and what you’ve put out there. But I guess I didn’t realize how similar in a way we were in terms of how we got into technology, growing up in, like I said, these dubious towns and things.

Maurice Cherry:
I hope that people will listen to this interview and not only, I think, seek out your services, but see just where and how far passion can take you. It was very clear to me from listening to your story that you have this passion for technology that would not quit, and to the point where it not only got you to working at one of the top tech companies in the world, but that it also, in a way, started a journey of self-introspection to get you to where you are today to be just a stronger and better person. So thank you so much for coming on the show, man. I really appreciate it.

Anthony D. Mays:
Well, thank you so much, Maurice. This has been quite a pleasure.

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Chris Burnett

I think my conversation with this week’s guest — artist, musician, and designer Chris Burnett — is probably the most chill interview I’ve done this year. Don’t be fooled though — Chris is a creative dynamo, and someone you should definitely keep your eyes out for in the future.

We start off with a quick talk about the creative scene in Los Angeles, and from there he talks about being an artist at heart and how his current editorial design projects have been keeping him active. Chris also talked about growing up as a skate kid, attending Cal Arts, and scoring lucrative gigs including a stint with Nike, as well as designing for Odd Future. Chris calls himself a creative superhero, and if you trust your heart and spirit, so can you!

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

Chris Burnett:
Hi, my name is Chris Burnett. I’m an artist, designer, musician, pretty much all around creative soul. It’s hard to peg me down.

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

Chris Burnett:
This year and probably for most people, it’s been a very much transition year, buckling down on the things that I really want to be focusing on and being more selective with my time and my energy and my creative focus. So, it’s been good to narrow down the path of where I’m headed. It also coincides with me turning 30 in two weeks.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, it’s the beginning of a new decade, a new chapter. So, things have been shifting, but in a good way.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s good. What would you say you’ve learned about yourself since last year?

Chris Burnett:
I’ve learned that I’m an artist at heart. That’s ultimately what I really want to do with my life and my creativity. I’ve been doing graphic design at this point for maybe eight years professionally. As much as I enjoy working with clients and collaborating on projects, there’s this burning desire in me to just be the artist that I want to be, have gallery shows, release albums, have more maybe design collaborations with companies and do things like that. So, yeah, things are in the works, things are in the works. It feels good to head towards the ultimate dream.

Maurice Cherry:
Is L.A. a good city for that kind of creative collaboration? I feel like it is.

Chris Burnett:
Well, yeah, I mean, L.A. is such an interesting creative scene, because you get people who come here from all over the world to pursue what they want to pursue. So, I’m constantly meeting people from all different walks of life, different types of creatives, whether that be musicians, other designers, other artists. So, it is pretty good for that. Although a lot of my work does come from people just reaching out to me by email and the collaboration happens more in a digital space, but I’m opening myself up more to relationships that I’m developing in the city. So, I have people that I can actually meet with in person and maybe visit their studios and see what they’re doing. So, yeah, if you wanted to find it in L.A., you could, for sure.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. We just had a fine artist on the show a few weeks ago in L.A. His name is Gabe Gault. I don’t know if that name sounds familiar.

Chris Burnett:
I haven’t heard of him.

Maurice Cherry:
He painted the world’s largest mural in Toledo, Ohio. I think it’s like an ongoing project, but he does a lot of fine art work. I don’t know if you’re familiar with football, but his dad is Willie Gault-

Chris Burnett:
Oh, wow.

Maurice Cherry:
… who played for the Rams. Don’t get me talking about sports. I don’t know that much, but I do know that. It’s funny because I interviewed him and he kept throwing out like, “Yeah, my dad does sports. He’s in NFL and won a few Super Bowls.” I was like, “Okay.” It didn’t click to me after the interview to be like, “Wait a minute, who is his dad? Oh, it makes sense, because they have the same last name.” Yeah, I can imagine that L.A. is a really great place for that creative collaboration. We’ve been seeing so much Black creativity come out of L.A., I think largely, due to Issa Rae and Kendrick Lamar and folks like that. We’ve seen a lot of what feels like specifically Black L.A. creativity.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, I’m loving every bit of it. I was just watching Insecure yesterday. I think I caught up on the latest episode, but just to see that creativity coming out of the neighborhoods that I grew up in feels like finally we’re getting the recognition that is well-deserved.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So, talk to me about Colibri Studios. That’s a studio that you began last year. Is that right?

Chris Burnett:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So, I started Colibri Studios in the middle of last year. It was right when everything went into lockdown, actually, which seems like it would be the least opportune moment to do it, but there’s an interesting story to how I went about it. I was in New York. I was visiting a friend of mine, and I’ve been working on a necklace design. I found this charm that I really liked to go in the end of the necklace, and it had a hummingbird in it. It was the first time I was designing a chain and I was really excited about it.

Chris Burnett:
The hummingbird has special significance to me, because of the way that the animal moves throughout its life. It’s not really in your face. It’s secretive. But when you do see a hummingbird, it’s like this moment for you to be present with it and admire it. That’s how I feel about myself. I’m not really in the public eye per se. I’m not too show-offy. But when I do come around people, I make my presence felt. Honestly, I always see them, which is the weirdest thing. I’ll just be walking down the street and one will fly right in front of me. I’m like, “All right, there’s some weird connection here.” So yeah, I was designing this necklace.

Chris Burnett:
I get back from New York and the necklace is ready to be picked up. I get it and I’m so happy with the design that I thought, “That’s the logo. That’s the logo for the studio.” This was before I even really conceived of starting a studio. But once I had the necklace done, that was the moment where it was like, “Okay, this is a step in a new direction that you need to take.”

Chris Burnett:
It became more clear to me over time that I wanted to create a studio that really just was an umbrella for all of my creative endeavors, whether that be music, fine art, design. I found an office space in West Hollywood. I woke up one morning. It was on Craigslist, found the space. The first one I clicked on was the one that I’m actually in now. It all came together step by step. So, there wasn’t really a big plan that I was conscious of. It was more these little moments that led to the establishment of the studio. So, that’s what it is right now at this point.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, you mentioned it being this umbrella. I went on your website. You’re doing art direction, you’re doing graphic design, you’re doing collage and mixed media work. Again, you mentioned music being part of that as well. What made you decide to do such a broad range of services, as opposed to just graphic design?

Chris Burnett:
Well, I’ve always had this desire to really just be into one thing, but that’s just not how my life works. There’s so many creative outlets, and I’ve never felt limited to stick to just one. So, anything that I pursue, I want to do it to the best of my ability. If I can provide those services for other people, whether that’s producing music for people or working on an ad campaign for someone or just creating my own artwork that will eventually show in a gallery, I just wanted it to feel like it was a part of one family. So, that’s why I wanted to include all these different artistic mediums in it.

Maurice Cherry:
Talk to me about how you approach a new project. What does your process look like?

Chris Burnett:
Well, it really depends on the context of the project. So, if we can start with a typical design project, I’ll get an email from a random person. I’m always amazed by how people find me because I’m not on Instagram or social media. I’m hidden, right? So, I’ll just get an email out of the blue. Someone’s saying, “Hey, we think you might be great for this project we’re working on.” We move forward with a brief, which is them giving me a document of what they’re looking for and maybe the end deliverables and the goals that they want to hit. And then I get to work.

Chris Burnett:
The process of me actually getting to work is not really standardized in the sense that I don’t have a list of things that I do every time I start a project. It’s really based on feeling and it’s more intuitive, because it allows me to be a bit more spontaneous with the end product. If I had the same process every time, I feel like it might be too stale for me and I might come up with the same thing too much. So, I allow for space in between projects for me to just sit and think about new directions or think about things I want to explore and then try to align those new things with what a client might be asking. Typically, it works out.

Chris Burnett:
For the most part, a client will ask for what I’m already good at. They don’t really ask for things that are completely outside of my wheelhouse. That allows me to use the skills that I already have, but then push it in a little bit of a new direction. Sometimes that creates a back and forth where there’s notes and there’s feedback, of course. And then sometimes I hit it right on the head and people are happy with what I create first try. So, it really depends on the project that I’m being asked to work on.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I would also imagine, because like you said, you’re not on social media and folks have to go to your website and look through your work. By the time they’ve done that, hopefully, that’s a pretty good metric for you to see that this is someone that you would possibly want to work with. I’m pretty sure you have, but I don’t know. Have you ever gotten the client that has just been completely not a fit?

Chris Burnett:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yes. It’s funny, because me and one of my designer buddies, we always have this joke that what we show on our website is typically the type of work that we want to receive, which is why we put it there. But there definitely will be times where someone will hit me up and just be like, “Hey, I need you to design just a simple logo.” It’s not that I can’t design a logo, but that’s not really where my skillset lies and my strengths are.

Chris Burnett:
So, I can do it, but then the process becomes a little muddied when it’s not something that I’m too passionate about. They’re maybe expecting the crazy, colorful collage type stuff, but it’s a logo. So, I can’t really do that for a logo. Yeah, there have been moments where it doesn’t work, but I’m learning which projects to say yes and no to now that I’ve been doing this for so long.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. What are some of the projects that you’re working on now?

Chris Burnett:
So, a lot of the things that I’ve been doing now is a lot of editorial illustration, which I’ve found that that really suits my strengths really well. It’s mostly image making, which is my favorite thing in the world to do is just create a compelling image to look at. So, when you pair that with an article for, say, The New York Times or the Guardian, that’s where I get to really flex my abilities. Over the past year, I’d probably gotten the most editorial illustration work than I ever have.

Chris Burnett:
There’s also a lot of merch design, merchandise design for artists in the music industry. That’s always ongoing. There’s always artists who need things to sell on the road or sell on their website. I help with a lot of that stuff. Some of its like under wraps because people don’t want to release info about music projects that they might be doing. But yeah, most stuff in the music industry and editorial illustration, I’d say, are my two big ones.

Maurice Cherry:
Is there a specific type of client that you prefer to work with?

Chris Burnett:
I’m always open to new types of clients, people that I haven’t worked with before just to be able to stretch myself and see, “What industries can I adapt my creativity towards?” But I think I do love working in the music industry. It’s fun to work with artists that you admire. It’s fun to work with artists that you’re playing their music in your car when you’re driving around and you get to work on something that’s for their project. It’s fun to be a part of things like that. I love editorial. I don’t know what it is about it. It’s just the pairing of an image with an article is like a dream project. It’s like they’re little, tiny dream projects, because they’re really quick and the turnaround time is super-fast, usually within a week or a couple days.

Chris Burnett:
It’s typically within those industries like editorial that there’s a little more room for creative freedom, because they’re trying to see how you would interpret the article and how that article maybe is reflected in your style and your own sensibility. So, that’s why I like it a lot, because there’s not too many notes. There’s not too much canceling of ideas. It’s very open ended, which I love.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. I don’t know why for some reason, I would imagine working with musicians might be temperamental, but I guess like you said, if it’s an artist that you really like, it probably makes it a bit of an easier match.

Chris Burnett:
Well, that’s a good point. I mean, they’re definitely artists I’ve worked with in the past who are artists. An artist comes in mind a lot. There’s a certain temperament like you said that goes along with it. But I think the reason that I enjoy it and the reason I think I’m able to do it is because I am also an artist, so I understand that sensibility. It allows me to be as flexible as I need to be when working with them. It also informs my own practice of how I go about my music or my art as well. So, it’s fun. It’s a double-edged sword for sure, but I do like it.

Maurice Cherry:
I just want to say to the audience, I don’t know if Chris is being a little humble now, but his music is really good. It’s really good.

Chris Burnett:
Thank you, thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
With your permission, I’d like to link to your SoundCloud because I was doing research for the interview and I just put the music on. I was like, “This is good. This is good.” I was like, “I can hear this on Insecure. I can hear this on Insecure. It’s pretty good.”

Chris Burnett:
Oh, man. I would love for that to happen, but this is their final season. I’m so sad. Yeah, but thank you. I really appreciate that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, no, I guess to that end, talking about Black art and things like that, we started to see over the past few years that with this influx in Black television shows and movies and stuff, we’re really starting to see a much wider range of artists, not just musical artists, but visual artists and stuff portrayed through these works. We had Gabe Gault who I mentioned before on the show, and he’s mentioned that his work has been in a television show. We had Dawn Okoro, who’s an artist in Austin. Her work has been on a BT show.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m wondering, because we hear so much about this Black creative renaissance and you hear about it through these visual artists, does that exposure help you in any way? I don’t know. Has your work been out there in that way where you feel like you’ve got an exposure because it’s been amplified through, say, a musical artist or something like that?

Chris Burnett:
Not necessarily. I guess this is a little hard to explain and this is the whole point of the studio, which is funny, is that because I think the hummingbird is such a secretive animal and it’s very hidden, because it’s so small and it moves really fast, I’ve settled into the idea that my work doesn’t necessarily exist in a public space as much as it could and I’m okay with that. I think when the time comes, some more visibility might help. But in the meantime, I still get to work with the people I love working with. Whether I’m publicly associated with them or not is not really what I’m focusing on. It’s just, “How do we make the best possible thing for this person? Or if it’s for me, how do I make the best possible thing for myself and share it?”

Chris Burnett:
I mean, that doesn’t mean that I haven’t had moments where my work was recognized and especially recognized for the culture. There was an article in The New York Times Magazine, I think this was last year, I’m not too sure, but by Isabel Wilkerson. She just wrote a book called Caste that explores the idea of racism, but not through a racist ideology. It’s through a caste system, which is a whole another way of looking at it. I did these two collage pieces for the article in The Times. It was heavily centered around Black imagery and police brutality. That was the first time that I actually incorporated imagery into my work.

Chris Burnett:
It was a very enlightening moment, because I did the collages by hand. I was cutting out images of MLK hanging out with Mahatma Gandhi. I was cutting out images of African American men on the floor with police pointing guns at their heads. It was the first time that I started to have my work speak in a way that was relevant to what was actually happening. That was really eye-opening for me and that led me down a whole new trajectory with my art. But in those instances, I really enjoy when I can speak to what’s happening in the now and speak to the culture.

Maurice Cherry:
I’ve just always been really curious about that, because I want to make sure… I mean, I’m saying this like I’m the singular person that can make this happen, but I want to see that Black artists, visual artists, graphic artists, particularly with their work being featured in entertainment get just as much shine as the show that the artists featured on or the actor that might be in front of the art and the piece. I don’t know. Something like that, it’s making me think of… Are you familiar with Brent Rollins? Does that name sound familiar?

Chris Burnett:
No. Who’s Brent Rollins?

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, my God. So, Brent Rollins, so he was on episode 400, but Brent Rollins is like… I forget the moniker that I saw when I was researching, but it was like your favorite hip-hop artist’s favorite designer or something like. He designed the logo for Boys in the Hood when he was, I think, 19. He designed the logo for Poetic Justice when he was 20. He was rolling in that crew with Ice Cube and John Singleton back in the day. He did a bunch of work in the ’90s and 2000s Ego Trip. God, I can’t remember the name of the magazine. It’s escaping me but it’s episode 400 if people are listening. Go back and listen to it.

Chris Burnett:
Hell yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
There were these shows on VH1. One was called Race-O-Rama. One was called… I think it was White rapper showcase or something or a reality show or something like that. He had his hand in all these really interesting things around hip hop culture, but it was through his design and eye. So, a lot of stuff that you see in Vibe Magazine and stuff for the ’90s and 2000s was heavily influenced by him and his work. He is such a cool ass, behind-the-scenes dude.

Maurice Cherry:
Him and I were talking. He was like, “Yeah, man, I did this and did this. I exhibited here and there.” I was like, “Do you understand, I grew up on your work, watching your stuff, looking at your stuff at Vibe magazine, be like I want to design like that?”, and was just being so humble about it. I knew who he was because I ended up doing the research on it, but I don’t think the average hip hop fan knows who Brent Rollins is. That’s not to say that diminishes Brent’s work in any way, but why is he not as recognized as artists from that time?

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, well, I think there’s a couple of levels to it. I think, on a larger scale, typically, designers are in the background, because the work is what speaks to the public, right? So, if I’m designing a logo for a company, my face isn’t going to be the face of the company, but the logo will, right? So, there’s never really been a need for the designer to be in the public eye as much as maybe the person who runs the company, or say, if you’re working for an artist, the artist is the one who is getting all the focus. So, the designer falls to the background.

Chris Burnett:
I think we’re starting to see a shift in that, especially in Black culture, with people like Virgil Abloh, who became almost like designer of the year for every year for a long time at this point. But he came from Kanye’s group, and he started to create the idea that designer can be the public figure also and not just be the one that sits in the background. So, I think that tide is starting to shift and we’re starting to see it. It also happens in music too. Back then, producers were always just behind the boards and you never really knew who was producing the music, but now, the producers are just as big as some of the artists. So, we’re seeing that shift take place and I think that’s really cool. I don’t know if it’ll happen to me, but it’s all right. I don’t mind being in the shadows.

Maurice Cherry:
No, that’s true. I do hope to see that day where the designers and the visual artists get that same level of recognition or at least name recognition, where folks know. They look at something. You’re like, “Oh, that’s a Chris Burnett,” if they see a collage or something like that, that thing.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, I mean, I’m definitely developing a visual language and a style that feels really specific to me. So, there are certain recognizable aspects of my work. As I’ve ventured more into music, I’m definitely going to be presenting myself and my person out there. So, maybe the moment where the tide turns and this all becomes more public is right around the corner.

Maurice Cherry:
There you go.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
So, tell me what it was like growing up in L.A.

Chris Burnett:
Growing up in L.A., yeah, I grew up in South Central, specifically Manchester and Vermont for anyone who knows that area. It wasn’t really the best neighborhood at the time. There was a lot of gang violence, a lot of drugs. Police relations with the community were not great. Growing up, there definitely had an impact on me, although my parents were very, very careful in what they allowed me and my older brother to do. We weren’t really allowed to go outside after certain time. I didn’t really have many friends in the neighborhood, because that was the way that I could get caught up in some of the wrong stuff.

Chris Burnett:
So, a lot of my time was spent creating indoors, whether that was drawing or painting or my parents would put me in art classes at a pretty young age just to keep me occupied and doing something that I enjoyed versus running around my neighborhood, getting into trouble, like a lot of the kids who were there probably did. It wasn’t until I went to high school that I was taking the bus to high school to public transport. That was the first time I got a little taste of freedom. I started skateboarding at the same time. So, I would take the bus to skate parks and start to explore a little bit. That was when I really started to understand the neighborhood a little bit better.

Chris Burnett:
It wasn’t as dangerous as it was when I was a little kid, but yeah, it definitely influenced my practice and my behavior in terms of I like the area I grew up in, because to me, it feels real. It feels very honest. Where I live now is actually a completely different environment. At this point, I’m not sure that I want to stay there as much, because every time I go home to visit my folks, it’s like, “Oh, I actually really liked this neighborhood.”

Chris Burnett:
Maybe I was scared of it when I was a kid, but now I’m an adult and I know how to move. Certain things become illuminated when you’re in different stages of your life. So, back then, it was a little intimidating, but now it’s more enticing, especially they just built the big stadium in Inglewood. That’s 10 minutes from where I grew up. So, there are things that are happening in that area that wouldn’t necessarily happen. Resources are coming back down there, which I think is great. So, I might move down. Who knows? We’ll see.

Maurice Cherry:
L.A. is so big.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, man.

Maurice Cherry:
I was there actually, for the first time last year. We were set to do a live tour throughout 2020 last year. We started off in L.A. and did our first live show out there.

Chris Burnett:
Nice.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, I live in Atlanta, which is pretty spread out, but L.A. is gargantuan in terms of scale. I was in the Korea Town neighborhood initially and then we did the live show. We did that down in Leimert Park, but I didn’t really get to see L.A. I saw a couple of neighborhoods.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, yeah, there’s always the pockets that people go to, but there’s a lot of hidden treasures in this city. It takes time. It takes time of living here or just having the time to explore. You got to have a car. You got to drive everywhere. But yeah, it’s massive. It’s massive, massive, massive, massive.

Maurice Cherry:
So, you grew up studying art. You were taking art classes and everything. Eventually, you went to college. You went to CalArts. What was that experience like?

Chris Burnett:
CalArts, for me, was extremely transformative. At this point, I was coming out of high school. I took a graphic design course in high school. So, that’s how I knew that’s what I wanted to study in college. So, I applied to a couple different art schools in California. I didn’t really want to leave the state. The minute I stepped on the CalArts Campus for a tour is the minute that I knew that was the place I needed to be. I didn’t really even do that much research, I’ll be honest, but the feeling I got when I arrived there, it felt like I definitely made the right decision.

Chris Burnett:
The thing that I loved about that school was that there were so many disciplines in one roof. There was acting, there was costume design, there was character animation, there’s graphic design, there’s fine arts, there was music, there was set design. There was all kinds of creative people who come from all over the world to study and perfect their craft. So, that period of time really opened my eyes to all the things that maybe I didn’t get to experience growing up, especially because my parents were really careful about what I was exposed to. Once I got to CalArts, it was like, “Oh, I’m an individual now. I’m going to do it or what. I can explore. I can see what life really has to offer.”

Chris Burnett:
It was in a bubble of CalArts, but still, within that bubble, there were so many different pockets to explore. A lot of the friends I have now are people from that school. A lot of the people that I try to keep in touch with creatively are people from that school. It was just a really transformative time. I think it really allowed me to grow up. I’ve always been the youngest one in my friend circles. I have funny stories.

Chris Burnett:
When I got to CalArts, I still maybe looked like a 13-year-old or 14-year-old. It was very strange. People would walk up to me and say, “Do you go here? Are you lost?” I’m like, “No, man, I’m headed to the movie class right now.” It was really interesting. It was that time for me to grow up and grow into myself. I wouldn’t trade those four years for the world. Even though I picked up some student debt from it, we all have a little bit of that.

Maurice Cherry:
Is that where you met Bijan?

Chris Burnett:
That’s where I met Bijan, yeah. So, Bijan was my classmate all four years. What happens at CalArts in the design program is that you share a studio. In the graphic design program, you share a studio with your entire year level. So, there were about 19 to maybe 21 of us in our first year, which was pretty large for an incoming class. Bijan was in that class with me. We actually met the day we had a portfolio review. We didn’t know each other. We were just both coming from our high schools and trying to show our work to get accepted. He was literally standing in line right in front of me. Lo and behold, we both got accepted and ended up in the same class.

Chris Burnett:
Bijan was and still is one of my best friends. He became this creative rival, but in the best way possible, where if he was doing something, I would see what he’s doing and be like, “Oh, that’s really good. Okay, now I got to do something that’s really good.” And then he would see what I was doing and it would level him up and then he would level me up. We ping pong off each other like that until we graduated.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. It’s good to have that creative tension in a way, I guess.

Chris Burnett:
For sure. I’m really competitive. So, whether it’s in sports or in making a cool poster, I feel that edge or that desire to want to be the best and bring the best out of myself and others. So, we really thrived on that with each other.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. For folks that are listening, who are like, “Who is Bijan?” Bijan Berahimi founded… Actually, YouTube co-founded FISK together. Is that right?

Chris Burnett:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Maurice Cherry:
A studio called FISK, like the HBCU but not the HBCU.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, not the college. Everybody knows. So, this came about in our first year. It’s actually a collaboration between a bunch of our classmates. We wanted to create a website where we could showcase student work and just have a digital space for us to talk about design as students. A lot of us contributed to the website. We had a thing called Things We’ve Stolen, which was posters that we stole from the walls of CalArts. We would feature them on the website. There’s a large poster culture at that school. We would interview other designers who were working professionally and ask them questions about the transition from student life to professional life.

Chris Burnett:
We would have zines, where we asked students in the program to submit artwork, and then we would throw a party for the zine release. It was a myriad of things when we were in school. After we all graduated, we settled into our own pockets and practices. Bijan decided to resurrect FISK in Portland, and that’s when it became the studio. I wasn’t a part of inauguration of the studio per se, but the initial idea was a very collaborative thing. It still is to this day. He runs it out of Portland and has a couple employees and they’re doing great.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Speaking of Portland, after you graduated, you did eventually head to Portland, because you had an opportunity with Nike, which we’ll get to, but you had another opportunity that happened to you senior year where you got to work with a pretty well-known music group. Can you talk about that?

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, it’s actually a crazy story about how that happens. So, my third year of college, we had a project that was to design a magazine of a subculture, any subculture of our choice. I decided at that point, I wanted to focus on Odd Future because they had just started to gain a little traction. I think they were doing most of their stuff independently. It was something that I really resonated with, because of that DIY spirit and because they were from where I was from. It was just cool to see kids like me doing cool stuff. So, I decided to make my magazine about Odd Future.

Chris Burnett:
I designed the whole thing, printed the whole thing. I gave it to my brother, who was friends with Travis, who used to go by Taco, just so they could see it and be aware of me. I don’t know if Travis ever got the magazine. I have no idea where the magazine was. I would love to see it because it’s been so long. But I did that in hopes that that would be my connection point with them. So, they can know that I’m over here doing my thing. They’re over there doing their thing. Nothing really came of that. So, by the time fourth year came around, I was setting my sights on other jobs and other opportunities.

Chris Burnett:
Randomly, on a trip to Joshua Tree with Bijan, I get an email in the car from a guy who’s running an agency that’s handling all of Odd Future’s merchandising and branding and things like that. He goes, “Hey, Chris, I saw your work. Would you love to come work for Odd Future?” I was like, “What, a year later, what?” It was so random and I was not expecting it, but immediately, I said yes. So, that was midway through the end of my time at CalArts. I started interning there. So, I would have class. After class, I would get in my car and drive all the way back down to L.A. to work with them for a couple of hours, come back to school, do my schoolwork.

Chris Burnett:
That was a balance that I struck at the end of my fourth year until I graduated and then I just started working for them full time. That was a crazy experience for me. It was one of those dream moments where these are artists that I really respect and admire. They’re doing really cool things musically, visually. Just the fact that I got to be a part of it for that span in my life was pretty amazing.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s a dope story. I mean, when you think of Odd Future and of course, Tyler the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt and-

Chris Burnett:
Jasper Dolphin.

Maurice Cherry:
Jasper Dolphin.

Chris Burnett:
Hodgy Beats, Left Brain, yeah, all the OGs.

Maurice Cherry:
When you think of their whole persona, it’s so hard to pin down. I feel like you could just say, “Oh, Black Skater,” or whatever, but it’s so much more than that. I think particularly Tyler, I remember Tyler had this show on Vice a few years ago called Nuts and Bolts.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, I love that show.

Maurice Cherry:
He was doing all these different design things. He’s like, “Oh, I’m designing apparel, I’m designing a shoe or something like that. I’m designing furniture.” He was doing all this interesting design stuff. This was going on, I think, right around the time there was also this reality show on YouTube that I’ve mentioned on the show before called Lace Up, which is basically, a sneaker design reality show contest thing. Because you know, there’s a PENSOLE Academy in Portland.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, yeah, definitely familiar.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So, Dr. D’Wayne Edwards, by the way, but he runs that school. He did this reality show on YouTube, where he was bringing in designers to design shoes and stuff. I remember, I would watch that and I would watch Nuts and Bolts and be like, “Why is nobody talking about these design shows?” I mean, their style is so hard for me to pinpoint. I think most people know Odd Future because of their donut logo. But what stuff were you doing? How did that creative process look like?

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, that was definitely wild for sure. I mean, by the time I started helping with a lot of the merchandise and the clothing, there was definitely a visual aesthetic that was already established. That was primarily Tyler’s ideas and the group’s ideas. When I hopped on board, there was definitely a lane to work within. There was definitely visuals that I could reference, things that I knew they liked, things that I knew they didn’t like to stay away from. So, a lot of the times, what would happen is I’d be in the office with… There was me. There’s another designer named Aaron Martinez, shout out to Aaron.

Chris Burnett:
There’s another designer named Phil, who handled mostly the Golf Wang stuff, which was separate from the Odd Future stuff at the time. So, they were the two creative directors, for me, at least. They would pinpoint where I should take things and what directions I should go in. But a lot of the time, the guys, the group of artists and the music makers and the whole clique would just show up at the office. We would have these meetings where they would just pitch ideas to us. I remember Jasper one time saying, “I want a dolphin on the Empire State Building smoking a blunt.” I just graduated with a design degree. I was like, “How am I going to do this weird photo manipulated illustration and pull this off and then put it on a T-shirt? This is wild. It’s so weird.” But I ended up doing it.

Chris Burnett:
It actually became one of my favorite pieces, even those one of the strangest things in the world. Yeah, they would just come in. We would print everything out, have these just big jam sessions of getting everyone’s thoughts and ideas and opinions. If they liked what we did, they would rock with it. If not, they would exit immediately and say, “Do this differently,” or “Do a different thing over here and maybe change the color of this and tweak this a little bit.” So, it was a super, super collaborative process and really wild to just hang out with them, because this was really at the peak of their stardom as a group. Super interesting, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Did you have an Odd Future name? Did they give you a name or something?

Chris Burnett:
No, this is another thing that contributes to me being in the shadows. I didn’t really try to infiltrate into the group like that. I knew that they were already so tight knit and close friends. I’ve never really been the type to try to eat off of someone else’s success. So, I purposefully was like, “It’s cool. I enjoy working with you guys. I enjoy creating these things for you, but I’m just going to take my place in the backseat and watch you guys do your thing.” It was so fun for me just to do that. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
I can’t imagine how some of those design sessions might have went. Just the ideas and the crazy shit that they come up with I imagine is… I mean, I think for any really strong visual designer, that’s a dream to have a client or to have someone that has that creative capacity to just do whatever.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, it was definitely really freeing, especially to come from CalArts, which was a similar environment in terms of the freedom of creativity that we had in school and to have that as my first full time gig, I couldn’t ask for anything better. It was great.

Maurice Cherry:
So, after working with them, you got an opportunity to work with Nike, which then eventually had you go to Portland. If you could sum up your time at Nike in one phrase, what would it be?

Chris Burnett:
Oh, man. One phrase, working at Nike, you put me on the spot. I would say high level hierarchy.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Chris Burnett:
I mean, I might have to explain that a little bit. When I say high level, I guess I mean, the quality of work that was being produced and the scale of work, the amount of people that would see it, the amount of reach that it had, that’s what I mean by high level. When I say hierarchy, there’s such a system in play. It’s such a large corporate company like that, that sometimes creativity and new ideas are not necessarily accepted, because it doesn’t fall within the framework of what has been successful for them as a company. So, I’ve always understood that before I started working there, so I wasn’t going in thinking that it would be another Odd Future.

Chris Burnett:
I went in knowing that, okay, this is going to be a big place where there’s a lot of moving parts. There’s a lot of things that I can’t control. There’s a lot of things that I don’t have any impact over. So, it was a humbling experience to be able to contribute my ideas to such a large and fast moving company, but then it also, for me, told me that that environment wasn’t necessarily the one that I wanted to be in for a long time in terms of work in the design world. But it was definitely a great learning experience to get my feet wet. Being a professional was cool.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, we’ve had a few designers on the show before that have worked at Nike and I don’t know if they all liked it. In a way, it’s good, because it’s like, “Oh, this is Nike.” Like you said, there is this high level reach, but each person we’ve had on has said, it’s not a great place to work.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, I mean, there’s certain aspects of it that are really difficult to stomach if you’re not capable of grinding it out. I think one of the bigger things that I had to do when I was there was just work a lot. When we needed to get a project done, we were up very late working on it on campus until it was done. It really instilled a good work ethic for me, but as far as being a sane human being, it did not contribute to that at all. So, yeah, that was a really difficult part of it, especially coming in as a young designer, who had new ideas and maybe I wanted to bring new innovations to the way they were thinking about design. It’s not that they didn’t want to listen. It’s that they already understood what works for them.

Chris Burnett:
So, for a group of young designers to come in and just shake everything up and try all these new things, it’s not really something they were looking for at the time. Now that Virgil cracked open the door with his initial The Ten collaboration, the shoes, where he was messing with the swoosh and change the game, putting it in different locations where they would never do that, it’s really opened the door for them to expand their creativity to a whole new level, which we’ve been seeing lately. But when I was there, it was still very much you play by the book, because this is the recipe that has worked for them.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, if they know that it’s going to work all these different times, we’re not really looking for any variations on that. They just need you to do the same thing.

Chris Burnett:
Right. At the end of the day, if we’re being honest, they’re a company, they’re a business, and they need to make money. So, if they’re experimenting too much and it messes with their stock price or some of the shareholders get upset, it’s going to trickle down. That’s what I mean by hierarchy is that there’s so many layers to it, that it’s really impossible as one designer to go in there and really have your voice heard, but to each their own.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. But I mean, like you say, because of the crucible that that design environment is, like you say, it’s strengthened your work ethic and I’m sure probably has helped you out in some way now as a designer, just having that experience working there.

Chris Burnett:
Oh, yeah, for sure. So, there were two stints that I did at Nike. The first one was in brand design for sportswear and that was my first experience there. Honestly, all of my co-workers were amazing people. I had a great time working with them. It was, like I said, grinding out a lot, just working hard on campaigns. We were doing the overarching branding system that would then be sent out to all the different categories around the world. They would apply what we designed to whatever product was being released. So, that was really cool to see that.

Chris Burnett:
And then the second stint was for the Olympics, for Rio ’16. That was wow. If I thought the first stint was crazy, the second one was… I don’t even know how I lasted, but it definitely helped put a work ethic into my brain. So, if I need to work on something, I will get it done. There’s no excuses. They always said at Nike, there’s no finish line. That’s one of the taglines. The reason I say that is work just keeps on going and innovation keeps on happening. Things don’t really stop. Even though we’re running, we’re putting our all in, things just keep moving and keep going and keep evolving. It’s a tough environment to be in if you’re not used to that type of pace of work. But if you’re down for it, it can really instill a good work ethic in you.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s how I was when I worked at AT&T. AT&T was one of these places, you walk in and they have this huge banner over their big marble reception desk that says, “Shaping human capital,” or something. You’d go and there would be this never-ending firehose of work. I think when we go in, we were always six months behind on something. Salespeople just kept selling and the work just kept coming in. So, you’re never caught up. We had, I think, roughly about 36 designers that were working there in teams of 12. They had this floor to ceiling LED board. So, everything that you design had a point value to it.

Chris Burnett:
No way.

Maurice Cherry:
As a designer, I think when I started, you have to hit 36 points at the end of the week and then eventually up to the 40. But everything you design had a point value. So, if you design a banner, that’s point nine points. If you design a three-page website, that’s five points. If you design a 10-pager, that’s nine points. So, you could hit your total pretty easily if you just design four websites in a week or something like that. I mean, this was 2006. You would pull the order from the system.

Maurice Cherry:
They have this system called Ice Blue. I don’t work there anymore. So, even if all this stuff is proprietary, I don’t care, but they have this thing called Ice Blue and you pull your rec. So, you have to go to a file cabinet, fish out the envelopes, this is my paper, fish out the envelopes that had all the assets in it. It was usually printed out Word files, scraps that the salespeople got from the company of their logo drawn on a napkin or something. You have to go to the scanner. I’m dating myself, you have to go to the scanner. There was one computer with the scanner for 36 designers.

Chris Burnett:
Oh, my God.

Maurice Cherry:
So, you had to go to the scanner, scan your stuff in, mail it to yourself, because we didn’t have Dropbox because it didn’t exist then. You mail it to yourself, you get back to your station, and then you have to trace it out. We were using Dreamweaver because it’s 2006. You basically had to build a website, retype all the information and everything. Eventually, you got faster because it’s one thing to do the actual coding and the design work and Photoshop and Illustrator, whatever, but then you’ve got all this other operational stuff you have to do like pull the rec and scan and do this and return the folder and walk it over to QA, physically walk it over to QA and all this stuff.

Maurice Cherry:
Eventually, you get better just in terms of speed. So, I could knock out four or five websites in a week. If I got the packet in the morning, I could finish it by lunch. And then I could pick up on that lunch and then finish it by the time I was ready to go home. Again, this was 2006. So, this was right around the time when table-based layout was being phased out and CSS layouts were being phased in. I mean, we fired some people because they couldn’t get it. They did not know how to convert the tables to CSS, so they weren’t getting it. We fired people.

Maurice Cherry:
God, this was a long, long time ago. But eventually, I like made a little CSS work template or something that I could easily just plop in and change the value so I could get quicker with it. I still use that to this day, principles from that. But it’s one of those things where if I wasn’t in that type of design environment, would I even know to do something like that? You know what I mean?

Chris Burnett:
Exactly, exactly. So, do you think that having the point system actually helped people stay on track in terms of what they needed to get done? Because I mean, that’s almost public accountability for the work that you have to do.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, yes and no. For some people, it really freaked them out. Because if you didn’t hit your number, because you could see how everyone on the team was doing at any given point in time. So, you could see what your number was and who was above you and who was below you. So, it was one thing for you to know the number but now everyone else knows your number. So, you’ll be sitting at lunch and someone will come and be like, “You got to get the numbers up.” Keep in mind, we only could take a 15-minute lunch. So, you have to wolf down your sandwich or whatever that you brought from home.

Maurice Cherry:
And there would just be random people, random supervisors that don’t even work on your team will just come by you. Points look a little low this week. I don’t need that kind of pressure. I’m trying to try to get the work done. I don’t know if it helped. I mean, certainly, it’s one of those things where you either cut it or you don’t, but you definitely knew at any given point in time where you stood. Eventually, it got to the point where they upped the amount of points you have to get and then they lowered the point value of the items. So, you have to crank out more work to get to a higher target. It was a mess. I left there and said, “I have to do my own thing.” I didn’t want to work for another place after that. I think similarly, when you left Nike, you started freelancing too. Is that right?

Chris Burnett:
Yes. So, between those two stints that I just mentioned, after the first one was when I decided to leave. I just had a nine-month contract, so I never actually took full time at Nike. I was what was called ETW, it’s like a temporary worker. My contract was up after nine months. I decided that I wanted to try my hand at freelancing, which is something I had never done before. The funny thing is even coming off of the new work ethic that I just developed, all the skills and connections that I had made, freelancing did not really work for me. I think it was because I lacked motivation to do so just because I was coming off of nine months of very, very grueling work. Having this time to set hours for myself, it made me not really want to do that much work and almost like take a vacation.

Chris Burnett:
So, in that period of time, I was focusing a lot on my music and a lot of my artwork, but I wasn’t really successful at the freelance thing. So, by the time the Rio Olympics had come around, the guy who wanted me to work with him on his team, Ibrahim Hassan, shout out to Ibrahim, he became my mentor in that moment. He wanted me to come back and work on the Olympics. So, that’s when I went back. That was even more grueling than the first time, but I learned so much more by working with him and working with our team that it was very much worth it for me to do it.

Chris Burnett:
But after that, I knew that that was it, that I couldn’t keep doing it. That’s when I went freelance. The second time around it, it clicked for me. I’m not necessarily sure what I changed. I think I was just more hungry to make it work, because it didn’t work the first time.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. I mean, I think, with freelancing, for me, when I first started out, I left in late 2008, I just quit my job. I was like, “I can’t do this anymore,” and started my studio. I’d say maybe those first three or four months were rough, because even though I was like, “I got all the skills, I know people XYZ,” finding the work ended up being difficult. It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t do it. It was just finding the right clients.

Maurice Cherry:
And then eventually, I did end up working for a client. It was a political client. And then working on that campaign kickstarted my studio and kept me going. If I wouldn’t have gotten into that, I don’t know if I would have continued freelancing. I don’t want to say I have to link up with someone. But once you got the right client and it clicked, then you’re like, “Okay, I can keep doing this.” It makes sense. You had worked with an agency called Ceremony of Roses when you were freelancing, right?

Chris Burnett:
Right. So, after I left Nike the second time, I think there was a stint in between where I went overseas, just to travel around for a little bit. That was maybe three months in Southeast Asia, which was really fun. By the time I came back, I did another short contract at Jordan, which was still on Nike campus, so in that world, but just for the Jordan Brand instead. And then after that, it was like, “All right, I think I’m going to move home to L.A.” At the time, that agency, Ceremony of Roses had reached out to me and was like, “We have a position open at our agency down in L.A.” It was literally perfect timing because I was already moving back home.

Chris Burnett:
That’s when I decided that I was going to take that job down in L.A. when I got back. They were heavily focused on music, so a completely different world than sports and branding. They had a lot of clients in the music industry. Their main bread and butter was merchandising and creating the brand that surrounded the artists, whether that’s from tour announcements and flyers and posters to actual merchandising to websites to things for them to post on social media. So, in a similar way to the agency that I worked with for Odd Future, who was just handling a lot of the creativity, that’s what Ceremony of Roses was, but in a updated and more efficient way, I’d like to say. I stayed there for about two years.

Chris Burnett:
My timelines are always a little foggy, but I stayed there for around two years in L.A., just doing a lot of work with artists in the music industry. Janelle Monáe had released her album, Dirty Computer. That was one of the bigger projects that I got to work on. Her and her team were fantastic just because they really trusted me and they gave me a lot of creative freedom to create pieces that worked with her album and with the whole concept of what she was doing. That was one of the highlights of that job for me.

Maurice Cherry:
Wonderland Studios has a great team.

Chris Burnett:
Oh, yeah, yeah, fantastic people to work with. So, I made a lot of good connections from that, from working with that agency. Yeah, we still work together today.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, cool. I know George 2.0. We went to Morehouse together.

Chris Burnett:
Oh, nice. Yeah, 2.0.

Maurice Cherry:
We went to Morehouse together. Now, this was back before she was doing the whole Android thing. She had the CD called The Audition, I think. I remember buying it off The Strip one day in the late 2000s, not late 2000s, way earlier than that. This was early 2000s. I’m not that young. But I remember getting her CD and being like, “Oh, this is really good.” Of course, they have the Atlanta connection, because she’s lived and worked here before and stuff. But their whole crew, their whole studio is doing great work.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, I’ve always admired them because they operate in a way that’s different to a lot of artists. I think just their tight knit community of people that they work with, it was a real family vibe when I would connect with their team and we would talk and discuss work. It just felt really good to be around them, great people.

Maurice Cherry:
Who are some of the people that have really helped you out as mentors throughout the years?

Chris Burnett:
I wouldn’t say that I’ve had specific mentors, where their role was to mentor me through the stage of life that I was in, but I think a lot of the times, the supervisors that I had at the companies I worked with took on that role in maybe a subconscious way. The first being a guy named Michael Spoljaric, who was the… I think, he was brand director or creative director. There’s so many titles at Nike that I forget what he was doing, but he was the head of sportswear brand design when I was there.

Chris Burnett:
So, when I got hired to work with them, he was the introduction into that world of professional corporate design. So, really, in terms of design and creativity, he really helped me to understand good typography, good layouts, how to design a book properly, what images to choose for a campaign, stuff like that.

Chris Burnett:
The next when I was working on the Rio Olympics, I already mentioned Ibrahim. He really became that mentor figure for me. He already saw that I had potential, but he fine-tuned it. That’s what I really appreciated about him was that he really got down to the nitty gritty and the specifics of things, the details of things, because every little detail counts if you’re trying to make something that is impactful. If you leave one little thing out, then it might ruin the whole trajectory of the story. So, he was really a figure like that for me.

Chris Burnett:
When I came to Ceremony of Roses, the two people who really stuck out to me was Brad Scoffern, who’s the owner of the company. He’s the one who brought me on board. I met him when I was working at Odd Future. He always remembered me. So, by the time he started his own agency, he immediately reached out to me and wanted to work with me. And then another guy at that company named Jared Hankey, who became my pseudo mentor at that time when I was working there, too. So, I haven’t really had specific people outside of work environments that have done that for me, but it’s always been supervisors or bosses or those who are in higher positions than me who can show me the ropes and keep me on track.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you call yourself a creative superhero. What does that mean to you?

Chris Burnett:
It means that I have a lot of superpowers. It’s always been really difficult for me specifically to classify what I am or who I am in terms of my creativity, because I can say one day that I’m an artist and then another day, I can say I’m a musician. One day, I can say I’m a designer. I can wear all these hats, and I try to wear them really well. I was always thinking of, “What’s just a cool umbrella term that I could use that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but does speak to the idea that I can do all of these different things?” I came up with that when I was designing the website for Colibri and it just stuck. So, that’s the moniker that I like to use if it’ll be on business cards or any little bios, but yeah, that’s what that means.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Now, I’ve read where you talked about your ultimate dream project, which was back when you were working with Odd Future. It was this collaboration with their brand, with Golf Wang and Hello Kitty. That was years and years ago. Is that still your ultimate dream project or do you have another dream project you want to do one day?

Chris Burnett:
I think I have a bunch of dream projects. That one specifically came about, my older brother, who’s also a designer, artist, musician, just like me, his name is Jordan. He was really into A Bathing Ape. This was before I was really knowledgeable about these brands at this time. He had this one shirt, which featured a character named Baby Milo, which was a very cute drawing of a little monkey. It was really simple and it had really thick lines. I was just obsessed with that illustration style for the longest time. I remember when I was working for Odd Future, Tyler had created a character called Shark Cat. He was really into cats. We used them a lot, a lot of the merchandise. I decided that I wanted to create a Shark Cat version of almost a Baby Milo-like character.

Chris Burnett:
So, I took this cat head that Tyler had come up with, and I placed it onto a very simplified body with the bold strokes and just really a cute little character. I wanted to use it for something but I didn’t really know what we would use it for. And then my boss at the time told me that Sanrio, which is the company that owns Hello Kitty, they were looking to do a collaboration with Odd Future. That was the moment that I was like, “Okay, Hello kitty is definitely in the same style of Baby Milo, and this is the moment where I can combine those two worlds. So, I can take this little Shark Cat character and I can take the Hello Kitty character. I can put them in one.” I must have created an entire capsule collection for them.

Chris Burnett:
And then I don’t really know what happened. I was told that the executives at Sanrio saw some of our futures videos and were like, “Maybe not, it’s not really in line with our brand aesthetic.” So, it never went through, but that was definitely just a dream project because I really was into the aesthetic of Hello Kitty and Baby Milo and wish that I could have combined those two worlds, but that never really came to fruition.

Chris Burnett:
But fast forward to now, my biggest dream project is more self-focused. I want to have a gallery show with… I’m working on a new body of work right now, some of the biggest canvases I’ve ever worked on. I want to have a gallery show where all of that new work is there. I want to create a couple of sculptures to go in there. I also want to perform my music at the gallery show. So, then it can be a full representation of my artistic abilities. That’s really what I’ve been spending a lot of my time in the past couple of months. So, that’s where my brain goes when you ask, “What would a dream project be?”

Chris Burnett:
If I could work with a client, it might be Tame Impala. He’s my favorite band. Kevin Parker, the guy who writes and records all the music, is the reason that I started making music. That happened at the end of CalArts, but we can get into that a little later. So, if I could work on some album packaging for him or do some tour visuals or just anything, even if I could just meet them and have a conversation, I’d be happy. But yeah, he’s a big influence on me.

Chris Burnett:
And then I also love the brand Fucking Awesome. It’s a skate brand. Here out of Hollywood, they have a store here. Jason Dill is the creative genius behind that brand. The reason I love it is because his artwork as an artist, as an individual artist, is the aesthetic of the brand. So, I don’t know if it’s still like this, but at a certain point, he was designing all the graphics. He was making all the skateboards that people would ride. That’s always just been a huge dream of mine is to either work with him or create a brand that follows in his footsteps, because I love skateboarding, too. I’ve been skateboarding for 15 years at this point. So, combining those worlds would be amazing to me.

Maurice Cherry:
I could really see that gallery show. I could even see a gallery show that combines all of this. You’ve got that, you’ve got the music. I don’t know. Maybe you have a small halfpipe in there doing some skateboard or something. I could see all of this taking place. It’s interesting now even looking at exhibitions and stuff like that, because we’ve had a few Black artists on the show, exhibitions now are so much more than just a painting on a wall. They’re really these immersive 360 creative experiences.

Maurice Cherry:
I mentioned Dawn Okoro before, and she did a show that had a punk band in it. So, she’s doing her art and has her art on the wall, but then also has a punk man performing. Wow. So, it’s like a whole environment that’s being created with exhibitions. Especially in L.A., I could see all of that really coming together.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, I mean, that would definitely be a dream of mine to have this multi-hyphenate experience for people to enjoy. A big thing for me is the more that I look at art, the more that I want it to not exist in just a white walled space.

Chris Burnett:
I understand that that allows the art to speak volumes when there’s nothing else to look at except the piece that’s on the wall, but I’ve also had this dream of having a gallery that’s outside and maybe an old, abandoned warehouse and seeing how the art that’s on the wall in the warehouse communicates with the actual aesthetic of a rusted-out building. I think that could create an interesting tension too, but a lot of these things that I feel like I’ll pursue once I established my footing in the art world and then I can maybe expand on some of these ideas. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, are you still pursuing your music?

Chris Burnett:
So, music for me has been really interesting in terms of my dedication to it. Honestly, this happens with a lot of the facets of my creativity. There are moments where I’m really into making music, and I’ll write a new song every day. And then there are moments where I just want to collage and I don’t even pick up the guitar or play the piano at all. Right now, I’m in a down on the music and I’m really focused on the artwork. So, it tends to fluctuate and I like that. Because if I was too obsessed over one thing all the time, then I think all my other things would suffer. I just can’t let anything go.

Chris Burnett:
So, I can’t ever stop collaging. I can’t ever stop making music, but they ebb and flow in ways that support each other, whether I know it or not. That’s how I feel about it. So, I am planning to release a project next year, but there’s not much in my mind that’s happening with it yet. But I know that it’s going to be released early next year. I’m sitting on a lot of music that no one’s heard. So, it was definitely enough to create a project and give it to the world.

Maurice Cherry:
All in due time.

Chris Burnett:
Yeah, exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
Do you feel like you’re living your life’s purpose or do you think you’re still figuring it out?

Chris Burnett:
Wow. It’s funny that you asked that, because I would say that I learned what that was this year, specifically. It’s been a long journey to get to this point. I’ve always known that I wanted to do art. I’ve always known that I wanted to be creative. I’ve always known that I wanted to do music. But for some reason, recently within the past couple months, the specific focus has been on I’m an artist and telling myself that and believing it and moving towards it. As I moved towards it, the more it feels natural to me, which also tells me that hey, this is probably what you’re supposed to be doing. Because for a long time, I was in the design world. I was a graphic designer, and I would call myself that.

Chris Burnett:
I think the artist’s part of me was really sad that I wasn’t allowing myself to embrace that. I think at heart, I’m an artist. I can do graphic design, but I think at heart, my purpose is to create art and share it with the world. So, yeah, I think I’m getting there. It’s baby steps for me in terms of establishing who I am as an artist and sharing that with the world and being a bit more open with what I’m doing creatively, because I tend to sequester myself a little bit, but that’s all starting to change. So, I’m pretty happy about it.

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

Chris Burnett:
Next five years, definitely doing more art shows. I think the ultimate goal for me is to have a bunch of solo shows and really focus in on creating work that challenges the way we think about life, that challenges the way that we interact with each other. Yeah, I see myself really settling into the art world and becoming the artists that I know I can be. It’s been so long, because when I graduated with a degree in graphic design, to me, that felt like, “This is who I am now, and this is what I have to do.” After working so long and reaching a certain amount of success that I am satisfied with, I realized that there was just something missing.

Chris Burnett:
So, this year really marks that transition that I mentioned earlier into me fully embracing me as an artist and maybe moving away from a lot of the client work and focusing in on the work that I want to be doing for myself. So, in five years, I’ll be 35. So, hopefully, by then, I’ll have a couple solo shows under my belt. I’m definitely getting better at playing guitar. That’s one of the things I’m focusing on too. I want to put a band together so that I can play shows in Los Angeles, eventually tour around the world if that’s a reality that presents itself. Yeah, but really focusing in on the artist’s aspects of me and myself. That’s where I see myself in five years.

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

Chris Burnett:
So, you can go to colibristudios.com to pretty much see everything that I’m doing. I’m not on social media, and I don’t really like Instagram. We could have a whole another conversation about social media. As much as I understand that it’s something that allows you to connect with people that may have never seen your work before, something about it just doesn’t feel right with me.

Chris Burnett:
Especially given the past couple years that we’ve all experienced in America, we’re starting to realize and understand the effects that these platforms can have on our mental health and our well-being as individuals and our relationships with other people. I’ve decided to remove myself from it. So, I can have a different type of perspective. I think it served me pretty well. So, I only have a website. That’s why I’m saying that. It’s colibristudios.com. That’s where all my music is, photography, artwork, design work, everything. That’s me.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds good. Well, Chris Burnett, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. One, for just telling your story and really given some insight into the work that you’ve done, but I think also, it’s important when we hear your story and hear you talk about the passion behind your work to know that creativity is something that we all in some way can tap into.

Maurice Cherry:
I think it’s one of those things where as a kid, we have finger painting and all this stuff. But then as you get older, doing things in art design tend to be looked at as more of a hobby and less of a profession. It really seems like you were able to really lean into a lot of creative work, work with a lot of really interesting and creative companies and people. I’m excited to see what you’re going to do in the next five years, because I think it’s definitely going to be something worth talking about. So, thank you so much for coming on the show, man. I appreciate it.

Chris Burnett:
Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you.

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