Manny Ikomi

Photo: @queerjay

I love that Manny Ikomi has adopted a philosophy of “lift as you climb” as it relates to his career. Manny works as a UX design consultant for IBM iX, but he’s also a design educator and even streams some of his personal web development and UX projects on Twitch. It was great chatting it up and learning about how he balances his work with community outreach.

We started off diving into Manny’s journey from discovering interactive design and UX, to hitting a career ceiling and pursuing further education. Manny also spoke about teaching at his alma mater, his aspirations on working for public sector institutions, and his podcast Gay, Geeky + Tired. Hopefully Manny’s story will inspire you to make a positive impact in the world!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

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

Manny Ikomi:

So my name is Manny Ikomi. I’m a UX designer at IBM currently, and also recently, I am adjunct faculty teaching an interactive design course at Bunker Hill Community College.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice. How’s your year been going so far?

Manny Ikomi:

So far, it’s been a bit of a whirlwind. I think there’s definitely been some really good ups and some really low downs. But at the end of the day, I think the net ending of that is still growing and succeeding in the things that I want to do so far. And there’s still more to come, I guess. So, still with a lot of optimism, it’s been going well.

Maurice Cherry:

How would you say you’ve grown and improved over the past year? Have you noticed anything in particular?

Manny Ikomi:

So I started at IBM in June of last year of 2022. That first year was like a little trial by fire because of the project that I was working on. But I also had access to a lot of really great mentors; people in my network, both inside and outside of the company. And so professionally, I think there was just such an immense growth in that stretch zone, that I like to call it, within my first year. And so now that I’m a little bit over a year in, as of June of this year, I’ve kind of, like, leveled out. The honeymoon phase is a bit over, and I’m kind of just like doing the thing now. Things that I thought maybe I wasn’t capable of, like a year ago. I guess I’m capable of now — teaching being one of them.

I think probably most recent, a little bit of recency bias. But teaching has been something that has been on my mind to do for a little while, ever since a professor of mine kind of planted the seeds, like when I graduated from the college that I’m teaching at now, which is another story. But it’s been a really great experience so far, like, teaching IBM only like four weeks into my class. It’s my first time teaching ever, and for the most part, it’s also been going really well on top of just working at IBM and doing other things. And interestingly enough, there’s also a lot of overlap between some of the work that I’m doing now and some of the things I’m doing for my course this year has been definitely a year of growth and stretching and learning and teaching. So sometimes teaching also is a really great way to learn. So it’s been really great.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice. Let’s talk about your work at IBM, specifically IBM iX, where you work, like you said, as a UX designer. Tell me more about that.

Manny Ikomi:

So yeah. IBM iX. So IBM, for those of you who maybe don’t know, because they’re not as recognized, I guess, of a brand anymore, especially for younger folks, it stands for International Business Machines. It’s a very old company. There’s lots of history. They hold a lot of patents for things interestingly that I learned about. Most notably, I think, like the magnetic stripe on credit cards is something that I never realized that they had essentially invented. And so they’ve been a very large technology company for a very long time.

And over the years, I think they evolved from more like hardware and stuff. And then now they do mostly software and consulting, so they have their own cloud offerings. And then I’m in the Consulting part of the business. And then iX, which stands for Interactive Experience, is a smaller bubble within IBM Consulting. And what I do there as a UX designer, I guess, like all of us will say, it depends. It depends on the project, it depends on the client. Because ultimately I’m considered a consultant as opposed to an in house designer. So I don’t necessarily work on IBM’s cloud services and software and products.

I actually work on clients of IBM who come to the company and say, “hey, we need UX designers for this”, or “we need design services for some sort of initiative”. And through that, I’ve really gotten to do a whole bunch of stuff, particularly within my first year, I could be doing anything from contextual inquiry and design research, traveling to clients on site doing observational research, typical, like user interface prototyping, working in Figma, doing demos and things like that. Usability testing, enterprise design thinking, which is kind of like their methodology around design thinking and how we deliver design services. Yeah, I’ve pretty much done, I think, the whole gamut of user experience, design and really just design in general. I’ve really expanded my view, I think, kind of going back to the other question about how I’ve grown. My view of what design is and how it works and what I do has definitely been a lot more expansive beyond just the tangible artifacts and things that we make.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, it sounds like your day to day work is pretty varied then. Like you said, you’re either researching, you’re doing site visits, et cetera. It sounds like there’s a lot of variety in the work that you’re able to do.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah, there definitely is. And some of that is for better or for worse, I guess, because it turns you into a little bit of a generalist, which some people have opinions about. But I think at least at this point in my career, because it’s a little bit more earlier on, it’s good for me to have that kind of exposure and growth opportunities to try and do different things, especially when the risk is low for me personally. Right? Yeah, I mean, I get to work on a whole bunch of stuff. Most recently, the project that I’ve been working on is a little bit more on the strategic end and getting a local state government to actually adopt some of IBM’s design thinking methodology, which really kind of lines up to what I was talking about earlier, about teaching people about design now as like an adjunct faculty instructor. So there’s also been some really interesting overlap and ways in which I’m now delivering design that I never really considered possible up until recently. So that’s been interesting. But yeah, it’s been a really great growth and learning experience so far.

Maurice Cherry:

I kind of want to talk a little bit about that generalist part that you just mentioned there. I know there’s this book by David Epstein called “Range”. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it.

Manny Ikomi:

You know what, it sounds familiar now that you say that. I think I might have saved a sample to my Kindle at one point and never ended up buying it.

Maurice Cherry:

But it’s called “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World”. And it does sort of make the case for why generalists are…they’re really sort of sought after in a way. I’m curious though, because you do so much, are you finding there’s a particular part of UX that you prefer over others?

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah, that’s something I’ve been kind of thinking about a little bit lately ,and I guess due to the fact of my generalist nature, it kind of goes beyond just design and also into web development too. And so this area that I’ve been kind of occupying, at least not necessarily within IBM, but just in general as I upskill and just learn different things. I’m also like a self taught front-end web developer and so I’ve been thinking a lot about the intersections of experience, design and web development and the opportunities there for people who have that kind of hybrid skill set and can really, I guess, specialize in there. Despite considering myself a generalist in some ways, I specialize in others. So the areas that I think I’m really liking the most is research.

There are things that I’ve learned about design research and psychology and humans and their behaviors just from watching them interact with designs that I’ve made or others that I just find so fascinating that just kind of lends itself to my own just like innate sense of curiosity and wanting to learn. But then there’s also, interestingly enough, the complete flip side of that, which is like the more logistical, I guess, x and y’s ones and zeros codes and things like actually developing and building the things that I design in some tool and actually making it a real thing, because that’s kind of where I started. And that’s how I really transitioned into the work that I do now, is I started as a graphic designer and then I became interested in web design and then I would create these web designs, but I couldn’t actually put it on the Internet and have it be a website.

And all kind of roads, basically, no matter how hard I tried to avoid coding, were just like, basically “if you want to do it, you got to do it yourself.”

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Manny Ikomi:

So I learned coding through that and then now it’s just kind of been a skill that’s really stuck with me, I guess, along the way. It’s not a skill that I get to use or a muscle that I get to flex all the time, but it does surface in some other interesting ways, especially when it comes to collaborating with other developers and just thinking a little bit more logically about the designs that I’m creating and their ability to be feasibly implemented. So I would say between the design engineering part…so that kind of hybrid of making a design and actually being able to build it, but also some of the user research aspects of it and strategy, which I guess is kind of everything, but also specifically at the same time.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, I think it’s good to have that sort of generalist, I think, sort of mindset as well as skill set. I mean, back in the day when the Web was really just first starting to become something, everyone sort of had to become a generalist in some way. Like you designed it, you had to code it, you had to slice it up, et cetera, and put it on the Web. Of course, now it’s so interesting with companies because it seems like companies want specialists and yet when you look at their job descriptions, what they really want is a generalist that has a specialization. So they kind of want that…what do they call it?

Manny Ikomi:

T-shaped.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, like the T-shaped designer or whatever where you’ve got this broad set of skills. Like, I saw something for this company; they wanted like a social media manager, but then they also needed them to be a graphic designer and they also needed to know motion design. And I was like, those are entirely different things. What you want is a designer. It sounds like you want a designer that has social media experience, but they were like, no, we want a social media manager, but then you want this person doing motion design. I don’t know if that’s also just a byproduct of how messed up the job market is right now, but I’ve seen a lot of that.

Manny Ikomi:

Definitely, I’ve seen a lot of it.

Maurice Cherry:

What are some of the projects that you’ve worked on that you can talk about?

Manny Ikomi:

For a lot of reasons, obviously, I can’t talk about a lot of details. Probably the level to what I can say is the first project that I worked on while I was at IBM was basically in the realm of safety. And so the idea was that people who were working in a manufacturing facility could record and take pictures of safety violations or safety issues that they might find and then be able to report that through a system that we developed. So the application of actually reporting and observing safety issues, and then like a whole process and chain of people involved essentially like a service design around people on the front end actually recording issues, and then all the way in the back end, actually analyzing issues and doing some predictive analytics and things like that. And then the most recent project that I’m on right now with a local state government is basically helping them adopt human-centered design thinking processes and methods and frameworks. And the way that IBM does that is through their enterprise design thinking framework, which I’ve come to really like and appreciate. It was one of those things that I wish I had known about as a student and definitely kind of opened my world to the possibilities of what design can be and how it can manifest itself, I think. And then ever since then, it’s kind of just become this thing where I’m like, “wow, it’s more than just the artifacts that we make.”

It’s also the way that we think and how we convey our ideas to others, how people interpret our ideas. And it’s really just kind of expanded my view, I guess, of what it is. But yeah, those are probably the highest level I can get with those two specific projects. The first one I was on for just under a year, and that was pretty much the majority of my entry level experience, getting hired into IBM as an entry level professional hire. And that first project was really great. I had a great team that I worked with. I got to travel a little bit as part of it, and it was a really great experience. There were parts of it that were challenging, definitely, as with any project or design engagement. But ultimately I’m really thankful for that first project and the people that I got to work with and I’m hoping to reach out to them again the end of this year to just kind of check in and see where the work has gone since I’ve left the project.

And then this more recent project that I was talking about in terms of design adoption, that one just recently kicked off like a few weeks ago. So we’re still in the early stages, but the team is also looking really great to work with and so far it’s been great. So the work has just been very varied and interesting and every time I just feel like I’m learning something new or learning something different about design than I thought was ever possible, like maybe like two or three years ago. So it’s just fascinating.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, you talked just a little bit there about one of the projects having predictive analytics, which of course makes me think about sort of this current era that we’re in of artificial intelligence and machine learning. And there’s a number of different sort of cutting edge technologies now that have clearly bled into the mainstream that I think have been going on for a while, like AR, VR, et cetera, but now they’re becoming mainstream sort of things.

How do you see UX evolving with these new technologies?

Manny Ikomi:

I haven’t put too much thought into this. I think, obviously you know, obviously the glaring kind of observation here is with generative AI, right? And like ChatGPT and OpenAI and all this stuff that’s come out recently. I think ultimately, at least in the specific realm of generative AI, it kind of offers an opportunity to actually augment the work that we do as designers. And in some places, I guess, yeah, it will replace some jobs, but I think ultimately it will also kind of augment the way that we do work. And there are products now that are out that kind of help user researchers find patterns in their interviews and the transcripts using AI and things like that that are just really interesting. So there are areas where AI is kind of like enhancing the work that we do and allows us to kind of augment the work and be more productive. Things like AR and VR. I actually haven’t had too many experiences with, not really even in college. However, the Apple Vision Pro device that was announced by Apple earlier this year, I thought that was really interesting and had a bit of a rabbit hole of thoughts around that in terms of experience, design, and how.

For the longest time, a lot of our designs for user interfaces have kind of been at least for digital user interfaces have been kind of confined to these rectangles that you’re probably looking at right now in these screens. And so with AR and VR experiences and mixed reality with products like the Apple Vision Pro, it’s kind of like it allows us to step outside of those bounds, really, of that rectangle screen that we’re so used to designer for. And it really opens up a lot more possibilities for a lot more intuitive and natural interfaces for us that maybe we just have not developed even usability patterns for yet, or rules of thumb for. And so I find that like a very interesting area that’s kind of opening up. I imagine there are much more qualified people than me to talk about that, but it is something that I’ve been thinking about, especially since technology, it’s kind of hard to stop progress in that sense. And so as experience designers, I guess we’re also kind of well positioned in the sense that almost everything is an experience and almost everything is designed in one shape or another. I think we’ll end up having a hand in it and potentially not only just consuming the technology, but also producing ways for people to interact with it too.

Maurice Cherry:

I mean, I think, as you mentioned, the way that the technology is rapidly advancing, I mean, I feel like this time last year, companies were just starting to kind of test the waters a little bit to see what they could do. And now I think within that past year, every major tech company has made some sort of announcement about how they’re using AI or they’re using like a ChatGPT or some sort of generative type of new technology in the work that they’re doing, almost kind of shoehorning it in in some mean. Let’s just talk about the obvious — Google Search. Google Search now will bring up AI stuff right along with these SEO-optimized results that will come up in your regular search engine results page, and it’s a little difficult, I think sometimes to be able to discern what is good with that and what’s bad with that. Like, I think everyone’s trying to sort of race to find how they can use technology, how they can make it work without really stopping to think, is it necessary? Do we have to do this?

Is it just a competition thing? Like business competition? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I mean, I feel like after a while we’ll start seeing appliances that have AI. We already have stuff like smart fridges and smart toasters and stuff, but I don’t need my toaster to have ChatGPT or whatever, just toast the bread. I mean, that’s an extreme case, but you know what I mean.

Manny Ikomi:

I totally get what you mean. I think that’s where I have the negative sort of perspective on AI particularly, is really with any sort of emerging technology, especially for these really larger tech companies, like IBM included. it’s kind of like the rat race to figure out who’s going to be able to monetize it and make the most revenue with the technology and kind of have their moat. So to speak. In that case, that’s where we end up with like, oh, let’s just slap AI on everything and see what happens. Without really, to your point, stopping to think about the impact, whether it’s positive or negative, to the people that AI is being deployed on, in the same way that it can be a really immense help and benefit to society in some case, it can also be very dangerous. And I don’t think companies are really incentivized right now to really think about it in that more ethical or social impact lens because that’s just not going to make the money. And that’s the way the world turns, essentially, right?

Maurice Cherry:

So there’s this startup, I’ll say it now, I was thinking about if I should even mention this, but I’ll go ahead and say it. There’s a startup based out of Seattle that does like AI text to speech. Essentially they cloned one of the host voices of Planet Money for NPR and did like a whole episode with this person’s voice and it sounds pretty mean. You know, I think there are still going to be certain eccentricities in the human voice that humans will be able to discern, but of course the models are getting better for it and things like that. But they’re one of the few companies, the company is called WellSaid Labs. They’re one of the few companies I’ve seen that actually has like a code of ethics behind the work that they do because it could be so easy for someone to use their service that they offer use that technology for extremely nefarious purposes.

Manny Ikomi:

Right?

Maurice Cherry:

But they actually have a code of ethics behind about what customers do with that technology and how they even plan on implementing and using it, which I would like to see more companies if they’re going to be implementing. These features I would like to also have them talk about, like we said before, those ramifications of what it means to include all of this. And who is it really serving? And this is something that we saw with, like, Bitcoin and with Web three and all this sort of stuff, where the use of all this generative AI also uses a lot of natural resources, which is something that I don’t think we regularly would think about because computers have been such an ever present just an ever present sort of thing. But I remember I was reading something I want to say, I don’t know, a couple of days ago about how Microsoft’s water usage or something has increased by 30% because of the fact that they’re like using AI within oh wait, I’m looking at it now. AI usage fuel spike in Microsoft’s water consumption, it spiked 34% because they’re using it in all these other types of programs and stuff, which you would think water, why water? But it takes more servers, space and power to do all this AI stuff, which means it has to be cooled in some way with air conditioning. It’s all tied in, so it’s not really happening in a vacuum. I would just like to see more companies talk about the ethics behind why they’re doing what they’re doing instead of just rolling out innovation after innovation that I guess we’re supposed to OOH and awe over in some fancy presentation.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah. My perspective is obviously kind of biased because I work for IBM. But recently, with the whole Watson X announcement thing that you may or may not have heard of, I think part of it, and IBM does, I think. Have pretty decent programming and ethics and training around the use of AI, because that’s kind of like, one of our strategic areas that we’re trying to be leaders in. And so the whole rollout for Watson X was kind of centered around three different areas. There was Watson X AI data and then governance. And governance, I think, is really that part of it that kind of talks about making sure that it’s responsible and transparent and explainable. And then we also have even like an enterprise design thinking course where the methodology for design thinking is tailored around.

Like if you want to implement AI and you’re using a design thinking framework or initiative to do that, there’s also training that’s kind of specific to that as well. That kind of goes into some of the what is the ideal outcome or impact that we want to have, and is AI really even necessary for that in the first place? Right, so it wants you to think about those things. Now, in my personal experience, have know deployed AI in some way with IBM? Not really. So I haven’t actually gotten the chance to user these learning materials, but I think at the very least, they’re there as a resource for us employees to use. And it is in IBM’s interest for us to be very smart about the user of AI because in some ways we are kind of seen as leaders or innovators in that space. There is definitely an aspect of companies need to have more ethics and intent around how they’re using AI, where it gets deployed, what the impact is, who’s using it, who’s being affected by it. I think I would like to see more from that from every company, IBM included. But from what I’ve seen so far, I think at least at a programming and learning level, IBM seems to be very aware of that.

And it’s also from a risk and compliance perspective because we’re mostly operate as a B2B or enterprise to enterprise business. Privacy, security and compliance are things that really large businesses that IBM really care about because it kind of is what amounts to their risk and being litigated against. Right. And so when we deploy AI for a client that uses IBM’s technology, we do have to have a certain amount of ownership over what the technology does and who it impacts because we’re. Like, the designers and deployers of those things.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, we all have to, I just think, be a bit more cognizant of the usage of these tools and what they mean and what the greater sort of impact of it is. But I think we’ve nerded out enough about that. So let’s kind of shift the focus here and talk more about you. Let’s learn more about Manny. Tell me about where you’re from.

Manny Ikomi:

I’m mostly from the Boston area. I grew up mostly in towns called Saugas and Malden, and a little bit in Revere. And that’s kind of like, known as, like, the North Shore area of Boston, I guess you could say. But I’ve pretty much lived like, within 20 to 15 minutes outside of Boston for my entire life. And I’ve worked around the same area pretty much my entire life. I went to school around the area pretty much throughout my entire life, too.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, growing up, were you always kind of interested in technology? Was it something that your parents kind of tried to get you into?

Manny Ikomi:

I would say I’ve always been interested in it. I think what led me to becoming a designer and my interest in it was that combination of being able to merge my creative interests and creative outputs and curiosity with more technical implementations and things like that. I remember in high school, I went to a vocational high school for context. So we had kind of like vocational programs as part of the regular high school programming.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Manny Ikomi:

And so that’s kind of where I got my first taste of, like, I can be creative and make something and have it be like a physical, tangible thing. And I just thought that was so cool because, one, I was really bad at drawing, even though I was trying to be creative. But I did find that I had an affinity for things like the software and tooling that was available in the computer labs that we have. The shop was called Graphic Communications, by the way. So that’s kind of what led into my whole six years at a printing company and things like that. But that’s really where I started to develop that interest for the combination of creativity and technology. Although at the time the technology was printing, not as we would think about it, I guess today from a UX standpoint.

Maurice Cherry:

Let’s talk more about Bunker Hill. Of course, you mentioned earlier that you are a teacher there, which we’ll get into, but that’s where you started off in college. You went to Bunker Hill Community College, majored in graphic arts and visual communications. Tell me, what was your time like there? Do you feel like it really kind of prepared you?

Manny Ikomi:

Bunker Hill was kind of interesting because I was kind of facing some, I guess, conflicting realities. That was actually a very huge period of growth for me, I think, relatively to where I’m at now. If I really reflect on it so with Bunker Hill, I think the programming that they had there at the time was pretty good. I think from a design perspective, it was definitely skewed more towards those kind of typical graphic design programs where your first year is kind of like your foundation year, you’re required to do a whole bunch of drawing and painting and kind of like more artsy stuff. And then in your, I guess, second year of the Associates program, that’s where you start getting into more specific studio level courses around typography, which is where I think my trajectory in design kind of started to skyrocket when I finally recognized the importance of it and my ability to influence that as a designer. Now that’s always the one thing I tell people if they learn nothing about design is Typography is like 90 or 80% of the stuff that you need to know if you want to become a designer or at least design something well if you’re not formally trained as one from there. I spent quite a few years there because I was a part time student and then I was working full time at the Print Shop, and that was mostly because I couldn’t afford to go to a full four year institution. I didn’t really feel comfortable with the idea of taking out a whole bunch of student loans.

And although I had pretty decent support from my parents, it wasn’t something that I also felt like, I guess I didn’t want them to be fiscally responsible. I don’t really think we were in a position to do that, especially at the time that I was doing community college classes. So it was really just kind of me like, finding my way, figuring it out. When I first started there, I tried to take twelve credits worth of courses and work full time at the print shop, which lasted maybe all of like four to six weeks before I was, this is definitely not going to work because that was just a lot. And then finally I found like a good balance between two classes a semester, which ultimately ended up requiring me to go twice as long to finish my associate’s degree. So it actually took me four years as opposed to two, but for the most part I was able to go through community college without any loans whatsoever, which was extremely helpful to me. Now I’m thanking myself much later in the future for being smart enough to think about that during that time because I had to be so, I guess, independent in that sense and really think about myself and my needs and ultimately my own personal finances. That’s kind of where I started to really think about my personal finance money, what success meant to me, becoming more financially literate in the decisions that I was making and the impact that it might have on me later.

Learning about debt and compound interest and investing and all those things. And luckily I made a lot of really smart choices during that time to the point where now, financially, I’m doing things less so out of fear, which was kind of like the original motivation for me to do that because I didn’t want to be broke. And I had some minorly traumatic experience around involving money and things like that when I was growing up. So it kind of started from that place of fear. And then now that I’m finally in a place where I feel much more well established, much more secure, not only in my professional life, but also my personal life and just who I am, those things are more so. They’re not top of mind for me and I don’t have to obsess about them, but I have enough of a foundation to think about it more as an opportunity rather than a risk, if that makes sense.

Maurice Cherry:

No, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, college is a transitory time for a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. And for you, you were going to college and working at the same time. Tell me about how you sort of balance that.

Manny Ikomi:

I was not very good at it. I guess work-life balance, I guess, is something that I’ve always kind of struggled with a little bit. It originally stemmed from like, I always need to have something to do. I always need to be busy, I always need to be productive. And that was kind of a very unhealthy way of thinking about it because I was kind of motivated by that fear of not having money or opportunity. But the way that I balanced it was thankfully the company that I was working with at the time, they were actually pretty supportive of me going to college and doing what I needed to do. So there were some days where I had class during the middle of the day and they had no problem with me leaving the office to I was working in the office five days a week for that job. They had no problem with me leaving work to go to class for like four hours and then do what I needed to do to get my degree at Bunker Hill. And so that was really helpful because it gave me a lot of autonomy and really, as long as I got my work done, it really wasn’t a big deal for them.

So that was like a huge help. And I know a lot of people just don’t have that sort of opportunity or luxury. That being said, they definitely did not subsidize, nor were they in a position to help me subsidize my education, but it definitely gave me, I think, the flexibility I needed. And then it was really up to me to just be very good about time management, make sure I was keeping up with my assignments, making sure my work obligations were taken care of. Sometimes that required really long nights. Other times it required really early mornings. I wasn’t as much of a social butterfly, or I didn’t really get to do all of the social things that are part of a college experience that people might want or be accustomed to. I didn’t really have a dormitory experience.

There were sacrifices in that, but I think ultimately I came out better for it, and I would definitely do it again if I had to. I just might be a little bit more forgiving with myself in terms of working myself too hard, I guess you could say.

Maurice Cherry:

Trust me, you missed nothing about the dorm experience. There’s nothing about that you have missed. I don’t know if you have siblings or not, but you’ve missed nothing. Consider yourself lucky.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah. It ended up working out, I think, a little bit, because once I transferred to Lesley and finished my bachelor’s degree there, although I didn’t get the full know experience there either, I did end up, you know, slowly making friends throughout the entire college experience who did have the dorm life. And we did go over each other’s places and play video games and hang out and do homework together. And not all of them were from the same college. But Boston is…there’s a lot of college-level institutions here, so I got to do some of that. But I guess you’re right. I didn’t really miss much, either.

Maurice Cherry:

I feel like Boston is a pretty extremely diverse college mean. Of course, you have the well known colleges like MIT, Harvard, et cetera, but then you’ve got, like you said, Lesley, you got Bunker Hill. There’s other universities in and around the sort of Boston metro area, so it makes sense that there would be a lot of commingling like that. Yeah, I mean, Atlanta, in a way is sort of like that, too. I mean, I went to Morehouse and there were opportunities where you would, of course, hang out with students from Georgia Tech, from Georgia State. Spelman is right across the street, Clark-Atlanta is right across the street. So you’re just all kind of commingling together. I mean, Atlanta really is a big college town. I don’t know if a lot of folks realize that it’s a pretty unique college town because the number of HBCUs we have, but it’s really a big college town, so you have all these opportunities to meet people doing all sorts of things at all sorts of different places.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah, I never really thought of ATL like that, to be honest. I think one person who I met was from the Savannah College of Art and Design, which I think is in Georgia, if correctly based out of Savannah, Georgia.

Maurice Cherry:

We have a campus here in Atlanta, too, right? Yeah. And you mentioned this kind of before we started recording, but one of your professors at Lesley was actually a recent guest on Revision Path.

Manny Ikomi:

Yes. So, yeah, shout out to Shanae Chapman. Ever since you reached out to me and I discovered the podcast, I’ve definitely gone in and done my due diligence. And I just think what you’re doing is really cool again. And it’s really kind of surreal, actually, I think, to kind of be part of this in the same way that they were, knowing that some of those people I either looked up to or I learned from or had some sort of influence in my life, personally or professionally. And we’ve also had some other IBM designers on the podcast as, like, I listened to a couple episodes way back with Oen Hammonds and Shani Sandy, who are both, like, design executives at IBM still. Yeah, it’s kind of a very small, interesting world, I guess, as we were speaking earlier. But, yeah, it was a really full circle moment.

I haven’t talked to Shanae in a little while, but recently we did kind of have a bit of a go back and forth because she was interested in the talk that I had done earlier this year. But, yeah, I just think it’s really cool and it’s honestly kind of an honor to be doing this right now.

Maurice Cherry:

I’m kind of…I have a question about sort of…I just kind of want to go back to your college experience for a bit because, like we said before, you were working and you were going to college at the same time. What made you want to continue your studies in design? Because it sounds like you already had — if I’m wrong here, please correct me — but it sounds like you had a nice kind of set up because the company was very flexible about you going to class and still working for them. It sounded like they really supported you. What made you want to continue your educational career?

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah, so that was a combination of quite a few things. I think, for context, the company that I worked at for six years, it was a small, family-owned business. We weren’t like some large…we weren’t like a Vistaprint or anything like that. And although it was a really great experience, I think I hit my ceiling there in terms of growth and opportunity relatively quickly, probably in hindsight, within the first three years. But the reason I stayed was, like you said, because of that flexibility that I really liked, and also the pay was decent enough to get me through college, do the things that I needed to do, have a little fun on the side. It was good for what it was.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Manny Ikomi:

And then I think as I started to become more interested in things like interactive design and user experience and things like that, that I really didn’t even know existed as career paths, really, I kind of stumbled upon them by virtue of learning how to code and kind of self teaching myself that stuff on the side. Hill I was working there. I just basically hit a ceiling there. And then when COVID happened. I graduated Bunker Hill in the fall of 2019, and I had applied to Lesley. I had got my transfer papers, and thankfully they had a matriculation agreement, which made it really easy for me that they just take your associate’s degree, no questions asked, that the credits all get applied where they should, and you start as a junior in their bachelor’s program. And at the time, I was reluctant about doing it because it was going to require that I took out student loans, but I did get a really great scholarship. And the fact that they took all of my credits was really huge, because when I did the math, financially speaking, it actually made it lower cost for me to go there and do the program that I wanted than, say, to transfer and go to a state school like Salem State or Mass Art were probably the other alternatives that I looked into.

So even though the sticker price of Lesley was a lot higher, it was actually going to be net cheaper because of the scholarship that I got. And they took all of my credits, which some of the other colleges may not have been willing to do.

Maurice Cherry:

That’s great.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah. And so from there, that kind of made the decision really easy for me. And then when COVID happened, the world blew up in the spring of 2020. I actually decided to take a gap for like a semester and then start in the fall of 2020. Of course, when I had planned to do that, I didn’t know COVID was going to blow up the entire world, but thus it did. And so in some ways, I actually kind of avoided that initial shock to my education experience, because, like everywhere else in the world, everyone was trying to figure out how to do virtual class instruction if they’ve never done that before. There was a whole bunch of new challenges that happened as a result of that. And so I kind of skid by those for the most part.

And then when I started in fall of 2020, I was still working at the print shop. But because I was working at the print shop remotely now, because it just wasn’t safe for us to be in the office, still, I was able to do Lesley full time and work remotely for the print shop.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Manny Ikomi:

And then in 2021, in January, because my hours and income from the print shop was drastically reduced just because business was slow and it was really tough time for everyone. And so, thankfully, I had prepared for some of this. Because going back to financial literacy stuff, I had prepared an emergency fund and kind of knew, worst case scenario, I would be able to make it through college for the most part, even if I wasn’t working a full time gig. And I could just find maybe some freelance work and stuff on the side. So in 2021, I decided to leave. I put in my notice. I left on really great terms with them overall. Actually, recently, I ended up asking them to do some print work for me for a side thing with IBM.

But, yeah, from there it was just like full steam ahead with Lesley. I was like, I just want to get my education done. Out of the way. I know interactive design is the area that IBM interested in. I know it will somehow bring me to some interesting path with coding in some way. And at the time, I didn’t really know what user experience was until a particular studio course that I had, which just so happened to be with two IBM distinguished designers who were my faculty and they were the ones who ended up asking me to apply, like, a year later when I was a senior into the role that I’m in now, essentially.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, nice. I was going to ask how you sort of came across IBM with the work that you were doing, but it sounds like you already had this kind of support system in.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah, I think it really started kind of like, way back in vocational school because I had a pretty good technical understanding of the tooling and the software and some of the processes for design in terms of the tactical aspects and visual design, working in hind design, all that stuff. And so for me, the real value that I got out of college was the networking, the mentorship, the one on one time. And a lot of the theory and history behind design was most valuable to me, so I could really focus on that rather than trying to struggle with some of the tooling and learning new methods that I was already familiar with. And so when it came time to really work on projects, the technical aspects of doing the design work and making the artifacts and deliverables was actually relatively easy for me. What I was most challenged by was, like, the strategic parts of it and kind of training myself to think like a designer, not just make pretty designs.

Maurice Cherry:

I hear you. Okay. And now, let’s talk about what you sort of mentioned before about teaching at Bunker Hill. I feel like that might be an interesting experience to go back to your alma mater years later and now teach. What made you decide to go that route?

Manny Ikomi:

It’s definitely been a full circle moment that I’m still kind of, I guess, pinching myself for a long time ago. So when I had graduated from Bunker Hill in 2019, a professor of mine who I developed, like, a really great relationship with while I was there for four years, she asked me when I graduated. She said, when you finish your bachelor’s degree, I would love for you to come back and teach the college. And when she said that to me, I was kind of like, what? Because I was like, I just never really considered that as a possibility before. And then ever since she said that, I have kind of noticed getting really positive signals from people that I might be good at doing that. And so over, like, I guess it was kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way, where if I found it interesting and I thought it was nice, maybe it would happen. I maintained a relationship with that professor for quite a while, and even while I was going through Lesley and doing things, I would always go back to the college and even before I got the role there, do design crits with some of their students and provide networking and opportunities and portfolio reviews, things like that, to kind of give back.

And earlier this year, I had went to a design conference. It was like the first in-person design conference I got to go to since COVID kind of unleashed everything she had just so happened to be there. The professor ended up asking me to teach, and we were just kind of, like, catching up a little bit because we hadn’t talked in a little while, but we email back and forth every once in a while, and she had told me, like, hey, we have adjunct positions opening. We’re looking for people to teach certain courses. I want you to apply, basically. And even still, I was kind of like, well, I’m still just barely my first year into this role at IBM. Am I really even qualified or ready to do this? I was hoping, I think, realistically, to get another maybe four years or five years or so in the industry and doing more practice as a practitioner. But I kind of just kind of said to myself, self, take your own advice.

Like, if the opportunity presents itself, just apply and see what happens, just like I did with IBM. And so, long story short, it was like the worst that they can say is no. Right?

Maurice Cherry:

Right.

Manny Ikomi:

So I applied. I did the interview, I did the teaching demo, and then, yeah, now here I am. So I’m only teaching one class. It’s Wednesday evenings, which works really well with my schedule, considering I also tend to go into the office on Wednesdays, and it’s right down the street from my office pretty much too. And the topic that I’m teaching is interactive design, which is kind of right up my alley since that’s what I studied in college, and now that’s what I’m doing for my job, pretty much. So the stars aligned, I guess you could say.

Maurice Cherry:

How’s the teaching experience been so far?

Manny Ikomi:

So far it’s been, I think, a net positive. I think the teaching aspects of it, working with students, kind of like digging back in some of my own archives and coming up with my own content and assignments. I also spent a lot of time reaching out to some of my own professors and also students that I went to Bunker Hill with and at Lesley as well and kind of doing my own design research. I kind of just approached it as like, well, if I was to design a student experience, I just kind of treated it like any other experience design project, except my users are now students. So approaching it with that mindset kind of really helped me. And from there, I think the parts of it that I like are really going well as far as in class instruction, working with the students, providing feedback on their work. I think it’s probably one of the most valuable things I got out of my design education is like, getting critiques and feedback from other people and getting that other perspective on your work that you might not otherwise get if you’re trying to learn by yourself. And then the parts of it that I don’t like so much really are kind of like the more logistics and administrative stuff around it.

I really struggled with grading in the first two weeks to kind of figure out, like, I probably need a rubric. And then also the learning management system that we use isn’t the most user friendly thing either, which is kind of meta hilarious in a sense because I’m trying to teach my students how to design interactive systems like that. There are parts of it that are bad that come with the good, but I’d say overall it’s been going well. And despite currently maybe potentially having to fail one student if they don’t show up next week, it’s been going overwhelmingly good, I think. But ideally I would like to make it to the end of semester without failing anyone. I definitely did not set out to do that when I started teaching, so it’s kind of unfortunate that they’re just not participating or engaging. And I certainly don’t want to make any assumptions as to why they’re not doing it or assuming that they’re a delinquent of some kind because they may have things going on as a student that I just don’t know about and probably never will. But I did try to make an effort to reach out to that person and be as supportive as possible, as opposed to being punitive and penalizing, despite having to uphold the rules of my syllabus in the classroom and things like that.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I was an adjunct for two years. I think I taught for two years. It’s 2012 through 2014, I think. I taught a web development course to business majors, and it was a BIS course, like business information systems. And I get that struggle that you’re talking about, like, you go into it. Well, for me, I think the Virgo in me wanted to be like, “hey, this is all wrong.” Like, the way that you’re teaching. I remember going to the dean, like, the first week saying, “we are setting these students up to fail if this is what we’re teaching them, because this is not what we use out in the real world.” Like, if this is what you’re teaching business students, they’re going to go to a company and get laughed at, or they’re going to try to apply for a job and no one’s going to hire them.

And I offered to redo the whole rubric. I’m talking about the grading, the tests, the lessons. I was like, “I’ll redo it and make this into my course that I think they should have.” And they were like, “okay, it’s fine. We don’t care.” And also in that same vein, yeah, you go into it not wanting to fail anyone, and it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. It’s one of those sad eventualities, and it’s because, oh, how could I put this and I don’t mean this in a derisive way, but students will always try to get one over on their professor. They always will. It doesn’t matter how old they are or anything. They will always try to get one over on their professor. They will give you all kinds of excuses just out of everywhere as to why something did get done, why something didn’t get done. In this case, the syllabus is your friend. The syllabus is the contract between the professor and the student to say, if you’re in this class, these are the things that you have to do in order to succeed in the class. And we had office hours. Students would come to office hours and would wonder why. And it’s not that office hours were included in their grade, but then they would come at the last minute, like, “oh, well, can we meet on this day?” I’m like, “well, that’s not my office hours. “My office hours are on the syllabus because I’m also a working designer, so I can’t go out of my way.” You want to help the students because you’re their teacher, so I get that.

But it’s going to be an inevitability that you’re going to have to fail someone. Students are going to go cry bloody murder to the dean or to whatever, because you’re not fair. You’re a bad teacher. They’re going to leave bad reviews. It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen.

The best thing that you can do is to follow your syllabus, teach the students that are receptive, because there’s just going to be some people you’re just not going to reach. Because I’m assuming you’re doing this in person. Yes, there’s just going to be people that you’re just not going to reach. I think ours was a mix of in person and online, and the online students were the worst. I mean, copying straight from Wikipedia. I’d run it through TurnItIn and get 99% plagiarized. I’m just like, oh my God. And they would swear to you up and down that they wrote it. And it’s like, “I can look at the quality of your written posts in the forum and tell that you didn’t write this. Don’t lie to me.” But it’s one of those things, unfortunately, that’s just going to happen.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah, it’s interesting that you say that because one of the things that I had done that I had conversations with some people about when I was developing all the content, because the college basically kind of they didn’t really direct me on. Basically, it was like, here’s the course description. Here’s a sample of a syllabus that’s been used previously. Make it your own. So I had a lot of academic freedom, I guess, in that sense of being able to develop the materials the way I wanted to do it. Because, like you were kind of saying when I took this very same course when I was a student, it was not very good. One of the courses I actually took ended up being so bad that I actually went to the dean as a student, complained about the course, got a refund and then still got the credits for the course.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

Manny Ikomi:

But I was also a fairly advanced student because I had already had prior experience. I had already kind of known some of the things that were out there that were happening. I also spent a lot of time investing in my learning and education outside of the classroom. So I was very aware of where the college was doing well and not doing so well at the time. And so now coming back into it, I kind of had the same mindset of like, there is no way I’m doing it this way, I’m going to do it my way. Which ultimately creates a lot of work for me in terms of having to come up with all the content and things like that. But it’s also just been kind of like an interesting way to think about my design skills in a different light in terms of designing for instruction and learning as opposed to making profit off of people, I guess. Yeah, so that’s been kind of interesting.

And then on the topic of plagiarism, one of the areas that I talked to people about is, like, using generative AI. I kind of went into it with a mindset of, like, I would rather students use it and use it liberally and experiment with it and not be afraid of it. But come to me with questions because I think ultimately, if I was to put in my syllabus, there’s no use of generative AI allowed one. It’s really hard to detect whether someone’s using it or not, unless, to your point, you’ve kind of gotten to know them a few weeks in. You can kind of see where people are at and kind of what they’re capable of to a certain extent. Right. But for me, it was kind of just like, I know. And I told them on the first day, I was like, when we were going over key parts of the syllabus, I was like, I know that you are going to use generative AI probably whether I allow you to or not.

So just use it, but be conscious of how you’re using it. Cite your usage of it when you do, and provide documentation to me so that I can see how you’re using it. Because there may be parts like kind of we were talking about where it could be harmful or misleading or maybe it’s not giving them the right information that they need and things like that. So that’s been kind of an interesting thing to also navigate. There are a few students who I suspect of using generative AI without disclosing it according to the rules of our syllabus. But for now, I’m kind of letting it slide, mostly because I just haven’t gotten that sense of familiarity with where they’re at and being able to tell one way or another. And I also have seen the negative effects of accusing students of plagiarizing their work or doing something that they are capable of that you just don’t believe. And that can leave a really lasting and poor impression on students because I remember experiencing that once a little bit where because I was working at the printing company, I had access to all kinds of printing equipment, tools, materials, and quality paper, quality design.

I also did a lot of prepress. And so I knew what it took to design something and actually have it be printed in a way that is high quality. And for one of my first projects I did that, I tried to pull out all the stops, like my work let me use what was available. And when I brought in my project, I remember they didn’t believe the work that I did was really mine and that I actually bound the book, printed the book, designed it, and did all of that. And although it wasn’t as relevant to the conversation on generative AI, I still remember that to this day and feeling like, well, if I’m in a student in this scenario who’s really excelling at their projects and doing to the point where you don’t even believe the work is mine, then why am I here, right? You know what I mean? So I try to be very careful about who I accuse or not of using it. And I think ultimately at the end, if they are going to use generative AI to essentially cheat their way through my course, they’re not going to get the return on the educator investment that they’re putting in. So I think ultimately it all ends up in my favor anyway, but the initial impact of that may work in their favor in the short term.

Maurice Cherry:

I’m glad I didn’t teach in the age of AI. I’m so glad because I can only imagine now that it’s and I mean, that was sort of a thing that came up a lot as sort of a stopping point for educators. Like, I think maybe about a year or so ago when Chad GPT really started to become used more commonly was in educational spaces. Professors really being like, prohibiting it, of course, but then also curious about it because the work is sometimes actually kind of good.

And yeah, it’s like if a student is going to mortgage their future away by using generative AI, why are you in school? Why are you even doing it? I mean, I taught business students, so these weren’t even design students. So maybe I came into it with a little bit of a bias because they really were just like, “look, this is an elective. I just need to take this so I can get my business degree and go get my MBA or whatever.” They didn’t really care about design. And not to say that I wanted to make them care about design, but I also didn’t want them to think this was going to just be a cakewalk for them.

Manny Ikomi:

Right.

Maurice Cherry:

Not to say I made it hard on well, I might have made it a little hard on purpose. I would kind of change the course as things went along because like I said, I came in and I really wanted to change things up. I would edit it from like, semester to semester. I would change some things up. And I remember this one student who I failed three times. Not on purpose. I didn’t fail them on purpose. What I’m trying to say but they failed the course three times, and it was because I would change the course slightly, like change certain things, and they would keep using the same homework and materials from the first time that they failed the course.

I would change the nature of the assignment, and they would just turn in the same thing. I’m like, did you not read what the assignment was? Why would you turn in something that’s completely different? Just…students.

Manny Ikomi:

Oh, my God, that’s so funny. I hope a year or two from now, when I’ve hopefully taught this class again, more in the future, that I don’t have students like that because I am a very patient and lenient person, and I often see the big picture of these things, I think, more than my students do. But I really hope I don’t get to that point because that’s when it’ll really start. Like, the shade will start coming out and…are you for real for real? You’re just gonna submit the whole same thing? I really hope I don’t get to that.

Maurice Cherry:

I don’t think you’ll get to that point. Again, you’re teaching design students, so they want to be there for that for the most part. I think you’ll be fine.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah, it is a requirement. And one of the things that I did on our first day was do, like, a little intro survey to kind of understand where they’re at in terms of their interest in the topic of the course, but also how many hours they’re working outside of the college versus how many credits they’re taking. Mostly to make sure I’m saving students from the mistakes that I made when I started college, because I had no idea what I was doing. But it’s also just good contextually for me to know a little bit about each individual student because that may be one reason or another why they aren’t participating as much or miss a few deadlines here and there and things like that. So it’s good for me to have that kind of in mind here and there.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice. Now along with teaching, along with your work at IBM, you not only stream on Twitch, which I really want to get into, but you have a podcast also. What made you decide to kind of branch out into these other forms of media?

Manny Ikomi:

The way that I describe it to people is…I just like making shit and putting it on the internet. Oh, sorry, I don’t know if I’m allowed to swear, but…

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, you’re fine, you can curse. It’s fine.

Manny Ikomi:

So that’s really kind of the mindset that I guess I kind of approached it with is just, I just want to make stuff and put it out there. Well, I guess I’ll start with, I don’t know, should I start with streaming or the podcast? Which one do you want?

Maurice Cherry:

Let’s talk about streaming first.

Manny Ikomi:

Okay, so for streaming, the way that it kind of happened is during the pandemic, like at the height of lockdown and quarantines and things like that, we were all stuck inside for the most part. And originally I had started as a viewer on Twitch like most people do, and I would primarily watch people play video games and they were mostly within the queer community. I am a gay man for context. I don’t know if I talked about that yet, but yeah, I’m queer as fuck. And I just started watching queer streamers on Twitch who play games and I started playing with them and then I forget what it was that really kind of crossed me over in terms of the boundary of going from Twitch to entertainment, but now as a way to learn more about web development and design, because there are a few of us that stream about design on Twitch, myself included. And then there’s also quite a few and quite a bit more people who stream web development and software engineering within the software and game development category, which is typically where I stream as well. And probably like a year into being a viewer, that’s when I started to think about, well, I’m stuck at home, I’m doing some freelance and consulting work here and there, I’m doing my own thing. Let me just start like a co-working stream and see what happens and just share my work.

And then, because I had been so embedded in the Twitch community and the streamers that I had watched some of which who were still very much my good Judys, as I like to say to this day, even outside of streaming. One of them actually, coincidentally ended up living down the street from me during parts of the COVID quarantine, which is also hilariously coincidental. But those people from the queer gaming community really gave me the viewership that I needed and that initial push of support to become a Twitch affiliate. So that’s basically at the point where you can monetize your stream a little bit, you can have subscribers make emotes and do things like that. That happened within the first two weeks of me streaming and everyone was just so extremely supportive despite having little to no idea what my content was or what I was actually streaming because I was streaming my design work and some of my process. And then one thing led to another and probably now I’m a little bit more removed from that kind of like queer gaming part, but I still do participate in some of the communities and lurk in some streams here that I like to support here and there.

But then I started to really find more of the software and game development community and all of the streamers, and now some of them are also like my friends. I met some of them at TwitchCon last year for the first time, which was really great, and actually this year, later this month or in October, I’m going to TwitchCon again and we’re actually going to do a panel about programming on Twitch. And so I don’t have a significantly huge viewership around my stream or anything like that, but the people who do come and who hang out and who stay, whether it’s other streamer or viewers that I’ve had for years now, some of them have been subscribed to me for over, like, three years. And I’m like, oh, wow, this is crazy. Thank you so much for your support. And some of those people still to this day have no idea what I do, but they just support me and who I am and what I like to share and put out there. And so it’s been a really interesting and net positive way of putting myself out there. Kind of like how you’re talking about in terms of building my personal brand, I guess you could say.

It’s kind of taken on, I guess its own thing, I guess. I definitely don’t do it as much as I used to just because now that I work full time and IBM doing my own course, it’s really hard for me to stream on a regular basis as much as I used to. And so as a result, my viewership and other metrics have kind of gone down since the kind of height of my streaming career, if you want to call it that. But I still do it for funsies and I always did it for fun and I never really cared about the metrics anyway because all I really just wanted to do was just make stuff and put it on the Internet. And so streaming just happened to be the lowest barrier to entry, coincidentally enough for me to do that because when you’re live, you’re live. It’s not like a recording like this where maybe we could potentially edit out some things or something like that. For me, it’s like what you see is what you get. And also, at the same token, I don’t have to worry about editing, I don’t have to worry about scripting or being like a perfectionist on it, which kind of can take away the fun because sometimes I do have that nature about my work.

And so for me, it’s a fun way to put myself out there to share what I know. And also it’s part of the reason why I think I’ve become a bit of a better public speaker, why IBM more willing to engage with public speaking opportunities, do things like this. And also people have learned things from my stream, which kind of goes back to the whole you might be a good teacher someday. And so people on my stream have literally told me like, oh, I’ve learned so much from you, or thank you so much for your feedback on my work, or something like that. And it’s just become a really positive outlet, I think, for me whenever I get to do it, just not as frequently as I used to.

Maurice Cherry:

Is there like a big web development community on Twitch? I mean, like you said before, there’s obviously gamers and such, but it sounds like there might be a pretty big community there for web development.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah, I would say so. We’re relatively unknown, I would say, in terms of the grand scheme of Twitch, but there are some people who have an upwards of an average of 200 viewers and there are some people who have upwards of 1500 viewers when they’re live.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

Manny Ikomi:

And they could be doing anything from coding in Rust or building a silly website with animations and things like that. One of my really good friends, mewtru, I think she’s like the perfect example of how you can be a streamer and a content creator and have fun and just like, she’s just really awesome. And I met her through streaming and we’ve kind of become good friends since then. And we’ve always been supportive of one another despite not really even knowing or meeting each other up until Twitch last year. And so, yeah, it’s just interactions like that with people, whether they’re fellow streamers or viewers, it creates a community around what we’re doing. And even though I’m a designer mostly by trade, I still kind of, I guess, hold my own in terms of programming and web development. And my stream is kind of unique in the sense where I add a design lens to things from that. Again, how are you talking about the design, engineering and hybrid perspective that I think a lot of people in the category may not have except for a very small handful of us.

Maurice Cherry:

Twitch sounds like one of the rare places online now, like in 2023, one of the rare places where you can really carve out a niche for yourself. Because with things like Instagram and Twitter and things like that, a lot of stuff is very algorithmically driven. And it feels like, at least from what you’re telling me, Twitch is really more community based in that way.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah, I mean, that’s actually perfect because that was going to be like my next soapbox to get on. When it comes to creating content on Twitch is…the way that I frame it to people is Twitch is kind of unique as its own brand of social media, like you were kind of thinking about earlier, because it has kind of its own unique culture, to be quite honest around it with emotes and chat and how people interact with the streamer while they’re live. There’s also the kind of aspects like you were talking about around community where people who are creating content on TikTok and YouTube and podcasts and even blog articles, any form of media that you put out there. A lot of it is a one way interaction and a lot of people do it with the goal of building an audience that then they can later monetize. But with streaming on Twitch specifically, what I found is that what you’re really doing is building a community because discovery and algorithms and search on Twitch kind of suck, to be quite honest. That’s why a lot of people don’t really know there’s a whole community of us out there. But for the ones that do know and for the ones that discover us, they tend to stick around and they tend to support what we do, even if they may not like all of the content that we stream.

When I first started streaming one day out of the week, on Sundays, I would just stream League of Legends, which is a game that I like to play for fun with some of my friends. It had nothing to do with the content that I streamed two days a week during the day when I was coworking and things like that. But for the people who wanted that, they came and they stuck around and then when I was streaming other stuff, sometimes they would still come and hang out anyway. And so it really builds on that two-way interaction that I think a lot of people don’t get from other social media platforms that Twitch is really good at enabling. And in hindsight, it also kind of really aligns with, I guess, desire, you could say, to have a two way interaction with people and not feel like it’s just a transaction of like this post or subscribe to my newsletter and things like that. It really is a two-way interaction and I’ve created some really great friends out of it, some of which have helped me with the course that I’m doing right now, some of which I’ve helped with their content and vice versa. And it’s really created a nice little community around what I do, even if my particular streamer and viewership isn’t as strong as it used to be, I guess.

Maurice Cherry:

Interesting. There was a time when I was thinking of doing a live show via Twitch for Revision Path. Like I was thinking of doing Revision Path Live like one day a week. This was before the pandemic. If we manage to get the resources to be able to do it, I would love to try to branch into doing something like that because like you mentioned, it’s a totally different sort of dimension in terms of reaching people and then also in terms of communicating.

Like this conversation that you and I are having will be edited. If it was live, it could be a totally different thing in terms of where the conversation goes and what we talk about or anything like that. So I’ve been thinking about it, I’ve really been putting a little bit of thought into it, if we are able to do it. I’m kind of working on some things behind the scenes just in terms of securing funding for the show and stuff. So I would love to do a live thing maybe like once a week or something as sort of a supplement to the podcast because the podcast has been such a constant thing over the past ten years and we’ve had blog articles here and there. We did a literary anthology for a couple of years and I would love to sort of add a different sort of component to Revision Path. But yeah, Twitch sounds like it could be it.

Manny Ikomi:

That’s great. And honestly, it may not even have to be Twitch. It could be another live platform. I mean, obviously if you want help with that, definitely feel free to reach out to me. I could probably help you in some way or another. One of the things that just in hindsight that I caution people about is there are some people who maybe come from other platforms and they’re trying to diversify their viewership, their audience and things like that. And one of the mistakes that I’ve seen and that people make, what they tend to do, especially if they come from YouTube, is they still treat Twitch like an audience and not a two-way interaction.

And so what you get is people streaming their content and talking into the void, but they’re not interacting with chat, they’re not engaging with the people that are there. And that’s where I think a lot of people tend to maybe fail, I guess you could say, or not get the results or outcomes that they want out of streaming. And mostly it stems from, I feel from my very limited anecdotal evidence and observations that the reason is because a lot of them just aren’t used to that mindset shift, whereas for me it just kind of happened naturally because I started my content creator journey on Twitch. And so now when people come from other platforms, it may not, I mean people in general tend not to convert between one platform for another. So if you have a really strong audience in one type of media or platform, like the podcast for example, it’s going to be really hard to get people to move over to something else and that’s universally regardless of which type of social media or interaction you have with your audience. But it is challenging and it’s especially challenging for people to go into live streaming on Twitch for that reason I believe too.

Maurice Cherry:

No, that’s good to know. I mean, like I said, if I did it, it would be a supplement to the show and also honestly for scheduling it would be so much easier. I think it will be so much easier but in the future we’ll see. But since we’re talking about podcasting, you also have a podcast that you said you started kind of during the pandemic.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah. So that kind of ended up just starting as kind of like an inside joke between me and a really close friend of mine, Kevin, who’s my co-host on our podcast Gay + Geeky and Tired. Hashtag ad. And we started, you know, during the height of the pandemic amongst all the other content creation things I was doing for fun. A lot of times the way I would socialize with my friends during the pandemic was through discord and with my friend Kevin in particular, we would have a group of us, some of us, I met my friend Kevin while I was in college, which was part of Know ancillary college experience. And so a lot of our friends would just joke with me and him about how we should make our own podcast and how we talk about so many things around current events and pop culture and queer culture and society and things like that. And so particularly music and gaming are like two kind of key areas that we tend to talk about a lot. And at one point I think we were kind of just like “should we do it? Should we do this? Is this for real? Should we really make a podcast?” And then long story short, we did. We ended up releasing the first episode, I think on my birthday in June of 2021.

It started as Gay + Graphic and Tired because initially, well, we’re kind of both in the design trade but he more approaches it from like an architecture perspective where I’m more user experience and so we thought that would be a cute title and then we ended up changing it to what it is now. But we talk about all kinds of stuff. I just explain it to people. It’s like we just talk about gay shit. We do it very casually. It’s very unscripted, unfiltered. We come prepared with some topics; we tend to rant a lot. It’s a little all over the place and you probably won’t like it, but for the people that do, and some of them have come from my twitch audience as well, they listen to it whenever we release an episode because it is something we do for fun and something we don’t really monetize.

We have had some spurts and lack of consistently or consistency around posting, especially recently now because of my adjunct role and the kind of demands that both of our jobs now require of us. But we are looking into getting back into it and for the most part we’ve been putting out episodes pretty consistently now since then. So we don’t really have a posting schedule or anything at the scale that you’re doing with Revision Path. But again, it just kind of started as one of those things that we wanted to do for fun and we still do it for fun and probably will until we don’t want to anymore. That’s what it is.

Maurice Cherry:

Now have you found that that sort of helped you out in a similar way that Twitch streaming has in terms of communication?

Manny Ikomi:

I think so. I would say Twitch definitely moreso because there is kind of like you’re talking about that multisensory experience of like you’re visually there talking to people and then they can obviously hear you because it’s a video format. I would say, with a podcast, because we have the luxury of being able to edit it and because they can’t see us. There’s aspects of it that outside of the technical parts of learning what it takes to produce a podcast a little bit and some tips and tricks here to edit audio and understanding what that process looks like. I’m not, like, an audio engineer or anything, and I’m sure your editor could probably do way better than I can at editing our pod, but it’s just one of those little technical skills that I’ve always just been able to pick up really quickly just to do something and get it out there. And nobody really complains about our audio, so I think it’s okay. And outside of that, I would say I’ve definitely gotten more personal growth and value out of streaming. But for the podcaster thing, I think it’s also just half of it is just an excuse for me and my friend to get together on Discord and just talk a bunch of crap.

So it has had value but in less, I guess, tangible monetary ways.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, it’s more like it’s a personal thing. It’s cathartic. I got you. Okay, what does success look like to you at this point in your career?

Manny Ikomi:

When I was listening to some of the episodes with some other people, I figured this one was coming and of course I did not prepare a very well-worded response. I think success is a really tricky word and the way that I tend to think about it and the way that I frame it to people is that success is different for everyone. And for me, it’s not necessarily tied to a monetary amount of money or becoming a millionaire or doing anything like that. I think ultimately my idea of success is being able to have a positive impact on the world and the people around me, whether that’s in small ways or big ways, whether I become some notable designer, Lord, someday or something, I don’t know, I don’t care. But just being able to have a positive impact with people, preferably through my profession and personally, and being able to do that sustainably, I think. So although money is not like a motivating factor for me, it is just a reality of the world that we live in. And there are certain ways, like when it comes to the lifestyle that I want and the flexibility that I want and the security and things like that, to where money does play a role in it. But it’s not necessarily my sole motivator, I guess, like kind of going back to the key takeaway that we were talking about, it’s really lifting as I climb.

I think it’s just been something that especially ever since I got my job at IBM, it’s something that I take maybe a little too seriously. Because I recognize that there is an immense amount for someone like me who is a queer black person who may not have had the most affluent upbringing, but somehow managed to have this beautiful story of overcoming adversity and all that stuff. There are elements that I still recognize are due to elements of privilege in some way because it’s on a spectrum. And so there are privileges that I’ve had, there are opportunities that I’ve had because of that. But there are also ways that I may have been disenfranchised or oppressed, whether internalized myself or externally.

And so lifting as I climb is kind of a way that I like to give back and uplift people in ways that I can, where I have the power and privilege to do so. Like, one of the ways that I try to do that is, right before coming on the podcast, someone who I’d went to college with at Bunker Hill actually reached out to me and said, like, “hey, I saw you posted about consulting opportunities at IBM. I want to learn more about your role and what you do and how to apply and things like that.” And although I’m not in a position to hire them outright, I can at least meet with them, give them feedback on their portfolio, give them some advice, insight into what it’s like, and really just mentoring people. And that brings me joy, that brings me satisfaction. I feel like I’m helping people. I think that’s why I also like teaching so much. It’s a way to just be successful, but also make others successful with me as I go. I guess. Does that make sense?

Maurice Cherry:

If it makes sense to you, it makes sense. It makes sense. It makes sense. I’m not messing with you. If you didn’t get into UX, what do you think you’d be doing?

Manny Ikomi:

Oh boy. To be honest, if it had started the other way around, I probably would have been a web developer. It’s probably the closest alternative, I guess. And then maybe my roads would have crossed elsewhere into UX design later on. Probably, like, out of the wild the answer would be maybe working somewhere in a nonprofit or in healthcare or in the public market somewhere like either, again, teaching — maybe not teaching design — but teaching in some form or fashion design. And it’s just something that’s been with me that I known I’ve wanted to do in some fashion or another ever since my vocational training in 9th grade. And that kind of hyper fixation and just knowing what I want to do that early has really propelled me to go really far, at least relatively to people in my age group, I guess you could say.

So I’d never really considered alternatives outside of maybe becoming a web developer and leaving design or potentially becoming a teacher. But all of those things still include design, I guess, in some way, now that I’m doing both of those things.

Maurice Cherry:

Where do you see yourself in the next five years? Like what kind of work do you want to be doing?

Manny Ikomi:

One of the things that I’ve been thinking about recently, aside from my craft and that intersection of design and engineering is just putting my design skills and knowledge to work in places where I feel like it aligns with my values. And so I’m trying to move towards, at least within the short term in some way, moving towards doing more consulting projects and gigs with public sector institutions, so education institutions, colleges, local and state governments, healthcare providers, things like that. And I want to do that because as close as I can get to, I guess, public service, while still very much maintaining what I do as a designer and being able to bring value there in terms of inclusive design where I can add intersectionality and a lot of those things, like socially, that some people don’t always get the opportunity to bring to their work or maybe just aren’t to because they don’t represent or have the identities that intersect in the way for the people that they’re designing for, I guess. So I guess it would be being a design consultant in some shape or form, working with local and state governments, educational institutions or healthcare.

Maurice Cherry:

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

Manny Ikomi:

Online I basically compiled if you want to know where I am on the Internet, basically just go to mannyikomi.com/links. It’s kind of like my own IBM a web developer, so I’m going to make it myself version of Linktree essentially. And that just lists all of my links to places where I show up online, including my blog, my stream, my podcaster, my portfolio is also there on my website if it’s even vaguely up to date. Yeah, I would say mannyikomi.com/links will take you to anywhere I am on the internet that you may also be.

Maurice Cherry:

Sounds good.

Well, Manny Ikomi, I want to thank you so, so much for coming on the show.

I think one for talking about your story, talking know, just sort of what you’re working on and even what you’re teaching and everything. I feel like you’re kind of at this point in your career where it’s all going to start to come together for you like in the next few years. I feel like it’s all going to gel. I’m listening to what you’re doing now and that it sounds like kind of what I was doing back in the day. Like I was trying to do all these different things and creating stuff and putting it online. I feel like you’re at that point where it’s really going to start to come together and gel in a really positive way and I’ll be really excited to see what you come up with when that happens.

So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Manny Ikomi:

Thank you so much for having me. This was fantastic. I’m just so obsessed with what you’re doing. I think this is great and maybe hopefully one day I’ll have the kind of impact that you’re having right now on the community. I think it’s really cool what you’re doing. So thank you so much for having me. This is really an honor to be here.

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.

Sponsored by School of Visual Arts

The BFA Design program at the School of Visual Arts consistently produces innovative and acclaimed work that is rooted in a strong foundational understanding of visual communication. It encourages creativity through cutting-edge tools, visionary design techniques, and offers burgeoning creatives a space to find their voice.

Students in BFA Advertising are prepared for success in the dynamic advertising industry in a program led by faculty from New York’s top ad agencies. Situated at the center of the advertising capital of the world, the program inspires the next generation of creative thinkers and elite professionals to design the future.

School of Visual Arts has been a leader in the education of artists, designers and creative professionals for over seven decades. Comprising 7,000 students at its Manhattan campus and more than 41,000 alumni from 128 countries, SVA also represents one of the most influential artistic communities in the world. For information about the College’s 30 undergraduate and graduate degree programs, visit sva.edu.

David Dylan Thomas

This week’s guest is a true legend in the game — the one and only David Dylan Thomas. He’s the author of Design for Cognitive Bias, has over twenty years of content strategy and UX experience, and he’s presented talks and workshops worldwide on topics at the intersection of bias, design, and social justice.

We had a pretty broad conversation, touching on everything from his latest talk in Copenhagen to how he started The Cognitive Bias Podcast. David also shared his story of growing up in Maryland, attending Johns Hopkins, and gave his thoughts on the present environment of creating content online. You might want to take notes on this episode, because David drops a lot of knowledge!

Interview Transcript

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

David Dylan Thomas:
My name is David Dylan Thomas. I am an author and a speaker. My day job really is to just go around and get people excited about and give them better tools for more inclusive design, and I do that from talks and workshops that I give at conferences, organizations, what have you.

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

David Dylan Thomas:
Busy. I’ve been doing a lot of traveling. It’s like I’m making up for years of growing up without travel, and then the most recent three years of no travel because of COVID. I’ve been to Stockholm, Denmark, Japan, and then last fall I was in Berlin and just Seattle and all these other places, so it’s been really fun but exhausting.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow, so you’ve been making up for lost time.

David Dylan Thomas:
Exactly, yeah, and it is this very much like growing up, I did not make a lot of money or my family didn’t have a lot of money, so the idea of travel was just totally out of reach, and now it’s the exact opposite end of the spectrum where I’m like world traveler and I love it, but yeah, it’s a lot.

Maurice Cherry:
Living the dream.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Speaking of all this travel, do you have anything that’s planned for the summer?

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, it’s not slowing down. Well, so I’m going to be at UX London in a few weeks. I’m going to visit some friends in San Francisco in a few weeks. I’m hitting up a gig in Tampa, family vacation to Montreal, so it’s staying pretty busy. I might get a break in August. I’m not sure yet, but it’s all good, but yeah, there’s still more to come.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. I mean, you’ve got a stacked year so far. That’s pretty good.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. I hate the act of travel, like air travel I despise. I…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… [inaudible 00:04:00] it, but I love being places. I just hate getting there, so that’s the other exhausting part is the actual act of air travel. I’m not a big fan.

Maurice Cherry:
I know the feeling all too well. I went to Toronto back in October last year, and it was my first time traveling since before the pandemic, at least air travel before the pandemic. I was like… I was kind of dreading it a little bit, to be honest. I was like I had been seeing stuff on the news about people fighting in air airports and on the plane and stuff, and I was like, and I’ve been Atlanta. I’m like, “I don’t want to do,” I mean, I wasn’t flying spirit or anything, but I was like, “I don’t want to go to the airport and it’s a whole thing.” You know?

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
I just want to get to where I have to go without incident, and it was fine, but I was kind of a bit worried leading up to it. I’m trying to get my sea legs back with travel because I used to travel a lot, like pre-pandemic for work and for the show, and I’m trying to like ease back into it now.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, I’m fully on board at this point. I’ve been… I think I’ve traveled more post-pandemic than I ever did pre-pandemic…

Maurice Cherry:
Wow-

David Dylan Thomas:
… at this point.

Maurice Cherry:
What lessons did you learn this past year? How would you say you’ve grown and improved?

David Dylan Thomas:
I’ve learned what my, or I’m starting to learn, I’m beginning to learn what my boundaries are because as much as I enjoy the travel, there’s a psychological hit, a social hit, there’s a family hit, there’s an economic hit, to be frank, but I’m learning. I won’t say I’ve learned it yet, but what I’m learning is balance and trying to figure out, “Okay, what am I comfortable saying no to?” I’m in the privileged position of having enough things going on and having enough financial stability to be able to say no, so where does it make sense to say no? Where does it make sense to say yes?

An example would be like Japan is a very expensive trip, and I was paid for my time there, but it’s always going to be more cost-effective to do something online. It’s sort of one of those I’ve never been, I love it so much, I’m willing to take a bit of a financial hit on that or whatever. It’s figuring out how much of that before it becomes a burden, that kind of thing. I would say balance, or that’s what I’m endeavoring to learn in this past year is, what does that look like?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm, and now I would say outside of the travel realm, is there anything in particular that you’re learning about now?

David Dylan Thomas:
My new hotness is really grappling with ownership. I mean, I’m finding that my talks, my work is drifting pretty rapidly into the political, so I talk about design, I talk about UX and content strategy, but increasingly the stakes, the things I’m talking about are things like Facebook’s impact in Myanmar. These are quickly becoming very political topics, and the stuff I’m reading, I’m reading currently Braiding Sweetgrass, and there’s a lot in there that’s really challenging me around ownership, like the idea of ownership and, where is it appropriate? Where is it problematic actually? Where is it actually doing more harm than good to have these strict notions of ownership?

A basic example would be if you think about colonial perspectives on Native Americans and taking the land from them. That presumes that Native Americans uniformly believed the land belonged to them, when in fact, many Native American cultures didn’t believe in ownership at all. It was sort of like, “Hey, those aren’t your strawberries or my strawberries. They belong to themselves and that’s it.” We don’t own things in that sense. Really, if you were going to do a reset, for example, to say, “Okay, what would reparations look like in the context of Native American land?” One version of that would actually be not giving the land back, but actually abolishing ownership of land, which is I think is a far more controversial, right…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… concept than just saying, “Oh, we’re just going to give all the land back.” That’s hard enough, but so we’re not giving the land back. We’re just saying no one’s going to own any land. I think that would freak people out way more, so that’s the kind of stuff that’s really got me excited and challenged in terms of what I’m learning about right now.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, especially in this country. I mean, manifest destiny and everything. You talk about ceding ownership and people get hot.

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
That is a hot potato to deal with.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, that is the, “Y’all ready for this conversation” meme? That’s…

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Let’s talk, I guess, a little bit more about the work that you’re doing. I saw just recently that you spoke in Denmark at UX Copenhagen. How was that?

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh, it was fantastic. Copenhagen is nice, and it’s one of those conferences where the talks are great, but what’s really awesome is just the people, the conversations you have in between talks at dinner after. Copenhagen’s a great place to have those conversations. Helle Martens who runs it is so kind and so thoughtful and is a great host, not just hosting the conference, but hosting her guests, her speakers at the conference, everyone involved. What I remember most, though, about UX Copenhagen is really just the great conversations and the people I met there, which is to me like the highest value of any conference is not the talks, although I enjoy the talks, it’s the people. It’s getting to meet new people, getting to reestablish old relationships, and UX Copenhagen was great for that this year.

Maurice Cherry:
Had you done that conference before?

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, that talk is actually historic for me. The book Design for Cognitive Bias comes from a talk called Design for Cognitive Bias, and the first time I ever gave that talk was at UX Copenhagen in 2018, which was also my first international conference. She invited me based on a podcast I did with Saskia Videler. She was like, “Oh, it sounds like you’re doing really cool stuff. Can you come to my conference and talk about cognitive bias in the context of like UX and content strategy?” I’m like, “Yeah, I can.”

I put together that talk, and putting it together was really where I found what I believed to be the spine of the book, even before I knew it was going to be a book, which is really this notion of not just, “Hey, here are these biases that our users have,” but, “Hey, here are these biases that we as designers have.” Really, this isn’t a talk about bias, this is a talk about ethics. When I figured that out, I unlocked that, that became what the talk was, what the book was, but all that started at that first UX Copenhagen I went to in 2018.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice, so this was kind of a good return to form in a way.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, it was kind of a homecoming, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, and now speaking of talks, you have a new talk that you’re doing now. Can you tell me a little bit about it?

David Dylan Thomas:
Sure, so this is a massive talk that I’ve been working on for a while, and it all started once, I don’t know what it was, but some social media company did something terrible. There’s way too many examples of that for me to remember which one it was, but I got mad and I posted something like, “I swear to God, my next talk is going to be called. “No, Seriously, F Engagement,” except I didn’t say F, I said the actual word…

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… and…

Maurice Cherry:
You can say fuck here, that’s fine.

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh, okay, so “No seriously, fuck engagement.” Of course, people were like, “Oh yeah, you should give that talk.” It was kind of a joke, but then I was supposed to give the closing keynote at An Event Aparts, which ends up being the final An Even Apart in San Francisco. I needed a new talk because I’d already given all of my other talks. We kind of went back and forth and I said, “Look, my new talk, it’s like super anti-capitalist. Are you sure you want me to do this?” They’re like, “As long as you have like actual positive advice and it’s not just a rant.” I’m like, “Yeah, I got great, great advice or challenges that I want to kind of put out there.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
The talk ends up being based on a quote from Martin Luther King which says, “We must rapidly move from a thing-based society to a person-based society or thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” This is something he said like 50, 60 years ago, and I basically start off by saying, “Okay, if we agree that’s a good idea, what is our role as designers, makers of things, whatever, in that shift?” I start by saying basically, “This is what a thing-oriented web looks like,” and I talk about things like Facebook and engagement and how the obsession with engagement could lead to things like genocide in Myanmar where they let lots of hate speech just sit up there because, frankly, hate speech is good for their bottom line. It increases engagement.

I sort of paint that portrait, and then I say, “Okay, what would a person-oriented web look like?” For that, I look to things like the Siksika and the Wyandot, who are Native American tribes that have different perspectives on just fundamental assumptions about humanity, basically that, “Hey, maybe you’re born having value and I don’t need you to have a lot of money for me to consider you having value.” You know what I mean? What happens if we take those assumptions and build the web based on that? I can point to a couple of different instances where people are kind of experimenting with that, but the whole point of the talk is we don’t have that web.

How do we build it? Really, it’s more of just like a challenge, almost like a design brief for the audience to say, “Okay, if we were to make these other assumptions about people and about how we should interact, what would we build? How would we build differently? Let’s go do that.” It’s the first time I’ve ever given a talk that’s more of just a challenge for something that doesn’t exist yet, as opposed to saying, “Hey, here’s all of this evidence from science about these methods you can use to make your stuff more inclusive.” I love that, but the thing that I’m really into now is this notion of, “Okay, what’s the next step?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I like that the talk is sort of putting the onus on the listener, the audience, whomever, to kind of come up with what the solution is. You’re pointing out the issue. You’re not giving necessarily a solution, but you’re saying, “These are the things that you need to think about so we can come to a solution.”

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah. It’s really challenging the audience to listen to themselves, frankly, because a big chunk of the talk I get very personal. I go into therapy that I’ve been through, I go into how I found value in literally writing down my values and trying to proceed from there. The only tangible advice I give the audience ends up really being around, “Hey, after this talk is over, I want you to go home and write down your values and ask yourself, ‘Is your work taking you closer to or further away from that?’ If it is getting you further away, well, what can you do to get closer?'” That to me is the beginning of that journey, so it gets very personal, too.

Maurice Cherry:
You know, I did a talk, it was 2020, maybe 2021, but I did a talk called Content is Subject to Change, and I had sort of come with… I guess I won’t say I came up with the idea on a whim, but I was talking about how content on the web is in this sort of state where nothing is really being sufficiently archived because the internet and the web itself was never meant to be a tool for archive. It was a tool for research. It came out of research institutions and how like the early web, the “Web 1.0” was really about research and discovery. Then, of course, Web 2.0 sort of ushered in user-generated content, and we’re sort of in the throes of, I don’t know, I guess we’re sort of limping into Web 3 with the way companies have been approaching the metaverse and such.

The reality is that users create and put so much content on the web. I mean, tweets, Instagram posts, photos, videos, et cetera, and none of that is really stored anywhere, not in a very active way. You can look at, or you can try to find articles from 10 years ago and all the links are broken. none of the images work if you can find the actual article at all. People point to the Internet Archive, but they’re just a small nonprofit. They can’t archive everything. They can’t even archive things in certain countries. They can’t archive Flash. I mean, Flash was everywhere. Now, Flash is a relic, and all of that stuff that was created with Flash is just like dust in the wind, essentially.

David Dylan Thomas:
I have an interview with Jack Dorsey that is-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh wow.

David Dylan Thomas:
… [inaudible 00:15:31] to Flash, and it’s such a tragedy because one of the questions I asked him is, “What makes you pessimistic about the web?” This is like 2008 or something. What makes you pessimistic about the web? What he said was, “I think it’s going to be hard to prove what is true.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Like oh my God. Not being able to just post that online every single time something blows up, like, oh my God, but yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, even to what you were mentioning there with what Jack said, look at now with deep fakes and AI and MidJourney and all sorts of stuff. Like what is real? I’ll see imagines on Twitter or whatever, and it’s like, “Wait, I think that’s real. That might be real.” It sort of is falling into that sort of uncanny valley, especially as the technology gets better. I say all of this to say I like the fact that you’re giving sort of a design talk that’s not specifically about, I guess, digital design, but more so the concept of design and how that relates to what we go through in society.

David Dylan Thomas:
Well, yeah, and truth be told, it’s a political talk. I don’t market it as such because I’m giving it at design conferences, although I did give it at a journalistic conference once, but it’s a political talk because the things I’m talking about, the things I’m recommending are for everyone. This is at the societal level, and it’s what King was talking about. King was talking about what he was talking, about not for designers, not for politicians, but for everyone.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
He wanted everyone to be involved i this shift, and he saw the need for it. I’m like I’m speaking to designers for the most part, just because of the milieu in which I work, but I’d be happy to give this in Congress, in civil activist organizations, in churches, in just stand on the street corner and yell it. This is something I believe in and that I think is applicable at a very, very universal level.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, and I think certainly as technology increases and as we start to… I mean, AI is pretty much already being used now by companies and a bunch of different things. Not to say that AI is like the scapegoat or the catalyst for the talk that you’re giving, but it’s important that more people outside of our profession know about this. They know that this is sort of, I have to say it, it’s sort of a condition of the world that we live in now. It’s like this is a thing that we have to contend with and it doesn’t just have to deal tech or just have to deal with design. This is a human problem.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, and the thing I try to get across in the talk and in my work in general is it’s just a tool, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
I mean, the same database that was used to hunt down people for their medical debt, it’s like, “Hey, you got cancer, but guess what? I don’t care. You have have to pay these bills.” That comes from a database and hospitals, people go and buy that debt. These two guys who were running one of those companies that had those databases sort of had a moment of truth when Occupy happened and they flipped it and said, “Okay, now we’re going to use the exact same database to find people who owe medical debt and then forgive it. We’re going to use the exact same financial mechanism of buying that debt from hospitals for pennies on the dollar and then forgive that debt.” They’ve forgiven something like $6 billion of medical debt that way.

Exact same tool, exact same database, exact same like… I don’t know if AI was in there or not, but let’s say, yeah, why not? AI’s in everything, but it’s like that’s a very, very old story. There were examples going back to indigenous Peruvians who were doing similar things with taking the same tool for different purposes, so this is… When I see AI, yes, it’s scary, and yes, it’s doing all sorts of mischievous stuff, but it is the exact same story. It depends what you want to do with it, and you can use it for great good, or you can use it for great harm.

Maurice Cherry:
The reason sort of like I said that it’s good that you’re giving this talk or you want to give this talk outside of our industry is that more people need to be aware of the consequences of these things or why it’s sort of something that we’re bringing up as a point. AI has really blown up to mainstream, at least to the point where the media is really talking about it outside of specialty outlets. It’s blown up over the past nine months where now the creators of this stuff are testifying before Congress about what are the best ways to curtail this or to use this or something like that. It’s important that these are issues that we talk about now before they sort of spin out of control.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, and I think that what I want people to do is not focus on the tool so much as the players behind the tool. There’s a great PBS Digital Studios channel that show, it’s not around anymore, but it was called Idea…

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, Idea Channel with..

David Dylan Thomas:
… Idea Channel…

Maurice Cherry:
… Mike Rugnetta. Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, fricking love that, and one of the episodes at some point they’re like, “Hey, we’re instituting this new policy on our show where when we talk about a new technology, we are not going to embody it, which is to say, we’re not going to say AI is doing this or AI is doing that. We’re going to say people are doing this with AI, people are doing this with ChatGPT, whatever that technology is because we don’t want to give the impression that technology is embodied, that it is its own thing. No, human beings are using a thing to do a thing. I feel like we need to keep our eye on that because if we point people and get hysteria around a particular technology, we sort of draw their attention away from the people because the people are the thing you need to be losing your mind about, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
You know, Elon Musk firing all the content moderators is the thing you need to be worried about, not Twitter per se, or I sat on a panel earlier about ChatGPT and content and people freaking out. “Oh, ChatGPT is going to take my job,” and I’m like, “Trust me, you do not need to be afraid of ChatGPT, you need to be afraid of shareholders. Shareholders are going to take your job hella faster than ChatGPT.” Shareholders have been taking people out a thousand employees at a time for the past two years. They’re the ones, but we’re not having this panic over shareholders, so yeah, I’m like, “AI, great.” It’s interesting, but the big story isn’t AI. The big story is who’s using it for what. The who is the big story.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, I first heard about you from your book Design for Cognitive Bias, which you mentioned earlier. For those who might not have heard about it, one, will include a link to it in the show notes so you can pick it up, but can you tell us a bit about the book?

David Dylan Thomas:
Sure, so the basic premise is that we have biases, our users have biases, our stakeholders have biases, and when I say bias, I just mean your mind has to take shortcuts just to get through the day. You have to make something like a trillion decisions a day. Right now, I’m making decisions about how fast to talk, what to do with my hands. If I thought carefully about every single one of those decisions, I’d never get anything done, so it’s actually a good thing that a lot of our decisions are made on autopilot, but sometimes the autopilot gets it wrong, and so the book is really… We call those errors biases, so really the book is saying, “Okay, if we accept that bias is going to be with us, what do we do? At the user level, what are some biases we can design our products in a way to either mitigate or maybe even use for good? How does that also play with stakeholders? How do we sort of use persuasion techniques to leverage biases they may have to steer our organizations in maybe more inclusive directions?”

Then, really, I think the most important part is our biases. How do we keep our biases from causing our users harm? All of that is in 92 quick little pages you can read, but yeah, that’s the spine of the book is this journey from our user’s biases, our stakeholders’ biases, and then our biases, and all the way through these very concrete examples and concrete methods to try to work with that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I love that the book really emphasizes the importance of recognizing and understanding them because that’s sort of the first step to fixing them or to create in spite of them, I suppose, to make more effective and inclusive work to strive for DEI. Oftentimes these things are brought up only in a sort of DEI context, which I think gives some people, some people, gives some people permission to not think about it at all because they’re like, “Well, I don’t fall within the, I don’t know, BIPOC spectrum or whatever. Why should I have to think about this?” You know?

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, which is actually the number one reason you should have to think about it.

Maurice Cherry:
Exactly.

David Dylan Thomas:
Right, right [inaudible 00:23:57] supposed to be, you know? No, and then the thing is like, yes, when people think of bias, one of the main things they think about is race or gender, which absolutely they should, like two of the most harmful biases out there, but it’s even things like, “Hey, stuff that rhymes is more believable.” If you’re making something rhyme, you better make sure it’s true. It’s things like that that are both within and without the realm of race or gender. Yeah, it is important at a global level to understand how these things work.

Maurice Cherry:
You know, that’s even something that I think about honestly with this show. I think about it in the context of podcasts in general. I remember I think I saw some study, it was either from Pew or from maybe Edison or something like that, but they were talking about how most people believe I think it was like 80-something percent of podcast listeners sort of get their news from podcasts. That’s what they believe over, say, mainstream media, which is really dangerous because anyone can put out a podcast. Just because you say some shit on a microphone does not necessarily make it true, and so I think about that even in the context of this show.

I’ve done over 500 episodes. I try to get as varied a swath of people as I can to talk about a universal experience, which is being a Black designer or a Black digital creator or whatever, and that is broken down across gender, sexual orientation, gender presentation. It’s broken down across so many different things, age, geography, industry, and I try to do that to not sort of introduce what I think people may already look at. They may look at all of the people that I’ve interviewed and say like, “Oh, you just talked to a bunch of Black people. It’s all the same.” It’s not the same. It has changed drastically over the years. We talk about a lot of different topics. It varies. Every person’s conversation is different because every person is different so…

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
… I understand kind of that need to recognize the bias so you can work against it.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, and by the way, if people out there are like, “Oh, you just talk to a bunch of Black people,” I’d be like, “Have you met Black people? We don’t all agree. When was the last time you hung out with more than five black people and they all agree?” Are you kidding with this? When’s the last time you sat in a barbershop for more than five minutes?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Right? We agree? What?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Have you met black people? That’s funny. That’s a t-shirt right there. That’s funny. I like that. With everything that you’re doing, what does a typical day look like for David Dylan Thomas?

David Dylan Thomas:
No such thing. Well, okay, two such things, so one is the travel Dave where I am on a plane and I’m getting up in some new city and doing this weird mix of touristy stuff and my job. Those days look like this weird mix of I’m going to go check out this castle or this museum, and then I’m going to go rehearse. It’s very much like touring a comedian or a band. You go and you do the thing, but you also try to have a good life at the same time, or you meet people in town that live in that town that from the web or something. That’s travel Dave, and then there’s home Dave, which is I don’t do a schedule in the sense of at 9:00 AM I do this, at 10:00 AM I do that, but I do have a Trello where I just have my priorities.

It’s like the first few things I’m going to do is try to have… I like to wake up slowly, so I have a nice breakfast, watch some TV, maybe play some video games, maybe do some reading. Then, I’ll get into things like household chores like laundry or trash, or maybe help with the dishes and cleaning. Then, I might get more into things like, “Okay, let’s check some emails. Let’s go through all of that stuff.” That’s more of like depending on how the day comes out because I might have a meeting, I might have this, that that’s sort of fixed. Everything else that’s kind of liquid time that I can kind of play with is sort of like, “Okay, this is the next thing on the Trello that I want to get to.” Some days I’ll get through maybe laundry and the day’s over because there’s just too much other stuff going on.

Other days, I’ll be like, “I actually got through all 500 emails. My God, how did that happen?” That’s a little more fluid and it’s what I’ve learned over time works bests for me, both from an anxiety perspective, but also from just a functional perspective because I have the luxury of having a job where, with very few exceptions, my time is my own. I can choose how to spend my… I’m not required to be in a certain place at a certain time with very few exceptions like, “I have to be in that place giving that talk at that time, so that’s one hour that is a hundred percent accounted for.” For the rest of it it’s like, “You could be doing dishes. You could be meditating. You could be playing with your son. Any of those are options that are just as equally valid. I don’t have a boss saying, “Hey, why aren’t you doing this right now?”

Maurice Cherry:
Hmm. Yeah. I think with any sort of entrepreneur, that’s the challenging thing is balancing it, managing your time, and still getting stuff done within the midst of all of that.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, and I’d say that’s my biggest challenge over the past year is really now that it really is much more fluid, making sure that I’m not over-optimizing for gigs, that I’m really making time to be there for my wife, to be there for my son, to be there for my family, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
Excuse me, and kind of give that its due weight and its due context because it’s really easy to fall into the trap of, I’ve found it, to fall into the trap of like making everything like a checklist…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… of like duties rather than look at the team effort of we’re a family and we have these shared goals and we’re each chipping in to work on those goals. Yes, an easy way to get closer to that is to have the sort of list of to-dos, but there’s also times to be flexible. THere’s also times to like see a need and just work on it. That’s hard for me because I am a very list-oriented person, so that’s sort of what I’ve been working on is how to be more present, frankly, for my family. That’s the new hotness.

Maurice Cherry:
Same, same. Right now, I was just talking to my Mom recently because Mother’s Day just passed. Her and I were talking and she’s telling me like, “Oh, I’m finally thinking about moving.” She lives in Alabama. We’re from Selma, Alabama, and I grew up there, moved out when I was 18. I’ve been here in Atlanta ever since. She’s lived there her whole life. Now she’s talking about moving to Dallas, and the first thing in my mind was like, “I’m about to project manage the shit out of this move because, one, I’m like, “I have been waiting for you to leave this town forever, and you are finally going to do it. We are making this happen.”

It’s also about being in the moment of like why she wants to do it now. She’s been retired for, let’s see, she retired at 62, she’s been retired for eight years now. She just turned 70. I’m like, “Now you want to move? Sure, yeah, let’s talk about it. Let’s do it. Let’s try to make it happen.” I have to resist my urge to try to really plan this and make sure this goes off without a hitch, but also make sure that I’m present for her feeling behind moving because, I mean, she grew up there just like I did, but she’s just lived there now her whole life and now she’s like, “It’s time to get out of here.” I’m like, “Okay, let’s make it happen.”

David Dylan Thomas:
Just for a second, can we just talk about the South? Because…

Maurice Cherry:
Sure.

David Dylan Thomas:
… being born “in the North,” I was born in Maryland, which is technically the South…

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

David Dylan Thomas:
… and is the South in a lot of ways. I grew up with this fear of the South, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
I see like… When I think of the South, I think of Mississippi Burning, right? Like that’s…

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

David Dylan Thomas:
… at the same time, I’ve been to the south a lot of times. I never really had any problems, and that’s where 80% of us are. Black folk live in the South. That’s where we are.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
I talk to people who have lived there their whole lives, or who lived in the North and are anxious to move to the South and I’m just like trying to get my head… I don’t even know what my question is, but it’s just sort of like when I hear, “Oh, she’s moving from Alabama,” I get that, to Dallas. Oh, that’s…

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… Texas isn’t awesome right now, but okay, you know?

Maurice Cherry:
Well look, her other choice was Florida, and I was like, “Well, that’s definitely…

David Dylan Thomas:
Ooh…

Maurice Cherry:
… not happening…

David Dylan Thomas:
… ooh.

Maurice Cherry:
… so…

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah. No, Dallas is better.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Well, I’ve been to Dallas. It’s better than all of Florida.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
The entire state.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh my God. Yeah, it was either Florida or Texas and I’m like, and even talking to her about it, I think honestly the main reason she wants to move is because her brother lives there, so her older brother-

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
… lives there with his family and he is extremely well-off. It’s like…

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
… “Okay, well, if you move there, if you move in with him or even in the vicinity of where he is, at least you’re together, it’s family. The main thing I’m excited about is that she’ll be in a city that is served by a major airport because I don’t drive and I don’t have a car, so me trying to get from Atlanta to Selma takes like a bus, a pack mule. I probably have to hitchhike part of the way. It’s not easy to get back home and I was like, “Heaven forbid there’s an emergency and I can’t get to you quickly.” If you’re at least in a city served by an airport, I can hope on a plane and take an Uber or a Lyft to get to where you are. That’s not a problem, you know?

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, it was either Texas or Florida and I was like, “Well, it’s not Florida, so Texas it is.”

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, and I’ve been to… I actually like Dallas a lot, but it’s just this… I don’t know how many Black people hold this special relationship with the South or hold… I feel like Black people just have a feeling, it may not be the same feeling, but have a feeling about the South, and it’s just endlessly fascinating to me.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m curious, what’s the fascinating part?

David Dylan Thomas:
Well, it’s just like I think I grew up with this myth in my heard that once you hit the South, it’s all Klan. You know what I mean? Like… How can you live there? I do. I get genuinely surprised. I have a brother who was living in Maryland and was like, “Oh yeah, I want to move further south.” Or I’ll meet someone else who’s sort of like, “Yeah, I was living in San Francisco, but I want to move back to North Carolina.” I’m like on the one hand, I kind of get it. Again, it’s one of those things I’m learning more about now, but on the other hand I’m like, “Yeah, but you know about the South, right?” You know?

Maurice Cherry:
Right, right.

David Dylan Thomas:
I think the part that’s fascinating to me is that as I interrogate that, there’s no real evidence that the South is any safer or more dangerous. If I think about all the shootings that have happened with Black people, they’re all over. They’re not just in the South. There’s plenty in the North, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
I do think… I don’t know. It’s me dealing with my own fear of white supremacy, and when I think of white supremacy I associate it far more at the South than I do with the North, even though there’s plenty of it in the North.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, I can only speak on the South because I grew up here. I’ve lived here all my life. I do know that there is that perception, certainly because I have cousins that live in the North. Most of my Mom’s side of the family is in Detroit. My Dad’s side of the family is in Cleveland, and they’ve always kind of treated us as like the country cousins, you know?

David Dylan Thomas:
Mm-hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
Like for whatever that means, but i think there is that perception. Granted, I mean, I grew up in Selma, which, I mean, I think now certainly within the past maybe like 10 to 15 years has started to become something that’s in the regular zeitgeist because presidential candidates go there and there was a movie about it and all this stuff. I can tell you, when I first came to Atlanta in ’99 from Selma, people thought that I meant Salem, Oregon, because they had never heard of it.

David Dylan Thomas:
Wow.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah, which is weird…

David Dylan Thomas:
Wow.

Maurice Cherry:
… because like when you grow up in Selma, you are not divorced from the history of the Civil Rights Movement at all.

David Dylan Thomas:
Right.

Maurice Cherry:
It is present. It is not just something that you learn about. It is everywhere. You are a byproduct of it. I’m the first generation outside of Bloody Sunday. Like it’s everywhere, I remember, oh God, was this fourth grade, fifth grade? When did I have my social study teacher? I think this was fourth grade, my social study teacher Mrs. Manz had shown me… Well, it was like a field trip. She had shown us a spot downtown where her blood was spilled because she got hit by a police officer 20-something years ago. You’ve never divorced from it.

It’s always around you, and even growing up in Selma, I mean, I’m using Selma as kind of a bit of an outlier here, but you are fully aware of the gravity of racism and the Civil Rights Movement and all that sort of stuff because you’re in it. You know, “Don’t go to this part of town after a certain time, don’t go to this grocery store.” You just know that, and even as politics change and you see how people change because of politics, and Selma’s another good example of this, we had a racist white mayor from Martin Luther King, Jr. Times like the ’60s up until he died right around 2000, Joe Smitherman. He famously called Martin Luther King Martin Luther Coon, like…

David Dylan Thomas:
Hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
… and like the fact that he still got elected year after year after year is strange in a city like Selma, particularly when Black people are the majority, but he died, and so the city got its first Black mayor. Many of the white citizens were so incensed by that that they closed businesses, moved roughly about five miles up Highway 22 and started their own city called Valley Grande.

David Dylan Thomas:
What?

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds like something out of The Simpsons, you know? Like…

David Dylan Thomas:
This is why I’m afraid of the South.

Maurice Cherry:
… but I mean, it’s one of those things where you are cognizant of it and aware of it and you kind of just… I don’t say you kind of just deal with it, but it’s because you are aware of it and it’s such an ever-present thing that you know how to navigate within it.

When I left Selma and came to Atlanta, I mean, came to Atlanta, went to Morehouse, the school that King graduated from, and being in and around all of that history and everything, it’s like you’re just aware. You just know this is the world you live in. I think sometimes when people think of HBCUs, there’s this perception that you’re in a bubble in some ways, and in ways you kind of are. You’re in a bubble of being around only Black people and certain aspects of the diasporic African experience because it’s not just African-Americans that go to Morehouse.

Then, you get out in the real world and you meet other people and you know that it’s different. It’s just hard for me to describe it, I think, in a way because it’s just something that’s been ever-present. You just know how to deal with it because you see it in so many different ways. I mean, just racism in general, sometimes it’s super overt, sometimes it’s covert. It’s just all this kind of a thing that you recognize. It’s a cognitive bias to put it… to kind of like, I guess, bring it back to your book and everything.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s just something that you know about, you’re aware about, and because you know about it and you’re aware about it, you know how to effectively work through it, work around it, or work to include it in some way. I mean, even what I do with this show and in the design industry is very interesting, we’ll just put it that way.

David Dylan Thomas:
Hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
I would say my time growing up in the South and in Selma and everything has taught me to deal with a lot of the stuff that I deal with in terms of just discrimination from this show that it’s just like, “Okay, I know that’s going to be a thing. I can work around that.”

David Dylan Thomas:
Right.

Maurice Cherry:
I can deal with that. I’m not going to let it stop me or bog me down or get me down in some way. It’s just a general awareness of it to the point that I know this is a thing. I’m just going to have to kind of work through it, work around it to try to make it better or to try to circumvent it or something. You just… It’s just always a thing that’s present. You just know that it’s always there. Even your mentioning about like the Klan, I mean, Selma has a Klan hall. One of our housing projects is named after the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan…

David Dylan Thomas:
What?

Maurice Cherry:
… Bedford Forest. One of the… It’s not an all-white school, but it’s pretty much an all-white school. One of the schools there is John T. Morgan, which is also named after a Klansman. It’s a thing that you know about. Even one of the cemeteries has a Klan monument in it. You know that it’s there so you don’t fuck with it. You don’t deal with it. You know like this is a thing not to deal with, so you just work around it or don’t deal with it. It’s kind of hard to describe, but

David Dylan Thomas:
No…

Maurice Cherry:
… but yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… no, I think I see, and what it reminds me of is I talked to a guy from Singapore…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… and Singapore does not have free speech.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
You talk shit about the president, you are not necessarily going to go to jail, but you’re going to get sued into oblivion. I was asking him about it and it was this thing where it was difficult for him to answer because it was sort of like asking a fish about water. It was just sort of like, “Of course they are.” You don’t fuck with it, but you also don’t necessarily… It wasn’t really affecting his day-to-day. It wasn’t like every morning he wakes up and thinks, “Oh God, I wish I could say shit about the president.” That’s just not a thing, and I don’t know, it’s interesting, but what you said makes perfect sense.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Even that sort of description you mentioned about asking a fish about water, that’s just how it is. Sometimes things happen and you’re like, “Well, that’s just how it is.” Some of it is unfair. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that you just deal with everything and just sort of shrug your shoulders about it, but at least you are cognizant and aware of the fact that it is happening. You know why it’s happening, you know the cause from which it stems. It’s not just like out of the blue. You know this is how people are like. I mean, I can give you another example. Now, we’ll bring the interview back to you, but I know you asked about me, but…

David Dylan Thomas:
No, that’s cool.

Maurice Cherry:
… but I mean, when I was graduating high school, my guidance counselor was doing everything in her power to not want me to go to college. She wanted… The one white guy that was in our class, all-Black class and one white guy who happened to end up becoming valedictorian, but that’s a whole other story, but was doing everything to get him into college, giving his applications and all this sort of stuff.

Then, she’ll turn to me and be like, “Well, why don’t you think about learning a trade? You could go to the community college. I know your mother works there. My husband works there. You could go there and learn a trade. People always need air conditioning. We live in the South. What about HVAC?” I’m like, “Ma’am, I have a 4.5 GPA. What are you talking about? Are you daft?” I mean, this is also at the time when computers really started to be put into libraries and stuff like that, so I just did a lot of research on my own, but she was actively not wanting me to go to college like…

David Dylan Thomas:
Hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
… not helping with applications. She would give… The guy’s name was Gary. She would give him application vouchers for application fees and stuff and…

David Dylan Thomas:
Wow.

Maurice Cherry:
… then she would tell me about, “Have you thought about welding? Welding could be a good trade for you.” “Ma’am, I’m taking AP Calculus, what are you talking about?” Welding, so it’s just stuff that you deal with and you’re like-

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
… “Whatever.” Yeah, that’s a tough nut to crack, but let’s bring it back to you since we’re talking about beat. Let’s talk about your upbringing and your backstory.

David Dylan Thomas:
Uh-huh.

Maurice Cherry:
You’re right outside of Philly right now in Media. Is that where you’re originally from?

David Dylan Thomas:
No, so I was born in Columbia, Maryland. It’s the city that’s basically right in between D.C. and Baltimore, and I grew up… My mother and father split when I was very young. I didn’t really get to meet him, get to know him until I was like 25 years old.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
That’s very formative, and my mother was amazing. She really always made sure that we knew, like me and my sister, we knew we were loved and we knew that we could be whatever we wanted to be. Nothing could stop us, and she also really, really went to great pains to make sure we were educated, so for all of those things and much more, I’m always eternally grateful to her. She passed in 2011. From a very young age, I was writing, I was reading at a young age. Very smart, doing al of the smart Black kid things, and having to sort of like… It’s interesting. My earliest experiences of racism were actually coming from Black kids who didn’t-

Maurice Cherry:
Hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… understand why I talked the way I do, why I didn’t talk Black and that was… I think every Black person has the story of when they realized they were Black. That was it for me. It’s like the way I was talking was different from the way the other Black kids were talking. Weirdly, that’s how I found out I was Black because I wasn’t talking the way I was supposed to with this flat, not African-American vernacular we would call it now, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
That was also sort of an interesting wrinkle for me growing up, but I was always interested in filmmaking. I still do it today and I did it ever since high school, and that’s the sort of content in my content strategy trajectory really comes from that storytelling aspect. I went to Friends School of Baltimore, very prestigious school. Again, my mother went to-

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… great pains to make sure I was able to get in there, went into debt for that, and then ditto for Johns Hopkins University, which I originally went for electrical engineering, and then found out I was bad at that and switched to writing seminars and kind of got a concentration in theater and film.

I’m there, this is like the mid-’90s, and I’m armed with this like really solid… Basically I know how to think now that I’ve been through college. I know how to think and I know how to write, and for four years I’m just working in a record store because if you remember in the mid-’90s, there was like yet another recession slump. Nobody had any jobs-

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… so for four years I worked in a record store, which was actually kind of fun, and I just worked on whatever independent movies came to town. Then, after that, I finally got a job that more or less had to do with my major, which was being a online writing tutor for a CTY, Center for Talented Youth’s online writing courses, basically giving junior high and high school students these college-level narrative nonfiction courses on CD-ROM. That’s how long ago we’re talking.

Then, they go into an online forum to submit their work and to their workshopping, workshop those things. That’s when I really kind of fell in love with the web because what I was seeing the web do was take people, students who lived all over the world and might never meet each other in person, and they get to talk about sports and homeschooling and all these other things. That was amazing to me. That was just… The potential for the web to bring people together was where I really fell in love with it, and I’ve worked in tech in one form or another ever since.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, just to kind of give an idea, I’m trying to sort of place this within the context of history, I’m guessing this is roughly around like early 2000s?

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, so I worked at CTY from 2000 to around 2004.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Yeah. The web was really, I mean, it’s hard, I think, probably for people now to really know about this or think about it because, I mean, it’s been 20 years, but the web back then was just exploding in terms of new experiences, new things to discover. The technology itself with browsers and such were growing at such a rapid pace. I think about that time so fondly. I mean, I was in college right around the time I graduated in ’03, but that was such a magical time to be into the internet and the web because the big agents that are around now did not exist. It’s hard to think of an internet without social media, without Facebook, without Twitter, but I don’t know, maybe it’s rose-colored glasses. I don’t know. I think about that time so fondly with just the web being a fairly idyllic place. I might be romanticizing-

David Dylan Thomas:
No, I think-

Maurice Cherry:
… it a bit.

David Dylan Thomas:
… I don’t think you are. Actually, my new talk, I start out talking about personalization and how today it is almost impossible to find a website that doesn’t have a login, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
You go back to the early web, zero websites had a login. It was just this big art gallery-

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… and you’d have things like Homestar Runner, which to this day has no login option. The Homestar Runner you see is the Homestar Runner I see-

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… but every other website, you see a different version that’s personalized to you, and there are real psychological stakes for that because it basically makes it seem like the entire world revolves around us.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
You could be forgiven for believing that because on the web it does. Literally, every website you go to is custom-made for you, so that was not always thus. The early web was just a place where a lot of weirdos were just putting up like, “Here are my opinions about Star Trek. Here is this weird animation. Here is a bunch of things about badgers that’s like saying, ‘badger, badger, badger over [inaudible 00:48:23].'” It was sort of like if you think about the creativity you see in a place like TikTok where people… Some people are there being very money-minded and trying to do a business, but some people are just putting up weird, fun shit, you know?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
That’s the early web, it’s just here is… Yeah, there’s a definite difference there, and there was a gold rush that came where people started realizing, okay, they can make a lot of money off of this by taking what was like the open web, something like an mp3, which is a format for music that isn’t owned. It’s free. Anyone can use it and changing that into a format that’s proprietary so, “Oh, if you want to play that movie, you have to do it on this browser, in this website, using our technology, and if you try to copy it, God help you.”

That was how we moved into the web we have now, which is much more capitalistic, much more predatory, and it’s basically, “Every way we can possibly make a buck off of you we will.” The early web was more like, “Hey, look at this new toy. What can we do with it?”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. The early web was also just a place where you could play, I guess play… I mean, I’m using play in sort of a broad sense, but you’re playing without consequence. Like you said, there’s no… Aside from there also not being any logins back then, there was no tracking really. Google Analytics wasn’t a thing. The way that you found other people were visiting is if you had a hit counter on your website, or if you had a…

David Dylan Thomas:
[inaudible 00:49:46]-

Maurice Cherry:
… guestbook-

David Dylan Thomas:
… web counters. I’m like-

Maurice Cherry:
… and someone signed it, you know? You didn’t know.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
There wasn’t all this sort of stuff to sort of track your movements across the web and like, “Oh, you went here? Where did you go next? Where did you go after that? What purchases did you make?” None of that existed, and you could really… The thing that I… It’s funny. I tell this to my… I have two goddaughters, they’re nine and twelve, and I tell them that back when there was Windows 95, how when you logged off there would be this message that would pop up that would say, “It is now safe to turn off your computer.” There was a time when you could turn things off.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
TV had a stop time.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
At 12:30, those test bars came on and you went to bed. There was nothing else to sort of keep you up. You know what I mean? It’s so different now with everything being so tracked and analyzed and stored and sold to other companies. It’s just the web now is so different, and I think about that a lot in the context of “creating content.”

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
You’ve been writing, you’ve been making podcasts, you’ve done web series, et cetera, and I do want to talk about your podcast work, but you’ve been creating content online for over 20 years. How have you seen content online change during that time?

David Dylan Thomas:
There’s a dichotomy there because the original sin of the OpenWeb, and Anil Dash talks about this in a talk called The Web We Lost.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
The original sin of the OpenWeb was that it was very, very privileged. If you did not know how to code at some level, it was very difficult to create content on the web. What Facebook did, what Twitter did, what all these walled gardens did was make it easy to create content, make it easy to put it on the web.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
In exchange for that ease, we gave up data. The plus side of that was a lot of poor people got to make content. I don’t know another way to say it. If you look at Vine, back in the day before it collapsed, there was some amazing BIPOC content going up there, especially BIPOC humor. There was so much like I would say sort of innovative work being done, and some of that has bled over into TikTok as well. There are people who are creating content today who could not have made it otherwise because of Facebook, because of Vine, because of Twitter, because of TikTok. The trade-off was, “Oh, now we have your data. Now we can track you everywhere.”

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
I don’t think it had to be that way. I think that governments could have stepped up to say, “We think it’s important that people who aren’t privileged are able to make content. I think that different business models could have arrived that were better than that, but I don’t think any of that was likely because we live in America. We live in capitalist country in a largely capitalist world where people are incentivized, are told from a very early age your highest value, the best thing you can do is make money, so the likelihood of having a web that is sort of built on the idea of lest as many people responsibly make content as possible is not likely. This is not going to happen. The way I’ve seen content change over time since I started doing it is it is way easier than it ever, ever, ever, ever was-

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… but it has come at the cost of data. It has come at the cost of misinformation. I will always, if I have to choose between a privileged few being able to create content and a whole lot of people being able to create content, I’m always going to choose a whole lot of people, even if it means the odds of disinformation going up. The fact of the matter is, the odds of disinformation don’t go away if it’s only a privileged few. In fact, depending on who those privileged few are, the odds of disinformation skyrocket.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
You know what I mean? So-

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, I think we’re definitely seeing that now with Twitter’s recent change in ownership.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, so that’s a lot of why I talk about what I talk about now is this idea of I want people to understand what that balance is like and that it is good for lots of people to be able to create content. We don’t know how to deal with that yet. Somebody was pointing out so people talk about these unprecedented times, and I always get kind of like, “Really?”, when people say something like, “Yo, we’ve had.” There’s a lot of people who’ve been living in precarity for a long time now. It’s just more middle class people. More white people are having to deal with black people shit than ever before and they’re calling that unprecedented. I’m just…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… [inaudible 00:54:26] that, like poverty and health problems and all these other things. Other people have had to deal with that before, but what I do think is unprecedented is two things.

One, we have never, ever, ever, ever had 8 billion people on the same planet at the same time. Just hasn’t happened, and two, they have never all been able to talk to each other at exactly the same time. We’ve never had many too many communications at scale instantly ever, like ever, ever, ever. That’s never happened, so why should we be good at it? Why would we expect we’d be even remotely good at it? Especially if it’s all being done through a capitalist lens. It makes sense that we’re fucking this up, but I think we need to focus up on, how do we do this? I think it’s important to preserve our access to each other. I think it’s critical, but I don’t think we know how to do it yet.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, you mentioned something here just about the fact that we’re dealing… I mean, I think the unprecedented part of what you’re saying is just that, yeah, we don’t really have those mechanisms available, even though communication now is easier than it has ever been just because of the technology. You can text, you can FaceTime, you’ve got WhatsApp and Instagram and all these sorts of things, but I don’t know if the tools are necessarily facilitating the conversations in that way.

David Dylan Thomas:
Well, and I think it’s really, really important to understand that the societal work has to come first.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
There’s a great Twitter thread where someone talks about how this comes from actually an episode of The Orville, I guess, but there’s a character… The Orville is kind of like a Star Trek kind of show. There’s this character from an impoverished planet that asks the Federation, basically the spaceship, “Hey, why don’t you give us all replicators?” A replicator, for those who aren’t geeks like me, basically just a device that can just make anything you want. It just out of thin air it just makes it, so food, clothing, whatever. It just makes it. “Why don’t you give us all replicators and then we can be as peaceful as you are?” The guy from The Orville explains, “That you got it backwards. The only reason we were able to develop the replicator technology in the first place was because we got over our shit.

We were able to actually support each other to the point where we could coordinate to make something like that. The guy goes on, the Twitter thread goes on to say, “Look if we had replicator technology, if Twitter developed replicator technology, they would license it. They would make it so that if you don’t keep paying your subscription fee, or give us data for advertisers, it would stop working. Different companies and then different countries would be like, or different political groups would be like, “Oh, replicated meat is ruining the meat industry, so we’re going to say that replicated meat is bad and evil and I’m going to run on that platform so I can get votes.”

He basically breaks down all the ways that the greatest technology in the world can be ruined by people. People have to get their shit together first. Then, you can do good things with the technology. Yeah, we’re going to keep using social media for shit because we the people have shit that we need to work out. We have trauma that we need to get over. We have all these sort of agreements we need to actually make with each other before we can even have a hope of actually using the technology in a positive way.

Maurice Cherry:
Amen to that, amen to all of that. Society has to work through their own biases and other shit before we can really start to have the technology serve us, hopefully in a positive and constructive way. Just to kind of bring it back to the earlier conversation we had around content, to you, what does content strategy mean now? I mean, you’ve been a content strategist since before the title really came to be in this industry, and like I said, you’ve been creating content online in many different media for over 20 years and across several different fields, I should mention. To you, what does content strategy mean now?

David Dylan Thomas:
Organizational change. I was talking to a friend of mine who’s doing some work with the G20, and long story short, she was talking to someone about trying to get more buy-in around content strategy with her stakeholders and the person was like, “Don’t call it content strategy. Call it what it is. It’s organizational change.” Even from day one, so like 10 years ago I get my first official job. I’d been doing content strategy before, but I get my first official job where it says, “Content Strategy” on my business card. Within a week, I turned to one of the strategists at the organization and I ask then, “How much of our job is just doing interventions?” Hey says, “90%.” I’m like, “Oh, okay, I get it now.”

Yeah, I do content audits and I do this and that, and I built content models and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I make these artifacts, but at the end of the day, none of that means anything if I can’t work out your political problems, your organizational problems, your biases, all of the stuff, half of the examples in my book come from real-world experience I had working with clients, which is why I think it’s valid, frankly.

I’m glad I went through those experiences because I don’t think my book would make any sense otherwise, but yeah, it is people stuff. It’s messy people stuff, and content strategists are at a great position to witness and document the outcomes of the messy people stuff. If you have no taxonomy, if you have paths that don’t make any sense, if your language only makes sense to certain people in the organization with certain seats of power, all of that is just the outcome of people stuff, messy people stuff.

When you’re really… I’ve never seen a content strategy work lest there be organizational change that preceded it. If you did not fix the organizational problem, the best content model in the world isn’t going to help. I mean, the same thing with UX, same thing with dev. I think content strategists in particular get exposed to that first if they are kind of looking because they’re kind of the first ones under the hood looking at, “Okay, let’s take a look at your content inventory. Let’s take a look at your… Let’s do an audit.” You get to see those outcomes firsthand…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… but yeah, so I think call it what it is, organizational change. I spent 10% of my time as a content strategist creating these like artifacts like from an effort perspective. I spent 90% of that effort trying to convince you that it works.

Maurice Cherry:
Right.

David Dylan Thomas:
That’s what I’ve seen is a shift toward understanding that, or at least personally what I see, and that’s the other thing. I don’t feel comfortable commenting on content strategy like per se because I haven’t worked with a client in three years. It’s like, “Don’t ask me, ask the people on the ground what content strategy is.” My observation is that it is becoming clearer and clearer that content strategy is, in fact, organizational change, and to varying degrees, absolutely UX, absolutely design, absolute… There is no service industry in terms of like, “I am building you a website,” or, “I’m helping the organization do X, Y, or Z.” That is not on some fundamental level organizational change. That’s the shift I’ve seen.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, as I mentioned, you’ve done a lot in your career, events, web series, talked about podcasting. I have to ask about the podcast because you’ve done several. You’ve been host, you’ve had your own podcast. When did you really start getting into doing that?

David Dylan Thomas:
I was in podcasts before it was cool. Do you remember Odeo?

Maurice Cherry:
I remember I was on Odeo.

David Dylan Thomas:
Do you know what Jack Dorsey was up to before Twitter?

Maurice Cherry:
I remember. I do, I do. I remember Odeo in like 2004-2005. Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
My friend, Kevin Smokler, wonderful author and filmmaker in his own right, convinced me or we partnered up. Basically he’s my best friend, so we partnered up and said, “Hey, let’s do a podcast about movies.” We’re just going to talk about it because we’re both huge movie buffs. We called it Talking Pictures, and our first episodes, I believe, were posted on Odeo. Then, we moved on to other things later. That’s back in 2006 or so I started doing podcasting. I’ve never done it with any sense of like, and again, this is that arc. The early days of the web, you just did stuff because it was fun. You weren’t trying to get followers. You weren’t trying to make a fortune. You were just, “Hey, I can post something, and like hundreds, hundreds, hundreds of people could potentially see it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Wow. You have to understand, that was new. The only way to hear your voice on the air was to go on the actual radio. There was no like… The idea of just putting something online and having other people witness it that you will never meet was just a totally new thing. It didn’t matter if it was five people or 5,000 people. There just wasn’t as much a thing as it is now where it’s like, “Well, if I don’t get a million followers, what’s the point?” Yeah, and then many years later, I did The Cognitive Bias Podcast because basically I had been reading up on cognitive biases ever since I saw a talk by Iris Bohnet called “Gender Equality by Design.” It blew my mind, and she was the first one to start connecting the dots for me around here is this bias and here’s this impact, and here’s how design influences that.

It lit a fire under me to learn about cognitive bias, so I literally went to the The Rational Wiki Page of Cognitive Biases and just looked at one bias a day. I would pick a bias and I’d learn about it. Next day, go on to the next one. This turned me into the guy who wouldn’t shut up about cognitive bias, so my friends, and I remember one friend in particular who worked for Ted at the time was like, “You should do a podcast.” When someone who works for Ted is like, “You should do a podcast,” you listen. I’m like… Okay, at the time, I had a job that I only worked four days a week, so I had Fridays off, and so I was like, “I’ve already studied all these biases. What if I just do a podcast where I talk about one bias? Then I just would kind of reacquaint myself with a bias, make some show notes, and then just turn on the mike and talk.

I could wrap that up within an hour, and one hour every Friday was super manageable, so yeah, I just started posting it. Again, I wasn’t with the intent of like, “Oh, I’m going to grow this big audience.” It was more like, “Hey, this would be a fun thing to do,” and people tell me that they’re interested. Yeah, and it just grew and grew and grew and grew. It was never like… I never got to the point where I was like, oh, getting advertisers, or anything like that because frankly I’m too lazy. I just don’t have the energy to… I don’t care about that enough to build a whole business around it, but I care enough to do this thing, and it led to all these other things like giving the talk in Copenhagen, like writing the book. My experience from career perspective is that that’s how it works.

You may have a plan, you may not have a plan, but if you are diligent and lucky, and I stress the lucky because I don’t want people to think, “Oh, some people are just better than others and the ones who have all the hustle get the good shit.” No, the ones who have the hustle are persistent and that helps if the lucky thing happens, but there’s also luck. There is privilege, like I was born lower middle class to a mother who really cared about education, which put me in a better position to be able to get education and so on and so forth. There are people in my life who have cared about me and supported me…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… so that wasn’t something I planned and then happened because I’m so fricking awesome. No, it happened because of just all of the chaos theory things that happen in life-

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
… but when those things happened. I was prepared to say, “Yeah, I will do a hundred episodes of this podcast. I will go out and give all these talks.” I’ll… I think it’s a mix of those two things.

I always stress that because I won’t want people to forget about privilege. I don’t want people to forget about privilege. I don’t want people to forget about the social structures that limit our opportunities, and I really, really, really don’t want people to fall into the trap of thinking some people are just better than others. That’s one of the most horrific doctrines…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… in the history of the world. I’m not even a little bit overstating it. I always stress that, “Hey, I’m not here because I’m so fucking awesome, I’m here because I tried really hard. I care about these things. I was passionate about these things. I did it in a context where very fortunately these other people were in my life and I was born in this particular place at this particular time.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
There are a lot of things that I didn’t have control over that played in my favor, as well as some that played against me, but it isn’t just don’t think that some people are better than others. That’s the thing I really try to avoid when I’m telling my story.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I’m so glad that you mentioned that just kind of in the context of the work that you do and how that places you with where you are now. It’s a combination of things. This wasn’t something that was just handed to you. I mean, we’re talking about privilege, too, but also it’s kind of by privilege, I don’t want to say by privilege, but it’s also by fact of just being early, being around at the time that this technology started to pop off in a way where people could really take advantage of it and make livelihoods out of it. I think about some of the early projects that I’ve done, the Black Weblog Awards, and in 2015 I did a whole podcast about tea for a year. I just did like…

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh wow.

Maurice Cherry:
… short bursts, less than five-minute episodes about tea, one episode a day. I called it The Year of Tea…

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh.

Maurice Cherry:
… because I only did it for a year, and I could do that now. Maybe people would pay attention to it, maybe they wouldn’t. I hate the fact that content creation is now under not just the filter of algorithms, but also the lens of like how many likes or shares or whatever it gets.

The early web was just so much about doing things because you could do them and no one else was doing them, so you’re like, “Well, I’ll just do it and maybe it becomes something, maybe it doesn’t, but I’ll also not doing it for it to try to become something. Like…

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
… it’s… I don’t know, it’s hard, I think, to explain in the current context because so much of what’s done now is just filtered through engagement.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s as you kind of said earlier about fuck engagement, but everything is like, “Well, are people paying attention to it?” Who cares? Are you doing it because you like it? You know? Like… oh yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Who is being helped? I think that’s the other sad truth about the early web is it wasn’t particularly, I won’t say exclusively, but it wasn’t necessarily… It wasn’t helping people, I think, necessarily in the way that there’s the potential for it to help people now. Some of the early shit like Ushahidi was awesome where it was like this tool for helping people know where to avoid violence during the Kenya elections of 2007. It became this disaster relief tool. I think people… I wanted to see more of that out of the early web. I was perfectly happy to see us just kind of fuck around and do cool shit, but I also wanted to see us, and I think some of us were, and I think it got harder in some ways after the web got commoditized. I want a web that where the metric isn’t how many people are looking at my shit, but how many people am I helping?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
That’s the web I want to see. That’s the metric I want to see.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, that’s something with Revision Path, I’ve certainly… I don’t want to say I’ve come to terms with it over the years because when I started this, it really was just honestly as a continuation of a project that I did back in 2005. I started the Black Weblog Awards in ’05. In ’06, we had a category that was Best Blog Design. I was a blog designer at the time, designing movable type and WordPress sites. I was also working at AT&T at the time. I had other friends who were designers that were Black designers, and I just thought we weren’t getting any recognition in the industry. The magazines at the time, the conferences, we were not there, period. I wanted to do something about it, but couldn’t do it then.

It took me seven years until I started Revision Path, and now I’ve done that for 10 years as of this year. I’ll still run across people that think like, “Oh, this was just a fluke.” Like, “Oh yeah, you know, you’re just an overnight success.” Yeah, overnight since 2005. Come on, you know? I think about it in that context of like, “Is Revision Path ever going to be as poplar as, say, like Design Matters or 99% Invisible?” I don’t even look at the success of the show through that lens.

David Dylan Thomas:
Mm-hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
I don’t. I mean, I could and then I would be like, “Oh, the show is failing.” I don’t think about it that way because we haven’t reached that level of, say, audience or general I would say design community knowhow or knowledge or penetration, largely because people, honestly, they see the word Black and they’re like, “It’s not for me. I’m not interested. Whatever.” Which I’m fine with, but the impact that the show is having on the design industry, I know that there are teachers that teach the class in their schools, so there’s a new generation of designers learning about current Black designers, that those current Black designers that I talk to never encountered other Black designers.

I’m helping to change the conversation around who can be a designer, the visibility of what a designer looks like, where a designer can be, what a designer can do, et cetera. I have to look at it in that sort of lens of this is the impact that it’s having and less about whether or not it’s getting a hundred thousand downloads or something like that.

David Dylan Thomas:
We never know truly the impact we have, and you’re reminding me of this little Twitter contest that happened at least a decade ago where Ashton Kutcher and Wil Wheaton basically said, “Okay, we’re each going to ask our followers to do some kind of charitable thing.”

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
I think the way it broke down was… I don’t know, Kutcher had a much, much bigger reach than Wheaton, but Wheaton, a higher percentage of his followers actually did the thing, so it may have been technically more of Kutcher, a larger number of people did the thing from Kutcher’s clan, but if you did it by percentages, maybe 50% of Ashton’s people did something. Whereas, like 90% of Wheaton’s people did something. It’s sort of like if I had to pick, right?’

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
I’m not sure. I feel like maybe I’d rather be Wil Wheaton in that scenario because the people who are following you mean it. You know what I mean?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
It’s this tighter relationship, and increasingly I find myself defining success through relationship rather than through numbers. I’m working on this movie right now and I’ve decided the number one metric for success for the film isn’t going to be how much money it makes, it’s going to be, what are the relationships like during and after? Do I get to meet more people and form these new relationships? Do I get to strengthen existing ones? Because, A, that’s people I can work with again, and most of the experience making the movie is going to be working with people, so why would I not want that to be pleasant? B, I would much rather have that than have the movie just kind of fizzle versus have the movie be a huge success and we all hate each other when it’s over. That is not interesting to me.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
Where I’m at now, that’s just not interesting to me. Yeah, I feel you in terms of trying to not fall into the trap of it just being about the numbers and comparing yourself to other podcasts. I mean, my latest podcast, I’ve done two seasons of my new podcast called Lately I’ve Been Thinking About, and it’s nobody. There’s like… it’s like five people have heard it. The people who have heard it love it, but it’s sort of like compared to… Even compared to myself, it’s a failure in the sense of I don’t think it has nearly as much, as many plays as my Cognitive Bias Podcast, but I don’t care.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

David Dylan Thomas:
I actually am in some ways more proud of it because it’s the first podcast I’ve done that’s actually accessible. I’ve got a transcript now and I paid for the transcripts and I’ve got good… There’s certain things that I’m doing as a podcaster that I think is better podcasting than what I did with the first one, so…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… to me, it’s not as cut and dry as like, “Am I getting more likes than Joe Rogan?”

Maurice Cherry:
Right. I’m hoping to get to that. I mean, I don’t want to say I’m hoping to get to that. I still am in the mind of creating things just to make them, and if it does, well, it does well. If it flops, it flops. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was a bad idea. Maybe it’s bad timing, you know?

David Dylan Thomas:
Mm-hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
We did a design literary anthology we started in 2019 called Recognize, where we wanted to sort of cultivate like BIPOC design voices, et cetera. We did that in 2019. I think it went pretty well. The pandemic happened in 2020. That pretty much killed it, so we did one more year in 2020. I think I tried to do it in 2021 and it wasn’t working. It did not have the impact that I wanted it to have. I’m going to bring it back one day. I’m going to find a way to do it again because I still feel that it’s super important, especially as I start seeing more Black designers and Black creatives like writing books and stuff. I still want to do that because there was a time, and not too long ago, I’d say maybe roughly, I don’t know, maybe five, six years, maybe a little bit longer than that, but I feel like there were prominent design voices online. Not necessarily authors, but like you have venues like A List Apart. I remember when Designer News used to be a thing before it turned into a graveyard, but there used to be places where you could read writing about design.

David Dylan Thomas:
Mm-hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
There was AIGA, had Eye on Design. I think there might have been a couple of others. Now you see things and they’re mostly just glorified tutorials, which is not to say that’s a bad thing, but who’s the next generation of design writers? The current generation is either, I mean, not to be morbid, but they’re either dying or nobody’s paying attention to them anymore. Who’s going to be the next generation that are going to be talking about the things that are important? I feel like it’s going to be us and our generation, like you, of course, with your book and the works that you’re doing, hopefully me with this podcast, but there are more design voices out there that need to be cultivated. I feel like it’s going to mostly be designers of color that are the ones that do that.

David Dylan Thomas:
Mm-hmm.

Maurice Cherry:
How do we bring back Recognizing the Future? I don’t know. I’ll have to noodle on it some more, but I still think it’s important because it’s just important. I still think it’s something that needs to be out there. You know, did it do well the first time we did it? No. It’s just a timing thing. I’ll find a way to bring it back.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah, and I hope you do, and frankly, I think that the… I’ll say women and people of color are going to be like the new design voices, and I think they’re Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Eva Penzey Moog, Sheryl Cababa…

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… all these folks are doing great work, but I think that the new design voices are also going to be political. I think that’s the difference. I think that’s…I think it’s going to be increasingly difficult to tell the difference between good design voices and political activists. I think…

Maurice Cherry:
Oh yeah. Hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… that is… and frankly, there are periods in design history, like look at Bauhaus, there are periods in design history where that has been the norm where… I mean, design has always been political and sometimes it’s more pronounced than others. I think, I hope, we’re entering into a time where it is this thin, thin line between kind of activist voices and design voices, especially as we come into this period where we’re really realizing racism is designed, sexism is designed, transphobia is designed. All this injustice is designed-

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

David Dylan Thomas:
… and can be undesigned. Social equality can be designed. People treating each other humanely can be designed as well, but that there’s this, I don’t know, increasingly, and maybe this is just the voices I’m listening to, but increasingly I’m seeing design and discourse becoming more human and less technical.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I’m definitely starting to see that as well. I mean, I look at what I did for… I mean, I’m trying not to keep bringing it back to me, but I’m seeing it with things like, where are the Black designers? Which was kind of an offshoot of a talk I did in 2015. Mitzi Okou ended up doing a conference around it for two years starting in 2020. Now, it’s sort of grown out to be its own thing. They’re partnering with agencies and stuff, so I’m starting to see the byproducts and the effects of the work, and that to me is how I measure the success of what I’m doing or the impact that I’m having is that it’s reverberating out into the industry in other ways.

If I do something and it doesn’t go well, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the idea was bad. Maybe it was just the execution or the format or the timing, like those… Again, with the way that the modern web is and everything being geared around algorithms and numbers and such, just because something isn’t seen doesn’t mean that it’s not in some ways a success.

David Dylan Thomas:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What keeps you motivated and inspired to keep going?

David Dylan Thomas:
A couple things. I mean, people mostly. I have a wonderful wife, a wonderful son, I have wonderful friends, and just seeing them thrive or meet challenges helps. I think what also helps, frankly, is once you study things like cognitive bias in the human mind, you start to get a really great respect for uncertainty. Uncertainty can be scary, but it can also be invigorating, and so one thing that makes me hopeful about the future is that I am terrible at predicting the future and that, in fact, everyone is terrible at predicting the future. That’s just something we know. We’ve looked. People suck at it. I used to fancy myself a futurist until 2020, and then it was like, “Oh, it was adorable how much I think I could predict about the future.”

Now, I’m like, “Oh, something happens, Ron DeSantis will do some ignorant shit in Florida,” and I’ll be like, “Oh my God, we’re all doomed.” I’ll feel my feelings, but then I’ll remember, “Oh, right, I have no fucking clue what’s going to happen.” I don’t. I really don’t, for better or worse. I cannot accurately predict the dystopia and I cannot accurately predict a utopia. All I can do is what I can do, and what I can do is I can go around and get people fired up about inclusive design, get people fired up about treating each other like humans. That’s something I can do. I can go make my art, make my movies that I feel are going to have an impact and express these things and that might even bring me some healing. I can treat my family well. I can support my friends. Those are the things I can do. What I can’t do is predict the future, and that means I have just as much right to hope as I do to despair. I have equal access to both of those things because neither of them are accurate.

Maurice Cherry:
What advice would you give to someone out there that they’re hearing your story, they’re hearing about your work, and they sort of want to try to go into that direction? Not necessarily following your footsteps, but they want to be a more active designer as it relates to the issues and the things that you’re talking about. What advice would you give them?

David Dylan Thomas:
I would give them the advice that I give at the end of my newest talk, which is say sit down with a piece of paper and write down what you believe in at the level of like for me, it’s compassion, creativity, curiosity, connection, open-mindedness, spirituality. I just write these things down. Literally, I have them in a Trello, like straight up they’re in a Trello. Then, I look at them from time to time pretty regularly, actually, and I remind myself what I believe in. When I have to make a decision, like a hard decision, I look at that and I say, “Well, which course of action is more compassionate? Which course of action favors creativity?”

It’s not always an even mix. Sometimes it’ll be like, “Okay, well, this decision would be more compassionate, but less creative or whatever.” I have to… It gives me a framework for approaching the world and it reminds me that it isn’t all chaos, that there are things I can control because when you sit down to write those values, that’s you. You get to decide what you believe in. You may not get to decide how much you get paid, you may not get to decide how other people treat you, but you get to decide what you believe in and that the degree to which you want to strive for those things. Honestly, everything else I’ve done aside from the just chaos of it all that I couldn’t control began from those things. I would say that’s the best first step.

Then, after that, I mean, if you want to know what I did, what I did was I doubled down as much as I could on the things I was passionate about to the degree that I could and I chipped away. I basically reached a point where rather than think about my day as, “Here’s my day job and here’s the time I spent doing what I love, and here’s my hobby or whatever, or my passion.” Instead, I broke it down into, “How much of my time am I spending doing what I love?” There were times during my work day I could, in fact, do 5% of that work day was doing something I love. Okay, maybe next year it’s 10%. Maybe next year it’s 15%. I chipped away, chipped away, chipped away until now, I’m at the point where I’d say 90% of my day is spent doing things I love, and then there’s laundry. That’s a 20-year journey, by the way, at minimum, so don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t happen in a week.

That, I’m speaking about that abstractly because I don’t have a path. There is no like, “Oh yeah, Dave, that’s who you follow if you want to become a podcaster/speaker/filmmaker/workshop-giver, I guess author.” That’s the thing, right? No, it’s just a bunch of shit I do and I love it and I’ve worked very hard at it, but it’s like no, there’s no… I didn’t sit down one day and say, “Oh, well, first I’m going to do a podcast, and then that’s going to get me some talks, and then that’s going to get me a book deal.” No, I didn’t know any of that was going to happen. I seized the opportunity when it did happen, but I didn’t know it was going to happen. I just knew I really care a lot about this, so I’m going to start talking about it.

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

David Dylan Thomas:
I mean, in terms of impact, it’s like I said, I want people to treat each other better and anything I can do to make that happen, but concretely, I’ve got this movie I’m making. It’s based on a true fact, which is that beneath Washington Square Park in Philadelphia and Urban Park in Philly there are buried the bodies of hundreds of enslaved people. What if they came back one night as zombies, but they only ate white people? Movie is called White Meat. I have finished the screenplay. I did a table read-

Maurice Cherry:
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… I want you to keep going. You completely have gagged me by talking about the zombies and called it White Meat. Oh my God. Continue, continue. Please continue.

David Dylan Thomas:
Oh no, no, so I did a table read in December with professional actors and an audience. It killed, and I’m now putting together a budget, maybe a pitch deck, so I’m moving forward with that. That is one of those if it takes me until my dying day, I’m working on it kind of thing, but I’m hoping it’ll only be like five years, so that’s one piece. When I’m done that, I kind of maybe have another book in me because this new talk, it keeps getting longer. It’s like this actually might be a book or one-man show, so I’m going to keep doing that, and I’m going to keep doing what I do. I’m going to keep going out and giving these talks and these workshops, but yeah, that’s where I see my energies focused over the next few years is really do what I do on the daily, but I really want to make this movie. That’s the number one creative priority for me right now.

Maurice Cherry:
A zombie flick that kills. I like that. 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?

David Dylan Thomas:
The one-stop shopping for me is daviddylanthomas.com. You can buy my book there. You can sign up for my mailing list. You can hire me to speak. All the good stuff is there.

Maurice Cherry:
All right, sounds good. David Dylan Thomas, it has been an honor and a pleasure to have you on the show. I had a feeling that we were going to have a great conversation. We had, I think, a tremendous conversation. I just want to thank you for the work that you’ve done, the work that you’re continuing to do around not just helping us designers, people, et cetera, to uncover our biases, but also find ways to take that knowledge and then put it into action and to service to help make the world a better place. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

David Dylan Thomas:
Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for all the hard work you do with this podcast. Appreciate it.

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.

Kendell Burton

It’s been fun checking up on folks I’ve interviewed on Revision Path before, which brings us to my interview this week with art director Kendell Burton. When we spoke nearly a decade ago, he was just kicking off his career. Now he’s winning awards and staking his claim as one of NYC’s most dynamic creative talents.

We started off talking about his current work at international health agency 21GRAMS, and from there Kendell shared his story of growing up in Brooklyn and getting excited about tech through an unlikely source — Xanga. Kendell also spoke about the high points of his career, gave some tips about working at agencies, and talked about his horror podcast TerrorNova. Kendell truly loves what he does, and I can’t wait to see how his career continues to grow well into the future!

Interview Transcript

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

Kendell Burton:
Hey. My name is Kendell Burton. I am a senior art director at 21GRAMS, currently. I’ve been there now for a year. Yep. Coming up on a year. Yeah. Just past the year.

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

Kendell Burton:
2023 has been nice so far. I can’t complain. I’m always excited for what comes each year. I try to mix things up a little bit.

Maurice Cherry:
Is there anything that you want to accomplish this year that you didn’t accomplish last year? Any New Year’s resolutions or stuff like that?

Kendell Burton:
I don’t really do resolutions that much, but I guess if I had to say the closest thing to it is this year I want to travel a little bit more. I haven’t traveled as much as I would like, in a lot of ways, these past few years. Of course, due to the pandemic and stuff like that. I want to get back to doing that a little bit more.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I hear you there. I took my first plane trip since the pandemic back in October. I went to Toronto and spoke at a conference. I was tripping, leading up to the trip. You see on the news folks be fighting the airports. I don’t want to go and it’s some hassle. I just want to go to the airport, get on the plane, get where I’ve got to go. You know what I’m saying? It was fine. Once I got back into that rhythm, I was like, “Okay. This is good. I can do this.”

Kendell Burton:
That’s cool. You went to Toronto. I love Toronto. It’s one of my favorite places to visit.

Maurice Cherry:
That was my first time visiting. I didn’t get to see a whole lot of the city because they had us right by the convention venue where we spoke at. I tell people that Toronto kind of feels like if Hollywood made a big city to shoot movies in, it would be Toronto. It feels like New York, but less gritty and grimy, in a way.

Kendell Burton:
That’s a perfect description, actually. Yep. Someone who goes there every year, that’s a perfect description.

Maurice Cherry:
Interestingly enough, I got to the airport, took my cab to the hotel, got to the hotel. Soon as I walk in the hotel, they’re playing Drake. I’m like, “Really? Really?”

Kendell Burton:
They love Drake over there. [inaudible 00:07:03] Drake. Cab drivers have asked me and my lady about that last time I went. I went in the summertime last year and the guy was like, “you heard of Drake?” I’m like, “I know [inaudible 00:07:11]. Who didn’t hear of Drake?”

Maurice Cherry:
Who hasn’t heard of Drake?

Kendell Burton:
I don’t listen to his music like that, but of course I’ve heard of the man. He’s like, “He’s not popular in America?” It said, “Very, very popular.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. You mentioned 21GRAMS. Let’s talk a little bit about the work that you’re doing there. Can you tell me about that?

Kendell Burton:
Yeah. I could tell you a bit about agency. I’ve been there, like I said, for a year. The work is pharma based, which is really interesting because it’s my first step ever into pharma. I’ve like never done anything pharma before this. It’s been really interested. 21GRAMS a pharma agency. It sometimes comes down to figuring out the best way to market a drug. Very similar to a traditional agency in the consumer space where maybe Mars or M&M’s would come to the agency and say, “Hey. We want to do a campaign. What should we do? What is the thinking? What is the concepts? What does your campaign look like?” That’s pretty much the 21GRAMS does with pharmaceuticals.

It could be a general campaign that’s about bringing awareness around a particular disease or particular condition that people suffer from or it could be a campaign that’s about a very specific drug that is meant to help and treat a very specific condition. The campaigns kind of range, but the thinking and all of that stuff, strategically, conceptually, design-wise, all that stuff still applies.

Maurice Cherry:
What is a typical day like for you?

Kendell Burton:
Oh, man. It’s exciting for me, because I’m still learning so much new stuff every day. Some things are the norm, just hopping on Teams or hopping in chats and talking to my teammates about what’s happening on the project. Some days can be very heavily design focused where I’m in design or Photoshop or XD or any of the millions of programs in the Adobe Suite. Could be one day of me making maybe working on a brochure or a lead behind or working on a direct mail alert or it could be working on a page for a website or I could be working on print ads. Like I said, it’s a variety. Honestly, some days can just be very heavily meeting focused where I may be having conversations with my internal team about the upcoming project, relaying questions to them about what I need to do, what I can do.

This is the interesting thing about working on pharma, you kind of have to learn about the drugs or a disease stage you’re trying to fix. That’s another meeting, they call it Med 101. They may be sitting in a meeting for an hour where I’m just learning about the condition that people suffer from and this is why this particular medication was created to treat this. It’s really interesting. My day could jump around. It could be very, very different from day to day.

Maurice Cherry:
What attracted you to work for them?

Kendell Burton:
I wanted to try something new, to be honest with you. I wanted to try something new. I remember telling them that during an interview process as well. I wanted to try something different throughout a good portion of my career I’ve to work consumer side, which you knows things like Nike, Adidas, my Little Pony, Hasbro, all of this variety of brands I’ve been fortunate to touch. I remember one of my professors always said with pharma, he was like, “Hey. Some people get stuck in it. Some people don’t like being stuck, so if you could try consumer for a little while and then go into pharma, so at least if you don’t enjoy pharma, you can go back. You might find that you like it, so it’s kind of up to you.”

I’m the type of person that likes to try new things. I was like, “Great. I’ve done all these years of consumer.” The opportunity for pharma came up to me and I was like, “Yeah, I want to try that. I haven’t done that before, I’m sure I’ll have to think differently and learn new things.” That’s kind of a part of a reason I got this field to begin with. So I was like, “Time to launch a new step.”

Maurice Cherry:
Overall, as an art director, what would you say is the best thing about the work that you do?

Kendell Burton:
It’s a lot of things. Of course I’m a fan of the end result, when the project is done. [inaudible 00:11:03] A everyone’s just like, “Wow, this really came out better than we expected.” It’s always great to hear that. I honestly love proving the people that design requires more work than people think. I think oftentimes people just to just go, well, you know the brand color is, what photography to use, I would direct that. I think sometimes a big part of art direction, which is different from design, they are not a hundred percent the same. A big part of our director is trying to direct people like, “Hey. We can do it like this. We can do it like this. I know you may be selling this particular thing, but we could style this in the style of, I don’t know, a Cinderella book or something or some type of fairytale story.” You could just remix things in the ways that people don’t expect and that’s a part of the experience.

It’s not just laying out the content, but it’s the way in which you lay out the content that makes things really interesting. That’s a part of the art direction. What type of typography do we use? What type of photography do we use? That’s a part of art direction that’s slightly separate from design, but is of course connected. That’s one of my favorite aspects of it. Just kind of showing non designers that and showing “non creatives” that aspect of what we do.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, I hear people kind of use art director and creative director somewhat interchangeably. What would you say are the difference between those two, from your perspective?

Kendell Burton:
I’ve heard it a few different ways. I would say, I guess, in my experience, the way the industry has been lately, within the time I’ve been in it, it seems like people have tried to merge the two. From my understanding how things used to be, there was never really a mergence of the two because thinking and doing are two very different tasks. There are people who are really good designers, like fantastic designers, but they may not be the best in terms of figuring out the best direction for something to look visually, but they may be the best to put it together. They just may not be the best to come up with the idea. Generating ideas is important. Similarly, to how people think of Apple when they’re just, “Steve Jobs didn’t design anything.” You’re like, “You’re probably right.” Having the vision and coming up with the idea is a big part of the process too. You can’t separate the vision from the actual technical part they’re doing.

I’ve always viewed creative director and art director as they’re different. In my opinion, the creative director is more of the manager. The creative director is the manager of the entire project. Not just necessarily the art aspect of it, but understanding what are we trying to accomplish? What are we doing on brief? What is the brief. What is the brief action? Do we have enough information in the brief? All of those things. I feel like, the creative director is a part of kind of guard railing to make sure that the art director and the designers can succeed.

The art director, I’ve always viewed it as art director is generally in charge of what is the ownable creative POV in which we can tell this story. Are we telling the story in a way of a video game? We know some type of video game narrative that uses maybe a UI video game experience. What are we trying to say? Here’s the best way to say it. The career director is just, I would say, there to make sure that you have all things in place such you can actually get to doing part. That’s just how I viewed it. I’m sorry if that sounds a little complex, but that’s just kind of how I thought it. Art director is the creative vision. Creative director is making sure art director has everything they do and need and being the guardrail and the pressure cooker to make sure that things are going out make sense.

They’re like the, I would say, the artistic version of the client. That’s how I’ve always thought of it. When I work on a project, even though I’m designing as well oftentimes, I’m going to the creative director far before I’m going to anyone else to go, “Hey, here’s what the brief said. Here’s what the POV is. Here’s what the goal is. Here’s how I think we should do that. We should tell that story. We should solve this problem. What do you think?” I feel like the creative director’s supposed to put their client hat on in some ways to go, “Okay. The client may or may not like certain aspects of this. We’re kind of pushing a bar, but that’s cool. Let’s push the bar. Let’s do this.” That’s kind of how I’ve always viewed it.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay, I got you. No, I like that distinction and that comparison. When I’ve had folks on the show or even when I’ve just talked to other creatives, I keep hearing them used interchangeably. I know they’re different, but I don’t know if they know that it’s different, if they’re saying one thing and it should be something else.

Kendell Burton:
Yeah. That’s why I say what it is now, because from my understanding from people I’ve spoken to who have been in this field far longer than I have, even before I knew this field was an option in life, people who have been in this field maybe 20, 30 years, maybe even longer. They’re like, “Hey. These jobs used to be treated entirely separately.” Even the designer and art director were treated entirely separately. You weren’t just promoted from designer to then your next level was art direction because some can’t make that jump. I was like, “That makes sense.” Now it seems like it’s been smushed together in a lot of ways. I’m sure it has to do with money, it’s easy to pay one person versus two. I’m sure that’s why that decision was made. Everyone who’s an art director is not meant to be a creative director and vice versa.

Maurice Cherry:
Got you. Got you. I kind of want to switch gears here a little bit because you sort of alluded to earlier about not even knowing this was a profession. I kind of want to know about your origin story, how you first got into design and art direction and everything. You were born and raised in Brooklyn, right?

Kendell Burton:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Tell me what it was growing up there.

Kendell Burton:
I loved it. I still live in New York. I’m not in Brooklyn anymore. Now I live in Manhattan, but I’ve always loved Brooklyn. It’s always had a good community, in my opinion, especially being a kid. I was born in 89, which isn’t that long ago, but it can feel like it [inaudible 00:16:42] hindsight. I’ve always had a really great community. I was not a cool kid, but I mean I had a good time as a kid growing up in Brooklyn. I was always in parks, really simple life. My family wasn’t super wealthy or had money to really do vacations in crazy places or anything like that. It was a lot of spending time with family, going to block parties when Block Brooklyn used to do more of that when I was a kid, block parties were a thing. The thing, especially in the summertime. It’s the best thing ever. Just every morning in the neighborhood comes out, everyone’s cooking, giving stuff to kids, nobody’s worried about kids getting kidnapped. It was chill. It was really cool.

I really just loved that as a kid. That’s literally my fondest memory of Brooklyn is just block parties and everybody just kind of being out and no one calls [inaudible 00:17:31]. Everyone’s just chilling. Hey, you want a hamburger? We’re making burgers over here. You want some hotdog? You want some ribs? Everyone’s making everything. It’s a great time. I loved it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I love that sort of sense of community that comes from close-knit places like that. I mean, I grew up in the deep south, but that’s one of my memories of growing up is we were around this tight-knit community where if you needed something, you went across the street. It sounds quaint. Oh, I’m going to go across the street and borrow a cup of sugar or whatever, but you could do that. Folks would sit out on their porch and wave to each other and all of that. Doesn’t happen now, but back in the day it definitely was just a different vibe back then.

Kendell Burton:
Yeah. I try to recreate that in my everyday life in some capacity. It’s a little challenging, but I try to create some small aspects of that going forward.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, were you a really creative kid? Did you do a lot of drawing and stuff?

Kendell Burton:
I tried. I tried. I guess I would say I was creative. I was like every other kid watching Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon and things like that and trying to draw the character as best I could. I did have that aspect of it. Drawing never really stuck with me, but I did do that. I just enjoyed comedy and seeing and doing creative things. I was a really active kid. I was never one of those kids who just knew what they wanted out of life in terms of … Some kids are like, “I know I want to be a doctor. I know I want to be this.” When that question came to me in elementary school, I was like, “I don’t know, man. I’m five. I know firemen do cool stuff, but I know police do their thing. All these other companies and professions do their things, but I don’t know. Can I just learn life?”
That was always how I’d been. I would just learned stuff. I was like, “Oh. This is interesting. That’s interesting.” Standup comedy was interesting. My father would play that stuff in the house and that’s how I knew Richard Pryor and things like that. I was like, “This is funny. This is interesting.” It was movies another thing.I just experimented with everything.

Maurice Cherry:
You said you were born in 89, right? Right around that time of the late eighties, early nineties. I would say even going into the mid and late nineties, there was such an explosion of culture that happened, I think particularly here in the US, because of the advent of technology and personal computers and cable and the internet and all that sort of stuff. Prior to the generation before us, we just got exposed to so much more stuff at a formative age. It kind of makes sense that when that question gets asked about what do you want to be, it’s tough because you have so much choice.

Kendell Burton:
Yeah. I think it’s good to have choice. I’m always the person that thinks people need to experience stuff to know what they like. That’s just how I view it. I guess you can call it my childhood wisdom even. That was just the way I viewed things. I was like, “I don’t know until I tried it,” I would just try stuff. That’s why I played a billion sports. I was also drawing stuff. I was trying to write poetry, I was doing so many things. I was just like, “I don’t know what I’m good at yet. I know I’m smart. I don’t have any self-esteem issues or self-confidence issues, but I need to explore the world. I just got here. I’m eight.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now did your family support you in this, all this sort of exploration of all these different things?

Kendell Burton:
Yeah. Yeah. They definitely did. My dad, I mainly raised by my dad, because my mom passed when I was a young age. My dad, he didn’t even tell me to do these things. I just was interested in stuff. I would see stuff that he did and I was like, “That’s kind of cool,” obviously. Whether it was movies we watched or TV shows or bike riding. We did a lot of bike riding when I was a kid. I still try to ride my bike now. It still applies. Seeing things in the world, seeing things in the park, seeing people try stuff maybe in a TV show and I’m like, that’s interesting. Let me try that. My parents never discouraged me from doing anything.

They kind of in some ways opened the world up to me. They didn’t really shield me from things in the world heavily. They were just kind of like, “Yeah. Some things are like this and things like that.” They kind of encouraged me to ask questions and tell them my thoughts if I had any. I just kept going. I just kept doing it.

Maurice Cherry:
Now I read in another interview that you cut your teeth in tech trying to set up a Xanga blog to meet girls. Is that right?

Kendell Burton:
Yes, that is.

Maurice Cherry:
Talk to me about that. What’s the about?

Kendell Burton:
This is my origin story. You know what’s funny? I tell this story at job interview, so I’ll tell you exactly how I tell it. I need people to know my personality. I’ve always felt like if people don’t understand my personality then there’s no point in me working at places. I tell them the same story when I go to job interviews. People are like, “What got you in the design?” I go, “Women.” People are like, “What? What does that mean?” It’s not a answer you expect. You expect me to sit down and be like, “I was drawing such a young age, Picasso.” No, it was none of that.

It was gross. I was a teenager, I was 13 years old. I had my first summer job or first job, period. It was a summer job. I worked at a senior center in Queens. I lived in Queens at the time. I worked at the senior center and Ravenswood in Queens. This kid that I worked with with was a little older than me. He was a graduating senior in high school. I just finished my freshman year. He was always on this website called Xanga. I didn’t know what it was. I just saw he was always on it.

They had a computer. This is before computers were everywhere. People had computers, but not everyone had a computer at home. I was one of those people that didn’t have a computer at home. I knew how to use computers because schools had computers. In our office job, at the senior center … It was office job. You’re sorting paperwork, you may occasionally have to type something, you may occasionally have to send an email. We mostly hung out with the elderly people that were there, because that was what it was. It was like maybe bringing lunch to him, stuff like that. It was just a space where older people could hang out in the summertime and they didn’t have to go out and worry about the heat or anything like that. It was a really chill place.

My coworker that worked there, he was just on his website all the time, Xanga. I always saw he was on there, whether he was putting music or changing photos. It was a really simple blog. I guess this was before people even called them blogs, but it was a really simple blog. He always had music playing. He was just metal. He had cool backgrounds. I think one day after a few weeks of getting to know him, I was like, “Hey, man. What is this website?” He was like, “Oh. I use it to talk to my friends who are” … What is the word I’m looking for? For people who were shipped out in the military, because he was in a program called ROTC, I believe was the name of it, which is kind of a preparation program for people who were going to go to the military or go to military schools, things like that. He was like, “Yeah. I stay in touch with my friends who are overseas and who have already been deployed. I just used us to stay in touch with them and talk to other people.”

I was like, “Oh, that’s cool. That’s really cool. Can I meet girls on here?” Specifically, can I meet girls on here? He was like, “Well, technically, yeah.” I was like, “Cool. That’s all I need to know. Create a profile for me.” [inaudible 00:24:45]. I had my own page. I remember my username was Shadow 1989. I had my own page and I just started tinkering with it, because I saw that he was always tinkering with it. I was like, well, what can you do? The page gave you limited HTML on coding capabilities, honestly. It was like you can change the background color, you can put an image in the background, you can position the image in the background, you can change the color of the text. You could change some of the effects over the text. Maybe you hover over the text and instead of it going purple, maybe it glitters or something. It was just these little capabilities that were really cool. Me and my friends were literally Googling stuff to find out how to change the code on certain things.

It just opened up a can of worms. I was on it all the time, customizing my page all the time, thinking of really interesting themes for my page. Oh, I want to do a Final Fantasy theme. I think at the time, Final Fantasy 10 was a thing. I had the photo of Titus and Uno. It’s from the game for people who played the game. There’s a scene in the game that’s really beautiful where they’re in this water and there’s these fireflies around. I had that in my background. The hover state for my links was this sparkling glitter that looks like it was from the scene. It was beautiful. [inaudible 00:26:03].

I didn’t know what design was at the time, but I was just doing that all the time.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean I think what you’re mentioning here is something that’s really important for, I think, anyone that’s looking to learn something new. Use the gateway of something that you enjoy to be that sort of fuel that pushes you into it. Do you think you would’ve gotten into this if you couldn’t meet girls or … You know what I mean? Because you knew that because that was an avenue for you, you’re like, “Okay. I think I want to learn more about this,” because you had a vision of what you wanted to do because of what you were interested in.

Kendell Burton:
Yeah. It was a hundred percent that. See, that’s the funny part. I had years of using that software, using that website. I got all my friends hooked on it. We were all 13 at the time. I think one or two of my friends maybe a year older. We all got hooked on Xanga. We’re all using it for the same reasons, pick up girls. We also all were just really getting into the design aspect of it, but not knowing that it was something that people do professionally.

The way I found out graphic design was an option was in my junior year of high school. Yeah. My junior year of high school, I had a computer class. I transferred schools. I went back to Brooklyn. I had a computer class, I remember with a teacher, Mr. Mastell. That was his name, Mr. Mastell. Mastell. I remember his name. Really nice guy. I remember seeing him years later and I told him this story. He laughed. He was like, “I forgot all about that.” I was like, “I know you’ve had a hundred students.” The computer class, we had to build a webpage. We had to build a website, but mainly you could just build a webpage. He was like, “Just build a page.” In that class, as we were on computers all day, I was bouncing between building my page and then playing with my Xanga. Why not. I’m a kid so this is what I do.

Then one day the teacher was coming over to my desk and I was on Xanga and I saw he got close, because remember when he used to have those big computer monitors, it wasn’t like [inaudible 00:27:54]. Well, you could see somebody walking up to you. It was the big one. I didn’t see him until his shadow basically came over the top of my screen. I was like, “Oh snap. Let me minimize this window.” Being an old computer, the window froze and it got stuck. My Xanga page was just stuck on the page. I’m just sitting there clicking so hard on the minimize button. It just wouldn’t minimize. He came by and he was like, “How’s your project going?”

He sees my screen. I’m like, “It’s going.” He was like, “Hold on. What’s that?” I was like, “I don’t know. This thing [inaudible 00:28:29].” Yeah. I thought I was in trouble. He was like, “No, that’s actually really cool.” I remember having this tornado marquee with typography coming out of and stuff. He was like, “That’s really cool. Wow, that’s really cool. How did you even learn how to do that? I didn’t teach you guys anything like that. This is cool.” He was like, “Wow. You should maybe be a designer or something.” I said, “Hold up. I was just using this to pick up women. You’re telling me I could have a career choice here?”

He was like, “Yeah. There are people who do graphic design, professionally, whether it’s websites or other stuff.” I was like, “I had no idea. I’m so happy you said that. I didn’t even know what I wanted to do in college. I just knew I wanted to go to college.” That was kind of how it started.

Maurice Cherry:
Speaking of college, you went to City Tech. For folks that have been listening to the show for a while, we’ve had a few professors on the show; Douglas Davis, Danny Shaw, we’ve had a couple of City Tech alums too. Tell me what your time was there.

Kendell Burton:
That’s my professor, Douglas Davis. I had him as a professor.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, really?

Kendell Burton:
Yep. Danny Shaw, that’s one of my good friends.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice.

Kendell Burton:
City Tech was great, man. I loved City Tech. It was a really nice experience to get around other people who were trying to do something in field. Remember, I’m just a kid who’s just playing around on the website. I don’t know design principles, I don’t truly know color palettes. I know how to use color. I know what looks good to the eye. I wasn’t that kid who was like, well, you’re supposed to use these particular shades of red to go with this particular shade of blue. I didn’t understand or know any of that, because I never was traditionally taught any of it. That’s why college was really great, because I got to really see the basics of how to do some of these thing, even just basic drawing. I still don’t draw much to this day, but just having life drawing classes and things like that was really fun. You see different people skill levels. You see people who’ve clearly been doing it for way longer than you, or you see people who are also learning as well.

Meeting these people, becoming friends with them and become friends with the professors. City Tech was honestly one of the best parts of my life. I met a lot of really cool people that I’m friends with to this day. It was great. It was a great experience, man, from beginning to end. My skillset was terrible walking in, considering I only knew how to play around on our websites. To what it was post, after leaving City Tech, like drastic change, man.

Maurice Cherry:
I’d imagine it was probably pretty cool also having a black male professor, someone that’s teaching you how to do all this stuff too.

Kendell Burton:
Oh, yeah. Doug was cool. His class was hard. As somebody who didn’t have any traditional training in the field or any understanding of what a concept for a campaign was, it was very hard for me at first. I remember telling him this. He was always just like, “Oh, I know it’s hard. I make it hard because this is what it’s going to be like.” His class isn’t hard for the sake of being hard. It’s hard because he’s being realistic about how projects are done and the actual agency space. I was like, “Okay, cool.” It was super challenging. I didn’t know how to come up with a concept fora campaign. I didn’t know what a campaign truly was. I knew commercials I saw that were really cool. I remember, I used to always tell people this joke, but I’m clearly when I saw the Old Spice commercial, which was out at the time with the dude … What was his name Isaiah Washington?

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, Isaiah Mustafa, I think.

Kendell Burton:
Yeah, something like that. The guy riding on the horse?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Yeah.

Kendell Burton:
[inaudible 00:31:42] to the camera. That came out when I was in college. I remember seeing that commercial going, I don’t know how they got to a black guy on a horse, but I know it couldn’t have just been somebody saw Old Spice black guy on a horse. There had to be thinking again from A to that. There had to be thinking. He was like, “Yeah, for sure.” I was like, “I don’t know what any of that thinking is, but I would love to learn.” His class was great for that. His class was really, really good for that. Yeah. Seeing a black professor was awesome. In a lot of ways he was inspirational, because I didn’t have many black professors prior to that, that I can recall, let alone that was still actively working in the field and still was keeping up with where things are moving. He’s a very innovative professor for not just City Tech, but just in general.

Maurice Cherry:
What was your early career after you graduated? You obviously had this interest that you had sort of cultivated through getting on Xanga and meeting girls and stuff. Then you’re also strengthening it through college. Once you got out there, what was your early career?

Kendell Burton:
It was interesting, man. I didn’t know where to go. There’s no clear handbook for what you do once college is done. You know you want to get a job in your field, but for somebody like me, like I said, I didn’t know what was possible. I had a better idea of what was possible after all of this college stuff, whether [inaudible 00:33:02] internships or talking to professors or being fortunate to volunteer for some award shows to actually see what those were like. I still didn’t really know where I wanted to go. When I graduated, I didn’t get a job right away, but I was applying places. I was talking to recruiters and all that. I still do that to this day, honestly. Talk to recruiters, email recruiters, hop on the phone with recruiters and talk to them. I always kind of try to make a habit of that because you never know.

Actually, Doug used to always say this. He was like, “It’s best to talk to people when you don’t need them.” [inaudible 00:33:35] for a favor. I was like, he’s a hundred percent right because I hate when people hit me up only to ask for favors. I try to it make a habit. No, I make it a habit to be a good person in general, not just when I need something, to everybody, whether you can give me something or not. I was the same way with recruiters. Yes, I needed their help when I was coming out of college, but I was also just trying to build a relationship. It actually worked out for me. That was how I got my first job.

I got my first job three months after I graduated college. It was at VaynerMedia. I got that job because of a recruiter that I spoke to probably about two or three times a week. He was always so proactive about trying to help me get something, it’s my homeboy Jakes. We still talk from time to time. He was so proactive about helping me get a gig because he was like, “Your work is clearly good. Obviously you’re a junior and [inaudible 00:34:22] stuff you have to learn.” I’m like, “I know. For sure. I’m willing to learn it.” He was like, “I’m going to keep trying to place you.” He kept trying to place me.

Then eventually the intermediate reached out to me through email for an interview. I went to the interview, I got the job. I was like, “Wow. This is awesome. I got first job.” Ironically, the first day I ran into him in the bathroom. He was like, “Hey.” I was like, “Hey, man. What’s going on?” He was like, “Hey. How’s everything going?” I was like, “Good.” He was like, “How’d you think you got the job interview?” I was like, “I don’t know. They just randomly reached out.” He said, “It was me, dude. I recommended you.” I was like, “Oh, thank you, man. I didn’t know. You didn’t tell me that. I knew you left your recruiter job, but I didn’t even put two and two together that you came here and then they reached out to me.” I was like, “That’s so cool. I appreciate that.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I remember when I reached out to you. I think this was almost 10 years ago, almost a decade ago. Good Lord. You were working at VaynerMedia at the time. For people that know Vayner Media was founded by Gary Vaynerchuk, who … I haven’t really followed him lately, but I know back during that time, right before he started VaynerMedia, was really well known in the social media entrepreneurship space. What did you learn from that experience working there?

Kendell Burton:
I will say a lot. Honestly, I also want to preference, I didn’t know who he was when I went to the job interview.

Maurice Cherry:
That probably is a good thing, to be completely honest with you.

Kendell Burton:
I guess. Well, I’m sure people do, but I didn’t go there like, “Hey, I really want to work with Gary.” In my mind I’m like, I just got out of college. It’s an interesting job where I could do social media work. I’ve always been told that digital is going to be the future anyway, in a lot of ways. This is a cool opportunity. I remember the woman who interviewed me, she said, “Hey. Do you know anything about Gary?” She was like, “I’m not going to hold it against you. I just want to know.” I was like, “I don’t know anything about this man. I just found out who he was when I found out about this agency and that’s fine. I’m cool with that.” That’s not to say that he’s bad or anything, it’s just I didn’t know who he was prior to getting the job.

Sorry, what was the question?

Maurice Cherry:
What did you learn from that experience working there? Did it teach you anything? Any sort of lessons that you still carry with you to this day?

Kendell Burton:
Yeah. I worked with some really awesome art directors there who were, I would say, patient with me. I tell everybody, you need patience with people. Regardless of job level and title, you need patience with people. It was my first gig. I’d done social media work a little bit prior to that, but honestly not a lot. I did intern at Buddy Media when I was around at one point I interned at a F Sharp building user experiences for social, but not creating daily social content.

Working at Vayner was a bit of a change, because at that time we were pumping out social content for so many different brands daily. It was a very go-getter energy. I kind of really liked that. I didn’t right away appreciate it. I was kind of like, “What’s going on here? What the hell’s going on here?” Because everyone was kind of bouncing around doing different things. I would see the art director. He’s like, “I’m heading to a shoot.” Then I see him five minutes later, he’s like, “I’m designing something for something.” Then I see him a few minutes after that. He’s like, “I’m overseeing this other person who’s working on a different brand, but I’m in charge of what happens on that brand.” I was just like, “Wow, this guy’s doing a lot in two hours. There’s a lot happening.”

That was just the energy there at the time. Even as a designer, they gave me a good amount of responsibility. I was in charge of my daily creative needs where it was a certain amount of content for maybe a brand I was on. I was on Hasbro. I touched a lot of brands when I was there, probably some of the most in my life. It’d be like maybe designing maybe four to five pieces of content a day. I remember this daily content, they’d do daily content at the time for brands. My day would be designing maybe four or five things. Then I may be leading a small photo shoot for one of the products for one of our brands. Then maybe I’m also helping out somebody else for another brand because maybe someone just needs a body to do something.

Hey, guys. We’re trying to record a Vine, when that was a thing. Need someone to be here. We need someone to be here. Who’s free to help? Then it’s like, “Kendell, are you free for 10 minutes?” Sure, I’m free you. Then I’ll go in and help out with a Vine, whether we’re doing something for Chips A-Hoy or doing something for a random brand. I was like, “Cool.” It was just a really good go-getter energy. I really appreciated and that it. It was really cool. It was a lot to learn there from everything that was just happening.

Maurice Cherry:
Now after VaynerMedia, a couple of years afterwards, you ended up working at another agency G and you were their lead designer. Was that kind of a big shift from that sort of fast hustle culture that it sounds like VaynerMedia had to, what was going on at GLOW?

Kendell Burton:
A little bit. Yeah. A little bit. I felt like with Vayner, often days you didn’t know what you were going to get. I knew it was going to be designing a few things, but you sometimes didn’t know if you were going to be leading the shoot or volunteering with different things. There was a lot going on. It was really fun. I loved being a part of that. That was awesome. GLOW is drastically different and drastically smaller. It was way smaller. When I first got to Vayner, I think two weeks in and they were moving to a new office, because they needed more space. I think we might’ve been over 300 employees at that point. It was a lot of people there. So much so I started losing track of names of so many people. If you weren’t on my direct team, or I didn’t work with you in the past, it was hard to keep track of names. There was so many people.

GLOW was a lot smaller. GLOW was maybe 20 to 30 people.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow.

Kendell Burton:
[inaudible 00:39:41] the creative team. I meant the company was 20 to 30 people. It was a lot smaller. The work I did there was some of my favorite work I’ve done in my career. It was just a good time. It was a different experience. Whereas, Vayner was a lot of consumable goods, whether it was like Hasbro or Chips Ahoy and things of that nature. With GLOW, it was a lot of entertainment focused. It was TV shows, which was drastically different. I worked on social for a lot of TV. It was still social based, so that aspect I still hold down to. It was a lot of TV shows, whether it was shows for HBO, Showtime, Star, Sci-Fi Channel. It was a lot of TV shows. There was a little bit of a learning curve in what you can say for a TV show, what you can do or what you can’t do. It was interesting.

Maurice Cherry:
Interesting. I’m trying to place the year. I’m guessing this is like 2010s maybe, mid to early 2010s?

Kendell Burton:
Yeah. Roughly about maybe five years ago almost. Probably mid to late.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Yeah. I think about how television and social, because you mentioned that, I remember when Scandal came out on ABC. I had been on Twitter. I had been on Twitter since 2007. I don’t think the concept of live tweeting a television show was really a thing back then until that show. It really popped off. Now you go on Twitter and you can’t escape every web series, movie, television show has some kind of hashtag or social campaign behind it or something. I feel like that was really sort of the golden age of that stuff popping off.

Kendell Burton:
Yeah. Yeah. I was actually just looking at the year. It was like 2015 till 2018 I was there. Yeah. Definitely during that time where live tweeting was becoming a big thing and brands were starting to care, TV shows in particular, but all brands. Really TV shows are starting to care a lot more about how they appeared on social, how did they engage with the audience? Were they doing good stuff prior to the episode airing and then during the episode earring and then after the episode airing. It was really cool, man. It was a great time. Some of the stuff I got to touch and work on, some of the most fun work I’ve done in my career, honestly. It was just a really interesting time.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, after GLOW you worked for even more agencies. You worked for 360i, you worked for Collected, you worked for Ghost Note. We actually had their art director on last year, Rebecca Brooker. What draws you to working for agencies?

Kendell Burton:
They keep hiring me.

Maurice Cherry:
Look, that’s real. Hey, I get it.

Kendell Burton:
It’s really that. They kept hiring me. From Vayner, like I said, I had no predetermined career path. I was like, “Well, this agency works for me, let me try another one.” It just kind of kept snowballing that way. It’s been good. It’s been interesting. It’s been good. I’ve learned different things from every agency. They just kept hiring me and I kept getting really interesting opportunities. I was like, why not? I’ll keep rolling with this. It just kept working.

Maurice Cherry:
What qualities do you think agencies look for in a designer? Is it just about having a portfolio of good work or is it something else?

Kendell Burton:
I think it’s a little bit of both. I’ve heard people say different things, but I think it’s a little bit of both. I think on one hand they see a portfolio that people look for potential. They’re like, “Oh. How does this person think? What does this person think about?” Who they are based on their work. Then I also think they’re looking for a fit. Oftentimes, a lot of agencies, at least a lot of ones I’ve experienced, I can’t speak for all agencies. A lot of agencies I’ve experienced, they usually hire because they were trying to fill a specific need. It was like we got new business coming in. They probably have a specific type of business coming in, so they’re looking for a specific type of person to fit that brand that they’re bringing in. Whether it’s a cooking brand or something, like looking for somebody that probably fits that niche.

Sometimes it’s just general and they’re just like, we just need bodies in here. We need people in here who are going to fit the mold and fit the team. I think oftentimes people are looking for a specific kind of fit. Yeah. It is your work. I think also it’s a part of who you are. That perspective of who you are can be very helpful in your day-to-day life.

Maurice Cherry:
I’ve always kind of just been curious about that because I mean, I’m speaking partially from personal experience, but also from what I’ve heard from other designers. For those that may have worked on more of the UX side or product or tech, what I’ve heard and experienced personally is that it’s hard to break agency because agencies are looking for “agency experience”. Have you heard that before?

Kendell Burton:
I have heard that. I have heard that, but I can’t say definitively they are, because I think it’s mixed. Here’s the thing. I think a lot of people like agency experience because agency … It’s just my opinion, I’m not speaking for everyone. I think a lot of people look for agency experience because agency experience tells them that you know how to deal with a lot of crazy things happening at once. I think there is an underlying but known secret that a lot of agencies are not super organized. I don’t think it’s that they’re unorganized, because they just decided we’re going to not be organized. There’re things that happened. There’s a lot of moving pieces in our field from account, strategy, creative. There’s a lot of moving pieces. It’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. Some people can’t function when things slip through the cracks. They’ll just be honest. There are different personalities. I have friends who don’t want to do agencies at all. I understand, because I work in agencies so I can understand why that wouldn’t be for everyone.

As an employer I can see why employers would see that as exciting because it’s like, “Wow. This person knows how to kind of function in a little bit of chaos. They may be good here.” Some people don’t know how to function in that little bit of chaos. Depending on the type of jobs or internships you’ve had prior, you may not have dealt with this kind of chaos. You may have been in-house, probably had one brand. That one brand that’s probably not super dependent where you selling something every day. You just kind of, not coasted, you ain’t coast, but your workload was different.

Agency, you could be on three brands doing campaigns for three different projects that are completely different. They have the deadline of four days between the three, they just slightly staggered. That’s not what it should be like, but that is what it’s like sometimes.

Maurice Cherry:
You know what? Thank you for saying that. I have asked that question to so many people and the response I get is almost like they’re ruining the first rule of fight club. It’s like, “Oh, well I can’t tell. If you don’t have it, you don’t have it.” Even my personal experiences with trying to work at agencies, they’ll look at my work and be like, “Oh. Well, you’ve done all this tech stuff. We’re really looking for agency experience.” I’m like, “Well, I can’t get agency experience if I don’t work at an agency.” I’m glad that you mentioned what that distinction is.

I get. It makes sense mean. From the other folks that I’ve had on the show that have worked at agencies, you do have the opportunity to work on lots of different projects. It can be kind of fast-paced, a little frenetic. Again, if you’re in-house and you’re only working on a brand or part of a brand or part of a product, it’s just different. It’s just a different type of workflow.

Kendell Burton:
Yeah. It’s very different. I often think when I’m on Twitter, I’m on Twitter quite often, but I’ll see someone, unfortunately when Twitter did all those layoffs, a lot of different people talked about different aspects of their job. Some of those people have very specific needs, I mean very specific rules. Some people were like, “I work just on bookmarks.” I’m just like, “Only bookmarks? That’s all you did for Twitter? You work specifically on bookmarks?” That’s really interesting. I wonder what their day to day is. That’s tech, so it could be very … That’s not to say their life’s cushy, but if you’re working on just one thing …

Maurice Cherry:
It’s a little cushy. A little cushy.

Kendell Burton:
I would hope your job is some level of cushy from time to time. Every day can just be grinding nonstop. I would [inaudible 00:48:00]. You go, “Wow, that’s cool. You get to work on this one thing and really refine this one thing.” There is a lot of pros to that, but some people could look at that as a con, because like I said, similarly to the creative director, art director thing, it seems like people are kind of smushing these roles together. They want somebody to be a bit of a Swiss Army knife.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It’s so tricky because in the tech world, at least what I’ve found, there’s just so much sort of needling down to specialty. They want specialists. They want a UX person that’s done work on a healthcare brand. They’re looking for a specific person that fits in that specific niche. It could be a person that’s done UX as more of a generalist, but if they haven’t done it for this brand or this type of company, then they’re like, “Oh. We’re looking for this one thing.” I’m kind of grossly generalizing this, so please, people don’t write to me and be angry. I find tech really wants specialists in very particular, finite roles and places, because even that can differ for company. Whereas, advertising is kind of more about, like you said, being a Swiss Army knife, someone that can do a lot of things at a particular level across a number of different brands.

Kendell Burton:
Yeah. That’s not bad. I don’t think being a specialist is bad. I don’t think being a general is bad. When somebody’s hiring, they could ask for whatever they want.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It’s wild man. It’s wild.

Kendell Burton:
It is.

Maurice Cherry:
What advice would you give to somebody listening to this episode and they want to follow your example in being an art director. What would you tell them?

Kendell Burton:
Network. I always tell people this for any field, but network heavily. Network. That means with people in your field and out of your field. It is good to know people because the more you get to know people, you get a better idea of not only what they’re capable of, but maybe what you’re capable of, which you didn’t even consider. Right now we’re talking about design and the design field, but there are a million other ways to be a part of the design field and be a part of this industry in one way or another, whether it’s a strategist or an account person. There’s a lot of other ways that can still utilize design thinking. You could have a good design taste, but be a project manager. You don’t necessarily have to be the person that’s in Photoshop. You could have a good design taste and be an account person. That doesn’t mean that you are a designer, but that means that you can at least do a good job backing up the designs that are being presented to clients. There are a lot of ways into this industry.

I think you need to talk to people and network with people to kind of figure that out. Hell, go on LinkedIn, man. Go on LinkedIn. If you ain’t got one, create on LinkedIn. Message absolute strangers. I think of it as back in the AOL days when people were just online like, “A/S/L, where you at,” but on LinkedIn. You type in project manager, if that’s what you want to be. You could literally type in project manager or senior project manager. A bunch of people will come up. You can narrow it down to your state, your country, whatever you prefer. I would just recommend you message somebody.

Hey, man. I’m a new kid who’s interested in project management. I see that you have a title that does this. Can I ask you about it? I’ve done some research on project management, but do you have a few minutes to tell me what you do or type? Why not? Right? You may not get response, but LinkedIn has unlimited people. You can do this all day. You can do it for five people a day. Somebody might respond. I’m saying that because I did that. I did that at times when it came to finding a job. I got an interview at ESPN a few years ago because of me doing that.

I was going online, looking up other things. I was like, hey, I’m interested in sports. Let me see what people were doing in this. I’m looking for recruiters. Recruiters, lot of times they’ve got the 411, they know what’s going on, they know what’s happening. I was just online looking up recruiters. All right, man, design recruiters or recruiter or whatever, narrow it down. Okay, cool. I’m not familiar with this recruiting agency. Let me reach out to one person that works there and tell them who I am and maybe they can at least give me on their list of creatives and then down the line they can push something out from me. I started those conversations. Somewhere along the way, somebody at ESPN got pushed my way. I was like, “Oh. That’s great.” I had an interview at ESPN. I would’ve never gotten one otherwise, probably just existing out here. People do and just get reached out to, but you can also play a little bit of active role. That’s networking.

I would highly recommend your network online, of course. I would also recommend you network work in person, the people you sit next to in class. Doug used to always say this to us, Professor Doug, our professor, as I always call him. He always said this. You’d be like, “The people who sit next to you in class, to your left, to your right front and the back, these might be the same people you end up working with. You never know which one of them end up giving you a job or you end up giving them a job or they end up recommending you for something or you end up recommending them for something.”

I have friends who finished in City Tech like I did, who did not get into design, who still reach out to me for design related jobs doing other things. They just reach out to me. They just like, “Oh, Kendell, I was thinking about you because this gig popped up.” Does that always mean I want it? No, but that opportunity is there from me just being a good person and being their friend for so long that they’re just like, “Oh. I thought of Kendell when I saw this.” There were 40 other people in his classroom, when we were teens learning this stuff, and he was like, “I thought Kendell when this position popped up. That’s why I’m reaching out. What’s going on, Kendell? Network.

Maurice Cherry:
Network. I agree with that a hundred percent. That’s a really great thing I think people should all try to cultivate. Like you said, you never know when you’re going to need it. Don’t just do it when you’re in need. Continually network even when you’ve got the job, when you’re in the job, but just let people know that you’re always out there.

Kendell Burton:
Yeah. That’s how I met Danny. I met Danny through networking.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, was he not teaching at City Tech when you were there?

Kendell Burton:
No. When I was there, Danny had already graduated. He’s a few years older than me, so he had already graduated. I think I might have heard his name in passing because Professor Davis mentioned him a few times. At City Tech, I think they still have it, we had a design club. In the design club we would do this event called Meet the Pros. We’d bring the professionals to talk to the students. We’d also do an alumni version where we’d bring back people who graduated from City Tech who are working in the field. Danny was one of the people who they brought in.

I wasn’t the president at the time, so I was just a part of the club. I wasn’t the one actively talking to them that had those conversations. Well, after the event was over, I was like, “Hey, man. You seem really cool. I appreciate everything you said in the talk, man. You want to stay in touch?” Then we just stayed in touch. Now we’re good friends. We are very good friends.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, aside from work, you are a podcaster. You co-host a show called TerrorNova. Tell me about that.

Kendell Burton:
That’s my baby. TerrorNova, it’s a horror podcast as it says in the title. It’s TerrorNova Horror Podcast. Me and actually one of my fellow alumni from City Tech, Jackie, Jacqueline Martinez, we both were fans of horror. We’re both really big fans of horror.I grew up watching horror. She grew up watching horror. We’re both massive fans of horror. Even when we were City Tech, whenever I needed somebody to talk about horror movies, it was usually her. Now we’ve got Get Out and all that, so a lot more people get into horror. Before that, a lot of people weren’t as broley into horror. Me and her would always chop it up and watch horror movies, whether it was digitally sending each other the link or just talking generally about horror movies.

I was like, “Man, she’s always my go-to for this. This is great.” Then during the pandemic, we had that, I guess you could say two years or a year where everybody going through different stuff, everybody’s figuring stuff out. We had a little bit of that slowdown when it was kind of like you just stay in the house. Then after that two weeks slowdown, we still had a bit of a slowdown. I was like, “Man, I kind want to do something. I want to do something that’s fairly positive, but also enjoyable and doesn’t really feel like a job, but it is something I could have fun with.”

I listened to a lot of podcasts. I was like I guess I could do a podcast, but what would I want to do it about? I didn’t want to do it generally. I wanted to be very specific about what I talk about. Horror just popped in my head. I was like, sure, why not? I love horror. Let me see if there are any podcasts out there to talk about horror. There were a few and I was like, okay, cool. There’s a little bit of market for this. Let me have some fun with this. I want to do it with a co-host, I don’t want to do it by myself. Then Jackie came to mind. I reached out to her. I was like, “Hey. I have an idea for a horror podcast. Do you want to do it? If you don’t do it, I probably won’t do it.” Then she was like, “Okay. I’ll think about it. You know what? Yeah, sure. Why not? Let’s do it.”

Then we kind of jumped in. We have a horror podcast. We talk about movies, we talk about TV shows, we do topics. We started doing kind of more autobiography type episodes where we highlight your figure and talk about their relationship with horror. Yeah. We do everything horror. It’s really, really fun, man. To go back to that whole community thing, there’s a really big horror community everywhere, honestly, but definitely on Instagram as well. We found some really interesting people on there. We’ve brought people on as guests from all different walks of life. I had people from London who came on, people from Texas, people from just all over. They were just like, “Hey, man. If you ever in town, let us know we’ll hang.”

Just kind of an extension of the stuff I was doing when I was in high school with Xanga, but now I’m doing it not to pick out women, but to meet new people who also like horror. It came full circle.

Maurice Cherry:
What has podcasting as a medium taught you? Has it taught you anything that you kind of take back with you in your work as an art director?

Kendell Burton:
It taught me to be clearer with my thoughts. Not even just as art director, as a human being, it is sometimes hard to clarify your thoughts. You have so many of them going through your head, especially at once, even before someone probably even asks you a question. Just someone can say a statement, you have a hundred things running through your head. I’m really big on trying to be clear about what I’m saying when I say something. That is probably one of the biggest things I try to be hard on myself about. When I say something, do I mean what I’m saying and is it clear what I mean what I’m saying? I don’t want to misinterpret or mislead someone. I’m sure that’s in part because of a lot of the fake news stuff going around in the world and fake thoughts and fake opinions that people have about stuff. I try to be very clear on my thoughts.

The podcast has been a huge help for that, because we end up talking about horror movies. We always say the podcast is for people who horror movies and even for people who don’t horror movies, whether it’s you don’t want to watch them or you’re too scared to watch them. The podcast is for those people as well because it’s not that we spend a bunch of time talking about the guts and people being ripped in half. We spend time talking about how the characters feel and how the characters are relatable and how there’s a scene and the themes and the socioeconomical version of this stuff, the race. All of these things that make these movies, these movies that people go, “Oh. That’s [inaudible 00:58:47] culture.” No, all of these things were written and baked into the film for a reason. We’re not making this up.

We spend time talking about all of that. It forces me to get clearer about what I’m saying because I’d never want to say something and people would just go, “That person’s being crazy,” or, “That person’s making stuff up,” or, “That person’s being hateful,” or, “That person’s being ridiculous.” I try to be very clear in my thoughts and it translates to my job a lot because often as the art director, even the designer, you have to just explain your decision making. Even if you wow somebody with a design, the person still probably wants to know the logic behind it because [inaudible 00:59:25] the design is nice, but if it’s not on brief and it’s not hitting the goal, not hitting the mark, it just looks good and that doesn’t help anymore.

Maurice Cherry:
What would you say is your favorite contemporary horror movie?

Kendell Burton:
Of the past few years? Something recent?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I’d even go say the past decade or so.

Kendell Burton:
Actually, no, I’m going to just go with something fairly recent that I really enjoyed. There was this horror movie that came out recently called Pearl that I thought was really the great. I saw it in theaters three times.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, I think I saw a trailer to that movie. I think the setting is in the twenties or something. Is this the movie I’m thinking of? I don’t know.

Kendell Burton:
Kind of, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
I think the lady that’s in it is Mia Goth, I think.

Kendell Burton:
Yeah, Mia Goth. It’s set around I think a time of World War II.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. She’s like an actress or something, right? You can tell I watch a lot of movies.

Kendell Burton:
[inaudible 01:00:20] you only saw the trailer then I can understand why you wouldn’t know what it is. She’s a farm girl in a lot of ways. Her family grew up on a farm. They’re German, so they in some ways fled from Germany during a war and all of that stuff. She just wants to get off this farm. She has aspirations of being a star, whether it’s a singer or actor, she has these aspirations. She grew up on a farm. The way her life is going there’s probably no chance that she’ll see those aspirations come to life.

Maurice Cherry:
Interesting.

Kendell Burton:
The thing that makes it interesting is the style of it. I tell people it’s The Wizard of Oz of it was a slasher because it’s not styled like a dark and grim horror movie. It’s styled very beautifully with bright colors and mostly during the day, similarly to Midsommar. It’s styled really interesting, which kind of in some ways is a reflection of how the main character sees the world. I could talk about it all day. It’s very interesting stylistically how they did the movie versus what the messages of the movie are and the themes that are super relatable about identity and self and all that stuff. It’s like it’s a really, really well done movie.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. It’s clear that horror is certainly a big thing for you. It’s something that you really love. What are some other influences for your creative work? Is it any people in particular? Any things in particular?

Kendell Burton:
I wouldn’t say a specific person or anything like that. Just like when I was a kid, I’m a fan of stuff. I love science fiction. I love action movies. I love every genre of everything. I try to take pieces of that with everything I do. Just how I tell stories, how stories are told, how I design. I try to take all of these things into account when I’m working. I wouldn’t say I’m inspired by any specific visual style or specific person. Honestly, life just inspires me. Life inspires me. The people I get to have conversations with, the people I meet, the characters I see in movies and TV shows, all of those things inspire me. I’m not inspired by any specific graphic designer. I’m sure there are better designers than me in the world, but I’m not heavily inspired by super great graphic designers. I’m inspired by super great storytellers and super great stories that I’ve seen unfold that feel very human, they feel very grounded.

Maurice Cherry:
At this stage of your career, do you feel creatively satisfied?

Kendell Burton:
Surprisingly, yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Why surprisingly?

Kendell Burton:
I say surprisingly because, man, you would expect the corporate world to kind of beat you down. There’s always that tragic story of the artists of they got in it because they love it and then somewhere along the way money got involved and they hate it. I could see that very easily happening in this field as well to people. Trying to fill a lot of bellies, [inaudible 01:03:03] task of a designer or honestly even any world you have in this field. You’re trying to fill a lot of stomachs, man. Whether it’s account people, the clients, strategy, yourself, creative. There’s a lot of people that have go to get fed before an idea goes out into the world and actually exist.

There’s a lot of battles that people have to fight for their work to be seen by the general public. You would think with all of those challenges in front of you that some people end up hating this, but I actually surprisingly still enjoy it. I do enjoy these conversations. I enjoy the people that I work with. I enjoy the people that I’ve worked with in the past, whether we had disagreements or not, because I’ve learned something from them, whether it was about myself or about them. Honestly, if it was just about myself, how do I handle a situation? How do I handle moments where things feel like it’s too tough and they feel impossible? How do I handle moments where I spent a lot of time on a design and then someone goes, “Let’s just change the whole thing.” How do I handle that? How do I bounce back from that?

It’s been satisfying, man, how I’m bouncing back for these things and how I learn from them and how I get better from project to project. It’s been very satisfying.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, when I had you back on the show again, this was 10 years ago, I asked you where do you see yourself in the next five years? You had mentioned that you wanted to create a product that you can build a company around. Granted, since then you’ve worked for agencies and such, but at this stage of where you’re at now with your career, where do you see yourself in the next five years?

Kendell Burton:
Oh, man. That’s a good question. I forgot I told you about that. That was back when I was working on this bike app idea that I had. I still have that somewhere. I think in the next five years, man, I feel like I still see myself doing this. Maybe my title will probably go up, but I still see myself doing design or possibly even still pharma, but I’ll see. I still see myself just enjoying this field, man. I’m not tied to any specific industry in terms of which one I [inaudible 01:05:01] or not. I just really enjoy what I do. It’s a good time. You get to meet interesting people and they get to tell you interesting stories. You get to live a pretty interesting life when you make it in there.

I’m not flying to Dubai every week or something for photo shoots or anything like that. I’ve done very little of that in my career. The type of people you meet and the type of stories you get to hear people tell and that you get to tell yourself, from the projects you work on, it’s really interesting and priceless, man. I really enjoy it. I kind of just see myself still going down this road of in some ways where the winds takes me, but in some other ways, I’m just enjoying this space.

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 you online?

Kendell Burton:
You could add me on LinkedIn. You can look me up, my name, Kendell Burton. It should be in a show notes and everything. You could add me on LinkedIn, feel free too. You could follow me on Twitter if you like. Honestly, on Twitter, I don’t really talk about the field much. I just kind of enjoy the craziness of Twitter. Enjoy the memes and the wild stuff people say on Twitter. That’s pretty much what I’m doing on there. I guess if you want to laugh along with me about the crazy stuff that happens on Twitter, then feel free to follow me there. My name is theKendellB.

That’s my name on most things. You can find me on Instagram, same way, where you can follow my podcast, which is exclusively on Instagram. I just don’t want it bounced between a million platforms. The podcast TerrorNova is only on Instagram, but you can listen everywhere. It’s on Spotify and all that stuff. Yeah. So LinkedIn or Twitter, or Instagram. Those three places, best places to find me.

Maurice Cherry:
All right. Sounds good. Well, Kendell Burton, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for, I think, honestly for just showcasing how much your enthusiasm and passion for what you do. To me, it just sort of permeates through everything you talk about, your life story, your story of working through the industry and things like that. I can tell that you really have this innate, deep, burning passion for it. That’s something that I think we all need to kind of work to try to cultivate, find what it is that sort of lights your pilot light.

I get the sense from you that really this is something that you’re super passionate about. I’m excited to see what you end up doing next, man. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Kendell Burton:
Yeah. I appreciate it, man. I appreciate the invitation to come here and talk to you again, man. It’s a pleasure. It’s great. For everyone listening, man, just find what you like, man. Find what you like and just strap yourself to it, the best way you can, because you’ve got to enjoy life.

Donate to Selma Tornado Relief

United Way of Central Alabama, Inc.

We are raising money for Selma Tornado Relief through United Way of Central Alabama to help serve victims of the tornado that tore through Selma, Alabama on Thursday, January 12th. Donate now, or text SELMA to 62644. Send us proof of your donation, and we will match it 100% (up to the first $1,000 donated).

Thank you for helping fund Selma’s recovery!

Sponsored by Hover

Hover

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

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

Kirk Visola

If you want to be more authentic in your work and life, then this week’s episode is especially for you. I sat down with Kirk Visola, creative director extraordinaire, and the founder of Mind the Font, a full-service branding and packaging design agency.

We dove right in and I learned about how Kirk approaches design projects while balancing the want for innovation with the need to stay true to a brand’s established identity. Kirk also spoke about growing up and getting into design and illustration, talked about his podcasting endeavors, and he gave some great advice for aspiring creatives of all stripes. We even nerded out for a bit about comic books and video games!

For Kirk, being himself and sticking to those who encourage and support his creativity has given him a great life, and that’s a lesson we can all take to heart!

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

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

Kirk Visola:
All right, what’s up? How you doing, Maurice? Thanks for having me on, man. I’m Kirk Visola. I’m the founder and creative director of Mind the Font. It’s a full service branding and packaging design agency. We try to focus on things in the food and beverage space, mainly CPG, which is consumer products goods. And as much as this sounds like I’m reading this, I am not. That was off the top of the dome.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. How has 2023 been going so far? I know you’re in California, so y’all have been getting hammered by the rain.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah, it’s not too bad for the most part. I’ve been fortunate enough, I’m in Santa Cruz, which is close to Aptos and Capitola, which were both hit pretty heavily on their downtowns, and also SoCal and on the docks, and then next to the ocean. We lost part of our road here, West Cliff, in Santa Cruz, so it’s been raining pretty heavily. But today it led up and it’s a beautiful day. That’s the weather forecast for 2023.

As far as business and just livelihood, I’m happy to be upright, pushing 50, in my late-forties, and I’m a Black male in this country and I’m still alive. So that has to count for something, so I’m happy about that.

Maurice Cherry:
I heard that. Amen to that. Let’s talk about your branding and packaging design agency, Mind the Font. Tell me more about that.

Kirk Visola:
That’s a really, really good question, which is what people always say on podcast, “Great question,” because we’re actually trying to think of a way to answer the question. I’ve been working in design for a long time. I started in ’98 and I was doing all kinds of things. I was still going to school. I was going to take design classes. And I started working freelance with my wife at the time. And then I was working freelance and I decided to go into the private sector or into corporate sector, however you want to call it. And so starting in 2009, I got a job at Pure Red Creative. If you want to read my resume and when you got off here, that’s fine too.

But fast forward to 2014, I started working at a company called Shaklee, and it was a great job at the get go. My boss, who’s still a really good friend, she was very, I’m trying to think of the best way to put this, very progressive by the means in which people worked. Because I had been freelancing for Lord knows how long, and that was all from my house. It was all via emails when FTP, File Transfer Protocol, first came out, and stuff like that. And I was doing all that stuff and then she left.
No, actually, here’s what happened. I got absorbed into a different place at the company, and then she left and it just went downhill from there. It was a horrible experience. I guess I can get into that later, but what made me leave was the fact that I couldn’t handle it anymore. I was stressed out. Half of my face would go numb going into work. And I’m like, “You know what? Fuck this. I’m going to do my own shit.”

So my wife and I were on vacation, and I was at the point where I was trying to figure out what I was going to do. And we were in the UK and everything there when you ride on the London Underground is, “Please, mind the gap.” It’s like this repeated person over the intercom saying, “Please, don’t forget to mind the gap. Mind the gap.” And so my wife goes, “Why don’t you just call it Mind the Font?” And I just was floored. How did I not think of this? How did I not think of this? So I have to credit her with giving me the name for the company.

And it’s just doing stuff I’ve always done. I’m really good at what I do, but my main interest and my main focus in regards to design work is branding and packaging. That’s like my forte. It’s what I love. And so that’s what I do at Mind the Font. And clients range from new alcohol products to new baby food products or just food products. And also, I’m trying to think of stuff I’ve done, beauty products and perfumes. So we run the gamut on all things that come in a box, and that’s what Mind the Font does.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m curious, have you found there to be any sort of big changes in designing for consumer packaged goods over the years?

Kirk Visola:
Oh, absolutely. There’s always standards that you have to abide by. There are certain things that need to go on packaging that you need to think about. There’s certain techniques that have evolved over the years, especially in printing. That’s a big thing. Printing has evolved so much and all of the protocols of companies trying to go greener, and then print companies also keeping up to go greener. The actual programs that you use are advancing, especially with the big AI thing coming out.

I’ve even kind of dabbled with Midjourney. And it’s weird because people are speaking about how it’s used to steal their art, but what I’m doing is I’m taking art I’ve done and using that as a prompt to see what it does. So it’s like my art as a base, but then putting in the prompt is what it does for Midjourney and add texture to this to make it look more like three dimensional. And it does it to my own artwork. So I’m thinking maybe that’s something that could possibly be an avenue for people to go.

I don’t think it’s going to replace designers. I don’t think it’s going to replace artists. But I do think that it’s a means of weeding out the bad designers and good designers. Like when there was a big real estate boom, there were tons of real estate agents and a lot of them went away, but the ones that were really good at what they did, they’re still there.

And so there’s programs that are advancing, and there’s also different mediums to go about. When I first started, it was basically web and print. This is the late ’90s. There was no real social media. Maybe Facebook started coming out and other things. And all of a sudden, next thing you know, there’s UX designers, product designers, UI designers, web designers, and there’s print designers, social media managers, social media content creators. There’s like this wide gamut of things that people can do now. And so it’s just advanced with all the stuff that’s coming out.

And for me, it’s just too much to keep up with from that standpoint. But in my own field, which is why I specified branding and packaging, it’s like I feel very comfortable there. And I’m always trying to learn. I’m always talking with people. I’m always getting new ideas and figuring out new ways to handle things and bouncing ideas off of people to see what they think. I have a trusted group of friends who are phenomenal designers I talk to. It’s always good to do that, man. And so I think I’m keeping up that way, so I’m doing all right.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s so interesting you mentioned that about Midjourney. I’ve been doing a lot of playing around with ChatGPT, which is another sort of AI generated tool. Midjourney is more for visuals. I think ChatGPT is more text based. And it’s funny, I was talking about this with my mentor and we kind of both came to the conclusion that these kinds of tools, they almost feel like you’re working with a really good intern. They’re not going to be specific enough to be an artisan or a master and expert at it, but they can get pretty good.

Like how you’re mentioning with Midjourney, how you feed your own art into it. I’ve been doing that with ChatGPT, hopefully listeners don’t get mad at this, but I’ve been feeding in some past episodes and generates 20 questions based off the transcript of this interview.

Kirk Visola:
Oh, wow.

Maurice Cherry:
And it’ll put the questions out. I’m like, “Oh, this is pretty good.” They’re not perfect, but it’s a good jumping off point for me to say, okay, “I can take this out. I can change the words here. I can do that.” I’ve even, not for this interview, just to be clear, but I did do it for one interview. I had ChatGPT. I fed them this person’s bio and said, “Generate 20 questions as if you’re doing an in-depth, one hour podcast interview.” And I knew some of them. Some of them were good, some of them were not. But some of them I was like, “Okay, this is promising.” It’s promising.

Kirk Visola:
“If you had a breakfast cereal that you would like to eat, what would it be?”

Maurice Cherry:
Right. And with ChatGPT it’s so interesting because you can even tell it certain books, books that I haven’t necessarily read, but I could say, “Give me a 10 point summary of this book by this person.” And it’s the best kind of Cliff Notes in a way. I know that there are educators that are like, “Oh, we got to ban this shit. We can’t have this in the classroom.” Because some of this stuff is too… I don’t even want to say it’s necessarily too good, but it’ll get you there. It’s not the best, but it’ll get you there. It’s good enough.

Kirk Visola:
Right. Here’s the thing with that, twofold. One, there are actually programs where you can put in someone’s work or a written book from what I’m reading, like their actual essay or whatever they’ve written, and you can plug it into the internet somewhere and decipher if it was written by them or if it was generated by AI. There’s some type of thing that does that. And two, just because it’s written by someone doesn’t necessarily educate them or make them a better writer.

My biggest fear and problem is that all AI is doing is taking stuff we’ve already done and rehashing it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kirk Visola:
And right now the focus is on speed. The focus is on, “Oh, look how quickly I can do this.” What if people just stopped making art? What would we be able to choose from? It would have to go back and it’s just going to repeat the same thing. And the next thing you know, everything is going to start looking the same.

And I noticed that when I put in a prompt in AI, it gives you four images in Midjourney. And the images, they usually have the same colors when you do it, and the type isn’t right, which is something that’s going to work through, I’m sure, but it’s always relatively the same. And I’m thinking to myself, “Man, how can you just sit there and do something up real quick and then use that as your work?” No.

I can see that what you’re saying, as a jumping off point or a starting point. It’s great for that. “Oh, I wouldn’t have thought of doing that shape.” Or, “Oh, I wouldn’t have thought of using that pattern or color. Let me build off of that.” But to just use it as your work? I don’t know, man. I can’t fuck with it.

And the other thing too is there’s been tons of programs that have come out that were supposed to “destroy” the art industry and make art more hard for people to get into. Like Canva. Canva came out and you can do your own design work. And it hasn’t gotten rid of designers. Motion pictures, telephones, the car, everything else is coming out. The only thing I can really say that really hurt people was Netflix. Blockbuster got destroyed.

When there’s some type of disruption in a field, it’s good because it forces people to progress. But with the progression, you don’t want to regress in regards to art and creating art or thought processes. And I think that’s so critical for any type of field is to have a thought process, is to have some type of critical thinking in regards to what you’re doing.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I think that’s being lost with AI because it’s just pulling from art. It’s pulling from our shit to create more to shit give back to you. It’s literally plagiarizing everything that it’s doing. There’s no other way around it. People say, “Oh, well, it’s not. It’s not. It’s this, it’s that. This is the future.” It’s like, that’s great. It’s plagiarizing. It maybe the future, but it’s plagiarizing. It’s literally stealing everything we’ve already done to recreate something.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
And that’s weird. But anyway, enough of that.
But like you said, the art styles do kind of end up looking the same in some instances. And I’ve heard that argument too from designers and artists that are like, “Well, this is going to take over my job,” or something like this. But if someone comes to you, say, a client comes to you and they want you to do some changes or do some design based off AI artwork, you can always just say no. You can say, “You know what? I don’t work with that. I’m not going to work with that.”

Kirk Visola:
Right. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, binary, non-binary folk, thank you for coming to our AI chat.

Maurice Cherry:
How do you approach a new design project?

Kirk Visola:
Carefully. It’s interesting because there’s so many ways to approach a new design project, and it’s so broad. But I’ll try to paraphrase and not be as wordy as actually giving you this explanation as to how I’m not going to be wordy. You get a brief usually of what someone wants to do as far as a design goes. That way the brief’s more entailed, rather than just saying, “Just do something and I’ll let you know when I like it.” Sorry, I don’t work that way. And if I am going to work that way, you’re going to be paying a lot of money for it because I’m not going to do it for free.

So the way I approach a project is to see exactly what the person wants, see what they have, if they have anything, and then what I’d like to do, and this is old school, I go pencil and paper, pen and paper, and I just sketch. I sketch and I fill up sheets and sheets of paper with just sketches and ideas and thoughts. And maybe this will work, maybe that won’t work. And to me, it’s the best tool you have. It’s quick and it doesn’t break. It doesn’t break down. You can’t lose files unless you throw it away.

And once I get to a spot where I think it works, I then start going digital, if it’s supposed to be digital, and I bring it into the computer. This is the way I describe it: Whatever I’m doing, whatever I’m making, I do “high quality comps,” meaning that I will do something in a manner to where it feels real and looks real, just to give the person who’s on the other end a better idea of what’s to come. Like, “Hey, here are the concepts and here’s what I’m thinking.”

And I explain each concept and I put it into a different bucket or theme. And I explain why it works in this theme. I explain why it works for their business, and I explain how it’ll work in the space, whatever space they’re going into, just so they know that I’m not just doing something because it looks pretty. And I think that’s important.

Oftentimes people do stuff because it looks pretty, rather than serve as being functional. Being pretty, that shouldn’t even be in the vocabulary. That shouldn’t even be a thought. Of course, you’re going to do something that looks nice, that’s a given, but does it fit within what you’re trying to achieve, which is in that certain niche, in that certain area? What are you trying to achieve by making this product? Are you doing what’s best for the client?

And so I try to approach initially with gathering information with them as much as I can, seeing where it needs to go, wherever space they’re into, sketch, go digital, put together a thoughtful presentation as far as why I was doing things a certain way and why it will benefit them, and then get feedback and move forward and see how that works.

And honestly, this is a interesting conversation, but I’ve been doing this for, oh my God, a long time. ’98. So, holy shit. 25 years? Is that right? Is my math right? 25 years? No. “Was he that old?”

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds about right.

Kirk Visola:
Oh my God, that is… Wow. Okay, cool. The point was…

Maurice Cherry:
You blew your own mind there.

Kirk Visola:
I got a lot of my sensibility, I’ve been doing this so long. The point is I’ve had maybe six or seven clients in that time who were just disappointed with what I did. And so to me, it makes me feel like, all right, I’m doing something right, because if I wasn’t, the list would be a lot longer.

So I’m also realizing too, this is something very important for people who are starting out and doing any type of art or any type of media that is subjective, anything that visually captures your eye, to be judged is subjective, so art, video games, design, packaging, clothing. Whatever is visually perceived is subjective. And that is fact.

So when you’re designing something, you have to remember that if someone doesn’t like your work, it’s subjective. It doesn’t mean they don’t like you. It doesn’t mean that your work’s bad. It’s just subjective and it doesn’t fit their taste, or it doesn’t fit their style. It’s not on you to make the client like your work, it’s on you to deliver what’s best for your client. That’s your job as a artist, as a designer, as a game developer, you deliver what’s best. And if they like it, great. If they don’t, it’s okay. It’s not personal. So that’s how you have to view things moving forward.

And I just, man, I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I’m so old. But I just realized this a couple years ago, and because my wife told me. She’s so smart. She said, “You know what, Kirk? It’s not they don’t like you, it’s just they didn’t like your design.” Like, mind blown. Like, “Damn, you’re so right.” For everybody who’s starting out or who is in the crux of it every day grinding, just remember that it’s not you, hopefully your work doesn’t suck, it’s subjective. That’s what they’re judging: your work, not you. So there we go.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s a great piece of advice, I think, for even folks that have been in the game for a long time. That’s a good piece of advice to know.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah, and it took my wife, she’s so wise, to tell me that. Because here’s the thing, we’re all emotional creatures. And as designers and as artists, we’re all a bit egotistical. I’ll admit it. I am. And when you hear a fresh perspective from somebody and you remove the emotion and you remove the subjectivity, and you look at it objectively, you’re able to say, “Oh, well, you’re right.” Because everything that you do in the visual world is subjective. So there you go.

Maurice Cherry:
There you go.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
So how do you kind of balance the business side of everything, like the marketing, the finances, the contracts, how do you balance that with the creative aspects of your work?

Kirk Visola:
I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure that out. The business side of things will work itself out. I do what I’m supposed to do to get paid. I do what I want to do to stay fresh. So I will do the jobs I have to do and depending on what it is, if it’s a fun job like branding or packaging, that’s where I can explore. Sometimes you have to do things like marketing pieces or flyers or graphics for a social media post or design a booth or design a shit-talker for whatever.

And so there’s just various little things that go into branding and marketing, or whatever, that need to be done and it’s just more of a production artist or more just a getting it done aspect rather than actually creating things. So for me, what I do if I’m stuck or want to stay fresh or creative is I draw. I haven’t been drawing enough. So I try to draw. I do writing, and I try to make up stories and make up characters.

And I also like to play video games. Now, this sounds silly, but video games unlock a lot of creativity for me. And the biggest reason as to why is because my brain literally has to shut off because it has to focus on the game I’m playing. Like everything else is shut out and so my mind quiets. And when my mind is able to quiet, it actually has a better time thinking. So oftentimes I’ll play a game for, I don’t know, 30, 45 minutes, and I’ll stop playing and be like, “Oh, damn, I just had an idea,” because it makes me refocus. And so whatever the idea is, I try to go with it.

And that’s the other thing too, is if you have an idea — and I have several because of the ADHD — if you have an idea, just start it. Just do it. Just get it out of your head, whatever it is. If you want to paint something, if you want to draw something, if you want to write something, if you want to come up with an idea for a game, if you want to think of an idea for a cocktail you like or a coffee drink, or even a puzzle that you want to do, just do it. I mean, take some time and just do stuff for you. Always mind your deadlines, but also make sure that you do stuff to stimulate you. I always tell people I’m a very creative person, but my medium of earning for my creativity has always been design.

And growing up, I loved reading comic books. This is in my bio, but growing up, I loved reading comic books. I loved all things comics. I would draw, I would pretend I was a comic book hero. I would make up stories. I would watch Star Wars. I would watch everything. And the one thing I did with comics was I copied how they looked. I would copy the lettering, I would make up my own lettering, I would make up my own stories. And all of that is all design. If you look at a comic book, people are like, “Oh, it’s just a comic book.” The amount of vocabulary used in those as well as the form and the pictures and the settings and everything else, it really enhances readers, because you get engaged with it. And also, it gives you lessons in layout, and it gives you lessons in hierarchy, in form, in structure and the way things should look on a page with composition.

So, all of that led into what I’m doing, and I think that people need to realize that you can find creativity in anything, but I think you need to love what you’re doing in order to do so. You can be creative in any way you want. If you have an idea or whatever, just get it done. And I know I’m talking too much, so I’m going to shut up now.

Maurice Cherry:
So, tell me more about these video games. What are you playing?

Kirk Visola:
Oh. See, now we got on a real topic. First of all, let me preface this by saying I’m older, so we’re the generation that grew up playing games. We were the generation that had… And television and the Commodore 64 and Apple and playing Oregon Trail on Atari 2600 and the first Sega and the Sega Genesis and Nintendo 8-bit, and then went to the Super Nintendo. So all this stuff we grew up with. So I love games. I’ve always loved video games and I just got a PlayStation 5 about six or seven months ago and I just never played it. I thought, “Why am I not playing it?” So I broke out Miles Morales and I played that.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Kirk Visola:
I played through it. And then I’m like, “All right. Let me try God of War.” Started it. I’m like, “I have to dedicate time to this and I don’t have time.” The first God of War, Greatest Hits, of course, because it’s been out forever. I played through that, finished it, and I got Ragnarök, played through that, finished it. Then I replayed Tomb Raider, which Tomb Raider was it? Finished it. Started playing a Ratchet & Clank, I’m like, “Ah. I can’t fuck with this.” It’s too happy for me. I need to kill people.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s not bad to say, that’s a video game, right?

Kirk Visola:
Oh. This is some crazy shit. So you heard about Jaguar going off, right? She’s an artist, R&B artist. I can’t think of her last name, but she’s “exposed”.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah.

Kirk Visola:
So she’s talking about things in just really… I don’t know if it’s spilling the T or borderline snitching. I’m not sure which one it is, because sometimes it’s like she’s spilling the T on bad things. And sometimes she’s just snitching thinking, “Girl, speak your mind. Do what you want to do, but people are going to come at you one way or another.” But the one thing she said that really bothered me that went back to white racist senators was talking about… I don’t blame any of people doing the one thing I don’t like is GTA six or GTA. GTA is a terrible game. I mean, you sit there and you sit there and you kill people. You do this stuff and do that stuff. And then what’s going to make you change and do it in real life? What’s going to make you think you can’t do it in real life? It’s like, I can play Uncharted. I can play Max Payne 3, Tomb Raider, Last of Us.

I can play violent video games and never kill anybody or have it come across my mind because I have the ability to separate reality from fantasy. So you can’t say that someone playing a video game in fracks on their life. I’m not going to be Spider-Man, I’m not going to be Batman. It’s a ridiculous notion. Rather than talking about the environment in which they grow up and the violence that they’re exposed to outside of their house, and the systemic and cyclical poverty that they’re exposed to on a day by day basis, especially in poor areas and ghetto… [inaudible 00:29:01] even say ghetto. That’s terrible.

Poor areas of black and brown people. You have to think about that before you say it’s the video game’s fault. It’s a silly notion. But anyway, back to video games, I really have to dedicate an hour at a time because I just get swapped in. And once I’m in a game, if I’m into it, I got to finish it. It’s like, I know I can’t get into it again, because I know I have to finish it. It’s going to be a big chunk of my time. It’s going to be a lot of stuff that I do. So that’s the other problem. But it really does help me shut off. And it’s a nice stress reliever just thinking about the pattern of the boss that you’re fighting. Okay, he’s going to do this, which means I got to dodge which means I got to throw this. It’s like, so there’s always a pattern and there’s always something you can figure out in a video game. That’s what I like about it. Do you play games?

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. I have a Switch. I have a PS5. It’s funny, I’m not a big PlayStation person, but then I look back and I was like, “I’ve actually owned every PlayStation console, even the handheld.” Even though I haven’t really played them a lot. I had a PlayStation one when I was in middle school, high school. I played the hell out my PS2. I had the big chunky PS3 that could do backwards compatibility. My PS4 is in my closet. I just got a PS5 last year. And I have a Switch. I have one of the first… When they came out five years ago or whatever, I’ve got a Switch. Oh yeah. I’m a big gamer. Well, let me take that back. I feel like I’m more of a game collector slash enthusiast because I don’t play as much as I used to. I’ve started recently, I guess you could call it a resolution this year. I was like, “I’m going to start playing more games this year.” Because my switch is literally right next to my desk. And I got one of those little…

It’s called a ShadowCast. A Genki ShadowCast, where you can basically connect your Switch or your Xbox or PlayStation, whatever, to any HDMI input. And so I have HDMI on my main computer, which is a gaming PC. So I have my Switch hooked up to my PC, so now I can just have it in another window. Because I have a ultra wide screen monitor. I just have another window and I’ll play a little Animal Crossing or play some… I play a lot of play Picross, which I started playing when I was in high school. I think Picross is this Japanese… It’s sort of like a crossword puzzle, but you make out a picture instead of doing words. Although I do really crossword puzzles too. And there’s this company called Jupiter that just keeps cranking out Picross games every six months. There’s like a new Picross game. So I had all the ones on the Nintendo 3DS Picross E, E2, E3, E4, E5, E6, E7.

And now the ones on Switch are Picross S for Switch. So now I’m currently playing my way through Picross S8. And it’s very much one of those things where… Yeah. I can just kind of turn my brain off because I’ve played it so much that I already know, my hands and brain already know what the controls are to do the things, so I don’t have to think about it. And it’s such good… I actually block out three hours on my calendar at the end of Friday, just to play that. Not all three hours, but I’ll play it through some of those three hours just to sort of defrag my brain from the week. Like, “Okay. This is good.” Calm down time. Turn the phone off. Yeah. [inaudible 00:32:39] games we played with more recent, Kirk. Thanks for tuning in.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah. Man. You mentioned the PS. And there’s a game that I just… Honestly, man, it still blows my mind even going back and playing it. It is Metal Gear Solid on the PS. And [inaudible 00:33:00] was at Konami for a long time and he owned… And he’s the guy that invented… He’s basically the dude that solidified, invented action adventure games. Without him, there wouldn’t be a Resident Evil. I mean, without him, there wouldn’t be any of those games, because he invented the idea of sneaking around and figuring about puzzles and collectively trying to collect goods and stay as… It’s just brilliant. And you go back and play and it still holds up. This still holds up. The graphics are not great at all, especially on a nice TV. But man, the story play and the cut scenes… Cut scenes became a thing then it’s just, oh. Anyway. All right. I know [inaudible 00:33:43] let’s finish your interview. Shall we?

Maurice Cherry:
I want to go more into your origin story. You’ve kind of already touched on really being into comics and video games. Tell me more about growing up.

Kirk Visola:
I grew up in a small town called Modesto, California. And I know you grew up… We touched about this before we started the podcast. You grew up in Selma, and just because people get a Black president or you live in a certain area, doesn’t necessarily mean that racism goes away. And growing up in an ag heavy city like Modesto, it was very different, for lack of a better term. And I played soccer, I played sports. I had three older brothers. But the one thing I really loved to do was read comics. I mean, let me mention that before, I loved reading comics and I never thought there was an avenue for it. I wanted to be a doctor or a firefighter.

And it wasn’t until I met my ex-wife that I knew about graphic design. And damn. This was in ’98. I basically started doing design when I first learned about it, just because I was so intrigued by it. Her father, my father outlaw was the head of the creative services department in Modesto, called E&J Gallo Winery. And he was the head there and literally known in very, very wide spaces, especially in the beverage, in wine and spirit space, because of the work he had done. He had been doing it since the sixties, and he invented the E&J brandy bottle, and he invented the New Amsterdam vodka bottle, the shapes. So if you look at those, those are very iconic. So he would sit there and he took me under his wing basically, and told me about design.

So from there, I was intrigued and I started taking classes at the local JC and I went to classes at San Jose State. And the one thing that was very bothersome to me was being accessibility to take more classes there, because at the time before they made it into a BFA, Bachelor of Fine Arts, it was just a BA, you had to qualify for their design program. And I quote-unquote wasn’t good enough to qualify for their program. And I remember sitting there thinking, looking at designs and critiquing designs, and I found what I was good at. I just understood design, I understood it spoke to me, and it was like I was the duck. I was the duck who had been sitting at the office desk that finally found out that there was water outside and he could fly.

That’s how I felt, right? And from there, I was just able to have mentor. A mentor was the best in the world at doing something and run ideas by him. I still talk to him. I just talked to him three or four days ago. I mean, he’s my father outlaw, but I still talk to him to get advice and stuff like that. So I look back at that experience and look back at my life, and I just think of all the obstacles that were there that I have no idea how I would’ve found this job had I not been where I was. I mean, I’m in Modesto. Modesto’s known for Scott Peterson, George Lucas, Gallo Wine. Those are our three major claims of fame. And it’s just a small town. It’s not a small town. It’s fairly decent sized town in the Central Valley where it’s not heavily populated by Black people. There are tons of Latinos, predominantly Mexican, that work on the area there.

But I had no idea what graphic design was or that it was even a possibility. And I still wouldn’t have had an idea had I not met my ex, I would not be doing what I’m doing. It’s all the things that had to happen in order for me to be able to do this is just… I don’t know, man. It’s luck. There’s no other way to put it. And I’m not religious. I can’t be, I guess spiritual, but I don’t believe in going to church and everything else. I do believe in karma, and I think that my karma was to be a designer. It just was just happened. So I got lucky man. And I started doing design work from there. Worked freelance for a while when I had my kid in 2000. And then see here, in 2009, I started working in the office I was telling you about. And then from there on out, just did design work. And here I am.

And I think the experiences I had and the wide range of dabbling in different designs, being me a better designer, but also having that foundation of the fantastical world of comic books and video games also helped. It just led to this path for me.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, it sounds like it was also kind of just this constant sense of inspiration too, for you.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah. No doubt. I mean, I can’t doubt that. I mean, my profile pick on my LinkedIn is me holding a Batman cup, taking a sip. My signature, my professional signature, my actual signature is the bat simple. It’s on my passport, it’s on my license. It’s like that’s my legit signature. It’s just kind of part of me. I have on my sloppy ass desk, I have a couple of Grogu figurines, a Boba Fett Star Wars lamp. I have Batman behind me. I’m just surrounded by it. So it’s always influencing me and always has. And I’m thankful I found a career that kind of lets me create.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you were already a working designer when you were studying at San Jose State. How did you balance school and work?

Kirk Visola:
Honestly, I don’t know. I had a kid at home, young kid, and I was working part-time as well. As well as going to school and having a job, freelancing. I don’t know. I’m not saying that to… Because I’m doing a brag or I’m self glossing. I’m saying it because, I don’t know. It’s all a blur, basically. From 2000 until 2010 is all a blur for me. During that time, I had gotten married in ’99, and then had our first kid in 2000. And then a set of twins in 2003, my father passed away that year, and then my brother passed away. Or sorry, he didn’t pass away. He was murdered in jail by cops in 2009. And then 2010, I moved from Modesto. Honestly, dude, that whole decade’s kind of a blur. So you know how you do things in the moment and you go back and you say, “How did I do that?” That’s the moment for me.

Because my ex was laid up in bed when my twins were born, and so I was taking care of the newborn twins. A three-year-old or soon to be three-year old kid. And then my ex. So the resiliency of the human spirit is truly amazing when it’s put to the test. You can do a lot. When you set your mind to do something, you really can do a lot. And I had to do it. There was no choice. So that’s what I remember. I’m sorry, I can’t answer.

Maurice Cherry:
No, no, that’s real. I think about… I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a blank spot, but it’s definitely a blur. I remember vignettes of things from 2000 to maybe 2006. That’s my blurry period because I was in college and I remember certain things. I remember where I interned at. I remember getting my first apartment. I remember graduating. I remember graduating because they had the graduation outside in the middle of a thunderstorm. And the person sitting next to me would not share their umbrella with me. So I kept trying to scooch under the umbrella, and they kept moving it back. So how umbrellas are curved. So the water just wow came down. And I had this sad droopy mortar board when I went to go get my degree. I remember vignettes and things, because I know during that time I was working a bunch of jobs and I hated… I get what you’re saying. I get what you’re saying.

Sometimes you’re so in it that you don’t really remember the… You don’t remember it. Yeah. You were there. But you don’t have full recall of that time. I even have a pop culture blind spot from 2000 to 2006 or so. People will mention movies and TV, and I’m like, I kind of know what that is. People will mention stuff about SpongeBob and Harry Potter. I’m like, “I’m familiar with it in the cultural zeitgeist.” But I don’t really recall being into that because I was in my twenties and just trying to survive. I don’t really remember it.

Kirk Visola:
Most artists or some artists have a blue period. We had a blurry period. But honestly, man, this is kind of sad but true that more than likely it’s just severe trauma that we’ve suffered at that time. And neither one of us know how to deal with it or even comprehend.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And I say it was a blind spot because I had… And I’ll ask you about what your time was like at Shaklee, but I know I was working at… I don’t know if I’ve even mentioned this on the podcast before. I was working at Autotrader as a… I think I was a dealer concierge or something. I was trying to work my way up to something higher paying or whatever. And at the time, I was also a blogger. I won’t mention what my blog name was, but I had a blog and I was talking about other stuff. And I never used anyone’s name. Everyone had a pseudonym or whatever, but they found out about it at work. And they had called me into the office. And they had printed out reams of my blog, which honestly was a little flattered because I fancied myself a writer.

I wrote all through high school and college and stuff. And so I was like, “Oh, for me?” I was kind of bit taken and they’re pointing out stuff that they’ve highlighted. And then I remembered, I was like, “How did they find out about this?” Because I never did it from work. And then I remembered that there was someone at work that I told about it. And that could have been the only way that they found out about it.

Kirk Visola:
Snitch.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kirk Visola:
Snitch end up in ditches as Paul Bettany said.

Maurice Cherry:
And so they tried to fire me and I quit before they fired me. And then I remember I was going home that evening. And I was on the phone with my mom, and she was just like, “What are you going to do with your life? You got this degree, you don’t want to do this, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And I applied to this job in the back of our [inaudible 00:45:10] weekly here called Creative Loafing. I applied to a electronic media specialist gig. That was where the start of my professional design career actually was doing work for the state of Georgia. But that job was so bad. Oh my God. At the time, I thought I was living large. I was 25, I think? 24, 25, had my own office, had cards. I mean, you wouldn’t get this shit nowadays because of the way that the industry is.

But I had my own office. I had cards with a door that I could close, and I thought, “Okay, I’m doing pretty good.” But then there was also all this at the time, this sort of pervading narrative that I kept hearing from people. “Well, you just have a bachelor’s degree. Well, the bachelor’s degree is a new high school diploma. If you really want to get far, you have to get a master’s degree.” And I’m just like, Ugh. And so I was trying to get my master’s degree at that time and my boss was just the worst. I’m not going to slander her on this podcast, but she was just a very bad boss to the point where we had to get mediation from the state to come in. And it concluded with me just leaving. I just had to leave. I was like, “I’m not going to stay here with her any longer.” It’s just not going to work out.

So that whole period is kind of a bit of a blur, because I was like, look, I’m just trying to survive. And also at that time, I had just started my first big design project, which was the Black Weblog Awards. I was working full time, I was doing that, and I was just trying to survive because I didn’t go to design school. So I didn’t have any sort of design knowledge of anything. All I had was Photoshop, blends that I made, because I downloaded a cracked version from LimeWire and it didn’t put a virus on my computer. And I was copying tutorials from books that I… That I didn’t buy from books that I just read in Barnes and Noble. And I either took notes or I took pictures with my little Olympus point and shoot camera and took them back to my apartment and was like, “Okay, so how do I do this?” So I had to teach myself how to do all this stuff. I was just trying to get by, man. I was trying to make it so I get that blurry period. A hundred percent.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah. That’s life. I mean, it’s one of those things too, because being older and you talking about just reading something, reading up on something and figuring it out, it’s like, if I really wanted to, I could do that now, but I don’t want to. I don’t [inaudible 00:47:42]. I just want to learn TikTok. And I mean, I don’t want to get on there and start doing stuff. It’s not hard. I don’t want to do it. And I don’t think that the younger generation, they think that we’re old and we don’t know what we’re doing. It’s like, “What the fuck. We’re the ones that invented this shit. We were the ones who were going on Napster and Limewire and everything else to try to figure out how to get stuff.” That was us. We were the ones who…

Kirk Visola:
Everything else to try to figure out how to get stuff like that was us. We were the ones who saw things go from landlines to mobile phones. We saw it go from VCRs to downloadable HDX files. We’re the ones that saw that. We’re the ones that saw the transition. We were the ones that evolved with it. If the apocalypse happened, like the zombie apocalypse happened, have you seen The Last of Us yet?

Maurice Cherry:
I haven’t seen it yet, the first episode.

Kirk Visola:
Have you played the game by chance?

Maurice Cherry:
I haven’t played the game, so that’s why I haven’t seen it yet because I don’t know if I need to play the game to watch the show.

Kirk Visola:
No, you don’t, but it’s just shitty because you can see stuff coming and it’s just like… but it’s so well done. It’s so well done, but what I’m thinking is if we were to go back into the zombie apocalypse, and everything had to go back before there was all this technology and digital and everything else, many of us wouldn’t survive. Many of us wouldn’t know how to take notes or to do basic things because we’re so dependent upon electricity, and power, and the internet because I’m thinking we are in Santa Cruz and the electricity went out and it’s just pitch black. I’m thinking, “If it stayed this way, could any of us really figure out how to survive? How long would it be before we started going into full on the Walking Dead Kegan mode? How would that take?”

And so I think that we would immediately have some better survival skills in the previous generation, but I just don’t feel like going through that mess, and so hearing you go in and say, “I read this and read up on it and figured out,” I’m like, see, that’s baller status right there, and I think that’s something that I’m happy I don’t have to do, even though I probably should in order to keep up with things, but what are we talking about again?

Maurice Cherry:
We’re talking about you. We’re talking about you.

Kirk Visola:
Okay.

Maurice Cherry:
I wanted to ask about your podcasting. I mean, we’re on a podcast, but you are a pretty prolific podcaster yourself. What made you get into it?

Kirk Visola:
Wow. First of all, I don’t listen to podcasts. I don’t even listen to my podcasts except when I’m editing them. It’s very odd. I know, but I find them to be a bit pretentious at times. I feel like, “Well, it’s always so formulated,” so I feel that way about podcasting, but what made me get into it was, and I’m so glad you said when we started this, it’s just going to be a conversation because that’s what got me into this, was listening to talk radio, and being 13 or 14 years old, I was exposed to talk radio and I was exposed to “shock jocks.” I didn’t listen to a lot of NPR, things like that. I listened to the Don and Mike show. They were out of WJFK in Washington DC. They were syndicated, and I listened to Howard , and I listened to a show called Mark and Bryan.

I listened to this show called The Rise Guys out of Sacramento at KHDK, and then I listened to Carmichael Dave out of KHDK, and then Jim Rome, so I listened to a lot of talk shows, and what I learned is that most of the times when they were doing things and talking, it was just the stream of consciousness. It was just the thought. It was just four guys hanging out, but they made it interesting and they knew how to pivot, and they knew how to keep the topics going. They knew how to really get through things, and there’s a lot of stuff that they would mention, and say, and do, and just the feel of the show was like you were there hanging out with them, and I really like that about talking. I’m like, “Well, I want to bring that to a podcast,” because I try listening into podcasts and it’s so boring.

And I want to just bring that to a podcast. I want two guys who understand design, and my good friend Andy Kurtts, K-U-R-T-T-S, Andy is, that’s my dude. He is so cool, man. He’s cool. He always knows what to say, and he’s a good designer, and I love the guy, and it’s like, I couldn’t do this design show with anyone else really, and I met him on a whim when I was doing something with startup CPG, which is a foundation that helps up-and-coming CPG brands, and we were both on a Pictionary thing, and that’s how I met him. We just did this online Pictionary during a holiday party, and like, “Hey, let’s do some stuff,” so we started doing stuff on Clubhouse, and then we started doing stuff finally on Buzz Sprout, I think it’s called, where you just do podcasts.

And so our idea was let’s just do a packaging podcast, so we go on to talk about all the specifics of packaging, what’s important to put on the front of the pack? What’s important to put on the back of the pack? Do you know about your nutritional labels? Do you know about all the contents that go in? And then we started having people on, and we would have people who actually worked in the industry who owned their own brands, rather designers, and then we realized that it went past that, and we just started talking about design, strictly about design, and that’s how I got into it with Andy, and we have people on every week, and it’s just grown into this fun little sit down and chat with people, and I love it. I love that aspect of it.

It reminds me of the old talk radio I used to listen to, but now I’m actually doing, and only have to do it for an hour instead of three or four. I don’t know how those people do that. That’s so impressive. Three or four hours on the air just talking and talking. I hate hearing myself talk, and which is why I probably don’t listen to my own podcasts, but that’s one thing, and then I did another one called Jerks with my friend Jeremy Smith, and I had to stop that one just because I was doing two a week, and when we did Jerks, it was mainly, it was an honest approach to things, but I felt it took a lot of me emotionally and to do the edits because we were talking about real shit, and then I have to the edits and things like that, and it was just like a lot, and I said, “I have to cut one out,” and I thought, “which one’s going to be better beneficial to me as far as my business goes?”

“And as far as really promoting that,” it had to be Kirk and Kurtts, but Jeremy and I would get on and we’d talk about shows we watch, we’d talk about laws that were made. We’d talk about people that were doing stupid shit, and it would be Donald Trump or Kanye West or whatever was the topic that week we would talk about, and it was good, but it just took so much from me, and I wanted to get back into my own podcast because what I was doing was just having anybody on and talking to them about what they liked, talking about stuff that I liked, but then I’m realizing it’s just so much work and I just am not willing to put in that work. Whereas if I’m doing it with Andy, it’s twofold.

I get a chat with Andy and we get a catch up on work and we get a catch up on life, and then the other thing is that it holds me accountable that someone else is dependent upon me to actually do my shit, so that’s the thing, and it’s not as emotionally draining as Jerks was because it was frustrating, uplifting, happy, and sad. It was just this bag of bittersweet, mixed emotion the entire time, so it was very taxing, and I love Journey Man. Dude’s cool. I still keep in touch with them. Really nice guy, really great guy, but it was just a little too much for me.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kirk Visola:
What made you get in the podcasting?

Maurice Cherry:
I’ve done this for a long-ass time.

Kirk Visola:
The OG.

Maurice Cherry:
What made me get into podcasting? I started back in 2005, again, back with this blog that I had mentioned before. I started, I bought a $10 mic from CVS, like the CVS up the street from me. It was like this little GE mic that you just stick into one of the ports on the back of your computer and you just start talking. Back then, at least when I started, podcasting wasn’t a big thing. I actually don’t even remember if it was really called podcasting back then because podcasting is like a portmanteau of iPod and broadcast, and I know the iPod came out in ’03, but I don’t think podcast was a big word in general back then.

Kirk Visola:
No.

Maurice Cherry:
I know audio blogging was because the precursor to Twitter was this website called Odio that I used to use to just record snippets of stuff and would send it to friends because a lot of my friends lived either in New York or they lived in California. They didn’t live in Atlanta, so we would just do audio blogs and stuff back and forth, and on the side, I would just do a… I called it a blogcast, but I would just kind of record an episode, and maybe I’d have a guest on using Skype. I would have a guest on, and we would talk about just whatever’s in the news and whatnot, and I was learning how to edit. I was doing editing myself with Audacity or whatever, and then I fell into this group of other people in Atlanta that were doing podcasting, and I met this couple, Amber and Rusty, who were doing…

They basically created this organization called the Georgia Podcast Network, and it was mostly Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, the Tri-State area, and we would have semi-regular meetups. There was a website. I think they even put on a few pod camp conferences using the camp style of conferences, which they called an un-conference back then because the attendees are the ones that set the itinerary and got into the podcast community, then met some people, just kind of other folks that were doing shows, and then I kind of fell out of favor from doing it for a while because, I mean, this was around the time also, YouTube started to become big, so people were really starting to get into doing video. Blogging itself was dying out a bit. More people were going towards video.

Audio was still something that largely in terms of distribution was more in the arena of big media entities, so a New York Times or an NPR or something would do a radio show, and then they release it later that day as an MP3 or something because I would listen to that stuff at work or whatever, and so that’s how I first got into it, and there just wasn’t, at least around the time with the Georgia Podcast network, outside of them, really a big community for it. I call that the first wave of podcasting, and then the second wave really came in the mid 2010s with Cereal. Like Cereal came, and then they had that famous ad with the woman mispronouncing MaleChimp, and that seemed to just take off wildfire in terms of people just being like, you can listen to audio on this device that I hold in my hand that has a headphone jack that I’ve been listening to music?

Yes, you can. You can do that. It wasn’t a big, big push.

Kirk Visola:
Right. Sometimes the most obvious answers aren’t obvious.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, but people started to see, I think, the possibility in it because even though Sarah Koenig is a journalist, and she was doing this independently at first, people saw like, “Oh, wait. I can make a show about anything,” and the way that the podcasting industry has, honestly, expanded and grown in the past 10 years is phenomenal, just in terms of the availability and the the suaveness of hardware, the availability of software. I mean, if you have a Spotify account, you can record a podcast. There’s so easy now, and so the learning curve has gotten much, much flatter for people to try to get into it, which I think for better or for worse, has been something for the industry.

I don’t want to say it’s been good or bad, but now, because so many people can do it, everyone can do it, and so there’s just so many different shows out there, but I wanted, at least with Revision Path, I wanted to establish the lane fairly early because I had been listening to other design podcasts, and there were no Black people. And I would ask them, “Why aren’t you talking to any Black designers? I know Black designers,” and sometimes I would get a response, which would usually be negative, but most of the times they would never even respond, and so I started Revision Path, not as a podcast at first, it was just going to be an online magazine because a friend of mine, this woman named Deedee Sutton had a really successful online magazine that she created called Clutch Online, or Clutch Mag Online, I think is what she called it, but she had a really super successful online magazine.

I was like, “I want to do something like that with, but around design at Revision Path,” because by this point in time in 2013 when I started the show, I had quit my job at AT&T five years ago, started my studio, and then I had been in my studio now, and it was successful for five years, so I was like, “Oh, I have the time and the space to actually do this,” and so that’s how Revision Path was born, and I recorded my first podcast in June of that year. We started in February in terms of interviews, but the first recorded podcast was in June of that year, and then in 2014 is when we started to do it on a fairly regular weekly basis in terms of audio interviews, and it just kind of took off from there.

Kirk Visola:
That’s dope. That’s so cool to hear because I’m in the process now on our show of interviewing more Black designers because I told Andy, he’s a North Carolinian white dude from North Carolina, and he’s just, he’s super cool man, and he is definitely an ally. He understands things. He is very encouraging. I keep telling him, “I want this person on,” and I’m like, yeah, and he’s feeding me people that I’d never even met before seen because he’s more in that space for knowing people than I am as far as designers, and so it’s good to see, and so I’m starting to get more people of color, all colors on our show, but mainly Black people because there was a survey, and I’ve mentioned this before on other places where I’ve talked, I think it’s called Design census.org or design census.com, and they interviewed 9,450, so for arguments sake, let’s just say 10,000 people.

And only 3% of the people interviewed design wise were Black because that was the space, and then it was like 13% Asian other, but it was 71% white male were designers, 71%, and you look at agencies and you look at the about us, and you go through the headshots and it’s like, “Wow, there it is right there. This is exactly it.” Okay, and you go to the next agency. “Oh, there you go. This is exactly it,” and that’s how it is, and it’s understandable, but there’s so much talent being missed out on, just even basically from seeing things from a different perspective, being Black and understanding different ideas and stuff.

It was like, for instance, I think also two companies don’t even really try to be creative anymore. I’m serious. I’m serious. Think about the last cool Apple ad you’ve seen, and so I thought Apple’s always, like they had this weird thing where they were showing they did this weird for shortening of people holding up their phones. And then they were small silhouettes in the back and it’s now bigger, and I’m thinking, “Oh, my God, that’s terrible.” Here’s my idea for the perfect Apple ad, apple iPhone, iPhone, if you’re listening or this service goes back to you, I want my royalties on this shit.

What you do, all you do is you show a phone with a screen off, and you just show the phone screen off on a desk, and I want the desk to be a real desk, not like this perfect pristine thing. I want to see a takeout menu. I mean, real life shit, everything kind of just normal, and then I want to hear two people in the background. You hear a show in the background, it’s like, “Nah, now I’m telling you, that’s the dude.” This is how it starts. “‘s the dude from the last night or Night Quest.” “No, it’s not. No, it’s not.” “Yeah, it is.” It’s an argument going on and finally you here, “Hey, Siri?” “Yes?” “Who was this person then?” And then it just comes up, it says, “iPhone,” and then phones scratched out. It says, “I want to win this bet,” so every scenario’s like that, and then you go do another one, and it’s in the car in the holder. The phone’s in the car, in the holder, right?

And you see traffic in the background. It’s kind of blurry. It’s nighttime, and you hear two people talking about, “I’m telling you the Tacoria is right here.” And then it’s like iPhone and Scratcho says, “I want to find that restaurant.” Right? Focus on what it does rather than what it is. That was Steve Job’s big thing, focus on the product, the actual benefits of the product rather than the product itself. So why wouldn’t they do that? Why wouldn’t they found a way to push it? Because everybody knows what iPhone is, right? It’s not a phone. It’s a mini do wall in your pocket, and so why not focus on that?

And I hardly, and this is no joke, I maybe talk on my phone two times a month, maybe actually talk on my phone two times a month because people know I don’t like talking on the phone and they’ll text me, so it’s like, you can have anything now. I want to win this bet. I want to find a restaurant. I want to see what time that movie starts. It’s like it does everything for you, so why not mention that and make it fun? People know what it does. People know why they’re buying an iPhone. You don’t have to show the camera on the back and how it’s like, who cares? We all know it has a camera. We all know it takes good pictures. That’s the given. Just saying that when you design something, it’s going to look good.

What is a solution you’re trying to find? What are you trying to do with that solution? And so for me, being a creative person, I’m always thinking of shit like this, how to solve for a real thing. What would I want to see on a commercial? Anytime I see a commercial and I see a iPhone commercial, it’s Lily, right? She’s talking about AT&T and how you can get a free iPhone. I like her. I love that character because it’s just kind of silly and it’s fun. It’s like a nice counter to the Verizon can you hear me now, guy? So that’s one thing, but it doesn’t speak about the phone itself. It speaks about AT&T services, so have something that does something to do with the phone, but anyway, I think they’re missing that because they narrow their search to what looks good on paper rather than what performs well in real life. You know what I mean?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kirk Visola:
People can present really well on paper, but not be that great in real life.

Maurice Cherry:
Apple also snaps up a lot of really good designers and art directors, and I don’t know what they’re doing with them. I mean, I would imagine they work on many of the other parts of the Apple ecosystem. For example, I’ve never been able to interview anyone that worked at Apple or that, I’m sorry, that currently works at Apple because they don’t let their employees do interviews, so it’s I’ve interviewed X Apple people when they’ve told me what they can about it, but I don’t know what goes on inside that large Taurus building in Cupertino, but that’s some ironclad NDA action right there.

Whatever is going on. I don’t know if the creativity necessarily is making its way out to people because I think even with the last iPhone, with the iPhone 14, a lot of people have been like, it’s not that much of an improvement over the 13, and granted, that’s probably supply issues and things of that nature too, just in terms of the camera and stuff, but yeah, I don’t know if Apple is the innovator like it used to be in that aspect.

Kirk Visola:
No, and also, too, I’m still rocking my old iPhone 7 plus.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow.

Kirk Visola:
I’m still rocking that and I love it. Honestly, I wish they would go back to the four size, the size of the iPhone four. It was just a little bit bigger than a business card. That’s what I don’t want. I’m tired of these phones getting so big. I don’t want to carry around an iPad. I want to carry around a phone, like the old flip phones. I think Samsung, they had the flip phone, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. The Galaxy Flip or Galaxy Fold or something like that.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah. That’s pretty cool. I see some problems with the screens possibly being messed up because of all the opening and closing, but I like the idea. How fun was it? Remember how fun it was to end a call just by closing it, closing it shut, like end of the call. Now you have to just push a button violently in order to make sure people know you hung up.

Maurice Cherry:
A violent tap, a long press.

Kirk Visola:
You want to give them those three beeps. You know when they hang up beep, beep, beep?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kirk Visola:
Okay. That’s the end of the call. It used to just be slam and that was it. Call over, so that’s the one thing that phone brings back, which would also be a fun aspect for a marketing standpoint. With this phone, you could now end calls properly. It shows a dude just like, “Bye,” slamming the phone.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kirk Visola:
I think, yeah, but anyway, tangent.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m curious with the podcast, and as we talked about little earlier, has that helped you become a better designer now that you’re able to really speak with other designers in congress on a regular basis about stuff? Has that helped you out?

Kirk Visola:
Oh, I don’t talk to anybody in Congress or in the Senate at all.

Maurice Cherry:
No, no, no, no.

Kirk Visola:
I know what you said. Not necessarily a better designer, but a better-informed designer. I’m able to see perspectives in a different way from people who’ve done certain things, but I don’t think it’s helped me be a better designer, just helped me understand where people are coming from and just more exposure. More exposure to anything definitely increases knowledge of something in regards to your field, but I don’t know if it necessarily makes you better equipped design wise, although it might, I don’t know. I haven’t really seen a big uptick in my design skills. Maybe I should just keep interviewing people in the hope that it will rub off via telekinesis because osmosis, you need water, so people say, “oh, you’re going to get that osmosis.” You always need a water source, so you can’t get it through osmosis, but through telekinesis, possibly.

Maurice Cherry:
My mother is a biologist. She tells me that same thing, that exact same thing. People can’t get stuff through osmosis. I get it. I get it. I get it.

Kirk Visola:
So you need to have areas of high concentration to low concentration or to living proper in order to have… Okay, Mom, sorry,

Maurice Cherry:
I get what you mean about being a better-informed designer. Even as I’ve done this show and I’ve talked to people all over the world, it lets me know what our differences are, what our similarities are. I feel like a lot of designers have the same issues regardless of where they are, whether it’s their work or finding work or finding purpose and things like that, but then you see how different it is in parts of Africa versus in the UK versus here in the States, even from the rural areas of the states to big cities and things like that. It has, I think, made me, I get what you mean about it, making you better informed. Just hearing more people’s perspectives helps you to see a lot farther than what you just might in your own kind of narrow field of vision.

Kirk Visola:
Right. Yeah, exactly, and that’s exactly what… You said it so much better.

Maurice Cherry:
What kind of advice would you have for any… Like people are listening to this conversation. They’re hearing you. They’re hearing your story. What advice would you give to people that want to follow in your footsteps, they want to have the career that you have?

Kirk Visola:
First of all…

Maurice Cherry:
They want to have the career that you have.

Kirk Visola:
First of all, I think it’s good to understand, like I said before, not everybody’s going to like your work. Right? Everybody’s not going to like your work, and so you can’t take it personally. I also think that it’s good to find a designer whose style you like in different fields, and find multiple influences to help your thought process. I also think it’s good to find a mentor if you can, someone you trust that will be honest with you. And by honest, I don’t mean absolutely mean, but I do think you should find someone who’s not going to bullshit you.

And last, and this is the most important thing that I’ve found, is just be yourself. Just be yourself. Be unapologetically you. Now granted, there are, and you and I both know this from working with people in the corporate space, you have to figure out a way to tone back a little bit at times, because especially if you’re a person of color, black, brown, you have to figure out a way to tone back sometimes, because then you’re seen as being aggressive. You’re seen as being loud, you’re seen as being abrupt. You’re seen as being a disruption. But you can set boundaries by your actions, not answering emails, being cordial [inaudible 01:13:31] people, being firm, and then setting those boundaries. But try your hardest to be yourself because people who will fuck with you will understand you 100%. It’s not going to be, “Oh, I’ve never seen this side of you before.” That should never come out of anybody’s mouth who you’re talking to.

And I say this all the time, that whoever I’m talking to, I talk to the same way. I talk to six-year-olds this way I’m talking to you. I’ll cuss around them because that’s me. I’m not going to blatantly go out on my way to cuss, but if something comes up, I will cuss. And it’s just because that’s who I am. I’m not trying to be rude. I’m not trying to be edgy. I’m just trying being me. And if that happens, it happens. And at times I realize I’ve said something and it’s like, oh, it doesn’t work the best around my two-year-old nephew, because he’s a parrot and repeats verbatim with incredible syntax, vernacular and diction, exactly what you’ve said, so I have to watch that. But be unapologetically you as the biggest takeaway, I would say. But know when to. And this is a horrible thing to say. So it’s like good advice and bad advice, because you shouldn’t have to shrink for anybody. But there’s times in order to get ahead, you kind of have to make sure you do, which is terrible to say.

And if people don’t like you and they don’t fuck with you, then you don’t want to work with them.

Maurice Cherry:
Have there been times in your career where that’s come back to bite in some way?

Kirk Visola:
Yeah, it has. And we didn’t mention Shaklee earlier, where I worked, but I basically had a target on my back after speaking back to the VP at some point. And here’s a fun story, and other people who’ve heard me on other stuff will probably say, “I’ve heard this a thousand times.” When I was working there, there were one, two, three, four, five, like six black people that worked there, maybe seven. And one of the women that worked in a different department that I worked with, she was walking by the VP’s desk. And the VP, she sat in the middle of the office in it’s an open office, which for those of you who are listening, open office plans, they’re terrible for everybody. But anyway, she was walking through [inaudible 01:15:57] open office, and she walks by and she says, and I’m going to call her Sarah for the conversation, “Sarah, how are you coming along on that action brochure?”

The action brochure was a brochure that I was working on that was due for a global conference, which Shaklee holds every year. And last time they did it was in Vegas I think, but I haven’t thought about that shit for four years. But anyway, “So where are we on that action brochure for the global conference?” And Sarah looks at her and says, “Oh, well, I have it back with creative, and they’re making changes to it.” Mind you, I am literally 20, 25 feet from the VP in an open office. And she says, “Oh, well what can I do to help you? How can I help you?” The VP says to Sarah. Sarah looks at her confused and says, “I’m not sure exactly how you can help. I mean, it’s with creative right now.” Being incredibly calm, as Black women have to be in the workplace, or they are assumed to be combative. So that’s another thing.

And then she says, “You know what? Forget it.” The VP, “Forget it. You go do your thing. And I’m going to sit here and do my thing. Okay?” [inaudible 01:17:09] So I hear this and I’m thinking, this bitch. So I get up and I walk over to my project manager who sits even closer to the VP. And I walk up to her and I say in this exact tone, in this exact voice, “Was that about the fucking action brochure?” And she looks at me. And the project manager and I, she’s dope. I love her. She’s at a different company now and whatever, but she’s so cool. She was basically a mom to all of us. And she wasn’t that much older, but she just had that caring and very organized nature about her. And she goes, “Yeah.” And I go, “Tell them if they would stop changing shit, then I’d be able to get it done.” And I said it loud enough so the VP would hear it.

And so I started walking back to my desk and the VP does this. “Oh, oh, oh, I’m sorry, Kirk, what did you say?” And I turned to her and I say, “If you would stop changing shit, then I could get it done.” So this is what she does. Puts her hands up, like the entire hands up, shoulders back, like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, we’re all on the same team.” And I said to her, “Mm-hmm, yeah, right.” And I went back to my desk.

After that moment, it was like a bullseye was on me. Everybody was like, “Kirk is leaving early to go do something,” which I had established because I was leaving early on certain days to get my kids from school and spend time with them, because I was going through a fucked up divorce and custody battle. So I needed every moment with my kids. And then it was like, “Kirk isn’t doing his work, or getting work done, or asking for more work.”

And I was like, “Motherfuckers.” So I got called into the office after that one day, or into HR. And I go in there and the first thing I ask is, “Am I fired?” And they’re like, “No.” I said, “Well, okay, then let’s talk, because here’s the thing, if you’re going to fire me, just fire me. I don’t want to lecture. I don’t need to hear anything. Just fire me.” So they sit down and all these things come up. You’ve been leaving early. And I said, “Well, I told you I was going to leave early because it was my supervisor and the HR lady.” I said, “I told you I was going to leave early.” And he said, “Well, what do you do when you get your work done?” I said, “Well, predominantly, I probably either surf the internet or I catch up on other work than I’m doing.”

And they go, “You don’t ask for more work?” I say, “No, why should I? Why should I ask for more work?” See, Kirk did quiet quitting before quiet quitting was cool. And I said, “Why should I ask for more work?” And they go, “Well, you know [inaudible 01:19:49].” And I said, “No.” They said, “Well, people have come up to you and you’ve had your headphones on, and you put boxes up on your desk.” I said, “Yeah, because I need to get work done and I’m right next to the bathroom. And people know that I’m friendly and they want to talk to me, and I don’t have time to talk sometimes, so I put the headphones in and get stuff done.”

“People have also said that you’re unapproachable,” and we all know what that’s code for. You’re Black and scary. People-

Maurice Cherry:
Or that you’re just Black.

Kirk Visola:
Right? And so I said, well, I don’t understand that. And I look at my supervisor and they go, “Yeah, because you might be hurting people’s feelings.” I said, “Okay, well,” I look at my supervisor and I say, “hey, have I ever given you any flack for a job?”

“No.”

“Have I ever done a bad job?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been displeased with anything that I’ve done?”

“No.”

I said, “I don’t see what the problem is though.” I said, “My job is to do the best I can in the time allotted, with the information that I have. That is my job.”

“You [inaudible 01:20:51] hurt people’s feelings.”

I said, “I don’t give a fuck about people’s feelings. That’s not my job.” And I knew I wasn’t hurting anybody’s feelings because I would have people come back to me repeatedly, specifically asking for me to do work for them. I think it’s a combination of jealousy and other people in my department who I worked with who were fucking busters.

And I think it’s also the fact that I didn’t march to their drum. I didn’t do everything that they said. So they’re like, “Oh, well how can you do this?” I’m like, “Nah.” And they said, “Okay.” And then the HR lady asked, “Kirk, do you like working here?” I’m thinking, “Bitch, what the fuck you talking about? How can you ask me that? You already know the answer. You’re asking me a rhetorical question. You already know the fucking answer.” Like, “Dude, you know the answer.” So I sit there and I look at her dead in the eyes and I say, “I really like who I work with.” And that was it. I didn’t say anything else. It’s like, “You really think I’m going to dig the hole with a shovel you gave me so you can knock me in it, so you can shoot me and put me in it like a damn gangster movie?” No, I’m not digging a hole. I’m going to say what I have to say and it’s going to be honest. I did the people I work with there.

Here’s the thing, man, this is the biggest thing other people can remember too. Working with people is about relationships. And when you have a good relationship with someone, your work is going to be better than it would be if you have a bad relationship with someone. That’s just, that’s everyday life. That’s a job. That’s a marriage. That’s a basketball team, that’s a baseball team, that’s sports, whatever, it’s everywhere. So I have people, and I can think of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven people who I used to work with at Shaklee that have left Shaklee and have come to me for work, to help them do things.

Now, if I was that bad of an employee or that bad of a person, they wouldn’t want to work with me. They wouldn’t seek me out afterwards. It’s like that’s the thing that I measure from being not only a good designer but a decent person to work with. And that’s important to me. So just realize that people at work aren’t your friends, but there are people who can become friends when you get to a certain point. And there’s several people who I work with from there that I really enjoy working with and love. And so there were people that I loved there. But I couldn’t say that I actually liked working there. I would have half of my face go numb going into work. I would have headaches. I would have terrible anxiety. I would sit in my car at times. I would start around 8:30 and I would get to work at about 8:20 and sit there until 8:50 or 9:00, just not wanting to go into the office. That’s how bad it was.

And the day my wife said to me, “You know what? You should look into seeing if you can get time off for stress relief.” I said, “Okay, cool, bet.” So I talked to the Kaiser Permanente psychiatry department, which is non-existent. It’s terrible. And I talked to the dude and then either in person or over the phone or whatever, I don’t remember. But he said, “You know what, they normally only give out two.” He said, “I’m going to give you three weeks.” And I thought, as soon as he said, I’m giving you three weeks from work, this weight had been lifted. I mean, right now talking about it, my face is kind of going numb. That’s how stressful and traumatic it was being at that fucking work environment. And when the three weeks was almost up, I started having the same fucking symptoms coming up.

Same shit would happen at home, knowing I had to go back in. And my wife said to me, “Just quit.” And I said, “Really?” She’s like, “Yeah.” And the moment she said yeah, it’s like the weight had been lifted. I felt like Atlas finally could stop holding up the world. Like, “This is someone else’s job. And ain’t my job.” There was that much stress and pressure on me. And when people were talking about, “Oh, you quit because you were mentally not there,” or whatever, it’s like, “You’re fucking right I did, because it was killing me.” It was literally killing me to be in that environment. And I don’t think people understand the amount of shit that other people can’t escape from. There’s people who can’t do what I do. I was lucky. I was fortunate to have a supportive partner and to have someone who cared enough about my mental health, as well as my physical health to say, “You need to quit that fucking job.”

And my former boss who was working at a different company was just telling me like, oh, I need to stick it out. [inaudible 01:25:40] said, “No, you need to quit. Since you started working here, this, this, this and this have happened to you. All these physical things have happened to you based upon your job. The stress is killing you.” So finally she quit and she said she feels so much better already. She’s getting back into a rhythm. She’s starting to exercise. She’s sleeping better. And it’s like, yes. And I don’t think people realize the importance of A, working in a hostile work environment, but B, working in a hostile environment by being a marginalized person, i.e. not a cis white male. And it’s tough. It’s tough and it’s tougher for other people in certain situations. So yeah, that’s the reason why it left. That’s my experience there. Overall, I learned a lot while being there and I met some nice people. But I can honestly say I would not work there again.

Maurice Cherry:
That sounds a lot my time working at AT&T. It was just, oh my God, not great, not great. AT&T at least at the time when I was about to quit, I thought I had had Crohn’s disease or something. Every time I thought about going in or had to go in, I would automatically get sick. I would automatically have stomach issues. I thought I had IBS or something. And then once I quit, it all just cleared up. It just like, poof, vanished. It was gone. So yeah, working in those stressful environments can definitely do a toll on you mentally, physically. Yeah, I know what that’s like.

Kirk Visola:
Yeah. And I’m sorry you had to go through that. It’s not a good experience.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Kirk Visola:
It’s difficult. See, you empathize and you sympathize and it’s hard for people to understand it if they haven’t gone through it. How can you let that happen? Actually, dude that used to work there at Shaklee went somewhere else. And all the shit was happening to him from an abusive narcissistic boss. And he said, “Oh, I have to quit.” And he said, “I remember criticizing you for quitting Shaklee.” But he said, “Now I understand. I apologize because I had no idea before.” Like, “Yeah, man, it’s real. It’s real.”

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

Kirk Visola:
As much as I don’t like Kanye West, one of these great lyrics from one of his songs, he said, and I’m paraphrasing because I don’t know the exact words, because it’s Kanye, he said, “Where do you want to be when you’re 25? She turned around, looked at me, and she said, alive.” I was like, “Damn, that’s kind of how I feel. I would like to say I want to be retired in Hawaii, sipping on pina coladas and mai tais and watching the turtles. But reality, I just want to be around. I mean, I want to be somewhat healthy, doing stuff with my wife, chilling, working, just enjoying life.

As far as career goals, I really would’ve liked to finish a script I’m working on, finish a video game idea, finish a graphic novel. I just want to finish something, because I have all these ideas and they all kind of go around and sync up. Oh, here’s something too. See, the ADHD brain is working. I’m working on a project right now that has a certain character I meet up. And so this is what I was thinking. I hadn’t seen it done before and I think it would be kind of fun. I was going to start a character and the first thing [inaudible 01:29:07] do was write a little brief book intro about him. And the second thing I wanted to do was write a or design a video game that picks up where the book left off. And that’s the only media it’s available in. It’s not going to be in a book, it’s not going to be online. It’s just going to be only the game.

And then after the game, I want to make an animated movie or show where that picks off and pick up from there. So it crosses three different media, but it continues one story. And I hadn’t seen that before. And I was thinking maybe because it’s not as big of a deal or it’s too hard to do, but just different things too. And I want the video game to be able to transfer, like when you’re playing it from a 2D scroller to a 3D sandbox. I want them to interact that way, where you can just pause it, change settings, and then go to a 2D scroller. Think of Rayman versus Batman Arkham Knights or any game like that, God of War or Tomb Raider. So you go from that to a 2D scroller, like Kung-Fu or a Rayman or whatever, or Kung-Fu Master, that was my idea behind that.

But I want to do something along those lines from my personal, not personal, but just for my creative zeal. But mainly just in five years, I want to be able to chill and probably have some better relationships with my sons, my twins. We go deep when we talk. This is always me. So I’d probably like to have a better relationship with them too in five years. But we’ll see what happens.

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

Kirk Visola:
You know what? Just to wrap it up, thank you so much for asking me that question Maurice. I’m putting on my podcast voice. I want to tell you about [inaudible 01:31:09] … No, people can find my agency work at Mind the Font dot com, so it’s like M-I-N-D-T-H-E-F-O-N-T dot com. And then I have something else I do, just kind of my own weird personal thing. It’s called Vsla Brand, but it’s V as in victory, S-L-A brand dot com. And on there, it’s just kind of my own personal stuff. I do have some swag that I sell on there, like hoodies and a T-shirt. I also have a thing called Thought Spot on there, where I write down random stuff that I’ve been thinking or what I’m going through at the time. And I date it, so you can read that. It kind of like is just me unfiltered. And I think that’s it. And also if you look up Kirk Visola, you’re going to find me, which is everything.

It’s pretty weird. You can find podcasts I’ve done, old pictures of me from newspapers when I had dreads. Yeah, Kirk Visola, that’s me. Just type it in, you’ll find me. And also too, anybody listening to this, please seriously reach out to me, and if you want any questions or ideas or thoughts or anything, reach out to me, because we don’t communicate enough, especially other Black designers, other Black creatives, we should be communicating with each other. Maurice and I were talking about this beforehand. And I told him to call me anytime he wants to vent or talk or chat or whatever, because we need to lean on each other in order to make each other strong. So reach out to me anytime y’all. And Maurice, thank you so much for having me on. That’s it for me.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, no, this was a really great conversation. Kirk Visola, thank you again so much for coming on the show. Really I think, if there’s anything that’s come across in this conversation, it is your just unfiltered, complete authenticity about yourself and your work, and your attitude to the work and everything. I hope that that’s something that as people certainly look at what they want to accomplish this year, they can sort of follow in your stead about being yourself, and knowing that by doing that and by being themselves, that they can succeed as well. So thank you so much again for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Kirk Visola:
Thank you, Maurice.

Donate to Selma Tornado Relief

United Way of Central Alabama, Inc.

We are raising money for Selma Tornado Relief through United Way of Central Alabama to help serve victims of the tornado that tore through Selma, Alabama on Thursday, January 12th. Donate now, or text SELMA to 62644. Send us proof of your donation, and we will match it 100% (up to the first $1,000 donated).

Thank you for helping fund Selma’s recovery!

Sponsored by Hover

Hover

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

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

Lauren Brown

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

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

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lauren Brown:
No, I actually went to Savannah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maurice Cherry:
How did that experience go?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsored by Hover

Hover

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

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