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Tag: creative director
Episode 408: Maxwell VanHook
Tagged as:	amazon, Baltimore, creative director, Designing While Black, Maxwell VanHook, Seattle, Under Armour
https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/20181fbd-7d36-4dca-97fc-d48d9dea8a64/episodes/c5f2d8ad-b6c2-498c-86fe-1518bd316a18/audio/cc7c5bcf-7cc7-4be0-821f-111805b8bfef/default_tc.mp3
Maxwell VanHook is an associate creative director at Amazon in Seattle, Washington, and the co-host of Designing While Black.
"If you have a vision for yourself, go for it." When Maxwell VanHook told me that before our interview, I knew that he was about to drop some serious knowledge. And he did not disappoint!
We started off in an interesting place — the home — and he talked about how newlywed life and how he's been re-evaluating the concept of work and code switching in this current age. He also shared a bit about his work as an associate creative director for Amazon Devices, and his role as co-host of the weekly IG Live show Designing While Black. For Maxwell, trusting your voice and values has been key to his success…and I definitely agree with that!
Maxwell VanHook's Website
Maxwell VanHook on Instagram
Designing While Black on Instagram
Maxwell VanHook:
I am Maxwell VanHook. I am from Baltimore, Maryland, currently. In my professional life, I am an associate creative director on the Amazon devices team. That basically entails anything that has Alexa in it, but it also involves the devices that Amazon makes. You can think about your Echo Dots, Echo Shows, Kindles, emerging platforms like Amazon Luna, which is cloud gaming. Outside of my professional life, I am a music lover. I'm also the co-host of Designing While Black along with Bekah Marcum. That comprises who I am. First and foremost, I would say with all of those things, I like to show up as a friend. I'm just a friend, support system and a champion of other people's dreams. I like to see people succeed. I'd like to see people win.
How's the year been going so far?
The year's been good. I'm not going to lie to you. When COVID hit, I think that I had some psychological and emotional barriers. No, just in terms of shifting my schedule. I had a routine. I would get up every day, probably around 6:37 o'clock, do whatever I need to do for the morning, get dressed, go to work, probably get coffee when I went to work. And so it gets monotonous. All of that broke down once COVID hit. And so now, I'm at home. Now, I'm with my wife and I'm with my cat. Nobody's really going outside. And so I had to create new routines for myself. I had to learn how to work out within at home, I had to learn how to run within my home, I had to learn how to make sure that I was keeping my mind active outside of my day-to-day work. I also need to figure out how to keep myself emotionally and mentally stable.
And so it's been good because I learned a lot about myself. I really had to scrutinize what I wanted from life and it allowed me to be still. I know that there were a lot of things that came along with the pandemic. But now that we're somewhat out of it, I actually appreciate it because it allowed me to sit with myself and really be introspective about how I wanted to move forward in this next phase of life. I just turned 31 not too long ago. And so I feel like I'm at a crossroads in terms of who I want to be. This has been good for me.
Yeah, I think a lot of people now, especially peer in the states who have hopefully gotten their vaccines or they're seeing now that just restrictions are being lifted like nationwide and in many places, I think a lot of people are at that point of reexamining and reevaluating where they're at now that they've come out of this and trying to figure out what moving forward looks like, because I think there's been this big push to get back to normal. You got to get back to normal. But it's almost impossible in many ways because the world is just a different place. We're different people now that we have all collectively went through this extended trauma. It's hard to just snap back into what you used to do before all of this.
Now, it was important for me… I realized, especially like on a work-front, there are certain conditioning that you go through in terms of how you show up that especially in physical spaces, like when you walk into a corporate office and you're not the dominant culture. And so things like code switching, dialect altering, I was with… not too long ago, we had someone that we interviewed and they used the phrase telephone voice. These are things that I feel black and brown people use every day to survive in these spaces. I just had to do a deep conditioning because when I was at home, I was way more relaxed. And then I realized that I'm not in the physical space with you and I'm not going to become someone different when I'm outside of my home.
And so I had a conflict with myself, like internal conflict. This is the space where I am authentically myself, this is the space where I can be free and open and now I'm bringing work into that space. And so I like, "No, I flipped that on its head. Anywhere that I show up, that's how I'm going to be." And so working at home actually allowed me to do that, getting on the phone and not really caring how I'm phrasing things, not really caring on what type of vernacular I'll use because I was just embracing fully who I am. Especially when you put it in the context of the pandemic, you realize, "Hey, life can be snatched at any moment. It's up to us to live use the agency to own your life."
That's interesting. You're like reevaluating… it's funny… well, not funny, but I like that you said that you're looking at home and how you bring work into it, because certainly for a lot of folks, having to work from home, it's been tough, I think, for many people to really make that delineation between like, "This is work, this is home." Even if you've got a dedicated space, you're still bringing a totally foreign thing into your sanctuary. Home is where you… That's where you sleep, that's where you let your hair down, that's where you let your defenses down. But now, it's also your workplace and your gym and your daycare and all these other things now. Yeah.
Yeah, all those things converged. When they converged in that manner, I just started to look at how I was showing up and then also how I was relating to people. I think you discover things about yourself throughout life because I believe that we're fluid beings in that way. And just being able to sit at home, knowing that this is my space and I own it, I couldn't even access any form of code switching or altering, if I wanted to, because it just wouldn't sit right with me. And that just ultimately led me to say like, "Why was I doing it in the first place? Also, who told me to do this?" And that was another thing like, "Who told me to do this?" I was like, "No one told me to do this? This is a decision you made and you have to break and work to get out of this."
And so if there is a danger and not code switching, that's just something that I'm going to have to deal with, but I would rather live my truth. I feel like most people should live their truth in that sense. There's so many people who stay away from their unique sensibilities or their unique form of expression because of how other people will perceive it and that stops you from that expansion. That's the goal. I'm trying to expand, I'm trying to try as many things as I possibly can. With curiosity comes failures sometimes. I don't even look at failure as failure. I look at that as a lesson, a learning lesson. I want to fall as many times as I can. I want to show up in any form that I want to show up in. Yeah, I just want to own my space. I'm trying to walk away from conditioning that may have happened beforehand.
Does Amazon foster that kind of exploration for you as an employee?
I don't necessarily know if Amazon fosters it. But I will say that when I came to Amazon, I was met with some very real confrontational energy in terms of the people that I was interacting with. I know there are horror stories about Amazon. I do not believe that the majority of them are true, just not in my case. But there was this presence of trying to be A type, trying to be the best, trying to always be on. And for me, there was the double whammy of walking into a social environment inside the building where nobody looked like me, and then also outside of the building, nobody looked like me. And so I don't necessarily know if there was a support system there. I'd argue that there wasn't and they're trying to build it now to foster that individuality and that freedom of expression, but it forced me to build my own.
And so in that way, I would appreciate the experience of coming to Amazon, being able to live in Seattle, because it put me directly in line and maybe come face-to-face with who I am as a person, as a designer, especially as a man. And so it was like a forcing function. If I was half stepping in in who I wanted to be and how I wanted to show up, I couldn't really do that there. And so there were a lot of things that I just started to think about differently life-wise once I started working at Amazon. More specifically, like my wellness, like self-care. I didn't even get a therapist until I came to Amazon, which is odd, it's super odd. That shouldn't have been the case. I probably should have always had a sense of reflection or someone to help me process, but that stuff did not happen until I came to Seattle.
Interesting. We'll talk about what brought you to Seattle and everything later, but I want to focus now on the work that you're doing at Amazon. You said you're an associate creative director when you're working on Amazon products, devices I should say, Amazon devices. Amazon has been in the device game for a minute. I think everyone knows about the Kindle, but now there's Echo, like you mentioned, there's the Fire TV, there's the Fire tablet. Amazon has also acquired other electronics companies. And so there's wearables, there's the ring security system, all this sort of stuff. There's a lot that goes into devices at Amazon. Just like as broad as you can, and if you want to go into specifics, that's fine, what are some creative considerations that you have to think about when it comes to Amazon devices because you're really working with an entire ecosystem of tech here?
Yeah. I would say at the center, there's a leadership principle called customer obsession. Really without getting into too much jargon, essentially at the epicenter of any Amazon product or any Amazon device is this human focused, this human lens. Always creating product and always creating innovation with your audience in mind. And so anytime that I am getting ready to create a campaign or I'm getting ready to market a product, I always think about the audience that I'm trying to serve, because if I'm not thinking about that, then I'm probably being a terrible designer.
And so I would say that one is that audience, but then also balancing that as you go through and you're innovating from device to device, realizing how these technologies may create tension points. You want to look at like Echo Dot, for instance, the way that it functions is it very much so has to record. And so it's constantly listening. It's pinging to see if it's being called every so often. And that's why when you say the key phrase, Alexa, it'll activate. And so how do I humanize technology like that? How do I humanize emerging technology to show people like, "Hey, this is new, this is novel, but it can fit within your day-to-day lifestyle and it can be a benefit to you"? And so that's how I think about marketing any product with Amazon. What is the human entry point? What is the human lens? How does this product help serve the customer base and how does it help enhance their lifestyle?
I worked on a product, a service within the Alexa app not too long ago, which is probably one of my proudest projects. It's called Alexa Care. Essentially, it's for the more senior, elder loved ones in your life. It allows people to stay in touch with those loved ones without infringing on their day-to-day lifestyle. Imagine you have a grandmother who's 75, 80 years old. She lives by herself at home and you live maybe in another country or another state. How do you stay in touch with her? And so those are the types of products and that's essentially how we would want any of the Amazon devices to show up. It needs to be a benefit, it needs to enhance, it needs to be brought into the life of our everyday customer and improve. If it's not doing that, then we probably won't make it.
Now that you mentioned, I'm thinking of other kind of Amazon devices. I think these might've been some that were discontinued. I remember at one point there was a… I think one was like a camera or a camera wand or something that went with Amazon wardrobe that would analyze your outfit. It reminded me of Clueless, like the opening scene in Clueless, where Cher is picking out her outfit on the computer and the closets got the dual conveyor belt curtains, or whatever, or the rods, or whatever, but thinking about like, "Is that really a benefit? Do I need to do all of that if I'm getting ready in the morning?" Probably not. I think Amazon discontinued it fairly shortly. But when you put it in that way of like the devices need to be a benefit, then I see why Amazon has made such a, I think, deep strides into the home with their devices.
The Echo is something that easily can blend in with your decor. The Fire TV it sits behind your TV, it's out of sight. The ring it's literally outside the house. You don't really even see it. But the benefits that it adds, whether that's security or extensibility or smart home functionality, stuff like that, it's interesting how all of that still works together under the Amazon brand because now it, of course, ties into the services, it ties into Alexa, it ties into purchasing, or whatever that you want to do on the website.
Yeah. It's really important to look at the ecosystem of devices that we have. I don't even think there's a lot of things that Amazon tries. I would say a year-over-year, we've increased our device output like 10 fold. I expect it to continue to grow and grow. Really, I think the goal is to provide through Alexa a service that can be personalized to the end user and can function in a way that benefits them specifically. I imagine a world… And these are not conversations that I've had with anyone in terms of how Alexa functions. But I imagine a world where there are no devices and potentially Alexa is integrated into the home itself.
I could imagine like seeing a tiny home, it could start off there and it could just have Alexa integrated into. You don't need to have these one-off devices in order to have it function. Imagine it already being built into the smart appliances, imagine it already being able to interface with your computer. You don't need to have a suite of devices that ties into the Internet of things in order to function efficiently. That's what I think is going on with most AIs. I think the overall goal is to arrive there and the device is just to open up new spaces and open up how customers relate to the voice assistance.
Yeah, because I imagine you get a ton of data with just seeing how people talk to Alexa, how they interact with the different devices, and then you can use that, of course, to upgrade the experience. But then as you said, you can venture off into greater implementations. Like I know there's the Amazon Go store, which I think started in Seattle. I'm not sure if it's started to spread nationwide yet, but it's almost like a person list convenience store. You can go in, pick up what you need and walk out. As you're doing this, you're automatically being rung up, like the things that you're buying are being tabulated, you're charged when you walk out the door, and you don't have to interact with a person. You just go in, do what you have to do, walk out.
Yeah. I think, if I'm not mistaken, not too long ago, and you probably find this online, they just opened up a full fledged grocery store here in Washington.
Yeah. I'm going to have to go check that out. Even like that concept, it's interesting because it's not like we haven't tried that in history before. I look at the, on a smaller scale, like a lot of the grocery stores already have some form of self-checkout. But even the human psychology behind self-checkout, you look at it, realistically, if you were to assess how long it takes you to go into a store, get what you need and then go through the checkout line by yourself, it probably on average takes you a lot longer rather than having else. But it's the thought that you are going to be a lot faster than that person who may be checking you out in line, which is interesting. But also even seeing Amazon try something like this and be relatively successful has a lot to do with studying the human behavior. But yeah, that's not the first time in human history that we've we tried that before. [crosstalk 00:21:10].
Yeah, no, no, I'm thinking specifically of the automat, which has been around since like the late 1800s. When Amazon is doing at least in… if you look at from the automat to the Amazon Go store is essentially taking that same concept and almost treating the store like a vending machine and just having this layer of technology that handles interactions throughout the entire process.
Yeah, no, it's crazy to see. I remember the first time that I actually went into… because I work in Day 1, and for anyone who doesn't know what Day 1, it's one of the buildings. I believe it's actually the building that Jeff Bezos is. And so within the verticals and the business orders that he cares about, they all exist in that building, with the exception of AWS, Amazon Web Services. I remember when I first went into that store and it was such a weird thing. It was like coming from where I come from, just be able to use an app, walk in and walk out, and I stopped myself and I was like, "Am I like really…" It's almost like you feel like you're about to steal something like, "Am I really allowed to walk out with this?" Yeah, but it's interesting in that I think as they become more successful with the rollout of the stores, yeah, you're going to see a lot more of it.
I can see Amazon coming out with like the Amazon house of tomorrow. You know what I mean? It's almost like those old Tex Avery cartoons where you got all the machines and robots doing stuff. It's so interesting because these are concepts… Just this whole thing about home automation, for example, we've been fed that for like 50 years now. The Flintstones and all those little animals and shit doing stuff for them in the cave, we've been fed this whole thing about having the house work for us instead of us working in the house for such a long time. And so now you've got a company like Amazon that's able to really do that through their devices. Other companies have gotten on this too, but I feel like Amazon was really one of the first to really do deep penetration into the home largely because I think it was tied to commerce.
Yeah, no, I also think it's so interesting to see the exponential growth of technology and the rate of change and the rate of innovation and technology. I'm sure that you've watched Black Mirror.
Yeah. And so I remember the first season and I was like, "Oh, some of the things that are happening in this series, like the grain, the grain where you can run back all your memories, that's super far away." And then season-by-season, I think I realized by the third season, I'm like, "No, these are things that can happen now." And so I'm looking back because I always feel as though like art imitates life. I think we seed ideas within the consciousness of society and then some person out there will have the goal or have the genius to make it. And now, I think we're at a crossroads where it's like, "All right, you put that into the world, I can make that tomorrow."
And so yeah, I think you're 100% right. We're going to look probably within the next few years, there will probably be some sort of smart home that will have all this integrated tech. I think we're at a stage where that next technological revolution, if it's not already here, it's getting ready to come underway. It's pushing up against our beliefs about identity in how we think about ourselves. Going back to Black Mirror, that episode about VR and video games, I forget the actors that were in it, but…
Is this from the latest season, the Striking Vipers?
Yes, Striking Vipers.
That was so interesting to me because it introduced a new topic, because that technology is not far away. It's right around the corner. I want to say not to get too graphic, but there are streaming websites that people probably sit or shouldn't be going to that get a lot of data and they have invested and have given seed money to companies who are creating bodysuits that can sense like AR/VR touchpoints and mimic haptic feelings throughout the body if you're wearing these suits. And so, yeah, like seeing an episode like that and knowing… because I pay attention to angel investors, I'll pay attention to what people are doing in the market, knowing that there are websites who want that technology and are spending money in order to make it happen means that that conversation may not be that far down the line. And that to me, it's somewhat terrifying, but it's also really interesting.
No, no, I totally get what you're saying. I didn't even think you were going to go that way with it. But now that you've mentioned it, I can see that. I was thinking more so about like now how… A couple of weeks ago I had this guy on the show, Brandon Groce, and we were talking about the metaverse and about how there are online personalities, YouTubers, podcasters, et cetera, that have a virtual realish avatar, like a VTuber or something like that. We're starting to see it on YouTube, for example, people that have these online-ish identities that are getting some level of fame. There's Dream, there's Corpse Husband, there's probably a few other folks. It's like these are real people. No one knows who they are, what they look like, but they've presented this digital 3D avatar of themselves. They're able to use that to, I guess, be themselves online in some sort of way. But to go back to what you said with the Black Mirror portion, I do see how that's not too far away at all. Between augmented reality and things of that nature, it's pretty close.
Yeah. Even what you just said, I love to unpack that even more, because in a sense, it's the most ideal version of yourself. That's what I think in a real way because I'm conflicted about social media and how it's used, but you curated. A lot of people do not give this holistic presentation. It's not like a direct one-to-one to your everyday life experiences. Yeah, you just amplify that and then now I can actually physically choose what I look like. If I want to be part animal, part human, or if I want to be a cyborg, I can do that. And now, we're all in ready player one.
Yeah, absolutely.
I can imagine that that'll happen. Yeah, not too long from now. I feel like I'm watching kids now and at least my… I have a godson and he constantly in his video games. If he's not in his video games, he's watching streamers. I hear you on that one.
Yeah. Let's switch gears here a little bit. I know we've been talking about your work at Amazon. One of the other things that you do is that you are a co-host of a show on Instagram called Designing While Black. Tell me about that.
Yeah. I think Bekah and I met in my first year at Amazon. And so Bekah is my co-host. What we realized is that internally there were no spaces for designers to come together, meet politic, learn from one another, and generally just have a social bond that feels like support. We wanted to change that. And so we got together. I want to say one day, we went to a mini golf session and we sent out a blast. We expected like five people to show up. I think like over 30 people showed up. So now, we realize like, "Oh, there's a community within Seattle that we really, really need to access." That's where black designers of Seattle came from, just trying to create a space where black designers who may feel other, who may feel like there's no one who shares the same interest or even walks in the same spaces that they do. There is a social circle out there that they can access.
And so a lot of the times like when we were starting to have these gatherings, we weren't talking about design at all. We were just having fun. We would go, pick a place, we would eat, and we would just fellowship. And then we slowly started to shift that and it became a little bit more educational. We started to bring people in like Tim Allen, I believe you had Tim Allen on your show.
Mm-hmm (affirmative), from Airbnb, yup.
Mm-hmm (affirmative). We brought in Jessica Rochelle, Timothy Bardlavens. And so we were bringing in these different people who were really able to share knowledge, share their experience, and uplift the designers within our community. And then we were getting reached out to from agencies or other bigger tech companies because they wanted to host us in the space and then the pandemic hit and then things started to take a bit of a low. We try to figure out how to navigate the new world and the new situation that COVID presented to us.
One of the things that we thought about was having a Zoom. But then outside of that Zoom, because we were specifically talking to designers within Seattle, we were really, really interested in being able to reach a larger audience. And within that larger audience, really speak to emerging designers. People who are either in middle school, high school, college, and wanting to walk in the same spaces that we're currently walking. And it's like, "How can we reach out to them? How can we give them content that can encourage them and allow them to know that there are people out here who look like them and are doing this work?" Because I firmly believe like if you don't see yourself, then you may not believe it's possible.
And so that's where Designing While Black came from. We spent a lot of time thinking about it, scrutinizing it, trying to design out the materials in the brand and a bunch of different ways. One day, Bekah and I just sat down and like, "We're just going to do it, do it. We're going to get out within a week, we're going to bring on…" I think our first guest was Alyssa Johnson, "and we're just going to keep going every week, short form content, bringing the people that we know and make sure that this gets in the hands of the right people." And so uplifting those stories and disseminating them to the people that can access those younger folk who want to be creative and want to do design professionally, that's our main goal.
As COVID restrictions start to lessen and we get back to peopling again, our goal is to get right back into those physical spaces and those physical venues, and then maybe we can start to do those shows in a more brand way. But that's where it started. I think her and I really, really believe in education and we both stand on the shoulders of the people that came before us. Like I specifically, one of my design mentors was in my church. I know that that's not like a common story to have a professional graphic designer who can talk to you at the age of 14, 15 and guide you. But I want to give back to other people what he gave to me. That was the overall goal of just doing the IG Live show.
What have you learned since starting the series?
One, I've learned that there are some magical black folk out there, real like, "You start to like." You'll sit down with some people and you think that you have a full understanding of everything that they've done. And when you sit down and you have a conversation with them and you really have to assess and dive deep into their life and their work, you start to realize like, "Yo, there are black people who are innovators in every single type of design that you could think of." And that's really encouraging to me, especially in the spaces that I travel. But I think the biggest thing is that like, "Yo, we're killing it out here. We're killing it out here, and not just when it comes to being like a director or a VP or an executive."
I met a young woman the other day, her name was Kiwi. She's currently in school. But she was a producer on MasterClass. Yeah, and she has spent time producing for films. She just completely shifted and decided that she wanted to become an instructional, or she wanted to become not only like an instructional designer, but industrial designer more so. That's probably like the most amazing thing like being able to meet people who have had just so many different types of experiences in life and aren't afraid to try new things. That probably is the biggest thing that I've learned. I do want to ask you, as you were building out your platform, what probably is the biggest roadblock that you faced just in terms of making sure that, one, it was reaching the people that you wanted it to reach?
It's a good question. I think it was two things. One was really me trying to get out of my own way. I think I certainly was trying to do, especially early on, a lot of partnering up with other entities to try to reach an audience that I just didn't have yet. I should have been spending that time really cultivating the audience that I did have, like the ones that I knew were listening and were leaving reviews and stuff. Instead, I would try to talk to another design podcast or another design organization and see if there's ways that we could work together and do some stuff. Oftentimes the answer to that would be no answer. It just wouldn't go anywhere, even though I'm reaching out.
I think that's probably been a big roadblock. To be fair, I'd say money is a continual roadblock. But in those early days, there wasn't really a whole lot that I really needed that money for in terms of I think I wanted to have it as a status symbol to myself that I've created something that companies will pay me for. And of course, I would use it for operational resources and stuff like that. But I spent way too much time trying to chase sponsors and chasing audience I didn't have and I should have been really focusing inward on cultivating the audience I do have and making them really rabid fans of what I'm trying to do that can see the vision that I see. I would have done that. Because yeah, in those early days, there was… I'll say this, it was certainly not as progressive as it is now, not by a long shot.
When I was reaching out to people in 2013 and 2014 there was a lot of, "Oh, we're post-racial, we don't do this sort of stuff anymore, et cetera, blah, blah, blah," which then just made it difficult when people ideologically feel that the work that you're doing for some reason is racist and it's not. It's like, "Oh, well, I don't see why you would think that." The tenor of the design community was not as open and accepting and as, I'd love to say the word woke, but it was not as woke now as it was back. Back then, people were really closed off to like, "No." Now, it's a lot more open. I think there's a greater consideration and a greater perspective for what black designers are doing and what they can bring to the table and their voices and such.
Yeah. I want to think back to when I first discovered your podcasts. I think, for me, especially I was young. I was fresh in the design game. And so you don't see a lot of examples of people have had robust careers. I probably didn't meet too many people outside of my actual mentor who had decades worth of experience in design. And so being able to access your podcast reassured me that like, "Not only can I have a long career in this, but I can aspire to do great things."
And so, yeah, I just wanted to I appreciate the platform that you built in that sense because it does not only spread knowledge, but it also reinforces some things identity-wise within a young designer to know like, "Hey, there are people who are out there and there are people who are great and they're killing it." And so, yeah, I was really, really, really excited when I found the show. I don't even remember how I found it. I can't even remember how I found it. I may have been searching online. It probably was like Facebook back then. Yeah, I would just check in, listen and use it to build not only my knowledge of self and what was happening in these different spaces, but also to explore new territories.
Well, I'm certainly glad that you found it. It's interesting because like I said, I've been doing this for such a long time. And oftentimes, it's probably different with what you're doing with Instagram because you have a live audience. But with podcasting, a lot of this is pretty solitary. I don't really know how it's being received unless someone leaves a review, or they write me an email, or they send a tweet, or send a DM on Instagram. Other than that, I'm just pushing episodes out into the void. I can see that they're getting listened to and downloaded, but I don't get that direct feedback. And that could just be honestly because of the medium. But yeah, no, I'm glad that you found Revision Path and that it was able to serve as an inspiration for you.
Yeah. I feel like we should give people flowers again maybe on the internet. We don't do the best job of that, especially when you look good like the vacuum that is Instagram in the light system. But as I live and breathe, I just wanted to let you know that… And I definitely share your podcast with young designers and people that I mentor because I don't want people to think it's just me out here. I'm tired of that narrative. I'm tired of the narrative of being like, "Oh, I was the only one. I'm the only black designer that I know, I'm the only black designer for 100 miles." Is exhausting. I don't subscribe to it. I don't want to hear it anymore.
I also want to change the narrative in terms of how people of color relate to design because I tend to think that the way that you think about something has to be vastly different than the way that another person thinks about something. And the way that you will build something is going to be vastly different than the way that someone else will build it. I think inherently, black people are designers. Even thinking about systems that were placed on us and how we've navigated around them, we've organized. We have created structures, we have created innovation and process to be able to by step roadblocks that have been placed in front of us.
And so I think that that's a part of your heritage, that's a part of your legacy. I think if you want to be a designer, you can do that. It's just a matter of sending your mind to it. And so I tell people that all the time, especially younger folks like, "This is a part of your ancestry, bro, you've been creating long before you were in existence. It's in your blood. Don't let anybody tell you that it's not."
Yeah. Speaking of ancestry and going back, I want to go back to where you grew up. You're originally from Baltimore, born and raised. Tell me about what it was like growing up there. Did you feel like you got a lot of exposure to art and design as a kid?
Yeah. Both my parents are like… We're really supportive of the arts. My dad, he forced me to take drama classes oddly enough. He came to me one day after school and was like, "You're signing up for You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. You have an audition two days from now." And then my mom would make sure that during the summers and after school, I was doing some sort of arts and crafts. Baltimore has this program called TWIGS. It's attached to this high school called Baltimore School of the Arts. And so when I would leave my middle school, I would just take a bus there. And so I'm learning foundational principles of traditional art. And also from year-to-year, I'm switching off. Maybe one year I'm doing more traditional art practices and then the next year I'm learning how to act.
And then that evolved. As I started getting a little bit more focused, my mom would take me to MICA. Even in middle school, I was able to get a lot of exposure to institutions that existed within Baltimore that solely focused on art. And then when I went to city, city is… I'll say it's the best high school that exists within Baltimore, but they have a program called International Baccalaureate. That allowed me to get a little bit more focused when it came to how I was telling my stories through art.
I had some teachers who were just really, really helpful and set the foundation for how I wanted to express myself. And one day, one of those teachers came up to me and was like, "You know that you could do this as a career." I was like, "Huh, I didn't really think about that." This was just something I would do when I was just chilling or late at night or when I have free time. And so once he expressed that to me… because I was going to go to school for communications, which would have been really, really bad. But I had made the connection that what you're probably passionate about, you should follow that. You should figure out how to do that as much as you can.
And so what they saw in me, they really, really poured into me. And then I talked to my mentor and he opened up that lens a little bit more and he was like, "Hey, you could go to school for graphic design. But I see something different happening in the space. And so you're going to need more than one skill when you graduate from school. He's like, "Don't do graphic design." He's like, "There are programs out there now that will teach you those principles, but you need to be more in the digital space." That's how I ended up majoring in multimedia and I got crazy amount of exposure to different things.
I want to say we were doing physical computing. I was messing with Arduino boards, trying to figure out how I could trigger light within a physical space, doing sound production, messing with middies, a bunch of stuff like video production, pretty much all the different types of design and art forms that you could think of. I just had so much freedom, I think. Out of all the majors in that school, we had the most electives. It was wonky. I want to say like three to four years after I left, they shut it down. Yeah, they just rolled it into graphic design.
But even that was indicative of the fact that graphic design as a major or as an industry had changed, and we were using new terms and I had no idea what a user experience designer was, but also those lines hadn't been defined yet. But to go back to Baltimore, that's my heart and soul. Even though I'm in Seattle right now, the goal is to always return back to it. It's taught me a lot, is where I get my grip from, is where I get my perseverance from. It's the place where I learned to be me. And so me and my wife, we're here in Seattle now, but the goal is always to go back home.
Now growing up in Baltimore and everything and with what you've just described, when did you know that this was something you really wanted to do for a living? Did it click at any point growing up?
When did I know that this was something I wanted to do for a living? It's really odd, but it was probably my senior year of college because I wasn't really sure how viable a design career was. I was going back and forth and as I was starting to get closer to graduation, I was having some apprehension. It was like, "Do I just go get a master's degree?" Both of my parents have master's degrees and they're both educators. I just thought that that was the path. And then my senior year, I had a teacher… It's interesting. He led our whole program. I had him like freshman year and he leaned on me. He's like, "You don't understand any of these programs." He's like, "You have great vision, but you can't execute on any of your visions because you don't have the technical knowledge."
And then I had him again in my senior year and he did the exact same thing, except it was a different message. He was like, "You could be so great." He was like, "You could be so, so great." He was just yelling at me. I could see this passion in his eyes. I'm seeing all my other classmates and they're walking in with projects that are half thought out, or they did the night before. He's just letting them come in and out, come in and out. What you said to me is like, "You're not the same as them."
In a good way or a bad way?
In a good way, in a good way. He's like, "That's why I'm yelling at you." He's like, "I can see you doing this for the rest of your life."
And so that really set you on that path. Yeah.
It set me on that path because I woke up and was like, "Oh, do I need to get a master's? Why am I going to get a master's degree?" I lit fire within me because I didn't have that confidence yet. There was nothing saying that I was meant to do design full-time, there was nothing saying that I was going to work at Under Armour, there was nothing saying I was going to be where I am now. And that teacher, yeah, it came full circle. Like first year, lit a fires like, "Oh, you got to learn these programs."
And then it was like my last year. I still remember this man. His name's Chris Garvin. Yeah, just leaned on like… just yelled at me and would not do it to anyone else at all. But I think I saw him maybe like five or six years after that because my brother ended up going to that school and I thanked him, because there's a level of care. You need a support system of people who are going to hold you accountable, but also people who see you as greater than what you see yourself as. That was important for me. But yeah, that's when the switch turned. That's when it turned and I was like, "Oh, I can do this, I can do this. I can see myself as a designer professionally."
Yeah. And speaking of which right after you graduated, you ended up working at Under Armour and you stayed there for what? Six years pretty much?
Yeah. That's an interesting story. I want to say I was up late at night once Saturday evening, probably like Sunday morning, around twelve o'clock in the morning. I'm on Craigslist. I'm just applying for anything. I have my busboy job. I'm like, "I got to pay off these loans quick as possible. I'm working as many shifts as I can. I'm not trying to live in my parents' house forever." And so I'm like come across this ad that says, "Oh, we have a contract position for a designer working with a sports organization within Baltimore." I'm like, "Hmm, what could that be?" I was like, "Could it be the Orioles? Probably not. Could it be Baltimore Blasts? I don't know." I was like, "It's not going to be Under Armour. They would just have it posted on their site."
Got a call probably… I'm in church. I got call around nine o'clock. Someone leaves a voicemail. It's like, "Hey, we want you to come in tomorrow, take a test." Still don't know what it is. Go in, fail the test. Yeah, failed the test. There's an old version of Photoshop that I've never used before. Completely different set up. I think around that time it was like CS3. There might be like CS1 or something like that and they still send me in. They send me in. I'm at the door. At this point in time, my parents are telling me like, "No, the only way you get the job, dress up suit and tie, blah, blah, blah."
I have a suitcase on, I have a suitcase, Maurice. I have a suitcase. I pull my portfolio out of a suitcase. This a woman, she comes and she gets me. The first thing that she says to me, she was like, "Don't worry, you got this." The person interviewing me, comes like, "You got this." I don't know what she saw in me. She was like, "You got this. This is yours." This is as someone else's walking out. I know that they're interviewing other people. But yeah, I ended up getting the job. I walk away from that interview, by the time I catch the boat back across the harbor in order to go home, I get a call and saying, "Hey, they want to bring you in."
What started as a contract position evolved into a six-year career with Under Armour. They were a fledgling team. I worked on the e-commerce team there, really supportive people. It was a blessing because I got a lot of experience that typically contractors don't get. I was able to work in their custom CMS. I got to see how you grow a business, how you grow a platform. We essentially went from just supporting ua.com to looking at the whole digital consumer journey. It was like ua.com and then now all of a sudden it's emails, it's social paid and organic, it's apps. I'm looking even at designing for touchscreens within retail stores.
I was only like 23 years old. And then we go from there and then all of a sudden it's like, "Hey, we got all these different channels that we need to marketing now. The brand team can't support all of these. You all need to figure out how to extend these stories." That's when the art direction experience comes in. And so now I'm in studio and I'm internalizing these products and figuring out how to craft stories and narratives around them that are compelling, and not only tell the technology story, but then also give that emotional and aspirational lens to the product.
And so I'm started off in studio and that was a really good experience, and then now all of a sudden it's like, "Hey, can you go on location? Can you scout places? Can you work with athletes? Can you put them through training regiments?" I got a lot of crazy experiences from that. I got to meet Steph Curry while I was working at Under Armour. I got to work with him on set. That was key for me. I wouldn't trade that experience for anything because that's where I learned how to really fly in, like really be a leader. They allow me to pitch ideas. No, they didn't accept all my ideas, but they allowed me to take chances there. I really appreciated that.
No matter how many times things may have not gone perfectly, they always gave me another chance to push my ideas. And that also gave me a lot of confidence. I probably wouldn't do what I do now if I hadn't worked there and worked around the people that I worked around. There was a lot of black leadership. When I was there, there was a lot of black leadership at Under Armour. Like Adrienne Lofton, she's a black CMO, Julian Duncan, he now works with the Jacksonville Jaguars as a CMO, but he was a director, Thomas Harden, Ernie Talbert, he works here at Amazon with me, Tai Foster. These were the people giving me the opportunities. These are all black people. Like that, that matters. Looking back on it, that was a blessing for me. That was really, really key because I would say the majority of designers who enter into professional workplace don't get that level of support.
No, absolutely not. I've had a number of folks here on the show and like… There are some that will go into agencies and agencies may have some kind of apprenticeship type setup or something like that. But it's rare to go into a real corporate design space, like I'm sure Under Armour was, and still feel not just that supportive, but then also to have that many black creatives around you supporting you as well.
Mm-hmm (affirmative), and opening up the budget for you to fully realize your idea. It wasn't until I left Under Armour that I realized how special that environment was, kind of like when we were talking about like, "Yeah, I hold that near and dear to my heart," because I realized that that's not the case for everyone. I cherish that moment. I still have relationships with those people now.
I was going to ask what prompted you to move out to the West Coast because you went to school at the university of arts in Philly and it sounds like this opportunity was it, like this was the reason you moved out there?
Yeah. I had always wanted to live on the West Coast. Nothing's like Baltimore. Baltimore is always… will be my home. I love it like I said earlier. But I feel like when you put yourself in new spaces, that's when you learn new things about yourself. And so I like being uncomfortable because I firmly believe that it leads to expansion. And so a part of going to the West Coast was about not falling into this sense of like comfort and familiarity with my environment. I just knew I got to a point probably when I was like around 26 where I was like, "This feels amazing. I feel like I know everything. I'm starting to feel like at work. I don't have to try as hard. I don't have to exert myself as much." And that's when I knew I had to go.
I was like, "I made a plan." I was like, "I have to go. Because if I stay here, there's the potential that I plateau." And so I set up a plan for myself. West Coast was the ultimate goal, but I teared it out. It was like, "Getting to California, number one. Number two, we stay at Under Armour and then we go to Amsterdam." I lined that up. Number three was going to be like even moving to Virginia. Yeah, because I was just like, "I need to have some new experiences." That's really what drove it, having new experiences, being in new environments. Living in Philly gave me a little bit of a taste, but also both of my parents are from Pennsylvania. My dad is from North Philly. Then Philly was like a second home to me.
And so even though I was away, I wasn't ever really away. I wanted that experience, I wanted that moment. That's ultimately like it landed me in the bay with Athleta, which is a part of Gap. But yeah, I didn't even stay… I loved Athleta. They had a wonderful environment, completely different than Under Armour. They were way more focused on empowering women. And then also it was more so from like a wellness lens, but then I got that opportunity you with Amazon. Once again, it was someone who believed in me so much so that a position that I did not even apply for, they wanted me to come and work with them.
And so I got a call from… He's not my hiring manager anymore, but I got a call from a man named Kay Tran, a Vietnamese man. He's like, "I know that you exist as a designer right now, but I think that you could be way bigger than that." It was like a costume theme within the experiences and the interactions that I'm having. He was like, "I think you can be an art director." He was like, "I think you can lead these projects. I know that you have no experience in tech, but I'll support you and I'll work with you."
He held true to that. He held true to that. I owe a lot of my success here to the support that he provided me initially at Amazon. And that also set the foundation for me wanting to create the spaces with Bekah that we've created so far. But yeah, and he reached out to me, called me, told me to come up here, gave me the lowdown on how it would be. I remember that one of the first calls that we had, he was like, "I used to live in the Bay." He's like, "Seattle is not the Bay at all. So be prepared for that." I think it's worked out for me, it's worked out for me, for sure.
It certainly sounds like it has. I can tell. When you look back at your career and you've dropped a few names throughout this interview, but who are some of the people that have inspired you? Any mentors or colleagues?
Yeah. First and foremost, one of the people that inspires me the most, I'll go to my first mentor, that Sean Cunningham, the man that I met at my church, a professional graphic designer over 20 years. He worked in agency life and he really, really took me aside. He would spend time with me on Sundays, on the weekends showing me how you craft a portfolio. Because I think a lot of times, kids can think that they're putting their work together and they have a bunch of pretty pictures, but they don't have any story behind it. There may not be any depth. And me having access to him, he started to mold me and shape me and pull back the curtain. He was one of the people that really blocked down field for me, because if he wouldn't have spent that time with me, who knows if I'm in the same space that I'm in? Sean Cunningham would definitely be a really, really big one for me.
In terms of other mentors, definitely I have to give… My parents are really, really keen and influential in my life. And so a lot of the principles that I have… I do think that this relates to the design as well. My parents are extremely empathetic. I don't believe that you can be a good designer if you do not have empathy. If you're just out here making decisions and building products and doing work solely because you think it looks good or solely because you think you're making the right decision and you're not considering the people that you are doing it for, then it's all for nothing.
And so one of the sayings that exists within my church is, "It's all about relationship or ain't about nothing." My parents are the embodiment of that. And so they pass that empathy along to me and that's how I like to show up. And not just in how I think about my work, but also how I relate to people. Those would probably be my key mentors. Of course, like all the people that I currently fellowship with now, even though back in [inaudible 01:04:11] like relatively like the same age, I think being in contact with her has been a form of mentorship for me. John as well. John has been huge for me, especially in these past couple of months, just in like owning your agency and owning how you want to show up for people and making sure that you do it with a spirit of service. Those would be my mentors, for sure.
What are you obsessed with right now?
Okay, this is a side thing. I'm absolutely obsessed with how the market is changing currently, like how it's peered into the social conscious of millennials specifically. I'm seeing this stuff that's going on with AMC and hedge funds and Citadel. And for whatever reason, that really interests me. It's like this story of fighting against the man and government agencies and little people banding together. Outside of that, I'm really, really, really into vinyls. I'm copying a different vinyl every other week. I'm searching, going in different spaces. That probably consumes a lot of my time. I'm trying to look to see if I can get a new credenza soon. We were just talking about getting rid of furniture. That's going to be a big purchase for me. I don't even know if it's like 350 anymore. We're probably approaching over 400.
Yeah, I got more [crosstalk 01:06:01].
You got storage for it and everything?
No, man, I don't even know. Yeah, I had a credenza and I thought it'd be big enough and then I filled it up. So there's probably about 150 of the vinyls that are either in the crate or they're on a shelf. I need to create a storage space specifically for it. But even past that, I have to go home and probably grab like another 500 or 600. My dad called me because I think it was a little bit of a test. They allowed me to go into the storage and grab my uncle's records because that's really why it's important to me. It's kind of twofold. It serves as this design inspiration. You look at these covers and the sleeves and how they put everything together, is like a master's class in design.
You look at some of the type, the color palettes, the photography, and the composition, it boggles my brain. You don't know all the people who have done these things. Some of these people are hard to find, they're dead. You can have someone in present day who can say like, "Oh, that was my great grandfather who did this cover for The Spinners." That's really interesting to me because you're actively discovering things with a sense of duality. Not only from this perspective of looking at it as a creative, but then also musically. Not just like discovering new sounds, but like, "I am learning things about my family and my uncle Candy, specifically, in terms of his tastes." I've never met the man, almost like him and I are having a conversation through the music and I can take that to my dad.
For me, it's been really good, especially in contrast to what you get with streaming services because this is way more passive with streaming services. They serve it up to you, they give it to you and you just consume it. I know that you have to be active. You got to look through it, you have to touch it, you got to look at those songs, you got to look at their artists and then you have to put it on the turntable. And then once that side A is done, you got to flip it over to that side B. There've been fascinating things that have shown up in that vinyl collection. I'm like, "I got an original test pressing of a snake fundraiser concert."
Yeah, it's wild. I got to figure out how to… Yeah, I got to figure out how to get that into the right hands because I feel like I personally shouldn't own it. I feel like it should be in a museum somewhere. But yeah, it's a part of my family history and I want to keep it intact and establish a library around it where I can give it to my kids, God willing.
Something like that ends up being really like a family heirloom, but it's something that you keep continually adding to and diversifying and curating and everything. That sounds amazing.
It's been a good discussion starter, or just catalyst for how I talk to different family members because a lot of them have at some point in time come across this collection or have contributed to it in some way, shape or form, like even the snake record that I have, which has a speech from Jesse Lewis on it, and that original test pressing came by way of my aunt's old boyfriend because he used to help him disseminate those vinyls and sell them for the fundraiser. I can talk to her and then get the background and the story behind that and then also get her other stories. She used to work for the Schomburg Center. She used to be a part of Freedom Rides citizens. And so that's what these vinyls have done for me, where it was like, "All right, this is a really, really interesting piece. Where did this come from?" And then all of a sudden I'm getting a story around like how it was made and then all the experiences that are connected to it. And now, I'm learning more about my aunt, Roberta.
Where do you want to see yourself in the next five years? What kind of work do you want to be doing?
I think in the short-term, I've leaned more into the visual side of design. There's a people focused in that, especially working for Amazon. Data is super key. But I want to get more into the product side. Especially with what I'm seeing in a lot of the technology that's being created, there are inherent biases that exists. And so when you're designing, you have to design with those problems in mind. If the room of designers that you have are largely white, the same issues that exist within society and exists within the world, probably going to exist within that product.
And so I'm like, "Hey, maybe we need to take a step back from visual design and get more into product and user experience. And with that, get a better understanding of how people are interacting with the products and how these systems are set up, how we can decolonize those, in a sense." I have a lot of different thoughts about how we think about accessibility. All right. Traditionally, accessibility is like people who may be hard of hearing, people who may not be able body. But I also think that race may be a component of accessibility as well. And so I don't fully understand why we divorce those things. And so I just want to do more of a foray into that space so I can figure out how to set up structures that will be more encompassing of people who look like me.
Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more about you and your work and everything online?
Yeah. You can find me on Instagram @maxwellvanhook, and you can also find me on Instagram as well @designingwhileblack. Either of those, feel free to follow me, feel free to reach out to me also. If you are looking to get into design, if you want to politic, or if you just want to share your passion about design and your experience, I'd love to connect with people.
Sounds good. Well, Maxwell VanHook, I want to thank you so much, one, for coming on the show, but two, I think it's obvious from anyone that's listening up to this point that you bring such a deep level of passion and introspection to your work. You're a very thoughtful designer that really takes a lot of considerations into account when it's not just about the work that you're doing, but also the impact that it's going to have on people and on communities and such. I think this was just such a great interview, such a great introduction of you to the Revision Path audience. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.
No, thank you for having me. It was great actually being able to talk with you and, yeah, meeting you. I feel like I've listened to you so much over the years. Finally getting down to talking with you has been somewhat surreal. Thank you. Thank you for allowing me to share this space with you.
Episode 400: Brent Rollins
Tagged as:	art director, artist, Brent Rollins, Complex Media, creative director, Ego Trip, graphic designer, Los Angeles, New York City, television producer
https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/cdn.simplecast.com/audio/20181fbd-7d36-4dca-97fc-d48d9dea8a64/episodes/f6106484-3826-4b65-bbe6-15deaaee3e7e/audio/38dd6936-2644-48fa-a568-986a1508791b/default_tc.mp3
Creative conductor Brent Rollins, co-founder of Ego Trip, is a creative director, art director, and graphic designer located in New York City.
It's time for our annual audience survey! Tell us what you think about Revision Path, and you could win a $100 Amazon.com gift card! Visit revisionpath.com/survey to give us your feedback. Survey ends on May 31.
This week's guest is a true creative changemaker. If you're a hip-hop fan, there's a pretty good chance you've seen his work somewhere over the past 30 years. He's your favorite designer's favorite designer. For our monumental 400th episode, meet the one and only Brent Rollins.
We have a wide-ranging conversation where Brent goes into some of his current projects and collaborations, and shares a bit about his creative process when starting on something new. Brent also talked about growing up in Los Angeles around the entertainment industry, how he helped co-found Ego Trip, and we have a great discussion around Black design aesthetics and defining success. Brent is someone who has been a huge inspiration to me as a designer and a creator, and having him share his story for this milestone episode is truly awesome.
Thank you all for supporting Revision Path!
Brent Rollins' Website
Brent Rollins on Instagram
All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.
Brent Rollins:
My name is Brent Rollins, and the short answer is that I'm a multi disciplinary designer, the long answer would be that I'm a creative who collaborates with people, organizations that are passionate and sort of driven in their mission to kind of spread their ideas and positivity to the world and to sort of create guiding paths for people.
How is 2021 been for you so far?
You know what, man? 2021, I'm ready to go. 2020 was actually the year that I was like, "Let's do this. Weird. I'm ready to make some stuff happen." Well, we know how that sort of ended up. So I think it's been… I think a lot of people, including myself have been kind of bubbling and if you're driven and if you have ideas and you're creative, you've been using this sort of sabbatical or this time or this kind of slower period to think about things and formulate things and come up with ideas and plan. Like the people that have passed unfortunately, I know a few people that have been affected by the virus and stuff. So my heart goes out to them, but for those of us who are alive, this is a moment for us to be alive and to embrace that, and to really like… This is a blessing in that sense, if we haven't been devastatingly affected. This has been a blessing to have this moment, to think about what we want to do and what we want to accomplish into what's a forced introspection.
And I hope rather that people kind of use it to better themselves. So, that's what I'm about, man, I can't wait for this year, unlike I'm ready to go.
Yeah. I have talked to a lot of people that are saying that this is going to be like the new roaring 20s in a way?
Oh, man. Is it ever? This is going to be yo, roaring 20s, baby boom, it's going to be crazy. I think, come June, July, this is going to be wild, bro.
Yeah, No. And I think even now, there's this sort of like, I can feel this renewed energy in the air, especially as people are starting to get the vaccine. And even as some places are starting to relax restrictions, things are starting to open up again. So, people are anxious to get back out there and experience the world, whatever that may look like.
Yeah. Some people unfortunately continue to experience the world and they didn't really care, no shots, no judgment. But for the rest of us hopefully like I said, we're sensible enough to kind of use it to our advantage and kind of make plans and sort of think about things. And it's really funny because at the top of 2020, I distinctly remember thinking, I can't tell you where it was, but I can distinctly remember thinking. I was like, "Man, the world is moving really fast. This thing needs to slow down." It was like I felt just how much stuff was going on. Because I live in New York City, and I see construction going on everywhere. And I see all this stuff happening. And it just felt like things were kind of out of control. And so it was… Like I said, it's been a weird, mixed, I guess, [inaudible 00:07:08] and kind of blessing that this thing sort of forced everyone to slow down.
Yeah. What does a typical day look like for you now?
It's funny, because I was never a very structured person, and I've become a little bit more regimented. And I actually really enjoy it. Or I feel like I need that. So, typical day for me right now is I'm in this kind of like new cycle. So, I'm actually implementing kind of new sort of regimens that I didn't really do. So, I don't know how typical it is. It's only like maybe four months old. It seems like this has been Rollins's day. But I typically go to sleep late, just because I'm a night owl. And I don't get much sleep. So, I sort of wake up maybe about five or six hours later. And kind of like I want to read and sort of see what's going on in the world and fix myself a little pot of coffee, and maybe take a little walk, get some air, get out the house, kind of just sort of take in what the environment has to offer, and start working on one of the multiple sort of projects that I got going on.
And what are some of those projects? I mean, as much of them as you can sort of talk about at liberty.
Yeah. It's really funny like… Because I was thinking about before this interview, I was like, "Man, you know what? I can't really talk about the things that I'm working on right now." Not because they're secret, but I don't want to get ahead of myself. A few of the things that are maybe like projects for people, again, like people that are doing sort of very interesting, sort of passion projects, or things that have sort of a larger good, I think that's the kind of stuff that I can maybe talk about, as far as there's this brother Waajeed, who is a DJ based in Detroit, who is pretty well known. And Detroit as you know, has amazing music history. And so, Waajeed has got this fantastic opportunity to open. I don't want to call it a school, but he is spearheading this project to create a… I think it's called underground music academy. It's sort of a place for people to sort of engage in musical creativity. And it's on this Boulevard in Detroit, that has a lot of insane Detroit musical history. So, I'm working on the identity for that. And I'm very excited about that.
Some of the other projects that I'm working on, are really entrepreneurial projects that have been in the works for the past year. One of them, I had to put the brakes on because of COVID, but is still moving and I'm super excited about it. And I really can't wait to sort of show the world what that's about. But the short story is that it'll be a sort of a restaurant or cafe or something. And then the other project, there's another entrepreneurial project that I kind of don't want to talk about. But I'm also very excited about. Other than that, yeah, everything else is really working on stuff for people for short films and some album covers and things that… Or people that I've creative history with, people that really want to kind of put something out into the world that's a little bit different. I'm at the point in my sort of life or career, or however you want to talk about it, or however you want to think about it, where I just want to be a little bit selective, and I'm okay.
I need to figure out… Everything has to… You have to make a living. But I can be a little bit selective about things because I don't want to depend on those projects for the things to make a living, I'd rather have the entrepreneurial things be the things that I use to make a living.
And that way, I have more control over the creativity, because it's my projects. And then if I'm working with anybody, it's going to be because I really believe in what they're doing. There are people that have hit me up via social media. Man, people are like, "Yo, I'm doing this, would you do an album cover for me?" And I'm like, "Number one, you don't talk to people like that." You know what I mean? I also am like, "I'm not getting your hustle, but I'm also… I want to lend myself to projects that I feel that I understand and I feel have some sort of worth and value, and prove it to me."
Yeah. It's interesting how Twitter… And I guess you could say social media as a whole. But it's amazing how Twitter has kind of almost flattened the… Like it's flattened the hustle in a way. People will talk to you on Twitter in any kind of way. They don't know who you are, and to that respect, I guess it's that way with social media in general, they'll just approach you on like some, "Hey, can you do this for me?" I get so many people that will… I wouldn't even say that they write to the show, they tell the show, "I don't know why you haven't interviewed me yet." Who are you? Person with no website and I can't tell what kind of work that you do and you have 100 followers?
Yeah. It's interesting how social media kind of flattens out in a way. People just don't approach you with the same kind of not necessarily gravitas, but just the same sort of urgency. It's just like, "Hey, do this for me."
Yeah. Well, I mean, people don't… I can get into my old man, I'm going to put my old man pants on right now. It's a little bit of number one, you should just learn if you're going to… Like I said, if you're going to approach people, show some respect, if you really like their work, at least be like, "Hey, I really like your work, this is what I'm trying to do," and come with some humility and be like, "I'm doing this thing, would you be interested in it?" Yes, no, if not, I understand. I don't really appreciate this sort of informality. I think social media enables people to be in contact, right?
But it doesn't mean that you should abandon sort of what has been traditional decorum and sort of like, just respect in terms of like how you approach people. I wouldn't talk to any of these kind of design heroes that I have, as though they were my peers, they're not my peers. Those are people that I look up to, and they're deserving of that respect. And you're right, yeah, as far as flattening, I think most of the people or a large amount of people that are using social media, it is flat, because they're all peers. So, they can sort of approach people like that, but then there are other people that are within that space that are old like myself, that are like, "No, man, this is not how you run up on folks." I didn't run up on people like that. I was very-
Respectful?
Yeah, respectful. But whenever I'd meet people that were in a particular state, I would just approach them [inaudible 00:13:57]. You know?
I think that that's… Not that I'm suggesting, "Yo, I'm better than you," but I'm just kind of like, "Come on, man, I'm a grown man. Don't talk to me like that."
Right. And also, it's clearly when someone's approaching in that way, it's one way transactional. Like, "What can I get?"
Oh, yeah.
"Can you do something for me?" Not like, "How do we help each other out in that kind of way?"
Yeah, yeah. But you know what? I mean, if you've been doing anything for a moment, and you're worth, you're like us all, you can filter out who's real and who's not.
Mm-hmm (affirmative). That's true.
And even the people that are not, maybe they haven't found their tribe yet, but you can tell that, "Oh, you're looking." If you can identify the people that are like the junior use.
Like, "Oh, yeah, no, I get it. Yeah, this person, they're definitely on that vibe. And you know what? I'm going to put you under my wing because I can see that in you, and come along for the ride homie." So, yeah. Oh, man, people hacked up on social media.
So, you've mentioned all these different kind of projects. First of all, I have to say I love the way you kind of just slowly was like, "Yeah, this is DJ in Detroit Waajeed." You're not talking about what Waajeed from slum village.
No, no, no. Not at all.
Just like, "Yeah, this guy, he's starting a school." Doing the thing like, okay, all right. But when it comes to all these different projects that you do, what does your creative process look like when you're starting a project?
That is depending on the project, but I think that… I do a little research depending on what it is, one of the things that I try to tap into where… It's really funny, because I have a great appreciation for sort of like, very learned kind of design approaches. But I think I'm really like a designer that came from an art background, I think, or more so just the act of creativity itself. And so I approach things in a way that's more about emotion. And oftentimes, what is the feeling that I got when I encountered X? And so that's what I'm trying to tap into in terms of like that sort of intuitive sort of feeling. I'm sure there have been moments in your life where there's been some baby… I'm going to just use music, because it's such a common denominator. When you… There was like maybe a club that you were just like, "Oh, man, that club was just… That was it. Because the DJ, the music was just right, and the vibe was right and the crowd, and the this and the that, and the…" All those kind of things.
That's a feeling. And if it's done right, there's a visual component to it as well. And so what I look towards is tapping into that visual trigger. That's the thing because that's my language. So, that's the thing that whenever I was in any of these kind of environments, that's what I latched on to, as my sort of like, this is my flotation device, this is what's going to keep me up in this space. And I'm going to use this design thing or this visual thing and I'm going to sit back on my floaty and chill, while I'm observing the rest of the stuff that's going on. That's kind of like how I go. The creative process is about tapping into that vibe, that thing, that emotion that people get that is very subconscious. If you've been to the Caribbean, or certain countries, I don't want to say third world countries, but just developing countries or something. There's like the smell of like gasoline and burning jungle foilage. I was exposed to it as a young age.
And then as an adult, I go back to those places and I'm like, "Oh, whoa!" It's like automatically, it's something that I totally forgot about, like, boom, it just triggered me. And I was like, "Oh, I'm back here. I'm ready to roll." So, that's what I'm trying to try to reach for, is to think about those kinds of things.
All right. So yeah, you try to tap into a certain… You said like a visual trigger or a vibe, or a feeling and then you kind of build out from their sounds like?
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's really funny man, the emotions and the memories. Like I said, people don't necessarily… Sometimes people don't remember them. But when they see them, they get excited. Like, I love remembering things that I've totally forgot. Sometimes there's a thing that maybe happened to me as a child, or that maybe I went to, and someone else will bring it up and I'm like, "Oh, whoa! Oh, man, I totally remember." I love that. That's like the best feeling ever, because you're taken back to something that you had kind of pushed in the… It's like in the back of the storage room. It's like if you have stuff in storage, and you kind of go through things, and you rediscover them. Like recently, I was going through my parent's garage sort of cleaning things out. And kind of came across two boxes of old comics that I had left behind when I left Los Angeles from New York. And I hadn't thought about those comic books in 20 plus years, right?
It's not that I… I knew that I had comics, but I had got to the point where I just sort of disassociated and attached myself to those as possessions. Comic books are really important to me, the stories and the illustrations were… Some of the artists were very significant to me, and rediscovering those comic books in the back of my dad's garage, and kind of going through it, man, I got a little teary eyed because I was like, "Oh man, a few comics." I was just like, "Oh, man." Because I decided to sell them because I haven't looked at these things in so long. What's the point of keeping these things? I just sort of resolved to sell them. I was going through some of the comments, I was like, "Man, do I really get rid of this? Oh, this is so awesome." And it was like, yeah, I reconnected with something that I completely forgot about.
So yeah, when I do… So, take it full circle. So, when I do design, there's a tinge of nostalgia I guess, in some of the things because I think that's what people are relating to, in some cases. And then other cases it's like, "Well, I want to do something completely new." And how do you do that? Even when you make something new, it's rooted in something because if you do something that's too new, you lose people. So, you want to put a little bit of something familiar in it.
It's interesting you mentioned that sort of tinge of nostalgia, because I feel like there's… We'll get into the work that you've done with Ego Trip and Rap Pages, et cetera. But there's a very temporal quality to your work that is kind of evocative of the 60s and the 70s in different ways. I think one, there's this sort of like collage, mixed media kind of thing that I see you do sometimes. But then there's also… And maybe I'm thinking of the more visual stuff that I see on television, but it's also like a nod back to projectors. And there's an audio element of a film reel, or noise grain that you see on film and stuff like that. And then just even the playful way that you use typography, it's almost like you see those old school horror movie title cards or something. I get what you mean about that kind of tinge of nostalgia. But I think that's a pretty big theme in your work though.
Yeah. The thing about using that as a device, it's funny, because I don't know what… I really want to talk to some younger designers now and kind of get where their head is at, because when I would resort to those options, it's because that's what I know is familiar to people. And the idea of design, in my world design meaning kind of visual communications, graphics, that type of design. It's really about I want to communicate with you. What's our shared language? What are our shared memories? What is our shared sort of commonalities? And when I pull from those kinds of things, this is very conscious. Those are things that I want to trigger you. I want you to be like, "Oh, I get it."
I think there's the idea of design as ornament and sort of fireworks, where it's like, "Yo, I'm doing something new and this is [inaudible 00:22:39]." And you're going to get about five people that understand what you're doing, which is cool. I'm not against that. I love that kind of stuff. But the idea of design, my foundation, or my understanding of design is rooted in the old idea of what a graphic artist was, which was communication design. Right?
So the idea of, I'm trying to reach you, I'm trying to talk with you. And for me, the shortcut is shared experiences. For me, the shortcut is what I'd surmise as being the things that we grew up with. And that's how we begin to talk to each other. That's kind of where I'm coming from. When I was doing that kind of stuff, it was based off of… It's not the nostalgia because it looks… Sometimes that nostalgia can be about the kitsch factor or whatever.
Hmm, okay.
I could… Man, I can go [inaudible 00:23:33].
I was actually careful not to use the word kitsch. So, I'm surprised you brought that up.
Well, it's sort of like the idea of… Well, when I say kitsch, I think… Let's talk about the 70s for instance.
And when you see things that are about the 70s and particularly black culture, it's always expressed in these very kind of superficial, simple… It's like the lettering is groovy, whatever that means.
Hobo standard kind of… I know what you mean. Yeah.
Yeah. You think of afros as kitsch. It's a little bit kitsch, right? People don't look at afros as… They don't look at afros as what it was, which was like this assertion of black identity and being sort of proud of kinky hair and all this other kind of stuff. They look at it as being a style. Right?
And how big it was, or how large your afro was. And sometimes there's this sort of… There's definitely like a silliness to some stuff from the 70s. I think that's the sort of kitsch thing and it becomes like this kind of joke. I think about that movie, Black Dynamite, which avoided it because it was… That movie wasn't… It took place in the 70s, but it wasn't about afro jokes.
It was, but it wasn't. It was really like a very loving, sort of understanding about that sort of aesthetic. But it was deeper than an afro jokes. I don't like afro jokes. I don't like afro jokes… [inaudible 00:25:10] my fist on the table. Yeah, it's not about the kitsch today, kitsch isn't about… It's about like, "Oh, I remember that vibe."
Yeah, that's what I'm trying to tap into.
So you mentioned Los Angeles, where you're originally from. Tell me what it was like growing up there.
Oh, man, what a weird place! I have a love and hate relationship with Los Angeles, because it made me who I am. So, I can't hate on it. And there're some really beautiful things about the city. There are some other things that I didn't like, because I grew up around the entertainment industry. And so it was just sort of like a preoccupation that… Yes, it generates money and it generates attention. But sometimes I have to wonder why people sort of got into that world. But the world that I grew up in, was a middle class, black neighborhood called Windsor Hills, which I love to say, the Issa Rae's character on Insecure, she's from the neighborhood that I grew up. So-
Uh-huh (affirmative).
They got to her and when that show came out, I was just like, I just couldn't believe that anything was shot in my neighborhood. I'm like, "Oh, my God, they're shooting there, they're doing a scene there or some other place." And it just blows my mind. So, I have to admit, it's like a place that I'm very proud to come from, even though ironically, when I was growing up, I wasn't. It was very conflicting because it was a neighborhood that in the 60s, I would say was probably… It was… I think my understanding was predominantly white, predominantly… A lot of maybe Jewish people who lived also in the neighborhood of Windsor Hills, View Park, Ladera Heights, Baldwin Hills, that area. And I think as black people started… I like to say or not like to say, but I kind of refer to the 60s as being like when black people actually arrived in the United States.
That was when actual opportunities started opening up in the same way that other immigrants sort of arrived in the United States and they have to kind of scrapped their way, they're at the bottom, but they still have this sort of legitimate way to sort of move on. In some ways, the 60s was kind of like that, finally being able to participate. And so a lot of folks who had been able to get like civil service jobs, or other types of sort of middle class jobs started buying into the neighborhood that I grew up in. And so, I think that was great to see. Some things I didn't necessarily like, because I don't… I had problems with sort of the kind of class segregation that was apparent and less about money, but more about social segregation. And the idea that… The idea society was something that I kind of struggled with. I grew up around people that… I want to make it very clear, I'm not knocking something like Jack and Jill or those kinds of organizations.
I think at the time, I wasn't part of those things and I didn't understand them at the time. So, my limited understanding was, this was just a weird, boujee, kind of whatever, I understand it, or have a better appreciation of it now in the sense of… The way I like to think about it, is if your parents, regardless of the situation that they come from, they want something better for you. And so, that sort of situation exists because they want their children to succeed, or they want their children to have a guaranteed better life. But I didn't understand that at the time. And so even though my father worked in or rather was trying to make his way in entertainment during that time, we ourselves were not probably as well off as maybe the people that were around me. So, that kind of gave me a different sort of perspective on things.
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I remember Jack and Jill growing up, but I didn't think it was just some boujee black people. Like, seriously. But then I grew up as folks who listen to the show know. I grew up in Selma, Alabama, and it's like at the end of the day, we're all poor black people in the country. I think when I was looking at it from sort of as like from a teenage perspective, and I don't know if it's this way for all of Jack and Jill, but it certainly was this way back then in Alabama. It was by sort of social class of course, but then also by skin color. Pretty much everyone in Jack and Jill was light skinned and I am not. And it's like I would have people say, "Well, you would be so good at Jack and Jill, but you know." So, if you were just a few shades lighter maybe and this other thing that we had, we're like…
And this was in high school, I don't know if this is even a thing or if this was just a thing endemic to our high school, but we had these high school fraternities and sororities that were based off of black fraternities and sororities. So, you had the mini Alpha Phi Alpha, we're the African Knights, and like the mini AKAs, Alpha Kappa Alphas we're culture Rama, and the mini Delta Sigma Theta, were delta teams. And I never understood any of it. My mother was in a sorority, my mother's a delta, but I didn't get it. Like, "Why are we doing this? This doesn't make any sense. You're just sort of lording this imaginary social position over someone else for what?"
Yeah. It's funny, I don't… Again, I don't really understand the motivation for that. I could say that as I've grown older, I don't want to say I've grown more boujee. I'm not going to say that though. I'm not going to say that I don't like nice things. Let's put it that way. But I don't really quite understand that point of view. An interesting thing that… And I don't know how this connects, really. But what comes to mind is, I got the opportunity to work with Don Cornelius.
Oh, wow!
And one of the things that he said to me was, black people don't recognize class.
And which sort of defies what we're talking about.
But in some ways, I understand what he's saying because at the end of the day, in the United States, we're all black people. We're all structurally, socially, second class. And so, that's our commonality. And I don't know, I just thought it was a really interesting statement from him. I think we are people in general, I don't know. Sort of seek to separate ourselves. But at least in the United States, there's still this thread, that we're all on the same boat.
Yeah. I think in the south, certainly there was probably just an additional… There may have just been an additional element of wanting to… I don't know, maybe have what white people had in some way?
I wonder if that's part of it. For example, like I mentioned the high school fraternities, we had both a cotillion and a beautillion. I had a beautillion that was stupid. But like you-
Thank you. But you're like-
Black tie.
It's like, "Oh, you're a distinguished man of a certain age." And it's a whole thing with like, they do a cakewalk and you have to be in a suit. A tux actually, be in a tux and you do the waltz. It's so stupid, I don't know if any other… I hope they don't still do that. Because when I think back on, I'm like, "This is like some midnight in the garden of good and evil kind of shit. This is weird."
I'm going to offer the inverse of that. I think that there's an opportunity to create expressions that are highly developed. And I don't necessarily have a problem with that. I think that, to your point, when it becomes about emulating the surface aspects of white culture, then that's where it becomes problematic. But if you're celebrating the things that are great about your culture, I think that's a different point of view. And maybe that's not the way we're going to solve this problem, or be able to put a suggestion box to Jack and Jill, but maybe that's how it transforms, or maybe there's some other organizations or people who are less about that sort of take on things. And more about, "This is what's beautiful about black culture." And we should celebrate those things. And we should aspire to those things. I think that that's the thing.
There should be a quality and execution and decorum level that a lot of cultures have that are had been sort of codified and sort of expected like we were talking earlier about like, I go to Japan or something like that. I expect Japanese design to be kick ass. Or even like Scandinavian design. I expect it to be pretty damn good. And so that's okay to me to be like, "Are you at that level?" No. And when you reach that level, dope, we're going to knight you. You know what I'm saying? It's like, you did it. We have a sense of that with music in terms of it doesn't matter necessarily what genre it is. And even if you don't like it, you might be like, "Okay, I'm not really necessarily feeling this particular take, but I can tell that it's the person behind it, they put a lot into it.
I think music is like one of the things that black Americans do very well, and is worldwide considered to be of excellence. And we have grown up and been exposed to something of excellence, that when it's time for those who decide to participate into those avenues, even when they're doing something new, they're trying to shoot for a particular bar.
Right, right.
And I think that having those kinds of standards, absolutely. I think that I see no problem in that sort of higher culture participation. Does that make sense?
That makes sense. Certainly, I get what you're saying about when you'd look at another nation's culture for example, there's a certain expectation there. And I think that's because that play that particular aesthetic, similar to what you're saying with like black people in music, it's been distilled and exported in a way where you already have a presupposition of what it's going to be before you even know what it is. Like if you order… I'll give you an example. I ordered some pants from, I forget what the… It was something I saw on Instagram, that was probably my fault. But I saw some dope pants on Instagram and I was like, "Oh, they're like some Japanese, Myketo pants. So I expect when I get them, they're going to have a certain flattering cut or something different than maybe you wouldn't see with American apparel or something like that. Not the brand, but just apparel in general.
And like for black design, I think that's a moving target in a way, because it's going to depend on your experiences, where you grew up, where you pull inspiration from. I just had a German American designer on the show, Julian Williams, who is currently in Amsterdam. Young kid, 25 years old, has done design work for Karl Lagerfeld, Nike, Tommy Hilfiger, has this very distinct, bold graphic type of graphical design. But then he also pulls inspiration from voguing and the ballroom scene that he's a part of. And so it's all a part of his general design aesthetic. Is that black design? Because he's a black designer? Yes?
Absolutely. Yes.
But I'm saying like it's like a moving target, because then you could look at your work, and your work is definitely very steeped in like I said, these kind of references from the 60s and the 70s, and this tinge of nostalgia. And a lot of what you have done has kind of set the… I feel like has set the visual cornerstone for an entire culture when people think of hip hop design, it comes down to a lot of the stuff that you did with Eagle Trip, a lot of the stuff you did with Complex, these very interesting graphic styles. That also is black design.
Yeah, that's the goal. Like I said, it's not one… What you're alluding to, it's not one thing, it's not one particular genre, but is when you enter that space, it's going to be executed at a particular level. It's going to be… It's going to cover specific things. And there are sort of expectations that you get. Like jazz is totally different from R&B and is totally different from Samba, is totally different from reggae, is totally different from dancehall, but it's all black music, right? It's totally different from the blues, it's all black music, they all sound different, right? But there's this thread of expression and commonality. And when these genres develop themselves, the execution is you can't deny it. So, that's a goal, is to create things that even though they're not in one particular space, or they may jump from place to place, which is what's going to happen, you want them to leave a mark.
And I will say speaking about how kind of having black design being internationally recognized in a way similar to how black music is, a lot of your work has been exhibited in group exhibitions, both here in the US, as well as internationally. What does it mean to have your work kind of shown in that kind of fashion?
When my stuff is recognized internationally, it means a lot because a lot of it was pre-internet and that means that the people that decided to talk about design or whatever, they're seeking, they're looking for. They're looking for content like anybody like anything or anybody now, but they have a certain standard in mind. And there's a filter that they have in their head. So, what I'm most proud of, I guess, is publications and people that have reached out to me. Yeah, like I said, particularly before the internet was popping. Because they were like, "Oh, I've seen this, I've seen a few of these things. I really was affected by this, or this was a music artist that really meant a lot to me. And I see that a couple of other artists that mean a lot to me were represented visually by this guy, Brent Rollins. And so let me look into it." That's a good feeling. And to know that people around the world who are on the same wavelength as you, and who are seeking out things, find you. That's incredible.
That makes me feel good. Yeah.
Yeah. Now, we've talked about Ego Trip, just kind of briefly touching on it. But I want to go more in depth about that. You came on as our director, you're kind of one of the co founders of this group with some titans in the industry, Sacha Jenkins, Elliott Wilson, Jeff Mao, take me back to that time. What did it feel like sort of coming together and building something like Ego Trip and the work that you all were able to do?
Oh, sure yeah. And we have to remember the one titan who is always like never wants attention, was Gabriel Alvarez. Yeah. I mean, Ego Trip was kind of like… We were like a band. And in some ways for that world, we were like a supergroup. And I got to know… I started working with Gabriel Alvarez when I was working at Rap Pages, got the gig through very awesome, incredible woman named Sheena Lester. And Rap Pages was an early sort of competitor to The Source Magazine. And-
Larry Flynt.
Larry Flynt, my man. Yeah. Enough respect to that guy, rest in peace. What a person to work for. I didn't work for him specifically, but just to know that he was in the building, what a… Very bizarre to be early 20s and working for a pornographer. But yeah, he had started this magazine, Rap Pages basically to kind of reap some attention that The Source was getting. And Sheena had taken it over, after maybe a few issues, I guess. And we wanted to build an editorial team. I was one of the later people to join, and one of my compatriots, there was Gabriel Alvarez. So, between myself, Sheena, Gabe, Blau, Dorothy, and I apologize if I can't remember Hannibal and some other folks that… Nikki, incredible person. We kind of were a little kind of a group who kind of wanted to take on The Source. At the time, that was like the main kind of hip hop music magazine. It was the first and undeniably significant. But we sort of had our take on things or whatever.
But we had hired freelance writers, and among them was Sacha Jenkins, and Elliott Wilson, and I'm not sure if Mel… I believe Mel may have been hired as well, as a freelance writer, but that's how I got to know those guys. Or that's how I made first contact with them. And after a few years of working at the magazine, Gabe had moved to New York to work with Sacha, on Ego Trip. And Sacha Jenkins, who for people that don't know, I would say in recent years, he's probably known for producing these documentaries called, I believe it's called Fresh Dressed, which is about hip hop fashion. He also directed this Wu Tang documentary on Showtime. And so he's been… And he's also in a punk band and all this other kind of stuff. And Sacha has always been doing all these kind of great self-started initiating things and had this sort of fledgling magazine, or zin rather, called the Ego Trip.
And Ego Trip was… It was coming from the perspective of mainly, mostly writers of color to talk about hip hop, with a love and reverence, but also an irreverence towards the subject matter, and also had interest in other music such as punk rock, indie rock, what have you. And so, as Sacha would say, it was like Rolling Stones, but the inverse. So Rolling Stone would mostly cover rock, and maybe occasionally do hip hop. And so, Ego Trip was the flip side of that. And so that's how I got to know those guys, and I eventually moved to New York in 1997, because of having some contact with Sacha. Sacha had sort of said, "Hey, we need to step up our magazine visually," sort of invited me to join the team for no money, but more just out of like an outlet to do something creative.
I looked at myself, as the Terry Gilliam to everybody else's John Cleese, and the rest of the Monty Python crew. As far as being the visual person, I understood editorial, and I also wanted to do sort of humor. We were doing a lot of funny, goofy stuff. And so I had my take on how to express that. And eventually, that became the collage. There were… The magazine itself was instrumental to me in terms of my creative development, because it was very DIY, it was like, "Let's just take…" We used to do precursors to memes called Ego Trip Ads. So we would find these funny images from Jet Magazine or, or Ebony or something like that. Just older magazines, like ads of black people in Burger King ads and write funny captions to them. But the captions were always like hip hop lyrics. And then we would kind of put the little slug like Ego Trip.
And so basically, they became ads to fill in the unused ad space in the magazine. But they were fun. They helped us sort of develop our creative voice and make the magazine more individual and sort of unique. And so, that's how I kind of got down with them. I had myself this irreverent take on hip hop and sort of making fun of hip hop, but loving it at the same time. This was the vehicle for it. And so, once we got together, yeah, Sacha was working, I think at Vibe Magazine. Elliott was working at The Source, Jeff was writing for a lot of other music magazines and Gabe, he's the glue and like I said, he doesn't get the credit that he deserves because he's very much behind the scenes, he doesn't want the attention, but he is the funniest MF around the planet, and super creative.
And so, collectively, yeah, we kind of just became like Voltron, like superhero group and looked at the magazine as a vehicle to express just how we… Just things that we were interested in, and also to try to put it to… Like every issue, I only did like the last three issues, but it felt like making an album. And each issue got more and more personal. Like there's running… It's a magazine literally with like running jokes. Because if you turn the pages, you'll see a reference to something that came earlier, and we made it this kind of like goofy puzzle. And it became semi… Everything in Ego Trip became this… It started blurring the line between music, journalism and autobiography.
Hmm. How was it received at the time?
I think you'd have to ask a lot of journalists maybe how they thought about it. I guess at the time, no one was doing what we were doing. And I don't say that to sound like arrogant, I just mean in a sense-
No. Hey, talk your shit.
But I'm not [inaudible 00:48:30]. It wasn't usual for people to get together to be like, "Hey, we want to talk about this with this particular voice. That isn't straight ahead. So, when we got together to do that stuff, we just had fun. We would just goof around and just make jokes and it was like one of the… Those guys were like my brothers, brothers that I never had. And so, like I said, it's kind of like we were sort of a supergroup. Yeah, we used to do some stupid things. In my head, I'm thinking about this time we kidnapped this journalist.
Wait, wait, wait. What?
Yeah. Yeah. So, there's this journalist who writes for the New York Times now named John Caramanica.
Oh, my God! Okay. No, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead.
Wait, do you know…
I know of him because of some of his shitty reviews. But no, go ahead.
So, I can't remember what he was interviewing us for, maybe it was for our first book. I can't remember probably. But we were like, "Okay, this is how we want to be legendary." So at the time, we used to have this one office on 16th Street in Chelsea Market, and we used to have this really dope… The fourth floor, we had almost all to ourselves. We were sharing it with this graffiti brand named Bullets of Brooklyn, but they were never there. So, we kind of just had the run of the space. And then for reasons that I won't get into, we had to vacate that space. And so we ended up moving into the basement of the building. So, we wrote our first book in the basement of this building on 16th Street in Chelsea. And so, there were pipes of bolus than you'd hear like toilet flushing, and you'd just hear all this sewage going by and stuff like that.
And then we have this room in the back… We only have like two rooms, we have this one room that was where, if you see the cover of our book, the book of Rap List, that was the room that we shot this in. And we were like, "Okay, I guess we're going to get interviewed." I think it was probably for the New York Times, and we're going to get interviewed and we can't just do a normal thing, man. We're like, "We're Ego Trip dude, we're [inaudible 00:50:49] this shit." So we told them to meet or show up someplace in the Chelsea Market, which is like this kind of food court now. This glorified food court in Chelsea. And we had this really cute girl who was a friend of ours, go meet him and she was like, "Are you John Caramanica?" He's like, "Yes." She's like, "Come with me."
We wanted him to have a story to tell. So, she leads him… I can't remember if she… We weren't there. So, I can't say exactly. But I believe she probably blindfolded him at this venue, and probably walked him outside across the street and then walked into the building took him downstairs in the elevator. He shows up, he's blindfolded, we walked in [inaudible 00:51:39].
I've still a thought of the fact that he just went with this woman and got blindfolded, just went with her.
Yeah, man. It's like, what is he going to do? Is he going to say no?
That's true, yeah.
Yeah. He did it. So, it was just funny.
So, you say kidnapping, I'm thinking like somebody got shoved in the back of a panel van or something. He sounds like a willing participant in this case. Well, go ahead. Go ahead.
I can imagine that for someone in his position, it must have been definitely strange. He thought he's going to an office to talk to somebody, he's being blindfolded by some attractive young lady and brought to who he doesn't even know where he's going.
This white van as far as we're concerned. She takes him into the back room and we have the lights down low. I remember exhaustion now, Jeff and I we're back there. So we had turntables in there. And I remember because I was in the other room. I just remember Sacha had something… He had some record on the turntable, and he kept looping it. So it was just super creepy. He was just scratching it, [inaudible 00:52:50] just back spinning it. Super creepy thing. And then we instruct Caramanica to take off his blindfold. And then the guys proceeded to talk with the flashlight under their heads.
Wow!.
And then they do the interview. And finally, it's time to leave. I do remember Jeff going like, "It's time to go." And I do remember Jeff now going like, "Hey, thanks. Thanks for coming by, you know what you got to do now, right?" He's like, "Yeah." So we asked our friend to… The young lady to blindfold him again. We span him around a few times, and he exited the building. And the rest is history.
Wow! That's a wild story. That's a wild story. So, Ego Trip eventually evolved from this magazine to a book, to several television shows. I mentioned prior to us recording how I remember watching those shows on VH1 as a teenager, the White Rapper Show and Miss Rap Supreme, and Race-O-Rama and everything, and just being so… Well, maybe not so much the reality shows, but certainly, the visual elements from like Race-O-Rama and stuff like that being so enamored with… I had never seen anything like that before talking about black culture, hip hop culture, that kind of thing. I've never seen it done in that way. And it blew my mind. It was really… I have to say it was kind of an early design reference for me, I wanted to make stuff like that. I wanted to be able to kind of have that sort of tongue in cheek irreverence towards culture in that way, in a way that felt familiar, but also felt kind of new and fresh, unlike something that you haven't really seen before.
Oh, man, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. I think that was again, the… For me, that was a little bit of a Terry Gilliam in terms of all the crazy animations that you would see from Monty Python. That was my inspiration in the sense of the humor of stuff. And how do you express that stuff visually. And everything that we were doing in Ego Trip was really… It's funny, because I'd like to think that we… I don't want to say that we originated things, but there definitely wasn't any sort of bigger reference. And it's funny how meme culture has years later sort of assumed some of the similarities to what we were doing. So, was it a human thing? I don't know. But it was in terms of like pairing these references and music lyrics to things and doing so like tongue and cheek, but I don't know, but we definitely did it early. And so yeah, for Race-O-Rama, each episode, or there was three series, I'm sorry, three episodes in the series.
And Race-O-Rama was this kind of fun house idea. And the idea that looking at race through this sort of voyeuristic lens. And so each of the shows was blackophobia, which used sort of the visual language of horror films, and pulp alien invasion movies and stuff like that. In Race We Lost, which was pulling from the visuals of like… I mean, I love this time square CD, porno theater graphics and all that kind of stuff. And the other one was, "Dude, Where's My Ghetto Pass?" Which was kind of like this we call an urban safari. So this idea of cultural sort of, not necessarily appropriation, but this sort of… Everything was about the voyeurism of race, right?
So, once we started thinking about those kinds of things, it was just like, it was just super fun to kind of riff off of them, because our take on on discussing race or presenting race was about the idea of not so much making fun of it, but at least making it less about some of the typical things or things that people would immediately associate when you're talking about race. Particularly at that time, that series was based off of… Well, that series sprang from a book that we wrote called The Big Book of Racism. And that was a book that Dana Albarella, our beloved editor, who also produced our Ego Trip's, Book of Rap Lists, she had moved on from St. Martin's Press to HarperCollins, which was headed by Judith Regan, who was kind of a big shot in the publishing world, particularly at that time. And so we had the opportunity to do that book called The Big Book of Racism.
And our thing about that book was that it was about race, because that was our secondary preoccupation after hip hop, the title and the premise kind of started off as a joke. And then we actually kind of started really getting into it. The thing about that book was we wanted to talk about race in a way that people could relate to, because generally, when people talked about race, they talked about sort of the history and we're talking about the history of race from the arrival of slaves in America, up until the civil rights era. And so… And it tended to be very academic. And our lens as far as how we related to each other and joked with each other, was always through the lens of popular culture. And so the idea of doing a look at race through the lens of popular culture, was an interesting challenge. It was a crazy challenge for us.
And on top of that, to bring attention to things and to make fun of it, or to joke about it, in that sort of sarcastic sort of coping mechanism kind of way. And it was really hard because we wrote it during 911.
Which really… Yeah. There was a point where we had started writing that book, The Big Book of Racism, and then 911 happened and we were just like, "Man, we don't hate anybody, we're critiquing things." But it was very difficult. But we kind of decided if we're going to do this, it's going to be… If we're going to fail, it's going to be a magnificent failure. We were just like, let's… Man, I've never doubted myself as much. I don't edit and perhaps I'm speaking for the rest of the guys when we were doing that thing because we were just like, "Should we do this at a time when people needed unity?" And we're just writing, not so much a divisive book, but a book to sort of in our minds, illustrate why people of color feel the way they do based off of the treatment that popular culture has presented. And so that was always my interest personally, was understanding how popular culture affects the perception of people. And so like I was saying, a lot of the academic books spoke to a very specific audience. And our goal was to be anti-academic.
Chock full of information and intended to be sort of ingested sporadically wherever you want to enter it, but also for you to walk away to understand like, "Oh, damn, this country is built on race, there's so much race in this country that people want to not acknowledge. And here's our sort of listical way of doing it with jokes." With comedy, but trying to make it apparent. That's the role of an artist, is to make you see things that are right there in front of you.
Yeah. Wow! During 911. Yeah. That was certainly a very interesting. I think that was definitely a pivotal point in the country as it relates to race relations. Because aside from that, you got the formation of the TSA and how that has changed. Just so many things around screening in airports and stuff like that. But it really turned the dial on how race relations were in this country.
Yeah, there was a lot of internal examination going on. And that tragedy. Tragedy sort of expose what you're made of, right?
Even just the recent craziness that we, as a country have been going through the past few years, it's ultimately I guess, a good thing because it's being brought to light. And then you see where people are trying to reach out and where people are trying to find those commonalities, and that common ground, and where they're not. And so that just reemerges.
I know that you have worked with Ego Trip for a number of years, but during that time, you also were the creative director at Complex for a while. What were some of your memories from that time?
I was creative director after Ego Trip, we had sort of kind of fizzled and disbanded.
Yeah. So there was a period where I was kind of back to sort of doing… I was always kind of working on independent projects concurrently while doing Ego Trip, when Ego Trip was in sort of in full rev, that's where I spent the most focus on. But there were always opportunities to do album covers, or things like that during that time. But complex kind of came about because actually our former Ego Trip intern, Noah was an editor at complex and he sort of, he needed, I like to call myself a substitute teacher, because the previous art director had left, and they needed to finish a few issues. And so that's when I kind of came in to work on the magazine. And then what was interesting about working there, was I came in and sort of helped finish the issues. And I was like, "Okay, cool, this is fun." Got to work with some younger designers, and really start to exercise my kind of delegation, and start to teach in some ways or pass along whatever information that I could and knowledge that I could to other people, and to learn how to shape things.
Because when you're creative, you tend to keep it to yourself and you do things that you don't need to do. Like you don't need to scan, you don't need to… If we're talking about graphics, you don't need to do the silhouetting. You don't need to do that stuff. Maybe you do it sometimes out of necessity, and maybe you might get really good at it. But the bigger thing is just really putting all those pieces together. So it was a great exercise to learn how to orchestrate a symphony. And that's kind of what I refer to myself as a creative conductor, because at a certain point, it's less about my actual hands and more about my actual thought and how do you put all those elements together. And so Complex became from a magazine, and this is during start of the decline of print as a popular media form, and the ascension of the web as the dominant media form. And so Complex, all the business heads behind it, were very perceptive in terms of growing that business.
And so that's what also kept me there, was learning. I learned about media when we were doing stuff with VH1, but the opportunity to work with teams of people and to build a business really, was exciting. That was an exciting opportunity because now, I'm dealing with for the first time in my life, a generation of people whose references are different than mine. And I'm now in this position of also learning from them. So, I like to learn new things. And I get excited by new stuff. And I'm always looking for that new drug. Like, "Yo, I need to get high again, give me that design crack. Give me that culture crack." That was an opportunity to stay plugged in and to learn new things. And also to be able to work with people. And also Ego Trip as "successful" as we were, we hit a wall in a sense, and going to Complex was an opportunity to sort of flex some different muscles and to see…
Ego Trip was patronizing in the sense of that we had the VH1 give us money. VH1 gave us money and before that the book publishers gave us money. But we were not successful in the sense of able to generate money ourselves. So, Complex was an opportunity to sort of look behind the curtain and then kind of step behind that curtain and see how business, or how entrepreneurial minded business grows and develops and becomes like this media titan that it is today. So, that's what kept me there, was to learn from the younger designers, to help shape them also, to pass on that information and that knowledge, and they would also show me some things or helped me… I used to say they helped me think. Because they would try different things and I'd be like, "No, no, no, no, no." They would create these different options… I'm a good critic, I think. As a graphic designer or a communication designer, or that kind of visual designer, you're taking these kind of existing elements, and arranging them versus an artist necessarily who kind of create something from scratch.
So, they would create these things from scratch in some ways, or create these options and then I can look at them and be like, "Oh, yeah, no, no, no, no, no, this is not communicating, or this is not tapping into that feeling that we were talking about before. This is not communicating this thing." And helping to shape them. So, that was immensely satisfying. And working with celebrities is interesting and fun. And traveling around the world is great. And so, yeah.
How do you define success now?
Success is kind of about satisfying the need to create projects that actually propel ideas and culture. And I guess that's maybe always the idea of success for me. I think the idea of monetary success, yes, I'm not going to say that that's not important. But I've come closer to this understanding of when my time is up, for me, what am I putting forth in the world, or what's my legacy? And so I can't do everything myself, there are things that I'm working on that are about personal vision, but as a group, we can accomplish a lot of things. Ego Trip as a group, we accomplished things that we didn't think we would ever accomplish. Working in Complex, we accomplished things that were in that… The metrics for that world, we surpassed them. And so for me, when people tell me that they've been influenced by something that I did, or they show some sort of appreciation for the things that I've done, and even more so when these things are attached to something that has some sort of cultural importance, man, that's a great feeling.
I want to keep doing that. For me, that's the metric of success. Again, know how to make money, [inaudible 01:08:48] money, love me some money. But we're put on this world to do things. And so I'm happy and fortunate that whatever mark I've made in the world, I've been able to do. I think the thing about it is, it's also fleeting, and it's also like you got to keep doing things. Success is also somewhat short lived. You know what I mean? I'm happy to inspire people, but I'm also like, I want to inspire more people and I need to keep doing to continue to be relevant, not because I'm trying to be the cool of the week, but because a large enough body of people are viewing and affected by the things that I work on. Right now, that would be the marker of success to me.
Hmm. That's a very interesting answer.
Well, I guess because I've been kind of dropping these little pins like throughout the interview like your work, and the work that you did with Ego Trip, the work you did with Complex, is really like been a cornerstone in the design style of when people think of hip hop culture, a lot of that boils down to work that you have done, whether that's been magazines, we didn't even touch on the album covers that you've done. I feel like a lot of people are inspired by your work, but they may not know that it's from you, maybe.
Oh, yeah. It's funny. The thing about [inaudible 01:10:15] is because it's still kind of being done in the service of whoever. And I've been fortunate enough to work with people who more or less are like, "Hey, Brent, I like your style." I had to develop a style because the more you do something, the more people recognize it. And then if they like it, then they come to you. But in some cases, yeah. There's been the suppression of Ego in the sense of, it's not about me, it's about I'm doing this for someone else. And so yeah, there's been things that I've done that maybe people don't see that thread, I have a good friend, Phil McMillan, who he was another designer. And he's… Some people are really in tune with it. He'll be like, "I saw this and I was like, yo, I think Brent did that."
So he sees it. And so whatever is the essence of me creatively shows up in those things and he's in tune with that, and he can find that. And there are other people that can do that too. And so that's a much more honest relationship, when you can work with those people, because that means you guys are on the same wavelength. And so that's… I found that those have been the best projects for me, is when people come to me because they do know, because they are familiar with the things that I've done, and they're like, "That's the vibe that I want." And it's freeing because it lets me be me. I'm a designer in the sense that I'm problem solving, but I'm also an artist in the sense that I'm trying to express something emotionally and I connected with those people. And so, yeah. Ramble, ramble, ramble, ramble.
So, is there a dream project that you would love to do one day? I feel like you've done television, you've done magazines, you've done album covers, you've done a book. What's next? What do you really want to do one day?
There are many dream projects that I want to do. There's personal projects that I've finally started initiating. One is really getting into furniture design.
Oh, okay.
Yeah. And so I had gone to Italy in 2019 to start that. I'm working with a friend of mine over there. And then just the nature of the project really meant that I couldn't restart it until the warmer months. Totally happens and dashes those dreams on the Mediterranean rocks. That'll still happen. And then I have a sort of a creative… The dream projects, yeah. I mean, it's really more about when does Brent start putting his own voice forward more? Right?
My voice has been forward in people's projects, and mostly because I'd never… I would probably say that there's one critique with myself, it's like I devalue what I think I have to say. I have an idea… I actually started this project during the pandemia, I'm going to is like Black Star Wars, and let people kind of go from there. But I started some stuff in making models, telling friends who are also creative, and they got super excited about that stuff. And they're like, "Oh, man, I wanted the soundtrack." And you got to have this character do this, and you got to do that. And it'll happen. And I'm not afraid to say it. I thought about like, "Should I even talk about this?" But hall yeah. But really, just more personal projects are exciting. My father was a phenomenal creative person who passed away recently.
And my mission I guess, is to let the world kind of see what this guy who inspired me, what he did, and with the hope that maybe he also inspires other people, so that's also another project. Man, I got a lot of projects. God, I got a lot of things. Yeah. Like I said, 2021 let's go.
Yeah. I hear you. Well, Brent, just to kind of wrap things up here. Where can our audience find out more about you and about your work and everything online?
I guess online you can look me up Brettrollins.com under my website that really needs to be updated. You can follow me on Instagram, my handle is Brentronic, B-R-E-N-T-R-O-N-I-C, and then at that point, by the end 2021, hopefully you'll be seeing my name in a lot more places when you won't even try.
Sounds good. Well, Brent Rollins, I have to thank you. Just thank you so much for coming on the show. I guess prior to us recording about how much of a design influence you've been to me seeing your early work, and it's been just such a pleasure to one just introduce you to the Revision Path audience, I have a feeling that people are going to listen to this. And they'll be like, "Wait a minute, he did that!" They're going to now know that you are the person behind so much iconic work out there. It's just been a joy to talk to you, it's been a joy to hear about the work that you're doing. And I want to see what comes next absolutely, because I have no doubt it's going to be hot. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.
Man, thank you so much. And I know other people will say the same thing to you, man. But dude, you're doing God's work. Thank you so much for doing Revision Path.
Episode 377: Brandon Viney
Tagged as:	advertising, Brandon Viney, creative director, google, Google Brand Studio, group creative lead, VCU, virginia
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Brandon Viney is group creative lead for Google Brand Studio in Portland, Oregon.
If you've seen either the the "Black Girl Magic" video or the Black History Month video this year from Google, then you're already intimately acquainted with the work of Brandon Viney, group creative lead at Google Brand Studio. He heads up the creative agency inside Google that uses data from the search engine to produce powerful ad spots like these (and many more).
Brandon gave a peek behind the curtain on his creative process when starting new projects, and talked about the Google Brand Studios Fellowship Program and shared what Google looks for when bringing on new talent. He also shared growing up in the Blue Ridge Appalachian mountains of Virginia, attending VCU's world-renowned Brandcenter, and reflected back on his time working in advertising at Wieden + Kennedy. Brandon is definitely one of the most down-to-earth and humble guests I've had on the show in some time, and I hope his story inspires you to push the boundaries of your creativity!
Brandon Viney's Website
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Episode 350: Kojo Boateng
Tagged as:	5 Points, creative director, design educator, Kojo Boateng, MICA, PBS News Hour, Washington DC
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Kojo Boateng is the creative director for PBS News Hour in Washington, DC.
It's Revision Path's 350th episode, and for this special, historic occasion, I'm honored to talk with Kojo Boateng. You might remember our 2016 interview with Kojo (episode 125!), and we get into everything that's changed in his world since then.
We started off talking about the transition period in his life that led him to move to the United States, and Kojo goes into his current work as a creative director for PBS News Hour. He also shared some of the community work he's doing in the DC design scene, including creating safe spaces for Black designers to fellowship and network. Kojo also spoke about the effect hip hop has had on his design work, and talked about how he's staying motivated and inspired during these current times.
Thanks to all of you for helping us get to this huge milestone!
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CRE8 DC
Facebook Design is a proud sponsor of Revision Path. The Facebook Design community is designing for human needs at unprecedented scale. Across Facebook's family of apps and new product platforms, multi-disciplinary teams come together to create, build and shape communication experiences in service of the essential, universal human need for connection. To learn more, please visit facebook.design.
Episode 348: Ed Williams
Tagged as:	creative director, Ed Williams, Mayke Entertainment, National Civil Rights Museum, storyteller
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Ed Williams is a Memphis-based storyteller and the founder of Mayke Entertainment.
It's time for Revision Path's annual audience survey! Give us your feedback on the podcast, and you could win a $250 Amazon.com gift card from us! Head over to revisionpath.com/survey today. The survey closes on May 31, 2020. Thank you!
You might not think of Memphis, Tennessee as a bustling creative city, but folks like Ed Williams are here to show you the truth. By day, he works as a creative manager at the National Civil Rights Museum, helping shape the brand design and strategy for the museum for all its visitors. But by night, he is the founder of Mayke Entertainment, and creates comic stories with culturally-rich superheroes from all walks of life!
We started off with some quick talk about Ed's museum work, and from there we went into a conversation about Memphis' design scene and then learned how Ed turned his talent for art into a career in design. He also shared how he's holding up during this pandemic, and gave a behind-the-scenes look at Mayke Entertainment and what's coming up in the future. Give this episode a listen and learn about what Ed Williams brings to the creative community!
Ed Williams' Website
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Mayke Entertainment
Mayke Entertainment on Facebook
Mayke Entertainment on Instagram
Mayke Entertainment on Twitter