Ep. 129: Creative Strategist Maurice Cherry
Creative strategist, graphic designer, and podcaster Maurice Cherry was born in Selma, Alabama where it quickly became apparent he was going to take the world by storm. Immensely talented on all fronts, Maurice has dedicated his career to recognizing and celebrating the power of Black design and creativity online. These days, Maurice is perhaps most well-known for his award-winning podcast Revision Path, which showcases Black designers, and as of 2019 is the FIRST podcast to be acquired by the Smithsonian.
Read the full transcript here.
Maurice Cherry: I wanted to make a platform to allow us at least have that opportunity to talk about ourselves for ourselves.
Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. And today I'm talking to designer and OG podcaster, Maurice Cherry. Maurice Cherry is Principle and Creative Director at Lunch, an award-winning multidisciplinary creative studio in Atlanta, Georgia. These days, Maurice is perhaps most well-known for his award-winning podcast, Revision Path, which showcases Black designers, developers and digital creators from all over the world. And as of 2019 is the first podcast to be acquired by the Smithsonian. Other projects of Maurice’s include the Black Web Blog Awards, 28 Days of the Web, the Year of Tea, and the design anthology, Recognize. As well as, he’s the creator of the influential 2015 AIGA presentation, where are the black designers? Maurice is the 2018 recipient of the Steven Heller prize for cultural commentary from AIGIA for his work on Revision Path. He was named one of GD USA’s people to watch and was included in 2018 edition of The Root 100, their annual list of the most influential Afrian Americans ages 25 to 45. He’s talented in all dimensions, can see way into the future, and is uniquely capable of building platforms from scratch. You’ll love him. Let’s hear from Maurice.
MC: My name is Maurice Cherry. I am in Atlanta, Georgia. I think I can sum up the ethos of my work with recognizing and celebrating the power of black design and creativity online.
AD: Yes! Before get to deconstructing that and understanding everything about what you’re doing today, I always like to go all the way back to zero and learn about the formative years. So can you tell me about young Maurice and your family, your home
MC: Oh yeah, so I grew up in Selma, Alabama, which a lot of people know about from the civil rights movement -
AD: Sure.
MC: From the movie, from numerous politicians making their way through there on their campaigns. I grew up there; I’m like part of that first generation of kids right after Bloody Sunday and everything. So that’s where I grew up. It’s odd to describe how Selma is now because so many people, I feel like, have a greater cultural reference of it, that’s steeped in, not necessarily the rose colored glasses of history, but they have this sort of reverential look at what Selma is.
When the reality is, it’s just a small town off the bypass in South Central Alabama, with all the trappings that come with that [laughs] in terms of, there’s like a hundred churches. There’s maybe one place you can go shop, like one mall or a trading post or something. Everything closes at around 8:00 or 9:00pm and that’s about it. Just sort of a small, sleepy kind of southern town. I mean when you’re living there you’re not, you’re cognizant of the history of it because there’s museums and certainly if you’re a student, there’s no shortage of field trips to show the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which I walked over hundreds of times.
This is where people were beaten at Bloody Sunday and this is a monument to whomever, at this church and stuff. So you’re kind of always aware of it and cognizant of it, but I don’t know if as a kid it’s something that you really care about. Especially, I would say if you’re a kid in the 80s because there’s Nintendo and there’s Saturday morning cartoons and so many other things that are just vying for your attention.
So the, the weight and the history of the civil rights movement isn’t really a thing that, at least as a kid, that I was like super invested in. But certainly as an adult, it’s something that I know about now.
AD: You were marinated in it, but it’s not necessarily, I mean kids will do what kids will do.
MC: Yeah, and it’s, it’s interesting because like when I moved away from Selma, people had no idea what Selma was or who it was. I remember even going to college and telling people I was from Selma and they thought that I was from Salem, Oregon. Like I said the name of the town that I’m from wrong or something, like really weird [laughs]. But that was, I think, before Selma was really such a big part of the general public discourse, so yeah.
AD: Sure so what kinds of things fascinated you? You mentioned Nintendo and a hundred churches, were you a church going family? What was your family like?
MC: Oh man, so grew up mostly with a single mom. I mean my parents were married, they got divorced when I was around 13 or so. My grandparents were really big church goers. My grandfather, who has passed away and my grandmother were both like big in the church that they were at, deacon, as they had these titles, kind of great position. I wouldn’t say necessarily that our direct family was a big church going family.
They certainly made us go and I never wanted to go [laughs], would fake asleep and my mom is like, I know you’re awake -
AD: What would you have rather been doing?
MC: Anything else.
AD: Okay.
MC: Literally anything else. There were some times that I went to church and I would just sit outside the church and just do something else. Like anything besides that, not that necessarily I was really a heathen or anything like that, but it just wasn’t interesting to me. In terms of stuff that I did for fun, I was, let’s see as a kid, I did a lot of drawing and writing and of course, like you know, I said Nintendo, so I played a lot of video games. Hung out with friends of mine, although my mom wasn’t really big about me hanging out with other kids.
She really kinda wanted me to like stay in the house and be safe and not like go out and about because she grew up in Selma, so she knew of a time when it wasn’t safe to do the kind of things that I wanted to do as a kid cause I just didn’t know about, you know, the history of, of the city in that way. So I did a lot of things, mostly in the house, but I mean Selma is in the country, so there certainly were opportunities to like ride four wheelers and shoot BB guns and you know, do all of the fun country kind of stuff that you do when you don’t have cable, [Laughs] and you have the wide open spaces, you know?
AD: [Laughs] Yeah, I can imagine the gravity of that, on your mom, raising a child, having been witness to violence and just that low grade worry that’s always there.
MC: Yeah.
AD: How did your childhood transition into your adolescent years?
MC: This was around the time when, I mentioned that my parents got divorced when I was around 13. I have an older brother, he’s four years older than me and so when I was 13 he was 17, he was about to graduate high school, go off to college. And for me, I felt like, oh, this is the time when I can sort of have a little bit of freedom because we shared a room my whole childhood, until he left home. And so I was like, oh, I finally get to have my own room where I can close the door and do what I want in silence, you know, without getting bothered by anyone or anything like that.
But my brother was off to college for about a year, he ended up not making it, coming back home, getting in trouble with the law and then ended up getting, going to jail. So I still had the room to myself but just for different reasons. And in terms of sort of what my adolescence was, I did a lot of stuff just focused around school. Like school was kind of my escape in a way. And I kind of treated my room like the lab where I would experiment with things that I would then go and do at school.
For example, I was in the marching band and in the symphonic band, so I was teaching myself music and then going home on my keyboard and trying to transpose like video games soundtracks that I heard. I would record it, then I would take it to my keyboard and try to change it from treble clef to bass clef and then try to play it on my trombone so I could then take it back to school and say hey, this is this new song that I learned how to play or whatever.
Still doing a lot of writing and drawing, just a lot of creative things to kind of take my mind off of the fact that we were in this just like small southern town that really didn’t have much going on. Outside of that I think I learned a lot about the outside world through magazines, so I had subscriptions to Vibe magazine and I think I had a subscription to YSB also. YSB doesn’t exist anymore, but had subscriptions to a lot of magazines just to kind of see what life was like outside of Selma, Alabama.
Because the most that I knew was Selma, I knew Montgomery, which was 50 miles away, which is the capital, Montgomery, and that’s about it. And we got to travel a few places in the marching band but they were still all kind of within the city. The only sort of outlier is Atlanta where they sort of took everyone, every year as like a class trip. Like, oh, everyone did so well in class; we’re going to Six Flags over Georgia, yay!
And like that gets tiring after the second and third time, you know, like oh, we’re just going to Six Flags, again, oh whoo, this is so much fun. Not really seeing the rest of the city, like only going to Six Flags and that’s it and coming right back home. My adolescence was just really a lot of nerdy pursuits. I was in the math club, I took AP courses, I just kind of focused a lot on, I wouldn’t necessarily say bettering myself, cause I guess I didn’t see it that way back then, but I just focused in on the pursuits that made me happy and made me feel like I actually had an outlet. So like I focused on music, I focused on math, I focused on writing. Those were kind of the three main things that I did a lot of.
AD: And were you forming an idea of what you thought you’d become professionally at this time, you know, like I wanna be when I grow up?
MC: Absolutely not! [Laughs] I had no clue; I was not thinking about it at all because, how can I put this? So, when I was growing up I was sort of considered back home like a bit of a prodigy. I don’t know if I would necessarily call myself that now, but certainly there were times during my childhood where things would be pointed out, like oh, you’re exceptionally smart in these areas. Like I could read at a very early age, I took my first standardized test, major standardized test when I was in 7th grade and the score was high enough where I didn’t have to take standardized tests all through high school.
So it was sort of this thing like, oh, Maurice will be fine, like a lot of people kind of treated me in a way, like oh, Maurice will be okay, he’ll find out what it is he’s gonna do, he’s gonna be big, he’s gonna be successful. So there was like this weird propping up of who I was and what I was gonna do and like I really didn’t think about like, oh, I want to do XYZ as a career. I really didn’t have an idea. I would watch television shows like A Different World and I would see the character Dwayne Wayne and think, oh yeah, I might want to go into computers.
And I did do things with computers when I was a kid. I taught myself basic, I taught myself HTML and so I was like, yeah, I guess I could do that, that’s something I’m good at because in school I’m like, I don’t know what kind of job I can have where I’m really good at math and music and writing. I don’t know what career that looks like, maybe I’ll go to college and figure it out. It’s kind of a big what, what I was initially thinking but I really didn’t have any sort of a plan at all.
And I’ll be honest; I didn’t really have a plan in college either. I was just doing what I thought was fun and that I really enjoyed.
AD: hHow else are you gonna figure it out? If you have a plan before you know what that plan should be, then you almost always are gonna change the plan.
MC: That’s true. I think if there was any plan that I had, in high school, it was to get out of Alabama. It was like, if I can get out of this town and out of this state, then the rest of the world is out there and I’ll figure it out. I always sort of had this notion that I would just figure it out but my main goal was just to get out of Alabama, which is what I did two weeks after I graduated college. Like I’m out of here.
AD: Whoa, so I have a quick follow-up question. Did that propping up and that sort of you know, almost like we don’t have to worry about Maurice, he’s gonna be all right, it’s almost a sort of positive neglect in a way. Did you, do you feel like you missed out on some attention?
MC: Oh yeah, absolutely [laughs].
AD: That they didn’t have to worry about you [laughs]?
MC: Absolutely, I mean and part of it was, was brought on by myself, honestly. I mean once my parents got divorced and my brother was just kind of running with a bad crowd and was in and out of trouble, stuff would happen to me too at school. Like I would have negative experiences with things, but I never brought that home because I didn’t wanna have to be the thing, another thing for my mom to worry about. She was already dealing with stuff at work with getting, you know, profiled and harassed and everything and she’s got this no-good ex-husband and now she’s got this other son that’s doing stuff, like I don’t wanna contribute. I don’t wanna be the, the cherry on top, no pun intended, of everything that’s happening. I’ll just kinda keep it to myself.
So there were things that happened when I was in high school that I just, I just didn’t mention. I was like, well, I’ll handle it myself, I’ll deal with it and I just don’t want it to be like, like I didn’t want to be a burden on my mom in that kind of way.
AD: And are you still that way?
MC: Sorta [laughter], I mean I think, I think my mom knows now, like Maurice will be fine, you know, but it’s in a different, I think it’s a different level of respect now than it was when I was a kid, you know. If I’m under her roof there’s a whole thing of like I have to take care of this person, he’s a minor, I can’t just let him out, you know, do whatever he does, but like now I’ve been out in the world and succeeding and travelling and everything. And so she’s like, yeah, he’s, he’ll, he’ll be okay.
AD: But do you share your burdens with your support network, your friends, your family?
MC: Oh yeah, like my friends and family know, but even then, like I tend to be pretty positive most of the time. I try not to take myself too, too seriously with some things. I think it’s good to have just sort of like a personal, one, to have like a personal code of ethics that you just live by. But then also to determine what success looks like for you.
AD: Yeah.
MC: Because I think what that, that want of not wanting to be a burden is rooted in, is like a fear of not being a success in some way or like letting someone down or something like that. But once I was able to kind of think about what success looks like for me personally, like what I’m happy with at the end of the day, then everything else is fine.
AD: Well, I definitely wanna talk about what success looks like for you, but before we get to that, I wanna know about two weeks after graduation, when you got the hell out of Selma. Where did you go and what was that like?
MC: So, I went right to Atlanta, and just to kind of give some, some context to why I wanted to get the hell out so fervently. It was just a small town and especially when you’re a teenager and I mean I was watching BET and seeing the music videos and watching MTV and I’m like, there’s a whole world of like fun, cool stuff happening outside of these sticks, like I got to get out of here.
But also I was experiencing like a lot of racism at school, particularly in my last semester of high school where I had teachers that were like purposely changing my grades so I wouldn’t be salutatorian.
AD: What?
MC: I was getting threats from people, you know, all kinds of stuff like that. And so I really wanted to get out because I’m like yeah, this place is not, I don’t see myself staying here and I wouldn’t even say thriving, but like just living and surviving, like I don’t see that being an option. It was around the last week or two of school when they were doing the senior awards day and I received a full scholarship from Morehouse College to attend there and then on top of that a full scholarship to Morehouse from NASA where I would be a NASA scholar and I could intern at two NASA facilities while I was going through college.
And then by the time I graduated I would have a job with NASA and so I’m like oh, okay. So -
AD: Wow!
MC: This will all work out, the only thing I have to do is get out of Selma.
AD: Yeah [laughter].
MC: Soon as I graduated, the summer program for the scholarship program started in two weeks and so I got out as soon as I can and went straight to Atlanta and right to Morehouse’s campus, stayed in the dorms.
AD: Were you so excited?
MC: I was so excited because I just wanted to get out so bad and this was at a time, I mean this is, this is 1999, so there’s a lot of stuff going on that year outside of just the fact that it’s like the turn of the century. When you think about it here in the south east in particular, this is right after the Olympics, so Atlanta is still kinda buzzing from that like post-Olympic glow. It’s right after Freaknik and so a lot of people still know of Atlanta as being like this big party city, which I never got to go to parties in high school and I wanted to go to all the parties in college.
And I’m like, there’s any place to do it, like this is gonna be the place to do it. And Morehouse was such a prestigious and well-known school that I’m like, Martin Luther King went to Morehouse, like this should be a good time, this should be a very like, interesting and fun experience once I go to Morehouse. So I was just ready to get all of that started. So like why wait until August. If I can go ahead and go now, two weeks after and just start taking classes, and get into the mix of campus life, then I’ll do it and so that’s what I did.
AD: How nice to go where you’re recognized and wanted and supported, right, I mean those full ride scholarships from NASA and Morehouse are real big examples of validation where you’re coming from teachers who are actively sabotaging you, which is, that should be a crime, educators [laughs], that’s not what they’re supposed to do.
MC: Yeah and some of those teachers are still there, I should, I should make mention of that, some of those teachers are still at my high school. I don’t know if they’re still doing it to other people, but they’re still around and it’s sinister.
AD: It is sinister. Okay, but I like this positive trajectory you’re on and I mean did, did it turn out to be everything you wanted it to be? Did the world open up for you? Did you go to all the parties?
MC: So yes and no. Okay, and I’m sort of giving a peak behind the curtain here for folks that may not be familiar with the HBCU experience, or even what it is like going to college in Atlanta. But there were so many parties, not necessarily on campus, Morehouse is a dry campus and there’s not really, they just didn’t have a lot of places for parties. Some people might throw a party in their dorm room or something, but you had to be really kind of covert about it. What would happen though is that the night clubs would send charter buses to pick you up, take you to the club, and then you can get on the bus and they’ll take you right back to the dorm.
AD: Wow!
MC: [Laughs] Almost like a weird kind of like valet service sort of thing. They have the same thing for churches too, even though there is a chapel on Morehouse’s campus, some of the mega churches would also send charter buses, like oh, we’re gonna pick you up and take you to church and we’ll bring you right back.
AD: That’s smart, make it easy.
MC: Yeah, so I did go to a fair amount of parties, but the thing is that that first year I’d say really that first semester, but definitely that first year at Morehouse is very tough, it’s a culture shock in a lot of ways. I think it’s just the regular culture shock of going from the sheltered environment of being with your parents to now you’re on your own with you know, your peers and you can do whatever you want, whenever you want and no one is really gonna say anything.
And like for a lot of people that’s too much freedom, like it’s very easy to just get wrapped up in going to the clubs or just get wrapped up in doing anything but going to class. Because no one is going to make you go to class, you know. You sort of have the obligation that you should go, especially if you’re on scholarship because that’s how you keep your scholarship. You’re not getting a wakeup call, no one is knocking on your door like come on, it’s time to go to class, nobody is gonna do that.
You have to do that yourself, so if you have that self-determination, then you can get through that first semester. And I think, you know, during my first semester I certainly did my fair share of parties, also went to class and everything and, and did what I needed to do. But I almost got kicked out that first semester. I had a roommate at the time that was sort of conspiring against me and brought that up, brought up some issues with the RAs and the RDs there and I ended up getting kicked out of the dorm that I was in freshman year.
For people that know Morehouse, it was Graves Hall; I got kicked out of Graves Hall. Had to do like a probation period in a different dorm, this is a very long story, this could be the podcast [laughter] but like I had to do this weird probationary period in a different dorm, in a room, it was like an apartment almost. Like it had a separate bedroom and bathroom and everything, but the doors didn’t have locks and so I had to push all my stuff up against the door so no one would walk in because sometimes people would walk in.
And then eventually got placed in another dorm with a new roommate, sometime near the end of the first semester and him and his roommate had like gotten to blows. They had been fighting, like I remember going to his room for the first time and he was sitting there with like a black eye and a busted lip and the door was off the hinges and I’m like, you want me to stay here? This can’t be right.
But him and his roommate apparently had got into it and just got like really super messy. And I ended up spending the rest of my, my freshman year in that room, ended up getting a part time job. I was working for a tech start up called College Club. Which was like a predecessor to Facebook, College Club was this place where different campuses had these like online, basically like an online message board of sorts.
And each school had its own representative, so I was the campus rep for Morehouse College and basically what I would do is I would take pictures of people to document campus life, but also get them to sign up for College Club. And when you signed up for College Club, you got your own profile, you got your own email address, you got a phone number that you could call and like listen to your mail over the phone, like someone would read it out to you.
It was like a text to voice kind of thing where we would read the mail out to you. And I was getting paid money, like hand over fist to do that.
AD: Wow.
MC: I, I remember my first check, I think for the first month was around $4,000 and -
AD: Wow, that’s a lot of money for a college kid -
MC: That’s a lot of money, that’s a lot of money when you’re a freshman in college, I just did, just stupid, random flagrant, idiotic things with that money [laughs]. You know, like -
AD: How fun was that?
MC: It was so much fun and I guess sort of the better thing about it was, my roommate, who I had at the time, it was starting to become clear that college was just not the thing for him. He was getting into it with other people, like he was just very, a very argumentative kind of person. He ended up not going to classes -
AD: This is the guy with the busted lip?
MC: Yeah. He ended up not going to classes, he rearranged all the furniture in the room so all of my furniture was just like in this little sliver next to the, the wall and he took up like 80% of the room and I had 20% of the room [laughs]. And at one point, I think he kind of just had like a mental episode and then he stayed in the room for about a week, playing Mega Man games on emulators, cause I introduced him to that. And like I would go to class in the morning, he’s like, I’m gonna beat all the Mega Mans today. Okay, all right, I’m going to class. I go to class, go to my work study job, come back, like six or seven at night, he’s still playing.
I’m like oh, you haven’t moved, all right, well. Eventually he ended up leaving and then I had the room to myself, I think for the last two or three months of freshman year. Freshman year was a rollercoaster, freshman year was -
AD: It sounds like it!
MC: It was a year that I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay at Morehouse, I actually, at one point, tried to see if, and this is just me being young and stupid, being like, oh, can I transfer my scholarship to another school? And they’re like, no, you can’t do that, like are you sure? Cause like they want me, it’s not necessarily me at the school, they’re like, no, it’s to the school. Like okay, well, couldn’t do that.
So the first year was, was rough [laughs], my first year, I can look back at it and laugh now but going through it was hellish. What made it better was the fact that right after that I did my internship in California at Ames Research Center, which is in Moffett Field, right outside of, right outside Mountain View, California and so that was like my first time on a plane, first time in California. First time I had like a real burrito, first time I saw Whole Foods, like there were so many firsts out there. Like oh, I got to see a palm tree for the first time, oh, this is what West Coast hip-hop is like, oh my god, like just a lot of great firsts out there, I was only out there for a couple of months, working at Ames Research Center and studying robotics, education. We were teaching these K through to 12 students how to do robotics with these little Lego mind storm kits. They would make the robots and then we would show them how to do programming on these micro controllers called buddy boards. And that was a lot of fun. Like I really enjoyed that time out there because it was so far away from the south.
It was far away from home, it was far away from school and it kinda gave me a good chance to reset because again, I went from a very stressful environment in Selma, two weeks later get to Morehouse and then that’s stressing me out for that entire year. So this was like the first time that I could really take a breath and like take stock of what is happening, what do I need to change to make this a better experience, like at Morehouse specifically.
Like what do I need to change, what do I need to do to make this a better experience cause you can’t keep going through this every year. Like what’s gonna have to change internally for that to happen.
AD: What kind of changes did you make?
MC: Well, the first change I made was that I changed my major [laughs]. I, I was, I came in as a computer science, computer engineering major, cause they had this dual degree programme where if you did three years of Morehouse, two years at Georgia Tech and then once you graduated you would have a master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree. And I’m like, oh, that seems like, you know, two degrees, five years. That seems like a good deal.
It’s terrible, but also I really wanted to work on the web, I wanted to do web design because I had been teaching myself HTML and really got into that in high school and that I wanted to do it in college and my advisor at the time was like, the internet is a fad. If this is something that you really want to get into, you need to change your major because that’s not what we do here.
I was like oh, okay, well, so one of the first things I did, certainly when I got back, was I changed my major over to math, which I was good at math, I mentioned before I was in the math, the math team in high school. I literally did the math to see if I switched over, could I graduate earlier, which I could, I could graduate like a semester early, if I switched over to math, cause I had taken Cal II in those, that summer period, after high school.
And took AP calculus in high school, so I was like, oh, these count, so sure, yeah, I’ll just switch the math. So that was the first thing. And then the second thing, and I kind of, this wasn’t really my decision, this kind of just happened throughout the course of the year was, all the people, or most of the people in my scholarship program, who I had sort of went through the summer with and went through that freshman year with, cut ‘em off.
I’m like, I can’t, I, I can’t run with this crowd. I just couldn’t run with that crowd anymore, it just wasn’t a good fit for what I was trying to do. My main focus now, once I came back from that internship is, get the hell out of Morehouse. Like get your degree and then you have your NASA job and then we’ll see what happens. Because that’s kind of what the general trajectory was for everyone in the program anyway.
You did your two internships, then you graduated and then you get placed as a NASA facility. So I’m like, let me just focus on that, like focus on the end goal instead of trying to go through and do all the fun stuff in college, which is not to say I didn’t do more fun stuff in college, but I just had to shift who I was hanging around, what my mindset was and like just keep my eyes on the prize, essentially.
AD: That sounds incredibly mature for a college sophomore.
MC: [Laughs] Well I think, you know, also it’s tied to me even being there, like if I would have continued the way I was continuing, I definitely would have been in danger of losing my scholarship and then that would have been thousands of dollars that I know my mom couldn’t pay, you know, she was making maybe 30-40K a year, probably, there was no way she could have paid for me to go to a school like Morehouse, unless it was on scholarship. And so it’s like I’m already in the door, I can’t fuck it up by being stupid about stuff. So like just keep my focus on getting my work done and just having like a cool core group of people that I hang out with and not these jokers that I thought I was cool with, that I came up with in my scholarship program. I just had to kind of change everything.
AD: I get it that you don’t want to fuck it up, but it also sounds like you’re an incredibly sort of centered individual and kind of knew, [0.35.00] this is what I require of myself in order to achieve the goals that I’m setting for myself. -
MC: I think that’s my Virgo moment, I think -
AD: Okay. It doesn’t sound like it was pure, just like discipline and like I’ve got to abstain from the fun stuff and buckle down because that’s what’s expected of me - It sounds like you were really, you were steering the ship but it was towards something that you wanted.
MC: Right and I mean I had the fun experiences. Like I was a total raver, like my first two years of college, so like we were going to raves at the Atrium, did all manner of illicit drugs and stuff, can I mention, can I talk about that?
AD: Of course [laughter], of course I’m a believer in sowing oats, I think you got to get it out of your system [laughs] or else it’ll haunt you [laughs], do it in middle age.
MC: We would take the bus out to the Atrium, which was this club out in like Stone Mountain and just [laughs], I mean it’s a rave, so there’s ecstasy and other types of, you know, illicit drugs and stuff and so we would do that and come back to the dorm and just crash, like, oh, [laughs]. So I did have my fun times at college, don’t get me wrong. But I definitely also had the, the focus to just, like I have to get out of here, like I have to focus and get my degree, get placed in a NASA facility and then I’m good after that.
AD: Okay, so take me to the NASA facility, clearly you got your degree, right? You did -
MC: I did get my degree, so there’s a, there’s a bit of a detour in there [laughs].
AD: Oh?
MC: So, sophomore year, and so I’m still staying on campus, I’m staying in a different dorm with this guy who wants to be a lawyer, or a judge or something like that. This guy from Philly and I mean he was just not the best roommate, got in a lot of trouble. He had this thing where he would store [laughs], he would store butterscotch crumpets from Tasty Cakes, he would store them in boxes under his bed cause he’s like, oh, I’m from Philly, you know, cheese steaks and Boyz II Men, I don’t know, but like he would store the boxes under his bed.
AD: Oh, this is not gonna turn out -
MC: And we ended up getting mice in the room -
AD: Of course you did.
MC: And he blamed the fact that we had mice because I’m from Alabama -
AD: Oh god!
MC: I’m like yeah, they came in with me in my luggage, what the fuck are you talking about? [Laughter] That’s not why we have mice, you’re storing dozens of boxes of snack cakes under your bed, you didn’t think we were gonna attract mice, what the fuck, you know? [Laughs] But yeah, that, that sophomore year after that, the summer going into junior year, I interned at Marshall Space Flight Center, which was in Normal, Alabama, which is right outside of Huntsville, so it’s back to Alabama, but just a different part, like northern Alabama.
AD: Okay.
MC: So it’s kind of a return home, but not really. You know, like back in Alabama, but just in, under different circumstances. They gave us a really nice apartment right there near the base and everything and I was studying human computer engineering. It’s the first place I saw a 3D printer because they 3D print the nose cone for the space shuttle because it burns up on re-entry. So they show the 3D printer on how they make it and everything and I was like, oh, this is cool.
He’s like, yeah, we may have these in homes one day, like oh, this is like 2001 when this happened. So I get back to college, it’s my junior year, which is 2001, it’s September, I think you might see where I’m going with this?
AD: Yes.
MC: I’m in the Kilgore which is one of the, it’s a dorm, but they also have a study hall there. So I was at the study hall at Kilgore and I was studying for a test for my abstract algebra II course and I saw on a TV in one of the other rooms, like the first plane going to the towers. And so everyone is transfixed and watching and we’re seeing all this happening. I still go to try to take my test cause my test was at 9:45 or so, so I still go to try to take my test and the professor was like, it’s cancelled for today, we’ll be in touch about what we do for the rest of the week or anything like that.
And I remember trying to get home and it being just super difficult because everyone was trying to get home at the same time, you know, this just happened and nobody knew what to do. I couldn’t get in touch with my parents, like the other good thing was that I had moved off campus by this point. So I had an apartment way off campus, which really removed a lot of drama from going to Morehouse, was the fact that I didn’t have to live and go to school there.
AD: And there were no mice and Tasty Cakes.
MC: Yeah, and none of that, no, no mice and no, I [laughs], I knew it was time for me to move out of campus when, to go back to the mouse incident, we had went to Kroger, we got glue traps and we ended up catching the mouse and he caught the mouse and he put it in this, this big plastic cup. There used to be these, I don’t know, I guess they still have like these industries that will drop off these little care packages at college.
And so it’s like this big plastic cup that I guess you could drink water and stuff out of, but they put, you know, gum and socks and a toothbrush and stuff in there, just to be like, hey, here’s a little welcome package. So he takes the mouse and he puts it in this cup and he takes the cup outside in the parking lot, sets it on fire and starts dancing around it. And I’m like, yes, I need to get off campus, this is -
AD: Yes.
MC: This is not what I signed up for at all [laughs].
AD: That’s sadism.
MC: It’s, it’s very, yeah, but to go forward to September 11th when this all happened, I remember getting back home and not really kind of knowing what was happening, I don’t think anybody really had a clue what was happening, we just all watched television and tried to figure out what the situation was. And what was happening in the country and everything. And I want to say it was maybe a few weeks later or so that we got told that the funding for our program was changing because now there’s this like new department of homeland security and that funding is being diverted.
We know that we promised that you would be working at a NASA facility upon graduation and that will be true, I think the seniors that were in the program, but we were juniors and so it now was no longer a sure deal that I was gonna work at a NASA facility after graduating. This is the beginning of my junior year, I have no career prospects lined up, like this was gonna be it. I put all my eggs in this one basket and now you’ve basically cut the handles off the basket and stomped on the eggs, so now what?
AD: Oh man.
MC: So I had to get very crafty to try to figure out kind of what my next step was because I really didn’t have anything lined up. I was working at the local symphony, well, it’s a symphony and the art museum, but I was working there, selling tickets, making, you know, minimum wage-ish, I think, maybe a little bit more, like $8.70 an hour or something like that. And it was a good job to have, like on nights and weekends, but I wasn’t getting rich from it, you know. And I was like I certainly don’t -
AD: What happened to the College Club where you were getting rich?
MC: Oh, College Club, went belly up, basically there was a point with College Club where they were giving away like $10,000 a week and they just went bankrupt, they got bought out by Student Advantage and I don’t even know if Student Advantage is around anymore, but College Club went belly up my freshman year. The good thing was they let me keep the camera. So the camera that they had us use, the digital camera to show how long ago this was, it was about the size of, huh, maybe the size of a DVD case, maybe a little bit shorter than that.
But you have to put a hard disc in it, like a three and a quarter hard disc in it because it was, that’s what it used for memory. So it saved all the images to like a disc that you could then take out and then put in your computer, like a floppy disc.
AD: Man, technology.
MC: So they let me keep the camera, which was great, but I’m like, who is gonna lug this big ass camera around? [Laughs] It’s not feasible. So junior year, I’ve already done my two internships but now there’s no guarantee of what I’m gonna do after that. I ended up getting in really good with the secretary in the computer science department, shout out to Mrs Banks and got really in good with her. I would sit in the computer lab, I would sit in her office, we would talk all the time and I mean she was a good friend, definitely helped get me through those last two years of college.
And sometimes you know, she would have to go and run an errand or something and she’d be like, I just need you to watch the office for me. So I would sit at her desk and I would be the secretary of the computer science department or whatever. But that also got me access to the interview books. So what happened was, the majors kind of had different companies that would come to the school and say, oh, we want to interview people blah-blah-blah, have them sign up or whatever.
And so there’s like this book that’s basically almost like a registry. You would put your resume in there, you’d put your name and your email address or something and you’d get basically placed for an interview with this company once they came to campus. So I was able to slide my resume in there, put my name on the registry and got to interview with a few places, interviewed at Microsoft, interviewed at Real Player, a couple of other companies.
None of them panned out unfortunately because they quickly realized, wait, you’re not studying computer science. I’m like no, but I really like computers. They’re like yeah, that’s not enough [laughs]. You can’t just really like computers; you have to actually be getting a degree in it. I’m like, well, I’m getting a degree in math, that’s like computers do math, no. [Laughs] None of that worked, unfortunately.
So by the time I graduated I had nothing lined up. I was still working at the theater. The only difference was that they took away the calculator that was at my terminal because they said that, you have a math degree, so you don’t need this [laughs].
AD: Oh man.
MC: Which I didn’t but I mean, come on! You know?
AD: Right.
MC: Kind of like rubbing salt in the wound.
AD: Yeah [laughs]. Okay, so get me from graduation and working at the theater to Revision Path -
MC: I worked at a lot of customer service jobs because there just were no real job prospects if you had a bachelor’s degree in math around that time in the market. You could be an actuary for an insurance agency, which I didn’t wanna do, or you could be a math teacher, which I didn’t wanna do. I didn’t wanna do anything that had to do with school cause I’m like, I’ve done 12 years of K through 12, plus four years of college, I’m, I needed a break from school.
So I did a lot of customer service jobs. I worked at it’s called the Woodruff Arts Center but it’s an alliance theater as well as the High Museum and then there’s also like a venue space inside of that as well. So I worked there selling tickets, I was a tele marketer for a long time, I did work for the Atlanta Opera. I just did like a bunch of like odd jobs in between that ticket, like design gigs here and there.
AD: So wait, I got to stop you. So you got a math degree, but you were interested in coding and HTML and web design and since you were a kid you were always interested in drawing. So at this point are you sort of a self-taught designer, a self-taught web designer?
MC: I am, but like I didn’t really have a portfolio of like things that I could show off because even then, we’re talking, and this is sort of the odd thing. There would be positions that I would see for like a web master or a web designer or something or a graphic designer. But they either wanted you to have went to an art school and gotten a degree in like visual communications or something like that or [0.50.00] went to a four year college and got a degree in computer science.
I don’t know why you need a degree in computer science to know how to program a website, but that was kind of what it was back then, we’re talking like from 2003 to like 2005, that’s kind of what the market was because there were no bootcamps or anything like that. I mean there actually [weren’t?] even, I think a bunch of schools that had, like design programs for the web.
AD: Right.
MC: So finding a job was, was really hard in design at that point, so I was, you know, I worked at AutoTrader for a while, like being a customer, it was a dealer concierge for like car dealers in the south west, you know [laughs], just a bunch of random jobs. Honestly, just to get food, you know, just to get food on the table, but nothing that was really stable. And I got fired from my last customer service job in December of 2004 and I had no clue what I was gonna do.
My mom pissed, like what are you doing? You went to that fancy school, you got that degree and now look at you, like what are you doing. And so now I’m like, oh shit, now I’m the one she has to worry about.
AD: Oh no!
MC: [Laughs] Yeah, that was the, the fucked up part about it, I’m like I need to, I need to figure something out. We have an all weekly here in Atlanta called Creative Loafing, sort of like analogous to the Village Voice or something like that. And there was a position in there, in the back, like the back classifieds for an electronic media specialist and I just applied on a whim. I was like, it’s like, I think I meet like 60% of this stuff, but sure, why not. And I got the job.
I interviewed, I got the job and I was there for about a year and a half and that’s kind of really like my first professional design gig where I cut my teeth on. Like oh, this is what design is like in the workplace, like I was web master, I don’t even think webmaster is a thing that people can be now, but like webmaster over three sites and I was making interactive CDs and slide shows and marquees, like those big roadside marquees that you see with the animated stuff, I was doing that kind of thing.
Did that for about a year and a half, then from there I went to AT&T as a designer, worked there for on and off about two years. Quit AT&T, started my studio, called Lunch, although back then it was called 3eighteen Media, I ended up changing the name later to Lunch because there were a lot of three blank blank media companies in Atlanta, there was like a 360 Media, a 352 Media, I was 3eighteen Media and I changed my name just to make it easier because people kept getting us confused [laughs].
I kept getting leads for the other companies, like yeah, I need to change that.
AD: I like Lunch, I wanna go to Lunch.
MC: Yeah [laughter], so it was about five years into Lunch, it was 2013 when I first got the idea to do Revision Path and it stemmed from an earlier project of mine that I did called The Black Weblog Awards that I started in 2005 and it was the first internet awards that kind of focused on black bloggers and podcasters and video bloggers. And I did that from 2005 to 2011. Right around my 30th birthday I sold it and then I kind of still had the idea to do some kind of big project like this, that I knew focused on like black creativity online.
Because I was a designer, I knew friends that were designers, and I just felt like they were not getting any kind of recognition for the work that they were doing. I certainly didn’t feel like I was getting recognition for the work that I was doing. Like no one was talking to us, we weren’t reflected in design media at all. So I wanted to make a platform to allow us to at least have that opportunity to talk about ourselves, for ourselves.
And so that’s how I started Revision Path is just kind of out of that idea, out of that notion. I wanted to do long form interviews, very similar to like The Great Discontent, or something like that, where you had these long, deep, 2,000 plus word interviews on people. And that was good, but it was just hard to get all of that in one sitting from a lot of folks. Also, nobody knew who the hell I was, so I would reach out to people and say, hey, my name is Maurice Cherry and I’m doing this on the 3rd and they’re like, who are you? Why would I talk to you, you know -
AD: Well, in 2013 nobody even knows what a podcast is yet.
MC: Right, exactly.
AD: It’s still really new and so the technology as probably difficult and were you doing in-person interviews or remote recording and -
MC: Oh, they were all remote.
AD: Yeah, okay, so, man, you really are a pioneer [laughter].
MC: So there were a lot of no, I mean there were some yes’s, thankfully, but there were definitely a lot of no’s in that first, I’d say maybe two years or so because people were just like, I don’t know who you are, I’ve never heard of this, why would I talk to you. You know, I’m gonna talk to this other podcast or I’m gonna talk to this other magazine, like why would I speak to you about the work that I’m doing. And so I kind of in those early days, it was tough. I really wanted to give up in those early days a lot because not only was I not really getting the support from other black designers, I just wasn’t getting support from the design community period.
I had reached out to other designers, podcasters that I knew, to try to you know, trade guests or say hey, if you’re looking for more diversity in your guests, I’ve talked to these people, I can introduce you and they’re like, yeah, we don’t really talk about race, we don’t really, we don’t really go into that, so that’s not really a thing that we’re gonna do. Or, you know, sometimes the messages would be just a lot nastier than that. I would often get accused of being a racist, like all the time, yeah, just a racist side project. Why are you only talking to black people, or why are you only talking to white people, you know. And then you flip it on them and they never respond.
AD: Yeah.
MC: When I look back at it I know what I was trying to do. I was trying to take this thing and put it in front of an audience that honestly wasn’t ready for it.
AD: You were ahead of your time but at the same time you built a platform and then you started stocking it with this incredibly nutrient dense archive and you were growing it, I mean it gestated and, and grew in the garden you know, and now it’s in full bloom.
MC: The big change came from me probably in 2015. In 2015 I had started to get involved with this, with this professional organization, AIGA, so I was doing some volunteer work with them on their diversity and inclusion taskforce and I had put together this presentation that I was gonna present at South by Southwest called Where Are the Black Designers? And I did that in conjunction with AIGA, they certainly helped out with the research, they helped out with the funds for me to get to South by Southwest to even make it, like happen. And I remember giving that speech to a room of about 15 people, maybe 20. Like it was an empty room [laughs]. It was an empty room.
I mean the room at South by where they have these, where they have these talks, can easily seat about 200 people. And my room felt like the room that you ducked into at the end of the day to charge your phone, you know. I’m speaking to like a anaemic crowd [laughs] of folks, just like not a lot of people there. And thinking, what am I doing? Like what am I proving with this, you know, sort of having another come to Jesus talk with myself. Like what are you doing? What is this? Now, there were people in that room who thankfully I still actually keep in touch with to this day because these were people that were from like Facebook and from Pinterest and from other companies and stuff that kind of saw the value of what it was that I was trying to do. And what I was trying to put forth. But it was sort of at that time, particularly at South by Southwest I got invited to the Facebook house that they had there and got to meet some people that were there and talk to folks. And it suddenly dawned on me, like I just need to run like my own race. Like I just need to stay in my own lane, like very similar to when I was in college and figuring out, I need to just focus on my stuff. I need to focus on whatever the end goal is and just keep doing that and not get distracted by trying to make this a thing for everyone.
And just make it the best that I can for the audience that I have. And so that mindset happened like right after South by Southwest where I just kind of said okay, we’re just gonna go full steam on this, every week and just keep going and see how far we can take it. That was sort of what the goal was and I’m, you know, very fortunate to still be able to do it to this day, which is great, we’re over 350 episodes -
AD: Yeah!
MC: But I don’t know if I would have gotten that far if I wouldn’t have made that shift because I really was trying hard to make it like something for the entire design community to be a part of. And the entire design community kind of showed me, like yeah, we’re not interested in it. So I was like, okay, well let me just focus on the audience I have because they like it and so that’s kind of what I ended up doing.
AD: Again, a very mature and astute and wise kind of decision making, I think, especially at that young age and, and to dedicate to yourself -
MC: Well, I wasn’t, I wasn’t, I wasn’t that young when that happened, I was 35, so [laughs] I -
AD: Oh man, that still feels young though [laughter]. I feel you that it’s a difficult and yet important decision to make to stay the course on something that feels so organic and important and meaningful to you and does have an audience but is not necessarily turning into the thing you thought it would be right away or turning into something that’s gonna pay your bills and take care of your future, or is it? To stay so driven and, and connected to a course, I don’t know man, what, what were you doing at the same time to pay the bills and were you still pursuing web design or?
MC: Yeah, so, so when I started Revision Path I was five years in on my studio.
AD: Okay.
MC: So I had, yes, so at this point in time I had established clients, I had a distributor team of designers and developers that I was working with. I was very fortunate early on in the days of starting my studio to get involved with the Political Campaign. It was one of the, the mayoral candidates that was running for mayor in Atlanta and ended up really impressing her and impressing the whole campaign and a lot of the connections that I have to this day stemmed from that, like a lot of professional connections. I’m not saying everyone should go out and work a campaign cause it’s brutal, but those early days of like 2009 in my studio really kind of helped shape what the rest of the studio was until I kind of wound things down in 2017. But certainly by the time I started Revision Path, it was just like a hobby/passion project.
AD: Got it.
MC: Like oh, I finally have the time to do this, let me see if I can do it, you know? And once, honestly, I think it was maybe around 2017 when the podcast started overtaking the studio work cause what happened was, really the market just changed. People didn’t really want or need these big bespoke word press sites anymore, they were very comfortable with just getting something on Squarespace or Wix or something and so a lot of the work that I was doing just kind of died out because people wanted simpler solutions that they could handle themselves and they just didn’t see the need to do something bigger than that.
And I tried to pivot my business. I did creative consulting and that worked out for a while, doing some work with Vox Media and with some other companies, but even that was, like short lived stuff, like six months here, three months there, that kind of thing. Nothing really super sustainable whereas you know, back in the day I was like on retainer with a few companies. So there would be [laughs], it would be great, I’d have constant work, constant money coming in, like this is great.
But Revision Path started to overtake the studio just in terms of not just money that was coming in, but also just the amount of work that was happening.
AD: Sure.
MC: And so by the time you know, 2017 kind of came by, I was winding the studio down, I ended up getting a fulltime job at a company called Fog Creek Software, which then became Glitch and I worked there for two and a half years and got laid off in May and now here I am.
AD: So, okay, so the pandemic has definitely thrown people for a lot of loops but at what point did, and I wanna talk about you being laid off, but I also wanna know how did Revision Path be acquired by the Smithsonian, that’s a huge honor?
MC: Yeah, so, that happened, that started to, to really tell that story I have to go back to 2015.
AD: Okay.
MC: And in 2015 I attended this conference, it was at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it was called The Black and Design Conference and it was put on my the African American Student Union at the [1.05.00] Harvard Graduate School of Design and it’s the first time they had ever done an event like this and I heard about it, I saw tickets were like less than $100 and I’m like, yeah, I’m going. I’m going and I was trying to get other people to go with me, like other black designers and they’re like, oh well, what, what are they gonna be talking about and you know, is it, are they talking about Photoshop, I don’t know if that’s really to do with my job.
And I’m like, it’s a black design conference, how many of these have you been to in your career, let’s just go! Like the tickets are super cheap, let’s just go. And I couldn’t really get other folks to wanna go with me, so I went for that first year and it was so transformative because it’s rare, and it’s probably different now but certainly back then in 2015, it’s so rare to go to an event and feel affirmed, not just as a designer, but also as a black person.
AD: Yeah.
MC: Like oh, like I felt like this was, this was great. So they talked about space, like the concept of space and they started at the neighborhood and they zoomed out to, like the city, then the, the region and like further out and there was a lot of talk about preservation and how do you create safe spaces and make spaces and things of that nature. And granted, Harvard Graduate School of Design largely deals with the built environment, so it’s architects, it’s landscape folks, etc. Not a lot of, actually no, at that point, web and graphic people.
I was like one of the, probably one of the, the few that were there, really just trying to see what this was all about, see what, see what this was going to do right?
AD: Hmm-mm.
MC: And I just felt so inspired from that and one of the things that they were mentioning was the new African American Museum of History and Culture that was gonna be opening up because at this point in time the announcement, I think, it came up, I don’t even know if they had broken ground on it yet. And so one of the, the head architects, Phil Freelon, who passed away last year – rest in peace – was there at the, at the event, giving the keynotes. And he was being interviewed by Darrel Crooks; Darrel Crooks at the time was the art director for the Atlantic, now he’s a creative director at Apple.
But they were doing an interview together and one of the curators from the museum was there and I remember talking with her and I gave her my card and I told her like, yeah, I do this podcast where I talk to black designers and you know, I’d love if you could just take a listen to it and if you think this might be something that would be good for the museum because they kept mentioning that they were looking for people to donate and they were like, you can donate anything as long as it has to do with black culture.
AD: Oh?
MC: And we’ll evaluate it and see if it’s worthy, you know, to go in the museum. And I remember telling her this and she was just like, aha, yeah, sure, okay. [Laughs] Like I think at first she didn’t really understand, she’s like, a podcast, what is that? Like she didn’t really -
AD: Right, it’s really hard for her to imagine what, how an audio format could be donated and fit in a -
MC: Yeah, and I was trying to kind of, you know, explain like what we do and these were some of the people I talk to and she didn’t really, I don’t think it really registered then. And so the next time that I went to the conference, because they have it every other year, in 2017, I went and the same curator was there. And I told her about the podcast again and I said we now have these sponsors and we just hit 250 or so episodes, I think, something like that and you know, it would be great if she could take a listen and just let me know. I don’t mean to be a pest but I really feel like this is important and I just really want to get your take on it, you know, honestly.
And it wasn’t until the year after that, 2018 that I finally heard back from the National Museum of African American History and Culture and they’re like, we’re gonna go through the archives and evaluate it and we’ll let you know what we think. So they go through the archives, they come back to me and they say, these are the people whose interviews we want to have in the museum and they have like a list of 10 people.
And we went back and forth on a couple of the people just in terms of the historical relevance and what they were looking for. Settled on the final list and they’re like great. So then we’re going to do our thing and obtain museum usage rights, which is, I guess, contacting each of the people and seeing if this is okay and getting, you know, getting everyone to sign off on it essentially, right? And so from then it’s just really like a waiting game. One of the unfortunate things that happened, one of the people whom we were set to include in the, set to include in the exhibit and we did end up including him, but he passed away and so we ended up dedicating it to his wife and his son, so it went towards his estate and everything, which I think might have lengthened the process a bit. For those who might be curious, his name is Jon Daniel, J-O-N, he’s a prolific creative director in the UK.
And so it wasn’t until around, I wanna say May or June of 2019 that they finally got back to me. So this was a lot of waiting at this point and I’m checking up like, hey, merry Christmas, just trying to see if there’s any more I can do, they’re like, we’ll get back to you, okay.
AD: Okay.
MC: So just me continually checking in trying to figure out, like, is there more that I can do to speed up this process, you need more information from me, anything? So they get back to me and they’re like congratulations, you know, they send me the deed of gifts, which basically is the contract that solidifies, this is what you’re donating to the museum and we’ve verified it etc. And so at the time I’m like, we’re coming up on our 300th episode and I knew that was going to be with Hannah Beachler, who was the academy award winning production design for Black Panther.
And I really wanted to have Hannah’s episode in there because I told her agent that if we interview her, we can get her interview into the museum and she was like great, we’ll do it. So I kind of like lied a little bit to make that happen because there was no guarantee that the museum was gonna accept it, but I had to say that in order to interview Hannah, sorry Hannah if you’re listening [laughter].
AD: It’s a great interview.
MC: Thank you, yeah, and also I had been to the museum since this whole process had started. So I actually got a chance to see like the exhibits and see what the museum actually is like about and what they’re looking for. And I knew that at the time they were learning very heavily into Black Panther cause Black Panther came out in 2018, I believe. And so they were leaning very heavily into that. Like in the gift shop it was like all Black Panther stuff and everything and I’m like, oh great, I have one of the people who worked on the movie and I asked the curator, like can we slide this interview in and I was like, I’m gonna have it in a few days, I can send you the raw audio file in the same format as the other ones and she was like, yeah, sure, we’ll just issue a new deed of gift.
Like great, so sent that in, they issued a new one, so it was initially gonna be 10 episodes, it ended up being 11. And then I also double checked with them to make sure that we could actually announce that this was the first podcast to be admitted into the Smithsonian. Like I really wanted that -
AD: Yeah.
MC: I really wanted to make sure that distinction was correct, cause I knew that the Smithsonian had audio files -
AD: Okay.
MC: Like audio recordings from the past and things like that, but I don’t know if they actually had a podcast and also because the Smithsonian is not just one museum, it’s like all of the museums collectively make up the Smithsonian, but this was particularly attributed to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. So once we checked with their internal affairs and they said yes, that’s true, it’s the first podcast that’s been admitted into the Smithsonian. I’m like yes, send the press release [laughs]. And it went out; it was July of 2019 that it went out and the news kind of hit that Revision Path is now in the Smithsonian.
AD: I have goosebumps, that’s such an exciting story [laughter] and I love how you worked all the angles, you are very resourceful, in the same way that you sort of slid your name into that, those interview books in college [laughs] you just had, well you had your eye on all the moving parts and pieces and all the stakeholders and when something aligned or when you could make it align you did and it worked out really nicely. And you’re the first podcast that’s been admitted into the Smithsonian, that’s huge.
MC: Yeah [laughs]. And it’s interesting because, you know, that happened and I wasn’t sure, like, and I think maybe it’s something I’m still, I, I told this to people, maybe months or so after that happened, I was like, I don’t really feel the weight or the gravity of it yet because when that happened, also at the same time that the company I was working for, like they were doing this restructuring of management and then I was like in this weird place at my job for a while. And it happened the very next day after that assignment and so it felt like this was happening because of that.
AD: Oh?
MC: And so I was like in this weird limbo period at work for about, I don’t know, maybe like a month or two and it was coming up on the next instalment of this same conference, this Black Design Conference I was telling you about. And so I was just telling myself, okay, you know what, I’ll go to the conference and that will be my victory lap. Like don’t try to stress now about whether or not you’re getting your roses for this thing that just happened. Like go to the conference, that’ll be where this happens and sure enough, it was.
Like I went to the conference, the curator was there, people knew about it, people were like taking pictures and I’ll never forget this one girl actually came up to me and was like physically crying, like I listened to your podcast when I was studying at Mica and it just helped me get through and like just thank you so much and like, it’s so weird because podcasting for me has kind of always largely been this solitary thing.
I do all my interviews remote and I really kind of don’t hear much feedback unless I do a survey or someone says something on social media or I get a review on Apple podcast. So I kind of just keep things going, often I’m also recording like a month or so in advance, so I’m always ahead of whatever is out right now. Like people listening to this interview coming up, but I’m like, oh yeah, we did that like a month ago, like I’ve already moved past it to, to something else. Like wait until you hear what’s coming up next, you know [laughs].
It wasn’t until I got to that conference and then really like felt it, like that’s where it sort of, like the weight of it kind of hit me, like this is a big deal and you know, I went back to work and things were fine, you know, after, after I was able to kind of, I guess feel that recognition. But certainly for a while afterwards I didn’t feel, I wouldn’t say I didn’t feel good, but I just didn’t feel anything about the announcement. Like it happened, I’m like yeah, it took four years to happen, I’m like great. Now what?
AD: But I think you’ve done something really important here and you know, it may not, it may not all be felt in a single moment. I think it’s the kind of thing where it’s a legacy building activity that will be felt by many people, that it’ll ripple out and you won’t necessarily even know how many lives you’re affecting with this, but hopefully you know, you’ll be able to look back after it’s been in the Smithsonian for years and you’re on episode 600 or 750 [laughs] and feel like the architect of a really powerful and important archive.
MC: I think I’m starting to feel that now, let’s say particularly this year I started to feel it because you know, 2020 has already been such an interesting year in general because of the pandemic and the lockdowns but prior to all of that, I was set to do, well we did a live show out in Los Angeles in February and that was the first time we had done a live show, maybe in about, oh god, maybe about two years, I think we did one back in 2017 in Atlanta.
We did it with Facebook, it was a good event, but it could have been better, I think. But this was the first time doing one that was like 100% from me, from Revision Path and like had a great turnout, saw a lot of people that I hadn’t seen in a long time, like there were friends from college that I hadn’t seen, showed up, that I was not expecting.
But like yeah, we heard about it on TV, I’m like, oh TV? Who said something about this on TV? I just put it out on the web that I was doing a live show, you know? And so like I started off the year like yeah, we’re gonna do this kind of like tour of sorts where I had been talking to AIGA people in different cities about bringing the show there and so we were gonna do Seattle and Kansas City and Houston and Chicago and DC and New York and you know, then pandemic happens and it’s like, no travel.
[Laughs] And then I had been pushing things so hard, doing stuff and work and then right up to the time I got laid off, you know, it was the time when, as the layoff happened and then the week after that was really when I think I was really able to start processing what was gonna happen next. As I said before, before we started recording, I just let life kind of wash over me for several weeks while I tried to figure out what the next step was gonna be.
AD: Are you still figuring it out?
MC: I’m still figuring it out, I’m not great at the job search thing. I can build something from scratch, I can build an idea from scratch and build it up like the thing that has been difficult for me, and took me a while, even at this stage in my career, is like how do I take all the stuff that I’ve done and like condense it into this resume/portfolio format that may get screened out by some algorithm. I feel like I can always describe my work in context better than someone just seeing it on their own, particularly if it’s in a portfolio. I know that I bring all this stuff to the table, I bring all these skills and experiences etc. And then I try to get it down into a resume that I think might be good and then you submit it to a job that you think you’d be perfect for and they’re like, no, like oh, okay, well. Let’s try another one [laughs].
AD: You do teach, right, you’re an educator as well?
MC: Yeah in the past I’ve taught, I haven’t taught probably courses in probably a good four or five years, but I taught web design courses at DeVry University, I also did some teaching for a small, tiny bit, it was like a crossover course with Savannah College of Art and Design. I taught courses with Media Bistro, so I was teaching other professionals in the media industry about podcasting and digital marketing and stuff like that.
AD: Okay, I just want to put this out there into your sort of marinade to think about, as you’re figuring out what your next step is, is that all of this really diverse life experience and all of this really scrappy resourceful building of platforms from scratch is really, really useful for other people to learn from in an educational environment. I think you would be an exceptional college professor. This kind of diverse experience that maybe doesn’t work well with algorithms [laughs] really plays very well in the academic sphere where they’re looking for people who have done a bunch of different things and can apply that to the educational environment. Not only that, but you’re a natural mentor. I’m, I know I don’t know you, but I feel like that might be true.
MC:Wow [laughs], thank you for saying that. It’s interesting because in the past I have been, I wouldn’t necessarily say I’ve been offered, I think it’s sort of been tossed around and it’s only been here in Atlanta, which I have a whole rant sitting on my spirit about the Atlanta design community, but I won’t go there. But I certainly have had kind of invitations to teach, like at some Atlanta design schools and then that opportunity kinda just fizzles out when they’re like, oh, but you don’t have a degree in education. No, but I’ve got all this lived experience. They’re like yeah, that’s not gonna count, like oh well.
AD: I don’t -
MC: I’ve heard that in the past, yeah, you should come teach, you should do a lecture at this school or that school and then it always like comes down to the fact that I don’t have the, whatever the pedigree or the certain degree is that is needed to, I guess, signal to someone that I would be okay to do this thing. It’s a weird feeling and so part of why, I think, I built a lot of platforms and things on my own is because I know I can do it.
I don’t need to have whatever that pedigree or that degree is that says, you can only do this if you’ve done a four year course of study and blah-blah-blah. I’m like no, I can do it, I’ve got the skills to do it, so I’m just gonna do it.
AD: Right, yeah, I’ll admit that my feeling is more of a gut feeling and I can’t speak to how you may present in terms of you know, the academia, trying to fill hire, for positions, but just in general, in your soul searching, keep that in mind because I feel like there is so much information that you’ve learned and taught yourself and there’s a very, very important thing, equation here, is that you learned how to teach yourself. You had your first really positive experience was with those kids and the Legos in California. And I think there’s something to that.
MC: From your lips to a higher managers ears [laughter].
AD: Okay, okay.
MC:No, I agree with you, you know I certainly have had, and there’s been other times throughout my career, I mean I did a lot of volunteer work with Hands On Atlanta, which is a local non-profit here in Atlanta that helps out, it’s a local non-profit that helps out other non-profits, but they do it through education. So I’ve done a lot of speaking through there, I think it’s possible, I’m not ruling out, certainly.
AD: Okay.
MC: It’s, yeah, like the thing that’s always been a struggle for me, when it comes down to looking for work is like how do I take all this experience and put it in a way that someone will say, yes, you got the job or yes, you got the opportunity cause oftentimes that doesn’t happen. I mean I’ve went in and talked with like recruiters, or I’ve talked to people at like design, staffing firms or something and they’ll have resume and they’ll look at say my nine years of work with my studio and just put a big X over it.
Like okay, so, let’s talk about this work that you did at AT&T in 2008 and I’m like, argh, I don’t even remember anyone who worked there back then. Like why are we counting out all this other stuff? Or they’ll look at the things that I’ve done and I don’t know if this is a particularly unique Atlanta thing where the work that I’ve done that has not been for an established company, has always been looked at as a hobby.
Like I’ve had people say podcast, oh, you have a podcast, that’s a nice hobby, but not actual experience because it’s not for a company or something, you know what I mean? It’s a really, weird, stupid feeling.
AD: Yeah, I hate that weird, stupid feeling. My life before podcasting was in TV and I did a lot of home improvement and makeover television shows and what I really took from that is, you know, I learned how to tell stories and I love storytelling and particularly where it intersects with design. But when people look at that experience, I’ve always felt like, well, what does this qualify me for? It’s not gonna get me a job with a design firm, it’s not, so how is it useful?
But I learned so much in that chapter of my life in terms of just being able to be really agile, really scrappy, really creative, really fast thinking, solutions on the fly, you know, shoved into many different situations and adapted to them, you know, that kind of thing and that’s all really valuable life experience. But yeah, how do you tell somebody that? I feel your concern there, but I just wanna put my vote out there for you being an educator. And then I’ll leave it at that cause I [laughs] -
MC:I’m here for it; I definitely would love to do it. I mean I do, I wouldn’t, in the times in the past where I’ve taught, like I have loved it, like it’s been great, so I’m not against it at all.
AD: So I have an important question to ask before I let you go, I’ve taken a lot of your time. But this has been, I just enjoy so much, so it hasn’t felt like it’s taken a lot of time. You know, you’ve made, you’ve made the last chapter of your life, the central theme of it has been about asking important questions of others in your interviews but also questioning things around you and society and culture. And I wonder what would you like to be asked about you now that you’re on the other side of the interview equation?
MC: I mean I guess the big question mark for me has always been kind of how do I take all of these skills and things that I can do and just find a way to make a living [laughs], you know? I don’t feel like I wanna be pigeon holed into doing just one particular type of thing. The work that I did at Glitch, for example, was really great because I got to do a little bit of everything. I did audio and video and marketing and design and business development and just, I got to really spread my wings and do a lot of stuff. And so I really thrive in positions like that where I’m able to do a lot of different kinds of things, but it’s still all in service of like a central goal.
AD: Okay.
MC: I just still don’t know the best way [cross talking – inaudible] -
AD: Director, what was Glitch?
MC: Glitch, well the last title I had was senior creative strategist.
AD: Okay.
MC: Yeah, but I know just right now, in this particular time that I happen to be looking for work, is like I’ll look for creative strategist positions or, you know, things that are similar and they’re like oh, you need to have had agency experience, have you worked for an agency? You haven’t worked for an agency? Then why would we talk to you, that kind of thing. Like it’s a weird sort of, I don’t even know what the right word for it is. It’s like I know that I have the experience but then when it actually goes out to me trying to find like work with a company, it’s always a barrier there and the barrier is because I didn’t go this particular route or I didn’t take this particular path to get a degree in this subject or something.
You know, there’s a lot of talk about the pipeline, about oh, the pipeline is broken, or how do we change the pipeline and I know that there’s a lot of work that is done with that towards like new graduates, like how do we get kids and new graduates into the industry, but like there’s a lot of mid-career folks like me that are scratching their heads too. Like what the fuck? You know, I’ve seen how this industry has changed in the past 20 years.
I mean the positions I had back in my 20s don’t even exist anymore, because the industry has just changed that much. And granted, I’ve kept up with it as much as I can, just in terms of education and trying new things, and I’m not saying this is some sort of weird ageism thing, but it’s just been very difficult for me to figure out how do I take all this stuff that I have to offer and really, like make a living with it, cause that’s always been the thing.
Like all my projects and things that I’ve done have like not gotten a lot of support. When I did the Black Weblog Awards from 2005 to 2011, I mean I sold it because it was costing me thousands of dollars to do every year and we were getting like jack shit in terms of support. I think we got, at the most, $100 in donations throughout the five years that I did it. I ended up selling it because I was like, I’m turning 30 and I don’t want this anymore.
Like this is my burden that I’m gonna cast off and even with Revision Path, I’ve been fortunate to get sponsors to do you know, this kind of work, but even that varies from year to year. Like it’s, I know that the work is important, but then having a foundation in place to continue to sustain it has been difficult. So it’s, I don’t know if I answered your question, I think I’m just rambling at this point.
AD: Okay, well, that’s fine [laughter].
MC: I’m sorry.
AD: Maybe it’s time to bring your studio back, but more of a, being, coming more of a consultant at this point.
MC: I think that would be good, I think that would be good if, if, yeah, I think that would be good. If folks would pay for it, I think that would be good. That’s, that’s also been, I don’t know if that’s another thing that’s been weird in terms of like questions that I would wanna ask me. Well, I guess that might be one thing. I, I know that my work has value. I know that intrinsically, but the work doesn’t seem to have value when it’s time for me to actually get paid, which I think might just be the general creative struggle, but I certainly feel it pretty hard.
Like when people say, oh, we love what you’re doing, we love, you do this, blah-blah-blah, can you come speak for XYZ and they don’t pay. Or, oh, we’d love to just, you know, take some time to pick your brain and they don’t want to pay for consulting. They just think I’m gonna just help them out for free.
AD: Yes.
MC:I get so many, so many requests that are like, could you just throw this around to your network, can you just check your network and see if your network might be interested and I’m like, my network is working, I could do it as an ad on the podcast cause then I could certainly get it out that way and then the offer usually just kind of dies out, after that. So.
AD: Yeah, I feel you; I mean that is, that is an ongoing struggle across the board -
MC: Yeah, it’s just, it’s frustrating cause I know that my work has value, I know that what I’ve done over the years has value and I know that they know that it has value because they wouldn’t come to me and ask me. But yeah, when it’s like, when it comes down to getting paid or when it comes down to something where I can sustain this and keep doing it, you know, it dies off, so.
AD: Well, I do wanna mention to our listeners that there is a job board on Revision Path and so it’s a great place to look for talent, but also to place your listing if you’re hiring. And that’s one way, that’s one stream of revenue that’s coming in for you, correct?
MC:Yeah, so people can place listings, $99 for 30 days, we mention it on the, at the top of every podcast we’ll mention your listing and it’s a way that it’s getting out, you know, to thousands and thousands of folks that are listening.
AD: What aspect of yourself do you wish that the world would acknowledge?
MC: I wanna just say like the general brilliance of the work that I’ve done and I don’t mean to sound egotistical when I say that, but like even doing the Black Weblog Awards back then in 2005 and, and keeping it going through 2011, I mean NPR even picked it up at one point. They had a show called News and Notes and they had this thing called the Bloggers Round Table, that I know one of their producers got from the Black Weblog Awards because the only people that they featured were Black Weblog Award winners.
They even would mention it on the show, like oh, you just won a Black Weblog Award, congratulations. Like clearly it’s got the value, like I wanna get my flowers while I’m here, you know what I’m saying?
AD: Yeah, but you’re a head of your time, which is, I mean it sucks for you, but that’s, you’re a visionary and an innovator and an inventor and the very nature of that is that you build things and people take time to recognize their value, even though you see it, that’s why you built it. And so it’s hard, it’s hard to be first, it’s hard to be ahead of your time.
MC:I guess I just want people to, to see and recognize that or, or know that that’s a talent, I guess, that I have. I don’t know, I don’t know if you can put that on a resume and it not sound cheesy.
AD: I don’t know if you can either, but that’s [laughter] why I wanna put it here in this podcast because, because it’s true and that’s one of the things I think you could bring to academia and also to consulting is you have a very astute sense of what’s coming down the pipeline and what needs to be built, what platforms need to be built in order to sort of bridge those gaps and get there. And that’s a systems thinker, that’s a strategy mind and then, you know, you’re a design thinker.
And I think all of that, that skillset, yeah, it doesn’t, it doesn’t line item into resume things very well, but it’s a kind of thinking that a lot of companies could really benefit from. And students, so it’s hard to be brilliant man, and everyone is going oh, Maurice will be fine [laughs].
MC: Yeah, you, that’s, that’s, yeah, that’s so funny because people, people have like contacted me, you know, like oh yeah, like you’ve got a great network, you’ll be fine, you’ll find something. I’m like, okay, these bills still have to be paid, but I’ll take your word for it [laughs], I guess. Cause, I mean I’m not sitting on my laurels not doing anything.
AD: Nobody is thinking that -
MC:Yeah, oh no, I hope no one is thinking that, actually some people might be thinking that, to be honest. Some people I think are, are thinking like oh, this is, you know, this just happened because you know, you’re a black guy in podcasting, so that’s why you got this thing. I’ve certainly heard that, but whatever. I know that’s not the case, I know what I’ve had to work on and work hard at to get to where I’m at, but you know. There’s no accounting for what other people think sometimes.
AD: No, I know, that’s a whole [laughter] drama. Well, okay, so let’s just remove all of the pandemic and your current sort of evaluating of what you want out of life, in the short term and thinking about and look at the big, big picture. What do you want your life to be like 30 years from now?
MC: Thirty years from now, I’ve definitely thought this out. So there are people whom I would love to work with, to build things. And you know, before I did, this has been alluded to earlier in the interview, is before I did all this like design and podcasting stuff, I was a writer and a musician, I did that well before I started learning computers and teaching myself code and all that sort of stuff. I would like to get back that in some sort of way. I have a big fantasy of having my own [laughs], of having my own Afro Cuban big band, like Bobby Sanabria, like something along those lines.
AD: Oh my god, I want that so bad.
MC:I, because I played in a jazz band in high school, it was actually for the community college and that opened up my mind to like the Great American jazz classics and stuff. But we also did a lot of classic rock, like a lot of Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears and stuff like that and I just love that whole sound, like I’ll listen to songs and think of like, oh, this would be better if it were this. Like I’ll give you an example.
The other day I was saying something about the theme to Punch Out, which is a video game on Nintendo. I was like the theme for that would be so great if it was like this duelling guitar Spanish style, like a guitar and a mandolin, just strumming it out, that would be so dope. So I would love to get back to music in some kind of way in 30 years, whether it’s that band or something. I would like to get a MacArthur Genius Grant - I don’t know how that would happen, but that is on my bucket list [laughs]. My bucket list is definitely to get a MacArthur Genius Grant. I would really love to work with Lin-Manuel Miranda. I’m like one degree of separation from him. I don’t know how that would happen, like we’re right around the same age too. I would, and I just watched the Freestyle Love Supreme documentary last night too. I would love to find a way to work with him in any capacity. I don’t know what that would look like, I’m putting out in the universe, for sure, I would love to work with him. I also have like, I know I have a series of graphic novels inside me.
AD: Whoo!
MC: It’s been a number of ideas that I’ve been germinating for shit, decades at this point. And in 30 years I would love for that to be out in the world in some way, whether that’s graphic novels, whether that’s web series or be that whatever, the media ends up being in 30 years, but I would love for that to get out in some kind of way. Like I still feel like some of my best work has not been done yet. But it’s not necessarily in design, like it’s in music and it’s in writing.
So I feel like those opportunities are things I would like to do in the next 30 years. I mean the thing that, you know, I sort of had to come to terms with, with the podcast thing and the Smithsonian is like, that’s a huge honor and it’s always gonna be there, as long as the Smithsonian exists, the podcast will be there. So in that respect I feel like my place in history is set as it relates to that.
I’m not saying that’s where I just say okay, that’s it; good job everybody and just walk away from it [laughs]. But I feel like the fact that it’s in such an institution and it’s preserved in that way, that it makes me feel like it won’t be something that vanishes with time. I mean I’ve been around on the web since the late 90s. You try finding something from the web from back then maybe it’s in the internet archive, it most likely is not. There has been so much content that has just been lost, completely, to the annals of time as technology has progressed. And I don’t want what Revision Path is to get lost in that, but then because I feel like it’s now part of the Smithsonian that it, you know, it’ll be preserved in that fashion. So like now for the next 30 years I know there’s music in me, like I said, there’s graphic novels and books in me. I just need the, or want to have the time and the space to do that and to make that happen. So I feel like that’s what my, like magnum opus stuff will be later on in life.
AD: Yeah, well, you’re a multifaceted creative and you don’t want to get pigeon holed. So I think that Genius Grant is a nice way to sort of put some financial fuel into all those fires.
MC: Yeah, that’s, I forget how much money it is, but that would be great. Not that I’m doing it just for the money, but I mean I do know that they do provide you the sort of sustainable kind of framework for you to do a creative work for an extended period of time and I would love that, that would be great.
AD: I would love that for you! Thank you so much for spending this time with me, for sharing all those great stories from your life and for, you know, just, just sharing your whole life story with me and our listeners.
MC: Well, thank you, it’s not something that I think about all the time because again, I’m always kind of thinking ahead, months ahead, years ahead etc. So I never really do a lot of taking stock in that way. And it’s funny, even when I think back on like the past experiences that I’ve had, I can laugh at it now, so I don’ t want people that are listening to think that I’m being sort of, like flippant or dismissive of things that have happened in the past which honestly, you know, has contributed trauma.
I’m not gonna lie, I have been to therapy, things of that nature, so I’m not saying that it happened and I just got over it. But, I’m at a point now in my life where I realize, you know, these things have all happened for one reason or another. I’ve lived through it all and that makes me a much stronger person that I could have ever thought I would be. So let’s just kinda keep it going and see what happens.
AD: Yeah, let’s do it. Thank you for listening! To see images and learn more about Maurice’s work and read the show notes, click the link in the details of this episode on your podcast app, or go to Cleverpodcast.com where you can also sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe to Clever on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you would please do us a favor and rate and review, it really does help us out. We also love chatting with you on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, you can find us at Clever Podcast and you can find me at Amy Devers. Clever is produced by 2VDE Media with editing by Rich Stroffolino, and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is proudly distributed by Design Milk.
Many thanks to this episode’s sponsors:
Yellow Images
Yellow Images is the number one marketplace of 40K high-quality premium mockups, creative fonts, Images 360°, and a creative store full of amazing graphic assets like lettering, icons, illustrations, pattern, textures, presets, brushes, UX & UI kits, and more. Use promo code CLEVER30 to get a 30% discount on your purchase right here. Don’t miss out! These coupons are limited, so first come - first served.
Webflow
Webflow gives designers the power of code in a visual interface, allowing you to directly build whatever you have in mind—without engineers. Webflow brings the power of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into a visual interface so designers can actually build completely custom designs without worrying about writing code. Webflow is offering Clever listeners a limited number of discount codes for 10% off an annual plan with a new account! Use code CLEVER at wfl.io/clever.
Adobe MAX
Adobe MAX’s annual creativity conference is going online this year -- October 20-22. This is sure to be a creative experience like no other. Plus, it’s all free. Explore over 350 sessions across 10 tracks, hear from amazing speakers and learn new creative skills… all totally free and online this October. To register, head to max.adobe.com.
Photography by Li Su
What is your earliest memory?
I think I was around three or four years old, and I vividly remember the "Where’s The Beef?" commercial that Wendy’s used to air in the 80s. We actually had a Wendy’s in town, and I remember us going there as a family for dinner one night. One of the burgers had a tiny beef patty in the middle of it, and I said "Where's the beef?" just like in the commercial.
How do you feel about democratic design?
Honestly, I'm not too familiar with the concept. Democratic design sounds like a good ideal to strive for, but I think it probably works best when the designer and the client are in sync. I think we have all worked on a project where the initial scope of work has creeped out of the realms of affordability (for the client) and sustainability (for the designer). At that point, it might be hard to apply democratic design to make everyone involved on the project happy.
What’s the best advice that you’ve ever gotten?
Happiness is a choice.
Also, you're going to get criticized anyway, so you might as well do what the fuck you want.
Maurice at age 4
Maurice in high school, senior year
Revision Path Live flyer
How do you record your ideas?
If I'm on my phone, I'll either record voice notes in Otter or jot down lists in Google Keep. I like using Google Keep, because you can turn notes into Google Docs if you need to expand upon something.
If I'm on my iPad Pro, I'll write down or sketch ideas quickly in Notes. I also use GoodNotes a lot for taking notes during meetings, organizing random thoughts, and for free writing.
What’s your current favorite tool or material to work with?
Notion. I was introduced to it at my last job, and fell in love with how versatile and extensible it is. I manage my podcast production, track project updates, and I even host my portfolio on Notion. It's been a real game changer for me.
What book is on your nightstand?
Currently, it's You Were Born For This: Astrology for Radical Self-Acceptance by Chani Nicholas. It’s the last physical book I bought, but I also have lots of books on Kindle and Audible.
Why is authenticity in design important?
Authenticity is important because design -- for products and services -- is about solving problems. If you're not authentic about trying to solve a problem, then perhaps you're the problem.
Favorite restaurant in your city?
Oh wow... remember restaurants? Memories. Carroll Street Café is usually a favorite of mine because it's so chill and cozy while also serving great food.
What might we find on your desk right now?
Aside from my podcast setup, I have two Mega Man amiibos, a Mario figurine, a Morgana figurine from Persona 5, and some other small trinkets from my travels. I also have a big steel storage box from Best Made Co. for papers and larger items.
Who do you look up to and why?
I don't mean for this to sound sappy, but I really look up to pretty much everyone I've had in Revision Path. Many of them are navigating challenges, spaces, and systems that I've never experienced, and hearing their stories of how they do it is really inspiring.
But I also look up to the activists out there fighting the good fight and representing their communities and fighting against issues such as police brutality, workplace discrimination, and others. This past year, particularly, has shown that fighting for what is right is more important than ever.
Oh, but if we're talking celebrities? Oprah, who I reference in probably every episode of Revision Path, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, because he is a genius and we're around the same age and I think he'd be just cool to hang out with and learn from in general.
What’s your favorite project that you’ve done and why?
I was just about to say that my favorite project is one that's not even out yet!
But of the projects I've done, my favorite has probably been the Black Weblog Awards. It was my first big self-directed, self-funded project and I learned so much. In many ways, it set the scene for what I'm able to do with Revision Path.
What are the last five songs you listened to?
I Didn't Mean To Turn You On - Cherelle
Whatever It Takes - The James Hunter Six
WAP - Cardi B feat. Megan Thee Stallion
Teach Me A New Language - Van Hunt
Where can our listeners find you on the web and on social media?
My website is mauricecherry.com -- that's pretty straightforward. I'm also on Twitter at @mauricecherry, though I don't tweet often.
Clever is produced by 2VDE Media. Thanks to Rich Stroffolino for editing this episode.
Music in this episode courtesy of El Ten Eleven—hear more on Bandcamp.
Shoutout to Jenny Rask for designing the Clever logo.
Keep Listening
