Podcast appearances and mentions of Douglas Davis

Au début des 90's, Mariah Carey était l'une des figures emblématiques de la scène pop, partageant la vedette avec une autre diva, Whitney Houston

If you're part of the garden centre world, you may have heard the name Boyd Douglas-Davies. Boyd has had a long year career in ther garden centre industry, most recently heading up the PR and Communications of the popular British Garden Centres brand. He is now working as a freelance consultant, and chair of Greenfingers Charity. Boyd has a wealth of knowledge about garden centres, so if you've ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes, this is the episode for you.   Afterwards, @mr_plantgeek and @ellenmarygardening gossip about naughty squirrels, midlife crisis and procrastination.   Series 16 is sponsored by Grow This, Not That - the Substack about new plants, horticulture news, botanical travel and more from Michael Perry.  https://mrplantgeek.substack.com

Kitty talks with Madison physician Dr. Douglas Davis,who recently returned from a trip to Ukraine, about the war in that country, what it means for global democracy, and how we can help. 

We discuss the Creative Strategy Framework with Emmy Award-winning strategist Douglas Davis. He has a unique approach to bridging strategy, design, and execution.   Douglas Davis is the principal of the Davis Group LLC and the author of the book Creative Strategy and the Business of Design. He is the former Chair of the B.F.A. in Communication Design program at New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn and holds a B.A. in Graphic Design from Hampton University, an M.S. in Communications Design from Pratt Institute, and an M.S. in Integrated Marketing from New York University.   douglasdavis.com Follow Douglas on LinkedIn If you have any questions about brands and marketing, connect with the host of this channel, Itir Eraslan at LinkedIn.

Tanya talks to the author of Yoga: A Love Story about his first novel; the writing process; finding your space in any environment and carving your own path.

Welcome to an 11-part series exploring the intersection of listening and creativity. Why is listening so important? How can we become better listeners? How can listening make us more creative? In this conversation, creative strategist Douglas Davis, generously shares the way listening is critical to the dynamic of understanding communication gaps that can exist between various stakeholders in the creative process and how listening allows creatives to be more strategic, including the importance of listening for the questions behind the questions. He also shares how learning to control our emotions is necessary within the context of the creative process through listening to our own bodies, as well as his take on imposter syndrome, drawing parallels between today's creative climate and that of the turn of the new millennium (in the early days of web design). Finally, Douglas reminds us that listening is required to allow creative people everywhere to remain on brand, on strategy and on message.

Brooklyn-based Douglas Davis enjoys being one of the variety of voices needed in front of and behind the concept. As principal of The Davis Group, Douglas offers strategic solutions to client branding, design, and communications problems. As author of Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, Douglas regularly contributes to the design discourse in The European Business Review, RGD Design Thinkers, and the OneClub Educators Summit. Douglas is an Emmy Award-winning strategist who serves on the advisory boards of the Poster House Museum CMYK council, The Type Director's Club, The University of Oregon's Masters in Advertising and Brand Responsibility, and City College's Masters in Branding and Integrated Communications.

In this episode of the Brand Master Podcast, I'm speaking with Brooklyn based professor Douglas Davis about the creative strategy framework & process taken from his highly popular book, creative strategy and the business of design.We speak about the importance of brand strategy for modern creatives and the role of the brand strategist in educating clients on strategy includingWhy Brand Strategy Is Important Modern CreativesThe Creative Strategy Framework & Process OverviewHow To Find Your Target Audience How To Translate Benefits Ands Value To Brand MessagingHow To Translate Brand Strategy To Marketing StrategyHow Do We Bridge The Clients Strategy Education GapThe Adobe Creative Mentor Series with Douglas DavisFor more brand strategy resources and downloads visit brandmasteracademy.com

When he would get sent to detention, he'd spend his time there drawing for hours. And despite growing up in a super small town in South Carolina, he had access to an amazing art program. With the help of a nurturing mother, and a lot of talent and hustle, Douglas worked his way into a design career but always wanted more. He had spent a lot of his life creating, but came to a point where he wanted to explore the business side as well, and moved into strategy. In this week's conversation, Chris talks to Douglas about growing up and going to school with very few resources, moving into the world of strategy and the value it has provided both for Douglas's clients and himself, and Douglas's hustle as a teacher, bringing up a new generation. Douglas shares his unique perspective on life itself and how important it is to do what you love. “Life is long,” Douglas says. “Do you want to spend your life going to a job you hate?” After completing an arts program from Hampton University, Douglas took his resume and experience and applied to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He studied communication design and discovered the problem-solving capabilities of graphic design. During his time at Pratt, Douglas was inspired to teach and work in the industry he had grown to love so much. When he was just 22 years old, Douglas was found and hired at Juno Online Services, but lost the job a year later when a recession hit. Then, when he was kicked out of his apartment at 25 years old, he became an adjunct professor. With so many forces going against him, Douglas persevered through curveball after curveball. He learned to hustle and keep going despite the scarcity of opportunities. Douglas's story is nothing short of inspiring. We highly encourage you to listen and hear how he turned from designer to strategist, to now teach other creatives the business of design. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

BGBS 071: Maurice Cherry | Creative Strategist | The Restorative Power of Play Maurice Cherry is the creative strategist for CodeSandbox, an online code editor tailored for web applications. Prior to this, he served principal and creative director at Lunch, an award-winning multidisciplinary studio he created in 2008 that helps creative brands craft messages and tell stories for their targeted audiences, including fostering relationships with underrepresented communities. Past clients and collaborators included Facebook, Mailchimp, Vox Media, NIKE, Mediabistro, Site5, SitePoint, and The City of Atlanta. Maurice is a pioneering digital creator who is most well-known for Revision Path™, an award-winning podcast which is the first podcast to be added to the permanent collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Other projects of Maurice's include the Black Weblog Awards, 28 Days of the Web, The Year of Tea, and the design anthology RECOGNIZE. Maurice's projects and overall design work and advocacy have been recognized by Apple, Adobe, NPR, Lifehacker, Design Observer, Entrepreneur, AIGA, the Columbia Journalism Review, Forbes, Fast Company, and many other print and digital outlets. Maurice is also an educator, and has built curricula and taught courses on web design, web development, email marketing, WordPress, and podcasting for thousands of students over the past ten years. Maurice is the 2018 recipient of the Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary from AIGA, Creative Loafing Atlanta's 2018 Influentials in the fields of business and technology, was named as one of GDUSA's “People to Watch” in 2018, and was included in the 2018 edition of The Root 100 (#60), their annual list of the most influential African-Americans ages 25 to 45. In previous years, Maurice was awarded as one of Atlanta's “Power 30 Under 30″ in the field of Science and Technology by the Apex Society. He was also selected as one of HP's “50 Tech Tastemakers” in conjunction with Black Web 2.0, and was profiled by Atlanta Tribune as one of 2014's Young Professionals. He is also a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Maurice holds a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Morehouse College and a Master's degree in telecommunications management from Keller Graduate School of Management. In this episode, you'll learn... As a creative on the web, it's beneficial to stay fluid and agile enough to go where the market goes. It's detrimental to focus on only one specialty because the industry changes so quickly that it may become obsolete. When done correctly, brands can put forth an image that is discordant with people's initial perception of them, through storytelling in marketing. This can draw in an entirely new audience based on the brand's "personality." Podcasting is not as easy as it looks. Everything is deliberate, and a lot of care goes into each episode. Quotes [8:10] It almost is a detriment to be kind of a specialist, because your specialty may end up getting absorbed or may become obsolescent or something like that. So you kind of have to stay fluid and kind of see where different trends are going and see how you can fit in there. [12:45] Brands may try to put forth an image of who they are or who they want to be. And that may not even mesh with how people are thinking about them…but it makes people remember them in a way that perhaps people may not think of, and so they may gain a whole new level of audience just based off of that kind of storytelling and interaction that draws them in to who they are as a brand and what they sort of represent in terms of company values. [1:00:43] I think people will look at the 400 episodes of revision path and just see a monolithic set of people. But I mean, there's so much diversity within the people that I have interviewed, whether it's age diversity, whether it's what they do in the industry, years of experience, there's men, there's women, there's trans folk, there's folks in the US and the Caribbean, throughout Europe, throughout Africa, throughout Asia and Australia. They're everywhere. The thing that sort of ties them all together is they're practicing designers, or they're practicing techies, or they're doing something creative on the web that is worthy of kind of falling into line with everything that I'm doing with revision paths. [1:04:53] I just turned 40 this year. And there's still a lot of things about myself that I feel like I've managed to still keep a very playful spirit and still be able to kind of tap into the restorative power of play, even into the work that I do. I mean, even what I'm doing with creative strategy, it's kind of playing at work a little bit. I get to really dive into myself and come up with inspiring things that we can do and fantastic campaigns that we can execute. Resources Podcast: Revision Path LinkedIn: Maurice Cherry Twitter: @mauricecherry Have a Brand Problem? We can help. Book your no-obligation, 15-minute Wildstory Brand Clarity Call now.  Learn about our Brand Audit and Strategy process Identify if you need a new logo or just a refresh Determine if your business has a branding problem See examples of our work and get relevant case studies See if branding is holding your business back and can help you get to the next level Book Your FREE Brand Clarity Call   Podcast Transcript Maurice Cherry 0:02 And I started doing these long form interviews, maybe about 1500 to 2000 words or so. But it just took so long to put together. I was doing it by myself. And it was someone that actually was a reader of revision path, who one day wrote me and said that she was a fan of revision path as you would really like to be on revision path, but wanted to record a podcast because she had a podcast that she was doing in Chicago. At the time. I'm like, yeah, we can record that's fine. thinking to myself, I have no recording equipment. So we ended up recording our interview, the very first episode of revision path on my mobile phone in a restaurant. Terrible quality. I still keep the episode out. I mean, it's somewhat listable, I guess, I don't know. But that was kind of where the genesis of the podcast started. Marc Gutman 0:54 podcasting from Boulder, Colorado. This is the Baby Got Back story Podcast, where we dive into the story behind the story of today's most inspiring storytellers, creators and entrepreneurs. I like backstories and I cannot lie. I am your host, Marc Gutman, Marc Gutman, and on today's episode of Baby got backstory, we are talking with Maurice cherry, the award winning podcaster, creative strategist, and designer. And before we get into this episode, I feel so lucky that I get to talk to people. And I get to talk to people on this show. And I get to talk to people on this show, and share it with you, the audience. I truly, truly, truly thank you and appreciate you. If you like this show, and want to show your like an appreciation for me or the show, please head over to Apple podcasts or Spotify and give us a five star review and rating. Ratings really do matter. Apple and Spotify use these ratings as part of the algorithm that determines ratings on third charts. And we're human. We like likes and follows and ratings too. So thank you for your reviews. I do appreciate it. Today's guest is Maurice cherri, creative strategist, designer and host of the award winning podcast revision path. past clients and collaborators included Facebook, MailChimp, Vox media nyck Media Bistro site five sitepoint in the city of Atlanta. Maria is a pioneering digital creator, who is most well known for revision path and award winning podcast, which is the first podcast to be added to the permanent collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Other projects of maurices include the black weblog awards 28 days of the web, the year of t in the design anthology recognize Murray says projects and overall design work and advocacy have been recognized by Apple, Adobe NPR, life hacker design observer entrepreneur, the AI GA, the Columbia Journalism Review, Forbes Fast Company in many other print and digital outlets. He says the 2018 recipient of the Steven Heller prize for cultural commentary from the AI GA, creative loafing Atlanta's 2018 influentials in the fields of business and technology was named one of GED USA people to watch in 2018. It was included in the 2018 edition of the route 100. He was number 60 and their annual list of the most influential African Americans ages 25 to 45. In previous years, Maurice was awarded one of Atlanta's power 30 under 30 in the field of science and technology by the apex society. He was also selected as one of HPS 50 tech tastemakers in conjunction with black web to Dotto. It was profiled by Atlanta Tribune is one of 2014 young professionals. He is also a member of the International Academy of digital arts and sciences. And this is his story. I am here with Maurice cherry who is a creative strategist, designer and podcaster. You may know him from his very popular podcast revision path, and that's because they just recorded their 400th episode which is a major, major milestone Marie's Welcome to the baby. Got back History podcast. Maurice Cherry 5:01 Thank you so much for having me, Mark, this is great. Marc Gutman 5:04 That's so great to have you here. Why don't we just hop right into it? I mean, you, you have this varied what I'd call a hybrid background of creative strategist designer podcaster. Like, how did that come to be like, like, how do you make that all work in today's environment? Maurice Cherry 5:24 You know, I'm kind of still trying to figure that out myself. I'm lucky to be able to kind of remain a bit fluid and hybrid in some sorts as it relates to my skill set, which allows me to kind of go where the market goes, but I mean, my background, I have a undergraduate degree in mathematics. my graduate degree is in telecommunications, management's. I've worked in media, I've worked in web, I've worked with nonprofits, I've worked with tech startups, I've had my own business for nine years. So I've done a little bit of everything and a lot of different places. And I've had the opportunity to work with everyone from, you know, startup founders and entrepreneurs to like, captains of industry at fortune 100 companies. So I've kind of been a little all over the place. And like I said, being able to remain fluid has helped me as things have changed in the market. I mean, I started off working for companies here, I'm in Atlanta, Georgia, I started off working for companies here and then quit the last place I was working out, which was at&t and working as a senior web designer, started my own studio did that for nine years, sort of wound that down and then jump back into working for places design working for tech startups. And just kind of going from there. Yeah, and Marc Gutman 6:40 you use that word, fluid and fluidity. And you know, the old way of doing things used to be very specialized used to be very siloed not not bouncing between disciplines. Why do you think it's important to to be fluid in in your skill set in your career? What advantage is that given you, Maurice Cherry 7:01 um, for me, the advantage that it's given is being able to have the perspective to see where commonalities lie, as the market, or as you really the industry sort of changes. I mean, when I first came about on the web, you were either a web designer, a web developer, or a webmaster, like those are kind of the three particular titles that you had. And now you've got all different types of product designers and UX designers and things like that, despite the fact that there are new titles and the way that things have changed. There's still some sort of common threads between a lot of these different types of titles. And even as companies have come along and introduced new types of technology into the world, which therefore mean that there are new types of people that work on these things. Like, there's conversation designers, there's mixed reality designers like you know, a couple of weeks ago, I was first introduced to the metaverse, which sounds like something you'd hear in like a 90s sci fi afternoon kids show her something. So there's so many Tell that to say that the market and the industry changes so much, it almost is a detriment to be kind of a specialist, because your specialty may end up getting, you know, absorbed or may become obsolescent or something like that. So you kind of have to stay fluid and kind of see where different trends are going and see how you can fit in there. Marc Gutman 8:29 Yeah, and I want to be a part of the metaverse like that sounds awesome. I don't even know what that is. But I want to like tell people that I am part of the metaverse or that I work in the metaverse, that'd be great. And it's really interesting because the person that introduced us, Douglas Davis, who is appeared on this show, he was talking about something really, really similar in his conversation, his interview, which was a lot of what we're doing today hasn't been invented yet. Right? And we're kind of in this next wave of, of that. And so he gave the example back when he was starting out, like no one had really invented, like how to build web pages and websites. And so it was real time, right? And then we started to grow up in no one had invented how to be an expert on Twitter when Twitter first came out, we all just kind of did it, you know. And now you know, what I'm hearing you say is that business is again, moving technology is moving so fast. And it's you know, they're intertwined, right Business and Technology and it's moving so quickly, that you have to be fluid that you have to be nimble, and you have to be kind of you can't be an expert at anything, if anything because it's moving so fast, but what you probably can be is a really good thinker and a really good strategist in order to bring all these disciplines together. Did I didn't get that right. Maurice Cherry 9:52 Yeah, that's pretty accurate. I mean, the the beauty of my particular title of being a creative strategist Is that no matter what business that I'm put in, I'm still able to kind of function because what I do, but one of the top one of the things that I'm sort of tasked to do is kind of be a company's in house creative experts. So I'm working across teams to discover opportunities for storytelling. I'm working maybe with a marketing team on campaigns, I'm working with a sales team on ways that they can reach new audiences. So I can kind of be very flexible, you know, no matter what sort of business that I'm putting in, which is pretty good. Marc Gutman 10:31 Yeah. And that sounds like awesome, like, I hear you talk. And I'm like, wow, I want to be a creative strategist, you know, how, you know? How does that show up in business? are more and more businesses recognizing the need for it? And what really is the the, the impetus for bringing on a creative strategist? Like why? Why do they say like, hey, Maria, we need you to come in and help us out. Maurice Cherry 10:55 In my experience has mostly been when it's boiled down to needing help with storytelling, or with some sort of brand awareness or brand campaign strategy tends to be tied. In my experience, that strategy has tended to be tied to branding fairly easily. So say, at the past few places that I've worked at, I've done a lot of sort of brand centric work with what they're doing in order to take the story of what their business is, and what it is that they're trying to sort of put forth to their customers. And then really kind of, I don't know, tell that in a way that their audience would find compelling or that potential audiences may find compelling. And that could be video, that could be a podcast, that could be a really well done marketing campaign. It could be a drip campaign of newsletters, it could be a series of white papers, it can really sort of manifest in a number of different ways, depending on who we're trying to reach and what the story is that we're trying to tell. Marc Gutman 11:51 Yeah. And so as I think about it, I mean, I get excited about this idea of creative strategist and working at a brand level across departments, because that's typically where we run into problems, right, is that this type of initiative is siloed, into the marketing department into the creative department. And so having that influence across departments is really, you know, what I see is the magic of this type of work. But when you were, in your experience, when you look at this, what do brands that get this right? Like, what do they do? What are you seeing them do to get this this type of work? Right? Maurice Cherry 12:31 One thing I'm seeing is that they're doing a lot of listening, they're listening to their audience there, whether that's through social media, or through any sort of, you know, other channel or back channel, they're listening to what their audience is telling them. Oftentimes, brands may try to put forth an image of who they are or who they want to be. And then that may not even mesh with how, you know, people are thinking about them. Sometimes that works to a brand's advantage. Sometimes it doesn't. I think we've mostly seen this on social media, where you see brands like, Oh, God, what's a good brand that that's kind of subversive stay comes. The stake of his brand, for example, is weirdly stoic and philosophic. On Twitter, which you would not associate with a brand of like frozen meat products, like, why are they so deep right now, I don't understand this. But it makes people remember them in a way that perhaps, you know, people may not think of steak gums. And so they may gain a whole new level of audience just based off of that kind of storytelling and interaction that draws them in to like, who they are as a brand, and what they sort of represent in terms of company values. And such, I certainly thinks that as social media has grown as that and and as more people have tapped into social media, they're kind of starting to hold brands accountable a lot for the causes that they find the people that they hire, a number of companies get taken the task for these sorts of things that have nothing to do with their actual product at all. But if you're hiring someone who might be unknown abuser, for example, that's going to look bad on the brand. Or if you know your your company is funding a politician that might be taken away, or might be funding voting rights or something well taken away voting rights or something like that. These are the kinds of things that people are now keyed into. And they're looking at brands to kind of be these while they're there. They're wanting to make sure that the brands that they support with their dollars are also kind of, you know, in accordance with their values as well. Marc Gutman 14:37 Absolutely. And it's, it's crazy and amazing at the same time to me, I mean, I love the amount of power that consumers have on brands at the same time. Everybody has a voice right? And so how can brands even navigate all this? pressure and criticism to be something Different, right? You can't You can't please everybody all of the time, like, where do you see the challenges for brands in this new landscape? Maurice Cherry 15:09 I mean, I think the biggest challenge that happens is just making sure that you are being consistent with your voice. Often times I've seen brands try to like adopt a certain kind of you know, cheeky haha Twitter voice or whatever, that may be completely discordant with how they treat employees or, or you know how they treat customers or something like that. This is particularly the case I've seen with a lot of tech startups that try to like get in on certain little you know, punny things that are happening. But then something hits the verge where they mistreated a number of employees or something like that. And it's like, oh, you can't be you can't be cheeky and sarcastic on Twitter, and then you're treating your employees like crap, you know, behind the scenes. So I think love just trying to be consistent throughout everything that you're doing is one thing that that companies should think about as they kind of navigate the space, I would, I would also say, you know, it helps to just be agile and nimble, because sometimes these you know, if a certain catastrophe befalls a brand, sometimes it happens completely out of the blue for something they don't even know about. So, for example, say, a company has a particular actor or actress as a spokesperson. And this actor or actress did something on Instagram. Well, the first thing people are going to do, yes, they're going to take that particular actor or actress to task, but then they're also going to take the company to task and think, Oh, well, is this the kind of person that you want speaking for your product? And now it's like, oh, now we have to kind of go into crisis mode, and figure out how do we either distance ourselves from this? Or say, Yes, we are a part of what it is that this actor actress is about, here's what we're doing, as a company or as a brand to support them. So it's, it's tricky, but you have to kind of be, you know, pretty nimble to these sorts of things, because they can happen really out of the blue. Marc Gutman 17:08 Yeah, and there's a lot going on. And so, you know, it really lays out the, you know, the the framework for why a company might need a creative strategist. Yeah, there. It's not just this omni directional unit, or is it? I mean, I guess it'd be one directional conversation. It's not a one way conversation, right, this massive dialogue, and there's comments and insights and, and opinions, ping pong all over from every direction, and to really have someone at a higher level thinking like, how are we going to manage this conversation as something that is no longer a luxury for brands, but really a necessity? Maurice Cherry 17:44 Yeah, there's a lot of thought that has to go into so many things, the imagery that you use the hashtags that you use, the colors that you're using, all of that ends up sort of falling under the purview, usually of creative strategist. And I will say, you know, a lot of advertising firms employ creative strategist as well. So they know fully kind of what it means to have someone that's really thinking about the brand from like this 360 view, but also from this bird's eye view of being able to zoom out and really see all parts of where a particular campaign or something may touch, and realize those sort of points where something may go wrong, or maybe misconstrued and try to figure out a way to kind of circumvent that or fix that issue, you know, so it doesn't occur. Marc Gutman 18:29 Yeah. And so switching gears a little bit, you mentioned that you're in Atlanta. Now. Is that where you grew up? Maurice Cherry 18:35 No, I grew up originally in Selma, Alabama. But I've been here in Atlanta now for a little over 20 years. Now. I came here in 1999. So I've been here for what that's 21 years or something like that. I've been here longer than I've been in Alabama. Marc Gutman 18:56 Well, looking back to Alabama, assuming that you were there when you know, Murray was a young Murray's, like eight years old and you're hanging out. And were you there in Selma when you were eight? Maurice Cherry 19:06 Yeah, yeah, I grew up there. went to elementary, middle and high school there. Cool. Cool. So Marc Gutman 19:11 eight year old Morrison, did he think he was going to be a creative strategist? Maurice Cherry 19:18 I'm pretty sure eight year old Mario had no idea what a creative strategist was. I think eight year old Mario is probably either wanted to be a firefighter. I have an uncle, that's a fire chief. Or probably a writer. Probably one of those two is when I probably wanted to be at that age. Marc Gutman 19:37 Then I was gonna ask, but a writer might fill in this answer. So did you have a tendency towards either creativity or strategy or both? or What were you into at that age and as you started to matriculate through through the years and sama Maurice Cherry 19:54 Oh my god, eight years old. I really was into writing. I mean, that sounds like such an old hobby for a kid but I had been writing probably since around, let's see eight years old. What's that like, second grade, second, third grade, something like that. I have been writing since first grade like stories and also drawing along with them. I have an older brother, he's four years older. And he's really like, the super visual creative in the family, he paints he draws he sculpts. I mean, he's, he's a fantastic artist. And I remember growing up wanting to be like him, but I could not draw, I could do like little stick figures or whatever. I would say my work was very abstract at that age when I look back on it now. But I would draw that I would write these stories that would correspond with the drawings. And I remember, my teachers would give us this sheet of paper where it's like, blank on top, and then there's ruled lines on the bottom. And so you draw whatever top the picture or what have you. And then you write your story. Down below, I remember doing a lot of those, I have a whole, like binder full of those in my storage unit from when I was a kid, like just doing a ton of writing and drawing and exploring, I guess, I mean, trying to explore my creativity in that rather limited space. I mean, Soma is a is a very small town in South Central Alabama, most people know about it from the civil rights movement. I can tell you growing up there as a kid, I mean, it's the country, it's not super fun. Like, there's not, there's no, you know, big amusement parks, or movie theaters and things like that, that you would, you know, kind of hang out and do stuff with as a kid. So it was very much, you having to kind of find your own entertainment, maybe you're hanging out with other kids, maybe you're at home. A lot of people would be in church, because almost a big church town is like 100 plus churches there. So that's usually kind of what you were doing. You were trying to find something to do. Maybe watch TV, let's see eight years old that I haven't intended. I probably had an intent though back then also. So I was most likely playing Super Mario Brothers or pro wrestling. Probably pro wrestling, I was probably star man in pro wrestling back then. Marc Gutman 22:17 Good, good hobby, good hobby. And you mentioned that you know, you were creative with words, your brother visually creative. Were your parents creative? Did they instill this in your Where'd that come from? Maurice Cherry 22:32 Um, no, they're not creative at all. Let me let me take them. I mean, I think you know, as I think parents have to be creative to some capacity, just dealing with children, but they weren't in particularly creative fields. My dad at the time, was an engineer at GE, working on plastics. And my mom was working at the local community college as a lab assistant in the biology department. So they were very much like in the sciences kind of feel. So not a lot of, you know, creativity there, I would imagine, but I did have the opportunity at times to maybe go like with my dad to work or maybe go up my mom to work and like, see where they work and like, see the machines and see the lab equipment and all that sort of stuff, at least get interested in it like, like, know that this is like a possibility for me, perhaps but no one say anything creative. Like we don't think like someone doesn't have any, at least not to my recollection, any art museums or, or anything like that, where you would go and like be overwhelmed with visual creative inspiration. At that age, maybe probably when I was a little older, I certainly remember getting a lot of visual and creative inspiration from magazines. So I think probably when I was maybe about 10, or 11 or so I remember us getting maybe I had to be old enough that maybe I was a teenager at this point. But we would get subscriptions to like zillions magazine, which was Consumer Reports. They had this like kids vertical that they called zillions. And I remember we would get vive magazine and source the source magazine and stuff like that. So I'm gonna get visual inspiration from magazines a lot. Growing up, Marc Gutman 24:18 what an awesome like, sub brand for kids zillions like Maurice Cherry 24:23 yeah, I don't know, if they do that anymore. It was it was like they were teaching kids how to be like, responsible consumers. So they would like for example, talk about fruit juice and say how most fruit juice is not made of actual juice. If you check the labels, it's actually more you know, it's actually water and sugar and all this sort of stuff. So they were kind of like teaching you how to, you know, be a good consumer as a kid. It was like, it was like a kid's magazine about money, which was very interesting. Marc Gutman 24:52 That's so cool. I love it. And as you got older and as you got into high school was this creative like writing And in this creative outlet, was that still coming out of you? Or what were your interests at that time? Maurice Cherry 25:06 It was, I mean, I was all over the place for people that knew me in high school, I was all over the place I was writing. Let's see, I think I was in eighth grade or so. And I started taking college English courses in writing. So I was like, always writing something writing poems and like, getting published and stuff. But also right around seventh or eighth grade, I discovered music. And I discovered why once I discovered music, we had a band in middle school. And I wanted to join the band because the band could get out of sixth and seventh period. And I'm like, Well, I want to get out of 67 period. How do I make that happen? And they had like this open session where you, you know, go to the band room and you choose the instrument like, I remember going in and the band director, Mr. Ruffin would say, like, you know, you choose the instrument and turn the instrument will choose you like you just pick the one that you think you'll do best on it. I really wanted to play trumpet. I was like, yeah, I'm gonna play trumpet, but the mouthpiece was just too small. I just couldn't get the right on the shore. And then my band director switched me over to trombone. And that was like a match made in heaven. That was perfect. So I played music, from seventh grade all the way through high school, all the way through college, all throughout my 20s. I played trombone, in marching bands, and jazz bands and like, house bands, at clubs and all sorts of stuff. So in high school, I was doing music, I was writing. Also just doing class, I was kept in the math club. I was sort of all over the place in high school, doing a lot of different things. I was really though getting more into music, because I'm with the marching band. My band director also allowed me to kind of try my hand at composing. So I would like listen to songs like mostly songs from video games, I would listen to songs like say the fanfare from Final Fantasy when you beat an enemy. And I would say, Okay, how can I turn this into like four parts for trombone. So that means me sitting down on my keyboard, and like, dissecting out each part, and then go into my section, and then we practice it. And then we take it to the game, and we play it at the game and stuff like that. So I got a chance to really sort of cut my teeth with doing a bit of like arranging and composing there. And then my band director also introduced me to so much good music, mostly, like Earth, Wind and Fire. And he was a big Earth Wind and Fire fan. So he introduced me to like their whole catalogue at the time. And we were also playing some popular songs from off the radio. See, this was 95. So we were playing. Like, this is how we do it. For montell Jordan, water runs dry boys to man that might have been 96. But like, we were playing like radio hits, but then also playing like these, you know, well known songs from like the 70s and 80s from Earth, Wind and Fire and stuff. So I was I was all over the place in high school. I really was like, I was always doing something different mostly with the band, though. I think most people knew me for that. But also, I was just like, in class and making A's and you know, it was I, I really enjoyed high school. I enjoy high school a lot. Marc Gutman 28:23 Yeah, and are you still skilled and playing the trombone. Maurice Cherry 28:29 I haven't played the trombone and over 10 years, so I don't know, I would imagine, it's probably just like picking up, you know, like riding a bike, I would suppose because the trombone, unlike other brass instruments has no keys. And so it's just one long, interconnected tube. And it's there's only seven positions to the trombone are not marked either. So you have to know them just by memory. And you have to get the note right really by ear. So like this a lot of like active listening as you're playing. And because you're sort of like varying the length of air in this long tube as you're playing. You don't have a lot of room for error. But you also have a lot of room for improvisation, because you can easily slide in between notes without having to exactly know, the right fingering to get there, you can just get there based on how it sounds. And so like even doing something as simple as the chromatic scale, which you know, takes into account all the flats and sharps, you're just going up and down the slide. And so if you hit an F, then you know, if I need to get down to a flat, I just keep sliding down until I get there. So you sort of in your mind, you know, kind of the connective tissue between the notes that you have to reach. So I say like trombone is easy to pick up but hard to master. Because you have to be thinking about all of that while you're playing. So sad. Marc Gutman 29:49 I thought you would be the first guest that we would have on the Baby Got Back story podcast that would break out the trombone and it doesn't sound like you have one within arm's reach right now. I'll give you I'll give you a pass on that. But Maurice Cherry 30:02 I saw I saw my trombone when I was 30. Because I was like, I'm gonna hang it up because I really wanted to focus on, like, at the time, like, focus on my career and on tech and stuff, and I couldn't be playing, you know, like pickup songs and stuff like that, like I was a session musician for a while about 20s. Like, it's it's fun until it's not, you know, like, it's just not stable. And I don't know, I wonder what I wonder who I would have been if I kept up with it, though. Yeah, I still have kind of in the back of my mind. Like when all this tech stuff is said and done. To start my own Afro Cuban jazz, big bands. That may still happen. Like when I turned 50 maybe I'll I'll make that happen. I don't know. But it's in the cards. Marc Gutman 30:49 The future vision and you know, who knows, maybe we can get a crowdfunding campaign going for Murray's here to get them a new trombone? It's Yeah, seems like you should, you should be playing the trumpet, trombone, and you shouldn't be, shouldn't be selling your trombone. But as you were growing up in so many getting into high school, what do you think you were going to do? I mean, I see that you went to Morehouse, and I'm sure your parents were very proud. Where are they? What were their hopes and dreams for you? And what did you think you were going to do with your life as you were starting to get a little older, and, you know, into high school and looking into college? Maurice Cherry 31:24 So I, this is so interesting, and I don't know if this will make your viewers angry or not, or jealous, I don't know. But like, I was not thinking about, the only thing I was really thinking about at that age was getting out of Selma. That was like, my number one. Main imperative is like, get out of this town. This is a small town, I mean, to kind of give you some context with this. I mean, I came about in the generation right after, like civil rights movement, Bloody Sunday, all that sort of stuff. And so the city itself already has this, like, deep, like, just ghost of history about it everywhere that you go. I mean, Selma itself is a very haunted town, like there's a number of haunted houses and things of that nature, but like to live that close to history, and then also be so detached from the rest of the world is a very eerie feeling. I think about that, in hindsight, you know, growing up, like I really did not know, much of the world outside of Selma, until I left. And I think about well, who would I have been if I stayed there? Like I probably would have, you know, I don't know that a pastor or something. I don't know, who knows. But it's such a small, insular type of community. And it's very easy to like stay in that and never change and never go anywhere and never experienced anything new. For me, the main thing I wanted to do was just get out of Selma. So the reason I say this is because I didn't really have a plan as to what I wanted to do. My plan was just how do I get out of here? What what way do I make that happen? I don't care what the way is, it just has to happen. And so in seventh grade, I remember being part of the, I think it was called the Duke talent identification program, or tip for short. And what they will do is they will take like, high achieving middle schoolers, and you would spend a weekend at Duke University. And then they would also give you an opportunity to take one of the like, standardized tests early being the LSAT, or the a CT. So seventh grade, I took the a CT, and I scored a 30 on it. Now, I think the AC T goes up to a 36. So 30 out of 36 was very good that I think that's like analog to maybe like a high 1400 or low 1500. On the SSAT like it's pretty good. So when I took that in seventh grade, that pretty much wrote my ticket to any school that I wanted to go to. I didn't think at all about like, Oh, I'm really want to go to these colleges, so I have to apply or I really wanted colleges were coming to me. I didn't have to do it. And I don't mean to sound like a bragging sort of way. But I mean, you know, my mom wanted she tell you to like colleges, were contacting us left and right, sending us all sorts of materials. And I was really for me to just think, Oh, well, where do I want to go. And I didn't want to stay in Alabama. Because again, my thing was like I wanted to get out of Selma, but really, I just wanted to get out of like the state and experience something new. But my mom was very much like you know, wherever you go, I'm not getting on a plane. So you have to go somewhere close. Like you have to be still in the south because I'm not getting on a plane. I'm not taking a bus anywhere. It has to be fairly close. And Morehouse ended up being the choice because they came to me on my senior awards day and presented me with two full scholarships, which was more than any other The school had presented me with at the time and I mean, like every major school in Alabama and presented it was like a full ride or something. But I didn't want to go to like, no, no shade to the University of Alabama. I don't want to go to the University of Alabama. I didn't want to go to Auburn. I didn't want to go to Alabama State, no snow shade. The Alabama State. I didn't want to go there. But Morehouse came and Morehouse has this big reputation. And people are like, Oh, well, Martin Luther King went to Morehouse. And, you know, I should go to Morehouse. And I'm like, you know what, I should go to Morehouse. I want to go to Morehouse. And part of the reason of going was one, I knew that was a quick ticket out of out of Selma, but that also, and I think anyone who grew up in the south, probably in the 80s, and 90s, that wasn't near a big city, came to Atlanta at some point, like, there was a field trip to Six Flags, it was all your your class, they were on sa t we're going to Six Flags like everything was going to Six Flags. So there were always all these trips to Atlanta. And Atlanta was always sort of the destination, I think for a lot of us because it was the nearest really big city. Plus around that time. I mean, Atlanta in the 90s was a magical place. I mean, yes, you have the Olympics, but you also had freakness. So you've got like this combination of all this electricity happening in the city. And it was just the place like Atlanta was just the place to be. And so I'm thinking, well, if I can go to Atlanta, and it's a free ride, and I don't have to pay it, my parents will have to pay. Yeah, we'll do it. Let's do Atlanta. And so Morehouse ended up being the choice for me. I didn't even apply to Morehouse, they came to me. And, and the rest is history. Marc Gutman 36:44 A common question I get all the time is Mark, can you help me with our brand? Yes, we help companies solve branding problems. And the first step would be to schedule a no obligation brand clarity call, we'll link to that in the show notes, or head over to wildstorm comm and send us an email, we'll get you booked right away. So whether you're just getting started with a new business, or whether you've done some work and need a refresh, or whether you're a brand that's high performing and wants to stay there, we can help. After you book, your brand clarity call, you'll learn about our brand audit strategy process will identify if you need a new logo or just a refresh, will determine if your business has a branding problem. And you'll see examples of our work and get relevant case studies. We'll also see if branding is holding your business back and can help you get to the next level. So what are you waiting for, build the brand you've always dreamed of. Again, we'll link to that in the show notes. or head over to wildstorm comm and send us an email. Now back to the show. All I could think about when you were talking about music in Atlanta in the 90s was salt and pepper. So that's what it triggered for me. But so you went to Morehouse and sounds like you know, first and foremost, you're like a lot of young people. You're like, I just want to go someplace, I just want to change my life. I just want to start my life, you know, and kind of figure things out. When you got to Morehouse, what did you think you were going to do with with yourself? Maurice Cherry 38:30 Oh, my goodness, you know, I'm gonna be completely honest with you, Mark, I had no plans in college. I'm telling you that back then I didn't plan anything. I was such a easy going go with the flow kind of person to kind of give you a sense of that. I graduated from high school in late May of 1999. And then two weeks later, I packed up moved everything and went somewhere else because the the program that I was a part of for my scholarship, had a summer program is called project space. So I was at Morehouse in June of 99. Like, it was such a magical feeling. I'm like I'm in this big city, by myself. No one can tell me what to do. I could do whatever I want. But of course, it's still like within the confines of college and you have to kind of be, you know, aware of your surroundings. Morehouse is in that it's not in the best neighborhood. I mean, certainly back then it was it was not that great. It's probably better now. But back then it was a pretty rough neighborhood that the school was in so they really wanted to make sure that we stayed on campus where it was safe and not venture out into the neighborhood. But we could easily like catch a bus to the train station and like, go to all parts of the city where the train would go and so you know, the city kind of ended up being like our oyster but when I got there, I mean, I had no plans. I was in the summer program. And we were taking oh my goodness, we were taking like calculus two courses and we were taking care computer programming courses and Spelman, the program that we had on the head of cohort at Spelman College, which is the all female college that's across the street from Morehouse, which is all male college. And so we will take classes together with the girls from Spelman, we would hang out together. But mostly everything we did was kind of in and around. And on campus, like there wasn't a lot of off campus kind of stuff. Except for the people who were from Atlanta who could, you know, like, they could like get in their car, like take us somewhere, like take it to the grocery store or something like that. But they were they really highly discouraged us from going out and about in the city. And then once the school year started proper, I mean, I was just trying everything that I could like I was meeting new people that were into different things that was sort of my first real deep introduction to like anime, and trans music. Was that Morehouse, I was, like I mentioned, I was also still playing trombone. Just like discovering different things and different people, honestly, I mean, I'm just coming from Alabama, just being like this country bumpkin. Like now I'm all of a sudden, meeting all these people from the Caribbean, and from other parts of the country, and like, you know, them being really proud of where they're from, and their culture and everything like that. And so, just getting introduced to so many different things at once made it really, really hard to like, focus, like, I'll be honest, I almost almost flunked out. Freshman year, like first semester was, I was lost in the sauce. As I was going out to the clubs, I was hanging out late. I was getting back to the dorm room 234 in the morning for and then like sleeping for a few hours and then have an eight o'clock, Cal three class like I was reckless. I was so reckless freshman year, and it caught up to me to the point where I ended up getting evicted from my dorm. I was homeless for a slight bit like about a week or two, and then ended up getting placed into another dorm. And then that ended up being like a weird kind of situation, because the rd was kind of a creepy, like kind of a creepy guy, and got moved to another dorm. And then that was weird because my roommate in that dorm clearly had been suffering physical abuse from his roommate, and was very like, I don't know, very jumpy, like, anytime I will come around. And he's like, oh, like, don't you know, don't look at me that way, don't you know or something like that. So freshman year was a lot, at least the first half of freshman year was a lot. During that time. One thing I would say that was like, the stabilizing force outside of my classes was that I had joined a website and started working for them. So there was a website called college club calm. I don't know if people remember college club. And it was sort of like a precursor to Facebook. And basically, every college had their own campus on college club. And you could upload pictures. Every person had like a college club email, and they had this number that you could call that would read your email to you over the phone. There was live chat. I mean, comms club was lit. I mean, they ended up going bankrupt. for good reason. I think at one point, they were giving away like $10,000 a week to people, they were really just like that early, calm money was coming in. But I worked for college club as a campus representative first at Morehouse, and then for the entire Atlanta University Center. So I had three or four other people under me. And we had devised the system. Why am I telling this might be illegal actually know what comes out of the system? Well, that's fine. So we had devised a system where we basically would get paid from college club for every account that was created after every photo that we uploaded. So one of my good friends, good good friends, Chris wrote this macro that would allow us to basically just like dump a bunch of photos into a folder, and they would automatically get uploaded to college club. And so we would get, you know, money for that. And then he also came up with this other macro that will automatically create accounts. So we had these cameras, we have these huge Sony mavica cameras that actually were so big, you had to put a floppy disk in it for storage, like three and a quarter floppy disk. And we would go and take pictures and swap out the disk. And then at the end of the night, we would dump everything into this Network Folder. We run the macro, the macro would upload the stuff from the Network Folder, we would literally be making money while we slept. I mean I was making at that point. roughly about $4,000 a month. Marc Gutman 44:46 Pretty good for a college kid. Maurice Cherry 44:48 This is this is my This was my, like second half of freshman year and I mean, we did not know how to act with that with that much money we were just doing just spending money on just the dumbest stupid shit just like, go to Linux and like, you know, buy a whole bunch of people's stuff in the food court or just buying like extravagant clothes. And so I mean, in hindsight, just dumb, dumb stuff. But at the time, you know, you're 19 was 19 then trying to think now I was 18 and I was 18 then, and just like have money hand over fist. It was it was ridiculous. Um, eventually college club ended up going bankrupt. And so that job didn't last too long. But for the time that we had it, it was great. And so yeah, I didn't really have ambition. My freshman year, I was too busy having fun. Like, we would go out to the strip and take pictures and like, and then I mean, I guess I kind of have to set the scene here. I mean, so the Atlanta University Center is six colleges. It's Morehouse College, Spelman College, Clark, Atlanta University, Morris Brown College, they entered the interdenominational theological center and Morehouse School of Medicine. So like six schools, all together and like this one huge meta campus. And now the schools kind of have their own like, sort of divisions like Spellman, for example, has a huge wall around and it's basically like fort Spellman. But the other colleges, you can easily walk between and through and everything like that. And so the connective kind of tissue between the main colleges is this long brick thoroughfare called the strip. And it's basically just for walking. So like, you know, cars were coming up and down, it was just, you could walk, there were benches, there were booths, all sort of stuff. So you could hang out all day on the strip, and like, people watch, then walk down to seagulls and like, get some wings and then go sit on the bench and listen to some music and then go to the bookstore, go to the library, like everything was just connected in this big, almost like a marketplace. And then on Fridays, at the very end of the strip at Spelman, they would open their gates and you could go into Spelman to their lower courtyard that they called lower manly, and they had market Friday, and they would be DJs. there and dance. I mean, it was so much fun, that you didn't think about class, like class was almost like, why would I go to class, but I could just hang out on the strip all day, you know. So that was very easy. That first year as a freshman and you have money to it was very easy to just get completely sidetracked. And I completely fell deep into all of that. Well, Marc Gutman 47:37 and as we know, Time marches on. And it sounds like you know, had a very similar experience. I went crazy my freshman year and pulled it together primarily because my parents told me I had no choice. It was gonna be big trouble if I didn't. But Time marches on, and you get through Morehouse and like, how did you start a career in creativity and strategy Maurice Cherry 48:00 that really kind of came about almost as a almost as circumstance. So and I'll try to fast forward through, like past like post college on but so I graduated from Morehouse, I didn't have anything lined up like I'm to be completely honest. When I graduated, I had no plans whatsoever, partially because our scholarship program, they pulled the funding from it in 2001, because of 911. So they pulled funding from that and funding went to which was then created the Homeland Security Department. So we didn't have funding to kind of continue out what we thought the end result of our internships and stuff was going to be so with my scholarship program, basically, I would intern for two years for NASA. And then after that, we would get placed at a NASA facility. So in my mind, I'm like, as long as I keep Baba 3.0 I got a job at NASA. So that's all I have to do. jr came along and completely dashed all of that. And so by the time I graduated, I had nothing lined up. I was working at the Woodruff Arts Center, selling tickets to the symphony, and to the art museum into the theater, just like you know, selling old patriots tickets and stuff like that. And they took away the calculator at my station because I had a math degree, which was kind of degrading but whatever. Did that for a little while, left that job, worked at autotrader. Like, as a dealer concierge is basically just like a glorified customer service rep. Did that for a while, quit that job. And then on a whim, I found in the back of our local weekly newspaper, creative loafing. I found a listing to become an electronic media specialist for the state of Georgia, applied for it on a whim, got the job. I worked for there for about a year and a half left went to at&t as a junior designer. What worked my way up to being a senior designer left there in 2008. After Obama got elected, I started my own studio. I did my studio for nine years. And I would say that was kind of the genesis of this whole creative strategy career. Because even though I had my studio where I was doing web design and graphic design and email marketing and stuff like that, I really was able to branch out and do a lot of other creative stuff like I was able to do. Like DNI consulting for tech companies, like I did that for Vox media. For a while I did that with Netflix for a short period of time, did a lot of writing still, like I was still writing during that time. So I wrote four sight points. And for psych five, and I wrote for media B's show for a while I taught classes at the Bri and at Savannah College of Art and Design, I did a lot of different stuff in the studio. And so because I was doing all these different things, like I was gaining all this knowledge and other parts of the, you know, the business and the really in other parts of the industry, and was able to really kind of bring it all together. So by the time I Wow, my studio down in 2017, I knew that there was more that I wanted to do that I couldn't accomplish and sort of the current state that the studio was in. Also the market was changing, like, bespoke web design was sort of going out as more people started to use kind of drag and drop options like a Squarespace or Wix or something like that. So it made more sense for me to kind of phase out of that market and get more into the actual like, strategy portion of it. Because now there are these tools that allow me that allow people to do the things they would pay a designer to do. But the tools don't really give you the strategy behind why you would use certain things or something like that. And so I tried to kind of brand myself more in this strategy route. As I wind my studio down, um, at the end of 2017, I started at a tech startup, or there's a tech company at that time called Fog Creek software as starting, they're just kind of doing content marketing and getting a sense of the business and what they were doing. As I stayed there, they switched over to become the startup called glitch. And then as they were growing, and they look, we're looking to me, as someone that sort of had this thought leadership that was built up to this point, I was able to then kind of come in on a strategy aspect, and then help out with, you know, bizdev opportunities or partnerships or, you know, things of that nature. And so that really kind of set the stage for me to take all of the cumulative knowledge that I gained throughout my studio time and even the time prior to that working for companies and use that to kind of be this this sort of creative thought leadership at a company that needed it at the time. Marc Gutman 52:44 And when did revision path come about? Like how did you get into podcasting? Because it 400 episodes, I'm guessing you were a bit of an early adopter? Maurice Cherry 52:55 Yeah. So I started podcasting, initially in 2005. So I have old shows that will never see the light of day. I have old old shows from back then. And Atlanta, to its credit actually had a very vibrant podcasting. Community back then we had this thing called the Georgia Podcast Network that was put on by this couple rusty and Amber. And I mean, that was big for maybe about five or six years, there were meetups and things of that nature. And it was mostly Georgia, but also included like South Carolina, Tennessee, kind of like that tri state area. So I have been doing podcasting for a while but never really looked at it as a viable thing, then it was sort of this first wave of podcasting. Because, really, it wasn't something that caught on then like people were more so starting to latch on to video. During that time, it wasn't about, oh, we're gonna listen to this podcast. And even then what podcast were normally was just stuff that was on the radio that they didn't put out as an mp3. So like, The New York Times, NPR, etc, would have these little shows. And that's how you sort of picked up on like maybe a radio show that you've missed, you can subscribe to the podcast, which is really just that day is episode that they downloaded and made into an mp3 or whatever. I first started doing revision path in 2013. And at that time, it wasn't a podcast, it was gonna be just an online magazine. I wanted to do something which showcased what black designers and developers were doing in the field like peers of mine, etc. to kind of counteract what I wasn't seeing in design media. And I started doing these long form interviews, maybe about 1500 to 2000 words or so. But it just took so long to put together I was doing it by myself. And it was someone that actually was a reader of revision path is woman named Raquel Rodriguez, who one day wrote me and said that she was a fan of revision paths. She would really like to be on revision path, but wanted to record a podcast. Because she had a podcast that she was doing in Chicago, and at the time, I'm like, yeah, we can record that's fine thinking to myself, I have no recording equipment. So we ended up recording our interview, the very first episode of revision path on my mobile phone, in a restaurant. Terrible quality. I still keep the episode out. I mean, it's somewhat listable, I guess, I don't know. But, uh, that was kind of where the genesis of the podcast started. And then as I continue to keep doing revision path throughout 2013, I would give guests the option to either record, or we could do like the long form interview. So I sort of alternated. And then when 2014 came around, and it was a full year of revision path, I just decided it's just easier to do the podcast, so switched over to becoming a podcast in March of 2014, officially, but when we launched, we still had about, I say, about 15 episodes prior that we had done. So we launched with a pretty big catalog already. So technically, we launched that like, Episode 16. But we have been recording since episode one. Back in June of 2013. Marc Gutman 56:11 Yeah, and as you mentioned, you just recorded your 400th episode, you've been doing this for a while. I'm terrible at math, but it sounds like about eight years or something like that, which is a long time. Like I'm, I think you're gonna be Episode 71 for the baby backstory podcast, and I can tell you, I mean, it's been difficult it you know, sometimes I hear, I hear 71. And I'm like, Ah, that's not that much. But there is a lot of energy, a lot of effort and a lot of time that's gone into it, like 400 episodes, do you ever think like, enough's enough? Are you just gonna keep keep recording? Maurice Cherry 56:48 I mean, at this point, I'm going to keep recording. As we're talking, I've already got episodes recorded through 405. And then I've got five more in the queue. So we're up to like, 409, I think, technically, I, you know, I'll be honest, there's really no shortage of people for me to have on the show, I've got a running potential guests list in the 1000s of people that I could have on the show. And then, of course, folks recommend others, I've started to bring back old guests on the show, just to kind of see what their, their updates have been since they first came on the show, you know, like, so it's been fun to kind of chart that journey, in some ways. And then honestly, as the industry has changed, what the show has really allowed me to do is keep up. Because I mean, at this point, I'm not really a practicing designer anymore. Like I'm not, you know, in Photoshop, or sketch or figma, or whatever. But being able to talk to so many practitioners still keeps me up to date with what's going on, and what are the new technologies? And what are folks talking about? What are folks passionate about? It keeps me up to date with, with that sort of stuff. And also just being able to introduce design still to a whole new generation of people that may not have known that there were people in design who looked like them. People who think like, Oh, I'm just alone in this by myself, and then they can look and see no, you're not, there's like 400 other people here that you're in this thing with? So I don't I personally don't see it stopping anytime soon. I mean, we're still, you know, you know, knock on wood, getting funding and able to keep things going. So I'll keep it going for as long as the industry will have me. Marc Gutman 58:34 Yeah, let's talk about that really quickly. You know, you mentioned that revision path is really this outlet to showcase those those folks who typically aren't showcased and to show people that, hey, there's other people like them out there. Like when you think about revision path, like what's the one thing you want people to know, like, really now about what you're doing with this podcast? Hmm, Maurice Cherry 59:00 that's a good question. I mean, I think, off the top of my head, I would want people to know that this is not easy. And I think people will look at what I'm doing and think that it's pretty easy. And it's not, I mean, I think that might be the case for most podcasters. But for me, in particular, like I've had to continually work and try new things to get to a system that I know works with me and my team, like and it's bulletproof. It's a time to get there, that wasn't just something that I was able to kind of pull out from, you know, from scratch, and it was something I had to build myself. I had to find the right tools to pull in to make sure all of this work. So it's really about that. I would say for any podcast, it's really about building systems that allow you to be able to do this work. I don't necessarily want to say at scale because I think honestly, the the production level that we're doing is not really changed that much over the years. But it's refined to the point where I can take long breaks between interviews and not get burned out from this. And I'd say yeah, like, it's not easy. People will look at me and will look at me and look at the show and think that it's easy like oh, is, it just seems so easy for you to get people to come on the show. I'm like, no, it's still, it. Honestly, it's still a challenge sometimes to get people to come on the show. Just making sure that everything sort of flows regularly. Like, even though we have our system down, that could still be one thing and that system that could cause it all to, you know, tumble like a house of cards or something. So definitely, that it's it's not easy that it's a lot of thought that goes into it. I think people will look at the 400 episodes of revision path and just see like a monolithic set of people. But I mean, there's so much diversity within the people that I have interviewed, whether it's age diversity, whether it's what they do in the industry, years of experience, as men, there's women, there's trans folk, there's folks in the US and the Caribbean, throughout Europe, throughout Africa, throughout Asia and Australia. Like they're, they're everywhere, the thing that sort of ties them all together, is you know, they're practicing designers, or they're practicing techies, or they're doing something creative on the web that is worthy of kind of falling into line with everything that I'm doing with revision paths. So yeah, I would say that's probably the the main thing I think now as the show has started to, I don't want to say become mainstream, I'd say the older that the show gets. I've seen the more people maybe not understand what it is. And I tell people right off the bat, that revision path is a design podcast granted, I do have developers on the show, I have had software engineers on the show. Just lately, like I was talking

I couldn't think of a better way to start off the month than by talking with author, professor, and strategist Douglas Davis. Longtime fans of the show will remember our initial conversation from 2016, so it was good to catch up and talk and get an update over what he's been doing. What follows is less of an interview and more of a general conversation that ranges a number of topics: creativity during the pandemic, design equity, social justice, the value of remote design education, relevance vs. belonging, AIGA, fatherhood, and a lot more. Hopefully this conversation gives you some food for thought and starts some much needed conversations around our place in this current world as designers! Links Douglas Davis' Website Douglas Davis on Facebook Douglas Davis on Instagram Douglas Davis on Twitter Douglas Davis' 2016 Revision Path Interview 2021 Revision Path Audience Survey It's time for our annual audience survey! Tell us what you think about Revision Path, and you could win a $100 Amazon.com gift card! Visit revisionpath.com/survey to give us your feedback. Survey ends on May 31. Sponsored by Brevity & Wit Brevity & Wit is a strategy and design firm committed to designing a more inclusive and equitable world.We accomplish this through graphic design, presentations and workshops around I-D-E-A: inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility.If you’re curious to learn how to combine a passion for I-D-E-A with design, check us out at brevityandwit.com.Brevity & Wit — creative excellence without the grind. Like this episode? Then subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, Spotify, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Subscribe and leave us a 5-star rating and a review! Thanks so much to all of you who have already rated and reviewed us! Revision Path is brought to you by Lunch, a multidisciplinary creative studio in Atlanta, GA. It is produced by Maurice Cherry and engineered and edited by RJ Basilio. You can also follow Revision Path on Instagram and Twitter. Come chat with us! And thank you for listening!

A beautiful and painful poem..

BGBS 063 | Douglas Davis | The Davis Group | Decide To Learn Something NewBrooklyn-based Douglas Davis enjoys being one of the variety of voices needed in front of and behind the concept. His approach to creativity combines right-brained creative problem solving with left-brained strategic thinking. Douglas' integrated point of view has enabled his natural evolution from designer to strategist, author, and professor. His expertise spans advertising, design, and business education and has found an international audience through presenting his tools on combining the three to produce more effective creative business solutions. Douglas enjoys interacting with creative people and regularly presents at industry conferences including HOW Design Live, RGD Design Thinkers, The One Club Educators Summit, Midwest Digital Marketing Conference, Revolve, and The Art & Branding Conference. In 2016, Douglas wrote his first book Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, a title currently being translated into Chinese by Beijing Normal University. He is a former co-chair of AIGA's National Diversity and Inclusion Taskforce and regularly contributes to the business of design discourse in Printmag.com, Applied Arts, and The European Business Review. In 2011 Douglas founded The Davis Group LLC and continues to offer strategic solutions to client branding, digital, and design problems. In addition to client work, Douglas leverages his professional experience to inspire high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. As the longest-serving member on the 4As High School Advisory Board, his experience was translated into the four-year curriculum at New York City's High School for Innovation in Advertising and Media. Following the launch, Douglas contributed as an education consultant for the launch of the Manhattan Early College School for Advertising (MECA). Currently, he is Chair of the Emmy-Award winning B.F.A. in Communication Design program at New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn and serves on the advisory boards of the University of Oregon's Masters in Advertising and Brand Responsibility and City College's Masters in Branding and Integrated Communications. Douglas holds a B.A. in Graphic Design from Hampton University, an  M.S. in Communications Design from Pratt Institute and an M.S. in Integrated Marketing from New York University. In this episode, you'll learn…The importance of diversifying the minds and perspectives to address the world's issues and industry changes. Try something new. Master something you're not good at. Find the fear and reinvent yourself. ResourcesWebsite: douglasdavis.com Case Study: Imported From Brooklyn Youtube: Imported From Brooklyn Film Win Without Pitching Article: Red, White, Black and Blue: The Land of Mixed Signals COMD: douglasdavis.com/comd LinkedIn: Douglas Davis Quotes[15:49] I like to say our job is to take the rational language of business and turn it into the emotional language of design…I also like to say that creative people really are the spoonful of sugar that make business and marketing objectives palatable to the public. [42:52] We have to keep changing, we have to keep growing, we have to keep learning, to even keep up, to even remain relevant. Why would you not want as many different minds or perspectives on a problem that you can grab? [48:12] I'm going to turn my weaknesses into strengths. And that is the evolution. It's a mindset. Leading is a verb and a posture. [53:55] We can't measure everybody by the same yardstick…creative people like me and you can grow up comparing themselves to other people based on those measures and conclude that something's wrong with them, when they're the ones with the superpowers. Have a brand problem? We can help.Book your no-obligation, Wildstory Brand Clarity Call now. Learn about our Brand Audit and Strategy process Identify if you need a new logo or just a refresh Determine if your business has a branding problem See examples of our work and get relevant case studies See if branding is holding your business back and can help you get to the next level Book Your Brand Clarity Call TODAY Podcast TranscriptDouglas Davis 0:00 I think when you look at what's going on in society, when you look at design needing to become more diverse when you look at the demographics in America, when you look at how some people will describe what's going on in the southern border as an, you know, an infestation. terrible word, other people describe it as well. It's what humans do when they're fleeing or in a situation where they have to flee. It's what happens on every border, because if we're having a crisis, here you go, and seek a better place to be. Marc Gutman 0:41 podcasting from Boulder, Colorado. This is the Baby Got Back story Podcast, where we dive into the story behind the story of today's most inspiring storytellers, creators and entrepreneurs. I like being backstories and I cannot lie. I am your host, Marc Gutman, Marc Gutman, and on today's episode of Baby got backstory, we're talking about strategy and changing the world. I'm not kidding. This episode goes deep and calls out those with the creative spirit to stand up and be the change. Before we get into today's show. Can I level with you? This podcast ain't cheap. But we continue to produce it as a service to you, the audience. And if today's episode isn't worth the price of admission, your time, then no episode is I need you. If you like enjoy the show, please take a minute or two to rate and review us over Apple podcasts or Spotify, Apple and Spotify. Use these ratings as part of the algorithm that determines rating on their charts. If you haven't reviewed, you know who you are. And by the way, I do see who is reviewed and who hasn't. What are you waiting for? review service. That's it guilt trip over. Let's get on with the show. Today's guest is Douglas Davis. I really don't know where to start with Douglas. I first learned of Douglas when I read his book, creative strategy and the business of design. And it's one of those books that literally changed my perspective and worldview on strategy and business. So I had to meet the person who wrote such an influential piece of work. And Boy, was I in for a surprise. Douglas Davis takes great pride in being Brooklyn based and in his words, enjoys being one of the variety of voices needed in front of and behind the concept. His approach to creativity combines right brained, creative problem solving, with left brained, strategic thinking. Douglass's integrated point of view has enabled his natural evolution from designer to strategist, author, and professor, and his expertise spans advertising, design and business education, and is found in international audience through presenting his tools and combining the three to produce more effective creative business solutions. Douglas enjoys interacting with creative people and regularly presents IT industry conferences, including how design live RGD design thinkers, the one club educators summit, Midwest digital marketing conference revolve and the art and branding conference. In 2016, Douglas wrote his first book, creative strategy in the business of design, a title currently being translated into Chinese by Beijing Normal University. He is a former co chair of AI je A's national diversity and inclusion Task Force and regularly contributes to the business of design discourse in print mag comm Applied Arts in the European Business Review, Douglas founded The Davis Group, and he continues to offer strategic solutions to client branding, digital and design problems. In addition to client work, Douglas leverages his professional experience to inspire High School, undergraduate and graduate students as the longest serving member on the four A's High School advisory board. His experience was translated into the four year curriculum at New York City's High School for innovation in advertising and media. Following the launch, Douglas contributed as an education consultant for the launch of the Manhattan Early College School for advertising. Currently, he is the chair of the Emmy Award winning BFA and communication program at New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn, and serves on the advisory boards of the University of Oregon's masters in advertising. And brand responsibility, and City College's master and branding and integrated communications. Douglas holds a BA in graphic design from Hampton University, an MS and Communication Design from Pratt Institute, and an MS in integrated marketing from New York University. Wow, that was a big, big bio, we really don't touch any of it, except for the book in this episode. And that's why I wanted to share that with you. Now. I'm going to stop talking and turn it over to Douglas because well, this is his story. I am here with Douglas Davis. And I couldn't be more excited. Douglas. Douglas Davis 5:47 I'm excited to be here to thank you so much. Marc Gutman 5:49 We were just having a little conversation before recording. And I wish we were recording it. And I know this is going to be a great conversation and in a great episode. And Douglas is a strategist and author and a professor. He's also the author of a book that I think is just gold called Creative Strategy and the Business of Design. Here's my copy Douglas. It is less it has dog years. It's got notes, it's got. It's got post it notes, I mean, this thank you for your support. Yeah, this is like a resource for me, and I can't wait to talk to you about it. It's definitely one of my top, you know, 10 books on branding. Absolutely. But thank you for having me. Yeah. And in addition to being the strategist, author and professor, what are you doing right now? I mean, I see some Emmys in the background. I'm super impressed. When they tell us once you tell us a little bit about what else you're doing cuz you wear a lot of hats. Douglas Davis 6:43 I do. And first of all, Marc, I want to just say thank you, to all your listeners. Thank you all for spending time with us. My name is Douglas Davis, as Marc said, strategist, author, and professor. And right now my current role is that I'm also the chair of the BFA in Communication Design that New York City College of technologies, you know, Department of Communication Design, it's sort of a big mouthful, but we're part of the City University of New York, and over my shoulder, or the Emmys that we were able to when we were nominated for two of them for this story, imported from Brooklyn. And overall, it's about, you know, what, what, how you find the path the possible when you have more ambition and resources. And so overall, we offer graphic design, illustration, we offer web design, we've got advertising, we've got graphic design, so you can come to our program for a fraction of the resources for a fraction of the cost is, you know, going to the design schools. But it's a wonderful, wonderful opportunity to be here. And that's what I do in my day job. Marc Gutman 7:55 Oh, that's so awesome. And I saw that you had put a Vimeo link in the chat is that to the piece that you just described, Douglas Davis 8:02 That's actually, we just recently entered the one show. And, you know, please Wish us luck, we're in three different categories. But this is to the case study of what the impact of that piece imported from Brooklyn was. And so I just wanted to sort of throw that into the mix. Maybe I can go into the show notes, but I'll also send a link to to import it from Brooklyn. It's about 22 minutes documentary on Tony de spinia, who was my professor of prep, and I didn't realize this until years later. But the program that I'm the chair of right now, Tony, when he emigrated to America, he wanted to go to Providence to didn't have enough money. So he went to the communication design department. And just, you know, how wonderful, certain serendipitous, you know, that sort of connection is that I'm now the chair of this program that's offering, you know, private school education and public school prices. So his story is the same story as our Asian, black and Hispanic, Eastern European students today. So it's, it's pretty wonderful in that way, you'll check it out. Marc Gutman 9:19 Yeah, absolutely. We'll link to that in the show notes. We'll make sure everyone knows about it. And I'm going to be watching that. Absolutely. After the after the interview. Thank you very much. So Douglas, what is Creative Strategy and the Business of Design? You know, I was thought design was just a bunch of like, you know, pretty colors and logos and, and some maybe some posters, Douglas Davis 9:39 To a lot of us it is and I was really fortunate enough to have my skills polished in places that I couldn't afford, like Pratt Institute for my first Master's, but uh, just to back up a little bit. I went to Hampton University is historically black college, and I went to study graphic design and photography. Even before that in K through 12, I'm from I was born and raised in Lexington, South Carolina, a very small town, right outside of Columbia, South Carolina, the Capitol there. And surprisingly, we had really wonderful art program really wonderful. And wonderful in a way that I had, you know, in K through 12, murals, rock carvings, ceramic sculpture, the wheel, had exposure to printmaking, drawing, painting, all those different things, right, you know, going through K through 12. Marc Gutman 10:35 So that, was that your primary interest then was that, like, were you? Or was it like a side thing? Or were you you were kind of an art art kid? Douglas Davis 10:43 I was an art kid only because I was really bored, I didn't have a place to channel that energy. And it was just a really great place to to focus my F, my just effort and attention on, I literally applied myself, you know, really didn't apply myself Truthfully, I could go to class and listen, you know, be the class clown. And then the teachers like, what did I just say, and I could verbatim spit back every single thing, because I could do two things at once I wasn't being engaged mentally. So when I found art, it was a place for me to focus and channel that energy and my behavior changed. And so maybe some of your listeners would be able to relate in that way that just having an outlet really did change my life in that way. But in terms of what Creative Strategy and the Business of Design is, it's what I was able to write down as, just as I fumble through my career, I realized that I had gone as far as I could go with my aesthetic training, and again, going to undergraduate going to graduate school, bouncing around from agency to agency design, firm, publishing digital. I also went to NYU and got another Master's. But I realized that design school doesn't teach you business, it teaches you to focus on what are the tactical parts of what should be strategic decisions, largest strategic decisions, without even explain to you what those decisions are, then. So the challenge there is that when you are working somewhere, and you get promoted for doing your job really well for answering those client briefs in ways that are not only creative, but effective. I think there's some assumptions sometimes that you must know strategy, because you're able to knock it out of the park on, you know, all these different points. And so eventually, what I started to notice is that clients were not just coming to me for creative content, they were coming to me for strategic context. And I was uncomfortable with that, because I didn't know strategy. And so I realized that over time, I started losing battles, even though I could write the proposal, build the team, you know, pitch the business, do whatever I needed to do. And I was able to get positions of responsibility relatively quickly as a result of that. But eventually, I started losing battles, because I couldn't justify by the creative decisions within the context of the business and marketing objectives that we should have been trying to hit. And so I lost those battles. Because I fell back on my aesthetic, you know, I was arguing typefaces, well, we should have been talking about marketing objectives or metrics that we needed to hit within the business, you know, objectives. And so one day I stumbled into a strategy session, I realized, Oh, this is that thing that keeps beating me This is that that language that I don't know how to speak. And so let me learn this. That's why I went to NYU, to add the strategy to the creative side, so that I could, my rationale was that I could, you know, become a better creative because I could think, how they think to do what we do like to speak their language, in order to justify what was there. And I'll give you one more piece of that, because this was, you know, you know, you've been in the business for a while. This is back when you could learn ActionScript flash, this is back when you could choose to just double down on the execution part of things. And so even then, I realized, you know, what, I don't want to sit outside the meeting, and wait for these people who are making decisions inside the conference room to come out and tell me what to do and when to have it and, and whatever. So how about I inject creativity into the beginning of solving a business problem, versus being a better executer? And I'm so glad I did that, obviously, because flashes no more. And I think that that's, that's a really important lesson. And a lot of those lessons are what, what I wrote down and Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, in addition to the tools, the frameworks, and the things that allowed me to get to where I needed to go when I added strategy to my creative skill set. So hopefully It'll be useful to somebody to listeners. Marc Gutman 15:03 Yeah, well, you know, I think so I mean, the concept of strategy has completely changed my life. I mean, when I started my career, like, I was exactly the the executer I was like, someone wanted something. And yeah, you know, I started in the movie business, and it was like, you want a story? Great. I'll write that right guys. I didn't even like ask why do you want the story? Right? Like, I was, like, so excited. And, and actually, I, I had a limiting belief that if I asked why that if I questioned it, I would either lose the job, or they would think I was, I was less intelligent or unintelligent, because I was asking questions, you know? Douglas Davis 15:36 Well, that's part of our that's part of our superpower, right? In terms of those emotions, that you need to find a way to channel you need to find an outlet for It's why we are I like to say our job is to take the rational Language of Business and turn it into the emotional language of design, that's our job, we translate that for people. I also like to say that, you know, designers are the spoon. creative people really, are the spoonful of sugar that make business and marketing objectives palatable to the public. And so I can absolutely agree that that insecurity and even navigating those rooms where you don't even know why they want something, and you're a little afraid to ask questions, because you don't want to seem as if you shouldn't have been in that room in the first place. All of those things, I think, are really, really important. And I dress dealing with your emotions, and just how to navigate different rooms. Because if you as you know, if when you're walking into that room, after pouring your heart and soul into whatever you're going to show, and you walk into that room full of people who you don't know, and your emotions, that thing that got you into the room, because of your creativity are now your worst enemy, because you can't even formulate the words, to articulate what it is that you've done. And I think, you know, all these things were things that I had to learn from failing. And so the other piece, too, you know, design schools don't teach business is that business schools don't teach how to get the best out of designers how to inspire creative people. And I realized that because after going there, there was still this gap. And, you know, I had to learn that when you walk into that room as a creative person, they're not going to learn creativity, you have to learn their language. And you have to then put the recommendation up front, instead of walking into the creative side of things where you're going to tell the story. And you're going to talk about the insight and we're going to arrive at the end here it is, you have to completely flop how you even tell the stories in these rooms. But all of those things were things that I had to learn through failing through having outcomes completely opposite of what I wanted to happen. So I can absolutely agree with some of those insecurities. And, and some part of what I teach now is really about organizing the chaos, questioning the answers that clients will come to you with, because they think that they know, or they're still trying to get the same solution that worked six months ago, or in this case, now that we're in Coronavirus times, you know, a year ago, but the environment shifted, and none of that still none of that's even applicable anymore, in order to then turn insights in execution. So we have to retrain the way we listen as creative people. And some part of that is exactly what you're talking about. Marc Gutman 18:34 I mean, thank you so much for sharing that. And I couldn't agree more. And, and and that in itself is a tremendous insight. I mean, what do you do when, you know, let's just hop right to it, like, what do you do when a client has skipped that step? So, you know, hypothetically, you come in, and they've either, you know, started down a campaign road, or they say, look, we've chosen, you know, an identity, but, and you're and then you know, you start to ask your questions, and you're like, Well, wait a second, you haven't gone to step one, like how do you handle that? Like, what do you do when that happens? Douglas Davis 19:06 Yeah, well, overall, one good thing about having been in the business for a while and just being really, really specific about what it is that I do and what I don't do. I haven't been brought in, in a in a situation where there's miscommunication like that in quite a while. But when I was in a situation where people thought that they needed me, but didn't know how much the value of what I would be bringing with cost in asking those questions and and realizing, oh, okay, you're not clear that the way that you're going about this is what you want, but it's not what you need. And I think for me, I've always just walked into the room and been very Matter of fact, and either you hire me or you don't, but I'm going to tell you what you need because I'm the expert and I'll make The recommendations, but as the client, you will make the decisions. And so it's become really easy to to really listen and to know really quickly, whether I'm going to refer you to other sites or other people, because either a, you don't have the budget or B, you're not clear, you need a little bit more information, in order to shift away from being price sensitive, or you need a little bit more information to shift away from that thing that you saw that you liked, that you want the exact copy of that you're not saying. But that you, you're basically going to critique all the work and through a series of meetings, you know, we're going to come out with the exact copy of something else. And so I think, being willing to walk away, being willing to refer other people and being willing to say, you know, if you go to this website, you can be up and running in an hour. Or if you go to this mix of websites, you can have what you need to and under five grand, and then I add the last piece, and so can your competitors. And after that, I think there's a little bit of a pause, been, you know, we can have a conversation where we back up a little bit, and then we can start talking about the value of the services that they need, whether they hired me or not. But I think it's important to just take control of the conversation in a way that you are offering things that makes the client think and it may not even be in that current conversation, it may take a couple of weeks, but giving them something to think about. And then sort of being willing to let it go, has been the way that I've been able to navigate situations where I'm really not the right person. It's best for everybody, if you just you know, shut it down. Marc Gutman 21:54 Absolutely, I've had to walk away from my share. And that I also learned that the very hard way, I mean, I look back at all the things that went bad and all the mistakes I made. And I wouldn't know that without doing it. But it was typically like, there were a lot most of the time, I'd say there were like misalignment issues. Right now. And, and you just learn that the hard way. And I think that's sometimes the only way to learn. So when we look at your book, and we look at it, a lot of the work you've done here, if there was like one thing that we were to know about this book and take away, what would that be? And then what framework is like, you know, I know there's no silver bullet, but which one is the one that's like, if I had to only kind of do one, i i'd lean into that. Douglas Davis 22:37 What chapter six and seven? That was the last question first chapter six and seventh deal with the creative strategy framework, which is literally an alignment exercise. You know, it's, it's something I developed when I was at NYU, when one day, my competitive strategy professor, you know, sort of looked out at the class and held the the whiteboard, pen out, and looked out and says, you know, who's going to step to the board, and I stepped to the board, I was the first one grabbed that pencil. And I started working out this column that, you know, was was four columns and three steps that would help me to organize the chaos, because when I first started learning the language of business, it was new. And so I could be on brand, but off strategy or message on message, but off strategy. And so it takes a little time to speak and understand the language of business. But this tool helps to organize all the information by going through a series of steps where you qualify what the information is that you're dealing with, to create and build your creative work or concepts or just coming up with thought starters, you could use it as a brainstorming tool. I've actually sat in meetings with clients and literally started to write the notes from the briefing into the framework so that I could take what wasn't given to me back to the creative team, stick it up on the whiteboard, and we could just literally hit the ground running where the client left off. But that's really what I would say that that tool and any tool, any framework, you know it we're not talking about something that's a recipe, right? We're not talking about something that is, you know, fill in the blanks, and you'll voila, you'll have this any strategy, any any design even, that's worth its salt is going to be a custom solution. And so the framework, I always like to say is only as good as the information that you put into it, the thinking that goes into it. So yeah, that's that's the one tool that if you didn't go anywhere else, Marc Gutman 24:49 This is the one we're talking about. Right. Great. And so I'll just kind of hold it up there so people can see and get a sense about it. But that's, that's it. Douglas Davis 24:56 That's the one tool that would be that now, the one thing That I would tell people about the book would be that this book is for someone who understands that our careers are a series of transitions, right? You go to you go to college, and you transition from being a student, to breaking into the industry, then you break, you've broken into the industry, you transition from being a junior, to someone who's seen a little battle. And then you transition from someone who's seen a little battle to someone who gets a little bit more responsibility. Now, there are people who report to me, I'm sort of client facing now. And then you move from that person to someone who, at different points might even be a little bit intimidated that the people who are coming in might be a little faster, might have a little edge, because they're the last people and even though they're going to get paid the least, you know, you start to wonder whether you can hold your own as things shift so fast. So the one thing that I would tell people about Creative Strategy and the Business of Design is that it's built for a person who understands that what we do evolves, it shifts. And we all know that, whether it's learning flash, or ActionScript, or whether it's learning about new typefaces, or learning about Slack, or and how to use Basecamp. And all these different things are like a timeline that sort of bring us from the very beginning, and to where we, where we are, and then it keeps going because now we have Tick Tock and we got clubhouse, and you know, everything is going to continue to change. And as creative people, we've always understood that we've always done that in a way that would allow us to, you know, survive, because we're continuing to change. But I think when I think about 1999, when I entered the industry, you know, the.com recession, and all the websites that were there, people didn't know how to make money on the web, I wish that people would have known that, you know, direct marketing was the father of digital because it's, you know, accountable, you can track it, right. But nobody knew that. So they're throwing all this money into this new medium, that my professors at the time I was at Pratt, my professors at the time and not worked in. And so I'm applying my skills, these traditional skills to this medium that no one's worked in who's taught me and you realize that, you know, in 99, no one had a web design degree, because it didn't exist, you couldn't study it. Everybody who was there participating in that industry was there because they decided to learn something new. And I think that that's a really important insight, because I think we're back there right now. If you think about the ways that the Coronavirus has made everyone have to pivot, we have to figure out ways to do the same thing, the exact same thing and complete different ways. Or we have to figure out ways to take what we've already what we have on hand skills or equipment or whatever, and do something completely different. And so I think, when you look at where things were back, then and 99, where you can go to school to learn web design, but there's this industry, you realize that your skills, your willingness to be agile, to change, to morph, that's what actually allows you to survive. And when you add on top of it, the trend, you know, Apple, Microsoft, Google, they're saying the you know, since actually since 2017, that you don't have to have a college degree to enter their ranks, we're back to a point where skills, what you can do, the value that you bring as a person, regardless of what your degree says. That's what matters. And so I think that the book is about those transitions. And, and I wrote it obviously, before we were in this point, because the principles are what we're really talking about here, when you're really understanding that what we do will always evolve, and it's going to evolve at the speed of business, it's going to evolve at the speed of the next thing that marketers are going to create that we're going to have to figure out ourselves to engage and build the relationships that our clients want us to build with our customers who are going to join that platform, and who are going to adopt it in mass in ways that we're gonna have to figure out how to show up and you know, entertain them in a way that they're not shutting us off or blocking us. And I think that that evolution and change that constant change is something that I'm encouraged that as creative people that we're dealing with this pandemic right now. Because who better? Who better to deal with something to change the whole world in an instant? If they no snapped his fingers? We literally were in a situation Where how you enter the industry was different. How you work when you're in the industry is completely different. And we're literally back where we, as the people with experience, we're in the exact same position, as I was saying about in 1999, where my world class practice, the two professors had no experience in this thing that I was going to apply my skills to, were literally back to that point where none of us with experience has more experience than any student. And any, like, we're back, it's leveled the playing field, but who better to to navigate that, who better to lead that then creative people who have to do that to save their lives, every single time anyway, you have to reinvent yourself. So that's the one thing that I would say that the book will help you to do. And you know, I always tell people, it's very similar to like a Harvard Business Case Study, if you're, if you're familiar with that, where your objective is to read it, and then figure out who the decision maker is, and then play that person's role, you step into their role. And everything that you're reading for is to find your, your recommendation, the risk and rewards are what you would do in that situation. So it's about role playing, and sort of stepping into those shoes. The book gives you the stories of why these things are important that I'm going to talk to you about. The book tells you the stories of how I got here, it gives you my story and the way I do it, but it's asking you to bring yourself to it. It's asking you to take the thought process the principles, and then apply it to your own situation, and figure out how to save your own life. That's what this is about the transitions. So that's the one thing that I would tell you, if you're interested in the book, if you want to keep reinventing yourself, this is this is going to help you do that, because it's going to teach you the language of how things change. And that one tool that, you know, if I said, you know, all the other ones have to fall away, would be the creative strategy framework, because it helps you to organize that chaos. And it'll help you to only focus on what's relevant, and solving the problems and those four columns and three steps in order to question the answers that the client comes to you with, so that you can you know, organize that chaos, question those answers and turn insights into executions. And those executions can be the actual work themselves, it could be the brainstorming session, it could be the brief because sometimes, going back to what I was saying about business school doesn't teach how to inspire designers, we've all had a brief that's the size of a novel that's completely worthless, that was given to you by somebody who has a strategist title, and who came from sort of the business side of things, but who has no idea how to talk to a creative person. And that's what's so ironic that the very things that make us professionals to be on the same team to service that client don't even teach us to talk to each other. So sometimes to have a sound strategy, you got to write to yourself as a creative person, to even have one. And so this framework will help you either get started on the creativity part of things, thought starters, it'll help you write the briefs. It can help you with strategy itself. But it's a very, very elastic tool that I'm asking you to bring yourself to. Marc Gutman 33:39 A common question I get all the time is Marc, can you help me with our brand? Yes, we help companies solve branding problems. And the first step would be to schedule a no obligation brand clarity call, we'll link to that in the show notes, or head over to wild story, comm and send us an email, we'll get you booked right away. So whether you're just getting started with a new business, or whether you've done some work and need a refresh, or whether you're a brand that's high performing and wants to stay there, we can help. After you book your brand clarity call, you'll learn about our brand audit and strategy process will identify if you need a new logo or just a refresh, will determine if your business has a branding problem. And you'll see examples of our work and get relevant case studies. We'll also see if branding is holding your business back and can help you get to the next level. So what are you waiting for, build the brand you've always dreamed of. Again, we'll link to that in the show notes or head over to wildstorm comm and send us an email. Now back to the show. I just feel like I got a master class in a few minutes. There. are on strategy and you've really changed actually my perspective and worldview I'm, I'm kind of caught up in obsessed with relevance and this idea of staying relevant being relevant, am I relevant? How do I stay relevant? I recently had a post where I was music, I have never felt the right age, you know, when I was younger, I always wanted more, and to be in someone else's seat. Now, as I'm further my career, I'm looking back and be like, oh, there's all these tick trackers, like, as you're mentioning, all these things happening, that I don't know, but, but the way you just describe that, and what I heard was that reinventing yourself and always learning something new as a gift and an opportunity. And, you know, I haven't always looked at it that way. And so I just want to take a moment and pause. And thank you for that. Because that's changed really how I am seeing this, this concept of relevance. And I want me to ask you, like, on this topic of relevance, is that one of the reasons you teach? Douglas Davis 35:55 It is, and yet, I, you know, if you were to ask me, if I was going to teach one day, this is, you know, back when I'm bouncing around from agency to agency, I'd say the guy you know, and I thought, the farthest age that I could think I was, like, yeah, I teach when I'm, like, 35, or something, this is me like 22 or 23. And it ended up that I started teaching at 25. And, you know, the model was always there that my teachers, I pride, they worked in the day, and they taught at night. And so I saw that. And so I realized that, you know, ended up being what I saw. And yet in some ways, the relevance part, I'm going to sort of unpack this as well, because I think that this word and the change, and what's going on in our industry is something that is a larger issue that's also going on in our society that I think we have to deal with. But I remember, as I mentioned earlier, I went to Hampton University, historically black college to study graphic design and photography. After leaving there, as I mentioned, I went to private Institute to get my masters. And then after maybe about seven or eight years of losing, like I said, while winning but losing different battles, because I didn't know how to speak that language. I then went to get my second Master's in integrated marketing, I didn't want you. And what I realized lately is that not only did my high school guidance counselor not have a one, even one conversation with me about college, but in those three institutions, there was no one black teaching design or, or strategy. And then I became a design professor, then I became a strategy professor. I think, when you look at what's going on in society, when you look at design needing to become more diverse, when you look at the demographics in America, when you look at how some people will describe what's going on the southern border as an, you know, an infestation. terrible word. Other people describe it as will, it's what humans do, when they're fleeing, or in a situation where they have to flee. It's what happens on every border, because if if we're having a crisis, here you go, and seek a better place to be. I think when we're talking about relevance, when we're talking about representation, when we're talking about being able to see yourself, I can't say that I teach because I, I didn't see someone like me. But I can say that, if we're talking about design changing, if we're talking about the issues that are in our profession, also being a part of what's in our society. I think that when we talk about relevance, I think we have to really have the conversation that is on the base of the Statue of Liberty. It's calling out to immigrants. But our policy has been so different in the past, you know, very different in the past four years, if equal justice under law is on the top of the Supreme Court, and yet, we're watching the George Floyd trial right now in front of us. And there is witness after witness up there telling you that the sequence of events that happened were completely unique and different than what would have normally happened. Then, I think when we talk about relevance, and when we talk about America living up to its melting pot, you know, equals and, you know, liberty and justice under our equal justice under law. I think we have to really talk about belonging. We have to really talk about the fact that people are coming to us because they believe what we say If we were a company, these would be our mission statement documents, these will be our vision documents, but there's so many mixed signals that are built into what they say, and what the actual experiences. And a lot of times, as you mentioned earlier, alignment is what we're being asked to do as creative people we're being asked to come in and align some problem. And I always start with, well, where's the gap between what we say? And what the people's experience is, whenever they trust us? I close that. And I think relevance and belonging are why people are coming to us. But I think that we have to start asking ourselves, as institutions as an industry, are we relevant? Because there's a call and response here? various people come to various institutions or employers or countries, they're basically asking, do I belong? And based in their interactions with the country or with the employer, or with the client, good or bad? They're going to conclude yes or no. And I think that if we can, as an industry, but also as individuals continue to ask ourselves a question that you asked, am I relevant? Are we relevant? If your metric on yes or no, I am relevant or not, I'm not relevant. It's tied to how many groups of people feel comfortable in the space that you've created, how wide your arms are open, then that is a call and response because it's connected. And if you do care about being relevant, but you do see that some people have decided that they don't belong, based on whatever environment you influence or which is created, or what you're a part of, the next step is to go get those people to understand why, right? And so I'm mixing culture, I'm mixing, you know, what's going on in America. But you can't separate it from the problems that are in our industry, you can't, it's not possible to separate the two. And when you look at it like that, it explains what's going on in our industry, whether we're talking about relevance, or belonging. And I think that if we don't become really serious about this, we're there will be threats to creativity, because of diversity being hindered. And I'll go back to just on this point, I'll go back to again, we got clubhouse. Before that it was you know, tick tock. And before that it was Snapchat before that was Twitter, right? And before that Facebook, and I can keep going because it's gonna keep going. So why in the world, would you not want as many different types of minds on the problems when the industry moves at the speed of business, and we've already covered that we have to keep changing, we have to keep growing, we have to keep learning, to even keep up to even remain relevant. Why would you not want as many different minds or perspectives on a problem that you can grab? And so I say this, in hopes of some of your listeners who I know are creative professionals who have influence over their studios, who could determine how exactly to staff, I'm saying this to your listeners, because I'm hoping that they can really think about the new barriers that COVID-19 has posed, since we're all in our houses. You know, right now, going to school depends on your own bandwidth, your own internet speed, your own Mac, your own whatever, right. But if you think about it, we're asking people who don't have a lot to buy the equivalent of a computer that cost as much as the car just to go to school. And, you know, if you don't control what your internet speed is, because if you live in public housing, you know, again, people are going to college in order to get out of this the circumstances that they were born into in many cases, and all they need is a chance. And so, the Coronavirus has put us in a situation where, you know, there are a lot more barriers that are different. And some of the barriers that were there before are not there anymore. So some of it is leveled the playing field. But I think that belonging and relevance like these, these words that we we often talk about as people who are tasked with solving brands problems, you know, do our customers feel like they belong? are we creating a culture where we're solving their problems, like what are their pain points that we discussed that stuff all the time, we talk about relationship management, we're a field built on targeting, we craft messaging, you know, there are all these different words that we talked about. And yet, when we exclude groups of people from sitting around the table, then not only can we not hear their perspective of what creativity is, and how we can solve this problem that it's, it should be different than ours. But we also put ourselves in a situation where we're not helping ourselves in in the demographics that are shifting, you know, because either what's either your client base is going to become more black and brown, or either the people sitting at the table, this should be it should be, shouldn't be really an ad or should be both. But overall, on order to serve that client basis, becoming more black and brown with the demographics of the nation, you got to make sure that they're people behind the concept, who actually understand how to talk to these groups, so that you're being authentic, and you can build that trust. And that you can actually build the customer base because that takes, you know, making promises, and then actually delivering on them. So, again, I know I expanded that into way more, but it's bigger. And again, the strategist in me won't allow me to sort of just look at those two words, as just those two words. The strategist in me says, You know what, this is much bigger. And there are a lot of pieces to this, if we're going to continue to evolve to remain relevant, if we're going to continue to, you know, now I think apply our skills to new systems design, operations, forecasting, decentralized decision making, all those things are the things that I believe are the new creative skills as a result of the Coronavirus. All of that is what's coming out of how you got to pivot because your clients are asking how we're going to pivot, then it's going to be your job to also have an opinion on some of those things. This is the next evolution of all the things that creative people have to learn. In order to stay relevant. I'll give you this one last piece. I literally just days ago finished a class on finance, from Harvard Business School online. I hate Numbers, chapter one in the book, first paragraph, I take you back to NYU when I'm sitting in my statistics class, and I want to somebody shoot me in the face, because it was too much. However, what is my point? I understand that at my altitude, and at my point, like where I'm at in my career, if I don't understand how to talk to other people who do get it. If I don't understand how to ask the right questions, if I don't understand which levers I can pull on my level, then I'm not going to get the business, I'm not going to be chosen, somebody else is going to be chosen. So me taking a finance class 15 $100. Okay, I hate numbers. But I'm going to find the fear. Gonna find the fear just like I did when I was bad at typography. And I said, I'm only going to use type on this particular solution, because I'm going to turn my weaknesses into strengths. And that is the evolution. It's a mindset leading is a verb, and a posture. And as creative people, I believe that we will lead us out of this crazy mess that we're in right now. Whether it's climate change, whether it's our social ills that we're going through right now, this just horrible Asian hate, or just you know, what happened in your area with, you know, people not having access to mental health and just having so many guns, I don't even know why people do what they do, but that the systems need to be redesigned. And relevance and belonging are the questions that we will be judged by. It's bigger than just words, this is how we are going to survive. And I'm hoping that in talking about it in a way that I'm scaling it up, unpacking all the different pieces, connecting these dots on something that's much bigger than just your job, the problems your client has, and you being able to like navigate that stuff. It's much bigger than that. And if we can see it as creative people, as bigger than that, I believe that they're the opportunities there for us to lead. That's what I believe. That's what I believe. Wow. Marc Gutman 49:36 I mean, I believe the same and taking that leadership role. And you know, what I've always loved about this idea of design. So when we take it in a very literal sense, you know, I think of it in terms of graphic design of aesthetics of type and I'm like, I wish I was a designer. I'm not a designer. I love designers. I love being around them. I love being in their spaces. There's every there's something magical about it. But when I really think about what design means to me, it's exactly what you just articulated. It's it's seeing the problems, both the ones in front of us and the ones that that expand out of Yeah, of the the the first maybe insight or initial problem, and then coming up with creative, innovative solutions to solve those problems. And I agree, I think creatives are our only hope right now. And they're going to lead us to, to the new world. And yeah, no dog was on that topic of diversity. I mean, what is the step that creative leaders can take? Besides the the obvious of like, Hey, we need more representation at the table, because I hear that a lot. And I hear people putting energy into it, but I'm not seeing it in the way that you just articulated. And I think that's where we want to get to, you know, no doubt. Douglas Davis 50:56 So I'm gonna be I'm gonna be blunt, like we are in Brooklyn. I think a lot of times when I hear, again, our industry that's built on targeting and messaging and, and like, we get that stuff, but yet there are a lot of people are excluded. Right? as a percentage of the population, you can't understand that stuff. Like that can't be your job, your industry, and yet, we're leaving people out. Right, like, and that's what targeting is right? You not you, you, not you, right. So we're deciding to leave people out. And I like to tell people who asked this question, I think it would come from a really good place who really do want to do something different. Now school, you know, what do we find people can't really find, you know, qualified candidates of color and x y&z. I, my answer to that is that I'm not a black white person. Don't look for me in the same places, and in the same way that you would if you're looking for white person, of course, you can't find me. Of course you can't. I'm not there. You're looking for me as if I was not me. And then when you say, Well, I looked, and I can't No, you didn't look, and you didn't even understand that you're not looking for me. And I think that that's the part that has to be corrected. I also think that we have to rethink the measures of what we've used to determine someone's aptitude or potential, whether it be for leadership or, or carrying a gun, frankly, as a policeman. I think we've got to rethink what we've used to judge someone's worthiness or potential. I took the LSAT probably about three times. And again, I mentioned earlier that my guidance counselor in high school, we never had one conversation about college, not 1/11 grade summer, I said to myself, you know, what, if I don't go to college, I wanted to be because I didn't choose to go versus I couldn't go. So I chose to go to summer school, I chose to finish my foreign language requirements, I chose to take extra math, like get it right, I chose to take the LSAT three times. And in those three times, I got to like a 720, or 780, I can't even remember. But on that measure, Marc, I'm stupid. If I were to let that number, tell me dictate to me what I was and was not capable of in the future, then I'm stupid. And I'm so thankful that that's not how I didn't listen to that, like, What do you know about me? None of these questions were even crafted with me in mind. So of course, I didn't do well. And I'm not just saying that, like, Everything about it is wrong. I am saying though, that we can't measure everybody by the same yardstick. And that doesn't mean that one is better than the other. It just means that there are other ways. And and people learn differently as creative people, you know that we all know that. And yet, we don't apply that to the standard measures that we've always used to gauge someone's potential. And I think that there's something wrong with that. Because, you know, creative people like me, and you can grow up comparing themselves to other people based on those measures, and conclude that something's wrong with them, when they're the ones with the superpowers. You know, and I think that that is something that's really important. We have superpowers and I'm not saying that being able to crunch numbers is not a superpower. It definitely is. But I am also saying that being bad at numbers is an indicator that you might be a creative. Think Overall, we really have to rethink our measures. We've got it and again, this is back to new systems design. This is back to us thinking through what's wrong? And if you if you really look at this right, I love this example. You know, there are more design decisions than there are visually literate people to make them. How do I know this? Well, if on live TV, the best picture is announced lala land and not moonlight because of the card, then that tells me that there was a problem that needed to be solved. There were people around who who had the title and the tools, but who are not visually literate. What is another example, if the wrong Mr. Universe gets crowned on national TV? What is another example if the Supreme Court has to determine who the President is because of the ballot design? What is another, I can keep going all day? Right? So there are more visually, there are more design problems than there are visually literate people to make them. And so again, like I'm back to this place, that we've got to redesign our systems, there's so much broken, and there's so many sort of problems to solve. And, you know, if you're like me, as a creative person, you can't unsee all the work around us. Because there's so many things to redesign. There's so many things to rethink, but I think we can do it. And I think, you know, I was thinking about Okay, so what are the new measures, I would argue that we should have a grid metric, you know, if you don't come from money, the money's not the first thing that you think about to solve a problem. I want that person on my team, because that person had everything but money, that person has creativity, that person is thinking creatively, that person is not just like, yeah, we'll throw XYZ in the budget at the problem. Yeah, we're gonna need money at some point. But if you don't have money, you still got a problem that you got to solve. And, you know, I would much rather have a grip metric, somebody who had to fight through some stuff. In order to get here. I want to know your story. How'd you get here? What do you do when you have more ambition and resources? You know, how did that work? And how, you know, what is your origin story? How did you get here, I can only see you now. You know, and oftentimes, I'm always really, really clear that, yes, I have three Emmys, you know, over my shoulder, and yet, it was not always like that. And so I'm making a point to tell young creators, that it was a struggle, it was a struggle, because I don't want anybody to get the wrong idea. It wasn't always easy. And it's not easy now. And so I think there's so much work to do. There's so many systems that we have to redesign and rethink. And the right people to do that, are you and I want to put another link in the chat that sort of deals with all of this, this sort of social, creative sort of mix that I'm putting together, because I'm looking at this as our competitive advantage as a nation, just like Michel Porter's book, you know, competitive ventures of nations, this is a big problem that if we're not careful, we are going to lose out because there's so much human potential that we don't allow, because of the color of somebody's skin, or because of their gender, or because we're worried about which bathroom, you're going to use stupid stuff that if we could just focus on, you know, how someone's mind would process dealing with this issue. We can be so much farther ahead than we are right now. But we're caught up on stupid things that divide us. And I think that, you know, I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful, especially in this generation, because they grew up in a time where, you know, the only president that they knew was black. But it wasn't even a hurdle that like a black person could be president, right? They grew up in a time where now the vice president as a black woman, who also is, you know, has Asian descent as well, like these MCs, these these barriers that we had, like, you can have same sex unions, like all the stuff that took forever, right? It was just it was here, we had made the progress by the time that they were born. And so I hope that they can do something about the climate. I hope that because of their energy, and because they don't have the same limitations that we had. I hope that their creative problem solving skills that we we get out of the way that we let them apply themselves to these big problems. Because if we, if we're not talking about if we keep talking about logos, we keep talking about like the job, then we're part of the problem because we're not even addressing all the other things that we better start to like attention to. And it you know, it would be embarrassing if I didn't speak out, based on all the things that I had to navigate to even get here. And I think that, that that's just always a really important thing that, you know, I have to touch on those things, things that, you know, may seem, you know, like third rail, but I, you know, I think we have to be more deliberate about closing the gap, the mixed signals that are there between what we say and what the experience is in America, you know, none of us as professionals would advise our client to do the complete opposite of everything hit the brandy, mission statement, and just the who would do that? Who would do that? No, but none of us. And so why do we tolerate it? Why do we tolerate it in society? And I think that again, because that's what we do, we should be the ones leading the conversation about how to make change. And I know that, you know, some people might be listening to like, well, this is outside of the lane of what I do. You know, I'm here to learn about tips and tricks about how to, like, you know, do better my job. And yes, I hear you, you know, I hope that there was something there that you could also listen to, but I also hope that you'll take your superpowers and think about our systems that are broken, they need your skills. That's why I'm talking to you about this, because you're a part of who can fix it, because of your creativity. And so I'm calling out, because, you know, we need a different type of person to go into these other professions, you know, or else we're lost. We're lost. But I'm hopeful. Marc Gutman 1:01:52 In that is Douglas Davis. I've goosebumps as I sit here, goosebumps and a bit like I was just shaken into my senses, that we need to stop talking and start doing that I me, because it starts here must work to close the gap, to open my arms and bring more of the world into the conversation. I hear you, Douglas. There was so much gold in this episode. And I can't wait to get Douglas back on the show. So we can hear his story. As he shared it hasn't been easy. And he's worked his tail off to find success in this industry. I hope you're as excited as I am to hear all about that in the future as well. Inspired by Douglas, I challenge you. What new thing are you going to decide to learn? make a commitment to learning something new, put a flag in the sand. Email us if you're so bold with what it is. I want to know that I'll share it with Douglas as well. We are living in such an exciting time as the story is being written as we live it. We have an incredible opportunity to reinvent ourselves, learn new things and change the world. really change the world. It's our job to reinstate that American mission statement on the Statue of Liberty. I'm up for the challenge. Are you a big thank you to Douglas Davis. You inspire me professionally, personally, and culturally. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, my friend. We will link to all things Douglas Davis, his book Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, imported from Brooklyn, and much more in the show notes. If you know of a guest who should appear on our show, please drop me a line at podcast at wild story calm. Our best guests like Douglas come from referrals from past guests and our listeners. Well that's the show. Until next time, make sure to visit our website www.wildstorm.com where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes, Stitcher or via RSS so you'll never miss an episode. I like big stories and I cannot lie. You other storytellers can't deny. ‍

BGBS 063: Douglas Davis | The Davis Group | Decide to Learn Something New Brooklyn-based Douglas Davis enjoys being one of the variety of voices needed in front of and behind the concept. His approach to creativity combines right-brained creative problem solving with left-brained strategic thinking. Douglas’ integrated point of view has enabled his natural [...]Read More...

Design, in all its shapes and flavors, involves two kinds of activities: Picking problems, and solving them. Making decisions, and executing them. Reasoning, and crafting. The concepts “strategy” and “tactics” capture what these two sides of the coin. This is a useful mental model and language for how to think and talk about design, and what it means to be a designer.http://designdisciplin.com/strategy-and-tactics-in-design# Related Books, Links, and Resources- Creative Strategy and the Business of Design by Douglas Davis: https://amzn.to/30JkGC5- Designing Brand Identity by Alina Wheeler: https://amzn.to/3qEY7Ju- High Resolution: https://www.highresolution.design/- Joseph La Delfa: https://cafeciaojoe.com- The Art of War: https://amzn.to/3bKK3K7- The Win Without Pitching Manifesto by Blair Enns: https://amzn.to/3qPXFrH- Visualize Value: http://visualizevalue.com/- How To by Michael Bierut: https://amzn.to/30KVVp2# Connect with Design Discipline- Website: http://designdisciplin.com​- Podcast: http://podcast.designdisciplin.com​- Instagram: https://instagram.com/designdisciplin/​- Twitter: https://twitter.com/designdisciplin/​- YouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCtXM3JdnERaNOiFKaHZJL_w- Bookstore: http://designdisciplin.com​/bookstore# Episode Bookmarks00:00 Intro01:09 Inspirations02:05 What does "design" mean?04:53 What do "strategy" and "tactics" mean?06:15 Why is this useful?11:47 What does it look like?15:34 Closing

Phillip J. Clayton is a hybrid consultant; his focus is centered around Art & Design and Business & Marketing. He started in the fine arts and found his purpose as a designer and creative consultant with 15+ years of experience working in the creative industry, Advertising & Marketing. He is inspired by people, passionate about teamwork, and practices a holistic approach to delivering excellent creative solutions that drive business results. He is a founding partner of noTheName: PJC, a hybrid brand-focused business solutions agency. He is also a writer and a member of the PAC Global Leadership Awards International Judging Commission. In this episode of Nodes of Design, Phillip shared insights on Brand Design and its importance, and how young creative enter into brand design. He also spoke about the various Attributes of Brand Design? And what are the steps involved in designing a brand? In the later part, we spoke about the various parameters to use to measure the success of failure of the brand that you designed. Takeaways - What is brand design? What are the various attributes of brand design? Measuring the success and failure of brand design. Tales from Designers around the world - https://medium.com/design-warp Books recommended by Phillip J. Clayton. Creative Strategy & The Business of Design by Douglas Davis. The Anatomy of Type by Stephen Coles The History of Graphic Design Volume 1 - 1890-1959 by Jens Müller Thank you for listening to this episode of Nodes of Design. We hope you enjoy the Nodes of Design Podcast on your favorite podcast platforms- Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. If this episode helped you understand and learn something new, please share and rate us and be a part of the knowledge-sharing community #Spreadknowledge. This podcast aims to make design education accessible to all, as knowledge shouldn't hide behind paywalls. Nodes of Design is a non-profit and self-sponsored initiative by Tejj.

In this episode Arek Dvornechuck interviews Douglas Davis and we talk about the creative strategy framework. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ebaqdesign/support

In this bonus episode, we have Douglas Davis join us, Jacob Cass & Matt Davies, to discuss the current state of design education and what it takes to remain relevant as we evolve as creatives in these disruptive and turbulent times. We explore his book, Creative Strategy & The Business of Design as well as the future of design. There has never been a more timely episode. Douglas Davis is a strategist, author and professor at the New York City College of Technology, a part of the The City University of New York. He holds the chair for the BFA in Communication Design and has a through background in marketing, creative strategy and art direction. Show notes available at https://justcreative.com/podcast

Too much frustration can arise from a language disconnect between creatives and business leaders. But both the creative and business sides of a company must learn to speak each other’s language if they want to succeed. Tune in to our next Real Creative Leadership episode to join Adam Morgan and Douglas Davis as they discuss how designers can become fluent in the language of business and strategy — and how it will transform your company.In this conversation with Douglas, you’ll learn:Why creatives struggle in business environmentsThe value of putting yourself in the shoes of non-creative peersTips for learning the language of business How strategy-fluent creatives can help transform businesses

Douglas Davis is a designer, author, filmmaker, digital marketer and an educator. His book, “Creative Strategy and the Business of Design” helps readers truly understand design’s place in business. And it goes even further to illustrate how to marry the magic of creativity with the logic and language of strategy and finance. Douglas also shares the back story of his new film, “Imported from Brooklyn.” And the professor offers up his unique approach to teaching design born from his remarkable journey to NYC from Lexington, South Carolina. Only on the Disruptor Series Podcast.  Check out “Imported from Brooklyn” in the link below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9SYKAS0SSY&list=PLRSIxTBS2eRzoAcrxKJOFiLMMhBCnBcC7&index=34   Podcast Credits Host - Rob Schwartz  Intro/Outro Voiced by Sophia Barnett Executive Producer - Sean Riojas Audio Engineer/Sound Design - Corey Bauman

This week we do our first two part series on the future of creative strategy beginning with an exploration of what exactly is this mysterious force we call creativity. Our guest this week is Douglas Davis, Chief Strategist of the Davis group and the chair of the BFA program at City Tech in New York City. Also many shout outs to Brooklyn. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/revision/message

This week we do our first two part series on the future of creative strategy beginning with an exploration of what exactly is this mysterious force we call creativity. Our guest this week is Douglas Davis, Chief Strategist of the Davis group and the chair of the BFA program at City Tech in New York City. Also many shout outs to Brooklyn. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/revision/message

www.GoodMorningGwinnett.com In this episode I Monica Douglas Davis joins me at the table to talk about mental health and how you can recognize the signs of depression and what to do if you are not a health professional.#Podcast, #DailyHoroscope

Tamsin Westhorpe meets and talks to Boyd Douglas Davis the Horticultural Trade Association (HTA).This podcast comes to you from Candide Gardening, the app where gardeners find inspiration and knowledge, to find out more please visit CandideMusic: Vacation by Scandinavianz

FYI this is another two-parter but it is so worth it. On part two of the HBCU (Historically Black College & University) edition of Henny With Keni my brother for another mother Douglas Davis stopped by the set to discuss advertising on the collegiate level, new fatherhood, diversity and multiple ways to slay dragons while dropping bars and toasting Henny all at the same time. Follow him on Twitter @DouglasQDavis Instagram @dquajuan and his site douglasdavis.com For guest spots and organization/brand shout outs reach me on social @kenithacker on everything.

FYI this is another two partner but it is so worth it. On part one of the HBCU (Historically Black College & University) edition of Henny With Keni my brother for another mother Douglas Davis stopped by the set to discuss advertising on the collegiate level, new fatherhood, diversity and multiple ways to slay dragons while dropping bars and toasting Henny all at the same time. Follow him on Twitter @DouglasQDavis Instagram @dquajuan and his site douglasdavis.com For guest spots and organization/brand shout outs reach me on social @kenithacker on everything.

Monica always worked very well with children, but she knew she couldn't keep doing it out of a home office. Listen to this week's podcast to hear how Monica used natural charm to power her way into her own office and a flourishing referral network. The post TTE 138: The Importance of Networking & Staying Connected with Monica Douglas Davis appeared first on BrighterVision.com.

If you would like to get a chance at winning the book, join the give-away on letstalkbranding.be/douglas In this episode, we talk about: Douglas his story, working at multiple advertising agencies The end of the DOT.com bubble Douglas plays the role as my therapist, where we talk about my dilemma being a designer that becomes more and more of a strategist Features, benefits, insights The article Douglas mentions: https://www.adweek.com/agencies/design-experts-weigh-in-on-ddbs-and-joans-new-visual-identities/ What makes a good brief Overcoming the fear and doing the work As always, if you would like to stay up to date, subscribe to the podcast and give me a rating.

Learn more about Douglas: http://www.douglasdavis.com/ https://twitter.com/DouglasQDavis Learn more about Episode 100: https://www.passionbehindtheart.com/pod100 Join the Community: http://passionbehindtheart.com/ https://www.instagram.com/dpcreates/ https://www.instagram.com/pbtapodcast/ https://twitter.com/PbtaPodcast https://www.facebook.com/groups/pbtapodcast/

This week on the Creative South Podcast, I’m talking with designer, educator, and author of “Creative Strategy and the Business of Design,” Douglas Davis. Douglas and I chat about how a kid with no plans to go to college ended up with two masters degrees and as chair of his department at New York City College of Technology, struggling with addiction for years and how having a front row seat to seeing the planes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11 helped cement his sobriety, learning from your failures and how overcoming the fear of failing can help you progress in your work and life, and more.

To be a successful designer, freelancer, or small business owner you need to understand strategy and business, so to kick off season 3 Ian Paget chats with Douglas Davis, the author of the hugely popular book “Creative Strategy and the Business of Design” to discuss the importance of understanding business, and using a strategic approach when working as a designer. Douglas is the associate professor within the Communication Design department at New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn. View the show notes & transcription for this episode   Resources Mentioned  Book: Creative Strategy and The Business of Design – Amazon US | Amazon UK Thinkhowtheythink.com   Logo Geek Podcast Sponsored by FreshBooks This episode kicks off the 3rd season of the logo geek podcast. I’m incredibly thankful to FreshBooks for sponsoring the show, who have allowed me to made this possible. FreshBooks is an online accounting software that makes it easy to create and send invoices, to track time and to manage your incoming and outgoing money. It’s designed specifically for small creative businesses, so it’s beautifully designed, and continually optimised and improved. I highly recommend it, and you can try it out for yourself free for 30 days.  Go check FreshBooks out!

In this podcast, we speak with Douglas Davis live from the Midwest Digital Marketing Conference (MDMC18). Douglas tells us all about the struggle of creative entrepreneurs in the business world. He explains how his classes help creative minds better navigate the business world in order to get the resources that they need. Host: Gus Wehmeier Produced: Brian Borgstede, James Brandt, Taylor Caputo, Khadijah Johnson, Blake Rudloff and Gus Wehmeier Guests: Douglas Davis About MDMC: the MDMC is the largest Digital Marketing Conference in the Midwest, and it boasts speakers annually from companies such as BuzzFeed, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google, including some local talent. The conference was held in St. Louis Union Station on March 27-28 2018, featuring over 120 speakers, and offering about 80 sessions for more than 1,700 attendees. About the Speaker: Douglas is based out of Brooklyn, New York and is very proud of his home. He is an Associate Professor of Advertising Design at New York City College of Technology, which is part of the City University of New York. He is the principal of the Davis Group, LLC, and is the author of the book called "Creative Strategy and the Business of Design."

Douglas Davis was the kid who was drawing when the teacher was lecturing, creating when others were just coasting. With the help of a nurturing mother, and a lot of talent and hustle, Douglas worked his way into a design career, but always wanted more. He had spent a lot of his life creating, but came to a point where he wanted to explore the business side, as well, and moved into strategy. In this week's conversation, Chris talks to Douglas about growing up and going to school with very few resources, moving into the world of strategy and the value it has provided both for Douglas's clients and himself, and Douglas's hustle as a teacher, bringing up a new generation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Five years. Over 230 podcast episodes. And if you include our blog, that's nearly 300 interviews with Black designers, developers, and creatives worldwide. This episode is a love letter for you, our loyal listeners. I answer your questions, give you a bit of a peek behind the curtain of Revision Path, talk about Revision Path's upcoming plans and goals, and share some updates and words of wisdom from some of our show's most popular guests. Here's to five years of Revision Path and the future of design!

A special part two conversation with the author of “Creative Strategy and the Business of Design”   Today on Obsessed with Design we have a special second conversation with one of our most popular past guests, Douglas Davis. Douglas is the author of “Creative Strategy and the Business of Design”, Digital Marketer, Freelance Art and Creative Director, and Advertising & Design Educator.   Douglas and I talk about his new video series, and the role fear plays in the creative process.   Subscribe on iTunes

In this episode, I talked with Douglas Davis, creative strategist, the author of Creative Strategy and Business of Design and he is also the principal of The Davis Group LLC. We talked about his book, getting the right strategy behind your products, how to write a good strategy and what should you take into account when creating products or solving problems for your consumers. His work experience and previous clients include ABN·AMRO Bank, Council for Economic Education, The Economist, HSBC, Tribal DDB, JWT, Deutsch and many others. Book references during this episode include Hey Whipple Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan, Truth Lies, and Advertising by Jon Steel and Juicing the Orange by Pat Fallon His book can be bought on Amazon: https://goo.gl/2iAsfG You can also listen to this episode on iTunes: https://goo.gl/2cyAgu Soundcloud: https://goo.gl/gByB8P About Laroche: https://www.laroche.co/ ------- Laroche.fm is a podcast hosted by Eugeniu Esanu, the founder and creative director of Laroche.co, a design agency from Amsterdam. We are on a journey of learning from different experts and industry leaders who share their expertise and knowledge. ------- Music: https://soundcloud.com/itsnglmusic

I'm so glad I had the opportunity to speak with Chad Brown. Aside from his own studio, Chado Creative, he also owns the nonprofit organization Soul River Inc. and has his own apparel line! On top of all of this, Chad's an adventurer at heart. We start off talking about how he got started in design, what it means to him to be a designer today, and then Chad shared his backstory of being in the military and how those experiences shaped him and helped him to where he is today. I really want you to listen to what Chad says when he talks about inspiration, because it really gets to the heart of what I think all designers struggle to overcome. Thanks to Chad for opening up and sharing his story, and thanks to Douglas Davis for the introduction! Chad Brown's Website Chad Brown on Facebook Soul River Inc. Soul River Runs Deep Soul River Runs Deep on Facebook Come join the Revision Path community on Slack! http://revisionpath.com/slack Check out the Revision Path store and buy a t-shirt or hoodie to help support the movement! Free shipping from January 27 - February 1! Use promo code SHIP17 at checkout! http://revisionpath.com/store We're on iTunes and Stitcher as well! Visit http://revisionpath.com/iTunes or http://revisionpath.com/stitcher, subscribe, and leave us a 5-star rating and a review! Thanks so much to all of you who have already rated and reviewed us! Interested in sponsoring the Revision Path podcast? Head on over to http://revisionpath.com/donate and help support the show!

Based in Brooklyn, Douglas never intended to go to college. Today, he's the author of Creative Strategy and the Business of Design and he teaches online courses on design and business strategy. During our interview, we talk about his book, his educational series, and how he went from not intending to go to college to educating college kids himself. You can follow him on Twitter here. In this episode, we discuss: His inspiration for his book. How he started a digital department at his first agency. What he's most obsessed with now. You can get show notes at ObsessedShow.com.

Michael Stinson (@MWStinson) is a veteran designer, educator, and business owner. In addition to his work as a professor of graphic design, he also runs Ramp Creative, a branding studio in Los Angeles, as well as Type Ed, a dedicated typographic education business which helps creative pros return to form in the fields of typesetting and layout. Together in this conversation we unravel some of today's worst typographic habits, and how to overcome them, share a few tips that all creatives can use to improve their type usage, and discuss some processes for working with clients. Catch up with Michael on his website, MichaelStinson.com, or through Type Ed.              Get The Episode Download The Busy Creator Podcast, episode 97 (MP3, 52:40, 25.4 MB) Download The Busy Creator Podcast, episode 97 (OGG, 52:40, 22 MB) Subscribe to Get New Episodes     Subscribe to The Busy Creator Podcast on iTunes, on Google Play Music, on Android, on iHeart Sponsor Freedcamp, the finest free online project management software Bandwidth for The Busy Creator Podcast is provided by Freedcamp, Group Efforts Made Effortless. Freedcamp is best free online project management software available. By using the built-in functions and additional tools like time tracking, invoices, milestones, file storage, and more, teams can customise the software for the task at hand! The Busy Creator Podcast itself is managed and operated on Freedcamp. Get started for free on Freedcamp.com Show Notes & Links Michael is the first person from Los Angeles to join The Busy Creator Podcast Ramp Creative handles a lot of variety — digital, print, mobile Type Ed is an Education Organization, founded 2012 UI/UX design has eroded traditional type study High School scribbles are largely typography Michael was taught both ends of the type spectrum — hand lettering and typesetting (3 words or 300) "I'm not training you to be designers; I'm training you to be Creative Directors some day." —Michael Stinson Tweet This Phonetics Whiskey Labels, an underrated technical as well as artistic challenge "Everyone likes to do logos but wordmarks are extremely challenging." —Michael Stinson Tweet This Chronicle Books Typography for Lawyers, great site for anyone, not just lawers "Designers these days don't like process. They want to jump to making it look good." —Michael Stinson Tweet This "If you get your process in place, you can design anything." —Michael Stinson Tweet This Michael is a former Aerospace Engineer; Prescott studied Mechanical Engineering Prescott — in spite of the hyphen in his last name — doesn't like to use hyphens in his paragraph text "Imagine if you're reading War & Peace in all caps — how far would you get?" —Michael Stinson Tweet This Milton Glaser's Bob Dylan poster Bob Dylan by Milton Glaser Michael was accepted to study Physics at Berkeley, but received scholarships in Art "The beauty of graphic design is that it works both sides of the brain." —Michael Stinson Tweet This Additive & Subtractive Colours Lithographic printing Calculus Ramp Creative is 2 principals and 1 designer "If you follow the right words the path will take you to the promised land of the visuals." —Michael Stinson Tweet This Different methodologies — layer cake vs. pay-as-you-go Lots of Jewish families in New York City worked in the garment industry "You're an actor, you're a leader, you're an entrepreneur, you're a psychologist, you're a therapist ... all at the same time." —Michael Stinson Tweet This Building Brands, a Step-By-Step Guide for Creative Pros to Develop Strategy and Design Identity — original eBook by Prescott Perez-Fox Building Brands eBook "You're not going to use a crescent wrench for a hammer. Right tool for the right job." —Michael Stinson Tweet This "Never stop noticing design." —Michael Stinson Tweet This The most stringest morning routine ever described on The Busy Creator Podcast was that of Michael Bierut Reading in The Brain by Stanislas Dehaene on Amazon The Intellectual Devotional by David Kidder & Noah Oppenheim on Amazon and on Audible "Type isn't all about the characters themselves, it's about the space they take up and the negative space that's left." —Michael Stinson Tweet This Michael defines himself as an introvert Douglas Davis, another educator to appear as a guest Cat Rose discussed creative introverts on The Busy Creator Podcast  Type Ed  MichaelStinson.com  RampCreative.com  Michael Stinson on Twitter  Michael Stinson on Facebook  Michael Stinson on Instagram  Michael Stinson on LinkedIn  Type Ed on Twitter  Type Ed on Facebook Tools InDesign Basecamp Harvest Techniques Use Tables in InDesign for grid-based layouts (restaurant menus) Build type hierarchy from the body copy up (subheads, etc.) If you're setting more than 35 words, don't use All Caps, Italics, Centered Don't be afraid to use hyphens, but with discipline. (e.g., don't use hyphens in the first line) Don't use more than 13 words on a line (left-aligned), or 7 words on a line (centered) Aim for 50-70 characters per line (type size in points x 2 = measure width in picas) Don't build websites in Photoshop — it's not made for layout Habits Keep the reader in your mind. Think of them first. Always take clients through a verbal discovery phase first before visuals Give your print partners multiple files — flattened, outlined, original files, native links, etc. — make their lives easier Constantly observe and comment on design around you Try Audible.com Free for 30-Days Visit BusyCreatorBook.com for your free trial Get The Intellectual Devotional Modern Culture: Revive Your Mind by David Kidder & Noah Oppenheim as a free audiobook   

Douglas Davis (@DouglasQDavis) is a graphic designer, professor, consultant, and author of the new book Creative Strategy and the Business of Design. The book, which follows his recent talks and workshops, explores business issues that face creative professionals, especially those which may not even seem apparent. In this conversation, we explore the business culture exposed creatives, the shortcomings of our design education system, and how Brooklyn is becoming the home for creative thought. Check out Douglas's book, Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, now available where fine books are sold. Show Notes & Links Douglas joins Prescott at his home-studio in Brooklyn. Douglas too is a Brooklyn resident and former neighbour. Douglas describes himself as a Professor, among other things New York College of Technology, Communication Design City College, Branding & Integrated Communication graduate course Nancy Tag The Davis Group “In The Arena” DCRIT – MFA in Design Criticsm at the School of Visual Arts, now MA in Design Research "Everyone has that story of when they were first taken advantage of." —Douglas Davis Tweet This Creative Strategy and the Business of Design by Douglas Davis on Amazon Pratt, Communication Design MA Creative pros spend the first ten years of their careers “face down at the desk” NYU, MS in Integrated Marketing “In The Trenches” "Design school doesn't teach business, and Business school doesn't teach how to inspire designers." —Douglas Davis Tweet This "Clients expect us to answer their problems with creativity that's on-brand, on-strategy, and on-message." —Douglas Davis Tweet This "Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan." —Russian proverb (or maybe Tacitus c. 98 AD) Tweet This "Do it right or do it thrice." —Douglas Davis Tweet This The in-house design team of yesteryear was almost like a Kinko's "Business is annexing design. Our design jobs are more important because of that." —Douglas Davis Tweet This McKinsey & Co. “Building a Design-Driven Culture” article IBM has been acquiring digital advertising, marketing, design The New York Times also has been acquiring Deloitte, other consulting companies GoPro is becoming a content/media company "Design is the spoonful of sugar that makes marketing & business palatable to the public." —Douglas Davis Tweet This Apple's invested in design and beat Sony. Sony did that previously to beat Panasonic. Dr. Marjorie Kalter, NYU  Direct Marketing Hall of Fame "'I love it' is not a compelling business rationale." —Dr. Marjorie Kalter Tweet This RIP Flash, Actionscript "We're here to inject art into commerce." —Tibor Kalman Tweet This Unknown Unknowns "It's almost a rite of passge to make every mistake in the book." —Prescott Perez-Fox Tweet This Bryce Bladon, editor of Clients From Hell, was on The Busy Creator Podcast, ep. 78 “Trial By Frying Pan” Fred Nickols, Strategy Is Execution (PDF download) "Begin with the end in mind." —adage Tweet This "Think like they think to do what we do." —Douglas Davis Tweet This Litmus Test "The short hand comes later; first you have to use the long hand." —Prescott Perez-Fox Tweet This "I've seen ideas die on the table because creatives weren't able to set the context." —Douglas Davis Tweet This Adams Media/HOW Books HOW Design University Creative Strategy began as an online course. It earned $17,000 in 9 offerings Tony DiSpigna, typographic illustrator How to Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul by Adrian Shaughnessy on Amazon "Some people are better at other things than I am." —Douglas Davis Tweet This Applesaucing Art Director can mean many different things General Assembly The Narcissicm of Minor Differences September/October 2016 issue of HOW Magazine  DouglasDavis.com  ThinkHowTheyThink.com Revision Path with Maurice Cherry Obsessed With Design with Josh Miles  Douglas Davis on Twitter  Douglas Davis on Facebook  Douglas Davis on LinkedIn Tools AdWeek  HOW Magazine Laptop Evernote Techniques Learn what keeps your client up at night so you can speak the same language Divide a project into smaller pieces so your clients can see the process unfold Consider how you “Frame” your solution. Often that's the point of differentiation.  Banish words like “right” or “wrong”, in favour of “it works” or “it doesn't work” Practice with co-workers to use better, more instructive language Start with the story, then teach the lesson. This helps you write chapters in a book, for example. Keep a desktop folder called “desktop dump” where pretty much everything goes. Habits Work to maximise the “trust in the room” Take a moment at the beginning to write a “problem statement” Add a physical activity to your routine, such as boxing Take time to travel, perahps 2x per year Try Audible.com Free for 30-Days Visit BusyCreatorBook.com for your free trial Get Inside the Business of Graphic Design by Catharine Fishel as a free audiobook   

Based in Brooklyn, Douglas never intended to go to college. Today, he's the author of Creative Strategy and the Business of Design and he teaches online courses on design and business strategy. During our interview, we talk about his book, his educational series, and how he went from not intending to go to college to educating college kids himself. You can follow him on Twitter here. In this episode, we discuss: His inspiration for his book. How he started a digital department at his first agency. What he's most obsessed with now. You can get show notes at ObsessedShow.com.

I've known about Douglas Davis for years because of his work with HOW Design University. I finally met him in person this year at HOW Design Live, and was delighted to have him come on the show! Douglas stays busy — he’s a former professor at NYU and a current adjunct professor at City College's Branding and Integrated Communications graduate program, as well as a designer and creative strategist with his own firm called The Davis Group. Now he can add another title to his resume -- author! His new book, Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, is a must-have for any designer out there looking to level up their skills. We started off talking about how he started his creative strategy firm, the inspiration behind writing his book, and what he's learned from his students over the years. And because this is HBCU Month, we also talked about Hampton University and how they prepared him for furthering his journey and education as a designer. Thank you Douglas for being such an inspiration to us all! Douglas Davis' Website Creative Strategy and the Business of Design (Amazon) Creative Strategy and the Business of Design (Barnes & Noble) "Creative Strategy & The Business of Design" at HOW Design University Check out the Revision Path Store, and buy specially branded t-shirts, mugs, and buttons to help support the show! http://revisionpath.com/store Come join the Revision Path community on Slack and learn how you can win free tickets to Revolve Conference 2016! http://revisionpath.com/slack We're on iTunes and Stitcher as well! Visit http://revisionpath.com/iTunes or http://revisionpath.com/stitcher, subscribe, and leave us a 5-star rating and a review! Thanks so much to all of you who have already rated and reviewed us! Interested in sponsoring the Revision Path podcast? Head on over to http://revisionpath.com/donate and help support the show!

June 30, 2016 Lumi Organics Hillary Lewis & Creative Strategy Douglas Davis

If you want to survive as a creative professional, you need to be one who understands business, especially the things in business that trump aesthetics. But how? That's what Ilise Benun of Marketing Mentor discusses with Douglas Davis, in this week's installment of the HOWLive/CFBC 2014 Speaker podcast series. Details and sign up for the event this May in Boston here: http://bit.ly/1eNEI0v

Photographer Robert Burley takes pictures of the end of analog for his book The Disappearance Of Darkness. Christine Frohnert explains how conservators must care for Art with a Plug. Curator Christiane Paul tells us how the Whitney Museum of American Art restored the digital artwork “the world’s first collaborative sentence” by Douglas Davis. And TOE’s Washington D.C. corespondent ‘Chris’ tells us the truth about Edward Snowden and Snapchat. *********Click on the image for the whole story about this week’s installment**********