Maurice Cherry (designer and digital creator in Atlanta, currently working as a creative strategist at Glitch and the creator and host of the podcast Revision Path) and Taylor Simone (graphic design faculty member at BGSU, graphic artist, designer and writer from Metro Detroit) discuss highlighting the work of black designers, developers, and digital creatives, or more broadly, race, technology, and design.
Transcript:
Introduction:
From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society. This is BG Ideas.
Intro Song Lyrics:
I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment.
Jolie S.:
Welcome to the Big Ideas podcast collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, associate professor of English and American culture studies and the director of ICS. Today I'm joined by Maurice Cherry and Taylor Simone. Cherry is a designer and digital creator in Atlanta, currently working as a creative strategist at Glitch and the creator and host of the podcast Revision Path where he highlights the work of black designers, developers, and digital creatives.
Jolie S.:
He was the 2018 recipient of the Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary from the American Institute of Graphic Arts and was included in the 2018 edition of The Root's annual list of the most influential African-Americans age 25 to 45. Taylor Simone is a graphic artist, designer and writer from Metro Detroit. She previously worked at the Detroit Institute of Art. She's currently a faculty member teaching graphic design here at Bowling Green State University. Thanks so much for talking with me today. Maurice, can you tell us a little bit about how you came to focus your design work so much on social media and digital formats?
Maurice C.:
Oh wow, that's a really good question. So when I first started really working with design, it had all been on computers. It was really first starting out with the Apple IIe computer doing a little USA Rocket in basic. That was sort of my first time really experimenting with design and with computer graphics. So it kind of came together in that way. And then when I was in high school, I had the opportunity to redesign my school's newspaper. So that was my first time sort of cutting my teeth with using Adobe Photoshop, Adobe PageMaker, which doesn't exist anymore, Adobe Illustrator, etc. And I always sort of had digital design as sort of a hobby because I had been so into computers. I had started learning HTML in high school and it was something that I always did as a hobby on the side. So my design practice sort of evolved in the same time as my interest in working with computers and doing programming, so it sort of ran at the same pace.
Jolie S.:
How do you approach teaching design and what ideas or practices do you emphasize for young people entering into design fields?
Maurice C.:
I always think it's good to start with a project. There is a concept out there that's called Ultra Learning where essentially you are learning how to do something in a very quick amount of time. I think the old school ways of learning are, you read a book, you do the exercises in the book and then you hopefully try to apply those skills to your future work in some way. And I think what studies have shown is that can be somewhat of an inefficient process because the things that you do out in the real world or in your job are going to be different from what's in a textbook. That's a very sort of dated reference when you're doing that. Whereas if you're doing a project, you're able to apply the skills in real time to whatever it is that you're doing. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a public facing project.
Maurice C.:
It can be a private pr
