S8E1: Maurice Cherry

Maurice Cherry is the host of Revision Path, a weekly interview podcast featuring Black designers, and the principal and creative director at Lunch.

In addition to his own design work, Cherry has been celebrating Black creativity online, from the Black Weblog Awards to Revision Path, which he started back in 2013, and which has become part of the collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. And during the pandemic, he says, he’s been poring over the digitized archives of the magazines he remembers from childhood:

Selma’s like a small town off of Highway 80. It’s a bypass town. You literally could drive past it. It’s not a big draw in terms of people wanting to come unless, you know, you’re interested in civil rights. But outside of that, you’re like, OK, what’s next? But magazines were a big inspiration for me because that was the outlet that I had to the world outside of Selma. I mean, Selma is a very small town, a very religious town, and magazines were my way of kind of seeing what the world was like outside of all of this. So, of course, we had Ebony magazine, we had Jet magazine, YSB, Emerge, etc. Just being able to kind of see representations of life, particularly what Black life looked like outside of Alabama, was my first real introduction to design.

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