“In terms of impact, I can tell you in the real world, like outside of this rectangle, nothing. I got demoted at my job the very next day after I got put into the Smithsonian.”
Design Better · Product & Design · October 2026
Context
Cherry on the gap between attention and impact after his podcast Revision Path, which profiled Black designers, was added to the Smithsonian's archive. He adds that in the show's tenth year, at its 500th episode, he couldn't get a job interview.
Transcript
…like hired a staff of writers. I made merch. I like was able to kind of really build things out to a big point of turning this podcast into more of a general community for designers. And then being in the Smithsonian's archives in 2019 was kind of the cherry on top, no pun intended. It's like, oh,
it's the Maurice Cherry. Yeah,
it's like a podcast you're doing. Not only is it great at talking to people all over the world, it's a part of history of African-American history. That's amazing. Like I never, never starting this would have thought, oh, yeah, this podcast that I make out of my office slash bedroom is going to be something that's that monumental and historic. And it's great that it's getting that attention. In terms of impact, I can tell you in the real world, like outside of this rectangle, nothing. I got demoted at my job the very next day after I got put into the Smithsonian. They were pissed. Yes. Yes. Oh, no. Look, I don't want to malign anyone. So I'm not going to name names with them. And this has happened sometimes at places where I've worked where they don't. Feel like an individual employee should be bigger than the company, especially if you're like a startup. They're like, Look, we started this. We know what we're doing. You work for us. And this is not to…
I want to just go back to the Smithsonian thing because that is pretty amazing and must feel amazing to have a corpus of your work enshrined like that. What does that look like? Did they say like, oh, just send us all the files and we'll put it in our archives? How do people access it? How is it…
I would say the archival process took a year, but the entire start to finish process took maybe four years. Started in 2015 at Harvard University. They were doing a design event, the Harvard Graduate School of Design did an event called Black and Design. And I went there, one, because I had never…
Aaron and I have been thinking a lot about the design community and how we can be more helpful. For many years, it was sort of one to many or two to many where we were broadcasting, but we weren't creating a lot of opportunities for people to maybe learn from each other, connect from each other.…
More from Design Better
