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Maurice
Woods once dreamed of playing in the NBA, a fact that's
easy to believe when encountering the 6' 10“ designer. Far from
imposing, he has a quiet demeanor and soft eyes that light up when
the conversation turns to a subject he's passionate about. And the
only passion greater for him than designing is using it to change
peoples' lives. Through his Inneract Project,
which
facilitates design mentoring for kids from troubled neighborhoods,
he has truly found fulfillment.
Born
and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Woods would be
the first to admit that he was not a star student. Luckily, a
basketball scholarship gave him the opportunity to attend the
University of Washington in the early 1990s. Although he had a
solid high school career and his sights set on the NBA, he didn't
get much exposure at first. Time was running out, and as a junior
he had to declare a major. ”It was my mother,“ he smiles,
remembering the first of many times his life has taken an
unexpected twist. ”She was looking through the catalog, going
'Let's just try to find something. Graphic design. I know you liked
to draw when you were young, why not try that?' I was throwing a
dart at a board.“
On
the lessons of design:
There are a lot of great designers out there but very few who
understand how important and powerful design really is. Design
powers the world. Our world relies on it to help us live productive
lives.
In his design
program at UW, Woods met two instructors who he
considers his design mentors: Doug Wadden and Christopher Ozubko.
Although they were hard on him, it was a tough love that Woods came
to appreciate. ”I used to hate being in Doug's class, because he
didn't like anything,“ Woods says with a laugh. Crits were brutal,
work was torn off the walls, and he would have to try again and
again. ”It gave me the power to self-vet.“ Slowly his confidence
grew. Instead of bringing all his concepts to class, he'd bring the
best three.
If there is a single
person that Woods credits with design
inspiration, it is Tony Gable. Renowned in the Pacific Northwest as
both a jazz musician and a designer whose work spans Malcolm X to
Microsoft, Gable was a guiding light for Woods. ”I remember going
to an art store in Seattle and seeing his posters and asking 'Who
designed this?' I actually went out of my way to find him
and get to know him. It's no secret—there aren't many blacks in
design. But at the time he was one of them. I was able to
relate.“
Yet basketball still called.
The team had a new coach who played
him more regularly, so Woods benched FreeHand and Quark for a time.
After graduation, he was offered the opportunity to play
professionally in Europe, and he took it. ”Basketball was something
I felt I had to get out of my system before I could commit one
hundred percent to design.“
He played
abroad from 1995 to 2001, traveling to Spain, Greece,
France and even Japan. But he never stopped designing, and towards
the end he was taking his laptop on the road, designing cards to
send home to his wife and doing small client projects. Upon
returning to San Francisco, he found life was hard. After working
from three in the afternoon to eleven at night at Costco, he'd
return home and work on freelance projects until three or four in
the morning, plus weekends. This went on for two years, and the
pace was grueling. Yet basketball had instilled in him a relentless
work ethic. ”I was very competitive—not with others, but with
myself. I have to be the best. That's something that sports drives
you to.“
On the impact he hopes to make:
I don't actually want to be remembered for the work I did for a
company, organization or institution. I would like to be remembered
for how I used my influence or skills to help nurture young folks
into responsible, educated adults. I get more out of that than any
project I have ever done or will ever do.
Woods wanted more direction, so he started
to think about
graduate school. A conversation with his former teacher Doug Wadden
convinced Woods to return to Seattle and enroll in his alma mater's
graduate design program, with the help of financial aid. He
recalls, ”Graduate school helped me advance my career. Client work
had me in a monotony. I was stagnant. My clients didn't understand
design, and I didn't know how to explain my concepts and solutions
to them.“
In graduate school Woods
found his footing, and his master's
thesis, Envisioning Blackness in American Graphic Design,
was a groundbreaking work that addressed the difficult question: Is
there a design aesthetic that belongs to African Americans? There
have been countless surveys of Japanese animation, German
typography, French film and Danish furniture; Woods wanted to do
the same for black designers in America. His thesis examined both
fine and graphic art. Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000), perhaps the most
famous African-American painter of the 20th century, informed
Woods' thoughts on color as power, though he never got to discuss
the matter with him. ”At the University of Washington, we had a
gallery named after him. When I was an undergraduate years before,
I walked right past the guy and didn't even know it was him. And
I'm kicking myself now. We could have had a conversation,“ Woods
chuckles.
It was another, smaller grad
school project that ended up
planting the seeds for what would eventually become the Inneract
Project. One day his instructor Annabelle Gould challenged the
class with an assignment: Use design to change the world in a
unique way. Having found his own path to the profession
through the example and mentorship of men like Doug Wadden, Chris
Ozubko and Tony Gable, Woods knew exactly what he wanted to do:
pass the torch and continue the tradition of teaching kids about
design and guiding them on a career path.
After polishing up his proposal in class, he
hit the streets.
Because he had been coaching youth basketball in the Seattle area,
Woods was already a familiar face at many community centers. What
wasn't familiar was the subject matter. ”I got the door slammed in
my face a bunch of times. They were like, 'Graphic design, what is
that? Get out of here.'“ But he remained persistent. His
offer was to teach middle school kids for free. He found a venue,
printed scores of posters and plastered them up at schools and
youth centers, and eventually launched his first class with just
two students. Five or six others had signed up but didn't show.
On diversity in design:
We must bring design to the community, and you will see more
minority representation without having to have a special program
set aside. The design community should probably have more of a
presence with youth at a younger age.
Undaunted, Woods brought on another 30 kids
by the end of the
first summer. The goal from the start was to get young people
excited about creative possibilities. Rather than focus on
technology and technique, Woods wanted to show them, not so much
how to design a poster, but that there is such a thing as
even designing a poster. ”I wanted young people that
have creative talent, even if they don't want to get into design,
to know at least that it's an option.“ Soon, folks were calling
him. His former teacher Chris Ozubko offered him space, along with
graduate students to teach the classes. Woods was teaching the
teachers—he'd prepare materials and teach the starting session,
while the grad students serving as TAs would be tapped to teach the
sessions after that. They in turn would then teach fellow grad
students. This cycle continued while Woods left Seattle to look for
work back home in the Bay Area.
Tony
Gable placed a call on his behalf to Kit Hinrichs, a
partner in the San Francisco office of Pentagram. ”I know it sounds
corny, but I believe that it was fate,“ Woods says of first meeting
the noted designer. Although Hinrichs didn't have an open position
at the time, he loved Woods' work enough to refer him to Michael
Bierut at Pentagram's New York office, where he interviewed but was
not hired. For the first two years after grad school, Woods learned
the ropes doing agency work for large clients such as Nike and
working as a designer for Neal Zimmerman at Zimmerman Design, Inc.,
and Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners (BSSP). Eventually, Hinrichs
hired him as senior designer at Pentagram and brought him along
when he opened his own firm, Studio Hinrichs, in 2009. ”He respects
my work, and I respect his work,“ Woods says modestly.
In fall 2008, Woods re-established the
Inneract Project in the
Bay Area at the request of AIGA San Francisco. In Seattle he had
relied on University of Washington graduate students, but he had to
expand his mentoring network to include working professionals.
There are now more than 100 volunteers in the pool. Woods wants to
develop a modular program that can be started in any city with a
simple resource toolkit, and hopes to set up headquarters with
ample space for multiple interdisciplinary studios and
classrooms.
”It's important for me to
feel good about what I'm doing, to
connect with young people in a way that changes their lives. Doug
and Chris and Tony, these guys were there in my corner, pushing me
to move forward,“ Woods says with earnest appreciation. ”It's my
job, as someone who came from a rough neighborhood, to tell other
kids they can do it.“
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