Design Better

Maurice Cherry: Revision Path creator on why attention isn’t impact

Design Better

Show Notes

For eleven years, Maurice Cherry made a weekly podcast called Revision Path showcasing Black designers from around the world. He recorded more than 500 episodes with designers on six continents and built a community around the show.

Find bonus content and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/maurice-cherry-revision-path-creator

In 2019, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture added eleven episodes to its permanent archives. And in 2025 the Eames Institute named him to its Curious 100.

Maurice never went to design school. He wanted to study English, but a STEM scholarship put him in computer science at Morehouse, where an advisor tol him the internet was a fad. He switched to math, graduated a semester early, and taught himself Photoshop from books he read in the aisles of a nearby Barnes & Noble. Years later, he was running his own studio with real clients and a payroll, and people still told him he wasn’t a real designer. So in 2013 he started Revision Path to show the work Black designers were doing.

We talk about growing up in Selma, Alabama, where civil rights history is part of the everyday landscape; what a math degree taught him about solving problems; and why Revision Path ultimately ended. Maurice explains how AI is speeding up problems the design industry always had, including the shrinking junior role, and argues that the modern designer has outgrown traditional design organizations.

Bio

Maurice Cherry is a designer, podcast producer, and commercial voice actor. From 2013 to 2024, he hosted Revision Path, a weekly podcast featuring Black designers from around the world. Eleven episodes are in the permanent archives of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. He also founded the Black Weblog Awards and ran the design studio Lunch. A math graduate of Morehouse College, he was named to the Eames Institute’s Curious 100 in 2025. Today he consults on podcasts and writes essays at mauricecherry.com.

Show notes

mauricecherry.com

blog.mauricecherry.com

Maurice Cherry

linkedin.com/in/mauricecherry

mauricecherry.com/speaking

W.E.B. Du Bois charts and infographics

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits

Quilts of Gee’s Bend

Whitney Robinson on Revision Path

Youth HBO series

Meditations for Men Who Do Too Much

Books & Publications

The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression & Reflection (2022)

Extra Bold (2021)

***

Premium Episodes on Design Better

This ad-supported episode is available to everyone. If you’d like to hear it ad-free, upgrade to our premium subscription. We’ve launched a private Slack workspace…join now to connect with designers, product leaders & creative practitioners in our community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

More from Design Better

Oct 21, 2026

Tom Foley didn’t set out to design typefaces. As a postgraduate student at Central Saint Martins in London, he was researching why Ireland, unlike Switzerland, the Netherlands, or Germany, never seemed to have a confident typographic voice of its own.

Oct 14, 2026

Kevin Flores has been part of the Design Better community for years — we first met him in 2017, while he was leading design at 23andMe, back when we were researching how design teams are structured for the Design Genome Project. So it’s a real pleasure to finally have him on the show to talk about his new book, Find Your Inner Rebel.

Oct 7, 2026

In graduate school, Randy Hunt poured his heart and soul into a poster for Milton Glaser’s class, a picture built entirely from hand lettering that read as an image from across the room and as words up close. Glaser glanced at it, said, “Well, that’s not very good,” and moved on to the next student.

Oct 5, 2026

When Aarron was fresh out of grad school, working at an agency outside Philadelphia, he and his coworkers used to crowd around a monitor to study volumeone.com. Most websites back then had a picture, maybe an image map. Matt Owens’s site had 3D, animation, and experimental graphic design, and none of us could figure out how he made it.

Sep 23, 2026

Blaine Billingsley is a staff designer at OpenAI, and his path there was anything but a straight line. He studied music composition and comparative religion, played guitar in Texas for a living (he remembers checking his bank account, seeing seven dollars, and feeling pumped), then drove to San Francisco and took a data entry job at a startup.

See all episodes →