We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Chad Phillips. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Chad below.

Chad, appreciate you joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

From as early as I can remember I was very interested in automotive design, so I started drawing the cars I saw in books and on the street but also the cars I saw in my head. I still have several sketch books from my early childhood and they remind me of my keen observations and obsession with the complexities of what makes a car a car.

After my father witnessed this obsession for a few years, his research into where to pursue a career in the automotive industry, led us to visiting the first university to offer an automotive design program, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, california at age 12.

I remember this visit quite well. The difficulty my father had in finding the remotely located hillside campus, the dramatic architecture of the bridge-like main building, the smell of the flora on the hillside around it, but most importantly the creativity I was blown away by when viewing the student gallery in the main lobby.

It was at that moment I felt I had found my purpose in this world, and dreamt of someday coming back and showing my own work in this very same student gallery. That dream became a reality, and I graduated from Art Center with a degree in Transportation Design in 2007.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My early obsession with automotive design led me on a pretty direct path towards working in this industry, but along the way I realized I had a few other adjacent creative interests. Namely architecture and interior design were woven into my interest in cars which has pointed me into multiple career paths that touch on all of these passions.

Working as an automotive interior designer for a major automotive company was interesting to me because it required so much depth into the details of where we spend our time driving and/or riding around in cars. While this process took much longer than I anticipated, it was important for me to learn its complexity so I could learn a designer’s key role: to translate complex problems into simplified solutions that are easy for the average person to understand.

This philosophy followed me into my work as set decorator in the entertainment industry and also an interior designer. The average ‘consumer’ of whatever I create probably won’t understand how a car is assembled, a set is designed, or how to arrange furniture in a space, but they will intuitively respond to how it makes them feel. This response is what sets good design apart.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

I think society’s biggest challenge is finding more equity with how we value different kinds of artists & creatives, both with their identities AND their craft. And that will mean we will have to include those previously not considered “artists” or “creatives”. At the risk of sounding too idealistic and utopian, I believe we ALL benefit when we value each other’s creative abilities instead of exhausting ourselves in the pursuit of walling others off because we don’t see them as equals. And as technology brings us new tools like social media and AI, we find ways to empower creatives with these new tools, rather then exploit or steal from them.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

This may sound strange to some other artists/creatives, but I actually feel rewarded when I see an idea I’ve had in my head realized through someone else instead of myself. Yes it’s also quite rewarding to be part of making an idea a reality, but when I see it manifest through another person or creative collective it feels even more important. It’s the old idea of “great minds think alike”. I think it’s all too easy as artists to feel like we have totally original ideas, or to get jealous when someone else is a part of something impactful. I believe that humanity’s greatest inventions are actually just waiting for the right person to discover it. There’s even a Björk song about this called “The Modern Things”.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.chadphillips.design
• Instagram: @chadsfantasygarage @chadphillips.design
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/thechadof1980

Image Credits
Karl Stelter. Ian Mackney.