We were lucky to catch up with Cory Say recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Cory thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

As a child I grew up in a household with two older brothers, both of which loved to draw, that love bleed into me. I wanted to be as cool as them. I soaked up everything they were into, movies, cartoons, games and comic books. Comics were huge for us, we copied and tried making our own comics. A love for art developed and I enrolled in every art class I could from middle school to high school. I had my eyes set on being a comic book artist when I was in High School, but my art teacher who was a designer, introduced me to Graphic Design. After her introduction, I was all in, I had a new path, Design.

Cory , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

It’s important for me to start with college. I went to University of North Texas located in Denton, Texas. This was life changing for me. The program they had for Graphic Design was, and I assume still is, one of the top in the nation. It was tough and intense but it was what I needed to prepare me for the industry. I leaned on my drawing skills to get me through and along the way picked up new skills like, coming up with concepts, composition, color theory, illustration and working with typography. As I made my way through college, my love for typography grew and became a focus for exploration in my own time beyond school walls. All my life, I have kept a sketchbook and always filled the pages up with drawings but those pages started filling up with letters, words and typographic compositions. During this time, our type teachers brought Doyald Young, lettering/type designer icon, to UNT to give a lecture and workshop. He became my Michael Jordan, someone I wanted to draw lettering and type like. The other thing that school showed me was how type and image could work together to feel like a cohesive piece. This skill was developed through projects and exampled by my heroes in the industry.

After college, my first job was for a mega church in Grapevine, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Fellowship Church. It was here that I learned how to work in an extremely fast paced environment. We worked on a wide range of projects, developing campaigns around a sermon series, events, conferences, logos, informational brochures. posters, etc. It was great job to start my professional career. It allowed me ample opportunity to hone my lettering and illustration skills.

My next job was working at TracyLocke, a shopper marketing agency that was based in downtown Dallas. At TracyLocke, I worked with clients such as, HP, T-Mobile, Pizza Hut, Apple Bees, 711, Samsung, and the non profit Cattle Baron’s Ball. Each of these, had their own unique projects but one that is still pretty special to me is the Cattle Baron’s Ball. The Cattle Baron’s Ball is a single night auction/fundraiser for The American Cancer Society. At the event you can expect three different auctions, amazing locally catered food and a live performance. In 2012, the theme for the event was Give Cancer the Boot. My logo was selected which meant that I was the design lead, in charge of coming up with the design aesthetic that could be rolled out across multiple formats and projects. I came up with the design for the program catalog, designed the tickets, stationery, invites and parking passes for the event. I call this project out because it was my first major project where my I got to showcase my lettering skills. My design approach for this project was based primarily on lettering. The logo was hand-lettered and the main pages found within the program were illustrated and hand-lettered. As a result, people around the web started taking notice of my work, it was award winning and thus gave me the confidence to pursue lettering more. This pushed me to work on my lettering in my personal time. I was trying different projects, posters, murals, sketching, anything and everything. I was posting to Behance and Dribbble (social platforms available to creatives) constantly and freelance opportunities started to come my way, working with clients like Texas Monthly and an agency out in Canada. Each project at this point started to lead to other opportunities which lead me to where I work now, Hallmark Cards Inc.

In 2015, Hallmark found my work on Pinterest. They reached out to me to do some to work on lettering-based cards. That year I worked with 3 different teams and in the summer of 2016, I was made aware of an open position at Hallmark, and I jumped at the opportunity! This was and still is my dream job. Since I started working here more freelance and growth in my skills have come my way.

Focusing on freelance for a moment, the clients and work produced that stand out to me are the Illuminated Bible, Lakewood Brewing, AndWalsh and the #NoFilterImages, and Half Priced Books.

• ILLUMINATED BIBLE – For me this is probably the most meaningful. My friend, Dana Tanamachi was given the amazing task of designing the Bible. Her approach was to design it like an Illuminated Bible. It’s filled with over 500 illustrations/lettering. The task was so immense that she reached out to her friends for help. Fortunately, she thought of me! I was given 10 verses, each verse filled a full page. I had to be sure that my designs fit her aesthetic and were drawn and hand-lettered to high level of quality. My faith is very important to me, so the fact that I got a chance to create work that would live in The Bible plus do it for a friend, that’s pretty special.

•LAKEWOOD BREWING – I have been fortunate to work on many projects with these guys. I was an amazing opportunity to redesign their branding, design a couple of series of beer labels, and a couple of murals located in their beer garden. I am very proud of the work produced with them! They are amazing!

• ANDWALSH – In the design world there are designers everyone knows about and Jessica Walsh would be one of those designers. Getting an email from her to work on posts for their social is something I never expected… like at all! The project is a series of photographs that her talented team took of women in an environment that is vintage and retro aesthetically. Each photo carries a message, the point of the post. These were so much fun to work on. They allowed me the chance to work on my range of lettering styles. The lettering I chose to execute for a particular photo had to match the styling and time period of the image. It needed to look as if the object housing my lettering was made and produced that way.

•HALF PRICED BOOKS – In the last quarter of 2024 I was given the opportunity to work on 2 projects for HPB, a poster calendar and a tote bag. Both were an awesome exercise in harmonizing type and image. The brief for the tote bag was create an illustration of an alien saying Take Me to Your Reader. Immediately, I knew exactly how I wanted to approach this from an aesthetic point of view. The saying comes from the 50s, so I wanted my illustration to feel as if it were created in the same time period. For inspiration, I looked at 50s scifi movies and pulp magazines. In any project given, I always try to come up with a unique concept/story that relates to the message. If the aliens want readers, what would the UFO look like? I came up with the idea of making the spacecraft look like open books. For the calendar, I was tasked to create a vintage circus poster. They provided amazing copy for me to work from. The idea of the poster Is each circus act is a personification of a certain type of reader. Both projects pushed me in areas I wasn’t certain I could accomplish but both are some of my favorite projects to date.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I love creating and crafting experiences. If I can elevate, bring enjoyment or discovery, through an experience that someone has with a card, poster, label, etc. I designed, then I have done my job. That interaction is what drives me as a creative.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

In my time at college, I was always trying to be as good as the top designer in our class. I saw this as a pathway to immediate success. I carried that mentality with me in professional career as well. To no one’s surprise I wasn’t getting achieving it. It wasn’t until I started investing in my own personal growth that I started to realize that when I place my drive on me and my abilities that’s where I can achieve “success.” Give yourself time to grow and be you, no one else but you.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://corysay.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cory.say/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cory.say
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cory-say-92499123/
• Other: https://www.behance.net/corysay