We were lucky to catch up with Troy Farmer from Raven & Crow recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Troy thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

That was a twisting path for me, personally and professionally. I served in the US Peace Corps after college, moving to Poland after graduation and working with other volunteers and locals in various facets of environmental education. After returning to the States, I found myself pulled to the non-profit world, working both with environmental and land conservation groups as well as those promoting animal advocacy and providing services for the unhoused.

My educational background was in science, but, again and again, I found the organizations I worked with had the biggest needs in messaging, brand, and design. I’d always considered the arts a personal passion, less of a profession. But my love of the arts and deep belief in the importance of high quality aesthetics and clear messaging repeatedly pushed me to fill those organizational gaps.

In the early days of our design studio, I viewed my lack of formal arts training as a disadvantage to the studio. But after more than two decades of working in communications and running our creative agency, I’ve seen first hand how my view of the creative world became an asset for clients time and time again. I take pride in my ability to not only create brands and products that help clients achieve their goals, but also in my skill at building bridges for how audiences will understand and access that messaging.

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

Raven & Crow started as a creative collaboration with my partner in life and business, Katie Frichtel. At its most nascent, it took the form of moonlighting freelance projects—working our non-profit day jobs in early 2000s New York City and coming home for late nights of gigs we picked up on the side. I have far too many memories of early hushed client calls in a conference room and the stairwells of the Manhattan conservation group I worked for at the time.

Slowly, we started getting more regular work and eventually, we hit two jump-or-turn-away moments where pretty big clients wanted to work with us, but we knew saying yes meant making the leap and quitting our full-time jobs. So we leapt. Over 17 years later, we’ve worked with clients from NGOs like the United Nations, to academic institutions like NYU, Yale, and Caltech, to non-profits we hold dear like Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and the founding farm animal sanctuary in the U.S., Farm Sanctuary.

We like to say we make the world a prettier place in two ways — first, by being good at our job; creating beautiful, effective designs that grab an audience’s attention and communicate our clients’ goals.

The second way is by making an effort to work with clients who we think are actively making the world a better place. We enjoy partnering with non-profits that work in the environmental realm, sanctuaries that rescue mistreated animals, human rights and social welfare groups, vegan-based businesses, and other responsibly minded ventures. We love what we do day-to-day, but what keeps us going is knowing that we’re doing it all for a greater good.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on AI. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

I mean, I totally get the fear of AI in the creative community—a lot of us think the robots will take our jobs, right? But I feel like we’re just ‘in it’ right now and it’s hard to see what all of this will look like for those of us in the design and marketing world 5, 10 years down the road.

But I feel like so much of this technology that’s *very* quickly coming to bear in our worlds are just very keen, cutting edge tools that we’ll all be able to add to our arsenal, not something we should see as a huge threat to our creativity and actual livelihood.

Most of us are already working with artificial intelligence—when I take out a background element in an image and have Photoshop fill it with content-aware tech, that’s AI; when I create a pre-set shape or chart type in Adobe Illustrator, that’s really basic AI; when I shoot with my iPhone in Portrait mode, iOS tries to determine background vs foreground, with AI (for the record, I never use Portrait mode; big pet peeve, that mode, but that’s a different story).

I think it’s just that these simpler tools that lived in relative seclusion of each other relied on developers and only grew with new versions of software as people updated them every few years.

But now we have these far more complex, more impressive tools that can pull from these massive clouds of information and learning in a matter of seconds. And yes, that’s scary, but even more so, I think it’s super-exciting—I can’t wait to see where AI-as-a-tool takes the creative community.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

It’s funny, right around the time we decided to create this studio, we were trying to figure out what we wanted to call it (kind of like when you start a band and the most exciting part is deciding on the band name together).

At the time, I was reading this book by John M. Marzluff and Tony Angell called “In the Company of Crows and Ravens.” It’s about the furthest thing from a business or management book—it’s a kind of cross between a nature book and a behavioral study put together by an academic and an illustrator, both of whom clearly love ravens and crows and, in a larger sense, the natural and scientific worlds.

Their reverence for these animals and fascination with their social structure, tool-use, and undeniable intelligence was all passed on to us through this book and became a large part of our origin story, as it were. We’d always loved corvids for their striking look, but this book made us appreciate them much more as non-human animals. It also made us reexamine—in a time when we’d adopted one of the biggest cities in the world, New York, as our home—how we all interact and communicate as a species and a society. I think a lot of that early thinking became formative for us as a company and as creative professionals who need to constantly examine and re-examine how we all communicate and interact with each other.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.ravenandcrowstudio.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ravenandcrow/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RavenAndCrowStudio
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravenandcrow/
• Other: https://www.threads.net/@ravenandcrow https://music.apple.com/profile/ravenandcrow

Image Credits
IMG_3448.jpg, IMG_9371-edit.jpg, IMG_9396.jpg, and raven-and-crow-studio.jpg – Katie Frichtel and Troy Farmer of Raven & Crow IMG_9417.jpg – Troy Farmer of Raven & Crow raven-and-crow-illustration.jpg – raven and crow illustration by Raven & Crow rc_contact.jpg – Letterpress letters in Raven & Crow’s offices all copyright Raven & Crow