We chat with award winning designer Joel Anderson of Anderson Design Group. ADG has produced some of the best design work to come out of Nashville; not only for this city, but for the National Parks Service as well.
Today's Guest - Joel Anderson | Founder of Anderson Design Group (ADG)
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00:08 Hello everybody. I'm Stuart Deming with XPLR.Nash. I'm cohosting the Nashville daily podcast with Mr. Erin Pennington. It is a Friday morning. Erin, what are you doing this week?
00:18 Well it's a Friday morning, so first of all, nobody's really working here in Nashville. Everybody kinda takes Fridays a little bit slower and a little bit easier, enjoying some good national food. But I am getting ready to head off for a few days. I'll be out of Nashville for a few days. So definitely taking Friday. Really easy here. Yeah, you're flying very far away to where headed to Santa Fe. So I'll be in Santa Fe for a few days, so enjoying the heat somewhere else. Maybe a little less humid. So we'll see what that's like. So we have
00:52 Special guests with us today. His name is Joel Anderson. Audi. Are you the founder of Anderson design group? Yes. in 1993 I started Anderson Thomas design with my buddy David Thomas. We ran it as a design firm for a long time in about eight or nine years ago. I retooled it to Anderson design group after David retired, changed the focus from full service design for clients to poster art and book publishing.
01:18 That's awesome. So for everybody who's listening again, that's Joel Anderson. He'll be joining us today on the podcast interjecting his thoughts into what's going on in the city before we get into a deeper interview with him. And he's the founder of Anderson design group here in the city at first of all, just a little perspective are you in Nashville native?
01:40 I was not born here, so I came in 1986 and I think that makes me a native. All my children were born here except for our daughter who we adopted from Korea and brought her over. But so I have kids that were born in this city and grew up here, so it kind of qualifies. Yeah, I think you could say you're alienated all native.
01:55 Yes, exactly. Long enough here, experienced enough in here to be called a native. So we're, we're moving into a segment that we famously just call
02:05 Traffic. Mm Hmm. [inaudible] Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. We should put that on a tee shirt. Yeah, the T word.
02:17 What is your experience for somebody who's been here for awhile? Is this bad traffic to you or is it tolerable or is it I need to move kinda traffic. Yeah.
02:27 I love this city so it's going to take a lot more than bad traffic to make me leave. But I was here before four 40 opened and so we saw it open and they actually, the day before it opened, they said, Hey, if you want to walk on the interstate before we open it to traffic, you can tell your kids that you once walked on four 40 and so it was pristine back then and then you walk on four 40 yeah. That's amazing. It's full of potholes actually. They're redoing it. It's going to be gorgeous once it's done, like twice as wide, but a, yeah, it's really changed in my wife and I lived in Sylvan park when we started this business and then we moved to Brentwood, so used to take me 11 to get to my
02:59 Office from Brentwood and now takes between 30 and 50 minutes depending on what time of the day I leave. And now that it's 2019 you can move from walking on the interstate to scootering on the interstate. Apparently has been caught on camera several times. Wow. It's been like five cities in the last week. It's really, it's really interesting people, the one that happened, that one that happened here in Nashville, the dude said he was trying to get to the airport. Yeah. And then the, the cop, the cop picked him up and they put the scooter in the car and then the a guy asked the cop if he could stop to get lunch somewhere. Very interesting. I'm sure that definitely, that definitely caused some traffic headaches. So it's Friday live on the green is currently happening this weekend. That's tonight, Saturday and Sunday. Lots of bands are playing to learn more. Go to the live on the green.com
03:48 Is also yoga tomorrow morning. Oh yes. And doing yoga. They'll do yoga on the lawn. I think that the kids' yoga thing too.
03:54 Yeah. I, I don't know what that looks like, but live on the green.com. The find out the schedule for that. It's not the kid's yoga, like a goat yoga. Oh, thank you. I'll do like the kids. Have you seen anything that Joel, the 18 goats are? No, there's a, there's some yogas and here in town here in Nashville that actually you do yoga with goats or kids on your back while you're doing yoga. And so the goat can poop on you. That's what being yoga, I've heard people who have monkey on their back with goat. Why not? Yeah.
04:28 Oh, we also have some Nashville sounds games coming up Friday today through Monday. And now this has four games this weekend. Four games this weekend. Yeah. And they're hitting it hard because this is the end of their season. So if you have not been out to see a Nashville sounds game yet do it while they, while they may be the largest baseball team here who knows, maybe another baseball team will come into Nashville by the time the next season starts or announced. We don't know. We talked about that last week on the podcast, the Orioles, there is a rumor that Orioles were maybe seeking some kind of new new city to be sold to. Those are just rumors that were reported. But make sure to go out and see a soundscape. It's a great stadium. I'm sure they'll have some fireworks.
05:15 Fireworks. Friday's usually a thing in while sounds. This is the last Friday for cause it's the last games last Friday for fireworks. Yep. And then we also have at the Ryman they played last night, but they're also playing Friday and Saturday the rec and tours. And if you're just in national for this weekend, that mean there's a lot of events. But man, it's hard to beat a show at the Ryman. Have you, have you been to shows at the Ryman? Yeah, I love the place. Yeah. It's intimate. Yeah, it's very intimate. There's really, like if I had to pick between almost any venue in this city, I would continue to go back to the Ryman. It's, it's just fantastic. Stuart, what's happening in the outdoor space?
05:55 Yeah, so we have a, we have a few things happening. Especially tonight. We have Shakespeare in the park happening at eight city Boulevard that you could, you'd learn about that@nashvilleshakes.org. Then you also have zoo, a zoo V night at the Nashville zoo starting at 6:00 PM. They're showing small foot to get tickets for that and Nashville zoo.org and this is like outdoors, so it's like under the stars, under the stars watching and you can hear it in like the animals and I'm sure there'll be some goats. So why not? Yeah, it's a zoo. And then you also have a Safari slumber. So I guess this is like a slumber party. This is happening Saturday night. You bring your, you bring your tents. At the zoo and then they have a dinner, smores around the fire. He get to see the animals at night.
06:39 So it's, it's a really cool experience that starting at four o'clock on Saturday. Yup. You guys have mentioned everything you've mentioned. We've have a poster for it. We didn't know what to Shakespeare in the park. We did a poster for the Nashville sounds. We did a poster for the zoo. So yeah. That's amazing. Try to hit all the highlights of Nashville and our spirit of Nashville collection. It seems like you hit the Mark. Exactly. Yeah. The spirit of natural is showing through a poster for this. So it's dog days at the Andrew Jackson's Hermitage. We have a Hermitage poster, but there's no dogs in. Okay. so this is all day, August 31st and I guess you can go bring your dogs and walk around the Hermitage. I'm, I'm actually surprised that they're kind of doing this one of those dogs and they mansion that mansion.
07:20 But yeah, they, they may limit it to just outdoors on a, I wouldn't let it in one of these historic mansions either. But this is maybe an annual event that they are going to be doing, but it's a great facility to take your dog to amazing facility to walk big open spaces for the village to run around. Yeah, absolutely. So definitely take advantage of this. If the weather's nice, if you're not into going and seeing concerts and everything then if you're just want to take a day to yourself and walk your dog, then why not do it at a historic place in Nashville? Go visit the Hermitage, you'll learn some fantastic history about this city and about Andrew Jackson and his role and kind of that family's role in Nashville. No, if you want some more nighttime and labor day type activities.
08:07 There are labor day fireworks at national shores and that is at national shores.com/fireworks. I'll have to see the cost of that event. I'm not sure if that's going to be only one 99. [inaudible] That's a little shorter. So I knew it probably wouldn't be a free event. And then we have a one more thing going on on Saturday. On Saturday you have Vanderbilt football versus Georgia. 6:30 PM that's going to be at Vanderbilt to get tickets for that is VU VU Commodore's a.com and that's where you can get your tickets. All right, so some business news that we wanted to cover Tennessee lawmakers want to expand state's slow poke law. Yeah. Why don't you slow poke law? That sounds familiar. So want me to exactly the way I understand the slow poke
08:56 Law. Okay. So this is what it says. This is on news channel five.com. It says the current law makes it illegal to travel slowly in the left lane of a three lane highway because it implies yeah, so it basically stops this flow of traffic if you're going slower. And the way I understand it is in New York state if you're in the left hand lane, you have to be passing somebody to be in the left hand lane and you can only ride the left hand lane for two miles after you pass somebody. Then you have to be over. I love that law. So I don't, I don't know if that's what they're trying to imply here in Nashville. I don't know how that would work. You know, I wonder if
09:34 This is one step closer to reenacting those. A HOV lane,
09:38 You know, we're in there. Retro could make so much money just by enforcing that. Cause I was driving home the other night and every car I saw had one person in it and big SUV is everybody driving an HOV lane. So there they're totally not enforcing that. And then if they did, I mean half the people would be paying fines for it. And [inaudible] isn't it? Isn't it down in Atlanta, if you're, if you have, if you're in the HOV lane, it's like a $300 fine, isn't it? Oh, Atlanta. Atlanta's think if life in prison price sounds good and their traffic traffic's still pretty bad. Yeah. Okay. And so this fine will be $50. If they pass this bill that's not that much of a fine New York state. I know it's at least $300.
10:17 Yeah. So this'll be interesting. And this w we asked a lot of our guests on here. You know what, especially with traffic being kind of a huge issue. I mean it's an issue we're lucky to be having. As far as some of the other issues we couldn't be having as a city, what kind of solutions do you think Nashville could bring to the table to solve these things?
10:37 Well I think widening four 40 and all the exit ramps is a great call because there only one lane wide. So that's got to change. But then the enforcing HOV lane, I think if people who wanted to carpool and commute could have a lane where they're treated differently and they can get someplace faster than everybody else would get the idea and start doing that too. So do you think the new Tennessee hands-free law where people shouldn't be using their cell phones, do you think that's actually working here in the state of Tennessee? Yeah, I hope so. Cause I see that fatality sign every year. It's higher than the last year. And I think that's the only reason why is cause more distracted driving constantly. Oh yeah, absolutely. They can limit that. That should, yeah. I was driving to downtown yesterday and I live about four miles away from downtown. I saw nine accidents in that four miles. Wow. Yeah. Gosh, it's, it's insane. Yeah.
11:20 I know they're given out tickets for that, you know, they're enforcing it. So, you know, hopefully we'll be able to see the stats on that
11:27 Positive side for that thing. Okay. Some other news I'm actually surprised this hasn't been talked about yet, but this is on Fox 17. Senator Alexander announced his call boxes on Natchez trace Parkway bridge to prevent suicides. Hmm. And this is, this is kind of, and have
11:43 Been a, I guess a step too for the Natchez trace bridge because they decided to go ahead and raise the, the not the ledge. The barriers that are on the Natchez trace bridge
11:57 By 2021, I believe that it was. Or 22, they're gonna raise the barriers on the bridge cause I think it's harder to jump over. Yeah. So this must be kind of the next step in making sure that that's a safer area for everybody. So I was, I was there last week, I actually took clients and I was there literally three days before they installed the boxes. And then I walked on the bridge and I was like, Oh, there's the brand new suicide like hotline boxes, call bomb. So on Fox 17 it says at least 32 people have committed suicide on the Natchez trace a bridge since 2000 which statistically speaking, that's very low compared to like San Francisco with golden gate bridge and other bridges throughout the United States. And I definitely understand like the barriers need to be raised. The only thing I'm concerned of because that view is so spectacular is are they going to block that view if these barriers or are they going to be smart and implement some type of glass system? Well, yeah, at the bottom of it, it says
12:55 The national park service federal highway administration announced plans to explore the feasibility of adding a pedestrian barrier to the bridge construction on the mirrors could begin as early as 2023. I'm wondering if that's, you know, kind of pulling back and adding new barriers where the pedestrians can see but can't even reach that other, the overlook.
13:15 We have a poster on the natural Trish bridge too and we'll have to revise it if they change the look of it. Yeah. Yeah. Well the good news is that could be begin as early as 2023 so you've got a little bit of time by your natural stretch brute postage now. Yeah. Now have you actually had to go in and revise some stuff cause things have changed? Yeah. we have to do a new skyline designed this year because so many new buildings have popped up. So most of our national skyline posters are obsolete and some people like them that way. Cause it was a snapshot of what Nashville look like in the day. Right. But we kind of owe national a, an updated poster since there's probably six or eight new buildings that, that are downtown, especially behind the at and T building now.
13:53 Which, which, which building has messed up the skyline the most in your opinion? From a design standpoint? It's, it's really, I think they're all adding to it because Nashville just had a few tall buildings in one spot. Now it's kind of evenly spread out. So I kinda liked that aesthetically. But the only difficult thing is now there's a lot of tall apartment buildings where you would have stood to take a shot of downtown. So it's a little bit harder to catch a sh a picture of downtown without something right in front of you. Yeah.
14:17 We've noticed this since, and Stewart and I've talked about this all the time, it's getting a more limited for the spots that you can be in downtown, just like you said, but specifically just to see the 18 T building. It used to be, you could see it from everywhere and now it's very limited on where you can see that building.
14:32 Yeah. So Batman building, we don't call it 18 T, we call it Beckman. R2D2 is a building next to it. The definitely one. Yeah. It changed names a bunch of times. It's the region's building. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So we were fond of, actually my, my best memory in Nashville of buildings was on the top of the LNC tower. July 4th had a friend that worked up there on the deck. So we sat
14:52 Out there on lounge chairs watching the fire light fire show, exploding it eye level three blocks away. Yeah, sure. Yeah. We had a workspace up there for awhile. We try getting up there for the fireworks, but we just kind of arranged. Yeah. But that, but that view, no matter what time of the year is, is just insanely gorgeous. One of the best spots in the city to see Nashville, I believe. And it used to be the tallest building in Nashville, but [inaudible] ain't no mall. That's true. Okay. So one thing we love to cover is like a Nashville tip of the day. So Joel, what's a tip that you have to experience Nashville?
15:26 Hm. I, I like the food here is incredible. So if you can eat somewhere different, like make, make a a week's plan. Is this a day or a week? You could do a week. Okay, perfect. Yeah. Perfect. So try to kind of have something different. Have a different genre every day of the weekend. You won't run out of ideas anytime soon.
15:45 No, not at all. Food here, there's been a lot of people who I've talked to who moved here and because of the amazing food scene they've said they've gained like what the, what they call the freshman 15 when you first go to college. But they did that with Nashville. Here's the Nashville 15. Yeah, the Nashville 15 for the Nashville six pounds. My mama was here for a week from my wedding last year and she gang six pounds. Sorry mom. And then I'm going to talk about this on podcast. But yeah, that's, that's what happened. So one thing we also love to cover is where did we locally, since we're talking about restaurants so I'll start I had the opportunity at Oscars, taco shop. Have you ever had the Oscars? So Oscar's has nine locations throughout middle Tennessee and it's fresh ingredient, like California style Mexican food. [inaudible]
16:32 Fantastic. And I had I had a few things. I had their breakfast burrito and then I also had a bite of their fish taco and the chicken taco. And then I also had a case of DHEA. So that's what I ate locally. Aaron raid you eat? So I had one of my barbecue favorites here in Nashville and that's at least and Emily's to me has been some of the top barbecue places that I will eat specifically because of one sandwich. And that's their took sandwich and that's where they have their brisket with a fried egg on top and then pimento cheese, pickles and some of their, I don't remember which barbecue sauce that's on there, but they have some barbecue sauce and it's just, it blends together really well. And I like the, the tuck sandwich and I believe their brisket is, is one of my favorite in the city. So Joel, what's a, a place that you've eaten at recently that's kind of a local Nashville place?
17:33 Yeah, I live in Brentwood and there's a whole bunch of cool things popping up in South Nashville. One of them, I'm not that new, but soy B stro, they're Asian fusion and Hannah and Chris Lee are the proprietors and they make a mean bebop dish, a fish taco. They have all kinds of great, great stuff there. And it's kind of a little bit of something for everybody. If you like Asian fusion food, we're in Brentwood. Is that exactly. It's a write off. I'm in Maryland farms near the, the taco bell in the backyard burger and, Oh yeah, I know exactly. Cleaners. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Switching your way. I think
18:06 Soybean stro yes. Awesome. Very cool. All right, so now Joel, we'll get more into the Anderson design group and kind of the stuff that you've you've done. And just kind of a, a smaller introduction that we haven't done before. Joel is coming on as somebody who's a really had some notoriety for his work, he's won an Emmy dove award, our director of the year published some books. You've done work for Denny's, Chrysler universal studios, Warner brothers, Hasboro Hasbro, Nat geo, Harper Collins dollar general. I mean we could probably list a lot.
18:49 Have you, have you ever done any work with like Disney or Pixar studios? We did some with Disney a little bit, but it's usually what their licensees who are working on products and toys and things related to a Disney or Pixar product. Okay.
19:03 So with all of this background just kind of to get a sense of who you are and how you got to this point, when did you start your kind of creative ventures in the world and, and how did it end up into this kind of area of graphic design?
19:24 My first job was in Myrtle beach, South Carolina, in high school at Chuck steak house. And I worked in this set stock on the salad bar and busing tables and I realized I want to get out of food as fast as I can. So my mom showed me an ad in the paper for airbrushing tee-shirts on the boardwalk. And so I was probably 15 or 16 learn how to airbrush t-shirts. Started doing that, open up my own little tee shirt shop airbrushing t-shirts, stand in Myrtle beach and did that every summer through college when I went to art school in Sarasota, Florida. So I was kind of an entrepreneur in the arts from the age of 16.
19:56 Wow. That's awesome. Yeah. Awesome. And so when did you expand that into graphic design? Was that when you went to school?
20:03 Yeah, I went to Ringling school of art and studied illustration and design and got a feel for a passion really for illustration. But I knew that design was where it was at as far as just being able to apply the art skills to everyday life. And so everything you see out there, whether it's a business card or a billboard or a brochure or poster, it's got design in it and sometimes they've got illustration or typography or photography. And so com I got a job offer with carne and cherry advertising agency based here in Nashville. And they hired, they hired me came up from Sarasota, started working here in 1986 and worked there for seven years doing graphic design and some illustration for them.
20:43 That's awesome. So how did you get to the point where you have Anderson design group today? Where was the point that you said, I want to be doing this for myself?
20:53 Yeah, I've always had my, you know, multiple irons in different fires. So even at Cardin cherry I was painting and hanging my art in galleries. I was building clocks and selling them, doing a little bit of sculpture and a, just some freelance illustration and design. And my buddy and I, David Thomas we started doing more and more album cover art and book cover designs. And at some point we said, you know, maybe we could do this for ourselves. So it started in my upstairs at Sylvan park. We just, the two of us. And then eventually our business started growing. So we hired designers and ended up moving to a building right next door to our current space. And we rented space over there for several years and then bought this building. And we've been planted here for about 20 years this corner.
21:34 And so that's, that's the start of Anderson design and a design group. So just for anybody who's listening at home, can you tell them, it just kind of, when you describe what Anderson design group does, what do you tell somebody in a quick pitch of who Anderson design group is and, and what you guys do?
21:50 Yeah, we're we're passionate about creative excellence in, in that usually takes the form of poster art and things that just make you smile. So we're, we're creating artwork that that people can live with everyday. A lot of its wall decor. So you put your artwork on the wall or it's a calendar that's decorative or it's a coffee table book. It's something that has design and art in it. And so many of the things that we're doing now are location specific. So start out with our spirit of Nashville collection, celebrating our city through artwork. And then we started celebrating other cities around the country and other places in the world and national parks. And so now a lot of people that buy our artwork, they're basically preserving a memory as a space in time where they experienced a location with somebody special and they want to hold onto that. So a lot of folks when they, they're making travel walls in their house, they're full of all the different kinds of places they've been to as they traveled, they get a souvenir, a momentum of that.
22:42 Yeah, I, I definitely, I, I love the way that you've raised that with art that you can, you know, live with every day and be, and walk through every day. I think that's,
22:50 I think that's awesome. What's it like having a business here in the city of Nashville? Nashville is a great place for doing business. I don't think we've felt the recessions that the rest of the country has felt. And so I think it's such a diverse city economically that there's always somebody doing well if another sector of the economy is not doing so well. Yeah. And so we've is good for creativity as well because the, the music industry and the publishing industry have brought a lot of creative folks here for design, for songwriting, for writing a books and you know, any kind of literary stuff. So it's, it's got this huge creative vibe to it, but it's a strong, robust industrial side as well. Well, how many employees do you have working for Anderson design group? I think right now we're seven people. We've been as big as 15, but as I get a little bit older, I like to simplify and just focus on what we're passionate about.
23:39 And so we're we've got two full time artists that work here on staff. I have three or four other artists that are contract artists that one of them lives in Spain a lot. One lives in Seattle. Other people live kind of in the area, but we we kind of work remotely as a team to kind of flesh out big collections of posters. Okay. And then what's the, so what's your favorite part of owning a business in Nashville and then what's your least favorite part of owning a business in Nashville? Well, I love the fact that there's no state income tax here and so it's fantastic and they're not, you know, it hasn't been odious as far as, you know, government regulations and just people telling me what to do. So I'm kind of a free spirit as an artist. I, I like to do what I like to do without other people breathing down my neck.
24:26 So the, the business climate in Tennessee and in Nashville is specifically, is pretty, pretty good for, for business. I think if there's anything I don't like about it is just the traffic right now, but they're working on that, so I'll give them an a maintain another decade. But yeah. How do you, as somebody who's creative and it has also started a business, how do you separate those? Two? I'm kind of a freakish hybrid because a lot of creative people are not business-minded. And a lot of business people are not that creative. And somehow it got equal portions of those. And so anytime I'm doing anything in business, it feels like I'm creating something out of nothing. So that is a creative process in itself. But if it's a creative venture, like, Hey, let's come up with a whole series of national parks, posters, and then let's do a book and then we'll turn it into products that can sell the national parks visitor center.
25:18 That was all a creative spark that started from a road trip that my family and I took. We all got into an RV that we borrow from a friend and went out to grand Canyon and Zion and Bryce and just really enjoyed being out in nature. And we, my son, who is a lit major, he was like, you know, we could, we could write a book about this. And it happened to be just before the Centennial of the national parks foundation. And so we went ahead and did that. And so it was a harebrained idea that we bit off way more than we could chew. And it was monumental. We didn't realize just how big of a thing it was to try to get all 59 posters done, the book written and everything done. But by the time of the anniversary in 2016 somehow we did it.
25:57 But that's the great thing about being in a small businessman and entrepreneur. I didn't have to wait on red tape. It was just us. If we want to stay up all night and all weekend and do it, we could. And so we did. And it was, what was the, with the national parks, what was the timeframe until you had to have like completion? So 2016 so when did you start doing all the illustrations and everything? Yeah, we probably had about seven or eight national park posters done in 2015 then we get after the trip in the summer of 2015 we got the idea to do all 59 of them. Wow. So it was really within a year's time, we had to have all the Poe posters done. We had to have the book written. Wow. And and so the first edition of the book actually had a few factual errors and things just cause we, you know, we're running and gunning but we've reprinted it like nine or 10 now. And so each time we find something else we can tweak and make better. Yeah. How many man hours went into all the poster designs, if you don't mind me asking? Sure. Each poster usually takes between 30 and 60 hours to do. And so I don't, I'm not that good at math. It's a lot. It's a lot [inaudible] times 59 and in a lot of the parks actually we, they have more than one design per park because a Yellowstone or Zion are because they're so different. Yeah. They have so much street get. Yup.
27:10 Was you know, talking about books was this national park book kind of the first book that you guys have published or was publishing books in your wheelhouse before this began?
27:21 Yeah, we did so much work with the publishing business, like we're doing book cover design and interior designs for other publishers for years. The first book we did ourselves was the spirit of national book and we did that in about 2007 or eight and that was a collection of all of our national poster art with photography, with historical background of what Nashville is all about. So we wanted to focus on the history and charm of the city and then once we created that format for that book of poster art, historical photos, text and tips about enjoying the place, we could use that template to kind of do national parks. And now other things. We're working on a book about the grand circle right now, which has all the parks in Utah, Arizona, LA. That'll come out next year. That's cool. I've actually a spirit of Nashville book, I've used that for I'm a tour guide here in the city of Nashville by trade.
28:10 And I've actually used that book to like show some of my clients like, Hey, this is like some of the history of these places. So it's been a great resource for me. So thank you for making that welcome. With the national parks stuff, what's everything that you have available for the national park? So you have a book, you have your coffee table book, a coloring book, postcard set, sticker set a an adventure guide book, which is kind of tips about things to do in each, each park and getting it stamped and put a sticker on it. We're working on a memory map right now that'll have a stickers of places you've been or a bucket list of places you want to go in the national parks. And then we have licensees who sell into the actual national parks, visitor centers, coffee cups, mugs, magnets, all the kinds of, you know, souvenir things you'd like to bring back home from visiting a trip
28:56 Like that. None of this stuff come out of a personal love for the natural national parks. What, what has been, if it did, what has been your experience with the national parks?
29:07 Yeah. I think I remember going to Carlsbad caverns as a child with my family. And then a couple other parks. And then I took Nathan, my oldest son to Yosemite and grand Tetons when he graduated from high school. And that's probably our first really bonding moment. And it's funny on the back of our book, Ken burns wrote a little thing about it because he's all about handing down the park to the next generation and all about experiencing intergenerationally. I didn't realize it at the time, but going out there with my son was just this intergenerational bond. The two of us had this experience in nature and it wasn't just the, the wilderness and wonder awe, but it was also us experiencing it together. And then as a family, we brought everybody out like the next year and now we go every year to, you know, a set of different parks as often as we can go.
29:53 And nice thing is I get to write it off as a business expense because I take my camera, I'm doing research, he's doing research. So we visit the place to come back and write about it and do poster art and put it in our book. So it's a hobby. I love hiking. I love the outdoors. I'm a photographer and an illustrator and a designer, so it hits everything right there. That's incredible. Speaking of Ken burns, I don't know if you know this, but he's actually making a documentary on the history of country music that sets a release
30:18 September 17. So yeah, it's already been made. It's, it's complete. And they are doing some viewings here September 15th this week in the city. Yeah. So I'm, I'm excited.
30:28 Let's see. The, I think that's going to be, it's a, it's a 16 part series. Yeah, it's a, it's a big documentary that he take a lot of time to work on. What is your favorite national park right now? [inaudible] They're all beautiful and unique for different reasons. Obviously. I like the Smokies cause I can go to it within three or four hour drive. But when I want to see something that just blows me away, there's nothing like the Tetons or great Rocky mountains or any of these places that are, we don't see everyday here. And desert stuff is pretty cool too. And so I think for me going to see something that I can't see every day. Like there's a lot of beautiful green rolling Hills in Tennessee, but go out there to the painted desert in Arizona and see the grand Canyon or any Bryce Canyon. It's like you're walking on Mars. That's really cool. And so yeah, it, I don't have a one favorite. It's like what kind of mood am I in or do I want some desert solitude or all honesty? Some blow your mind grand juror of huge, huge mountains. Or is it something more like just pristine, want to be alone in a, apart from anything manmade, you know?
31:32 Yeah. going back to Nashville, you know, a lot of your, your work here, if you, for anybody who walks down into kind of the, the show room and the floor where you can see all of them.
31:46 What's the address for that, by the way? It's one 16, 29th Avenue North. We're right across like two blocks away from Centennial park.
31:53 Yeah, Midtown. Cool. So if you, if somebody walks down there, you know there's definitely a theme to your artwork as far as what you guys choose to focus on. And it's a lot of the important things that make Nashville Nashville. So what kind of inspired you to make sure you hit those important marks of Nashville and that those got represented in your artwork?
32:16 Anytime I have a friend or family member from out of town, I asked myself what do I want to show off in my city that I love? What's a good place to eat? What's a good thing to go stand in front of and look at or experience. And so we kind of broke up the book by focusing on the history and the charm of the city. What makes Nashville Nashville. And so really it, and if it doesn't, if you can find it everywhere else in the United States, we probably ignored it. But if it's something that you can find in Nashville that that was the prime candidates for most of the first posters that we did. Yeah. So how many Nashville theme posters are in the spirit of Nashville book? There are about 110 in the book and I think we're up to 150 designs now in the of national collection.
32:56 Sorry, you gonna rerelease that book. You're again in the future or, yeah, we'll probably update it some more. There is no hot chicken in the book and that was a thing that's really become a thing lately in the last like five years. Yeah. So yeah, there's definitely and yeah, there's so much new stuff in Nashville. We probably could do a whole 24 new pages of, of just new stuff. Wow. Oh yeah, absolutely. So another question about Nashville, because we have so many diverse neighborhoods here. When you go to a neighborhood and you're trying to create a poster, a say for 12 South do you have a 12 South poster currently now, yet we actually thought about doing neighborhood by neighborhood and hadn't gotten around to that yet. I was wondering, but like how would you say you went to 12 South and you're making a poster, so you have a lot of incredible food and 12 South you have a boutique shopping.
33:45 You have just really good coffee scene in 12 South, where would you find your inspiration to create a poster for that neighborhood? Yeah, and that's the hard thing. That's probably why we put off doing neighborhoods because there's so much in that neighborhood that any one thing might not adequately depict the whole place. Right. And so we thought about doing a Hillsborough village or you know, some of these different East Nashville and we shied away from it because we couldn't figure out what it is. That one iconic image that sums it up for the neighborhood. So there's probably a different style. There's, Lucy rice is a great artist in town and she's actually done neighborhood posters and she has, she has great stuff. Yeah. And so her, she, her style lets her put in a whole bunch of different stuff and make it almost a collage of things.
34:30 And that's really the style you have to do to, to nail a neighborhood. So she's already done a good job of it. And I don't know if I'm intimidated now, I don't think I could top what she has done. Our stuff is a little more simplistic and iconic. And so that's why we shied away from just depicting a neighborhood per se. So a theme that you really have in your print is, is from a certain age era. What age is that? And like what style of print is that known as? You know, a lot of people look at it and they think of it as art deco era cause we, we model it after the early 20th century. So the 1920s, thirties and forties Americana and and hatch show print put us on the map as a city as far as posters. Absolutely. And so that, that look probably bleeds into stuff that we do a little bit, but we're not a letterpress shop and we can use any color we want instead of having to lay them on one at a time.
35:20 Right. and so I think if you're trying to nail our stylists early 20th century American advertising sort of poster design. Yeah. When I look at some of your posters, I think of like those some of those world war II posters where they're advertising these soldiers and stuff. And so that's, I really think of when I see your guys' work. Speaking of Nashville still, if you had the guests coming in from out of town, what's the first thing you'll show them? Is it based on their personality or is it based on what they want to see? I guess it does have to be based on their personality. I'd take them down to the men's room at the currently the telltale back green, Marvel, black and everything. It's really very interesting place. Do you have a poster for the Herman now? We should look good.
36:04 Yeah, we get a urinal. Yeah. yeah, so I like taking people downtown because I feel like a tourist when I go down and there's always so much new stuff that my wife and I, if we wait six months and then go again, we'll be just like walking around like earth. The rest of the tourist with our mouths open, looking up in awe at just how much has happened. I do really like some of the authentic stuff that you can't see anywhere else. We'll go into the station Inn or the blue bird or Arnold's or pancake pantry where you can get pancake anywhere. But [inaudible] yeah. Donut in there. Chocolate sin pancake at pancake pancake pantry. So yeah. So I like taking people that are to places where you won't find that same thing anywhere else. And hot chicken now is one of those princes used to be at now.
36:53 Bolton's and what's your favorite? What's your favorite hot chicken in town? I'm still a sucker for the original princess cause it's, it's just got that, that unpretentious kind of flavor. But, but now, I mean there's a lot of people doing it really well. I like Hattie B's and it's always, they everyday their spicing degrees are different. So if you go in there thinking you're going to get hot and it's really damn hot, you just don't know. Yeah. and so that's kind of fun for us. We, we laugh about it cause we were just like, Oh no, what kind of Hattie B's we're going to get today? It's always good, but sometimes it's just a lot harder than you thought. Or sometimes you're like, Hey, put some more on this with ya. Have you tried party foul yet? No, I've, I've seen the building.
37:31 It looks good. So there's a, they have three locations. They have one in the Gulch, they have one in Donaldson, and then they have one in Murphysboro. We actually had the owner Austin Smith on last Friday's episode. But the thing about party foul that I love is they have so many unique dishes for hot chicken. So you can get hot chicken tacos, a hot chicken Cobb salad, you can get a hot chicken poboy they have a BNB bourbon glaze. Vinay with the hot chicken as well. Yeah. And it's just, it's a, the most diverse hot chicken portfolio for a ranch. Very cool chicken and to another level. Yeah. And the, the head chef is from new Orleans, so it's a very new Orleans style, like experience with the food. So that, that's just our recommendation for hot chicken for you. But what keeps you motivated?
38:17 You have so many different posters, but what keeps you motivated at the, at in the beginning of the day to wake up and then to go and create? Well, for one thing, we love our family business cause everybody in the family makes their living off of this company doing what we do. That's incredible. We love our employees and it's kind of fun to let them come in and do what they're passionate about doing and then leave and have a life. So we never work past dinnertime, we don't work on the weekends. We just kind of set it up so that you work during the week doing what you love to do, but then you also have a life outside of work. And so I think keeping that balance and doing what we love to do, it doesn't feel like working every day. At the end of the end of the day, I'm like, man, it's time to go home.
38:58 And so I, the day flies by and then I just do it again. But the idea is never stopped coming and I think that's, that's when I'll know it's time to quit is if I just don't have any more ideas. And right now a lot of those ideas are coming to us from our fans and from our licensees who are saying, Hey, we've been to all these places, but we went to these three other places, this this year. You don't have a poster on them yet. Can you do one for us? And so if we look into it and say, that's a pretty cool place, let's go visit it, let's check it out, let's do a poster on it. Then there's still millions of places in the world, a lot of places in national. We'd never been to an experience. So you know, we're not any even close to running out of ideas.
39:32 Do you guys have any like posters for international like Italy and Ireland? Yeah, that's our world travel collection right now. We're trying to do one poster for every country on the planet. Wow. We've already done all of Europe. We've already done South, South America, central America. We're working on Asia right now. And then African and the middle East. So probably by this time next year we'll have completed our whole series. That's incredible. We've got a lot of cool European destinations too. So are you visiting all these destinations? Can't, yeah. Yeah. My artists, Steven Garcia in Spain, he he's doing most of our international stuff right now and okay. Sometimes he gets to go traveling and experience them cause it's a little easier to get around. Yeah. In Spain. But these days, you know, one of the ways we actually decide what should you depict in a general location is by looking at what everybody's posting on social media. Absolutely. If everybody has to get their picture made in front of this icon, then you just know that that's the postcard they're going to buy. That's the one place they want to have their picture made. So why not do a poster on it?
40:29 So does that mean you're going to do a poster of the angel wings and the goals? You know, that's not a bad idea except I, it's probably copyright infringement [inaudible] else's stuff. Kelsey Montague, we haven't done pedal Tavern yet. That's to happen. Yup. We also ask everybody this kind of at the, at the end of the episode for anybody who's been in Nashville for a while, we always ask, what is Nashville not have, what would Nash, what would be a kind of something that Nashville could have to make it complete?
41:01 Hmm. Wow. I, I can't think of anything that we need. We don't have room for anything else. [inaudible] If national could have more space that wasn't crowded in that [inaudible] really unattainable, we just need to go up. Yeah. High rise Nashville. Yeah, I had this question I've been asking people to, no one has the right answer yet. If a pedal Tavern had an accident, would there be like 12 DUI accounts because everybody was driving it? I'm not sure how that works. The liability of people.
41:32 I know what I've never written, so I don't know what the waiver says. Yeah. So that's a, that's a great question. We don't have a lot of paperwork for somebody. We used to have Opry land and a theme park was pretty cool. And yeah, that's a very common theme that we're noticing is that if we've got a theme park back, that's something we don't have that we probably, I think would be cool to have. Yeah, I totally agree. That's a Austin Smith who's on last Friday. That's what he said as well. He said theme park, we needed Opry land back. And then one of our other answers, which I've been saying for years is a beach and Nashville had a beach. Nashville shores [inaudible] fireworks. Yeah. You can go watch the fireworks from the 2199. Just pretend for an evening that Nashville does have a beach. It'll be dark enough.
42:14 We're getting destined all the time. Destin's about six and a half, seven hour drive from here. So yeah, we'll take it. It's close enough. Awesome. Well, Joel, thank you so much for being on. It's been a pleasure having, having you on this podcast. Where can people find you and Anderson design group on social media and all the interwebs? Yeah. So ADG store, Anderson design group, store.com is our, is our web store, and then all of our social media is Anderson design group or ADG at, and so we're on Twitter, we're on, we don't tweet that much. Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, those are the main ways people see our stuff. But our website has everything. So AAD ADG store.com. You also have a, a storefront on Amazon and Etsy, correct? Correct. Yeah. So you can we, we like if you shop at the family level, but if you have to have something prime sent to you overnight, then you can find us on Amazon too.
43:09 Yeah. And definitely if you are in Nashville or visiting inside of the city there just blocks away from Centennial park. So make this a priority to stop here and by some other spirit of Nashville that we'll have to apologize in advance. There's construction, there's building a hotel right across the street from our building. And so parking is a little bit rare right now, but a few months from now when that's done, it'll be easy to get it in and out again. Yeah. Luckily we're not downtown. So there is street parking. Yeah, that's from, that's free. So at least that's for an hour than downtown where there's no free parking. And we have a two story mural on our wall with a big leaning cowboy leaning on the word spirit of Nashville. If you get your picture made in front of that and bring it in and show us your social media post, you get a free poster.
43:47 Oh that's fantastic. Let's grow a, we'll make sure those details are in the show notes as well for you guys to so you can use those tags and everything. And also I liked that you guys are beside a no baked cookie dough place. That's that's nice. That's dangerous. Yeah. Yeah, we are over there pretty much and in hog heaven is just another block away and Kevin is a great place barbecue, some phenomenal. Yup. Awesome. Great place. So I'm still dealing with explore dot Nash. This is the Nashville daily podcast. It is the weekend. Make sure to get out and see some of these incredible events happening in the city. Follow us on Instagram at X PLR dot. Nash, our YouTube channel is the same X PLR. Dot. Nash we just came, are coming out video best restaurants in 2019 here in the city of Nashville.
44:32 So make sure to watch that. Aaron, do you have anything to say for the weekend? Go see a concert. It's a good time to do that. As long as the weather is nice. If not, go pretend you're on a beach and enjoy the fireworks in Nashville shores. Joel, thanks. Thanks again for coming on. Thank you for having me. Yeah. And everybody have a good weekend. We'll see you on Monday.
44:59 [Inaudible].