In this episode, we sit down with designer, illustrator, and longtime Creative South community member Jeremy Slagle to talk about building a creative career by following curiosity wherever it leads.

From raising two graphic designers under the same roof to turning a pickleball obsession into real client work, Jeremy shares how some of the biggest opportunities in his career came from personal projects, side interests, and ideas that initially seemed too small to matter.

We talk about the value of creative communities, why portfolios should be filled with real work instead of just class assignments, and how pursuing the things you're genuinely excited about can open doors that strategic career planning never could.

Jeremy also shares his perspective on parenting creative kids, the lessons he's learned from more than three decades in design, and why showing people what you want to be hired for is still one of the most powerful career strategies available.

Along the way, we discuss Creative South, remote work, building expertise through passion projects, and the surprising connection between pickleball and creative entrepreneurship.

About Jeremy Slagle

Jeremy Slagle is a designer, illustrator, and creative director with more than 30 years of experience helping brands tell their stories through thoughtful design and illustration. Based in Columbus, Ohio, he's also an avid pickleball player, longtime Creative South attendee, and passionate advocate for creative community, mentorship, and lifelong learning.

Follow Jeremy on Instagram

Check out Jeremy's website

Join the Creative Slash Newsletter and Get the 5-Part “Off the Record” email series FREE

Click here to get the five-part “Off the Record” email series

Note: If you're looking for hard-earned advice, resources from top creatives, and the products they can't live without, you're going to love this.

Brad Woodard

Brad is an illustrator and designer behind Brave the Woods, a full-service studio working with clients like PBS Kids, Ford, Target, and USPS. His bold, playful style and heart-led storytelling shine through everything from brand campaigns to children’s books.

View Brave the Woods

Dustin Lee

Dustin is the founder of RetroSupply, a shop for retro-inspired brushes, textures, and digital tools used by tens of thousands of creatives from indie artists to major studios. He shares what it’s really like to run a creative business while keeping it small, weird, and intentional.

View RetroSupply

Credits

Audio/video editing: Clara Wright
Cover art: Brad Woodard
Intro animation: Seth Austin
Intro music: “Snakes and Fire” (Instrumental) by Pär Hagström

For years, Lenny Terenzi built the kind of creative life designers dream about.

He ran a beloved studio and screen printing shop, taught workshops to hundreds of creatives, spoke at conferences around the country, helped build creative communities, and created work that genuinely impacted people’s careers and lives.

And yet underneath all of it, he secretly felt like he was failing.

In this episode, Lenny opens up about discovering later in life that he had been living with ADHD his entire adult life and didn't know it.

Plus, how that realization completely reframed the way he viewed his career, relationships, burnout, creativity, and self-worth.

“I was fighting a war that I never knew was declared on myself.”

This sentence hit Brad and I hard (and I suspect it does a lot of our listeners as well).

We talk about the hidden ways ADHD can show up in creative lives: unfinished ideas, difficulty crossing the finish line, tying your identity to your work, burnout disguised as laziness, and the exhausting cycle of feeling capable of more while never understanding why certain things feel so impossibly hard.

But this conversation is also about an important reframe of how we define success.

Lenny reflects on shutting down Hey Monkey (the studio and workshop space he spent years building) and why he no longer sees it as a failure simply because it didn’t become a forever business.

Over the years, the studio taught hundreds of people how to screen print, launched careers, created friendships, inspired other studios, and gave people a place to belong creatively.

And maybe that counts for something too.

This episode is for anyone who has:

• Struggled with burnout or creative exhaustion
• Wondered if they’re “lazy” or broken
• Tied too much of their identity to their work
• Felt ashamed of a business, project, or career pivot
• Almost without knowing it, gauge success purely by revenue and profit

It’s an honest conversation about creativity, ego, reinvention, mental health, and learning that the value of the things we build can’t always be measured on a spreadsheet.

Sometimes a project changes your life even if it is not an indestructible empire.

About Lenny Terenzi

Lenny Terenzi is a designer, illustrator, creative director, educator, musician, and longtime creative community builder based in Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina. Known for his bold visual style and irreverent approach to creativity, Lenny has spent decades helping brands and creatives embrace personality, craft, and experimentation.

Follow Lenny on Instagram

Check out Lenny’s website

Join the Creative Slash Newsletter and Get the 5-Part “Off the Record” email series FREE

Click here to get the five-part “Off the Record” email series

Note: If you're looking for hard-earned advice, resources from top creatives, and the products they can't live without, you're going to love this.

Brad Woodard

Brad is an illustrator and designer behind Brave the Woods, a full-service studio working with clients like PBS Kids, Ford, Target, and USPS. His bold, playful style and heart-led storytelling shine through everything from brand campaigns to children’s books.

View Brave the Woods

Dustin Lee

Dustin is the founder of RetroSupply, a shop for retro-inspired brushes, textures, and digital tools used by tens of thousands of creatives from indie artists to major studios. He shares what it’s really like to run a creative business while keeping it small, weird, and intentional.

View RetroSupply

Credits

Audio/video editing: Clara Wright
Cover art: Brad Woodard
Intro animation: Seth Austin
Intro music: “Snakes and Fire” (Instrumental) by Pär Hagström

In this episode, we sit down with legendary illustrator Orlando Arocena (Mexifunk) to talk about building a creative career by leaning into the things other people run away from.

While most designers saw Adobe Illustrator as limiting for hyper-realistic illustration work or something to outsource, Orlando saw an opportunity. He spent decades pushing the software far beyond what people thought it could do.

Eventually, he became known for his coveted work with major films, entertainment brands, and some of the most recognizable vector illustrations in the industry (lots of movie posters look Photoshopped, but they're actually vector, insane, I know).

Along the way, we also dig into highly actionable insights like:

• Why specialization can become your biggest advantage
• The hidden opportunities inside unpopular tools
• What decades of creative work taught Orlando about standing out
• How to build a career around curiosity instead of trends
• And why “breaking the rules” sometimes just means paying closer attention than everyone else

If you've ever wondered whether your weird interests, niche skills, or unconventional path could actually become your advantage, then buckle up because this episode is for you.

(And yes… somehow we also start with colonoscopy stories.)

ABOUT ORLANDO AROCENA (MEXIFUNK)

Orlando Arocena is a Mexican-Cuban-American artist and creative strategist known for his bold, highly detailed vector artwork. A 13-time CLIO recipient and 2025 Emmy Award nominee, Orlando has worked across film, pop culture, gaming, and brand storytelling, bringing more than 30 years of creative experience to his distinctive style.

Follow Orlando Arocena on Behance and on Instagram

Join the Creative Slash Newsletter and Get the 5-Part “Off the Record” email series FREE

Click here to get the five-part “Off the Record” email series

Note: If you're looking for hard-earned advice, resources from top creatives, and the products they can't live without, you're going to love this.

Brad Woodard

Brad is an illustrator and designer behind Brave the Woods, a full-service studio working with clients like PBS Kids, Ford, Target, and USPS. His bold, playful style and heart-led storytelling shine through everything from brand campaigns to children’s books.

View Brave the Woods

Dustin Lee

Dustin is the founder of RetroSupply, a shop for retro-inspired brushes, textures, and digital tools used by tens of thousands of creatives from indie artists to major studios. He shares what it’s really like to run a creative business while keeping it small, weird, and intentional.

View RetroSupply

Credits

Audio/video editing: Clara Wright
Cover art: Brad Woodard
Intro animation: Seth Austin
Intro music: “Snakes and Fire” (Instrumental) by Pär Hagström