HIS COMMERCIAL BACKGROUND

Robert has worked for big advertising agencies, he’s designed logos and skateboards and tee shirts — he even worked for Disney, designing art for clothing, where his speciality was Goofy (although he also designed an image of Micky Mouse with his ear-hat slipping off).

Robert says he dropped out of school in the early 1980s, when he was about sixteen. He wanted to be a graphics artist, he says. What’s more, he wanted to make a living. So even though he had a scholarship to a design school, he quit and took the first commercial art job he was offered.

“I kind of blew it,” he says now. “I had a four year scholarship, but I thought at the time — hey, I’m going to school to get a job as a graphic designer and someone just offered me a job at a graphics design firm. So I took it.”

That was a production job. He wasn’t creating his own visions, rather he was taking someone else’s work and preparing it for reproduction. Today, he says, that kind of thing is done pretty much automatically by computer. Back then, it was a careful manual job.

He worked there for two years, he says, primarily doing logo designs. “I learned a lot,” he says.

He also started doing freelance work, designing graphics for tee shirts, and he spent a lot of time trying to educate himself, since he had skipped the opportunity to get a formal education.

“I joined an organization for advertising and design, because they gave seminars I could go to if I was a member. I remember it was a lot of money for me back then, but I met famous designers, older designers, and listened to their lectures and learned from them.”

He liked the security and the regular pay that attached to working for a company, but, he says, in his mid-twenties he was becoming ‘more entrepreneurial.’

He took a shot at starting several businesses. He started a company called ‘Thoughts for Tots’ that made little baby shirts. He started a novelty company called ‘City Trendz. And he started a company called ‘LA Bronx’, which designed graffiti skateboards. 

When we talked to Robert, it was the LA Bronx skateboard company that animated him the most. He says he was ahead of the trend for bringing street art — graffiti — into commercial products like skateboards.

“The problem with that was I had trouble getting into stores, even the ‘edgy’ stores, because at the time, in the eighties, graffiti art was considered gang-related or vandalism. But I was really getting into the art of graffiti, the wild style, the bubble lettering.”

“I’m a graphic designer,” Robert says, “so I love typography. When you see tagging on the side of a building — well, there’s bad tagging, but there’s also really beautiful calligraphy tagging with a spray can or a fat ink marker. There’s a real rhythm to that, and I always really appreciated it. I thought I could bring it to the commercial market.”

When the market was ready for it, however, bigger companies with more money quickly dominated, and LA Bronx — which he ran from 1987 to 1992 — was never ‘monetarily successful.’

Then he got a job offer from the Caribbean Tourist Council and spent a year in the Caribbean. “That really changed my life. I learned how to slow down.”

For a while, Robert went to work for Disney in the textile department, where they produced clothing and textiles for all their stores.

“Because of my surfing background, I suggested ‘Goofy foot’ surfwear, because surfers that pivoted with their left foot were called ‘goofy foots’.”

Getting something like that approved took time, Robert says, because he insisted that Goofy couldn’t surf with his shoes on. “It took six months to put together a whole booklet on how Goofy’s foot was going to look.”