You’re in a meeting surrounded by business jargon. Around you are sticky notes, and harsh light fills the room. Across from you sits Brian Morris paying attention to every word. With his head down, he takes a Sharpie to paper and meticulously draws skulls, color studies, and abstract figures. From a distance, this differentiates Brian Morris, and his discipline and obsession with art-making are apparent up close.
Morris has said goodbye to those cold, brightly lit rooms that are laced with just about every buzzword imaginable. Now his environment is much different; his steps seem lighter, his mind freer, and his spirit more joyful.
In his 25-year career working in digital agencies — he held the roles of Executive Creative Director and Chief Creative Officer at some of the world’s largest firms, parallel to freelancing and creating a vast repertoire of artwork.
Now, he works out of his garage — surrounded by cars and art and armed with autonomy and drive. He operates at the intersection of emerging technology and creativity. He is an artist through and through; his entire life has been devoted to the practice of creation. If you follow him on social media, you’ll be quick to notice that his rigorous discipline of art-making pushes him to rise in the early hours of the day. For Morris, art is a vocation more than anything.
When Morris was eight years old, by his own agency, he gave himself his first tattoo with rapidograph pens he received for Christmas. Years later, this creative hunger would drive him to attend Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, to pursue a degree in Graphic Design while working the second shift at a clip art company where he digitized illustrations. Shortly thereafter, this became a full-time role and a gateway into interactive media. Suddenly, he could leverage the internet and the web to tell stories. In the early 2000s, Morris moved to Chicago to lead design teams, build creative offices, and work for years in experience consulting.
Today, Morris was amongst the first artists to expand his art to the world of NFTs. Since 2021, Morris has established a large following in the NFT space and has crafted multiple collections. And most recently, he’s begun to utilize AI to manifest ideas, concepts, art, and inspiration. But unlike others suddenly adopting the title of artist because they typed in a few prompts into Midjourney, Morris has earned it. He’s put in tens of thousands of hours, ink to paper, and has mastered image-making, so his AI art outputs and NFTs deserve respect because they come from discipline, skill, and dedication.
Advice to emerging designers by Brian Morris
You will not be creatively satisfied in your job. You can seek it. You can want it, but at the end of the day, there’s gonna be a hungry ghost inside of you that craves more no matter how cool the design job. You’re always going to want do something more. There’s always something more interesting, so I would encourage folks to have a side passion, even if it is design. If you’re doing design for a day job, it is also cool to do design for a night job. Work on things you’re really excited about. If you work on things you’re excited about, it fills up your creative tank. So when you have to deliver on things that are required and less exciting, you can pull from that tank you filled up creatively.
In our podcast, Underscore, I spoke with Morris about his introduction to creativity, giving himself a tattoo when he was eight, leaving a job to pursue his passions, NFTs, artificial intelligence, and more.
Follow Brian Morris on Instagram
Written by
