Christian Solorzano [00:02]

Hello, you are listening to Underscore, a podcast by the Chicago Graphic Design Club. I am your host, Christian Solorzano. On today's episode, I speak with Rich Alapack, founder of we All Live Here, an organization and community-focused project which describes itself as using the power of creativity to gently remind people to get along and help each other succeed. In this conversation, we speak about creativity as being the primary catalyst for positive change and community impact.

Rich shares with us stories on how he works with community leaders, schools, libraries, and businesses to advocate and to help people teach the power of using their voice for positive change.

He walks us through several case studies of murals and projects that he's initiated in Chicago and takes us behind the scenes to understand how a lot of these projects get off the ground and even shares with us some of the challenges and some of the highs and lows of being in charge of something that is Driving so much change and making such a difference for so many people.

This is a really great conversation, and I personally really enjoy seeing and hearing about creativity and design as being two things that can go beyond business, but rather as something that can lead to more wholesome and value-driven impact. So as always, thank you for listening and enjoy this conversation. Talk to you soon. Welcome, Rich. Thank you so much for being on Underscore, our podcast. How are you doing today?

Rich Alapack [01:59]

I'm doing great. Thank you so much, Christian, for having me on and, being interested in hearing about myself and we All Live Here. I really appreciate it.

Christian Solorzano [02:07]

So I want to ask you about— so you're not from Chicago, you're from Canada, but you've been in Chicago since 2003, and you came here while you were in high school to play baseball, correct?

Rich Alapack [02:20]

My senior year of high school, I'm from originally Waterloo, Ontario. The only reason people ever know about that is if they know something about the University of Waterloo or BlackBerry was from there. So we were on the moon and then right back down to normal. But I, yeah, I was a baseball player and we had family friends in Prior Lake, Minnesota and connections to the baseball program. That I guess we leveraged and had me go live with my aunt, my uncle, and go from there.

Christian Solorzano [02:52]

So talk to us about that transition of coming into a new city as, new people, new school, new place, new environments, and how— what was it like being new in a place, being in a place where perhaps you didn't feel like you belonged? And now fast forward, now you have this successful project, we All Live Here, that's about belonging and it's about inclusion and it's about making people welcome. So I feel like there's a connection there. So speak to us a little bit about that. Sure.

Rich Alapack [03:32]

I think you're hitting the nail on the head. I think one fed the other. When I first moved to Prior Lake, I was 16, 17. And I forget where I was in the year, I guess. And I, it was weird. I didn't, I went from knowing everybody to where I had, from where I had grown up every day for my whole life. And all of a sudden I moved to this new community and I didn't know anyone.

My little cousins were 2, 4, and 6 at the time. So I spent a lot of time babysitting, which I'm sure my aunt and uncle loved having this live-in babysitter. And so they could go out and do whatever they did in the meantime. And gradually through sports and stuff, I was able to, make more friends.

But I had— so in Canada where I went to high school, you went to high school for 5 years and your first 4 were your regular curriculum and your 5th year was what was called an Ontario Academic Credit year. And that's basically like easing you into college life.

So I had already done the first 4 and I had this 5th year, so I actually had too many credits and I suddenly found myself, okay, I need to drag this out to baseball season because that's the whole point.

And so they, in order for me to make more friends, they had me, I think that first trimester I had 5 study halls and I was basically supposed to go to school to meet people and then take 5 US history classes because those are the 5 requirements I did not to graduate. So, but they again had to space that out to baseball season. And so one of the first people that I met was a girl whose locker was just a couple lockers down.

And in Prior Lake, there's a successful tribe of Native Americans that have a casino that's the biggest casino outside of Vegas and Atlantic City. And there's a lot of jealousy and resentment that happens because like when you turn 18, if you're part of the tribe, you start to reap the rewards of being a member of an owner of the casino. And so they get a lot of money. And this girl was out, went out of her way to be my friend. She was the chief's daughter.

And so I had this like totally different experience with people. With her and the tribe because of that than any of the other people. And I just thought it was ridiculous anyways that people were mad or jealous over this casino when, and the amount of money that tribe members got instead of remembering how much they definitely suffered before they ever got to that financial success, which is still a loss in a big way on the far, as far as land goes, right?

So anyway, I think that informed we All Live Here because the night that I actually thought of the phrase, I was walking my dog and I had— I was reflecting on how I made it to Chicago and how I got there. And so naturally that went through my head. And I think just that unique chance meeting of the chief's daughter probably started to infect that into my head. And I also grew up as a kid taking French immersion every day for half a day.

And we were always kind of bullied by the kids that didn't take French immersion because the school sort of did treat us a little bit preferentially, not really on purpose, but because it was a new program, they had to like figure out this pilot and make it work. Our class was the first class through. And so I guess in a weird way there was this form of discrimination. I sat out of it a lot again because of support of sports.

And so as one of the better players on the field, you didn't really get bullied as much as if you didn't play sports at all. And so, but I was very much aware of it and I saw my classmates and people that I went to school with every day since first grade getting abused all the time. And I think all of that helped me. With this, with this idea of something more positive and inclusive.

Christian Solorzano [07:52]

Okay. And then, so then you come to Chicago and based on, based on your history and like the list of places that you worked at and the projects that you've been on, it seems like for many years you were focused primarily working in sales. And then up until, within the last few years or so, Since 2015, you founded this project, we All Live Here. That's— that, in my opinion, it is a large-scale creative project that's focused on creativity.

It's focused on community engagement, and it's focused on just creativity being a catalyst for conversation and for just change, community impact. So I want to understand, because I think sometimes when it comes to there's like the business, there's the business side, which I would associate sales as falling into that. But then there's also the creative world. And there, and I, and I was reading a, an interview with you and you were speaking about how you had this, you had this really successful job.

You were working at Tumblr and you had like your dream house, like your dream car. You had what I think many people like just think of as, finally making it. But you were met with this decision of your project that you were working on the side was getting, was becoming successful, and you had to make that choice to leave something behind in exchange for pursuing your passion. So maybe a question from that is, what was your earliest memory of creativity and perhaps design?

And what impact did it have on you? Is there something that you, that comes to mind, like one particular milestone in your life that—

Rich Alapack [09:47]

That's a great question. I don't think I've ever necessarily been asked that in that way. 2 things popped into my head right away when you said that. I was lucky enough as a kid that I had a mother that let me draw on the walls, create however. And I, there's one specific thing that I remember doing where she let me poke a hole in the bottom of the paint can and just spin around my room splattering paint everywhere.

And I think most parents would probably have a heart attack if they saw their kids splattering the walls like that. But mine, my mother encouraged that kind of thing. And then the second thing was I wanted an Air Jordan basketball hoop. When I got a basketball hoop, it was just a regular basketball hoop and I was like, this would be so much cooler if it had the Air Jordan trademark on it.

So I went ahead and did that, and that was probably my first experience creating a stencil. And I was probably— gosh, I don't know, it would probably be close to right after, I would say probably '86 or '87 when I probably did something like that. So I guess it's all pretty young.

And with regards to like the business side of things and where all that kind of came from as a salesperson, I was always doing creative things to try to sell people and to be clear, I was selling advertising. So I was also in the advertising ecosystem, which, is a different thing to sell than maybe some sort of a widget. But I would always try to reach out in creative ways.

So there's a lot of people spamming your inbox every day with how many leads they could generate for you, right? And I never wanted to be that type of a person. So I had started a company called findaplace2live.com when I was in college. I was a sophomore in college when I started that.

I grew that to be the official fundraiser for the American Marketing Association and 323 different college chapters that brought me to Chicago because they had me flying around talking to different student groups about how to use this as a fundraiser. And I got contacted one day by a guy who was building the advertising sales team at CareerBuilder, a Chicago company that everybody knows, and I was pretty proud of never having had a job and I kind of never wanted to have a job.

And, but this guy was like, listen, I encourage people to have side hustles. I think it's important. And I was just what a weird attitude this dude had. I'm going to at least go interview. And I interviewed and I started to get successful there because I started— CareerBuilder used to have these emails that they would, you could send that were called monkey mails. It was part of a Super Bowl promotion that they had.

So you'd have this avatar that you could create with a monkey wearing different hats or clothes or whatever. And then you would speak into the phone and it would come out speaking, the monkey would speak your voice. So I would call cold calls or, business that I already had existing customers and you use the monkey to do the delivery for me. So it was sort of always how I sold. And then I started using Photoshop probably whenever Photoshop first launched.

And so I would, when I was calling on advertising clients, I'd look up someone who I was supposed to speak to because I mean, that's the bare minimum you could do as a salesperson. And I'd look them up and I'd find like a funny photo and I'd crop their head and do something and make the photo, funny photo funnier somehow, right? And people weren't weirded out by that because it wasn't as easy to do as it is today.

Now you're maybe just creepy, but back then it was just maybe stand out. And so I guess I'd always been doing creative things in order to sell, but, working in advertising, I think you get an interesting view on creativity, right? Because creativity is such a commodity or part of what advertising is and the different ways of creating commercials and print ads and out-of-home ads and all that, those kinds of things really was always just something really interesting to me.

And then when social media came around, kind of these silly things that I was doing to sell sort of just became what silly things that people posted. So when I started to work for Tumblr, which I never really thought of as a social network, but it was always lumped in there with the social networks. To me, it was always a blogging platform, but I always was trying to get people to stop using that word blog.

Because it just, for me, it like, it had become something that people didn't want to follow through on. It was too much work to like do a blog really well. And some people did that very well and other people were just never gonna get it. But then the phone came along and then the phone made a feed of things you could follow, subjects you could follow instead of people you could follow. And I thought that was a godsend for Tumblr.

And I thought, wow, that's sort of what brands need. They don't need— they need that same sort of messaging. And so I thought I could probably sell that and that's why I started working there. And when I thought of we All Live Here, I mean, when you work at Tumblr, you start a blog. So I, the first thing I did with the phrase was to, grab the handle, start a blog, Start taking pictures of people all around the city holding signs.

And I had made the signs so that they were what the whole phrase on one sign or all the way out to one letter per sign. So no matter what size of the group I was engaging with, it could be 4, it could be 13, or it could just be one. I'd have a sign for everyone in the group. And then I started animating, GIFing those signs or those pictures that I would take and I'd post them to the blog.

And then I did that at Pitchfork. If it didn't work at Pitchfork, it wasn't gonna work anywhere. And then I did it at Lollapalooza. If it wasn't gonna happen at Lollapalooza, it wasn't gonna happen anywhere. But I, by then I already knew it was. And so I sort of had friends helping me and it was just a great excuse to go up and talk to strangers nonstop. And so we created thousands of pieces of content and then the blog ended up going viral.

And I sort of found myself in this position where I was like, man, I want to do something a lot more meaningful with this. I do have my dream house. I do have my dream dog. I do have my dream car. I don't have a wife and I don't have kids. So maybe I might be the only person who could go and, jump off of a cliff financially for a period of time until a new idea gets off the ground. And figure this thing out.

And so I just decided to do it.

Christian Solorzano [16:59]

And I'm interested in learning about what— so that blog that you initiated, what was on that blog? And just, you were working on the blog at the same time that you were working at Tumblr. So how would you balance the two things?

Rich Alapack [17:19]

So that was still easy to do both because Tumblr, if you didn't have a blog when you worked at Tumblr, you weren't gonna be working at Tumblr very long. And so like my model for what I was doing was David Karp, who's the founder of Tumblr, his favorite blog ever on Tumblr was People of New York, which you've probably seen a copy of that book.

And so David had bought like every time, like every new employee at Tumblr got a copy of People of New York from David Karp. And that was sort of one of your intros into, what Tumblr should be or could be at its best. So I basically started to do something similar to that when I was just taking these pictures of people.

But the thing that made it a little bit more interesting than just pictures of people holding signs that said a positive, inclusive phrase was the fact that I would animate them. So I would, I might make them a bobblehead. I might, there, there'd be different ways that I would look at the image and different techniques that I had figured out how to do on Photoshop to animate somebody's random static image. And sometimes they'd just like tilt the sign or whatever.

And so that blog was sort of like, I knew it was a stopgap idea. I knew it wasn't the main purpose of what I was gonna do. But it gave me, bought me enough time to have the real idea. And it actually came as a result of the blog because I was eventually contacted by a principal at Oak Lawn Community High School who said, hey, do you mind coming out? I hear you're based, you work for Tumblr, but you're based in Chicago.

Will you come out to our school and just talk to our kids about what a blog's like? And just by the nature of the blog being the we All Live Here blog, somehow that made their local paper. And then when that happened, he called me and he was just thrilled. He's like, we didn't expect that to happen. You want to come back out here and talk to more of our kids? And I kind of liked that talking to kids part.

I think I've always been sort of someone who likes to share life experiences and talk to kids about things that might help them avoid some of the mistakes I've made or whatever. And so I did that and then he came to me a third time and he said, what can we do As a whole school with this.

And that's what really got my wheels spinning and where I thought the big idea might actually be was, wow, if we could just like start installing this positive inclusive mindset into communities via public art with the kids being the ambassadors for the message, being the ones that are, growing up trying to live that example, man, that could really do some cool things. And so I had no clue about how to work with Chicago Public Schools.

I had no clue how to do anything really, but I think one of the greatest things about when you're in sales is that you kind of just have to make it work or you're fired. So I went to the school closest to my house. And, I wanted to put we All Live Here on their fence.

And so I just basically went and knocked on the door like a weirdo that didn't have any kids at the school, not realizing that people would think that I was weird because I wanted to engage with the local school. And finally melted through like that initial resistance and just got to a point where I said, hey, this is what I want to do and I'd like to get the kids involved and blah. Didn't have the whole program figured out yet, but we did it.

We put it, the phrase on the fence in English and in Spanish on the other end of the fence because those were the languages the kids learned at that school. And lo and behold, the principal, actually the kindergarten teacher first started raving to me about how just adding the phrase in Spanish sort of brought the Spanish-speaking students more into the fold. And it helped the families of the Spanish-speaking students feel more included in the school. And then the English sign was sort of just like there.

The Spanish sign had done so much more to bring these communities together. And I thought that was really wild because it wasn't done by design. It was more done by accident. But it did show me what we could possibly design.

Christian Solorzano [21:50]

So, and what were the, what were the, I'm curious to hear a little bit about what were the responses from the kids? Because I, I've done some community programs in the past with younger kids, and the reactions are always mixed. There's the students that are just oh, here's an adult talking to us about, Something that just doesn't seem interesting whatsoever. But for you talking about this, what were the kids responding like? What were they saying? What were they talking about?

Rich Alapack [22:23]

Great question. So I thought pretty hard about how this program should work. So the program is called ACT. It stands for Art, Community, and Technology. I called it that because I wanted it to obviously inspire action. Out of people who participated. But also I thought those were 3 great tools to use and 3 things that I kind of had some expertise in using.

And then I thought back to my own school and the only thing I could remember, especially because this first school was a grade school, I could only remember like guest speakers and I could only remember like people coming in and talking to our whole school and the whole school in the assembly in the gymnasium. And so I thought, I'm going to do that. It just seems way more important when there's one person.

And then the other thing I could remember was always being told to sit down and shut up. And I thought, this is going to be the anti-assembly almost. I'm going to— the kids are going to draw the entire time during the assembly. I'm going to talk about stuff. I'm going to show them stuff, but they're going to draw something for we. They're going to draw something for All. They're going to draw something for Live, and they're going to draw something for Here.

And that'll help them formulate their own ideas about what this means. It's almost like design thinking without the Post-it notes and research without the questionnaire. You're just letting them kind of, there's no right or wrong answer, just, flow. And so the kids got really excited. Like they loved figuring out that they could just come up to me and I'd hand 'em the mic and they'd start to brag about what they drew for we. What does we mean?

And I'd hand them the mic and they'd be a little bit stunned that they had the mic and then they'd get over it and they'd say, and then 10 other kids would raise their hand and want me to come over and tell me about their drawings. So it worked out really well right off the bat, just because I think I thought about how the community might want to engage with the message before we do anything.

Christian Solorzano [24:28]

Yeah. I think it makes a big difference to have it be interactive and to have the students participate because, I mean, for me, like the guest speakers that are the most memorable ones for me are, have always been the ones that would hand you the mic and sort of empower you to share some insight, whereas the less interesting ones were like, we're just here to talk at you. And that's that. So, right.

Rich Alapack [24:58]

Yeah. And I think that that's something you have to avoid no matter what you're speaking about and no matter what environment you're speaking in because, the engagement really drives a better experience for the speaker and for the participants, the listeners, the audience. And so, I mean, I started to get questions and it really helped me actually navigate the waters of where I was headed with this. But I'd have kids that came up and they'd be like, well, I don't really live next to the school.

My neighborhood is wherever. And I'd be like, yeah, but, you still live in Chicago, you still live in Illinois, you still live in the United States, you still live in North America, you still live on planet Earth, and you still live in the Milky Way. And then these kids would be like, I never thought of it that way. And so even when they didn't feel like they necessarily belonged to the school community geographically, locally, it was just somewhere where they went.

That gave them the chance then to realize, oh no, I'm bigger. I'm part of something way bigger than just the 4 walls of this building. I'm part of the whole wide world, right?

Christian Solorzano [26:14]

Yeah.

Rich Alapack [26:15]

I think that's a good thing, is the earlier the kids can learn that, the better.

Christian Solorzano [26:19]

Yeah, and I think it also instills in people a sense of stewardship and care over their communities, because if you know that you live here, I think that encourages you to maybe care a little bit more about the place that you live in.

But I, but I have noticed, it's always interesting because for me younger people are the ones that always intimidate me the most because they will— they're going to be brutally honest and they will let you know if you're— if you just lost them because they'll just sometimes get up and just walk away. I've had that happen to me in the past. So whereas I think as adults we're a little bit more of an expert at faking it or pretending that we're—

Rich Alapack [27:07]

Yeah, I mean, I felt Sometimes that I was faking it so much that I didn't even have the option of not acting like I was faking it. So what I did learn pretty quickly was no matter the age of the kids, but particularly for high school kids, if they want to give you the assembly on a Friday at 3 or, 2, whatever the last period of the day might be, say no.

No matter what you do, you're not going to have that crowd because they're already gone. And so, luckily I only had that happen to me a couple of times, and it's been 110+ schools. And so once that happened a couple of times, it was actually one of the first times my wife ever came to observe an assembly. And here I am with like all these anecdotal things that have gone well, and she comes to this one school and it's the last thing on a Friday.

And she's like, those kids didn't care at all what you're saying. I'm like, well, last thing on a Friday. And I think it was even worse. I think it was right before break.

Christian Solorzano [28:09]

So I want to hear you talk about the— you mentioned believing in the 3 C's: creativity, curiosity, and confidence. And I want to hear— I just want you to break them down for me. What is— what do they mean? What— let's— we could start off with creativity. What is— what is creativity?

Rich Alapack [28:29]

So let me back up one second because I think the way I think of this is a good way to like get on the right side of the kids. So, the kids are sitting there, it's— they don't know who I am yet. And I need to do some sort of an icebreaker to help them appreciate what I might say to them. And so I always say, I think we need to get 3 C's in school.

And all of a sudden, the kids are like, we've only been told to get a's. This doesn't make any sense. This guy's telling us to get C's. And I see the principal always kind of like, where is this guy going with this? And so then I say, I think if you get creativity, curiosity, and confidence out of school, then you'll be successful in life. And I think creativity is, it's something from your soul. I really do believe that.

I think creativity, it could be any different actual manifestation, but it's something you imagine that you then bring into the world. And I think that that's the way I think of creativity. Curiosity is sort of the thing that allows you to get creative.

If you don't have curiosity, helping you think of new thoughts or think of, learn new things or experience new experiences, then it's gonna be hard for you to get creative because you're only gonna, if you've only seen a black and white TV, all the TVs are black and white. Unless you've seen a color TV. Now you know that you want a color TV, not a black and white one, right?

Christian Solorzano [30:06]

Yep.

Rich Alapack [30:07]

And then confidence, I think, is the other thing that helps make both those other things happen. And so if you get into this loop and there's probably other C's like you could add into the equation, but I think those 3, I just think sometimes things in 3s get remembered easier. And I think those 3 things are what we should be striving to instill in our young folks.

Christian Solorzano [30:34]

And I think also for me, confidence is like we talk a lot about creativity and curiosity. I think those definitely go parallel, but confidence I think there isn't, at least from my vantage point, I don't see enough dialogue about confidence because we just assume that you're either confident or you're not.

But I think for most of us, it's a journey getting to a point where we feel somewhat comfortable just speaking in public or just being confident with the work that we're sharing. So how so throughout, your entire journey, not just within we All Live Here, but even just coming to Chicago, how have you seen your confidence shift or evolve throughout the last, the last, 2 decades? And have there been any significant memorable moments? I've heard people say Main character moments where you felt like—

Rich Alapack [31:43]

Interesting. Yeah, I was thinking confidence boosters, but main character moments, that's a good way to think about it. I don't think of confidence as a static on or off. I think confidence is something that you could be very confident that you are going to drive your car without getting in an accident, but you might not be very confident at public speaking.

You could be very confident your wife is gonna say yes when you propose, or your fiancée is gonna say, or your girlfriend is gonna say yes when you propose, but you could be very poor at sharing something that you've created. And that's something that has to build. So for me, I, throughout my whole life, I feel like I have to remember to breathe no matter what I'm doing.

So whether that's performing, whether that's as an athlete, whether that's whatever the case may be, I have to remember to breathe. And so I physically had to remember to do that. I remember being on a sales call once in Detroit pitching an ad agency called Donor and I fainted in the meeting because I didn't breathe. And it wasn't because it actually, it kind of was because of the material.

I had a boss at that time that was like, you have to do everything by the script instead of letting a salesperson be who they are and say what they need to say, but say it in their own way. It was very much like, listen to this, say it exactly like this. That's the way I, as a manager, know you're saying the right things. And that would stress me out and I would forget to breathe.

And then I fainted and then I actually closed the deal anyways, because I think they felt sorry for me. But that's like one of those milestone moments and maybe my character was not doing well. And then when you do public art, right? Like you're putting stuff out there. You're— so the very first time I went and wrote, we all live here, on a wall and just like tagged something, I had to get used to it.

I had to get comfortable with the fear that instills and also learned that people were going to shout things at you. They might mostly positive things. I can only really remember one time where someone had a bad reaction. But that's something that brings out something new in you. And then I basically, I started to be someone who's speaking a lot and I really was never that great at public speaking, but I had to get better at that.

And so the confidence came later after doing it and realizing that if you get out of your own head, no one knows if you said it perfectly or not, right? Whatever your speech or your presentation was, no one in the room knows exactly what you were trying to do perfectly. So eventually I realized that perfect is stupid. I should just be authentic and it will convey the information necessary and the people will have no clue that I didn't say something that I wasn't supposed to say.

So, and once I was able to let that go, then public speaking became a lot easier for me. And I, again, always remember to breathe.

Christian Solorzano [35:27]

Yeah, always remember to breathe. Very important. And you have several of these murals throughout the city. For me, the most memorable one is the one on Lake Street. Because I, I'm always driving down Lake and it wasn't until recently that I, that I actually realized that it was a, it was a project by we All Live Here, even though it says we All Live Here on it.

So are there, are there any, walk us through and just what is the process of getting one of these murals up, these installations? How do you, how do you pitch something like this? If we're talking about things like sales. How do you get buy-in? And just walk us through how you fuse creativity with your background in business and being an entrepreneur and whatnot.

Rich Alapack [36:19]

So I think it comes down to a lot to knowing your audience, right? So if I'm pitching a school, it's different, right? I, a lot of times I, at this point now I'm more getting approached, but I think back to when I didn't have a body of work that people could see and so they couldn't find something that they wanted themselves.

So I'd almost always have to, I still have to go do a site visit to really get the gist of what's going on at that school and come up with something specific for that particular installation. But I would come up with something and then again, I'd have the ability to mock it up. So I would mock it up and I would just say like, this is what we want to do.

And then in like other murals, if it's like a real estate developer or something like that, At this point, those didn't really come no matter how much outreach I was doing until people started to see the phrase around and then they would start to, think whatever it meant on their own and decide, oh, I want one of those.

And so a lot of those ideas, I just try to listen to where someone is coming from and then I try to identify how could it really sort of fit into the neighborhood. And the mural that you're talking about on Lake Street, unfortunately it's torn down now because that building got torn down, but it was 6,400 6-inch by 6-inch tiles, basically a giant Space Invader, if people are familiar with the artist Invader. And so it was a pixelated planet Earth.

And the reason that came up was because I was asked by the West Loop Community Organization to create something in response to some racist graffiti that somebody had written on a— on the bridges that cross the freeway and go into the West Loop. And so they asked, we love what you're doing with schools and stuff, and we love this message. Is there any way you can help us remind our community that this racist stuff is not tolerable?

And I said, I looked out the window and there's a big blank wall in the middle of the old Bridgeford Foods factory. And I said, do you know the guys that own that factory? And she said, actually, yes, I do. I said, awesome. See if you can get that big square wall in the middle. And so she did.

And I said, well, I was thinking about it and I was like, what's a better representation for, showing people that we're better when we do something together, then create a giant tile installation that everybody can come and put a tile on the wall. And the West Loop was under construction, Fulton Market still under construction.

So it gave the community members a chance to come and put a tile on the wall and actually build something in their neighborhood instead of just, watching all this construction come around and block their views. And so that process I then had to find how I was gonna pay for it, and I think they would've just commissioned me, but I didn't really want to do it that way. I wanted to have community members. I wanted to set a precedent.

I wanted to get the idea out there that there could be this collaboratively produced art where you pay a little admission fee and then you get to participate. So what I wanted was someone to be able to buy their tile. Come get up on the lift. And there's always costs associated with doing these walls no matter what. Like you need the materials themselves, whether it's paint, tiles, whatever it is, you need a lift, you need basically some seed money no matter what you're doing.

And so in this case, I said, let's go to get some corporate sponsors to sponsor this mural because I think the story itself makes sense. We're putting it on a factory. Those guys will probably give us some money. There's some real estate developers that'll probably want to be associated with that message.

I wanted to make it out of tile, so I went and I tweeted Daltile, which is the biggest tile company in America, and I didn't know anyone there at all, but I said, this is what I want to do, and sent them a mockup when they tweeted back at me and they gave me, $15,000 or whatever worth of tile. And all I had to do was go to their showroom and give a talk about what we were going to do.

And then they had image rights to using calendars and stuff like that. But that was a pretty much no-brainer value exchange for me. So that got, everything we needed except participants. And so then we just had to start getting the message out to the community that they could come and make it.

And basically what the way that worked best was just me standing out there putting tiles on the wall and just flagging people down and asking them if they wanted to do it too, and just telling them they could. And when you had a— we had Lyft as a sponsor as well. And so they sponsored the Lyft. No-brainer. It was a big leap there. And Lyft was just kind of getting started in this market. So it was a great opportunity for them.

And for a while, they had— Lyft would put the we All Live Here murals or whatever installations. You could get picked up from one of those spots and you would get 15% off, which was pretty rad. I, sure, whatever you guys want to do, that sounds great. Let's do it. And then it took a long time to finish because it was so huge. It was over 50 feet tall, 50 feet wide. But it finally was done and then it was there.

It was only supposed to be there for 3 years because they knew they were gonna sell the building and it was gonna come down, but it ended up being there for 6, which is pretty great. And actually, one of the best stories about that, they didn't— the building, actually, they were like, let's do this is cool. But they didn't want we All Live Here on the mural at first. And I was like, damn, if you don't want we All Live Here, what am I here for?

That's the only reason I'm here. And so we came up with a compromise where we initially put it up there that said Add yourself to this planet at walhplanet.com. So it didn't even say we All Live Here, but it said walhplanet.com. And that gave people a chance to go to a website and then add their name to the planet, which I thought was cool. And we kind of wanted to do that anyway, but it needed to say we All Live Here on the wall.

And then a few like months later, like maybe even a year later, I can't remember exactly, they came back to me and they said, hey, look, we had this wrong. We thought it was gonna be received too politically and we didn't wanna be involved with the controversy. And at the time, I think Trump was just starting and I don't know, I don't know what they were thinking, but they wanted to avoid the controversy.

And then after this time had passed, they were like, we had so many people come and like knock on the building's door and try to tell us that it was so cool what we were doing that I think we just want to put the message on the wall. And I always think that that's really cool because it changed the mind of the physical location, which that it's one thing to change a person's mind, but you changed the mind of the physical location to have the message.

Christian Solorzano [43:39]

So in regards to all this work that you're doing, what about it keeps you up at night?

Rich Alapack [43:46]

Great question. The pandemic really was tough on me because the pandemic, as hard as it was on everyone else as well, the idea of getting people together to co-create art together, which seems like, yeah, let's do that all day long, suddenly was like potentially gonna kill people. So it just wasn't possible and it certainly wasn't possible at schools.

So, that was probably how I was going to navigate that and how I was going to survive until the pandemic subsided and things went as close to normal as possible. That really got me kind of worried. And other than that, I think like I actually joke that I caused the pandemic because I was on a podcast being interviewed. And it was February, right before the pandemic, a week before the pandemic happened. And the host had asked me, how is this after doing this for 5 years?

What's going on? And I said, for the first time I can breathe. I can see all the way to November. I know all the installs that are happening. It really feels like everything's coming together. And then I had to eat my words a week later because Virtually all of that was gone. I had a few key projects that kept me fed and alive, but—

Christian Solorzano [45:14]

Because you're engaged in a lot of these conversations with community members, community leaders, is there anything in particular, like what do you see as being a really critical problem in Chicago? And there's so many of them, but I think as designers, as creatives, we all want to feel like we're capable of making a difference, however big or small. For the listener, for the person that's listening, what's something that we could do today? What's something that we could do tomorrow, whether large or small?

How do we make a difference? Because I think for me at least, that's something that's always on the back of my mind. And even with some friends that I speak with, we do our jobs, like we have our 9 to 5s. But it's very easy to just to have that not be the thing that like, fills your heart with the things that you're passionate about. So what would be your advice to someone that maybe is thinking about pursuing something that they're working on the side?

Rich Alapack [46:18]

Yeah, I think there's no right or wrong answer to that question, but I think Going for it, if that's what your heart is really saying, and it's sort of how you phrase the question, then if that's what your heart is really saying, you almost have to, because you're never going to forgive yourself for not pursuing it, right? We're getting to the holiday season. I think of like the Grinch, or not the Grinch, the Dickens classic Christmas Carol, right?

And Scrooge is just sort of like someone who doesn't follow through on love and he pursues money constantly and that's it. And then like never is fulfilled and suddenly gets haunted and changes his ways and blah. All we all know the story, but I think that just doing something, if you feel that you have a desire to do something like that, then you have to keep Letting yourself feel that until you find exactly what it is you want to do and then just do it.

I mean, I have a friend of mine, Jeremy, he has an initiative that he's starting called Love More. And the idea is, this design could go onto products that could be sold and then the proceeds can go towards whatever organizations that he's donating to that fulfill that need of love more. I love that he just did it, right? I love that he just went ahead and did it.

And I think once you do that and you get some positive feedback in some way, it'll help spur you to continue doing more unless you suck at it. And if you suck at it, then you, there's no hiding from that. And that'll either make you recalibrate and come back and not suck. Or it'll make you find something else that is more aligned with your talents, right?

I can't make movies, but I think the other way I wanted to answer this question was we the people is this thing that gets this phrase that gets touted during election season. And I don't feel like we the people feel like we the people right now. I feel like we the people feel like we're divided and diverse and strange and different aliens to each other almost at this point.

Christian Solorzano [48:52]

It's almost like there needs to be an asterisk after people, and then there's like a long list of—

Rich Alapack [48:58]

Right. And I— but I think if we could figure out a way to like have some sort of a win as a we the people, and it wasn't spurred by politicians, it wasn't spurred by, the philanthropic causes, it was just like we the people won something. I think of these kids in my neighborhood, there's the Bennett Day School and these kids thought that there needed to be a stop sign in front of their school.

And so they worked with the school to figure out how to lobby and Harassed the aldermen until finally there's a stop sign installed at the intersection in front of their school, which made them feel safer walking across the street. That is an excellent exercise that I think probably should be baked into the curriculums because it shows you how to get something done at an early age when it's before it's your personal, heart thing. You've learned now how to get something done.

And so now when you do find your personal heart thing, you can use that as a blueprint for maybe how to get that done. And they, I don't think those are too far apart from each other.

Christian Solorzano [50:10]

When it comes to a lot of this work that you're doing, what are your influences? Are there any artists, anyone in Chicago or just in general, like what speaks to you as a, as a, as a viewer, as a participant, as a consumer?

Rich Alapack [50:26]

I mean, I owe a lot to Matthew Hoffman. I think you are beautiful is a phrase that he created and started with those stickers and, it went all around the world and it resonates with people and you see it resonate with people when you, when they interact with it. And I think if I hadn't been friends with him and hadn't known what he did with that, I don't think I would've ever thought about the power of a phrase and what it might be able to achieve.

And so I would say he's definitely an inspiration. I think just the idea of public art in general. I mean, Chicago has an amazing collection of public art, right? Like it blows me away that I get to participate at all sometimes because you see like the Calder downtown or the Dubuffet downtown, which I think they're moving after With the whole Thompson Center thing, the Picasso. I think those sculptures are just rad and they suit their belongings.

And I don't know, I think I'm rambling about my love affair with public art, but I think it's just, it's different to make art that sits in the public domain because you, in a gallery, you sort of have your thought framed. In someone's living room, you sort of have your thought framed. But in the public domain, I don't necessarily know if you have that thought framed for you in the same way.

I think it's still a lot open to interpretation because you're like, what is this doing here? A giant windmill on the lakefront. Why is that there?

Christian Solorzano [52:13]

Yeah. So you were talking a little bit about, you didn't necessarily say about embracing the failures, but just about the idea of just doing something and you might suck at it and that might, encourage you to take inventory.

Rich Alapack [52:30]

Fail all the time. Like fail as much as possible because failing is what makes you not suck. I mean, it really is. It's coached out of us incorrectly. Like we learn from a very young age that you're supposed to do things correctly. You're just supposed to do things right.

And No one ever notices that, even when you have, you're learning cursive and you have that sheet that you're just following along and repeating L's ad nauseam until you can get the L, you failed 3,000 times on the way to finally being able to write the L and now you got it. So it's actually a blueprint, right? And I think that people forget about the hard work. Behind it.

And that's a, that's something that people need to remember too, is don't expect yourself to be an expert even if you have expertise, right? I think the beginner's mindset is such an important component to the creative process. I think just approaching whatever you're trying to solve creatively whatever you're trying to do creatively with a completely naive mindset is gonna at least give you some different starts to where you try to tackle the creative output, I think.

Christian Solorzano [53:51]

Can you share some of, a failure or 2 that you've encountered?

Rich Alapack [53:58]

Yeah. I, so I wanted to, Hebrew Brantley. I got to work with Hebrew Brantley on an album cover for the Chicago Children's Choir album, which was called we All Live Here. And so he did the album art and I then fell down a rabbit hole about who this Hebrew Brantley guy was and he's Chicagoan and he's, prolific and I was like, we should fly the Flyboy.

We should fly the Flyboy in the sky around Chicago on like one of those airplane banners that Allstate or State Farm seem to have all the time. Let's get rid of that and let's put art up there. And the way I conceived of it, this was one of the very first things I tried to do. I was like, we'll use Kickstarter and we'll make the reward just be you pay $5 and then you get your name on the banner.

You're obviously not going to see your name on the banner, but you're going to basically have a proclamation publicly that you are not racist. And that's basically what I wanted to sell, the ability for you to pay $5 to say that I'm— my name's up on that thing. I am not racist. And the Flyboy would fly around the different neighborhoods of the city, all 77 neighborhoods. I wanted to do something that was like a fundraiser for schools too.

So I wanted to do something like, if the kids sell these signatures, the 10 schools that sign up the most people, we will fly over their school. And then because we're filming from the plane down, you, they could do something up at the plane too, which would be really cool. And so like make a word or phrase or wheel if you're out of all the kids or whatever.

And so that categorically catastrophically failed because I didn't have enough awareness of who I was or what I was trying to do. But we had, we had talked again. I had, I had big plans for this. So I had talked to like the park district about making a documentary out of that so that it could play for free in movies in the parks instead of like the fees that always they have to pay to have the movies in the parks.

This could be a free movie and it could do like, do wonders of good for the kids through the parks. And so I think about that every day. Because like, it would have been so cool to see the Flyboy fly through the sky. And we had timed all of this to try to launch with the rebranding of the Chicago Children's Choir that we had worked on and the launch of this album with Hebrew's art as the we All Live Here album cover.

I mean, it was such a perfect, ball of wax and yet it still failed. And I had to realize that I was the reason that it failed. I just, I didn't know how to generate the awareness. I didn't have the community to engage, to bring that to life. And I had to realize like, okay, I need to get better at that so that when I have these kinds of crazy thoughts, I might have an army of people that might want to do the crazy thought.

Christian Solorzano [57:30]

So, and when it comes to crazy thoughts, Rich, the person, Outside of all this work that you're doing, how do you— how do you— like, first of all, just how do you maintain your sanity? Or what do you— what do you do outside of the work that you do? I'm curious about just learning about Rich the person. Who is he?

Rich Alapack [57:53]

Who is—

Christian Solorzano [57:54]

Who is this Rich person?

Rich Alapack [57:55]

Well, I live a pretty boring life at this point in my life. I like to go home. I have a Great Dane named Bowie. It's a different Great Dane than I had when I was walking the dog and I originally thought of this concept. Benson lived to be 13 and which almost 13, which is pretty huge for a Great Dane. And I'm married to a wonderful woman who puts up with all of this stuff.

And she's a, she's a producer, so she actually knows how to help make stuff happen. I'll tell this story. I think this is a good story about who I am and what— so when I was proposing to Britt, I wanted to do something special for her because I feel like she's really been the backbone of what has made all of this stuff possible.

And so I went to my friend Jeff Shapak and I said, do you have a building that is, along Ohio Street Bridge or, something that is along a roadway? And he said, yeah, actually I got a perfect building right off of the Ohio Street Bridge. And I said, well, can I draw a big heart on it that says marry me, question mark?

Is, and I want to propose to my wife and I want to fly over in a helicopter because I don't want to choke and I don't want to forget to breathe. And I just want to be able to point out the window and have, her understand what I'm trying to do. So Jeff said yes. Benson, my dog at the time, and I went out, we drew this humongous Part on the building. I had to use spray chalk.

I wasn't allowed to use paint, obviously, because he— it's a rooftop that he has. And I did that. I ran out of chalk in the pink, bright pink color that I had, and I drove to every place that you could find that, and they didn't have that hot pink color. So I had to do it in a white, which killed me. But I, it was spray chalk and I didn't think it would last very long.

So I thought that the date when I'm going to fly in this helicopter is coming up. And of course there's no way to hide. Like I would, I was like, look, I'm going to come pick you up from work. You have to be ready. We have to go right then and there. There can't be any dilly-dallying where we talk to your coworkers or anything like that. And of course it was like, she thinks something's up, right?

But she, I don't know if she thought I was going to propose or not. But then we pull up and it's a helicopter, a heliport. So it's like, what are we doing this for? So then we get up in the helicopter and I'm trying to rack my brain, how am I going to tell this guy where to fly without like, indicating too much, right? Because he wants to tell me about the Sears Tower and the Hancock Building and all these things.

And so he starts doing that and My wife, this is why I married her. She cuts them off. She's like, listen, we don't care. We're not tourists. We don't need to see whatever the sights are. And so as she says that, and I'm like in my mind going, I love this woman. She like just solved the problem that I couldn't solve. I just thought of it and I was like, can we fly up the Ohio Street Bridge?

My studio is underneath it and I just want to see if I can see it from the sky. And so we did. And then I got to point it out the window and luckily I didn't drop the ring, but she said yes and everything has been awesome ever since. So I think that that's a good story for who I am.

I mean, it brought something ridiculous and over the top to life, but it like I was trying to use that as a way to show how much I'm in love with my wife, and I think, I think she got it.

Christian Solorzano [62:01]

Thanks for sharing. So we're almost at time, but the last thing I want to ask you is, what are you working on right now? Are there any projects we should be out on the lookout for?

Rich Alapack [62:14]

Yeah, great question. So right now we— so we do these Dr. Seuss Christmas trees every year at Christmas time. They are these adorable trees that look like they, fell out of Whoville. And so that's gonna take up, December, I guess, once those start selling. I think we're gonna do some fun stuff with doing some artist-rendered versions of those and also in some cool locations in different neighborhoods. So stay tuned for that information. I think that that's gonna be a lot of fun for people.

There's a few different mural projects that I'm designing for right now. It probably won't come to life until spring. School projects are always in the works. So my pandemic pivot was to create something called Schooltopia, which we created software that was basically, there's no place for the kids to hang out at school virtually, right? Like they'd sort of, the Zoom doesn't really work.

And so what we did is we created this software that it allows you to have this visual image of, in our case, what we were doing is like a bird's eye view of your school. And then you have an avatar, but you also have your face and your sound. So your avatar physically walks around the virtual space. Your face and your voice are there. The tech works so that you can only see the 10 closest people nearest to your avatar.

So as your avatar walks around, you stop hearing and stop seeing the person you were just talking to, and then you find a new person. And if you've never actually met someone before yet, then you have to arrange to meet them in order to make it work.

So, but the point of that was to create a place for the kids not only to just hang out and have like this virtual world that's sort of theirs, but I wanted content to be able to live within that world so that the schools could have providers like myself that do programming within the schools. We were all left to dry when the pandemic hit, and I don't think that'll be the last pandemic.

So I think having the ability for kids to be able to go in there and experience something that a provider is providing as many times as possible, whatever their spikes, their interest, I think is really valuable. And that's how a lot of kids learn right now. They just watch YouTube videos until they figure out whatever they're trying to figure out. And when we block YouTube from being in our schools, we kind of prevent the natural way of learning from happening.

And I think that's probably smart from a safety standpoint and from like an attention standpoint. But at the end of the day, the kid needs to still learn. And I think if we do a good job with that, then we can also create a platform for mentorship. So one of the biggest problems that our kids have is if they don't have, they always never think their network's as big as it is, but it always, almost always is bigger than they think it is.

And so if Karen Harold from Studio K wants to give a talk to a bunch of high school kids about what it's like to become an interior designer, I don't know how Karen would go about doing that. There's no on-ramp for that.

But Schooltopia would— could be that place where, maybe we host Karen here to talk about that in person, and any kids could come and see it in person, but then we film it and then it lives within Schooltopia so that any kids that couldn't be there physically could be there virtually.

And then if you think that might be what you want to do with your life, you could potentially reach out to Karen and be like, I saw this through Schooltopia, and she could potentially actually become a mentor to you. And because mentoring doesn't scale, right? Like anybody worth being a mentor doesn't have enough time to mentor all the kids that need them to mentor them. So I really want to figure out a way to kind of solve that.

And I think what we're doing, just creating this kind of curated content hub by each school, I think could really create that.

Christian Solorzano [66:52]

I love that. We'd love to be a part of that somehow.

Rich Alapack [66:56]

I agree. I mean, I think like the graphic design club, right? There's so— kids don't even necessarily know that that's a career, right? And I think there's so many ways that could be brought to life, the earlier the better, right? I think in this country we like don't think about what you're going to do until you get to college and then figure it out.

Well, then you're racking up debt and you're like, and you're still probably wasting at least the first half of the first year, but probably a lot more. If we did, I think the European model where you sort of have to have it figured out long before that to get into the right lane, I think that kind of makes a lot more sense.

Christian Solorzano [67:36]

What I believe to be the most, one of those main character moments in my life was giving a talk to a bunch of 4th graders on careers in graphic design. And I had this little boy come up to me and he pulled out his wallet and rather than having like money in his wallet, he just had a bunch of drawings that he did. And he was like, here's my portfolio. I keep it in my wallet.

And I already know that I want to be a graphic designer. Thanks for letting me know more about it and that there's, that there's someone that does it here and that there's a school for it. And in my opinion, as an adult, there's so many cool things that we're capable of doing that we don't always know about when we're in school. And I think it's such a shame. I grew up just hating High school was terrible for me.

Middle school the same, because I just never thought that you could one day talk with people like on video and record the conversations and share them with the world? So yeah, so it'd be, it'd be definitely would love to be involved in something like that.

Rich Alapack [68:47]

I love that. I mean, what you just made me think of is how like, people say that there should be mandatory time spent in the service industry so that, people are not as rude as they are to the service industry folks. There should be time spent in mandatory time spent where you're conscripted into being a mentor for young folks, and it should be related somehow to what you do in the world. And it can only help, I think. Maybe not mandatory.

They'll still think that there needs to be some controls on there. But I think that would make for a really healthy society. And that's we the people, right? That's a we the people kind of thing.

Christian Solorzano [69:32]

Well, thank you so much for spending time with us, and I look forward to more conversations. And I'm going to definitely be on the lookout for some of these upcoming projects that you're working through.

Rich Alapack [69:44]

Well, thank you for having me. And I definitely encourage you and everyone else to come on by the studio whenever you want to come on by. I always like sharing, how the process works from within the Batcave, so to speak.

Christian Solorzano [70:02]

Thank you so much, as usual, for staying Until the end. I really appreciate it. I also want to mention that the Chicago Graphic Design Club is currently taking feedback and suggestions for the new year, 2024. We are curious to hear about what kind of programming, what kind of events, what kind of podcasts, what kind of content you want to see. So to take that survey, just visit our Instagram page. You will see a link in the bio for that.

And thank you so much, and we'll talk soon. Thank you.