JORDAN LYLE / JAMAICAN / DESIGNER/ BASED IN LA
fortheculture.club | @forthecultureclub
| jamdownflava
"If it's one thing I'ma do is my best, and my best is going to take me to the next step."
For The Culture Club Apperal
Growing up in Jamaica you weren’t exposed to many people enduring a creative career. What was your original career interest before moving to the states?
Jamaicans tend to have a particular viewpoint of what, you know careers. Jamaican parents have an idea of what they want their kids to be. And it’s like, oh, you know, you should be an engineer, you should be a doctor, you should be a lawyer. You know something of the sorts. This is very typical of like, black parents. But for me, I’ve dabbled with the idea of like a biochemist, because it sounded cool. I’m like, yeah you know what, I feel like this will create some waves, make some changes in the world. But to be very honest, it wasn’t something that I even really knew too much about. It just sounded pretty and it sounded like something that you know, had a lot of successful attributes attached to it.
After attending SCAD did you have a plan for what would come next?
So I landed on motion design as what my career path would be. And I followed through with that until the end. I didn’t have a particular idea, you know you get to senior year and you have an idea of where you want to be. I did a few internships with some pretty big studios and those offered me many opportunities beyond that. So I think it was just for me to follow through on my game plan. You know, I say coming from Caribbean parents that have to know what you’re doing next. If you deviate from the idea of success, being a doctor or a lawyer or whatever it is, you have to have a plan and I think my plan was just to find something that felt stable and tapped into the heart of what the industry is, my particular industry and felt secure enough. And I just followed through with that, I actually got hired before I left school. I graduated school one quarter early and got offered a position when I came to California, and came back to SCAD to graduate.
"Culture to me is kind of like your DNA, right? It's how you move through the world, it's how you experience the world, it's also what you have to offer."
What does culture mean to you?
Culture to me is kind of like your DNA, right? It’s how you move through the world, it’s how you experience the world, it’s also what you have to offer. And I think everybody experiences the world differently, but there’s certain similarities and certain ways in which as a people and certain kinds of people that we just kind of a clicks and it’s a natural understanding of what makes sense to us, what moves us, what resonates with with us, like what’s important to us. And I think that is what culture is to me. It’s kind of all the things that make up how you relate to people and have some of those connections with like minded people, people who look like you and it also shows you how you’re different from other folks.
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