Design x Mario Smith-Mena
Founder of Mystic Pineapple
Illustration by Casey Magnuson
Interview conducted by Christine Chong on May 28, 2021
Tell me about yourself and how you became the designer you are today.
I have always wanted to be a designer or at least a creative of some kind. As a kid, I was always asking questions. I was interested in how things worked and how they were built. I was always playing with Legos, but everyone used to say that if I liked Legos, I’d be an engineer when I grew up. I began studying engineering in college while I was in the Navy. At the time, I assumed design was kind of like graphic design, and I thought being an artist was somewhat risky. In my early 20s, all I was thinking about was money and being successful.
One random day in the summer of 2019, my wife told me she wanted to learn Photoshop, and I was like “Photoshop, that’s cool.” I got Adobe Creative Cloud for my wife and I to use together, but I ended up using it more. After learning how to use Photoshop, I learned to use Illustrator. Learning graphic design led me to UX, and I went to a UX boot camp at General Assembly.
How did your Navy experience shape your way of being in design?
For the most part, it gave me good discipline. Maybe too much, sometimes. I definitely think there’s a nice balance of discipline and also being creative, always falling back on the logic side of things. The Navy’s kind of a weird place to find empathy, but my job there was taking care of sailors. I had a hard time relating to the warfare, the deployments, and the politics of the Navy, but I enjoyed taking care of my sailors, making sure they were well fed, and doing whatever I could to make their deployment enjoyable.
How has living in other countries influenced you as a designer or person?
I’ve lived in three places on three different continents. I grew up in the States but also spent a good chunk of my childhood in Costa Rica. Then, at 28, I moved to Japan. Moving to Japan was my way of getting away from the xenophobia and the racism that was going on in the States back in 2014. I felt the discrimination, primarily in Virginia. In Japan, I learned that xenophobia and racism exist everywhere, it’s not just an American problem—it’s a people problem. Realizing that maybe I’m more empathetic than most, I began to see that it’s not just black people and white people dealing with this tension.
Living in Costa Rica opened my eyes too. You become more sensitive and empathetic when you learn about different cultures. It’s difficult to relate to others if you’ve never been to another country and lived there. Seeing a place portrayed in the media, or reading about it in a book is one thing, but until you’ve been there, lived there, and seen it with your own eyes, it’s a whole different story. The longer you spend in a place, the more nuances you discover, and the more open you become to learning about the people, their culture and perspectives.
I could go on for days and tell you all about my experience. I could describe my experience in Tokyo, what Japanese people are like, but you just can’t fully grasp it until you live there yourself, no matter what. There are so many possibilities, and it’s not all negative. You could paint everything in a negative light, but even then, there’s a lot of beauty there. Understanding this is where a person’s at in their journey, how they relate to me, and how I relate to them; that’s a really beautiful experience.
Costa Rica was a continual feeling of being lost and found. I was 20, I’d just entered the Navy, and I didn’t really have a plan. Since I'm also passionate about coffee, I ended up stumbling upon a job in coffee that grew into a side career. Costa Rica is such a beautiful country with so much natural beauty, but there’s so much corruption that everybody’s just trying to survive. It seems like everybody’s trying to out-hustle each other. I got shafted buying a car, and there’s just so much of that going on because everyone’s just trying to survive. Even food is expensive, due to a 30% import tax. It’s a beautiful place with beautiful people, but it’s a shame what’s going on with the government and the local politics.
“The longer you spend in a place, the more nuances you discover, and the more open you become to learning about the people, their culture and perspectives.”
I think most people dread working customer service jobs, and there’s a reason for that. Customers can be rude and challenging, but those jobs have been my most enjoyable experiences, things like figuring out how to make the customer satisfied. There’s nothing like a customer coming to your shop and loving everything, but that’s rare. You vibe with them, you connect. It’s great when customers respond like, “Man, I love this cafe, I love the service.” There’s just this amazing feeling that you’re able to provide this experience to them. That carries over into design. The one unfortunate thing about design is, you don’t always get immediate feedback since you don’t get to witness them using your product in real time. You might hear or read a review, but when you work customer service like at a cafe, you get that feedback face to face, and it can be motivating.
There’s a quote I like: “Humans always want to expand into infinity.” A lot of the time, I feel like I’m shackled by society or whatever constraints that are put in my life. My last job was a great opportunity, but I felt so constrained and the designs I was doing made me want to get out, so I left. I started over with the job application process, but it felt like people got jobs mostly through networking or through their connections. It wasn’t always based on merit or what you knew, it was based on who you knew. Of course, that’s how the world works, but it frustrated me. I sat down and asked myself, “Do I want to play this game where I need to know somebody to get a job that I might not even like? Do I want to go through that whole process of the interview prep, the actual interview, the portfolio, the case studies, and all that, and then land the job and learn that I don’t like it?” The answer was no, so I thought, “Well, I’d like to take some more of my life into my own hands.”
I’m restricted in what I can do, but that was the motivation behind it. Once I started it, I was kind of surprised about how much traction I initially made. It’s kind of funny. I made my portfolio, then I redid it, and then I posted it, with very little intention of starting my own business, but the feedback I got was, “Whoa, you do logo design? Are you freelancing? What services do you offer?” As I got more into it, I was like “You know, I think I can make this work.”
I’m a big believer in the idea that everything you know is redesigned. There’s a lot of arrogance and ego around design, but really, nothing is original. If you look at science, everything is built on some other prior knowledge. When I first started, I had no idea what I was doing with my website. I spent about a week learning Webflow and then a week researching. I worked at creative agencies including some of the top creative agencies in the States, and I just looked at all the websites and took notes on what I liked and what I didn’t like. I put that together, which helped develop the site, but I also had a copywriter, Clair Biggerstaff. I discussed rates and realized it was a lot of money, but the work was amazing and I like how it flows now. Copywriting is a huge part of the process.
“I have realized that brains in general crave new experiences.”
Can you also tell us about the other website you developed, Being Black Was?
I was inspired by developing Being Black Was as a place for creatives to post their experiences with racism. When I went to the Naval Academy, there were numerous experiences where I was the only person who was not only Black but of a minority. When you’re in that kind of space, it’s hard to speak up and say, “Hey, this is my experience. That joke isn’t fair.” Unfortunately, all they see is a guy that’s always complaining or seems overly sensitive. The mission of Being Black Was was to create a space for people who might be experiencing this to speak up about it and say, “This is what I’ve been through.” I had some hesitation with making and promoting it because I didn’t want to create a controversial space. My intention was never to create tension. It’s easy for that to happen in a space like this, but I wanted to create a space prioritizing empathy for every individual. Everyone’s experiences are valid. How someone feels—whether they’re being too sensitive or not—is how they feel. Sharing that helps me understand them better and communicate with them better no matter if they’re a White, Latino, Asian, or Black person. There are some experiences recorded on there right now that I’d never heard of or experienced as a Black male.
During COVID I had some rough days, where I was trying to figure out who I was and where I was going. It’s frightening when you come to a point in your journey that’s not necessarily a dead end, but there’s a lot of fog on the road. You don’t know where you’re going, but you keep going anyway. It’s frightening because everybody wants the safe route, like what’s going to make them money. But recently, the more I’ve gone on this design route, the less I care about making money and being a well-known designer. I just want to help people in general, whether it be with their mental health or other areas. Long-term, whether it’s introducing web design to people who’ve never heard about design or UX, exposing people to how much they can do with the internet and learning that they can do whatever they put their minds to is important.
Providing a space like Being Black Was for people to feel normal and less weird, a space to express themselves is something I feel strongly about. I want people to feel like they belong just as they are and they don’t need to be anybody else.
Where and how do you find inspiration as a creative in general?
There’s an idea in the creative community that the less stable or the less put-together you are, the more fire the artwork you put out. That’s always kind of been the backstory to artists and poets. Recently, things have been pretty calm with me, with COVID kind of going away, things opening back up, being able to see friends more, and I'm noticing my artwork is less inspired. So what I’ve tried to do for inspiration is go up to New York on a lot of trips. I have realized that brains in general crave new experiences. When I go somewhere new, it’s not just artwork, but also new people, buildings, and environments that inspire me.
As for the artwork, I find inspiration in other topics or websites. As I mentioned earlier, nothing is created from scratch. Even with drawings, I start with a process, unless I have something burning in my head that I really want to say. I have a few artwork pieces that I love that have been like that, but they’re few and far between. I try not to force it, so when it comes, I’m able to draw and get it out on paper. I’ll go on Pinterest or Dribbble to scroll through anything that could be inspiring. I’ll take a screenshot and keep scrolling, and then I’ll start drawing and I just kind of let the pen go where it goes. For websites, I’ll do the same thing and look up “web design inspiration 2021” for things that inspire me, and then I go from there.
What does “letting the pen go where it goes” look like?
I don’t have a word for it, but I recently made a new friend in New York and we were talking about art and surrealism. I’m not sure if I’m using that term correctly, but I’ll just sit there and allow my hand to shape what I draw. I’ll draw something, and then I’ll see something in that shape, and I’m like, “Oh, that’d be cool.” I’ll go down that route, and then maybe I’ll think, “I don’t really like that,” so I undo and start from there. It’s kind of like a treat when you branch off and realize you don’t like that branch and you come back. I think the coolest pieces I’ve done have been like that, where I don’t have an end goal in mind. When I do have an end goal in mind, the piece feels very rigid, and I’m not usually a fan of it. It’s when I give myself more freedom to just go where my brain wants to go, that I fall in love with the piece.
“I’d been putting pressure on myself, convinced that my drawings needed to be perfect.”
What is your proudest work of all time?
Probably my portfolio, because it made me feel like my back was against the wall, like I was an animal backed up into a corner. I felt like I was fighting for my life and fighting to prove myself a designer. I came into the space from a very different background as everybody else—Navy and coffee. People were looking at my old portfolio and saying, “Oh this is good, but I’m not sure it really screams UX.” So I took that as a challenge and was like, “Okay, I have to prove myself.” That took a good three to four weeks of research, learning how to use Webflow, and figuring out how I wanted to structure my portfolio.
It sounds weird talking about my website like this, but I drew inspiration from all different places, Blue Note jazz album covers for example. There’s one album cover in particular for Freddie Hubbard’s Hub-Tones that’s structured in a way where there are musical bars that represent piano keys, and one’s off the grid. I thought this was cool, so that was the inspiration for the play section of my website. Then there’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, which I especially drew inspiration from. There are also quite a few different artists from the 80s who inspire me, such as Basquiat and Haring. Every time I see my website, I admire it. I’ll probably never go away from it—maybe I will in 10 years—but for now, I’m still really, really wild about it.
The coolest art piece I did was my most recent one. I’d been in a funk for the last two months, where I was drawing but not posting any of it. I didn’t like what I was drawing. I’d gotten in my head, and was questioning whether or not I was a good artist. Maybe I’m not an illustrator, or maybe I had my phase and it was cool and now it’s over. Every time I’d draw I just wouldn’t like it. Then one day, I saw this video from Pursuit of Wonder, a cool YouTube series where this artist has this great quote, “Don’t try.” It made me realize, every time I sat down to draw, I’d been trying too hard. I’d been putting pressure on myself, convinced that my drawings needed to be perfect. I said to myself, “This has to stop,” and sat down and tried my best not to care.
As a creative it’s hard to not care, but the more I thought about it, the more I learned to let go. I began to see my art for what it was and began to embrace it. The art I made as a result is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen, and I know that might sound arrogant, but it really is the coolest thing I’ve ever made. It’s 12 squares that go through the flow of my personal belief of how life starts as energy, then it changes into life as plants, then the plants change into mushrooms, which eventually become animals, and then it goes back into energy, as consciousness. The flow is just so cool, the way the squares interact—they’re held within a frame but they also go outside the frame, and the colors line up vertically. I feel like the universe made that piece, and I just happened to be the medium that it flowed through.
Where do you see yourself in five years, and what does your future self look like?
During the pandemic, I began a spiritual journey. Previously, I’d always worried about where I was going and questioning where I’d be in five years, 10 years. In recent months I’ve stopped caring about that, and tried to align myself to the now, or the will of the universe, and accept that I’ll be exactly where I’m supposed to be in five years.
I’m making a move to New York here shortly, and would like to stay in the creative space. I’m leaving D.C. because it feels too structured, even in the creative spaces. There are a lot of government contracts and a lot of federal work which influence the vibe there. I really just want to get into a weird space, so I’m trying to channel my energy and be weird. Being creative is funky. I guess people describe my artwork as funk. I don’t know if I’ll be in UX, web design, or illustration forever, but I’m open to anything—anything that I feel would be good at helping people, which will help give me a sense of purpose. Of course, I need to make enough to eat, but anything that aligns with those values would make me happy.
