Some say our environment shapes us, but I believe our own truth shapes our world. The truth is present when my inner core is revealed through rewatching animated films, creating outfits through film styling, and the stupid questions I dare to ask, despite silence feeling like a warm blanket. I know my truth, but trained myself to share it through advertisement, film, really everything; it thrives from the people who own their story and create new ones. I get goosebumps when I catch myself buying an ordinary, okay item, just because the brand rose up to reveal their truth through the words on thoughtfully designed packaging.

My work as an art director allows me to live my truth. With copywriting, I feel called to express a new world through playful ways to ridicule the status quo.  I love creating storyboards for Television because I never outgrew my childhood ability to daydream through comic sequences. I aim to shape brands by adding more layers to their identity while merging my ideas with creative individuals with a drive for story that takes any identity beyond the surface level. 

Through the act of creating, my individuality feels true.

I am Makeda. 

During my time as a student at ArtCenter College of Design in California, I learned how to make wooden sculptures, laser cut, weld, design and publish a book, and conceptualize design communication. My natural way of communicating was initially purely from storyboarding, since I have found it easy to communicate as a child who created comic fantasy novels for fun. After graduating from New York as an Animation/ Fashion Major, I expected university to be exciting.

Since reaching the sunny side of the world, I have been told to tone down, design like the norm, for potential success in designing for the masses. In the middle of my second term, my love for painting, playing with different mediums, and exploring the world of toys led me to collaborate with multiple peers as a Costume designer. During my free time, I would work on creating advertisements for my fashion business “Missfit Doll,”  a company that I have built from the ground up since the age of seventeen. A fashion company that creates one-of-a-kind earrings to help misfits find their own aesthetic through accessorization. Being heavily bullied in Middle school made me become aware at an earlier age of all the social norms that would ostracize expression from childhood to becoming an adult. This isolation, I have learned not to take it personally, but have sadly witnessed peers and old friends change in order to fit somewhere. Through my creations, The Gr00vy Pets, were created to be earrings with different superpowers based on the color you purchase, but all contain different features that make each Gr00vy Pet your very own pair. I want children and adults to embrace their uncertain quirks to unlock their once-forgotten selves and to fall in love with the way they express themselves through life. Through ArtCenter, though I managed to keep all my passions afloat, I was able to be reminded of different ways of storytelling that I continue to grow within me. Being exposed to a 100-year-old library, of exclusive artist archives, style guides of famous brands, storyboard pages from the movies that would bring me hope, made me stay inspired during a 4-year-long period of deep growth and confusion.

I styled and modeled for Brooklyn Fashion Week under the name of Missfit doll with companies like AnneJamesNewYork, which led me to want to learn more about how to expose my work as a designer. Are runway shows really the only way to make people care about new collections? How can that change? I wouldn’t believe that a question like that would lead me here in California with a purpose to learn every day, and continue to build layers to brands through my multiple ways to tell a story.