Dare to challenge the status quo with joy - PJ Richardson (Live from OFFF 2026)

0:14Welcome to the Daring Creativity Podcast. I mean, it's a live conversation from a festival, but Daring Creativity is a podcast about a show to dare forever explore creativity that isn't about shining perfection. It's about showing up with all your doubts and imperfections and making them count. It's about becoming more of who you already are. My name is Radim Malinic. I'm a designer, author, and eternally curious human being. I'm talking to a broad range of guests. Some of them actually might be in the room. Hello. I'm talking to a broad range of guests who share the story of small actions that spark lifelong discoveries, taking one step towards the world that makes them feel alive.

0:53This show reaches 161 countries, getting a quarter of a million downloads in the last two years. and this is my very first live episode and I can't be any more happier to do it here at OFF 2026 by the way

1:11no we're going to do this again it's OFF 2026 hey hey right as I said it's the first live episode and I could not be more privileged and enjoyed to welcome my friend and PJ Richardson to share the state with me for the first episode, the last episode. Thank you, my friend. Nice, man. Thank you. So, PJ, welcome to Daring Creativity Hour Festival. Thank you. We are equipped with two clickers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I normally say this catchphrase on my podcast and say, for those who may have not heard of PJ Richardson, how would you introduce yourself? Just by my name, I'm PJ. Oh. Person. I always find it quite interesting when people say, the people with very broad and beautiful output, and say, how would you introduce yourself?

2:02How would you introduce yourself? And they say, I don't really know. And I'm like, I can see all your work. I can see everything that you do. But sometimes, is it hard to give a title, give you a name? No, I think it's, I've seen this, I've seen this question comes up a lot, right? And I've seen it happen unfold, where everybody defines themselves by what they do. But we do a lot of things, and that's not who we are. So my name is... Sorry to interrupt you. What is the name on your business card? What does it say? ECD and co-founder of Laundry, a motion design studio in LA and San Francisco. We do this stuff.

2:36We make colorful things and we attempt to make people happy with what we do and just keep trying to do more of it and stay curious and have some fun. How long have you been in the industry so far? How long have you been working? Oh, 25 years. 25? Yeah, we started Laundry 20 years ago this year. Wow. Yeah. Ah, thank you. I mean, we met a year ago at Paradiso in Mexico, and we were talking about what you do, and you said, I'm just working with these people, it's a bit chaotic, I'm just doing stuff that I'm not really used to about, I'd like to have more sort of rigidity in the structure. And you were working with Linkin Park, creating their visuals.

3:17And I'm thinking, it's Linkin Park, come on, tell me more about it. But yeah, we are here to celebrate the titles of 2026. PJ, I've got a question for you. What does daring forever mean to you? Oh man, so many things. I mean, like, it's the key to staying inspired and to keep going creatively is, because, you know, creativity stays the same. We get older, but I think the temptation is to, you know, sometimes, especially in this day and age, to give up and to just sort of call it and fall on our heels, especially with AI and uncertainty, right? But ultimately the reason we got into this was the courage and the risk-taking and experimentation and kind of all the crazy chaos of being creative.

4:04And so I think it's just the mindset of just keep being that 17-year-old self that I think got all of us into being creative in some form, right? Wow. That's an amazing answer. Yeah. And the reason why I ask this, because, show your hands, have you got one of these? If you're not, did you get through the back door? And so I'm sure you've opened this. There's a card inside. So we've got audience participation. What I want you to do, well, me and PJ want you to do, there's a card, which is a square. There's a reason why there's a pencil. And there's a question, what does daring forever mean to you?

4:36You don't have to write it straight away, but we want you to write your first answer for now. What does daring forever mean to you? and once you think about it, we're going to carry on. So, PJ, you and I did a podcast episode about nine months ago and you asked you about your background and you said you came from the graffiti scene. That's right. And when the pennies dropped, I was like, there it is. It's a digital graffiti. It's a 21st century graffiti. 100%. Yeah. so who's seen the titles yesterday have you guys seen them awesome I think they're better than that come on we can watch it again tonight I mean it's an incredible piece of work because you've tackled something that hasn't been done before it's totally new I mean Pep was so excited that this happened I was lucky to see the process from start to finish and I'm excited to share this with you because our conversation is very much about the titles and what goes behind the scenes and all this stuff.

5:42But what does it feel like for you when you've actually seen all of this finally on the side of a building which is bigger than anything I've ever seen? Oh man, it's emotional. It's still, I get chills even just looking at it now. I think it's the, like, we're all together here, creatively, all with a shared love for what we do in design and all the different sort of subcategories that falls into where we're all together most time most of us in a far away place that with the intention of being inspired and and then there's just the added layer of like doing something gigantic in front of all of my peers and the the the joy and the pressure of that and then purely the the technical miscalculation quite frankly it's something so enormous than and being like, holy fuck, that actually worked.

6:34Which is kind of a theme in what we do at Laundry. We say yes, and then kind of figure it out later, and then pray to God that it works. Like you say, the gigantic miscalculations, because some of the projections that were sort of crowdsourced and submitted, were like five, 10 seconds. Yeah. When I've spoken to you, when you guys were working on this, I was thinking like three minutes to two and a half minutes, and then I've seen the final piece. It was like nine and a half minutes. Yeah, all right, I'll tell you the full story. I don't know if this is the right point, but I'll tell it to you.

7:02So the way that this unfolded is, you know, being in the room looking out and seeing all these wonderful titles by all of our heroes over the years, right? I was like, man, I want to do that. I really, like, that would be cool. So I emailed Pep for probably three years in a row asking, and timing wasn't right. And this year, as luck would have it, timing was right. It was maybe January, like early January. He said, you know what? Yeah, let's do it. And so I agreed, thinking that it would just be a 69-minute video on roots and usual thing, committed. And then he's like, oh, we're projection mapping it.

7:43I'm like, OK, cool. This is not the plan, but sounds rad. And then got the technical specs and was like, holy shit. Like, it was a lot bigger. And then it just kept getting trickier. I was like, well, how long do you want that? One minute, two minutes? He's like, well, there's 55 to 75 names in there, and you're like, three seconds of peace, to be fair, that's how we do titles. And you're like, suddenly the calculator out was like, shit. We'll definitely get through absolutely the process. Because you've got to have taken my question out of my mouth, really, where it all started. And I like that you said you've been emailing Pepper three years.

8:19Yeah, yeah. I'm a big believer in making future happen, inventing your future. You ask. Ask. It's like, and James from Future Lux, from having a conversation even about clients, I'm like, just reach out, share, ask, anything, and most times people don't answer, but they see it and then they don't, you know, something doesn't get answered until it does. Truth to be told, we're sitting here because we asked. Yeah, that's exactly. Like, I, you know, truth to be told, thank you, because I sort of passed on a conversation about the titles, I just honestly couldn't see technically or creatively how to look at process stuff for 55 minutes as good or bad as it might be without boring everybody and then you had this idea of this conversation and then asked and got us here so it's, you know So I've actually advanced us to the inspiration, let's see if I can go back on this Yeah Yeah, because you guys, obviously every single year gets a bit of a branding system by an agency that says a theme and this year the theme was created by Uncommon I didn't know that Anklemen were swabbing people for their DNA and their germs at mixes I was in London and I couldn't really put one and one together what does it all mean I've seen the shell, I was like what's this but you had a bit of an insight you made it sound darker than it really was so the idea that they came up with that I thought was absolutely incredible was that the community off is made of the community of people the attendees that are here right it's it's in each in our own individual way but we all come together as one instead one ecosystem that makes this community that tear it off and they they got to this mold idea as a representation of that as something you know however you want to decide what mold means to you is something ugly or beautiful or individual or what have you and and came over this brilliant identity of literally making it growing it and having it become the community coming together and having that literally be what the identity is for off.

10:18It was, and I was like, I was like, well, I'm definitely not that smart, but that's really cool and I wanna be a part of that. What did it feel like to see the theme, which is, I mean, it's not standard. I mean, seeing sort of germs and sort of, what would you call it, like penicillin kind of thing, like I don't know, molds. Did it feel like, what was the first reaction to it? Like, this is not the regular thing we're working with here. And then normally there's a photography and type and some sort of design system. really really sound and fascinating concept and beautiful to look at and so in my very first instinct was hey there's no good or bad way to do anything creative and what we do certainly at a conference but my first instinct was like hey why don't we make the titles tie in with the branding that was my first thought like let's let's make some some make it and you know started pulling reference that you guys are seeing here of all these cool like trippy mold things on you know from Pinterest and like with every idea and intentionality of starting there and ending there with the visual look of this and that was a jumping-off point.

11:19Very quickly I realized that both because of time and skill set we were not gonna pull this off to literally grow our own mold for the titles or to create it in you know in Houdini or any other tools with I just didn't have the, just those moons were not aligning for the creative direction for this, but we were trying. Well, I like what you did. You've seen the visual stuff. You kind of like tried to dissect it. How can you potentially recreate it in 3D? But when we spoke about it, when you were working on this at the beginning, like, you actually made a statement. You actually made a statement piece where you wanted to summarize the element of cultured audience, like how we all to hear together and how we sort of work together and this was your statement piece, how did you unlock it?

12:05Yeah, like I think one of the biggest things that thinking about the audience here and ignoring a second like the style of what we make, I think the commonality between all of us here at office that we challenge the status quo of creativity in some way or another and you can call it a rebel, you can call it whatever you want, it's not about being rebellious necessarily, but we're here because like this question, we ask what if. We all, like the amount of people you meet every single year that come here that are like, I couldn't afford this or I'm from a faraway place or I was in a different place and I maxed out my credit cards to go to off to get inspired and I did the same thing early on like and I was like man that's what this is all about.

12:50That's where we all are at some point and start and certainly begin at because of this passion to get to where we want to go because it's just such a cool, privileged, awesome, humbling experience to be able to be as creative as we all get to be and be around each other. And so that theme of challenging the status quo. And then I think the one little checkmark I added to it was with joy because, look, creativity is so subjective and it is so hard. And especially in this day and age, there's so much pressure with world chaos. There's this whole AI thing. It's like, so it was just like, okay, how do we challenge all of that with joy?

13:31And that was the theme that came out of this, to try to put something on this idea of community that the Uncommon team had formulated so well with this identity. I mean, it's a big statement, let's challenge the status quo with joy, because obviously you've got the hard part and then you try to make it fun, like let's do it, let's enjoy it and I remember telling you that ever since we were talking about this conversation prior for the last few weeks I could start to see the word joy everywhere yeah and I opened a rollin magazine which is a cycling magazine and there was something like an article about Spanish gravel rider and she was like I'm done chasing the title so I'm now gonna go and chase the joy of cycling and I'm like but you've been doing the thing but the joy thing like the joy is not always present so I like really sort of challenge this challenge the statement and say let's not only challenge the status quo but do it whilst enjoying it.

14:25Yeah it's an intentionality, it doesn't, some people are just happy and things fall into place and things are rad but like a lot of the time you kind of have to force yourself there given any number of different reasons. You've put this slide in here which I again I think it's a big big question, what is creativity? Yeah so here's the big challenge that I ran into with this with this beautiful mold idea and even this challenging the status quo with joy is like, what do you do for at least four to five minutes of titles and how do you add any rationale or any meaning or any purpose or any, like literally how do you make something and give it a reason?

15:07And so I asked this big question is what is creativity and where I got to with it is, you know, even the next slide is what is community and ultimately I broke that down and took this really postmodern approach to this where the process and the journey is the art like that is the that is the in this case that is the titles is and and so what is that what is the journey and that but but the journey is us coming here is us doing work is us doing work to get to the end it's the same way that it is us coming here from wherever we're coming from for whatever we're going through to to become the community together at one place, which is off.

15:49Yeah, because I like what you put together. You put joy, creativity, community together, put it on a journey, and you say the journey is the joy and struggle. Yeah, because it's easy to make these slides with these big one statements, but ultimately the messy reality is that it's a mix of everything. It's joy if you decide it to be, but it's also struggle no matter what you decide because sometimes things are hard. And I think in the journey of creativity, I'm not speaking for anybody else, but it's a roller coaster. It's up and down and up and down and back and forth. And I think that's the comment that I wanted to make with a piece like this.

16:29I'm looking forward to getting to the roller coaster as soon as we get into the technical slides. But the second question, as PJ has now been talking about joy, he suggested a question, what gives you joy? So you've got this card and a few more minutes to actually write what gives you joy. So if you haven't think about it and fill that in, there's a conclusion to it. There's a reason why you're doing the homework and not sitting just quietly. PJ, in your process slides, in your deck, in your frame board, you had these three stages of creating this. You've got anticipation, process and celebration.

17:03Do you want to tell us what it means? Yeah, yeah. That's the journey. That's the creative journey and that's how I wanted to break up in chapter in the titles into three three chapters that are here You know, I think the anticipation when we let's say we get a project or decide to make a project right The anticipation and excitement and sometimes the stress because I think as creatives it's our our Passion is to challenge ourselves. We get pretty bored pretty easily doing the same thing So we're like, well, let's do something new and that gets us a surge of joy and excitement but also you're like holy shit how do I do that right and then the process is something that I think at least in my world clients have been really really putting the the really cramping into and saying we need it now we need it tomorrow get it on the first try and so we the idea of play and experiment and and and just trying to see what can be discovered by making a ton of different things and then I touched on the celebration is that's the that's when it all comes together together, that's getting to the end, that's aiming for the end, that's getting to a happy place, if you will.

18:08What were the failures? What ifs? What was there? Because I have to say, from running my own creative studio for nearly 20 years, we would normally start with a frame board and a mood board and start with something and get to a completely different place, whereas your mood boards were actually pretty close to what you suggested to do to actually find a product. How rigid was it? What were the failures and what were the worries? Well, the reason I have this slide is that I've learned from many talks that I've seen here that it's one thing to have an idea, but to experiment and play and to just make a bunch of stuff no matter.

18:47Because I've done, and this happened a million times on this, I had tons of ideas I thought were great, and as soon as I started it, they were total garbage. And so the idea here is, for no good reason except that I like doing 3D, I worked in Cinema 4D and Maxon, shout out to the Maxon team here, this is my Maxon, let's just some UI slides here, and viewport stuff, and just started making a ton of stuff, just experiments to see what was viscerally cool, and from there, just see what could kind of formulate itself from it, and not overthink it. And they were all failures per se, but you also helped me learn something from it, and and helped me be like, okay, well, this little unmemorable thing became this, became this, became this, and suddenly you have piles of a thousand, it's sort of like, it's like the reverse social media, you know how we see all those one posts of amazingness and they're secretly something like one of a thousand bad days for a particular artist.

19:46This was like a thousand shitty ones to get to the one day, one little snippet of an idea. So that's the whole like failure, what ifs thing. It's really interesting because how annoying, I mean how annoying, that's the wrong words to choose. What was the challenge about getting to the shape of the building because it's not a standard format? Did you already started thinking like there are certain limitations in the shape or did you actually take it on thinking we've got a challenge like we've not done that ever before? So Pep to his credit was like hey this is a screen for off, this is a screen for Barcelona, this is a screen for people walking by that don't know anything about creativity, so how can we do something that warps the perception of even an abnormal screen to begin with?

20:28And so it was a lot of thinking about how to use that as a box, as a screen, as a surface, and so it was definitely like, this is not how we normally work, how do we do something with that? But I kept coming back to how can I get this identity, this beautiful mold idea from Uncommon, and we're still trying to give it a good old college try with some of our 3D experiments, and it looks like little kids' toys to the beauty of what they're making. But we're still trying at the same time. What are we looking at on the right-hand side? So on the left-hand side is the off Identity, and this is, what did you grow it in?

21:04The left side is from the Uncommon team that literally grew that with real mold, a real mold artist, and all of its beauty. And the me is on the right with the team trying to recreate it in 3D to, you know, just because we wanted the control and sort of line it up, but it just wasn't good enough. And then it's moved on from, kind of almost like semi-parked, the idea that the mode is going to be the main character, the main hero, and you've taken it on those three stages, that's going to almost create like three chapters. So where did the inspiration come from that just flushed out? Like, where did you collect it from?

21:37So we started to respect the... Let me see if I can explain this the right way. We started to respect that this was really ambitious and got a little scared. But it also kind of lined up with this idea of anticipation. So we're like, okay, the first chapter, let's test out technically what our systems can even do. So we started to explore this cube voxel world because we're like, okay, this is going to be a lot lighter on our CG and see what cool stuff we can do. But it also became this really interesting aesthetic that represented the early idea that hasn't formed yet, the anticipation and excitement, but this very basic thing that you know is very analog and frankly like imperfect.

22:28But at the same time I also started to see like, hey this is our first status quo breaking moment of using, you know, flat bricks on the wall of the front and starting to warp those with field effectors and stuff in 3D that makes it kind of breaks your perception of what a flat surface is. And then from there, you know, as you're going through it, it's really messy, but you start to be like, well, what about this idea? And so we're doing experiments like this that seem really great one afternoon, and you put it in, and you're like, this is total garbage, and you get that out of the way. I absolutely love it.

23:00No. Yeah, but it just didn't, I don't know. it didn't feel like it had enough going on, but it became again, it's the what ifs from the quote unquote failures and became something else. And then the process became the art on this because it led us to this very sort of like amorphous moldy, like coagulating like a bunch of no ideas coming into one idea aesthetic with this thing. Of course, we had to do the AI thing, run it through AI to see what it would look like. And it looked like we had nachos and bubble gum, and it didn't digest very well and it was AI and we were like let's, I don't know, we didn't like it.

23:37It felt a little too frankly like AI slop. So we ruled it out, got it out of there, no AI in the final piece. And I actually like AI stuff, we just couldn't get it anywhere we liked and it didn't serve our purpose. I like what you said, it was a bunch of no ideas coming into one big idea. It's like the process of curation, I mean for example the piece that I liked, you were like no, it didn't work. I mean, the fuzzy AI stuff, especially the beginning, the solid shapes were really good. But what was the process of curation? Did you work on it yourself? Did you say, I'm directing this or was it an input from other people?

24:11Well, no, I was directing this with my inner voice or voices that were complete chaos. Some days I liked it, some days I was like, this is shit. So I've got a question for you, because I know you and I talk quite a bit. and sometimes in one of our conversations it once came up that it was the element of trust that sometimes you don't feel like you are fully behind something that you feel like maybe am I making the wrong choice. What was the element of trust in here? I think it was the discomfort of not knowing if it was good or good enough or would hold up or and just keep grinding through it in in spite of the inner tension.

24:53And then eventually something came that you're like, oh yeah. But it's not like there's no logical thing to do it. It was just one little motion test and texture thing. And you're like, yeah, that's it. So I've got us to process stage. So that's when things become to be a bit more juicier. I'm waiting for the thing to show up. Let's go. Here we go, color and texture. So in the process, originally the plan was to create color-coded stages and all of that stuff. How quickly did you... Because I know that most of what's in there is quite close to what you had originally planned, but how did you kind of travel with the idea?

25:30Because this process section, and by the way, for anyone who is into soft bodies and particles, is going to enjoy the next 10 minutes because it's going to be a blizzard of 3D thrown into the shape of a building. But you touched on, in the process, obviously in the beginning, in the process, you touched on the fact that this is about creative community, it's about friendship, it's about how we come together and how we celebrate our sort of own shared creativity. The people that you worked on with them, how did it come about? Like, what was the sort of deciding factor? It's the plot twist. All right, so this is me working on this for a long time, for not for a long time, for like maybe a month and being like okay this is way more than I can handle but at the same time I knew about this I had got to this process section and I knew that like look for all the like Houdini and C40 artists that are into this stuff like myself it's it's so fun to just experiment with different techniques and so I've created this category to be able to find these experiments to find you know do stuff to try you know soft bodies all the stuff all the fun all the fun 3D shit.

26:39But at the same time I was like, I am out of my element here time wise. I need to ask for help. And I suck at asking for help. But my friend Alex Liu, amazing Houdini artist, I've done tons of titles with him and just hit him up and was like, as if he wouldn't say yes, but I was like, I need help. And he's like, dude, we always do this stuff together. But what was really interesting and cool about this process was that it was not like, hey, you must do this. I had all of these categories of things we could explore, and I like sort of the simplicity of some of it, like the Men V Nike reference that now is kind of retro and dated, but there is this element of speed and excitement of just cool little experiments with some art directed color, and it wasn't like do that, but I was like, Alex, just play with stuff you wanted to play with, whatever, and he He's been doing some...

27:31I don't even remember how he described it. So he just started making his own stuff for this process section and just let the cook cook. What was the process of you letting go and actually giving him the trust? Because are we looking at some early development stages? What was that? Well, you know, everybody works differently. Like I like to be kind of more emotional and stressy and existential with my inner chaos and what does this all mean? Alex is completely different. and it's just much more technical as an artist. And he just was like, I was like, yeah, we'll just use their color palette, throw it on at the end.

28:06Here's a lighting setup that's consistent. Now, you know, do what you want to do and see what you can do and find. And he started making piles and piles of stuff. And, you know, in the real life considerations came up, like, is it quick enough? Is it long enough? Is it, you know, that kind of a thing. And, but it was, it became very sort of methodical with his side of the things. And yeah, we just started kind of pecking away. It's really interesting what you said. Is it quick enough? Is it long enough? Because did you have a spreadsheet with all the names on it and go like, this is this person, this is the section they get, or was it more...

28:40No, I didn't. I don't mean this in a disrespectful way to the names of the titles. I knew what they were going to be and where they were going to sit, but I was much more in consideration of the audience standing in the room or standing outside and how they would take it in. and also the scale, you know, how this plays in a little quick time on your computer versus how we're all looking at it outside, was like, hey, let it play out, but let it not be so fast or so slow that it puts you to sleep or makes you throw up or something. So it was trying to just be delightful in just the right cadence.

29:20Because I mean, the titles are always beautifully, incredibly designed and executed by so many amazing studios. And sometimes you try to find the way of how far did you go with this? What did you create it and why? And how did you get meaning into this? And in your way, we were talking about the fact that is there a way to challenge the status score and introduce the organisms, the modes and that kind of stuff, and then introduce everyone as a character or as a sort of end credits. but that idea kind of floated for a while, but then... Yeah, I think we just went with our heart and who we are as artists and our passions and kind of just made the stuff we wanted to make and just break the rules of brand consistency.