Daring Creativity
Dare to challenge the status quo with joy - PJ Richardson (Live from OFFF 2026)
27 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Daring Creativity podcast. I mean, it's a live conversation from our 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 Rade 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 what makes them feel alive.
This 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 OFF2026. By the way... No, we're going to do this again.
Chapter 2: How did PJ Richardson's creative journey begin?
It's off 2026. Hey, hey, right. As I said, it's the first episode, first live episode, and I could not be more privileged and enjoyed to welcome my friend PJ Richardson to share the stage with me for the first episode. The last episode. Thank you, my friend. Nice one. Thank you. So, PJ, welcome to Daring Creativity Art 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? How 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 I've seen this question comes up a lot, right? And I've seen it happen and unfold where everybody defines themselves by what they do. But... We do a lot of things and that's not who we are.
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.
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Chapter 3: What role does persistence play in creative projects?
We 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 industry so far? How long have you been working?
Oh, 25 years. We started Laundry 20 years ago this year. Thank you.
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. You're right. Creating their visuals. And 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. It's the key to staying inspired and to keep going creatively is because creativity stays the same. We get older, but I think the temptation is to sometimes, especially in this day and age, to give up and to just call it and fall on our heels, especially with AI and uncertainty.
Ultimately, the reason we got into this was the courage and the risk-taking and the experimentation. kind of all the crazy chaos of being creative, and 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. That's an amazing answer.
The reason why I ask this, because share your hands, have you got one of these? If you're not, did you get through the back door? I'm sure you've opened this. There's a card inside, so we've got audience participation. What I want you to do, or 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? You 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?
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Chapter 4: How does collaboration enhance creative outcomes?
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 we 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.
It's an incredible piece of work because you've tackled something that hasn't been done before. It's totally new. Pep was so excited that this happened. I was lucky to see the process from start to finish. 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.
But what was it feel like for you when you actually seen all of this finally on the side of a building which is, I mean, bigger than anything I've ever seen?
Oh man, it's emotional. Like 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, you know, with a shared love for what we do in design and all the different sort of subcategories it falls into.
We're all together most of us in a faraway place with the intention of being inspired and then there's just the added layer of doing something gigantic in front of all of my peers and the joy and the pressure of that
And then purely the technical miscalculation, quite frankly, of something so enormous than being like, holy fuck, that actually worked, which is, you know, 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.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did PJ face during the title creation process?
Like, one minute, two minutes? He's like, well, there's 55 to 75 names in there, and you're like, three seconds apiece, to be fair, that's how we do titles, and you're like, suddenly the calculator out was like,
We'll definitely get through absolutely the process, because you've taken my question out of my mouth, really, where it all started, and I like that you said you've been emailing Pep for three years. I'm a big believer in making future happen, inventing your future. You ask.
James from Future Deluxe, when I heard 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 something doesn't get answered until it does.
Truth to be told, we're sitting here because we asked.
Yeah, that's exactly. 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 grabbed this idea of this conversation and 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 Uncommon were swabbing people for their DNA and their germs at their mixes. I was in London and I couldn't really put one and one together. I was like, what does it all mean? I've seen the shelf.
I was like, what's this? But you had a bit of an insight into this.
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Chapter 6: How does PJ define the relationship between creativity and community?
with every idea and intentionality of starting there and ending there with the visual look of this. And that was a jumping off point. Very quickly, I realized that both because of time and skill set, we were not going to pull this off to literally grow our own mold for the titles or to create it in Houdini or any other tools.
I just didn't have the... Those moons were not aligning for the creative direction for this, but we were trying.
What I like what you did, you've seen the visual stuff, you kind of 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, you actually made a statement, you actually made a statement piece where you wanted to summarise
the amount 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?
Yeah, like I think one of the biggest things that... thinking about the audience here and... Ignoring a second the style of what we make, I think the commonality between all of us here at OFF is that we challenge the status quo of creativity in some way or another.
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. 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 far away place or I was in a different place and I maxed out my credit cards to go off to get inspired and I did the same thing early on and I was like, man, that's what this is all about. That's where we all are at some point and start and certainly begin at because of this passion to get to where we...
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 that the one little
checkmark I added to it was with joy because the 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 you know this whole AI thing like it's like and and so it was just like okay how do we challenge all of that with joy and that was that that was the the the theme that came out of this to try to
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of joy in the creative process?
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 become the community together at one place, which is off.
Yeah, 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 it's 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 in a case like, 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.
No, I'm looking forward to getting to the roller coaster as soon as we get into the technical slides. The second question, as PJ's 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 have a 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. Do you want to tell us what it means?
Yeah, that's the journey. That's the creative journey and that's how I wanted to break up in the titles and the three chapters that are here. I think the anticipation, 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 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 really...
cramping into and saying, we need it now, we need it tomorrow, get it on the first try. And so the idea of play and experiment and just trying to see what can be discovered by making a ton of different things. And then I touched on the celebration. That's when it all comes together. That's getting to the end. That's aiming for the end. That's getting to the happy places, if you will.
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Chapter 8: What lessons can we learn from PJ's experiences in motion design?
What was the challenge about getting to the shape of the building? Because it's not a standard format. Did you already start 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 before?
Yeah, 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... that warps their perception of even an abnormal screen to begin with. It was a lot of thinking about how to use that as a box, as a screen, as a surface.
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 with 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? On the left-hand side is the off-identity. What did you grow it in?
The 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 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 flashed up? Where did you collect it from?
So 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 lined up with this idea of anticipation. 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 is very analog and frankly, imperfect.
But at the same time, I also started to see like, hey, this is our first status quo breaking moment of using 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.
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