Check Out David Lazaro’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to David Lazaro.

Hi David, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
When you get arrested for graffiti and finally sober up in bookings at 4am on a Saturday night, a couple of things run through your head: 1: Is the guy on my right passed out because he’s bleeding from his forehead? Or is he bleeding BECAUSE he passed out and landed on his forehead? And 2: If I’m going to get into this much trouble for my “art,” I should probably get a career in the arts field. After all, how many electrical engineers are THAT passionate about their craft to catch charges for “the culture?”

“HIP HOP MADE ME DO IT!” While not an admissible defense in court, it does seem to be the refrain that echoes during these life-changing moments in my life. Hip-hop has manifested both mountains of positive experiences and craters of destruction throughout my life, which all helped shape the paths that would lead me to the poetry community, a career in graphic design, and combining the two to help create Pen Clique.

Like many backpackin’ “real-hip-hop” millennials, I found poetry through rap. In my college days at Purdue University, I quickly realized how much of a buzzkill trying to battle everybody in the cipher was when you’re not on THAT particular buzz (beer-drunk or whiskey-drunk). But at the time, all I knew was freestyle battling; I would try to rap about my regular school day and after a couple of bars, it would somehow devolve into telling my friend why his elbows ashy, pores got acne, sores are cracking and needs lotion badly. Thankfully the poetry gods threw me a bone when I randomly found myself at the Purdue Black Cultural Center one day and caught the spoken word group, the Haraka Writers, performing a showcase. My mind was blown by these poets reciting intense, visceral stories, delivered in such a slick and dope way. THIS. THIS WAS IT! THIS IS THE THING THEY DO ON DEF POETRY JAM, BUT LIKE, FOR REAL. I immediately signed on the next week, and the art of spoken word enthralled me so much, it made me recalibrate my pen from rap to poetry.

Two years after college was the aforementioned life-changing graffiti-arrest incident in the beginning of this text, which would inspire me to pivot my career from electrical engineer to graphic designer. It was a means to pursue the arts professionally and cut my teeth in the world of entertainment advertising design. I went from building circuits to designing ad campaigns for movies and TV; I left poetry and hip-hop to the side to focus on building my professional skillset, enthralled with learning the inner workings of entertainment advertising. But after a couple of years in the game, the poet in me got restless. I realized though that at this point in life, maybe there was a way to use my newfound professional skills to better service the poetry community as a whole?

Funny thing about musicians and poets; their needs for design are very similar, but it’s musicians that have a time-tested blueprint to utilizing design for marketing. There’s music videos, club flyers, logos, shirts, album covers, promo materials – all of which have similar parallels to poetry; poetry videos, event flyers, logos, prints, book covers, and promo materials. The main difference here is that the path of music’s monetization has always been clear; for poetry, not so much. Book sales, performance fees and… teaching? Music shows us that design can be used to create a vast array of merchandise, as well as heaps of diverse content to be used for promotion and branding. What if this entertainment marketing and advertising approach were applied to poetry? Would it work? What would this paradigm shift mean for the poetry community? What is the best way for poetry to adapt to the digital era?

My pivot from engineering to entertainment advertising has been satisfying career-wise, but the REAL-HIP-HOP BACKPACKER BOI within was still hungry to jump back into the fray. And as an older millennial, the days of drunk cypher circles and spraining ankles to attempt a 6-step in your friend’s cramped studio apartment are long gone. However, I realized that everything I’ve learned through work can be applied to poetry in new and interesting ways. By treating poetry as entertainment rather than an abstract art, we can apply tried and tested tactics of branding, marketing and content creation for poetry. PEN CLIQUE [cue airhorn sounds and fireworks explosions] is my and Daniel Hees’ joint project where we apply modern design, entertainment marketing, professional production and media tactics to poetry in order to amplify the poetry community. Pen Clique is our laboratory where poetry meets pixels as we figure out how to make poetry as engaging and enjoyable as any other form of art entertainment. Hope y’all clique up and join us for the ride.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
“Perfection is the mask of insecurity” says the hustle lord Gary Vaynerchuk; cool, but as a designer, you don’t get paid till the client gets what they want (even if you think the end product is ugly as sin). The problem of being paid to sweat the details is… you tend to sweat the details. OUR NUMBER ONE PROBLEM has been mistaking quality of production for quality of content. (Read that again till it sticks). Picture this: you might THINK you need that 8k camera or that RTX 3090 graphics card to make good videos, but while you spend hours color correcting footage in DaVinci Resolve to get six views, kids are going viral, catching millions of views, for funny, frosty-looking, potato-quality videos shot with their mom’s hand-me-down smartphone. That alone should tell you that content truly is king (or whatever non-binary ruling monarch that illustrates top tier priority).

As a designer and art director in entertainment advertising, my only concern is how the ads look, not necessarily why we build what we build, nor to consider what the end goals are (thank your social and digital strategists for that). As I assumed the creative lead for Pen Clique, I realized I needed to break out of the AD mindset and consider the game as a whole. But just like any open sandbox, once you uncover one corner of the map, you see the game gets deeper and deeper. I’ve still got lots to learn about strategy and copywriting, but I’m glad I’m getting to flex my creative director legs early through Pen Clique.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Professionally I’m a senior designer and art director in the digital entertainment advertising world; what that jumble of words translates to is that I design social media posts, ads, IG filters, and banners for TV shows, streaming services and movies that you all love/hate to see. Where that all comes into play for Pen Clique (the most poppin’ poetry platform on the internet) is that I use every practice I learn from the entertainment ad-world to help amplify poets and poetry.

Poetry is an art form, and the majority of us consume art for the sake of entertainment. In that vein, I’m trying to forge an entertainment-centric lens in building our poetry-based content. So practices like creating quote cards, making countdown posts, creating microcontent clips from pillar content, etc., get utilized for creating our own brand of poetry content. If you follow any movie or TV show accounts on Instagram, one thing you’ll often see are “quote cards;” it’s an image of a character within a fun design, and a quote they said overlays the composition. With poetry being the text as the subject of the art form, it makes sense to create quote card types of content.

This particular idea was carried out to its most realized form when in October of 2019, we produced L.A.’s very first poetry art gallery, featured at the Panamanian Film Festival. We took twelve short poems and turned them all into beautiful posters with the help of my poet and designer friends. The idea was that everybody can appreciate a good poster and some inspirational text. Thus, a well-crafted poetry poster would make for an awesome way to experience poetry. Not only would it lure audiences into consuming poetry in a fresh new way, but these beautiful designs would also double as print merchandise for the poets to sell as well. We were experimenting to show how design can be used to support poets and their work in ways not often practiced. It’s this type of thinking, the paradigm of marketing poetry as entertainment through a designer’s lens, that separates Pen Clique from any other poetry platform. Throughout our three years run, the poetry art gallery was the event I’m most proud of building.

We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up?
Getting those oddly cylindrical scoops of Thrifty mint and chocolate chip ice cream on a hot summer day. To this day, my mouth will reject mint ice cream made from real organic mint like a bad Captcha test because this tongue was raised on that deliciously fake mint-flavored ice cream that brought the homie chocolate chip with them. And the cylindrical ice cream scoop shape is wild underrated; the cylinder shape, while prone to melting straight down to your velcro Batman shoes and leaving you with sticky kid hands, visually made you think you were eating a tower of ice cream. Sure the Rite-Aid napkins were 0.5-ply and instead of cleaning your ice cream hands, it would only spread the mess, but the child’s joy of not knowing you’re supposed to care about things like that was indicative that life was simple and dope.

Contact Info:

• Email: kuyadavid@penclique.net
• Website: http://penclique.net
• Instagram: http://instagram.com/penclique
• Facebook: http://facebook.com/penclique
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/thepenclique
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/c/pencliquemedia?sub_confirmation=1