Between Major and Minor

On March 21, 2022, Maurice Cherry sat down with Rob Martin for Revision Path episode 443. Martin — who records and performs as RCA — had spent more than a decade running Majorminor, a San Francisco branding studio, while keeping music close enough to touch but rarely in the same frame as client work. The conversation ranged from studio operations to Sunnyvale adolescence to the parallel grammar of Photoshop layers and DAW tracks. What follows is adapted from that interview for the Rhythm of Resilience archive.

The name in the middle

Majorminor did not arrive as a client brief. Martin named the studio in college, during a Sacramento State portfolio class he treated like a dress rehearsal for running a business. He had wanted to own something since childhood — first imagined as a 7-Eleven or a rollerblade shop, later as a place where graphic design could be the product.

The name came from the overlap he kept seeing between design, music, and himself. Line studies in a first-year class: black and white strips creating rhythm and form. Sound waves: peaks and valleys, speed and contrast making tone. And identity: "Oh, you're a Black dude, but you grew up in the South Bay around a bunch of Asian folks, so you don't necessarily fit that mold." Majorminor, he said, was the practice of living between those ups and downs — in visual systems and in life.

I see Majorminor as existing between those ups and downs — in visual design, that balance between form, shape, color, and contrast.

By 2022 the studio was turning thirteen. Martin, producer Vincent, and project manager Michelle had been the core team for about two years — friends first, colleagues second, rebuilt after a COVID-year pause that followed a panic attack in 2020. The work was brand strategy and identity for clients who often had revenue but no system: companies making at least a million a year, Martin said, who had never paid for strategic design before and needed a Sherpa, not a vendor.

Two dreams, one process

When Cherry asked what kept him going, Martin answered in two registers. The first was practical gratitude: he had gotten his "second dream" — running the studio, staying self-sufficient doing work he loved. The second dream was music. Not fame, exactly. He described a scene on the street: someone stopping him to say a song played at a club when they met their partner, that it had become their memory, that they wanted to say thank you. "That would make my whole life," he said.

I got my second dream. I'm running the studio, and we're good. Now I want to get my first dream — being able to release music, work on it, and have people make memories to it.

The through-line, he argued, was process. Layers in Photoshop and tracks in a DAW. Curves and EQ. Outreach for gigs and outreach for clients. He had only recently taken both careers seriously at once — and noticed that improving one lifted the other. Concert visuals were the next synthesis: Ableton, Resolume, After Effects, video synthesizers — "the marriage of my two passions," as he put it on the recording.

Retail and physical artifacts mattered too. His mother worked in research with nothing she could point to at the end of a day. Martin wanted the opposite — a record on vinyl, a package on a shelf, a night you could name. That impulse echoes through Rhythm of Resilience: composition you can stand inside, documentation that outlasts the room.

Sunnyvale, Sac State, Craigslist

Martin grew up in Sunnyvale — video games, skateboard graphics, punk and ska bands he was never good enough to ride with but close enough to learn from. Design as a theoretical practice clicked at Sacramento State, where the degree was a Bachelor of Science and professors trained in Swiss modernism still moved with the times. Before that, Academy of Art and a commute that broke him halfway through the first semester; community college and a transfer path that, in hindsight, he called luck.

Early agency years — Chen Design, Volume, Duarte, Punchcut — were shortened by fit, recession, and a self-awareness he would only later name as ADHD. Starting Majorminor in 2009 meant Craigslist every twenty minutes: small logos, magazine layouts, whatever paid. "Those first two years were basically my master's program," he told Cherry. Contracts, negotiation, learning to say no without becoming a factory.

Representation mattered in the same breath. He remembered meeting Armando Simmons — the first Black studio principal he had seen — and feeling the door open. Years later, on company sites, he still looked for Black creative directors in leadership, not only on the team slide. School talks and portfolio reviews were part of that give-back: proof that the work was out here.

What the floor asks for

Cherry and Martin traded war stories — contracts read clause by clause, clients who did not know what a six-figure identity would require, the Obama-election-day firings and layoffs that pushed both men toward independence. The design education Martin described is the one Rhythm of Resilience extends to the floor: show the whole system in context, not logo-then-colors-then-type in isolation; let people see the campaign mockup and discover what they actually need.

Everything I did, I wanted to have something to show for it — an artifact of what you accomplished.

This conversation was originally recorded for Revision Path episode 443 on March 21, 2022, hosted by Maurice Cherry. Adapted for the Rhythm of Resilience archive. Studio: majorminor.co · Music: rcawhatsgood.com.