Black Sheep Strings

It’s not a new thing that people think they can do graphic design all by themselves. Know that “Graphic Design is My Passion” meme? That went viral back in 2014. On Tumblr.

But yes, AI has convinced many more people that they can go it alone on designing a logo or a brand. Which raises an awkward question for the people who do this for a living. If everyone can make the thing, what exactly are you paying a designer for?

Blake Lagneaux says that’s an existential question for his profession.

Blake Lagneaux, graphic artist & Owner of Black Sheep Studio. Blake says people don’t realize the limitations of AI generated art till they go to use it in the real world and find out their files don’t work

Blake grew up in Rayne, the son of a custom homebuilder, and he’ll tell you that watching a house go from an idea to a building taught him creativity is mostly problem-solving. He studied mass communication at UL Lafayette, then largely taught himself design. He got a job as a creative director at a local ad group and worked on the Lafayette Consolidated Government rebrand. If you’ve seen a city bus, you’ve seen his work.

He later spent about four years as exhibits curator at the Lafayette Science Museum, then went back to branding and design at another agency.

Blake left agency life to go full-time on the side hustle he calls Black Sheep Studio. He saw agencies chasing bigger corporate accounts, and a lot of small and midsized organizations left without a creative department.

Blake calls the business a three-ring circus. There’s the local design shop, with 15 to 20 clients. There’s corporate work with a partner in Chattanooga. And there’s his own art and merchandise, sold under the name Follow That Sheep. His recent work includes the Gulf Brew rebrand, merchandise for Moncus Park and a 30th-anniversary logo for the children’s museum.

Plenty of people in Acadiana are fiddlers. That doesn’t qualify them to fix a violin. A fiddle is a temperamental thing. It’s wood, glue and tension, and it takes a specialist to keep one playing.

In Acadiana, where the fiddle is close to an official instrument, that person is often Anya Burgess.

Anya Burgess, Owner of SOLA Violins and member of the Magnolia Sisters and Bonsoir Catin. If there were Louisiana Lifetime Achivement Awards for contributions to the fiddle and violin, Anya would definitely be a recipient

Anya grew up outside Boston in a musical family and picked up the fiddle in college. She studied folklore and violin-making at Indiana University and built her first violin there. She came to Louisiana with Teach for America. Teaching didn’t stick. The music did.

In 2002, Anya started repairing instruments out of her house. In 2014 she opened SOLA Violins in Downtown Lafayette at a shop with about 300 square feet. Three years later she moved to a space five times that size.

Today SOLA has five employees, including her husband, Richard, around 50 instruments for sale and 400 more out on rental. Anya believes it’s the largest violin shop in Louisiana, serving Cajun and Creole fiddlers, symphony players and kids in their first year of orchestra.

She plays, too. Anya has been nominated for Grammys with two different Cajun bands, the Magnolia Sisters and Bonsoir, Catin.