33 Years and Counting

Thirty-three years ago today, I started Orange Star. That’s not a typo. Thirty-three.

I’ve now run this business longer than I did anything before it — longer than school, longer than childhood, longer than I’ve done literally anything else. Three-plus decades of waking up, saying “let’s go to work” to my dogs, following them down to my studio, and making things for a living. Most businesses don’t last five years. I’m still here. Still at it. Still, somehow, not bored.

In 1993 I incorporated as Jodi E. Hersh Graphic Design & Photography, Inc. — a mouthful that never fit in the little letter-boxes on a form. I eventually renamed it Orange Star Design, after a marshmallow. No one can spell Jodi or Hersh. The orange star, on the other hand — everyone knows that one from Lucky Charms. Memorable, spellable, magically delicious. It wasn’t until someone tried to buy the domain off me in 2000 that I realized how attached I’d gotten and made the name official. Best branding decision I never planned to make.

I’ve designed for names you’d recognize and people you’ve never heard of. The part that never gets old: helping someone haul a vague idea out of their head and into the world, where it’s suddenly real and has a logo and exists whether they’re nervous about it or not. Thirty-three years of that, and it still feels like the good part. The making especially — I dig in, time stops behaving, I look up and the day’s gone and I have no complaints about where it went.

My industry changes at what feels like the speed of light. When I graduated from the University of Michigan, computers barely existed in graphic design. I learned on paste-up boards and in darkrooms. I have the X-Acto scars to prove it. When a local record store needed hand-painted signs and I’d never done it, I said yes and figured it out. When the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum wanted 3D signs I’d never built, I said yes and figured it out. When the computer guy left the design firm I worked at and someone had to take over the Mac — which was barely a thing yet — I stepped up. I knew very little. I figured it out.

Then desktop publishing arrived and reinvented everything. Then the web. Then mobile. Then social. Now AI. Every few years the ground shifts completely, and every time I’ve done the same thing: I don’t know, but I’ll find out.

Here’s what nobody tells you about the climb: it’s all uphill, right up until it isn’t. For a long stretch it was build, prove, climb, repeat. Now the road tips the other way, and it changes your thinking.

So here’s what’s next. The first part is easy: I’m still here, still doing the work, still taking on exceptional people and helping them bring their visions to life. That isn’t going anywhere.

The second part is the one I’m most excited about. I’m an artist — mixed media painting and experimental photography. For years I made art and sold it at festivals and galleries. Then I sidelined it, deliberately, because you can’t sprint in two directions and I’d picked the business. That was the right call. It got me here. Now the time is right to pick the art too. Maybe you’ve seen some of my recent urban sketches. I think of them as studies, a way of loosening up for the larger mixed-media work I want to make next. 

It turns out the things that matter don’t happen unless you decide they’re going to happen. The amazing Patti Smith put it best: in times of strife, our imagination and creative impulse “are more important than material things. They are the things that we should magnify.”

Magnify what matters.

I think a lot about how I pulled this off in the first place. And the milestones — so many. I just made my final house payment. (Woohoo doesn’t quite cover it.) My first album covers — Caroline Aiken’s Live at the Attic, Bucky (Angela) Motter’s Outta Control. My first music sites for Michelle Malone and Lift (SXSW 2000 finalist for best band website). My first music video for Murray Attaway. The higher-profile gigs: the CDC, the American Cancer Society, Best Buy, Mercedes Benz, Georgia Tech, Alltel, Atlantic Station, Streets of Buckhead, and on and on. None of it on a master plan. All of it one yes, I’ll figure it out at a time.

Which brings me to my dad.

He believed I could do it — before there was an Orange Star. He backed art school over law school. He helped me start my business. He built my studio, the room I’m sitting in right now, with his own two hands.

My dad was larger than life. He ran the New York Marathon at 50. Biked from Maine to Orlando. Piloted our boat from Miami to the Bahamas. Did my taxes until he couldn’t anymore. Came to every game, every school play, every awards ceremony — and yelled at every umpire who deserved it, and some who didn’t. He taught me to build things. To fix things. He taught me by example to be fearless. To trust myself.

I see him in just about every aspect of my life. In my studio — dad built that. Doing my accounting — dad taught me that. The crime novels I still read — dad would have loved this one. He was the greatest thing since cream cheese. IYKYK.

“A person should do the things a person loves with the people a person loves because you never know what happens next.”
— Goodbye Christopher Robin (great line, otherwise mediocre film)

He died in 2024. I miss him daily. But I work in a room he built, and when something breaks I know how to fix it because he showed me how. He didn’t leave this studio. He’s load-bearing.

Alzheimer’s robbed him of his last years. It robbed us too. And it clarified something I couldn’t have articulated before: the reason to build a business that runs on focus and intention isn’t efficiency. It’s freedom. Freedom to be present for the people who matter, to do the things you actually want to do, to stop spending your best hours on the wrong things.

Tomorrow I fly to France with my friend Jane. First time — the kind of trip you keep filing under “someday” while you’re busy building the thing. 

Thirty-three years. To the work, the people, the absurd good luck of getting to do this for a living — and to the man who built the room I work in, and somehow, the room to go.

— Jodi