Before Keith Marcel Woods could spell “interface,” he had one. It plugged into the back of his family’s television in New Orleans — yellow, white, and red cables snaking from an almost-Wacom-sized tablet into the AV inputs, AC adapter into the wall. The TV took over. And for a while, an eight-year-old got a small, glowing room of his own.
His parents had just separated. His mother worked a lot. His father, a journalist, worked harder. “If I had time to use it, I was using it,” Woods says. He drew. He edited. He cut shapes from clip art and rearranged them. Nobody else saw any of it.
Nobody could. The tablet had no memory. “Once you unplug that thing, whatever you spent hours creating was gone,” Woods says. “You started over fresh.” He pauses, working through what that meant for a child who didn’t yet have the words for it. “It taught me early about letting go of things.”
It is a strange origin for a designer. Most begin with an artifact — the drawing taped to a fridge, the sketchbook saved for decades. Woods’s began with disappearance. The work was for him. Output was beside the point. What he learned, before he could name it, was that the act of making was the thing — and that nothing made was meant to last.
His father’s career gave him the ballast. Keith Woods Sr. began as a sports reporter at New Orleans’s Times-Picayune, became the paper’s first Black city editor, and then joined the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg — a move that brought the family across the Gulf and gave a ten-year-old his second start. The elder Woods would spend the rest of his career on a single idea: ethics, diversity, and journalism. He retired about two years ago as chief diversity officer at NPR.
“His journey gave me solace and confidence that you can find something you love and ride it out.”
Woods’s own path was less direct. At Florida A&M, he started in business school at his father’s encouragement. Three years in, he wasn’t going to pass accounting. He was, however, the most-booked freelance designer in Tallahassee: club flyers, album covers, photo shoots, websites. “I was the Photoshop guy.”
He still remembers the moment he switched. The brick road between two buildings on FAMU’s campus: the School of Business and Industry on one side — “straight brick, huge tall buildings, looks like a fortress” — and the newly built journalism school on the other — “all glass, tight angles. You could see everybody like a mile away who’s walking inside, collaborating.” He calls it his yellow brick road. He crossed the street.
Inside the J-school, the freelance hustle wasn’t enough. A professor named Brandan Craft saw through it. “I thought I was the shit,” Woods says. Craft failed him. Twice. The second time, Craft offered a deal: make up the class by going to work, unpaid, at FAMU’s student magazine, Journey. Woods’s first daughter was about six weeks from being born. He took the job and kept his mouth shut.
He learned InDesign in those weeks. Publication design. How a magazine actually gets made, end to end. The following year, the outgoing art director — Anthony James — handed him the chair. Woods redesigned Journey: layouts, structure, table of contents, voice. The magazine swept its categories at the Southeastern Journalism Conference that year. Awards for the writers, for the photographers, and for Woods’s redesign.
“I design for understanding. I want my work to be understood immediately.”
The aha came in the same season. His first formal typography and color theory courses turned the freelance instinct into a discipline. “Everything just kind of spoke to me, and I went with the vibe,” Woods says. “It wasn’t until late stage of designing these things that I had this aha moment. There’s psychology behind this. There’s people behind this. It’s not just how you feel when you output. There’s also the people side.” Two decades later, when asked to compress the whole thing into a single sentence, he doesn’t hedge.
The medium has kept moving. From magazines to enterprise SaaS, from agency life to seven years inside Bisk, from a year at Citi designing for sanctions and AML to his return to Bisk in 2025 as a senior product leader. His current title says it out loud: AI-accelerated. He has never been a software engineer, by his own account. He ships software now. He builds in what he calls 4D — flipping cubes, turning angles, examining each idea from dimensions pure collaboration alone could not reach.
There is also a smaller thing. An app he made for himself and his girlfriend. The two of them kept a shared photo album for the interesting things they found on their adventures together — the idea was to go back later, research each one, explore further. They never looked at them again. So he built Topicals to turn all that research and exploration into a single click: upload an image, get back a 2,000-word article, follow the threads to books and research papers. “It was just out of pure desire and creativity,” he says. “And no one knows about it.”
Twenty years from now, Woods says, he hopes to be teaching — standing in front of a room of arrogant kids who think they know everything, kids like the one he used to be, the one Brandan Craft had to fail twice before he’d listen. “I want to look back and know that the work I did helped the people it was made for.” The cables are gone. The output is permanent. But the practice is the same as it was when he was eight years old, plugging a tablet into the back of a TV in New Orleans, making things only he would ever see. He was already designing for understanding. He just didn’t know that’s what it was called.