From IP to Parsons: How IP Prepared Noah for College

Longtime IP student, Noah Resplandor, discusses the lessons he’s learned from Inneract Project, the importance of his exposure to design professionals, and the ins and outs of becoming a cofounder of his brand, Imploded Brains.

By Inneract Project

Meet Noah Resplandor, an incoming college freshman, longtime IP student, and cofounder of the brand Imploded Brains. Noah first joined Inneract Project as a middle school student looking for an outlet to explore his interest in art. Now, he’s recently graduated from high school and is preparing to move across the country to attend the Parsons School of Design in New York City.

We spoke to Noah about his experience creating and running a brand, how IP has impacted his design journey, and what he hopes to achieve on his pathway in the design field.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start at the beginning. How did design originally come into your life?

I’ve been drawing since I was very young. In my essay to get into Parsons, I wrote about how I was in a second grade art class and we were drawing patterns and flowers. I remember watching our art teacher and thinking she was so good at drawing these intricate designs. That was the moment when I realized that I liked art and I wanted to learn how to do it. Back then, I was actually pretty bad at art and drawing! So, I told myself that I wanted to get better at it.

Four or five years later, my dad found a Facebook ad for IP. At that time, I was really into shoes, and I wanted to become a designer with my own shoe line. So, here is this free program that my dad is seeing at a time when he knows I like drawing and designing. It was great timing, and my dad enrolled me in IP’s Youth Design Academy in 2017. From then on, everything kind of clicked for me. That early programming with IP helped me realize that design was the path that I wanted to follow. I feel like without IP pushing me and providing the support, I wouldn’t be so confident right now in what I want to be doing in life.

What do you feel like IP has done to help you shape your interests in art and design into something tangible?

I feel like IP taught me how to conduct myself in a professional environment at internships, design labs, even through Zoom meetings where we’re interacting with employees from Adobe and Dolby. Those experiences are a stepping stone that students can use to really envision our futures.

IP is also very welcoming. There was an event that IP hosted with Apple that I decided to bring some friends to. IP picked us up and brought us to Apple where we got to see a presentation from lead designers at the company. It was crazy, even for me being an IP student. The experience was cool because we were able to sit in the audience knowing we had iPhones and Mac computers that we used every day. Seeing the people who were doing the advertising and designing the products and launches was surreal.

The connections I’ve made from IP have shown me that I can be creative and also make an honest living doing this kind of work. That exposure is very beneficial for kids in our communities like Hayward where I’m from, or kids from Oakland, kids from Richmond, wherever they’re from. It’s important to be exposed to this kind of career path.

Can you speak to how IP has helped you learn how to collaborate effectively with your peers?

Some of my earliest memories at IP are just getting together in a room with people that I didn’t know. Some of them were my age right now and some of them were my middle school, like me at the time. I remember after the first meeting, we all quickly felt bonded. IP provides a space for people like me to get together and express ourselves without the feeling of being judged. All the adults in the room, the design professionals there, are encouraging us to be our best and most creative selves. That support has been instrumental in how I feel I have developed as a designer and as a person who can more generally apply design thinking to daily life. I learned all those skills I learned from IP.

OK, let’s change gears and hear more about your brand, Imploded Brains. Where did the inspiration of your brand come from?

My sticker brand is called Imploded Brains. It was started back in 2019 by me and two friends who have a digital media class together at school. We all like to doodle, and we’re all into fashion, clothes, and we have a lot of shared interests. So we thought, why don’t we just start a brand?

I had the design skills to cover that aspect creating the brand, and my friends were very good with business because their parents had businesses so they’ve been around people who have experience with this kind of thing.

We settled on Imploded Brains as the name because the three of us were very interested in graffiti culture, hip hop, and all that type of stuff. We basically asked ourselves, “what’s a cool edgy name?” So Imploded Brains is what we got. I think our main inspiration was just the connection we had with each other.

Fast forwarding to when you were starting your brand, did you have any challenges there that you had to overcome?

Especially because I’ve always been good at school, I know there are other pathways that would be more traditional for me to pursue like tech or nursing. Part of the difficulty that I had deciding to take design seriously was being able to envision what this kind of career could look like. Design as a career path, I think, was a little difficult at first for my family to understand. That was a challenge as well.

I’m Filipino, and I was born in the Philippines. Coming from a background of an immigrant family, sometimes there can be a stigma towards artistic jobs. There are people in my family who are photographers and DJs, but you sometimes hear these thoughts from the elders in the family that those jobs are just temporary or a fad for people like us.

My time at IP gave me and my family a chance to see that design can be a road that leads to success. I could show them how I’m getting invited to go with IP to Facebook, to Google, to these large names in the tech field, and that was helpful. So, I think the hardest part was convincing myself and convincing the people around me that I can make it in this field. Even talking about it right now makes me feel like I’m manifesting that I’m going to successfully keep going down this path.

Last question, do you have any advice for anyone, particularly people your own age who are looking to start their own brand?

I would say you have to find your identity. I feel like it’s easy with all these TikTok brands coming up to just hop on the wave of whatever’s popular at the time, but my advice is to find what you’re into and harness that because there’s going to be an audience for it. Just find what you like, harness that, and be true to yourself.

Noah will be attending the Parsons School of Design in the fall. In addition to preparing for college, Noah and his Imploded Brains co-founders are thinking about the future of their brand and the expansion into new products like key chains and eventually clothing. You can keep up with Imploded Brains on Instagram here.