AH - One of the ones that stands out the most was a Happy Meal I did from McDonald's. I was actually approached to take the idea of the finger skateboard and create a world around it. I created this group of non-descript characters, that were in my little world, and they each had on signature model and also build a skate park that snapped together. It was pretty interesting, because at first there was that idea of grappling with idea of the sell out factor, working with somebody like McDonald's, but as a traditionally educated fine artist and visual communicator it was a great opportunity to get up to a ton of kids in a different age group than I had ever been involved with before. I think the target age was 3-8. So, I developed the concept and everything and when theyÉ and also, one of the key things is, I had to have some sort of subversive element in there. I kept, I made these little stickers that came with the packaging, and you could put them on the little skateboards or ramps, the stickers were all the same tags and graffiti line I used to do in the bathrooms of McDonalds when I lived in Atlanta. That Happy Meal was for all of North America and I think it beat out some of the major movies that came out. It was amazing, as an artist, to be able to reach kids that had not yet been touched by skateboard art and the peer pressure or images that came to them as teenagers. What happened was, the promotion ended up attracting people up to 14 and 15 years old. It was kind of a trip, because teenage kids were going to buy Happy Meals so they could get the entire skate park, which was pretty funny. That ended up being a top 10 sale for all of North America, and it was number 1 for Australia and New Zealand. It ended up selling something like 73 million units in 5 weeks. So, as an artist it was really incredible to see that same feeling I had in creating skate stickers, back in the day, going out to thousands of people to suddenly going out in a 5 week period and touching more people than I ever had in my life in art all combined. That was pretty interesting and early on I decided, and I might have been one of the earliest, that the idea of selling out wasn't actually selling out. I partially had that because a lot of my friends were involved in music, a lot of the big producers and even some of the big rap acts in Atlanta, I was looking at the size of the industry that skateboarding was, and then looking at what they were doing. There was just a huge difference in the level of distribution and connectivity to some end source or use. With me it was skate kids, a finite group, with these guys it was anybody that listened to the radio. I was always inspired to do more and go bigger every time.

Validation of folk and outsider arts has a long and somewhat tumultuous history (we can think about a range of arts here... dance, jazz, dj'ing, graphic). I think the streetwear world, at least in the form presented in many of the blogs, is just realizing this. What do you view as important stepping stones in this quest?

AH - Well, as powerful as it can be for an illustrator or designer to commodify art in the popular culture sense, equally as powerful is the need for folk artists to continue to push on in the direction they move away from (or at least on the fringe of) the mainstream focus. As artists like Howard Finster created a very fringe commentary of common life decades ago, so Mark Gonzales, Jim Hauser, Andrew Jeffrey Wright, and Barry McGee have in this generation (among many others). Only they are making commentary on life as artists, graffiti writers, skateboarders, musicians. This seems a far cry from the country life Finster commented on years ago. But I pose the argument that these are the folk artists of my culture. And in that way there is a sacred nature to their work to be passed on as history. As for the tumultuous history for this generation? That part is over, since the subculture is now a revered mainstream culture. Of course you have to look between the lines to see the next surge in the underground, which inevitably, is coming.

How do you handle the issue of authenticity in addressing some of the challenges of expressing exactly what you want when you undertake a major corporate project?

AH - It depends on the client really. I'm not currently doing a lot of major corporate stuff, but the experiences I've had in the past it depended. I did stuff with Coca-Cola. I'd walk into the boardroom with all these, what I considered, really cool and awesome and authentic ideas. Then, I think at one time I was in a boardroom with like 30 executives at Coke to tell them what they should do with a new energy drink they had coming out. The amount of bureaucracy in some of these companies is pretty incredible. There are brand managers and assistants to the brand managers, and someone who oversees the brand, and kind of manages the brand manager. It's such a dog eat dog in world within the corporations, that with everyone needing to and trying to get their view in, it ends up watering down really the creative element. But, that's always going to happen, because in the end the creative element is just a service to the brand. The people in the brand make the final decision.