JACKSONVILLE BEACH, Fla. – Sandro Young came back to art as an escape.
Sure, as a kid growing up in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota, Young messed around with art, but he fell away from drawing before he moved to Jacksonville at 18 years old.
When he got to the area, he worked as a bank teller and washed windows and by 21, Young was married and his first child was on the way. Then he became unemployed.
“You couldn’t be further from where I am now at that moment,” Young, now 33, told News4JAX during a recent interview at Bold Bean in Jacksonville Beach. “None of this was on the radar. I wasn’t tracked into this.”
Armed with just an iPad, no art degree or formal training, and a health condition that makes it difficult for him to drive, Young hustled and self-taught his way into the highly competitive world of graphic design.
Young has gone from trying to get his T-shirts into local coffee shops to, in just the last three years, creating designs for some of the biggest clothing and outdoor companies in the world, including Patagonia, The North Face, Crocs, Marmot, Roark and Lululemon — on top of running his own design company. His work has been sold in national stores like REI and Urban Outfitters, as well as local shops.
But it certainly wasn’t a traditional — or easy — path to where he is now.
“Art started out as an escape from just the reality of being stressed out and 26 years old, which is old to start by the way,” Young said.
Dusty Nomad is born
After his son was born, Young landed a job as a school sign language interpreter. But during his eight years on the job, he was yearning for more.
Around that time, Young and his family, which now included a daughter, moved into his inlaw’s 1,200-foot home off Heckscher Drive. Then, two things happened that changed his trajectory: he watched the documentary “180° South” and Instagram took off.
The documentary awakened a dream to explore inside of him and on Instagram, he was inspired to start drawing again after seeing artists’ work on the social media platform.
“There’s an artist, a few artists that were influential, but there’s this guy, Sam Larson, just drawing these naturey scenes. So I basically just started trying to draw just like him, which is so funny, because it’s nothing like what I draw now. I couldn’t do it, but it did get me drawing,” Young said.
Young jokingly says his biggest artistic inspirations are Snoopy and SpongeBob, and that comes through in his simple, cartoonish style. Snoopy artist Charles Schultz is from Minnesota and he saw Snoopy everywhere in his hometown, and SpongeBob SquarePants also made its mark early on.
“People think I’m joking, but if you watch Season One of SpongeBob, specifically Season One, the way that the art was done, the squiggly of the lines and kind of those like swoopy waves that I draw so much of that was inspired by that,” Young said.
To escape the madness of a crowded house, Young started to draw at night and had the idea to start a local T-shirt brand.
Now he just had to come up with a name.
“I’ve always been into this idea of, not mythology, but like how do I build a story out of a name or a character? So I was like, I’m gonna call the brand ‘Dusty Nomad’ because it paints the picture of the antithesis of what my life is right now. Somebody who’s just freewheeling and riding around the world with not a care in the world,” Young said.
Then one night, when the kids were going to bed, Young opened his laptop and picked out a random font he liked on Adobe Illustrator and typed out “Dusty Nomad.”
“And I’m like, ‘Man, even if you just put that on a hat, somebody will probably wear that.’ And from that moment on, I’m just like, I’m gonna figure this out,” he said.
So he got an LLC and made his first T-shirt design in 2017 — an old-school camper with a quote, “THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED.”
His next journey was just starting.
“I’m not from here. I had no connections here. I knew no other graphic designers. I knew nothing about the industry. So I just started off on Instagram as like, nobody. Really friends and family were all my first orders,” he said.
Young started doing pop-ups at farmer’s markets and got his shirts into stores when he could, like the Good Dough donut shop, while trying to create connections with other local artists.
Eventually, that evolved into Young starting a podcast. Although he started to gain some traction on the podcast during the pandemic, he still wanted to design clothes. But he had closets full of merch he couldn’t sell.
Then his wife suggested he make designs for other people.
“I said ‘I’m not good enough. I can’t take people’s money and not be a professional. I’m not a professional.’ That imposter syndrome of being like, ‘I didn’t go to school for this.’ I had to get over that hump of like being a quote-unquote, ‘real’ artist,” Young said.
Then came his big break.
Life-changing call
As Young tells it, someone at Patagonia — the billion-dollar Ventura, California-based outdoor clothing company — heard one of his podcasts and followed Young on Instagram where he posted all of his design work.
Not long after that, Young got a phone call in 2021 while grocery shopping on the Southside. It was someone from Patagonia, and they were offering him a job.
“I get in the car and I can’t even get the words out. I just start sobbing. And my wife was like, ‘Did somebody die? What’s going on?’ because she saw me on the phone. And I’m crying, and I’m like, ‘I just got a call from Patagonia and they want to hire me,’” Young said. “It was a confirmation of like I didn’t make a mistake by stopping this [podcast] show. I was doing something I must be OK at.”
That job opened doors to some of the most well-known apparel brands where he did short, freelance jobs. But even with the success he’s had, he still has to hustle every day, and right now he’s looking for his next gig.
“Somebody could look at it from the outside and be like, ‘Man, you’ve worked for some of the biggest — like, I’m at Lululemon right now — man, you’ve worked for the biggest, like clothing and outdoor companies in the world, you must be killing it in the margins,’ and it’s like no, sometimes I don’t know where I’m gonna be working next week, “ Young said. “But at the end of the day, when it’s just me at night when my wife and kids go to bed, I make art, because at the end of the day, it is still an escape.”
“I never stop making random dumb stuff just for me.”
Young said he’s been offered full-time design jobs at companies in Boston, Los Angeles and Denver, but the jobs weren’t remote, so he turned them down. His roots in Jacksonville run too deep.
“This is home. I’m not leaving Jacksonville, and that counts for something to me. Nothing wrong with relocating and leaving, but I’ve got kids. I considered moving to Denver to take the full-time job with The North Face, but I have no regrets for not doing it because, at the end of the day, you can chase cool things on your resume, you can chase notoriety for yourself, but nobody’s gonna remember your graphic design work when you’re dead and gone anyway,” Young said. “But the legacy of loving your family and then your kids turn around and love their family, that is your legacy.”