Jordan Tate is the founder of Creative Duke Media, a digital marketing agency located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is also an alumnus of the Department of Art and History, where he studied graphic design and graduated in 2016 with a Bachelor of Fine Art. Tate’s story is one of talent, resiliency, adaptation, and faith.

After moving back to Albuquerque in 2018, Tate started working with Electric Playhouse, an all-ages dining, gaming, and recreation venue designed to transport visitors into an interactive, digital reality. In October of 2019, the company was in its early phases and, like many who work in start-ups, he functioned in a variety of roles and learned a lot in a short period of time. The venue opened in January 2020 and shut down in March due to the pandemic.

Meanwhile, Tate was working on Creative Duke, a side business for digital marketing and design. Since he was furloughed in his job for Electric Playhouse, he took advantage of his down time and focused on building Creative Duke to be sustainable and realistic. He obtained his remote/drone pilot’s license in order to provide drone imaging services for real estate.

Tate cites his time at CSU as being an important part of his growth as a designer and as a creative person.

“There’s a specific professor who helped me a lot, and I always shout him out. His name is Jason Frazier,” says Tate, “He helped me out as far as understanding the rules in design. It’s good to be creative and to put your creative style to things but at the same time, there’s rules. When it comes to graphic design, there’s a structure. He helped me to follow those rules and taught me to be super picky. He left me with the eye to see the outside world, to analyze everything, and being critical about it.”

As of this year, Creative Duke provides three distinct digital content service offerings to its clients: design, drone imaging, and digital marketing service. The company currently employs Tate, his wife Kait, and two other designers. He and his wife also welcomed their daughter into the world in May 2021.

Digital marketing and content and drone imagery are just some of Tate’s talents. This year, he teamed up again with Electric Playhouse to help them with Facing the Rising Sun: Homesteading from a Black Perspective, a tech-based mobile exhibit telling the story and honoring the legacy of the first African American families to homestead New Mexico. The exhibition is a partnership with the African American Museum & Cultural Center of New Mexico that examines the history of African American homesteading and highlights six families through photo, video, and audio. The interactive structure allows viewers to learn about details of families’ lives, while picture frames and projected content changes display family portraits and photographs of their land. Creative Duke designed the digital content in the exhibit. It opens at the Albuquerque Museum in January 2022 and will travel through the rest of the year.

Tate is also interested in future cultural trends and changes. In a partnership with Tim Patrick, wide receiver for the Denver Broncos and Treyous Jarrells, CSU alumnus, Tate created 8IGHT, a cryptocurrency non-fungible token. A non-fungible token, or NFT, is a unique and non-interchangeable unit stored in a digital ledger. The project is new and Tate didn’t want to disclose too much before the project is complete but believes it will becoming important and valuable in the future.

“It’s the way that the internet is moving,” Tate says, “Web 3.0, the future of the metaverse, all those dystopian novels that you read, that’s now. The project is on the ground floor right now. It’s a good time to get in, to establish things for the future, and having some equity out of that.”

Jordan Tate is an exemplary creative community member that leads from the heart, lives a creative life, and does work that is meaningful and impactful on the world around him.