Design Better

For eleven years, Maurice Cherry made a weekly podcast called Revision Path showcasing Black designers from around the world. He recorded more than 500 episodes with designers on six continents and built a community around the show.

Find bonus content and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/maurice-cherry-revision-path-creator

In 2019, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture added eleven episodes to its permanent archives. And in 2025 the Eames Institute named him to its Curious 100.

Maurice never went to design school. He wanted to study English, but a STEM scholarship put him in computer science at Morehouse, where an advisor tol him the internet was a fad. He switched to math, graduated a semester early, and taught himself Photoshop from books he read in the aisles of a nearby Barnes & Noble. Years later, he was running his own studio with real clients and a payroll, and people still told him he wasn’t a real designer. So in 2013 he started Revision Path to show the work Black designers were doing.

We talk about growing up in Selma, Alabama, where civil rights history is part of the everyday landscape; what a math degree taught him about solving problems; and why Revision Path ultimately ended. Maurice explains how AI is speeding up problems the design industry always had, including the shrinking junior role, and argues that the modern designer has outgrown traditional design organizations.

Bio

Maurice Cherry is a designer, podcast producer, and commercial voice actor. From 2013 to 2024, he hosted Revision Path, a weekly podcast featuring Black designers from around the world. Eleven episodes are in the permanent archives of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. He also founded the Black Weblog Awards and ran the design studio Lunch. A math graduate of Morehouse College, he was named to the Eames Institute’s Curious 100 in 2025. Today he consults on podcasts and writes essays at http://mauricecherry.com/.

Show notes

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https://www.mauricecherry.com/

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https://blog.mauricecherry.com/

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Maurice Cherry

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/mauricecherry/

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https://www.mauricecherry.com/speaking

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W.E.B. Du Bois charts and infographics

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W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits

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Quilts of Gee’s Bend

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Whitney Robinson on Revision Path

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Youth HBO series

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Meditations for Men Who Do Too Much

Books & Publications

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The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression & Reflection (2022)

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Extra Bold (2021)

***

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Tom Foley didn’t set out to design typefaces. As a postgraduate student at Central Saint Martins in London, he was researching why Ireland, unlike Switzerland, the Netherlands, or Germany, never seemed to have a confident typographic voice of its own.

Find bonus content and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/tom-foley

The answer led him through centuries of colonial history, to a so-called “Irish type” invented during the Reformation to make printed scripture look the way outsiders thought Irish readers would want it to look, and back further still, to fifth-century monks who may have given us the first true lowercase letters and the word space. The best response to that research, Tom realized, was a typeface. He called it Nib, and it now lives on Dublin’s heritage plaques.

That mix of deep research and hands-on craft has defined his career since. Tom worked on the first phase of Netflix Sans, a typeface you may see every day and probably never notice. At Monotype, he rose to Executive Creative Director and led custom work like the National Portrait Gallery’s contemporary serif. This year he walked away from that role to become Creative Type Director at Studio DRAMA, because he wanted to get back to making type.

We talk about how cultural context shapes letterforms, how to balance heritage with something that feels modern, and Tom’s practical framework for pairing typefaces, which starts with calligraphic roots and vertical metrics rather than vibes. We also get into why he left a prestigious executive role, how a childhood struggle with reading may have sharpened his eye for letters, and the books and typefaces he thinks every designer should know.

Bio

Tom Foley is Creative Type Director at Studio DRAMA in London, where he designs custom typefaces for brands. He was previously Executive Creative Director at Monotype, where his work included a custom serif for the National Portrait Gallery and his typeface Cotford. Before that, he spent years at Dalton Maag, working on multi-script projects for Nokia and the first phase of Netflix Sans. Tom came to type design through research: his postgraduate thesis at Central Saint Martins on Irish typographic history produced Nib, the typeface now used on Dublin City Council’s heritage plaques.

Short version: Tom Foley is Creative Type Director at Studio DRAMA in London and former Executive Creative Director at Monotype. His work spans custom typefaces for Netflix, Nokia, and the National Portrait Gallery.

Links:

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Website (Studio DRAMA): https://studio-drama.com

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Monotype Profile (archived): https://www.monotype.com/studio/tom-foley

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-foley-75062158/

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Instagram: tom_foley_type

***

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Weekly Portfolio Club calls this summer helped our paid subscribers build portfolios that land great jobs. Experts joined us weekly to provide feedback, and we compiled lessons from each session into a portfolio design guide.

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And get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes.

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Masterclass: MasterClass is the only streaming platform where you can learn and grow with over 200+ of the world’s best. People like Steph Curry, Paul Krugman, Malcolm Gladwell, Dianne Von Furstenberg, Margaret Atwood, Lavar Burton and so many more inspiring thinkers share their wisdom in a format that is easy to follow and can be streamed anywhere on a smartphone, computer, smart TV, or even in audio mode. MasterClass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. Head over to http://masterclass.com/designbetter for the current offer.

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Kevin Flores has been part of the Design Better community for years — we first met him in 2017, while he was leading design at 23andMe, back when we were researching how design teams are structured for the Design Genome Project. So it’s a real pleasure to finally have him on the show to talk about his new book, Find Your Inner Rebel.

Find bonus content and more on our Substack:

The book is built around what Kevin calls his punk rock formula for career reinvention: resistance plus resilience equals reinvention. But don’t mistake the attitude for advice to quit your job. Kevin is candid that sometimes the smartest move is to hunker down, keep working toward change from where you are, and be ready when it comes, whether you choose it or it’s chosen for you.

Get the book

We talk about why strong generalists struggle to get hired (and how to fix it), why your personal brand matters more than ever when you’re competing against hundreds of applicants, and a simple test for your portfolio’s opening statement: swap in someone else’s name and photo and see if it still works.

As Kevin puts it, “you are the unique thing in the equation.” We also get into misalignment burnout, why designers should look beyond big tech to places like local government, and servant leadership.

Bio

Kevin Flores is a design leader, mentor, and author of Find Your Inner Rebel. He has built and led product and design teams in every work environment: agency, freelance, startup, and mid-to-large companies, including Verizon, 23andMe, and LinkedIn. He and his wife Jeanine met as design undergraduates at the University of Illinois and went on to co-found an interactive agency in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, and together they co-wrote the Design Career Handbook. Kevin spent six years as a mentor in First Round Capital’s Fast Track program, and serves as an industry advisor for design and user research for the Mission College Design and Diablo Valley College Digital Media joint advisory board. Learn more at http://innerrebelbook.com/.

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In graduate school, Randy Hunt poured his heart and soul into a poster for Milton Glaser’s class, a picture built entirely from hand lettering that read as an image from across the room and as words up close. Glaser glanced at it, said, “Well, that’s not very good,” and moved on to the next student.

Get bonus content and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/randy-hunt

Randy tells that story fondly. What stayed with him wasn’t the sting but the standard: keep the floor high, and the ceiling keeps rising. He carried that idea from Glaser’s studio, where he apprenticed, through a career leading design at Etsy, at Grab in Singapore, and until recently at Notion.

At Notion, that standard meant a design team smaller than anyone would expect, on purpose. Randy argues that limited bandwidth forces a company to prioritize, and that great people have little patience for what he calls “the work around the work.” The team doesn’t talk about titles or levels. Designers ship code in the production app, something Randy built teams around at Etsy in 2010, long before “design engineer” came back into fashion.

We also get into what he calls “whole design,” which means treating a push notification with the same care as the main dashboard. He explains why hotels and restaurants inspire him as much as any software, and traces that back to growing up near Disney’s carefully spaced trash cans in Orlando and to the bowl of fresh fruit that always sat in Glaser’s studio.

Bio

Randy J. Hunt is a designer, artist, and author based in New York City, with more than 20 years of experience building products, brands, and businesses. Most recently, he was Head of Design at Notion. He also chairs the MFA Design program at the School of Visual Arts, a graduate program focused on entrepreneurial designers. Earlier, he led design at Etsy, Artsy, and Grab, co-founded the designer-made marketplace Supermarket, and served as Chief Product Officer at the coffee-tech company Morning. He apprenticed at Milton Glaser's studio, founded the design studio Citizen Scholar, and wrote Product Design for the Web (New Riders, 2013).

Books & Links

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Randy Hunt on LinkedIn

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https://www.randyjhunt.com/

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The Hunt

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Design Week: “A lot of this is about rituals”

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https://www.miltonglaser.com/

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The Creative Act, by Rick Rubin

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Johnny Cash Project

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Julia Hoffman

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Tequila Wars: José Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico

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Widow’s Bay

***

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When Aarron was fresh out of grad school, working at an agency outside Philadelphia, he and his coworkers used to crowd around a monitor to study volumeone.com. Most websites back then had a picture, maybe an image map. Matt Owens’s site had 3D, animation, and experimental graphic design, and none of us could figure out how he made it.

Find bonus content and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/matt-owens-athletics-co-founder-on

Matt launched https://www.volumeone.com/ in 1997, and it now sits in SFMOMA’s permanent collection. Before that, he was a skater and punk kid from Texas who ran a record label with his twin brother, then went to Cranbrook and landed in New York just as the web took off. In 2004, he and a few friends rented an old boxing gym in Williamsburg and kept the word on the door: Athletics. Today it’s a 30-person brand studio working with Google, IBM, Stripe, and Major League Soccer.

We talked with Matt about how punk rock taught him to start things without overthinking them, what designers lost when Flash died, and how Athletics grew from a punk house into a proper agency. He explains why he calls himself the studio’s most capable intern and still takes on projects of his own to keep his skills sharp.

We also get into how his team uses AI as one ingredient rather than the whole recipe, and why good creatives can smell polished slop. We wrap up with his book, A Visible Distance, and the rebel optimism he passes on to his students at SVA.

Bio

Matt Owens is co-founder and Chief Design and Innovation Officer at Athletics, a Brooklyn brand studio whose clients include Google, IBM, Stripe, Square, and Major League Soccer. He holds a BFA from UT Austin and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. From 1997 to 2009 he self-published the experimental design quarterly Volumeone.com, now in SFMOMA’s permanent collection. He is the author of A Visible Distance: Craft, Creativity, and the Business of Design (Set Margins, 2024), teaches at the School of Visual Arts, and writes on Substack. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.

***

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This ad-supported episode is available to everyone. If you’d like to hear it ad-free, upgrade to our premium subscription, where you’ll get an additional 2 ad-free episodes per month (4 total). Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books.

New premium subscriber benefit:

⁠Get design and career support in Design Club⁠

Weekly Portfolio Club calls this summer helped our paid subscribers build portfolios that land great jobs. Experts joined us weekly to provide feedback, and we compiled lessons from each session into a portfolio design guide.

We’ve launched a private Slack workspace…join now to connect with designers, product leaders & creative practitioners in our community.

And get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes.

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Blaine Billingsley is a staff designer at OpenAI, and his path there was anything but a straight line. He studied music composition and comparative religion, played guitar in Texas for a living (he remembers checking his bank account, seeing seven dollars, and feeling pumped), then drove to San Francisco and took a data entry job at a startup.

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The engineers taught him to script his way through the work in a couple of hours, and he spent the rest of the day learning from them. From there he went on to companies big and small, including a long run on Gmail.

Blaine has an allergy to corporate jargon that we found interesting. He’s known amongst his colleagues for rewriting product specs to get absolute clarity on a project, and for raising his hand in meetings to ask, “what do we really mean by ‘create a command center for work’”.

We talk about why a design principle only helps if you could reasonably disagree with it, and his counterintuitive advice for working with a pushy PM: the best way to have influence is to be influenced.

Then we get into how design actually works inside OpenAI. Blaine walks us through what goes into an eval, and the product design plugin he built with one engineer, whose biggest fans turned out to be the PMs and engineers who were starved for a design partner.

Bio

Blaine Billingsley is a member of the design staff at OpenAI, where he works on making ChatGPT a daily tool for designers and built a product design plugin focused on translation workflows like image-to-code. Before OpenAI, he was a Product Design Architect at Slack and a Staff Experience Designer at YouTube, and earlier held design roles at Airbnb, where he created a system of Host Guides, and Google, where he worked on Inbox by Gmail.

He was also the sole designer at Pattern Technologies, an AI-powered sales startup acquired by Workday. Blaine studied music composition and comparative religion, played guitar professionally in Texas, and got his start in tech doing data entry at a San Francisco startup. He's known for his allergy to jargon, his love of a clear process, and his belief that a designer's job is to represent the user.

Books & links mentioned

Show notes

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Blaine Billingsley

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blaineb

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Blaine Billingsley — Design Mentor

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@blaineranium

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The Systems Bible

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The OpenAI Product Design Plugin

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Mid-air Thief

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Vargamae: Volume I of the Truth and Justice Pentalogy

***

Premium Episodes on Design Better

This is a premium episode on Design Better. We release two premium episodes per month, along with two free episodes for everyone.

New premium subscriber benefit:

Weekly Portfolio Club calls this summer helped our paid subscribers build portfolios that land great jobs. Experts joined us weekly to provide feedback, and we compiled lessons from each session into a portfolio design guide.

We’ve launched a private Slack workspace…join now to connect with designers, product leaders & creative practitioners in our community.

And get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes.

Premium subscribers get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show.

And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further.

Upgrade to paid

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In the mid-1950s, North Carolina was one of the poorest states in the country. Its economy ran on tobacco, furniture, and textiles — all three in decline — and its universities were turning out talent that promptly left for somewhere with better jobs.

Find bonus content and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/mack-paul-co-author-of-miracle-road

Today the stretch of pine woods between Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill is the largest research park in the United States. The barcode came out of it. So did AZT, ultrasound, and AstroTurf.

Our guest Mack Paul spent years working out how that happened. He’s the co-author of Miracle Road, a history of Research Triangle Park (known as RTP) written with his father — a journalist — and built on about 160 interviews with the scientists, planners, and politicians who were there. It’s out October 6th.

Hundreds of research parks have been attempted, and most failed. RTP started later than Silicon Valley or Route 128, with no defense money, no entrepreneurial culture, and universities that were openly uneasy about mixing academia with industry. But it worked anyway.

Mack’s answer to why is not what you might expect. The park itself was almost an afterthought. What made it work was a set of long, unglamorous commitments: a governor who went industry hunting, a community college system that promised to train any company’s workers for free, and a decision about desegregation that made North Carolina a better bet than Virginia — which is a big part of why IBM came in 1965.

We talk about what made it take off, the challenges now as RTP tries to become something denser and less car-dependent, and what it takes to build a place people actually want to be. We also talk about what it’s like to write a book with your father.

Bio

Mack Paul is a founder of Morningstar Law Group in Raleigh, where he has spent 30 years on the legal and political machinery behind how places get built — zoning, land use, environmental permitting, public-private partnerships, and public financing for infrastructure, mostly on large mixed-use and urban infill projects in North Carolina’s Triangle region.

He’s a LEED Accredited Professional and served six years as the public member of the NC Building Code Council. He sits on the NC State Design Guild board, has advised the modernist preservation nonprofit US Modernist, helped organize the “Build Raleigh Better” symposium, and co-founded a development company aimed at raising design quality in the region. He teaches Real Estate Development Law at NC State.

Mack is the co-author, with his father, of Miracle Road: The Story of Research Triangle Park, published by Duke University Press.

***

Premium Episodes on Design Better

This ad-supported episode is available to everyone. If you’d like to hear it ad-free, upgrade to our premium subscription, where you’ll get an additional 2 ad-free episodes per month (4 total). Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. New premium subscriber benefit:

Get design and career support in Design Club

Weekly Portfolio Club calls this summer helped our paid subscribers build portfolios that land great jobs. Experts joined us weekly to provide feedback, and we compiled lessons from each session into a portfolio design guide.

We’ve launched a private Slack workspace…join now to connect with designers, product leaders & creative practitioners in our community.

And get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes.

You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further.

Upgrade to paid

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When Samsung’s CEO asked Federico Casalegno to redesign the cameras on the company’s phones, Federico told him he was the wrong person for the job. He wasn’t an optical engineer. He didn’t understand cameras. What he understood was storytelling — and he pointed to the Lascaux caves in France, where people were marking walls twenty thousand years ago for the same reason we hold up our phones today: to capture a moment, and tell it to someone we love.

Find the full episode on our Substack:https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/federico-casalegno

That’s the kind of answer you get from a designer who arrived by way of studying human society. Federico is Head of Samsung’s Global Design Studios, with teams spread across San Francisco, Europe, and Seoul. Before that he spent two decades at MIT, where he co-founded the MIT Design Lab with Bill Mitchell, and before that he was a social scientist embedded with engineers and psychologists at Philips Design in the nineties — back when “cross-disciplinary” wasn’t yet a word anyone put on a job posting.

We talk about what that looks like in practice at the scale Samsung operates at. His team builds digital twins of human ears — thousands of 3D and 4D scans across real demographics — then simulates millions of variations to figure out how an earbud should fit. Then they strap the buds onto robots and make them run. Then they test with actual humans, because at some point a person still has to decide what “comfortable” means.

There’s a phrase Federico kept returning to: technology without humanity is merely perfection without purpose. The designer’s role is problem making first, problem solving later.

We also get into how critique works inside a company that speaks a dozen native languages, what he actually looks for when hiring, and the French philosopher who, at 102, looked at his calendar and said he was booked until next year.

Bio

Federico Casalegno is Executive Vice President at Samsung, where he leads product experience innovation across business units and heads the company’s Global Design Studios. Reporting directly to the CEO, he builds teams of designers, engineers, creative technologists, and strategists working on advanced design and next-generation experience planning. As head of design and AI, he established Samsung’s Computational Design function and leads digital transformation across the organization.

Before Samsung, Federico spent two decades at MIT, where he founded the MIT Design Lab and the MIT Mobile Experience Lab and taught at MIT and the MIT Media Lab, researching the intersection of design, AI, and emerging technology. He previously worked at Motorola and Philips Design, and holds a PhD in sociology from the Sorbonne.

***

Premium Episodes on Design Better⁠

This is a premium episode on Design Better. We release two premium episodes per month, along with two free episodes for everyone. New premium subscriber benefit:

⁠Get design and career support in Design Club⁠

Weekly Portfolio Club calls this summer helped our paid subscribers build portfolios that land great jobs. Experts joined us weekly to provide feedback, and we compiled lessons from each session into a portfolio design guide.

We’ve launched a private Slack workspace…join now to connect with designers, product leaders & creative practitioners in our community.

And get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes.

Premium subscribers get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show.

And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further.

Upgrade to paid

***

Visiting the links below is one of the best ways to support our show:

Masterclass: MasterClass is the only streaming platform where you can learn and grow with over 200+ of the world’s best. People like Steph Curry, Paul Krugman, Malcolm Gladwell, Dianne Von Furstenberg, Margaret Atwood, Lavar Burton and so many more inspiring thinkers share their wisdom in a format that is easy to follow and can be streamed anywhere on a smartphone, computer, smart TV, or even in audio mode. MasterClass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. Head over to http://masterclass.com/designbetter for the current offer.

If you’re interested in sponsoring the show, please contact us at: sponsors@thecuriositydepartment.com

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Jonathan Adler was one of our favorite guests, so we’ve been angling to get him back ever since. He started as a potter and now designs furnishings and interiors that are decadent, but layered with meaning and humor. A lot has happened since we last spoke: he had a retrospective at the Museum of Arts and Design — the same institution whose gift shop took a chance on his pots 32 years ago — and launched a sprawling collaboration with Michaels, which he calls a temple of craft.

Find bonus content and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/jonathan-adler-returns

We talk with Jonathan about what it felt like to stop making long enough to curate three decades of his own work, why he’s grateful he chose commerce over the gallery world, and whether people really are trading doomscrolling for making things with their hands.

Along the way, we talk about his father, the lawyer who painted — and why the maximalist you think you know insists he’s a minimalist. Also, much like our last conversation with Jonathan, there are some instances of adult language and humor, so if you have kids around it might be a good idea to throw on some headphones.

Bio

Potter, designer, and author Jonathan Adler launched his namesake brand after leaving his day job to pursue his first love: pottery. In 1993, Barneys bought his collection of pots, and five years later, he opened his first store in Soho.

Today, Jonathan Adler is a design company with retail locations worldwide, a thriving e-commerce site, a full slate of residential and commercial projects, and a global wholesale business. They strive to create luxe and livable interiors that are seriously designed, but don’t take themselves too seriously. Earlier this year, the Museum of Arts and Design mounted a retrospective of his work, presented in dialogue with pieces he curated from the museum’s own collection. He lives in New York with his husband, the writer Simon Doonan.

***

Premium Episodes on Design Better

This ad-supported episode is available to everyone. If you’d like to hear it ad-free, upgrade to our premium subscription, where you’ll get an additional 2 ad-free episodes per month (4 total). Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. New premium subscriber benefit: we’ve launched a private Slack workspace…join now to connect with designers, product leaders & creative practitioners in our community.

And get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes.

You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further.

Upgrade to paid

***

Visiting the links below is one of the best ways to support our show:

Masterclass: MasterClass is the only streaming platform where you can learn and grow with over 200+ of the world’s best. People like Steph Curry, Paul Krugman, Malcolm Gladwell, Dianne Von Furstenberg, Margaret Atwood, Lavar Burton and so many more inspiring thinkers share their wisdom in a format that is easy to follow and can be streamed anywhere on a smartphone, computer, smart TV, or even in audio mode. MasterClass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. Head over to http://masterclass.com/designbetter for the current offer.

If you’re interested in sponsoring the show, please contact us at: sponsors@thecuriositydepartment.com

If you’d like to submit a guest idea, please contact us at: contact@thecuriositydepartment.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all know that there is something fractured about the workplace, that makes it inefficient, and at times inhumane. If only someone was thinking deeply about those problems, and how to address them…

Visit our Substack for the full episode: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/clay-parker-jones

That’s what Clay Parker Jones is working on right now. Clay has spent close to two decades on this problem — first at the consultancy undercurrent, and today as Head of Org Design and Development at Airbnb. He advocates for investment in creativity and humanity at work, something you might think would be obvious for any company, but sadly is eclipsed by short term thinking.

His new book, Hidden Patterns: A Playbook for More Human Workplaces, is one of the most cohesive philosophies of organizational structure we’ve come across. And his diagnosis of what’s broken is simple: there aren’t enough real teams. Most of us work in what he calls “co-acting groups” — people who convene for a meeting and then scatter back to their actual work.

In this conversation, we get into why psychological safety stays a platitude until you make it structural, what rule of law looks like inside a company, and how to break a manager’s job into atomic pieces and hand away the parts you’re bad at. We also chat about why the org chart is a design problem that designers should be at the table for.

Bio

Clay Parker Jones leads Organizational Design & Development at Airbnb, refining how a creativity-first company learns and ships new ideas. A former Chief Strategy Officer at Black Glass, co-founder of August, and transformation lead at R/GA, his work has been recognized by B Lab and profiled in a Harvard Business School case study. A former bike mechanic with a BA in Diplomacy and World Affairs from Occidental College, Clay now resides in Brooklyn with his wife Emily and cat Ian. You can find him on the Fort Greene tennis courts in his spare time.

***

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A few years ago, Dropbox redesigned its website and revenue dropped by thirty percent. It was an all-hands-on-deck moment: people working weekends, everyone hunting for a systemic failure.

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The culprit turned out to be a pricing page — specifically, the white space between the feature list items was slightly too generous. Angel Steger noticed that her eye kept landing on the white instead of the words. They tightened the gaps, and the revenue came back.

That’s the kind of thing Angel notices, and it’s not an accident. Currently the VP of Design at Wealthfront, She trained as an architect at RISD, where the first question in her first architecture class wasn’t about buildings. It was “What is a drawing?” — the sort of question that makes you realize every tool you reach for carries a point of view you probably haven’t examined.

Angel’s path into tech was less deliberate. By her own account, she mouthed off to her boss, got fired, and spent the severance on O’Reilly books, taught herself to code, and became the first designer at MySpace — where the head of engineering proudly informed her that they had never had design and never would need it. She went on to become the first product designer at 23andMe, learned usability from Larry Tesler, and led design teams at Pinterest, Dropbox, and Meta before landing at Wealthfront.

In this conversation, we get into what architecture teaches you about solving one problem at a time, why she tells her team to go lower fidelity, how a default chart setting can push someone into a financial decision they’ll regret, and what she looks for in a portfolio — high craft, high intentionality, and no boiled broccoli.

Bio

Angel joined Wealthfront in November 2023 and leads product design, content design, and creative teams, bringing 20+ years of experience building and leading customer-centric, business-focused design and product teams. What makes her perspective rare is the through-line she draws between business model and design quality — she's a practitioner who built her career arguing that growth design, done with rigor and craft, isn't a compromise but the highest form of product work. Beyond Wealthfront, she holds advisory positions at AudiencePlus and Ameelio, and previously held leadership design roles at Meta, Dropbox, and Pinterest, where major growth and user engagement initiatives were implemented. She guided Wealthfront's design organization through its December 2025 IPO, in which Wealthfront's shares began trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker "WLTH" — the first robo-advisor to go public.

***

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Like a lot of parents, Eli struggled over the years to get his kids more into reading and away from screens. He wasn’t necessarily on the search for a technological solution, but then an interesting device came our way: the Yoto Player, a screen-free audio player for kids. Eli’s 10-year old son has been loving to read along to the Harry Potter books (and he often finds him after he falls asleep, and the player is still going).

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The story behind Yoto is from a similar moment of parental struggle. About a decade ago, Ben Drury was shopping for a stroller in a London department store and found one with an iPad mount built in. For a newborn. He remembers the reaction being physical — this is just wrong.

But if you’re expecting an anti-screen crusade, that’s not quite what happened . The line Ben uses is: we don’t say screens are bad, we say audio is good. Listening is good for creativity and imagination — and there’s research going back to the 1980s to back that up.

Ben is the co-founder and CEO of Yoto, makers of a kids’ audio player that works by dropping a physical card into a small speaker. Before Yoto Ben spent about a decade building a B2B digital music platform called 7digital which he took public. What he learned from that experience proved helpful as he and his co-founder started Yoto.

Ben and his co-founder became parents at roughly the same time, and wanted a way for their kids to connect with music and books like they did in childhood. So they started hacking on Raspberry Pis with no hardware experience whatsoever. How hard could it be, right?

The 3rd Gen Yoto Player

Turns out, it’s pretty hard. They took a restrained approach. Yoto is a cube, because it was the simplest shape they could think of. It uses NFC cards that have a Pokemon card feel. The 16 by 16 pixel display presents pixel art that gives Yoto a fun personality.

In this conversation, we get into the design principles that came out of Montessori, their experience working with Pentagram on product design and branding, why Paul McCartney became an early angel investor, and what changes when you go from a Kickstarter that raised fifty thousand dollars to nine-figure revenue.

Bio

Ben Drury is the co-founder and CEO of Yoto, the screen-free audio player that lets children control their own listening by dropping a physical card into a speaker. Before Yoto, he spent roughly a decade building 7digital, a B2B digital music platform he took public. He and his co-founder started Yoto in 2017 with a Kickstarter campaign and no hardware experience between them; today the company employs about 220 people across six countries, sells in 1,900 Target stores in the US, and counts Paul McCartney among its early angel investors. He lives in London with his wife and two sons.

***

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This is a special bonus episode, an interview with Rivian’s Chief Design Officer, Jeff Hammoud. We’ve got all the audio here, but it’s worth heading over to our Youtube channel at http://dbtr.co/youtube to watch the video.

We recorded this one live in Miami, in the Rivian Pavilion during Art Basel, with a R1T truck in a new eggplant-purple called Boreal parked just over Jeff’s shoulder.

Jeff runs a team of about 140 people across Irvine and Palo Alto — interior and exterior designers, color and materials, digital surfacing, perceived quality, even an in-house painter and a clay milling shop. And he has a strong opinion about what all that machinery is for: constraints are what separate designers from stylists. Anyone can make a beautiful concept car, but making the production version look like the concept is the challenge.

We talked about why Rivian keeps making colors most people won’t buy, and how limited-run “Studio Originals” work like sneaker drops. Jeff makes the case that AI is going to level the playing field in design — shifting the advantage from whoever illustrates best to whoever has the better idea. We got into which controls stay physical and why, the haptic halo wheels coming in R2, and how scent ties a car to memory.

***

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This ad-supported episode is available to everyone. If you’d like to hear it ad-free, upgrade to our premium subscription, where you’ll get an additional 2 ad-free episodes per month (4 total). Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. New premium subscriber benefit: we’ve launched a private Slack workspace…join now to connect with designers, product leaders & creative practitioners in our community.

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Fifteen years ago, Eric Ries handed a generation of founders a playbook. When Eli was in a Palo Alto-based startup accelerator in 2011, The Lean Startup felt like the only book anyone in that ecosystem was talking about. It was in the middle of a wildly optimistic moment for tech. Marc Andreessen declared that “software is eating the world,” social media was blooming, and there was a widespread belief that technology was about to democratize everything and bring us closer together. Concepts like the MVP (“minimum viable product,”), the pivot, and build-measure-learn became the operating language of Silicon Valley.

This is a preview of a premium episode. Listen to the full interview on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/eric-ries

But a lot of the companies built on those ideas went on to get corrupted by forces Eric hadn’t yet named. His new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, is his reckoning with what happens after you build something great — and how to keep it from falling apart.

Buy the book

In this conversation, we get into why speed itself wasn’t the problem, but treating a rising stock price as proof of health is like assuming more exhaust means a faster car. Eric explains why doing the right thing 100% of the time is actually easier than doing it 98% of the time, and how companies behave like superorganisms with their own emergent character — a point he illustrates with a genuinely mind-bending study about ants solving a puzzle that no single ant ever could.

We talk about the “harder is easier” principle through stories from Patagonia and the long-term stock exchange he built as a design challenge, and why the value a company makes comes from the design of its products. And because we couldn’t resist, we get into AI slop, LLM psychosis, and Eric’s clear, simple antidote: never ask these tools to make you an artifact — ask them to teach you how to make one yourself.

Bio

Over the last two decades, Eric Ries’s ideas about continuous innovation, long-term thinking, governance, and market reform have reshaped company building and management practices. He is the creator of the Lean Startup method, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup; The Leader’s Guide; and The Startup Way.

As a founder, he has put his own ideas into practice with The Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE); Answer.AI, an AI R&D lab; the Lean Startup Co, which teaches and supports the implementation of Lean Startup; Virgil, a legal services startup; and IMVU, where the ideas that became the Lean Startup method were forged. On his podcast, The Eric Ries Show, he talks to guests including world-class technologists, thought leaders, and executives working to build profitable companies for the long-term benefit of society. Eric has served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School and IDEO. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three children.

***

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A few years ago, Ian Bogost wrote what he thought was a throwaway Atlantic piece about how electric vehicles would finally kill the manual transmission. It went off like a bomb — and the reaction told him people weren’t mourning a car part. They were mourning the feeling of dropping a gear into place, a small moment of sensory connection quietly disappearing without anyone choosing to give it up.

Find the full episode and bonus content on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/ian-bogost

That feeling is the subject of his new book, The Small Stuff. Ian calls it gratification — distinct from happiness or satisfaction, it’s the immediate sensory delight of communing with ordinary things: the ridged coffee cup, the click of an elevator button, the tink of ice in a water bottle. And he diagnoses what he calls dematerialization: the slow way efficiency, automation, and software have severed us from the physical texture of daily life.

A game designer, longtime Atlantic contributor, and philosopher of the everyday at Washington University in St. Louis, Ian has spent his career — across books like Persuasive Games and Play Anything — arguing that the systems we build carry values whether we intend them to or not. Here he turns that lens on the ordinary objects most of us stopped noticing long ago.

For designers, this is becoming more and more relevant. Ian argues that somewhere between the mid-90s and now, user-centered design quietly mutated into outcome-oriented design — we kept the language of user experience while the goals drifted toward the organization instead of the person.

But this isn’t nostalgia or a plea for friction. Gratification, he insists, is easy. It’s already happening to you all the time. The designer’s job isn’t to add friction, but to notice where the sensory life has quietly drained out of the things we build, and to re-introduce it. And the challenge he leaves us with is deceptively simple: get curious.

The Small Stuffis out now. You can find Ian at bogost.com.

Dr. Ian Bogost is a writer, designer, and scholar of media and technology. He is the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor and Assistant Vice Provost at Washington University in St. Louis. At WashU, he is appointed in three colleges and the co-executive director of the Office of Public Scholarship.

Bogost is also a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the founding partner of Persuasive Games LLC, a game and design studio. He is the author of 11 books, most recently The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life. Bogost’s award-winning games and artworks, which include Cow Clicker and A Slow Year have been played by millions of people and held in permanent collections around the world, including at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

***

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Years ago, two friends in Philadelphia — both designers, both obsessed with jazz — kept noticing the same notation on the back of their favorite records: “recorded by Van Gelder in Hackensack.” So one Saturday they drove out to find it. They tracked down the address in a 1955 phone book, pulled up — and found a parking lot. No sign, no plaque, nothing to mark that Rudy Van Gelder had once turned his parents’ living room into a recording studio there, capturing some of the most important American music of the century.

This is a preview of a premium episode. To hear the whole thing, head over to our Substack:⁠https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/chris-entwisle-and-mark-havens⁠

That quiet drive home planted the seed for a twenty-year project. Mark Havens and Chris Entwisle are the authors of WAIL: The Visual Language of Prestige Records — the first real look at the design history of a label that, unlike Blue Note, never got its design mythology, despite cover art that’s just as striking and durable. They tracked down original pressings, interviewed the designers before that history disappeared for good, and uncovered how a label run, in one historian’s words, “like a mom and pop store” — no budget, no briefs, no marketing department — produced a visual identity coherent enough to still echo through design today.

Buy the book

What we love about this conversation is how much of it comes down to constraints driving creativity. Reid Miles couldn’t afford imagery, so he made typography the art. Tom Hannon had no budget for stock photography, so he shot the musicians himself. Designers got an album title and nothing else — no brief, no comp, no client approval — and turned that absence of direction into creative freedom, because Bob Weinstock simply “viewed it all as art,” the music and the covers alike. This is a conversation about jazz, but it’s also about what happens to creative work when nobody’s watching too closely, and why limitations so often produce things that last.

Bios

Chris Entwisle is an artist and illustrator. For over thirty years, he has used his passion for both jazz and postwar graphic design in his illustration work. Entwisle has a BA in graphic design from Rutgers University. He and his wife live in the Philadelphia area.

Mark Havens is an artist and educator with a dual background in graphic and industrial design. His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in both public and private collections. Out of Season, his first major monograph, was described by the New York Times as “a decade-long elegy.” Havens is a professor of industrial design at Thomas Jefferson University.

***

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Niyati Gupta describes her career as one long experiment — deliberately putting herself in uncomfortable, ambiguous situations and treating every move as a personal learning loop. That instinct took her from a bachelor’s in design inside one of India’s most prestigious engineering colleges, where almost nobody understood what design was, to a research role at Carnegie Mellon where she studied health info needs for low-literacy users in rural India, to Autodesk’s bio-nano innovation lab building molecular visualization tools for scientists — and eventually to Google, where she joined the Next Billion Users team.

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That team’s mission was to ask an open question: where would the next wave of users come from, what did they need, and what products didn’t exist yet to serve them? Niyati ran immersion sprints in the Philippines, India, Indonesia, and Mexico — shadowing users, building prototypes in the field, testing them in the wild, and bringing those insights back to a team that was building products like Camera Go and Google Files from the ground up. And she’ll tell you that the swim lanes between designer, engineer, and PM felt just as artificial out there in the field as they do today with AI accelerating everything.

These days she’s a senior product designer at Netflix, working on commerce and partnerships — which means thinking hard about discovery, about fandom, about how you help someone decide what to watch on a Friday night without making them feel like the choosing is harder than the watching. It also means designing across a ten-foot TV screen, a phone, and every device in between, and trying to make all of it feel like one seamless experience.

In this conversation, we get into what the Next Billion Users work taught her about designing for people who aren’t like you, how she thinks about influence as a designer — and why she’s convinced the title was never where the influence actually lived — and what Netflix’s design culture looks like from the inside, including how they run crits and how they think about A/B testing.

***

Premium Episodes on Design Better

This ad-supported episode is available to everyone. If you’d like to hear it ad-free, upgrade to our premium subscription, where you’ll get an additional 2 ad-free episodes per month (4 total). Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. New premium subscriber benefit: we’ve launched a private Slack workspace…join now to connect with designers, product leaders & creative practitioners in our community.

And get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes.

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Typography is often treated as a detail — the thing you finalize after the real design decisions are made. But for our next guest, it’s closer to the foundation everything else rests on. He’s spent two decades in editorial design at some of the most iconic American magazines — Men’s Health, Esquire, Popular Science, Entertainment Weekly — and he’s now the Creative Director of Fast Company, where he recently led a redesign that does something pretty unusual: the magazine gets a completely new typeface every single issue. His name is Mike Schnaidt.

This is a preview of a premium episode. Visit our Substack to listen to the entire interview: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/mike-schnaidt

Mike’s also a professor, a runner, and the author of Creative Endurance — a book that maps the principles of physical and mental endurance onto the creative life. It’s built around 56 rules for sustaining a career in design, drawn from interviews with ultra-marathoners, astronauts, and designers who’ve pushed way past the limits most people set for themselves. And as you’ll hear, he’s already working on book two.

We chat about the nuts and bolts of typography (utilitarian vs. expressive, food metaphors, Fast Company's per-issue typeface system) to the philosophy underneath it all (design as service, authorship, hospitality). We dig into his book Creative Endurance — 56 rules for sustaining a creative career drawn from athletes, astronauts, and designers — and his counterintuitive take on burnout: the cure isn't rest, it's picking up something creatively different.

Bio

Mike Schnaidt is the creative director of Fast Company. He’s also the host of the Webby-awarded video series It’s All in the Typeface, a professor of illustration at the School of Visual Arts, and the former president of the Society of Publication Designers. One of the coolest moments in his life was when Paula Scher said his first book, Creative Endurance, was “beautifully designed.” His second book arrives in 2028.

***

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There’s something magical about the Vestaboard: it’s a physical, split-flap display connected to the internet that displays missives and useful information with a charm that we love. The Vestaboard in our kitchen greets our family with the family schedule for the day, riddles, updates from our favorite sports teams, and the best/worst dad jokes. Everyone who visits our house is amazed by it.

Vestaboard is the vision of Dorrian Porter, and has its origin story in a Parisian train station. A few years ago, we had Dorrian Porter on the show to tell us about Vestaboard, and since then, we’ve become even bigger fans of the product. We keep spotting them in the wild, from coffee shops in Savannah to airport storefronts in Minneapolis.

Dorrian is back to tell us about the Vestaboard Note, a smaller, more affordable, and more versatile version of the original that went from basic prototype to Red Dot Award winner in about a year — a story that starts, believe it or not, with tariffs.

We talk about what it’s like to build a hardware company through supply chain disruptions and trade wars, why Dorrian keeps betting on the consumer market when the easier path might be B2B, and how Vestaboard is finding its way into classrooms, baseball stadiums, and a bar in Northern California born out of a community recovering from wildfire.

We also dig into the tension between nostalgia and innovation — Dorrian’s honest about the fact that split-flap displays attract people who love vintage and transportation, but his ambition goes further than retro. He wants to build products that pull meaningful content out of our phones and into the physical spaces where we actually live together.

This is a special sponsored episode of Design Better, and we’re happy to share it because Vestaboard is a brand we truly love. Their mission to inspire and connect people resonates with us, and we think it will with you, too.

***

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When Tina Roth Eisenberg moved to New York in 1999 as a new designer, she kept asking herself the same question: where are my people? Eighteen years ago, she answered it by starting Creative Mornings—a free breakfast lecture series that has since grown into what she describes as the world’s largest face-to-face creative community: 252 cities, 70 countries, and more than a thousand volunteers gathering with around 25,000 people every month. Or, as she puts it, “church for creativity.”

Visit our Susbtack for bonus content and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/tina-roth-eisenberg-creative-mornings

But Creative Mornings is just one thread in Tina’s story. She’s the voice behind Swiss Miss, the beloved design blog she’s kept up for 21 years; the founder of FRIENDS, a creative coworking community in Brooklyn; and the creator of Tattly, the designer temporary tattoo company that started as a joke and turned into a business.

In our conversation, Tina shares what she’s learned about building communities that scale on trust rather than control, why she measures success in “return on friendship,” and how playful side projects increase “the surface area for luck to find you.” We also talk about commitment as a creative practice, raising creative kids, and why she believes the future isn’t lonely—it’s hyperlocal.

Bio

Tina Roth Eisenberg is a Swiss-born, Brooklyn-based designer and serial founder—though many know her simply as "swissmiss," after the design blog she started in 2005 as a personal visual archive, which grew into a popular design journal drawing an average of a million unique visitors a month. Raised in Speicher, Switzerland, and shaped by Swiss design (and, as she puts it, a lot of fresh mountain air), she completed her design studies in Geneva and Munich before moving to New York in 1999. She is the founder of CreativeMornings, the world's largest face-to-face creative community, with monthly talks in 252 cities across 70 countries; the founder of Tattly, the designy temporary tattoo company; co-creator of the to-do app TeuxDeux; and founder of FRIENDS, a creative coworking space in Brooklyn. She lives in beautiful Fort Greene, Brooklyn, with her two children, Ella and Tilo, who teach her about current memes and TikTok.

Books & Links mentioned:

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http://creativemornings.com/

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Creative Quests, Sam Furness

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Dark Forest,Yancey Strickler

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Nanowrimo

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Swissmiss

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Yancey Strickler: Creative Mornings talk from May 2025

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Vacation With An Artist

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Creative Mornings Field Trips

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Creative Morning Clubs

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The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

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