Design Better
Design Better co-hosts Eli Woolery and Aarron Walter explore the intersection of design, technology, and the creative process through conversations with guests across many creative fields, helping you hone your craft, unlock your creativity, and learn the art of collaboration.Whether you’re design curious or a design pro, Design Better is guaranteed to inspire and inform. Vanity Fair calls Design Better, “sharp, to the point, and full of incredibly valuable information for anyone looking to better understand how to build a more innovative world.”
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Eric Ries: Lean Startup author on why good companies go bad, and why good design is critical to success
<p>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.</p> <p>This i...
Ian Bogost: Game designer, Atlantic writer, and philosopher of the ordinary, on the small stuff that makes life delightful
<p>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. </p> <p>Find the full episode and bonus content on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/ian-bogost</p> <p>That feeling is the subject of his new book, The Small Stuf...
Chris Entwisle and Mark Havens: authors of WAIL on the constraints that led to timeless designs for Prestige Records
<p>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. </p> <p>This is a preview of a premium episode. To hear the...
Niyati Gupta: Netflix Product Design Lead on what happens when a designer becomes a product manager, and why your influence might not be in your title
<p>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.</p> <p>Find bonus content and more o...
Mike Schnaidt: Fast Company Creative Director on typography, creative endurance, and designing for the long haul
<p>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.</p> <p>This is a preview of a premium e...
Bonus Episode: Dorrian Porter returns with the Vestaboard Note
<p>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.</p> <p>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...
Tina Roth Eisenberg: Creative Mornings founder on building communities that run on trust
<p>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.”</p> <p>Visit our Susbtack for bonus content and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/tina-roth-eisenberg-creative-mornings</p> <p>But Creative Mornings is just one threa...
Paul Ford: Writer, developer & "fun Cassandra" on why everything is changing (but not how you think)
<p>Paul Ford likes to call himself a “fun Cassandra” — someone who, like the priestess in Greek mythology, sees trouble coming, but unlike her tries to make the warning as entertaining as possible. He’s the writer, developer, and co-founder of the tech agency Aboard who saw Claude Code drop last November and immediately understood it was going to change everything — while finding, to his surprise, that most people around him simply weren’t seeing it that way.</p> <p>This is a preview of a premium episode. Find the full interview on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/paul-ford</p> <p>That s...
Jessie McGuire: National Design Award-winning studio leader on design as a civic tool
<p>As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, the Constitution remains the most consequential document in American life — and more people are reading it than ever. But pick up almost any commercial edition and you’ll find the same thing: small type, no imagery, nothing that invites you in. Jessie McGuire noticed this too. </p> <p>Find bonus content and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/jessie-mcguire</p> <p>Every copy her studio ordered looked identical — dense, utilitarian, forgettable. So they redesigned it. They printed thousands of copies, donated them to New York City schools, and invited design...
Colin Fisher: The lone genius is a myth
<p>This is a preview of a premium episode. To listen to the full thing, visit our Susbtack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/colin-fisher</p> <p>In jazz, there’s a concept called minimal structures — a rhythmic framework, a harmonic pattern, an implied order of solos. Just enough to hold the band together, but plenty of space for autonomous creativity. It’s a useful lens for thinking about how any team works, and it comes directly from today’s guest.</p> <p>Colin Fisher was a professional jazz trumpet player before he became one of the leading researchers on group dynamics. He’s now...
