In this issue of The Brief:

1. Observations on designing a personal portfolio

2. Things to watch, read, and explore

3. Job openings

Join Portfolio Club Wednesdays 10AM PT/1PM ET

Join us every Wednesday through the end of July to talk through the best practices of portfolio design. A new industry expert joins us each week to critique portfolios and talk about what they look for when hiring. Build a portfolio you’re proud to share!

Become a paid subscriber to join, and save 20% off an annual subscription →

Observations on designing a personal portfolio

by Aarron Walter

I have always struggled to design my own portfolio. It’s an exercise in showing off, and that has never sat comfortably with me. But recently, I did the impossible. I launched my new website.

When designing for a client, I can be objective and curious. But when I design for myself, subjectivity clouds my judgment. Finding the right style and concept to represent my own personality, without overthinking every choice, is hard. I spin my wheels trying to satisfy my worst critic: myself.

Tooling has become another big hurdle. Though I spent years teaching coding, building large-scale products, and served on The Web Standards Project and the W3C, the modern web stack has grown so complex that it trips up my ideas.

For a long time I leaned on Squarespace to make the design process easier. It worked fine, but at times I felt pinned in by it, not really able to design what I wanted. By using a WYSIWYG editor, I felt I’d lost a piece of my identity as someone who prided himself on hand-building websites.

But no longer able to tolerate my old, cringy website, I resolved to get something new started. Something. Anything!

To break the ice, I brought in a collaborator.

AI can be an icebreaker

Sometimes tiny steps open the creative floodgates. That’s what happened for me in April, when I began describing to Claude Code the ideas in my head for my new website.

I started designing not in Figma, but in a Google Doc where I outlined my goals, site structure, the colors and typography I pictured, the feeling I was chasing. I gathered a few images that captured my imagination. The album cover for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. Broken Bells’ debut record with its geometric sphere. Hans Zimmer’s music for Dune. Star Wars: A New Hope. The future and the past colliding into a kind of aspirational nostalgia.

Claude served as a partner to push off of, instead of getting lost in my own ruminations. I described what I was searching for, and it came back with a version of my vision that carried new things for me to consider. Eventually I realized I wanted data from space and Earth, real signals from pulsars, seismographs, the oceans, and the climate, turned into visualizations that describe a feeling without spelling it out. I wouldn’t have attempted that without an AI collaborator as I would have considered it to be too much work. But with Claude, I felt some of the limitations I’d placed on my creative process lift.

At no point did I feel like Claude was the lead designer on this project. The ideas were mine, and I was able to stay focused on concepts, whereas in my many failed attempts at redesigning my portfolio in the past, I’d get lost in execution. It was liberating.

I chronicled the whole backstory on my site, in the colophon.

What our first Portfolio Club critique taught us

Building my own portfolio is what inspired us to start Portfolio Club, a community support group where Design Better members learn from one another, get honest feedback, and build a portfolio they’re proud to share. For our first session, Matt D. Smith (MDS, of Shift Nudge) joined Eli and me to critique real portfolios live. His advice was so good I want to pass the best of it along.

Make the work the hero

Matt’s first principle is the one most of us get wrong. Your work should fill the project page, roughly 80% of it. Explaining your process matters, but in the end people want to see what you made.

I want to see big, beautiful images of your work. Show me 50 images you’ve handcrafted for one case study. Eighty percent images, maybe 10 to 20 percent text. I need to see the work. Less text, less text.

Matt D. Smith, Portfolio Club

Show the work, show it well, and present it in a consistent, easy-to-see format. Matt keeps a “soft mini design system” in his head for this: every image the same width, set in the same frame, displayed the same way, so the whole thing is easy to take in.

Read more

This week on the show, Aarron and Eli talked with Jessie McGuire, managing partner of Thought Matter, the New York studio whose decade of civic, neighborhood, and cultural work just earned the 2026 National Design Award for Communication Design from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. An important question kept surfacing in the conversation: how does a studio committed to doing work that's good for the world actually keep the lights on? Jessie makes the case below , in her own words, that this is the wrong question. And then she tells us what the right one is.

Plus, at the end we share some amazing job opportunities for designers.

Listen to the episode and join the conversation

Jessie McGuire: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack

Already a paid subscriber? Follow this link to set up you premium feeds on Apple, Spotify or any other platform from your phone or computer.

Join the conversation about this interview in our chat room. →

Who funds the future?

by Jessie McGuire

There’s an assumption buried inside one of the questions I get asked most often: that design for the public good and design that pays are fundamentally in tension. That civic work is charity. That community-centered projects are a tax you levy on your profitable clients.

I’ve come to think this framing gets almost everything backwards.

Running Thought Matter for the past decade — making payroll, supporting a team, finding the right clients — I’ve found that the most meaningful projects don’t exist despite funding constraints. They exist because someone, or more often several someones, decided to put money behind something before its full value was obvious. That’s not charity. That’s how culture gets made.

What it means to show up

In the fall of 2016, like a lot of designers in New York, we were shaken by the election results. Our founder, a journalist before he became an agency owner, pushed us: if you don’t like what’s happening, you go into the streets. You figure out where your values are and you show up.

So we made posters. We did a Kickstarter for the Women’s March in Washington in January 2017, which turned out to be one of the largest demonstrations in American history, though we didn’t know that yet, raised tens of thousands of dollars, and printed 15,000 posters. Designers contributing visual communication on behalf of something they believed in.

That project lit something. We came off it asking: what else can we do?

The question that launched the Constitution project

A few months later, in the spring of 2017, the headlines were full of variations on the same question: has the new president even read the Constitution? We were sitting around the conference room table — we do that every week, looking at newspaper clippings, talking about what we want to see in the world — and someone asked: well, have we read it?

We ordered 25 copies. They all arrived at the studio looking identical. Small type. No imagery. Poor paper. Dense, utilitarian, forgettable. As designers, we knew we could do better. And we knew it mattered.

A Kickstarter raised enough to design, print, and donate 3,000 redesigned copies to New York City public schools. Buy one, we donate one. A paper company contributed materials. Our team contributed their time. We used a Risograph press and thought carefully about every detail — paper stock, typography, a fold-out insert for the Bill of Rights — to give the document the physical presence it deserved.

The design question we kept coming back to: how do you make something that people actually want to touch and find out more about? Not a political statement, not a rebrand — just a document that invites participation. We wanted a 13-year-old to open it and feel like it had something to do with him.

“Design is how we shape who feels invited. It’s how we think about who’s informed.”

Then we asked twelve designers we most admired — Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, Jessica Hische, Adele Rodriguez, and others — to each create a poster for one of the amendments in the Bill of Rights. Every single one said yes. The show ran at Cooper Union during Constitution Week in September 2017.

No institution owned that project. It lived because a community decided it mattered enough to show up.

What “shareholders” actually means

The studio has also worked with Business Improvement Districts, the Long Island City Partnership, the Times Square Alliance, the Union Square Partnership, as well as commercial brands, cultural institutions, and advocacy groups. That mix is intentional.

When I talk to potential clients and one of them says the work needs to be guaranteed not to upset their shareholders, I’ve learned to hear that as a signal. What they’re telling me is that they’re not actually committed to anything yet.

When I push on the shareholder question, though, something shifts. Working with cultural institutions, neighborhood organizations, civic groups — the shareholders aren’t a board. The shareholders are the community. They’re the people being affected by whatever the work is doing. That’s who I want to be designing for.

This is also what I mean when I say I want to do the work we want to talk about. Over the years, clients would hear about our civic projects and say: so you just want to do activist work. I’ve been sitting with that framing. We need a new word for it — because design that helps communities see themselves more clearly, that makes civic life more legible and more participatory, shouldn’t require a separate category. It should just be design.

The question behind the question

The most meaningful ideas that have shaped society were usually funded before their return was obvious. Patrons supported artists. Foundations funded journalism. Universities invested in research that didn’t have an application yet. Design belongs in that lineage.

The work that helps people see themselves as citizens rarely happens at the speed of a campaign cycle or a social media reaction. It happens over time, through schools, libraries, museums, neighborhood organizations, public spaces, and the people willing to invest in them before the outcome is easy to measure.

What would it mean to fund the future before it’s profitable? Because by the time something is proven, it’s no longer the future. It’s already the system.

We don’t have to wait to be the organizations willing to invest that way. We can choose to be them right now.

Jessie McGuire is the managing partner of Thought Matter in New York City. She also teaches entrepreneurship at Pratt Institute.

New jobs posted on Design Better Careers

View all job openings →

UX/UI Designer at Archetype AI
Full-time · San Mateo, CA

Principal UX Researcher at Upstart
Full-time · Remote, USA · Remote OK · $198,700 – $275,000

Sr. Product Designer, Growth at Life360
Full-time · Remote, USA · Remote OK · $129,000 – $190,000

Senior UX Researcher at GitLab
Full-time · Remote · Remote OK · $130,000 – $145,000

Art Director (Product Design) at Hello Heart
Full-time · Tel Aviv, Israel

Designer, Marketing & Custom Content at Vox Media
Contract · New York, NY · $40/hour

Product Design Program Manager at OpenAI
Full-time · San Francisco, CA · $216,000 – $240,000

Product Designer at Substack
Full-time · San Francisco, CA · Remote OK · $150,000 – $215,000

Product Designer at brand.ai
Full-time · Remote · Remote OK

VP, Product at brand.ai
Full-time · Remote · Remote OK

Designer, Web & Brand at Linear
Full-time · North America · Remote OK · Competitive salary + equity

Principal Product Designer at Linear
Full-time · Europe · Remote OK · Competitive salary + equity

Staff Product Designer, Time Tools at Gusto
Full-time · San Francisco, CA · Remote OK · $146,000 – $222,000

Product Design Manager at Figma
Full-time · Remote, US · Remote OK · https://boards.greenhouse.io/figma/jobs/5790585004?gh_jid=5790585004

Product Designer, Design, Dev, & AI Tools at Figma
Full-time · Remote, US · Remote OK

Product Designer, Growth & Monetization at Figma
Full-time · Remote, US · Remote OK

The Eames Archive.

Watch: How Charles and Ray Eames Worked

Inside, we were met by Llisa Demetrios — Charles and Ray Eames’ granddaughter, and chief curator of the Eames Institute. Llisa has spent her life inside this collection. She knows these objects not just as artifacts, but as family.

And she agreed to take us on a tour.

What you'll see in this video is rare. Llisa walks you through the early prototypes — including the very first Eames chair — and explains the decades of iteration that most people never hear about. You'll see Charles' cartoons drawn for his high school yearbook, Ray's paintings from her time studying in New York, personal letters, wartime leg splints, the lounge chair in its earliest form, and rooms full of objects that changed how the world thinks about design.

One of the things Llisa said that I keep coming back to: her grandparents never called anything a failure. They only called it a misconception. And if you asked them whether a great idea came in a flash, they’d say yes — a 30-year flash.

That's the Eames philosophy in two sentences.

Charles and Ray Eames are arguably the most influential designers of the 20th century. Their chairs are in millions of homes. Their ideas about function, craft, and constraint still shape how designers work today. And yet so much of their process — the early experiments, the wrong turns, the letters between them — has never been widely seen.

This video is our attempt to change that.

We’d love for you to watch it, and if you haven’t already, subscribe to the Design Better YouTube channel. That’s where we’ll be sharing more of what we discovered on our visit — and more conversations like this one.

Watch: How Charles and Ray Eames Worked

Subscribe to Design Better on YouTube →

Learn more about the Eames Institute and schedule a tour.

Bonus photos from our visit

Read more

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. 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 designers like Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast to create posters for each amendment in the Bill of Rights. That project became a turning point — not just for the studio, but for how they think about what design is actually for.

Jessie is Managing Partner of Thought Matter, the independent design and creative studio that just won the 2026 National Design Award for Communication Design from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum — the field’s highest national honor. It’s an award that recognizes not a single project but a decade of practice, and Thought Matter’s practice has been built around a bold idea: that imagination is a radical act.

A Salvadoran-American designer, New Yorker, and mother of two, Jessie brings a perspective shaped by navigating spaces that weren’t always designed for her. She teaches entrepreneurship at Pratt, mentors emerging designers, and leads a studio that works with cultural institutions, nonprofits, and commercial brands — all grounded in the belief that design is civic infrastructure, a tool for helping people see themselves as participants in shaping the world around them.

In this episode, Jessie talks about the origin of the Constitution project, what it means to fund the work you actually want to talk about, why she thinks scale and speed aren’t serving us, and why sitting down to make something with your hands — like the beaded bracelets she makes with her kids — still matters.

Bio

Jessie McGuire is Managing Partner of Thought Matter, the independent design studio that won the 2026 National Design Award for Communication Design from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum — the field’s highest national honor. She leads the studio’s strategy and long-term vision, working with cultural institutions, nonprofits, and commercial brands on work grounded in the belief that design shapes what people believe.

A Salvadoran-American designer and mother, Jessie is committed to expanding who gets to lead in the design industry. She teaches entrepreneurship at Pratt Institute, lectures on design as civic infrastructure, and mentors emerging designers. Before Thought Matter, she worked in-house at Kimberly-Clark and led projects for multinational brands. She holds a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MPS in Branding from the School of Visual Arts.

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

Read more

A few years ago, before the term “vibe coding” was coined by Andrej Karpathy, I created a “Design Better Radio” using ChatGPT to make a simple CSS/JavaScript/HTML app.1 The idea was to make a little web-based player that would pull random random shows from our RSS feed, which now has over 190 hours (or roughly 8 days!) of audio.

It worked, but the UI was frankly pretty terrible, and so I shelved it. I should also say that while I’ve helped to design and create many apps and websites over the years, in the pre-genAI era I mostly created the UIs in Photoshop(!?) or, later, Sketch and Figma, and would pass them to a developer to implement.

This past week I decided to create a new version of the app using modern tools like Claude Code.

The experience was so much different, and better, than my prior attempt. I first created the “radio” itself in ChatGPT, using reference images from Braun’s classic radio, as well as a few of teenage engineering’s wonderful products.

I then used Claude Code to create the app itself, using reference images I had created in ChatGPT, and pulling audio from our RSS feed. I pointed Claude to the Design Better Style Guide that Aarron created (also using Claude Code), so that it would use the proper fonts, colors, etc.

I deployed the app to Vercel, and was ably to quickly iterate through some functional and aesthetic updates.

What would have taken me at least a few days to implement before—including leaning on one of my brothers, who are developers, to help me code the app—took just a few hours.

We’ve entered an era where “should designers code?” is no longer really a relevant question. If you design digital products, you should be able to use these tools to create functional prototypes—even if your product at scale still needs engineering counterparts to help you implement it. Security, privacy, efficiency: all these things matter.

At the same time, many of the fundamental skills that designers have: aesthetic judgment, empathy and understanding of human needs and behaviors, and natural curiosity, are becoming more important than ever.

We recently had Brooke Hopper, Senior Principal Designer for Machine Intelligence and New Technology at Adobe, on Design Better. Brooke has watched multiple cycles of disruption reshape the creative tools landscape. She isn’t afraid of this one. But she has a perspective about what it means.

“Jobs in design aren’t being lost,” she told us. “[They’re] just being repositioned and refocused.”

Here are five ideas from the conversation that stayed with us.

Listen to the episode and join the conversation

Brooke Hopper: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube, Substack

Already a paid subscriber? Follow this link to set up you premium feeds on Apple, Spotify or any other platform from your phone or computer.

Join the conversation in our chat room. →

AI Gets You to 80%. The Last 20% Is Still Yours.

In the spring of 1968, astronaut Bill Anders pointed a camera out the window of Apollo 8 and took what became known as Earthrise. The photograph reframed an entire species’ relationship to home, and within two years, 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day. It wasn’t the image itself that changed the world, but rather the perspective it gave us.

That reframing matters a lot. Because the fear response to AI, the existential tightening that many designers feel right now, often collapses a complex situation into a simple, and incorrect, binary: replaced or not replaced. Brooke resists that framing, and she offers something more useful in its place.

What she argues is that AI surfaces a question designers have always needed to ask but could sometimes avoid: what is it, exactly, that I am bringing here? When the tool can generate the artifact, the artifact stops being the answer. The judgment behind it becomes the work.

“You’re bringing all of your knowledge of design fundamentals, your taste, your aesthetic, your point of view, your emotions, your experiences.”

One of the most clarifying things Brooke said came when Aarron asked where Adobe fits strategically in a world where you can generate a pretty good design just by describing it.

Her answer: designers are obsessive about quality — and that’s not going away.

“Gen AI is no technology that gets you anything close to perfect. It might get you 80% of the way there, but then at some point you have to jump into a place that allows you to start taking that thing from 80% to 90%, to 95, 96, 99.9. There’s always a more perfect thing to get to. And for people like us who really care about the quality of their work, Adobe has those tools.”

This maps onto what a lot of designers are finding in practice. The generation phase — getting to a strong starting point — is genuinely transformed. But the last mile, the part that requires taste and judgment and pixel-level precision, still demands human involvement.

Brooke describes this as a “precision continuum”: Express and Firefly live toward the more accessible end; Photoshop and Illustrator are still there when you need to get exact. The interesting design challenge is building tools that help people move fluidly between those modes — and knowing, as a designer, where you are on that continuum at any given moment.

Beware the Pull of the Machine

One of the subtler concerns Brooke raised is what happens when “good enough” becomes the default.

“It is very easy to just follow the machine. You start to get something and you’re like, that looks good. That looks pretty good. That looks pretty good. And then suddenly you have a bunch of pretty good things.”

Read more

This summer we’re helping you get your portfolio in shape in Portfolio Club.

In a recent Substack chat thread, we heard from a lot of folks that they’re stressed out by AI and the job market. People feel behind and unprepared for all that’s changing.

The best way to deal with anxiety is to take action. May 27-July 29, we’ll help you build a portfolio that will present you and your work effectively and create opportunities to learn new skills with AI tools in the creative process.

Here’s how it works:

• Critique every Wednesday at 1PM ET on Substack Live Video, Eli and I along with an invited design expert will give feedback on portfolios randomly selected from the #portfolioclub channel in Design Better Slack. What’s working, what to improve, how to tell your story. All sessions will be recorded.

• Between calls, share your work in the #portfolioclub Slack channel anytime for peer feedback from the community. Eli and I will be there regularly, as will other mentors in our community.

• We’ll also be exploring how to use AI to accelerate your design process without losing your creative voice. I just redesigned my portfolio with Claude Code as my collaborator, and I learned a ton from the experience!

Portfolio Club is open to all paid subscribers. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, this is a good moment to join. Save 20% on an annual plan.

Get 20% off annual plan now

First Portfolio Club Critique May 27 at 10AM PT/1PM ET with Matt D Smith

Aarron and Matt D Smith will be running the first Portfolio Club Critique next Wednesday May 27 at 10AM PT/1PM ET. Mark your calendar!

Paid subscribers will be invited to the live video feed here on Substack.

Stop worrying about the changing world. Start designing for it.

About Matt D Smith (MDS)

Matt D. Smith (known online as MDS) operates at the intersection of design and AI, with over 20 years of experience leading design for startups and global brands — and creating training used by thousands of designers at companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Pentagram, and Figma. He is the creator of the Float Label pattern (now adopted by Apple, Google, and countless companies), designer of Figma plugins Contrast and Flowkit, and creator of FloatPrompt, a text format that turns AI suggestions into AI specifications. He is now building the next generation of AI-focused design education through Shift Nudge, which he is evolving into the modern design school for interface designers and AI-builders.

• Shift Nudge

• MDS.is

• YouTube

• LinkedIn

Get 20% off annual plan now

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.

Design Better is brought to you by Wix Studio, the most powerful web design platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and creative thinkers. Learn more →

Colin Fisher was a professional jazz trumpet player before he became one of the leading researchers on group dynamics. He’s now an Associate Professor of Organizations and Innovation at University College London, with a PhD in Organizational Behavior from Harvard, and his new book is The Collective Edge. In it, he makes a case that we systematically underestimate the role groups play in every breakthrough we celebrate.

We love stories about lone geniuses — Newton, Einstein, Miles Davis — but when you peel back almost any one of them, you find a group behind it. We just tend to forget that part, because our brains are wired to remember heroes, not ensembles. Ask everyone on a six-person team how much credit they deserve for the group’s output, and one study found the total came to 235%.

In this conversation, we get into why teams are 6.3 times more likely than individuals to produce breakthrough work, why the sorting hat in Harry Potter is actually the series’ true villain, and why 84% of managers try to coach their way out of team problems when the real fix is structural. We also talk about the dangers of using competition to motivate creative teams, why the ideal team size hovers around 4.5 people, and what it would take to pull our increasingly individualistic world back toward something more collective — without tipping into the other extreme.

Bio

Colin M. Fisher is an Associate Professor at University College London’s School of Management and the author of The Collective Edge: Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups (Avery/Penguin Random House), translated into ten languages. His research on group dynamics, creativity, and improvisation has been published in top academic journals and featured in BBC, Harvard Business Review, NPR, Forbes, and The Times. Before earning his PhD in Organizational Behavior from Harvard, Colin was a professional jazz trumpet player and longtime member of the Either/Orchestra. He lives in London with his wife and two children, and can sometimes be found sitting in at jazz jams around the city.

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 coming soon: we’re launching a private Slack community…join now so you get access when it launches!

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

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

Read more

How beliefs make or break us

Nir Eyal is a familiar voice on Design Better and someone whose work has become essential reference across hundreds of design teams. His book Hooked taught us how to build habit-forming products. Indistractable taught us how to escape the ones that were eating us. And his latest book Beyond Belief argues both of those books were missing a third side of the equation and that without it, even the best behavior-design playbook quietly fails.

We covered a lot of ground with him in our recent interview with him, but three ideas stayed with us. Here’s how we think they apply to the work designers and tech pros are doing right now including how AI is reshaping our creative identity.

Listen to the episode and join the conversation

Nir Eyal: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack

Already a paid subscriber? Follow this link to set up you premium feeds on Apple, Spotify or any other platform from your phone or computer.

Join the conversation about this interview in our chat room. →

1. Motivation is a triangle. Most of us are working with two sides.

The model Nir and most of behavior design have operated with for over a decade is a straight line: you want a benefit, you do the behavior, you get the result. It’s the logic underneath BJ Fogg’s B=MAP equation, most of the personal-development industry, and frankly every “just build the habit” article in our feeds.

It’s also why your bookshelf is full of advice you’ve never used.

After years talking with Indistractable readers who’d done none of the exercises in his book, Nir concluded motivation isn’t a line. It’s a triangle, and the third side is belief. If you don’t believe your manager will follow through on the promotion, the benefit doesn’t motivate you. If you don’t believe you can ship the redesign, the behavior won’t stick.

“Beliefs are tools, not truths.”

—Nir Eyal

James Clear gestured at the same idea with identity-based habits — become the kind of person who… — but Nir argues the belief itself is the leverage point. If the belief isn’t there, the system collapses no matter how clever the trigger.

Every change-management problem you’ve ever run into at work is fundamentally a belief problem. Stakeholders don’t act on research they don’t believe is real. Teams don’t ship work they don’t believe in. We’ve been treating these as communication problems for years. Nir would say we’ve been working on two sides of a three-sided structure.

2. Your belief about AI is a choice. Make it a useful one.

We asked Nir which beliefs designers should hold onto and which need reframing as AI reshapes our work. His answer reframed the question itself.

Both predictions about AI — that it eliminates jobs and that it creates extraordinary opportunities — are likely true, he said. Neither is a fact yet. Which one you choose to believe isn’t a forecast. It’s a position.

Nir offered a metaphor to help us understand the role belief plays in times of change and turmoil. Imagine two-identical-runners with the same physical training, same lung capacity, same legs. One believes she can finish the race. The other doesn’t. Where do you put your money?

The neuroscience backs this up. Yale longevity research found that people with a positive view of aging live 7.5 years longer on average — a bigger effect than diet, exercise, or quitting smoking. Not because of magical thinking, but because beliefs route through behavior. The person who believes growth is possible at any age volunteers, gardens, calls a friend. The person who believes aging is decline stays on the couch.

Read more

If you want to understand how much your beliefs shape your reality, try this quick exercise. Look at the “checkerboard illusion” below and you can witness first-hand that even when you know two squares are the same shade of gray, your brain still refuses to show you the truth. If it can’t get a simple shade right, imagine what it’s doing with everything else.

In his book Hooked, Nir Eyal helped people build habit-forming products for good. Then he wrote Indistractable to help people break free from the ones that weren’t. But after years of hearing from readers who knew exactly what to do and still couldn’t make themselves do it, he realized something was missing from the equation entirely.

His new book, Beyond Belief, argues that motivation isn’t a straight line between behavior and benefit — it’s a triangle, and the third side is belief. The convictions we carry about ourselves, our abilities, and our circumstances quietly determine what we see, what we feel, and ultimately what we do.

Buy the book

In this conversation, we dig into why your brain actively resists changing its mind, how the placebo effect is reshaping what we know about pain and performance, and what all of this means for designers and creative thinkers navigating the uncertainty of AI. Nir also gets personal about living with ADHD and dyslexia, stage fright, and how a single reframe — not a new fact, just a new belief — changed the way he experiences all of it.

Bio

Nir Eyal is a globally recognized authority on behavior change and human potential. His frameworks have empowered millions to build better habits, enhance focus, and unlock greater agency in their lives and work. A former lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, Nir has collaborated with leaders and organizations worldwide to boost performance through behavior design.

He is the New York Times bestselling author of the international bestsellers Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, which have sold over one million copies in more than 30 languages. Hooked was a finalist for the 2014 Goodreads Choice Awards. Indistractable won the 2019 Outstanding Works of Literature (OWL) Award and was named one of the Best Business & Leadership Books of the Year by Amazon, Audible, and The Globe and Mail. His third book, Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results, became an instant New York Times best-seller and reveals how to identify and replace the hidden beliefs that define our limits.

As a seasoned entrepreneur and angel investor, Nir has backed multi-billion-dollar companies, including Canva, Kahoot!, and others. In addition to blogging at NirAndFar.com, his writing has been featured in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, and Psychology Today. For over 25 years, he has worked alongside his wife and business partner, Julie Li.

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 coming soon: we’re launching a private Slack community…join now so you get access when it launches!

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

Read more

As designers, many of us got into the profession because we had other creative passions. Perhaps we grew up drawing, or painting, or were into music or performing arts. Then the daunting reality of making a living set in, and we started asking: what careers let you actually get paid for being creative?

In high school, I loved illustration, and thought I might end up going to art school. But I ended up at a liberal arts school that wasn't known for its art program. I also loved making and building things. So the product design major seemed like a blend between art and engineering that I could embrace. I struggled through many of the engineering requirements, and despite surviving four years of advanced math, I still need to lean on ChatGPT to assist me when my daughter asks for help with her homework.

I’m sure many of you wrestled with similar challenges (though it’s not unlikely that you’re better at math than me!). Like me, you might be curious how some of the best known artists out there made their art while supporting themselves.

This week we published our interview with , author of Making Art While Making A Living, a book that uses the lives of artists, writers, and composers to ask the same question many of us been challenged with: how do you maintain a creative life while still paying the bills?

Listen to the episode and join the conversation

Mason Currey: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack

Already a paid subscriber? Follow this link to set up you premium feeds on Apple, Spotify or any other platform from your phone or computer.

Join the conversation about this interview in our chat room. →

Meet Crafted, the evolution of UserTesting’s Human Insight Summit — designed for teams who intentionally build with customer insight at the center. In Seattle, Eli Woolery will host AI & Design Thinking, a hands-on workshop exploring how generative AI can sharpen (not replace) your creative process.

Secure your spot at events.usertesting.com/crafted with code DesignBetter100 for $100 off workshops.

May 28th: Seattle, September 17th: London

Get tickets

The double life

One of the most surprising findings in Mason’s research is how many canonical artists had parallel professional lives that had nothing to do with their art. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. William Carlos Williams was a family physician. Franz Kafka spent his days at an insurance office, writing letters and diary entries that dramatically overstated his misery — even as he was, by most measures, actually getting writing done.

Read more

Crafting intelligent interfaces with AI

On Tuesday, May 12, we’re sitting down with Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred, authors of Sentient Design, for a live AMA you won’t want to miss.

If you haven’t heard of Sentient Design yet, it’s one of the most thought-provoking books to come out of the AI design conversation. Josh and Veronika explore what it means …

Read more

At several points in his life, Eli imagined what it would take to become a full-time artist — a photographer or illustrator free from client work. What he didn’t realize was that he already had an example of a different path right in front of him: his father, a practicing physician whose published poetry earned recognition from luminaries like John Ashbery.

Design Better is brought to you by Wix Studio, the most powerful web design platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and creative thinkers. Learn more →

Mason Currey’s most recent book explores these alternate paths. He’s the author of Daily Rituals, the beloved book that catalogued the working habits of nearly 200 artists, writers, and composers. His new book, Making Art and Making a Living, goes deeper — into the financial realities, the schemes, the compromises, and the surprising strategies that creatives have used to keep their work alive across centuries.

What he found is both humbling and strangely reassuring. Virginia Woolf had inherited investments. Kafka had insurance. Chantal Akerman had a cash register she skimmed from. John Cage had Italian game show winnings. And yet, running through all of it is the same question that Mason has been asking about his own life since the day he sat down to write a novel and couldn’t: How am I going to pay for this?

In this conversation, Mason walks us through the four funding models his book explores — family money, day jobs, patronage, and schemes — and what the lives of creatives from Kafka to Murakami can teach us about building a practice that actually lasts.

Bio

Mason Currey is the author of the Daily Rituals books, featuring brief profiles of the day-to-day working lives of more than 300 brilliant minds.

His latest book, Making Art and Making a Living, was published by Celadon Books on March 31, 2026.

Currey lives in Los Angeles and writes Subtle Maneuvers, a twice-monthly newsletter on the creative process.

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 coming soon: we’re launching a private Slack community…join now so you get access when it launches!

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

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

Read more

If you lead a design team, you’ve probably felt this: your designers are talented, curious, driven, and quietly starving for growth. The day-to-day leaves little room for the kind of learning that actually builds craft and keeps people engaged. And when designers stop growing, they quit.

That’s the problem we built Design Better for Teams to solve.

It brings everything Design Better has — nearly a decade of interviews, our books, The Roundup and The Brief newsletters, monthly live AMAs — directly into your team’s Slack or Microsoft Teams workspace.

Your team can search our entire archive with /db search, ask questions and get answers with /db ask, and get a weekly digest dropped into any channel you choose. New episodes, videos and newsletters show up automatically. No extra tools to log in to.

Everyone in your team will get a Design Better premium account too with all of this:

✔ 4 ad-free episodes per month (free subscribers get 2)
✔ The Roundup — weekly insights synthesized from 168+ interviews
✔ The Brief — monthly design deep dive
✔ Full ebook library (9 books)
✔ The Toolkit (software and courses, $1,000+ value)
✔ Monthly live AMAs with smart design leaders

Plus, the first 5 teams who sign up will also get a free lunch and learn Zoom call with Aarron and Eli.

And it’s way cheaper than sending everyone to a conference separately where 60% of the talks are irrelevant to your team’s goals.

It’s designed for design leaders who want their teams learning together, not just individually. A shared vocabulary. A shared source of inspiration.

Learn more about Design Better for Teams

If you manage a design team, or know someone who does, check it out at designbetter.team.

Happy to answer questions. Just reply.

— Aarron & Eli

We recently had behavioral economist Etinosa Agbonlahor on Design Better, and partway through the interview, we made the mistake of asking her to critique our own membership page live on air. The feedback was a little uncomfortable (in the best way). 🥹

Etinosa spent over a decade at Fidelity and Commonwealth Bank studying how people make financial decisions before building Decision Alpha, a consultancy that helps companies turn pricing into a growth lever. Her framework for pricing draws on behavioral economics, the field that sits at the intersection of psychology and economic decision-making. The principles she laid out for us are a treasure trove for anyone designing a pricing page.

Some of what she described in our interview connects to a broader body of research worth knowing. Two names that come up repeatedly in this space are Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose Prospect Theory established that humans don’t evaluate prices in absolute terms. We evaluate them relative to reference points, and we’re far more sensitive to losses than to equivalent gains. Their work earned Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. If you’ve never read Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman’s accessible summary of a career’s worth of this research, it belongs on your shelf .

Here’s what Etinosa taught us, with some of that broader research woven in where it adds context.

Listen to the episode and join the conversation

Etinosa Agbonlahor: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack

Already a paid subscriber? Follow this link to set up you premium feeds on Apple, Spotify or any other platform from your phone or computer.

Join the conversation about this interview in our chat room. →

Design Better is brought to you by Wix Studio, the most powerful web design platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and creative thinkers. Learn more →

We ❤️ Wix and we know you will too!

The core insight: nobody evaluates a price in isolation

Kahneman and Tversky’s reference-point theory is the engine behind almost every principle below. People don’t look at a price and ask “is this reasonable in absolute terms?” They ask: reasonable compared to what?

A $10,000 raise feels great until you learn everyone else got $20,000. A $27 bucket of popcorn seems moderate the moment it’s sitting next to the $35 one. Your job as a designer is to control what reference point the customer encounters first — because that context shapes everything that follows.

1. Don’t make “yes or no” the question. Make it “which one.”

When you present a single price, you’re asking your visitor to make a binary decision: pay up or leave. The moment you introduce tiers, you reframe the decision entirely. Now they’re choosing how to work with you, not whether to.

This connects to a phenomenon Kahneman and Tversky described called the disjunction effect — people under uncertainty tend toward inaction, even when action would benefit them. A single price creates that uncertainty. Multiple options create movement: the visitor is now deciding between things, not deciding whether to decide.

Etinosa put it directly: “It’s going to change the decision from a yes or no to which one.”

Design principle: Even if your product has one primary tier, consider what you’re putting around it. A free tier below, an enterprise option above — both shift the visitor from hesitating to choosing.

2. Use the decoy to make your target tier feel inevitable

The decoy effect — also called the asymmetric dominance effect — was first formally studied by researcher Joel Huber at Duke in the early 1980s, and it’s one of the most durable findings in behavioral economics. Introduce a third option that’s deliberately unattractive, and it makes one of the other options look dramatically more reasonable by comparison.

Read more

For product teams at startups and established tech giants alike, finding the right pricing and value proposition often feels more like alchemy than science. It’s a high-stakes game of guesswork involving the complex psychology, shifting values, and ingrained behaviors of your customers. While it can take years of trial and error to dial in, our guest today is here to help us decode the pricing formula and understand the behavioral drivers that make a product indispensable.

Etinosa Agbonlahor is a behavioral economist and founder of Decision Alpha, a consultancy that helps businesses understand the psychology behind how people make financial decisions. She’s worked with organizations like Fidelity and Commonwealth Bank of Australia studying how people save, spend, and invest — and she’s turned those insights toward one of the trickiest challenges any business faces: pricing.

In this episode, Etinosa walks us through the cognitive shortcuts that shape how customers perceive value — from anchoring and the decoy effect to the surprising power of round numbers. She explains why pricing should be a conversation that starts early in product development, not an afterthought tacked on at launch. And she offers practical guidance for freelancers and studio owners who struggle with that uncomfortable moment of telling a client what they charge.

We even put her to work live on the show, walking through the Design Better membership page to diagnose what’s working and what we could improve. Her advice was immediate, specific, and — honestly — a little humbling.

Whether you’re designing a SaaS pricing page or figuring out how to raise your freelance rates without apologizing, this one’s packed with insights you can use right away.

Bio

Etinosa Agbonlahor is a behavioral economist and CEO of Decision Alpha, a behavioral firm that helps businesses understand what customers value and turn that into clearer pricing and growth.

Passionate about helping people reduce financial stress and live healthier financial lives, Etinosa brings over a decade of experience working across the U.S., Australia, Africa, and the U.K.

She has shaped financial wellbeing, engagement, and customer behavior strategies for global financial institutions, private businesses, and venture-backed startups.

Her work has been featured in MarketWatch, Morningstar, and other leading platforms, highlighting her focus on how behavior drives healthier financial outcomes.

Etinosa is the author of How to Talk to Your Parents About Money, a guide to navigating complex financial conversations.

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 benefit: 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

Read more

Read more

Link correction*: join us here for the AMA: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/181419?utm_source=live-stream-share-button
(*we had some tech errors w/ Substack)

Few design leaders are as articulate about process, craft, and the art of being effective inside large organizations as Bob Baxley — and that kind of clarity doesn’t come from reading books. It comes from 35 years leading design at Apple, Pinterest, Yahoo!, and Thoughtspot.

Join us for a live AMA with Bob on Tuesday, April 28 at 9AM PT / 12PM ET / 5PM GMT. This AMA is available to paid subscribers. Upgrade now to join live — and unlock every past recording in the archive.

Beyond your questions, we’ll be asking Bob about the design culture he helped shape at Apple, what the leadership transition there means for the company’s design future, and what he thinks design teams need most right now.

Subscribe to join the Bob Baxley AMA

About Bob Baxley

Bob Baxley is a designer, writer, and advisor who lives and works in Silicon Valley. During a 35 year career that includes Apple, Pinterest, Yahoo!, and others, Bob has led teams and built products used by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Blending the principles of humanist philosophy with the craft of software design, he believes we have a moral obligation to create products that demonstrate a deep understanding, empathy, and concern for our audience…all the people out there on the other side of the glass.

In recent years, Bob has advised dozens of startups and mentored hundreds of designers and design leaders. With a perspective that intersects a liberal arts education with a deep background and understanding of computing and design, he regularly appears on leading tech podcasts and industry events around the world — asking difficult questions and nudging conversations into unexpected places.

Yes, I’m a Stranger Things nerd. As I mentioned in our recent interview with Stranger Things writer Paul Dichter, I watched the series myself, and then with my daughter when she was old enough, and most recently with my son. If you need any further evidence, just check out the birthday card my son created for my 50th birthday this year, which features a demogorgon and mind flayer, two of the shows iconic creatures.

And if you can get past our nerd factor, Aarron and I learned quite a few things from our interview with Paul, that apply not only to film and television writing, but to the collaborative efforts of any design or creative team out there.

Meet Crafted, the evolution of UserTesting’s Human Insight Summit — designed for teams who intentionally build with customer insight at the center. In Seattle, Eli Woolery will host AI & Design Thinking, a hands-on workshop exploring how generative AI can sharpen (not replace) your creative process.

Secure your spot at events.usertesting.com/crafted with code DesignBetter100 for $100 off workshops.

May 28th: Seattle, September 17th: London

Get tickets

Every Creative Team Needs Its Skeptics

Paul spent a decade in a small, tight-knit writers’ room — rarely more than six people around a table, in rented houses, with whiteboards and snacks. What strikes him most, looking back, is how clearly different roles emerged, and how essential each one was.

“I think inevitably in this process, you do end up feeling like you’ve got different camps — and one camp is the people that you have to convince, the skeptics. And another camp is the enthusiasts who want to make everything work. I’m definitely an enthusiast. Someone has an amazing idea and you just become obsessed with it... And then you have kind of the big-picture, macro, vision-of-the-whole-board brain, which is able to look at that and be that “Kill Your Darlings” fearless voice of, yes, it is an amazing idea, an amazing character, an amazing moment, but it doesn’t belong here because it slows the story down too much.”

This maps almost exactly onto how strong design teams function. The enthusiast generates energy and possibility. The skeptic prevents the team from falling in love with their own ideas. The big-picture thinker holds the vision steady when the details get chaotic. The mistake many creative teams make is trying to homogenize these roles — to turn everyone into a collaborator who agreeably builds on every idea. The Stranger Things room worked, Paul suggests, because the tension between these roles was embraced rather than managed away.

Read more

Both Aarron and I are official Stranger Things nerds. We watched the show ourselves when they came out, and again when our kids were old enough. As children of the 80s, the way it captured that particular feeling of freedom — biking with friends through the neighborhood, the movies and music of the era — struck exactly the right balance of nostalgia: present enough to feel real, but never forced. For that, much of the credit goes to the writers. So, we were thrilled to get a chance to talk to one of the head writers for Stranger Things, Paul Dichter.

Design Better is brought to you by Wix Studio, the most powerful web design platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and creative thinkers. Learn more →

We’d always wondered what actually happens in a writers’ room for a show like this. Heated debates? Storyboards and character maps to keep a sprawling plot straight? As we learned in this interview: yes to all of it. And in many ways, the writers’ room isn’t so different from the design studio — a place where creative ideas collide and combine, and when it’s working well, produce something greater than the sum of its parts.

Paul wrote co-wrote key episodes in every season of Stranger Things, including Season 4, Episode 4: “Chapter Four: Dear Billy.”

Paul discusses the dynamics of the Stranger Things writers’ room, describing the diverse roles—from enthusiasts to skeptics—that drive creative teams. He explores the discipline of restraint in using 80s nostalgia and the balance between following systemic logic and knowing when to break the rules for a great idea.

There’s also a lot here about how story structure maps onto design work — the idea that every scene needs an engine, that meaningful change has to register at every level, and that the best creative decisions often come not from defending what you already know, but from sitting with a note you hate long enough to find what’s really underneath it.

Bio

Paul Dichter is a television writer and producer best known for his decade-long tenure on Stranger Things. He joined the show in its first season as a writer's assistant — with no agent, no credits, and a background waiting tables — and rose to co-executive producer by the series finale. Over five seasons, he became a central creative voice in the writers' room, co-writing some of the show's most pivotal episodes. He also served as the liaison between the creative team and the show's expansive licensing universe, overseeing the canon across comics, novels, and other extensions of the Stranger Things world.

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. 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

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

Read more