Normally, I don’t write The Roundup while sitting in the middle of the Big Sur River, on one of the Adirondack chairs that The River Inn places on its property. But this week is different.

My father passed away after a long illness last Saturday, and as painful as that was, I was grateful to be there for his final moments, along with my brothers and mom. I took some time off today to surf at the Big Sur river-mouth, and now I’m here, sitting in the river, writing this.

Normally, I don’t write The Roundup in VS Code either, but one of the blessings of this place is its lack of cell service. So here I am, instead of writing directly on Substack, using a tool that doesn’t require an internet connection. A side benefit of this constraint is that I’m not tempted to lean on AI too early in the writing process. I’ll use it later to help with research, but it’s no surprise that using it too early leads to very average writing at best. Stay Human, as the hat I’m wearing reminds me.

Though my father was a physician, he had a diverse array of interests: poetry (he wrote under the pen name Jamie Irons), mathematics, biology. One of the books he left me was Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, by the paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.

Among other things, the book discusses what is popularly known—among us nerds at least—as the Cambrian Explosion, a point in the evolutionary history of life where life explored a dizzying array of different forms in a geologically short time period. Roughly 540 million years ago, the fossil record lights up with a diversity of body plans. Creatures with five eyes. Animals with no clear descendants. Arthropods in shapes evolution would never try again. The burst of experimentation was spectacular, and sometimes spectacularly strange (see a rendering of the aptly named Hallucigenia below).

Scott Belsky, chief strategy officer at Adobe, used the Cambrian Explosion as metaphor when we spoke with him last year to describe what generative AI is doing to software.

“So now we’re in this Cambrian Explosion of sorts where there are just so many new models and capabilities and apps and all these things. And I feel like every few weeks, orientation changes about what’s the best this and what’s the best that. And it’s hard to keep up with…

In some ways, you could argue that empathy outperforms passion when it comes to product design. And sometimes as technologists, we’re like, oh, if the technology can do that, we’re just going to apply it. But people may not be ready for some of these things, especially with the ramp of capability right now.” — Scott Belsky, Chief Strategist at Adobe

We are watching an explosion of new tools, new workflows, new categories of creative possibility, in real time. It’s exciting. It is also, as Gould would remind us, mostly going to fail.

While the actual Cambrian Explosion is relatively well known, one fact about it isn’t. Of the many arthropod groups that emerged, only four survived past that period. Three persist today: the Uniramia (insects, millipedes), the Chelicerata (spiders, scorpions), and the Crustacea (crabs, shrimp, lobsters). The fourth, the Trilobata, lasted another 270 million years before going extinct. The rest were filtered out by evolution.

As for the software explosion, every week brings new tools, new features, new categories. The Cambrian seabed of 2026 is thick with strange creatures, most of which will not make it to 2030.

Gould’s deeper argument was that the Cambrian Explosion was not random. The survivors were not simply the strongest or the fastest. They were the ones whose body plans were most adaptable, most capable of being elaborated over time into something the environment could use. I think the same logic applies to what we are living through now. And when I look back across the conversations we have had over the past few years, three ways of working keep surfacing, like body plans that might actually survive the filter.

AI x Influence Workshop

Bobby Hughes and I have a few spaces left in our upcoming AI x Influence for Design Researchers workshop happening next week over two days (Tuesday the 23rd and Friday the 26th).

We’re happy to offer two 50% off tickets for Design Better listeners.

September Work(shop) Leadership Excursion

Join Eli and Aarron September 28–29 in Sonoma for the September Work(shop) Leadership Excursion — an intimate, conversation-first gathering of forty design leaders in the heart of wine country, built to challenge how you think about your craft and the coalitions behind it. Only a handful of tickets remain — see the lineup and reserve your spot.

1. Specificity of intent

Eric Snowden, head of Adobe Design, said something in our conversation that I’ve thought about many times since:

“Most AI out there today is very good at making something generically beautiful, but not very good at making a specific idea you have in your head a reality.” — Eric Snowden

On one side are tools that produce output on demand, a slot machine you pull and something comes out. On the other side are tools that amplify our human abilities.

The tools that survive will be the ones that help us amplify our humanity, and the specificity of our creations. The singer and songwriter Bishop Briggs told us she wanted to throw her phone across the room when Suno wrote a song that sounded exactly like her work. Not because it was bad, but because it felt like her work, and it had cost her nothing:

I kind of wanted to throw the phone away, it was so terrifying…it’s [like] seeing all the answers for your homework and you don’t have to put in any of the work.

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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.

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), the philosophy underneath it all (design as service, authorship, hospitality). We dig into his book — 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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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.

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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.

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

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If you’re newer to Design Better, you may be looking for the episodes, ideas, and resources that feel most interesting and inspiring to you. And if you’ve been with us for a while, you might want an easier way to catch up on what you’ve missed.

We’ve put together a series of tools and toys to help you explore the Design Better library — and zero in on the conversations, themes, and resources that matter most to you.

Curate

Rather than make you dig to find what’s relevant to you, we built a tool that does the curating for you. Tell us four quick things — your role, where you are in your career, what you’re trying to get better at, and the topics you care about most — and we’ll hand you a personalized library, drawn from everything we’ve ever made.

It takes about 60 seconds.

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Have fun and let us know what you learned!

— Eli & Aarron

Creativity is a discipline in optimism

When Tina Roth Eisenberg moved to New York from Switzerland in 1999, she kept asking herself one question: where are my people? Eighteen years ago she answered it by starting Creative Mornings — a free monthly breakfast lecture series that has since grown into 252 cities, 70 countries, and roughly 25,000 people gathering every month. She calls it “church for creativity.”

The scale of Creative mornings is astounding, but even more impressive is how little of it she built by controlling anything. Creative Mornings, the Swiss Miss blog she’s kept for 21 years, the Friends Work Here co-working community, Tattly — none of it ran on a growth plan. It ran on trust, friendship, and a stubborn belief that there’s a better way.

That belief turns out to be the through-line. Late in the conversation Tina said the thing this whole issue is really about: creativity is a discipline in optimism. You can’t make something better unless you first believe better is possible. Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Listen to the episode and join the conversation

Tina Roth Eisenberg: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack

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Join Eli and Aarron September 28–29 in Sonoma for the September Work(shop) Leadership Excursion — an intimate, conversation-first gathering of forty design leaders in the heart of wine country, built to challenge how you think about your craft and the coalitions behind it. Only a handful of tickets remain — see the lineup and reserve your spot.

1. The metric is friendship

Most communities die because their organizers measure the wrong things — headcount, engagement, reach. Tina measures one thing, and it’s a joke that turned out to be the strategy.

“The only thing I measure is ROF — return on friendship.”

She told us about a night last year when Timothy Goodman spoke at Parsons to 475 people. She ran a live, in-the-room data visualization: stand up if you’ve ever made a friend at a Creative Mornings event. Out of 475, about 450 stood up. That’s the whole business model. Not attendance — belonging.

It tracks with something Bill Burnett told us about what he calls a formative community: “a group of people who get together to help each other become better people… deeply interested in each other’s journey.” The opposite of a networking room, where everyone’s performing their résumé. If you’re building a community — and a lot of you are, internally or otherwise — the design question isn’t how to get people in the door. It’s whether anyone leaves with a friend.

2. Communities scale on trust, not control

When the first stranger knocked on Tina’s door asking to bring Creative Mornings to their city, her instinct was to clamp down. Will they keep it safe? Will they translate the values? What she did instead is the most transferable lesson in the conversation: she wrote down the non-negotiables, and then handed away everything else.

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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.

In the video above, Dorrian shares a touching story about giving his mom one of the new Vestaboard Notes

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.

There’s currently a waitlist for the Vestaboard Note. But as a Design Better listener, you can head over to vestaboard.com/designbetter to skip the waitlist and receive a special offer.

Claim your special offer

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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.”

But Creative Mornings is just one thread in Tina’s story. She’s the voice behind Swissmiss, 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:

• CreativeMornings.com

• Creative Quests, Sam Furness

• Dark Forest,Yancey Strickler

• Nanowrimo

• Swissmiss

• Yancey Strickler: Creative Mornings talk from May 2025

• Vacation With An Artist

• Creative Mornings Field Trips

• Creative Morning Clubs

• The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

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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.

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

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“Being a parent is like being a psychic who is constantly correct, but always ignored.” – Jim Gaffigan

The comedian Jim Gaffigan has a funny bit about being a parent. It’s familiar to many of us who have raised kids from toddlers through the teenage years: “It’s cold outside, grab a jacket,” we say, or, at a different time of year, “put sunscreen on. You’ll get a sunburn.”

Inevitably, the mandate/directive/advice is ignored, and the child comes back: “Can I use your jacket?” or “Dad, my skin hurts!”

As parents, much like the Greek priestess Cassandra, we can predict the results of ignoring our sage advice, but it doesn’t matter. Our kids need to learn through direct experience that their mistakes, despite our best efforts to protect them, have consequences.

Which brings us to our guest this week, Paul Ford — writer, developer, entrepreneur, and co-founder of the software agency Aboard. Paul describes himself as a “fun Cassandra”: someone who makes predictions, sometimes gets them right, and has learned to deliver the news with grace and humor. When Claude Code dropped in November, Paul saw immediately that something had fundamentally shifted. The people around him, not so much.

In this conversation, Paul walks us through what’s actually changing, and what’s stayed the same, inside a software agency that has gone all-in on AI. Why ideation gets faster but building stays slow. Why transparency about AI use is becoming a competitive advantage. Why taste and judgment are becoming more valuable, not less. And why the liberal arts kid who can parse ambiguity and connect disconnected ideas might end up being the most important person in the room.

Here are four things we learned from Paul in our conversation.

Listen to the episode and join the conversation

Paul Ford: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack

The acceleration paradox

If you’ve spent any time vibe coding or prompting your way through a project lately, you’ve probably felt it: the beginning is exhilarating. Ideas materialize, prototypes appear, whole interfaces snap into existence. It feels like a superpower. And then, somewhere around the point where the thing actually has to work — really work, for real users, with real data — the pace drops back down to earth.

Paul has been living this dynamic inside Aboard:

“The coding is really fast, but the thinking is actually not that much faster. It’s maybe a little bit faster, or possibly a little bit slower, because there’s so much more product to work through. Once people get that taste of the incredible acceleration, they’re like, well, now it’s always going to be like this. But I actually don’t see product going away. Everything kind of still needs to be there.”

The bottleneck, it turns out, was always the thinking. Prototypes are important of course, but so is the research, the iterations and testing, and the shared understanding that has to get built before anything real can ship. AI hasn’t changed that. If anything, by making the early stages so fast, it’s thrown the slowness of the rest into sharper relief.

Taste is the new technical skill

One of the most useful reframes in the conversation is Paul’s argument that as AI commoditizes execution, the ability to recognize quality becomes the scarcer, more valuable thing. Not just having taste, but being able to articulate it, defend it, and use it to pull the work back when the machine goes in the wrong direction.

He illustrates it with a telling detail about LLM-generated prose:

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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.

That same instinct is what drew him into AI early. Where others hedged, Paul dove in — vibe coding nonstop, running full enterprise subscriptions for his entire team, and building in earnest. But he’s not a fanboy. He’s a critical optimist who believes something important is happening, while holding equal concern about the companies pushing it, the students expected to learn from it, and the decades of hard-won knowledge that might be quietly evaporating in the rush.

Paul is also an English major who sold an agency, a developer who thinks in prose, and a father of 14-year-old twins — one of the most multi-disciplinary thinkers we’ve had on the show. He won the National Magazine Award for writing an entire issue of Bloomberg Businessweek dedicated to explaining programming to a mass audience — a 38,000-word essay called “What Is Code?” A regular contributor to Wired and published in The New Yorker and MIT Technology Review, he’s one of the rare writers who can make the inner workings of software feel urgent and human.

We chat with Paul about the strange paradox of AI that makes ideation blindingly fast but leaves the hard work of product thinking as slow as it ever was, why the best thing you can bring to this moment might be taste rather than technical skill, and what it actually means to build a company around tools that didn't exist two years ago.

He’s exactly the kind of thinker this moment needs: someone who can write code and read the room, and who cares about quality as much as velocity. He can also make you laugh while explaining why you should probably be a little worried.

Bio

One of the world’s leading technology thinkers, Paul Ford has written about the way that software works for dozens of publications like Wired, Businessweek, and the New York Times, including his National Magazine Award–winning Bloomberg cover story “What Is Code?” After years of writing about technology, Paul decided to do something about it, co-founding Postlight and Aboard to help deliver quality products to the people who need them.

Books & Links mentioned:

• Gamer Gate

• Ftrain

• Jeff Koons

• Marcel Duchamp’s urinal

• To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare

• What Is Code?

• Strudel.cc

• Firewalla

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: 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

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

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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!

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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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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

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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.”

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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

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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.

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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.

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.

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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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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

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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.

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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

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