In the Making

This episode profiles Jon Perdomo, co-founder of Plant Man P, as he tries to marry his two seemingly disparate passions and audiences: street wear and houseplants. You can find Jon on Instagram and YouTube. Jon is paired with his hero in the plant styling space: Hilton Carter. Hilton talks about his own journey of starting out, and how he navigates the challenge of engaging two distinct audiences: those interested in interior decor, and those craving houseplant content. Hilton also impresses upon Jon the importance of auditing the design of other brands, like Supreme. Find Hilton on Instagram and TikTok.Adobe designer Kyle Webster encourages Jon to take risks and experimentat in his design work. Kyle references his own experience designing for streetwear brand The Hundreds, and uses some of those lessons to guide Plant Man P’s branding and messaging. Find Kyle on Twitter and Instagram.This season of Wireframe is supported by Adobe Express, a new web and mobile app that helps anyone create great content from thousands of templates. Learn more about this podcast at adobe.ly/wireframe. (Most of the guests appearing in this season are part of Adobe’s CoCreate program.)Find a transcript of this episode here.

Adriana Alejandre is a therapist working to break the stigma of mental health in the Latinx community by making mental health services more accessible. Find her on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok or listen to her podcast. We pair Adriana with Ellen Marie Bennett of Hedley & Bennett, an apron & cookware company known for their iconic ampersand logo. Ellen shares the story behind how she chose to represent her own heritage through her brand.Designer Schessa Garbutt of Firebrand Creative House helps Adriana harness the simple power of symbols to inspire her new look, and they talk about the potential of using the Quetzal bird as a design inspiration for her refresh. Schessa references work she’s done with “Mindfulness For The People”, a queer Black-woman-owned non-profit that used symbolism from African culture in their branding. This season ofWireframe is supported by Adobe Express, a new web and mobile app that helps anyone create great content from thousands of templates. Learn more about this podcast at adobe.ly/wireframe. (Most of the guests appearing in this season are part of Adobe’s CoCreate program.)Find a transcript of this episode here.

For some content design tips, we pair Juliana with Chris Do. He’s a podcaster, and the founder of The Futur Academy—an online education platform with the mission of ‘teaching 1 billion people how to make a living doing what they love.’ Watch his videos on YouTube, and find him on Instagram and Twitter. Elaine Lopez brings pro designer knowledge to the episode too. She’s a designer, researcher and educator in the faculty of Communication Design at Pratt Institute School of Design. Elaine talks about how typeface, color and composition can help Juliana cut through clutter and design educational content that’s simple, accessible and consistent. You can check out Elaine’s work on her website. And you can follow Juliana’s design journey on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.This season of Wireframe is supported by Adobe Express, a new web and mobile app that helps anyone create great content from thousands of templates. Learn more about this podcast at adobe.ly/wireframe. (Most of the guests appearing in this season are part of Adobe’s CoCreate program.)Find a transcript of this episode here.

This episode pairs Will with Courtney Quinn - a prolific online content producer you might know as Color Me Courtney. Find her on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Courtney used her own website as inspiration to help Will think through color theory, and how different tones and shades could prompt consumer behavior on the merch page.For a professional designer’s perspective on web design, we connect with Brandon Groce. He’s a designer, speaker, content creator and friend of Adobe. You can check out Brandon’s design portfolio here. And check out Will’s website as he continues to think through some design choices and try out new ideas.This season is supported by Adobe Express - a new web and mobile app that helps anyone create great content from thousands of templates. Learn more about the podcast at adobe.ly/wireframe. (Most of the guests appearing in this season are part of Adobe’s CoCreate program.)Find a transcript of this episode here.

Design plays a big role in shaping how we buy, how we sell, and how we support the businesses we believe in. Meet six young entrepreneurs struggling to brand their small business. We pair them with successful creators who share secrets to designing content that gets noticed. Then we meet a professional designer who offers design tips and advice to empower our entrepreneurs and listeners level-up their design chops.

If Comic Sans showed up at a house party, would it be welcome or shown the door? In this episode, the Wireframe team parties down with a wild array of fonts, good and bad, to learn about the rise of novelty typefaces like Comic Sans and the proliferation of the now all-too-familiar geometric sans serif typeface. They’ll find out what the popularity of these fonts says about how we think about the role of typography in today’s world. And they’ll also talk to some exciting new type designers who think that it’s time for a new chapter in the story of type, one that reflects a richer, more diverse set of voices. Join host Khoi Vinh, and producers Pippa Johnstone and Dominic Girard as they explore the personalities of the typefaces we know and love and ideas that are influencing what we’ll see next.Emma Tucker is a Comic Sans apologist. She’s a senior writer and deputy editor at Creative Review, and believes there’s a time and a place for this font. Though she’s noticing how its “time and place” has become more subversive and cynical than before. Next, Stephen Coles is a major expert on type. He’s the co-publisher of Fonts in Use and Typographica and editorial director at Letterform Archive. He explains how Comic Sans’s rise made sense, and follows up with an argument for why design is ready to embrace more expressive fonts, and not fear personality so much.Then, young independent type designers introduce us to a pair of fonts they’ve created that embrace personality and expression in very personal ways. Tré Seals is the founder of Vocal Type - and we hear about how he made his Martin font, and its connection to the American Civil Rights era. Lynne Yun, of Space Type Continuum, introduces us to her “earthy and bold” font, Ampersandist. Both of these designers explain how they find creative reward, and liberty, in type design.Other fonts mentioned in this episode: Times New Roman, Impact, Arial, Comic Sans, Calibri, Garamond, Windsor, Cooper Black, Roboto and Wingdings. And here's an excellent resource of comic book style alternatives to the font we love to hate. Find a transcript to this episode here.

Do you know what “flatten the curve” means? If so it’s likely in part due to the hard work by data visualization designers over the last year. Our society is now more data driven than ever; as everything is quantified, counted, and dumped into spreadsheets, and it’s easy to be overwhelmed by numbers. Data visualization designers work to sort through the numbers using both science and creativity to find the stories they have to tell, and help us understand the world a little better. But what goes into designing an effective data visualization, and how do you balance the art and the science of it? In this episode of Wireframe, host Khoi Vinh, and producers Dominic Girard and Pippa Johnstone, learn how designers are building charts, games, and more to take the numb out of numbers.If you’ve been fighting over housework during lock down, you’re not alone. Designer Amy Cesal and her husband, Zander Furnas used data visualization to clean up the messy business of their own household chores, and made the invisible, visible, along the way. Shirley Wu, worried that people weren’t taking the pandemic seriously enough. Her data visualization game, People of the Pandemic, helps us understand the consequences of defying stay at home orders. And Alberto Cairo outlines the responsibilities data visualization designers must balance when designing with data. He’s the author of How Charts Lie, and the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the School of Communication of the University of Miami.The New York Times visualization we referenced is here. The Washington Post’s most read article is a data visualization that you can see here. Listen to NASA’s X-ray sonification here, the sonification of American COVID deaths here, and Jordan Wirfs-Brock’s sonification of last year’s stock market volatility here (it happens at 4:18). Find a transcript to this episode here.

Do you keep your iPhone boxes—or toss them? This simple question sparked a heated debate on Twitter earlier this year that, at its heart, is really about the role that the design of packaging plays in our lives. At the same time, online shopping keeps gaining huge momentum, especially during the pandemic. And that’s changing how we interact with the boxes arriving on our doorsteps, and the way packaging designers think about the products we buy. Host Khoi Vinh, and producers Pippa Johnstone and Dominic Girard, take a look at how the design of product packaging is evolving, how designers are thinking about the environmental footprint of their work, and the right answer to the question of whether you should keep—or toss—that iPhone box.First, actor and writer Bisserat Tseggai tells the story of the unexpected controversy that arose from tweeting that people should throw out their iPhone boxes. Photographer and creative director Sailey Williams heartily disagrees.Next, Brittney Swindells, design manager of Alfred, explains how creating a cheerful unboxing experience helped their coffee shops pivot to online sales during lockdown, and bring the Alfred experience to customers' doorsteps. Stephan Ango, the co-founder of Lumi, explains the differences between designing packaging for a store shelf, and packaging to sell online. You can find Stephan’s podcast, Well Made, here. And Andrew Gibbs, founder and CEO of Dieline, tells the story of his reckoning with the environmental impact of packaging – and what he’s doing about it.Finally, Ian Montgomery and Marisa Sanchez-Dunning, of packaging design firm Guacamole Airplane, share the story behind their innovative packaging design for Hammerhead’s Karoo 2, and how sustainable design is about more than just the materials.Find a transcript of this episode here.

The Black Lives Matter movement has mobilized countless people all over the world in the urgent fight for true racial justice and equality, one of the most important issues of our time. In this episode, host Khoi Vinh and producers Dominic Girard and Pippa Johnstone examine the intersection of BLM and the world of design and creativity. They unpack the challenge of building a brand around an expansive social movement, investigate the role that art, craft, and design can play in the struggle, and bring to light the role bias can play in the underpinnings of the design profession itself.First, Teddy Phillips is an illustrator who posts on Instagram as Stat the Artist. He discovers that his artwork plays a bigger role in the protests than he knew – and finds inspiration to bridge his art with newfound activism. Then, Ivy Climacosa is a worker-owner at Design Action Collective, the design team behind the very first BLM logo. Ivy explains the unique challenges of designing for an activist movement, and how design helps to clearly and effectively communicate the message. Finally, Dori Tunstall is on a mission to decolonize design. The Dean of the Faculty of Design at OCAD University in Toronto speaks with Khoi about how the definition of design itself can be culturally problematic, how she’s working to create a more inclusive industry, and how all designers can work towards a more just and diverse practice.Learn more about how Adobe is listening, learning and taking action and see more on Adobe’s efforts to support diversity & inclusivity here. And don’t forget to take a moment and fill out our audience survey for a chance to win a year of Creative Cloud.Find a transcript of this episode here.

An entirely new user experience has been designed for people who want to exercise from home. By combining touchscreens and apps with stationary bikes, treadmills, rowing machines, punching bags, strength trainers - even smart mirrors - a new category of exercise has created millions of new fitness buffs. Long gone are the days of VHS fitness classes and Thigh Master infomercials. But is the UX of fitness something truly creative and revolutionary? Or is it just the latest fad from an industry with a history of fads? Host Khoi Vinh, and producers Pippa Johnstone and Dominic Girard dig into the brain-hacking and body-shaping UX designs that promise to help users break bad habits and break a sweat.Software Designer Ariel Norling is a connected fitness fanatic. She explains how the UX of Tonal's strength training gear keeps her coming back for more. Jennifer Clinehens is a customer experience strategist, and a Peloton owner. She writes about the intersection of UX and behavioral science, and explores the psychology behind how Peloton's UX has turned so many couch potatoes into cycling converts. Then, UX designer Kevin Twohy explains how he helped design the user experience for Mirror, a connected fitness, well… mirror, and how their approach to designing a home workout is very different from the competition.
 Finally, UX designer and R/GA Creative Director Gene Lu offers a counterpoint to connected fitness. He tells us about his own creative approach to keeping fit with tech, but without the gadgets. (Tap here to see the artwork that Gene made just for this episode!)Have a look at his Instagram to see the artwork resulting from his literal creative exercise - work he created specifically for this episode.Find a transcript to this episode right here.