Revision Path

For our 250th episode, I'm so honored to bring you this conversation with creative director, graphic designer, and entrepreneur Julian Alexander. Julian may be most well known for designing the album cover for 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Trying, and his design work on the Miles Davis box set The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions even earned him a GRAMMY for art direction! Even with those huge accolades under his belt, Julian is a really humble guy, and I think that really comes through in the...

There's no single way to becoming a designer these days, which I suppose is one of the most interesting things about this industry. Mikell Fine Iles, for example, grew up in San Francisco around art and design, went to Clark-Atlanta University for school, studied more design in Denmark, and worked for agencies Noise and JWT before his current position at Bloomberg as design director. And there's more! We started our conversation talking about Mikell's day-to-day work at Bloomberg, and from...

If you have followed me and Revision Path since at least 2015, then you'll hopefully recognize how powerfully significant this week's guest is. Cheryl D. Miller holds many titles -- visual artist, designer, author, writer, and theologian. Her trailblazing 1985 graduate thesis at Pratt Institute helped fuel the conversation about diversity in design for Black designers and designers of color -- a conversation we're still continuing over 30 years later. Cheryl and I talk about her...

Forest Young is the global principal and head of design at Wolff Olins, and let me tell you...he's a busy, busy guy. Whether he's serving as a design critic at Yale University (his alma mater) or or overseeing award-winning design projects, Forest brings a high level of observation and specificity to his work. We start off talking about one of Wolff Olins' recent award-winning campaigns Dotdot, and that spurred a discussion about the ethics of bleeding edge future design, and even access to...

One of the brilliant things about design is that there's no one "right" way to enter the industry. Career paths aren't linear anymore, and no one demonstrates this more than Sabella Flagg. Her journey has a designer has literally taken her around the world, and now she's settled in Seattle as an interaction designer for digital agency Artefact. Sabella and I talked about what interaction design is, and she shared what prompted her move to Seattle after spending time teaching English in...

Design and journalism might seem like opposite fields, but technology has brought them closer together than ever before (especially over the past few years). How are journalists navigating this new landscape where news is now a designed experience? To gain some insight on this, I spoke with Michael Grant. He's the creative director for the San Francisco Business Times and is a current John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. Michael an I talked about his current research...

Like several guests I've had on the show, I knew of Brandon Breaux's work before I even knew who he was! He may be known best as the artist behind the mixtape covers for Chance the Rapper, but Brandon's art spans much further than that. And no matter how far his art takes him, he always represents for Chicago. Actually, Chicago is where our conversation began! We talked about the local design scene and how he feels being a part of it as his profile has grown, and from there Brandon told me...

If there's anything I learned from talking with Thomas Dang, it's that he really puts a lot of effort into not just making sure his work is seen, but that it's felt as well. That can be a difficult thing for a graphic designer to do, but Thomas' unique mix of skills gives him a perspective many others don't have. Thomas is currently pursuing his MBA while freelancing, so we talked about how what he's studying factors into his life as a designer. From there, Thomas shared the early days of...

There's been some debate in the community recently about whether UX is considered a design discipline, so we've been talking to UX designers in lots of different fields to get a better look at just why UX is so important. And thanks to Alex Binder, that's how I met Tony Turner, a UX designer in Cleveland, Ohio. Tony started off with talking about how he first learned about UX, and how he's used his skills in both the insurance and technology industries. We also delve a bit into the topic of...

There's been some debate in the community recently about whether UX is considered a design discipline, so we've been talking to UX designers in lots of different fields to get a better look at just why UX is so important. And thanks to Alex Binder, that's how I met Tony Turner, a UX designer in Cleveland, Ohio. Tony started off with talking about how he first learned about UX, and how he's used his skills in both the insurance and technology industries. We also delve a bit into the topic of...