AIGA Design Podcast

AIGA Executive Director Bennie F. Johnson talks with today's leaders in design, business, and technology, focused around the topics of leadership growth, the future of work, and creating a culture of design. Join us in welcoming Robin Petravic, Co-owner and Managing Director of Heath Ceramics.

Heath Ceramics is the 2022 AIGA Corporate Leadership Awardee. Founded in 1948 in Sausalito, California, is an American maker of goods for the home. The company is best known for its handcrafted tableware and architectural tile in distinctive glazes. Led by husband and wife, Robin Petravic and Catherine Bailey, who are shaping the relationship we have to things we own, and the way we come to own them.

Llisa Demetrios, the youngest granddaughter of Ray and Charles Eames, is a third generation maker, following in the footsteps of her creative legacy. Llisa is leading the Eames Institute as Chief Curator, and has previous experience as an Archivist at the MoMA, Eames Official, and has dedicated her life to keeping the Eames name present throughout design endeavors. Additionally, Llisa is on the Board of Directors for the Petaluma Arts Center, and is a passionate bronze sculptor.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Bennie F. Johnson is the Executive Director of AIGA, the professional association for design. Bennie thrives on the connections between marketing, technology, education, and innovation. With experience in strategic and consumer marketing, brand management, and innovation management, he is drawn to opportunities that allow him to lead and create new modes for business engagement. He has broad experience growing brands, businesses, and organizations with a special focus on venture launch and brand relaunch business environments.

Llisa Demetrios, the youngest granddaughter of Ray and Charles Eames, is a third generation maker, following in the footsteps of her creative legacy. Llisa is leading the Eames Institute as Chief Curator, and has previous experience as an Archivist at the MoMA, Eames Official, and has dedicated her life to keeping the Eames name present throughout design endeavors. Additionally, Llisa is on the Board of Directors for the Petaluma Arts Center, and is a passionate bronze sculptor.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Bennie F. Johnson is the Executive Director of AIGA, the professional association for design. Bennie thrives on the connections between marketing, technology, education, and innovation. With experience in strategic and consumer marketing, brand management, and innovation management, he is drawn to opportunities that allow him to lead and create new modes for business engagement. He has broad experience growing brands, businesses, and organizations with a special focus on venture launch and brand relaunch business environments.

AIGA Executive Director Bennie F. Johnson talks with today's leaders in design, business, and technology, focused around the topics of leadership growth, the future of work, and creating a culture of design. Join us in welcoming Rick Griffith, the 2022 AIGA Design Conference Chair, who will share his vision and the theme for this year’s upcoming conference in October taking place in Seattle, WA.

Rick Griffith has been a full-time designer, occasional writer, teacher, activist and printer, who produces, collects and loves artifacts (often made of paper) that are sometimes qualified to be discussed as art. He also participates in a studio called MATTER, and every Saturday he works in the shop at MATTER; these are both enterprises and collaborations with his Partner Debra Johnson.

Elise Schuster is a sexuality educator with 15 years of experience in youth development and pleasure-based sex education. Elise has a masters in public health from Columbia University with a specialization in sexuality and health. Elise began their work in public health at Physicians for Reproductive Health, training doctors to provide adolescent-friendly reproductive health care. They also spent many years teaching workshops at Babeland and having thousands of one-on-one educational pleasure-based sexual health conversations.

After their MPH, Elise spent almost a decade at a premiere NYC youth development center serving over 11,000 marginalized young people every year. Elise had several roles here including running intake and assessment for over 30 new young people every day, overseeing capacity building work, managing 30 student volunteers, starting a professional training institute, and a youth council, and overseeing a $6.5 million wraparound services grant with twelve subgrantee partners.

Elise also serves as a trainer on LGBTQ+ competency issues and regularly facilitates workshops for healthcare professionals, educators, artists, corporations, and more.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Bennie F. Johnson is the Executive Director of AIGA, the professional association for design. Bennie thrives on the connections between marketing, technology, education, and innovation. With experience in strategic and consumer marketing, brand management, and innovation management, he is drawn to opportunities that allow him to lead and create new modes for business engagement. He has broad experience growing brands, businesses, and organizations with a special focus on venture launch and brand relaunch business environments.

Margot Bloomstein is one of the most prominent voices in the content strategy industry. She is the author of Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap and Content Strategy at Work: Real-World Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project and the principal of Appropriate, Inc., a brand and content strategy consultancy based in Boston. As a speaker and strategic adviser, she has worked with marketing teams in a range of organizations over the past two decades. The creator of BrandSort, she developed the popular message architecture-driven approach to content strategy. Margot teaches in the content strategy graduate program at FH Joanneum University in Graz, Austria, and lectures around the world about brand-driven content strategy and designing for trust.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Bennie F. Johnson is the Executive Director of AIGA, the professional association for design. Bennie thrives on the connections between marketing, technology, education, and innovation. With experience in strategic and consumer marketing, brand management, and innovation management, he is drawn to opportunities that allow him to lead and create new modes for business engagement. He has broad experience growing brands, businesses, and organizations with a special focus on venture launch and brand relaunch business environments.

Meg Mothershed is the strategy guru and resident wordsmith for Mothershed Design Co., a boutique branding and web design studio based near Denver, Colorado. Having wanted to own her own business since she was six years old, joining her partner, Josiah, was a no-brainer. Meg combines her passion for entrepreneurship with a love of problem-solving to help small businesses. Meg manages all the nitty-gritty details of the business, as well as handles the copywriting for brands and websites.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Bennie F. Johnson is the Executive Director of AIGA, the professional association for design. Bennie thrives on the connections between marketing, technology, education, and innovation. With experience in strategic and consumer marketing, brand management, and innovation management, he is drawn to opportunities that allow him to lead and create new modes for business engagement. He has broad experience growing brands, businesses, and organizations with a special focus on venture launch and brand relaunch business environments.

Diana Barnes (DB) is the Chief Brand Officer and Creative Director at Munchkin. Under her leadership, Munchkin’s Brand Design team has won over 80 top international design awards for 360 designs, the highly coveted Red Dot Award among the latest. A passionate advocate for trees, animals, and the environment, she created and leads all Munchkin CSR initiatives such as partnerships with The Whale Sanctuary Project, Trees for the Future and IFAW (The International Fund for Animal Welfare) and Radiant Colors. Before joining Munchkin, she served as the Global Director of Brand Design for Dell, Inc. In this key role, she led global teams in Austin, India, and Asia. Prior to this, her career actually began in music and entertainment, holding executive creative positions at Sony and EMI, as well as several global ad agencies.

About AIGA Design Adjacent

AIGA Design Adjacent is a monthly podcast series with AIGA’s Executive Director, Bennie F. Johnson, in conversation with industry leaders who are innovating and designing the future. These conversations expand beyond the design community, encompassing industries and areas that intersect with design and shift the ways in which we think about and interact with each other and the world around us.

About Bennie F. Johnson

Bennie F. Johnson is the Executive Director of AIGA, the professional association for design. Bennie thrives on the connections between marketing, technology, education, and innovation. With experience in strategic and consumer marketing, brand management, and innovation management, he is drawn to opportunities that allow him to lead and create new modes for business engagement. He has broad experience growing brands, businesses, and organizations with a special focus on venture launch and brand relaunch business environments.

Fireside Chat with design leader and 2017 AIGA Medalist Art Chantry and AIGA Executive Director Bennie F. Johnson. They discuss best practices and learnings from their career in representing yourself in your work and approaching graphic design as a language we all speak.

This episode was originally livestreamed as part of the third annual AIGA Portfolio Festival in July 2022.

This episode is a recording of a livestream on 7/12/2022 with Lee-Sean Huang, AIGA's Director of Design Content and Learning and Beat Kaspar Badenbacher, Chief Creative Officer of loyalkaspar and author of the upcoming book, Somewhere Yes: The Search for Belonging in a World Shaped by Branding.

Beat is known for designing the brand identities for Peacock, Paramount+, MTV, ESPN, Comedy Central, and many more over the entertainment and media space. The book is about how the tools of branding, which naturally bring people together, have been weaponized by our culture around ideals and causes that have put us on a dystopian trajectory... and they may be the same tools to help us recover from that trajectory. The book also isn’t walls of text either, or a dissertation on branding, it’s a visual exploration, blanketed with illustrations, photography, symbols, and design—inspired by the graphic sensibilities of Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Massage) and Paul Arden (It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be).