Two Years of Podcasting – From Polyfro Studios to Boise State

Just over two years ago, Nate came up with the idea (well, Steve Jobs told him what the next big thing was in a keynote, but Nate knows a good idea when he hears it sometimes), and that was podcasting. Podcasting about design, and since Debbie’s show wasn’t on iTunes yet, Nate had nowhere to go hear all of the design talk, so he decided we’d start a show.

I was interested enough that it didn’t take long for them to convince me to join in, especially since the thought was simply to record something we’d find entertaining, more like just talking about design like we always ended up doing, just with a microphone in front of us. And me, Nate and Tom were off on our venture.

Over the next two years, we recorded fifty full shows and another eight segments we call half-shows, lost Tom to other ventures, recorded shows in Omaha, Des Moines, Minneapoilis, Ogalala, San Francisco, Nashville, and Denver, and that’s not counting the segments Steve Gordon recorded for us from the past two HOW Conferences.

It’s been a lot more learning than I thought, a lot more work than I imagined, but even more fun and rewarding, and we hope that our excitement carries us well into season three this week. But the end of fifty shows seems to be a good time to recap five of my favorite episodes. It’s impossible for me to remember shows by themselves though, it’s always the events surrounding them that I think of first.

1. Be A Design Cast 22 : Robert BrunnerI tell people I learned more from sitting next to Robert Brunner for half an hour than I did in entire design courses, and I mean nothing bad about my instructors. Leaving Pentagram that day, all I could think was how much harder I needed to try, how I have to learn to take a step back and re-think what the real problem is, not what I think is the problem, and then take another step back and look at it again.Nate said all he can remember is the feeling that he needs to try harder, and we got that feeling before he even started speaking.
   
2. Be A Design Cast 7 : Joe DuffyThere is something exciting about driving a couple hours to see a speaker rather than just going across town, brings back memories of college, where every event was a drive, and you planned your entire day around the trip. Plus, this was the first venture out of Omaha for recording, as well as only our second interview show. The room was huge (hence the bad sound), and two people we didn’t know asked to sit and listen in, adding our first “live audience”, and the largest one we’ve had to date.
   
3. Be A Design Cast 31 : Dream Project IslandOut of what we consider our “regular shows” where we have a guest and talk about design news, opinions, actually, what we planned for the show to be (the interviews basically started by accident), this one is my favorite.We emailed past guests to see what they dreamed of for projects, and we simply answered what our dream projects were, but ended by reading “the experts” answer, once again reminding me to dream bigger.At least we did dream big on this show. The original plan was to just list dream projects, but thoughts change when you add rules and structure around it, so we made the choices based on categories, and we paired up past guests with these, giving us those “expert answers”. List shows can be fun, we just have to come up with a good topic so we can do another one.
   
4. Be A Design Cast 44 : Debbie Millman : How to Think Like A Great Graphic DesignerReally? We’re speaking at the same conference as Debbie Millman? Still not sure how that happened, but we ended up in AIGA Nashville’s Think Tank conference, and decided we’d better set-up interviews with the other four speakers while we were there. The entire weekend was a blast, and we ended up doing a hotel-room tour, where we just went room to room and recorded shows. Debbie had been on the show ending our season 1, but she had a book about to hit the shelves, so it made sense to have her back. We really didn’t need a reason, she’s such a great guest that we’d have her on every show if possible.We got back to our room and told Bennett that “Debbie stepped up her game on this one” (which I didn’t think was possible), and he replied “How do you step it up from rocking my world?” Exactly.
   
5. Be A Design Cast 50th Anniversary : Steven HellerThe AIGA Conference happened to be in Denver last year, and as that’s within a day’s driving from Omaha, a few of us decided that although we couldn’t take that much time off work, or afford to go, a three day weekend in the mountains would be good, especially since we were able to find a free place to stay, so other than gas and food, we were covered.Nate was going to the conference itself, so we decided that even though his schedule was packed, we’d have to record at least one show while we were there, but with who? I mean the speaking list was huge.Then an email arrived from SVA, talking about a Steven Heller Master’s Series (SVA in New York has so many great events I just start hearing about, it’s incredible. Is there a better program right now?), and our decision was easy.

   Of course, the time that worked best was 8 a.m. on Sunday, when Mr. Heller would already have been up for four hours or so, and we would, well, we just got in four hours ago…

   Steven Heller is very smart, very quick thinking, and a great guest. We spent a total of 35 minutes with him, 30 of it was recorded. The other five minutes consisted of us setting up the computer and using duct tape to attach the microphone to the stand, as the connecting part somehow did not make the trip.

   

So join us as we start Season 3 at Boise State this week. We don’t know what will happen in the future, but Nate and I stay committed to recording shows, and we hope you find them even close to as entertaining to listen to as we do to record them.

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