Our guest is Nika Simovich Fisher, a writer, designer, and educator based in New York City. A tenure-track Assistant Professor of Communication Design at Parsons School of Design, Nika directs the AAS program and researches how design shapes what people believe — politically, spiritually, culturally, and about themselves. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, WIRED, Fast Company, and AIGA Eye on Design, and she is the founder of Labud, a design studio working across fashion, publishing, and technology.

In this episode, Nika speaks with host Christian Solorzano about her journey from publishing fiction on Neopets as a child to studying journalism at Columbia and building a practice that lives at the intersection of writing, design, and education. She shares how her research brings overlooked histories of the internet into contemporary conversations about technology, and why she believes the way things look is never just aesthetic — it's always political, always cultural, always telling you something about power.

The conversation explores the early web as a space of genuine self-expression, what gets lost when platforms replace personal homepages, and how vernacular design — from MySpace customization to Trump's political merchandise — reveals more about culture than polished professional work ever could. Nika also speaks candidly about her daily writing practice, her Serbian immigrant identity, and the studio name that connects everything.

Music by the band Eighties Slang.