Our guest is Sarah Adler, a multidisciplinary designer and artist originally from Sanibel Island, Florida, who moved to Chicago in 2016 to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently works as Brand Designer at Thatch and is the creative director of Gab Magazine, an independent Chicago publication now on its third issue.

In this episode, Sarah speaks with host Christian Solorzano about her origin story — from building websites in fourth grade and leaving Florida at seventeen, to finding her footing as a designer in Chicago. She shares how working across mediums — logo design, web design, print, object design, and painting — has shaped her creative identity and why she's always resisted staying in one lane.

Sarah discusses her hand-crafted, tactile approach to design and how analog processes find their way into her work even in a digital context. She speaks candidly about the creative process behind Gab Magazine, what draws her to print, and the role intuition plays in how she makes decisions as a designer and artist.

The conversation also explores Sarah's personal history — including the discovery of her grandmother's legacy as a graphic designer in the 1930s. Sarah reflects on how that lineage quietly shaped her own path, and how her time at SAIC deepened a hands-on approach to making that runs through everything she does — from scanned textures and cut paper to the physical object of a printed magazine.

Music by the band Eighties Slang.