Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/alex-schleifer
Airbnb’s mission is both simple and powerful: to help create a world where you can belong anywhere. Alex Schleifer, Airbnb’s head of design, fully embraces this mission. To create the products that make the Airbnb experience so welcoming and immersive, he also believes in being product driven, and organizes his teams in an Engineering, Product, Design (EPD) structure, which they also call “the triforce.”
Have a listen as Aarron and Eli talk with Alex about the advantages of this team structure, and about some of the problems companies run into when they try to create a “design-led” culture. They also dig into Airbnb’s mission and vision, and talk about the tradeoffs between quality and speed when building products. Enjoy the episode, and may the triforce be with you!
Alex Schleifer’s Bio
Alex is a designer, who as a teenager co-founded the digital agency Sideshow, which went on to produce award-winning work for a variety of global clients. They were acquired by Say Media in 2011.
He’s been on the incredible design team at Airbnb since 2015.
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Alex Schleifer: Airbnb's hasty Super Bowl decision guided by a clear mission

Design Better co-hosts Eli Woolery and Aarron Walter explore the intersection of design, technology, and the creative process through conversations with inspiring guests across many creative fields. Whether you’re design curious or a design pro, Design Better is guaranteed to inspire and inform. Episodes are released semi-weekly. Vanity Fair calls Design Better, “sharp, to the point, and full of incredibly valuable information for anyone looking to better understand how to build a more innovative world.”

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Find the transcript, full show notes, and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/brian-tyler
Our conversation today takes us further into the creative process across different mediums.
If you’re a fan of Yellowstone, Crazy Rich Asians, Iron Man 3, or the recent Mario Brothers movie, then chances are good that one of the soundtrack clips in the trailer below is familiar to you. And today on Design Better we speak with the person behind them all: Emmy-award nominated composer Brian Tyler.
We talk to Brian about his childhood influences, growing up in an artistic family, and how he finds the starting threads of a score.
Bio
Brian Tyler is a multiple BAFTA and Emmy Award nominee, platinum-selling recording artist, and has been a composer and conductor on over 100 feature films. Tyler’s scoring credits include Joss Whedon's Avengers: Age of Ultron, James Wan’s Furious 7 and F. Gary Gray’s Fate of the Furious as well as others in the Fast and the Furious franchise, Shane Black’s Iron Man 3, Alan Taylor’s Thor: The Dark World, Jon Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians, for which he was voted to the 2019 Oscar shortlist for Best Original Score.
Brian also tours as a successful electronic artist and producer, playing major festivals such as EDC and Hardfest, and he recently launched "Are We Dreaming", a completely immersive audio-visual experience created by Tyler himself, which debuted in October 2021 on the 400-foot Main Stage at Lost Lands Music Festival; an epic two-hour midnight performance for a crowd of 30,000 people. 
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Brian Tyler, composer for Yellowstone, Crazy Rich Asians, Mario Brothers, and more, on his creative process

Find the transcript, show notes, and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/eric-snowden
Adobe has been the big wrench in our creative toolbox for decades. But there’s a new tool shaking up our workflow —Generative AI. Eric Snowden, leader of Adobe’s design team, sees a big opportunity for designers to extend and enhance the creative process by folding generative AI into each of our tools and we wanted to get his take on what’s around the corner. 
We spoke with Eric about his journey from Atlantic records during a period of upheaval in the music industry and what he learned there, to his time on the Behance product team and working his way up through leadership roles at Adobe.
Eric leads a team of over 600 people, so we also talk about finding the right size for teams (and Amazon’s “Two Pizza Team” framework), as well as how R&D works at Adobe.
Bio
Eric Snowden is the Vice President of Design at Adobe overseeing a multidisciplinary team of designers responsible for the Creative Cloud & Document Cloud suite of product and services. His team is responsible for the Digital Video & Audio, Digital Imaging, Design & Web, Documents, Mobile, Portfolio, and Services across web, desktop, and mobile surfaces.
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Bonus: Eric Snowden, Head of Adobe Design, on AI + Design

Visit our Substack for transcript, show notes, and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/kate-aronowitz﻿
Few designers have an instinct for business fundamentals. Those that do are able to position design as a competitive advantage for a business and pave the way for design teams to collaborate more effectively. Kate Aronowitz is one of those rare birds.
Kate has held high level design roles at LinkedIn, WealthFront, Facebook, eBay, and today she’s at GV (formerly known as Google Ventures), where she helps early stage companies find their footing.
We speak to Kate about the arc of her career, about entrepreneurship as a designer (and why there aren’t more designer-founders), as well as some of the stories from the early days of Facebook like how she was one of the first designers to teach Mark Zuckerberg (or as Eli’s 8 year old son calls him, Zerk Merkerbergen) about human centered design.
Bio
Kate Aronowitz is a design executive who has built her career empowering teams at some of Silicon Valley’s most iconic companies. In addition to her role leading GV’s operations team, Kate coaches GV portfolio companies on cross-functional design processes, scale, product development, and management strategy.
Kate has built world-class design teams at eBay, LinkedIn, Facebook (now Meta), and Wealthfront. She joined the first user experience team at eBay before taking her experience to LinkedIn, where she started the user research team. As Facebook’s first design executive, Kate grew the organization from 20 to 200, establishing multidisciplinary design teams in front-end engineering, user research, content strategy, and communication design.
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Kate Aronowitz: Shaping the story of design in business

For decades, graphic designers have been introduced to typography by Ellen Lupton’s book, Thinking With Type. It was certainly a staple in Aarron’s courses when he taught graphic design. It’s now in its third edition, with loads of new content. It’s worth noting, the layout of each page of this book is beautiful and entirely designed by Ellen herself. 
We chat with Ellen about what’s new in this edition of her book, and how people other than designers can use it. We also go through some rapid-fire questions about the fundamentals of typography, and origins of some of the terminology like points, leading, kerning, italics, and more.
Whether you’re new to typography, or a seasoned pro, you’ll learn something from this conversation.
Bio
Ellen Lupton is a graphic designer, curator, writer, critic, and educator. Known for her love of typography, Lupton is the Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair at Maryland Institute College of Art. Previously she was the Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City and was named Curator Emerita after 30 years of service.
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Ellen Lupton: Thinking With Type

Visit our Substack for the transcript, additional show notes and links, and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/jonathan-hoefler
Chances are you have a few fonts on your computer designed by Jonathan Hoefler. Since 1991, Apple has included Hoefler Text on every Mac. Ideal Sans, Knockout, Archer, Verlag, and Sentinel—are a few more of Hoefler’s well known typefaces —each is steeped in history and timelessly beautiful. It’s no wonder that Jonathan was featured in the Netflix series Abstract, which explores design and creativity, as he is truly a typography legend.
As part of our series on design history, we talk with Jonathan about his typographic influences, his philosophical views on the value of presentation and why he views entrepreneurship as an invitation, and some of the themes in his work like “Unfinished Business” and “Conservation and Preservation.”
This is the first episode of our 10th season of Design Better. We’ll be continuing our exploration of design history and the creative process, but also adding new themes like how we can design a better future, and the secrets of living a more creative life, with guests like potter and designer Jonathan Adler.
Bio
Jonathan Hoefler (pronounced "HEFF-ler") is a typeface designer, typographer, writer, and inventor, and the creator of some of the world's most influential fonts such as Gotham, Knockout, Mercury, Sentinel, and Hoefler Text. He founded the distinguished type foundry Hoefler&Co in 1989, which he sold in 2021, after publishing more than eleven hundred original tyepfaces. He's currently enjoying a sabbatical, and writing about typography and visual culture on his website, JonathanHoefler.com.
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Alex Schleifer: Airbnb's hasty Super Bowl decision guided by a clear mission

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