Core77 Presents Afterschool

There’s a certain quality to Joey Roth’s work. It could be the honest use of materials, or the quirky essentialness of his form language, or maybe it’s clean functionality of his products. From his Ceramic Speaker System, to his poster series, to his self watering planter, maybe all you need to say is that Joey Roth’s work is really good.

If you’re reading this, then you’ve probably had the same dream as a lot of us: You want to make and sell your own thing. You may not even know what that thing is yet exactly, you just know you want to do it. And that can be daunting. Maybe even feel nearly impossible.

Well you’re in luck, because today’s guest, Rusty Meadows, is just the guy you want to talk to. Rusty is the founder of the Nearly Impossible conference, an event for people who make and sell physical products that’s set to take place this November 7th and 8th in Brooklyn. The event is geared towards sharing stories about overcoming the hurdles we all face when trying to bring our ideas to life. Rusty’s experience comes from his role as manager of Tattly, the designy temporary tattoo company that celebrated it’s second birthday earlier this year.

No redesign affects hundreds of millions of people around the world quite like an update to an operating system. In September, Apple released a doozy: iOS 7 is one of the biggest updates in the company’s history, marking the beginning of a new era for it’s software and Apple itself.

Like anything that has hundreds of millions people using it, any change big or small is bound to cause controversy, but we have the perfect guest to help us sort through iOS 7. Neven Mrgan is a designer and developer at Panic. Over the past 15 or so years Panic has established itself as the premier Apple indie software developer, releasing wildly successful apps such as Audion, Transmit, Coda, and Status Board. In his spare time, Neven is also an indie game developer, with two iOS games: The Incident and most recently Blackbar, a text-based game about censorship. As you would expect, we have a lot to talk about.

Our guest today is Catherine Bailey, the co-owner and Creative Director of Heath Ceramics. We talk about her career as an industrial designer and her path to turning around a beloved American ceramic studio and manufacturer.

Our guest today is Gary Hustwit, the documentarian behind The Design Trilogy which features the films Helvetica, Objectified, and Urbanized. We talk about the trilogy and the new book he has up on Kickstarter: The Complete Interviews featuring the full length and unedited interviews from those films.

Our guests today are the two co-founders of Studio Neat, Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt. Their design for an iPhone camera mount, called Glif, was the very first product design project to launch on Kickstarter way back in 2010. Since then, they have launched two other projects, Cosmonaut, a wide grip iPad stylus, and Simple Bracket, an easy to use iPhone app for filling out March Madness tournament brackets. Now they’re back with a new project called the Neat Ice Kit, which is designed to help you easily make clear ice for cocktails at home. If there is a theme to their work it’s this: smart, simple, and successful.

We talk about their approach to running a Kickstarter campaign, how they pick projects to work on, our favorite cocktails, the new iPhone 5C, and vintage software.

Our guest today is Martin Kastner, the founder and principal designer at Crucial Detail in Chicago. One of his major clients also happens to be one of the world’s top restaurants: Alinea. If it sounds funny to hear that a restaurant regularly works with a designer, well: The food they create at Alinea is so inventive and so unique that they literally had to design tools just so people could consume it. If you haven't seen this work before, you owe it to yourself to look at Crucial Detail's website before you get too deep into today’s episode. Check it out at crucialdetail.com. Seriously. You’re gonna want to see this.

This week's guest on Afterschool is Robert Brunner, the founder of Ammunition in San Francisco. We go deep on the creation of the Beats by Dre line of which Ammunition has helped develop along with Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre. We also talk about setting up Ammunition.

In this special edition of Afterschool, we talk with conference chair Paul Hatch about the planning behind the conference, some of the speakers attendees will see, and what to do in Chicago. Even if you're not going to the conference, this is a great behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to put on an event at this level.

Our first guests are Theo Richardson, Charles Brill and Alexander Williams-- the dynamic trio behind Rich Brilliant Willing, a lighting and furniture manufacturer based in Brooklyn. Although they have been on the scene for only a few years, RBW has already carved out a reputation for creating some of the most inventive and inviting work being created right now.