DesignThinkers Podcast

Martina Flor is an award winning lettering designer, author, TEDx speaker and educator who helps designers develop expertise and creative voice so their work is impossible to ignore. Originally from Argentina, she moved to Berlin in 2010 where she founded her independent studio specializing in lettering, typography and custom letterforms. Over the past fifteen years she's collaborated with global brands including Adobe, Vanity Fair and Mercedes-Benz and spoken on stages around the world. 

Through her books, online programs, workshops and educational resources, more than a hundred thousand designers have used Martina's teaching to sharpen their visual judgement, master lettering and typography and build expertise that sets their work apart.

Her DesignThinker's keynote was called The Art of Seeing: How Letter Design Changes the way You See the World, it explored how creativity begins with seeing what others overlook. 

In this conversation, we're gonna talk about how she got her start in lettering, how she approaches teaching, how she built her online presence and what it means to observe before you start creating.

Follow us on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit us online at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

Nikki Gonnissen is co-founder and Creative Director of Thonik, the Amsterdam design studio she started with her partner Thomas Widdershoven in 1993. That’s the same year they met in Vondelpark, when Thomas spotted her eating ice cream with friends and followed her until she stopped to talk. What began as two solo practices under the clunky name "Gonnissen and Widdershoven" eventually became Thonik. A name built from their two first names: Thomas and Nikki. Thirty-three years later, they're still creative and life partners, running a studio that's stayed intentionally close to the same size, around 15 people, because, as Nikki puts it, grow too far past that and the work starts to slip through your fingers.

In this conversation, Nikki walks through two recent identity projects that show just how differently "moving people" can look in practice: a bright, kinetic identity for the Phion Symphony Orchestra, where the typeface bends and slants like a conductor's baton, and a complete overhaul of Schiphol Airport's identity, where the job was actually a practical one of stripping away visual noise and inconsistency until travelers could simply find their way. From there, the conversation turns to the argument at the center of Nikki's DesignThinkers talk: that as AI makes the world faster and more efficient, staying close (to yourself, to the people you design for, to what actually resonates) becomes increasingly more important.

This episode is for designers thinking about what to protect as their tools get speedier, for anyone building a studio and thinking about their philosophy, and for listeners who believe the most human parts of design are also the most valuable.

Follow us on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit us online at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

Erika Barbieri is the co-founder and creative director of OlssønBarbieri, a design studio in Oslo. The studio's ethos is built almost entirely around one idea: that packaging can be a portal into much bigger conversations about food. She and her partner Henrik met in design school in Florence, moved to Oslo in 2005, and spent years finding their footing before officially committing to the studio in 2012.

In this episode, Erika talks about how for her, good packaging design lives at the intersection of economic interest, cultural and social expression, ecological complexity, and aesthetics. That balance shows up in how the studio works, too. They’re as equally committed to research and storytelling as they are to creating beauty in the world. We talk about their work on Varus 775, a spirits package that was named Best in Show at the 2026 Dieline Awards, their work on Steroescope Coffee, an early wine project and her upcoming DesignThinkers talk. 

This episode is for designers who want packaging that does more than sit on a shelf, for anyone curious about the research that hides behind a beautiful work, and for the food lovers who've always suspected that there's some overlap between what tastes good and what looks good.

Follow us on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit us online at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

Goldie Chan is the author of Personal Branding for Introverts, the founder of the social strategy agency Warm Robots, and the Huffington Post once called her the "Oprah of LinkedIn." She built that reputation kind of by accident. She started posting a daily video on LinkedIn as a way to push her introverted self to speak on camera. She then went on to post 800 consecutive daily videos between 2017 and 2019, long before AI made that kind of output easy.

In this conversation, Goldie takes us back to her biology degree from Stanford, a failed fashion brand, and an intervention from her friends that nudged her out of a depression and into a marketing job that shifted her focus. From there we get into the real substance of her work: the five C's of personal branding, why she thinks the stereotype that introverts are quiet is a myth, how she protects her energy, and the surprisingly playful daydreaming exercise she uses to help people figure out what they actually want. We also get into her side hustles, which includes producing films and writing Archie Comics, and a candid conversation about why she chose to share her cancer journey publicly.

This episode is for anyone building their personal brand or working in branding. It’s also for the introverts in the room who feel like the current playbook wasn't written for them.

Follow us on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit us online at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

Five years ago, Gabby Lord and Lauren Wong started a design studio because a friend joked that they should—and because Gabby was, by her own admission, extremely burnt out and looking for a way out of her work situation. Those aren't good reasons to start a company, and yet SUPER KEEN is succeeding by most metrics. They complete 20 to 35 projects a year, have found a work-life balance that works for them, and have built a reputation for delivering solid design and strategy work.  

In this conversation, Gabby and Lauren walk me through the studio's early years. It was reactive, maybe a little chaotic, and included a website that instead of showing work, redirected prospective clients to a video of Tom Holland lip-syncing. They talk candidly about why they've kept Super Keen small despite pressure to grow, why they've published their studio's financials publicly every year, and how they're thinking about success.

This episode is for anyone questioning whether bigger is actually better. It’s for anyone feeling the pressure to scale—or to do things the way they’ve always been done. 

Follow us on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit us online at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

Valentina D'Efilippo is equally comfortable immersed in science as she is in storytelling and graphic design. That tension has shaped nearly two decades of work translating dense, unwieldy datasets into visual stories: flowers standing in for a century of wars, a dandelion holding the shape of the #MeToo movement on Twitter.

A cold email from HarperCollins turned an early instinct for this kind of work into a profession—pairing her with data journalist James Ball on The Infographic History of the World, a book that's since sold in eleven languages and launched the career she now runs through her studio, Apostrophe One.

In this conversation, Valentina traces her path back to a graduate thesis on gender stereotypes in children's books. It was her first real data project, before she had a name for what she was doing. We talk about the responsibility of deciding what a dataset reveals and what it hides, and why she reaches for beauty and visual metaphor even when the numbers are devastating. She also opens up about revisiting her 2014 project Poppy Field last year: an analog visualization where each hand-painted mark represents a single Palestinian death, made largely in silence over sixteen hours and shared on Instagram. 

This episode is for designers, journalists, and anyone who's ever had to decide how to represent a data set—and felt the weight of that choice.

Follow us on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit us online at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

Edel Rodriguez refuses to be small or quiet. He’s the illustrator behind some of the most recognizable political images of the last decade. That 2016 cover for TIME Magazine, the one of Donald Trump melting down: that was Edel. The Der Spiegel cover of Trump beheading the Statue of Liberty. Also Edel. At this point, he's produced more than 300 images of a single, very orange, subject. As a kid who grew up in a country where saying the wrong thing about the wrong leader was dangerous, Edel has spent his career speaking up.

In this conversation, Edel talks about hustling his way into an art director at just 26 years old. We talk about how that experience informed his editorial illustration process. We talk about how social media is a great place to share the kind of work you want to be making and to rally interest until someone notices. We get into how he wrote his graphic memoir Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey backwards, designing the cover years before he wrote a word. We talk about how the book's ending—a visual rhyme between the events in Havana in January 1959 and the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—came together at the very last minute. He talks candidly about why he refuses to self-censor, why he's not tired of the Trump-based work, and why the question he'd most want to ask himself in twenty years isn't about politics at all.

This episode is for illustrators, designers, and anyone else who's been told to play it safe—and isn't sure they want to.

Hear Edel speak at the DesignThinkers conference, Canada's premier design conference, in Toronto and online this October 20–21, 2026. 

Follow us on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit us online at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

This week on the DesignThinkers podcast, I’m joined by Temi Coker. A Dallas based designer, photographer and the multidisciplinary artist behind Coker Studio. Temi’s client list includes Adobe, Apple, Google, HBO, Peloton and The Oscars. But almost none of it started with a client brief, it started with a self assigned poster a day challenge in 2016 made for no one but himself. And it led Temi to a belief that you should be making creative work just to make it. 

In this conversation, we trace that thread through his whole career, from a stint studying biomedical engineering to please his parents, to pursuing digital media for himself, from making a pillow because his wife thought his work would look good in people’s homes to a full fledged home collection at Walmart. From teaching photography and design at his former high school, so that students would have a model of what a Black creative professional looks like to finding the nerve to ask the Academy if he could steep his Oscars statuette artwork in Black history.

This episode is for anyone with an idea sitting quietly in their mind, something they haven’t started yet. Temi’s whole career is proof that the things you make for yourself are often the things that end up mattering the most.

Hear Temi speak at the DesignThinkers conference, Canada's premier design conference, in Toronto and online this October 20–21, 2026. 

Follow us on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit us online at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

This week on the DesignThinkers podcast, I’m joined by Dalit Shalom. Dalit is the Director of Product Design at The New York Times where she oversees the creation of new formats, spaces and tools that advance the future of storytelling. She also leads Design and Strategy for various work streams for the company's AI initiates, having previously focused on trust and credibility by developing features that clarify Times journalism for its readers. 

An educator as well as a practitioner, Dalit also teaches design thinking classes at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering and ITP.

Follow us on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit us online at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

This week on the DesignThinkers podcast, I’m joined by Kenjiro Kirton. Ken is the co-founder and creative director of HATO, the London- and Hong Kong-based publishing house, design studio and concept store known for its playful, research-driven approach to culture, branding and digital experiences.

His work moves fluidly between publishing, interaction, retail, and storytelling, often blurring the line between design practice and everyday life. In this conversation, we talk about what happens when design escapes the boundaries of the studio—when research becomes fiction, when process becomes play and when creative practice becomes something lived rather than simply produced.

We also get into the value of iteration and experimentation, the similarities between cooking and design, building participatory creative communities, and why some of the most meaningful creative work happens along the soft edges between disciplines.

This episode is for designers who are interested in expanding everything design—and the design studio—can be.

Follow us on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit us online at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.