Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/ts-balaji
Design leaders spend a lot of energy trying to get a seat at the table. It’s an ongoing process—and it’s tough to keep design involved over time. What questions should be asked along the way, and what business language can design leaders use?
In this episode, LogMeIn’s Vice President Product Design & Customer Experience TS Balaji talks about helping big corporations use design to be competitive in new ways. He covers everything from maturity models and setting up team playbooks to how LogMeIn measures the business impact of design.
Listen as Eli and Aarron chat with TS about design’s place in business—and hear why a multidisciplinary background could be the ultimate career boon, even if it does require a bit of statistics.
TS Balaji's Bio
TS is a user experience and product development executive, currently leading product design, internationalization, and insights and analytics functions for LogMeIn.
As a former designer turned strategist, TS specializes in identifying new technologies, spotting trends, introducing business models, and combining all of the above with design to advocate for customers. Prior to his current role, TS established and led digital experience practices at Cox Communications and Sprint.
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TS Balaji: Thinking and acting like a business leader

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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TS Balaji: Thinking and acting like a business leader

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