1. 5 Essential Design and Marketing Podcasts

    The (consistently) great podcast is a kind of personal holy grail. I love being able to visit a certain site once a week (if I’m lucky) and know that I’ll hear a great conversation taking place. The following is my list of absolutely essential interview based podcasts. I’ve pointed out some of my personal favorite episodes from each show as well.

    1. Typeradio
    No design podcast tops the Dutch program Typeradio. Its apparently about typography and type design but the interviewees are from the broader world of graphic design and the first questions they are asked is “Are you religious?” (along with the awkward “Do you love me?” and “Do you ever lie?”). From there the conversations can go anywhere.

    Highlights:

    • Robert Bringhurst The author of The Elements of Typographic Style discusses his non-designer background, translating Native American literature, and surprisingly (to me, at least) his love for Hey Ho’s single typeface approach to designing for Éditions Galaade (work that we showed extensively in our book [warning: plug self-promotion ahead] Function, Restraint & Subversion in Typography).
    • Experimental Jetset A 2-part interview totaling 50 minutes with Danny and Marieke of the highly-influential Dutch design unit. Topics include atheism, printing, and their own estimation that based on the criticism they receive history may have already made up its mind about Experimental Jetset (and its not good). A really interesting and unguarded conversation.
    • Peter Saville Peter Saville is unable to open his mouth without being interesting.
      “Q: Are you famous? A: It would seem so.”

    2. 6 Pixels of Separation
    How did I find this? A Gary Vaynerchuk interview? Seth Godin? Anyway, I’m glad I did. Mitch Joel posts a new hour-long conversation with leading marketers and business authors every Monday. Without fail. And he’s a great interviewer, though you have to wait for the weekly variant on “Now I own a digital agency with 720 employees in 8 offices, how does this affect me?” which gets annoying after awhile (ok, its 2 offices with 100-something employees but we get it already).

    Highlights

    • Avinash Kashuik Former Google Analytics Evangelist and now Digital Marking Evangelist at Google (those are some titles, huh?) and author of the best-selling Web Analytics: An Hour a Day and Web Analytics 2.0, Avinash gets into how to use analytics productively and not just as a way to measure your popularity. He’s been a guest on the show a number of times and I’d highly recommend listening to all of them.

    3. The Big Web Show
    I will admit that I didn’t really know anything about Jeffrey Zeldman before checking out an episode of this show that Gary Vaynerchuk linked up. Now, I’m obsessed. Each episode is about an hour, features one guest from the world of web design and is co-hosted by Dan Benjamin and each week it feels like I’m getting a master class in web design and theory. This show has single-handedly sparked my interest in getting involved in web design for real rather than a passive interest.

    Highlights


    4. The Web Ahead
    Hosted by Jen Simmons, The Web Ahead is like the nerdier version of The Big Web Show. If The Big Web Show has been exposing me to new ideas and people on the regular, then The Web Ahead is blowing my mind. Long, deep conversations about where the web is going with a lot of focus on HTML5, Responsive Web, Mobile, and more.

    Highlights:

    • Jeremy Keith A fascinating discussion on responsive design and the future of designing for mulitple formats and an eye-opening take on the need for archiving our digital output.
    • Ethan Marcotte Ethan seems to have been interviewed on every major show on the 5by5 network but he’s got a lot of important stuff to say about responsive web design and not needing to design 4 million different iterations of 1 website to deal with the mobile onslaught.

    5. Graphic Design on the Radio
    If I were ranking these shows from in some kind of 1=Amazing and 5=Not-As-Amazing-As-#1 (which I’m not doing except in this one instance), then British design, author and entrepreneur Adrian Shaughnessy’s actual radio program would be number 1. But, there’s no permalinks on the flash-based design of this website, which is infuriating/annoying/2004. So, Adrian, you’re a hero of mine but you’re number 5 until you fix this. Sorry.

    Highlights

    • Wim Crouwel I was definitely a fan of Crouwel after seeing him in Helvetica where he’s one of the only designers over the age of however old Michael C. Place, Norm and Experimental Jetset are (40?) that doesn’t come off like a total jack-ass (well, him and Michael Beirut. Beirut, you rule), but after this interview I freaking love the guy. A must listen-to.
    • Kim Hiørthoy Like Peter Saville, Norwegian designer Hiørthoy cannot help but be interesting. Unlike Saville, though, he’s totally self-effacing and understated.
    • Fuel Along with Tomato (who have also appeared on the show), Fuel have been doing the Designer-As-Producer thing since the late 1990’s with their own magazine and more recently a publishing house.

Notes

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