Interviews

Jenny Arden: Look for Dark Horses and Misfits

The Airbnb user experience design manager unpacks how Airbnb is designing for the superhost, what her team is learning offline that they are applying online, and how the line between design and business is so blurry these days she can’t even see it anymore.

By Matt McCue

Interviews

Ian Spalter: Find the Grind that is Your Personal Fairytale

Instagram's head of design, Ian Spalter, has numerous management tools in his belt to get the best work out of his team—from Monopoly brainstorm sessions to timeboxing. But, for Spalter, the most important tool is obsession. In an interview with 99U, he remembers learning early that the things you're willing to waste time and energy on might just be the key to ultimate success.

By Matt McCue

Interviews

Hector Ouilhet: Making Technology Human

In teaching computers how to communicate with people, Hector Ouilhet, Google's head of design for Search sees in the technology the same 'painful yet interesting' learning phases that a young person goes through when becoming an adult. To train computers in the art of questions, Ouilhet looks to the questing period of his own youth and to his four-year-old daughter for models of both simple and complicated questions that he wants computers of the future to understand.

By Matt McCue

Interviews

Roz Chast: From Free Fall to Full-Time Cartoonist

The New Yorker cartoonist once saw her career going over a waterfall. Four decades as a working artist later, and still churning out whimsical and pithy cartoons, Chast sees humor everywhere she looks—especially in New York City.

By Emily Ludolph

Interviews

Rejane Dal Bello: Design to Give People a Voice

Globe-trotting designer Rejane Dal Bello explores stories and design languages for disease and health. In this interview, she exposes the family roots of her most ambitious project, a series of books about Dr. Giraffe, fine arts paintings inspired by Google Earth, and how these passion projects balance her arduous work regimen.

By Lee Magill

Interviews

Big Spaceship: The Indie Agency That Grew Up With the Internet

Calling itself a “modern partner to ambitious brands,” the agency has dropped the word "digital" from its list of attributes in a move aimed at putting the limiting and, in its opinion, now obsolete definition of digital agency behind it.

By Dave Benton

Interviews

Eike König: Deliver the Unexpected

Eike König got his start designing album artwork during Frankfurt's techno era. In this interview, he traces the DNA of those rave years to the founding of his Berlin-based design collective "Hort" and his mission to always deliver the unexpected.

By Madeleine Morley