Whitney Warne: The Reflex Blue Show #250

by on September 25, 2023 at 9:21 am
Posted In: The Reflex Blue Show

Whitney Warne: The Reflex Blue Show #250

Whitney Warne was the opening keynote of this year’s OnBrand Conference in Omaha, Nebraska. Recorded from the event on July 13, right next to where the taco bar was being set-up, Whitney and I discuss her coaching and consulting business, Evoke EQ, and the nine enneagram types. What is an enneagram? I was also curious as well, and Whitney gives an amazing breakdown of all nine types on the spot (without notes!). We then speak of using someone’s enneagram type to help understand why people do what they do, and now they are motivated. We also discusses her new Evoke EQ Podcast that just launched.

Thanks again to the AAF Nebraska, AMA Lincoln, AMA Omaha, and PRSA Nebraska for once again making the OnBrand Conference happen. This annual one-day event has continued to be a great way to remind us how our different professions (design, advertising, marketing, public relations) overlap as well as work together – and seeing the organizations . And big thanks to all three of this years’ keynote speakers for sitting down with me to record episodes of The Reflex Blue Show during the event.

As this is also the 250th episode of The Reflex Blue Show, I guess I need to write a note of some sort – like, how crazy is this? When Nate, Tom and I started the Be A Design Cast (BADCast) in 2005, who knew that podcasting would even still be a thing this many years later. Between the BADCast episodes, BADCast half episodes, The Reflex Blue Show (RBS) episodes, RBS conference specials, RBS conference recaps, and other RBS specials, I think we’re at around 385(!) total podcast episodes since this adventure began. Crazy indeed.

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Justin Dauer: The Reflex Blue Show #249

by on September 8, 2023 at 1:49 pm
Posted In: The Reflex Blue Show

Justin Dauer: The Reflex Blue Show #249

Justin Dauer, who is no stranger to The Reflex Blue Show, and author of Cultivating a Creative Culture and it’s second edition, Creative Culture: Human-Centered Interaction, Design, & Inspiration, joins me to discuss his new book, in fulfillment:
the designer’s journey. We talk about what it means to be fulfilled at work, and what you can do to reach this goal as a designer. And how to maintain fulfillment once you achieve part of it.

We then discuss a bit about his previous two books and how the ideas in them about creating an office culture turned out to hold up even in the realm of working remote.

We also talk about Justin’s new venture, anomali by design, and making the move to starting his own company after all of these years as a design leader.

Of course, as this episode was recorded a couple of months ago, we end up speaking of Michael Keat0n’s return as Batman in The Flash. Turns out we both had memories of seeing the 1989 Batman in our local mall – still weird to me how important malls felt a few decades ago, and how much that industry has changed / disappered. Strangely enough, I have seen more movies in the past two years (still only ten total so far) at the theater than I have in decades (even without a Star Wars in that timeframe). Not sure why, most of them were unplanned. But I will say, that way to watch a movie has yet to be replicated at a home for myself anyway.

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Jada Britto: The Reflex Blue Show #248

by on August 24, 2023 at 10:01 am
Posted In: The Reflex Blue Show

Jada Britto: The Reflex Blue Show #248

As the last of this year’s HOW Design Live podcast interviews, Jada Britto joins me to discuss her talk on, ‘Reigniting Hope: Breaking Out of the Checkbox Mentality.’ I had met Jada the day before at the conference, and immediately knew I would love to have a longer chat, and thankfully, we found a time to record the next day with just hours of the conference left. We discuss what a checkbox mentality is and how to get out of it, diversity of thought, when to bring up designing for accessibility with your client, her teaching Design Management at Georgetown, her designing more sustainable packaging at Colgate-Palmolive, and more.

Once again, big thanks goes out to the team at HOW Design Live for bringing in such a great group of speakers, and giving me the opportunity to talk to a number of them. For those who missed any, at the 2023 event, I recorded three recap shows:

I also recorded eight interview podcasts (including this one):

I have four more episodes recorded (three from the 2023 OnBrand Conference in Omaha) that will be launching in the next month(ish) to wrap up Season 16 of The Reflex Blue Show.

Enjoy.

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Emily Mills: The Reflex Blue Show #247

by on August 17, 2023 at 2:54 pm
Posted In: The Reflex Blue Show

Emily Mills: The Reflex Blue Show #247

Emily Mills was at the HOW Design Live conference in Nashville to talk about transition as a creative professional. And as the founder of Sketch Academy, she was also spending quite a bit of time sketch noting the event itself from the exhibit hall – for those who want more about the live sketch note mural she did with Gary Kopervas, I spoke with Emily about it while she was working on it from the exhibit hall on both our Day 1 Recap (where Gary also joins in), as well as our Day 2 Recap where the mural was well under way.

For this show, I met up with Emily after the mural work was complete, and spend most of the episode talking about transitioning from a designer to an illustrator, sketch noting, her Sketch Academy, and more.

As this was recorded after most of the conference was over, we also talk about this year’s closing party, which involved a LOT of neon (the theme was ‘Nashville Neon Lights’ after all). A lot of the memories of an event like this come from the location, and as The Gaylord Opryland® Resort & Convention Center was just enough distance from downtown Nashville to make leaving an actual decision, well, I really only left the area once (not counting the to and from the airport). Of course, the upside was I did not seem to be alone in this thinking, and because of the convenience of staying at the event site (which contained plenty to do as I found out), that closing party seemed to have been attended by a larger group than I have seen in a while, and by a lot of the people that usually skip it, and it was a great one.

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Carl Gerhards: The Reflex Blue Show #246

by on August 11, 2023 at 10:23 am
Posted In: The Reflex Blue Show

Carl Gerhards: The Reflex Blue Show #246

Carl Gerhards was at the HOW Design Live conference in Nashville to talk about the rebrand, I mean, ‘the next generation of the Pepsi logo‘. It’s rare to have such a large company make a shift in their identity in today’s age and get a lot of positive feedback from the design community, which this one deserves. To my surprise, this was mostly handled in-house. It was fun to talk with someone about what is involved in a rebrand of this scale – the Pepsi brand alone has around 300 SKUs for packaging in the the US, and around 2,000 worldwide.

We also talk about their t-shirt operation in the exhibit hall at HOW Design Live, as well as if you hang around after the show, the news that the new Pepsi blue is none other than, you guessed it, Reflex Blue! And we talk about growing an in house team, like the PepsiCo Design + Innovation one Carl is at.

Since I have been podcasting, starting with the Be A Design Cast in 2005 to the Reflex Blue Show of today, we always had a little thing of who we’d love to talk with about design, and honestly, I’ve spoken with more people on that list than I ever imagined I would, but one of the few missing ones was someone who worked on the brand we seem to discuss as much as any other over the years, Mountain Dew. We have spent many episodes talking about new flavors, have had multiple taste tests, and probably have a slide or two about it in most of the presentations we have given, but have never actually spoken to someone about what it’s like to work as a designer for the brand itself. When I saw Carl was speaking at HOW Design Live this year, he was the first person on my list because of this. So yes, we talk about designing for Mountain Dew.

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