Marian Bantjes stops by the Reflex Blue Show to discuss her new venture – Design Art Gallery (DAG). Located in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, DAG is the gallery showcasing the fine art from designers we all wish was in our town.
We talk about Marian beginning as a typesetter, her work in lettering, and her current work in fine art. We end with a discussion on what makes a good pattern.
Enjoy.
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Charles Nix, Senior Executive Creative Director at Monotype, stops by to kick off Season 19 of The Reflex Blue Show!
We talk about working with type at scale (Monotype has a font library of 250,000+ from 4,500+ foundries, which is crazy). We also talk about the Fonts, Feels, & Reels: Generational Attitudes to Type – 2025 Report, 1 of the 6 type trends reports monotype released at the end of 2025.
We also discuss the need for a new (well, 2018?) version of Helvetica in Helvetica Now, the Creative Characters podcast, how Charles got started in type design, and more.
November 7th, 2025 marked the 20th anniversary of the podcast launch for “Be A Design Cast” (the show that we did before “The Reflex Blue Show”, which launched March 4th, 2008) … I guess I have been doing this for a while now. At the 10 year date, I wrote a longer post, this milestone gets a paragraph, and one that is 3 months late.
Enjoy.
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Lyn Wineman opened up the 2025 OnBrand Conference in Omaha last month with her talk, “The Invisible Problem: What’s Really Holding You Back – and How to Fix It.” Her talk, covering the importance of branding, was a great way to start a conference on, well, branding.
We talk about signs of a bad brand, a few red flags in a potential new project, and branding.
We also discuss her “Agency for Change” podcast, and her book, “Untangling Spaghetti: A Branding Fable.”
A big thanks goes out once again to the groups behind the OnBrand Conference – AAF Nebraska, AMA Lincoln, AMA Omaha, and PRSA Nebraska.
Enjoy.
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Jessie McGuire of ThoughtMatter was last on The Reflex Blue Show during the 2023 HOW Design Live conference in Nashville, TN. This time, we speak via Zoom about, well, first that Nashville venue, and then move onto ThoughtMatter’s Censor This! event that was held at their office during the New York City Design week back in May and created to discuss what a designers role is in civic engagement.
We also cover their work for the NBA 2K League (the official Esports league of the NBA), ThoughtMatter’s Where Democracy Begins mural (and what it takes to get a mural made in NYC), and more.
Enjoy.
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Rachel Elnar & Erik Cargill of the Cheers & Tiers podcast stop by to talk about their show that is based partly around the heydays of the AIGA Leadership retreats. I was fortunate enough to get to be at six of these conferences, ending with the one in Omaha, Nebraska. I still miss this event and the immediate connections you had with the other 250~ people there. We also talk about design leadership, the need for design community, and human pyramids.
Enjoy.
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