Our guest is Cass Pokora — a photographer, artist, and designer who has been a familiar face in our community for years. Cass recently exhibited at Typeforce in Bridgeport, currently has work showing at New Wave Coffee in Logan Square, is featured in our upcoming issue of Faculty 3, and recently co-designed a poster for the Chicago Paper Show at the Chicago Cultural Center.

This episode is a little different. Cass sat down with host Christian Solorzano on a Saturday afternoon for a conversation recorded in the car, between the Chicago Pottery Market in Wicker Park and David Byrne's Theater of the Mind at the Goodman. The conversation moves between Cass's design practice, her process and return to working with her hands, her childhood obsession with sharks, the imaginary city she's built in her head, and her dream of someday designing a corn maze.

Music by Eighties Slang.

Our guest is Matthew Hoffman, the artist and custodian behind You Are Beautiful — the Chicago-born project that has placed over 10 million stickers and more than 100 public installations around the world since 2002.

In this episode, Matthew speaks with host Christian Solorzano about the long, unplanned path that led him here. He traces his story from taking apart radios in the basement as a kid and falling in love with making things by hand in middle school wood shop, to a final-year high school graphic arts class that opened the door to photography and design, to moving to Chicago in 2002 with no network of family or friends — and turning the feeling of being lost in the city into a message that now lives in over 100 languages.

Matthew shares his philosophy of being a "slow builder," why he prefers the word custodian to founder, and how the community has carried this project far beyond anything he could have on his own. He talks about mental health as an undercurrent in the work and the wall of letters in his space that people have been sending in since 2003.

The conversation also explores how he finds his voice by simply putting things out into the world, why he believes that "over perfection is procrastination," and his guiding mission statement for designers entering the field: make things that matter.

Our guest is Derek Desormeaux, president of AIGA Chicago, who moved to Chicago from a small town in Northern Michigan after studying graphic design at Kendall College of Art and Design.

In this episode, Derek speaks with host Christian Solorzano about his path into design — from wanting to be a concept artist and comic book artist to discovering graphic design through a typography class. He shares how he started volunteering at AIGA Chicago events almost as soon as he arrived in the city, eventually launching Coffee and Crits, a free monthly group critique event he's now run for three years.

Derek discusses the moment the previous president offered him the role, his first instinct to turn it down, and the reasoning that led him to say yes anyway. He opens up about what leadership looks like in practice — checking tickets and bringing in food at events run by his board members — and his belief that one person can't meet everybody's needs in a community.

The conversation explores Derek's conviction that design deserves the same respect as any other form of labor, his thoughts on what keeps him up at night about the sustainability of a creative career, and what gives him hope in a moment that feels uncertain. He also talks about the AIGA Chicago Paper Show, his love of print and his nearly 500-book collection, and why he stopped posting his illustration work on Instagram.

Music by the band Eighties Slang.