Our guest is Jonathan Nesci, a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, furniture, and fine art. He grew up in Oak Lawn, spent eleven years in Columbus, Indiana, and now works out of a studio on his brother's farm about an hour outside Chicago, in collaboration with a guild of high-craft makers throughout the Midwest.

In this episode, Jonathan speaks with host Christian Solorzano about an origin story that begins in a sandbox — his grandfather owned a concrete block company in Des Plaines, had fresh sand delivered every summer, and made him a chest of hand-sanded wooden blocks. Jonathan traces that state of play forward through a fundamentalist Baptist school, a thirty-foot BMX ramp in his driveway, and five years driving a forklift at FedEx, where a coworker named Brian asked whether he knew that people design furniture for a living.

Jonathan describes cold-emailing Richard Wright, breaking a thirty-thousand-dollar Gio Ponti desk in his first two months at the auction house, and discovering that the job was never about repairing things himself. It was about finding the upholsterer, the glass guy, the welder. That model became his entire practice, and he makes a case for it in an essay he calls Craft Surrogates: producing a thing doesn't make it any less yours.

The conversation turns to systems and constraint. Jonathan describes himself as a formalist — form drives everything, while scale, material and finish stay open. He talks about designing around what local fabricators can already do, about the golden ratio as a framework that scales endlessly in both directions, and about the H1 coffee table he built in 2006 after being rejected from a juried competition, simply to find out whether he could.

He also tells the story behind 100 Variations, the hundred mirror-polished aluminum tables he installed in the sunken courtyard of Eliel Saarinen's First Christian Church in Columbus — including the moment a local architect told him, mid-pitch, that the courtyard had once been a reflecting pool, and the week in which three organizations funded the whole project. It became the pilot for Exhibit Columbus.

Along the way, Jonathan speaks about faith and hope on his own terms, about what meditation clarified for him in 2017, about why he now sells almost entirely to the trade, and about why, six years into a sculpture practice, he feels like a kid again.

Underscore is produced by the Chicago Graphic Design Club.

Music by the band Eighties Slang.

Our guest is Alisa Wolfson, EVP and Head of Design at Leo Chicago, where she built the agency's design department.

Alisa grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and found design sideways. Her dad was in the wine import-export business, and she kept asking if she could design the labels — she didn't yet know that what she wanted to do had a name. She taught herself design history and layout, made projects in her garage, shot her portfolio on slide film, and applied to a program a friend had gone through. She still has the Kodak Carousel that portfolio came back in. She got to VSA by calling until somebody finally picked up.

In this episode, Alisa speaks with host Christian Solorzano about being a generalist among specialists, and about what it took to figure out how she actually wanted to work. She describes the stretch she spent working for herself and finding it lonely, and walking into Leo expecting a short freelance project.

The conversation turns on a question about polish. Alisa argues that almost nothing made for a brand reaches us unedited — that the images built to look like someone's bathroom have been edited too — and that designers have been standing right next to that since the beginning of advertising. She doesn't think that's cause for despair.

She also talks about what makes collaboration work, why she thinks happy is a weird word, the Chicago designers she came up around, and a project she once made about her own hair, with a line in the corner she remembers as "I take myself wherever I go."

Our next guest is Anne H. Berry — designer, writer, educator, and Director of the School of Design at the University of Illinois Chicago.

In this episode, Anne speaks with host Christian Solorzano about her path into design — how a middle school visit to a publishing house sparked something in her, and how that spark took years to find its footing. She's candid about the periods of doubt, a toxic early work environment, and the graduate school experience that finally brought everything together.

Anne discusses her two books — The Black Experience in Design and her upcoming Guiding Principles for Inclusive Design Values — and why both feel more urgent now than when she started them. She speaks directly about what design owes to democracy, the chilling effect of anti-DEI legislation on creative work, and why she believes designers cannot afford to sit on the sidelines.

The conversation also explores what brought Anne to Chicago, what sustains her on the hard days, and what it means to build a career rooted in service — to students, to the community, and to the people coming up behind her.

Anne will also be featured in the upcoming issue of Faculty, a publication by the Chicago Graphic Design Club.

Music by the band Eighties Slang.