I'm away this week, so rather than giving a summer update backed by the soothingly persistent rumble of a hotel air conditioner, I thought I’d share a straight-up rerun—though one inspired by our sister Portland art school (and, of course, hated rivals) PNCA hosting her for a recent talk as part of their Design Lecture Series.

Way back in 2022 as part of season 3, Olivia Johnson (then an Associate Design Director at Instrument, now a Senior Product Designer at eBay) joined Sean to talk challenging Barbies, Neopets Black Friday, and what Elvis had been up to.

If you want to watch Olivia’s talk, you can find it on the PNCA Live Video YouTube channel (for your convenience, I’ve linked straight to her introduction a few minutes into the video). You can find Olivia’s work on Instagram @o_j.co, for just her handcrafted data viz work (mentioned both here and in the PNCA talk) onto its own Instagram @handcharted. If you want to learn how to make your own textile-based data visualizations, Olivia’s self-paced online course “Data Visualization with Alternative Mediums” is available on Domestica. Too, if textile work is new to you, the course also includes an introduction to cross-stitch! Give it a download!

This episode was originally published July 27, 2023.

Thank you to all who came out to share stories at our Design Confessional at the Future Fonts & Friends event in Portland, and who attended our live “Bottom of the Barrel” event at Seattle Design Festival! Special shout out to the great Colby Nichols and Sean Bucknam for being a part of it. Both those recordings will hit this feed in the near future, so keep eyes out for it! If you'd rather experience the latter in video, though, your wait is already over: Seattle Design Festival has posted the full thing, slides and all, for you to view on their YouTube channel! Please feel free to pause and marvel my Tiger Beat cover—I put so much more time into it than I should've that maybe I should be directed to a medical professional.