Design, creativity, and a new season of Wireframe

$Hilton Carter and Kyle Webster Help Plant Man P Design for a Split Audience: Jon’s business, Plant Man P, is a melding of his two passions: streetwear and houseplants. It’s a unique combination, but it means that Jon’s audience is fractured: the houseplant crowd don’t resonate as much with his streetwear posts, and vice versa. As a result, Jon is stumbling through efforts to design great content. Should he try to please everyone, all the time? Or can we help him find a design strategy to hone in on his target audience?$

Ellen Bennett and Schessa Garbutt Help Latinx Therapy's Founder Refresh Her Brand: Therapist Adriana Alejandre is great at helping patients refresh their mindsets and improve their mental health. But when it comes to her own branding, she feels stuck in the past and just stuck creatively. Her mental health org, Latinx Therapy, has grown in leaps and bounds since it was founded in 2018, and it’s time for a branding update. Khoi’s challenge today is helping Adriana feel inspired to create a new look that represents the breadth of the Latinx population and herself, so Latinx Therapy can move with confidence and clarity into its next stage. by Wireframe

23 min listen

Chris Do and Elaine Lopez Teach Juliana Cifuentes How to Educate Homebuyers: Juliana’s social media content is, as she says, a mess. The color, typeface, and style are inconsistent, and her message is getting lost. As a realtor, she finds great satisfaction working with first-time homebuyers, and she wants to be an educational resource for her clients online, making the process of home ownership less intimidating. But the process of designing engaging educational content on her social feeds overwhelms her. If Juliana wants to teach her clients about the market, she needs lessons on how design can help. by Wireframe

23 min listen

Courtney Quinn and Brandon Groce Help Will on a Whim Rethink His Website: Will Humphrey, aka Will on a Whim, grew up in foster care where none of his foster parents knew how to care for his natural hair. So he’s on a mission to change that for the next generation, creating funny, lively hair content on Youtube and Tiktok. And he’s really good at it - to quote one of our guests from this episode, Will’s content is “fire.” But his website, where he sells the merch to fund this mission, is a different story. Or, rather, it doesn’t tell much of a story at all. It’s functional but sparse, and doesn’t properly represent Will’s brand, energy, or purpose. So the challenge today is to help Will see a new vision for his website - and then build it himself. by Wireframe

22 min listen

This is Wireframe: Designed for Small Business: This season, we zoom in on how good design supports the small businesses we believe in. Khoi Vinh, our series host and Adobe senior director of design meets six young entrepreneurs struggling to brand their small business. He pairs them with successful creators who share secrets to designing content that gets noticed. And then Khoi connects with a professional designer and swaps design ideas to help empower our entrepreneurs, and our listeners, to level-up their design chops. This season is supported by Adobe Express - a new web and mobile app that helps anyone create great content from thousands of templates. Learn more about the podcast at adobe.ly/wireframe. (All six entrepreneurs appearing in this season are part of Adobe’s CoCreate program.) by Wireframe

2 min listen

Why We Love to Hate Comic Sans and the Return of Fonts with Personality: If Comic Sans showed up at a house party, would it be welcome or shown the door? In this episode, the Wireframe team parties down with a wild array of fonts, good and bad, to learn about the rise of novelty typefaces like Comic Sans and the proliferation of the now all-too-familiar geometric sans serif typeface. They’ll find out what the popularity of these fonts says about how we think about the role of typography in today’s world. by Wireframe

28 min listen

How do designers use data visualization to take the numb out of numbers?: Do you know what “flatten the curve” means? If so, it’s likely in part due to the hard work by data visualization designers over the last year. Our society is now more data driven than ever; as everything is quantified, counted, and dumped into spreadsheets, and it’s easy to be overwhelmed by numbers. Data visualization designers work to sort through the numbers using both science and creativity to find the stories they have to tell, and help us understand the world a little better. But what goes into designing an effective data visualization, and how do you balance the art and the science of it? by Wireframe

21 min listen