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Underscore: Daily Summaries Delivered
by The Chicago Graphic Design Club
Underscore is a podcast by the Chicago Graphic Design Club that brings you conversations with Chicago’s creative community. On this podcast, host Christian Solorzano explores the craft, theory, and practice of graphic design, plus discusses ideas that cultivate a more inclusive and thoughtful creative community.
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- 1 weeks ago53 min
111 • JARRETT FULLER
Our guest is Jarrett Fuller, a designer, writer, educator, and host of the long-running podcast Scratching the Surface, based in Raleigh, North Carolina.In this episode, Jarrett speaks with host Christian Solorzano about how conversation became the organizing principle of his creative life — from growing up surrounded by a large, talkative extended family, to a journalist grandfather who taught him the difference between a closed question and an open one. He reflects on ten years and nearly 300 episodes of Scratching the Surface, what he's learned about listening, and why the questions keep multiplying rather than resolving.Jarrett shares his evolving relationship to graphic design — how he still claims the title even as the work has shifted toward writing, teaching, and podcasting — and why he believes the field has always been more expansive than the industry gives it credit for. He talks about the tension between design as a commercial discipline and design as a cultural practice, the homogenization of aesthetics in the age of AI, and what it means to make work that actually moves someone.The conversation also explores Jarrett's photography — his interest in the friction between the natural world and the built environment, returning to the same places over time, and the design sensibility that shapes how he frames an image. And he gives a preview of his forthcoming book, Graphic Designers After Graphic Design, a celebration of designers around the world redefining what the field can be — due out September 29th.Music by the band Eighties Slang.
- 3 weeks ago1h 4m
110 • JO-NELL SIEREN
Our guest is Jo-Nell Sieren, a photographer, designer, and educator who spent fifteen years at Columbia College Chicago before moving into her current role at Northwestern, where she focuses on industry strategy and connecting design and engineering students to employers.In this episode, Jo-Nell speaks with host Christian Solorzano about her path from studying photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York to building one of Columbia's most ambitious student programs — Agency Columbia, a studio that placed students in real client engagements with real deadlines. She shares how that experience of learning through doing, not just observing, shaped her entire philosophy as an educator.Jo-Nell talks candidly about what it actually takes to build confidence in students who don't yet believe in their own work, why she considers networking a design skill in its own right, and what a cohort of exhausted, overcommitted, fully present students taught her about resilience. She also reflects on the anxiety she feels watching AI reshape both the creative landscape and the job search — and what she hopes the next generation of designers holds onto.Music by the band Eighties Slang.
- Jun 22, 202657 min
109 • DANIEL SWARTZ
Our guest is Daniel Swartz — a letterpress designer, printer, and writer based in rural northern Indiana, where he runs Hoosier Type Company out of the back of his garage using antique wood type, vintage presses, and hand-mixed inks.This episode, Daniel sits down with host Christian Solorzano for a conversation that moves between his winding path from aspiring illustrator to graphic design educator to letterpress printmaker, the serendipitous gift of a printing press that started it all, and what it took to rebuild a creative practice from scratch after 2020. They talk about the relationship between digital and analog, the beauty of working within constraints, faith and humility as creative foundations, and what it means to make something that lasts beyond a file in the cloud.Music by Eighties Slang.
- Jun 8, 20261h 5m
108 • CASS POKORA
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.
- May 25, 202656 min
107 • MATTHEW HOFFMAN
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.
- May 11, 20261h 10m
106 • DEREK DESORMEAUX
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.
- Apr 27, 20261h 6m
105 • SARAH ADLER
Our guest is Sarah Adler, a multidisciplinary designer and artist originally from Sanibel Island, Florida, who moved to Chicago in 2016 to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently works as Brand Designer at Thatch and is the creative director of Gab Magazine, an independent Chicago publication now on its third issue.In this episode, Sarah speaks with host Christian Solorzano about her origin story — from building websites in fourth grade and leaving Florida at seventeen, to finding her footing as a designer in Chicago. She shares how working across mediums — logo design, web design, print, object design, and painting — has shaped her creative identity and why she's always resisted staying in one lane.Sarah discusses her hand-crafted, tactile approach to design and how analog processes find their way into her work even in a digital context. She speaks candidly about the creative process behind Gab Magazine, what draws her to print, and the role intuition plays in how she makes decisions as a designer and artist.The conversation also explores Sarah's personal history — including the discovery of her grandmother's legacy as a graphic designer in the 1930s. Sarah reflects on how that lineage quietly shaped her own path, and how her time at SAIC deepened a hands-on approach to making that runs through everything she does — from scanned textures and cut paper to the physical object of a printed magazine.Music by the band Eighties Slang.
- Apr 13, 20261h 3m
104 • LIAM GUIRITAN
Our guest is Liam Guiritan, a Chicago-based designer and creative coder who grew up being told there were only two career paths worth taking, and chose neither.In this episode, Liam speaks with host Christian Solorzano about how curiosity became his education — from taking apart his sister's Hello Kitty radio as a kid to teaching himself creative coding tools like p5.js and Processing after graduating from DePaul. He shares how stepping away from institutional structure gave him the freedom to experiment on his own terms, and why he believes real exploration only becomes meaningful when you give it boundaries.The conversation gets into what craft means when your medium is syntax, how Liam thinks about measuring growth through what he learned rather than what he produced, and why he draws more inspiration from design coming out of South Korea, Japan, and Switzerland than from what's happening closer to home.Liam also talks about performing live coding at an algorave in Chicago — an event where the code itself is the instrument — and why in an era of infinite digital surfaces, print is the thing giving him the most hope.Music by the band Eighties Slang.
About Underscore
Underscore is a podcast by the Chicago Graphic Design Club that brings you conversations with Chicago’s creative community. On this podcast, host Christian Solorzano explores the craft, theory, and practice of graphic design, plus discusses ideas that cultivate a more inclusive and thoughtful creative community.
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