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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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- 5 days ago1h 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.
- 2 weeks ago56 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.
- Mar 30, 20261h 37m
103 • HANNAH CORMIER
Our guest is Hannah Cormier, a visual and digital experience designer at One Design in Chicago.In this episode, Hannah speaks with host Christian Solorzano about a design origin story rooted in curiosity, sensory processing disorder, and early web culture. Adopted from China and raised by musician parents in rural Illinois, Hannah shares how the way her brain processes physical and digital environments became the foundation of her approach to systems-focused design.Hannah traces her path from a middle school design tech class to building and selling virtual goods on IMVU, freelancing in high school, and eventually finding her home at a Chicago design agency. She talks about what drew her to web and product design, what it means to design experiences that compassionately address the end user, and the value of getting comfortable with endless iteration and troubleshooting.The conversation also explores the future of interfaces — where invisible design works, where it breaks down, and why the threshold between invisibility and control is one of the most interesting problems in design today.Music by the band Eighties Slang.
- Mar 16, 20261h 1m
102 • ERIC HOTCHKISS
Our guest is Eric Hotchkiss, an interdisciplinary designer, engineer, and educator based in Chicago, and the founder of Made in Englewood — a design-build practice grounded in the belief that communities should shape their own spaces and tell their own stories.In this episode, Eric speaks with host Christian Solorzano about growing up in Englewood, where he and his friends made go-karts from garbage can axles, built clubhouses from construction site scraps, and figured out how to make nearly everything they needed. He reflects on how that upbringing — and a father who taught him to make things with his hands — quietly became the foundation for his entire practice.Eric talks about the origins of Made in Englewood, why he almost didn’t name it that, and what it really means to design with a community rather than for one. He shares how artifacts — murals, installations, basketball backboards nailed into alley walls — carry the stories of neighborhoods that history might otherwise overlook, and why that idea drives everything he makes.The conversation covers his work designing a youth-led miniature golf course in North Lawndale, his ongoing community work on Chicago’s South Side, and what’s coming next — an Afro-diasporic outdoor kitchen and gathering space he’s building in Englewood. Eric also opens up about what makes him angry, what inspires him, and why he thinks this moment — as uncertain as it is — might be exactly the right time to be making things.Music by the band Eighties Slang.
- Mar 2, 20261h 7m
101 • NIKA SIMOVICH FISHER
Our guest is Nika Simovich Fisher, a writer, designer, and educator based in New York City. A tenure-track Assistant Professor of Communication Design at Parsons School of Design, Nika directs the AAS program and researches how design shapes what people believe — politically, spiritually, culturally, and about themselves. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, WIRED, Fast Company, and AIGA Eye on Design, and she is the founder of Labud, a design studio working across fashion, publishing, and technology.In this episode, Nika speaks with host Christian Solorzano about her journey from publishing fiction on Neopets as a child to studying journalism at Columbia and building a practice that lives at the intersection of writing, design, and education. She shares how her research brings overlooked histories of the internet into contemporary conversations about technology, and why she believes the way things look is never just aesthetic — it's always political, always cultural, always telling you something about power.The conversation explores the early web as a space of genuine self-expression, what gets lost when platforms replace personal homepages, and how vernacular design — from MySpace customization to Trump's political merchandise — reveals more about culture than polished professional work ever could. Nika also speaks candidly about her daily writing practice, her Serbian immigrant identity, and the studio name that connects everything.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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