Goldie Chan is the author of Personal Branding for Introverts, the founder of the social strategy agency Warm Robots, and the Huffington Post once called her the "Oprah of LinkedIn." She built that reputation kind of by accident. She started posting a daily video on LinkedIn as a way to push her introverted self to speak on camera. She then went on to post 800 consecutive daily videos between 2017 and 2019, long before AI made that kind of output easy.

In this conversation, Goldie takes us back to her biology degree from Stanford, a failed fashion brand, and an intervention from her friends that nudged her out of a depression and into a marketing job that shifted her focus. From there we get into the real substance of her work: the five C's of personal branding, why she thinks the stereotype that introverts are quiet is a myth, how she protects her energy, and the surprisingly playful daydreaming exercise she uses to help people figure out what they actually want. We also get into her side hustles, which includes producing films and writing Archie Comics, and a candid conversation about why she chose to share her cancer journey publicly.

This episode is for anyone building their personal brand or working in branding. It’s also for the introverts in the room who feel like the current playbook wasn't written for them.

Follow us on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit us online at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

Five years ago, Gabby Lord and Lauren Wong started a design studio because a friend joked that they should—and because Gabby was, by her own admission, extremely burnt out and looking for a way out of her work situation. Those aren't good reasons to start a company, and yet SUPER KEEN is succeeding by most metrics. They complete 20 to 35 projects a year, have found a work-life balance that works for them, and have built a reputation for delivering solid design and strategy work.

In this conversation, Gabby and Lauren walk me through the studio's early years. It was reactive, maybe a little chaotic, and included a website that instead of showing work, redirected prospective clients to a video of Tom Holland lip-syncing. They talk candidly about why they've kept Super Keen small despite pressure to grow, why they've published their studio's financials publicly every year, and how they're thinking about success.

This episode is for anyone questioning whether bigger is actually better. It’s for anyone feeling the pressure to scale—or to do things the way they’ve always been done.

Follow us on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit us online at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

Valentina D'Efilippo is equally comfortable immersed in science as she is in storytelling and graphic design. That tension has shaped nearly two decades of work translating dense, unwieldy datasets into visual stories: flowers standing in for a century of wars, a dandelion holding the shape of the #MeToo movement on Twitter.

A cold email from HarperCollins turned an early instinct for this kind of work into a profession—pairing her with data journalist James Ball on The Infographic History of the World, a book that's since sold in eleven languages and launched the career she now runs through her studio, Apostrophe One.

In this conversation, Valentina traces her path back to a graduate thesis on gender stereotypes in children's books. It was her first real data project, before she had a name for what she was doing. We talk about the responsibility of deciding what a dataset reveals and what it hides, and why she reaches for beauty and visual metaphor even when the numbers are devastating. She also opens up about revisiting her 2014 project Poppy Field last year: an analog visualization where each hand-painted mark represents a single Palestinian death, made largely in silence over sixteen hours and shared on Instagram.

This episode is for designers, journalists, and anyone who's ever had to decide how to represent a data set—and felt the weight of that choice.

Follow us on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit us online at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.