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.

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.

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.