Design Better

Tom Foley didn’t set out to design typefaces. As a postgraduate student at Central Saint Martins in London, he was researching why Ireland, unlike Switzerland, the Netherlands, or Germany, never seemed to have a confident typographic voice of its own.

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The answer led him through centuries of colonial history, to a so-called “Irish type” invented during the Reformation to make printed scripture look the way outsiders thought Irish readers would want it to look, and back further still, to fifth-century monks who may have given us the first true lowercase letters and the word space. The best response to that research, Tom realized, was a typeface. He called it Nib, and it now lives on Dublin’s heritage plaques.

That mix of deep research and hands-on craft has defined his career since. Tom worked on the first phase of Netflix Sans, a typeface you may see every day and probably never notice. At Monotype, he rose to Executive Creative Director and led custom work like the National Portrait Gallery’s contemporary serif. This year he walked away from that role to become Creative Type Director at Studio DRAMA, because he wanted to get back to making type.

We talk about how cultural context shapes letterforms, how to balance heritage with something that feels modern, and Tom’s practical framework for pairing typefaces, which starts with calligraphic roots and vertical metrics rather than vibes. We also get into why he left a prestigious executive role, how a childhood struggle with reading may have sharpened his eye for letters, and the books and typefaces he thinks every designer should know.

Bio

Tom Foley is Creative Type Director at Studio DRAMA in London, where he designs custom typefaces for brands. He was previously Executive Creative Director at Monotype, where his work included a custom serif for the National Portrait Gallery and his typeface Cotford. Before that, he spent years at Dalton Maag, working on multi-script projects for Nokia and the first phase of Netflix Sans. Tom came to type design through research: his postgraduate thesis at Central Saint Martins on Irish typographic history produced Nib, the typeface now used on Dublin City Council’s heritage plaques.

Short version: Tom Foley is Creative Type Director at Studio DRAMA in London and former Executive Creative Director at Monotype. His work spans custom typefaces for Netflix, Nokia, and the National Portrait Gallery.

Links:

Website (Studio DRAMA): studio-drama.com

Monotype Profile (archived): monotype.com/studio/tom-foley

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tom-foley-75062158

Instagram: tom_foley_type

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Kevin Flores has been part of the Design Better community for years — we first met him in 2017, while he was leading design at 23andMe, back when we were researching how design teams are structured for the Design Genome Project. So it’s a real pleasure to finally have him on the show to talk about his new book, Find Your Inner Rebel.

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The book is built around what Kevin calls his punk rock formula for career reinvention: resistance plus resilience equals reinvention. But don’t mistake the attitude for advice to quit your job. Kevin is candid that sometimes the smartest move is to hunker down, keep working toward change from where you are, and be ready when it comes, whether you choose it or it’s chosen for you.

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We talk about why strong generalists struggle to get hired (and how to fix it), why your personal brand matters more than ever when you’re competing against hundreds of applicants, and a simple test for your portfolio’s opening statement: swap in someone else’s name and photo and see if it still works.

As Kevin puts it, “you are the unique thing in the equation.” We also get into misalignment burnout, why designers should look beyond big tech to places like local government, and servant leadership.

Bio

Kevin Flores is a design leader, mentor, and author of Find Your Inner Rebel. He has built and led product and design teams in every work environment: agency, freelance, startup, and mid-to-large companies, including Verizon, 23andMe, and LinkedIn. He and his wife Jeanine met as design undergraduates at the University of Illinois and went on to co-found an interactive agency in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, and together they co-wrote the Design Career Handbook. Kevin spent six years as a mentor in First Round Capital’s Fast Track program, and serves as an industry advisor for design and user research for the Mission College Design and Diablo Valley College Digital Media joint advisory board. Learn more at innerrebelbook.com.

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In graduate school, Randy Hunt poured his heart and soul into a poster for Milton Glaser’s class, a picture built entirely from hand lettering that read as an image from across the room and as words up close. Glaser glanced at it, said, “Well, that’s not very good,” and moved on to the next student.

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Randy tells that story fondly. What stayed with him wasn’t the sting but the standard: keep the floor high, and the ceiling keeps rising. He carried that idea from Glaser’s studio, where he apprenticed, through a career leading design at Etsy, at Grab in Singapore, and until recently at Notion.

At Notion, that standard meant a design team smaller than anyone would expect, on purpose. Randy argues that limited bandwidth forces a company to prioritize, and that great people have little patience for what he calls “the work around the work.” The team doesn’t talk about titles or levels. Designers ship code in the production app, something Randy built teams around at Etsy in 2010, long before “design engineer” came back into fashion.

We also get into what he calls “whole design,” which means treating a push notification with the same care as the main dashboard. He explains why hotels and restaurants inspire him as much as any software, and traces that back to growing up near Disney’s carefully spaced trash cans in Orlando and to the bowl of fresh fruit that always sat in Glaser’s studio.

Bio

Randy J. Hunt is a designer, artist, and author based in New York City, with more than 20 years of experience building products, brands, and businesses. Most recently, he was Head of Design at Notion. He also chairs the MFA Design program at the School of Visual Arts, a graduate program focused on entrepreneurial designers. Earlier, he led design at Etsy, Artsy, and Grab, co-founded the designer-made marketplace Supermarket, and served as Chief Product Officer at the coffee-tech company Morning. He apprenticed at Milton Glaser's studio, founded the design studio Citizen Scholar, and wrote Product Design for the Web (New Riders, 2013).

Books & Links

Randy Hunt on LinkedIn

randyjhunt.com

The Hunt

Design Week: “A lot of this is about rituals”

MiltonGlaser.com

The Creative Act, by Rick Rubin

Johnny Cash Project

Julia Hoffman

Tequila Wars: José Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico

Widow’s Bay

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When Aarron was fresh out of grad school, working at an agency outside Philadelphia, he and his coworkers used to crowd around a monitor to study volumeone.com. Most websites back then had a picture, maybe an image map. Matt Owens’s site had 3D, animation, and experimental graphic design, and none of us could figure out how he made it.

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Matt launched Volumeone.com in 1997, and it now sits in SFMOMA’s permanent collection. Before that, he was a skater and punk kid from Texas who ran a record label with his twin brother, then went to Cranbrook and landed in New York just as the web took off. In 2004, he and a few friends rented an old boxing gym in Williamsburg and kept the word on the door: Athletics. Today it’s a 30-person brand studio working with Google, IBM, Stripe, and Major League Soccer.

We talked with Matt about how punk rock taught him to start things without overthinking them, what designers lost when Flash died, and how Athletics grew from a punk house into a proper agency. He explains why he calls himself the studio’s most capable intern and still takes on projects of his own to keep his skills sharp.

We also get into how his team uses AI as one ingredient rather than the whole recipe, and why good creatives can smell polished slop. We wrap up with his book, A Visible Distance, and the rebel optimism he passes on to his students at SVA.

Bio

Matt Owens is co-founder and Chief Design and Innovation Officer at Athletics, a Brooklyn brand studio whose clients include Google, IBM, Stripe, Square, and Major League Soccer. He holds a BFA from UT Austin and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. From 1997 to 2009 he self-published the experimental design quarterly Volumeone.com, now in SFMOMA’s permanent collection. He is the author of A Visible Distance: Craft, Creativity, and the Business of Design (Set Margins, 2024), teaches at the School of Visual Arts, and writes on Substack. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.

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⁠Get design and career support in Design Club⁠

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Blaine Billingsley is a staff designer at OpenAI, and his path there was anything but a straight line. He studied music composition and comparative religion, played guitar in Texas for a living (he remembers checking his bank account, seeing seven dollars, and feeling pumped), then drove to San Francisco and took a data entry job at a startup.

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The engineers taught him to script his way through the work in a couple of hours, and he spent the rest of the day learning from them. From there he went on to companies big and small, including a long run on Gmail.

Blaine has an allergy to corporate jargon that we found interesting. He’s known amongst his colleagues for rewriting product specs to get absolute clarity on a project, and for raising his hand in meetings to ask, “what do we really mean by ‘create a command center for work’”.

We talk about why a design principle only helps if you could reasonably disagree with it, and his counterintuitive advice for working with a pushy PM: the best way to have influence is to be influenced.

Then we get into how design actually works inside OpenAI. Blaine walks us through what goes into an eval, and the product design plugin he built with one engineer, whose biggest fans turned out to be the PMs and engineers who were starved for a design partner.

Bio

Blaine Billingsley is a member of the design staff at OpenAI, where he works on making ChatGPT a daily tool for designers and built a product design plugin focused on translation workflows like image-to-code. Before OpenAI, he was a Product Design Architect at Slack and a Staff Experience Designer at YouTube, and earlier held design roles at Airbnb, where he created a system of Host Guides, and Google, where he worked on Inbox by Gmail.

He was also the sole designer at Pattern Technologies, an AI-powered sales startup acquired by Workday. Blaine studied music composition and comparative religion, played guitar professionally in Texas, and got his start in tech doing data entry at a San Francisco startup. He's known for his allergy to jargon, his love of a clear process, and his belief that a designer's job is to represent the user.

Books & links mentioned

Show notes

Blaine Billingsley

blaineb

Blaine Billingsley — Design Mentor

@blaineranium

The Systems Bible

The OpenAI Product Design Plugin

Mid-air Thief

Vargamae: Volume I of the Truth and Justice Pentalogy

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This is a premium episode on Design Better. We release two premium episodes per month, along with two free episodes for everyone.

New premium subscriber benefit:

Weekly Portfolio Club calls this summer helped our paid subscribers build portfolios that land great jobs. Experts joined us weekly to provide feedback, and we compiled lessons from each session into a portfolio design guide.

We’ve launched a private Slack workspace…join now to connect with designers, product leaders & creative practitioners in our community.

And get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes.

Premium subscribers get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show.

And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further.

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