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.

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.

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.