300: Looking Back on 300 Episodes

Design Details

This week we reflect on 300 episodes of Design Details. We recount the origin story, answering listener questions as we go about how we've managed to maintain the schedule for so long, the high and low points, and future plans for the podcast. And as always, we share a couple cool things like a new music discovery app and Marshall's favorite book of all time.

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Follow-up:

• Brian watched Survivor - and liked it! Jeff Probst, vampire?
  • Survivor, Edge of Extinction is the most recent game mechanic in the Survivor-verse.
• Brian and Gabriel Valdivia went to see The Late Show - good times were had.

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WWDC Hot Takes:

• Brian is most excited for Project Catalyst, the real name for last year's Marzipan announcement.
• The new Mac Pro is silly. The price of the Pro Display XDR is even sillier.
• Marshall is excited for too many things:
  • New semantic colors that handle dark mode automatically.
  • iOS 13 will block spam calls automatically
  • iOS 13 gets a native swipe keyboard, years after Gboard's implementation.
  • SwiftUI is a new declarative way to build iOS applications. It is very exciting, indeed.

Reflecting on 300 episodes of Design Details

• Design Details was originally a blog. The post for Facebook Paper became popular and led to many more posts in the following months.
• Bryn Jackson and Brian co-hosted Design Details for 256 episodes.
• The full Design Details archive is available for all to hear! We have recommended starting episodes and you can search for the "Best-of" compilation episodes.
• Early episodes, like Episode 3 with Wilson Miner were critical for setting the tone of the show.
• Sarah Marie, and recently Drew Luper, have been editing and producing every episode of Design Details. The show wouldn't be possible without them, and their work is the reason our audio sounds so good. Thank you Sarah and Drew!
• Aaron Miller and Joshua Shao asked how we keep the show going every week, and what it takes to pull off the weekly release schedule.
• Eileen Wong asked if there were ever times we wanted to give up, or what the low points were of recording Design Details.
• Tom Moor asked if any life-changing connections were made through the show.
  • Tea Chang's episode was great example of changing how Marshall thought about interviewing guests.
  • Episode 23 with Christophe Tauziet helped Brian get his foot in the door at Facebook.
• Leo asked if we are planning on bringing back old guests to follow up on their progress as designers.
  • We like the idea of doing followup interviews similar to Vanity Fair's interview with Billie Eilish recorded one year apart.
• Hari asked what episodes we would recommend a new listener start with. Here are our top ten episodes (by download count):
  • 143: Design Systems: So Hot Right Now ft. Karri Saarinen
  • 197: Chillaphobia ft. Rachel Been
  • 271: Principles of Design
  • 169: Invisible Unicorns ft. Maykel Loomans
  • 178: Best of 2016 (Part 1)
  • 163: Guardrails ft. Ben Wilkins
  • 111: Claim to Flame ft. Vicki Tan
  • 166: Ambient Struggles ft. May-Li Khoe & Andy Matuschak
  • 168: Auto Goats ft. Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk
  • Whitespace Friends ft. Lori Kaplan
• Design Picnic is a new design podcast specifically for Thai designers

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One Cool Thing:

• Brian shared Spotify Stations, a new standalone app from Spotify to help curate new radio playlists. We muse whether this is simply a faster surface to explore new UI and interaction patterns that might someday make their way back to the main app.
• Marshall shared Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, a cyberpunk-genre book which takes place in a dystopian future was published in 1992.

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Design Details on the Web:

• We are @designdetailsfm
  • Brian is @brian_lovin and [e-mail]
  • Marshall is @marshallbock
  • @Sarahberus and @Luperdev make us sound smarter than we are
• Join the conversation on Spectrum or leave us a review on iTunes

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BYEEEEE!