Podcast Awesome

Episode Summary What happens when you give a world-class icon designer a dream brief with almost no boundaries? A brief existential crisis, and eventually a beautiful type-inspired icon packs for Font Awesome 7. 😅 In this episode, Matt and Jory chat with icon designer Laura Bohill about the making of Chisel — the wonderfully chunky icon pack she designed for Font Awesome 7. They get into the weird magic of creative constraints, why icon design is really just tiny-illustration puzzle solving, ...

AI makes it easier to build almost anything. So why does that make the job harder? In this episode, Matt sits down with Font Awesome founder Dave Gandy and engineer Travis Chase to get past the hype and into the real day-to-day of building with AI. The conversation covers what's actually changing on the team, where AI falls short, and what human skills matter more now than they did before. If you're a designer, developer, or anyone trying to figure out where you fit in a world where your outp...

Episode Summary What does it really take to ship something as powerful, polished, and downright magical as Web Awesome? In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt sits down with Lindsay and Cory, the dynamic duo behind the official launch of Web Awesome. Together, they peel back the curtain on how the team brought a customizable design system to life (without summoning any cursed CSS incantations). From the slick Theme Builder to the deeply thoughtful Figma integration, from production-ready ...

🧠 What do LEGO logos, hand-puppet dreams, citrus gadgets, and naming things "Turbo" have in common? They're all part of Dan Cederholm’s design universe — and part of this wide-ranging, joy-filled second half of our conversation. In this episode, Dan returns to talk about: • Embracing constraints as a creative fuel source • Naming fonts after misspelled words (because ... domains) • The delightful hellscape of naming anything in tech • Why imposter syndrome might actually be useful • An...

Build once, run everywhere. In this full-nerd, front-end-leaning episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt sits down with Zach Leatherman (creator of Eleventy) and Konnor Rogers (Web Awesome developer) to chat about how a static site generator just might be the key to building some of the most powerful, performant documentation on the web. We dig deep into Eleventy’s evolution, Web Awesome’s hybrid architecture, and how a team of devs found a way to keep docs fast, flexible, and secure — without rewr...

Have you ever rage-coded your way into building a developer tool that actually fixes things? Burton Smith has. And we’re here for it. In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt and Web Awesome's boss, Cory Laviska chat with Burton Smith. Burton is an open source wizard and creator of the Web Components Toolkit, and he tells us about the gap between the promise of Web Components and the messy reality devs often face. 💻 Burton’s toolkit bridges that gap like Gandalf on a DX bender. In this episod...

Designing Joy: Don Clark of Invisible Creature on Creativity, Collectibles & Culture In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt hangs out with legendary designer Don Clark of Invisible Creature to dive into the analog soul of digital design. From their punk rock roots and Grammy-nominated album covers to art directing for Seattle’s swankiest restaurant, Don and his brother Ryan have created work you’ve seen —whether you know it or not. They discuss growing up with a NASA illustrator grandpa...

Pork chop sandwiches!! 🫡 🏃‍♂️‍➡️ Gather round the interwebs young Gen Xers and Elder Millennials ... In this oddball solo episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt rewinds to the early 2000s and dives deep into the glitchy, glorious chaos of Fensler Film’s GI Joe PSA remixes — a series of bootleg web videos that helped shape meme culture as we know it. These gloriously low-res VHS-rip remixes mashed up 1980s GI Joe cartoon PSAs with absurdist humor, surreal voice dubbing, and non sequiturs that ...