Millman - Why Design Matters : Conversations With the Worlds Most Creative People (9780062872982)

For my generous listeners around the world,

and to my wife, Roxane Gay,

who patiently

and ceaselessly

listens to me at home.

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Debbie Millman is one of the finest interviewers working today. She is, indeed, my wife, so you would expect me to believe in her unparalleled interviewing ability, but it also happens to be the truth. I married very well.

When you live with your partner, you learn a great deal about who they really are. I knew Debbie was passionate about her work and, especially, her longstanding podcast, Design Matters. And then we started living together. I saw just how ferociously committed she is to having genuine, probing conversations with some of the worlds most creative people.

Debbie is voraciously curious and loves research. She spends hours a day in the weeks leading up to an interview learning everything she can about a guest. She studies their previous interviews. She unearths seemingly innocuous details about their early lives and careers. She reads everything theyve written or that has been written about them, taking copious notes. And then she sifts through everything she has learned, drafting questions and determining the shape of the conversation she hopes to have. By the time she finally sits down with her guests in her studio at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Debbie Millman is ready to guide anyone through one of the most engaging conversations of their lives. She settles in her seat, notes in hand. As she crosses her legs, her voice lowers to a huskier register, and for the next hour or two, she treats her interview subject like the most interesting person in the world. And in that time, they are.

A good interview is much harder than it looks. When a notable person has achieved enough acclaim to be interviewed, they are asked a lot of the same questions about who they are and how they work and what they think. They develop a slate of standard responses because it is rare to be asked the unexpected question. It is that unexpected question Debbie most loves asking. Theres a reason she prepares and then overprepares for her conversations. In every Design Matters interview, there is a moment where her subject expresses genuine surprise about some detail of their lives she has unearthed. Or they reveal a tender vulnerability she elicits from them with grace, care, and patience. It is always that moment when her interview evolves from good to great, from interesting to utterly compelling.

Design Matters has been in continuous production for more than sixteen years. Over that time Debbie has spoken with the worlds foremost designers, public intellectuals, artists, writers, and creatives. She initially created the podcast to have a creative outlet divorced from her professional vocation as a brand expert and designer. She was interested in what it means to design a creative life, but over the past sixteen years the Design Matters project has expanded as her skill has sharpened. She has created a gloriously interesting and ongoing conversation about what it means to live well, overcome trauma, face rejection, learn to love and be loved, and thrive both personally and professionally. She has spoken to people about their crowning achievements and lowest moments. She has amassed more than four hundred and fifty interviews at this point, and each and every one is unique. From her first interview, with designer and creative director John Fulbrook, until now, Debbie Millman has become a singular voice in the world of intimate, enlightening conversations. She has demonstrated, time and again, why design matters .

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Debbie Millman is my sister from another mister.

Then again, thats probably how a lot of her guests feel.

She first interviewed me on a crisp November night in 2016. The School of Visual Arts signage drew me off the streets of Manhattan, and as soon as I sat down in her recording studio, I knew things were going to be different.

First, the layout makes you feel like a child emperor, coveted zoo animal, or perhaps the first Martian to visit Earth. Her recording studio is a walled-off eight-by-twelve-foot sound booth within a larger classroom, and speakers pipe the audio outside. There is a huge window on one side so that students can look inside, and that early evening perhaps twenty-five students filled chairs in the room. That turns on all the lights of the mind.

Second, I noticed my books on a desk at her side, filled with more Post-it notes and bookmarks than I thought humanly possible. That made me excited to go deep.

Third, as I looked into Debbies eyes, I felt an emotional phase shift: I was now inside the protective shell. This was her home and her safe place. The literal dark of winter had enveloped the building, but I felt like Id been wrapped in a warm blanket. Everything seemed softer around the edges, and I let out tension I wasnt even aware that I carried. Debbie smiled, and our breathing seemed to sync.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Debbie works. Shes very witchy with her setup.

Her prep and poise produce contagious calm around the mic. This zone extends out in a good thirty-foot radius, so interviewees and students alike fall under the spell. Once she hits record, the prompts trickle out one by one like well-trained ballerinas. It has a powerful momentum but feels unrushed, and the stage and the story arc are only fully visible at the end. Its beautiful.

Sounds pretty nice, eh? It is, and I assure you: it aint easy to make such a dance work when youre in Debbies chair. Its fucking hard as hell.

Our session was in the middle of week one of my book launch, and I was in press junket purgatory. Doing twenty-five-plus interviews per day exposes you to the full spectrum of hosts, and 99 percent of them ask the same five to ten questions. To survive the monotony, every author develops an autopilot mode. Its like your head becomes a ventriloquists monkey puppet, and you can recite all your polished sound bites while simultaneously thinking about chocolate or sleep or margaritas.

With Debbie, there was no autopilot. It was like driving the winding and hypnotic coastline of California on Highway 1. I was fully engaged and could not waver. Throughout the experience, the thought that popped into my head repeatedly was: Im not here today to be interviewed. Im here today to watch Debbie.

Yep, shes that good. Even the most jaded, world-weary traveler cannot help but feel that they are the only person in the world when Debbie is sitting across from them. And to her, for those 90 to 120 minutes, they truly are the only person in the world.

That singular, empathic attention is a rare gift to the world .

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My first two decades working in design and branding are what I regularly refer to as my years of rejection and failure. Over and over again I attempted to find a way to bring together my love of the visual and the written word. I applied to the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, but my application was soundly rejected. My father had attended Columbia University, and in that moment, my opportunity to follow in his academic footsteps vanished. I was rejected from the Whitney Museum of Art Independent Study Program. I was rejected for a job at Vanity Fair working for design director Charles Churchward. At the far-less-interesting jobs I did get, I dealt with all manner of messy workplace politics and the kind of sexual harassment men rarely answered for. But I was also relentless in pursuing my ambition, working to become a better designer, and then a better brand strategist, and then a better leader. Twenty years into my career, I became more successful than Id ever imagined: I was one of the few women in the United States running a global branding consultancy, Sterling Brands.