Design Your Life with Vince Frost

What happens when you combine a love of design with a mind for business? For Ajaz Ahmed, it meant building one of the world’s most successful creative companies from scratch before starting all over again. 

Ajaz is the visionary founder of AKQA, the global digital agency that he grew to 5,000 staff across 30 countries. After three decades at the helm, he stepped down and launched Studio One, an agile new venture built fo...

Growing up in North London in the 80s, no one was talking about art or design. Life was about conversations with neighbours on the street, the good and the not so good. Four decades later, Paul Cocksedge’s work is grounded in these formative years. Known for his unorthodox approach to materials in works that span public art, sculpture and architectural installation, everything he designs is about human connection.

Paul founde...

When Elad Yifrach was growing up his art teacher mother would entertain he and his sisters by setting up art projects on their dining room table. It wasn’t long before his bedroom was home to stacks of magazines covered in sticky notes, and he was studying a unique architecture and interior design course at Technion, “kind of like the MIT of Israel”.

Yifrach is the Founder and Creative Director of L’OBJET, w...

Keith Hempel always knew he was going to be an architect. Growing up in Southern California with a creative mother and a technical father, he seemed destined for the vocation. A transformative, “eye opening” and “earth shattering” year studying the craft in Florence set him on his way.   

 Today, he helps lead a cohort of over 500 architects, engineers, landscape architects, interior designers and plann...

As a teenager, Dr Michael Brand experienced moving from Canberra to Washington as both traumatic and exciting. It was on a journey back to Australia via family in Nepal with his brother, they were aged 15 and 18 respectively, that he first experienced Islamic art. He can trace a direct line from that experience to his field of study and life’s work.

Brand has recently retired as Director of the Art Gallery of NSW, after guidi...

The question of living well is a big one. What does it actually mean? For Eva-Marie Prineas, home is where the heart is, and the way a home is planned has the most impact in how it feels to inhabit when it’s complete.

Prineas founded her eponymous architecture practice in 2004. Perhaps unsurprising considering she would sit in the back yard of her family home in suburban Sydney and sketch the roofline. Her background and pass...

Lily Froehlicher inherited a love of luxury from her mother and a passion for travel from her father—interests that shaped her desire to create beautiful experiences for others. After studying in Paris, Shanghai, and London, and gaining experience at Hermès and Chanel, she joined Invisible Collection at its inception.  

Now Managing Director, she leads the online platform connecting design lovers with handmad...

Once a music-obsessed kid dreaming of designing record covers, Chris Law found his rhythm in the world of sneakers. The iconic shoe designer, known by everyone who’s anyone in the sneaker world, shares how hip-hop culture, graphic design, and a love for storytelling led him to work on some of the most famous sneaker designs, ever. “Icons that are so big in the history of sneakers,” including the Adidas Superstar a...

Growing up in public housing on Roosevelt Island in the middle of New York City’s East River, Elie Gamburg went to sleep every night staring at the city’s remarkable skyline from his bedroom window. His father was an artist and his mother a mathematician, so, “I guess I sort of had to do architecture if nothing else.”  

Gamburg is a Design Principal at KPF, a global architecture firm known for designing...

As an architect, are you influenced by the environment you grew up in, even if your work looks vastly different to where you spent your formative years? John Pawson thinks so. He grew up in the north of England in the 1950s with his four sisters, playing with kids from houses around their family home. Despite being a master of minimalism, he grew up in a house that was quite the opposite. 

John Pawson CBE has spent over forty ...

Children of immigrants are often hard workers; they’re under pressure to live up to their parents’ dreams. And it’s often thought that creativity and hard work don’t go hand in hand.

Jean Lin has proven quite the opposite. Growing up in Massachusetts she was aware she came from a different place to her friends. But she credits her different upbringing, one focused on valuing family, hard work, integrity, wit...

Is it better to start a business with a fully fleshed out plan? Or can passion be the driver for success? In the case of George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg, intent is everything. And you can achieve global success and excellence in your field “while still being fun and nice”.

The partners in business and life founded their international creative design studio, Yabu Pushelberg, in 1980 with curiosity, passion and energy, a...

Does having a social agenda matter when you’re a landscape architect? At first, you may not think so. But when you truly understand the impact a compassionate designer can make on the spaces we inhabit, the answer is clear.

Sacha Coles is a Global Design Director at ASPECT Studios and founder of the design practice’s Sydney studio. As a global design influencer, Sacha leads projects of transformational change spanning p...

Being a change-maker in the humanitarian space is universally understood to be driven by the desire to help others. Equally, a love of travel and being motivated by difficult and hard to manage problems can be a huge benefit to working in the sector.

Thanks to parents who were avid travellers, and her childhood home in Massachusetts being filled with foreign exchange students, Jocelyn Wyatt grew up curious about the world. After co...

We’re kicking off the new year by hearing from two internationally acclaimed experts in data-driven cross-sector insights and global market intelligence. We hope the takeaways from this conversation helps set you up for a dynamic 2025.

When you’ve been in business together for 25 years, and life partners for 30, parameters are important. Almost as important as knowing the right parameters to put into your AI tool to get...

Designing sustainable tall buildings is no mean feat. Especially when the average lifespan of a commercial office building can be as little as 20 years.

Oliver Tyler, Managing Director of WilkinsonEyre, one of the world’s leading architecture firms, spends his time doing exactly that. Delivering projects like the Battersea Power Station redevelopment and the award winning 8 Bishopsgate building in London with engineering and ...

This 150th episode, part two, of Design Your Life coincides with the 30th anniversary of Frost*collective.

If you tuned in to Episode 150, you’ll know that over recent weeks, we’ve asked our audience to ask Vince anything. In this episode, you’ll hear his son Luca Frost ask Vince a selection of these questions and interview him about what motivated him to move his life and business to Australia, and the failures and successes along...

Welcome to episode 150! This week, we’re turning the mic on our host.

In a serendipitous turn of events, this 150th episode of Design Your Life coincides with the 30th anniversary of Vince Frost’s other baby, his strategic creative studio, Frost*collective.

Over recent weeks, we’ve asked our listeners and social media followers to ask Vince anything, and today his eldest son, Luca Frost, is in the interviewer’s chair.

If you’re not...

Collette Dinnigan has a storied history as one of Australia’s must successful fashion designers. Ever. But that’s just one chapter of her creative life. 

Her adventurous spirit and love of colour, fabric and proportion make total sense in the context of her childhood. In the mid 70s, her father built a yacht and set sail from Durbin, South Africa for the world with his young family. When they settled in New Zealand her creative mot...