The Funsize Show

Juliana Vislova is the VP of Design at Mercury, an all-in-one banking platform for startups. A former linguistics major, Juliana is career switcher who spent time as an art director for a digital marketing agency before her design career. After moving to the U.S., she stumbled upon product design and immediately loved its intersection of pscyhology, art, storytelling and problem-solving. Her design path has taken her from the found...

During our party for SXSW 2022, we interviewed designers and tech workers to understand how their careers were affected by the pandemic and what it means for their futures. We'd like to extend a huge thanks to Johnny Abowd, Carlos Menchaca, Dina Williams, Ali Metall, AC Cowart, Steven Parvaresh, Rick Messer, Isabelle Encela, Steven Ray and Katy Beightol for sharing their perspectives on this unique episode. 

In this episode we cover...

Brian Peterson is a a multidisciplinary creator supporting, connecting, and empowering organizations through strategic design. Brian’s background is in fine arts with a brief stint in animation/illustration. His path to design has taken him through freelance visual design, to a founding team startup, to the design studio at Funsize. Currently, he leads design teams at Affirm, where he works to bring honest financial products to the...

Kevin Hawkins is the director of product design at BookClub—an online platform that brings authors and readers together. He is also an award-winning, multi-disciplinary design leader and educator with over 12 years of experience building communities and launching products.

Kevin is a self-taught front-end developer and started his career doing freelance web design for local businesses and science NGOs in his home town: Washington D....

Michael Holzer is the director of UX at Google Payments and has been at Google for over eight years. He is a passionate, entrepreneurial design leader currently focused on building and operating large-scale creative teams working on new mediums and technologies.

Michael grew up in Silicon Valley and started his career studying mechanical engineering and industrial design by prototyping bicycle helmets for Bell Sports. After dropping...

Alli Metall is a husband, father, and designer living in Reykjavík, Iceland. He was born in Húsavík, Iceland--a small town on the northern coast (also famed as the setting of Netflix's Eurovision Song Contest). He began his career playing guitar in death metal and jazz bands and soon combined his interests in music and computer games to a career in design. After a brief agency stint as an intern in New York City, he returned home t...

Aaron “Ron” Irizarry, is the Sr. Director, Servicing Platforms Design at Capital One. He loves all things user experience, problem-solving, and design process. Having worked for Fox/IGN, HP, Nasdaq, and now Capital One, Aaron loves sinking his teeth into complex problems. In addition to his day job, Aaron speaks at events and provides training for companies on design team structure, communication, and collaboration. He is also the ...

In this first episode with Tony Sanchez as an official co-host, we were honored to be joined by a design legend. 

Toke Nygaard is the Chief Creative Officer at Zendesk. With more than 20 years of experience designing digital experiences, Toke Nygaard oversees Zendesk’s brand and product UX/UI. In this role, he is constantly developing and building the Zendesk brand with his global team of passionate creatives, keeping the product ex...

For the last episode recorded in 2020, we flip the spotlight onto our founders, Anthony and Natalie Armendariz, to walk us through the challenging, chaotic and — at times — exciting journey that was 2020. In a year that provided surprises and obstacles for just about every human being on the planet, we wanted to tell our agency's part of the story. We hope you enjoy.

We cover:

• Our mindset going into 2020
• Business and culture goals...

Ted Boda is currently a Product Design Manager on the Well-Being team at Instagram. He is also a former Director of Design at Udacity, former Senior Designer at Nest Labs, former Lead Mobile Designer at Netflix and a former Lead UI Designer for Keynote at Apple (where, interestingly enough, he worked on some of the slides used for Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth). With all that experience to draw on, we loved having Ted on the show...

Margaret Lee is the Director of UX Community & Culture at Google. A self-described "reluctant leader," she heads up programs that unite departments across the company and create Google career opportunities for those who might not typically have access. Margaret created this role for herself a few years ago when she noticed there was an opportunity to put more intention behind efforts of inclusion and community within Google. After ...

Braden Kowitz is a former design partner at Google Ventures, where he had the opportunity to work with startups like ClassPass, Gusto, Slack, Medium, Flatiron Health, TuneIn, BlueBottle Coffee, 23andMe, One Medical Group, HubSpot, RetailMeNot, Nest and more.  He is the co-author of NY Times Best Seller, Sprint, and the co-founder of Range, a tool that keeps teams connected and productive. We're extremely grateful to Braden for shar...

Douglas Ferguson is an entrepreneur and human-centered technologist with over 20 years of experience. He is the founder and president of Voltage Control, an Austin-based facilitation agency that specializes in helping teams work better together through participatory decision making and design inspired facilitation techniques. He has helped transform teams from U.S. SOCOM, the Air Force, Adobe, Dropbox, Fidelity, Vrbo, Liberty Mutua...

In a first for The Hustle, we're tackling important subject matter outside the realm of design. In a conversation led by our Guest Host, Tony Sanchez, a Design Lead at Funsize, Chas Moore joined us to discuss the public outcry and wave of activism in the wake of George Floyd's murder. Chas is the Executive Director of Austin Justice Coalition, an activist-led organization that educates and builds community power for people of color...

Note: We apologize for the audio quality. There was an issue with the microphone.

Justin is a multi-faceted, multi-pierced, multi-tattooed designer, author, and speaker. He wrote the book "Cultivating a Creative Culture", is the Vice President of Human-Centered Design and Development at bswift, the founder of The Dead Pixel Society, and a contributor to A List Apart. Justin had some really intuitive viewpoints on culture that were a...

Funsize friend, Chad Engle, is the Product Design Director at GoDaddy, a company that is rapidly expanding its product offerings and leaning into design with a focus on in-house talent.  He stopped by to share his experience growing design orgs, explain what he looks for in applicants, and provide some insight into how he approaches leadership.

We cover:

• Growing a design practice at GoDaddy
• Transitioning from designer to Design Ma...

Note: We recorded this one before COVID began, so some references (like to our SXSW party) did not come to fruition.

Theo Strauss is an 18-year-old product designer out of NYC who's already making waves in the community through his involvement with companies like Apple, Postmates, and Figma. As someone on the bleeding edge of a new generation of designers, we loved having him on the show to share some of his thoughts on where the in...

Note: We apologize for the audio quality. There was an issue with the microphone.

Ash Huang is a designer, illustrator, author, speaker, artist and parent who currently works at Adobe. After finding design at a young age, Ash's career has spanned a wide variety of well-known companies and different pursuits that have left her with some fascinating views on accomplishment, progress, staying curious and more. It took us a while to get...

Helen Tran is a designer, CEO, hobbyist writer, traveler and macaroon connoisseur (amongst other things). In this wide-ranging episode, we discuss everything from software design, business ownership and bodybuilding, to wealth and weird Texan habits.

We cover:

• Growing with Shopify
• Paying dues before taking big career risks
• Figuring out what to pursue and deciding to start Jupiter
• Why there's no such thing as "business vs. personal"
• L...