Show Notes
Jonathan Adler was one of our favorite guests, so we’ve been angling to get him back ever since. He started as a potter and now designs furnishings and interiors that are decadent, but layered with meaning and humor. A lot has happened since we last spoke: he had a retrospective at the Museum of Arts and Design — the same institution whose gift shop took a chance on his pots 32 years ago — and launched a sprawling collaboration with Michaels, which he calls a temple of craft.
Find bonus content and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/jonathan-adler-returns
We talk with Jonathan about what it felt like to stop making long enough to curate three decades of his own work, why he’s grateful he chose commerce over the gallery world, and whether people really are trading doomscrolling for making things with their hands.
Along the way, we talk about his father, the lawyer who painted — and why the maximalist you think you know insists he’s a minimalist. Also, much like our last conversation with Jonathan, there are some instances of adult language and humor, so if you have kids around it might be a good idea to throw on some headphones.
Bio
Potter, designer, and author Jonathan Adler launched his namesake brand after leaving his day job to pursue his first love: pottery. In 1993, Barneys bought his collection of pots, and five years later, he opened his first store in Soho.
Today, Jonathan Adler is a design company with retail locations worldwide, a thriving e-commerce site, a full slate of residential and commercial projects, and a global wholesale business. They strive to create luxe and livable interiors that are seriously designed, but don’t take themselves too seriously. Earlier this year, the Museum of Arts and Design mounted a retrospective of his work, presented in dialogue with pieces he curated from the museum’s own collection. He lives in New York with his husband, the writer Simon Doonan.
***
Premium Episodes on Design Better
This ad-supported episode is available to everyone. If you’d like to hear it ad-free, upgrade to our premium subscription, where you’ll get an additional 2 ad-free episodes per month (4 total). Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. New premium subscriber benefit: we’ve launched a private Slack workspace…join now to connect with designers, product leaders & creative practitioners in our community.
And get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes.
You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further.
Upgrade to paid
***
Visiting the links below is one of the best ways to support our show:
Masterclass: MasterClass is the only streaming platform where you can learn and grow with over 200+ of the world’s best. People like Steph Curry, Paul Krugman, Malcolm Gladwell, Dianne Von Furstenberg, Margaret Atwood, Lavar Burton and so many more inspiring thinkers share their wisdom in a format that is easy to follow and can be streamed anywhere on a smartphone, computer, smart TV, or even in audio mode. MasterClass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. Head over to http://masterclass.com/designbetter for the current offer.
If you’re interested in sponsoring the show, please contact us at: [email protected]
If you’d like to submit a guest idea, please contact us at: [email protected]
Lea
More from Design Better
Tom Foley didn’t set out to design typefaces. As a postgraduate student at Central Saint Martins in London, he was researching why Ireland, unlike Switzerland, the Netherlands, or Germany, never seemed to have a confident typographic voice of its own.
Kevin Flores has been part of the Design Better community for years — we first met him in 2017, while he was leading design at 23andMe, back when we were researching how design teams are structured for the Design Genome Project. So it’s a real pleasure to finally have him on the show to talk about his new book, Find Your Inner Rebel.
In graduate school, Randy Hunt poured his heart and soul into a poster for Milton Glaser’s class, a picture built entirely from hand lettering that read as an image from across the room and as words up close. Glaser glanced at it, said, “Well, that’s not very good,” and moved on to the next student.
When Aarron was fresh out of grad school, working at an agency outside Philadelphia, he and his coworkers used to crowd around a monitor to study volumeone.com. Most websites back then had a picture, maybe an image map. Matt Owens’s site had 3D, animation, and experimental graphic design, and none of us could figure out how he made it.
Blaine Billingsley is a staff designer at OpenAI, and his path there was anything but a straight line. He studied music composition and comparative religion, played guitar in Texas for a living (he remembers checking his bank account, seeing seven dollars, and feeling pumped), then drove to San Francisco and took a data entry job at a startup.