#11 - Talin Wadsworth, Principal Designer at Adobe, The Craftsman’s Mindset

Get ready for an insightful episode featuring Talin Wadsworth, the visionary Principal Designer at Adobe. Talin’s career spans over a decade of designing innovative tools that have reshaped the creative process for users worldwide. As the co-creator of Adobe XD and a leading voice in design innovation, Talin has been at the forefront of pushing boundaries in digital design. Before joining Adobe, Talin worked as a senior designer at Volume Inc. and played a pivotal role in shaping design education at the California College of the Arts.

In this episode, Talin shares his leadership approach, emphasizing collaboration, creativity, and a craftsman’s mindset. He discusses how design tools have evolved, the role of AI in shaping the future of design, and how real-world user feedback is essential to refining creative workflows. Talin also offers insights into how his personal experiences, including his journey from architecture to design, have influenced his approach to problem-solving and creative innovation.

What You’ll Learn:

•Talin’s leadership style: The power of collaboration and user-centered design 💼🎨

•Evolving design tools: Insights on designing tools like Adobe XD for creative professionals 🛠️✨

•AI in design: How AI and generative tools are transforming the creative process 🤖🖌️

•Overcoming challenges: Lessons learned from scaling projects at Adobe and Volume Inc. 📊🔧

•Personal journey: How Talin’s shift from architecture to design shaped his career path 🏛️➡️🎨

•The future of design: Talin’s vision for how emerging technologies will reshape the creative industry 🌐🚀

•Craftsmanship mindset: The importance of continuous improvement and refining creative processes 🧠🛠️

Don’t miss this engaging conversation where Talin shares his deep insights into leadership, design innovation, and the future of creative tools. Tune in, subscribe, and discover how collaboration and craftsmanship drive meaningful design solutions.

#DesignInnovation #TalinWadsworth #AdobeXD #Leadership #Creativity #AI #DigitalDesign #TechFuture #Craftsmanship #CreativeTools

Transcript

All right.  Today, I'm excited to welcome Talon Wadsworth, who is a principal designer at Adobe.  Talon has a really incredible and impressive set of accomplishments and journey from designing tools at Adobe and co-creating Adobe XD to previously working as a senior designer at Volume Inc.  And also shaping design at the California College of the Arts.  His expertise spans research, iterative design, prototyping, storytelling, and delivering a top-notch experience for his users, for the users that he works with.  Beyond all of the professional success, Talon is also a frequent voice on the Society of Digital Agencies podcast.  And when he's not working on pushing the boundaries of design, he's a dedicated husband, father, and always on the lookout for new creative ideas.  So I'm excited to welcome Talon to the podcast.  Thanks, Scott.  It's such a nice intro.  Thank you so much.  And it's a pleasure to be able to chat with you today.  Well, thanks for being here.  So I have a silly question to kind of start.  A little bit of an icebreaker.  You know, you've probably worked with a lot of fonts over the years.  If you could be one, if one represented you, which one would you choose and why?  You know, this is so funny.  It's such a weird sort of moment.  I actually answered this question.  The other day, and I think the, I have, I have probably purchased or licensed more typefaces in the last like two years than I have like in the previous 10.  I'm really in the type right now.  So I would say I'm not going to give a specific name, but anything bold and brash and or black letter.  Those are the two, like something, something that stands out, something that has a, you know, a lot of contrast.  Okay.  I like.  I like a big, bold typeface.  Amazing.  Okay.  So it sounds, sounds like it represents from what I've seen and worked with, with you.  I can see that.  Um, so I'd love to know a little bit about your kind of early story, how you first got into design, what you got excited about along the way.  And, and when maybe you decided, oh, this could be something I might want to do every day.  Yeah.  Well, you know, actually, this is not a career I even knew existed.  You know, again, it's not even that that I'm, you know, like that it was really that long ago.  But like in a way, like if you're not exposed to it, right, you just don't know.  And so really growing up, I just had no concept that there was a job like this, you know, a job that really relied on storytelling and visual communication.  Those were things that I was into, but I had no idea that this was something I could make a career out of.  And actually, the thing that I gravitated first, my first sort of career trajectory was to be an architect.  That's what I really wanted to be.  I wanted to be a draftsman and an architect.  And I was sort of on a path to go to an architecture design school.  And I was starting at the community college kind of, you know, because it was going to be a six year program I was going to sign up for.  So I'm like, well, I'll go to this community college.  And I'll get kind of my, you know, my the basics under my belt that can help me help me, you know, not, you know, not be as as in debt as I would, you know, if I just jumped right into the major university and the program.  And so I started at the community college and I took a class as an elective called designing with Photoshop.  And again, like that, that was the that was the entry point, you know, here was again, I've always been a huge.  Music fan, you know, if you're seeing a video of this conversation I'm having with Scott behind me, you'll see rock and roll posters, you'll see, you know, vinyl LP on the wall back here.  You know, I, I, you know, I fell into this class and we were designing rock and roll posters and we were designing CD and album vinyl album covers and I'm like, you can do this.  This is the thing that you paid for.  Well, that's it.  You know, so instead of again, like a six year degree.  I was like, well, I'm just going to, I'm going to be, I'm going to do this.  This is, this is much, this is, this is cooler.  And so I, you know, started to delve into the program of design at the community college.  I started screen printing and making my own zines and designing, you know, brand identities and silkscreening big posters, rock and roll posters.  And I was like, all right, this is it.  And that really set the trajectory.  And luckily I had some great professors and mentors.  It really helped me push beyond even what the program was set up to do, and that led me from there to California College of the Arts to really extend my learning and my career and really be exposed to even a wider world of design, coming to the Bay Area to attend school there, and the die was cast.  You know, here was a school that was going to really open my eyes and support me in the things that I wanted to do with design, which was everything.  I wanted to design everything, and they were fully supportive of that, and I met some great people.  Again, more professors and mentors that, again, just fueled to the fire, you know, and that was one of my professors at CCA was Eric Hyman, who became a great friend and mentor of mine.  And they gave me my first design job.  And again, I really, again, found an affinity with the crew there, with Eric and Adam Brodsley, who was the other partner, and again, we weren't just designing one thing.  You know, design wasn't just locked into one application.  We weren't just a brand designer.  We weren't, you know, just a print designer.  You know, we were designing websites and books and, you know, rock and roll posters, and we were designing, you know, the museum space, you know, the exhibit space at large museums.  The California Academy of Sciences, working with SFMOMA, and 826 Valencia, you know, doing amazing work with Dave Eggers and his crew there, and, like, that's what I wanted to be.  I knew that I wanted to just take design and apply it to any problem, you know, any medium, right?  Like, there was an opportunity there for me to carve out, and, you know, from Volume Inc., you know, like, I had no real idea.  Like, you know, what I would do at Adobe initially, just knowing that, you know, of course, living in the Bay Area with kids and, you know, student debt, I knew I needed to make probably more money than I could make at a small design studio, because as much as I loved those guys and the work that we were doing, the reality wasn't, like, you know, like, it takes a lot, you know, to support life there, and so my friend invited me to come over and apply for a position at Adobe.  Again, I had no idea what I would do.  I didn't know what I would do there, really, when I started, but, you know, this friend of mine, who was a classmate of mine as well, he said, you know, look, there's so much opportunity to play the role that you want, to really have it and do the work I know you're capable of doing, and you'll find your way, and, you know, that proved to be true.  I mean, that was prophetic.  You know, he said, like, the opportunity is here.  You know, grab it and make something of it, and, you know, again, I really resonated with the team there, and they hired me on, and here we are 13 years later.  You know, having a...  So having carved that path out for myself at Adobe and being able to work with some amazing people in that time, and that's what kept me going as a creative.  Did you find the transition from, I don't know how big Volume Inc.  was, for example, but presumably smaller agency compared to big Adobe, right?  So when you think about the skills that you learned and some of the projects you worked on, was it a lot of overlap or was it like, oh, shoot, I got to rebuild, revisit, re-understand everything?  Yeah, I mean, there definitely was.  I think the biggest thing, the biggest transition, the biggest hurdle for me was really the scale, right?  You know, at Volume, you know, I was like the senior staff designer, which meant most of the projects really, you know, went through me at some point.  At the...  At the studio.  And again, we would, you know, there's the two partners and we had a handful of other designers at various times.  You know, and the one thing I found there, though, is the projects kind of all fit a pattern.  You know, a client would come to us with a problem and we would, you know, give them back our opinion on what we should do.  And like, here's three ideas.  Okay, let's go to the next round, right?  And usually within a couple months, right?  Like, we'd turn the project over and we were on to the next thing.  And, you know, Adobe, right, like to create a digital product or service.  It just relies on the expertise and collaboration of a lot of people.  And I think that to me was like the biggest transition was going in from a studio where, again, it was a tight group of people.  I pretty much had my hands on projects from start to finish.  And it was really, again, like I really was just relying on myself and the partners and the people there.  But, you know, here at Adobe, now I'm working with product managers.  I'm working with engineers, right?  And to put together a...  Complex service or product, right?  It just relies on so many people.  And sort of finding yourself in there and finding your value in that, right?  Like, these are complex applications.  It takes a lot of people and takes us, you know, not months, but years to do it.  I think that was the biggest transition and that was the hardest.  And I think...  But other than that, like, what's been really...  Again, I think one of the things that's really kept me...  Sane, though, is, like, I've been able to, again, even saying these things are very different worlds,  I've still been able to find a through line in the way that I want to practice design and creativity.  And, you know, the level of quality and the level of sort of dedication and commitment to the craft, right?  Like...  And I've been able to maintain that and to continue to grow, you know, as well.  So again, even though we're working on very different problems in their way at a very different timescale, a very different people scale, like I still feel like I'm practicing design in the same way that I was doing in a volume.  Just the outputs are different.  You know, the application is different, you know.  Um, so I think that, that I think has been, again, uh, the thing that, that has, uh,  been, uh, again, just kept me afloat, you know, as a creative is just being able to practice design in a way that, that resonates with me and continues to challenge me, you know?  Yep.  So there's the brash, bold, creative, independent talent.  And then there's, you know, there's sort of like, also you have these customers who have  demands.  Like you mentioned, like each project has their own set of, whether it's the internal product team or the legal team who says, Hey, you can't do that despite whatever you want to do.  Um, how, how do you figure out a balance or maybe there's no balance or there's a counterbalance to what you'd like to build and what you'd like to see and what you'd like to bring to the world and what the customer might need?  Is that a hard problem to solve?  How do you, how do you work through that?  Oh, it's a challenging problem, but it's one that, that again, I think that I'm, I'm always up for, and I think at, at the heart of it is the user, right?  Is again, I, I, I get to make creative tools, right?  I get to make tools for other people to do great work.  So, you know, shining like a beacon in my mind, like, is that creative person at the other, other end of this?  And of course that just fascinating problem.  How do I help them create great work?  Like, that's such a fascinating problem, right?  How do I become, how do I create the, how do I.  I create the canvas and the tools to help that person do amazing work, right?  Um, you know, even before I was Adobe, I really had an obsession with tools.  I have an obsession with process my own in particular.  Um, how do I design, you know, better, faster, stronger.  Uh, I really have a, a lack of patience when it comes to tools, you know, that's just always getting in my way and always getting in the way of me, you know, executing that idea in, you know, in a fast and compelling and interesting way.  And, and so like, I think that.  At the end of the day is like the thing that still drives me, but, but then I think everything else, what's also just as fascinating to me.  Is the is the challenge of people is the problem of communication, you know, and I think you mentioned something else that I that I kind of call back to, you know, in the skills that that I bring to the table with me from my previous experience of volume and other places is the ability to to synthesize a lot of different needs and ideas.  You know, when you're you know, when you're collaborating, you know, with just equally as smart people and talented people, you know, like I do at Adobe, like part of the design problem is figuring out what they need, just like a client, you know, just like just like our users.  Right.  Like like, you know, I have to I have to be I have to have to influence people.  I have to convince them, you know, I have to synthesize information into a message that resonates, that galvanizes people, that organizes them.  Around a shared vision, you know, because, again, like we could go do any number of things, we could go develop any number of technologies, any number of features, any number of workflows in our tools.  But the question is, is like, why?  Which ones should we do first?  Which ones should we do second?  Right.  And so, again, like the meta design problem of working at Adobe and working with all these talented people is like, how do we get us all organized towards one goal?  Right.  So how do I take the information?  The research that we do with our users, the observations that we make, again, my own my own curiosity when it comes to tools and how they work and how they fit into our daily lives and shape us and mold us and how we sort of take all of that, take the needs of our, you know, our executives and take the needs of, you know, like the smart people I work with in engineering and product management and like find a story that resonates, that brings all those things together.  Again, it's an unattainable like task.  Ultimately, you know, it's never going to be perfect.  But I like that challenge.  I like the challenge of building something complex and bringing it out into the world like what that just that that's an amazing thing when it happens, you know, like at any scale, it's like, wow, we ship something.  That's amazing.  Yeah, I love that.  I especially love the aspect of kind of feeling the privilege of being able to create for a creative and providing them the tools to see what they're going to build and what they're going to bring.  Because it's like you have this double, I don't know, it's sort of an exponential creative effect that you bring to them and they bring more.  That must feel just incredible.  Okay, so you've worked with, you know, I think the first time I might have met you would have been at a tech conference.  You probably go to tech conferences and Adobe XD and you talk to customers.  You've got beta programs.  You get a lot of feedback.  Either I assume people message you, text you, call you, LinkedIn message, you know, all that kind of stuff.  I assume sometimes it can be harsh and aggressive and hard, but also like, you know, like Facebook always says, you know, feedback is a gift.  Are there times where the feedback you've received has struck you so powerfully where you've said, I need to change that?  Like I was completely wrong and maybe you were surprised?  Yeah.  Well, I think to me, like one of the things, and this is a slight, slight variation of that, but just in terms of feedback.  So when I joined Adobe, you know, a lot of what I know about, knew about Adobe and the way that I learned the tools  was from the community.  Right.  And if I had a question, I would just go to my friends, go to my colleagues.  Right.  There was an idea that like Adobe was this big monolith.  Right.  And it's almost like, how do you ask Adobe a question?  Right.  When I first joined Adobe, right, like, and this is, again, this is, you know, kind of like at the early stage of social media.  Right.  Like there felt like there wasn't the level of access.  Right.  Right.  Right.  And if you happen to know someone who knew a product manager or knew someone who worked at Adobe, like you could maybe get your question, you know, answered.  And so one of the things I really wanted to bring to my time at Adobe is to be a person who worked at Adobe who was accessible and open and willing to listen to feedback and listen to people and what they needed.  And one of my first projects at Adobe was actually finding ways to partner with Behance.  Right.  To bring all the great stuff that was being done with Adobe's tools, like actually like.  Right.  To the Adobe website, like that was actually my first project was was actually integrating Behance and community learnings and knowledge and the amazing work they were doing like to the product pages to be like, hey, like, this is where the knowledge is, you know, this is this is what drives our tools is all the great stuff that's being done, you know, things that we didn't even plan on.  And so I really wanted to, you know, it's been a through line through my career at Adobe is to always, you know, be a community organizer, you know, to be a conduit of feedback and and and knowledge to bring that and be an ambassador of the user, you know, to to the rest of Adobe.  And if anything, what what I what I love every time again, I'm never not surprised, but not like like I didn't expect it way.  But in like I whenever I go out there and I see what people are doing and then they give me that window into how they're doing it and how they're working with the tools.  What I love is not what they're saying explicitly, because I don't think they can always put a finger on why they do what they do.  But it's it's like it's like listening for the little things.  It's like observation.  It's just like seeing the behaviors.  And one of the times I finally we actually like put a really fine point on that is I.  I.  I kind of.  I created this test in a way, this like exercise.  And I said, OK, designer, would you design me this thing?  And what is what it is?  I recorded their screen like while they were doing it, like using the tools and we got down and as granular and nerdy as like how many clicks did it take them to do this thing?  Why did they do it that way?  What got in their way?  What was what was the repetitive thing they were doing?  We were like noticing like all these little details.  And so that was a very explicit be like.  Oh, we had to actually like like they couldn't describe this process that they tried.  So we just we had to watch them do it and actually like like look down to those granular details.  So that was those observations were fascinating.  And then also just like hearing them talk about what they wanted to be able to do and just listening to them and again, really observing them.  And then again, listening for the things they weren't saying as well as the things they were saying and really in trying to find and draw out of that, like some of those key.  You know, workflow moments of those key needs, again, things that, again, they would have a hard time putting their finger on if they were, you know, trying to describe it directly, but just like seeing how they behaved and how they actually got work done.  Not in theory, how we thought they could get work done, but how they were actually getting work done.  I mean, those are my favorite moments.  That's beautiful.  So, so you stepped out of the ivory tower, you know, you, you, you got out of your office and you watched somebody use the product.  One of the things that, one of my favorite things to do, I don't know if it has a name, but I actually go down to where I went to school and I will pay people 10 or 15 bucks and I'll say, Hey, can I just like watch you install my product?  I just want to see how annoying, painful and hard it is.  And like every time there's something where I'm like, Oh my goodness, there's like way too many clicks.  And it's, it's extremely frustrating.  I love being able to do things like that.  Like, you know, actually talk to interact with and see makes a huge difference.  Let's have an opportunity.  I'm gonna tell you what I love about being on any team.  Just kind of, just one of the things I like looking at saying is that we can become very institutionalized in our knowledge.  Right.  Because we're talking to our teams.  Right.  And we know, we know what's going on.  Like we know it down to again, down to the, the finest detail.  Like, and so we, we almost have this theoretical knowledge, right.  Of, of how the thing should work.  Right.  But once it's down there in the world, like we actually know nothing.  that thing is actually out there in the world like we know nothing our our knowledge stops and if anything again like that knowledge can hinder us in producing a product that is actually usable  again because we're making assumptions based on this kind of like learned repeated knowledge that we that we're talking about every day we're speaking in a language that our users really don't understand right it's impenetrable we know too much right so one of the things is actually i don't consider myself an adobe user anymore because i know too much and that was a hard lesson to learn you know when i was first at the company and being like well why are you you know product manager telling me what's important in this tool because like i'm the user i do this every day i use illustrator and photoshop every day but again that was that was a bias that was preventing me from actually seeing and understanding like users needs and what their intention was and what they found value in right and so i i you know i think connecting with users and getting feedback is always that moment to prick that bubble that we live in you know with our internal teams right to really pierce that and be like no actually  We only have theoretical knowledge.  We don't actually know what they're going to do with this once it's out in the world.  We're totally wrong, guys.  We've made a huge mistake.  I've been there.  And then also through actually paying attention.  We've launched things that people have done amazing things with.  Things I couldn't even imagine they did with that.  And again, it's like those are the two poles of experience right there.  And so it's like try to skew a little more towards the really good output and the really good end point and not the sort of theoretical, well, it should work this way.  Why aren't they doing it?  Yeah, absolutely.  So let's talk about theory in the world.  You built one of the coolest products I used for a while.  It's called Adobe XD.  And when it came out, I remember it was in a very competitive space.  There's products like Sketch and Figma.  I would imagine that as you were building this, you know, you were thinking like, how can we be incredible and unique and differentiated and then also sort of needing to, like, build some of these table stakes features?  Yeah.  How did you figure out, like, what to do?  How to be unique, special, differentiated?  Like, what was that whole building process like?  Or I'd even be curious to hear about the whole process of building Adobe XD.  Yeah, well, you know, I mean, I think in the early days it was really just an observation.  That, like, a designer's work had changed, you know, and that we were kind of, you know, either cobbling together workflows across tools to, again, just to be able to effectively communicate, you know, to our clients, to our stakeholders, to our users.  And, like, that was just, like, wasting a lot of time.  Like I said, like, I have very low tolerance or patience, you know, for tools.  And so, you know, there's a really keen awareness that, like, tools just weren't keeping up, especially with the scale of problems that we were being asked to solve, right?  So, you know, going from, you know, a simple website that maybe has a, you know, dozen, 20-some-odd pages, right, to doing, you know, to building out, you know, e-commerce websites and, you know, complex products and services that, right, were now hundreds of pages.  Hundreds of UI elements, right?  Like, and then not only that, like, we need, because this, you know, that we were coming from a static medium, you know, in print, right, and those sort of legacy mediums that we grew up with, like, we were moving into this world of dynamic communication, right?  Motion, interaction, right?  These were as important to storytelling inside of a website or a tool or product or service, like, in terms of the user experience, right?  Like, so how are we going to...  How could we communicate that, you know, to our engineers, you know, to our stakeholders, right, to our users, right?  Like, if we couldn't, we need the tool to help us effectively communicate our ideas, right?  This is the same time when I think a lot of designers were like, well, should I just be coding, right?  Because, again, we were looking for any solution to the problem of being able to communicate effectively.  And that's really where, you know, I kind of found myself at Adobe is at this time of transition.  Where we just, we needed a new tool.  And that's really what brought me together.  I worked on a kind of variety of what we'll call proto-prototypes of what eventually became XD.  I'd sort of spent a year kind of dabbling in that and trying to answer that question.  Well, what tool do we need?  You know, my team internally to do our work effectively.  And so I had been sort of dabbling in that.  And then I just happened to connect with some really talented people within an organization.  And Adobe, you know, engineers, product managers.  And again, it was, we all just kind of met each other, I think, at the right time.  Again, timing is a lot of, you know, what we do, especially in the tech world.  You know, as I found, there's not a lot of new ideas.  Just like sometimes the timing isn't right.  And sometimes, right, from a user standpoint, from an internal company standpoint.  And we just happened to all find each other at the same time.  And what was great, again, from doing a lot of that groundwork.  And a lot of that thinking and research.  We kind of hit the ground running.  And so we had a prototype up and running, again, to solve this problem of being able to communicate effectively as a digital designer.  As a designer working in a digital medium.  You know, using motion and interaction to communicate effectively.  You know, complex user experiences.  And that was really the foundation of XD.  It was a prototype we built.  And it was like the end of the summer into the fall, October, about the same time.  Best time of the year.  Yeah, indeed.  And we put together this really compelling prototype where, again, I was able to do and design the things that, again, we were seeing that people were interested in designing out there in the world.  And we were able to do that now instead of, again, cobbling together work streams across tools or exporting, importing, doing these things and making these UIs come alive.  I did it seamlessly within a matter of minutes, though it took 10, 20, 30 hour, again, or even seconds even.  I was able to design these amazingly beautiful screens, digital experiences, wire up interactivity in motion.  And that was it.  That was the compelling thing.  You know, that as well as, of course, all the foundational work that we did in storytelling and just saying, these are the users, this is the opportunity.  And so that was really the foundation of XD.  And, again, those things all coming together at that time, again, timing, you know, allowed us to start to build a team to go and execute on this vision that we had for this new tool.  And so, yeah, it really just came from, again, an awareness of users.  And design and what their needs were and how tools could play a role in it, you know, it's really, again, that research, that awareness, that exposure, and then just some really hard work and the timing just happened to line up for us.  I just talked with the president of 1Password and they make a great product and he was talking about how it's, he feels it's important for him that his kids see it.  And I feel like what you're kind of describing is like this grind, like, you know, working through all the details, the minutiae, the important, the things that nobody's going to see, like a terrific craftsman.  So what are you working on now?  So you built Adobe XD.  It was incredible.  What are you working on now at Adobe?  Yeah.  So, I mean, now, again, and what's been really cool with Adobe is also as I grow in my role and my capacity, right?  And actually my role now has shifted and changed, right?  As I've grown in my career, I'm not working the same way.  Again, I love talking and thinking about those XD days because in a way that was a very different designer at the time.  You know, again, like the role that I play, actually the needs of Adobe and the needs of my team have changed and I've changed.  And that's been some really fun is to be able to sort of grow through all these different phases.  And so now, you know, I just, I joined a team in the new year, really, and doing in a lot of ways what we were doing in the early days of XD without really putting or codifying any kind of process around it, but that we were really exploring the opportunities around new technologies.  And again, being out there on the cut.  In edge of these emerging workflows.  Again, creatives and the opportunities for creatives, you know, continue to change, you know, as culture and technology changes.  So do the needs of people out in the world and who's there to fill those needs?  Creatives.  Creatives are always out there on the front lines of figuring out how to effectively communicate in new mediums, new devices, and to take advantage of new technologies.  And so, you know, my job right now is really a hybrid of, you know, of research on those emerging work streams and those emerging technologies.  You know, I get to work with some amazingly, you know, some of our smart research engineers  internally here at Adobe, and really try to find new product opportunities.  And so that's really where my job is right now.  And it helped, and it's also, you know, growing the capabilities, you know, of our design organization.  You know, building strong working work streams across, you know, Adobe's a big place.  There's a lot of amazing people doing a lot of amazing things.  And oftentimes one of the biggest barriers is just connecting the dots.  And so again, in my role as principal designer on the emerging design team is, I see myself in a lot of ways as the connector, right?  Where I'm really trying to point the way  and show people, you know, how these things come together to solve problems, to solve these, again, these really dynamic and emerging problems for designers out there in the world.  When you're not at work, how are you, I don't know, I feel like trying to stay up to date or relevant learning.  You could certainly watch this video of yourself and probably take away some really cool, smart things, but how do you learn?  What do you do to get better?  You mentioned a word there that I wanted to go back to, which is craftsman.  You know, I read a book in the last year that has really stuck with me and it's an older book.  It's a couple, it's like maybe 15 years old now at this point, but it's called, it's actually called The Craftsman.  And there was something in there that I was reading that finally was able to give language to something that I do naturally.  We're going to have a natural interest in and curiosity for sort of all things design and sort of all things communication and kind of, you know, technology.  Is that in this book, you know, as in this thing that resonated with me, and again, I'm not going to be able to quote it verbatim, but basically the gist of it was, is that the craftsman is never not working.  And I don't mean that in a productivity sense, but in a, you know, once a craftsman has learned their trade and continues to grow and develop in that, in that craft or that trade, their brain is always problem solving.  It's not, it's a slightly different flavor of, I think it was something you mentioned earlier, which is like never not grinding, which is that the craftsman may not be working, but if, you know, if I'm reading, if I'm interacting with the world around me, if I'm interacting with technology and new tools and new forms of communication,  my brain is always kind of filing things away, is always kind of evaluating the world, you know, through the lens of the designer.  Right.  And so if I'm, you know, working on a problem at work, again, it's not that I'm working on it through the evening,  there's a part of me that like is still problem solving around that.  And so when I sit down the next day to work, to actually do the work.  And it's like my brain has done the calculations and I'm now further than when I stopped the day before, you know?  And so, again, I think it's just a, again, this is not unique.  I think this is, I just like that, again, the writer was, the author was drawing a point on it, is that people who are dedicated to their craft, you're never not problem solving.  You're seeing the world through that lens constantly.  And again, it's not exhausting and it's not about productivity.  It's about creativity and it's about problem solving.  And that's, you know, again, no matter what I'm doing, I feel there's a part of my brain that's always just, again, filing those things away, turning over that problem.  And I find joy in it.  And I think if, again, if I'm not finding joy in it, again, I think that's when I'll stop doing it.  I mean, I love how you position that.  When I was growing up and I'd ask my dad a question, we'd be driving.  Sometimes it would be like a three minute pause where I'm like, okay, I know his brain is thinking about something about work.  And, you know, it's hard to turn that off.  But I always admired that he was like working and trying to think through and process and find solutions to problems that he was probably working on that day.  One final question for you.  So obviously there's a lot going on in the design world.  I would love to know, like, what gets you excited?  Where maybe it hasn't come to fruition yet, it's being worked on, or you're thinking, like, what if, like, what are you excited about over the next few years or decade in design space, design world?  Well, you know, again, like, there's, the world is about, again, we humans, we excel at solving problems creatively, right?  And I recently was researching this artist.  Her name is Vera Molnar.  And I may be saying that, pronouncing that poorly.  She is an artist, again, a very creative person.  And she, in the 60s, was going to the Sorbonne in Paris.  And she just happened to have a friend who was in charge of the...  She had a room-sized computer at the Sorbonne in the 60s, and she ended up getting, I don't remember exactly the details, but she ended up convincing this person to allow her to use that computer to generate her artwork, to do generative work, to use the tool to think about it critically and think about the types of problems she could solve with the tool, the computer.  In a way that could help her express an idea about the world, to express an idea about, again, in a way like the capabilities of machines, right?  And I think all the great artists throughout history have always done that, have used tools as a transformational step in their process.  And to me, that's something that excites me the most about today.  And again, I think I've tried to look beyond, I think the...  I don't know, again, not that this is...  This is not to downplay it, but generative AI in the last year or so, as we've looked at it visually, it's a fine result.  I can put in a clever sort of scene, and I can get that result back, and then it's like, oh, great, awesome.  On to the next thing.  And what I'm really interested to see, and the thing that I'm really interested in exploring, and I've been doing this with some projects internally, is like, okay, well, what now?  What more?  What more can we do?  Why?  Why do we want to do this?  How can we use this tool, this amazingly powerful tool that we're just barely scratching the surface on?  Like, how will it help us see the world in a new way?  And how will artists use that technology to tell us something, not about the technology itself, but about us and about the world around us?  And how can it help us translate or transform our work into something that we've never seen before?  And that excites me.  And again, I've been working on some proposals internally on some projects that have yet to see the light of day.  Hopefully they will in the new year.  But to really, again, become a platform for artists to show us something, to help us see the world in new ways and communicate something.  Again, we are visual creatures.  We are not in language.  We're sort of applying after the fact.  So we are visual creatures.  We see the world and language and images, right?  These are forms that we use to communicate ideas that we have about the world.  And I'm really, again, I'm interested to see how these new technologies can help us express what we see in the world, you know, to each other.  Beautiful.  I love the idea of seeing the future of what can be transformed, despite maybe feeling like what we currently have is not quite there yet.  I showed my sister-in-law today, I was like, hey, did you know you could do this with JetGPT?  And she was like, completely blown away.  But for me, it was like something I do every day.  Yeah.  All right.  Well, Talon, thank you for joining me today.  And it has been such a pleasure to talk with you.  Scott, always a pleasure.  And I look forward to many more conversations with you.  All right, man.  All right.  Thanks, Scott.