Curious by Design
Curious by Design is a podcast about how things get built, and why they end up the way they do.
Every product, city, system, and business is the result of a series of choices. Some intentional. Some accidental. Some brilliant. Some… less so.
Hosted by Jason Hardwick, this show explores the thinking behind the work: the history, the tradeoffs, the constraints, and the invisible decisions that shape the world around us. From design and engineering to culture, technology, and everyday systems we take for granted, each episode pulls on a single thread and follows it deeper than expected.
This isn’t a how-to podcast.
It’s a why-did-they-do-that podcast.
If you’ve ever looked at something and wondered how it came to be—or how it could’ve been designed better, you’re in the right place.
Welcome to Curious by Design.
Curious by Design
Why Billboards Look the Way They Do
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
You probably didn’t mean to look.
But something landed anyway.
In this special episode of Curious by Design, we explore why billboards look the way they do, and how they became one of the most effective attention-capture systems ever created.
Unlike street signs, billboards don’t guide or instruct. They interrupt. They live in shared space, competing for a fraction of your attention while you’re driving, thinking, or simply passing through. And they do it using principles discovered more than a century ago.
From painted ads along railroad lines to massive displays on interstate highways, billboards evolved alongside predictable movement. As trains, then cars, created steady streams of passing eyes, advertisers learned a critical lesson: at speed, people don’t read, they sample. Design shifted accordingly. Fewer words. Bigger shapes. High contrast. Faces. Repetition.
This episode breaks down the biology behind billboard design, why contrast grabs attention, why faces are impossible to ignore, why motion triggers awareness, and why familiarity often works better than persuasion. We look at how digital billboards borrowed the brain’s sensitivity to movement, why cities regulate how fast they can change, and why some places decided the tradeoff simply wasn’t worth it.
Billboards don’t wait for permission.
They rely on proximity.
And they work because attention doesn’t need consent, just exposure.
The next time something sticks in your mind long after you’ve passed it, remember: the most effective billboard isn’t the one you recall seeing. It’s the one that feels familiar later.
That’s Curious by Design.
