Design Better

Every four years, the Olympic Games capture the world’s attention—not just through athletic achievement, but through a complete visual identity that must resonate across cultures, languages, and generations. It’s one of the most demanding design challenges in the world: creating a brand that honors Olympic heritage while reflecting the unique spirit of a host city and region.

This is a preview of a premium episode on Design Better. To hear the whole thing, subscribe via our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/raffaella-panie

Raffaela Panie is the Brand, Identity and Look Director for the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games—which means she’s responsible for how billions of people will experience these games visually, from the opening ceremony to the medals, from venue designs to digital platforms. It’s a project that requires balancing tradition with innovation, local culture with global recognition, and multiple stakeholders with a singular creative vision.

In our conversation, Raffaela shares what it takes to design for one of the world’s most recognizable brands, how she’s weaving Italian design heritage into the visual language of the games, and the unique challenges of creating an identity that needs to work everywhere from mountain venues in Cortina to urban spaces in Milano—all while serving athletes, spectators, broadcasters, and digital audiences simultaneously.

***

Premium Episodes on Design Better

This is a premium episode on Design Better. We release two premium episodes per month, along with two free episodes for everyone. Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books:

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

We recorded this special live episode of Design Better at Sequoia Capital in Silicon Valley, with our Experts in Residence: Irene Au, Kevin Bethune, and James Buckhouse.

Longtime listeners will recognize these names—Irene appeared on Episode 1 of Design Better, we explored Kevin’s remarkable journey from nuclear engineer to Air Jordan designer in episode 72, and we visited James at Sequoia Capital for a live AMA last year. Together, they’ve shaped how businesses build, how design operates at scale, and how creativity thrives inside technology and venture capital.

Irene Au led the design practices at Yahoo! and Google during their formative years. Now a Design Partner at Khosla Ventures, she coaches designers, executives, and founders from seed stage through exit.

Kevin Bethune is a multidisciplinary design and innovation executive. His career spans nuclear engineering, product creation at Nike, and formal design training at ArtCenter. Kevin wrote two MIT Press books—Reimagining Design and Nonlinear. And he’s the host of the TV show, America ByDesign on CBS.

James Buckhouse is a Design Partner at Sequoia working with founders from idea to IPO to design companies, products, and cultures. His multidisciplinary career spans film (Shrek, Madagascar, The Matrix), fine art (exhibited at the Whitney Biennial and Guggenheim), ballet, and technology (Senior Experience Architect at Twitter).

Over the course of this conversation, we cover the evolution of design in technology, the value of diverse backgrounds in design, how technology is reshaping what designers do and how they work, cross-cultural design perspectives, and much more.

***

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:

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

***

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]

There was a time when a movie title sequence was just the moment you grabbed your popcorn and waited for the real show to start. But in the mid-90s and early 2000’s, that changed forever with films like Seven and shows like Mad Men and Stranger Things. The title sequence became a prologue—a metaphor for the film itself.

This is a preview of a premium episode. To listen to the full interview, head over to our Substack:https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/mikon-van-gastel

Our guest today, Mikon van Gastel, was right there in the trenches of that revolution. After a formative and intense education at the Cranbrook Academy of Art—where the only teachers were artists in residence and your toughest critics were your peers—Mikon cut his teeth at the legendary studio Imaginary Forces.

Today, Mikon is the Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Sibling Rivalry, a hybrid brand studio and production company he founded with his best friend, Joe Wright. They’ve built a reputation for work that blurs the lines between branding, storytelling, and architecture.

In this episode, we explore the sheer scale of modern experience design. Mikon takes us behind the scenes of his work for the Sphere in Las Vegas—a venue he calls the “Champions League of content creation”. We discuss how to design for shared emotion, balancing the “collective gasp” of a 20,000-person audience with moments of intimate connection.

We also dig into the business of creativity. Mikon opens up about the “sleepless nights” of running an agency in a project-based economy and how he refuses to transition fully into a management role, preferring to write treatments and stay hands-on with the work on nights and weekends.

Whether you are designing software interfaces or directing films, Mikon’s philosophy on collaboration and stripping away the noise to serve the core idea is something we can all learn from.

Bio

Mikon van Gastel is Director, CEO, and Co-Founder of creative agency Sibling Rivalry, based in New York and Miami. Originally from Holland, he earned his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art before launching his career at Imaginary Forces, where he designed award-winning title sequences for feature films and theatrical trailers.

Van Gastel’s work spans multiple disciplines, with notable projects in architecture and experience design including MoMA’s interactive signage system, BMW World in Munich, the digital displays at Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade Center Oculus, and most recently, immersive films for the world’s first keynote inside The Sphere in Las Vegas. He also created a VR series with renowned curator Paola Antonelli.

He continues to direct commercial campaigns and product launches for major brands including Apple TV+, Ford, Google, Target, BVLGARI, and Vogue, working with high-profile talent such as Drake, Taylor Swift, Lionel Messi, and Lewis Hamilton. Van Gastel speaks internationally about design integration and emerging industry trends at cultural and educational institutions worldwide.

***

This is a premium episode on Design Better. We release two premium episodes per month, along with two free episodes for everyone. Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books:

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

***

As 2025 draws to a close, it’s time to pause and take stock of what’s been a transformational year in design. From Figma’s landmark IPO to the rise of AI across every category of product, to major brand evolutions at Nike, Netflix, and The New York Times—this year has been defined by what our guest today calls “mass acceleration.”

Visit our Substack for bonus content and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/mark-wilson

Mark Wilson is the Global Design Editor at Fast Company, where he’s been tracking these seismic shifts, reporting on everything from the architecture of data centers to the comeback of wired headphones. He’s a journalist who straddles multiple worlds—covering the design industry, and now co-hosting the By Design podcast. He’s someone who can explain why Labuboos became an unlikely cultural phenomenon and why your kids might be more interested in building with Chompsaw than staring at a screen.

Today, we’re looking back at 2025 with Mark to understand not just what happened, but what it all means. We’ll explore the biggest moments in design and business, and tackle the uncomfortable questions about AI—are we in a bubble? Is it actually making us more productive? And what does the future hold for designers in an automated world?

We’ll also dig into the design industry’s blind spots, the problems that aren’t getting solved because they’re not sexy or VC-fundable, and why there’s a growing hunger for physical craft and working with our hands in a world increasingly mediated by screens.

We’re taking a holiday break, so we’re rewinding to one of our favorite episodes this year with Cassie McDaniel, Medium’s head of design. We’re also including video from the episode, which you can watch here or on our YouTube channel at dbtr.co/youtube. We hope you have a lovely holiday season with your family, friends, and loved ones.

—Eli & Aarron

***

Cassie McDaniel, Medium’s head of design, is someone with a clear vision for how a design team should work. She believes team members should have a breadth of skills, craft should be the foundation of product design, and experimentation is important in both work and workflow. To that end, Cassie and the leadership team at Medium recently made what some might see as a controversial decision: They eliminated product management. The result? They are moving faster than ever.

We chat with Cassie about what led to this decision—and why it might not work for all teams, how she thinks about balancing Medium’s legacy of thoughtful design while moving the product forward, and how writing can help you advance your design career.

***

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:

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