Jessie McGuire: National Design Award-winning studio leader on design as a civic tool

Summary

Design Better – Jessie McGuire: National Design Award-winning Studio Leader on Design as a Civic Tool
Date: May 27, 2026
Hosts: Eli Woolery & Aarron Walter
Guest: Jessie McGuire (Managing Partner, Thought Matter)

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Episode Overview

In this impactful episode, the Design Better team sits down with Jessie McGuire, managing partner of the award-winning studio Thought Matter. Recently recognized with the 2026 National Design Award for Communication Design, Jessie and her studio are celebrated for their civic-minded, radically imaginative approach to design. The conversation traverses Jessie’s unique personal journey, the story behind Thought Matter’s widely acclaimed redesign of the U.S. Constitution, design as civic infrastructure, and the urgent need to redefine both the purpose and support for meaningful creative work.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Jessie McGuire’s Design Journey

• Education at Pratt, Master’s in Branding at SVA under Debbie Millman; early roles in advertising, fashion, big corporate (Kimberly Clark) and agency-side strategy.
• The move to Thought Matter: “How do you get a small design studio off the ground in a way that's unique and differentiated in New York City?” (04:48)
• Continual reinvention and experimentation at Thought Matter: “Every year we experiment on what does it mean to be a design studio in the 21st century.” (04:48)
• Family background and identity: Born in El Salvador, adopted and raised by a single mother in upstate NY, grappling with identity in predominantly white spaces (07:54).

“Are we the conditions in which we grow up in? Is it DNA? Is it your ancestry? What makes somebody somebody? And that's always been something at the heart of how I've thought about my own design practice.”
— Jessie McGuire (08:46)

Redesigning the Constitution as a Civic Tool

• Context: Post-2016 political climate, desire to use design for activism and civic participation.
• Inspiration: Realizing commercial copies of the Constitution are “dense, utilitarian, forgettable” (00:19). Women’s March poster campaign energized the team for deeper civic engagement.
• Process:
  • Ordered copies of the Constitution to the studio; disliked their design.
  • Decided “let’s redesign it”—aimed for broader accessibility and civic connection.
  • Utilized Kickstarter: buy one, donate one to schools; printed and distributed thousands to NYC schools (10:15–15:24).
  • Focused on participation and tangible engagement: “We wanted that document to feel it.” (13:58)
• Design details:
  • Rich use of open-source photography and illustration to represent “we the people” as truly inclusive.
  • Interactive, tactile formats (e.g., Bill of Rights leaflet).
  • Consulted with scholars, but centered on design’s civic value over politics.

"Design is a civic tool. Design is how we shape who feels invited. It's how we think about who's informed. It's about who feels powerful at any given time."
— Jessie McGuire (20:18)

Inclusivity and Design’s Civic Responsibility

• The challenge of designing for “all the people,” not just one political side.
• Accountability: Who is included or excluded is “designed.” (20:18)
• The Constitution poster project: collaboration with renowned designers (e.g., Milton Glaser, Seymour Schwast, Adele Rodriguez) on posters for each Bill of Rights amendment (22:09).
• Success factors: Authenticity and a sense of civic mission inspired leading designers to participate without hesitation.

"At the end of the day, I believe design is how you get more people to believe that what they're doing can change the outcomes of what they actually want to see in the world. Design is a tool for imagination and imagining what could be."
— Jessie McGuire (00:02, 23:44)

The National Design Award & Looking Back

• Receiving the 2026 National Design Award: A validation of a decade-long commitment to design as a radical, civic, imaginative act.
• Reflections on the award: It recognizes “a practice over 10 years, not just one project, not just one person, not just one point of view.” (27:47)
• Ongoing ethos: Continuously “test the edges of what's possible… how you can get funding for something to make sure that you pay people appropriately.” (28:44)

Mission-Driven Work vs. Commercial Survival

• Jessie challenges the “necessary evil” of unfulfilling commercial work to enable meaningful projects:

  • "How can we just do the work that we want to talk about?" (30:30)
  • Redefining “activist work” as simply impactful design for positive change (31:43)

• On funders/shareholders:

  • “When they’re signaling that the shareholders or the board are going to punish them if something goes wrong, then they’re not going to be committed to work that might be right.” (34:05)
  • “The community are the shareholders... that’s who I want to be designing for.” (34:20)

• Skepticism of scale and speed:

  • Large-scale, rapid creative projects often breed superficiality and performative cycles.
  • Real civic engagement happens on a more local, persistent level: “Maybe we all just need to be thinking smaller and more consistently about how design helps people really see themselves as part of a local community as opposed to always thinking big.” (36:33)

The Importance of Making by Hand & Tactility

• Personal inspiration comes from analog, hands-on activities (e.g., bracelet making with her children, founder’s newspaper clippings at the studio).
• Tactility as antidote to digital abstraction and overload; restoring “human experience” to the creative process.

“Sometimes it’s just good to sit and make something... maybe this is the most important thing I’m doing. Like I’m not holding a slick machine or staring at a screen. I’m physically making and doing something.”
— Jessie McGuire (37:37)

• Emphasizes “long-form narrative” and deeper storytelling—encouraging her own kids to watch films with rich dialogue over short-form digital content (40:00–41:06).

Learning More

• Jessie invites listeners to explore Thought Matter’s evolving website, particularly their blog, as a window into their thinking—valuing depth and ongoing experimentation over social media metrics (41:12).

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Notable Quotes

• “Everything is designed right. Like if somebody’s excluded, it’s been designed. If somebody’s included, it’s been designed that way.”
  — Jessie McGuire (20:18)

• "How do we get people to participate in their local communities, participate in conversations, participate in ways where you can actually open up a dialogue with more people and not feel like you are on the right or wrong side of something?"
  — Jessie McGuire (21:06)

• "The work really does represent this idea that imagination is a radical act that can change the world."
  — Jessie McGuire (28:44)

• “We need a new word for just great creative that is meant to change our outcomes. That can’t be activist work. That has to be the work that we’re just doing every day to change the way that we look at our communities.”
  — Jessie McGuire (31:43)

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Key Timestamps

• 00:02: Jessie: Design as a tool for belief and imagination
• 04:48: Jessie’s design journey and identity
• 07:54: Identity, adoption, and personal background
• 10:15: How the Constitution redesign project started post-2016
• 15:56: Design objectives—representation, tactility, and participation
• 20:18: Designing for inclusion/exclusion and design as civic tool
• 22:09: Collaborating with design luminaries on Bill of Rights posters
• 27:47: Winning the National Design Award and studio reflection
• 30:30: Navigating mission-driven work and commercial realities
• 34:20: Redefining shareholders as the community
• 36:33: Critique of scale, speed, and performativity in design
• 37:37: Inspiration from hands-on creative activities
• 41:12: Where to find more (thoughtmatter.com)

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Memorable Moments

• Jessie recalling the studio’s dream of dumping 10,000 redesigned Constitutions on the White House lawn—“which I'm still open to doing” (12:40).
• Meeting design heroes like Milton Glaser and Adele Rodriguez in person through the Constitution poster show (23:15).
• Her daughter’s budding bracelet “business” and the joy of family crafting (37:37).

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Conclusion

Jessie McGuire’s conversation on Design Better is a masterclass in aligning design’s power with civic participation, inclusion, and meaning. Through the story of the Constitution redesign, the episode delivers actionable insights on using design for change, resisting the lure of empty scale, and restoring hands-on creativity—even (and especially) for digital-first designers. Listeners are left inspired to re-examine their own practice and impact, motivated by Thought Matter’s decade of radical imagination.

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Discover more and connect:

• Visit Jessie and her team at thoughtmatter.com for blog entries, client work, and to get in touch about funding and creative collaboration. (41:12)

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Transcript

[Jesse Maguire]

At the end of the day, I believe design is how you get more people to believe that what they're doing can change the outcomes of what they actually want to see in the world. Design is a tool for imagination and imagining what could be.

[Aaron Walter]

As the United states approaches its 250th birthday, the Constitution remains the most consequential document in American life, and more people now than ever are reading it. But pick up almost any commercial edition, and you're going to find the same thing. Small type, no imagery, nothing that invites you in. Jesse Maguire noticed this, too. Every copy of the Constitution that our studio order looked identical. Dense, utilitarian, forgettable. So guess what? They redesigned it. They printed thousands of copies, donated them to New York City schools, and invited designers like Milton Glazier and Seymour Schwast to create posters for each amendment in the Bill of Rights. That project became a turning point not just for the studio, but for how they think about what design is actually for. Jesse is the managing partner of Thought Matter, the independent design and creative studio that just won the 2026 National Design Award for Communication Design from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. It's the field's highest national honor. It's an award that recognizes not just a single project, but a decade of practice and thought matters. Practice has been built around a bold idea. Imagination is a radical act.

[Eli Woolery]

A Salvadoran American designer, New Yorker, and mother of two, Jessie brings a perspective shape by navigating spaces that weren't always designed for her. She teaches entrepreneurship at Pratt, mentors emerging designers, and leads a studio that works with cultural institutions, nonprofits, and commercial brands, all grounded in the belief that design is civic infrastructure, a tool for helping people see themselves as participants in shaping the world around them. In this episode, Jessie talks about the origin of the Constitution project, what it means to fund the work you actually want to talk about, and why she thinks scale and speed aren't serving us. She also talks about why sitting down to make something with your hands, like the beaded bracelets she makes with her kids, still matters. This is DesignBetter, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery.

[Aaron Walter]

And I'm Aaron Walter. At DesignBetter, our primary mission is to

[Guest Host / Interviewer]

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[Aaron Walter]

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[Guest Host / Interviewer]

And now back to the show. Jesse McGuire, welcome to Design Better.

[Jesse Maguire]

Thank you. I am so excited to be here today.

[Guest Host / Interviewer]

The work that you're doing is particularly interesting to us in the timing. I can see behind you there's a beautiful poster. It says free speech ain't free. If folks are watching the video version of this on YouTube, they can see this. You've used design in really interesting ways to highlight social issues. We want to dive into that. And the work that you did redesigning the Constitution, which is not a small project, but first, maybe we could talk about how you found your way into design.

[Jesse Maguire]

So I am a formally trained designer. My undergraduate was at Pratt Institute. I studied communication design with a focus in advertising, did a little bit in advertising, a little bit in fashion. I did a little bit in what I would call like traditional graphic design. I worked in a really tremendous studio clothing called Dog's Name, where it was just a whole bunch of young designers and we would get briefs and we would do some really great work. And then I went to I felt like I needed something new to kind of get me energized. And I feel like that is a theme of my life. I like to look for the next thing. So I had opportunity to be in the first year of the SVA Master's in Branding program. So I had a chance to study under Debbie Millman, who had started that program. And it changed my life. It was amazing thinking about design more as a way of thinking and a framework for thinking. And so when I graduated, I ended up getting a great job at Kimberly Clark. So I got to go on the client side. Brigg Corporate Co. In the Midwest, moved out to Wisconsin and had a really wonderful three years getting to know the Midwest Getting to know what design looks like in a big organization, definitely in the moment around chief design officers and design excellence in these big companies. So I got a chance to see that firsthand. And when I needed to come back, had my first baby, I was like, I got to come back to New York City. I'm a New Yorker. I had a chance to work at a global packaging design company and did strategy. So I was a strategy director there and really got to see on the agency side, how do you look at design strategy? In that instance, it was in packaging, which is great. And then got a little antsy and really wanted to see what was out there if I were to consult. Cause I wanted to maybe take my strategy and my design eye into more organizations. So I did what everyone says, which is, I'm gonna go consult. But I got my first job with a small company called Thought Matter to be their strategy director, which I thought it was gonna be working on packaging, but it turns out it really was. How do you get a small design studio off the ground in a way that's unique and differentiated in New York City? And it turns out trying to just do packaging is not the way to do it. So I got to know our founder, who had started the company about a year earlier. And he has had many different careers. Journalist, art collector, just big thinker. And so I got a chance to get to know him. And for the past 10 years, I feel like every year we experiment on what does it mean to be a design studio in the 21st century. So here I am today and have some good, good stories about what does that really mean? So that's been my 26 years in the industry. I have two kids. And I always make my kids laugh when I tell them that I started my career at the turn of the century. And that's what I realized.

[Eli Woolery]

They probably think it's like horse and buggy, or that's what my kids think. That's awesome. So you grew up here in the US but your background is from El Salvador. Does your family history influence the way that you think about design or aesthetics, or how does that play into your story?

[Jesse Maguire]

I think more recently, I've reflected on my origin story. So I am adopted. I was born in El Salvador. I came over when I was 20 months. My mother is a single woman who wanted to adopt, I guess, in the late 70s, and there weren't many countries willing to let single women adopt. And so there were a handful of countries going through big civil wars at the time. El Salvador was one of them. And so my mother got me in the early 80s and raised me in upstate New York. I was raised in a really wonderful Ukrainian, Italian family in upstate New York. My mother was born and raised on Staten Island. So every time I would see my cousins or my extended family, we would always come to Staten Island. So I always thought New York City was Staten Island. It's not. It's one of the five boroughs. And it was, for me, a really amazing way to grow up. But I always tell people that I was raised in predominantly white spaces, so. So it wasn't until I went to college at Pratt that I realized I wasn't white. I realized I wasn't Ukrainian, Italian, upstate. And I think it's really been the last 25, 26 years as a designer, thinking about how we make sense of the world around us that I feel like, in many ways, I've been chasing, who are we as people? Are we the conditions in which we grow up in? Is it DNA? Is it your ancestry? What makes somebody somebody? And that's always been something at the heart of how I've thought about my own design practice.

[Guest Host / Interviewer]

It's fascinating. I'm a adoptive father, have two adoptive boys who are African American. And what you said about being raised in white spaces and sort of shaping one's identity, discovering one's identity throughout your life, certainly something that I'm familiar with, and it's not always easy. I think your origin story is fascinating. The work that you've been doing is really interesting, and I think the timing. I mentioned at the beginning that you did a redesign of the Constitution, and that, I think is very relevant right now because the Constitution is being discussed a lot in the past year, what it means, what our rights are. And it's surprising and I think troubling that a lot of American citizens don't realize what this country is all about and what our origin story is. Why did you take on this project to redesign the Constitution?

[Jesse Maguire]

So I came to thought matter in 2016, and as I mentioned, I thought I was coming in to help wrangle strategy for our packaging clients. And so when I started, I quickly realized there were actually no packaging clients, and there wasn't much strategy to wrangle. And so I spent the first half a year in 2016. So that would have been, I guess, March of 2016 into the summer, really helping to find clients and industries that we wanted to work in. And cultural institutions was one that I had never worked with, but I was really interested in. And our founder very much supports arts education and the art museums and culture. And so we had some really great opportunities to work with organizations like the New York Historical Society. And so we were working with them on opening up their first center for women's history. And it was the summer of 2016 where we were all getting ready for our first female president, because that was where we were headed. And we were doing a lot of work at that time just thinking about the role of cultural institutions and how we see ourselves as participants in civic society. Fast forward to November of 2016, and we did not get our first female president. We got the first Trump administration. And I know I live in New York City. I know I live in a bubble. I know that there are a lot of conversations, but I was absolutely floored and shocked that we were headed to our first Trump administration. And at the time, our founder was talking to most of the team. We were mostly millennials. And he was like, what are you guys all, like, getting upset about? Like, this is the time where people, if you don't like what's happening, you go into the streets, you, like, start thinking about protesting, you start thinking about where are your values and how can you really stand up and show up who you are? And so we really all were like, what does that mean? We hadn't really seen much, I would say, at that point, design through an activist lens. I think, if anything, we saw design in politics through maybe the Obama campaigns, and everyone got really excited about. But we started to say, what could that look like? So we actually designed posters for the Women's March. The Women's March on Washington in 2017 is now one of the largest demonstrations in history. We didn't know that at the time, but we knew we needed to make posters. We got so excited, we did a Kickstarter. We raised tens of thousands of dollars, printed 15,000 posters. We have books where our posters are in there. A lot of our designers were part of that. And so we really got energized by, like, wait, we are designers that are creating visual communication, and we can use that to communicate the things that we care about. This all brings me to the Constitution, because we came off of the Women's March, and we're like, okay, what else can we do? And so, as a studio, one thing that's really important to our practice is coming together. At the time, it was every Monday. Now it's every Tuesday, but every Monday, we would come around the conference room table, and we would talk about things that we really wanted to see out in the world. And one of the things we were seeing. And again, this seems so many years ago, but in May of 2017 was all the headlines of has the new president even read the Constitution? In some ways, it feels more innocent than what we see now. But at the time, we were like, well, if the president hasn't read the Constitution, have we read the Constitution? So we ordered 25 copies probably of the Constitution. They all came to the studio and they were terribly designed, small type of, no picture. You know, we all, as designers, we love good typography, good kerning, good photos, good paper. I mean, anything, right? And none of these constitutions had that. So that was actually one of the biggest insight we had was let's redesign it. And we originally wanted to design and print, I think 10,000 copies and dump it on the White House lawn. We had big dreams of getting like, Michael Moore to come and like, take us in, like a van to the White House to dump the constitutions on the lawn, which I'm still open to doing. That didn't quite happen, but we did do another Kickstarter. And we really wanted to see the project come to life through printing of these constitutions. And one of the mechanisms that we developed was if you bought one constitution, we would donate a constitution to a school. So we ended up designing, printing, and donating. I think at that time it was 3,000 copies to schools here in New York City to be part of the civic education. And so that was back in 2017 into 2018. And there were a lot of little projects that happened coming off of that, because we were also energized on just understanding the role visual communications could have on a document that is being talked about, but in many ways in a very abstract way. And so now we're here. Sometimes I think to myself, would we do that idea now with everything being so online? I don't know. Like, we really were into the physical, tangible, wanting that document to feel it. We used Arizograph and great paper. And I remember one of the reps came and was showing us all this, like, really cool, amazing kinds of paper we could use that could help make it a little more tactile, which was pretty tremendous.

[Guest Host / Interviewer]

Can you talk a little bit about the considerations? I know there's a lot of photography in the Constitution design. That phrase that we see on a lot of bumper stickers and a lot of T shirts, we the people. And it's overlaid not really on what those people look like. That's something that strikes me as very different. The people that you show in there. It's all the people. We. All of the people. That is very different. Can you talk about the specific design objectives in the project?

[Jesse Maguire]

We did use open source photography from the Library of Congress, but kind of what you were talking about with representation. And I know now, again, this is 10 years later, I don't know if representation was the same kind of conversation we're having now about who and what, but we did a lot of illustration. One of the things that we did was there's a leaflet in the middle for the Bill of Rights. Children love when things just open. And like, once you open it, you're in it, you're looking at it, you're touching it. We used buildings, open source photography. We used a lot of the founding documents and textures. We were very specific in using. And I think we used a Google open source font to show some of the historical documents. As any designer, right? You get a brief and you're like, I'm gonna make it as big as possible. So we had this brief, right? We were like, we know we wanna redesign the Constitution. What started happening was that, do we wanna make a political statement? Do we wanna start getting into the amendments? But we had an opportunity to talk to a First Amendment scholar up at Yale. And we were having these phone calls and we're like, oh, maybe it can be an app and maybe it can be an interactive document and we could talk about all the different rulings that have happened. And. And I think it was. One of the scholars we spoke to was like, but you guys are designers. Like, what is the design point of view that you want to have on this? And we actually had to take, because we had, you know, like a giant board with all these, like, pastings. And so we could have gone, like I said, into different kinds of representation and photography and typography. And are we more left leaning from a political standpoint? More right leaning from political. Like all of that, we took it all down and we were like, okay, wait, let's get back to like, as designers. What's the thing that we actually want to see happen with our redesign of the Constitution? And we wanted to go back to the founding principles of the Constitution, which is all about how we, the people can be represented and be understood at the moment in which we're living. This is a founding document. But to your point, it wasn't written including every American. It wasn't written including all the things that we know now and hold dear. It was written through a value standpoint. And so that's what we wanted to focus in on, was how could we make it something that people wanted to learn more about? And something that I think is really important to our process is how can we get more people to want to participate in thinking about what this document means to them? Because even talking about it being so important, it becomes so abstract. Even if I told my 13 year old this Constitution is really important, he doesn't know what that means. But if I tell him that when we are thinking about our local community and like the library being open or, you know, we just had a huge snowstorm in New York, the streets being cleared, or like those all are in his purview of how he's thinking about being a little citizen. And so I really do think it's. How do we help everybody feel that they can participate and that their voice can be heard? And that's why we wanted to create this and put it into schools. Depending on a teacher, depending on a curriculum, or depending on the community, or depending on what resources a school does or doesn't have. We just wanted to be able to create a piece of visual communication that everybody would want to at least touch and find out more about. So it really is about that participation versus a really strong point of view from like a political standpoint.

[Guest Host / Interviewer]

Yeah. Could we push on that just a little bit more? Because I think that's a really important point. Is the Constitution and patriotism, participation in democracy. There's a great deal of division and divisiveness and it's not new to the American experience. That's the way it was very early on, like from the beginning, the founding of this country. And we've had rough passages, we've had a civil war. But when designing for everybody, for we, all of the people, those are people on the left and people on the right, you know, in multiple parties. How did you think about that? Of how do we not only be inclusive in representation of these are people that look all the different ways that people on the planet could look. That's who's in the United States. That's one of the magical things about our country, is that it's for everybody, but also these different political parties, despite our divisions, we're all citizens. We are all Americans together. How did you think about that in the design of this project?

[Jesse Maguire]

I think what's interesting, what you're touching on from divisiveness, is that even from the founding of our country, everything is designed right. Like if somebody's excluded, it's been designed. If somebody's included, it's been designed that way. So I feel like even Though the Constitution design project that we did 10 years ago, it really is still what I hope we all are thinking about as designers, which is that design is a civic tool. Design is how we shape who feels invited. It's how we think about who's informed. It's about who feels powerful at any given time. And I think that some of the decisiveness we're seeing right now and is because it's being designed for people to not get the information they need. It's being designed for us to be isolated. It's being designed for us to question absolutely all the institutions around us, when in fact, I think it's more how do we get people to participate in their local communities, participate in conversations, participate in ways where you can actually open up a dialogue with more people and not feel like you are on the right or wrong side of something. Like, how do you actually, again, invite more voices in? So we did this Kickstarter and we raised tens of thousands of dollars to do it, which was great. And we worked with a printer. And we then said, what can we do next? And so we, as can I say, nerdy, like, really excited young emerging designers, we were like, what if we asked our, like, heroes to design a poster for each one of the amendments in the Bill of Rights? If we're saying we want more people to be invited, let's invite them. So we started with Milton Glaser studio. Milton Glaser was still alive at the time. And we emailed the studio and we said, hey, we just did this Constitution. We just raised all this money. We just donated to all these schools. We now wanna do a poster show to really get more designers to think about design as a civic tool. And so his studio said yes right away, with the caveat that he only wanted to do the First Amendment. And so we were like, absolutely. So from there, we then invited Seymour Quass, DJ Stout, Adele Rodriguez, Jessica Hish. But what was absolutely tremendous is every single designer we emailed said yes. And we said, it's going to be free. We're not trying to make money off of it. We're going to look for a museum or a gallery space to have it. But every single one of them said yes. Where can I sign on the line to do the work? And so we ended up having a poster show at the Cooper Union in Constitution Week, which is in September, and it was open for two weeks there. And we had every poster from the Bill of Rights of the first 10amendments and the preamble all on display, as well as our Constitution And I feel like that goes back to what you're asking about, which is, at the end of the day, I believe design is how you get more people to believe that what they're doing can change the outcomes of what they actually want to see in the world. And I feel like that's what we saw with that show. I had never met Seymour Quast and when he came to the opening of the show, like, you know, totally fangirled, was so excited. Same thing with Adele Rodriguez, who we now know as the cartoonist in chief. But at the time he was just getting started with a lot of his obviously very political work, but just got a chance to meet them and talk to them. And a couple of the artists was like, why did you just say yes? And they actually were like, we didn't think too much about it because it just felt like the right thing to do at that moment. So that was September of 2017. And I think every year since then we've been like, what else can we do to get more people to participate and see that design is a tool for imagination and imagining what could be? So, yeah, I guess I don't dwell too much on, like, how do you make people feel excluded, but more, how do you get more people to participate and talk about what's possible?

[Aaron Walter]

We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. Design Better is supported by Upwork.

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[Aaron Walter]

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[Jesse Maguire]

So good, so good, so good.

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[Guest Host / Interviewer]

And now back to the show.

[Eli Woolery]

So you and thought matter. Your agency just won a big award, the National Design Award for Communication Design from Cooper Hewitt. Tell us about that. How did that come about and what does it mean for your agency going forward?

[Jesse Maguire]

When we found out that we won the 2026 National Design Award, there was such a sense of like this is exactly what we need to be doing and seeing and thinking about, which is communication designers and studios and agencies pushing on what's possible. The National Design Award started at Millennium Council, so at the turn of the century about when I started my career, but it came out of a White House initiative, which is tremendous if you look up the background of it. But it is, you know, a highly confidential award. I feel like it's an award for the people, by the people, in 10 categories in design. And so I actually don't know that much about the process. I know it's very confidential, but we were nominated. You have to be nominated. I got the email that we were nominated. At first I was like, this can't be real. You know, it's this whole thing. But we spent quite a bit of time actually reflecting because you're like, oh, my gosh, we're nominated. This thing. You look at those that have won in the last 25 years of winners really do represent what design has meant and where it's going. And I feel like right now in 2026, thinking about representing where design should go feels so monumental and such a heavy weight of responsibility. And I think what Tom, our founder with Tom and I did was first sit and say, wait, what have we actually been thinking about over 10 years? Because it recognizes a practice over 10 years, not just one project, not just one person, not just one, like, point of view, but a 10 year practice. And so I remember, I think I was supposed to go on. Well, I did go on vacation with my kids, and then all I did was sketch in my notebook, like, what did we do back in 2016? What did we do back in 2017? You know, I love that we started with the Constitution project, because I feel like that was one of the first projects where we tested out a lot of what we've done over the last 10 years, which is test the edges of what's possible, test the edges of who you can collaborate with, test the edges of how you can get funding for something to make sure that you pay people appropriately. The work really does represent this idea that imagination is a radical act that can change the world. And that's where we really have been sitting with this award. And so when we got the call that we got it, I was like, this means we did something right.

[Guest Host / Interviewer]

Yeah, I mean, clearly you did a lot of things right. What's fascinating to me is y' all are doing really great work using the power of design, and it intersects with civic engagement and somehow also paying the bills. I wonder if you could speak to that. Like, there's the mission driven stuff that we want to do, and there's the stuff that we need to do to keep the lights on. What's the general thinking at Thought Matter about that?

[Jesse Maguire]

I know we're in 2026, and I know why you're asking that question. But I'm really excited how we can move into the next quarter century not having to ask that question. I want to see imagination funded the same way that we fund sugary sodas. I want to see studios find income and revenue sources and funding to be able to do more of this work. Because this is the work that our children need to see and feel that design and visual communication and branding can change their futures and their outcomes. And I know what it means to do work that keeps the lights on, but it's always gonna go to the work that no one either wants to talk about, or you're like, well, I guess I have to do this over here with whatever category. I have a slightly obsessive personality, so I've always been obsessed with the industry and what are studios doing and what does it look like? And I have been told over and over again that if you're in a studio, you're gonna do the work you don't wanna talk about to do the work you do wanna talk about. And I feel like for the last 10 years, I've been trying to experiment, to say, how can we just do the work that we wanna talk about? How do we do the work that you can go to a company, you know, a billion dollar retailer, and say, right, you know, that you want to be using some of your profits to give back to children in their lunchboxes. Let's talk about what that program looks like. Let's talk about this work. And it actually brings up something I've really been thinking about is for so many years, I would talk to clients or people and they'd be like, oh, so you just want to do activist work. We need a new word for just great, creative that is meant to change our outcomes. That can't be activist work. That has to be the work that we're just doing every day to change the way that we look at our communities or the way that we look at our, like, children's education, or the way that we think about what and how we're feeding our children, how we're looking forward to supporting our neighbors. Like, all of that should be the work that keeps the lights on.

[Guest Host / Interviewer]

100%. I totally agree. And yet, especially right now, it is even more challenging for large corporations where they are penalized at the government level when they have a certain point of view. Target, Budweiser. There's all kinds of different brands out there who have been inclusive or they have tried to bring their brand alongside good work. The good work of making people feel welcome or Doing the right thing in the world, and then that comes back and bites them through, like a boycott or various other things. So I'm just going to ask again, like, how do you do it? I hear you that you want to do it, but I know that a lot of our listeners want to be able to do what you do and would benefit greatly from your wisdom of how you frame this for companies where they feel like, yes, I'm on board with that and I can put money behind this because my shareholders aren't going to oust me if this goes sideways in some way.

[Jesse Maguire]

Yeah. And I don't want to sound naive, but I do feel that it's important to understand where your line and your values are. I have been in many a new business meeting. I can have a whole conversation about business development and business growth. That's actually what I've been doing for 10 years, is how do I find the right client. But if I get into a room with a client, that guarantees that the work you're doing is not going to make something go south so that my shareholders don't get mad at me, is not a client I want to be working with. Right. I feel like when you think about shareholders, I have been trying to even push our team in our studio to think about what shareholders are we talking about when we're working with cultural institutions or you're thinking about large institutional systems, the shareholders are. The community are. The people are those that are being impacted by whatever the work is doing. And to me, that's who I want to be designing for. When I start looking at big, large holding companies or beverage companies, and they're telling me they're shareholders or their board are going to punish them if something goes wrong, then they're not going to be committed to work that might be right. They're automatically telling you that that's kind of what they're signaling. And I recognize, yes, that this is a moment where people need to get a paycheck. They need to get paid. If you're a designer, oh, my gosh, how can I make sure that I don't go unemployed? And I know I've heard that over and over again, especially from emerging designers, is I really want to do work that matters. But I also know that I need to pay my student loans. And I get that. I'm excited to have a practice and be a part of a practice that just won the National Design Award and talk more about how more agencies and more studios can be supporting work that is right for this moment right now. And pushing back on companies that say, oh, I don't have enough money to do this, or if this goes wrong, I no longer want to do it. And instead start to say, how can we be celebrating the work that is really making a difference? Or working with the companies that really are pushing on something new. I think another area that I always kind of push back on, honestly, is scale. Everyone wants to work on big companies and big, large scaled programs. And the bigger the scale scale, the faster it needs to go and the more pressure it has to perform in. I feel like a moment right now that feels so performative. We're living in constant likes, this kind of engagement in these things that happen. But when I think of things like a library system or when I think of things like a museum or a cultural institution or something that's supposed to be helping us think about how we see ourselves as citizens and people, that shouldn't be happening at the speed of a like or a click. I mean, we now know that half the hot takes or the likes and these things that happen online are bots. They're not even people. And we're like, oh my gosh, no. You know, so many people hated this rebrand it has. We have to turn it back around because the shareholders are so angry. It turns out that most of it is synthetic online and it's not actually changing the way that somebody sees themselves. I don't know, maybe we all just need to be thinking smaller and more consistently about how design helps people really see themselves as part of a local community as opposed to always thinking big. I don't think scale's working for us. I don't think speed is working for us. I don't think this sort of synthetic outrage that we keep feeling, being pitted against each other on whatever topic is, is really helping us see better, more meaningful design in the world.

[Eli Woolery]

Jesse, what's inspiring you right now? And that could be movies or books or we were talking before we started recording. We both have kids roughly the same age, so maybe it's something your kids have brought to your attention that you're excited about.

[Jesse Maguire]

Yeah, I really love anything that can be done with your hands. I have a 13 year old who for many, many years struggled in school. Neurodivergent, he has dyslexia, he has executive functioning. Some of the words they're used to talk about him and his learning profile. I feel like it's just like most of us, we're all just overwhelmed. We all have terrible executive functioning. But something that I've really loved to help him not feel so overwhelmed or have like all this cognitive overload is to just do things with his hands. And so he's been learning to crochet and he's been learning to knit, and there's been all kinds of things he's dabbled in from a material standpoint. But I feel like it's a good reminder even for me that sometimes it's just good to like sit and make something. My 9 year old daughter is now, she thinks she has a bracelet business and so she's making bracelets all the time and she thinks she's gonna be selling it and people are gonna be asking her for it. But sometimes I just sit with them and I make little knotted bracelets or I make beaded bracelets. And right now for them, that's the most important thing that they're doing. But then I'm like, wait, maybe this is the most important thing I'm doing. Like I'm not holding a slick machine or staring at a screen. Like I'm physically making and doing something. And I've been thinking about that even in our studio. I think I mentioned once a week we come together, go through what's the studio work, but what we've done for the last 10 years is actually look at newspaper clippings. Our founder's a journalist, he clips newspapers. And so we're all physically touching these papers. We're like circling things, we're talking about things. And so I'm just really inspired right now to be physically making things that are just coming from my mind and my imagination. Even if they're not perfect and even if it's not great, it's a good reminder that as a designer and a studio manager, I am constantly just looking at everything on the screen. It's actually not real. Yes, I'm looking at spreadsheets and making sure I process payroll, but it's all like abstract on the screen. And so sometimes it's just really good to be like, wait, what does this physically mean? And how do we get back to what's really important, which is being in and around people and material?

[Guest Host / Interviewer]

Yeah, I love that. We hear that a lot from people who are working on digital things, that having something tactile that feels real, as Austin Kleon says, the creatureliness like that feels like the human experience is really important and often missing in our professional lives.

[Jesse Maguire]

Yeah. And then my husband is an International Baccalaureate film teacher, so he's always talking about film. So we talk a lot about storytelling and films with my children. If we're not physically making things. You always hear me being like, you need to watch some long form narrative. So that usually for my 13 year old, it's like, get off of whatever short YouTube thingy he's watching. Or like my daughter the other day was watching like a family shop at Costco and I was like, what? So long form narrative. I don't think for them, screens are necessarily terrible, but it's like, how can you get into long form narrative and film and storytelling? And so that's been something that's really been inspiring me and just watching a lot of films as well as shows to get us back into like, how do we tell stories and how do we see dialogue in a new and interesting way? And especially as we're getting more and more through the LLM storytelling that we're seeing, all that kind of content that's coming out, if you're anything like me, right, you go like LinkedIn or anything. And a lot of stuff is starting to feel very similar coming out of the same kind of mechanism. So turn on a movie pre the 1980s and you'll get some really interesting dialogue and some really interesting writing.

[Guest Host / Interviewer]

I like that. Where can people learn more about you and the work that you're doing with your studio?

[Jesse Maguire]

So definitely our website, so thoughtmatter.com, which is always a work in progress, we have a wonderful group. Creative director Abel Paris, who the other day we're supposed to have happy hour. We do happy hour over Thursday with the team. It's like, Abel, we're gonna do happy hour. He's like, oh, we're in here vibe coding. I was like, what are we vibe coding? And he was like a new nav on our website. So we just put up a new nav. All these new fun things, as well as a lot of the writings that we do in the blog. So our website is always a work in progress. And I like that better because I feel like those are the things that we're thinking about versus, yes, we're on Instagram and we're on some of the other platforms. But that's, as I said before, about getting likes. How many likes can we get on that? Is that going to be optimized for performance? But sometimes a random blog about something we're thinking about is actually more interesting as well as some of our client work that we like to put up on there to what we were talking about earlier, which is for more designers, more studios, more leaders to see different ways that we can be doing work. And then if anyone wants to call me up and talk about how do we fund it? That's the real question.

[Guest Host / Interviewer]

I love it. Jesse well deserved. Winner of National Design Award Thought Matter. Everything that you guys are doing is really inspiring and exciting, and it's just fundamentally good design work too. So thanks for joining us on Design Better.

[Jesse Maguire]

Yes, well, thank you. This was a lot of fun.

[Aaron Walter]

This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel designbetterpodcast.com It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.

[Jesse Maguire]

Sam.