Awaiting Approval

Jess Campbell has always known that the best work comes from the most honest place. She grew up in a Jamaican household, surrounded by music she couldn’t quite name yet, was told to be a lawyer, but was quietly certain that wasn’t her path. Jess knew that storytelling was in her blood. She found her way to agency world, to IBM, to Fantasy Interactive, and eventually to a project that stopped every...

Terri Williams trained as a radio broadcaster, ended up writing buggy buying guides for Argos at twenty as a non-parent trying to imagine what a parent would want to know, and has spent the twenty years since growing alongside digital in a way that very few people can claim. She has been the person with the plan when everyone else had opinions, the translator between engineers and end users, and t...

After going to Australia in his early twenties - because Alan Wicker said, through the magic of Sunday evening television, that it was the most optimistic place on Earth - Guy Vickerstaff was called by a place called home. He came back to Scotland and eventually found his way into advertising the long way round, via market research, a direct marketing client, and a junior typographer role where he...

Katja Alissa Mueller grew up in Switzerland, studied economics and law because it was the only option left by exclusion, lasted four years, and then walked into an internship at the main theatre in Zurich on what she describes as a complete whim. That year, she says, set up everything that followed, even though she had no idea it would at the time. She is now Head of Brand Design at Pliant, ninete...

Mikaela Calypso Dragon has never done things the expected way. She grew up in Saigon falling in love with TV adverts because there wasn’t much else to watch, ran away from home twice trying to become a creative, and eventually left Vietnam entirely for what everyone assumed would be a short trip to study in the UK. She never went back. She is now a Creative Director, working with some of the bigge...

Roberto Rotondi grew up in Italy knowing he wanted to design, studied industrial design in Milan, and then spent the next two decades letting life take him somewhere he never expected. A redundancy became a move to the UK. A quiet nudge from his wife became the confidence to try. A manager in Taipei, who on his first day told Roberto that even native English speakers make mistakes and the only goa...

Julie Kennedy learned to love design by walking the galleries of the V&A as a small child. She would walk around the galleries holding her granddad's hand, as he did his rounds as the Chief Warder. She went on to study sculpture, spend time dressing windows at Topshop during the IRA bombings, work at a tax office she hated, and eventually find her way to Yellow Pages, where she stayed for twelve y...

Oriana Gaeta grew up in Naples and stumbled onto design when making album covers for her friends. She didn’t know there could be a career in this kind of work, it was just a thing she kept doing. It took a degree she dropped, a year in London at 19, and a second attempt before she finally found her way to design properly. Since then she has worked at some of the best agencies in the world, includi...

Mark Iddon is Senior Commissioning Editor for Comedy Entertainment at UKTV, which means his job, in its simplest form, is to decide what gets made and what doesn’t. He has spent over 20 years in television, moving from making things to deciding which things get made, and somewhere along that journey he has developed a very particular set of instincts about people, about ideas, and about the differ...

Emily Court is a freelance web and visual identity designer who works with solopreneurs, freelancers and microagency owners, and has built her entire practice around the idea that the client relationship should feel like a collaboration between equals, not a job interview she's perpetually trying to pass. She came to design via an unlikely route, through gift baskets, studio photography, teaching...

Michael Glass has spent 25 years refusing to settle. He taught himself design in the late 90s by opening Photoshop every single day and learning something new before he was allowed to close it. He went from managing bars in Australia to becoming the guy you called when you wanted something on the FWA. He spent a decade as the most senior design voice at Fantasy Interactive, one of the world's top...

This one is different. No single guest, no slow burn, no deep dive. This is Awaiting Approval LIVE 2, broadcast simultaneously across three cities on one night, with people thirsty for creative insight in each room and a Clipboard of Truth to test the mettle of each guest. What made it into this edit is worth knowing about. Kris on the most ridiculous feedback he has ever received, and what it act...

Lara Juriansz was born in Sri Lanka, grew up in Singapore, studied in Sydney, built her career in London, and is now Creative Director at TBWA Media Arts Lab in LA, working exclusively on ... well, let’s just say a very well known brand. She has said yes to almost every significant change that has come her way, not because she was certain, and not because she wasn’t scared, but because she has lea...

Over a thousand questions came in from the audience. Six recruiters came back. And within the first few minutes, Tom Scott, said what a lot of people in the industry are quietly thinking: we talk about it every single day, and it would be really nice not to for an hour. And so the panel voted to ban AI from the conversation. What followed was one of the most honest conversations this show has prod...

Maria Nicholas grew up between continents, between cultures, and between disciplines, and has spent her career making that range work for her rather than against her. She came into UX from advertising and brand design, learned to code in a three-month bootcamp where she didn’t see the sun, and built her leadership philosophy around a simple idea: a good designer facilitates great decisions out of...

Martina Hodges-Schell has spent thirty years moving through design, from advertising in Germany at the dawn of the web, through Amazon and Yahoo in their early mobile years, to pioneering UX consultancies and a six-year run helping organisations build genuinely collaborative product teams. She is also an equine coach, working with horses as unfiltered mirrors for how leaders actually show up, bene...

Hey, it’s Adam. This is a short bonus episode because I want to talk to you about something I’m really excited about, and I think you might be too. On July 23rd, Awaiting Approval LIVE is happening again. Live, in person, in three cities at the same time: London, San Francisco and New York City. I’ll be hosting the London room. Amy Khan is hosting San Francisco. Maryam Cristillo is hosting New Yor...

James Ferguson has spent his career moving towards things that excite him rather than away from things that don’t. From a Scottish design agency at sixteen, to building Skyscanner’s design system, to shipping interaction work at Atlassian from the other side of the world, to leading product and creative design at OVO Energy, he has consistently backed his instincts and figured out the rest on arri...

Maryam Cristillo grew up between cultures and continents, studied anthropology and art in the same breath, and has spent her career building creative teams at places like Victoria’s Secret , Naadam , and now Lindt , where she gets to do creative work on chocolate, which she will tell you is exactly as good as it sounds. She also runs a seventeen acre homestead in Maine with her husband, a hundred...

Tamora Petitt has spent 25 years helping people find their way through complex experiences, from redesigning one of the internet’s most visited health tools to building UX teams from scratch, teaching over 200 career changers the craft, and quietly applying design thinking to everything around her, not just the screen in front of her. She started out as a dancer. That turns out to explain a lot. W...

Charles Cadbury has spent 25 years building things at the edge of what’s possible. He created one of the first voice-enabled hotel concierge systems, invented voice-activated audio advertising, won the global Alexa Cup, and has spent the last decade quietly convinced that the way we talk to technology is about to change everything. He also watches the sunset every Thursday, without fail, with some...

Odeya Noble-Bougay returns. If you heard her in Season 2, you already know why. If you didn’t, go back and find it, then come here. Odeya thinks in ranges rather than binaries, leads with a generosity that feels entirely natural rather than performed, and has a way of reframing a question that makes you wonder why you were asking it the other way round in the first place. She was the obvious choic...

Nacho Zuccarino - Vulnerability Nacho Zuccarino has lived several careers in one lifetime. He started out teaching metaphysics in Buenos Aires, moved into advertising, spent a decade in Silicon Valley working at orgs like Google and Netflix, helped launch Starlink with SpaceX, and has spent the last two years building at the intersection of creativity and AI. He is restless, warm, and deeply, disa...

Debbie Millman has spent over 20 years interviewing the world’s most creative people, built one of the most celebrated design podcasts in existence, written a number of highly acclaimed books, co-founded the Masters Program in Branding at the SVA, and helped shape how an entire industry thinks about craft, identity, and what it means to do meaningful work. She is warm, considered, and disarmingly...

David Martin founded Fantasy Interactive before most people knew what interaction design was. He helped shape the visual language of operating systems used by billions, built one of the most influential creative agencies of its era, and worked with some of the biggest names in tech and culture. He’s also a pilot, a go-kart mechanic, a consciousness obsessive, and a dad who quit the nine-to-five to...