Podcast Awesome

Josh Williams has been designing icons since before it was a “real” job. These days, Josh is one of the most respected icon and identity designers working in the field. He helped shape the Font Awesome and Web Awesome logos, and he just designed Mosaic — a brand-new icon pack for Font Awesome Pro with roots in his long-running Uni Calendar letterpress project and a style that's unlike anythin...

Episode Summary What happens when you give a world-class icon designer a dream brief with almost no boundaries? A brief existential crisis, and eventually a beautiful type-inspired icon packs for Font Awesome 7. 😅 In this episode, Matt and Jory chat with icon designer Laura Bohill about the making of Chisel — the wonderfully chunky icon pack she designed for Font Awesome 7. They get into the weir...

In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt  sits down with Font Awesome founder Dave Gandy to unpack what it really means to be a great employee and a great manager — without the “rockstar ninja unicorn” nonsense, micromanaging, or performative perks. Dave reframes the idea of a “lifestyle business” as a badge of honor (not a slight), explains why leadership matters more than the role you’re hired f...

Look Awesome: Solving Color Once and for All Locking in the color palette for your project is one of those things that seems simple until you're actually doing it. Pick the wrong shade and your text is unreadable. Pick the right shade and it only works in Figma, not in your codebase, not in Tailwind, not anywhere that matters. Dave Gandy — Font Awesome founder, Kickstarter legend, self-descri...

AI makes it easier to build almost anything. So why does that make the job harder? In this episode, Matt sits down with Font Awesome founder Dave Gandy and engineer Travis Chase to get past the hype and into the real day-to-day of building with AI. The conversation covers what's actually changing on the team, where AI falls short, and what human skills matter more now than they did before. If...

💻 AI side quests, but make it Snuggle. 🤖✨ In this episode, we’re fresh off the Snuggle (our company retreat) and talking about what happens when you give a curious team some time, space… and a bunch of AI tools. Travis and Dave join us to share how experimenting with tools like G-Stack , Spec-Kit , and Claude helped us explore ideas, prototype faster, and take on projects we normally wouldn’t h...

Job interviews aren’t just about proving you’re a fit — they’re about figuring out whether the company deserves you, too. 👀 In this episode, Matt chats with Font Awesome founder Dave Gandy about why hiring is a two-way street. They unpack the red flags candidates should watch for, what healthy companies actually look like, and how the interview process can reveal way more than a polished mission...

In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt sits down with Ed and Francis to talk through three newly shipped Font Awesome features that are small, practical, and just the right amount of fun. They dig into individual PNG downloads , a new global color picker for previewing icons in brand colors, and the wonderfully playful User Blender , which lets you mix and match heads, bodies, and styles to crea...

Eleventy is becoming Build Awesome — and Zach Leatherman is here to explain what that actually means. In this episode of Podcast Awesome , Matt has a chat with Zach about the Build Awesome Kickstarter, why this rebrand is part of building a sustainable future for the open source project, and what changes (and what doesn’t ) for people already running Eleventy sites. You’ll hear Zach break down the...

In this episode, Matt and Jory sit down with UK-based icon designer + illustrator Vic Bell to talk about the brand-new Font Awesome icon pack, Graphite — a loose, hand-drawn set that brings texture, depth, and a whole lot of human personality to iconography. If you’ve ever tried to balance clarity vs. creativity, or wondered how icons can feel more like typefaces with different “voices”, this one’...

Eleventy started as a side project. Now it’s a critical infrastructure for thousands of websites. TL;DR: Open source isn’t broken. But the way we fund it often is. Let’s talk about what actually works. In this episode, we sit down with Zach Leatherman, creator of Eleventy (11ty), to talk honestly about what happens after open source succeeds. From nap-time coding and nights-and-weekends maintenanc...

Happy New Year from the Awesomeverse! In this episode, Matt and Jory kick off 2026 by recapping all the wild, weird, and wonderful things that happened across Font Awesome and Web Awesome in 2025. From the launch of FA7 and small-batch icon packs to a possum puppet mascot (yes, really), they reflect on the big (and small batch) wins, behind-the-scenes hilarity, and creative experiments that made t...

What is nerdery, really? 🤓 In this episode of Podcast Awesome, we dig into the heart of Font Awesome’s culture — inclusive nerdery. It's not about lone geniuses or command line gatekeepers. It’s about heart, curiosity, humility, and building awesome things with other people. 💛 👾 You'll hear from FA team members Dave and Travis, plus a few snippets from topics we've covered on our...

🎬 What do Star Wars, oil painting, and storytelling have in common?   Turns out: everything. In this curiosity-fueled episode, filmmaker and multi-hyphenate creative Andy Maier (Soon Agency) joins host Matt Johnson to talk about building a life powered by relentless learning, visual storytelling, and the kind of curiosity that launches careers 🚀. From working with Apple, SpaceX, and Microsoft to...

Episode Summary What does it really take to ship something as powerful, polished, and downright magical as Web Awesome? In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt sits down with Lindsay and Cory, the dynamic duo behind the official launch of Web Awesome. Together, they peel back the curtain on how the team brought a customizable design system to life (without summoning any cursed CSS incantations)....

Episode Summary: We're heading back to the basement — (sort of). In this episode, Matt catches up with Mike Wilkerson, the OG guest of Podcast Awesome , to unveil the biggest update yet to the official Font Awesome WordPress plugin. From block editor visual support to full-on SVG injection wizardry (yes, that’s a thing), this version is all about giving developers and designers more power, mo...

🧠 What do LEGO logos, hand-puppet dreams, citrus gadgets, and naming things "Turbo" have in common? They're all part of Dan Cederholm’s design universe — and part of this wide-ranging, joy-filled second half of our conversation. In this episode, Dan returns to talk about:  • Embracing constraints as a creative fuel source • Naming fonts after misspelled words (because ... domains)...

Summary Designer, author, and co-founder of Dribbble, Dan Cederholm joins Podcast Awesome to chat with Matt Johnson and Jory Raphael about finding joy in creativity later in life, making fonts just for fun, and the art of embracing imperfection. From typefaces and merch to dice games and design detours, Dan shares how side projects, constraints, and a healthy dose of curiosity keep the creative sp...

Build once, run everywhere. In this full-nerd, front-end-leaning episode of Podcast Awesome , Matt sits down with Zach Leatherman (creator of Eleventy) and Konnor Rogers (Web Awesome developer) to chat about how a static site generator just might be the key to building some of the most powerful, performant documentation on the web. We dig deep into Eleventy’s evolution, Web Awesome’s hybrid archit...

Inside the UX lessons, internet lore, and surprising comeback of Clippy Love him or loathe him, you remember him. Clippy — the googly-eyed paperclip that lived inside Microsoft Word — has become a permanent fixture in internet culture. But how did a productivity tool become the patron saint of annoying-yet-adorable UI? In this episode of Podcast Awesome, we’re digging into the cult of Clippy with...

Have you ever rage-coded your way into building a developer tool that actually fixes things? Burton Smith has. And we’re here for it. In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt and Web Awesome's boss, Cory Laviska chat with Burton Smith. Burton is an open source wizard and creator of the Web Components Toolkit, and he tells us about the gap between the promise of Web Components and the messy re...

🔴 “Excuse me … I believe you have my stapler?” One line. Infinite memes. A red-hot icon. In this episode of The Story Behind the Icon, we dive deep into the surprisingly rich lore behind the humble office stapler — and how a cult classic film , a soft-spoken cubicle dweller , and a spray-painted prop turned it into a cultural artifact. 🎧 Whether you’ve got 37 pieces of flair or just enough sarca...

Designing Joy: Don Clark of Invisible Creature on Creativity, Collectibles & Culture In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt hangs out with legendary designer Don Clark of Invisible Creature to dive into the analog soul of digital design. From their punk rock roots and Grammy-nominated album covers to art directing for Seattle’s swankiest restaurant, Don and his brother Ryan have created work...

💥 A Podcast Awesome Deep Cut Episode Description: 🛎️ Guess what? We got a fever … and the only prescription is … well, you know. In this very special episode of Podcast Awesome, we hit pause on our usual tech-and-icon-nerdery to unleash a full-throttle ode to one of the wackiest icons in our set: Cowbell Circle Plus . What starts as a nod to the legendary SNL sketch featuring Will Ferrell and Chr...

Pork chop sandwiches!! 🫡 🏃‍♂️‍➡️ Gather round the interwebs young Gen Xers and Elder Millennials ...  In this oddball solo episode of Podcast Awesome , Matt rewinds to the early 2000s and dives deep into the glitchy, glorious chaos of Fensler Film’s GI Joe PSA remixes — a series of bootleg web videos that helped shape meme culture as we know it. These gloriously low-res VHS-rip remixes mashed up...