By Rachael Schultz
As designers, we dominate the visual world, creating images to please the eye.
Why not, then, conquer other worlds as well? That’s precisely what Aaron Heth and Matt McInerney did when they started their own podcast, “Read Between the Leading,” in order to spread aspects of design into the audio world.
The two senior graphic design students, who launched their audio show in Feb. 2009, talk about all aspects of design between themselves and with guest designers.
McInerney said they started the show because they “just wanted to talk,” adding that the first show was called “Name our Design Show” because all they wanted to do was comment on design.
The duo created the show to talk mainly about graphic design, including typography and trends.
“At its roots it’s graphic design but it’s a lot more about academics and theory,” added Heth.
And the name explains it all. “Read Between the Leading” is a pun on the saying “read between the lines.”
“Leading” is the design term for the space between two lines of text. If you’re in the know enough to get the joke, then the name tells you everything about the show. On the surface, it’s about graphic design, but it’s also about all the ideas contained within design.
“We’re kind of shifting. A lot of our guests beforehand were more bloggers or freelance designers so we’re trying to shift to these thinkers with these ideas, whether they’re educators or entrepreneurs,” Heth said.
“More recently, we talked to a woman named Robyn Waxman who’s more of a design thinker and designer for activism and I’m really excited to go down that path of using design to change things,” he added.
Even though they’ve only been online for 6 months (they took a break over the summer), they already have quite the following. Their first shows topped 300 listeners and Heth says they now have an average audience of about 3,000 people.
When they’re not talking to each other, Heth and McInerney interview different designers and thinkers three to four times a month on the show.
“There are a lot of people that Matt and I are fans of and that we love and that we’ve always wanted to talk to and that we always read anyway,” Heth said.
But they don’t just pick any designer. “Its not about a good designer, it’s about if there’s something about them,” McInerney said.
“There’s always an idea behind [who is chosen],” he said.
Waxman, for example, who appeared on the podcast Oct. 11, is a designer but also an activist, educator and farmer. They choose people who go beyond the realm of simply being a designer.
Despite the design basis of the show, Heth and McInerney are still able to reach out to non-designers and inspire them to learn more about the design world.
“Twenty percent of the people who contact us say they’re not a designer, they’re like writers or somehow involved in the scope of humanity and they are just passionate about graphic design and want to learn more about it,” McInerney said.
While both hosts are graduating in 2010, they agree that the future of the show is only looking up. “It can only get better from here,” McInerney said. “There’s so much we want to cover still and there’s so many smaller designers we want to get and ways we want to take the show,” he added.
You can check out their show at their Web site.
