Underscore

About Underscore

Underscore is a podcast by the Chicago Graphic Design Club that brings you conversations with Chicago’s creative community. On this podcast, host, Christian Solorzano, explores the craft, theory, and practice of graphic design, plus discusses ideas that cultivate a more inclusive and thoughtful creative community.

Publisher

The Chicago Graphic Design Club

Category

arts

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

3 May 2022

Latest episode

12 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

117 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   12 Oct 2026

   117 • ELAINE LOPEZ

   Our guest is Elaine Lopez (https://elainelopez.design/), a designer and educator who teaches at Parsons and spent the formative years of her design career in Chicago. In this episode, Elaine speaks with host Christian Solorzano (https://christiansolorzano.com/) about her first typography class at the University of Florida, a class so overwhelming she had to take a long walk around campus afterward, and how that challenge drew her into design. She shares the story of a Labor Day weekend visit to Chicago that made her feel at home for the first time, and her decision to quit her job in Miami and move during the recession. Elaine talks about her years in Chicago, from PowerPoints and pharmaceutical marketing to point-of-purchase work at Leo Burnett's Arc, field research at Gravitytank, and social impact work at Greater Good Studio. She reflects on six months working with Rick Valicenti and Thirst to help Columbus, Indiana return to Paul Rand's original identity, and on what she learned watching Rick present work to a room. The conversation explores identity and representation in design, why they led her to teaching, and how she builds community in the classroom. Elaine also discusses her love of Riso printing, the value of slow and inefficient work in the age of AI, her preference for "protopia" over utopia, and what she still carries with her from Chicago. Music by the band Eighties Slang.

2. 

   28 Sept 2026

   116 • JONATHAN NESCI

   Our guest is Jonathan Nesci (https://jonathannesci.com/), a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, furniture, and fine art. He grew up in Oak Lawn, spent eleven years in Columbus, Indiana, and now works out of a studio on his brother's farm about an hour outside Chicago, in collaboration with a guild of high-craft makers throughout the Midwest. In this episode, Jonathan speaks with host Christian Solorzano (https://christiansolorzano.com/) about an origin story that begins in a sandbox — his grandfather owned a concrete block company in Des Plaines, had fresh sand delivered every summer, and made him a chest of hand-sanded wooden blocks. Jonathan traces that state of play forward through a fundamentalist Baptist school, a thirty-foot BMX ramp in his driveway, and five years driving a forklift at FedEx, where a coworker named Brian asked whether he knew that people design furniture for a living. Jonathan describes cold-emailing Richard Wright, breaking a thirty-thousand-dollar Gio Ponti desk in his first two months at the auction house, and discovering that the job was never about repairing things himself. It was about finding the upholsterer, the glass guy, the welder. That model became his entire practice, and he makes a case for it in an essay he calls Craft Surrogates: producing a thing doesn't make it any less yours. The conversation turns to systems and constraint. Jonathan describes himself as a formalist — form drives everything, while scale, material and finish stay open. He talks about designing around what local fabricators can already do, about the golden ratio as a framework that scales endlessly in both directions, and about the H1 coffee table he built in 2006 after being rejected from a juried competition, simply to find out whether he could. He also tells the story behind 100 Variations, the hundred mirror-polished aluminum tables he installed in the sunken courtyard of Eliel Saarinen's First Christian Church in Columbus — including the moment a local architect told him, mid-pitch, that the courtyard had once been a reflecting pool, and the week in which three organizations funded the whole project. It became the pilot for Exhibit Columbus. Along the way, Jonathan speaks about faith and hope on his own terms, about what meditation clarified for him in 2017, about why he now sells almost entirely to the trade, and about why, six years into a sculpture practice, he feels like a kid again. Underscore is produced by the Chicago Graphic Design Club (https://chicagographicdesign.club/). Music by the band Eighties Slang.

3. 

   14 Sept 2026

   115 • ALISA WOLFSON

   Our guest is Alisa Wolfson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alisa-wolfson-a7422a4b/), EVP and Head of Design at Leo Chicago, where she built the agency's design department. Alisa grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and found design sideways. Her dad was in the wine import-export business, and she kept asking if she could design the labels — she didn't yet know that what she wanted to do had a name. She taught herself design history and layout, made projects in her garage, shot her portfolio on slide film, and applied to a program a friend had gone through. She still has the Kodak Carousel that portfolio came back in. She got to VSA by calling until somebody finally picked up. In this episode, Alisa speaks with host Christian Solorzano (https://christiansolorzano.com/) about being a generalist among specialists, and about what it took to figure out how she actually wanted to work. She describes the stretch she spent working for herself and finding it lonely, and walking into Leo expecting a short freelance project. The conversation turns on a question about polish. Alisa argues that almost nothing made for a brand reaches us unedited — that the images built to look like someone's bathroom have been edited too — and that designers have been standing right next to that since the beginning of advertising. She doesn't think that's cause for despair. She also talks about what makes collaboration work, why she thinks happy is a weird word, the Chicago designers she came up around, and a project she once made about her own hair, with a line in the corner she remembers as "I take myself wherever I go."

Who has been a guest on Underscore

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Rick Valicenti
• Cristobal Mora
• Aliona Solomadina
• Barry Deck

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

243

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

12 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

30 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 71 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

86

Social presence

0

YouTube

72

Engagement

71

Contact Underscore

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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Questions about Underscore