A podcast about iconic design and popular culture.

Two Designers Walk Into a Bar is a podcast about iconic design and popular culture.

Join Todd Coats and Elliot Strunk (that's us), two creatively curious pals living between the bookends of grand museums and dive bars, the sweet spot where highbrow and lowbrow become drinking buddies. We talk about influential creative work and uncover stories of how the familiar became iconic. Think "Behind the Music" but for designed stuff.

Todd has a career as varied as his sweet sock collection. Currently he’s the Senior Director of Creative for (ISC)² – an international cybersecurity nonprofit. When not directing brand strategy, he teaches it in a popular workshop series for the American Marketing Association. He also spends a lot of time making and collecting illustrations, and convincing his family that’s not a cry for help.

Elliot has been lucky enough to make a living doing what he loves. He is currently the Chief Creative Strategist for Honestly, a remote-first, highly-scalable marketing agency and also runs their in-house design shop, Studio H. Outside of the office, he also dabbles in collage art, entrepreneurial ventures and building creative community. He’s also not bad at trivia. He has an amazing wife and sweet-natured teenaged son he enjoys traveling with near and far.

Our listeners tend to be curious and creative types. History buffs who appreciate both high and low art. Mainly Gen X, but also with some Boomers and Millennials thrown into the mix for good measure.
 

We love podcasting because it's a chance to explore a creative medium that is new to us and provides an outlet for telling stories, something we do in our day jobs as marketers.

Our initial goal was to teach ourselves something new and have the podcast be a way to record the stories and conversations we were already having with one another. In fact, our first episode delves into our origin story:

https://www.twodesignerswalkintoabar.com/episodes/episode-01-teaser

We started our podcast in 2020. We found ourselves with some extra time and a creative itch during the pandemic. It was cathartic for us to make something that would allow us to connect with people virtually at a time when that wasn't happening in real life.

From the idea of the podcast to releasing our first episode took about four or five months. The first episode we mentioned above? We probably recorded it about six times before getting it right. The audio quality, the storytelling, the edit and episode length. We asked friends to listen and give us honest feedback and they did. That's the single best thing you can ask for when starting a podcast, especially if the experience is a new one.
 

We try to release a new episode every two weeks. That cadence gives us breathing room while still providing enough immediacy to complete our work in a timely manner. It's also predictable for the listener.

We have a really long list of potential topics we keep updating, so there's always something to work on that we're interested in. Because of that level of interest, we manage to make time to record new episodes. Once we figure out an interesting story, we're eager to share it. Our stories tend to have shelf life, something we do on purpose. That way nothing feels out-of-date when it debuts because it's not based on "of the minute" current events, but matters because the subjects are both time-tested and influential.

Since we both have jobs, our podcast work tends to happen on evenings and weekends. Since there's two of us, we also share in podcasting responsibilities and keep one another accountable.

We self-fund our podcast. Aside from the one-time expenses for hardware, we spend around $500-$600 a year for things like hosting, merch production, marketing tests and general business overhead (filing taxes, etc.).
 

The first thing podcasting does for us is it gives us a reason to share our curiosity with one another and our listeners. We've worn tools like Wikipedia out!

We have been lucky to partner with Evergreen Podcasts. We have gotten some sponsorship as a result but still operate at a loss. We have also sold some merch at some of our speaking gigs we've done, so that's another revenue stream for us. Since we're designers, we have the capability to quickly spin-up new things for our listeners.

We also have a Patreon account but need to do a better job of promoting it and posting exclusive content.

So right now it's a labor of love, but we're working to change that.
 

Being designers, we're Mac users, so tools like GarageBand and Logic are what we use for recording and editing. We discovered that recording locally on our own tracks and then assembling the edit later provides so much more flexibility. We also have studio-level mics and Focusrite Scarlet preamps.

For our project management, we use Basecamp and all of Google's productivity tools (Calendar, Docs, Drive, etc.).

We do a fair amount of research for each episode, whether it's a one-off topic or a themed season with a group of individual subjects within that theme. We always ask ourselves if there's a story about something iconic that hasn't been told...the story behind the story if you will. That's when things get interesting for us. Because we talk about design, we always explain that things don't just appear in the world. They exist as the result of a series of decisions, sometimes good and sometimes bad.

When we have had guests, we ask them to record locally as well and then share the audio files with us. We always have the live conversations over the phone with earbuds so the local audio is recorded cleanly.
 

We lean into social media as well as our peer networks, so our marketing is a combination of typical channels along with word-of-mouth. We also have an email newsletter and have also done a bit of paid advertising to test ROI and see if listens and subscriber numbers increase.

We also have content on our YouTube channel in both shorter, snackable audiogram form (YouTube Shorts) as well as full episodes. It's such a large search engine and it's built for rich media, so it only makes sense to add our content there as well.
 

You likely have a list of podcasts you subscribe to. Why do you like them? The host(s)? The structure? The subject matter? We took the best of what we like and listen to and translated those aspects into what's authentic and ownable for us.

The feedback we get is that our genuine friendship and deep research come through in each episode. We're also kinda funny.

There are so many wonderful podcasting resources in the world. Far too many to mention here. One we would suggest is the "Scrappy Podcasting" newsletter and events from Jeremy Enns. He has a great network of peers who provide insightful and actionable guidance.
 

We have episode notes and additional background information, our blog and merch available via our website. It also serves as a link to all of our social media activity.

https://www.twodesignerswalkintoabar.com/