Make What You Like: Reflections on my Interview with Chris Piascik

This is my first blog post on my new website. It's been a long time coming, but I'm glad I finally did it.

First of all, I'm a huge fan of Chris Piascik's work. I found him on YouTube first and he's responsible for making me aware of Adobe Fresco for iPad. I even bought a pack of brushes he designed for it.

So, as you can tell, my urge to nerd out was hard to resist. I actually did get into more of that in the longer version of the interview you can hear on Patreon. But for normal people, the public version is enough.

When we were getting set up we were chatting and I asked him if he did many interviews, kind of expecting him to say no, because I thought I had done my homework. I didn't find many interviews. He said "Actually, I just did Creative Pep Talk with Andy J. Pizza yesterday."

I'm a longtime listener of that. podcast so of course suddenly Chris got bumped up several notches in my mind. I was already star-struck but now I was actually nervous.

So I said that took care of one of my questions because I was wondering why Andy had never interviewed him. To which he replied, "no actually I was on an early episode. I've known him for years."

Had I known that I would have been way more prepared for this interview, which my nervous brain was making me acutely aware of. "Why didn't you search the podcast app?"

I encourage you to listen to the early episode of Creative Pep Talk with Chris. The new one isn't out yet.

Anyway, I wish I had followed up at several points. I should have asked more about his upbringing and graphic designer uncle. I should have asked about his method for managing ideas. I wish I had been less wedded to my notes and let the conversation move more naturally.

But it did make me want to get better at interviewing.