Ask a Designer Anything was my first ever podcast, and the first “a thing a day” project I did that wasn’t design. The design ones came first: Novl Cuisine, Nice Smile Sir, Gramophoney. This was the first time I pointed the daily-habit thing at something I had no clue about.
I decided it one late night, as you do: I’ll make a podcast every single day for 365 days. The small problem being that on day 1 I had no idea how to podcast. Where to upload it, how to record it, what I’d even say. None of it.
The first one I ever made is genuinely embarrassing. So here it is.
For the first stretch it was generic marketing advice. “What digital tools do you recommend?”, “Should I use WordPress?”, “How do I use Twitter for my business?” Then about halfway through I got bored of being useful, dropped the full name, and morphed it into just “AADA”: weird, trippy stuff that was slightly less shit than the marketing shit, but still shit. Here’s the episode where it turned:
I’d started messing about with music and words to build a soundscape instead of a podcast (which sounds even more wanky written down than it did in my head). A Blue Jam sort of thing. That experiment didn’t end with AADA. It came back years later, even weirder, as The Wednesday Audio.
It led somewhere first, mind. The next podcast I made was Get Doing Things, which began as solo episodes and eventually morphed into the interview show.
AADA was my first ever go at any of this. It’s very shit now. I remember it fondly anyway.