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In tomorrow’s data-driven environment, it’s becoming more and more common for a UX expert to be asked to create a personal digital experience, whether it’s a common website, user portal, or local application. However while there continues to be no lack of marketing buzz around personalization systems, we also have very few defined approaches for implementing personalized UX.

That’s where we begin. After completing tens of personalisation projects over the past few years, we gave ourselves a purpose: could you make a systematic personalization platform especially for UX practitioners? A human-centered personalization program that includes data, classification, content delivery, and total objectives can be compared to the Personalization Pyramid, a design-focused design. By using this strategy, you will be able to understand the core components of a modern, UX-driven personalization system ( or at the very least understand enough to get started ).

Getting Started

We’ll assume that you are already comfortable with the fundamentals of modern personalization for the purposes of this article. A nice guide can be found these: Website Personalization Planning. Although Graphic projects in this field can take a variety of forms, they frequently start from the same place.

Common scenarios for starting a personalisation task:

• Your business or client made a purchase to support personalization with a content management system ( CMS ), marketing automation platform ( MAP ), or other related technology.
• The CMO, CDO, or CIO has identified personalisation as a target
• User data is unclear or disjointed.
• You are running some secluded targeting strategies or A/B tests
• On the personalisation approach, stakeholders disagree.
• Mandate of customer privacy rules ( e. g. GDPR ) requires revisiting existing user targeting practices

Regardless of where you begin, a powerful personalization system will require the same key building stones. These are the “levels” on the tower, as we’ve made them. Whether you are a UX artist, scholar, or planner, understanding the core components may help make your contribution effective.

From top to bottom, the rates include:

North Star: What larger corporate goal is driving the personalization system?
1. Objectives: What are the specific, tangible benefits of the system?
2. Touchpoints: Where will you get a personal knowledge?
3. Contexts and Campaigns: What personalization information does the person view?
4. What constitutes a distinct, accessible market according to consumer parts?
5. Actionable Data: What dependable and credible information is captured by our professional platform to generate personalization?
6. What wider set of data is conceivable ( now in our environment ) to allow you to optimize?

We’ll go through each of these amounts in change. An associated deck of cards serves as an example of each level’s specific examples to make this more practical. We’ve found them helpful in customisation pondering periods, and will include cases for you here.

Starting at the Top

The elements of the pyramids are as follows:

North Star

With your personalisation plan, whether large or small, you aim for a general north star. The North Star defines the (one ) overall mission of the personalization program. What do you hope to accomplish? North Stars cast a ghost. The larger the sun, the larger the dark. Example of North Starts may include:

Function: Use simple customer inputs to optimize. Examples:” Raw” messages, basic search effects, system user settings and settings options, general flexibility, basic improvements
1. Feature: Self-contained customisation component. Examples:” Cooked” notifications, advanced optimizations ( geolocation ), basic dynamic messaging, customized modules, automations, recommenders
2. Experience: Individualized customer experiences across a range of consumer flows and interactions. Examples: Email campaigns, landing pages, advanced messaging ( i. e. C2C chat ) or conversational interfaces, larger user flows and content-intensive optimizations ( localization ).
3. Solution: Highly distinctive, personalized solution experiences. Example: Standalone, branded encounters with personalization at their base, like the “algotorial” songs by Spotify quite as Discover Weekly.

Goals

Personalization can help speed up designing with user intentions, as in any great UX design. Goals are the military and tangible metrics that may prove the entire program is effective. A good place to begin is with your existing analytics and calculation software and metrics you can standard against. In some cases, fresh targets may be ideal. The most important thing to keep in mind is that personalisation is certainly a desired outcome. It is a means to an end. Common targets include:

• Conversion
• Time spent on work
• Net promoter score ( NPS)
• Satisfaction of the customers

Touchpoints

Touchpoints are where the personalisation happens. This will be one of your biggest areas of responsibility as a UX custom. The connections available to you will depend on how your personalization and associated technology features are instrumented, and should be rooted in improving a person’s experience at a certain point in the trip. Touchpoints can be multi-device ( mobile, in-store, website ), but they can also be more specific ( web banner, web pop-up, etc. ). Here are a few illustrations:

Touchpoints at the channel level

• Email: Role
• Email opens at what time?
• In-store display ( JSON endpoint )
• Native app
• Search

Wireframe-level Touchpoints

• Web overlay
• Web alert bar
• Web banner
• Web content block
• menu on the web

If you’re designing for web interfaces, for example, you will likely need to include personalized “zones” in your wireframes. Based on our next step, contexts, and campaigns, the content for these can be presented programmatically in touchpoints.

Contexts and Campaigns

Once you’ve identified some touchpoints, you can decide what kind of personalized content a user will receive. Many personalization tools will refer to these as” campaigns” ( so, for example, a campaign on a web banner for new visitors to the website ). These will be displayed programmatically to specific user segments, as defined by user data. At this stage, we find it helpful to consider two separate models: a context model and a content model. The context helps you consider the user’s level of engagement at the personalization moment, such as when they are casually browsing information or deep-dive. Think of it in terms of information retrieval behaviors. The content model can then guide you in deciding which personalization to use in terms of the context ( for instance, an” Enrich” campaign that features related articles might be a good substitute for extant content ).

Personalization Context Model:

1. Browse
2. Skim
3. Nudge
4. Feast

Personalization Content Model

1. Alert
2. Make Easier
3. Cross-Sell
4. Enrich

We’ve written a lot more in depth about each of these models elsewhere, so be sure to check out Colin’s Personalization Content Model and Jeff’s Personalization Context Model.

User Groups

User segments can be created prescriptively or adaptively, based on user research ( e. g. via rules and logic tied to set user behaviors or via A/B testing ). You will need to think about how to treat the unidentified or first-time visitor, the guest or returning visitor for whom you may have a stateful cookie ( or an equivalent post-cookie identifier ), or the logged-in visitor who is authenticated. Here are some examples from the personalization pyramid:

• Unknown
• Guest
• Authenticated
• Default
• Referred
• Role
• Cohort
• Unique ID

Actionable Data

Every organization with any digital presence has data. It’s a matter of examining what user data you can ethically collect, its inherent reliability and value, and how you can use it ( sometimes referred to as “data activation” ). Fortunately, the tide is turning to first-party data: a recent study by Twilio estimates some 80 % of businesses are using at least some type of first-party data to personalize the customer experience.

First-party data has a number of benefits on the user experience front, including being relatively simple to collect, more likely to be accurate, and less susceptible to the” creep factor” of third-party data. So a key part of your UX strategy should be to determine what the best form of data collection is on your audiences. Here are a few illustrations:

There is a progression of profiling when it comes to recognizing and making decisioning about different audiences and their signals. As user data volume and time and confidence increase, it varies more granularly to more precise constructs about ever-smaller cohorts of users.

While some combination of implicit / explicit data is generally a prerequisite for any implementation ( more commonly referred to as first party and third-party data ) ML efforts are typically not cost-effective directly out of the box. This is because optimization requires a strong data backbone and content repository. But these approaches should be considered as part of the larger roadmap and may indeed help accelerate the organization’s overall progress. At this point, you will typically work with key stakeholders and product owners to create a profiling model. The profiling model includes defining approach to configuring profiles, profile keys, profile cards and pattern cards. a scalable, multi-faceted approach to profiling.

Pulling it Together

The cards serve as a starting point for an inventory of sorts ( we offer blanks for you to customize your own ), a set of potential levers and motivations for the personalization activities you aspire to deliver, but they are more valuable when grouped together.

In assembling a card “hand”, one can begin to trace the entire trajectory from leadership focus down through a strategic and tactical execution. It serves as the foundation for the workshops that both co-authors have conducted to build a program backlog, which would make a good article topic.

In the meantime, what is important to note is that each colored class of card is helpful to survey in understanding the range of choices potentially at your disposal, it is threading through and making concrete decisions about for whom this decisioning will be made: where, when, and how.

Lay Down Your Cards

Any effective personalization strategy must take into account near, middle, and long-term objectives. Even with the leading CMS platforms like Sitecore and Adobe or the most exciting composable CMS DXP out there, there is simply no “easy button” wherein a personalization program can be stood up and immediately view meaningful results. Having said that, every personalization activity has a common grammar, just like every sentence has nouns and verbs. These cards attempt to map that territory.

Humility, a writer’s most important quality, has a great circle to it. What about sincerity, an business manager’s important value? Or a surgeon’s? Or a teacher’s? They all have fantastic sounds. When humility is our guiding light, the course is usually available for fulfillment, development, relation, and commitment. We’re going to discuss why in this section.

That said, this is a guide for developers, and to that conclusion, I’d like to begin with a story—well, a voyage, actually. It’s a personal one, and I’m going to make myself susceptible as well. I call it:

The Absurd Pate of Justin: A Tale

When I was coming out of arts school, a long-haired, goateed novice, write was a known quantity to me, design on the web, however, was riddled with complexities to understand and learn, a problem to be solved. Although I had formal training in typography, layout, and creative design, what most intrigued me was how these traditional skills could be applied to a young online landscape. This theme may eventually form the rest of my job.

But I drained HTML and JavaScript novels into the wee hours of the morning and self-taught myself how to code during my freshman year rather than student and go into print like many of my companions. I wanted—nay, needed—to better understand the underlying relevance of what my design decisions may think when rendered in a website.

The so-called” Wild West” of website design existed in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. Manufacturers at the time were all figuring out how to use layout and visual connection to the online environment. What regulations were in place? How may we break them and also engage, entertain, and present information? How was my values, which include modesty, respect, and connection, coincide with that on a more general level? I was eager to find out.

Those are amazing factors between non-career relationships and the world of style, even though I’m referring to a different era. What are your main passions, or ideals, that elevate medium? The main elements are all the same, basically the same as what we previously discussed earlier on the immediate parallels between what fulfills you, independent of the visible or online domains.

First within tables, animated GIFs, Flash, then with Web Standards, divs, and CSS, there was personality, raw unbridled creativity, and unique means of presentment that often defied any semblance of a visible grid. Splash screens and “browser requirement” pages aplenty. Usability and accessibility were typically victims of such a creation, but such paramount facets of any digital design were largely (and, in hindsight, unfairly) disregarded at the expense of experimentation.

For instance, this iteration of my personal portfolio site (” the pseudoroom” ) from that time was experimental if not a little overt in terms of the visual presentation of the idea of a living sketchbook. Very skeuomorphic. On this one, I worked with fellow designer and dear friend Marc Clancy, who is now a co-founder of the creative project organizing app Milanote, to sketch and then play with various user interactions. Then, I’d break it down and code it into a digital layout.

Along with design folio pieces, the site also offered free downloads for Mac OS customizations: desktop wallpapers that were effectively design experimentation, custom-designed typefaces, and desktop icons.

GUI Galaxy was a design, pixel art, and Mac-centric news portal that graphic designer friends and I developed from around the same time.

Design news portals were incredibly popular at the time, and they now accept Tweet-sized, small-format versions of relevant news from the categories I previously covered. If you took Twitter, curated it to a few categories, and wrapped it in a custom-branded experience, you’d have a design news portal from the late 90s / early 2000s.

We as designers had changed and developed a bandwidth-sensitive, award-winning, much more accessibility-conscious website. Still ripe with experimentation, yet more mindful of equitable engagement. There are a few content panes here, with both Mac-focused news and general news (tech, design ) to be seen. We also offered many of the custom downloads I cited before as present on my folio site but branded and themed to GUI Galaxy.

The presentation layer, which included global design, illustration, and news author collaboration, was the backbone of the website. And the collaboration effort here, in addition to experimentation on a’ brand’ and content delivery, was hitting my core. We were creating something bigger than just one of us and establishing a global audience.

Collaboration and connection transcend medium in their impact, immensely fulfilling me as a designer.

Why am I taking you on this journey of design memory lane, now? Two reasons.

First, there’s a reason for the nostalgia for that design era ( the” Wild West” era, as I put it ): the inherent exploration, personality, and creativity that dominated many design portals and personal portfolio websites. Ultra-finely detailed pixel art UI, custom illustration, bespoke vector graphics, all underpinned by a strong design community.

The web design industry has experienced stagnation in recent years. I suspect there’s a strong chance you’ve seen a site whose structure looks something like this: a hero image / banner with text overlaid, perhaps with a lovely rotating carousel of images ( laying the snark on heavy there ), a call to action, and three columns of sub-content directly beneath. Perhaps there are selections that vaguely relate to their respective content in an icon library.

Design, as it’s applied to the digital landscape, is in dire need of thoughtful layout, typography, and visual engagement that goes hand-in-hand with all the modern considerations we now know are paramount: usability. accessibility. Load times and bandwidth- sensitive content delivery. A user-friendly presentation that is relevant wherever they are. We must be mindful of, and respectful toward, those concerns—but not at the expense of creativity of visual communication or via replicating cookie-cutter layouts.

Pixel Issues

Websites during this period were often designed and built on Macs whose OS and desktops looked something like this. Although Mac OS 7.5 is available, 8 and 9 are not very different.

How could any single icon, at any given moment, stand out and grab my attention? That is a fascinating question. In this example, the user’s desktop is tidy, but think of a more realistic example with icon pandemonium. How did it maintain cohesion among the group, for example, if an icon was a part of a larger system grouping ( fonts, extensions, control panels )?

These were 32 x 32 pixel creations, utilizing a 256-color palette, designed pixel-by-pixel as mini mosaics. Under such absurd constraints, this seemed to me to be the embodiment of digital visual communication. And often, ridiculous restrictions can yield the purification of concept and theme.

So I started to research and do my homework. I was a student of this new medium, hungry to dissect, process, discover, and make it my own.

I wanted to see how I could push the boundaries of a 32×32 pixel grid with that 256-color palette, expanding upon the idea of exploration. Those ridiculous constraints forced a clarity of concept and presentation that I found incredibly appealing. I was thrown the digital gauntlet, and that challenge fueled my determination. And so, in my dorm room into the wee hours of the morning, I toiled away, bringing conceptual sketches into mini mosaic fruition.

These are some of my creations that made use of ResEdit, the only program I had at the time, to create icons. ResEdit was a clunky, built-in Mac OS utility not really made for exactly what we were using it for. Research is at the center of all of this endeavor. Challenge. Problem-solving Again, these core connection-based values are agnostic of medium.

There’s one more design portal I want to talk about, which also serves as the second reason for my story to bring this all together.

This is the Kaliber 1000, or K10k, abbreviated. K10k was founded in 1998 by Michael Schmidt and Toke Nygaard, and was the design news portal on the web during this period. With its pixel art-fueled presentation, attention to detail paid to every aspect of every detail, and many of the more well-known designers of the time who were invited to be news authors on the site, well… it was the place to be, my friend. With respect where respect is due, GUI Galaxy’s concept was inspired by what these folks were doing.

For my part, the combination of my web design work and pixel art exploration began to get me some notoriety in the design scene. K10k eventually figured out and added me as one of their very limited group of news writers to add content to the website.

Amongst my personal work and side projects —and now with this inclusion—in the design community, this put me on the map. Additionally, my design work has started to appear on other design news portals, as well as in publications abroad and domestically. With that degree of success while in my early twenties, something else happened:

I actually changed into a colossal asshole in about a year of school, not less. The press and the praise became what fulfilled me, and they went straight to my head. They inflated my ego. I actually felt somewhat superior to my fellow designers.

The casualties? My design stagnated. My evolution has stagnated, as is its evolution.

I felt so supremely confident in my abilities that I effectively stopped researching and discovering. When my first instinct was to sketch concepts or iterate ideas in lead, I instead leaped right into Photoshop. I drew my inspiration from the smallest of sources ( and with blinders on ). My peers frequently vehemently disapproved of any criticism of my work. The most tragic loss: I had lost touch with my values.

My ego almost destroyed some of my friendships and blossoming professional relationships. I was toxic in talking about design and in collaboration. But thankfully, those same friends gave me a priceless gift: candor. They called me out on my unhealthy behavior.

It was a gift I initially did not accept but which I, on the whole, was able to reflect on in depth. I was soon able to accept, and process, and course correct. Although the realization made me feel uneasy, the re-awakening was necessary. I let go of the “reward” of adulation and re-centered upon what stoked the fire for me in art school. Most importantly, I returned to my fundamental values.

Always Students

Following that temporary regression, I was able to advance in both my personal and professional design. And I could self-reflect as I got older to facilitate further growth and course correction as needed.

Let’s take the Large Hadron Collider as an example. The LHC was designed” to help answer some of the fundamental open questions in physics, which concern the basic laws governing the interactions and forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, and in particular the interrelation between quantum mechanics and general relativity”. Thank you, Wikipedia.

Around fifteen years ago, in one of my earlier professional roles, I designed the interface for the application that generated the LHC’s particle collision diagrams. These diagrams are often regarded as works of art by themselves because they depict what is actually happening inside the Collider during any given particle collision event.

Designing the interface for this application was a fascinating process for me, in that I worked with Fermilab physicists to understand what the application was trying to achieve, but also how the physicists themselves would be using it. In order to accomplish this, in this role,

I cut my teeth on usability testing, working with the Fermilab team to iterate and improve the interface. To me, their language and the topics they discussed seemed foreign. And by making myself humble and working under the mindset that I was but a student, I made myself available to be a part of their world to generate that vital connection.

I also had the opportunity to observe the physicists ‘ use of the tool in their own homes, on their own terminals, during my first ethnographic observation. For example, one takeaway was that due to the level of ambient light-driven contrast within the facility, the data columns ended up using white text on a dark gray background instead of black text-on-white. This made it easier for them to pore over a lot of data during the day and lessen their strain on their eyes. And Fermilab and CERN are government entities with rigorous accessibility standards, so my knowledge in that realm also grew. Another crucial form of connection was the barrier-free design.

So to those core drivers of my visual problem-solving soul and ultimate fulfillment: discovery, exposure to new media, observation, human connection, and evolution. Before I entered those values, I had to check my ego before entering it, which opened the door to those values.

An evergreen willingness to listen, learn, understand, grow, evolve, and connect yields our best work. I want to pay attention to the words “grow” and “evolve” in particular in that statement. If we are always students of our craft, we are also continually making ourselves available to evolve. Yes, we have years of practical design experience under our belt. Or the focused lab sessions from a UX bootcamp. Or the monogrammed portfolio of our creative work. Or, ultimately, decades of a career behind us.

However, remember that “experience” does not equate to “expert.”

As soon as we close our minds via an inner monologue of’ knowing it all’ or branding ourselves a” #thoughtleader” on social media, the designer we are is our final form. There will never be a designer like us.

I am imaginative. What I do involves chemistry. It’s a puzzle. Instead of letting it get done by me, I do it.

I have a creative side. This tag is not appropriate for all creatives. Not everyone see themselves in this manner. Some innovative individuals incorporate technology into their work. That is their perception, and I regard it. Perhaps I even have a small envy for them. However, my thinking and being are unique.

It distracts you to apologize and qualify in progress. That’s what my mind does to destroy me. I’ll leave it alone for today. I may regret and be qualified at any time. after I’ve said what I should have. which is sufficient.

Except when it is simple and flows like a wine valley.

Sometimes it does. Maybe what I need to make arrives in a flash. I’ve learned to avoid saying it right away because people think you don’t work hard enough when you know it’s the best idea when you’re on the go and you know it’s the best idea.

Maybe I work and work and work until the thought strikes me. Maybe it arrives right away, but I don’t remind people for three weeks. Maybe I get so excited about an idea that just came along that I blurt it out and didn’t stop myself. like a child who discovered a medal in one of his Cracker Jacks. Often I get away with this. Yes, that is the best idea, but often others disagree. The majority of the time, they don’t, and I regret that joy has faded.

Joy should be saved for the meeting, where it will matter. not the informal gathering that two different gatherings precede that meeting. Nobody understands why these discussions occur. We keep saying we’re getting rid of them, but we keep discovering new ways to get them. They occasionally yet excel. But occasionally they are a hindrance to the real job. Depending on what you do and where you do it, the ratio between when conferences are valuable and when they are a sad distraction vary. And who you are and how you go about doing it. I’ll go back and forth once more. I am imaginative. That is the style.

Often, a lot of diligent and individual work ends up with something that is rarely useful. Maybe I have to take that and move on to the next task.

Don’t inquire about the procedure. I am imaginative.

I have a creative side. My dreams are not in my power. And I have no control over my best tips.

I can chisel aside, surround myself with information or photos, and occasionally that works. I can go for a move, which occasionally works. There is a Eureka, which has nothing to do with boiling pots and sizzling oil, and I may be making dinner. I frequently know what to do when I awaken. The idea that may have saved me disappears almost as frequently as I become aware and a part of the world once more as a senseless wind of oblivion. For imagination, in my opinion, comes from that other planet. the one that we enter in ambitions and, possibly, before and after suicide. I’m not a writer, so that’s up to authors to think about. I am imaginative. Theologians should circulate mass armies throughout their artistic globe, which they claim to be true. But that is yet another diversion. And one that is miserable. Possibly on a much bigger issue than whether or not I am creative. But this is still a departure from what I said when I came around.

Often, the outcome is evasion. And suffering. You are familiar with the adage” the tortured musician”? Even when the artist is trying to write a soft drink song, a call in a worn-out comedy, or a budget ask, that word is correct.

Some individuals who detest being called artistic perhaps been closeted artists, but that’s between them and their gods. No offence intended. Your assertions are also accurate. My needs are own, though.

Artists acknowledge their work.

Disadvantages know cons, just like real rappers recognize true rappers, just like queers recognize queers. People have a lot of regard for designers. We revere, follow, and almost deify the great types. Of program, deifying any person is a dreadful error. We’ve been given a warning. We are more knowledgeable. We are aware that people are really people. They argue, they are depressed, they regret their most important choices, they are weak and hungry, they can be violent, and they can be as ridiculous as we can because they are clay, just like us. But. But. However, they produce this incredible point. They give birth to something that may not occur without them and did not exist before them. They are the inspirations ‘ parents. And since it’s only lying there, I suppose I should add that they are the inventor’s parents. Ba ho bum! Okay, that’s all done. Continue.

Because we compare our personal small accomplishments to those of the great ones, designers denigrate them. Wonderful graphics I‘m not Miyazaki, though. That is glory right then. That is brilliance straight out of the Bible. I created this drained small issue. It essentially fell off the pumpkin truck’s again. The carrots weren’t actually new, either.

Artists is aware that they are at best Some. Also Mozart’s original artists believe that.

I have a creative side. I haven’t worked in advertising in 30 times, but my former artistic managers are the ones who make my hallucinations. They are correct in doing so. When it really counts, my brain goes flat because I am too lazy and simplistic. There is no treatment for innovative mania.

I have a creative side. Every project I create has a goal that makes Indiana Jones appear older and snoring in a deck head. The more I pursue my creative endeavors, the faster I progress in my work, and the more I slog through loops and gaze blankly before beginning that task.

I can move ten times more quickly than those who aren’t innovative, those who have only had a short-cut of creativity, and those who have just had a short-cut of creativity for work. Only that I spend twice as long putting the work off as they do before I work ten times as quickly as they do. When I put my mind to it, I am so confident in my ability to do a great career. I have an addiction to the delay jump. The climb also terrifies me.

I don’t create art.

I have a creative side. never a musician. Though as a boy, I had a dream that I would one day become that. Some of us criticize our abilities and fear our own accomplishments because we are not Michelangelos and Warhols. That is narcissism, but at least we don’t practice politicians.

I have a creative side. Despite my belief in reason and science, I make decisions based on my own senses and instincts. and survive in the aftermath of both the triumphs and disasters.

I have a creative side. Every word I’ve said these may irritate another artists who see things differently. Ask a question to two artists, and you’ll find three responses. Our dispute, our interest in it, and our commitment to our own truth, at least in my opinion, are the proof that we are creative, no matter how we does think about it.

I have a creative side. I lament my lack of taste in almost all of the areas of human understanding, which I know very little about. And I put my flavor before everything else in the things that are most important to me, or perhaps more precisely, to my passions. Without my passions, I’d probably have to spend the majority of our time looking ourselves in the eye, which is something that almost none of us can do for very long. No seriously. Actually, no. Because a lot of career is intolerable if you really look at it.

I have a creative side. I think that when I’m gone, some of the good parts of me will stay in the head of at least one additional person, just like a family does.

Working frees me from worrying about my job.

I have a creative side. I worry that my little present will disappear unexpectedly.

I have a creative side. I spend way too much time making the next thing, given that almost nothing I create did achieve the level of greatness I conceive of.

I have a creative side. I think method is the most amazing mystery. I think I have to consider it so strongly that I actually made the foolish decision to publish an essay I wrote without having to go through or edit. I swear I didn’t accomplish this frequently. But I did it right away because I was even more frightened of forgetting what I was saying because I was afraid of you seeing through my sad movements toward the wonderful.

There. I believe I’ve said it.

I’d like you to consider this a “yes … and” piece to complement Joe’s post. I’m not trying to reject any of what he’s saying, but rather to give some context to initiatives and options where AI may produce real, positive impacts on people with disabilities. To be clear, I’m not saying that there aren’t real challenges or pressing problems with AI that need to be addressed; there are, and we’ve needed to address them, like, yesterday; instead, I want to take a moment to talk about what’s possible so that we can find it one day.

Other words

Joe’s article spends a lot of time addressing computer-vision types ‘ ability to create alternative words. He raises a number of true points about the state of affairs right now. And while computer-vision concepts continue to improve in the quality and complexity of information in their information, their benefits aren’t wonderful. As he rightly points out, the state of image research is currently very poor, especially for some graphic types, in large part due to the lack of context for which AI systems look at images ( which is a result of having separate “foundation” models for words analysis and picture analysis ). Today’s models aren’t trained to distinguish between images that are contextually relevant ( which should probably have descriptions ) and those that are purely decorative ( which might not even need a description ) either. However, I still think there’s possible in this area.

As Joe points out, human-in-the-loop editing of ctrl text should definitely be a factor. And if AI can intervene and provide a starting point for alt text, even if the rapid reads,” What is this BS?” That’s not correct at all … Let me try to offer a starting point— I think that’s a gain.

If we can specifically station a design to examine image usage in context, this may help us more quickly determine which images are likely to be elegant and which ones are likely to be descriptive. That will clarify which situations require image descriptions, and it will increase authors ‘ effectiveness in making their sites more visible.

While complex images—like graphs and charts—are challenging to describe in any sort of succinct way ( even for humans ), the image example shared in the GPT4 announcement points to an interesting opportunity as well. Let’s say you came across a map that was simply the name of the table and the type of visualization it was: Pie table comparing smartphone use to have phone use among US households making under$ 30, 000 annually. ( That would be a pretty bad alt text for a chart because it would frequently leave many unanswered questions about the data, but let’s just assume that that was the description in place. ) If your website knew that that picture was a pie graph ( because an onboard model concluded this ), imagine a world where people could ask questions like these about the creative:

• Do more people use feature phones or smartphones?
• How many more?
• Is there a group of people that don’t fall into either of these buckets?
• What number is that?

For a moment, the chance to learn more about images and data in this way could be revolutionary for people who are blind and low vision as well as for those with various forms of color blindness, cognitive disabilities, and other issues. Putting aside the realities of large language model ( LLM) hallucinations. It could also be useful in educational contexts to help people who can see these charts, as is, to understand the data in the charts.

What if you could ask your browser to make a complicated chart simpler? What if you asked it to separate a single line from a line graph? What if you could ask your browser to transpose the colors of the different lines to work better for form of color blindness you have? What if you demanded that it switch colors in favor of patterns? That seems like a possibility given the chat-based interfaces and our current ability to manipulate images in modern AI tools.

Now imagine a purpose-built model that could extract the information from that chart and convert it to another format. For instance, it might be able to convert that pie chart (or, better yet, a number of pie charts ) into more usable ( and useful ) formats, like spreadsheets. That would be incredible!

Matching algorithms

When Safiya Umoja Noble chose to write her book Algorithms of Oppression, she hit the nail on the head. Although her book focused on the ways that search engines can foster racism, I believe it’s equally true that all computer models have the potential to foster conflict, prejudice, and intolerance. Whether it’s Twitter always showing you the latest tweet from a bored billionaire, YouTube sending us into a Q-hole, or Instagram warping our ideas of what natural bodies look like, we know that poorly authored and maintained algorithms are incredibly harmful. Many of these are the result of a lack of diversity in the people who create and build them. There is real potential for algorithm development when these platforms are built with inclusive features in, though.

Take Mentra, for example. They serve as a network of people with disabilities. Based on more than 75 data points, they match job seekers with potential employers using an algorithm. On the job-seeker side of things, it considers each candidate’s strengths, their necessary and preferred workplace accommodations, environmental sensitivities, and so on. It takes into account the workplace, the communication environment, and other factors. Mentra made the decision to change the script when it came to typical employment websites because it was run by neurodivergent people. They use their algorithm to propose available candidates to companies, who can then connect with job seekers that they are interested in, reducing the emotional and physical labor on the job-seeker side of things.

When more people with disabilities are involved in developing algorithms, this can lower the likelihood that these algorithms will harm their communities. Diverse teams are crucial because of this.

Imagine that a social media company’s recommendation engine was tuned to analyze who you’re following and if it was tuned to prioritize follow recommendations for people who talked about similar things but who were different in some key ways from your existing sphere of influence. For instance, if you were to follow a group of non-disabled white male academics who talk about AI, it might be advisable to follow those who are disabled, aren’t white, or aren’t men who also talk about AI. If you followed its advice, you might be able to understand what is happening in the AI field more fully and nuancedly. These same systems should also use their understanding of biases about particular communities—including, for instance, the disability community—to make sure that they aren’t recommending any of their users follow accounts that perpetuate biases against (or, worse, spewing hate toward ) those groups.

Other ways that AI can assist people with disabilities

I’m sure I could go on and on about using AI to assist people with disabilities, but I’m going to make this last section into a bit of a lightning round. In no particular order:

Voice preservation You might have heard about the voice-preserve offerings from Microsoft, Acapela, or others, or have seen the VALL-E paper or Apple’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day announcement. It’s possible to train an AI model to replicate your voice, which can be a tremendous boon for people who have ALS ( Lou Gehrig’s disease ) or motor-neuron disease or other medical conditions that can lead to an inability to talk. This technology can also be used to create audio deepfakes, so it’s something we need to approach responsibly, but the technology has truly transformative potential.
• voice recognition is. Researchers like those in the Speech Accessibility Project are paying people with disabilities for their help in collecting recordings of people with atypical speech. As I type, they are actively seeking out people who have Parkinson’s and related conditions, and they intend to expand this list as the project develops. More people with disabilities will be able to use voice assistants, dictation software, and voice-response services, as well as to use only their voices to control computers and other devices, according to this research.
• Text transformation. The most recent generation of LLMs is capable of altering already-existing text without giving off hallucinations. This is incredibly empowering for those who have cognitive disabilities and who may benefit from text summaries or simplified versions, or even text that has been prepared for Bionic Reading.

The importance of diverse teams and data

We must acknowledge the importance of our differences. The intersections of the identities that we exist in have an impact on our lived experiences. These lived experiences—with all their complexities ( and joys and pain ) —are valuable inputs to the software, services, and societies that we shape. Our differences must be reflected in the data we use to develop new models, and those who provide it need to be compensated for doing so. More robust models are produced by inclusive data sets, which promote more justifiable outcomes.

Want a model that doesn’t demean or patronize or objectify people with disabilities? Make sure that you include information about disabilities that has been written by people with a variety of disabilities in the training data.

Want a non-binary language model? You may be able to use existing data sets to build a filter that can intercept and remediate ableist language before it reaches readers. Despite this, AI models won’t soon replace human copy editors when it comes to sensitivity reading.

Want a copilot for coding that provides recomprehensible recommendations after the jump? Train it on code that you know to be accessible.

I have no doubts about how dangerous AI will be for people today, tomorrow, and for the rest of the world. However, I think we should also acknowledge this and make thoughtful, thoughtful, and intentional changes to our approaches to AI that will also reduce harm over time with an emphasis on accessibility ( and, in general, inclusion ). Today, tomorrow, and well into the future.

Many thanks to Kartik Sawhney for supporting the development of this article, Ashley Bischoff for providing me with invaluable editorial support, and of course, Joe Dolson for the prompt.

The same holds true for those of us who are currently employed in design and development. Having worked on the web for about three years at this point, I’ve seen the typical wax and wane of concepts, strategies, and systems. Every day we as developers and designers get into a routine pattern, a brand-new concept or technology emerges to shake things up and completely alter our planet.

How we got below

I built my first website in the mid-’90s. Design and development on the web back then was a free-for-all, with few established norms. For any layout aside from a single column, we used table elements, often with empty cells containing a single pixel spacer GIF to add empty space. We styled text with numerous font tags, nesting the tags every time we wanted to vary the font style. And we had only three or four typefaces to choose from: Arial, Courier, or Times New Roman. When Verdana and Georgia came out in 1996, we rejoiced because our options had nearly doubled. The only safe colors to choose from were the 216 “web safe” colors known to work across platforms. The few interactive elements (like contact forms, guest books, and counters) were mostly powered by CGI scripts (predominantly written in Perl at the time). Achieving any kind of unique look involved a pile of hacks all the way down. Interaction was often limited to specific pages in a site.

the development of internet requirements

At the turn of the century, a new cycle started. Crufty code littered with table layouts and font tags waned, and a push for web standards waxed. Newer technologies like CSS got more widespread adoption by browsers makers, developers, and designers. This shift toward standards didn’t happen accidentally or overnight. It took active engagement between the W3C and browser vendors and heavy evangelism from folks like the Web Standards Project to build standards. A List Apart and books like Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman played key roles in teaching developers and designers why standards are important, how to implement them, and how to sell them to their organizations. And approaches like progressive enhancement introduced the idea that content should be available for all browsers—with additional enhancements available for more advanced browsers. Meanwhile, sites like the CSS Zen Garden showcased just how powerful and versatile CSS can be when combined with a solid semantic HTML structure.

Server-side language like PHP, Java, and.NET took Perl as the primary back-end computers, and the cgi-bin was tossed in the garbage bin. With these improved server-side software, the first period of internet programs started with content-management techniques (especially those used in blogs like Blogger, Grey Matter, Movable Type, and WordPress ) In the mid-2000s, AJAX opened gates for sequential interaction between the front end and back close. Pages was now revise their content without having to reload. A grain of Script frameworks like Prototype, YUI, and ruby arose to aid developers develop more credible client-side conversation across browsers that had wildly varying levels of standards support. Techniques like photo alternative enable the use of fonts by skilled developers and developers. And technology like Flash made it possible to include movies, sports, and even more engagement.

These new methods, requirements, and systems greatly reenergized the sector. Web style flourished as creators and designers explored more different styles and designs. However, we also relied heavily on tricks. Early CSS was a huge improvement over table-based layouts when it came to basic layout and text styling, but its limitations at the time meant that designers and developers still relied heavily on images for complex shapes ( such as rounded or angled corners ) and tiled backgrounds for the appearance of full-length columns (among other hacks ). All kinds of nested floats or absolute positioning ( or both ) were necessary for complicated layouts. Display and photo substitute for specialty styles was a great start toward varying the designs from the big five, but both tricks introduced convenience and efficiency issues. And JavaScript libraries made it simple for anyone to add a dash of interaction to pages, even at the expense of double, even quadrupling, the download size of basic websites.

The web as software platform

The interplay between the front end and the back end continued to grow, which led to the development of the current era of modern web applications. Between expanded server-side programming languages ( which kept growing to include Ruby, Python, Go, and others ) and newer front-end tools like React, Vue, and Angular, we could build fully capable software on the web. Along with these tools, there were additional options, such as shared package libraries, build automation, and collaborative version control. What was once primarily an environment for linked documents became a realm of infinite possibilities.

Mobile devices also increased in their capabilities, and they gave us access to internet in our pockets at the same time. Mobile apps and responsive design opened up opportunities for new interactions anywhere and any time.

The development of social media and other centralized tools for people to connect and use resulted from this combination of potent mobile devices and potent development tools. As it became easier and more common to connect with others directly on Twitter, Facebook, and even Slack, the desire for hosted personal sites waned. Social media provided connections on a global scale, with both positive and negative outcomes.

Want a much more extensive history of how we got here, with some other takes on ways that we can improve? ” Of Time and the Web” was written by Jeremy Keith. Or check out the” Web Design History Timeline” at the Web Design Museum. A fun tour through” Internet Artifacts” is also provided by Neal Agarwal.

Where we are now

It seems like we’ve been at a new significant inflection point over the past couple of years. As social-media platforms fracture and wane, there’s been a growing interest in owning our own content again. There are many different ways to create websites, from the tried-and-true classic of hosting plain HTML files to static site generators to content management systems of all kinds. The fracturing of social media also comes with a cost: we lose crucial infrastructure for discovery and connection. The IndieWeb‘s Webmentions, RSS, ActivityPub, and other tools can assist with this, but they’re still largely underdeveloped and difficult to use for the less geeky. We can build amazing personal websites and add to them regularly, but without discovery and connection, it can sometimes feel like we may as well be shouting into the void.

Browser support for CSS, JavaScript, and other web components has increased, particularly with initiatives like Interop. New technologies gain support across the board in a fraction of the time that they used to. I frequently find out about a new feature and check its browser support only to discover that its coverage is already over 80 %. Nowadays, the barrier to using newer techniques often isn’t browser support but simply the limits of how quickly designers and developers can learn what’s available and how to adopt it.

We can prototype almost any idea today with just a few commands and a few lines of code. All the tools that we now have available make it easier than ever to start something new. However, as we upgrade and maintain these frameworks, we eventually pay the upfront costs that these frameworks may initially save in terms of our technical debt.

If we rely on third-party frameworks, adopting new standards can sometimes take longer since we may have to wait for those frameworks to adopt those standards. These frameworks, which once made it easier to adopt new techniques sooner, have since evolved into obstacles. These same frameworks often come with performance costs too, forcing users to wait for scripts to load before they can read or interact with pages. And when scripts fail ( whether due to poor code, network issues, or other environmental factors ), there is frequently no other option, leaving users with blank or broken pages.

Where do we go from here?

Hacks of today help to shape standards for the future. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with embracing hacks —for now—to move the present forward. Problems only arise when we refuse to acknowledge that they are hacks or when we choose not to replace them. So what can we do to create the future we want for the web?

Build for the long haul. Optimize for performance, for accessibility, and for the user. weigh the price of those user-friendly tools. They may make your job a little easier today, but how do they affect everything else? What is the price to the users? To future developers? To adoption of standards? Sometimes the convenience may be worth it. Sometimes it’s just a hack that you’ve gotten used to. And sometimes it’s holding you back from even better options.

Start with standards. Standards continue to evolve over time, but browsers have done a remarkably good job of continuing to support older standards. The same isn’t always the case with third-party frameworks. Sites built with even the hackiest of HTML from the’ 90s still work just fine today. The same can’t be said about websites created with frameworks even after a few years.

Design with care. Consider the effects of each choice, whether your craft is code, pixels, or processes. The convenience of many a modern tool comes at the cost of not always understanding the underlying decisions that have led to its design and not always considering the impact that those decisions can have. Use the time saved by modern tools to consider more carefully and design with consideration rather than rush to “move fast and break things”

Always be learning. If you’re constantly learning, you’re also developing. Sometimes it may be hard to pinpoint what’s worth learning and what’s just today’s hack. Even if you were to concentrate solely on learning standards, you might end up focusing on something that won’t matter next year. ( Remember XHTML? ) However, ongoing learning opens up new connections in your brain, and the techniques you learn in one day may be used to guide different experiments in the future.

Play, experiment, and be weird! The ultimate experiment is this web that we’ve created. It’s the single largest human endeavor in history, and yet each of us can create our own pocket within it. Be brave and try something new. Build a playground for ideas. In your own bizarre science lab, perform bizarre experiments. Start your own small business. There has never been a place where we have more room to be creative, take risks, and discover our potential.

Share and amplify. Share what you think has worked for you as you go through testing, playing, and learning. Write on your own website, post on whichever social media site you prefer, or shout it from a TikTok. Write something for A List Apart! But take the time to amplify others too: find new voices, learn from them, and share what they’ve taught you.

Go ahead and create a masterpiece.

As designers and developers for the web ( and beyond ), we’re responsible for building the future every day, whether that may take the shape of personal websites, social media tools used by billions, or anything in between. Let’s give everything we produce a positive vibe by infusing our values into everything we do. Create that thing that only you are uniquely qualified to make. Then distribute it, improve it, re-use it, or create something new with it. Learn. Make. Share. grow. Rinse and repeat. Everything will change whenever you believe you’ve mastered the web.

The personalization space is true, between the dream of getting it right and the worry of it going wrong ( like when we encounter “persofails” similar to a company’s constant plea to regular people to purchase additional bathroom seats ). It’s an particularly confusing place to be a modern professional without a map, a map, or a strategy.

There are no Lonely Planet and some tour guides for those of you who want to personalize because powerful customisation is so dependent on each group’s talent, technology, and market position.

But you can ensure that your group has packed its bags rationally.

There’s a DIY method to increase your chances for victory. You’ll at least at least disarm your boss ‘ irrational exuberance. Before the group you’ll need to properly plan.

We refer to it as prepersonalization.

Behind the audio

Take into account the DJ have on Spotify, which was introduced last month.

We’re used to seeing the polished final outcome of a personalization function. A personal have had to be developed, budgeted, and given priority before the year-end prize, the making-of-backstory, or the behind-the-scenes success chest. Before any customisation have goes live in your product or service, it lives amid a delay of valuable ideas for expressing consumer experiences more automatically.

So how do you decide where to position your personalization wagers? How do you design regular interactions that hasn’t journey up users or—worse—breed mistrust? We’ve discovered that several budgeted programs initially needed one or more workshops to join key stakeholders and domestic customers of the technology to justify their continuing investments. Make it count.

We’ve closely observed the same evolution with our consumers, from major software to young companies. In our experience with working on small and large personalization work, a program’s best monitor record—and its capacity to weather tough questions, work steadily toward shared answers, and manage its design and engineering efforts—turns on how successfully these prepersonalization activities play out.

Successful seminars consistently separate successful future endeavors from ineffective ones, saving countless hours of time, resources, and overall well-being.

A personalization training involves a protracted work of testing and function development. It’s never a technical load switch-flip. It’s ideal managed as a queue that usually evolves through three actions:

1. customer experience optimization ( CXO, also known as A/B testing or experimentation )
2. always-on automations ( whether rules-based or machine-generated )
3. mature features or standalone product development ( such as Spotify’s DJ experience )?

This is why we created our democratic personalization platform and why we’re field-testing an following deck of cards: we believe that there’s a foundation grammar, a set of “nouns and verbs” that your organization can use to style experiences that are customized, personalized, or automated. You won’t require these cards. But we strongly recommend that you create something similar, whether that might be digital or physical.

Set the timer for your kitchen.

How long does it take to cook up a prepersonalization workshop? The evaluation activities that we suggest including can ( and frequently do ) last for weeks. For the core workshop, we recommend aiming for two to three days. Details on the essential first-day activities are included in a summary of our broad approach.

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

Kickstart: This specifies the terms of your engagement as you concentrate on both your team’s and your team’s readiness and drive.
1. Plan your work: This is the heart of the card-based workshop activities where you specify a plan of attack and the scope of work.
2. Work your plan: This stage essentially entails creating a competitive environment in which team members can individually present their own pilots that each contain a proof-of-concept project, its business case, and its operating model.

Give yourself at least a day, split into two large time blocks, to power through a concentrated version of those first two phases.

Kickstart: Apt your appetite

We call the first lesson the “landscape of connected experience“. It looks at the possibilities for personalization in your company. A connected experience, in our parlance, is any UX requiring the orchestration of multiple systems of record on the backend. A marketing-automation platform and a content-management system could be used together. It could be a digital-asset manager combined with a customer-data platform.

Create a conversation by mentioning consumer and business-to-business examples of connected experience interactions that you admire, find familiar, or even dislike. This should cover a representative range of personalization patterns, including automated app-based interactions ( such as onboarding sequences or wizards ), notifications, and recommenders. We have a list of these in the cards. Here’s a list of 142 different interactions to jog your thinking.

The table must be set up for this. What are the possible paths for the practice in your organization? Here’s a long-form primer and a strategic framework for a broader view.

Assess each example that you discuss for its complexity and the level of effort that you estimate that it would take for your team to deliver that feature ( or something similar ). We break down connected experiences into five categories in our cards: functions, features, experiences, complete products, and portfolios. Size your own build here. This will help to draw attention to the benefits of ongoing investment as well as the difference between what you deliver right now and what you want to deliver in the future.

Next, have your team plot each idea on the following 2×2 grid, which lays out the four enduring arguments for a personalized experience. This is crucial because it emphasizes how personalization can affect your own ways of working as well as your external customers. It’s also a reminder ( which is why we used the word argument earlier ) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.

Each team member should decide where they would like to place your company’s emphasis on your product or service. Naturally, you can’t prioritize all of them. Here, the goal is to show how various departments may view their own benefits from the effort, which can vary from one department to the next. Documenting your desired outcomes lets you know how the team internally aligns across representatives from different departments or functional areas.

The third and final KickStart activity is about filling in the personalization gap. Is your customer journey well documented? Will ensuring data and privacy is a major challenge too much? Do you have content metadata needs that you have to address? ( We’re pretty sure you do; it’s just a matter of acknowledging the magnitude of that need and finding a solution. ) In our cards, we’ve noted a number of program risks, including common team dispositions. For instance, our Detractor card lists six intractable stakeholder attitudes that prevent progress.

Effectively collaborating and managing expectations is critical to your success. Consider the potential obstacles to your advancement in the future. Press the participants to name specific steps to overcome or mitigate those barriers in your organization. As research has shown, personalization initiatives face a number of common obstacles.

At this point, you’ve hopefully discussed sample interactions, emphasized a key area of benefit, and flagged key gaps? Good, you’re all set to go on.

Hit that test kitchen

Next, let’s take a look at what you’ll need to create personalization recipes. Personalization engines, which are robust software suites for automating and expressing dynamic content, can intimidate new customers. Their capabilities are broad and potent, and they give you a variety of ways to organize your company. This presents the question: Where do you begin when you’re configuring a connected experience?

The key here is to avoid treating the installed software ( as one of our client executives humorously put it ) like some sort of dream kitchen. These software engines are more like test kitchens where your team can begin devising, tasting, and refining the snacks and meals that will become a part of your personalization program’s regularly evolving menu.

Over the course of the workshop, the ultimate menu of the prioritized backlog will come together. And creating “dishes” is the way that you’ll have individual team stakeholders construct personalized interactions that serve their needs or the needs of others.

The dishes will be made from recipes, which have predetermined ingredients.

Verify your ingredients

Like a good product manager, you’ll make sure you have everything you need to make your desired interaction ( or that you can figure out what needs to be added to your pantry ) and that you validate with the right stakeholders present. These ingredients include the audience that you’re targeting, content and design elements, the context for the interaction, and your measure for how it’ll come together.

This doesn’t just involve identifying requirements. Documenting your personalizations as a series of if-then statements lets the team:

1. compare findings to a common method for developing features, similar to how artists paint with the same color palette,
2. specify a consistent set of interactions that users find uniform or familiar,
3. and establish parity between all important performance indicators and performance metrics.

This helps you streamline your designs and your technical efforts while you deliver a shared palette of core motifs of your personalized or automated experience.

Create a recipe.

What ingredients are important to you? Consider a who-what-when-why construct:

• Who are your key audience segments or groups?
• What content, what design elements, and under what circumstances will you give them?
• And for which business and user benefits?

Five years ago, we created these cards and card categories. We regularly play-test their fit with conference audiences and clients. And there are still fresh possibilities. But they all follow an underlying who-what-when-why logic.

In the cards in the accompanying photo below, you can typically follow along with right to left in three examples of subscription-based reading apps.

1. Nurture personalization: When a guest or an unknown visitor interacts with a product title, a banner or alert bar appears that makes it easier for them to encounter a related title they may want to read, saving them time.
2. Welcome automation: An email is sent when a newly registered user is a subscriber and is able to highlight the breadth of the content catalog.
3. Winback automation: Before their subscription lapses or after a recent failed renewal, a user is sent an email that gives them a promotional offer to suggest that they reconsider renewing or to remind them to renew.

A good preworkshop activity might be to consider a first draft of what these cards might be for your organization, though we’ve also found that cocreating the recipes themselves can sometimes help this process. Start with a set of blank cards, and begin labeling and grouping them through the design process, eventually distilling them to a refined subset of highly useful candidate cards.

The later stages of the workshop could be characterized as moving from focusing on a cookbook to a more nuanced customer-journey mapping. Individual” cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team, using a common jobs-to-be-done format so that measurability and results are baked in, and from there, the resulting collection will be prioritized for finished design and delivery to production.

Better architecture is necessary for better kitchens.

Simplifying a customer experience is a complicated effort for those who are inside delivering it. Beware of anyone who contradicts your advice. With that being said,” Complicated problems can be hard to solve, but they are addressable with rules and recipes“.

When a team overfits: they aren’t designing with their best data, personalization turns into a laughing line. Like a sparse pantry, every organization has metadata debt to go along with its technical debt, and this creates a drag on personalization effectiveness. For instance, your AI’s output quality is in fact impacted by your IA. Spotify’s poster-child prowess today was unfathomable before they acquired a seemingly modest metadata startup that now powers its underlying information architecture.

You can’t stand the heat, unquestionably…

Personalization technology opens a doorway into a confounding ocean of possible designs. Only a disciplined and highly collaborative approach will produce the necessary concentration and intention for success. So banish the dream kitchen. Instead, head to the test kitchen to save time, preserve job security, and avoid imagining the creative concepts that come from the doers in your organization. There are meals to serve and mouths to feed.

This framework of the workshop gives you a strong chance at long-term success as well as solid ground. Wiring up your information layer isn’t an overnight affair. However, if you use the same cookbook and the same recipe combination, you’ll have solid ground for success. We designed these activities to make your organization’s needs concrete and clear, long before the hazards pile up.

Although there are costs associated with purchasing this type of technology and product design, time well spent on sizing up and confronting your unique situation and digital skills. Don’t squander it. The pudding is the proof, as they say.

I’ve been fascinated by shows since I was a child. I loved the heroes and the excitement—but most of all the reports. I aspired to be an artist. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on exciting activities. Perhaps my friends and I had movie ideas to make and sun in. But they never went any farther. However, I did end up in the user experience ( UX) field. Today, I realize that there’s an element of drama to UX— I hadn’t actually considered it before, but consumer research is story. And to get the most out of customer studies, you must tell a compelling story that involves stakeholders, including the product team and decision-makers, and piques their interest in learning more.

Think of your favourite film. It more than likely follows a three-act narrative architecture: the installation, the turmoil, and the resolution. The second act shows what exists now, and it helps you get to know the characters and the challenges and problems that they face. The issue begins in Act 2, which introduces the issue. Here, difficulties grow or get worse. And the solution is the third and final work. This is where the issues are resolved and the figures learn and change. This structure, in my opinion, is also a fantastic way to think about customer research, and it might be particularly useful for explaining user research to others.

Use story as a framework for conducting research

It’s sad to say, but many have come to see studies as being dispensable. Research is typically one of the first things to go when expenses or deadlines are tight. Instead of investing in study, some goods professionals rely on manufacturers or—worse—their personal judgment to make the “right” options for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That might lead to some groups getting in the way, but it’s too easy to overlook the real problems facing users. To be user-centered, this is something we really avoid. User study improves pattern. It keeps it on record, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of the problems with your goods and taking action can help you be ahead of your competition.

In the three-act structure, each action corresponds to a part of the process, and each part is important to telling the whole story. Let’s examine the various functions and how they relate to customer study.

Act one: layout

Fundamental analysis comes in handy because the layout is all about comprehending the background. Basic research ( also called conceptual, discovery, or preliminary research ) helps you understand people and identify their problems. Just like in the movies, you’re learning about the difficulties users face, what options are available, and how those challenges impact them. To do basic research, you may conduct cultural inquiries or journal studies ( or both! ), which can assist you in identifying both prospects and issues. It doesn’t need to get a great investment in time or money.

Erika Hall writes about the most effective anthropology, which can be as straightforward as spending 15 hours with a customer and asking them to” Walk me through your morning yesterday.” That’s it. Give that one demand. Locked up and listen to them for 15 days. Do everything in your power to keep yourself and your pursuits out of it. Bam, you’re doing ethnography”. According to Hall, “[This ] will definitely prove quite fascinating. In the very unlikely event that you didn’t learn anything new or helpful, carry on with increased confidence in your way”.

This makes sense to me in all its entirety. And I love that this makes consumer research so visible. You don’t need to make a lot of paperwork; you can only attract people and do it! This can offer a wealth of knowledge about your customers, and it’ll help you better understand them and what’s going on in their life. Understanding where people are coming from is what action one is really all about.

Maybe Spool talks about the importance of basic research and how it may type the bulk of your research. If you can supplement what you’ve heard in the basic studies by using any more user data that you can obtain, such as surveys or analytics, to make recommendations that may need to be investigated further, you might as well use those that can be drawn from those that you can obtain. Together, all this information creates a clearer picture of the state of things and all its deficiencies. And that’s the start of a gripping tale. It’s the place in the story where you realize that the principal characters—or the people in this case—are facing issues that they need to conquer. This is where you begin to develop compassion for the characters and support their success, much like in films. And maybe partners are now doing the same. Their concern may be with their company, which may be losing money because consumers are unable to complete specific tasks. Or probably they do connect with people ‘ problems. In either case, action one serves as your main strategy to pique the interest and interest of the participants.

When partners begin to understand the value of basic research, that is open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making approach. And that can influence product groups ‘ focus on improving. This gains everyone—users, the goods, and partners. It’s similar to winning an Oscar for a film; it frequently results in a favorable reception and success for your item. And this can be an opportunity for participants to repeat this process with different items. The secret to this method is storytelling, and knowing how to tell a compelling story is the only way to entice partners to do more research.

This brings us to work two, where you incrementally review a design or idea to see whether it addresses the problems.

Act two: fight

Act two is all about digging deeper into the issues that you identified in action one. This typically involves conducting lateral study, such as accessibility tests, where you evaluate a potential solution ( such as a design ) to see if it addresses the problems you identified. The issues may include unfulfilled needs or problems with a circulation or procedure that’s tripping users away. Additional problems will arise in the course of action two of a film. It’s here that you learn more about the figures as they grow and develop through this work.

According to Jakob Nielsen, five users should be normally in usability tests, which means that this number of users can generally identify the majority of the issues:” As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again… After the second user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings consistently but not learning much new.”

There are parallels with storytelling here too, if you try to tell a story with too many characters, the plot may get lost. With fewer participants, each user’s struggles will be more memorable and accessible to other stakeholders when presenting the research. This can help convey the issues that need to be addressed while also highlighting the value of doing the research in the first place.

Usability tests have been conducted in person for decades, but you can also conduct them remotely using software like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other teleconferencing software. This approach has become increasingly popular since the beginning of the pandemic, and it works well. You might interpret in-person usability tests as a form of theater watching as opposed to remote testing. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Usability research in person is a much more extensive experience. Stakeholders can experience the sessions with other stakeholders. Additionally, you’ll also hear their reactions in real-time, including surprises, disagreements, and discussions of what they’re seeing. Much like going to a play, where audiences get to take in the stage, the costumes, the lighting, and the actors ‘ interactions, in-person research lets you see users up close, including their body language, how they interact with the moderator, and how the scene is set up.

If conducting usability testing in the field is like watching a play that is staged and controlled, where any two sessions may be very different from one another. You can take usability testing into the field by creating a replica of the space where users interact with the product and then conduct your research there. Or you can meet users at their location to conduct your research. With either option, you get to see how things work in context, things come up that wouldn’t have in a lab environment—and conversion can shift in entirely different directions. You have less control over how these sessions end as researchers, but this can occasionally help you understand users even better. Meeting users where they are can provide clues to the external forces that could be affecting how they use your product. Usability tests in person offer a level of detail that is frequently absent from remote testing.

That’s not to say that the “movies” —remote sessions—aren’t a good option. Remote training sessions can reach a wider audience. They allow a lot more stakeholders to be involved in the research and to see what’s going on. Additionally, they make the doors accessible to a much wider range of users. But with any remote session there is the potential of time wasted if participants can’t log in or get their microphone working.

The advantage of usability testing, whether conducted remotely or in person, is that you can ask real users questions to understand their reasoning and understanding of the problem. This can help you not only identify problems but also glean why they’re problems in the first place. You can also test your own ideas and determine whether they are true. By the end of the sessions, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how usable the designs are and whether they work for their intended purposes. The excitement centers on Act 2, but there are also potential surprises in that Act. This is equally true of usability tests. Unexpected things that are said by participants frequently alter how you view things, and these unexpected developments in the story can lead to unexpected turns in your perception.

Unfortunately, user research is sometimes seen as expendable. Usability testing is often the only method of research that some stakeholders believe they ever need, especially in this regard. In fact, if the designs that you’re evaluating in the usability test aren’t grounded in a solid understanding of your users ( foundational research ), there’s not much to be gained by doing usability testing in the first place. Because you narrow down the subject matter of your feedback without understanding the needs of the users. As a result, there’s no way of knowing whether the designs might solve a problem that users have. In the context of a usability test, it’s only feedback on a particular design.

On the other hand, if you only do foundational research, while you might have set out to solve the right problem, you won’t know whether the thing that you’re building will actually solve that. This demonstrates the value of conducting both directional and foundational research.

In act two, stakeholders will—hopefully—get to watch the story unfold in the user sessions, which creates the conflict and tension in the current design by surfacing their highs and lows. And in turn, this can encourage stakeholders to take action on the issues that arise.

Act three: resolution

The third act is about resolving the issues from the first two acts, whereas the first two acts are about understanding the context and the tensions that can compel stakeholders to act. While it’s important to have an audience for the first two acts, it’s crucial that they stick around for the final act. That includes all members of the product team, including developers, UX experts, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other interested parties. It allows the whole team to hear users ‘ feedback together, ask questions, and discuss what’s possible within the project’s constraints. Additionally, it enables the UX design and research teams to clarify, suggest alternatives, or provide more context for their choices. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.

This act is primarily told through voiceover with some audience participation. The researcher is the narrator, who paints a picture of the issues and what the future of the product could look like given the things that the team has learned. They provide the stakeholders with their suggestions and suggestions for how to create this vision.

Nancy Duarte in the Harvard Business Review offers an approach to structuring presentations that follow a persuasive story. The most effective presenters employ the same methods as great storytellers: By reaffirming the status quo and then revealing a better way, they create a conflict that needs to be resolved, writes Duarte. ” That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently”.

This type of structure aligns well with research results, and particularly results from usability tests. It provides proof for “what is “—the issues you’ve identified. And “what could be “—your recommendations on how to address them. And so forth and forth.

You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be visual, like quick sketches of how a new design could function to solve a problem. These can help generate conversation and momentum. And this continues until the session is over when you’ve concluded by bridging the gaps and offering suggestions for improvement. This is the part where you reiterate the main themes or problems and what they mean for the product—the denouement of the story. This stage provides stakeholders with the next steps and, hoped, the motivation to take those steps!

While we are nearly at the end of this story, let’s reflect on the idea that user research is storytelling. The three-act structure of user research contains all the components for a good story:

Act one: You meet the protagonists ( the users ) and the antagonists ( the problems affecting users ). This is the plot’s beginning. In act one, researchers might use methods including contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, surveys, and analytics. These techniques can produce personas, empathy maps, user journeys, and analytics dashboards.

Act two: Next, there’s character development. The protagonists encounter problems and difficulties, which they must overcome, and there is conflict and tension. In act two, researchers might use methods including usability testing, competitive benchmarking, and heuristics evaluation. Usability findings reports, UX strategy documents, usability guidelines, and best practices can be included in the output of these.

Act three: The protagonists triumph and you see what a better future looks like. Researchers may use techniques like storytelling, presentation decks, and digital media in act three. The output of these can be: presentation decks, video clips, audio clips, and pictures.

The researcher performs a number of tasks: they are the producer, the director, and the storyteller. The participants have a small role, but they are significant characters ( in the research ). And the audience is the audience, as well. But the most important thing is to get the story right and to use storytelling to tell users ‘ stories through research. By the end, the parties should leave with a goal and an eagerness to address the product’s flaws.

So the next time that you’re planning research with clients or you’re speaking to stakeholders about research that you’ve done, think about how you can weave in some storytelling. In the end, user research is beneficial for everyone, and all you need to do is pique stakeholders ‘ interest in how the story ends.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve watched promising thoughts go from zero to warrior in a few days before failing to deliver within weeks as a product developer for very long.

Financial goods, which is the industry in which I work, are no exception. It’s tempting to put as many features at the ceiling as possible and hope someone sticks because people’s true, hard-earned money is on the line, user expectations are high, and a crammed market. However, this strategy is a formula for disaster. Why? How’s why:

The fatalities of feature-first creation

It’s easy to get swept up in the enthusiasm of developing innovative features when you start developing a financial product from scratch or are migrating existing client journeys from papers or telephony channels to online bank or mobile applications. You might be thinking,” If I can only put one more thing that solves this particular person problem, they’ll appreciate me”! But what happens if you eventually encounter a roadblock as a result of your security team’s negligence? not like it? When a battle-tested film isn’t as well-known as you anticipated, or when it fails due to unforeseen difficulty?

The concept of Minimum Viable Product ( MVP ) comes into play in this context. Even if Jason Fried doesn’t usually refer to this concept, his book Getting Real and his audio Rework frequently discuss it. An MVP is a product that offers only enough significance to your users to keep them interested, but not so much that it becomes difficult to keep up. Although it seems like an easy idea, it requires a razor-sharp eye, a ruthless edge, and the courage to stand up for your position because it is easy to fall for” the Columbo Effect” when there is always” just one more thing …” to add.

The issue with most funding apps is that they frequently turn out to be reflections of the company’s internal politics rather than an experience created exclusively for the customer. Instead of offering a distinct value statement that is focused on what people in the real world want, the focus should be on delivering as some features and functionalities as possible to satisfy the needs and wants of competing inside sections. These products may therefore quickly become a muddled mess of confusing, related, and finally unlovable client experiences—a feature salad, you might say.

The significance of the foundation

What is a better strategy, then? How may we create products that are user-friendly, firm, and, most importantly, stick?

The concept of “bedrock” comes into play in this context. The mainstay of your product is really important to people, and Bedrock is that. It’s the fundamental building block that creates benefit and maintains relevance over time.

The core must be in and around the standard servicing journeys in the retail banking industry, which is where I work. People only look at their existing account once every blue moon, but they do so every day. They sign up for a credit card every year or two, but they check their balance and pay their bill at least once a quarter.

The key is in identifying the main tasks that individuals want to complete and therefore relentlessly striving to make them simple, reliable, and trustworthy.

But how do you reach the foundation? By focusing on the” MVP” strategy, giving ease precedence, and working iteratively toward a clear value proposition. This means avoiding unnecessary characteristics and putting your customers first, and adding real value.

It also requires some fortitude, as your coworkers might not always agree on your vision at first. And in some cases, it might even mean making it clear to consumers that you won’t be coming over to their home and prepare their meal. Sometimes you need to use “opinionated user interface design” ( i .e., clumsy workaround for edge cases ) to test a concept or to give yourself some more time to work on something else.

Functional methods for creating stick-like financial goods

What are the main learnings I’ve made from my own research and practice, then?

1. What trouble are you trying to solve first and foremost with a distinct “why”? For whom? Before beginning any project, make sure your goal is completely clear. Make certain it also complies with the goals of your business.
2. Avoid the temptation to put too many characteristics at once by focusing on one, key feature and focusing on getting that right before moving on to something else. Choose one that actually adds price, and work from that.
3. When it comes to financial goods, clarity is often over difficulty. Eliminate unwanted details and concentrate on what matters most.
4. Accept constant iteration as Bedrock is a powerful process rather than a fixed destination. Continuously collect customer comments, make product improvements, and advance in that direction.
5. Halt, look, and listen: You don’t just have to test your product during the delivery process; you must also test it frequently in the field. Use it for yourself. A/B tests are run. User opinions on Gear. Speak to the users of it and make adjustments accordingly.

The foundational dilemma

This is an intriguing conundrum: sacrificing some of the potential for short-term progress in favor of long-term stability. But the reward is worthwhile because products created with a concentrate on core will outlive and outperform their competitors and provide people with ongoing value over time.

How do you begin your quest to rock, then? Taking it one step at a time. Start by identifying the underlying factors that your customers actually care about. Focus on developing and improving a second, potent function that delivers real value. And most importantly, make an obsessive effort because, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, Alan Kay, or Peter Drucker ( whew! The best way to foretell the future is to make it, he said.

Picture this: You’re in a meeting room at your tech company, and two people are having what looks like the same conversation about the same design problem. One is talking about whether the team has the right skills to tackle it. The other is diving deep into whether the solution actually solves the user’s problem. Same room, same problem, completely different lenses.

This is the beautiful, sometimes messy reality of having both a Design Manager and a Lead Designer on the same team. And if you’re wondering how to make this work without creating confusion, overlap, or the dreaded “too many cooks” scenario, you’re asking the right question.

The traditional answer has been to draw clean lines on an org chart. The Design Manager handles people, the Lead Designer handles craft. Problem solved, right? Except clean org charts are fantasy. In reality, both roles care deeply about team health, design quality, and shipping great work. 

The magic happens when you embrace the overlap instead of fighting it—when you start thinking of your design org as a design organism.

The Anatomy of a Healthy Design Team

Here’s what I’ve learned from years of being on both sides of this equation: think of your design team as a living organism. The Design Manager tends to the mind (the psychological safety, the career growth, the team dynamics). The Lead Designer tends to the body (the craft skills, the design standards, the hands-on work that ships to users).

But just like mind and body aren’t completely separate systems, so, too, do these roles overlap in important ways. You can’t have a healthy person without both working in harmony. The trick is knowing where those overlaps are and how to navigate them gracefully.

When we look at how healthy teams actually function, three critical systems emerge. Each requires both roles to work together, but with one taking primary responsibility for keeping that system strong.

The Nervous System: People & Psychology

Primary caretaker: Design Manager
Supporting role: Lead Designer

The nervous system is all about signals, feedback, and psychological safety. When this system is healthy, information flows freely, people feel safe to take risks, and the team can adapt quickly to new challenges.

The Design Manager is the primary caretaker here. They’re monitoring the team’s psychological pulse, ensuring feedback loops are healthy, and creating the conditions for people to grow. They’re hosting career conversations, managing workload, and making sure no one burns out.

But the Lead Designer plays a crucial supporting role. They’re providing sensory input about craft development needs, spotting when someone’s design skills are stagnating, and helping identify growth opportunities that the Design Manager might miss.

Design Manager tends to:

• Career conversations and growth planning
• Team psychological safety and dynamics
• Workload management and resource allocation
• Performance reviews and feedback systems
• Creating learning opportunities

Lead Designer supports by:

• Providing craft-specific feedback on team member development
• Identifying design skill gaps and growth opportunities
• Offering design mentorship and guidance
• Signaling when team members are ready for more complex challenges

The Muscular System: Craft & Execution

Primary caretaker: Lead Designer
Supporting role: Design Manager

The muscular system is about strength, coordination, and skill development. When this system is healthy, the team can execute complex design work with precision, maintain consistent quality, and adapt their craft to new challenges.

The Lead Designer is the primary caretaker here. They’re setting design standards, providing craft coaching, and ensuring that shipping work meets the quality bar. They’re the ones who can tell you if a design decision is sound or if we’re solving the right problem.

But the Design Manager plays a crucial supporting role. They’re ensuring the team has the resources and support to do their best craft work, like proper nutrition and recovery time for an athlete.

Lead Designer tends to:

• Definition of design standards and system usage
• Feedback on what design work meets the standard
• Experience direction for the product
• Design decisions and product-wide alignment
• Innovation and craft advancement

Design Manager supports by:

• Ensuring design standards are understood and adopted across the team
• Confirming experience direction is being followed
• Supporting practices and systems that scale without bottlenecking
• Facilitating design alignment across teams
• Providing resources and removing obstacles to great craft work

The Circulatory System: Strategy & Flow

Shared caretakers: Both Design Manager and Lead Designer

The circulatory system is about how information, decisions, and energy flow through the team. When this system is healthy, strategic direction is clear, priorities are aligned, and the team can respond quickly to new opportunities or challenges.

This is where true partnership happens. Both roles are responsible for keeping the circulation strong, but they’re bringing different perspectives to the table.

Lead Designer contributes:

• User needs are met by the product
• Overall product quality and experience
• Strategic design initiatives
• Research-based user needs for each initiative

Design Manager contributes:

• Communication to team and stakeholders
• Stakeholder management and alignment
• Cross-functional team accountability
• Strategic business initiatives

Both collaborate on:

• Co-creation of strategy with leadership
• Team goals and prioritization approach
• Organizational structure decisions
• Success measures and frameworks

Keeping the Organism Healthy

The key to making this partnership sing is understanding that all three systems need to work together. A team with great craft skills but poor psychological safety will burn out. A team with great culture but weak craft execution will ship mediocre work. A team with both but poor strategic circulation will work hard on the wrong things.

Be Explicit About Which System You’re Tending

When you’re in a meeting about a design problem, it helps to acknowledge which system you’re primarily focused on. “I’m thinking about this from a team capacity perspective” (nervous system) or “I’m looking at this through the lens of user needs” (muscular system) gives everyone context for your input.

This isn’t about staying in your lane. It’s about being transparent as to which lens you’re using, so the other person knows how to best add their perspective.

Create Healthy Feedback Loops

The most successful partnerships I’ve seen establish clear feedback loops between the systems:

Nervous system signals to muscular system: “The team is struggling with confidence in their design skills” → Lead Designer provides more craft coaching and clearer standards.

Muscular system signals to nervous system: “The team’s craft skills are advancing faster than their project complexity” → Design Manager finds more challenging growth opportunities.

Both systems signal to circulatory system: “We’re seeing patterns in team health and craft development that suggest we need to adjust our strategic priorities.”

Handle Handoffs Gracefully

The most critical moments in this partnership are when something moves from one system to another. This might be when a design standard (muscular system) needs to be rolled out across the team (nervous system), or when a strategic initiative (circulatory system) needs specific craft execution (muscular system).

Make these transitions explicit. “I’ve defined the new component standards. Can you help me think through how to get the team up to speed?” or “We’ve agreed on this strategic direction. I’m going to focus on the specific user experience approach from here.”

Stay Curious, Not Territorial

The Design Manager who never thinks about craft, or the Lead Designer who never considers team dynamics, is like a doctor who only looks at one body system. Great design leadership requires both people to care about the whole organism, even when they’re not the primary caretaker.

This means asking questions rather than making assumptions. “What do you think about the team’s craft development in this area?” or “How do you see this impacting team morale and workload?” keeps both perspectives active in every decision.

When the Organism Gets Sick

Even with clear roles, this partnership can go sideways. Here are the most common failure modes I’ve seen:

System Isolation

The Design Manager focuses only on the nervous system and ignores craft development. The Lead Designer focuses only on the muscular system and ignores team dynamics. Both people retreat to their comfort zones and stop collaborating.

The symptoms: Team members get mixed messages, work quality suffers, morale drops.

The treatment: Reconnect around shared outcomes. What are you both trying to achieve? Usually it’s great design work that ships on time from a healthy team. Figure out how both systems serve that goal.

Poor Circulation

Strategic direction is unclear, priorities keep shifting, and neither role is taking responsibility for keeping information flowing.

The symptoms: Team members are confused about priorities, work gets duplicated or dropped, deadlines are missed.

The treatment: Explicitly assign responsibility for circulation. Who’s communicating what to whom? How often? What’s the feedback loop?

Autoimmune Response

One person feels threatened by the other’s expertise. The Design Manager thinks the Lead Designer is undermining their authority. The Lead Designer thinks the Design Manager doesn’t understand craft.

The symptoms: Defensive behavior, territorial disputes, team members caught in the middle.

The treatment: Remember that you’re both caretakers of the same organism. When one system fails, the whole team suffers. When both systems are healthy, the team thrives.

The Payoff

Yes, this model requires more communication. Yes, it requires both people to be secure enough to share responsibility for team health. But the payoff is worth it: better decisions, stronger teams, and design work that’s both excellent and sustainable.

When both roles are healthy and working well together, you get the best of both worlds: deep craft expertise and strong people leadership. When one person is out sick, on vacation, or overwhelmed, the other can help maintain the team’s health. When a decision requires both the people perspective and the craft perspective, you’ve got both right there in the room.

Most importantly, the framework scales. As your team grows, you can apply the same system thinking to new challenges. Need to launch a design system? Lead Designer tends to the muscular system (standards and implementation), Design Manager tends to the nervous system (team adoption and change management), and both tend to circulation (communication and stakeholder alignment).

The Bottom Line

The relationship between a Design Manager and Lead Designer isn’t about dividing territories. It’s about multiplying impact. When both roles understand they’re tending to different aspects of the same healthy organism, magic happens.

The mind and body work together. The team gets both the strategic thinking and the craft excellence they need. And most importantly, the work that ships to users benefits from both perspectives.

So the next time you’re in that meeting room, wondering why two people are talking about the same problem from different angles, remember: you’re watching shared leadership in action. And if it’s working well, both the mind and body of your design team are getting stronger.

Another San Diego Comic-Con is in the books. Going into what amounts to Nerd Culture Mecca last week, some margins of social media and the ceaseless online commentariat pondered whether this would be a quieter year without a Marvel or a DC Studios film slate. However, one glance at the euphoric reception Peacemaker alone received […]

The post Everything We Saw At San Diego Comic-Con 2025 appeared first on Den of Geek.

Another San Diego Comic-Con is in the books. Going into what amounts to Nerd Culture Mecca last week, some margins of social media and the ceaseless online commentariat pondered whether this would be a quieter year without a Marvel or a DC Studios film slate. However, one glance at the euphoric reception Peacemaker alone received Saturday evening (as well as, ahem, on the cover of our own July issue of Den of Geek magazine), suggests there was nothing quiet at all about 135,000 fans, cosplayers, and general pop culture enthusiasts descending onto Southern California.

During the course of the convention, Den of Geek hosted a murderer’s row of talent from the worlds of film, television, comics, and more at our SDCC studio, as well as got out on the field to check out panels, activations, and events. Below is a round up of all the sights seen and memories made.

Den of Geek Studio

Alien: Earth

Alien is not only one of the most important science fiction franchises in history, it’s also one of the most cinematic. Beginning with Ridley Scott’s iconic 1979 film, each and every story about H.R. Giger’s terrifying xenomorph has proven to be a perfect fit for the feature-length film format. Alien movies are tense games of cat-and-mouse that end with the cat killing every mouse save for Sigourney Weaver. How, possibly, could that approach translate to episodic television? According to the folks behind FX’s Alien: Earth, it’s all pretty easy as long as you find the right personnel to pilot your Weyland-Yutani vessel. 

“The experience of this speaks to the experience of Noah [Hawley],” Scott Free Productions producer David. W. Zucker says of the Alien: Earth showrunner. “He’s really in rarefied air when it comes to creators. The topic of this title has come up a lot of times over the years, but through Noah, we’re able to deliver something that’s really beyond our wildest imagination.”

As the creator of the Fargo TV series and the equally heady take on X-Men mythos with Legion for FX, Hawley indeed has a penchant for unique adaptation. He explains his approach to these projects as a sentimental exercise: “I start with feelings. ‘What did I feel about the original movie?’ I don’t go back and rewatch it. I just try to remember what stuck with me about the first two films. And then my goal is to recreate those feelings in you by telling you a totally different story.”

Joining Hawley and Zucker in the Den of Geek studio were the cast of Alien: Earth—Timothy Olyphant (Kirsh), Babou Ceesay (Morrow), Alex Lawther (Hermit), Samuel Blenkin (Boy Kavalier), and Sydney Chandler (Wendy)—the last of whom plays a first for the franchise: a child’s mind in the body of an android, aka a “hybrid.”

“Kids are great acting teachers,” Chandler says. “Noah really allowed me to find comfort and take the freedom to explore and fail and try again and succeed. It was play. For pre-production we did musical chairs and then learned how to kill people on set.” – Alec Bojalad

Anne Rice’s Talamasca: The Secret Order

Building on Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe is Talamasca: The Secret Order, a show that’s billed as a supernatural spy thriller. The Talamasca is a centuries‑old secret society tasked with tracking and containing witches, vampires, werewolves, and other paranormal beings in present‑day society. Fortunately for us, the cast and showrunners who came to our studio were very forthcoming about what we could expect when the show premieres in October.

“It’s nice to have Anne’s work as a backstop and to know that she created this organization and talks about it a decent amount,” says co-showrunner John Lee Hancock. “But we don’t have to follow the strict plot construction of anything regarding a Talamasca book. All the actors here play characters that are original characters.”

Nicholas Denton’s character enters the secret world of the Talamasca and brings the viewers with him. “I play Guy Anatole who’s a figure who gives the audience a perspective on what’s going on,” he says. “He’s a skeptic. He’s gone through a lot in his life, and at this point when we meet him, he’s kind of gotten it all together only to have it taken away from him by the Talamasca.”– Michael Ahr

Batman Azteca

The Batman character has seen no shortage of reprisals, homages, and renditions since his creation in the 1930s. Come September, the newest version will be Batman Azteca: Choque de Imperios (Aztec Batman: Clash of Empires). The animated Mexican-American film takes the iconic characters of the Batman universe and, with the film being set during the Aztec Empire, gives them a historical and cultural spin.  

“For a lot of us growing up learning about the Aztec culture and also being Batman fans, having the opportunity to combine the two was a unique and excellent opportunity,” the film’s director Juan Meza-León says. Combining the two worlds required lots of research within the realms of Aztec history and the Batman universe, and also came with a fair amount of responsibility for the voice of Batman, Horacio García Rojas. 

“I love representation, but I don’t want to be a token in a big production,” he says. “I want to represent my own culture in my own context, and that’s Aztec Batman.” – Sophia Rooksberry

Butterfly

In a spy thriller, a protagonist’s greatest fear is the discovery of his weaknesses. In the case of David Jung, the hardened former U.S. intelligence operative portrayed by Daniel Dae Kim in the upcoming series Butterfly, that weakness is his family. Kim, along with costars Reina Hardesty and Piper Perabo, stopped by the Den of Geek studio to dive into the complicated family dynamics of their show, and the ways in which it sets Butterfly apart from the extensive catalog of onscreen spy stories. 

“In the beginning of our show, you meet Rebecca in the middle of a mission, something she is very used to doing … I am pursuing a target and then I find out that it is my dad who I thought died 9 years before, and so then my whole world turns upside down,” Hardesty said. 

The resulting storyline follows a father and daughter as they rediscover their relationship while running from the dangerous organization that created them both, orchestrated by Juno (Perabo). The show balances themes of family and drama with the classic staples of a spy thriller, from car chases to shootouts to hand-to-hand combat scenes that Jason Bourne would marvel at.    

“I grew up watching people like James Bond and Jason Bourne, but on the other hand, I never saw anyone that looked like me do this in America,” Kim said. “It was a little bit of taking what I could from the characters I know and loved and trying to make it my own and trying to create a new archetype.” 

Adapted from the graphic novel of the same name, Butterfly maintains originality as an adaptation, an installment of a beloved genre and a platform for AAPI representation. Visit Prime Video on Aug. 13 to dive into the subversive and emotional world. – SR 

David Dastmalchian

David Dastmalchian had been coming to comic-cons, San Diego or otherwise, as a fan for far longer than he’s been a guest up on the stage. In fact, when he enters our studio space he can be faintly nostalgic about the times he would see other folks dressed up as Thomas Schiff, a minor but memorable character he played in his first film, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. He also can be proudly affectionate of those that are slightly more recent cuts, like cosplayers spotted as Polka-Dot Man from The Sucide Squad or Jack Delroy in the new cult classic Late Night with the Devil.

Yet when we talked with the actor and comic book author last week, Dastmalchian might’ve been proudest of how genre and the things he loves can be used as a way to talk about the personal elements of life. Take for instance Through, Dastmalchian’s new graphic novel as a writer, and which is illustrated by Cat Staggs. “Sometimes you just sit at the campfire with a cool idea, and you’re like, ‘Ooh, I’m going to creep people out. Ooh, I got a journey I want to take people on.’ … I just thought it was a cool story, it didn’t hit me until halfway through scripting how personal it was.”

That journey involves a woman falling through the ice above Lake Michigan on a cold Chicago day, seemingly on purpose, only to discover she was saved by an elderly and dying stranger, who might have been following her all her life. It will reveal one side of Dastmalchian’s personality when it releases in 2026, but there are many others, informing projects that run the gamut from Murderbot to the highly anticipated Street Fighter where Dastmalchian will next be seen playing the villainous M. Bison.

“I am deep in the process right now,” Dastmalchian says of the physical training it takes to become the greatest villain in fighting game history. “I can’t say much other than how it’s so amazing, and I love getting to start building and preparing.”

Keep an eye on Den of Geek for more of our conversation with Dastmalchian, from Through to Street Fighter, and everything in between. – David Crow

Defiant 

We had the privilege of speaking with the passionate and creative team behind the graphic novel Defiant:The Story of Robert Smalls. The novel, based on a true story, explores the journey of a man who broke free from slavery, stole a Confederate ship, and sailed to freedom during the Civil War. He later became the first Black naval captain in American history along with many historically significant accolades down the line. It is, in other words, fertile ground for a visual work of art dreamed up by storyteller Rob Edwards, as well as the subject of an upcoming new film from the production company Legion M.

“A story like this needs to be told in a dynamic way,” Edwards says after stopping by the studio. Throughout this conversation, it was clear that something was very different from most big-time epic history stories being told through an IP like this. This has a dedication to community and truth. 

As Legion M founder Chris Cooper explains, “We’re the largest fan-owned company for developing and producing films right now with crowdfunding being the very thing to help bring this story to light.” Fan input also extends to creative decisions such as casting and directing. Adds Cooper, “Legion M is a studio for fans, by fans. So I’d love to hear what the people think… All of us have had conversations with your favorite actors, your favorite actresses, [and] your favorite directors [about involvement].”

This project holds value not only for its importance in American history but also as a piece of culture that could’ve been left to time but instead has been revitalized and given a platform to be told and celebrated as it deserves.

Marvin Jones III, producer of the live-action adaptation, says, “It’s always been important to tell stories or be a part of stories that have an impact, especially for Black people in our community from a fictitious standpoint, from a superhero standpoint. Robert Smalls is a real-life superhero, especially for us as a people and our culture.” – Caleb Miller

Digman!: Andy Samberg Reveals Favorite Lonely Island Sketches

The timing of Digman! creators Andy Samberg and Neil Campbell’s visit to the Den of Geek studio at San Diego Comic-Con 2025 could not have been more auspicious. Not only had season 2 of the pair’s animated archaeology comedy premiered the night before on Comedy Central, it was preceded by the debut of a very particular episode of South Park. You know which one… So was the duo looking forward to the panel they were set to share with South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone that night?

“I’m looking forward to it now! Ask me again after,” Samberg said with a nervous laugh. “When we got told that we would have them as our lead-in, there’s nothing better.”

“That’s truly my favorite comedy,” Campbell added. “I’ve watched every episode, every special. Those guys, in a way they’re underappreciated for their influence on the world of comedy. It was awesome to get to come on afterwards.”

Samberg and Campbell were able to set aside their South Park nerves to discuss the surprisingly deep lore of Digman!, in which Samberg puts his Nicolas Cage impression to good use, playing a dubiously heroic archaeologist trying to save the world from the Unclechrist and Auntiechrist. Samberg also provided a rundown of some of his favorite “SNL Digital Shorts” that he and Lonely Island collaborators Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone created during their time on NBC’s comedy flagship. 

“I have a bunch of them that I’m very fond of,” Samberg said. “I really like ‘Jack Sparrow.’ I feel like that one kind of encapsulates everything that we do. I really like the one we did called ‘Great Day’ where I’m on Commerce Street and just gacked out of my mind. There’s one I did from last season with Jake Semanski and Jonah Hill called ‘Tennis Balls.’ That’s one that makes me laugh so hard. It was Jonah’s idea ‘cause there was actually a science video online of a guy who’s like, ‘This is what happens when you get hit in the nuts with a tennis ball.’ We took it and ran very far with it.” – AB

Gen V

The world of superheroes in training at Godolkin University is at the core of Gen V, but the cast members that visited our studio concede that the scope continues to widen the more synergy it has with The Boys, the series it spins off from. Jaz Sinclair, who plays Marie Moreau in the series, says they’re picking up right where things ended in the main show.

“The whole tone of our season is based on where The Boys leaves off,” she says. “Homelander has taken over, and we get to see how that directly affects the whole world and also the university itself… we have our new dean and the posters you see and things.”

Hamish Linklater, who plays Dean Cypher, is very cryptic about how his new character will be tied into the decidedly more contentious atmosphere. “I think the name says it all… he’s a cypher,” the actor says mysteriously. When asked about his superpower, Linklater preferred to leave it a mystery for Gen V fans to discover for themselves. Luckily they’ll only have to wait until the Sept. 17 premiere date to find out. – MA

Jason Universe

What exactly is a Jason universe you might ask? Well, at least in one filmmaker’s opinion, it is a whole interconnected, multimedia brand of everything we’ve ever loved about Friday the 13th and its bedeviled camp grounds. “It’s games, it’s movies, it’s figures, it’s collectibles, it’s all that stuff we’ve been craving for years now,” says Mike P. Nelson, who in addition to being a lifelong fan of Jason Voorhees is also the man tasked with bringing the hockey-masked killer back to live-action for the first time in decades via Jason Universe’s new short film, “Sweet Revenge.”

The short’s trailer gained an extraordinarily positive reaction at SDCC and fulfilled a dream for Nelson, who grew up perusing video store horror sections as a child in the same way an art critic might appreciate the walls of the MoMA. He also got to be the first filmmaker to work with a newly redesigned Jason courtesy of genre legend Greg Nicotero. “It’s just about capturing that vibe of what Jason sort of was. To me, Final Chapter was scripture. That was the movie that informed the ‘80s horror film. It was the look, the feel. It was sweaty, it was dirty, and for me creating a new Jason, I wanted to revisit that.”

While Nelson is coy as to whether “Sweet Revenge” could lead to a feature, or for that matter if it will literally crossover with other elements of the so-called Jason Universe like Peacock and A24’s Crystal Lake series, Nelson adds, “If down the road, those things collide, all the cooler.”  – DC

Heroes & Villains 

Releasing two highly anticipated merchandise drops at SDCC for Star Wars and Fantastic Four, Heroes & Villains stands out among other fan-merchandise brands that work with IPs for its wearable, streetwear-inspired look that is very specific to style and feel. We got the chance to sit down with Doug Johnson, the creative director of Bioworld Merchandising, which houses Heroes & Villains, to talk about the two collections and what specific characters and callbacks influenced their creations. 

Specificity and planting easter eggs for devoted fans are key. Take its recent collection, inspired entirely by Star Wars’ Rebel Pathfinders, who were formed within the Rebel Alliance during the Clone Wars, hand-picked and tasked with crucial operations by the Alliance High Command. Johnson was inspired by the Rebels’ color pallette, pulling from earth tones like teal, mustard, taupe, and olive. The collection’s contrast is of course the Galactic Empire, which Heroes & Villains opts for a more techie, clean look with black and red in its designs, drawing from the Inferno Squadron from the 2017 video game, Star Wars Battlefront II. 

“What we like to do is look back at what’s the story that brought us to that point and tell the comic side of that, or the true lore behind why this particular release is happening and have those touch points with our fans,” Johnson says. 

To celebrate Marvel’s first family, and the recent release of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Heroes & Villains also debuted jackets, shirts, bags, and hats inspired by the origins of the story and characters behind the new film. The collection blends futuristic and clean designs that feel true to the IP while also not abandoning Heroes & Villains’ quintessential streetwear and vintage look, appealing to both fans and franchise owners. While Star Wars has a little bit more to work with in terms of lore and characters, both collections are focused on creating wearable fashion for devoted fans.  

“We try to stay current with content and find unique ways to develop  products that speak to that truth, versus just marketing a slap of assets that you get from a style guide,” Johnson says. – Darcie Zudell

Interview with the Vampire

Back in 2024, Interview with the Vampire showrunner Rolin Jones stepped into Den of Geek Studio at San Diego Comic-Con with all the pep and vigor of a creative who had just completed a pitch-perfect two-season TV adaptation of Anne Rice’s classic first Vampire Chronicles novel. In 2025, having just begun production on the third season of the show, now styled The Vampire Lestat, Jones was equally as excited but a little more measured about crafting Lestat de Lioncourt’s big moment. 

“I was cocky and confident that this was gonna be easy and awesome. And it’s been uh…the hardest season of TV I’ve ever done. Without a doubt,” Jones says. “It’s gotten very personal. A lot of personal writing has begun to dump into the show. There’s a lot of people that are on this very risky, weird, little journey with me. They are entering it with a lot of confidence and a lot of enthusiasm. We’re doing something kind of wild.”

Any adaptation of Rice’s second novel The Vampire Lestat is bound to be pretty wild. The narrative switches over from the taciturn Louis de Pointe du Lac (played by Jacob Anderson in the series) to the decadent Lestat (Sam Reid) as he enters his rock star era. Thankfully, the show’s composer is up to the task of producing some bangers. 

“I started my [rock & roll] education long, long ago,” Daniel Hart says. “This is where I have been heading since I was a little kid – since my brother brought home Led Zeppelin IV. I feel right at home. It is a thrill and a great challenge to do something this ambitious. Inspirations run the gamut from Howlin’ Wolf to Chappel Roan and everything in-between.” – AB

Lilo & Stitch

It’s been over 23 years of riding the Hawaiian rollercoaster with some of Disney’s most beloved characters from the 2002 original animated film, Lilo & Stitch, and after a prolific opening weekend for the cast of the new live-action movie, stars Tia Carrere (Mrs. Kekoa, and the original voice of Nani), Maia Kealoha (Lilo) and Sydney Agudong (Nani) are celebrating the new film breaking several box-office records at SDCC. 

In the studio, we learned that this was the first SDCC that Kealoha ever attended, who was only six-years-old when the 2025 movie was filmed. Her breakout role as the misunderstood young girl being raised by her sister was her first time onscreen acting. And she’s been very pleased with the reaction to the live-action film. 

“It’s been amazing,” Kealoha says. “And I’m so excited that our movie is [worth] a billion dollars.”

The film was also significant for the young actress Agudong, who revealed that she was a huge Lilo & Stitch fan growing up. Her past experiences in theater helped prepare her for long days on set and returning to do it all again the next morning. Agudong also reveals when she was cast as Nani, her first instinct was to talk with the OG, Carrere, about stepping into a role she’s previously played. 

“I was so happy that Sydney invited me in,” Carrere says. “I just had to say, ‘Girl, you are a warrior. You are fierce, and you have everything within you.’ We grow into our power as women, and sometimes we need to be reminded of that by other women.” 

The film has been out since late May and has been subjected to public discourse by devoted fans who are emotionally attached to the original source material. One significant change from the original script was the ending of the 2025 film, which (spoiler alert) involved Nani leaving for college to study marine biology, leaving Lilo under the custody of their neighbors Tūtū and David. Sure, people had mixed opinions about the switch up, but what about the women who depicted the character? 

“I loved it,” Carrere says. “It’s a reality that—coming from Hawaii—you have to leave the island to achieve and bring back that knowledge.” 

Agudong adds, “I think we’re both on the same page.” She further echoes how the change made the story feel more real and spoke to the experiences of other mixed families in Hawaii. Plus in the new movie, Nani has a portal that she can use to see Lilo at any time, so as Carrere points out, it’s a non-issue.

“We’re also exposing the fact that hanai family is just as important as blood-related family,” Agudong says. “Everybody can belong. You can choose your family in that way.” – DZ

The Long Walk

Very rarely does San Diego Comic-Con feel the need to censor anything that comes by the hallowed grounds of Hall H. In fact, there is no other instance where the cavernous room’s big screens went black right before something as heinous as the summary execution of a teenager was carried out off-screen (although folks reportedly could still hear it). Yet that is what happened during a tense presentation of Francis Lawrence’s adaptation of The Long Walk, an adaptation of the first novel Stephen King ever completed as a writer.

“Comic-Con deemed the event too intense to show in its full entirety,” actor Garrett Wareing says when stopping by our studio after the panel. “So they censored some of the footage, and it was quite exciting to watch the fan reactions and to hear their reactions to what we’re seeing now.” There were gasps, groans, and perhaps an uneasy sense of creeping dread.

Screenwriter J.T. Mollner, however, notes that is both the power and appeal of something as potent as King’s dystopian paterfamilias to stories like The Hunger Games and Battle Royale.

“You know when I was a kid, and I was 12 or 13 and I couldn’t get in a movie because [it] was too rough for people my age, it made me want to see it immediately,” Mollner smiles. “So the beauty of this movie, in my opinion, is the way Francis handled the brutality, the intensity, the terror, it’s all shown honestly. It would be obscene to not show it honestly, but it never feels gratuitous. And I think that’s a fine line and a great balance, and Francis went all the way.” – DC

Nacelleverse/Toys that Made Us 

It wouldn’t be San Diego Comic-Con without a visit with collector extraordinaire Brian Volk-Weiss, the man behind the Nacelle Company and the hit Netflix documentary series The Toys That Made Us, which Volk-Weiss assured us would be delivering its fourth season in 2026 with a fifth and final run in 2027.

Among the many items we talked about were the Nacelleverse lineup of Star Trek toys, which Volk-Weiss acknowledges feature some very niche Starfleet characters like Captain Jellico from The Next Generation or Tuvix from Voyager.

“I just knew if we started with Kirk and Spock and Picard and Data, the community would be like, ‘Eh, okay’,” Volk-Weiss says. Instead he wanted to “send a message to the community that we are Trekkies too and we’re doing the ones you all wanted.”

With Nacelleverse toys making the transition to comics, Volk-Weiss was excited about Wild West C.O.W. Boys of Moo Mesa making the transition for its first issue from Oni Press. “For the first time ever, we’re gonna have two comic books running simultaneously. So C.O.W. Boys of Moo Mesa and Biker Mice from Mars are running concurrently.” – MA

Peacemaker Season 2

The opening credits to every episode of Peacemaker season 1 asked a simple question: “Do you really wanna, do you really wanna taste it?” Starring John Cena as the titular maker of peace, this DC Universe era-straddling HBO Max series liked to have a good time, as evidenced by its jaunty hair metal dance number to “Do You Wanna Taste It?” by Wigwam. 

Now season 2 has some more questions to answer. As showrunner and DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn told Den of Geek magazine, Peacemaker’s second season will provide a certain amount of clarity for the new DC Universe’s timeline. No previous Cena-starring effort like The Suicide Squad or Peacemaker season 1 can be considered canon until season 2 blesses it. Thankfully, this batch of Peacemaker episodes gets a lot of those clarifications out of the way early so it can get right back to dancing. When stars Cena (Peacemaker), Jennifer Holland (Emilia Harcourt), Frank Grillo (Rick Flag Sr.), Sol Rodríguez (Sasha Bordeaux), Steve Agee (John Economos), and Freddie Stroma (Adrian “Vigilante” Chase) visited the studio, they revealed just how seriously Gunn takes that musical sequence. 

“You don’t see James Gunn getting angry often but… he wasn’t happy halfway through the day,” Grillo says.

“It was actually two days [of shooting],” Holland clarifies. 

Once the episodes actually begin, Chris Smith a.k.a. Peacemaker will have a lot more than dancing to be concerned with. After all, does this kinder, gentler DC universe still have room for someone as violent as Peacemaker? 

“In Peacemaker’s mind he’s doing what he’s doing for the greater good. So it’s a shock to his system when people don’t accept him,” Cena says. Surely, the Justice Gang can find use for a marksman. – AB

Resident Alien

After nearly five years, the producers of Resident Alien have confirmed that the recently released season 4 will be the sci-fi comedy show’s last installment. As a part of their victory lap, members of the cast visited the Den of Geek studio to reflect on the recent season and the series as a whole.  

“Our show, despite not being renewed, is a complete story,” says actor Corey Reynolds. “So whether or not you are someone who is familiar with our show now, or if you want to jump on board after we aren’t renewed, you will get a beginning, a middle, and an end. We don’t just leave you hanging.”

In addition to discussing the longevity of a show with such reliable qualities, the cast reflected on specific moments in season 4 that wrap up each character’s storyline nicely, even if not in the way it was planned. 

“In season 4, she [Asta] is just learning how to love herself now,” says actor Sara Tomko about her character’s final arc. “She’s such a nurturer and she has been people pleasing and peacekeeping, trying to save the world like no big deal. Now all the people she loves are looking at her and they’re saying, ‘What about you now?’ and that’s real love, that’s real friendship.” – SR

Revival

As a show about a town where people suddenly return from the dead and try to return to their normal lives, Revival could be seen as somewhat derivative, but its first season is proving that the ensemble cast and compelling mystery make it a one-of-a-kind series. Showrunners Aaron B. Koontz and Luke Boyce joined the cast in our studio, and they spoke about how they approached the show’s brilliant storytelling.

“I’m a big believer in setup and payoff,” says Koontz. “We just wanted to make a show that we liked, and I like things that aren’t spoonfed. I like things that make me lean forward and ask questions and try to figure it out.”

Melanie Scrofano is in Revival’s lead role as small town cop Dana Cypress, and her character’s struggles feel completely realistic, including an episode where a bullet leaves her incapacitated at a time when she needs to be mobile.

“That was a real challenge to be bedridden and have this dialogue that’s really high stakes and have to do it in a bed,” she admits. “But it was a really fun challenge.” We’re anxious to see where things go in the Revival season 1 finale in August! – MA

Roddenberry and Does It Fly?

Since launching in 2024, co-hosts Tamara Krinsky and Hakeem Oluseyi have been dissecting some of the most beloved fandoms with scientific eyes on their podcast Does it Fly? Krinsky and Oluseyi, along with Kelsey Goldberg, who also serves as an executive producer of Does it Fly?, and Trevor Roth, the chief operating officer of Roddenberry Entertainment, visited our studio at SDCC to discuss the evolution of the podcast in just a little over a year, and how Krinsky’s love of pop culture and Oluseyi’s science education background join forces in unexpected ways to create Does it Fly? 

Goldberg shared that she was excited when the show expanded its range of genres and topics beyond purely sci-fi—recently, the podcast examined the logic of Superman’s sun-powered abilities and evolution in How to Train Your Dragon. 

“It was an absolute joy the moment we discovered we can go outside of strict sci-fi, and I can start to look at fantasy or horror,” Goldberg says. “I got a little evil, but I think the audience benefits from it.” 

Krinsky and Oluseyi’s friendship and appreciation toward what they’re discussing shines through every episode of Does it Fly? For Oluseyi, finding a co-host like Krinsky was a dream come true as he never really thought he’d find someone to share his passions with in this capacity. 

“I’m from Mississippi, and nobody was into what I was into,” Oluseyi says. “They would always say things like, ‘Man, ain’t nobody into that shit you’re into.’ Well, guess what? I found somebody who’s into that shit I’m into!”

Roth expressed his appreciation of the fandom, and voiced that the podcast’s mission was not only to analyze characters and stories but to examine them without tearing them down or dismissing devoted fans. 

“Sometimes we say, ‘We’re putting something on trial,’ but we’re putting something on trial in the nicest way possible,” Roth says. “We’re not here to cut anything down. We know that the things we’re talking about are beloved by someone, including us, much of the time, and because of that, we want to revel in whatever joy that it brings.” – DZ

Ron Moore

Ronald D. Moore is on a real tear these days with two of his most successful shows, Outlander and For All Mankind, both receiving highly anticipated spinoffs (Blood of My Blood and Star City respectively), so we were anxious to speak with him in-studio about his secret to making both a successful hit series and a companion show to explore. 

“It’s always in the back of my mind: what could this be?” Moore says. “Because you’re always playing around with what’s the potential for the story. How big is the story? How many seasons is it? Can you expand the universe into something else? But it’s really a back of the head kind of thing.”

We also asked Moore about his progress on the God of War adaptation, and whether it might follow Kratos and Atreus. “As someone who’s new to this world, I was really impressed with the depth of what you’re talking about,” he tells us. “It’s such a rich environment… it’s been really fun to dive into this world.” -MA

Shin Godzilla

Shin Godzilla was something of a game-changer for the Big G when it hit theaters nearly 10 years ago in Japan. After decades of sequels, team-ups, and crossovers, the monster that once looked like a walking metaphor for nuclear armageddon had become cute and cuddly. In fact, looking back at the impact Shin had on the culture, co-director Shinji Higuchi tells us in our SDCC studio that they were adamant to go out of their way and avoid making a “Godzilla is going to fight against something” movie.

Instead they crafted a bitter parable for bureaucratic inaction and paralysis in the face of existential crisis, something Japanese audiences were eminently familiar with following the Fukushima nuclear meltdown disaster of 2011. And yet, even so, Higuchi admits that he and his co-director Hideaki Anno were surprised when they learned that they’d inadvertently invented the cuddliest looking Godzilla ever: you know the one with the big, googily eyes.

“It’s evolution, it’s not growth,” Higuchi says of Godzilla’s ever-mutating appearance. “There’s a difference. So I wanted to really follow an almost Darwinism [form] of evolution.” Thus to represent the midway point between the sea creature at the beginning of the movie and the more iconic reptilian visage that ends it, he and Anno settled on an image they thought would be chilling, not charming.

“Director Anno doesn’t like fish and doesn’t like meat,” Higuchi reveals. “So director Anno hates when you go to a fish market and you see the eyes, the way they look at you. So that was what we decided. ‘Let’s give him those eyes!’ But Anno is kind of confused, because he thought he made the scariest creature imaginable, but all the kids love it and everyone says it’s super cute. So there is this gap.” Merchandising windfalls have started from less. – DC

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 

After countless spinoffs, movies, comics, and other projects, Star Trek is finally boldly going where many rootless Gen Xers go: back to school. No, Gene Roddenberry’s sunny vision of a collaborative sci-fi future isn’t going to grad school to get its masters; it’s going all the way back to Starfleet Academy in the fittingly titled Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. 

Den of Geek was joined by a supersized roster of Starfleet cadets and producers to discuss the project, including Holly Hunter (Nahla Ake), Robert Picardo (the Doctor), Noga Landau (executive producer), Alex Kurtzman (executive producer, co-showrunner), Sandro Rosta (Caleb Mir), Bella Shepard (Genesis Lythe) , Kerrice Brooks (Sam), George Hawkins (Darem Reymi), and Karim Diane (Jay-Den Kraag).

“It was very intentional to set it in the 32nd century,” Landau says. “Because it’s a time of rebuilding and it’s a time when the pressures of the rebuilding really falls on the shoulders of the younger generation. There’s a lot with these kids going on that other generations haven’t had to face.” 

Kurtzman elaborates on why the time was finally right for a series featuring young Starfleet cadets after so many previous rumors and false starts. 

“It feels like this generation in particular is facing so many deep challenges. Everybody is trying to figure out ‘how do we get back to hope?’ I think that’s where Roddenberry comes in. I always feel like Star Trek is a compass that points us toward our better angels and the people we want to be.”

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is set to premiere to Paramount+ in 2026. – AB

Star Trek Strange New Worlds 

When Paramount’s freshly-installed Star Trek czar Alex Kurtzman invited Akiva Goldsman to work on the first modern Trek spinoff Star Trek: Discovery, Goldsman ran a simple Google search to get what the series was all about. It immediately led him astray. 

“I discovered that it was a show about Pike and Number One… at least according to the internet. Then I got there and discovered it had zero to do with any of that,” Goldsman says. 

That initial internet research, however, planted the seed for the spinoff that would become Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, arguably the most creatively successful Trek endeavor of its era. Now with the show in its third season (and with two more final seasons on the way) Goldsman, producer Henry Alonso Myers, and castmembers Rebecca Romijn (Number One), Christina Chong (La’An Noonien-Singh), Ethan Peck (Spock), Paul Wesley (James T. Kirk), and Jess Bush (Christine Chapel) stopped by the studio to talk about season 3 and the show’s ultimate legacy. 

“What we’ve done so far exceeds anything I’d ever imagined,” Goldsman says. “I hoped we’d get the original Star Trek values back because God knows we need them in times like this. I had no idea that we would be gifted with this extraordinary cast. They are more than collaborators, they are authors. If we’re lucky and if we stick the landing we’ll have added a significant piece to the canon of Star Trek.”

Before the end comes, however, season 3 finds Strange New Worlds being its goofy, ambitious self, including a fourth episode that pays homage to The Original Series and Star Trek parodies in more ways than one. 

“That was the most fun episode I think I have filmed,” Chong says. “When I got to see all these guys as their different characters, it was just incredible. La’An has been really uptight. Season 3 I had an opportunity to lighten her up. She’s exploring her passions, full stop.” – AB

Todd McFarlane 

Todd McFarlane’s King Spawn is about to hit issue 50 later this year. It’s a benchmark and milestone for the creator of Hell’s monarch, a character he created in 1992. That’s also the same year McFarlane co-founded Image Comics, where he remains president. Still, that’s a modest run when compared to mainline Spawn’s 350 and counting issues. Yet the way McFarlane tells it in our studio, it is the character’s longevity which is the secret to his success.

“At some point over time, and I don’t care which business it is, you’ll have high and low points,” McFarlane says. “But what’s going to matter is that the brand, that word that you’re putting out there, just never goes away. It’s always there. Attrition of the same thing over and over. Has Spawn had highs and lows? Of course it has. What it has [though] is it’s been there nonstop for over 30 years. That’s the secret sauce.”

McFarlane also confides that his biggest issue with many creators today, even at Image Comics, is that they wrap up a story they personally created after five or six issues. 

“You get big sales in the first five and then they start to flatten and paper down,” the comic maestro notes. “And the thought is ‘I can stop and go start another book and get good sales for these next five of those.’ The answer economically is yes, in the short term, but I’m telling you, long-term I keep saying get to issue 50. Every book that Image Comics has done that has gotten 50 or more issues has gotten outside the bubble. And the bubble by definition is comic books and us in the geek [community]. The choir. The choir’s always coming, but how do you get it now out to T-shirts, hats, toys, video games, movies, TV shows? Outside so your neighbor may have heard of the work?”

Here’s to 50 more issues, King. – DC

Tony Hale

Tony Hale is quite simply one of the most successful comedic actors of this TV generation. After embodying motherboy Buster Bluth on Fox and Netflix’s beloved Arrested Development for five seasons, Hale would go on to win Emmy gold as President Meyer’s bagman Gary Walsh on HBO’s acidic satire, Veep. Now Hale is producing and starring in Sketch, a film he excitedly calls a combination of Inside Out and Jurassic Park. 

“It took eight years to get made,” Hale says. “My buddy Seth Worley had the idea and wrote the script. We just went back and forth for a few years. I play a single dad who is worried because his daughter keeps drawing these crazy pictures that end up coming to life. It’s a really fun family adventure with a beautiful theme of processing feelings.”

In addition to teasing the madcap adventure to come in Sketch, Hale was kind enough to go deep on his career, discussing his time on Arrested Development, Veep, Community, Toy Story 4, Inside Out 2, and even his brief Marvel and Star Wars voice acting forays. One theme that emerged is that you might just remember Hale’s best roles better than he does. 

“One of my favorite things is when people come up and are like, ‘I love this joke,’ and I’m like, ‘Please tell me it because I’ve completely forgotten.’ The only one I remember, because it’s my favorite, is Tobias joining Blue Man Group because he thinks it’s a support group for depressed men. That was the level of comedy you were working with.”

Next time you see Tony Hale out and about, please remind him of some more great Arrested Development gags. – AB

The Toxic Avenger

Writer-director Macon Blair and the stars of The Toxic Avenger remake, including Peter Dinklage, stopped by to chat about their new superhero movie—err, make that “super-human” movie. Yep, as producer Lloyd Kaufman, who co-wrote and co-directed the original Toxic Avenger, tells us, he has advised both Blair and Ahoy Comics to knock off using the term “superhero” while running with ol’ Toxie.

“[It’s] a super-human movie,” Kaufman insists. “You get a lawyer’s letter because Warners and Marvel co-own the word ‘superhero.’ When Toxic Avenger was a Marvel comic book, he was a superhero, but as soon as Warners dumped the Toxic Avenger remake, then suddenly we got a lawyer’s letter to no longer use ‘superhero.’ So it’s a super-human hero… That’s how you do things in the movie business.”

We should note that Marvel and DC have since lost their attempt to trademark the word ‘superhero’ in court, but the fact that Toxie has to stay DIY about even his job description—and even as the star of a glitzy (if still gory) new Legendary Pictures remake—is pretty on brand for a superhero who got dunked in toxic sludge. Watch the above video to see the rest of our discussion, including why Dinklage is not under the extensive Toxie makeup post-transformation. – DC

Twisted Metal Season 2

The first season of Twisted Metal on Peacock offered just about everything fans of the long-running vehicular combat video game series could have hoped for. In addition to Anthony Mackie’s anonymous hero John Doe, the season introduced many characters, vehicles, locations, and even the iconic fiery harlequin Sweet Tooth from the mythos. The only thing missing, however, was the all-important demolition derby itself. That is now set to arrive in Twisted Metal season 2 thanks to the introduction of another important game character: the mysterious Calypso, played by Anthony Carrigan (Barry, Superman). 

“He’s just kind of your basic, run-of-the-mill MC of a vehicular death match. Go with the old standards,” Carrigan says. 

Joining Carrigan to tease the season to come were Mackie (John Doe), Joe Seanoa (Sweet Tooth), Stephanie Beatriz (Quiet), and showrunner Michael Jonathan Smith. 

“First of all, New San Francisco is a wonderful place,” Mackie says of John Doe’s initial season 2 digs. “If you get a chance, go check it out. I discovered carpaccio in New San Francisco. It’s quite nice. We discover John there having a wonderful time and trying to move forward without his right hand…” 

“His right hand,” Beatriz interrupts with a masturbatory hand motion.  A brief moment of sincerity immediately followed up by a dick joke? Hard to imagine a more fitting representation of Twisted Metal than that. – AB

Upper Deck and Rush of Ikorr

We got the chance to speak with Travis Rhea, head of Upper Deck about Rush of Ikorr, and what Upper Deck has coming now and for the near future. 

The new trading card game dropped earlier this year, with Rush of Ikorr relying on strategy as you compete in epic mythological battles with up to 3v3 PvP. As Rhea explains, “Last year we released NeoPets TCG; this year, Rush of Ikorr. Rush of Ikorr is really a game changer. It’s a homegrown IP for us and has some pretty cool differences that you don’t see in the TCG world.” We touched on its unique qualities, including how the game encourages 2v2 and 3v3 play. But the style of play isn’t the only thing that separates it.

Says Rhea, “We tapped into stuff people were already excited about and somewhat familiar with.” This references the various cultures and sets of mythology the creative team researched for the creation of this game’s lore, which helps it to have a unique style in the TCG space. What is so great is that this is a return to form for Upper Deck, with Rhea stating, “We’ve been here before; we have a legacy on this side of the business. We did Yu-Gi-Oh!, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty…we’ve been in that world. It’s just we took a break from it for a while… back to TCG’s is really in our DNA.” – CM

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon

The folks behind The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon stepped into the studio triumphant, having just announced at the preceding panel that their Walking Dead spinoff would receive a supersized fourth and final season. Producers Scott Gimple, Greg Nicotero, and David Zabel; and producers and stars Norman Reedus and Melissa McBride were happy to tease the ending to come.

“The French part of this show was always envisioned as a two-season story,” Zabel says. “And then starting this season we have three and four. By the end of that, Carol and Daryl’s European adventure would have a really good conclusion and open up whatever comes next.”

Following two full seasons of fighting the dead in France, Daryl (Reedus) and Carol (McBridge) head west (in a very roundabout way that includes a trip through the “Chunnel”) to take in some post-apocalyptic sightseeing on their long journey home. 

“There’s a real passion in Spain,” Reedus says. “It’s like a Western. There’s a real Spanish fire to the cast and crew. You feel the passion in the show. We tried really hard not to make an American show and plop it down in Europe. We tried not to fake the funk. We didn’t want everyone in France to have a beret on and a poodle and eat brie. In Spain we were authentic as well.” – AB

Yaeji

One of the many draws of SDCC 2025 was the highly anticipated Crunchyroll Anime FanFest, two free days of live music, ranging from Japanese alternative bands to anime-inspired hip-hop groups. On the second day, Brooklyn-based DJ Yaeji performed a set on the Crunchyroll stage before stopping by the studio. 

“It was definitely different,” Yaeji said about her FanFest set. “I prepared for it specially on the side. I wanted to play only anime edits and get deep if I can, so it wasn’t like a usual set I would play at all.” 

Yaeji’s usual sets are platforms for her bilingual lyricism and dual lofi/electronic sounds. According to the DJ, the purpose behind writing lyrics in both Korean and English has changed for her over the years. 

“In the beginning, I just sang in Korean because I wanted my friends to not know what I was singing about, and then I discovered that Korean sounds really texturally interesting, so it was more of an instrument,” the musician says. “Now, I find it to be helpful expressing in both languages … and also communicating via sounds and the sonics.” 

Although Yaeji doesn’t point to one specific artist as her primary influence, she has resonated with icons of hip-hop and pop throughout her life. However, she has most notably found inspiration within mediums she shares in common with many SDCC attendees. 

“Sometimes I would find random indie music through a blog probably, but I was always on the internet,” Yaeji tells us. “I think the more influential ones are actually probably from video games or anime openings and endings that I listened to throughout my teens.” – SR 

Panels

Coyote vs. Acme Panel

Bright and early in Hall H, Looney Tunes fans at very long last got to watch never-before-seen clips from the long-awaited Coyote vs. Acme, the movie that Warner Bros. Discovery—I mean, Acme!—didn’t want you to see. The panel was hosted by comedian Paul Scheer and featured director Dave Green, cast members Will Forte, Eric Bauza, Martha Kelly, and surprise appearances by Wile E. Coyote himself, plus P. J. Byrne in-character as Acme’s legal rep. We saw three clips, including six minutes of footage and the film’s first official trailer. Byrne handed out fake cease and desist papers and had the panel removed by unpaid Acme interns.

These bits referenced WBD’s decision to shelve the completed film in 2023 as part of a $30 million tax write-off, which sparked immense fan outrage. Ketchup Entertainment later picked up the film for $50 million. The panel also revealed that Coyote vs. Acme is set for global release on Aug. 28, 2026. The film’s plot is based on a 1990 The New Yorker article by Ian Frazier, and imagines Wile E. Coyote finally suing Acme after years of injuries from their defective products.

“While [Wile E. Coyote] is the star of the movie, he is not the hero of this movie. Because I think what Paul [Scheer] and I, and everyone you’re going to meet on this panel today would say, is that the real hero of this movie is all you guys sitting in those seats,” Will Forte says at the panel. “Like Wile E. Coyote, you guys were underdogs who fought against a major corporation, and because you never gave up, this movie is now going to come out in a global wide release.” – DZ

George Lucas and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Panel 

In the discussion of geek culture’s biggest influences, few names loom as large as George Lucas. This year, the creator of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones universes, founder of Lucasfilm, and veritable godfather of science fiction made his first appearance at SDCC for a panel titled “Sneak Peek of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Panel.”

Over the course of 50 years, Lucas has collected over 40,000 pieces of narrative art. Many of those artworks will soon be on display at the museum in Los Angeles, founded by Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson. 

“It’s more about a connection, an emotional connection with the work, not how much it cost or what celebrity did it,” Lucas said about the artwork he collects. “It’s more a personal thing, and I don’t think it’s anything that anybody else can tell you… if you have an emotional connection, then it’s art.” 

Sitting next to Lucas were director and museum board member Guillermo del Toro, artist and designer Doug Chiang, and musician and panel moderator Queen Latifah. Each member of the panel has their own connection to Lucas’ work, as well as their own passion behind narrative art. 

“Many of the pieces we have celebrate freedom or anarchy,” del Toro said. “… Comics have a lot of social conscience, before or around the same time as movies and so forth. You have graffiti, you have many of the popular mimeographed forms of art that do that, they are not dominated… What is important for me or what is magical, [the museum] is not a man and his collection, it is a lineage of images… We are in a critical moment in which one of the things they like to disappear is the past, and this is memorializing a popular, vociferous, expressive, eloquent moment in our visual past that belongs to all of us.” 

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is scheduled to open in 2026 and will feature original works from the Star Wars universe, along with original Peanuts sketches, an original Flash Gordon comic strip, the first Iron Man cover and much more. – SR 

Gundam Wing

The flowing locks of unkempt ‘90s nostalgia were on full display when the anime heartthrobs of Heero Yuy, Duo Maxwell, Quatre Winner, and the rest of the Gundam Wing pilots took a long overdue encore at the convention center on Thursday night. Before thousands of cheering fans, actors Mark Hildreth, Scott McNeil, and Brad Swaile–who voiced Heero, Duo, and Quatre in the beloved 2000 English dub of Gundam Wing—took a bow and recited some of the fans’ favorite lines while reminiscing about how best to vocalize imminent annihilation at the hands of a Gundam.

The biggest piece of news out of the panel was definitely a modern tribute video to Gundam Wing’s 30th anniversary with dazzling hand-drawn imagery that set the mind aflutter with possibilities. Gundam executive producer Naohiro Ogata was on hand to also tease folks to “keep watching” if they liked the above video (which might just be fan-baiting the dream of a Wing sequel). However, for attendees in the room, the highlight might be one fan asking for Hildreth to tear up a hand-delivered invitation to his birthday party with the same coldness that Heero infamously displayed to Relena Peacecraft in the first episode of Wing… Hildreth even made sure to throw the torn scraps so that the paper could catch the air-conditioning, like a feather in the wind. – DC

Peacemaker Panel

Touching down at the Peacemaker panel in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con, we were graced with the presence of the crew behind Peacemaker, including actors John Cena, Jennifer Holland, Freddie Stroma, Steve Agee, Sol Rodriguez, Frank Grillo, Tim Meadows, and writer-director James Gunn. 

Not only did they answer questions and speak on their characters’ motivations coming into the next season, but we also got a few clips of the new season 2 coming to HBO Max on Aug. 21, including a comedic “bird blindness” bit with Steve Agee’s John Economos and Tim Meadows’ new ARGUS agent character, “Langston Fleury,” as well as a hard-hitting action scene featuring Jennifer Holland’s Emilia Harcourt giving out haymakers and head kicks in a biker bar.

James explained to the audience that coming into season 2, Peacemaker feels shunned from the superhero community, his love interest, and the things he wants from life in general. With Gunn speaking to where we find peacemaker: “He’s dealing with the demons he sort of uncovered from the first season and trying to deal with them and the world is not accepting him the way he is.” But once his father’s inter-dimensional storage door, aka the Quantum Unfolding Chamber, comes into play, Chris has a chance to see if the grass is greener on the other side in this parallel world. – CM

Percy Jackson and the Olympians Panel 

The mythological world of Percy Jackson & the Olympians has seen many iterations, from the original book series by Rick Riordan to the film adaptations in the 2010s to a spinoff series to, most recently, a TV rendition. The first season aired in 2023 and after a year and a half of patient waiting, members of the cast and production team offered fans a sneak peak at Season Two in the first Hall H panel of SDCC 2025. 

“We like to say it (Season Two) is supersized,” executive producer and writer Dan Shotz said. “Season Two is epic, it is so huge what we were able to build … We are out at sea, we are on a 175-foot ironclad ship, we are on cruise ships, we are in chariot races, we are fighting incredible monsters … It is so massive and we cannot wait for you guys to see what we do.” 

Season Two will dig deeper into Riordan’s written world, this time following the story of the series’ second installment: The Sea of Monsters. Cast members like Walker Scobell (Percy), Leah Jeffries (Annabeth) and Dior Goodjohn (Clarisse) all spoke to the experience of returning to a film set that has become a home to them and how Season Two allowed them to open up to their characters in a way viewers will not want to miss. The panel ended with a video message from Riordan, in which he announced the official release date of Season Two – Dec. 10 on Disney+ – and the casting of two vital characters set to appear in Season Three: Levi Chrisopulos as Nico di Angelo and Olive Abercrombie as his sister, Bianca. – SR

Predator: Badlands Panel

Disney and 20th Century Studios have a lot of confidence in Predator: Badlands, and for good reason. It was, after all, only three years ago when they brought Dan Trachtenberg’s previous live-action movie in the Predator universe, the Hulu exclusive Prey, to SDCC. There the historical period piece set during the 18th century and in Comanche Nation tore the roof off of a nearby theater. So seeing Trachtenberg back, now in Hall H alongside stars Elle Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi and moderator Kevin Smith, amounted to something of a victory lap. Except this win had a whole other movie to wow attendees.

While Trachtenberg didn’t bring his full Predator follow-up to San Diego in 2025 (it’s still being made), he and Disney confidently unveiled the first 15 minutes of Badlands, including portions of action sequences and special effects that are unfinished. They were right to be bullish, the sequence, which amounts to an extended prologue set on the Predators’ homeworld, reveals just how much of Schuster-Koloamatangi’s protagonist, a Predator named Dek, truly is the main character of the future-set movie (a first in the Predator franchise). His story is given vaguely Shakespearean heft as he must battle against the expectations of his clan and a murderous father.

Our full impression of the first 15 minutes can be found here, but rest assured that there is much yet to be revealed, including the full extent of Elle Fanning’s role as a pair of Weyland-Yutani synthetics that Dek discovers on a hostile alien world where there is an apex predator so ferocious that even the alien race which hunts Arnold Schwarzenegger for sport fears it. What that creature looks like has yet to be glimpsed–or just how much fun Fanning will have playing dual roles (Smith teased she portrays two very different kinds of robots)—but suffice to say the future looks bright for pop culture’s most beloved ugly MFer. – DC

Tron: Ares

Disney also brought Tron: Ares to SDCC this year with perhaps the most spectacular light show Hall H has ever witnessed. Heralded by several red-hued programs and neon-crimson beams piercing the darkness, an all-star cast, including Jeff Bridges (and for better or worse Jared Leto) took the stage to discuss the legacy of Tron, the future of technology, and just how awesome it is to walk on a Disney soundstage made to rebirth “the Grid.”

Still, the most tantalizing tease offered fans was an extended glimpse and listen at the original score written by Nine Inch Nails for the movie. Following in the footsteps of Daft Punk’s iconic score from Tron: Legacy (2010), all of NIN has reassembled to write and perform on a soundtrack that includes literal vocal tracks and new NIN songs. In fact, a killer music video was even fired up for Hall H attendees. Trust us, it’s amazing, as some naughty social media posts have proven with leaks like the one above. – DC

Events 

Avatar Party 

Earth, fire, water, air… the four nations were more than represented at the Nickelodeon x Den of Geek Avatar the Last Airbender 20th anniversary party in San Diego, celebrating the massively popular animated series and its ever-expanding world, with some of the cast and crew that made it special. including voice actors Jack De Sena, Jennie Kwan, Olivia Hack, Dante Basco, Zach Tyler Eisen, Michaela Jill Murphy, and Dee Bradley Baker, as well as co-creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko.

The party was a lively time with signature mixed drinks from each of the four nations and plenty of food to boot, including a beautifully crafted sushi bar made out of ice in the water tribe section, and a large charcuterie platter within the mini earth kingdom, while servers handed out a vast amount of food and treats like vegetarian spring rolls, cabbage dumplings, hand-cut potato chips, bao buns, and countless other Avatar-themed snacks. We were also happily entertained with the exciting sounds of DJ Dante, aka Dante Basco, pleasing the crowd with a set list signature to his swagger while at the DJ booth, Basco actually brought up his fellow Avatar castmates one by one, on stage by name and character name, to exclaim, “We just want to say thank you guys so much for 20 years, just being in support of the show and changing all of our lives… ours and yours.” 

And he wasn’t the only one with words for the audience; co-creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko came up on stage to lend some words, with DiMartino stating, “We have Den of Geek to thank for that, for throwing, to my knowledge, the first actual really awesome, really fun party… Thank you, Den of Geek.” Konietzko added, “Here we are, we’ll keep going as long as we can go.” –CM

DC Comics x eBay Live

Den of Geek was honored to host the culmination event of our Summer of Superman charity auctions live at San Diego Comic-Con. Partnering with eBay and DC Comics, we brought you all-new and original Superman artwork from seasoned comics veterans like Rafael Albuquerque, Cully Hamner, Scott Koblish, Joe Prado, Ian Churchill, John Timms, Eddy Barrows, Daniel Sampere, Clayton Henry, Tony S. Daniel, Dan Jurgens, Kenneth Rocafort, and Ivan Reis.

The event was hosted by Sam Stone and Rosie Knight, with guest appearances from comic creatives Jurgens, Hamner, Phillip Kennedy Johnson, and Tom King, as well as Peacemaker actor Steve Agee joining in on the fun. Fans and fellow geeks came out in droves to support the cause, helping raise over $7,000 for the BINC Foundation. BINC’s mission is to support the emergent financial, medical, and mental health service needs of comic and book shop owners and workers across the country, who have guided fellow comic enthusiasts along the way.-CM

Op Games 

The Op Games Party  came alive with shared laughter, the cheerful clink of glasses and a nostalgic soundtrack featuring ‘90s icons like Madonna and New Radicals, which captured the electric, feel-good vibes of the night. Tables buzzed with excitement as fans and first-timers alike dove into classic titles like Telestrations and Blank Slate. Founded in 1994, The Op Games, formally known as USAopoly, is celebrating over 30 years of bringing families and friends together over fun, easy-to-learn party games. The Op has built a legacy of laughter and connection with original fan favorites and licensed games from renowned brands like Disney, Marvel, Sanrio, and Nickelodeon. Partygoers who wanted to game rotated from table to table, speed-dating-style, sampling four of the company’s best-selling and most fast-paced games. Tasty hors d’oeuvres, beer, wine and specialty drinks at the open bar were restocked throughout the night as the over 400 guests that attended passed through the Andaz Hotel on the first night of San Diego Comic-Con.

At one table, each player would alternate between sketching and guessing to see how wildly their original phrase transforms by the end of the round while playing Telestrations. Others raced against the timer to shout out answers that fit a category without repeating letters during multiple intense rounds of Tapple. Attempting to read the room but not be too obvious, others tried to match one word with another player to complete a phrase in many hilarious rounds of Blank Slate. One of the most popular and competitive games of the night had to be Flip 7, which earned the 2025 Golden Geek Award for Party Game of the Year. People roared during this fast-paced, push-your-luck card game where players race to play numbered cards in sequence, which involves flipping and swapping cards to outwit opponents and be the first to clear their hand. Guests arrived in full cosplay, their best 90s fashion, in groups and solo, but no matter how they showed up, everyone found something to enjoy.

“My mission, and The Ops mission, is to bring people together, where we can all play these games and actually experience them in a real world situation that you can replicate at home and show to your friends,” Adam Minton, associate director of marketing at The Op Games, says. “We want nothing more than joy, laughter, lifetime memories, and doing events like these with cool people in a cool atmosphere.” – DZ

Mission Brewing Party 

No SDCC is complete without stopping downtown at Mission Brewing, and with the Comic-Con crowd still buzzing from the recent release of Superman (2025), what better way to celebrate than with a super happy hour?

In collaboration with Mission Brewing, Upper Deck and Den of Geek, the brewery hosted two live podcast tapings. The podcast Power-Up discussed Upper Deck’s Rush of Ikorr card games, and Roddenberry Entertainment’s Does it Fly and iHeartRadio’s X-Ray Vision teamed up to chat about the Man of Steel himself. 

The first 50 guests received a pack of Upper Deck Fleer Brilliants Superman trading cards, and the first 150 snagged a free Mission x Den of Geek custom pint. The vibes were good as people unwinded with tailor-made canned Den of Geek lagers, deliciously refreshing pale ales made just for the event. – DZ

The post Everything We Saw At San Diego Comic-Con 2025 appeared first on Den of Geek.