115 • ALISA WOLFSON

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