Design Matters with Debbie Millman · Design Matters Media

Best of Design Matters: Carson Ellis

May 19, 2025·1 hr 7 min·5 clips

Carson Ellis created an entire language for a children's book inspired by a gibberish-speaking penguin.

October 2024 brings Carson Ellis back to Design Matters in its nineteenth podcasting year. The setup is simple and lovely: picture books are often a child's first brush with visual art. From there, Debbie Millman follows Ellis into illustration, children's books, and, yes, the strange fun of teaching listeners to speak insect. The best stretch is less polished than that. Ellis remembers working with Colin on a children's book idea after an editor asked if she had any ideas for kids' books. She did not have the language for the process yet. When the editor asked for a dummy, Ellis kept making one anyway, half guided and half guessing. Then the replies dried up. The work was there, but the person who could steer it was too busy to answer. Steve entered at that awkward point, out of the blue. Ellis was skeptical because she thought she already had an illustration chance. He knew the editor, though, and asked the more useful question: did she want a book deal, with money attached to the work already underway? Hiring him mattered. He got the first deal for the book she and Colin were making, and she has worked with him ever since. Even then, the deal did not neatly hold. The editor moved to another publisher, and Ellis leaves the mess as a long story. The episode is better for that. It stays with how children's books first pulled her toward art, prose, poetry, and childhood attention.

As heard by us

Picture books, process, and the first visual impressions that stay with you.

Carson Ellis's talk with Debbie Millman feels less like a profile and more like a look at how a visual life gets built. It moves from childhood picture books to the practical business of turning an idea into a book, and it keeps returning to why illustration lands so early for…

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Why you'd press play

For when you want picture-book craft, biography, and a conversation about how an illustrator got here.

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