Cheers & Tiers: Design Leadership Tales Retold

Cheers & Tiers is a warm oral history of AIGA design leadership, told through reunion-style conversations with the people who helped shape chapters, retreats, conferences, and creative communities. Rachel Elnor and Eric Cargill guide the show with an easy, teasing rhythm. The format is simple. Bring on longtime design leaders, ask when they got involved, and let the memories do the work. Those memories tend to sprawl in the best way, moving from board roles and chapter programs to hotel bars, dance floors, conference friendships, and the occasional human pyramid. The show is not a polished lecture series. It feels closer to sitting near a table of people who have known each other for years and are still surprised by what they remember together. Guests from Seattle, San Diego Tijuana, Upstate New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Colorado, and other AIGA circles talk about how community work becomes career infrastructure. They also talk about the personal side of leadership: imposter syndrome, saying yes before feeling ready, asking for help, and learning that generosity can be a real operating model. Design itself stays present but broad. Episodes touch on brand systems, typography, wayfinding, design operations, accessibility, data, public-sector design systems, creative workflows, and AI. The professional detail matters, yet the show keeps returning to relationships. Someone shares a roadmap. Someone copies a good idea with permission. Someone gets pulled into a board or a retreat and finds lifelong friends. The humor is relaxed and a little messy, with tech glitches, family jokes, and affectionate ribbing left in the room. That looseness is part of the record. Cheers & Tiers captures how design communities are actually built: through formal programs, yes, but also through late nights, repeated invitations, borrowed templates, and people willing to make space for the next person.