Jessie McGuire: National Design Award-winning studio leader on design as a civic tool

0:01At the end of the day, I believe design is how you get more people to believe that what they're doing can change the outcomes of what they actually want to see in the world. Design is a tool for imagination and imagining what could be.

0:19As the United States approaches its 250th birthday, the Constitution remains the most consequential document in American life. And more people now than ever are reading it. But pick up almost any commercial edition, and you're going to find the same thing. Small type, no imagery, nothing that invites you in. Jesse Maguire noticed this too. Every copy of the Constitution that our studio order looked identical. Dense, utilitarian, forgettable. So guess what? They redesigned it. They printed thousands of copies, donated them to New York City schools, and invited designers like Milton Glaser and Seymour Schwast to create posters for each amendment in the Bill of Rights.

1:05That project became a turning point, not just for the studio, but for how they think about what design is actually for. Jesse is the managing partner of Thought Matter, the independent design and creative studio that just won the 2026 National Design Award for Communication Design from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. It's the field's highest national honor. It's an award that recognizes not just a single project, but a decade of practice. And Thought Matters practice has been built around a bold idea. Imagination is a radical act. A Salvadoran American designer, New Yorker, and mother of two, Jessie brings a perspective shaped by navigating spaces that weren't always designed for her.

1:49She teaches entrepreneurship at Pratt, mentors emerging designers, and leads a studio that works with cultural institutions, nonprofits, and commercial brands, all grounded in the belief that design is civic infrastructure, a tool for helping people see themselves as participants in shaping the world around them. In this episode, Jessie talks about the origin of the Constitution Project, what it means to fund the work you actually want to talk about, and why she thinks scale and speed aren't serving us. She also talks about why sitting down to make something with your hands, like the beaded bracelets she makes with her kids, still matters.

2:23This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery. And I'm Aaron Walter. At Design Better, our primary mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills, and get inspired by the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a premium subscriber at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe.

2:59We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

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4:06and now back to the show

4:13jesse mcguire welcome to design better thank you i am so excited to be here today the work that you're doing is particularly interesting to us and the timing i can see behind you there's a beautiful poster it says free speech ain't free if folks are watching the video version of this on YouTube. They can see this. You've used design in really interesting ways to highlight social issues. We want to dive into that and the work that you did redesigning the Constitution, which is not a small project. But first, maybe we could talk about how you found your way into design. So I am a formally trained designer.

4:51My undergraduate was at Pratt Institute. I studied communication design with a focus in advertising. Did a little bit in advertising, a little bit in fashion. I did a little bit in what I would call like traditional graphic design. I worked in a really tremendous studio called Dog's Name, where it was just a whole bunch of young designers and we would get briefs and we would do some really great work. And then I went to, I felt like I needed something new to kind of get me energized. And I feel like that is a theme of my life. I like to look for the next thing. So I had opportunity to be in the first year of the SVA Masters in branding program.

5:27So I had a chance to study under Debbie Millman, who had started that program, and it changed my life. It was amazing thinking about design more as a way of thinking and a framework for thinking. And so when I graduated, I ended up getting a great job at Kimberly-Clark. So I got to go on the client side, bring corporate company in the Midwest, moved out to Wisconsin, and had a really wonderful three years getting to know the Midwest, getting to know what design looks like in a big organization, definitely in the moment around chief design officers and design excellence in these big companies. So I got a chance to see that firsthand.

6:08And when I needed to come back, had my first baby, I was like, I got to come back to New York City. I'm a New Yorker. I had a chance to work at a global packaging design company and did strategy. So I was a strategy director there and really got to see on the agency side, how do you look at design strategy in the instance it was in packaging, which is great. And then got a little antsy and really wanted to see what was out there if I were to consult because I wanted to maybe take my strategy and my design eye into more organizations. So I did what everyone says, which is I'm going to go consult.

6:45But I got my first job with a small company called Thought Matter to be their strategy director, which I thought it was going to be working on packaging. But it turns out it really was how do you get a small design studio off the ground in a way that's unique and differentiated in New York City? And it turns out trying to just do packaging is not the way to do it. So I got to know our founder who had started the company about a year earlier. And he has had many different careers, journalist, art collector, just big thinker. And so I got a chance to get to know him. And for the past 10 years, I feel like every year we experiment on what does it mean to be a design studio in the 21st century.

7:22So here I am today and have some good stories about what does that really mean. So that's been my 26 years in the industry. I have two kids, and I always make my kids laugh when I tell them that I started my career at the turn of the century. And that's what I realized. They probably think that's like horse and buggy era. For sure. That's what my kids think. That's awesome. So you grew up here in the U.S., but your background is from El Salvador. Does your family history influence the way that you think about design or aesthetics, or how does that play into your story? I think more recently I've reflected on my origin story.

7:58So I am adopted. I was born in El Salvador. I came over when I was 20 months. My mother is a single woman who wanted to adopt, I guess, in the late 70s. And there weren't many countries willing to let single women adopt. And so there were a handful of countries going through big civil wars. At the time, El Salvador was one of them. And so my mother got me in the early 80s and raised me in upstate New York. I was raised in a really wonderful Ukrainian-Italian family in upstate New York. My mother was born and raised on Staten Island. So every time I would see my cousins or my extended family, we would always come to Staten Highland.

8:34So I always thought New York City was Staten Island. It's not. It's one of the five boroughs. and it was for me a really amazing way to grow up. But I always tell people that I was raised in predominantly white spaces. So it wasn't until I went to college at Pratt that I realized I wasn't white. I realized I wasn't Ukrainian, Italian, upstate. And I think it's really been the last 25, 26 years as a designer thinking about how we make sense of the world around us that I feel like in many ways I've been chasing who are we as people? Are we the conditions in which we grow up in? Is it DNA? Is it your ancestry?

9:15What makes somebody somebody? And that's always been something at the heart of how I've thought about my own design practice. That's fascinating. I'm an adoptive father, have two adopted boys who are African-American. And what you said about being raised in white spaces and sort of shaping one's identity, discovering one's identity throughout your life, is certainly something that I'm familiar with, and it's not always easy. I think your origin story is fascinating. The work that you've been doing is really interesting. And I think the timing, I mentioned at the beginning that you did a redesign of the Constitution.

9:50And that, I think, is very relevant right now because the Constitution is being discussed a lot in the past year. What it means, what our rights are, and it's surprising and, I think, troubling that a lot of American citizens don't realize what this country is all about and what our origin story is. Why did you take on this project to redesign the Constitution? So I came to Thought Matter in 2016. And as I mentioned, I thought I was coming in to help wrangle strategy for our packaging clients. And so when I started, I quickly realized there were actually no packaging clients and there wasn't much strategy to wrangle.

10:31And so I spent the first half a year in 2016. So that would have been, I guess, March of 2016 into the summer, really helping to find clients and industries that we wanted to work in. And cultural institutions was one that I had never worked with, but I was really interested in. And our founder very much supports arts education and the art museums and culture. And so we had some really great opportunities to work with organizations like the New York Historical Society. And so we were working with them on opening up their first Center for Women's History. And it was the summer of 2016, where we were all getting ready for our first female president because that was where we were headed.

11:12And we were doing a lot of work at that time, just thinking about the role of cultural institutions and how we see ourselves as participants in civic society. Fast forward to November of 2016, and we did not get our first female president. We got the first Trump administration. And I know I live in New York City. I know I live in a bubble. I know that there are a lot of conversations. But I was absolutely floored and shocked that we were headed to our first Trump administration. And at the time, our founder was talking to most of the team. We were mostly millennials. And he was like, what are you guys all getting upset about?

11:54This is the time where people, if you don't like what's happening, you go into the streets, you start thinking about protesting, you start thinking about where are your values and how can you really stand up and show up who you are. And so we really all were like, what does that mean? We hadn't really seen much, I would say at that point, design through an activist lens. I think if anything, we saw design in politics through maybe the Obama campaigns and everyone got really excited about those. But we started to say, what could that look like? So we actually designed posters for the Women's March.

12:26The Women's March in Washington in 2017 is now one of the largest demonstrations in history. We didn't know that at the time, but we knew we needed to make posters. We got so excited. We did a Kickstarter. We raised tens of thousands of dollars, printed 15 ,000 posters. We have books where our posters are in there. A lot of our designers were part of that. And so we really got energized by like, wait, we are designers that are creating visual communication and we can use that to communicate the things that we care about. This all brings me to the Constitution because we came off of the Women's March and we're like, OK, what else can we do?

13:00And so as a studio, one thing that's really important to our practice is coming together at the time. It was every Monday. Now it's every Tuesday. But every Monday we would come around the conference room table and we would talk about things that we really wanted to see out in the world. And one of the things we were seeing, and again, this seems so many years ago, but in May of 2017 was all the headlines of has the new president even read the Constitution? In some ways it feels more innocent than what we see now. But at the time, we were like, well, if the president hasn't read the Constitution, have we read the Constitution?

13:34So we ordered 25 copies, probably, of the Constitution. They all came to the studio, and they were terribly designed. Small type, no picture. You know, we all, as designers, we love good typography, good kerning, good photos, good paper. I mean, anything, right? None of these constitutions had that. So that was actually one of the biggest insight we had was, let's redesign it. And we originally wanted to design and print, I think, 10 ,000 copies and dump it on the White House lawn. We had big dreams of getting, like, Michael Moore to come and, like, take us in, like, a van to the White House to dump the constitutions on the lawn, which I'm still open to doing.

14:14That didn't quite happen, but we did do another Kickstarter, and we really wanted to see the project come to life through printing of these constitutions. And one of the mechanisms that we developed was if you bought one constitution, we would donate a constitution to a school. So we ended up designing, printing, and donating, I think at that time it was 3 ,000 copies to schools here in New York City to be part of the civic education. And so that was back in 2017 into 2018. And there were a lot of little projects that happened coming off of that because we were all so energized on just understanding the role visual communications could have on a document that is being talked about, but in many ways in a very abstract way.

14:59And so now we're here. Sometimes I think to myself, would we do that idea now with everything being so online? I don't know. Like we really were into the physical, tangible, wanting that document to feel it. We used a risograph and great paper. And I remember one of the reps came and was showing us all this like really cool, amazing kinds of paper we could use that could help make it a little more tactile, which was pretty tremendous. Can you talk a little bit about the considerations? I know there's a lot of photography in the Constitution design. that a phrase that we see on a lot of bumper stickers and a lot of t-shirts, we the people, and it's overlaid not really on what those people look like.

15:43That's something that strikes me as very different. The people that you show in there, it's all the people. We all of the people. That is very different. Can you talk about the specific design objectives in the project? We did use open source photography from the Library of Congress. But kind of what you were talking about with representation, and I know now, again, this is 10 years later. I don't know if representation was the same kind of conversation we're having now about who and what. But we did a lot of illustration. One of the things that we did was there's a leaflet in the middle for the Bill of Rights.

16:21Children love when things just open. And like once you open it, you're in it, you're looking at it, you're touching it. We used buildings, open source photography. We used a lot of the founding documents and textures. We were very specific in using and I think we used a Google open source font to show some of the historical documents. As any designer, right, you get a brief and you're like, I'm going to make it as big as possible. So we had this brief, right? We're like, we know we want to redesign the Constitution. What started happening was that do we want to make a political statement? Do we want to start getting into the amendments?

16:54But we had an opportunity to talk to a First Amendment scholar up at Yale. And we were having these phone calls. And we're like, oh, maybe it can be an app. And maybe it can be an interactive document. And we could talk about all the different rulings that have happened. And I think it was one of the scholars we spoke to was like, but you guys are designers. Like, what is the design point of view that you want to have on this? And we actually had to take because we had, you know, a giant board with all these like pastings. And so we could have gone, like I said, into different kinds of representation in photography and typography.

17:24And are we more left-leaning from a political standpoint, more right-leaning from political – like all of that. We took it all down and we were like, okay, wait, let's get back to like as designers. What's the thing that we actually want to see happen with our redesign of the Constitution? And we wanted to go back to the founding principles of the Constitution, which is all about how we the people can be represented and be understood at the moment in which we're living. This is a founding document, but to your point, it wasn't written including every American. It wasn't written including all the things that we know now and hold dear.

17:56It was written through a value standpoint. And so that's what we wanted to focus in on was how could we make it something that people wanted to learn more about. And something that I think is really important to our process is how can we get more people to want to participate in thinking about what this document means to them? Because even talking about it being so important, it becomes so abstract. Even if I told my 13-year-old this Constitution is really important, he doesn't know what that means. But if I tell him that when we are thinking about our local community and like the library being open or, you know, we just had a huge snowstorm in New York, the streets being cleared or like those all are in his purview of how he's thinking about being a little citizen.

18:39And so I really do think it's how do we help everybody feel that they can participate and that their voice can be heard. And that's why we wanted to create this and put it into schools, depending on a teacher, depending on a curriculum or depending on the community or depending on what resources a school does or doesn't have. We just wanted to be able to create a piece of visual communication that everybody would want to at least touch and find out more about. So it really is about that participation versus a really strong point of view from like a political standpoint. Yeah. Could we push on that just a little bit more?

19:13Because I think that's a really important point is the Constitution and patriotism, participation in democracy. There's a great deal of division and divisiveness. And it's not new to the American experience. That's the way it was very early on, like from the beginning, the founding of this country. And we've had rough passages. We've had a civil war. but when designing for everybody, for we, all of the people. Those are people on the left and people on the right, you know, in multiple parties. How did you think about that? How do we not only be inclusive in representation of these are people that look all the different ways that people on the planet could look.

19:58That's who's in the United States. That's one of the magical things about our country is that it's for everybody. but also these different political parties, despite our divisions, we're all citizens. We are all Americans together. How did you think about that in the design of this project? I think what's interesting, what you're touching on from a divisiveness is that even from the founding of our country, everything is designed, right? Like if somebody is excluded, it's been designed that way. If somebody is included, it's been designed that way. So I feel like even though the Constitution design project that we did 10 years ago, it really is still what I hope we all are thinking about as designers, which is that design is a civic tool.

20:43Design is how we shape who feels invited. It's how we think about who's informed. It's about who feels powerful at any given time. And I think that some of the decisiveness we're seeing right now is because it's being designed for people to not get the information they need. It's being designed for us to be isolated. It's being designed for us to question absolutely all the institutions around us when, in fact, I think it's more how do we get people to participate in their local communities, participate in conversations, participate in ways where you can actually open up a dialogue with more people and not feel like you are on the right or wrong side of something.

21:21Like, how do you actually, again, invite more voices in? So we did this Kickstarter and we raised tens of thousands of dollars to do it, which was great. And we worked with a printer. And we then said, what can we do next? And so we, as can I say nerdy, like really excited, young, emerging designers, we were like, what if we asked our like heroes to design a poster for each one of the amendments and the Bill of Rights? If we're saying we want more people to be invited, let's invite them. So we started with Milton Glaser Studio. Milton Glaser was still alive at the time. And we emailed the studio and we said, hey, we just did this Constitution project.

21:57We just raised all this money. We just donated to all these schools. We now want to do a poster show to really get more designers to think about design as a civic tool. And so his studio said yes right away with the caveat that he only wanted to do the First Amendment. And so we were like, absolutely. Really? So from there, we then invited Seymour Quas, DJ Stout, Adele Rodriguez, Jessica Hish. But what was absolutely tremendous is every single designer we emailed said yes. And we said, it's going to be free. We're not trying to make money off of it. We're going to look for a museum or a gallery space to have it.

22:32But every single one of them said yes, where can I sign on the line to do the work? And so we ended up having a poster show at the Cooper Union in Constitution Week, which is in September. And it was open for two weeks there. And we had every poster from the Bill of Rights of the first 10 amendments and the preamble all on display, as well as our Constitution. And I feel like that goes back to what you're asking about, which is at the end of the day, I believe design is how you get more people to believe that what they're doing can change the outcomes of what they actually want to see in the world.

23:06And I feel like that's what we saw with that show. I had never met Seymour Quast. And when he came to the opening of the show, like, you know, totally fangirled, was so excited. Same thing with Adele Rodriguez, who we now know as the cartoonist in chief. But at the time, he was just getting started with a lot of his obviously very political work, but just got a chance to meet them and talk to them. And a couple of the artists was like, why did you just say yes? And they actually were like, we didn't think too much about it because it just felt like the right thing to do at that moment. So that was September of 2017.

23:36And I think every year since then we've been like, what else can we do to get more people to participate and see that design is a tool for imagination and imagining what could be. So, yeah, I guess I don't dwell too much on like how do you make people feel excluded, but more how do you get more people to participate and talk about what's possible.