Dare to find curiosity in all things - Dora Drimalas
4/19/202655 min
Dora Drimalas, co-founder of San Francisco design studio Hybrid, joins Radim to explore what it really means to build a creative practice grounded in genuine, unfiltered curiosity. ~
Over 24 years, Hybrid has refused to specialise — working instead across branding, campaigns, books, and environments for clients from Nike to Lego — and Dora explains why that deliberate refusal to narrow down has been the studio's greatest creative strength.
From their formative years at Nike, where fearlessness was the culture, to the making of their debut monograph Curiosity in All Things — a 650-page love letter to design, process, and inspiration — this is a conversation about building the conditions for great work, asking bigger questions, and creating without fear.
Takeaways
- Specialising might be better for business, but diversifying is better for creativity — and Hybrid chose creativity every time
- Fertile conditions for good work require a mix of personalities, backgrounds, disciplines, and points of view — creative biodiversity is non-negotiable
- Clients often lock down possibilities before the conversation has even started — a great creative's job is to reopen them
- The Nike years were grad school for design: fearlessness, cross-medium storytelling, and throwing people into projects they weren't yet qualified for
- Being on the outside as an agency lets you cross-pollinate ideas across industries — that is an advantage in-house work can never fully replicate
- A monograph is not just a portfolio — it's a record of thinking, process, relationships, and the inspiration that makes the work possible
- You can make beautiful work on small budgets; it costs exactly the same to print ugly as it does to print beautiful
- Stepping back as a leader — and letting others grow into their roles — is its own form of creative satisfaction
Daring Creativity. Podcast with Radim Malinic
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDora Drimalas· Guest0:00
[gentle music] 'Cause we've all seen people spend a ton of money on terrible work, right? You can do that. You can spend a ton of money on terrible work, and I tell people all the time that you can make beautiful things with small budgets, and here's proof. It's nice to have a mixture of budgets. I'm not courting all the small budgets in the world, but you can make beautiful work with small budgets. You absolutely... It costs the same to print ugly and to print beautiful, right? When you're putting, just say, four color ink on paper, running it, taking the time to run it through a press or build a website or whatever, it's time, right? You're paying for time. So if you think about it, and if you've done all the homework and the years of learning, right? You're carrying all that, all those experiences with you, it shows up, right?
Radim Malinic· Host0:56
[upbeat music] Welcome to the Daring Creativity Podcast, the show about daring to forever explore creativity that isn't about chasing shiny perfection. It's about showing up with all your doubts and imperfections and making them count. It's about becoming more of who you already are. My name is Radim Malinic. I'm a designer, author, and eternally curious human being. I'm talking to a broad range of guests who