Hello and welcome to another episode of the AIGA Design
Podcast. My name is Lee Sean Huang, Co
Executive Director of Learning and Programs here at AIGA, the
professional association for design.
On this season of the show, we are exploring the theme of
design and performance, which will culminate in our design
conference this October 9th through 11th in Los Angeles, CA.
Now for my Co host and our guest.
Hi everyone. I'm Julia Donatello.
I'm the design competitions and event Manager at AIG.
And now for our guest for this episode, Sunny Bonnell from
Motto. Hi, Sunny.
Thank you for joining us on the show.
I'm happy to be here, thanks for having me.
Yeah, let's jump straight into things.
Can you please share a bit more about yourself and your career
journey so far? You have such an interesting non
linear career path that we're looking forward to exploring
with you from street musician, actor to veterinarian to
designer. So yeah, can you walk us through
a bit of that journey and what motivated you to follow this
path? Yeah, well, I come from a bit of
a colorful background as you as you illuminated there, which is
St. musician to performance artist to vet school, pre vet to
dropping out to becoming a designer in early 2005.
So my Co founder and I dropped out of college together with
$250 and we started Motto from a warehouse in a tiny coastal town
in South Carolina. And at first glance those I
guess paths seem kind of disconnected, but there's a
thread that absolutely ties them together, which is the desire
was to just kind of excite people, energize people, inspire
people. And whether it was through song
or performance or animals, it just tied it all together.
And I sort of found my calling moonlighting as a graphic
designer on the side. So as I was going into pre vet
school, I was moonlighting for musicians and bands, developing
posters, designing experiences and just really felt in love
with it. And I think at the heart of all
of those was I was just trying to find a way to stir emotion
and really inspire action. And I think founding motto was
that moment where I realized I could bring all of that into one
place. So think of, you know, as a
performance artist, you, you're, you're a bit of an orchestrator
and I think brand is tied to that, how you bring a lot of
disparate parts together to create a whole or to create an
entire picture. And so for me, it was just
uniting all of those gifts and all of the skills that I had in
my own zone of genius and applying them to something I was
extremely passionate about and also just had a bit of an
uncanny knack for. And so as we began to get
clients and start to see that, hey, this could be a career, we
just took and went full force on that vision and just had went,
went into with full, full guts and vision and audacity to try
to launch Motto into the stratosphere.
Looking forward to learning more about Motto.
I also love that phrase that you used, Zone of Genius.
I'm curious to follow up on that intro.
What are your thoughts about this theme of design and
performance? Obviously you have a background
as a performer, but how do you bring that into what you do now
as a designer and as Co founder and CEO of Motto?
Well, performance isn't just for a stage.
I think it's built into how we show up in the world and how we
perform in the world, and it's tied to often our identities and
our career. So as a musician, I really
learned, I think early on, I started playing music when I was
8 years old, so I grew up playing bluegrass and gospel and
really being a performer from a very, very young age.
So I learned how to be out in the world in front of a huge
audience, really, really young. And so both require a lot of
presence and intentionality and also an understanding of your
audience. So I think as a musician I
learned how to command attention.
And then as I developed as a young leader, I learned how to
command belief. And so the two of those things
together, I think made-up sort of a unique background and and
unification of like these two worlds coming together to kind
of give me some sense of confidence to be able to be in
front of a lot of people at any given time.
But also, what is the story you try to tell?
You do that through brand, you do that through music.
And I think that the best designers don't just make
things. They really move people.
They inspire people. And I believe that's
performance. Amazing.
Yes. So you mentioned that you're the
Co founder and CEO of Motor and you name it as a brand
transformation agency, which I love the way you chose these
words. I wanted to hear more from you.
What do you mean by that? And also, what What's the
coolest part of owning your own business?
Well, Motto is a strategic brand transformation company.
We really work with leaders and organizations at times of
pivotal growth and transformation to help drive
them into that future. So wherever they are trying to
go, there's usually some element of transformation that needs to
occur in order for them to reach that new height.
And So what Motto does we, we specialize in innovation and
tech, although because we just celebrated our 20th year in
business actually this past March, we have been working
across, across all types of verticals and sectors and
different types of categories. But over the last couple of
years, we've really, really focused on tech and innovation
as a sweet spot because we find that we can really bolt on to
like a, a big vision and be able to help their leadership team
not only achieve that vision, but use brand and use culture to
drive them into that new future. And we'd like to be a part of
that. So transformation is really at
the heart of everything we do for for organizations, you know,
there's a beginning state and then there's a next level state
and we're always transforming companies from that beginning
state to that next transformation state.
When I think of the coolest part of owning a business, I think if
you would have asked me when I was 20 some years old when I
started Motto, it would have been about being able to wrestle
your vision forward in a world that at the time, because we are
female owned, the two of us are we're young females in a
industry that is not notoriously female dominated, right?
It's male dominated. And so we were pretty rare in
that regard to be two young females coming out to try to
launch a branding company. And also, if you ask me now, the
coolest part is, is that I get to build the kind of company
that I always dreamed about in terms of like what I wanted and
what we wanted motto to be. So it allowed us to understand
that there were businesses that we were working with and we, we
were in cultures day in and day out.
And it allowed us to see kind of the good, bad and the
surprising. And it taught us a lot about
that. Brand is not something that's
left to the, to the marketing department.
Like brand is an inside job. It is inside the company and
it's driven by vision and culture.
And so it gave us a bit of a blueprint of like what we wanted
our culture to be at Motto. And so I think the coolest thing
about it is that I get to shape that culture, not just inside
Motto, but for our clients too. And it's deeply fulfilling about
helping a founder articulate a vision or a leadership team
articulate a vision and then watching their team rally around
it. And in some cases, what Ashley
and I and that the team do extraordinarily well is that
you're not just building brands or really building belief
systems. And so we can heavily influence
that with the work that we do. And it's just very meaningful.
I think in the beginning it was about trying to prove doubters
wrong. And then as the work and as we
were able to have some staying power and we're able to do
incredible work, it then became more meaningful, not about us,
but about the people that we were working with and also the
team that we started to build. So it was sort of selfish in the
beginning because we were just young and just wanted to try to
prove ourselves. But as we developed the business
over time, it became much more about the people that we serve
and the people that we work with in the in our team.
And that that is incredibly rewarding because it you kind of
go to business every day and you go to work every day with people
that we really love and that you're really motivated by and
inspired by. And at the same time, you get to
do really amazing things with them.
That's amazing. Yeah.
We wanted to come back to learning more about design,
shaping, company cultures and stuff like that.
But there's a few things that you'd said earlier that stood
out to me. One was this idea of influencing
belief systems or in a previous answer, you also talked about
commanding belief as a leader, as a performer, as a designer.
And so at motto, you have a motto or a tagline of ideas
worth rallying around. And yeah, how does that connect
with belief, belief systems and and the work that you do?
Yeah. Well, we came up with that
because at the heart of motto is the nomenclature behind the word
motto. The reason we called the company
motto is that a motto is a purpose to cause a belief.
And we kept asking ourselves, what are we doing for companies?
What are we doing for our in our work?
And it really was about shaping ideas and helping these
companies find their motto and articulate that motto and drive
it down through the brand. And as we begin to think about
what makes a powerful idea, well, a powerful idea is
something that you can rally around, that the people can
support, can believe in, and help you build.
And so we landed on this concept of ideas worth rallying around.
The way that we define that is an idea worth rallying around is
the signature idea that sits at the heart of a business and
makes it famous. It is the thing that you become
known in the world for. And a lot of organizations know
this. They have it within the walls of
everything that they're doing. But a lot of times it's not
codified, a lot of times sort of shuffled down and into a
tagline, which a, a big idea is much, much bigger than that.
It is internal and external and it's omnidirectional.
So when we're working with a client, we're really trying to
help them define and articulate, but also come alive that big
idea so that they can really push it through the culture,
push it down through the brand, and like ultimately rally their
entire audiences around it and their people.
It's awesome. It's very interesting how you
start with brand and and then you mentioned about company
culture and then it transformed it in, in belief systems.
What do you think looking back now, you mentioned that your
company just celebrated 2020 years.
Congratulations, that's a big deal.
Thank you. Thank you.
What? What do you see as the major
shift in the design ecosystem over the the past past years or
even decades? I think design used to be a very
intimate process and I think with AI and democratized tools,
it's it's everywhere and it's faster than ever and everyone
has access to it. In some ways that's powerful
because it allows us to be more powerful than ever and to use
these tools and really exciting ways.
It's not just about speed or access.
I think the real shift is in the meaning.
You know, in a world really flooded with content, I think
leaders and designers are being asked, like, what does this
stand for? Why does it matter?
And how do I make this in some ways original?
And is originality even part of our vernacular anymore?
And I think the future of design is really going to be tied to
how we use these tools for forces of good, but also use
them in a way that allows us to not just make things pretty, but
make them matter. And that's going to be a really
challenging thing because now we're sort of democratizing
design in a way that is more saturated than ever before.
I mean, even when we started Motto, there was probably, I
would say under, under 1000 design agencies, right?
Or at the time, maybe advertising agencies, and very
few of them called themselves branding agencies.
But now there's something like 600,000, right?
Or maybe even more here in the US Then it's just a noisy traded
landscape out there right now. And I think it's becoming harder
for brands to have something to say, have something to say
that's meaningful, be able to rise above the noise and to be
able to get themselves like noticed in a way where you can
remember who's who. I'm even on calls now where
folks will be kind of shuffling their papers and be like, OK,
you're, you're from motto, right?
Because they're talking to like 20 firms.
And So what we started, when we started to realize that was
happening, we were like, OK, how do we actually, what, what is
our zone of genius core differentiator?
What do we really have that maybe is really unique to us?
And so it's it's causing a lot of inward looking in order to be
more efficient outwardly. You, we're talking about this
democratization of design and of leadership.
And so I wanted to talk about something else you're involved
in, which is Vision Camp. You're the cofounder and creator
of Vision Camp, which is a leadership program.
So can you tell us more about Vision Camp and what sets us
apart from other leadership programs and who is it for?
Well. Vision Camp was a really
interesting idea. It started because we realized
as we were working with leadership teams and we have
clients as you know, biggest virgin to, I mean, real
innovation companies and you know, to Microsoft, to Google,
like big, big innovation teams. And one of the things that we
kept sort of coming back to was like there was always sort of a
visionary or a set of visionaries at the top.
But as you went down through the company, you started to see that
there was splinters in that vision.
And when we did some research on this, we learned that only one
in 10,000 organizations are ran by a visionary or ran by what
their team considers is a visionary leader.
So that means about one in 10,000.1% that told us that
visionary leadership is the is kind of not the rule and that
visionaries are an exception. And so we wondered, well, how
could we not only train and teach visionary leadership, but
how could we bring leadership teams to vision camp to educate
them on what a vision statement actually is?
What are the traits of visionaries and how do you
mobilize people around that vision to drive innovation?
And we realized there was nowhere you could go to actually
learn about this. You can go to brand workshops,
you can go to leadership workshops, you can train on AI,
you can train on the coding, but you can't really be trained on
vision. Are you visionary or are you not
visionary? And how do you know the
differences? And so we launched Vision camp
about two years ago with a pilot and we ran 3 pilots and they all
sold out. And we just opened it to anyone
who wanted to join. And we had leaders from all
around the world join from everywhere, from Nigeria to
Europe and and beyond. And it was such an incredible
thing because we were like, OK, people actually want this and
they want to know about it. And then we realized putting on
events and trying to do it that way was not ideal.
So we decided to turn it into an executive leadership workshop.
So now what we do is over 2 days, we work with teams usually
somewhere in the neighborhood of under 15 steering groups and we
bring them together and over 2 days virtually or in person, we
walk them through day one, which is about education.
And day 2 is about empowerment and building out.
What we've developed is a vision script, which their entire team
builds and is proprietary to us. No one else has it because it's
been developed over a really long period of time.
And we have these teams build their own vision script and they
run that out over the next year. And so we check in with them
over the course of a year to see how they're doing.
So the last team that that we ran it through was the Minnesota
Vikings and Vision Camp drove their 2025 Strategic Vision.
So it's a very powerful program and I think we're just
scratching the surface of what it can actually be.
It's sort of new and I'm sure that it's going to take some
time to get its footing, but so far we're seeing a tremendous
amount of excitement around it just because there's nothing out
there like it. Amazing.
I feel like we could do a whole episode just on that.
The next one, you just invite me back on that.
Exactly. And it's so interesting that the
workshop doesn't end, so the whole process, it just stays
with them and you check on them after a year.
That's amazing to see. Yeah, because implementation.
On those days, yeah, of course. Yeah, because vision is really
hard for a lot of teams to action.
A lot of times it belongs to the visionary or the visionaries of
that company, rather than it being something that they know
how to extract from the visionary and then down
throughout the company so that they can act on it and, and, and
build upon it. And so we've created this sort
of framework that allows you to do that.
And it's incredible. I mean, the, the, the outcomes
of what people have done after vision camp is really exciting.
We've worked with people who are starting companies, but also
entire steering groups of big, big organizations that have ran
through vision camp. The other cool thing, and I'll
just make this quick note and wrap it, but they also, we also
give out badges and certificates.
So when you graduate from vision camp, you get a certificate and
you get a set of badges just to again, like bring this down
through your team. Because we believe that if we
create a world where there are more visionaries in
organizations, not only do they run better teams, but they run
more provocative and innovative teams.
If someone is actually trained on what vision and visionary
leadership actually is, because there are things about it that a
lot of people don't know, it's, it's very important to
understand the differences because there is differences
between being a manager, a boss, a leader, and #1A visionary
leader. And how do you be the best that
you can possibly be so that you can inspire people to do the
things that you want them to do so that they feel like they're
part of something greater. And Vision Camp is the answer to
that. That's great.
That's very, very cool to learn. So, Sunny, I'm sure you have
learned and even unlearned many things throughout your career.
What's the common piece of advice that you strongly
disagree with, and what is the alternative perspective that
usually you bring to the table? Just show us something to get
started that the famous quote, right?
I think that request that I see a lot from teams feels like an
outdated practice. Meaning if you have created a
brief and you go out to 15 agencies and you ask that agency
to show you some ways in. I think it devalues creative
thinking and it also visionary thinking doesn't come from a one
off mock up. It comes from partnership.
It comes from trust and it comes from deeper understanding.
When clients invest in that thinking, they get ideas that
can really change their company. I always say if it's free, it's
probably not worth much. Not to say that it's not
valuable because it can be valuable.
But I think for the work that we do specifically, it's important
to invest in the minds that are trying to solve a real business
problem. And usually business problems
are complex. They're multifaceted.
They require you to study. I'm pretty good in the room when
I hear a client walk me through in a 30 minute call what their
hopes and dreams are and what their challenges are, because
I've gotten really good at pattern recognition.
When you begin to solve these problems a lot, and again and
again and again, your expertise becomes incredibly valuable
because you're able to ascertain where they're at probably in a
matter of minutes. But in order to solve it, you
need to take time, you need to be paid for that time.
And so I think it really is a disadvantage to creative
companies everywhere that we're being asked to do that kind of
sort of spec work. I mean, there's probably some
form of that that's going on, but I think we're in 2025 and we
shouldn't be doing that to creative companies any longer.
And I really fundamentally disagree with that practice.
I think you can have a great brief, but you're hiring someone
to come out and give you an evaluation and to really
understand the intricacies of your business, which often can't
be summarized in a 30 minute call.
You need to do a little bit more work.
And so I think you should be paid for that work.
And maybe if you narrow it down to three companies, like pay
those three companies a nominal amount to just get some initial
ideas or iterations if that's what you want, But I don't
believe in asking companies for free work.
Yeah, totally agree. And I was actually just speaking
to another studio owner about this very topic last week.
So hopefully more folks start to understand this and figure out
ways to act collectively on this and so on this theme of things
that you disagree with orthodoxies that you are
opposing. My next question is about yet
another hat that you wear Sunny, which is that of best selling
author. You wrote a book called Rare
Breed, A Guide to Success for the Defiant, Dangerous and
Different, which is a book that flips the script on business as
usual kind of thinking, has readers think about other paths
for success. So yeah, can you tell us about
that book? And yeah, what are some of these
ways to be defiant, dangerous and different?
Well, a lot of companies want to be brave, but it's it's there's
a price to being that. And for brands, I think you have
to straddle this contradiction a lot, which is you have to be
bold, but you have to be strategic.
You have to be human, but you have to be scalable.
You have to be rebellious, but you have to be relevant.
And we help companies kind of laser in on that.
But the book is actually about individual traits that then can
be applied to company traits. So in the book Rare Breed, A
Guide to Success for the Defiant, Dangerous, and
Different, we cover 7 so-called vices that society deems are
counterintuitive to your success.
Meaning, everything that you've ever been told.
Quiet down, keep your head down, don't ruffle feathers, right?
That's not great advice. Because ultimately, if that is a
superpower of yours, meaning rebellious is something that you
bring to the table, well, that is a gift.
That isn't a that's a virtue, not a vice.
However, over time, because those traits also have a dark
side, they can be in fact a vice.
And so the book really educates you on how do you take a vice or
a so-called vice and turn that into a virtue.
What was interesting about the book and why I think it took off
was because it started with the individual meaning, you know, I
think Ashley and I way back early on, probably being
audacious, being rebellious, being hot blooded, being all the
traits that we talk about in the book.
It was our superpower. It allowed us to actually
breakthrough. But at the same time, it's you
have to temper it because if you come into every room banging on
the table or slamming doors or being so rebellious that you
don't hear anybody, anybody else's ideas or opinions, like
it can turn into that vice and that dark side really, really
quickly. And so it was really about
education. How do you actually turn that
that gift that you have? How do you use it in a way where
you don't get fired from every job that you ever work on?
Because. One of these traits are at play,
but more importantly then what we saw happen was leaders were
reading the book and then bringing it to their companies
and saying I think we might be one of these traits as an
organization and I would love to know who on my team is one of
these 7 vices. And so then we created a quiz.
We had something close to 30,000 people in the first year take
the quiz and the quiz Red Breed quiz.com.
It allows you to take 28 questions, and it tells you what
is your dominant virtue. And then it tells you what are
the positives of that virtue and what are the negatives of that
virtue and how do you use that virtue to your advantage.
And then we had companies doing it, and they were like, we want
to be more rebellious, we want to be more audacious.
So it was just really cool to see that happen with the book.
But that's kind of the heart of it, yeah.
We'll post a link to that in the show notes in the description
for this episode as well. But yeah, thank you for sharing
that. I feel like, you know, a lot of
these traits are sort of like they're what makes somebody
unique, what makes a creative professional, a creative leader
unique. But then it's like learning how
to balance that, right? Of like, OK, how do you be
defiant to push things internally within a culture, but
you know, not so much that you could fire from every job as you
were saying, and that finding that balance.
Is a. Part of that journey.
So Sunny, you're bringing many perspectives of examples of
performance when it comes to company performance, but also
the creative professionals side. I'm curious to hear from you
what what do you think was the best failure or let's say
unexpected outcome that taught you about performance?
I, you know, interestingly, just coming off the the tail end of
the book, the original iteration of Rare Breed got rejected I
think 15 to 16 times by every major publisher.
And it was because we had positioned the book incorrectly.
So we had the right name and we had a fairly good subtitle, but
we were kind of coming at it as a branding book.
And I remember all the publishers were like, this is
such an incredible book, but branding books don't sell.
And so they rejected it right out of the gate.
And so we went to our agent and we were like, we're not going
to, we're not going to give up on the book.
So we want to rewrite it. And so we tore the whole thing
down, rewrote it, and we wrote, we penned all the letters, all
the rejection letters up on the wall and rewrote to all the
rejection letters because we, we just had a feeling that we were
onto something with the title and the subtitle.
And so we rewrote the book and we rewrote it through this lens
of what it what if the parts of yourself that other people
criticize, traits they call define dangerous and different,
were actually your superpowers? How could you succeed because of
who you are not despite who you are?
And that became the thesis of the book.
And so we went back to all of those publishers and it went to
a bidding war. And it taught us a lot about
resilience and perseverance and tenacity.
But it also told it, it taught us a lot about belief.
When you have something to say, how important it is to just not
give up and to keep pushing because on every, with every no,
there's a yes on the next one. So that is a huge lesson.
And it as an entrepreneur, you just have to be willing to hear
no a lot but not always listen. Yeah, on that point of
listening. And yeah, curious about like
some of your rituals or habits that you've see as being
essential to your success and how you got to where you are
now. So, yeah.
Do you have any habits or rituals that you'd like to share
with us? Well, I run a global team now.
So Ashley and I have scaled the company.
We were originally just leadership consultants and now
we've grown the team to, I think we're about, we're nearing about
45 to 50 people. And one of the things that I
have had to learn how to do is to, I was always an early riser,
but I'm an even earlier riser now.
And it's because the world is, is noisy and slack is noisy and
teams are noisy and there's a lot of pressure.
And as a leader, you need time to just kind of reflect and,
and, and get, get quiet for a minute so that you can be
effective. And so I really try to hold
space early in the morning to allow me to let my brain kind of
wander, like just kind of think about the day or think about the
what, you know, core strategic initiatives that we have going
on at the company. We're writing a second book.
There's there's lots of things that were initiatives that we're
working on. And so I just try to protect
that space a little bit so that I can be really effective for
the team and also available to the team because we have people
in Europe. And so they're up early, right?
Like 4 AM, 5:00 AM chats lit up all, all hours of the day and
night. And you need to be able to give
your brain those little spaces to kind of quiet down for a
minute so that you can be more effective.
Yeah, that reminds me of the parable of the cup.
I don't know if you've heard of that.
It's like a story from Zen, but basically, like the quick
version of it is like this guy who wants to become enlightened
goes to visit a Zen master. And it's like asking, you know,
basically like, sensei, teach me, give me your wisdom.
And the Zen master comes and, like, start serving tea and then
just keeps pouring the tea until it overflows, Right.
And the guy who goes to the master's, like, what are you
doing? You know, the cup is
overflowing, and then the master finally stops accessible.
This is, you know, this cup represents your mind and you
need to 1st empty your cup before you are ready to receive
more. And I think as leaders,
especially with global teams, like you have to be connected a
lot, all the time dealing with time zones, but also just as
creatives, we're always reading things, looking for inspiration,
looking at mood boards, whatever that is.
And sometimes you also need like, quiet to be within our own
thoughts, you know, before we can handle all of these inputs
and decisions. Well, we had a we have we have
this thing at motto called Motto and friends where we bring.
I'll just touch on this really quickly, but we have people that
come in from all around the world and for 45 minutes they
just tell us like their greatest stories or, or lessons and, and
teachings. And we had a team come on that
are neuroscientists and they taught our team about how even
just a few years ago you were interrupted maybe every 3 to 4
minutes. Now you're interrupted every 11
seconds. And I think it's probably even
less than that. So when you said I need to turn
off my Slack notifications, it's because you're being pinged all
day long and you have to have time where you step away from
that for a minute to just try to say like, what am I trying to
accomplish today? Because those things are really
distracting. And so as a leader, I think you
have to find the balance between being always on which you are as
a leader, especially if you're ACEO like me, you don't probably
sleep a lot and you're on a quite a bit and you have a lot
of demands and pressures. And so you're you, you kind of
have to have time to read and learn so that you can be on the
cutting edge of what you're doing.
Like I'm an avid and a voracious reader.
I read, I watch courses, I'm constantly learning and
studying. And it's because I protect that
time so that I can know what's happening in the culture and I
can be really a strong leader to my team so that they're not
saying things and using slang that I don't know anything
about. I got to be, I got to be into
what is going on around me. So it's important to protect
that time. So yeah, on on that topic of
what you're reading about, what you're connecting to, like where
do you go for inspiration and what are some of the ways you
stay up to date and innovative? I watch a lot of courses, like
master class is a really good one.
I read a lot of books. I study a lot about philosophy,
science, design, leadership. I read a lot of leadership
books. I'm really obsessed with like
patterns and contradictions and what's happening at the edge of
culture. And I just try to.
And we also have a learning development program at Motto.
And so everything that our team watches or is learning about, I
watch too, just because I want to be up, up to speed on what
they're, what they're learning about, what they're into, and
also AI advancement. So that's a really big one
recently is like very into AI at the moment and, and just really
paying attention to what is on the radar of everyone and, and
particularly that the culture podcasts, of course, and you
know, good biking, like get out on a bike, throw on a podcast
and this podcast and. Totally.
And and and and learn. That's a great company culture
for sure. Yes, and it's a huge culture
bonus because you will always find a reason not to do that
work. You will always find a reason
not you'll say I'm too busy or I can't do that.
And so we actually like really embedded into the very fabric of
what we do at Motto because we just believe that if we invest
in our people and we invest in the learning of our people, that
we're going to have more innovative thinkers and we're
going to have happier teammates because they're going to be able
to bring that thinking and that leading do everything that they
do. So we invest in leadership,
coaching and development, and we just really push for that
development. So that person really feels like
they're on a journey of growth. Yeah.
And especially you said that the company grew and now you have
teams in other locations. That's also a good way of making
sure that everyone feels like they belong to the same company.
That's great. Yeah, great weekly habits for
sure. So as we start to wrap up, I
wanted to hear from you a recommendation.
And it could be like a book, a show, a movie, or any type of of
media that you have listened or have engaged with lately that
you want to share with our listeners.
Jiro dreams of sushi. Have you all watched that?
Yeah, I got to eat at the restaurant like 10 years ago
with The Sun's restaurant. Not because by that point, Jiro
himself had stopped. It was no longer like a real
restaurant. It was like a private club, like
you had to somebody to get in there.
Whereas Like the Sun had built an identical restaurant to his
father. Wow, interesting.
I thought that was a fascinating documentary in terms of, I think
more so about the pursuit of perfection.
So the storyline is that a sushi maker is on this quest.
He's been making sushi for over 90 years.
And one of the biggest existential questions that he
has is like, will I ever reach perfection?
Have I have I folded the perfect piece of sushi?
And I think that that is such an empowering motivation for people
like me who are, who are kind of obsessed with the details and
are a bit of a perfectionist, you know, and being able to sort
of say like, how do I master what my craft is?
And can I master multiple domains of mastery?
And I think design is just about not always inventing something
new, but rather it's often doing those things better and better
and better. And it's about you and your
craft and your journey of who you're trying to become that you
have to sort of prove that to. And I love the film because it's
really a film about what it means to devote your life to
your craft. And so much of us, our
identities are tied up in the things that we do and the things
that we love and, and, and, and work.
And so when we continue to define that and, and refine that
over time is an incredible thing to do.
I highly recommend it. Amazing.
Yeah, and it's available on streaming, so folks should
definitely check that out. As we wrap up our time together,
Sunny, we'd like to ask our guests to give a call to action
for our listeners and our viewers, for folks who are
watching this on YouTube. So just yeah, let people know
where they can find you and your work online.
We'll post this in the show notes as well, but sometimes
it's helpful for people to hear it as well.
Well, you can find motto@wearemotto.com on
Instagram and LinkedIn at We are Motto.
You can also find a little bit about me at sunnybunnell.com.
And you can also learn about Vision Camp at Vision Camp dot
IO. And if you want to learn a
little bit about the book, it's available wherever books are
sold, but highly available on like Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
So any of those channels and for anybody listening, love to
connect with you and reach out, love starting new conversations
and making friends. So feel free to reach out and
say hello. Awesome.
Thank you so much, Sunny Bunnell.
Yeah, we really appreciated learning about your story,
hearing about Motto Vision Camp, the book as well.
I look forward to diving into some of that stuff myself,
learning more about all of the stuff that you do.
So thank. You thank you.
It was a lot of fun. I appreciate you guys having me.
Awesome, and thank you for watching or listening to this
episode of the AIG Design Podcast.
You know what to do in terms of finding us at AIG Design.
Subscribe, like, send us a message, whatever you'd like to
help support the show. And thank you to AIGA members
for making this possible as well.
We are a nonprofit membership organization.
And so we like to, you know, thank you.
And also, yeah, allow us to tell these stories and make them
available to the entire design community.
So I'm Li Shan Huang on behalf of Julia Donatello.
We will see you next time. Thanks.
Bye.