Daring Creativity
"Sitting with work produces better outcomes and trust." (Elana Rudick bonus episode)
21 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, welcome to another bonus episode of the Daring Creativity Podcast. I'm back to unpack some of the gems from this week's conversation, pulling out those moments that deserve a second look and dig deeper in what makes them special.
This week, I spoke to Elana Raddick, the founder and creative director of Design is Yummy, a Montreal-based studio that spent two decades doing purpose-driven creative work for non-profits, education and arts and culture clients.
Chapter 2: What insights does Elana Rudick share about slowing down in a fast-paced world?
In our conversation, we talked about what it means to slow down in a world speeding up, why thinking is becoming more valuable than making, and how a chocolate bar wrapper once got her job of her dreams. The episode, published a few days ago, was titled Dare to Shift Back to Human, and we unpacked 20 years of building something rare, a studio with genuine soul.
If you haven't checked out the full episode, let me share with you four standout moments from our conversation.
Chapter 3: How does thinking differ from execution in the creative process?
Yeah, I don't think it's counterproductive necessarily to our creation of things. But to me, thinking and execution of ideas are two very different things. So I think that's what we need to spend more time as creatives doing. And that's what I'm going to be advocating for in my talk in Vancouver is that we need to be slowing down and spending that time
thinking things through and what are we making because it's so fast and easy now and it's getting faster and easier to make things so what's going to set us apart is how we think how we express ourself and really spending more time slowing down on the idea part because we're going to be expedited on the execution part
It was a nice reframe from Ilana. At a time when everyone's talking about AI speeding up production, Ilana was reframing the entire debate by separating the act of making from the act of thinking. I'm a big fan of thinking, if I can say myself.
I think there is something about magical about the process when you have time to think about what you're trying to make rather than spending 27 tries to unlock a problem. So in Alana's case, obviously, she's highlighted that thinking and making is not the same skill.
Chapter 4: What unique approach did Elana use to land her first job?
I mean, you don't need to be more than five years old to know that. But what AI has done is widened the gap dramatically between thinking and making, which means the value of genuine, unhurried thinking hasn't decreased. It's skyrocketed. Her point is that direct challenge to anyone who's been treating ideation and execution as one continuous workflow, dare not.
She wants you to slow down on the idea. Be as fast as you like on the making. Alana has been applying this to her studio for years and it shows the quality of relationships and outcomes she describes throughout the episode.
I think back to when I got my first job, I got it because I had a different business card and I tried something new and different that was memorable. There was a lot of people that were vying for this job. And at the time, I don't know if I mentioned this to you before, but I had made my CV as a chocolate bar wrapper.
So I was walking around with chocolate bars and that was my CV that I'd put on their desk of the hiring managers.
And that's the first kind of time I did something, I would say, like a little gimmicky like that, which is why I hesitate towards scents of business cards, because I know what that actually looks like when you're on a bus to an interview and it's hot and you're trying not to get your chocolate bar CV to melt. I once showed up to an interview.
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Chapter 5: How did the pandemic impact relationship building in creative industries?
Thank God I had a spare copy because it was just like a melted chocolate in my bag. It was awful. But that's how I got my first job because the hiring manager was hungry. She was doing a day of interviews and then she ate my CV and called me and she said, listen, I feel bad for not hiring you. I just ate your CV. That's how I was different then.
And I think that's always how I've gotten jobs is by... stepping outside my comfort zone to just try something different and not be afraid to do that. So yeah, I think daring, anytime you're daring something, for me, it implies trying something different or at least different for you, something outside of your comfort zone.
This was a great moment of looking back of what got Alana one of her first jobs, a CV printed on a chocolate bar wrapper. She carried around with her to various job interviews and One made it really funny.
Chapter 6: What role do soft skills play in building trust with clients?
She lives in Montreal, but the story was that the chocolates were actually melting, so it couldn't have been the middle of winter. We talked about creative ideas and how to be seen and how to stand out and be different. And in this case, the medium was the message. Long before she had a portfolio worth showing, she understood that being memorable is a strategic act, not a personality quirk.
And the detail that made it perfect is you heard the hiring manager ate the CV and called her to apologize. That's not luck, as we know. That's a result. This moment beautifully connects to everything, to what Alana says later about standing out, being human-centric and making people feel something.
Chapter 7: How does uncertainty shape the future of creative work?
She's been living her own philosophy since before she had the language for it.
So during the pandemic, that was something that I realized because I was so used to going to network events and all of a sudden that was cut off. No more client in-person meetings. So I still wanted to really maintain those relationships that I had been cultivating for so long and to keep growing as a person and as a designer.
Chapter 8: What are the main themes of the full episode featuring Elana Rudick?
So I made it a point every day I called three people. And I did this for a year. I would call three people and touch base with them, whether I'd worked with them once, whether they just reached out one time and the work never went through, just to say, hey, how are you doing? The pandemic was a huge talking point.
It's very easy for somebody to have something to talk about because we were all going through this shitstorm together. So how are you navigating? How are you navigating this? What's going on in your world? And I would have people breaking down in tears on the phone and telling me about their lives. And usually we didn't talk about business at all.
But a lot of those relationships that I worked on during that time are people that I still work with now. And it changed the type of relationships that I have with clients and suppliers where there's a huge trust. In that situation I was mentioning before where we were looking to do creative services and pivot and they looked at me like, are you crazy?
And I said, I looked at them and I said, I know you can do this. And they trusted me because we had built that relationship up and that was leveraging the soft skills that I had developed.
This moment almost sneaks past you during the episode. Talking about a pandemic, whilst some of the rest of the world was retreating and waiting, she made a decision to lean in, not to pitch, not to sell, just to genuinely check in. No agenda. And what happened? People broke down in tears.
They talked about everything except work, and those relationships built in vulnerability and honesty became some of her strongest professional partnerships. I would say this is a masterclass in relationship building and a reminder that soft skills aren't soft at all. They are the infrastructure. The design work is downstream of trust.
In an industry obsessed with output, Alana was building something more long-term, genuine human connection at scale.
There's an illusion with clients that we are the experts, we know everything. And yes, it's not fully an illusion, like we do know what we're doing, but I also think nobody knows what they're doing. I truly believe if a designer goes up on stage and says, I don't know what I'm doing, I feel like the audience is still going to sit there nodding.
That's because no matter what level you are, nobody knows what the fuck they're doing. Right now, everybody's exploring and experimenting with AI. But do they actually know what they're doing? Nobody knows what they're doing. Then you look at legalities after and copyright laws and these legal lawsuits that are going to come for these big agencies because we don't know what we're doing.
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