Podcast Awesome
On Podcast Awesome we talk to members of the Font Awesome team about icons, design, tech, business, and of course, nerdery.
🎙️ Podcast Awesome is your all-access pass into the creative engine behind Font Awesome — the web’s favorite icon toolkit. Join host Matt Johnson and the Font Awesome crew (and friends) for deep dives into icon design, front-end engineering, software development, healthy business culture, and a whole lot of lovingly-rendered nerdery.
From technical explorations of our open-source tooling, chats with web builders, icon designers, and content creators, with the occasional gleeful rants about early internet meme culture, we bring you stories and strategies from the trenches of building modern web software — with a healthy dose of 80s references and tech dad jokes.
🎧 Perfect for:
- Icon design and content-first thinking
- Creative process and collaborative design
- Work-life balance in tech
- Remote team culture and async collaboration
- Internet history, meme archaeology, and other nerd ephemera
🧠 Come for the design wisdom, stay for the deep meme cuts and beautifully crafted icons.
Podcast Awesome
Clippy Cult: The Paperclip That Wouldn’t Quit
Inside the UX lessons, internet lore, and surprising comeback of Clippy
Love him or loathe him, you remember him. Clippy — the googly-eyed paperclip that lived inside Microsoft Word — has become a permanent fixture in internet culture. But how did a productivity tool become the patron saint of annoying-yet-adorable UI? In this episode of Podcast Awesome, we’re digging into the cult of Clippy with behind-the-scenes insights from Clippy's original creator Kevan Atteberry and Microsoft designer Sam Cundall. From meme fame to Microsoft Teams emoji, Clippy's legacy is more layered than you think.
📝 What We Cover in This Episode:
- 📎 Why Clippy was loved and hated
- 🧠 The psychology of nostalgic design
- 🔁 When Microsoft secretly brought Clippy back
- 🤖 What Clippy might teach us about the future of AI assistants
- ✍️ thoughts on reviving legacy designs the right way
⏱️ Timestamps:
00:00 – Welcome to the Cult of Clippy
02:00 – The origin story: from helpful to hated
04:30 – Nostalgia and annoyance: why we love to hate him
06:00 – Microsoft’s secret Clippy emoji comeback
08:00 – What makes emoji design "work"?
10:00 – Fun at work: why weirdness builds culture
14:00 – The creator's take: Kevan Atteberry on designing Clippy
20:00 – From embarrassment to pride: Clippy's redemption arc
24:00 – Clippy vs. Siri: The rise of personality-driven UI
26:00 – Final thoughts: where personality fits in UX
🔗 Links & Resources:
- Sam Kundal on LinkedIn
- Kevan Atteberry's books
- How to add a paperclip emoji to your UI
- Vote a favorite icon up the leaderboard
- 🎥 Podcast Awesome on YouTube
🎶 The Font Awesome Theme Song – Composed by Ronnie Martin
🎸 Music Interstitials by Zach Malm
🎬 Produced and edited by Matt Johnson with some extra help from Isaac Chase
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