design

Year in Review: 2024

As I’ve done for the past few decades, I’m ending the year with a look back at some cultural highlights I found most fulfilling during the past 12 months: Hitting the road with the kids: 2024 was a special year for family travel — an early summer trip to stay with relatives in San Francisco (a moment from there above), then a late summer stay with my sister just outside of D.

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“Studio Culture Now”

Paging back through the Kickstarter-backed “Studio Culture Now” from Unit Editions and realized I neglected to note it here. It’s an enjoyable volume featuring indie design studio heads talking shop. A few themes: There’s freedom in staying small. Having a nice workspace is a plus, but too much overhead’s a crusher. Output matters, but so does process, leadership, and owning your POV. Social posts and basic PDFs can aid business development more than a high-maintenance, glacially updated website.

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From How Design Makes Us Think, by Sean Adams:

Film director Billy Wilder enjoyed daily naps limited to fifteen minutes. Friends Charles and Ray Eames designed a chaise lounge for Wilder to assist with the fifteen-minute rule. The chaise has a narrow profile. If Wilder began to sleep longer, his arms would fall to his side and wake him. The base is exposed and honest, the form follows the function of short napping.

Prompted by this Jarrett Fuller post, I scooped up and quickly read “Two-Dimensional Man: A Graphic Memoir” by Paul Sahre. Funny, poignant at times — a great read for any creator. The memoir includes a good deal of striking work shown between prose pages, including several book covers I’ve long admired. You can get a good sense of Sahre’s sensibility by knowing that when he officialy launched his solo design business — the Office of Paul Sahre — he embraced its unintended acronym: O.O.P.S.

In love with just about every one of these Janet Hansen-designed book covers.

“Pentagram: Living by Design,” the exquisite-looking 50-year history of the iconic design studio, has landed at my house. Published by United Editions. Can’t wait.

At Brand New, a new logo and identity for Catskill Art Space designed by Athletics. Lovely.

Knoll: Our Work’s Worth Waiting For

Charming and savvy detail from Ana Araujo’s new book on the work of Florence Knoll, “No Compromise”: In 1964, the company Knoll released this letter it says it received from one of its textile suppliers, running it as a print ad (one assumes full-page): Dear Sir, Thank you for your letter of the 6th of October which we have received today. Please be assured that we have not forgotten about you.

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Enjoyable read — indie design studio heads talking shop in “Studio Culture Now”. A few common themes: There’s freedom in staying small; having a nice workspace is a plus, but too much overhead’s a crusher; your design output matters, but so do process, leadership & owning your POV; social posts and basic PDFs can aid biz development more than a high-maintenance, glacially updated website; you can find success based anywhere, but be engaged w/ the field and your community. 📚

From my Christmas wish list to under the tree: Self-Reliance. That “I” is just perfection. Designed by Jessica Helfand and Jarrett Fuller. 📚

Weeknotes #01

Borrowing the structure of a few other online writers whose websites I enjoy (Paul Robert Lloyd and Mark Boulton, among others), I thought I’d start weekly low-key look-backs on the week, bullet list-style. Perhaps weekly is aspirational. We’ll see. Greatly enjoyed Emily Nussbaum’s long New Yorker profile of Fiona Apple, whose long-awaited record just hit my Spotify streaming today. After reading the piece, I’d been going back through Apple’s back catalogue, awaiting the new songs and relishing the old.

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Charles and Ray, Designers From the Near Future

Loved this passage from Sam Jacob’s essay “Context as Destiny: The Eameses from Californian Dreams to the Californiafication of Everywhere,” published in the satisfyingly chunky The World of Charles and Ray Eames (2016): For architects and designers like [Peter and Alison Smithson, who were British], the Eameses’ Californian-ness opened a dazzlingly bright window into another world, a sun-kissed world far from the origins of European modernism weighed down by all that Old War baggage — by history, politics and war, by notions of an avant-garde, by post-war reconstruction and the serious politics of the welfare state.

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Michael Bierut on Honesty, Taste & Intelligence

I loved this book: a visually rich and smartly narrated collection of case studies exploring all parts of creative communications (logos, naming, typography, photography, illustration, messaging, client presentations…). Bierut is an intelligent thinker and a terrific, crisp writer (beyond his obvious world-class design chops). Yet he knows the readerly pleasure in having an accomplished instructor (recall the book’s title) chronicle his own missteps en route to delivering a gem. Here’s a passage I underlined and circled, a lead-in to a section on logotypes and symbols:  Everyone tends to get overly excited about logos.

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"50 Books/50 Covers" Winners for 2011

Some beauties in this annual competition, which is put on by Design Observer, AIGA, and Designers & Books. 

MATCHBOOK. bikinis meet their match

“Clever matches between bathing suits and books." Great idea.
Death in Spring — a beautiful cover, designed by Milan Bozic, and an unforgettably weird, savage, and poetic novel from the Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda. Published in English for the first time by the commendable Open Letter Books. (How great, I learned only today, that it received this NPR nod on its “You Must Read This” series.)

"The World’s First and Only Completely Honest Résumé of a Graphic Designer"

A gem by Marco Kaye at McSweeney’s:  In my portfolio, you will see that unproduced package redesign for Squirtburst, inspired by kinetic typography popular in the West Coast concert posters of the 1960’s. In this designer’s opinion, it creates a visual appeal unprecedented in the beverage aisle. The client called it “uninspired” and said it would make kids “vomit if they stared at it for too long.” Next time you’re at the grocery store, please, pick up any Squirtburst drink and compare our taste levels.

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"Which Cover Would You Choose?"

A behind-the-scenes post about how The New York Times Magazine chooses its covers (which are exceptional).