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. We have only one weaver making this cloth. He is rather more of an artist than a practical man and he has an artist’s temperament. In other words he makes the colour that he wants to make and not necessarily the colours we want to have from him, and if it is a nice day he will go fishing or shooting leaving the weaving for another day. You will agree that this is not very business-like and from our point of view it is impossible, but the fact is that if we want this cloth, which we do very much, we just have to put up with it. From past experience we would say that it is no use asking him to submit patterns of his future colourings as he will be unable to tell us what these are to be. The sort of thing that happens is that we get a letter from him saying that yesterday he saw a piece of rock covered with Lichen in a most beautiful colour. Sure enough in a few weeks we will get a Brown/Green mixed tweed of this colouring and this is what we mean when we say that he is an artist rather more than a weaver. With the colder winter weather approaching perhaps this man will get down doing some work to keep himself warm, we can only hope.

Beneath the letter was the tag line, “It’s worth waiting for a good catch.”

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. That stellar start of “I Know”: “So be it / I’m your crowbar….”

• Also in the New Yorker, I was moved by Alex Ross’s essay honoring his late mother, “Grieving With Brahms.” I admire Ross’s writing greatly.

• Okay, one more New Yorker reference for the week: I was floored by Dan Chiasson’s review of Joyelle McSweeney’s new book of poetry that involves motherhood and tragedy.

• I’ve been dabbling with Roam, which is getting a lot of indie attention as a networked-notes app. (See: #roamcult) At least for now, I’ve enjoyed reading in-depth use studies more than actually using it. Somewhat relatedly, it’s been a big few weeks for Notion, which I continue to use more as a work/life dashboard than a notes app. This general area of knowledge management is one I’m deeply interested in and will continue to be tracking.

• Speaking of tech, I’m three episodes into “Devs” (Hulu) and plan on continuing. Intrigued. (I loved the look of Alex Garland’s “Ex Machina.”)

• “Knives Out” was fun.

• During quarantine, Pentagram’s Michael Bierut — one of my favorite voices on branding and communications — is offering a “Virtual Bookshelf Tour” on Instagram. Mouthwatering. Starts here.

• On my family’s own isolation front, lack of options breeds ingenuity. Today Leo and I played driveway tennis over a rope tied between our basketball hoop and a locked stroller, followed by foam-ball lawn golf employing our Christmas tree stand as the hole. Worked surprisingly well.

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.

To the Smithsons and their ilk, the Eameses appeared as if designers from the near future. They saw in the American couple a ‘light-hearted thinking in featherweight climate-bits-and-pieces seeming off-the-peg-architecture … [a] do-it-yourself out of gorgeous catalogues, the Sears-Roebuck thinking … [a] whole blow-up, plug-in, camp-out, dump-digging type of thinking and living.’ They saw in Charles and Ray the kind of design practice that they themselves were struggling to imagine — a form of design practice that combined the modernist legacy of social improvement with new sensibilities of popular, mass-produced modernity. They saw a lightness of touch, with a direct connection to lifestyle and an easy ability to reach out across the traditional boundaries of design and out into the wider world.

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. If you’re a company, communicating with honesty, taste and intelligence is hard work, requiring constant attention day after day. Designing a logo, on the other hand, is an exercise with a beginning and an end. Clients know what to budget for it, and designers know what to charge for it. So designers and clients often substitute the easy fix of the logo for the subtler challenge of being smart. When we look at a well-known logo, what we perceive isn’t just a word or an image or an abstract form, but a world of associations that have accrued over time. As a result, people forget that a brand-new logo seldom means a thing. It is an empty vessel awaiting the meaning that will be poured into it by history and experience. The best thing a designer can do is make that vessel the right shape for what it’s going to hold. 

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

“Clever matches between bathing suits and books." 

Great idea.

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.

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