Saeed Jones

Jones has lived an extraordinary life of adversity and achievement—and in his memoir, How We Fight For Our Lives, he pulls no punches as he boldly brings it all to the page. Listen.

Jacqueline Woodson

In her inspiring creative journey, author Jacqueline Woodson went from struggling with words as a child to mastering them today. Listen.

Jason Reynolds

The award-winning author and National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature discusses his prolific writing career that inspires young readers to discover their own stories. Listen.

Audie Cornish

The legendary anchor, correspondent, journalist, host, and interviewer, joins Debbie live to talk about her two-decade career covering national, political, and breaking news. Listen.

Antwaun Sargent

The writer, editor, and curator joins to talk about his remarkable career, positioned at the center of the explosion of interest in art made by Black Americans. Listen.

Candace Carty-Williams

The author of the bestselling book Queenie joins a guest host, Roxane Gay, to talk about her latest novel People Person which follows five half-siblings forced together in the wake of a dramatic event. Listen.

Ashley C. Ford

Joining to discuss her memoir, Somebody’s Daughter, Ford has captured a complex childhood shaped by family secrets, incarceration, and resilience. Listen.

Michael R. Jackson

The Pulitzer Prize playwright, composer, lyricist and self-described “trash talker” riffs on race, identity and sexuality as he discusses his life on and off the page. Listen.

Mickalene Thomas

Known for her elaborate paintings composed of rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel, Thomas draws on art history and popular culture to create a contemporary vision of female sexuality, beauty, and power. Listen.

Amy Sherald

Before her portrait of Michelle Obama took the world by storm, Sherald persevered through an incredible set of obstacles to become the brilliant artist that she is today. Listen.

Bisa Butler

The fiber artist discusses the AfriCOBRA tradition, the artistic breakthrough that led to her finding her voice, and the process behind her amazing life-size works. Listen.

Dario Calmese

The artist, urbanist, director, and brand consultant shares his thoughts on photography and the design of the world around us. Listen.

Anita Hill

More than thirty years ago, she became a household name and a hero for many women when she told the world about how Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her at work. Hill joins to talk about her extraordinary life and her book, Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence. Listen.

Maurice Cherry

From Selma to corporate America to the launch of his own ventures, Cherry has faced extreme adversity and emerged as a brilliant mind at the forefront of design. Listen.

Cey Adams

He went from stealing paint and throwing up tags in the Bronx to happening upon a brilliant career in art direction and design—one that would brand the burgeoning movement of hip hop in New York City. Listen.

The Design Matters studio is small. It’s intimate. Within the recording booth at the School of Visual Arts’ Masters in Branding program, guests sit nearly knee-to-knee with host Debbie Millman, opening up about their creative journeys in all of their profound personal detail.

In addition to a pre-pandemic Design Matters anniversary bash featuring Amber Tamblyn, Roxane Gay flipping the interview script on Millman, and more, the year was filled with a medley of guests hailing from a medley of backgrounds in the creative arts—graphic designers; authors; fine artists; publishers; filmmakers; set designers; playwrights; the one-and-only Claire Danes.

While a couple of the interviews were recorded in the studio prior to lockdown, this writer wondered whether any of the usual Design Matters magic would fall to the wayside as interviews necessarily switched from that most personal of studios to Zoom—but we’re happy to report that it appears the alchemy of said magic is not confined to any one fixed location.

Still, we can’t wait to see everything, with hope, back to normal, and back to the studio, in 2021.

Here’s to the Design Matters of 2020, with 10 of our favorite episodes.

Bisa Butler

Fiber artist Bisa Butler discusses the AfriCOBRA tradition, the artistic breakthrough that led to her finding her voice, and the process behind her amazing life-size works

Chanel Miller

Author Chanel Miller reflects on her journey to healing—and the role of art in her past, present, and future.

Chani Nicholas

A self-described “late bloomer,” Chani Nicholas pursued different career paths before finding her future in both the least and most likely of places: the stars.

Marilyn Minter

Sex, power, feminism—Marilyn Minter reflects on her rise, being banished from the art world, and her return and personal revolution.

Ira Glass

From creativity to creative struggles and what makes or breaks a This American Life story, Ira Glass reflects on his career on the airwaves.

Cheryl Strayed

Cheryl Strayed battled through remarkable adversity—and the most intense of hikes—to emerge as one of the best American writers working today.

Michael R. Jackson

In his work, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Michael R. Jackson—a self-described “playwright, composer, lyricist and trash talker”—riffs on race, identity and sexuality. Here, he discusses life on and off the page.

Wael Morcos & Jonathan Key

Hailing from Lebanon and Alabama, respectively, Wael Morcos and Jonathan Key discuss their amazing journeys that coalesced into their design work as MorcosKey today.

Claire Danes

At 10, she announced that money or no money, she would be true to her art—and there was no plan B. And, well, actress Claire Danes stuck to it.

Tosh Hall

From breaking down outside of a Kinko’s to being named one of AdAge’s Top 50 creatives, Tosh Hall talks about the highs and lows of a life in branding and design.

Matthew Carter’s phone rang. It was the early 2000s, and on the other end of the line was a lawyer who was inquiring about a case she was working on. Her client was trying to claim property her late father had willed her—but his former business partner said the man had actually given it to him a couple decades prior. He even had a document dated 1981 to prove it. The lawyer wanted to know: Could the type design master provide any insight into the dispute?

In fact, he could. Because the man’s document claiming ownership was written in a font that Carter didn’t design until 1995.

People tend to take type for granted, Carter has said—they see it as something that has simply always existed. But type has power—even if most go about their days unaware of how it brings the world to vivid life, our communications coasting upon its rails like an operating system.

For Carter, type has been omnipresent since the beginning: Growing up in the midst of World War II London, Carter recalls his mother cutting a Gill Sans alphabet out of linoleum to help him learn to read. Meanwhile, his father was a typographer and type historian, and the young Carter would find himself in trouble for pouring clay into his molds in an attempt to cast his own letters.

When it was time for university, Carter applied to Oxford, but destiny intervened and the school recommended he take a year off—he was only 17, and the rest of the freshman class would be older because they had served in the military as asthma had kept him out. Thus his career began by accident when he took an internship at Enschedé en Zonen in the Netherlands, studying punch-cutting at the printing company’s type foundry.

“I spent that year … learning a completely obsolete and useless trade,” he tells Debbie Millman in this episode of Design Matters, which was recorded live at the Type Directors Club. “But I did get very interested in it.”

So interested, in fact, that when it came time to study Medieval English at Oxford, he couldn’t bring himself to actually do it. Instead, he sought work, struggling to survive on sign-painting and lettering gigs in the absence of anyone needing a punch-cutter. Today, virtually every piece of writing involving Carter is keen to point out that he holds the rare distinction of having created type in every form through which it has manifested over the years, from punch to film to pixel. One wonders if entering the workforce with a highly specialized skill set that was dead upon arrival gave him a unique survival instinct, an adaptability, a drive to evolve before being left behind.

In 1958 Carter moved to London, and there, a friend of his dad’s—who he has dubbed his “fairy godfather”—gifted him £300 so that he could travel to New York City. There, Carter’s mind was blown. He went to Push Pin Studios. He dropped by Herb Lubalin’s private practice. He visited Mergenthaler Linotype. He witnessed design of a quantity and caliber he had never encountered before, and returned to London with the goal of returning to New York.

After a few years, he did. Built upon the foundation of his work in England, his talent came into its own and a lifetime of typographic output followed. Over the years Carter released Snell Roundhand, Bell Centennial, Helvetica Compressed, Balliard, ITC Galliard and many, many others. Sensing change on the industry winds, he co-founded Bitstream in 1981 to specialize in digital type and licensing, before later breaking away in 1991 to focus exclusively on his own designs, which he did by launching Carter Cone Type in 1992. At his eponymous shop he has released Sophia, Big Caslon, Mantinia and, of course, his Microsoft commissions: Verdana, Georgia and Tahoma.

One might think that a designer reared on the classical creation of type would recoil at font software and the other hallmarks of the personal computer. But as Carter told J. Abbott Miller in 1995, he was energized by the “radical democratization of type,” and he couldn’t think of any other era in which he’d rather be working. (Still, it’s worth noting that as far as technological advances go, Carter has said that computers didn’t change his life; instead, it was “the coming of the laser printer. It’s an amazing luxury.”)

Carter’s output, always chameleonic and rife with surprise, has earned him nearly every top recognition in the field—from the AIGA Medal to the Type Directors Club Medal to a lifetime achievement award from the Smithsonian and even a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant”—and seven of his typefaces are featured in MoMA’s permanent collection, though he doesn’t consider himself an artist.

Perhaps fellow designer Jonathan Hoefler sums up Carter’s impact better than any recognitions can: “If you imagine a type designer as a colorist—colorists talk about the amazing blue they saw or the green of their bathroom—Matthew is the guy who invented brown, then 20 years later invented orange.”

Matthew Carter knows type in a way that very few others do. He has cast it, he has cradled it in his hands, he has curated the ghosts that populate our screens. His is a 360-degree understanding of it, a lifelong study of a craft largely hidden from, yet vital to, society. In a consumer culture increasingly ravenous to know how things are sourced, from food to clothing to tech, one wonders if that hunger will ever breach the realm of design and grant its creators the recognition their efforts deserve.

Though most will never know it, we’re all the richer for Matthew Carter’s relentless love affair with letters.

They curate the entire visual aesthetic of a cinematic journey—not entirely unlike, say, a creative director in the world of graphic design.

Ina Mayhew knows about bringing fictive worlds to life. A graduate of SUNY’s Purchase College, she has been working as a Hollywood production designer since the late 1980s, and her credits are vast: The upcoming Respect. Netflix’s “Heartstrings.” Spike Lee’s Get on the Bus and Girl 6. Ava DuVernay’s “Queen Sugar.” A dozen Tyler Perry films. MTV’s “Teen Wolf” series. Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s “Family Feud” video. And on and on.

Though she excels at bringing the narratives of others to life, in this episode, Design Matters explores her own.

After you listen, stick around for interviews with 10 creators of color whose brilliant minds, stories and perseverance through struggle inspire. Use these episodes to scratch the surface of their worlds—and then keep digging. There’s an incredible amount of beauty to be found within them.

Her beloved mother had just died of cancer at the age of 45. Grief gave way to infidelity. Infidelity gave way to heroin abuse and divorce.

And then, an impulsive decision—explored in this episode of Design Matters—led to her rebirth.

If you listen to Design Matters on PRINT, you know we’re fond of quote roundups—and so is Strayed, herself a prodigious collector of curated quips (or as she describes them, “mini–instruction manuals for the soul”). In 2015, Strayed released Brave Enough, an assemblage of highlights from her larger body of work.

As a complement to this episode of Design Matters, here are 15 of our favorite selections from the book.

Art isn’t anecdote. It’s the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. Be brave enough to break your own heart. You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you’ve got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was. Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don’t always do the right thing on our way to rightness. How wild it was, to let it be. Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. You go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on. You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and by allowing the pleasure in other days. You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage. No is golden. No is the power the good witch wields. Inhabit the beauty that lives in your beastly body and strive to see the beauty in all the other beasts. Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of being. Your life will be a hundred times better for it. The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It’s strength. It’s nerve. Put yourself in the way of beauty. The body knows. When your heart sinks. When you feel sick to your gut. When something blossoms in your chest. When your brain gloriously pops. That’s your body telling you the One True Thing. Listen to it.

The gig didn’t come easily. Uglow started as a Fine Art student, came across design and navigated the tides of the Dotcom boom and Dotcom bust, and then grabbed the laptop from her severance package and taught herself HTML. She bounced around a few design jobs, and then happened upon a one-month contract position to make Powerpoints for the sales team at Google.

… And then she founded Google’s Creative Lab in Europe.

How?! In this episode of Design Matters, Debbie Millman explores just that—and, of course, digs into what Uglow does today as creative director of Google’s Creative Lab in Sydney.

Uglow’s work may not be the easiest thing to nail down in a nutshell, and it’s best seen in action. So here we present a tapestry of Tea, from her personal writings to a medley of her striking projects that reveal the key to her swift rise and all the rest of it: her raw brilliance.

Teau.meAll things Uglow! Comprehensive and compulsory.

Tea’s TaleA series of wise, witty and important letters about her personal transition.

SemiConductor As the official elucidation goes, “Semi-Conductor puts you in front of your very own AI orchestra. It uses Tensorflow and PoseNet to allow you to conduct music by moving your arms, using only your browser and a webcam.”

Midsummer Night’s Dreaming“The Royal Shakespeare Company put on a unique, one-off performance of ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in collaboration with Google’s Creative Lab. It took place online, and offline—at the same time. It was the culmination of an 18 month project looking at new forms of theater with digital at the core.”

XY-Fi “XY-Fi allows you to mouse-over the physical world, with your phone.”

Editions at Play“Editions At Play is the Peabody Futures–award-winning initiative by Visual Editions and Google’s Creative Lab to explore what a digital book might be: one which makes use of the dynamic properties of the web.”

Hangouts in History“Google’s Creative Lab teamed up with Grumpy Sailor to help a class of year 8 students from Bowral ‘video conference’ with 1348, in what we became the first of five ‘Hangouts in History.’”

The Oracles“The Oracles is a cross-platform experience, developed for primary school children in Haringey. Digital and physical environments are blended, alternating between gameplay and visits to Fallow Cross, where enchanted objects know where you are so that your moves trigger the story.”

Story Spheres“Story Spheres is a way to add stories to panoramic photographs. It’s a simple concept that combines the storytelling tools of words and pictures with a little digital magic.”

Bar.Foo“Google has a secret interview process …”

Unlimited TeaAnd if you still can’t get enough Uglow … here’s a slew of talks to get lost in after listening to this episode of Design Matters.

Austin Kleon exists at the brilliant intersection of word and image—but as a schoolkid in the small town of Circleville, Ohio, the two were neatly torn into “art” and “English.” It stayed that way for Kleon until he had an epiphany while studying a Charles Dickens novel at Cambridge University. As he told The Great Discontent, “I was trying to explain what the book was like, so I took out a piece of notebook paper and drew a map of London; as I drew, I said, ‘Here is what happens when the characters are in these parts of London, and this is how the narrative maps.’ It was a really crude map, but my professor looked at it and said, ‘This is better than anything you’ve turned in for me.’ That crummy map was better than any of the writing I had done! I knew that I had to bring drawing back into my life, so I bought a sketchbook and started drawing again.”

After graduating from Miami University, Kleon began making poems by redacting lines of text in the newspaper—leading to his first book, Newspaper Blackout. And then, he gave a talk outlining 10 things he wished he had known when he was younger, dubbed “Steal Like an Artist.” It went viral, and launched Kleon’s career as we know it today—the sage of word and image, author of the subsequent books Steal Like an Artist; Show Your Work!; and his latest, Keep Going, which Kleon says he wrote because he needed to read it.

Rather than wax philosophical about Kleon, here, we steal his words (within Fair Use limits, of course). As a complement to this episode of Design Matters, what follows is a sampling of his books—and the many wisdoms you can find therein.

Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

Every artist gets asked the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” The honest artist answers, “I steal them.” How does an artist look at the world? First, you figure out what’s worth stealing, then you move on to the next thing. That’s about all there is to it.

When you look at the world this way, you stop worrying about what’s “good” and what’s “bad”—there’s only stuff worth stealing, and stuff that’s not worth stealing.

Everything is up for grabs. If you don’t find something worth stealing today, you might find it worth stealing tomorrow or a month or a year from now.

Nothing is original.

The writer Jonathan Lethem has said that when people call something “original,” nine out of ten times they just don’t know the references or the original sources involved. What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.

It’s right there in the Bible: “There is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

Some people find this idea depressing, but it fills me with hope. As the French writer Andre Gide put it, “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it.

(Bonus: Click here for Kleon’s TED Talk on artistic thievery.)

Show Your Work! 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

We’re all terrified of being revealed as amateurs, but in fact, today it is the amateur—the enthusiast who pursues her work in the spirit of love (in French, the word means “lover”), regardless of the potential for fame, money or career—who often has the advantage over the professional. Because they have little to lose, amateurs are willing to try anything and share the results. They take chances, experiment and follow their whims. Sometimes, in the process of doing things in an unprofessional way, they make new discoveries. “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities,” said Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki. “In the expert’s mind, there are few.”

Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes or look ridiculous in public. They’re in love, so they don’t hesitate to do work that others think of as silly or just plain stupid. “The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act,” writes Clay Shirky in his book Cognitive Surplus. “On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and the good is vast. Mediocrity is, however, still on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.” Amateurs know that contributing something is better than contributing nothing.

… Sometimes, amateurs have more to teach us than experts. “It often happens that two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can,” wrote author C.S. Lewis. “The fellow pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago he has forgotten.” Watching amateurs at work can also inspire us to attempt the work ourselves. “I saw the Sex Pistols,” said New Order frontman Bernard Sumner. “They were terrible … I wanted to go up and be terrible with them.” Raw enthusiasm is contagious.

The world is changing at such a rapid rate that it’s turning us all into amateurs. Even for professionals, the best way to flourish is to retain an amateur’s spirit and embrace uncertainty and the unknown. When Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke was asked what he thought his greatest strength was, he answered, “That I don’t know what I’m doing.” Like one of his heroes, Tom Waits, whenever Yorke feels like his songwriting is getting to comfortable or stale, he’ll pick up an instrument he doesn’t know how to play and try to write with it. This is yet another trait of amateurs—they’ll use whatever tools they can get their hands on to try to get their ideas into the world. “I’m an artist, man,” said John Lennon. “Give me a tuba, and I’ll get you something out of it.”

The best way to get started on th
e path to sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn, and make a commitment to learning it in front of others. … Don’t worry, for now, about how you’ll make money or a career off it. Forget about being an expert or a professional, and wear your amateurism (your heart, your love) on your sleeve. Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.

Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad

When I’m working on my art, I don’t feel like Odysseus. I feel more like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the hill. When I’m working, I don’t feel like Luke Skywalker. I feel more like Phil Connors in the movie Groundhog Day.

For those of you who haven’t seen it or need your memory refreshed, Groundhog Day is a 1993 comedy starring Bill Murray as Phil Connors, a weatherman who gets stuck in a time loop and wakes up every morning on February 2nd—Groundhog Day—in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, home of Punxsutawney Phil, the famous groundhog who, depending on if he sees his shadow or not, predicts whether there will be six more weeks of winter. Phil, the weatherman, hates Punxsutawney, and the town becomes a kind of purgatory for him. He tries everything he can think of, but he can’t make it out of town, and he can’t get to February 3rd. Winter, for Phil, is endless. No matter what he does, he still wakes up in the same bed every morning to face the same day.

In a moment of despair, Phil turns to a couple drunks at a bowling alley bar and asks them, “what would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”

It’s the question Phil has to answer to advance the plot of the movie, but it’s also the question we have to answer to advance the plot of our lives.

I think how you answer this question is your art.

… The reason is this: The creative life is not linear. It’s not a straight line from Point A to Point B. It’s more like a loop, or a spiral, in which you keep coming back to a new starting point after every project. No matter how successful you get, no matter what level of achievement you reach, you will never really “arrive.” Other than death, there is no finish line or retirement for the creative person. “Even after you have achieved greatness,” writes musician Ian Svenonius, “the infinitesimal cadre who even noticed will ask, ‘What’s next?’”

The truly prolific artists I know always have that question answered, because they have figured out a daily practice—a repeatable way of working that insulates them from success, failure and the chaos of the outside world. They have all identified what they want to spend their time on, and they work at it every day, no matter what. Whether their latest thing is universally rejected, ignored or acclaimed, they know they’ll still get up tomorrow and do their work.

We have so little control over our lives. The only thing we can really control is what we spend our days on. What we work on and how hard we work on it. It might seem like a stretch, but I really think the best thing you can do if you want to make art is to pretend you’re starring in your own remake of Groundhog Day: Yesterday’s over, tomorrow may never come, there’s just today and what you can do with it.

All excerpts © Austin Kleon / Workman Publishing.

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To ring in the occasion, we’re revisiting Blitt’s Design Matters With Debbie Millman interview from 2017, in which he discusses some of his most famous New Yorker covers (he has contributed more than 100 since 1992), as well as his process at large.

As he says in the interview, “I thought that art was something higher than wisecracks. Little did I know … there’s tremendous art in wisecracks.”

We’re glad to see that the highest journalism authority in the land agrees.

As a complement to the interview, here are 17 quotes by the hilarious and self-effacing Blitt. Collectively, they offer a keyhole view into his genius.

“I was born a smart aleck. A wisenheimer. A jokester, punster and fool. It is no picnic, feeling the need to be funny all the time. I remember my dad, similarly afflicted with the jester gene, coming home from work one day with a black eye; he’d made a comment to someone with no sense of humor, apparently.” (source)“I don’t know what I was thinking when I was starting out. I was hoping I’d get paid to draw realistic pictures of hockey players. I still hold that hope alive.” (source)“I don’t really know what makes someone want to be a cartoonist, but part of it is trying to get in trouble. You’re looking where the line is and seeing how much you can step over it, and I mean, I do that in my personal life, too. I try to anger and piss people off a little bit to try to see what I can get away with.” (source)“I didn’t always know I’d be doing this sort of work for a living, god no. And I’m still expecting someone who looks like they’re in charge to walk into the room at any moment and tell me to stop—I’ve had my chance, the fun is over.” (source)“I have no boundaries. I do anything at anyone’s expense.” (source)“A cartoonist’s style is created by weaknesses and personal restrictions as much as strengths.” (source)“I have no idea where ideas come from. It does seem like a mysterious, unconscious thing. Though I’m pretty sure that most of my lousy ideas—when no inspiration makes itself available—are the result of calculated, paint-by-numbers thinking.” (source)“I’ll just redraw things a million times. I’m never happy with what I’ve done. I’ll draw it once and think I can do a better job of it. I’ll draw it again, and I’ll go back to the first one and say ‘that was a little bit better’ and start a third one. And so it’s nice to have someone come and actually take it away from me. Usually a courier is sent and waits outside the door, and they just pull it away from me.” (source)“Really, the first attempt—sometimes the second one—is generally the best. A drawing loses life after that. I wish someone had told me that a long time ago. I probably wouldn’t have listened. And it’s still a hard thing for me to obey. But a drawing with life is really the best result you can get. I’ll take a mediocre likeness over a perfect one if it’s got more life in the line.” (source)“At 59 years old, I’ve given up wishing I was someone else, for the most part. I do wish my color palette was a little more vibrant, but even when I consciously try and do something about it, everything still looks kind of pale and drab. It’s hard to change who you are.” (source)“It just seems like every picture of Trump is a revelation. Any angle. I didn’t know a person could look like that. His facial expressions—he really is a cartoon. He’s like an instruction manual of how to caricature someone. I mean it’s just all there.” (source)“… For a while, it was the sweep of his hair, like frozen yogurt in slow motion, that captivated me. Then, his mildly prissy overbite was all the rage. His chin and secondary and tertiary chins are what I’m stuck on these days.” (source)“A cartoonist deals in clichés. Some are offensive, but some aren’t offensive. You tweak them if you can.” (source)“I can’t watch TV news anymore; it’s always people yelling at each other or—worse—people agreeing with each other.” (source)“Hobbies? Well, when I’ve applied a swath of watercolor to a page, and it’s going to take a little while to dry, I’ll often run over to the electric piano and pound out some chords. A lot of illustrators and cartoonists are amateur musicians, and it’s not hard to see why: the immediate gratification and improvisational fun found in making jazz or popular music is a nice antidote to the patience it takes to execute an image that tells a story in an exacting technique like watercolor.” (source)“I’m an adequatist! I would be happy with something adequate. Perfection’s out of the question.” (source)“I took my son Sam to a movie recently. I was dropping him off to meet a bunch of friends there. So I dropped him off, and a bunch of his little friends were there. And he, like, didn’t want me to come anywhere near them. He wanted me to drop him off and not say hi to friends. And I was, like, offended. You know, I’m just going to say hi to them. I guess I was just too uncool for him. And I said: But I did the cover of The New Yorker last week!” (source)

If you’ve ever met James Victore—or studied his design, heard one of his talks, read his books—you know, quite simply, there’s no one like him.

It starts from the moment you see him, the gunslinger mustache giving way to razor-edged turns of phrase and a design style that pummels you with the force of a barroom brawler. Aptly described as part Darth Vader and part Yoda, he is, unabashedly and brashly, himself.

As Victore has observed, “People have lived these lives before and left us some directions—their quotes are our access points.”

And thus to ring in this episode of Design Matters, here are 28 of his own.

Victore, photographed for PRINT in 2016 by Brent Taylor

“I learned to design the same way I learned to swear: I had to pick it up in the street.” (source) “I was born to do this job. I was born to be a graphic designer. As a kid, I drew and made wordplay constantly. Malcolm Gladwell has this idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery at something. My 10,000 hours started when I was 5.” (source) “I spent a little bit of time in design school and I felt that we all went in with this empty shoe box and we were handed out these particular tools and these particular answers, and as soon as we got out of school, we would be a success if we looked alike and acted alike. I thought that was the job. I think you could work in New York city and be very successful doing that, having no opinion, having no look, just melding to the client. It’s just not something that I can personally do.” (source) “From Paul [Bacon] I learned to how to throw your shoe at talk radio programs. I learned about wine. I learned about cars and auto racing. But mostly I learned about jazz. I learned how to use my ears. I learned why Fats Waller is relevant. I learned how good Jelly Roll Morton really is. And also how to listen to Philip Glass, James Brown and rap. In other words, he taught me everything I needed to be a designer.” (source) “Most people start by stopping. An utterly genius idea pops into your head—start a business, write a story, quit your crappy job—and you let it die a death of inertia. You fail to start. This makes complete sense; as Newton’s first law tells us, an object at rest—like your ass—tends to stay at rest. For any creation, any new project or new move in your life, starting is the hardest part. Too many of us are waiting to start. But while you are waiting, others are already living the life you want—the only difference between them and you is that they started.” (source) “I don’t think there’s a point in my life that I’ve ever decided not to take a risk. For better or worse, safety and comfort don’t interest me. To me, risk means feeling and being alive.” (source) “We do advertising, we do posters, we do all these things; we’re doing product design and customizing stuff—it’s all the same to me. I don’t really want any one discipline. There’s this wonderful line about being a samurai: A samurai doesn’t have one favorite tool.” (source) “I hand-pick my clients, that way I can fire them. Clients need to be educated to what we can, and can’t, do for them. This takes a lot of work. Talking the talk, as they say. Not all of us are good at it or even interested in it. Rarely does a good one just walk in the door. We have to make them. I also pick and find clients that I am interested in. I can’t work for Campbell’s soup. Campbell’s soup does not give me an erection.” (source) “Part of the problem these days is there’s so much choice. At some point, someone just has to say: We’re going to do it like this because I want to do it this way. Because, if you don’t, you’re going to be churning out oatmeal. You look at some graphic design today, and you can tell that nobody is in charge.” (source) “No amount of fame feeds this thing. It has to come from the inside. I don’t work for money. I’ve never worked for money. Don’t chase money because then you get so caught up in what shit costs, and what we don’t realize is that shuts the rest of our lives down. If you’re a graphic designer who wants to make a lot of money and do good work, there’s a good chance that you won’t do either of those things.” (source) “The larger audience out there responds to work when they can see that a real human being made it. So much of the work today just looks as though it was spit out by a computer. It doesn’t have any fingerprints or cat hair on it.” (source) “When we see freedom in someone’s work, it frees us up; when we see intelligence in someone’s work, it makes us smarter; and when we see vulnerability in the work, we feel closer, more human.” (source) “I’m doing a job right now for Bobbi Brown cosmetics, and using a Sumi-e brush with India ink precisely because I suck at it. It’s so much more interesting than being good at something—I like the idea of chance and mistakes. I can’t wait until I’m 80 and have that shaky old-man handwriting.” (source) “Our industry changes
all the time, and keeping up with it is like chasing a bus cross-country. We also change. The motives that drove us to become creative at 21 now have grown, developed and want more, different and uncharted. If I never changed careers, I’d still be doing book jackets for books I don’t care about with budgets fit for 10-year olds. I’m almost forced to seek more beauty and wealth and horizons.” (source) “Part of the teaching thing is to give back. That was the original intent: to give back. The other thing is, if you do a really good job of teaching, it’s a selfish occupation—I get so much more out of these guys than they get. And the third thing is I have a history of hotheads and grassfires that I want to be associated with.” (source) “This is a radical idea I’ve been developing over the last few years: When you see your work as a gift, your goal is no longer to satisfy a boss or client—or even to gain a paycheck. It changes how you think about work, why you do it, what you make and who you work for. You work to make yourself happy, and in turn speak directly to your audience. Because you now give them something of value—a piece of yourself.” (source) “Weird is good; it’s an anomaly and it’s unique. I teach on the simple premise that the things that made you weird as a kid make you great as an adult—but only if you pay attention to them. If you look at any ‘successful’ person, they are probably being paid to play out the goofiness or athleticism or nerdiness or curiosity they already possessed as a child. Unfortunately for most people, somewhere along the road their weirdness was taught out of them or, worse, shamed out of them. Crushed by the need to ‘fit in,’ they left their quirks and special powers behind. But it is our flaws that make us interesting. We need to not only hang on to them, but hone them.” (source) “Many of my peers see this as dangerous—I am the fox in Pinocchio, leading the good little boys and girls off to a life in the circus. ‘But however will they find a job?!’ they ask. When pushed to invite danger into their work, my students find something much better than a job—they learn to create their own place in this world.” (source) “Often I am told by young designers that they wish to ‘someday’ be as brave and as opinionated in their work as I am. I have to ask them why they are waiting.” (source) “Designers possess such amazing powers through words and imagery, it boggles my mind why we don’t wield it.” (source) “‘Mr Victore,’ he said, ‘I hear what you mean about taking risks in your career … but I’ve got rent to pay.’ …‘What’s your name?’ I asked.‘Thomas,’ he said.‘Thomas, here’s your headstone: Here lies Thomas. He would have done great work, but he had to pay the rent.’” (source) “Looking back is a trap. I could say that I wish I had a million dollars, but the amount of shit I would have to swim through for that wouldn’t come near the reward.” (source) “Wall Street is run by fear and greed. Social media is fueled by fear and ego—I know this because my ego is in charge of my Instagram account. From the outside everything looks easy and has a nice soundtrack, but the truth is we are all just making it up and trying to attract more attention as we go. Thou shalt not covet they neighbor’s Instagram account.” (source) “Whenever I’m at a loss for ideas I go for a run or to a bar. We’re all guilty of sitting at our desks, forcing meat through a grinder and hoping for excellence to gracefully emerge from the other end. Get out of the studio, wander, play, take a nap. Only when you step outside of your daily habits will chaos, madness and life-changing opportunities find you.” (source) “The world is brimming with would-be authors, dancers and entrepreneurs full of bright and innovative ideas, holding the future of creativity inside them. Most of their ideas will never make it to market and their talents will remain silenced. The biggest reason for this is too much thinking and not enough doing, too much worry and not enough action. Success goes to those who are moving. … You can’t be a mover and a shaker if you’re standing still.” (source) “I feel like a smoker who has just quit and can finally smell dinner. I am just realizing the full potential of my work and I now want to wield it like a large club with nails in it.” (source) “Bring the fire. Bring the fire that, quite frankly, god gave you.” (source) “Learn everything. Then forget it. THEN design.” (source)

Christoph Niemann is one of the best illustrators working today.

He’s also dryly hilarious. Mindboggingly brilliant. Creatively tortured by design; on the page his work seems playful, simple, created with confidence and ease. It’s anything but—and there’s a great reminder in that.

As a complement to this episode of Design Matters, here is a collection of 26 Niemann quotes, with some images from his new book The Paper throughout. Sometimes we riff on guests of the show at length in this space, but some creatives are best left to speak for themselves. In their words, the raw materials of their output can be found.

“As a schoolboy, I had one big problem: I had fantastic handwriting but it came in 10 completely different versions. And it changed every five lines. From loose and flowery to sloping. I always got into trouble over my handwriting.” (source)“You start not by creating things but by looking at art. And when you read that book, or when you look at a drawing or listen to that music and something lights up in you and explains the entire world … this is such an incredible thrill that you think, if experiencing art is so fantastic, how great must it be to actually make art? And that’s how they lure you into art school.” (source)“I think the most important difference between a person who is successful in art and a person who is not successful is how much frustration a person can take without losing this childish enthusiasm.” (source)

“If someone approaches me with a fixed idea, the conversation is pretty much over. Not because their ideas are bad, but if you already know what you want to do, there are better people out there to execute it to your liking. The reputation that brought me assignments was: ‘We can call him when we don’t know what to do.’ I was a bit like the fire department.” (source)“I found that what I enjoyed most was connecting with the reader through the poetry and absurdity of our common experiences.” (source)“I am a designer by education, and my approach to styles in illustration is similar to a designer and his typefaces. There are styles that are fashionable, and sometimes I find myself trying to find a venue for a spiffy pencil drawing, but ultimately it is always the idea that dictates what style I must use. Every idea needs a pretty exact amount of realism/abstraction, certain emotional warmth or cold graphic objectivity. I try to constantly broaden my range, and adapt new ways of solving problems, not out of vanity, but because it’s essential to my approach.” (source)

“Editing, editing, editing. I always want to make something so that at the end it feels like that was the only possible solution. Inevitability.” (source)“‘I’m not good enough!’ This is something I think a lot of people can relate to. I hear a lot about that in talks and conferences. And the consensus is, ‘relax, don’t be so hard on yourself.’ I absolutely disagree. I think the solution is practice and become better. It’s writing, it’s drawing, it’s taking photographs, it’s coding.” (source)“I absolutely think of myself as a problem solver! Any assignment, whether self-generated or from a client, needs to be broken down into a set of problems that I then try to solve—a process that is a lot less sexy than one would think. I always thought this would feel like playing ping pong with ballet moves, but it’s more like doing math while lifting weights. You must never forget, though, that nobody enjoys looking at something that feels like it was created through lifting weights while doing math. It is crucial that once you have solved the problem, you spend just as much time making things look like you just came up with it as you were sitting in a pretty café, dreamily slurping your macchiato.” (source)

“The only path to success leads through mountains of killed ideas.” (source)“I can say that the steps that lead to my finished drawings are very unspectacular. It’s more like with a sculpture, where I chip away piece by piece from a stone and slowly get closer to the final form—to hopefully have an elegant form where the reader is in any kind of way emotionally touched.” (source)“It’s not about having a goal but instead about thinking, Where does that object take me? I could take a photo of that chair and probably turn it into a reasonably good giraffe. But that is of course predictable. We have these stock images of life in our head, and only when you start looking at real life and the imperfections do things start to become fun.” (source)

“Drawing is an amazing exercise in feeling and in looking.” (source)“Whether for assignments or free works, the most important currency is the principle trust that people put in you. You have to earn it.” (source)“I can be efficient with my workday and technology and everything, but one thing you must not—and cannot—be efficient with is creating. Once you start thinking about what works faster or better, you start ruling out mistakes, and that’s really awful. So I really try to be as inefficient as possible.” (source)

“On the one hand, my work is my greatest reason for being afraid of going insane. On the other hand, I think that it’s the single thing that has kept me from going insane.” (source)“Imagine you’re a doctor who specializes in difficult surgeries. You excel 500, even 1,000 times. Everyone’s happy that you do this one thing perfectly well every time. If you’re a soccer pro and you score every penalty—happy days! However, in our world, if you scored a perfect penalty, you can never kick it the same way. If you’ve written a novel, the next one has to be different. Even if it’s slightly similar, they’ll say you’ve run out of ideas. The great thing about our job is, you can do new things all the time. The curse is, you have to do new things all the time.” (source)“In the end, with this combination of frustration, resistance and enthusiasm, I hope I will have gained a little more soul.” (source)

“What I try to do with my work is enter your space. Basically, I want you to stay where you are and give you things that redefine everything around you. I can’t take you to faraway places and show you dramatic stories. I’m always limited by our shared experience.” (source)“For me, illustration is closest to writing. When I say ‘I love you,’ with ‘I’ I take this entire universe of all my facets, hopes and dreams. With ‘you’ I do the same for you. And ‘love’ can designate a million things. You take all this meaning and then you put it into three words. It’s so simple, but if said in the right way, it can mean everything. In an ideal world, this is something drawing can do. It’s the incredible power of abstraction.” (source)“I try to squeeze as many animals as I can into business illustrations … like when I do the financial page for The New Yorker. I think animals are always—whether for kids or grown-ups—a fantastic tool for telling stories.” (source)

“Nobody needs an illustration. It is not a necessity. We can ask whether we need newspapers, but let’s say that if I want to see what the weather will be like or learn who won the election, the newspaper tells me what and who and why. Illustration, however, has to create its own relevance.” (source)“Among my colleagues, I would say, probably a majority would rather be acknowledged as an artist in a museum or a gallery. I’m pretty glad I’m not. It probably makes me a more content and happy illustrator. But also, I care so much about magazines and newspapers and books. This is the world that I live in as a consumer, and that’s why I really care about contributing to this world.” (source)“At lifestyle magazines you would think the art director is more important than the editor since two thirds [of the pages] are covered in images. It is not the case. I do not necessarily think this is horrible and we have to change it, but it is a curious fact. We live in a visual world still run by language.” (source)

“Frankly, everybody who is not an illustrator, I pity you!” (source)“When all is said and done, nothing beats the sexiness of black ink on a crisp white drawing pad.” (source)

Perhaps the best lens through which to view Ira Glass … is the world of Harry Potter.

But forget the eponymous wizard himself. When The New York Times asked Glass who his favorite character from children’s literature is, he cited Hermione Granger.

“Harry Potter to me is a bore. His talent arrives as a gift; he’s chosen. Who can identify with that? But Hermione—she’s working harder than anyone, she’s half outsider, right? Half Muggle. She shouldn’t be there at all.”

“Like most people,” Glass has joked, he had no interest in working in radio. At school, he studied semiotics—“an incredibly pretentious literary theory”—which he credits with teaching him to structure a story. In 1978, after his freshman year, Glass started poking around for media jobs. Someone at a rock station pointed him to a new outlet in Washington DC: National Public Radio. Glass walked in and offered to work for free over the summer. He then got hired as a production assistant, and wound up staying at NPR for 17 years … to the dismay of his parents who, unlike Granger’s, were not exactly proud of their son’s chosen path.

“They completely opposed everything that I was doing working in public broadcasting,” Glass said in his 2012 commencement address to Goucher College. “Somehow, my parents are the only Jews in America who do not listen to public radio. They thought I should be a doctor. I was a pre-med student, among other things. … I hope this is not embarrassing to say this: I had my own national radio show; I had been on David Letterman; [and] there had been a New York Times Magazine article about me before they stopped suggesting medical school was still an option.”

Glass’ success on air was anything but instantaneous. In fact, he wasn’t on air in his early years at NPR; he worked as a tape-cutter, and has said he wasn’t competent writing and structuring stories until he was almost 30. He had to work. “I’ve never met anyone who took longer, and I’ve met hundreds of people who work in radio,” he told Transom in 2004. “I was a very corny wannabe humorist. I’m not exactly sure what kept me going. Part of it, I’m sure, was that I didn’t have any other prospects. I certainly didn’t have any other skills.”

He also lacked the voice—the classic baritone of the medium.

“I bring all of this up to say that if you’re someone who wants to make radio stories (or do any kind of creative work), you’re probably going to have a period when things might not come too easily. For some people, that’s just a year. For others, like me, it’s eight years. You might feel completely alone and lost during this period—God knows I did—and I hope it’s reassuring in some small way to hear that what you’re going through is completely normal. Most people go through it. And there are things you can do during this period of mediocrity that will get you to the next step, that will drive you toward skill and competence.”

Glass had a goal: to document regular people’s lives. It would take him a month to do a story that would take another reporter three days, but still, he worked. And in his work, he began to bring new means of storytelling to the fore, such as when he broke down a dense federal spending bill for listeners via singing pie chart—every second of audio translated to $5 billion. He experimented with sound and imagination. With each story he turned in, he made sure it had a moment that would personally amuse him, an original observation that no reporter could replicate. He made sure that every story featured an interaction, an authentic human emotional connection.

And then, he won a MacArthur grant in 1995 to start a new show called “Your Radio Playhouse,” which would eventually become “This American Life.”

Program directors were thrown by the program at first: Some episodes were somber and serious. Others were light and airy. Though it’s synonymous with NPR today, Glass and his crew framed the show as the opposite of the “proper,” “stuffy” NPR model at the time— “We talked about it as a public radio show for people who didn’t necessarily like public radio,” he told The New York Times.

As the Peabody they won soon enough—not to mention an audience in the millions—proved, their brand of innovative journalism and storytelling was a revelation to listeners. And through it all, including the spinoff hit “Serial,” Glass has continued to show us not what radio is, but what it could be.

It’s a statement Glass would likely hate. But all told, Hermione would be proud.

Editor’s Note: The episode is worth a listen for this moment alone:

There is paradox in the work of Marilyn Minter. High fashion meets corrosion. Vulgarity dovetails with beauty. Focus gives way to sheer distortion.

At first it may seem wholly unexpected if not jarring, as it was to the artworld that initially rejected Minter’s now-iconic photographs and paintings as pornographic, profane, and assured her the works would destroy her career. But it might not have been had anyone looked to the juxtaposition that was her childhood.

Born in Shreveport, La., Minter was raised in the self-described “Wild West” of Florida—Fort Lauderdale and Miami. Her father was a gambler, an alcoholic and a hustler, and her mother suffered a nervous breakdown after the pair split. She turned to opiates and pharmaceuticals, leaving Minter to raise herself. (She taught herself to drive at the age of 12.)

[“My mother] was at one time a really beautiful woman, and she was very conscious of the way she looked,” Minter told Lenny in 2016. “She worked on herself all the time, but it was always off, because she pulled out her hair, so she had to wear wigs; she had acrylic nails, but she didn’t take care of them, so fungus would grow underneath them, and it was kind of an off-beauty.”

Even Minter’s color palette can be traced to her upbringing—the 1960s pastels that defined the Florida and Louisiana of her youth still pervade her work today.

As an escape growing up, Minter drew day in and day out. She got her BA from the University of Florida at Gainesville in 1970 (where she was enrolled when she shot the photos of her addicted mother that she would later credit for a career resurgence), and eventually fled the state for graduate school at Syracuse University. After moving to New York City, she launched collaborations with Christof Kohlhofer, and later drew both rage and fascination with her erotic paintings and her exhibition 100 Food Porn.

As she told The Creative Independent in retrospect, “You have to listen to your inner voice no matter what. People love my early work now. At the time, nobody could see it. I’m glad I didn’t destroy that. And it gave me street cred. I lived through being eviscerated by the art world. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? You have a point of view that makes you unique. You’ll be able to see and say things that no one else will be able to see and say.”

Ever since, Minter has done so, seemingly uninterested in ideals, and embracing the world for what it so often is: a paradox.

“Why would we dismiss glamour and fashion when they are giant cultural engines?” she asked The Standard. “Why would we dismiss pornography as shallow and debased? There would be no internet without pornography—wake up! The fashion industry does so much destruction, and it gives so much pleasure. It creates body dysmorphia. It creates a robotic, nonhuman ideal, which is so destructive. But it also gives people so much pleasure. Why can’t we have both? Why can’t we examine that?”

On this episode of Design Matters, Minter and Debbie Millman do just that. This installment was recorded remotely in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic—perhaps harkening back to Design Matters’ origins on the radio, where Millman interviewed guests by phone.

As a complement, here are seven photos from Minter’s archive.

“Big Mouth,” enamel on metal, 2017

“Half & Half,” C-print, 2008

“Last Splash,” enamel on metal, 2012

“Parted (Wangechi Mutu),” enamel on metal, 2010

“Pop Rocks,” enamel on metal, 2009

“Stranded,” enamel on metal, 2013

“Coral Ridge Towers (Mom Making Up With Line),” black and white photograph, 1969

Images: MarilynMinter.net

“Passion.”

It’s an overplayed word that we tend to throw around ad infinium in arts profiles, the semantic satiation quickly kicking in to render it meaningless. Our passion for “passion” has admittedly evolved into a literary crutch—but then, every so often, someone like Lawrence Azerrad emerges and redefines the whole thing.

Three things defined Azerrad as a kid: His love of art, his love of music, and his love of Concorde—that supersonic jet of yesteryear.

He first encountered the latter in a 1:72 scale model kit, and was hooked thereafter, though he didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate why yet: design, which he’d discover at California College of the Arts. As he went about collecting as much Concorde memorabilia as he could get his hands on, he switched his major from illustration to graphic design, graduated, and then embarked on that rare career perfectly calibrated between skill and obsession.

His first stop: Warner Bros. Records. He entered the field at the height of the music industry’s heyday in the mid-90s—which meant a half dozen years of transatlantic flights, elaborate photo shoots and production values that seemed without end, until they ended (but not before Azerrad designed the cover of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ blockbuster album Californication, which got his work into the hands of 15 million listeners). Like so many others in the business, in the early 2000s Azerrad woke to find himself laid off—which wasn’t the worst thing that could happen, as he quickly established a solo practice and continued working on the records that were in progress, such as Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

And still, he collected his beloved Concorde memorabilia—and, incredibly, even scored a ride on the jet of legend with his frequent flyer miles, as Debbie Millman and Azerrad discuss in this episode of Design Matters. That flight would plant the seed for his book Supersonic, a pinnacle of the synthesis between skill and obsession—a working methodology that has defined Azerrad’s output, imbuing fresh life into dead words.

Here, in his own words from the introduction to Supersonic, is a glimpse into passion.

“It began with a Concorde model kit. Even disassembled, the swept-back delta wings affixed to the kit frame excited my imagination and motivated me to glue all the pieces together as quickly as possible.

“The final 1:72 scale version of the world’s first commercial supersonic jet awed me and stirred nascent thoughts of becoming a designer someday. Posed dynamically on the kit’s accompanying stand, it was the embodiment of pure speed. And not just any speed, but Mach 2—twice the speed of sound. Everything about the shape of Concorde announced FAST.

“It made a lasting impression that deepened over the years into a lifelong obsession—if not devotion. At present my ever-growing collection of Concorde memorabilia encompasses about seven hundred items, including parting gifts informally called ‘prezzies’ that were handed out to the well-fed and well-lubricated passengers who could splurge on the ticket price, which was $12,000 round-trip in 2003. This was swag before swag was a thing. Model kits, stamps, matchbooks, flasks, luggage tags, lighters, and more were given to passengers, while some items were proudly stolen by those besotted with the Concorde lifestyle, such as menus designed by Christian Lacroix (b. 1951) and Jean Boggio (b. 1963), dinnerware by Raymond Loewy (1893–1986), and napkin rings by Sir Terence Conran (b. 1931)—all from the twenty-seven years in which Concorde graced the skies.

“Until its last flight in 2003, the silhouette of Concorde streaking through the clouds inspired a rare sense of wonder. Children cheered when they spotted it in the sky. Devotees who lacked the fortune to actually zip through the stratosphere inside its slender fuselage penned poems to honor its soaring beauty. …

“2019 marks fifty years since Concorde’s first successful test flight on March 2 in 1969. It also marks fifteen years since I experienced my one and only Concorde flight from JFK to Heathrow. What had been earmarked for the ‘someday’ column became an imperative when, just shy of my thirtieth birthday, Concorde announced service would be ending. A native Californian, the 9 a.m. departure out of JFK felt like 6 a.m. to me, and then—in a flash—it was over. In between, I made memories I will never forget: the rapid tranquility of check-in, the quiet elegance of the Concorde room, and the object of fascination, parked and waiting on the tarmac.

“I had a window seat. I remember being surprised at how tiny the windows were. But at takeoff was when the difference could really be felt. Every time Concorde departed from JFK, it had to perform a noise abatement maneuver—a sharp roll, turn, then spring out of the turn, almost instantly. I felt like I was in a fighter jet—with a hundred other people. Breaking the sound barrier was barely noticeable. I heard it because I was watching and listening for it—the sound was like someone popped a balloon in the next room. There was lunch, champagne, and flowers in the lavatory. I got the sense that the crew members took great care, and were the best in the field. Even though the fastest flight I had been on was over too quickly, the end of the flight was the real beginning of the journey that led to this book.

“As a designer, I’m particularly interested in Concorde’s design legacy, from the marvel of its aerodynamic perfection and the refinements of its interior cabin experience to the various and sundry objects designed to support and promote its brand. Some of the most interesting items in my collection are the brochures from the 1970s that contextualize the supersonic jet culture, lifestyle, and fashion. The photography, the graphic language, and the typography are all calibrated to excite an aura of speed, glamour, and progress.

“Concorde was the promise of tomorrow delivered in the here and now. It’s time we fully appreciate the lasting significance of our first—and so far sole—supersonic commercial airliner.”

Excerpted from Supersonic by Lawrence Azerrad, © 2018 Prestel Verlag.

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From the briefest of glances, it’s apparent that the artist Lisa Congdon is wholly and profoundly her own.

There’s her work: the lively illustrations that dance across page, canvas and garment.

There’s her personal style: the striking haircuts and tattoos, the bold jewelry and color pairings.

There’s her obsessions and collections: everything from vintage airline tags and golf tees to midcentury paperbacks and antique Hungarian stamps.

There’s her story, and the power and possibility within that story: Congdon began her professional life teaching elementary school and doing nonprofit work … and did not pick up the tools of her future trade until she was in her 30s.

Lisa Congdon is, indeed, wholly her own. So this likely comes as a surprise: Growing up, she abided by the Official Preppy Handbook (yes—a real thing)—which today she dubs “the ultimate handbook for conforming.”

Luckily, when she was 22, she had a catharsis.

“In May of 1990, I graduated from [a] Catholic college and moved the next day, quite fortuitously, to the city of San Francisco, and my entire interior world exploded. I realized after only a week there what Ben Shahn once so eloquently expressed: Conformity was for the birds.”

In Congdon’s new book, Find Your Artistic Voice, she is the ultimate creative sherpa—perhaps because she holds no airs that her artistic brilliance emerged fully formed. Rather, she emerged as herself, and took things bird by bird from there. After all, as she details in her new book, it doesn’t matter who you are, how old you are, or what you do—anyone can find their artistic voice.

Here are some lessons from the book that are explored in this episode of Design Matters.

“One of the things I learned when I began making art was that there was so much more to my story than I ever realized. In fact, once I started to make art, it was like a floodgate opened.”

“While in mainstream culture, idiosyncrasies and differences are often seen as flaws. In our world—the world of artists—they are your strength. They are part of what embody your artistic ‘voice’: all of the characteristics that make your artwork distinct from the artwork of other artists, like how you use colors or symbols, how you apply lines and patterns, your subject matter choices, and what your work communicates.”

“Many athletes set performance goals that are measurable and easily comparable to other athletes in the same sport based on set standards: number of goals scored, seconds or minutes it takes to complete a specific distance, or distance completed in a specific amount of time. As an artist, your goals are things like nonconformity and difference, neither of which is based on a shared set of measurable outcomes.”

“Spend periods of time off the internet and out of books. If you are someone who relies heavily on reference or inspiration to begin a piece of art, try spending an entire week (or more!) making art that uses no reference or inspiration. Notice what happens and how your work evolves.”

“Experimentation is where creativity comes to life.”

“Most artists are so busy simply attempting to produce satisfying work or make a living that they forget that, ultimately, they are making work to communicate their own version of the truth.”

“Sometimes when we bat around the term ‘skill,’ even the most experienced artists will cringe. And that’s because for hundreds of years in the art world, until the late nineteenth century, what it meant to be a skilled artist was wrapped up in something very particular: your ability to render something realistically, typically from life. Embedded in that notion of skill were years and years of painstaking practice and academic precision. That old notion is still woven into the fabric of our idea about what it means to have ‘skill,’ but it’s extremely antiquated.”

“Often, the word style is used interchangeably with voice. So it’s worth mentioning both of these facts: Style is one of the most significant aspects of your voice, and your voice is much more than your style, as you will see. Your artistic style is the look and feel of your work. It includes things like how neat and precise your work is or how loose and messy it is. It includes whether you make work that is representational or abstract, the marks you make in your work, and how those marks are repeated.”

“The consistency in your work is the ultimate expression of your voice. When you find that your work begins to use consistent media and subject matters and has a consistent style over time, this is evidence that your voice is emerging. Does consistency mean you’ll never experiment or try new things? Of course not!”

“One of the first tips my former agent, Lilla Rogers, gave to me was that I should give myself assignments when I didn’t have paid work; I should use the time I had to make the kind of work I wanted to get hired to do by clients. That notion—make the work you want to get as an illustrator—became a mantra that guided my career.”

“Once we’re in the messy, hard, or dark place we were trying to avoid, we realize that the messy, dark, hard part can also be the most interesting, and if we sit for a prolonged period in the discomfort of it, it’s often where our best work comes from. It’s always where we learn. Ultimately, it’s where the magic happens.”

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You’re too old. Too young. You’re a bartender or an accountant, and you have no right dabbling in the arts. You don’t look the part. You tried and failed once, and should throw in the towel, save face.

These are the types of things we tell ourselves when we’re pondering a new creative practice—and these might even be the types of things that are told to us. (Which is worse is anyone’s guess.)

Thankfully, Lynda Barry would throw another negative onto the pile: You’re probably wrong.

Barry is perhaps an unlikely creative hero … but ultimately perhaps the ideal one. She had a nightmarish childhood and found solace in comics, especially Family Circus and the pristine parents portrayed on the page. She learned to draw by copying R. Crumb’s work when she was 12, the same year she dropped acid for the first time. She worked as a janitor as a teen and pondered becoming a flight attendant. Her mother hated when she read—and hated even more that Barry wanted to go to college.

What is remarkable is not only that Barry survived, but that she would distill all of that pain into her brilliant comic documenting two children navigating the world, Ernie Pook’s Comeek. It was new—both in its outlook and its presentation, from its artistic style to the fact that it often featured more text than image. It was utterly, wholly Barry’s own. As The Chicago Tribune wrote in 1984, “You might call it the new wave of cartooning, or you might call it a radical wedding of sound, thought and drawing, but the creator calls it a Comeek. Some entries are just weird, others are sad, and still others are bitingly funny. All are presented in Barry’s ridiculously hard-edged scrawl.”

Of the work, author Rob Rodi declared, “If there’s a last word on childhood, it belongs to Lynda Barry.”

The strip appeared for three vibrant decades, before the mass death of American newspapers ended its run. And then, in 2008, the same year as her final Ernie Pook, she released What It Is, an illustrated exploration of creativity, and suddenly she was a guru of the field. Picture This and Syllabus followed, and November brings Making Comics, the latest bout of her insights into the creative process. Whether they’re a product of her years on the page or things she learned long ago, this episode of Design Matters explores.

As she details at the beginning of Making Comics, “There was a time when drawing and writing were not separated for you. In fact, our ability to write could only come from our willingness and inclination to draw. In the beginning of our writing and reading lives, we drew the letters of our name. The motions each requires hadn’t become automatic yet. There was a lot of variability of shape, order and orientation. The letters were characters, and when certain characters got together a certain order, they spelled your name.”

Barry advertises her live writing and art workshops as being ideal for non-writers and non-artists; ideal for those who have given up on the crafts—and yet still feel that nagging within themselves.

Over the years, she has quietly rescued some of her students’ discarded and abandoned drawings from the recycling bin. And in Making Comics, she immortalizes many of them. One wonders how a former student might react upon discovering such a piece in Barry’s book. Perhaps that is her ultimate lesson to them—and the rest of us.

For longtime listeners of Design Matters, this episode is a homecoming of sorts.

More than a decade ago, when the show was on Voice of America Business radio, season four kicked off with a special pair of guests: Malcolm Gladwell, and his mother, Joyce.

Among the items discussed: The Gladwells’ books. The curious new phenomenon of blogging. The poster of Ronald Reagan that a young Gladwell had in his room (!).

In its early years, Design Matters was broadcast live and took calls from listeners. Riffing off an article Gladwell had written, a caller posed this question to the author: Would you describe yourself as a puzzle, or as a mystery?

“A puzzle is a problem that is solved with an additional piece of information,” Gladwell said. “A mystery is where there is too much information. We all would like to be mysteries, and so I’ll cast my vote there. Whether I actually am or not is another matter entirely, but we all flatter ourselves and think that we are enormously complex and can only be understood through great efforts of analysis. So that’s what I want to be.”

His critics over the years like to believe they have him figured out—he’s a sort of Reader’s Digest of the literati, watering down their work for mass consumption; he does a disservice to the academic world by oversimplifying intensely complex subject matter.

But as this episode of Design Matters shows, to regard Gladwell in that capacity is to … vastly oversimplify the matter.

Today, Gladwell sits upon a mountain of words—his own, in books and articles, but also the words of others, in interviews and dialogues and reviews of every kind. And as writers of the latter pieces have detailed on occasion, he is in fact a bit of a riddle, from his personal life to his true opinion on various matters.

I’ve long collected quotes, and regard them as akin to snapshots. Here, from the scattered halls of the internet and the page, they offer glimpses at their author—often self-deprecating and hilarious, perpetually wise, and yet somehow, despite Gladwell’s ubiquitous presence in our culture, seemingly always a bit ever elusive.

Call him a mystery.

“My earliest memories of my father are of seeing him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy. I did not know it then, but that was one of the most precious gifts a father can give his child.” (source)

“A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.” (source)

“If you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous.” (source)

“I’m not a thinker, a philosopher or any sort of visionary. No. I’m a storyteller, a translator of academic research, and a journalist.” (source)

“What I’ve always thought my books were doing was whetting people’s appetite for the real thing. The mistake is to think these books are ends in themselves. My books are gateway drugs—they lead you to the hard stuff.” (source)

“You’re always, as a journalist, walking this fine line between faithfully representing the complexity of the thing you’re writing about and retaining your readers. The finest piece of journalism in the world is of no use if no one reads it.” (source)

“Most people leave college in their early twenties, and that ends their exposure to the academic world. To me, that’s a tragedy.” (source)

“I’ve considered all my books to be very private, idiosyncratic projects designed to make me happy. And I’m forever surprised when they make other people happy too.” (source)

“Parts that you think are going to make this big impact are ignored, and parts that you wrote in a day are like the ‘10,000 hours’ stuff—I thought no one would ever mention that again. And it is, in fact, all people talk about. Who knew?” (source)

“As a writer, my principal observation about why other writers fail is that they are in too much of a hurry. I don’t think the problem with writing in America right now is a failure of output. I think it’s a failure of quality.” (source)

“In any kind of high-stakes job where the penalty for error is high, you can’t afford to have hares. … Let’s create a safe space for the neurotic tortoise.” (source)

“I’m reminded of my father, who was a mathematician. There were problems he worked on for 20 years—not exclusively, but he started it, put it aside and then one day the answer would pop into his head. If you try to rush your work in that situation, you’re going to close yourself off to certain kinds of breakthroughs.” (source)

“If I was president of the United States, I’d rather be right than interesting. If I was CEO of a company, I’d rather be right than interesting. But I’m a journalist—what journalist would rather be right than interesting? Consistency is the most overrated of all human virtues. I’m someone who changes his mind all the time.” (source)

“I didn’t want the book to be too dark, but all great stories have some hint of tragedy in them. I’d rather make people cry than laugh, so this book is about trying to make people cry.” (so
urce)

“The world we could have is so much richer than the world we have settled for.” (source)

“The key to good decision-making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.” (source)

“It’s no surprise that the people who tend to come up with the most innovative breakthroughs in a given field are people who approach the field from the outside.” (source)

“The most important thing is to never make a decision about yourself that limits your options. Self-conceptions are powerfully limiting. In the act of defining yourself, you start to close off opportunities for change, and that strikes me as being a very foolish thing to do if you’re not 85 years old.” (source)

“Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.” (source)

“Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for 22 minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after 30 seconds.” (source)

“We so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.” (source)

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Jessica Hische, photographed for PRINT magazine by John Keatley.

Writing about Jessica Hische can be a challenge, because most designers probably already know some version of the following: “Lettering artist Jessica Hische is hilarious yet poignant, eloquent yet fond of the occasional F-bomb, elegant yet not averse to tossing back a bourbon—and moreover, every element of her character feels genuine, and every element of it appears in her work.”

I wrote that in 2017, after Debbie Millman and I returned from a PRINT photoshoot of San Francisco’s best creatives, Hische among them. (After 48 sleepless hours of shooting and interviewing more than 70 people, we wound up with two strong cover contenders—one of the inimitable Tim Ferris, and one of the inimitable Hische. We couldn’t choose a favorite, and ran both in back-to-back issues.)

If you feel like you know Jessica Hische a bit from her output, you might not be all that off-base, and you certainly wouldn’t be alone. It’s been written that her work has “personality,” but it might be more accurate to say that her work has presence—her presence. In my experience, what you see is really what you get.

Then again, as this episode of Design Matters and the one that preceded it in 2011 prove, the more you think you know someone’s story, the more you don’t. Something that might blow your mind, given Hische’s prolific output and perpetual talent: She almost didn’t get into art school. (She transferred high schools in 11th grade to be able to take more art classes, and as a result of a late start, emerged not with a massive portfolio, but instead, thankfully, with a teacher’s recommendation.)

And then there’s the reason she started experimenting with lettering in college—she couldn’t afford good fonts. The fateful mailer that landed her a job with the legendary Louise Fili. How she evolved from designer and prodigious lettering artist to bestselling children’s author.

Journalists make a career of briefly talking to people and then presenting them to readers who often presume they’re getting a complete biographic profile. But there’s a great joy in admitting that you’re not telling the full story—rather, every article, every interview, every printed page and spent pixel forms a mosaic that hints at it.

In other words, there’s always more to discover about the minds who create culture today.

This interview offers a deeper conversation with Jessica Hische. As you listen, I recommend dropping by her perpetually delightful and comprehensive website and browsing her work—some of which you might know well, and some of which you might be meeting for the first time.

Last week, Debbie Millman’s podcast Design Matters turned 15, and to ring in the occasion, we’re looking back on 15 years of episodes to spotlight some of our favorites. Within the archive, there are the legends of graphic design—think Massimo Vignelli, Paula Scher, Louise Fili—some of whom appeared on the show in its earliest days when it was broadcast from the Empire State Building using two telephones for audio. There are landmark musicians (Amanda Palmer) and directors (Thomas Kail). There are brilliant authors (Roxane Gay, Chanel Miller). There’s … the Richard Saul Wurman episode.

All told, the 450+ installments of the show form a mosaic of contemporary culture over the past decade and a half.

Here, Millman has illustrated 15 quotes from 15 episodes, which are paired below with the full audio from the archive. For much more, visit the Design Matters website.

She was “V01.” “Jane Doe.” “Emily Doe.”

“Unconscious intoxicated woman.”

Brock Turner sexually assaulted her behind a dumpster after a Stanford University frat party on Jan. 18, 2015. He was up for 14 years in prison. The judge sentenced him to a mere six months. He served three.

During the build-up and trial, her story had long been told by lawyers. The media. Pundits. Anonymous internet commenters galore.

And then, one day, an extraordinary thing happened: Emily Doe told her own account of the assault. First, in court—and then publicly on Buzzfeed, which published the Victim Impact Statement she had read at the sentencing. Intense, poignant and powerful, it went viral. As millions across the world discovered it, it was also read on the floor of Congress. People in her life who didn’t know about her assault forwarded her the statement. Her own therapist, unaware that she was in fact “Emily Doe,” suggested she read it to help process trauma. Meanwhile, the Santa Clara deputy district attorney gave her grocery bags filled with thousands of letters from readers. (“The statement had created a room, a place for survivors to step into and speak aloud their heaviest truths, to revisit the untouched parts of their past.”)

With the statement, she had begun to regain her voice—and in 2019, she sought to reclaim her identity. She had a name: Chanel Miller. And she was ready to tell her full story.

As Miller discusses her journey on this episode of Design Matters, we’re republishing her Victim Impact Statement from the County of Santa Clara Office of the District Attorney. As Vice President Joe Biden wrote in an open letter to Miller after reading the account on Buzzfeed, “I do not know your name—but your words are forever seared on my soul. Words that should be required reading for men and women of all ages.”

We agree. It’s a piece of writing that should be published, and read, in full. We’ll also embed a video of Miller reading the statement below.

“V01”; “Emily Doe”; “unconscious intoxicated woman.”

Her name is Chanel Miller, no matter how much Brock Turner and the world around her tried to say otherwise.

Your honor,

If it is all right, for the majority of this statement I would like to address the defendant directly.

You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me, and that’s why we’re here today.

On January 17th, 2015, it was a quiet Saturday night at home. My dad made some dinner and I sat at the table with my younger sister who was visiting for the weekend. I was working full time and it was approaching my bed time. I planned to stay at home by myself, watch some TV and read, while she went to a party with her friends. Then, I decided it was my only night with her, I had nothing better to do, so why not, there’s a dumb party ten minutes from my house, I would go, dance weird like a fool, and embarrass my younger sister. On the way there, I joked that undergrad guys would have braces. My sister teased me for wearing a beige cardigan to a frat party like a librarian. I called myself “big mama”, because I knew I’d be the oldest one there. I made silly faces, let my guard down, and drank liquor too fast not factoring in that my tolerance had significantly lowered since college.

The next thing I remember I was in a gurney in a hallway. I had dried blood and bandages on the backs of my hands and elbow. I thought maybe I had fallen and was in an admin office on campus. I was very calm and wondering where my sister was. A deputy explained I had been assaulted. I still remained calm, assured he was speaking to the wrong person. I knew no one at this party. When I was finally allowed to use the restroom, I pulled down the hospital pants they had given me, went to pull down my underwear, and felt nothing. I still remember the feeling of my hands touching my skin and grabbing nothing. I looked down and there was nothing. The thin piece of fabric, the only thing between my vagina and anything else, was missing and everything inside me was silenced. I still don’t have words for that feeling. In order to keep breathing, I thought maybe the policemen used scissors to cut them off for evidence.

Then, I felt pine needles scratching the back of my neck and started pulling them out my hair. I thought maybe, the pine needles had fallen from a tree onto my head. My brain was talking my gut into not collapsing. Because my gut was saying, help me, help me.

I shuffled from room to room with a blanket wrapped around me, pine needles trailing behind me, I left a little pile in every room I sat in. I was asked to sign papers that said “Rape Victim” and I thought something has really happened. My clothes were confiscated and I stood naked while the nurses held a ruler to various abrasions on my body and photographed them. The three of us worked to comb the pine needles out of my hair, six hands to fill one paper bag. To calm me down, they said it’s just the flora and fauna, flora and fauna. I had multiple swabs inserted into my vagina and anus, needles for shots, pills, had a nikon pointed right into my spread legs. I had long, pointed beaks inside me and had my vagina smeared with cold, blue paint to check for abrasions.

After a few hours of this, they let me shower. I stood there examining my body beneath the stream of water and decided, I don’t want my body anymore. I was terrified of it, I didn’t know what had been in it, if it had been contaminated, who had touched it. I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else.

On that morning, all that I was told was that I had been found behind a dumpster, potentially penetrated by a stranger, and that I should get retested for HIV because results don’t always show up immediately. But for now, I should go home and get back to my normal life. Imagine stepping back into the world with only that information. They gave me huge hugs, and then I walked out of the hospital into the parking lot wearing the new sweatshirt and sweatpants they provided me, as they had only allowed me to keep my necklace and shoes.

My sister picked me up, face wet from tears and contorted in anguish. Instinctively and immediately, I wanted to take away her pain. I smiled at her, I told her to look at me, I’m right here, I’m okay, everything’s okay, I’m right here. My hair is washed and clean, they gave me the strangest shampoo, calm down, and look at me. Look at these funny new sweatpants and sweatshirt, I look like a P.E. teacher, let’s go home, let’s eat something. She did not know that beneath my sweats, I had scratches and bandages on my skin, my vagina was sore and had become a st
range, dark color from all the prodding, my underwear was missing, and I felt too empty to continue to speak. That I was also afraid, that I was also devastated. That day we drove home and for hours my sister held me.

My boyfriend did not know what happened, but called that day and said, “I was really worried about you last night, you scared me, did you make it home okay?” I was horrified. That’s when I learned I had called him that night in my blackout, left an incomprehensible voicemail, that we had also spoken on the phone, but I was slurring so heavily he was scared for me, that he repeatedly told me to go find my sister. Again, he asked me, “What happened last night? Did you make it home okay?” I said yes, and hung up to cry.

I was not ready to tell my boyfriend or parents that actually, I may have been raped behind a dumpster, but I don’t know by who or when or how. If I told them, I would see the fear on their faces, and mine would multiply by tenfold, so instead I pretended the whole thing wasn’t real.

I tried to push it out of my mind, but it was so heavy I didn’t talk, I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t interact with anyone. After work, I would drive to a secluded place to scream. I didn’t talk, I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t interact with anyone, and I became isolated from the ones I loved most. For one week after the incident, I didn’t get any calls or updates about that night or what happened to me. The only symbol that proved that it hadn’t just been a bad dream, was the sweatshirt from the hospital in my drawer.

One day, I was at work, scrolling through the news on my phone, and came across an article. In it, I read and learned for the first time about how I was found unconscious, with my hair disheveled, long necklace wrapped around my neck, bra pulled out of my dress, dress pulled off over my shoulders and pulled up above my waist, that I was butt naked all the way down to my boots, legs spread apart, and had been penetrated by a foreign object by someone I did not recognize. This was how I learned what happened to me, sitting at my desk reading the news at work. I learned what happened to me the same time everyone else in the world learned what happened to me. That’s when the pine needles in my hair made sense, they didn’t fall from a tree. He had taken off my underwear, his fingers had been inside of me. I don’t even know this person. I still don’t know this person. When I read about me like this, I said, this can’t be me. This can’t be me. I could not digest or accept any of this information. I could not imagine my family having to read about this online. I kept reading. In the next paragraph, I read something that I will never forgive; I read that according to him, I liked it. I liked it. Again, I do not have words for these feelings.

At the bottom of the article, after I learned about the graphic details of my own sexual assault, the article listed his swimming times. She was found breathing, unresponsive with her underwear six inches away from her bare stomach curled in fetal position. By the way, he’s really good at swimming. Throw in my mile time if that’s what we’re doing. I’m good at cooking, put that in there, I think the end is where you list your extra-curriculars to cancel out all the sickening things that’ve happened.

The night the news came out I sat my parents down and told them that I had been assaulted, to not look at the news because it’s upsetting, just know that I’m okay, I’m right here, and I’m okay. But halfway through telling them, my mom had to hold me because I could no longer stand up. I was not okay. The night after it happened, he said he didn’t know my name, said he wouldn’t be able to identify my face in a lineup, didn’t mention any dialogue between us, no words, only dancing and kissing. Dancing is a cute term; was it snapping fingers and twirling dancing, or just bodies grinding up against each other in a crowded room? I wonder if kissing was just faces sloppily pressed up against each other? When the detective asked if he had planned on taking me back to his dorm, he said no. When the detective asked how we ended up behind the dumpster, he said he didn’t know. He admitted to kissing other girls at that party, one of whom was my own sister who pushed him away. He admitted to wanting to hook up with someone. I was the wounded antelope of the herd, completely alone and vulnerable, physically unable to fend for myself, and he chose me. Sometimes I think, if I hadn’t gone, then this never would’ve happened. But then I realized, it would have happened, just to somebody else. You were about to enter four years of access to drunk girls and parties, and if this is the foot you started off on, then it is right you did not continue.

The night after it happened, he said he thought I liked it because I rubbed his back. A back rub. Never mentioned me voicing consent, never mentioned us speaking, a back rub.

One more time, in public news, I learned that my ass and vagina were completely exposed outside, my breasts had been groped, fingers had been jabbed inside me along with pine needles and debris, my bare skin and head had been rubbing against the ground behind a dumpster, while an erect freshman was humping my half naked, unconscious body. But I don’t remember, so how do I prove I didn’t like it.

I thought there’s no way this is going to trial; there were witnesses, there was dirt in my body, he ran but was caught. He’s going to settle, formally apologize, and we will both move on. Instead, I was told he hired a powerful attorney, expert witnesses, private investigators who were going to try and find details about my personal life to use against me, find loopholes in my story to invalidate me and my sister, in order to show that this sexual assault was in fact a misunderstanding. That he was going to go to any length to convince the world he had simply been confused.

I was not only told that I was assaulted, I was told that because I couldn’t remember, I technically could not prove it was unwanted. And that distorted me, damaged me, almost broke me. It is the saddest type of confusion to be told I was assaulted and nearly raped, blatantly out in the open, but we don’t know if it counts as assault yet. I had to fight for an entire year to make it clear that there was something wrong with this situation.

When I was told to be prepared in case we didn’t win, I said, I can’t prepare for that. He was guilty the minute I woke up. No one can talk me out of the hurt he caused me. Worst of all, I was warned, because he now knows you don’t remember, he is going to get to write the script. He can say whatever he wants and no one can contest it. I had no power, I had no voice, I was defenseless. My memory loss would be used against me. My testimony was weak, was incomplete, and I was made to believe that perhaps, I am not enough to win this. That’s so damaging. His attorney constantly reminded the jury, the only one we can believe is Brock, because she doesn’t remember. That helplessness was traumatizing.

Instead of taking time to heal, I was taking time to recall the night in excruciating detail, in order to prepare for the attorney’s questions that would be invasive, aggressive, and designed to steer me off course, to contradict myself, my sister, phrased in ways to manipulate my answers. Instead of his attorney saying, Did you notice any abrasions? He said, You didn’t notice any abrasions, right? This was a game of strategy, as if I could be tricked out of my own worth. The sexual assault had been so clear, but instead, here I was at the trial, answering question like:

How old are you? How much do you weigh? What did you eat that day? Well what did you have for dinner? Who made dinner? Did you drink with dinner? No, not even water? When did you drink? How much did you drink? What container did you drink out of? Who gave you the drink? How much do you usually drink? Who dropped you off at this party? At w
hat time? But where exactly? What were you wearing? Why were you going to this party? What’ d you do when you got there? Are you sure you did that? But what time did you do that? What does this text mean? Who were you texting? When did you urinate? Where did you urinate? With whom did you urinate outside? Was your phone on silent when your sister called? Do you remember silencing it? Really because on page 53 I’d like to point out that you said it was set to ring. Did you drink in college? You said you were a party animal? How many times did you black out? Did you party at frats? Are you serious with your boyfriend? Are you sexually active with him? When did you start dating? Would you ever cheat? Do you have a history of cheating? What do you mean when you said you wanted to reward him? Do you remember what time you woke up? Were you wearing your cardigan? What color was your cardigan? Do you remember any more from that night? No? Okay, we’ll let Brock fill it in.

I was pummeled with narrowed, pointed questions that dissected my personal life, love life, past life, family life, inane questions, accumulating trivial details to try and find an excuse for this guy who didn’t even take the time to ask me for my name, who had me naked a handful of minutes after seeing me. After a physical assault, I was assaulted with questions designed to attack me, to say see, her facts don’t line up, she’s out of her mind, she’s practically an alcoholic, she probably wanted to hook up, he’s like an athlete right, they were both drunk, whatever, the hospital stuff she remembers is after the fact, why take it into account, Brock has a lot at stake so he’s having a really hard time right now.

And then it came time for him to testify. This is where I became revictimized. I want to remind you, the night after it happened he said he never planned to take me back to his dorm. He said he didn’t know why we were behind a dumpster. He got up to leave because he wasn’t feeling well when he was suddenly chased and attacked. Then he learned I could not remember.

So one year later, as predicted, a new dialogue emerged. Brock had a strange new story, almost sounded like a poorly written young adult novel with kissing and dancing and hand holding and lovingly tumbling onto the ground, and most importantly in this new story, there was suddenly consent. One year after the incident, he remembered, oh yeah, by the way she actually said yes, to everything, so.

He said he had asked if I wanted to dance. Apparently I said yes. He’d asked if I wanted to go to his dorm, I said yes. Then he asked if he could finger me and I said yes. Most guys don’t ask, Can I finger you? Usually there’s a natural progression of things, unfolding consensually, not a Q and A. But apparently I granted full permission. He’s in the clear.

Even in this story, there’s barely any dialogue; I only said a total of three words before he had me half naked on the ground. I have never been penetrated after three words. He didn’t claim to hear me speak one full sentence that night, so in the news when it says we “met”, I’m not sure I would go so far as to say that. Future reference, if you are confused about whether a girl can consent, see if she can speak an entire sentence. You couldn’t even do that. Just one coherent string of words. If she can’t do that, then no. Don’t touch her, just no. Not maybe, just no. Where was the confusion? This is common sense, human decency.

According to him, the only reason we were on the ground was because I fell down. Note; if a girl falls help her get back up. If she is too drunk to even walk and falls, do not mount her, hump her, take off her underwear, and insert your hand inside her vagina. If a girl falls help her up. If she is wearing a cardigan over her dress don’t take it off so that you can touch her breasts. Maybe she is cold, maybe that’s why she wore the cardigan. If her bare ass and legs are rubbing the pinecones and needles, while the weight of you pushes into her, get off her.

Next in the story, two people approached you. You ran because you said you felt scared. I argue that you were scared because you’d be caught, not because you were scared of two terrifying Swedish grad students. The idea that you thought you were being attacked out of the blue was ludicrous. That it had nothing to do with you being on top my unconscious body. You were caught red handed, with no explanation. When they tackled you why didn’t say, “Stop! Everything’s okay, go ask her, she’s right over there, she’ll tell you.” I mean you had just asked for my consent, right? I was awake, right? When the policeman arrived and interviewed the evil Swede who tackled you, he was crying so hard he couldn’t speak because of what he’d seen. Also, if you really did think they were dangerous, you just abandoned a half-naked girl to run and save yourself. No matter which way you frame it, it doesn’t make sense.

Your attorney has repeatedly pointed out, well we don’t know exactly when she became unconscious. And you’re right, maybe I was still fluttering my eyes and wasn’t completely limp yet, fine. His guilt did not depend on him knowing the exact second that I became unconscious, that is never what this was about. I was slurring, too drunk to consent way before I was on the ground. I should have never been touched in the first place. Brock stated, “At no time did I see that she was not responding. If at any time I thought she was not responding, I would have stopped immediately.” Here’s the thing; if your plan was to stop only when I was literally unresponsive, then you still do not understand. You didn’t even stop when I was unconscious anyway! Someone else stopped you. Two guys on bikes noticed I wasn’t moving in the dark and had to tackle you. How did you not notice while on top of me?

You said, you would have stopped and gotten help. You say that, but I want you to explain how you would’ve helped me, step by step, walk me through this. I want to know, if those evil Swedes had not found me, how the night would have played out. I am asking you; Would you have pulled my underwear back on over my boots? Untangled the necklace wrapped around my neck? Closed my legs, covered me? Tucked my bra back into my dress? Would you have helped me pick the needles from my hair? Asked if the abrasions on my neck and bottom hurt? Would you then go find a friend and say, Will you help me get her somewhere warm and soft? I don’t sleep when I think about the way it could have gone if the Swedes had never come. What would have happened to me? That’s what you’ll never have a good answer for, that’s what you can’t explain even after a year.

To sit under oath and inform all of us, that yes I wanted it, yes I permitted it, and that you are the true victim attacked by guys for reasons unknown to you is sick, is demented, is selfish, is stupid. It shows that you were willing to go to any length, to discredit me, invalidate me, and explain why it was okay to hurt me. You tried unyieldingly to save yourself, your reputation, at my expense.

My family had to see pictures of my head strapped to a gurney full of pine needles, of my body in the dirt with my eyes closed, dress hiked up, limbs limp in the dark. And then even after that, my family had to listen to your attorney say, the pictures were after the fact, we can dismiss them. To say, yes her nurse confirmed there was redness and abrasions inside her, but that’s what happens when you finger someone, and he’s already admitted to that. To listen to him use my own sister against me. To listen him attempt to paint of a picture of me, the seductive party animal, as if somehow that would make it so that I had this coming for me. To listen to him say I sounded drunk on the phone because I’m silly and that’s my goofy way of speaking. To point out that in the voicemail, I said I would reward my boyfriend and we all know what I was thinking. I assure you my rewards program is non-transferable, especially t
o any nameless man that approaches me.

The point is, this is everything my family and I endured during the trial. This is everything I had to sit through silently, taking it, while he shaped the evening. It is enough to be suffering. It is another thing to have someone ruthlessly working to diminish the gravity and validity of this suffering. But in the end, his unsupported statements and his attorney’s twisted logic fooled no one. The truth won, the truth spoke for itself.

You are guilty. Twelve jurors convicted you guilty of three felony counts beyond reasonable doubt, that’s twelve votes per count, thirty-six yeses confirming guilt, that’s one hundred percent, unanimous guilt. And I thought finally it is over, finally he will own up to what he did, truly apologize, we will both move on and get better. Then I read your statement.

If you are hoping that one of my organs will implode from anger and I will die, I’m almost there. You are very close. Assault is not an accident. This is not a story of another drunk college hookup with poor decision making. Somehow, you still don’t get it. Somehow, you still sound confused.

I will now take this opportunity to read portions of the defendant’s statement and respond to them.

You said, Being drunk I just couldn’t make the best decisions and neither could she.

Alcohol is not an excuse. Is it a factor? Yes. But alcohol was not the one who stripped me, fingered me, had my head dragging against the ground, with me almost fully naked. Having too much to drink was an amateur mistake that I admit to, but it is not criminal. Everyone in this room has had a night where they have regretted drinking too much, or knows someone close to them who has had a night where they have regretted drinking too much. Regretting drinking is not the same as regretting sexual assault. We were both drunk, the difference is I did not take off your pants and underwear, touch you inappropriately, and run away. That’s the difference.

You said, If I wanted to get to know her, I should have asked for her number, rather than asking her to go back to my room.

I’m not mad because you didn’t ask for my number. Even if you did know me, I would not want be in this situation. My own boyfriend knows me, but if he asked to finger me behind a dumpster, I would slap him. No girl wants to be in this situation. Nobody. I don’t care if you know their phone number or not.

You said, I stupidly thought it was okay for me to do what everyone around me was doing, which was drinking. I was wrong.

Again, you were not wrong for drinking. Everyone around you was not sexually assaulting me. You were wrong for doing what nobody else was doing, which was pushing your erect dick in your pants against my naked, defenseless body concealed in a dark area, where partygoers could no longer see or protect me, and own my sister could not find me. Sipping fireball is not your crime. Peeling off and discarding my underwear like a candy wrapper to insert your finger into my body, is where you went wrong. Why am I still explaining this.

You said, During the trial I didn’t want to victimize her at all. That was just my attorney and his way of approaching the case.

Your attorney is not your scapegoat, he represents you. Did your attorney say some incredulously infuriating, degrading things? Absolutely. He said you had an erection, because it was cold. I have no words.

You said, you are in the process of establishing a program for high school and college students in which you speak about your experience to “speak out against the college campus drinking culture and the sexual promiscuity that goes along with that.”

Speak out against campus drinking culture. That’s what we’re speaking out against? You think that’s what I’ve spent the past year fighting for? Not awareness about campus sexual assault, or rape, or learning to recognize consent. Campus drinking culture. Down with Jack Daniels. Down with Skyy Vodka. If you want talk to high school kids about drinking go to an AA meeting. You realize, having a drinking problem is different than drinking and then forcefully trying to have sex with someone? Show men how to respect women, not how to drink less.

Drinking culture and the sexual promiscuity that goes along with that. Goes along with that, like a side effect, like fries on the side of your order. Where does promiscuity even come into play? I don’t see headlines that read, Brock Turner, Guilty of drinking too much and the sexual promiscuity that goes along with that. Campus Sexaul Assault. There’s your first powerpoint slide.

I have done enough explaining. You do not get to shrug your shoulders and be confused anymore. You do not get to pretend that there were no red flags. You do not get to not know why you ran. You have been convicted of violating me with malicious intent, and all you can admit to is consuming alcohol. Do not talk about the sad way your life was upturned because alcohol made you do bad things. Figure out how to take responsibility for your own conduct.

Lastly you said, I want to show people that one night of drinking can ruin a life.

Ruin a life, one life, yours, you forgot about mine. Let me rephrase for you, I want to show people that one night of drinking can ruin two lives. You and me. You are the cause, I am the effect. You have dragged me through this hell with you, dipped me back into that night again and again. You knocked down both our towers, I collapsed at the same time you did. Your damage was concrete; stripped of titles, degrees, enrollment. My damage was internal, unseen, I carry it with me. You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today.

See one thing we have in common is that we were both unable to get up in the morning. I am no stranger to suffering. You made me a victim. In newspapers my name was “unconscious intoxicated woman”, ten syllables, and nothing more than that. For a while, I believed that that was all I was. I had to force myself to relearn my real name, my identity. To relearn that this is not all that I am. That I am not just a drunk victim at a frat party found behind a dumpster, while you are the All-American swimmer at a top university, innocent until proven guilty, with so much at stake. I am a human being who has been irreversibly hurt, who waited a year to figure out if I was worth something.

My independence, natural joy, gentleness, and steady lifestyle I had been enjoying became distorted beyond recognition. I became closed off, angry, self-deprecating, tired, irritable, empty. The isolation at times was unbearable. You cannot give me back the life I had before that night either. While you worry about your shattered reputation, I refrigerated spoons every night so when I woke up, and my eyes were puffy from crying, I would hold the spoons to my eyes to lessen the swelling so that I could see. I showed up an hour late to work every morning, excused myself to cry in the stairwells, I can tell you all the best places in that building to cry where no one can hear you, the pain became so bad that I had to tell my boss I was leaving, I needed time because continuing day to day was not possible. I used my savings to go as far away as I could possibly be.

I can’t sleep alone at night without having a light on, like a five year old, because I have nightmares of being touched where I cannot wake up, I did this thing where I waited until the sun came up and I felt safe enough to sleep. For three months, I went to bed at six o’clock in the morning.

I used to pride myself on my independence, now I am afraid to go on walks in the evening, to attend social events with drinking among friends where I should be comfortable being. I have become a little barnacle always needing to be at someone’s side, to have my boyfriend standing next to me, sleeping beside me, protecting me. It is embarrassing how feeble I feel, how timidly I move through life, always gu
arded, ready to defend myself, ready to be angry.

You have no idea how hard I have worked to rebuild parts of me that are still weak. It took me eight months to even talk about what happened. I could no longer connect with friends, with everyone around me. I would scream at my boyfriend, my own family whenever they brought this up. You never let me forget what happened to me. At the of end of the hearing, the trial, I was too tired to speak. I would leave drained, silent. I would go home turn off my phone and for days I would not speak. You bought me a ticket to a planet where I lived by myself. Every time a new article come out, I lived with the paranoia that my entire hometown would find out and know me as the girl who got assaulted. I didn’t want anyone’s pity and am still learning to accept victim as part of my identity. You made my own hometown an uncomfortable place to be.

Someday, you can pay me back for my ambulance ride and therapy. But you cannot give me back my sleepless nights. The way I have broken down sobbing uncontrollably if I’m watching a movie and a woman is harmed, to say it lightly, this experience has expanded my empathy for other victims. I have lost weight from stress, when people would comment I told them I’ve been running a lot lately. There are times I did not want to be touched. I have to relearn that I am not fragile, I am capable, I am wholesome, not just livid and weak.

I want to say this. All the crying, the hurting you have imposed on me, I can take it. But when I see my younger sister hurting, when she is unable to keep up in school, when she is deprived of joy, when she is not sleeping, when she is crying so hard on the phone she is barely breathing, telling me over and over she is sorry for leaving me alone that night, sorry sorry sorry, when she feels more guilt than you, then I do not forgive you. That night I had called her to try and find her, but you found me first. Your attorney’s closing statement began, “My sister said she was fine and who knows her better than her sister.” You tried to use my own sister against me. Your points of attack were so weak, so low, it was almost embarrassing. You do not touch her.

If you think I was spared, came out unscathed, that today I ride off into sunset, while you suffer the greatest blow, you are mistaken. Nobody wins. We have all been devastated, we have all been trying to find some meaning in all of this suffering.

You should have never done this to me. Secondly, you should have never made me fight so long to tell you, you should have never done this to me. But here we are. The damage is done, no one can undo it. And now we both have a choice. We can let this destroy us, I can remain angry and hurt and you can be in denial, or we can face it head on, I accept the pain, you accept the punishment, and we move on.

Your life is not over, you have decades of years ahead to rewrite your story. The world is huge, it is so much bigger than Palo Alto and Stanford, and you will make a space for yourself in it where you can be useful and happy. Right now your name is tainted, so I challenge you to make a new name for yourself, to do something so good for the world, it blows everyone away. You have a brain and a voice and a heart. Use them wisely. You possess immense love from your family. That alone can pull you out of anything. Mine has held me up through all of this. Yours will hold you and you will go on.

I believe, that one day, you will understand all of this better. I hope you will become a better more honest person who can properly use this story to prevent another story like this from ever happening again. I fully support your journey to healing, to rebuilding your life, because that is the only way you’ll begin to help others.

Now to address the sentencing. When I read the probation officer’s report, I was in disbelief, consumed by anger which eventually quieted down to profound sadness. My statements have been slimmed down to distortion and taken out of context. I fought hard during this trial and will not have the outcome minimized by a probation officer who attempted to evaluate my current state and my wishes in a fifteen minute conversation, the majority of which was spent answering questions I had about the legal system. The context is also important. Brock had yet to issue a statement, and I had not read his remarks.

My life has been on hold for over a year, a year of anger, anguish and uncertainty, until a jury of my peers rendered a judgment that validated the injustices I had endured. Had Brock admitted guilt and remorse and offered to settle early on, I would have considered a lighter sentence, respecting his honesty, grateful to be able to move our lives forward. Instead he took the risk of going to trial, added insult to injury and forced me to relive the hurt as details about my personal life and sexual assault were brutally dissected before the public. He pushed me and my family through a year of inexplicable, unnecessary suffering, and should face the consequences of challenging his crime, of putting my pain into question, of making us wait so long for justice.

I told the probation officer I do not want Brock to rot away in prison. I did not say he does not deserve to be behind bars. The probation officer’s recommendation of a year or less in county jail is a soft time-out, a mockery of the seriousness of his assaults, and of the consequences of the pain I have been forced to endure. I also told the probation officer that what I truly wanted was for Brock to get it, to understand and admit to his wrongdoing.

Unfortunately, after reading the defendant’s statement, I am severely disappointed and feel that he has failed to exhibit sincere remorse or responsibility for his conduct. I fully respected his right to a trial, but even after twelve jurors unanimously convicted him guilty of three felonies, all he has admitted to doing is ingesting alcohol. Someone who cannot take full accountability for his actions does not deserve a mitigating sentence. It is deeply offensive that he would try and dilute rape with a suggestion of promiscuity. By definition rape is the absence of promiscuity, rape is the absence of consent, and it perturbs me deeply that he can’t even see that distinction.

The probation officer factored in that the defendant is youthful and has no prior convictions. In my opinion, he is old enough to know what he did was wrong. When you are eighteen in this country you can go to war. When you are nineteen, you are old enough to pay the consequences for attempting to rape someone. He is young, but he is old enough to know better.

As this is a first offense I can see where leniency would beckon. On the other hand, as a society, we cannot forgive everyone’s first sexual assault or digital rape. It doesn’t make sense. The seriousness of rape has to be communicated clearly, we should not create a culture that suggests we learn that rape is wrong through trial and error. The consequences of sexual assault needs to be severe enough that people feel enough fear to exercise good judgment even if they are drunk, severe enough to be preventative. The fact that Brock was a star athlete at a prestigious university should not be seen as an entitlement to leniency, but as an opportunity to send a strong cultural message that sexual assault is against the law regardless of social class.

The probation officer weighed the fact that he has surrendered a hard earned swimming scholarship. If I had been sexually assaulted by an un-athletic guy from a community college, what would his sentence be? If a first time offender from an underprivileged background was accused of three felonies and displayed no accountability for his actions other than drinking, what would his sentence be? How fast he swims does not lessen the impact of what happened to me.

The Probation Officer has stated that this case, when compared to other crimes of similar nature, may be considered less serious due to the defendant’s level of intoxication. It fel
t serious. That’s all I’m going to say.

He is a lifetime sex registrant. That doesn’t expire. Just like what he did to me doesn’t expire, doesn’t just go away after a set number of years. It stays with me, it’s part of my identity, it has forever changed the way I carry myself, the way I live the rest of my life.

A year has gone by and he has had lots of time on his hands. Has he been seeing a psychologist? What has he done in this past year to show he’s been progressing? If he says he wants to implement programs, what has he done to show for it?

Throughout incarceration I hope he is provided with appropriate therapy and resources to rebuild his life. I request that he educates himself about the issue of campus sexual assault. I hope he accepts proper punishment and pushes himself to reenter society as a better person.

To conclude, I want to say thank you. To everyone from the intern who made me oatmeal when I woke up at the hospital that morning, to the deputy who waited beside me, to the nurses who calmed me, to the detective who listened to me and never judged me, to my advocates who stood unwaveringly beside me, to my therapist who taught me to find courage in vulnerability, to my boss for being kind and understanding, to my incredible parents who teach me how to turn pain into strength, to my friends who remind me how to be happy, to my boyfriend who is patient and loving, to my unconquerable sister who is the other half of my heart, to Alaleh, my idol, who fought tirelessly and never doubted me. Thank you to everyone involved in the trial for their time and attention. Thank you to girls across the nation that wrote cards to my DA to give to me, so many strangers who cared for me.

Most importantly, thank you to the two men who saved me, who I have yet to meet. I sleep with two bicycles that I drew taped above my bed to remind myself there are heroes in this story. That we are looking out for one another. To have known all of these people, to have felt their protection and love, is something I will never forget.

And finally, to girls everywhere, I am with you. On nights when you feel alone, I am with you. When people doubt you or dismiss you, I am with you. I fought everyday for you. So never stop fighting, I believe you. Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining. Although I can’t save every boat, I hope that by speaking today, you absorbed a small amount of light, a small knowing that you can’t be silenced, a small satisfaction that justice was served, a small assurance that we are getting somewhere, and a big, big knowing that you are important, unquestionably, you are untouchable, you are beautiful, you are to be valued, respected, undeniably, every minute of every day, you are powerful and nobody can take that away from you. To girls everywhere, I am with you. Thank you.

Print has been acquired by an independent group of collaborators—Deb Aldrich, Laura Des Enfants, Jessica Deseo, Andrew Gibbs, Steven Heller and Debbie Millman—and soon enough, we’ll be back in full force with an all-new look, all-new content and a fresh outlook for the future. Stay tuned.

If there’s something that seems so refreshing in Tosh Hall’s design work, it’s probably because, well, he never intended to become a designer.

Rather, Hall’s educational foundation was in economics and journalism, which he studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

As he told The Dieline, “Journalism was great because I had to learn how to tell a story, and that thinking is the way I approach design and approach a problem. Economics helped because we are a business and we must work with businesses. As much as I’d like us to be in the arts space, we’re in the business space.”

At UNC, he worked in the full-scale offset print shop that produced the school’s communications—and there, through trial, error and the cruel tutelage of the old-school press gurus, he began his own design education.

After graduating, he got a job as a designer at Revlon, spent seven years at Landor, and then became creative director at Jones Knowles Ritchie—and eventually global executive creative director and global chief creative officer.

Not bad for a journalism and economics major.

Here, as a complement to the new episode of Design Matters, we present 15 of Hall’s wisdoms on branding and design—showcasing the mind at play behind brilliant work he has produced for everyone from Stella Artois to Kashi to the nonprofit Fonderie 47, which makes luxury jewelry from assault rifles reclaimed from war zones.

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“We are part doctors and part Boy Scouts. Boy Scouts leave campsites better than they found them, and doctors must diagnose before they prescribe treatment and first promise to do no harm. Our job is to understand the business problems that design can solve, provide the right solutions and ultimately leave brands better than when we found them.” (source)

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“It’s best for the brand to go in a long-term direction of health and growth instead of zigging, zagging back and forth between whatever the marketing plan du jour is, and a hope for short-term success.” (source)

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“People are obsessed with the next. Be present and do the best work possible in that moment. It’s easy to say in retrospect, but the rest of it will take care of itself.” (source)

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“I believe everyone deserves great design. Whether you are holding a can of beer, eating a fancy ice cream bar or flying first on a great airline, brands can no longer get away with mediocrity. Ugly costs brands money. Great design adds profit much faster than it adds cost. We seek to influence what consumers hold in their hands and experience in the world, and we aspire to create the ideas that persist in people’s minds.” (source)

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“The answer isn’t always packaging.” (source)

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“My favorite artists comment on culture, commercialism and design: I love the intensity of Robert Longo, the combination of message and medium from Ed Ruscha, the scale of photographer Andreas Gursky, the geometry of Frank Stella and pattern of Bridgett Riley.” (source)

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“We wear black because it’s simple and everything else should be the color—your ideas should be the color.” (source)

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“Craft is almost table stakes. We have to have work that is representative of the best quality of craft in brand communications design, but what will differentiate the great from the good is what power design and communications can wield in the world. Going beyond being well-executed and well-crafted, ideas can not only drive strategic business objectives but push the industry forward and create cultural impact.” (source)

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“All you really need for a good idea is a pen and a piece of paper, and a brain. The more we can tap into that in this technological world where you’re always on, the better we’ll be.” (source)

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“My advice to designers comes from one of my favorite motorcycle racing formulas for winning. Success is only 20% talent, 30% being at the right place at the right time and 50% tenacity. Plenty of designers are more talented and many will have better connections—the trick is to identify the right opportunities, doggedly pursue your goals and work fucking hard.” (source)

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“We redesigned Budweiser because it deserved to be redesigned. It is an artifact of our culture—it deserves to be great.” (source)

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“The challenge was, how do we change everything and change nothing?” (source)

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“To me, nothing is worse than being right, but five years ahead.” (source)

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“It doesn’t matter what direction you’re moving in as long as you’re moving.” (source)

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“Spending time just crafting is a rare luxury. So enjoy it.” (source)

Ever since I got my hands on a copy of the book User Friendly, I’ve been trying to make sense of it.

Namely: How the hell is it so cathartic?

Over the years, a lot of books have come through the Design Matters and PRINT offices—and I’m loathe to admit that it’s easy to become jaded. But then, every so often, a book like Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant’s shows up. As we look forward in January 2020, User Friendly made me momentarily look back.

Years ago, when I first started writing for PRINT and other professional arts publications, the great cliche that haunts the field was there to welcome me to it, a right of passage:

“What’s graphic design?” my parents asked.

(As my father wrote me, “I perused your new magazine today. Fancy production, but if somebody asked me what kind of magazine it is, I couldn’t tell them.”)

It was a worthy initiation, and as time went on I’d find myself trying to define to any number of people everything from industrial design to information architecture. And then there’s that most indefinable of design subsets: User Experience design, further muddled by the term “UX,” and frequently paired with the equally befuddling “UI.”

As Fabricant dedicates User Friendly: “To my family and friends. Hopefully this will explain once and for all what I do every day, and why it matters.”

The astounding thing about the book: It does. In fact, it does to such a degree that I bought a copy for my father.

Perhaps the key is that it reads nothing like you might expect a book on user experience to read. It’s touted for uncovering the story of the discipline for the first time and, yes, it does that with a stimulating amount of discovery. But it’s in how it does that that’s so remarkable. User Friendly often reads like thrilling narrative nonfiction, beginning with its case study of the Three Mile Island incident. From there, the authors connect the dots and, case study by case study, from the historical linchpin of Henry Dreyfuss to Disney’s innovative RFID MagicBands, build out an extraordinary history of not just user experience design, but so much design at large. Paul Rand famously gave us the quote “Design is everything. Everything!” to ruminate on—and this book might be the most accessible evidence of that yet.

The secret to it all? The authors.

Kuang’s on-scene reporting and narrative flair is instrumental, as is his graceful distillation of otherwise dense topics. Years of experience writing for the likes of Fast Company, ID and Wired—not to mention his current day job as a UX designer at Google—brilliantly preceded the text. Fabricant, meanwhile, spent 15 years innovating at Frog before co-founding Dalberg design.

For those who know what user experience design is, User Friendly deepens. For those who do not know, it reveals—and for anyone discovering user experience design for the first time through this book, I am envious.

As Allan Chochinov writes at Core77, “There are also syntheses in the book that are beyond astute and likely to be quoted by designers and philosophers for years to come.”

He is exactly right.

So to ring in this new episode of Design Matters, here is a collection of 21 turns of phrase and bon mots.

Enjoy.

“Design presumes that we can make objects humane, but doing so requires a different way of seeing the world.”

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“Design thinking is now marshaled to solve myriad problems at every scale. What was once a niche profession more commonly associated with chairs is now talked of as a solution to the world’s ills, simply because of a shift in perspective.”

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“Technology should become simpler over time. Then it should become simpler still, so that it disappears from notice. This has already happened with stunning speed, and that transformation is one of the greatest cultural achievements of the last 50 years.”

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“It’s no surprise then that the reasons a bad app drives you crazy have a direct relationship to the reasons that Three Mile Island almost melted into the earth. The problems that caused Three Mile Island are similar to the ones that frustrate you when you’re trying to turn off the notifications on your smartphone; the inscrutability of a poorly designed light switch shares the same cause as your inscrutable cable box: a button that seems misplaced, a pop-up message that vanishes before you can figure out what it means, the sense that you did something but you don’t know what.”

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“Forty years after Three Mile Island, feedback is more than just what makes machines intelligible. When feedback is tied not merely to the way machines work but instead to the things we value most—our social circles, our self-image—it can become the map by which we chart our lives. It can determine how the experiences around us feel. In an era when how a product feels to use is the measure of how much we’ll use it, this is everything.”

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“The world of everyday life is so densely layered with information that it can be hard to realize how much information—how much feedback—we have to recreate in the world of design. And yet feedback is what turns any man-made creation into an object that you relate to, one that might evoke feelings of ease or ire, satisfaction or frustration. These are the bones of our relationship with the world around us.”

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“Designers, by aligning consumer design with business incentives, thus became high priests of the faith that better goods meant better lives all around. Such faith remains the unspoken message embedded in how new products are invented today.”

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“We live in a sandbox of someone else’s design, made more clever because the information on offer on our phones, on our computers, in our cars confines us within a simplified version of the world.”

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On Paul Fitts: “At the time, having a doctorate in the nascent field of experimental psychology was a novel thing, and with that novelty came a certain authority. He’s supposed
to know how people think. His true talent is realizing that he doesn’t.”

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“The magic of a well-designed invention is that you seem to know how it will work even before you’ve used it.”

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“Whether we’re communicating with a human or a machine, the goal is to create a shared understanding of the world. That’s the point behind both the rules governing polite conversation and how a user-friendly machine should work.”

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“Metaphors accomplish something essential to human progress: They don’t just spur us to make new things; they inspire the ways in which those things will behave once they’re in our hands.”

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“In digesting new technologies, we climb a ladder of metaphors, and each rung helps us step up to the next.”

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“The story of technology’s advance is also the story of metaphors bending to their limits, then breaking.”

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“Apple’s rise is nothing more or less than the story of three interfaces: the Macintosh OS, the iPod click wheel, and the iPhone touchscreen. Everything else has been fighting about how the pie would be divided up among competitors and copycats.”

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“User-friendliness is simply the fit between the objects around us and the ways we behave. So while we might think that the user-friendly world is one of making user-friendly things, the bigger truth is that design doesn’t rely on artifacts. As my collaborator Robert Fabricant likes to say, it relies on our patterns of behavior. All the nuances of designing new products can be reduced to one of two basic strategies: either finding what causes us pain and trying to eliminate it, or reinforcing what we already do with a new object that makes it so easy it becomes second nature. The truest material for making new things isn’t aluminum or carbon fiber. It’s behavior.”

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“User-friendliness has redefined nearly every minute of our waking lives.”

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“Sometimes, designers get called on to make better versions of things that already exist, but they spend most of their time trying to create things that never existed before. When something hasn’t existed before, how do you make it easy to use? And even after that new thing makes its way into the world, how do you improve it enough so that it disappears into daily life?”

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“We now expect that the tools we use to diagnose cancer or to identify a problem with an airplane engine will be as simple to use as Angry Birds.”

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“There may be no greater design challenge for the 21st century than creating better, tighter feedback loops in places where they don’t exist, be they in the environment, health care, or government.”

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“This was a designer’s way of looking at the world: the sense that if our better selves are within easier reach, then of course we’ll be better people.”

DESIGN. MATTER, HERBERT. Trademarks and Symbols. 2 volumes. Original full-color illustrations mounted to card stock. Oblong folio, loose in plain black wrappers and laid into custom burgundy cloth folding box. [California, 1960s] Estimate $3,000 – 4,000 [sold for $2080). Original maquette for an unpublished book by design master Herbert Matter. The images are color collages affixed to the pages and display his aesthetic of pared-down, straightforward designs of geometric purity. An intriguing glance into Matter’s working processes where one can see much of the design sense he employed as a photographer, a poster and graphic designer, and as design and advertising consultant for Knoll Associates, likely his most celebrated position. The vast creative output over the course of his career proves his remarkable scope and influence on 20th-century American visual culture.

I shot close-ups and details of many leaves in the portfolio, which provide a special insight into graphic designers’ pre-computer working techniques.

The logo design work shown here reflects Matter’s training in the disciplines of painting, architecture and typography. His light pencil guidelines are visible, and so is his steady, expert hand cutting, painting, pasting and drawing curves. Designers trained in pre-Macintosh techniques will recognize that the solid colors were painted in India ink or gouache or cut from Color-Aid paper. The tools used were a ruling pen or crow-quill pen, French curve and T-square and triangle, and the elements were assembled using two-coat rubber cement that created a bond that’s lasted 50 years.

A little background: Herbert Matter (1907-1984) trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva and with Fernand Léger at the Académie Moderne in Paris, where worked with Cassandre, Le Corbusier and Deberny & Peignot. He returned to Zurich and designed posters for the Swiss National Tourist Office that were acclaimed for his pioneering use of photomontage and typography. In 1936 he immigrated to the U.S. and was hired by Alexey Brodovitch to work on Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. From 1946 to 1966 he was design consultant to Knoll Associates, for which he worked with Charles and Ray Eames. He was also a professor of photography at Yale and a design consultant to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Guggenheim in New York. He was elected to the New York Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1977, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography in 1980, and was awarded the AIGA Medal in 1983.

Now we know who the designer was. But who were the clients? The leaves have no captions or explanations. Other than the ‘K’ for Knoll, above, that was a mystery. Thanks to a recommendation from Steven Heller, I contacted the London-based writer and historian Kerry William Purcell, author of many books on design and photography—and author of an unpublished 50,000-word manuscript on Matter—who kindly provided the following explanations:

Client: WESTINGHOUSE. This, from Purcell’s manuscript: “The following year, 1960, Matter’s flair for exhibition design was called upon on two occasions. The first was when he was commissioned by Eliot Noyes, the onetime head of Industrial design at MoMA and associate of Charles Eames, to design a trade show for the electrical supplier Westinghouse. Westinghouse had recently engaged in a massive overall of the ’public faces’ of the corporation. At Noyes’s suggestion, this redesign was entrusted to Paul Rand. Rand’s response was his now-iconic ’W’ that symbolized the companies business in a distinct and striking manner [see Rand’s logo and I.D. manual here]. Matter incorporated Rand’s work into exhibition designs that were sympathetic to its overall aims. Alongside the Rand logo, Matter’s Westinghouse display also included some of his own attempts at a new ‘W’ logo. In an approach similar to Rand’s, Matter’s work aspires to symbolize the idea of electrical power. One is made up of four lightening bolts emanating from a ‘W’ placed at the center of a tilted square, while another was crafted in the style of an electrical pulse with the upward strokes of the ‘W‘ representing the burst of energy.”

Client: CUMMINS ENGINE CORP. Matter was commissioned by Cummins to devise a range of symbols and construct a portable exhibit for the 1960 International Oil Show in Tulsa, OK.

Client: TECHNOLOGY SQUARE, a real estate development in Cambridge, MA.

Client: FIRST NATIONAL BANK, Miami, Fl.

Client: UNKNOWN. Ideas? A road construction company? L.A. freeways? Mr. Purcell suggests referring to Matter’s Symbols Signs Logos Trademarks (New York: 1977), a rare, out-of print brochure. He writes, “It sounds like the folio that was auctioned may have contained many designs that were featured in that publication (Knoll, Cummins, New Haven Railroad, Boston and Maines). It may also connect to a winter 1961-’62 one-man show of Matter’s work at the then-newly opened AIGA Third Avenue exhibition space. This exhibition consisted of two sections, photography and graphic design. It included his Arts & Architecture covers, logo designs and signs. The folio could contain that exhibition material.”

Much more information about Herbert Matter, including a useful illustra
ted timeline, is available on his official site, herbertmatter.org.

From Jim Krause, the author of the wildly popular “Index” series, comes a new take on logo books. Recognizing the challenge a logo presents for a designer, The Logo Brainstorm Book goes far beyond the typical logo swipe file. It will help you save time and produce incredible results.

Chimero hit the industry by storm as an illustrator, graphic designer and interaction designer. He was a Print New Visual Artist in 2010, and has made a name for himself as a multidisciplinary polymath working for a multitude of clients in multiple mediums. Most recently, Chimero collaborated with Tina and Ryan Essmaker, designing the print version of their popular website The Great Discontent, he has been involved in a top-secret project for NPR, and he is still doing award-winning illustration and web work. While I initially felt that I couldn’t possibly ask Chimero for a redux, I ultimately gathered up the courage to tell him the truth and request another interview. He took the snafu in stride and generously gave me another opportunity to talk about his career and his life as a designer and artist.

Thank you again for doing this a second time! I’m going to mix it up and ask different questions, as I don’t think it is a good idea to have the same conversation twice. OK, people are going to read this and they’re going to say, “Frank and Debbie are so chummy!”

The first thing I want to talk with you about is your book, The Shape of Design. What was the impetus to raise the funds to self-publish it on Kickstarter in 2011? I decided to use Kickstarter because nobody in the design community had really used it yet. It was in an unusual territory: It was a company started by designers, but the design community wasn’t participating in it yet. So it seemed like a ripe opportunity. I also felt that [my book] would not be terribly appealing to a conventional publisher. At the time, a project like this was totally out of left field for me. I had been writing a bit, but it was a risk. It worked out well in the end, but I think the large part of my Kickstarter success was because of the timing. In 2012, it was one of the first big design projects on the site.

Did you worry that you might not be successful in your funding? Not really. I had set a very modest goal for a printing: $22,000. That’s a really low budget to print a hardcover book; any lower and it would be totally unreasonable. If I made it any higher, then I would’ve had doubts about being successful. $22,000 seemed to be the sweet spot. I figured I could live off my savings to do the writing.

You were willing to live off your savings to write a book? Why? Two reasons. The first was that while I was teaching my undergraduate classes, I felt that there was a real need for an impractical design book to help people think through the process of making design that lives in the world. I wanted to investigate the answers to questions including, “What does it mean to make things for other people, and what does it mean to develop your own ideas?” I couldn’t find anything to offer to my students that considered these questions. The second reason was that I was doing a lot of editorial illustration, and I could sense there was an ax over my head. It felt like this genre of work was coming to an end for me. I was starting to get bored and I was also a victim of the editorial cycle. For example, I was being asked to make six or seven illustrations about iPhones a month! How many ways can you draw an app icon or a flat rectangle? There are people who can do this all day and keep it fresh and interesting, but I was running out of steam.

You begin The Shape of Design with a quote from E.E. Cummings: “Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.” Why? Getting started on a design process is about clearly phrasing these questions: “What are the objectives of the project?” or “What are we actually building this for?” and “What are we trying to do?” These are difficult questions that must be answered before any design begins.

Why are they difficult? Speaking for myself and my own creative process, you need the friction of the process to suss out your own bullshit [laughs]. It needs to be said out loud for it to seem as full of hot air as it actually is. One of the good things about pointed, well-phrased questions is that they are a good bullshit detector. I think well-phrased questions become heat-seeking missiles for clarity. If you want to do anything good in design, it helps to be clear about what you’re trying to make.

Do you find that you work better when there are more specific objectives, or do you work better when you have a more open, abstract landscape? I like having both. I want a lot of clarity at 10,000 feet, and I want a lot of clarity at two feet. Everything in between becomes the opportunity. For me, design has changed from a method of decoration to a manner of construction. How do the pieces fit together? How can we design
things so they are useful, scalable and maintainable? This was particularly important when I stopped illustrating, began consulting and working as an interface designer. My new landscape was incredibly technical, with a lot of specific necessities. I think you have an abundance of technical constraints whenever you transition into that space; you’re typically designing for unknown content, so you are designing systems. The scalability of those systems is what counts. It is not simply a matter of how many pages you serve out or how big a page can be. It is also about how different kinds of content can elegantly fit into what you’ve made.

Prior to this transition, did you really feel that design was a method of decoration? I can hardly imagine a time when you were working in a purely decorative mode. I think decoration can communicate. It’s never been willfully esoteric. I’ve always wanted to get ideas across. But whatever I was doing, whether self-initiated or commissioned illustrations, I was—in large part—decorating somebody else’s ideas.

There can be a lot of value in that. Isn’t that a functional, decorative expression? Yes. Decoration isn’t necessarily bad. I think that there’s value in adding beauty and whimsy and visual elegance to something. Not everything needs to be—or should be—austere.

You were interviewed on a site called Scout Books, and you were asked to describe your style. You seemed to bristle at the question, and stated, “style is a complicated thing now.” Some people tell young designers to avoid style so they can grow in different directions. But the market demands that illustrators have a style so clients can minimize risk and predict what they will get. Other people state that no style is a style. Do you feel that there’s a Frank Chimero-ness to your work? Do I have aesthetic tendencies? Yes. Do I have habits of tone in the work I produce? Yes, absolutely. But I think there’s a lot of overlapping ideas in the things that I’m making and in the aesthetics they communicate.

How would you describe them? They’re sprawling.

[Laughs.] That’s a good word. I relish taking two things that seemingly don’t have anything to do with each other and discovering a way to bring them together. Then you can begin to describe the bigness of an idea, or the diversity of the world, and communicate commonalities between fields or ideas or history or anything. But it can feel very unfocused if you’re not really diligent. Bringing disparate ideas together and finding a way to frame them so that they are related is a tone I frequently run into.

I read that your favorite medium to work in is with a wooden pencil and some loose paper. Yes, you get to make a pile! When I’m working digitally, it’s easy to undo the work that you’ve done, so you can’t see everything you’ve created unless you explicitly duplicate something every time you change it. But with a wooden pencil and some copier paper, it’s just out there on the table and you can watch the stack of blank paper get smaller, and the stack of paper that has drawings on it—good or bad—get taller. I like being able to circle my good ideas, and I like being able to crumple up and throw away the bad ones. It’s all very satisfying and you can really visualize the work.

I love the continuity of progression. Exactly. This happened, and then that happened, and then this happened, but then I tried this, but then I went back to that. Often, I’ll write a number in the corner of each page and circle it so I really know the progress of everything and the order in which it all happened. Typically, at the end of a job, I trash that stack of paper. It’s satisfying on every level. It feels great to have the document, and it feels great to finish something and say these aren’t useful anymore because it’s done.

Do you ever have experiences where your clients have a very specific idea of what they want something to become, and you think, “No, no, that’s not right; I don’t want to do it that way”? What happens then? It happens every once in a while. I’ve been lucky; it happens fewer and further between. It’s different every time it happens. Sometimes I say, “Hey, I know you have a lot of expertise here, but this is what I’m thinking. Can you tell me why these ideas are not the right ones?” Or sometimes I’ll go their way. Luckily, the engagements are usually long enough where you can entertain people’s assumptions. That’s all that these things are—they’re assumptions.

In this case, you’re talking about a conflict of assumptions where I have one set of assumptions and they have another set. It’s really important to figure out ways to suss out which are correct. Luckily, when there have been disagreements, my clients have had a rigid enough internal process that we’ve been able to test the assumptions. What’s ironic is that when clients have a set of assumptions that are in conflict with mine, almost every single time we are both wrong.

[Laughs.] That’s really interesting.

I think we look at conflicts as if one party is right and one is wrong. Maybe conflict is an indicator that you’re both wrong.

I came across an interesting self-assessment that I want to share with you. You’ve said, “I talk to the designers, and they think I’m an illustrator. The illustrators think I’m a web guy. The web folks think I’m a typography person. The type people think I’m a designer.” I’m curious if you think this multidisciplinary skill set is a requirement for young designers today. I don’t know. I can’t speak for anybody else’s career path. Mine has been so bizarre. I started in one place and then shifted over to another. It feels like every four years I sort of look around and realize, I’m in a different country than I used to be. But it’s been a great benefit for me. I have several friends who have benefited from this as well. I think there’s a whole subclassification of illustrators now who started out as designers, but the design work that they were doing was mostly image-making. Mikey Burton describes himself as a “designy illustrator.” He went to school for graphic design, he has a master’s degree in graphic design and he worked as a brand designer for years. Now he’s doing illustration work. Oliver Munday is another great example. He’s creating illustrations and designing book covers simultaneously. Jessica Hische is a great example of this too.

Has starting your own studio changed the way you work? Yes and no.

What made you decide to take on another way of communicating who you are? That’s why the studio is called “Another.” It’s another name. Most of the associations with my name com
e from my self-initiated work. People don’t necessarily associate it with the work I’ve done for my clients. People presume that I’m not someone that’s hirable. This was the more explicit reason.

Did you imagine when you were first named a Print New Visual Artist that this is where your life would be? The funny thing about my being a Print New Visual Artist is that all the work featured in that issue is work I don’t do anymore. Frankly, I was not expecting to take such a sharp, quick turn. A lot has changed since then. It’s fascinating to go back and see how that momentum allowed me to change directions. I appreciate the nod for the body of work and take a lot of pride in the work that was shown.

Any idea where you might be in several years? No. No idea [laughs]. You should know this: The road drives. I’m trying to be a bit more explicit about steering things, choosing things and pursing them than I have been in the past. Sometimes you make your opportunities, and sometimes you trip over them. You can also plan yourself out of opportunities. The good thing is, at the end of the day I’m totally stoked with where things are right now and what my days look like. Sometimes it’s a matter of following a whim, and to do whatever you want when the pencil hits the page.

Admire the inspiring work of Debbie Millman with this bundle that showcases her design style through a collection of essays and poems plus an exclusive poster, designed and signed by Debbie.

Get a personal and visual exploration of design with Self-Portrait as Your Traitor, and discover a collection of 10 visual essays and poems with hand-lettered typography. Featuring plenty of Debbie’s hand-lettered typography and emotionally-charged topics, you’ll be reeling with inspiration that will carry over to your own design projects. Plus, in addition to this breathtaking book, you’ll also receive a handcrafted felt-on-felt typographic print poster designed and signed by Debbie.

Whether you’re looking for design inspiration, an inside look at graphic design, or something else, get all of the above with the Self-Portrait as Your Traitor Set with Debbie Millman. Utilize the expertise of this renowned graphic designer, as well as her creative works to inspire your own design projects.