If you live in the States, you probably get something similar: black and white, newspaper-printed, a round-up of state and town government goings-on, library awards, referendums, new restaurants and pizza joints opening up, pet rescues, tag sales, ongoing Appalachian Mountain Club/church groups/AA meetings. And obituaries.

Normally, one of us reads it while the other one makes dinner, but last night we stood side by side at our kitchen island and read about the life of Mrs. Margaret Bickel of Southbury, Connecticut, who died on April 14th at 102 years old. Neither of us knew Mrs. Bickel, but we would have liked to.

Maybe it is a function of age to read the obits, or the fact that I grew up this way: when I was a kid, my father read the New York Times obituaries every morning over breakfast, he said, to make sure he was still alive. Maira Kalman has written and spoken extensively about this practice; it is how she discovered the life of Megan Boyd, eccentric master of fish flies who once turned down an invitation from Queen Elizabeth wanting to present her with the British Empire Medal. Miss Boyd couldn’t leave her home in Golspie, Scotland because, apparently, she didn’t have anyone to watch her dog that day. An extraordinary person who called little attention to herself, Boyd dressed in her daily uniform of a man’s shirt and tie, sweater, wool skirt, tweed sports jacket, and heavy army-style boots. She had no electricity until 1985 and died in 2001, age 86.

Susan and I both come from long-lived family members: her maternal grandmother lived to 101, her mother lived to 94, my paternal aunt lived to 102, and my paternal grandmother lived to 93. We know the stories: Susan’s subsistence farmer grandmother was widowed at a very young age, left with ten children for whom she made clothes and shoes (we use one of her heavy iron shoe forms as a doorstop), and got through her days by taking ten-minute naps on her farmhouse kitchen floor; she was, according to all who knew her, somehow never without a smile. Once my uncle went off to fight the war in Europe, my intrepid aunt and her mother-in-law spent their days in front of a large map spread out on the kitchen table, trying to figure out where he was based on a secret, censor-defying code they devised involving numerical tags: it was, he wrote, 48 days since they’d last seen each other, and he was looking forward to getting home and watching his 11 year old niece grow up. Meaning: coordinates were roughly 48.7904 N latitude, and 11.4979 E longitude. They figured it out; he was in Bavaria.

My father told me these stories, so I don’t know how accurate they are because memories can be like a game of telephone, changing and changing again over the years. Nevertheless, they are stories that I treasure: Susan and I are members of the last generation linking the pre-computer, pre-selfie, Megan-Boyd-fly-tying world where it would take days and sometimes weeks to get a letter, to the Tik Tok/instant gratification universe where digital addiction and oppressive rage at people one doesn’t even know are a built-in component of everyday life.

My aunt and uncle, Susan’s grandmother, Susan’s mother, my father — they’re gone now, and evidence of that generation is disappearing. I have in my office direct reminders of it: the piles of letters that my father sent home from the Pacific, where he flew planes as a nineteen-year-old night fighter pilot in World War 2; a picture of his squadron hangs over my desk; a New York City municipal photo of my mother, grandmother, grandfather, and granduncle outside the Brooklyn furniture store they owned on Grand Street, circa 1938, when my mother was just three years old.

But back to Mrs. Bickel of Southbury, Conncticut. Here is what we learned last night.

SOUTHBURY — Margaret Bickel of Southbury passed away peacefully at home on Sunday, April 14 at the age of 102.

Margaret Schrup was born on May 24, 1921 in Dubuque, Iowa. She was the 3rd of 8 children. Her mother died giving birth to the 8th child.

Margaret was 10 years old at the time, and assumed many adult duties including cooking, cleaning, and ironing her father’s suits and shirts. Margaret’s father, Tony Schrup, owned a Packard auto dealership and Margaret started driving at age 14 and would drive a 12 cylinder Packard to transport her younger brothers and sisters to school.

Tony was also active in Democratic politics and in 1936 drove Franklin Delano Roosevelt around Dubuque during a campaign stop. Tony brought FDR by his home so all his children, including Margaret could meet him.

At eighteen she left home, moving to Minneapolis and learned about bookkeeping and accounting.

She took a job with Remington Rand and learned punch card accounting. During the 1940s, Margaret traveled extensively for Remington Rand helping customer convert from manual accounting to new punch card accounting systems.

She spent a lot of time in the south, in Houston and Albuquerque, and many other locations across the U.S.

In the early 1950s she moved to New York where she continued her career. In 1953 she met John Bickel after being introduced by a mutual friend. John had built a table for the friend and Margaret complimented John on type of joint in the table legs. John was impressed with Margaret’s knowledge of woodworking and joinery and they began dating immediately.

Their first date was a walk across the George Washington Bridge.

They were married 3 weeks later and spent every day together for the next 65 years. Margaret and John lived in Manhattan. They spent weekends in Westchester, deciding in 1954 to buy land there and build their own home.

Both Margaret and John were admirers of Frank Lloyd Wright, and they managed to hire the architect who had overseen Wright’s Usonia project. With his plans in hand, they built their home themselves, while John continued working by day and worked with Margaret building their home in the evenings and weekends.

Margaret loved having children and being a mother. She was a feminist. An ardent advocate for education. She read to Rachel and John before they could read, sharing her love for books. Always curious. A fan of puzzles including the crossword, Soduku and others. Games including chess, rummy, canasta, and hearts.

Margaret and John took great pleasure in sharing their appreciation for all forms of art, architecture, and travel with their children.

Margaret loved to read and read The NY Times every day and The New Yorker every week.

After John retired as a photographer in 1979, he started a second career with Margaret as a fine wood craftsman. Margaret participated by contributing design ideas and ran the business end of things.

She taught herself to use the IBM PC and VisiCalc, Multiplan and Lotus 1-2-3. The two began exhibiting their work at juried craft shows in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions, winning several awards and selling furniture. This second career lasted from 1980-2013.

In 2014 John and Margaret sold the home they built in Ossining, N.Y. and relocated to Southbury in Heritage Village. They joined several clubs and made new friends in Southbury. John passed away in 2018.

Margaret is survived by her children, John Bickel, Jr. and his wife Margaret of Southbury, and Rachel Bickel of Brattleboro, Vt.

The family would like to thank her caregiver Kuhle Madlingozi for the wonderful care and compassion given to our mom in her final days.

There will not be a service.

Rest in peace, Margaret.

This post was originally published on Elissa Altman’s blog Poor Man’s Feast, The James Beard Award-winning journal about the intersection of food, spirit, and the families that drive you crazy. Read more on her Substack, or keep up with her archives here.

Image courtesy of the author.

Today, there’s a renewed scholarly and curatorial interest in Latin American furniture, product and graphic design. MoMA is currently exhibiting Crafting Modernity: Design in Latin America, 1920–1980. The recently published Diagramming Modernity: Books and Graphic Design in Latin America, 1920–1940 covers a largely unknown swath of publication and typographic history. And the forthcoming A Modernist Regime: Cuban Mid-Century Design—the first comprehensive museum exhibition dedicated to Cuba’s Modern design movement—will feature objects never exhibited outside of the country. The exhibition opens at Cranbrook Art Museum on June 15, and will run through Sept. 22; the excellent eponymous book is available now.

A Modernist Regime was co-curated by Cranbrook Art Museum Chief Curator Laura Mott, design historian and curator Andrew Satake Blauvelt, and curatorial fellow Andrew Ruys de Perez. The show originated with Abel González Fernández, an independent curator who was based in Cuba when the project began but is now Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

I recently conducted the following interview with Blauvelt, who also wrote essays in the book on the highly regarded OSPAAAL posters and the export of Cuban graphic design as means to globalize Castro’s ideology.

In your revelatory book I am particularly struck by the photo of Fidel Castro lounging in a Modern-furnished room. The photo suggests the “hope” that Modernism symbolized, but also suggests the American and European influences that were so prevalent in pre-Castro Cuba. Can you explain what you mean by A Modernist Regime?
“A Modernist Regime” is a way of identifying the idea of Modernism within the Castro regime that comes to power in 1959. We usually associate Modernism with socialism and capitalism, historically. What struck us about this story is how Modernism transforms in Cuba under different political economies: first, under an autocratic capitalism of the Batista regime, then under a promise of social democratic reforms by the early Castro regime, and then again under a communist dictatorship. All three phases are influenced by the Cold War politics of the U.S. and U.S.S.R., of course, as well as the non-aligned nations that sought autonomy from these superpowers.

Was Cuban design Modern by default, having been imported into the country by the previous regime, or was it symbolic of the new era to come?
Modernism in design was introduced in the 1930s by Clara Porset, and important furniture designer who had studied it in Europe and the U.S. Interestingly, she advocates for a Modernism that could be adapted to the Cuban culture and climate. Although she was from a well-to-do family, she was drawn to the social, egalitarian promise of early European Modernism. These political beliefs led her to be exiled from Cuba for most of her adult life as she fled the Batista regime for Mexico. She briefly returned to Cuba when Castro came to power, hoping to see the transformation of Cuban society and to lead a design school there, but that did not happen and she returned to Mexico after a couple of years.

Midcentury Modernism was definitely a presence in Cuba, especially Havana, which was the tourist center for the country, and given its proximity to the U.S. and the volume of American visitors it would take hold. At one point Knoll furniture company even opened a showroom in Havana. This was definitely an imported Modernism, more capitalist and Western in nature. There were Midcentury residences and hotels built before the revolution, for example.

The book and exhibition cover the designers who were associated with progressive design movements and groups. Was this encouraged as an alternative style compared to the previous regime?
The idea of Modernism shifts after the revolution. In the show, we focus mainly on furniture design. Since there is no private enterprise under the Castro regime, the government becomes responsible for design and thus creates companies or enterprises to deliver those goods. Inevitably, it inherits whatever was in place before 1959. So, design continues on, but it adapts to its new socio-economic-political circumstances. The regime creates a Modern furniture company called Dujo, whose design director is Gonzalo Cordoba, who was a furniture designer before the revolution but chose to stay in Cuba when many others fled.

Dujo furniture was created mainly as an export product and was shown and sold in Europe. It resembles Danish modern furniture but utilized native woods and local materials. I should note, however, that Scandinavian design took much of its inspiration from the tropical environs of the Global South, exotic woods and rattan or corded upholstery, for instance. So, the idea of influence and innovation under Modernism is a complicated story! Dujo furniture was also used in the offices and homes of high-ranking government officials. So, we find it in Castro’s office. Later, the government began focusing on domestic furniture needs and designers responded with explorations in new ways of making such goods in large volumes. It created a new company called EMPROVA and the Light Industry Group to explore such things as panelized and user-assembled furniture, flat-packed goods, and modular designs.

Was Cuban design deliberately attempting to reject Soviet-style communist/socialist “Modern”?
Interestingly, the country did not adopt a national style like social realism in the USSR under Stalin or in China under Mao. Social realism was the rebuke to Modernism and abstraction, in particular. As Cuba fell under the influence of the Soviet Union (it was under an embargo by the U.S. since 1960), it adopted more of its products and thinking. For example, prefabricated architecture emerged in Cuba before the revolution, where it made sense because of the lack of certain materials and manufacturing capabilities on a small island. This exploration continued after Castro came to power but eventually gave way to more expedient solutions imported from the U.S.S.R., like concrete slab construction for housing. It was efficient, I suppose, but ill-suited to the climate and aesthetically non-descript—the exact opposite of the glamour associated with Midcentury Modernism, for instance.

You state in your foreword, “Cuba also presents an interesting subject for design history given the country’s colonial history and multicultural legacy.” How does this manifest in the Midcentury aesthetic in Cuba?
For the furniture, we see especially in the Dujo line, a recourse to Cuba’s indigeneity—even the title of the company is a reference to a duho chair, a ceremonial lounge chair used by the Taino peoples who inhabited the Caribbean before Columbus. Some chairs referenced Taino artifacts and objects. There is a moment of historical reflection in Cuba, on this particular past, that I equate with the need to link to precolonial histories, a way past the dominant colonial legacies of exploitation, slavery and extraction. This I see also in the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL) posters, which were designed for mostly non-Cuban cultures, countries also escaping their colonial histories and legacies. For OSPAAAL, we see the use of the precolonial warrior figure as analogous to the contemporary freedom fighter or revolutionary. OSPAAAL also supports the American Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the U.S., drawing linkage between its own Afro-Cuban legacy of slavery and diaspora.

Another packed quote to unpack: “European modernism was transformed as it was introduced to pre-revolutionary Cuba.” How, in fact, did this transformation manifest? Did the designers ultimately have to conform to a state-sanctioned aesthetic? Or did Castro’s regime give license within the parameters of available resources?
In most ways, Modernism, understood as a European project, was transformed anytime it left its origin. That said, it was transformed when it came to Cuba, as I mentioned above, when it encountered a tropical environment, for instance. Porset was good at explaining that traditional heat-trapping upholstery would not be the best in Cuba, so the use of natural fibers woven with air circulation in mind. Or the use of local woods, called “exotic” in European counties. The OSPAAAL posters are also an intriguing blend of many styles and influences. It is so eclectic in fact it’s hard to call it Modernist by any strict definition—maybe pan-Modernist. Perhaps I would even call it Proto-Postmodernist when one views it collectively. All of this happens within a small historical window of opportunity—when Modernism could be imagined to be a more egalitarian solution to the people’s problems. Ultimately, many of these artists and designers grow disillusioned with the Castro regime and its increasingly authoritarian policies. This culminates today in a state which strictly controls what can be produced by artists, imprisons and forces into exile voices of dissent.

Where did all these artifacts come from? Who or what has been collecting these rare Cuban Modern examples? And is Cranbrook the first North American museum to display them?
We are indebted to two individuals for this project: Marco Castillo, who recognized that this furniture needed to be preserved and has done so. Most of the furniture is from his collection. And, curator Abel Gonzalez Fernandez, who recognized the importance of telling this history. Some designs, particularly in the 1970s, were only ever prototypes, so some of these are being recreated for the show with the assistance of the original designers. The objects have been on view in Cuba in smaller exhibitions but not in a museum in or outside of Cuba. This will be the first time at Cranbrook. The OSPAAAL posters are different and were quite celebrated in their own time, along with other forms of Cuban graphic design, particularly the country’s film and propaganda posters of the 1960s and 1970s.

The exhibition is, as you say, mostly about furniture and architecture, but let’s talk briefly about the posters. Cuban posters have long been on the cutting edge in terms of entertainment, information and propaganda. How do they fit into the book and exhibition’s focus on Midcentury Modernism?
I wanted to include the OSPAAAL posters and some examples of experimental architecture from the same period (1960s and 1970s) because they also deal with Modernism in their own unique ways. In my essay, “Becoming Modern: Importing Modernism, Exporting Revolution,” I wanted to show how graphic design and architecture participated in the same flows—being transformed by Cuban hands and minds but also by the state and its ideology, particularly when it left Cuba and was on an international stage.

Our stereotypical American view of Cuban design focuses on a frozen time period—mid- to late ’50s-era cars, architecture, signage—all nostalgically yet practically/functionally preserved. So, how has this project altered the perception of Cuban revolutionary style?
Interestingly, this furniture is now being preserved, refurbished, but only because it’s being collected. Typically, objects in Cuba are used until they are no longer able to be used—such is living with the scarcity of materials and goods under an embargoed Cuba. The Cuban government has not been interested in preserving this part of its history. The stories exist with the designers, many of whom are no longer alive, unfortunately. I hope we are able to help preserve this history and to enlarge the circle around it. I also hope that we can reflect on Modernism through a different lens. What would the story of Modernism be if it were written from the perspective of the Global South instead? I’d like to hear more stories like that.

We are lucky that Warren Lehrer didn’t heed his Queens College Art School drawing instructor’s advice that words and images operate in two different languages and hemispheres of the brain, so don’t combine them. Instead, Lehrer took from that his mission in life.

He doesn’t see himself as a designer or author in the traditional sense. But with his background in visual arts, words on the page have always married with the content. Steven Heller described Lehrer’s aptitude as performative design—creating stages for text to play.

And what gorgeous stages Jericho’s Daughter and Riveted in the Word are! The double release was serendipitous rather than planned. Both projects are based on short stories, have bifurcated formats (that dichotomy again), are led by visuals, and illuminate women whose lives have been torn apart and have to start over from scratch.

Our conversation was full of design geekery, like Do Si Do bindings, translating the reading experience into coding language, and storyboarding. There was also a rich discussion of the collaboration behind both books: Lehrer’s process with artist Sharon Horvath for Jericho’s Daughter and how words came together with music (composer Andrew Griffin) in the interface (designed by creative technologist  Artemio Morales) in Riveted in the Word.

Both books are available for presale. Riveted in the Word is sold through the Apple App Store (searchable under ‘book apps’). You can purchase Jericho’s Daughter through Earsay Publishing.

There are a bunch of upcoming book launch events (more info on Warren Lehrer’s website). If you are in NYC, you are invited to the May 31 double book launch at the Center for Book Arts.

Register here to watch the entire discussion.

For more, listen to Debbie’s 2019 Design Matters interview with Warren Lehrer.

And yet, for this year’s Kentucky Derby held in early May, partner and official hard seltzer of the Derby, White Claw, teamed up with the designer brand Homme+Femme and VCCP for an exclusive Kentucky Derby Collection. The main attraction in this collection is undoubtedly the White Claw-inspired windbreaker, dubbed the Clawbreaker, designed in two vibrant colorways.

We found inspiration in the heritage and vibrance of the iconic jockey silks. As a brand rooted in spontaneity, we look for the freshest spin on whatever we do. Exploring what a White Claw silk would look like led us to The Clawbreaker.

Gianmaria Schonlieb, Group Creative Director at VCCP

“We wanted to do something that celebrated the tradition of the Derby but also had our own White Claw spin,” Group Creative Director at VCCP, Gianmaria Schonlieb, said about the Clawbreaker development process. “We found inspiration in the heritage and vibrance of the iconic jockey silks. As a brand rooted in spontaneity, we look for the freshest spin on whatever we do. Exploring what a White Claw silk would look like led us to The Clawbreaker.”

While the fashion associated with the 150-year-old horse race might be a bit stuffy, The Clawbreaker is anything but, though it still harkens to traditional Derby motifs. “We wanted to stay true to ourselves while celebrating The 150th Kentucky Derby,” explained Schonlieb. “We designed this jacket with our brand ethos in mind. It’s designed to be both fashionable and functional, with the structure of the jacket reminiscent of an elevated jockey silk. We used bold colors from our hard seltzer flavors for the reimagined patterns. We incorporated embroidery and patchwork that nods to the legacy of the Derby and White Claw.”

The two colorways took inspiration from the Mango, Black Cherry, Blackberry, and Natural Lime White Claw flavors, chosen with the authenticity of Homme+Femme and jockey silks top of mind. “White Claw” is emblazoned on the back of each in the brand typeface, with detailed patches sewn on the front for added flair. “The patches nod to celebrating the 150th Kentucky Derby,” said Schonlieb. “It’s a unique way to inject the brand into a garment.”

The Clawbreaker provides White Claw’s avid consumer base with a fun and distinctive way to show their White Claw love, all while looking pretty spiffy in the process. “We created a garment that sits at the intersection of fashion, a cultural moment like the Kentucky Derby, and our fans’ love for the brand,” added Schonlieb.

White Claw lovers 21 and older can purchase their very own Clawbreaker for $150 to honor 150 years of Kentucky Derby fashion while supplies last.

For over 40 years Summit Magazine was a top periodical in its genre. “And its impact was—and continues to be felt—well beyond the climbing world, in large part due to the avant-garde aesthetic that Jean and Helen cultivated with the Summit‘s covers: sometimes chic, sometimes stark, sometimes playful,” says Michael Levy, its new publisher and editor-in-chief.

This spring, a refurbished Summit Journal (issue 320) was reborn as a print-only, biannual, oversized, coffee-table-quality magazine devoted to longform storytelling and large-format photography. The first issue came out in February, and the next is due in August. Previously, Levy spent five years working for two other outdoors magazines, Rock and Ice and Climbing. As has happened with so many other print properties in recent years, the print editions of those titles “went the way of the dodo.”

“As someone who loves print as a medium for longform storytelling, it seemed like the perfect time to take a crack at starting a new print magazine,” Levy says. “Rather than start a brand new magazine, though, I loved the idea of breathing new life into a historic title. Summit, in the climbing world, is as historic as it gets.” He acquired the rights in February 2023, and put out the first new issue in over 27 years.

Here he talks about his climb back up the summit, as well as some of the covers art directed by Kilness and Crenshaw, who have been unheralded in the history of magazine design.

Why have you revived the magazine as a journal in print only? Doesn’t that seem to be counter-intuitive?
On its face, there’s definitely something counterintuitive to being print only. But in another way, it seems exceptionally rational to me? That is, if you can get the material in the magazine online, doesn’t that decrease the perceived value of the print product?

My feeling is that with the glut of content online, there’s something to be said for a highly curated physical product. There’s so much out there on the internet that a lot of stuff, much of it quite good, just gets lost in the noise. But something tactile that you can feel between your fingers and read over a cup of coffee or a beer, that prioritizes longform … it might not reach as many people, but the people it does reach will be that much more invested. Print feels a bit like vinyl to me; what’s old is new again, and the collectability of it, the quality of the physical thing itself, is important. Just like vinyl isn’t going to replace Spotify, print isn’t going to replace digital, but there is a very real audience out there (and I’m in it) that likes analog media, and appreciates reading things that aren’t on a screen.

And building off that, print also felt like a more achievable business model, in a strange way. Though print has a higher bar to entry–the hard costs to get it off the ground were greater, and if I didn’t attract enough subscribers, the whole thing would have been dead on arrival–once cleared, the way forward felt much clearer. You can only fill a magazine with so many articles, after all. 

Of course, I’m a storyteller: What matters most to me is pursuing quality longform journalism. If the articles and image curation inside the magazine are no good, it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. But given what I think is the extremely high quality content we have managed to fill the magazine with, my feeling is that the exterior should match.

The magazine was founded by two committed climbers. Tell me a little about their goals and feats of magazine publishing.
Jean and Helen were trailblazers, plain and simple. … They were iconoclasts.

Jean and Helen were serious and eminently capable climbers. They lived in Big Bear, CA, in the San Bernardino Mountains, and would head out for adventures in the mountains, and climb at smaller cliffs close to home. Another fun story: Sometimes, so busy were they with their adventuring, they’d forget what issue number they were on, so there are a couple of the old ones that have the same month!

In the hundreds of issues they published, they were actively shaping the culture of the nascent sports of rock climbing and mountaineering in the U.S., pursuits that had a longer history in Europe. In addition to publishing the essays and accounts of cutting-edge ascents by the best climbers of the day—guys like Yvon Chouinard and Royal Robbins, who are household names today—they also published trip reports by families out in the hills or on a fishing trip. They cultivated an egalitarian ethos with their magazine, in content and authorship, publishing an outsized number of women.

What do you think is or are the most significant graphic element(s) of the magazine in its original form and format?
Summit’s old covers are just so distinctive. Particularly in the 1960s, they had a really bold aesthetic, combining bright colors, illustration, playful geometric shapes and different media. Most of the covers are devoid of coverlines, and many have a very minimalist look, e.g., a single pinecone against a blue background, or a silhouetted climber on a cliff against a bright yellow background. My favorite cover is probably September 1967: a minimalist illustration of a lone figure silhouetted on a hill looking up at the night sky. It’s beautiful in its simplicity.

They also used color in paradoxical ways—e.g., a mountaineering scene bathed in neon green or neon pink—and sometimes used ultra close-up shots—e.g., one section of a climbing rope.

One of the cool things in resurrecting the magazine has been to see how far its legacy extended beyond the fairly insular climbing world. I’ve had a whole host of people from the design world reach out to me to express their love and affinity for the old covers and their style.

What have you done to bring it valiantly into the 21st century?
One of the fun parts of reviving an old magazine versus starting one from scratch is that we can lean into the old stuff. The new Summit very much has one eye on the past, while also keeping one eye on the present and future. One example of this: For our debut issue in February, we had two covers. One was an illustration, one was a photo. The illustrated cover, by a great young French artist named Thomas Danthony, was very much an homage to Summit’s covers in the ’60s. The photo cover is very much a splashy, modern climbing photo, full of motion. The stories inside reflect this duality too: We publish both modern reportage, and stories about the history of climbing and climbing culture.

Physically, the magazine has also gotten a big overhaul. The new version is 10″ x 13″, so quite large. It’s printed on heavy stock, uncoated paper. It feels closer to a coffee table book than a newsstand magazine.

In terms of the aesthetic, the inside has what I’d consider a pretty modern look overall: Most of the imagery is displayed in full-page or spread format to really take advantage of the magazine’s size. My art director, Randy Levensaler, has been working on print magazines for decades, and has an incredible eye for effective yet eye-catching layouts

That being said, in terms of the text, we’re very much charting a classic look. I can’t tell you how much Randy stressed over the font choices, text size and spacing—and I think it shows.

We also retitled it as Summit Journal. For six years in the 1990s, after Jean and Helen sold the magazine, it was rebranded as Summit: The Mountain Journal. It closed up shop in 1996, and hasn’t been published since. So going with Summit Journal felt like a way to nod to both former iterations of the mag, yet once again signal that this is a new magazine for a new era.

Do you have to be a climber to be a reader?
Definitely not. I myself am a passionate climber, but at the end of the day my mission is to fill Summit Journal’s pages with quality journalism, photography and art.

The best piece in the first issue is by a brilliant young writer named Astra Lincoln, and it is about the advent of photographic surveying in the Canadian Rockies at the turn of the 20th century, and how this a) led to a boom in mountaineering, and b) is also inextricably related to episodes of ethnic cleansing in the area. It’s masterful.

Some of what we publish is surely a bit lingo heavy, but most of it, I’d say, should be totally accessible to the non-climber.

What is your longterm goal for Summit?
To make a magazine that people want to keep on their shelf to read and flip through again and again over the years.

That’s another of those characteristics that we’re hesitant to acknowledge. After all, look at the definition:

Webster’s primarily defines the word in two ways:

a) a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation;

b) an irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God resulting from superstition.

The secondary definition:

a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary.

Let’s see…”ignorance,” “fear of the unknown,” “trust in magic,” “irrational attitude toward the supernatural,” ideas “maintained despite evidence to the contrary.” Those are mostly not qualities we want applied to ourselves!

It’s pretty hard for us modern people to agree that we use this framework to make sense of the world. So, most of us say, “nah…not really…I’m not superstitious.”

At least, that’s what our Rider says. Remember, The Rider is a metaphorical way of describing our conscious experience of ourselves as decision-makers, as agents who are rationally in control of our lives. Beliefs in magic or making decisions despite contrary evidence is not The Rider’s way. The Rider is the agent I call “I” or “me.” The Rider uses logic. Thinking.

Ah, but then there’s The Elephant. The Elephant is that powerful aspect of our minds that unconsciously makes decisions and enables actions “without thinking about it.” The Elephant reacts to the world instinctively in order to stay safe and solve problems in the most efficient way possible. Logic takes way more time and energy than The Elephant wants to allocate. The Elephant uses intuition. Feeling.

Over evolutionary timescales, our species has developed little bundles of intuitive problem-solving algorithms that we’ve passed along across generations. How did we, for example, come to associate breaking a mirror with seven years of bad luck? As is so often the case, this one has origins in Greek and Roman culture. For the Greeks, a human soul was revealed through the person’s reflection in water or on a shiny metal object. The soul was out there, vulnerable, in the reflection. Glass mirrors were created in around 300 CE and the Romans determined that bad luck would befall anyone who broke one. But, not forever. The Romans believed the body renewed itself every seven years (a pretty modern way of thinking about cell replacement!) so that the original body of the mirror-breaker would be entirely switched out in that time period. Hence, seven years bad luck per broken mirror!

Of course there are hundreds of these superstitions in every culture. It seems we can’t help but provide ways of foretelling and controlling the future. We’ve connected good or bad fortune with animals (black cat cross your path?, carry a rabbit’s foot?), numbers (13 and 17 are particularly bad!), objects (indoor open umbrellas, horseshoes!), or actions (walking under ladders). Every culture has its own “supernatural” ways to explain the good or bad things that happen to people.

No matter how hard we might try, it’ would be practically impossible for us to completely rid ourselves of some vestiges of these superstitions.

And, why should we?

Isn’t it better to be safe than sorry? What’s wrong with wearing your lucky sweater on a job interview? Most of the time our Elephant’s inherent superstitiousness is harmless. Just go with it!

And, EVEN THOUGH I KNOW THAT WHAT I SAY HAS NO AFFECT ON THE OUTCOME, I’m absolutely not going to say anything about the Pittsburgh Steelers making the NFL playoffs this year!

But, if I should slip, I’ll be sure not to tempt fate by immediately knocking on wood!

Tom Guarriello is a psychologist, consultant, and founding faculty member of the Masters in Branding program at New York’s School of Visual Arts. He’s spent over a decade teaching psychology-based courses like The Meaning of Branded Objects, as well as leading Honors and Thesis projects. He’s spearheaded two podcasts, BrandBox and RoboPsych, the accompanying podcast for his eponymous website on the psychology of human-robot interaction. This essay was originally posted on Guarriello’s Substack, My Favorite Things.

Header photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash.

Brahma, a Brazilian beer brand, had an idea.

In preparation for Carnival in Rio earlier this year, Brahma created a cell phone that partiers would be okay with breaking or losing. As the Carnival’s biggest sponsor, Brahma took on the challenge of preserving the carefree revelry inherent to the festival by devising a phone stripped down to just the essentials— the ability to call and SMS text, a GPS and transportation app, as well as an 8-megapixel camera. “This innovation lets party-seekers leave their high-tech worries behind, ensuring the celebratory spirit remains unbroken,” the brand shared in a statement.

Brahma leaned into the comedy of the Brahma Phone concept in their marketing campaign, playing up that the phone is bare bones and undesirable, and that’s the whole point. “Meet ‘Brahma Phone’: A phone created by a brand who understands everything about Carnival and nothing about cell phones,” they proclaim. “We thought of a phone that is so bad, with only the features that no one would want to steal,” said Nicholas Bergantin, co-CCO of the São Paulo-based creative agency Africa Creative, who worked with Brahma on the campaign.

“Brahma is more than a beer; it’s a brand that solves real problems for those eager to celebrate life fully,” elaborated Sergio Gordilho, Co-President and CCO of Africa Creative. “This project perfectly encapsulates our approach to meaningful engagement with our consumers.” And engaged they are! The Brahma Phone has proven to be a major success as the most viral Carnival brand action of the year and is becoming a festival must-have.

Bolstered by this initial success, the Brahma Phone initiative is poised to spread far beyond Brazil and Carnival. Brahma and Africa Creative are keen on sharing the Brahma Phone with attendees of other events similar to Carnival, where phone theft can kill the buzz. Brahma’s mission to problem-solve, exemplified by the Brahma Phone, is just revving up; they want to continue enhancing audiences’ experiences with innovations that prioritize letting go, simplicity, and the essence of celebration.

I am a creative director with dyslexia.

In the past, seemingly mundane tasks like sending an email presented a challenge, draining time and mental energy. I would often spend upwards of an hour dictating, reading, re-reading, and asking a colleague to proofread before finally hitting send. Now, with a simple prompt in ChatGPT, my thoughts are magically transformed into clear, concise words. What once took precious time can be accomplished with a click, freeing up my brain to focus on what it does best: bringing ideas and strategies to life that help my clients stay ahead of the curve. 

This is just one example of AI leveling the playing field, enabling nonlinear thinkers like me to communicate as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Yet, for design and creative firms and professionals, AI presents an even more profound opportunity: the cognitive abilities inherent in dyslexia, like the knack for brainstorming endlessly, tackling problems from various perspectives, and manipulating objects in the mind’s eye, uniquely equip us to stretch the boundaries of generative design tools such as Midjourney, DALL-E, and DeepArt.

This is a game-changer. AI not only eliminates the logistical and communication barriers that have sometimes hindered the success of neurodiverse individuals in the workplace but also empowers people with dyslexia to leverage their inherent strengths and supercharge their creativity.

Case in point: You can present me—and most dyslexics I know—with nearly any business challenge, and we can riff on it and problem-solve for hours. We leverage each other’s ideas as springboards, challenge thoughts, and flesh solutions out collaboratively. Our capacity to dissect problems from multiple angles, akin to turning a simple problem over as if it were a tesseract, distinguishes us.

This same way of thinking lets me really push the limits of AI design tools. I thrive on playing around with art directions, constantly tweaking and refining them to bring ideas to life. For dyslexics, whose minds are often in overdrive, it’s like always having a tireless collaborator by your side, especially when working against tight deadlines. AI steps in when my dyslexic brain might be racing, helping me translate mental images into designs more quickly. By guiding the AI—use this relief, try this mode—I can accelerate the creative process and ensure concepts materialize closer to how my mind envisioned them.

And isn’t that just what every agency is after? In a world where ChatGPT can dish out answers faster than you can say “Google it,” intelligence means much more than just knowing stuff. In our industry, successful strategies and campaigns are ultimately about imagination – something AI will never be able to master. AI doesn’t stand for Artificial Imagination because that comes from the human brain, which is irreplicable. And you can’t teach an AI to think like a dyslexic even if you tried. The magic of dyslexic thinking lies in its ability to break free from the norm and see things in a totally fresh light.

A great strategy or campaign is all about asking the right questions to solve problems and challenges. You have to know what you need to achieve and then dig deep. Those who use AI in simplistic and basic ways risk regurgitating outdated ideas and strategies. After all, AI is programmed to be predictable and reliable. But the magic of human creativity lies in the ways that the brain thinks unpredictably – the instances when it fails to give the same old tired answer to the same old tired question. And that’s what dyslexics are really good at. 

So what should agencies do to capitalize on this moment? 

First and foremost, companies must fully embrace neurodiversity as a valuable asset in the workplace rather than viewing it as a limitation. Sir Richard Branson and the nonprofit Made by Dyslexia have championed this idea by collaborating with LinkedIn to enable people with dyslexia to showcase “Dyslexic Thinking” as a skill on their profiles. Branson himself has added this skill to his LinkedIn profile, and I have done the same. However, a 2020 report from U.K. employers revealed that 50% of HR managers admitted they would not consider hiring neurodivergent candidates. If you look at the top of every field, there is a dyslexic who threw out the rule book. Think: Steven Spielberg, Barbara Corcoran, and Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad. Businesses that fail to recognize this opportunity risk losing valuable talent to more forward-thinking companies.

Companies should also ensure that neurodiverse employees can access essential tools such as ChatGPT, Grammarly, Co.Writer, and VoiceDreamReader that help them communicate and work efficiently.

Lastly, they should offer thorough training on all AI tools, and consider forming specialized teams of neurodivergent employees dedicated to experimentation and innovation. These teams can craft instructions, best practices, and workflows to unleash the full creative power of AI tools.

When I was ten, I became a professional magician, which became my creative refuge — a sanctuary away from the confines of the classroom where, as a dyslexic, I often felt out of place. It’s one of the reasons I like to say there is a little bit of magic in dyslexia. Now, with the rise of generative AI, I’m more convinced of this than ever. When AI is harnessed to its fullest extent and paired with the unique strengths of dyslexics — strong problem-solving skills, unconventional thinking, and a knack for tackling challenges from many perspectives — the potential for magic and unbridled creativity becomes boundless. 

Images created by the author.

For Adam Hiner, our guest on today’s show, combining his passion for food and regenerative agriculture with his work ethic and growing knowledge of the entrepreneurial landscape has enabled him to build two really inspiring and conscientious brands. Adam is the CEO and Founder of Pacha, a gluten-free, grain-free, sprouted, fermented, paleo, and plant-based bread company, as well as the Co-Founder of Boochcraft, through which he and his team introduced the market to organic hard kombucha! 

In our chat, we get to hear from Adam about the important steps on his evolving path, the morals that ground his work, and some of the challenges he has faced and overcome so far. If you would like to hear about true innovations in the food sector, how Adam approached business during the pandemic, and the power of intuition in a data-filled world, listen in with us!

Key Points From This Episode:

• Adam talks about regenerative agriculture and how Pacha is involved and supports this movement.
• Challenges in the baked goods space: distribution, freshness, packaging, and more.
• The environmental and social initiatives that Adam and Pacha have linked with so far.
• A little about the organic, hard kombucha company that Adam started called Boochcraft.
• Advice from Adam for aspiring CPG business owners on the realities of running a business and using intuition.
• How Pacha was birthed at the beginning of the pandemic and Adam’s attitude towards riding that wave.
• Demand for kombucha and the surprising demographics that gravitated towards the products.
• Adam’s journey before launching Pacha; selling mortgages, restaurants, catering, and more!

Read the transcript and find links from the episode at Brands for a Better World.

The Brands for a Better World podcast (formerly Evolve CPG) is hosted by Gage Mitchell, founder (CEO) and Creative Director at Modern Species, a sustainable brand design agency helping better-for-the-world brand launch, evolve, and grow to scale their impact.

During the ’20s and ’30s the Italian artist Paolo Garretto was a giant of international advertising design and editorial art, as inventive as A.M. Cassandre, as prolific as Jean Carlu, as witty as Miguel Covarrubias. There was hardly a noteworthy American magazine that had not published Garretto’s work at one time. There were virtually no French, Italian, English and German poster hoardings or kiosks on which his advertisements did not regularly appear. His airbrushed caricature epitomized Deco styling. His geometric conceits captured the romance of the industrial age. Paul Rand called him “one of the world’s most formidable draftsmen.” Yet by the ’50s his ubiquity was on the wane. Art directors called his work a vestige of pre-war innocence. As happens to all stylists, the vagaries of fashion took their toll. Garretto’s approach was no longer in demand, eclipsed by Modern and faux Modern tendencies. Though he never completely vanished from view, and continued working until his death in 1989, his memory might have been forever consigned to the years between the wars if not for the Postmodern ethos that caused designers to quote, borrow and steal from history. In one such appropriation, Garretto’s spirit, if not his actual form, was briefly revived.

Garretto’s fame in the United States was due to the regularity with which his work appeared in Fortune, Time, Vogue and The New Yorker, but even more directly owing to his work in the original Vanity Fair. As one of Vanity Fair‘s three most popular caricaturists (the others were Covarrubius and William Cotton), Garretto’s work was regularly shown to millions on its covers and inside pages. In 1983 when the inheritors of Condé Nast’s publishing empire (but not necessarily of his wisdom) decided to revive the mothballed Vanity Fair, they tried to imitate its original formula (wrongly, as it turned out, since times and interests had changed). Because Garretto had given the magazine a portion of its graphic identity, it was reasoned that a modern-day Garretto would provide the same allure.

Caricaturists were found who were practicing similar moderne conceits but lacked the insight that Garretto brought to his pictures, insight and intelligence that made his work transcend mere ephemeral style. It was further reasoned that if Garretto, who had not worked for Condé Nast for 40 years, were alive and still capable of making art, perhaps he would lend a nostalgic glow to the fledgling publication. In fact, Garretto was then in his early 80s, and living in Monte Carlo.

He was located by Lloyd Ziff, then Vanity Fair‘s art director, who commissioned him to do several covers. They were, however, rejected by the new editors for apparently being too nostalgic.

Ziff’s discovery awoke my own interest in this artist, which actually began after I was introduced to his work some years prior. And late in 1986 I began a regular correspondence with Garretto that continued until a month before his death in August 1989. My questions to him focused on his professional life, the development of his distinctive style, the people he knew and admired, and why he faded from view. Well into our correspondence I somewhat timidly broached the subject of his early entanglements with the Italian Fascist party and the stories I had read about his having designed the Fascist uniform and being one of Mussolini’s elite bodyguards. From the outset his letters to me were surprisingly candid, open and warm, and amidst the countless references to, and apologies for, his failing health, he recalled his many triumphs and failures, including his flirtation with Fascism.

This article is based on these letters, on conversations with people who knew him and additional biographical material.

Garretto was born in 1903 in Naples. “I began doing caricatures when I was very young, just as an amusement,” he wrote. “Never thinking that I was going to be a caricaturist all my life.”

In 1913, at age 10, his family moved to America so that the elder Garretto, a scholar from the University of Pisa, could do research for a history of the United States that was commissioned by an Italian publisher.

“I knew very few English words at the time,” Garretto recalled, “and was only able to explain myself in school through drawings on the blackboard.”

The family ended their stay in 1917 when Garretto’s father was recalled to serve as an officer in the Italian army. Paolo and his mother settled briefly in Florence. At war’s end his father became a professor in Milan, and Paolo attended the Fine Art School of Brera where, “I always had trouble with my professors inasmuch as I liked Futurism and Cubism and they did not like the [odd] way I saw our models,” he mused in one of his letters. “For I did some sketches in the manner of these movements that shocked my teachers.”

Garretto’s naive interest in the avant garde and his youthful rebellion against authority was consistent with the social and cultural turmoil brewing in Postwar Italy that was splitting the society into two extremes—the Communists and Fascists—and ultimately led the nation to its totalitarian destiny.

In 1921 Garretto’s father assumed a teaching post in Rome and Paolo enrolled in the Superior Institute of Fine Arts to study architecture. He and some friends began to frequent Rome’s famous Cafe Aragno where artists, actors, and politicians assembled to drink, eat and debate the hot issues, and where Paolo began drawing crayon caricatures of these celebrities on the white marble tables.

“One night I happened to sketch a good one of Pirandello and a better one of Marinetti, and a journalist who was there asked me to sketch them on paper. His name was Orio Vergani, a poet and writer of comedies, and soon through him I began to sell my caricatures to the Roman newspapers.” His drawing became more than a mere hobby, and he decided that he too wanted to be a journalist. “I did everything from then on,” he recalled, “writing little pieces that I illustrated and doing posters and decoration for the movies.” In fact, the fickle Garretto quickly switched his ambitions to a career in the film industry, after initially serving as an assistant to one of his professors who was a scenic artist for the director Fred Niblo while in Rome filming the original Ben Hur (with Raymond Navarro). Niblo used Garretto as a translator and hired him to do some graphics too. However, the tiring daily routine on the set was “not for me,” wrote Garretto. “I have always been, and hoped to remain, quite independent.”

But not everything in the young Garretto’s life was so fancy free. As a young boy he had developed a “visceral” and long lasting anti-communist attitude after learning that the Imperial Russian family, “including little [Prince] Alexis,” were murdered by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution. He wrote that “I can still remember my father reading the article [about their assassinations] to my mother, who was horrified.”

So in 1921, as Italy’s political situation grew worse, Garretto was shocked into what for him would lead to a moral stand.

“I had suffered a terrible experience,” he wrote as if the event were yesterday. “During the anniversary of the 1918 victory over Austria my father went to a gathering at the tomb of the unknown soldier where he was assaulted and beaten by a mass of Bolsheviks. Father came home with a head wound, his uniform in pieces, his war decorations stolen. We were all furious! But father was one of the best men who lived in Italy. He told us to be calm and said about his foes in true Christian spirit: ‘they do not know what they are doing.’ But in those years nearly all my good friends were Fascists [because they too hated the communists]. At school and Aragno they all asked me why I did not join them. But my father had forbidden me to adhere to ‘that bunch of people who are not worth more than the Communists,’ and in those times one generally listened to fathers. Then one day in June 1922 a bunch of Communists passed [my house] shooting, hollering, shouting and carrying red banners. We all went to the balcony to see what was happening and saw them beating the local food merchant, stealing his wine, flowers, fruits, salamis and hams. They also smashed in the windows of the corner cafe before running away. The next day I went to the Fasio to join the Fascist party. But I was too young and was told to join the Vanguardista [the Fascist youth movement] until I turned 21 years old.”

Garretto’s father was furious with his son for disobeying him, and was heard to say repeatedly and seriously, “I have three sons—two are OK, but the eldest is crazy in the head.” Yet Garretto, like so many other young Italians, had been swept away by revolutionary fervor as well as the glamour of Benito Mussolini’s black-shirted legions. The only problem Garretto had was a sartorial one. “I did not like the way they were all dressed up: they had only one common garment—the black shirt. As for the rest of their uniform, they wore anything they liked, such as long pants of any color. So I designed for myself a uniform that was all black—shirt, cavalry pants and boots. My friends who liked the attire copied it. In fact, four of us, Mario and Carlo Ferrando, Aldo Placidi and me became known as the Musketeers.”

By accident this ad hoc collegial group became Mussolini’s formal honor guard. For in 1922 after being rebuffed by Parliament in a crass power play, Mussolini gathered his legions around the Royal Palace in Rome to give an ultimatum to King Victor Emanuele. The King received the bald soon-to-be dictator and named him to head the government.

Garretto recalled the thrill of that day: “Mussolini and the other Facist leaders came down among us. The Musketeers were all lined up at attention, and when Mussolini saw us in our crisp new uniforms he asked Gino Calza-Bini, the founder and leader of the Roman Fascio, ‘Who are these?’ My friend Placidi was prompt to answer: ‘We’re the Musketeers!’ To which Mussolini responded, ‘…they shall be my Musketeers!’ and passed on. In the evening we were ordered to the Fascio and told that we would become 33 instead of four. Calza-Bini was happy and we were too, but we did not know what kind of an ordeal it was going to be from that day on. This was the beginning of a period that [in hindsight] I did not like at all.”

With Il Duce’s approval, Garretto became a charter member of the manipolo (a formation of 33 men based on Julius Caesar’s plan of military organization in which three manipoli equal one legioni) whose expressed task was to escort Mussolini and his four lieutenants to various ceremonies. “There were always six or eight of us on duty,” Garretto wrote. “And who was the one that was nearly always on duty? Not being married nor having any business to attend, I was one of those. You can imagine my life at home,” he added with a touch of sly humor. “My father was furious inasmuch as I could not attend my Art Academy and continue studying to become an architect. My mother was worried to see me always on the run, but there was nothing to be done. For in the meantime Mussolini had founded the Milizia Volontaria Sicurezza Nazionale [the volunteers for national security], which enlisted all its Fascist members for life. So I found myself militarized forever.”

Garretto’s conscription lasted only one year. Though his biography in a 1934 issue of Vanity Fair called him an “enthusiastic Fascist and founder of Mussolini’s body guard,” he insists it was an act of folly that he tried to overcome. One day, in fact, his father interceded on his behalf with the general in command of the Milizia. He explained to the general that his son’s duty to Il Duce was ruining his chances for a position in architecture, and asked if Paolo could be given a leave of absence until graduation. Miraculously, the general agreed. “He asked me to give my name, date of birth, and address to his secretary,” recalled Garretto, “who typed it up, got it signed, and gave it to my father. We bowed, went outside, and to our surprise we saw on the paper that he had signed a permanent discharge.” To this day it is still a mystery whether the order was deliberate or a classic example of Italian efficiency.

As for the anti-Communism that caused him to embrace Fascism, it prevailed until his death, but regarding his flirtation with the party. “I consider all these years of my youth a great, useless lesson inasmuch as I am still not able to say what is right and what is wrong.” Garretto also wrote about 1925, the year of his reprieve, with a decidedly palpable sense of joy and innocence. “Aside from the Academy I started to really live.” At this time that he was drawing caricatures for more Roman newspapers and satiric journals, but his primary aim was to get a passport and start traveling. The first stop in what would become a peripatetic lifestyle was Paris, where Garretto hoped to find a market for his caricatures (which by his own description were “very different and modern”). After two weeks, however, he had not made any significant contacts and returned to Rome. But in 1927 he was urged by some former art school friends to return to Paris; since they had found work there they assured him that he would too. Their jobs were with Dorland Advertising, the largest agency in the world. Garretto was introduced to their boss, one Mr. Maas, who loved his drawings and suggested that he go to London where there were many color magazines requiring good illustration. Maas was the representative for the “Great Eight,” a group of British publications including The Illustrated London News, The Graphic, The Bystander and The Tatler, among others. With a glowing recommendation letter, Garretto flew to London, where he presented some decidedly unconventional caricatures of Chamberlain, Lloyd George, D’Annunzio and Mussolini. “They [the editors] asked me to leave the drawings as well as my address in Paris so they could contact me. However, after a few weeks without any word from them I returned to Rome [dejected] and proceeded to focus my energies on getting my architecture degree.”

The impatient Garretto gave up too soon. For one day, shortly after his return, he recalled receiving a phone call from one of his friends in Paris who excitedly said, “Paolo … how did you do it? How did you get into the British press?” The friend explained that in the current issue of The Graphic were printed four color caricatures with a caption announcing that these were “new ideas of a young French caricaturist.” Garretto was ecstatic (though he definitely did not want to be “branded as French”) and bought all the copies of The Graphic on sale at his local Roman newsstand. He also learned that the “Great Eight” was looking for him all over Paris so that they could award him a contract for regular contributions. Thus began what he called “the beginning of my international artistic adventure.”

Many monumental things happened in 1927. In addition to embarking on the road to fame and ubiquity as a graphic artist, “I also married [his first wife Ariane], went to live in Paris and worked in London,” Garretto wrote. “But my wife did not like London so I had to commute every week by airplane (Fokkers from the war that were adapted by Air France to make the trip over the Channel).” Over the years he made hundreds of caricatures for the “Great Eight” and for advertising clients too. “It was pleasant for a while,” but then he admitted, “with the years passing by, the faces to caricature were becoming scarce.”

To find other challenges he began doing some work in Italy for Gazzetta del Popolo in Turin (a newspaper for which he designed a format), Rivista del Popolo d’Italia (Mussolini’s flagship magazine), and Natura, a beautiful Milanese magazine for which he designed the covers, and which were reproduced in the leading advertising arts magazines in Europe and the United States.

The late ’20s was not only a time of political upheaval, but a period when artists believed in the power to change people’s thoughts through graphic design.

“As all others, I was pushed by Cubism, Futurism, Divisionism (what our professors had called ‘stupid inventions to get attention and fame any way possible’). I tried very hard to be different,” wrote Garretto about the genesis of his personal style. “We were all conscious that we were pushing and trying to change something or everything. I recall when Fortunino Mantania, a very famous [art nouveau] illustrator from the turn of the century, came to my father’s house one evening. To get his opinion, I showed him a drawing I had made for a new brand of coffee. He told me to forget, what he called, my ‘fantasies and useless tricks’ and design a nice, nearly naked girl embracing the package instead of my smiling Neapolitan cafeteria (coffeepot) pouring coffee in a demi-tasse.” Garretto respected him, but thought his ideas were old fashioned. So instead, “I did my idea and it was bought.”

Garretto’s approach was based on simplification of primary graphic forms into iconic depictions and loose, but poignant, likenesses. Vibrant, airbrushed color was his trademark, and he also experimented with different media to create exciting new form, including experiments with collage and modeling clay, which proved fruitful. Without his superb draftsmanship what is now pigeonholed as Deco styling would surely have been a superficial conceit, but his conceptual work was so acute, and his decorative work was so well-crafted, that he eschewed these pitfalls. Writing in a 1946 issue of Graphis, his old friend and sponsor from the Cafe Aragno days, Orio Vergani, describes Garretto’s ingenuity this way: “Once the constructive theme of his images is discovered, Garretto proceeds to the invention of the media necessary for executing them. I believe he has painted, or rather constructed, his images with everything: scraps of cloth, threads of rayon, with the bristles of his shaving brush, with straw, strips of metal and mill board, with iron filings and sulfur, tufts of fur and wings of butterflies. His colors are born of a strange alchemy of opposed materials in the light of an artificial sun; he seeks for the squaring of shade as others have sought for the squaring of the circle.”

Though Garretto lived and worked out of his flat in Paris, the City of Lights was no more than a base from which to work for publications and agencies in other major world capitals. He visited Berlin often, where he worked for the Berlin Illustrated News, Leipzig Illustrated, Der Querschnitt, Der Sport im Bilder, and others (until Hitler assumed power and had expelled many of the Jews on the creative staffs of these journals). In London he did advertising work through the London Press Exchange, the most important advertising outfit in the British Empire, basically because Charles Hobson, its director, asked him to do some “modern and surprising posters.” Owing to his own globe-trotting and the consequent lack of time for what he called “mondanities,” Garretto did not nurture many friendships in Paris. He did, however, know the French masters of poster art, A.M. Cassandre, Jean Carlu, Charles Loupot and Paul Colin, and was briefly connected to their advertising “agency,” Alliance Graphique, owing to his friendship with a Montmartre printer named Dupont. For this agency he did a sketch of a poster for Air France’s new airline, La Fleche d’Orient. It was immediately bought by the client, apparently ruffling the feathers of the other Alliance members, whose own attempts to sell their ideas had failed. Avoiding silly rivalries and business minutia was why Garretto invariably preferred to handle most of his other advertising accounts directly with the client. Around this time he met Alexey Brodovitch at his office at Les Trois Quartiers, the chic Parisian department store, for which he was art director. It was an acquaintance that would have interesting consequences later in Garretto’s career.

“I had seen some of Brodovitch’s work,” recalled Garretto, “and was very enthusiastic about his new way to advertise men’s clothes, shoes, and women’s beauty products. For me, an admirer of the [raucous] Futurists, it was very exciting to meet this very calm, controlled Russian.”

Garretto’s caricatures were published in the United States, first by the Philadelphia Ledger and the New York Sunday World, then Fortune Magazine started using covers, and later he did drawings for The New Yorker‘s profiles—but his really significant American exposure occurred in October 1930 when Clare Boothe Brokaw, one of Vanity Fair‘s chief editors, requested his services in a “flattering but unexpected” letter sent to his Paris home:

“Dear Monsieur Garretto,

“The Editors were very much impressed with your cartoon of Gandhi in the August issue of Fortune. We had also in our files some excellent caricatures made by you for the December, 1927 issue of the Graphic. It occurred to us that you may possibly have some other caricatures of prominent people, or cartoons of a political, artistic, or social nature, which you maybe able to send us. We should be very glad to consider them for publication in Vanity Fair.”

Garretto, however, did not respond until late December after Brokaw insisted in a second note that:

“We are indeed anxious to see your work, and if there is something we can use, we are anxious to do so in a forthcoming issue.”

Garretto no longer hesitated, and immediately sailed to New York to meet his new clients.

“Aside from the satisfaction that I always had through my work, I must say that the Vanity Fair period was really the most exciting of my life,” he recalled with a distinct melancholy about the special time that had passed. “I never had the slightest problem with them—[Frank] Crowninshield was a kind and most comprehensive editor, and what can I say of those beautiful and bright, intelligent Clare Boothe Brokaw (later Luce) and Helen Lawrenson? It was really a joy for me to go to New York every time. Not to speak of my friendship with M.F. Agha [Vanity Fair‘s legendary art director] whom I had met first in Berlin when he was art director of German Vogue.”

He spent time with Condé Nast in Paris and New York, stayed at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, and cultivated friendships with many of New York’s rich and famous. It was a charmed life. Fortunately for Garretto’s bank book he was commissioned by the New York office of the Italian Lines to execute some travel posters. For in addition to his fee they provided him with 50% discounted tickets on their transatlantic steamers. Since Garretto commuted to the United States almost as frequently as he went to London, the savings were well appreciated. When he elected to stay at home his working relationship remained unhindered by what today is a comparatively slow means of travel and communications. Indeed, he said that it was faster in the 1930s to send a drawing from Paris to New York (usually it took five to six days) than to send a package to Milan (taking 10 to 15 days). Moreover, his rapport with the editors was exemplary, given the commonplace interference in visual matters exercised by editors today.

“In general I would be told that [Vanity Fair] wanted a cover for a certain month and I would conceive it, send it, and then see it published,” he explained. “Only once did I have to rush another cover drawing because the one I had sent could not be used.” In this case the new one became a classic example of Garretto’s caricature as design in the service of polemics. It was rather prescient too, for this cover showed the world sweating under the heat of the Japanese flag (in a reference to an important world naval convention that Japan refused to sign). “Condé Nast wrote me a complimentary letter asking how ‘I came to nurture this idea.’ I told him that I knew the Japanese had no interest in signing a treaty that would limit their control. To me it was quite clear that Japan was growing fast and was very hungry for [power].”

Most of Garretto’s concepts were his own, and were often based on his sometimes profoundly acute—yet other times devastatingly naive—understanding of world politics. In addition to his commercial work, Garretto considered himself a journalist. He had been affiliated with newspapers for a long time, and so, as the war clouds over Europe began to darken and swell in the late ’30s, Garretto was allowed to travel, owing to his longstanding affiliation with the Italian Press Association, which made it possible for him to get visas for almost any country. When the war suddenly broke out in 1940 he was, however, in Turin art directing—”changing the face”—of the Gazzetta del Popolo and, because he was an Italian citizen could not get a visa to return to Paris to be with his wife (whom he later divorced) and son, who where stranded when the French frontier was closed to foreigners. Instead, he left for New York from Naples on the steamship Conte di Savoia, which was filled to capacity with Americans fleeing the future battleground. On board he shared a table with John Paul Getty, “who wanted to be left alone and was upset when he learned I was a newspaperman, but was mollified when I drew a caricature of him. He later told me to call him if I needed anything in the United States.”

Back in New York, Garretto worked for his friend M.F. Agha, who took over at Vogue after Vanity Fair had folded. He did covers for others. One such commission was earned a year before, through Brodovitch and editor Carmel Snow, who offered him a contract to design the 12 1940 covers for Vogue‘s competitor, Harper’s Bazaar. But as an American war with Germany and Italy was quickly becoming inevitable, Garretto’s past association would prove an insurmountable obstacle in his attempt to do more work and be allowed to stay in New York. The first problem arose with Harper’s Bazaar. Before leaving for Turin in 1939 he had completed finishes on two of the covers. When he returned he was anxious to complete the rest. But neither Snow (who was working with her publisher, Hearst, in California) nor Brodovitch (who was on vacation) could be found to discuss the jobs.

“So I started to work on ideas for covers for February and March,” he recalled. “Some time after this I reached Brodovitch, who told me in the nicest and kindest way he could that my contract was broken.” Garretto learned through the grapevine that a biography, titled Fascist Artist, printed in Vanity Fair in 1934 was making the rounds of Harper’s Bazaar, and given the tenor of the times the editors refused to give this “Fascist Artist” any work. “Happily for me,” wrote Garretto, “I always had Condé Nast and Fortune to accept me, so I carried on, nevertheless with a bit of bitterness, as you can understand. I later heard from Agha that Brodovitch had told him that he suffered but had to ‘obey orders.’ In my opinion he obeyed orders too strictly.”

Garretto was also given certain jobs to keep spirit and soul alive, including the re-rendering of Cassandre’s original Dubonet Man. It was assigned to Garretto by Paul Rand, then the art director of The Weintraub Agency that handled the account. Rand told me: “Garretto was a masterful artist, and accepted this job without any reservation or resentment even though I was not asking him for his own ideas.”

Because of the danger of war, President Roosevelt had stated that no German or Italian citizen could get a quota visa for the United States, and Garretto’s visitor’s visa allowed him only a few months sojourn. Covarrubias had assured him that he could help obtain a permanent visa in Mexico, so as to avoid deportation to the Virgin Islands. Unfortunately, this never materialized. However, since one of the many dignitaries Garretto met during his travels was Secretary of State Cordell Hull, he was told by Hull’s secretary that if he returned to Italy he could come back to New York to apply for permanent residency.

“But there was no time for this,” Garretto recalled. “Italy entered the European war. (And in the meantime I married my second wife in New York.) I was arrested, as were all other Italian newspapermen, and taken first to the Tombs [a New York prison], and then to the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs to join the Italian, German and Japanese diplomatic internees. After six months we were embarked on the Grottingholm, a Swedish boat as old as Noah’s ark, to Lisbon, where wagon-lit trains were waiting to take us to our respective countries.”

Just as his fling with Fascism was tolerated in America before the war, his farcical caricatures of Mussolini and Hitler (published in the United States) were only tolerated in Italy until war broke out. Garretto had heard that Mussolini was not pleased with a certain anti-war article he had written a few years earlier. So when he returned to Rome, Garretto was not in favor. And when he refused to do propaganda (owing, he wrote in a rather far-fetched statement, to an FBI declaration that he signed before being deported not to do any anti-US propaganda), he was forced to come up with an idea that would prove his patriotism and not land him in an Italian prison for insubordination or treason. His brilliant idea, which is quite funny in hindsight, was to help teach Italian to those peoples conquered by the victorious Fascist forces.

“I had patented an idea to teach our vocabulary through the movies,” wrote Garretto. “One would see a cartoon, a short (with live actors) and through the sound, the image, and written captions could learn the language.”

Garretto was sent with his new wife, Eva, to Budapest to put his invention into practice. His stay was rather pleasant until Mussolini was deposed, exiled and then reestablished as a puppet by Hitler. This meant that if an Italian living in a German-occupied country did not become a “new Fascist” in support of the new Duce, he or she would be interned as an enemy alien by the Germans. Such was Garretto’s fate for nine months until he and his wife were evacuated by the Germans in the face of the Russian advance. They were eventually deported to Trento, Italy, where they were able to escape from a transport train during an allied air raid, and managed to flee to Milan, where Garretto and his wife were helped by friends, even though they were “suspect citizens,” according to a document they were forced to carry.

With the war’s end, Garretto returned to Paris as an “ex-enemy.” Though it took time to reestablish himself, he made covers for the fashion magazine Adam and a few other small journals. In Italy he published a children’s book that he had written while interned in Hungary, and worked for several magazines, including Arbiter, Per Voi Signor, and others. In 1946, with the help of some friends, he was able to get a visa to return to the United States, where he designed a perfume bottle that was produced by Lucien Lelong. But generally speaking, in the United States his work was not as sought after as before the war.

“It is not me who stopped working for the American magazines,” he wrote in answer to the question of why he terminated his American associations, “but the American magazines changed a lot. They published less and less drawings. In my time, maybe there were less photographers. And the old art editors died or changed and maybe the new ones did not even know my work! My last serious appearance was in Vogue, in a special section dedicated to [the musical] South Pacific. So you see I did not stop … they did.” Dejected, he returned to France, where he worked for the Italian magazine Panorama and other “low-circulation, low-paying magazines.”

In 1952 Garretto found that living in France became a big problem. He “started to be singled out by the income tax operators in Paris, who found that I had not paid income tax in France on what I was earning in the US, Italy, etc. It was useless to tell them that I paid regularly in those different countries. So they fixed a big fine—too big for me to pay—and I decided to leave Paris and start again in Monaco where there is no income tax, but they tax you indirectly through prices that are higher than in France or Italy.”

Until Garretto’s death in August 1989, he actively pursued his life’s work. Though appearing only once in an American publication since the early ’50s—actually in a subscription flyer for Condé Nast’s Traveller—he has had many exhibitions throughout Italy and a critical biography about him was published in Naples. Yet despite today’s retro-illustrators who have borrowed and made a success of the Garretto approach, his own contemporary work, including portraits done in his 1930s style of The Beatles, Margaret Thatcher, and Liza Minnelli, is quite out of sync with the times. Stale even. Regardless of Garretto’s formidable drafting skills, his more recent representations of contemporary personalities lacked the intuitive strength that underscored his earlier work. Perhaps it might also be argued that the famous and infamous of the ’20s and ’30s are bigger than life while today’s are merely human scale. Maybe Margaret Thatcher could never be as powerfully charged a portrait as Benito Mussolini. Whether Garretto’s contemporary work holds up or not, the work he did during his heyday will be remembered among the most innovative caricature and illustrative design of the golden age of graphic style.

“I’ve always been working towards a world in which design for people, design for good, and inclusive design is just good design,” said Young, design researcher and acting chair of the MFA Interaction Design program at SVA. For decades thought leaders have been working to pinpoint the future of good design–and educators have been simply trying to keep up. Now they’re shaping the future themselves. This year, Young collaborated with Pinar Guvenc, partner at the award-winning global design firm SOUR, to construct the first year-long, graduate-level Inclusive Design course in the United States.

Designed to train the next generation of strategic, collaborative, thoughtful, and yes, inclusive designers, Inclusive Design I & II is SVA’s response to corporate reconstruction across industries. Since November 2023, interaction has seen mass layoffs from design leaders like IDEO and technology mega-companies including Google and Microsoft, citing “weak consumer demand.” 

There is demand, just not for their products. People with disabilities hold about $490b in purchasing power in the United States, while 68% of Gen Z prioritizes sustainable shopping. With these two groups holding consumer power, organizations have come to understand that corporate sustainability means social responsibility. Solutions are scarce, as design and tech hemorrhage capital in search of a new ‘new normal.’ 

With an undefined future, the leadership at MFA Interaction Design chose to focus on the only two constants in design — people and their problems. “Every designer is a social impact designer,” said Young. “Whether they like it or not, they’re having an impact on society and people.” 

Instilling inclusion, co-creation, and engagement into design processes may provide the necessary salve to these wounds, setting a strong foundation for our future. It’s the curb cut effect when a design created for a few changes the lives of many. Think of the touch screen on your trusty smartphone, rubber grips on vegetable peelers, or closed captioning; all universal products initially designed with the disabled community in mind. “If you’re not co-creating with people, what you’re putting out there is not going to stick or it’s not going to last, and therefore it’s not going to sustain,” said Guvenc.

Initially designed in two parts stretching over the second year of the MFA program, the course starts slow—painfully slow. Much of Inclusive Design I is spent slowing down, observing, deepening vocabulary, and unlearning traditional design processes. The MFA program defines inclusive design as designing with, not for, communities we aim to serve, recognizing that lived experiences are equally as important as professional expertise. The first few classes are simple yet complex, differentiating inclusive from accessible, universal, or equitable design and exploring what it means to actively invite participants into the process as co-designers. 

“Every designer is a social impact designer. Whether they like it or not, they’re having an impact on society and people. 

Adriana Valdez Young, design researcher and acting chair of SVA’s MFA Interaction Design program

From early January to May 2024, the second-year students in Inclusive Design II were given the mammoth task of redesigning their studio bathrooms. Though interaction design is often seen as a technological field, SVA broadens this definition to include the vast system of networks, services, narratives, products, and experiences shaping our daily lives. “Inclusion, where it differs from accessibility, is not necessarily concerned about the baseline axis,” said Guvenc. “It is concerned about the entire journey and the experience.” Because of this, the faculty chose to focus on a physical, universal human experience to frame the class project in the course’s pilot year.

Left: First-year students celebrate at the DesignIt headquarters with experience designer Brooke Viegut following an expedition throughout New York City; Right: Pinar Guvenc (left) moderates a talk with Jade McDonnough (center) and Marshall Sitten (right) about practicing inclusion as designers and creatives.

This initial class has proven to be a fruitful struggle. Designing for inclusion is a complex, intentional process, filled with co-creation, value-setting, shifting mindsets, community research, and detailed prototyping. As students began conducting anonymous surveys, Guvenc and Young found the emerging designers stuck in habitual thinking and linear processes; many of the students’ first drafts included problematic language and ableist assumptions. Several final prototypes raised an eyebrow, including one with signage depicting a male and female icon perpetuating the gender binary.

“These deeply ingrained mindsets and habits take time to break,” said Young. “For me, it’s about being patient; knowing that we have planted the seed and that seed might sprout later in their design careers.”

The students’ thinking evolved greatly, even if there wasn’t a sharp pivot in their work this year. “Inclusive design is a mindset I can keep with myself, in all types of design,” said Fan Fang, product designer and soon-to-be MFA Interaction Design graduate. “[The course] helped me learn how to decentralize my role as a designer.” Fan Fang’s thesis project focuses on democratizing gaming for those who are visually impaired, designing a tactile controller for blind people to play video games and access information traditionally only visually available. Other graduate projects this year range from apps embracing generative AI to nurture critical thinking for middle schoolers (ThinkKee by Amogh Gharpure), creating a better experience for people with mobility impairments to navigate ride-share platforms in New York City (Unit by Jennie Yang), to tools supporting young people in learning to care for their hands and prevent chronic injury from extensive technology use (Handy by Mihira Patel). 

Under Young’s leadership, the MFA Interaction Design program is turning the needle toward crafting more inclusive designers. Across courses, from entrepreneurial design to game design, students have been tasked with prioritizing ethics and inclusive values, asking them to go deeper into the same projects with these contexts in mind. This year the thesis project requirements have been redesigned to include community engagement, video stories, and a detailed body of work consisting of at least three different design prototypes addressing each student’s research, deepening their understanding of design and its impact. 

If you’re not co-creating with people, what you’re putting out there is not going to stick or it’s not going to last, and therefore it’s not going to sustain.

Pinar Guvenc, partner at SOUR

Looking to the future of the program, Young and Guvenc are hopeful. Inclusive design is still in its early stages as common practice, but its impact is clear. As Black Lives Matter invigorated new diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in leadership, and the deadline for the 2025 European Accessibility Act looms, companies have a need for lower and mid-level employees who bring a thoughtful lens to their work. “I feel like there was this portal that opened to making inclusive, accessible, and community-centered design this new norm,” said Young, “and we’re jumping through this portal to help future-proof our students.” Beyond future-proofing students, inclusive design just might be the key to future-proofing our world; we’ll just have to wait and see.

co-24: MFA Interaction Design Thesis Exhibition, a walk-through exhibition of works by 21 emergent designers exploring the themes of collaboration, connection, compassion, and construction towards a more intentionally inclusive future. May 16-17, 136 W. 21st St. RSVP here to attend.

Brooke Viegut is a narrative-driven experience designer, audience-centric theater maker, design critic, live entertainment researcher, donut connoisseur, cultural producer, collector of silly little things, and the creative lead at for.play. She is the author of Anonymous Intimacy (coming 2024) and holds an MA in Design Research, Writing, and Criticism from the School of Visual Arts.

Header: a snapshot of a tabletop at MFA Interaction Design filled with inclusive design tools and inspiration. Photo by Adriana Valdez Young.

Hello, hello. So the big news: I managed to escape to London for a day. Have to go down and refill the tanks every now and then. Thanks to some very intense and regimented planning, I managed to fit in a lot of art: the recently made-over National Portrait Gallery; the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize at the Photographers’ Gallery; the World Photography Awards at Somerset House; and Richard Serra’s six large drawings at David Zwirner. But the highlight of the day was this errant cardboard box that slowly and flamboyantly drifted down James Street to the delight of everyone.

In between all that frolicking about, I did manage to grab something to eat at the fantastic Lina Stores on Greek Street – sat next to Ruth Bloody Wilson. I was very cool about this, of course. I pushed the boundaries of nonchalance so far I think she actually ended up being starstruck by me.

Back in the real world of the internet, I got a little bit lost in the Rural Indexing Project, photographically documenting the architecture of America. Fascinating to see the buildings grouped by tags – I had no idea there were a number of uniform Post Office designs, for example.

Only a few days left for Unit Editions/Volume’s Anita Klinz monograph Seeking Beauty to hit its funding target. It looks absolutely lovely, but at fifty quid a pop, I can see why it might be some way off. I would imagine students/young designers are a huge section of the target readership for this sort of book, and that price tag is a heck of a barrier, but it now seems like the norm. There’s definitely a market for smaller, simpler design books at a lower price point.

I’ve finally switched to Chrome, and a big thank you to Alex for recommending the Control Panel for Twitter extension. It’s basically resets the design and usability back ten years – which is of course a very good thing.

… and then I immediately went a bit viral with a dumb bit of photoshopping. Kind of tangentially related: “Planet of the Apes” Goes to a ’70s Mall, an excellent find from the LIFE archive.

Hanging Stones, a five hour circular walk of abandoned buildings in the North York Moors, all housing Andy Goldsworthy artworks. Yes please.

Elsewhere across the newslettiverse: Animation Obsessive on how Ghost in the Shell was deliberately engineered for western audiences; Owen D. Pomery examines a particularly fine Tintin spread; Nick Asbury launched his new book The Road to Hell.

And finally a quick affiliate plug for Freeagent, without which my business would pretty much collapse into a void of unutterable fiscal despair. With this here link you get a 30-day free trial plus 10% off your subscription, which is nice.

That is all.

This was originally posted on Meanwhile, a Substack dedicated to inspiration, fascination, and procrastination from the desk of designer Daniel Benneworth-Gray.

Header photo courtesy the author.

Push’s visual character and personality shine through in the spacious counter of the capital ‘G,’ inspired by Thorowgood’s Seven-Line Grotesque (1830), and a lowercase ‘a’ (reminiscent of Plak, 1930) that presents as both squat and tall. Speaking of the letter ‘G,’ there’s also a looped American version, an open-looped Danish version, and a two-story Grotesk in the lowercase set.

Across its eight weights, seven widths, and 56(!) styles, Push showcases a blend of the Old and New—a type chameleon for the designer’s toolbox. The range of possibilities across the width, weight, and shape spectrum gives designers typographic versatility for today’s multifaceted, complex, and multi-media brand applications.

Push was created by Swiss designer, Christine Gertsch out of Fontwerk, a Berlin foundry known for helping brands stand out with type.

Drawing the best from the past century of type design, Push has been a labor of love to create a typeface that works hard under any conditions and will endure the test of time.

Christine Gertsch

Fontwerk tapped Rocket & Wink, a design-art-graphic-brand-bureau-agency-whatever (their words) from Hamburg, Germany, to create a video campaign that showcases Push in all its glory.

Richard Taylor is the founder of Brandon, a creative consultancy focused on helping clients scale and grow.

What is the thing you like doing most in the world?


Playing Padel tennis is where I could spend most of my days without a care in the world. In my early childhood I played tennis every day and often night whilst living in Kuwait, Saudi and the United Arab Emirates. When I came back to the UK, I carried on playing regularly and coached kids in my late teens.

I’ve just reached my first half century in life and am now hooked on Padel tennis, which is getting increasingly popular over in the UK. When on the court I can just be in the moment and not have to think (worry) about anything else outside of those four glass walls. The court and the cinema are the two places where I live in the now.
 
What is the first memory you have of being creative?


I fell in love with the creative world when I picked up a ‘Carrera’ typographic badge that fell off the back of a Porsche 911. It is a beautifully scripted font that hasn’t changed much over the years.

I remember sticking that black Carrera badge on my bedroom wall as a kid, alongside a Lamborghini Countach and Porsche 959 poster. I’m a sucker for typography and the beauty and artistry that surrounds sports cars. That combination has stuck with me and led me to explore the beauty and power of design in business, the form and function that surrounds our every being.

What is your biggest regret?


I don’t tend to regret that many things as I am a great believer in serendipity and a dose of hard graft to take you places. But, if I could look back, my biggest regret was not setting up Brandon with my wife Abi sooner. 

I realized quite early on from previous jobs that I didn’t want to play the corporate game. My skills are much more suited to being my own leader and working with amazing people that are more akin to the entrepreneurial spirit that imbues everything I do. It is fair to say that I think people need to find their own way in life and that is often zigging whilst others zag.
 
How have you gotten over heartbreak?


I’m from a working-class family in Yorkshire, albeit one that spent most of its life in and around the Middle East – with my father being seconded out to the region as a Civil & Structural Engineer.

With that I’ve had a pretty thick skin, and most things just bounce off me and I move onto the next. I’ve recently been diagnosed as having ADHD and have always felt a little bit like I live on outskirts of the world. So, I’ve never really felt that much heartbreak, I’ve always focused on the next thing and just worked hard to get there.

Too often I see people dwell in their own self-pity. We live one life, it’s important to crack on and grasp each and every opportunity that comes your way.  
 
What makes you cry?

I’ve just asked my wife this one and she laughed, the short answer back was “nothing”. Who said love is dead?

The last time I cried was 16 years ago when we were living in Dubai and I heard that my grandfather had passed away back in England. I was close to my grandfather, who was a real working gentleman in life, he taught me about laughter, humility, manners and just taking each day as it comes. That loss hit hard, and was made even harder by the distance.
 

How long does the pride and joy of accomplishing something last for you?


Now herein lies the problem and in part why my ADHD prognosis makes so much sense. I celebrate wins of any kind for a nanosecond and then move onto the next thing.

My team at Brandon say it’s in part what makes me what I’ve become which, reflecting back on the ADHD diagnosis, makes me that little bit different to the mainstay of people I come across. 

My working life has mainly been focused on winning business, but once the bell has been rung and whilst the champagne is being popped, I’m stood in the room thinking ‘what’s next’ whilst everyone else is in the moment relishing the win. I wish I could! That relentless pursuit and the thrill of the chase are what get me out of bed in the morning and I guess are a big part of my DNA.
 
Do you believe in an afterlife, and if so, what does that look like to you?


I have enough problem believing in life without having to think about the afterlife. As an atheist, I have little belief in the afterlife and little time to exert my energy in even thinking about it.

I’d dearly love there to be some form of happy ending beyond this world, but it is what it is. Not much I can do to change the day after I take my last breath on this planet. Live every day like it’s your last, one day it will be!
 
What do you hate most about yourself?


My short attention span can cause me to have a short fuse when people don’t bring clarity and speed to my table. I just don’t have time to waste talking around subjects.

I’m very straight forward to the point and can’t be doing with dilly-dallying. My team often ask me how I can just ‘tell it like it is’ to client partners – straightforward and without the fluff. I had to force myself to put on an act in past roles, but never again. 

Tell it like it is with radical candor and respect. People pay me for my expertise and views, they can then either take it or leave it – but it is who I am, and I wouldn’t change that for the world. 
 
What do you love most about yourself?


I tried to always be kind in my life, which is why I no doubt beat myself up about the ‘short fuse’ from the last question. I recall my grandfather always used to say “How-do!?” in his strong Sheffield accent to anyone he walked past on the street, it was his small gesture of love and it’s always with me in every daily encounter.

The late actor and comedic icon Robin Williams’ quote “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always” has always stuck with me. Just be kind to the human in front of you as everyone is battling something in life.

No truer words have been spoken and it led to ‘humankind’ being a value we have embedded into Brandon and how we deal with everyone that crosses the threshold.
 
What is your absolute favorite meal?


There is a restaurant in London’s Soho called Bone Daddies that does some of the best Ramen in the UK, I can often be found there in my own thoughts chomping into Korean Fried Wings, Pig Bones and a Tokyo Cock Cock. 

My favorite dessert was from a visit my family had to Miami too many years ago to remember (but probably pre-Miami Vice) it was a coconut fried ice cream. That reminds me, I must go back and dig that place out!

“One of the main purposes of this survey,” write the co-authors, “was to try and transmit the importance of the visual construction of modernity” through a trove of book and magazine covers. “These areas often became spaces for formal experimentation in the case of artists who were more used to working on canvas. … As a result, the artists enjoyed a fair degree of freedom, further encouraged by their incipient interest in using striking designs to catch viewers’ attention in store windows [italics mine].” Sometimes the illustrations, typography and compositions echoed “the same freedom” and even were “continuations of outer designs.”

The title of this book suggests the co-authors’ decision to avoid the term avant garde as focusing on European work that would force the “subordinate” view of Latin American design. Their achieved goal is to show that Europe alone was not the entire inspiration for what was Modern. They point to Mexican Stridentism and muralism and Chilean Runrunism as more homegrown and indigenous. For them “modernity” describes attitudes that were adopted by key artists and associated groups, which when seen together impart a holistic yet individualistic practice. In Diagramming Modernity the idea was not to prioritize nationalities but to describe and analyze “small societies” of progressives who have been forgotten or ignored. The names of these pioneering artists/designers are doubtless unknown to most of us in North America and Europe, but thanks to Gutierrez Viñuales, Boglione and other proactive design historians, they are now revealed for future scholars and collectors to newly explore.

We speak with Ryan Larcom, a Director at High Alpha Innovation, a venture building studio, to learn about his business design approach to launching scalable startups. You can watch the full video of our conversation or read an edited/condensed transcript of our conversation below.

Sam Aquillano: We’ve got a great guest this week. We have someone who’s using business design to nurture and grow new startup ventures that connect deeply with user needs so that they can achieve scale, sometimes massive scale. We’re joined by Ryan Larcom from High Alpha Innovation. Ryan loves turning bold ideas into reality.

I’m told his superpower is complexity busting — he’s guiding leaders to make sense of business and industry complexities in order to gain confidence and execute. As a director at High Alpha Innovation, Brian partners with corporations and universities and build partnerships to co-design and structure investments in new venture-backable startups to unlock amazing innovation.

We’re gonna hear all about it. The common thread of Ryan’s career has been a desire to make the world a better place through thoughtfully designed business models, products and experiences. Like me, Ryan attended Rochester Institute of Technology for industrial design. He also majored in mechanical engineering. So I’m super excited to hear how he went from designing and making physical things to designing businesses. So welcome Ryan, thanks so much for being here.

Ryan Larcom: Awesome, great to be here, Sam.

SA: First off, set the stage for us, tell us about High Alpha Innovation and what you all do.

RL: High Alpha Innovation partners with large organizations that could be corporations, universities, even municipalities to help them innovate, specifically by launching startups. We believe that startups are really efficient learning engines, and when you’re trying to enter a new space, access a new market, create a new technology, they’re actually the most efficient way to go about doing those things. So we help them innovate by launching new startups.

SA: Why is that the most efficient approach?

RL: Big companies are really efficient at their core business model. In fact, that’s what they’ve gotten good at over years upon years upon years. They were learning engines once as well. They figured out how do you create a product. How do you bring it to market? And how do you deliver that product really efficiently and effectively? And so they’ve built a ton of knowledge around that. They’ve trained employees to be able to deploy that core strategy. The problem is that when you need to work outside of that core strategy into an adjacency of some sort or another, you’re outside of your common knowledge area. And those processes that make you great at executing on the core actually restrict you from learning in those new areas. And so that’s why we think startups are really, really good to attack that opportunity.

SA: Yeah, drop a little startup in a massive enterprise and watch the magic happen. So would you consider High Alpha Innovation an incubator? right? When I was growing my startup, we were part of an incubator/accelerator that gave us space, a little bit of money, certainly a ton of mentorship. And it was about sort of like getting us through some of the early stage blocks.

RL: We classify ourselves as a venture builder, a brand new category. You think about accelerators being a time-bound cohort of people who have existing businesses that are trying to get access to customers and investors. The venture studio was the next logical kind of movement — a venture builder takes all of the core processes and knowledge and turns them loose in the context of someone else’s business model, so in our case, corporations and universities.

SA: In so many of those parts of your career, you were doing business design. Maybe we didn’t call it business design then, but we’re definitely calling it now. So how do you define business design today?

RL: Yeah, it’s a hard word because I think it’s still an emerging one in many ways. You think about industrial design, which usually speaks about the creation of a product. When we think about business design, I think about it as the creation of a business, so design is a series of intentional choices, and there’s a whole capability set that we’ve built around that — usually in the context of products or collateral or assets, like, like graphic designer, industrial design.

On the business side, I think about a business model having three parts, feasibility, desirability, viability, or how you create, capture, and deliver value. Visual design typically focuses on just the creation of value. On the value proposition itself. Business design incorporates the revenue model and the resourcing of how you actually deploy that in the context of a profitable entity.

SA: Yes, and you can design towards those choices — that makes sense. I get this question lot so I want to ask you given your role: is there a difference between entrepreneurship and business design?

RL: That’s a really good question. I’ve never thought about it that way before. I think that entrepreneurs practice business design in some ways, right? Because as I said, startups are learning engines, and so you’re constantly learning what is your business model along the way. But there’s usually about three big movements I think about from entrepreneurship: you’re de-risking the tech, you’re de-risking the business model, and then you’re scaling the business. And so it’s that middle one where I tend to focus on business design, which is turning assumptions and knowledge around those three pieces of feasibility, viability, desirability, which usually exists, at least in venture backed startups, between zero and series A or B. Once you start scaling the business, technically you’re still designing it, but really all you’re doing is creating a growth engine that powers a business model that’s already been designed.

SA: Let’s pretend I’m a founder of a startup. How is that process happening from idea to partnership with large organizations?

RL: We’re partnering with organizations who want to innovate, and so what we’re first trying to figure out is the theme. Where do we want to focus this opportunity? Is it far enough adjacent that the core won’t accidentally suck it back in? And then is there enough space that you can innovate there and really differentiate from what exists in the market?

From there, we get from kind of macro, really tactical. We all grew up on jobs be done methodology, of which I’m still a huge fan — what we want to understand is for a given customer, for a given persona what are their unmet and priority jobs to be done. So we spend a lot of time trying to understand the functional, social, and emotional needs of users in specific circumstances, and then prioritize them based on which ones are valuable and important, unmet, and widely held, so that we can understand jobs that are yet to be satisfied in the world. And so that becomes the core of our business model. We spend the first six weeks just doing that before we more forward on anything. I think the world in general is really bad at framing problems and really great at solving them. We need to make sure we frame the right problem to solve.

SA: I would say that’s the foundation to build from, right? Because then from there, it’s more of like, what’s our unique value proposition? How are we making money? How are we delivering? Do you use the same sort of iterative discovery approach to those elements as well?

RL: Yeah, absolutely. So that’s a hypothesis when we ship it right out of the gate. And what we want to do is figure out what are the critical assumptions that sit underneath the hypothesis that this customer has an unsatisfied job to be done. And the danger is everybody tests the hypotheses that they know how to test best first, instead of the ones that are most critical, right? I’m a designer. I start sketching stuff on paper. My dad’s a CFO. He starts going to Excel to write the revenue model. My friends are engineers. They start figuring out if you can make this thing. But the problem is if you don’t do them in the right order you end up spending a lot of time where it doesn’t matter.

Really great example of this: one of our friends consulted with a large airline company that was trying to commercialize the Osprey, the vertical takeoff aircraft. The big idea was wouldn’t it be neat if we demilitarized this, you could now ship large numbers of civilians right from heliports right out. And so they spent millions of dollars on architects to design the experience of going to a heliport. They did the interior design to figure out how many people would fit in this thing.

And it was at this point that this individual came in with a consulting company and started looking at it and was like, have you guys talked to any pilots? And it turns out no commercial pilot wants to fly the Osprey because it was made for military pilots in military settings. It’s a dog to fly, it’s rough.

And so as a result, the consumer experience is terrible too. It’s loud and you couldn’t put enough noise isolation into this thing to make a good consumer experience. And so as a result, two key pieces of the value proposition on the revenue model just totally broke. And so we try to go through really rigorously and figure out what can we test and then what’s the lowest fidelity way that we could go about testing those, right? Before you put fingers to keyboard, we’re mocking up product in Figma. Before we mock up product in Figma, we’re hand sketching storyboards. Before hand sketching storyboards, we’re describing it with customers. And you want to just make sure that you’re testing and iterating and every step along the way.

SA: To clarify, are you then literally building a startup from scratch, then recruiting individuals that will then carry that forward? Or are you recruiting folks from inside the partner organization?

RL: Great question. This is where business design becomes venture building in my mind. So business design is shipping the final pitch deck that looks investable that says these are the series of intentional choices that we believe makes for a profitable, venture-backable, scalable business that ought to exist in the world.

Venture building then is snapping together all the other functions to make that work. We’ve got a recruiting team who finds world-class founders who want to found this. We’ve got a finance team who figures out how to turn this revenue model into a set of assumptions they can execute against. Legal folks who can figure out a cap table structure that makes this investable from a corporate partner and a venture perspective and so on. There’s lots of functions to make a functioning business.

And so yes, in our case, we usually go out and find great entrepreneurs from the world. And our specific thesis is that we’re launching these companies alongside often large corporations. And so if you’re going to be in relationship with your first company as big enterprise and first investor, you need an experienced entrepreneur who has been through that multiple times to be able to navigate some of those difficulties. It’s a huge lever and also a huge stick. And you want to make sure that you’ve got experienced folks.

What we want to do ultimately is to de-risk the business to the point that we can attract world-class entrepreneurs. Clearly, there’s a lot of work to get to that point, but the business is going to continue learning. That’s not an inflection point when you hire someone that continues to learn all the way through Series A plus. And so what we want to do is attract world-class founders. So problem number one is how do you get world-class founders to co-found businesses alongside you? And then how do you do it at scale?

SA: How do you break assumptions and build confidence when designing a business?

RL: I think first is it’s an iterative process. You’re coming down the funnel. And so part of confidence building is talking to hundreds of potential folks at the top of the funnel, seeing some of those come back again, who said, I have a problem.

And then we articulated back to them and they say, yes, that’s the correct articulation of that problem. And then another set coming back and us saying, what if we solved it this way? And then saying, yes, that’s the type of solution, the value props we’d want to see. And then us coming back with a product and saying, what if it looked like this? And then saying, yes. And then us coming back with a business model and saying, what if we priced it and packaged it like that? So you just bring folks down the funnel. And then your assets, of course, get more and more high fidelity along the way. What starts out as hand sketches ends up in in beautiful product walkthroughs and mockups and things that you can run user tests on. So I think it’s a lot about just the incremental moving from one end to the other. But I think there are a couple of really key inflection points where we look for traction, right? Not just that people say, yes, that’s really nice all the way down, but that someone’s willing to write a check. That really matters. That an entrepreneur who says, that’s a really neat idea is saying, I’ll leave my job and start this.

SA: Can you share a real case study?

RL: One of our first portfolio companies ended up being one of the early success stories that I just love to tell. We started work with Koch Industries. Koch’s got a portfolio of companies, including Georgia Pacific. We worked with one called Molex, they’re electronic suppliers. And they were having a hard time understanding which of their electronics components were most likely to be late and shut down their factory as a result of the lags of lead time. Now, this was just pre-pandemic. And when the pandemic took off, of course this became even more imminent.

We ended up shaking out a company called Amplio that initially went about identifying those risks so that instead of looking at hundreds of potential parts that could go wrong, procurement leaders could look at the nine that mattered that week and spend their time really efficiently and effectively making sure that they had been dual sourced or expedited or something like that. We were really lucky to get an employee from the Koch portfolio to run this. He was running a corner of Georgia Pacific supply chain and had been in startups before. We paired him with a chief data scientist from a supply chain startup — so he understood the venture space. This became this like perfect little combo that we just dropped in and said start building product.

They created value in 30 days. They were able to find things that procurement officers couldn’t get to in months and months. What’s funny though, for all the success — yay, business design — they hit their biggest pivot right after they launched. They realized that the more electronic suppliers that they got online the more interchangeable those parts were. And so, yes, Molex could expedite a part on a 747 from China, but it turns out that one of their other clients had an electronic supplier just across on the other side of Guadalajara that was producing interchangeable electronics components. And so they effectively became a marketplace. They could tell better where parts were and create interchangeability for these suppliers so that you were saving massive amounts of time and money.

Instead of trying to solve this on an Excel spreadsheet, they were solving it in the context of a marketplace. So huge pivot. That hit right before the hype cycle of VC ended on the far side of 2021, right at the peak of the pandemic. So they raised a massive round of seed funding from some leading venture capitalists that have just set them up for some really early success and continue to go about solving the problem that they were set in place to solve.

SA: I saw like you also work with like academic institutions?

RL: We had a university endowment come to us and say something to the effect of, university endowments are asset managers, right? They are exposed to VC, they invest and they want returns and they want early stage exposure as well to diversify their risk profile. They’re also being pulled by their university is to invest in student and professor intellectual property. That’s really hard to do for a number of reasons. One is it’s super lumpy. You could have a ton of IP disclosure or nothing in a year. Most of it’s not venture-backable. And then a lot of it from a returns perspective are disincentivized from the university model. Meaning universities are great at commercializing devices and molecules, really poor at commercializing software because the skill sets are utterly different. And so the opportunity that they spotted that we’ve now jumped into is if we were to focus on partnering with students and professors at the idea stage rather than at the solution stage, We could avoid the solutions-in-search-of-problems problem, create brand new startups and commercialize them in ways that enable endowments to invest because they’re venture-backable. They have a great entrepreneurial talent in at early stages, but they stay aligned to the mission of the university. We literally are creating the proprietary deal flow that every VC says that they have. We’re building startups on campus. That’s it.

We just launched a fund with Notre Dame, which we’re really proud to announce, of $18 million. The fund is focused on the Catholic social teachings that underpin Notre Dame’s strategy and we’re already kind of digging into our first sprint which will focus on breaking the cycles of poverty. So while you have to be relatively humble, there’s only so many ways that software startups can act there, there are still a ton of low-hanging opportunities that we think that we can make an impact and make for-profit businesses out of that serve all the different actors.

SA: How do you apply business design to the business of high alpha innovation?

RL: We try and dog food as much as we can on our own process, but it’s really hard. I’ll tell you, I have gained a ton of empathy for entrepreneurs. I’ve been startup adjacent in venture capital before, but we ourselves are a startup.

High Alpha Innovation grows through revenue and aligned with our partners in that. We actually just had an offsite recently. Our portfolio management team focuses with founders day one on identifying what their revenue formula is for their business, which is really, really neat. So a revenue formula might look something like price times gross margin equals dollars, and then dollars minus headcount costs equals profit, right? That’s a very basic revenue formula,

When you get the formula correct, though, you can realize what the key levers of growing a business are along the way. And so we just dove in and defined our own revenue formula for our business that helps us to understand: how do we price and package? When you kind of put together the whole formula, you’re like, oh, those are the five levers I ought to be, acting on in my business. What experiments should we put underneath those levers that we can continue to go about unlocking new growth opportunities from?

SA: What tools and frameworks are you using? And then what artifacts are you actually generating beyond the classic slide deck?

RL: The process I want to talk about actually is Sprint Week. One of the things we realized is that all businesses have momentum inside of them that needs to be broken with forcing functions. So funny enough a fund has to start 12 businesses in three years. And yet after we launched business number one, it was easier to support the operations of business one than it was to start business two. And we said, shoot, we need a forcing function. Otherwise we’re never going to yield for our investors what we want to do. And so Sprint Week was born out of that and it has continued to iterate for the last almost decade since then. For us Sprint Week is about taking a really well framed problem and then designing the product and then business model that go around that.

It’s a three day intensive that we kind of deep dive into. And then on the fourth day, we pitch these decks with the idea that on the fifth day, we’re actually deciding which of these businesses that we’ve pitched goes forward. And success is multifold, right? Getting to the far side of Sprint Week and saying, this is an investible concept is success.

The assets that come out of Sprint Week look very, very much like you’d expect in just about any pre-seed pitch deck. We’re looking for a really good understanding of who our customer is. We’ve spoken to, at that point, dozens of folks inside of our ideal customer profile. So there’s something that looks like a persona. We have a really good understanding of what the job to be done is and why that is a priority to them. That usually gets told in a really compelling story that includes kind of a why now for that problem. Why is this moment the moment that customer jobs have become reprioritized in some way or another. What’s the secret by which this business knows something else about the world that other people have overlooked? Then we end up in a product. We really, really like to tell the future state in visuals. I think folks tend to underestimate the power of visual design as well inside large organizations.

We show the product, we show the faces of the people using the product, and we step through click by click, not as the full movie, but as the sizzler rail for the movie, if that makes sense, illustrating the key value props along the way. And then we talk about the economic model.

We have this kind of quirky thing that we call the nautilus, which, if you think about the way the shell expands on itself, we’re asking ourselves questions of how does this business get to 100K in recurring revenue, a million, 10 million, and a hundred million dollars. And some people call that a reverse P&L. But what it forces you to say is, okay, if I have 100K with only two customers, that’s 50K a customer. Great. Who are those two customers? Back to personas. How do we access them? Who buys? How efficient is that going to be? And then 50k, wow, that’s a lot of money in recurring revenue for a product, right? How long will the sales cycle be on that? What does the quality of the product need to do in order to yield 50k in recurring revenue? And so that sets your product roadmap. And then, of course, your product roadmap sets your team capabilities. And then your team capabilities set your investment needs. And so even basic crayon math like that, it’s so funny. You can get so many design decisions.

SA: What’s your advice for people designing businesses, either internally, as we’re talking, within a big organization, or your classic entrepreneur — what would you share to keep them going and to be successful?

RL: Different words of advice probably for different people. So for entrepreneurs, I think the number one thing is, be in market and learn. Build in public, learn alongside customers. It’s totally critical to ship before you’re ready and test your hypotheses, especially the hypotheses that you’re most scared of. And what that requires is forcing functions, that you stop working in the business and start working on the business at a regular pace, which I say with a high degree of empathy, right? Being in a startup ourselves, it is hard.

And then, I think that the idea of these business design skills of product management, of human-centered design are still very radical inside big corporations And I spent a lot of my time inside big Co’s with folks who are not used to emergent strategy. They’re used to deliberate strategy. We’re going here, we’re gonna get there from here to there. And in most of these spaces, we actually don’t know what we don’t know. And deploying tools like this really, really effectively allows you to ship case studies of success in really, really small ways that gets you the permission to be able to go do bigger things.

You’re not walking into the CFO and saying, I need 2 million bucks. You are saying to your direct boss, I need 20K to launch these three experiments. And then I’m back on the other side with data of what we do next as a result.

SA: Thank you so much for being here, Ryan — I loved this conversation. For more info about High Alpha Innovation and their business design work, visit highalphainno.com.

Sam Aquillano is an entrepreneur, design leader, writer, and founder of Design Museum Everywhere. This post was originally published in Sam’s twice-monthly newsletter for the creative-business-curious, Business Design School. Check out Sam’s book, Adventures in Disruption: How to Start, Survive, and Succeed as a Creative Entrepreneur.

Header photo: Unsplash+ in collaboration with Pramod Tiwari.

On May 11, The New York Times published an obituary about a pioneer of graphic design who many, particularly on the East Coast, may not have known much about.

The following excerpt from The Moderns by Greg D’Onofrio and me is a testament to Stauffacher Solomon’s incomparable legacy. The doyen of California modern design died on May 7 at 95.

“Learn some rules,” Armin Hofmann said. “Follow them. Later, if you’re brilliant enough, you can break all the rules. Fine. If not, you will be competent at your profession.” Barbara Stauffacher Solomon mastered the rules.

Under the tutelage of modern Swiss masters in Basel, she became an early and devout practitioner of Swiss Style design starting in the late ’50s. In the early ’60s, she brought these ideas to America, merging them with a bold, expressive and enthusiastic California spirit and pioneering the world of large-scale forms, murals, and signage—supergraphics.

“I was a Californian. I went back to San Francisco and I broke all the rules. My designs were bigger and bolder than my Swiss classmates’ solutions had been. Give me a big white wall and I covered it with big red stripes,” she recalled. She may have been the first American designer to use Helvetica. In San Francisco, “local typesetters used Times Roman, Baskerville, Garamond, Caslon, Bodoni or Wild West-style typefaces,” she said, and “hippies painted squiggles, free, loose and sexy.” For her own letterhead, she typed and specced the text as 10-point Helvetica Medium and mailed it to a friend in Switzerland, as no American typesetters had the typeface. When she received the proofs from Basel, she cut and pasted the type and prepared a mechanical, which she sent to the printer. “My designs were the antithesis of the psychedelic hippy posters made in the Haight-Ashbury,” she said.

Solomon met architect Al Boeke, who was developing a new kind of self-governed, cohesive community—he called it Sea Ranch. This was her first big job; she designed the logo and all printed matter with Helvetica. She used pure colors to paint simple geometric and energetic shapes on the weathered wood of the buildings—giant waves, vertical and angled stripes, circle, arrows, and red hearts—along with signage in large, all-capital letters. “In this superworld … I combined the supersized enthusiasm of California Abstract Expressionism with hard-edge Swiss graphics, and ended up with … supergraphics,” she said. The Sea Ranch opened in 1967, and Solomon’s work was received with fanfare.

From The Daily Heller: Scanlan’s, designed by Stauffacher Solomon, was decidedly more modern-minimalist in the International or Swiss style—which is just what editor Warren Hinckle III wanted. Solomon had known Hinckle socially before he asked her to be art director of Scanlan’s. Her friend June Oppen Degnan (sister of the poet George Oppen) introduced them. Degnan had also given Hinckle $25,000 to help start the magazine.

“Warren and I meet at her political/socialite dinner parties,” Solomon recently recalled. “There were lots of parties in those days.” Hinckle’s office was bedlam back then. So to be able to work without constant interruptions, “Warren and I worked mostly at my office at 1620 Montgomery St. Warren arrived with piles of copy and loose photos and we put it all together, page after page, on my desks and floor.”

Solomon’s Scanlan’s design was unique for counter-culture publications at the time. Although Swiss Modernism was a common corporate design language, it was foreign in this context. Solomon said she practiced “Swiss graphics as I learned from Armin Hofmann in Basel. Warren was familiar with the work I did,” which included the SFMOMA monthly bulletins, books for Lawrence Halprin, brochures and covers for New Directions. “He had a sharp eye for design but never told me what to do.” And then there was the Scanlan’s logo, with its distinct apostrophe: “It was intentional,” she says. “I always designed big punctuation marks. I think I drew it for some reason and Warren said, ‘That’s it.’”

The two are not the same.

Reality just is.

Your reality is how you see things. How you bend them to your vision.

Reality might be that your company is not growing.

Your reality is that you have an incredible vision to turn this company around and get it to thrive.

If you stay in this reality — the reality of your vision — you become impervious to what Shakespeare called “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

In your reality, you can deal with losing talent, because you are going to bring in folks who are better.

In your reality, you can deal with a terrible meeting because you are in the process of fixing things.

In your reality you can deal with modest revenue, because you know very soon, you will win a big piece of business. And run it efficiently.

Does this sound like some kind of business delusion?

It is. And I call it the Reality Distortion Bubble.

When I coach people, I often ask them to develop one.

Because reality just might sink your ship. But a Reality Distortion Bubble will help you float.

I first heard about Reality Distortion from Steve Jobs.

A colleague of his at Apple referred to Steve’s ability to convince anyone to do anything as his “Reality Distortion Field” (RDF). The RDF describes Jobs’ ability to motivate his team to accomplish seemingly impossible tasks through a mix of charm, persistence, and an unwavering belief that they could make the improbable happen.

One of the anecdotes of Steve’s RDF happened during he original development of the Macintosh. The reality was that the Mac’s software development would take years. Steve demanded that it be done in 10 months.

Impossible? That’s just an opinion. Not Reality Distortion reality.

And sure enough, the Mac team got the Mac ready in months. Not years.

There are plenty of Apple stories like this that prove the point.

Steve had a field. A way he saw things.

I am offering you a bubble. It’s a way to see things in a more positive light. And it’s a way to protect you from the inevitable negative forces. They simply bounce off the bubble.

To round out the bubble, Carl Jung, the scientific force and legendary founder of analytical psychology wrote: “We create the meaning of events. The meaning is and always was artificial. We make it.”

You see, there’s reality. And there’s your reality.

Create a Reality Distortion Bubble for yourself.

Step inside.

You’ll be amazed at what you can achieve.

Rob Schwartz is the Chair of the TBWA New York Group and an executive coach who channels his creativity, experience and wisdom into helping others get where they want to be. This was originally posted on his Substack, RobSchwartzHelps, where he covers work, life, and creativity.

Photo by Kind and Curious on Unsplash.

Lowrider culture is far from specific to Los Angeles, with vibrant pockets represented around the country. The nonprofit lowrider organization Slow & Low recently published a retrospective book of the same title, the first formal documentation of the lowrider community in Chicago. In partnership with Nick Adam’s team at the design studio Span, Slow & Low was created with the utmost thought and care to showcase the photographic archive of twelve years of the nonprofit’s events and festivals. In addition to its gorgeous and vibrant imagery, the book features essays from Slow & Low co-founder and curator Lauren M. Pacheco and ethnographer, cultural critic, and professor Dr. Ben Chappell.

Span took on the design of Slow & Low with the imperative that every detail and aspect of the book must somehow reflect lowrider culture. They worked closely with Pacheco and her co-founder, Peter Kepha, to ensure they achieved this, from the editorial considerations to the page layouts and materials.

The book’s grid, for example, creates an elaborate page sequencing system that balances variation and repetition, creating perspective shifts and contextual relationships. From page to page, the photo compositions create a filmic cadence where motion, zooming, and surrounding angles evoke the sensation of cruising.

Lowrider culture is about far more than cars, and Slow & Low aptly reflects that. Beloved community photographers shot the 112-page photo archive presented throughout the book with a firsthand understanding of the culture, offering an intimate and authentic insider’s perspective. The range of photos depicts lowriding as a way for individuals and the community to have a voice of creativity and pride, featuring waving Mexican flags, airbrushed Aztec symbols, and folklórico performances in the background, to name a few.

The photos have been curated and sequenced by Span and then printed in full color with a spot gloss varnish on high-gloss coated paper. This meticulous process better reflects the look of the candy-colored cars on display, a nod to the vibrant aesthetics of lowrider culture. The effect also feels like a family photo album. The book’s front and back are printed with silver ink on natural paper to contrast the glossiness of the photos. The silver ink has a reflective quality inspired by the engraved chrome of lowrider cars and viclas.

The book’s body copy is set in Canela, designed by Miguel Reyes at Commercial Type. Each column of the Canela text baselines to the bottom of the page and rises to hit different heights meant to represent the hydraulic bounce of a lowrider. The display type is Respira, designed by Lucas Sharp with Wei Huang at Sharp Type. Respira was inspired by blackletter, which is a signature lettering style in lowrider and Chicano cultures.

Meanwhile, the Slow & Low front and back covers also feature the blackletter style, stamped in white foil on a black textile texture. The form is reminiscent of the letter-based tattoos that read top-to-bottom on many forearms within the lowrider community. This style also pays homage to the way churches often depict text, given the importance of faith within those in the lowrider community.

The book is stitched with myth-sewn binding to open flat, allowing you to immerse yourself in each photo fully. It concludes with a series of 360 silver ink photo booth photos featuring over 1,000 members of Chicago’s lowrider community, all taken at the 2022 Slow & Low festival at Navy Pier.

Concept, Design Direction, Design, Content Collection & Curation: Nick Adam

Design: Grace Song and Cheryl Kao

Printing: OGM

Writers: Lauren M. Pacheco and Dr. Ben Chappell

Curators: Lauren M. Pacheco, Peter Kepha, and Edward Magico Calderon

Photographers: Carmen Ordonez, Carolina Sánchez, Don’t Get Shot, Edward Magico Calderon, Fernando Ruiz, Katrina Nelken, Manuel Lagunas, Manuel Velasco, Max Herman, Mike Pocious, Nick Lipton, Peter Kepha, Sebastián Hildalgo, and Nick Adam

Art Spiegelman revived interest in the poem when he published a newly illustrated version in 1999. Around the same time, two musical productions were in the works. Andrew Lippa wrote the book, music and lyrics for a 2000 off-Broadway version while Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe launched another musical starring Toni Collette in her Broadway debut.

Producer Jeffrey Seller planned on bringing the award-winning off-Broadway production uptown to the Great White Way. He contacted Drew Hodges and Mark Burdett of SpotCo, creator of posters for RENT, Avenue Q, In The Heights and more, to do the graphic design. The ambitious result, art directed by Kevin Brainard and photographed in luscious black and white by Ellen von Unwerth, involved showing the entire cast acting out the debauchery of the poem.

“It was the best photoshoot Spot has ever done,” said Hodges.

It was “the sexist Broadway cast shoot that never saw the light of day,” added Brainard, who has made an online archive of the full set of 29 images.

The Lippa production won the 2000 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Musical; Lucille Lortel Awards for Scenic, Costume and Lighting Design; and the 1999–2000 Obie Award for Best Choreography.

And now, for the first time since the original shoot, here is a selection of images from the all-day photo-orgy, with commentary by Hodges and Brainard—who also break down why the photos were never released.

How was the shoot accomplished?
Kevin Brainard: We did the shoot with the full cast at Nell’s, turning it into a 1920s speakeasy. It was amazing. Like a time machine. Every detail was considered, down to the matches on the table. We did not have a shot list—but there was the full cast in costume, there was booze, and photographer Ellen von Unwerth. Ellen was a whirlwind, running around with two assistants holding lights and shooting from the hip. A couple hours in, I switched the music and started with Prince’s “Sexy Mother Fucker.” All hell broke loose. Clothes started flying off, the cast was full on making out, pulling each other’s clothes off, candle wax was poured onto bodies. Ellen was constantly yelling, “Get naked!” It truly turned into a wild party.

Drew Hodges: We wanted to shoot a real party—kind of “method.” Everyone was, of course, in character and costume—but we took it further. As I recall there was real champagne, and Ellen Von Unwerth was literally being pulled around by the back of her belt through the “party,” room to room, situation to situation. I think her assistant did the pulling, although it might have been me or Kevin? I think it was the most “method” shoot I ever did—we were not looking at images on a monitor—there was no fourth wall. Ellen was just like a guest at a party, shooting constantly.

What were the pluses and hazards of doing it?
Hodges: I guess the hazard was we did not have a comp to match or a storyboard image we were creating. We were waiting to see what came out of the shoot. The actors were cast so well, the characters were so clear in the story, to both the actors and the production team. The obvious plus was Ellen. We had had a lot of success using the very best photographers in the world for Broadway (ultimately Max Vadukal, Amy Guip, David La Chapelle, Andrew Eccles, Len prince, Uli weber, John Dugdale, Brigitte LaCombe, Richard Avedon [stock]). No one had done this before us in the history of Broadway. That meant that budgets were bigger and so were risks. But it was completely fresh for the photographers and they responded with excitement. 

Brainard: This was my first large-scale shoot. I had developed a poster for client approval using a pre-existing photo by Ellen von Unwerth. But we did not have a shot list—which is crazy! Thinking back, I don’t remember being even a little bit nervous. Maybe it was because Spot—and Drew—were so nurturing that I felt no fear. Maybe it was because I knew Drew had my back. Or maybe because Jeffrey Seller—literally the best client ever—was always willing to take risks, and a leap of faith.

The short answer: giant shoot, big budget, full cast, rock star photographer, everything on the line, no plan.

How closely did it follow the actual book? 
Hodges: All the stories and characters matched the book 100%, as far as I recall. 

Why didn’t it see daylight (or Broadway light)?
Hodges: There were two interpretations of the same source material, two Wild Parties in the same season trying to come to Broadway. I begged them both to change the name of one—neither would blink. It was totally unheard of. The other production made it to Broadway based on reviews (and possibly foolhardiness), and a star, Toni Collette. And our Wild Party did not go to Broadway. These images were—mostly—meant for the Broadway campaign. Andrew Lippa’s Wild Party is still considered a legendary score and production. So many people in it became bigger and bigger stars. But at the time, we built a huge, beautiful, first-class campaign, and then the show did not move from off-Broadway to Broadway—so the images never ran. Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer and arguably the most successful producer in the last 30 years, considers it his favorite work we ever made together.

Who was involved in the conception, production and execution?
Brainard: Here is an excerpt from the SpotCo book From Rent to Revolution. This is Andrew Lippa’s recollection of approving the key art we developed:

“What color should the set be? There we were, with three painted panels placed on the empty stage of Manhattan Theatre Club’s Stage 1, comparing puke green, something vaguely blue and, finally, orange-y red? The production team was discussing the monochromatic notion of the set for the original production of The Wild Party and how it would all be painted with the same color wash.

“Oh well, off to a meeting at SpotCo to see what they had cooked up for the marketing and advertising. Getting a show poster of your very own show reminds me of high school when I had posters of Evita and 42nd Street on my wall. I arrive at the meeting and what do I see?  The color of the set. No, not puke green or vague blue. Dried blood. This, my friends, was it. This was the color our set should be and SpotCo told us how to do it.”

What happened to the end result?
Brainard: Besides a musical soundtrack released on CD, it went in a flat file drawer. There were test prints from Ellen of everyone’s favorite images. The thought was all the rest would be used in the Broadway campaign that never happened.

Many people who work for nonprofits view branding as a limiting force, a set of guidelines or a box that their communications team uses to keep everything consistent, but somehow restrictive. There’s also a perception that focusing on branding means prioritizing style over substance, detracting from the altruistic mission that forms the heart of any nonprofit and diverting time and money away from on-the-ground work toward what feels like a “nice to have” initiative.

But this perspective throws out the baby with the bathwater — it ignores the important benefits of branding. The reality is that effective branding is crucial for the success of any organization, including nonprofits. Whether you have a new vision of how philanthropy can be more equitable, or a novel approach for how community safety should be defined and measured, you’re always selling something to someone and wooing them to agree with your perspective so you can build the support you need to advance your mission. In order to demonstrate the value you provide — and for people to believe you — you need to be trusted. That is your brand’s job.

Taylor Swift said it best: “We think we know someone, but the truth is that we only know the version of them that they have chosen to show us. There will be no further explanation. There will be just reputation.”

For your team to understand and appreciate its power, it might be helpful to reframe the concept of branding as the management and cultivation of your organization’s reputation.

Branding as Reputation Management

At its core, a brand is not just a logo, tagline, or color scheme; those things are all important in generating a positive first impression and helping people remember your brand, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. Beyond that, your brand unlocks what people think and feel when they hear your organization’s name. It’s about the emotions and associations that come to mind, which are cultivated over time through consistent, positive experiences and interactions. This is why it’s more fitting to think of branding in terms of reputation.

Your nonprofit’s reputation (AKA, brand) encompasses everything it stands for: its values, its impact on the community, and the trust it builds with supporters, donors, and the public.

Why Reputation Matters

In the nonprofit sector, where resources are often limited and the competition for attention and funding is high, a strong reputation is a gamechanger. It can open doors to new partnerships, expand your donor base, and increase your organization’s influence. When people trust and believe in your cause, they’re more likely to support it with their time, resources, and advocacy.

Consider this: When faced with a decision to donate, volunteers and donors are more likely to choose an organization they’ve heard positive things about, one that has made a real difference in their community or the world. This is where the power of a well-managed brand comes into play. By effectively communicating your mission, values, and successes, you can forge stronger connections with your audience, making them more likely to support your cause.

Overcoming Branding Skepticism

It’s fair to say that the skepticism toward branding in the nonprofit sector is not unfounded. Many fear that too much focus on branding might lead an organization to prioritize image over impact or make it look too fancy. To overcome these fears, it’s crucial to present branding as a tool for better storytelling and engagement, not merely as a marketing strategy. The power of a good, authentic story is undeniable — and it’s something everyone can relate to. When nonprofits showcase real stories of change and impact that allow audiences to connect emotionally with their work, they are brand-building.

Impact doesn’t come at the expense of image. It’s not a zero-sum game.

Your image is a vehicle for sharing and bolstering your impact so your brand can strengthen your reputation and enable further work.

How to Frame Branding for Your Team

If your team has a negative association with branding, that’s not going to magically change overnight. To get your team on board with the idea of branding as a reputation management asset, you’re going to need to help them get there. This might require internal communication, workshops, and training sessions to help staff understand the role of branding in their day-to-day work, from fundraising to program delivery, and how it can enhance their efforts rather than restrict them. You can use these opportunities to show examples of how a strong brand has helped similar organizations achieve their goals, increase their reach, and make a more significant impact — always highlighting the power that comes from effective alignment between the brand and the organization’s core values and mission.

Building a Strong Brand

So, how can a nonprofit build a strong brand or improve its reputation? It starts with clear, consistent messaging that articulates the organization’s mission, vision, and values. This messaging should be evident in all communications, from the website and social media to fundraising appeals and reports. Transparency and authenticity play critical roles; people want to see the real stories behind the work you do, the challenges you face, the ideas and processes that guide your decision-making, and the impacts you make.

Crafting a confident and compelling visual identity is crucial in echoing your brand’s core idea across all touchpoints. This goes beyond just a memorable logo to encompass a cohesive visual language and design system that speaks to your audience — colors, typography, imagery, and design elements that resonate with your mission and values. When these visual elements are deeply rooted in your brand’s essence, they evoke the right emotions and connections in your audience’s hearts and minds and become a shorthand for everything your organization stands for.

Engagement with your people is another important aspect of building a strong brand that lasts — you always want to be learning about how your brand can better support your organization’s strategic goals throughout the lifecycle of your brand. Interact with your supporters, donors, and the broader community on an ongoing basis through various channels. Listen to their feedback and involve them in your journey. Celebrate successes together and be honest about setbacks, showing what you’re learning and how you’re growing.

Your Brand is What You Make of It

Your people might never feel fully at ease with the word ‘branding’ — that’s fine. Reputation is a much harder word to argue with because everyone can appreciate its value as a currency, so go with that.

It’s not about adopting corporate strategies wholesale or focusing on surface-level aesthetics. Instead, it’s about deeply integrating your organization’s values and mission into everything you do and communicate. By doing so, you not only enhance your reputation but also strengthen the relationships that are vital to your success.

In the nonprofit sector, where the ultimate goal is to make a positive change, a strong, well-managed reputation is one of your most valuable assets. At the end of the day, you don’t just want your organization to be known; you want it to be known for making a difference. That’s your brand’s job. Take control of it, or someone else will.

Looking for ways to get your team on board with the value of branding? Having them engage with some fundamental questions about your own brand with our free Nonprofit Brand Score tool might be a good place to start.

This essay is by Deroy Peraza, Partner at Hyperakt, a purpose-driven design and innovation studio that elevates human dignity and ignites curiosity. Originally posted in their newsletter, Insights by Hyperakt.

Illustration by Merit Myers.

Still, as grand as it is, The Book of Colour Concepts 1686–1963 covers, as you can see from the title, just a slice of color in human history. “No book on colour can provide an encyclopedic record with a cultural, historical, geographical and thematic claim for completion,” Loske adds, noting that “metaphorically speaking” this book is “a coat of many colours.” Exploring 67 color “concepts” in nine chapters, in Vol. 1 the authors feature early charts and tables, circles, wheels and globes, the rise of color theory and nomenclatures and standards; Vol. 2 examines the teaching of color, the early 20th century, spiritualism, occultism and music, Eastern color concepts and, finally, the Bauhaus and beyond.

Lavishly illustrated and generously annotated, this book—published in three languages, as is Taschen’s trademark—is not for the faint of heart or the weak of muscle. The volumes are packed so tightly with beautiful art and essential information that reading them on one’s lap will result in 50 shades of black and blue.

But don’t let the bulk dissuade you from getting this book. It is a masterpiece of erudition on and about the brightest virtues of the natural and supernatural world — colour.

Today’s guest is Sadrah Schadel, founder and CEO of No Evil Foods, a nationwide plant-based protein company that she and her life partner started in their kitchen in 2014 with just $5000. After a few major hurdles which we discuss during today’s episode, they got to a point where they were weeks away from running out of money and having to shut their doors.

Tune in to hear about the rise, fall, and recent rebrand of No Evil Foods!

Key Points From This Episode:

• Factors that inspired Sadrah and her life partner, Mike, to found No Evil Foods.
• An overview of the journey of No Evil Foods from Sadrah and Mike’s kitchen in upstate New York to a nationwide plant-based meat provider.
• Factors that are foundational to the company culture at No Evil Foods, and the award they won as a result!
• Major hurdles that No Evil Foods has been presented with over the past few years. 
• Sadrah shares the challenges they experienced during the process of scaling their manufacturing. 
• How No Evil Foods differs from many other plant-based protein brands.
• Lessons that Sadrah learned through dealing with her employees’ desire to form a union.
• The value of being transparent and showing vulnerability as a leader.
• The rebranding that No Evil Foods has recently undergone.
• Valuable advice for other entrepreneurs. 

Read the transcript and find links from the episode at Brands for a Better World.

The Brands for a Better World podcast (formerly Evolve CPG) is hosted by Gage Mitchell, founder (CEO) and Creative Director at Modern Species, a sustainable brand design agency helping better-for-the-world brand launch, evolve, and grow to scale their impact.

The rise of streamers like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Apple TV has catalyzed a (New) Golden Age of TV: episodic shows have become more poignant, more engaging, slicker than ever, and more nuanced—honing in on pinpoint cultures and subcultures.

The best of these programs (think Succession, Severance, The White Lotus, Shōgun, The Handmaid’s Tale, Fleabag, The Bear, Beef, and on and on) take cues from the world of cinema and demonstrate a new approach to craft and detail. When we get an ad break, however, people are all too often served generic, cookie-cutter promos that viewers understandably look to mute or skip. Essentially, it is the worst of what we as an industry create.

Given the abundance of talent working in the industry, it’s surprising that the ads surrounding today’s culture-defining shows fall far short. Undoubtedly, those who direct and conceptualize these spots have the ability, talent, and storytelling skills. With streaming now representing over 38% of all TV usage—why the lackluster commercials on streaming platforms?

I’m not looking to start a debate (well, maybe I am!), but the best we collectively have to offer shouldn’t be celebrated by a select few only on the festival circuit. Our most stellar work should delight, entice, and educate in living rooms and bedrooms all year round.

Surely, this is also a debate for the media buyers amongst us, but essentially, audiences are smart, and the quality of what we consume has increased over the past decade (contrary to what David Chase, creator of the greatest show of all time, The Sopranos, has recently said about the decline of episodic content). So, let’s give them the best of what we as an industry have to offer.

Netflix’s optional ad-supported plan, launched in 2022, has amassed 15 million users. Prime Video launched ads this year, and we’ve all read the speculation that even Apple TV+ is now poised to do the same. Safe to say, streamers are increasingly moving towards ad-supported services.

We all know about the Super Bowl effect: the connection between ads and the game transcends inside-industry chat and gets everyone talking about mega-budgets and celebrity brand collabs. But let’s be honest: Are these ads even as great as they once were?

Having been at “industry” Super Bowl parties for the past decade or more, I can assure you it’s not my opinion alone that fewer creative risks have been taken in recent years relying on believed-to-be-proven formulas, often using the same voices who have been directing these spectacle spots for the past decade. Why? Because they seem like the “safe choice.” Many of these ads are good, don’t get me wrong, but are they great?

There’s something we all know: we should be making more great work.

These formulas have become tired and expected, and by using the same directors, the spots generated are frequently obvious and, even worse, predictable. Some get it right; the folks at Highdive come to mind, and my synapses also fire to CeraVe (from Ogilvy and Tim & Eric) and even Tubi out of Mischief.

To go way back, those wonderful Tide ads directed by Traktor and Saatchi & Saatchi are the best semi-recent examples where delight, surprise, craft, cleverness, and inventiveness ruled the day. But I digress. Super Bowl rant aside, we can’t overlook the 529 million viewing minutes achieved by Ted Lasso’s final episode alone. Essentially, the best of what we make should be seen and celebrated on the Super Bowl and streamers alike, but candidly, there’s something we all know: we should be making more great work.

It’s not just streaming viewing figures (quantity) that should be luring brands to strive for creative excellence; it’s also the distinct mindset (quality) of those tuning in. Take Euphoria, a show that’s authentic, raw, and emotive and delivers a viewing experience that resonates at the core. Audiences of shows this good are in a state of heightened emotion, receptive in a way they arguably never have been before.

Epic cinema ads like we used to see would feel very at home on streamers; here are a few other ways to kick-start progress:

Push for greater transparency from streamers: Nielsen has started reporting streaming figures much as it does for linear TV. Additionally, in December, Netflix released a report that shared global hours viewed for nearly its entire library over a six-month period, its most comprehensive breakdown of viewership yet. The writers’ strike has also helped to galvanize change and transparency. Let’s build on this momentum by continuing the push for greater clarity around reporting.

Create narratives: Let’s tap into episodic advertising’s storytelling potential. Consider sequential campaigns that take viewers on an emotional journey they’ll want to invest in.

Don’t go for the safe choice: Invest in pushing the boundaries of creative work; as a rule of thumb, don’t create anything for streamers (or anywhere else) that you wouldn’t be proud to air on linear TV or even during the Super Bowl. Push harder conceptually and take more risks.

Embrace thematic alignment: Some posit that if advertising is high enough quality, it risks disrupting the program itself. Advertisers should rise to this challenge, creating ads so well-made that they enhance the viewing experience. Matching ad themes to the content will tap audiences’ unique emotional state when watching beloved shows.

Brands and beyond: Considering public service announcement films (PSAs), let’s tie them into the content of shows to reach the audiences who need to see them with relevant, targeted, unskippable films. Fentanyl’s rise, for example, is a monstrous and disastrous issue in the US and abroad. A PSA-esque ad for Narcan during Euphoria would save lives.

If we align as an industry to address the mismatch in quality between the majority of ads on streaming platforms and the incredible shows they house, we’ll start a virtuous cycle of more channels, more opportunities, and, in turn, continuously better creative work. We’ll also push back the perceived threats of AI, for example.

In this golden age of TV, it’s time to take cues from the cream of episodic content and create adverts that get people talking, not muting.

Images created by Sibling Rivalry.

The company recently reached another important milestone by expanding its mental health services. Ginger, a licensed medical provider group with a nationwide network of psychiatrists, therapists, and behavioral health coaches, has rebranded to Headspace Care and will operate under the brand umbrella.

With broader offerings beyond meditation and breathing exercises, Headspace has also initiated a brand refresh. The rebranding effort was a collaboration between in-house teams and Italic Studio, with Colophon Foundry creating a new custom typeface called a “Headspace-ified version” of their Aperçu typeface. This font was chosen for its ability to transition from a playful to a clinical voice, aligning with Headspace’s expansion into diverse health markets.

The new typeface reflects the brand’s ethos, balancing playfulness with functionality and incorporating curves reminiscent of the Headspace smile. The brand’s illustrative and animated identity remains prominent, now featuring a more comprehensive range of facial expressions to convey various emotions.

The updated color palette retains the signature orange while introducing complementary colors to represent a range of human emotions. The design team addressed accessibility considerations to ensure optimal contrast and color combinations. These vibrant colors contrast with the conventional blues and greys in the mental healthcare space, making Headspace visually distinctive and uplifting.

In mental healthcare, strong brand engagement is the first step to generating better outcomes and reducing costs. Expanding the Headspace brand across our full portfolio of content, programs, and services is a powerful catalyst to reduce stigma and guide our members towards a lifelong journey of better mental health.

Christine Evans, president of Headspace

Headspace’s ongoing evolution and expansion aims to meet the escalating demand for mental health support. Among the notable brand enhancements are:

Streamlined Care Experience: Ginger app users can seamlessly transition to the Headspace Care app, offering a reimagined platform for coaching, therapy, and psychiatry support.

New Therapeutic Content: Headspace will introduce guided programs focusing on sleep improvement and stress management, grounded in evidence-based practices such as cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness. These programs join the existing library of mindfulness and meditation content.

Unified App Experience: As of January 2024, Headspace offers corporate clients and members access to a comprehensive suite of mental health resources within a single app. This integrated approach encompasses mindfulness resources, coaching, therapy, psychiatry, and work-life services, ensuring holistic support tailored to individual needs.

Leslie Witt, Headspace’s Chief Product and Design Officer, underscores the company’s commitment to simplifying access to mental healthcare. By providing continuity and personalization of care, Headspace aims to alleviate the burden often associated with navigating the fragmented mental health landscape.

“So much of our mental healthcare system is siloed and episodic, leaving those seeking help with the added challenge of figuring out the type of care they need, what providers are available, let alone where they can turn for everyday support,” said Witt. “Our goal is to alleviate that burden by creating a seamless, highly personalized spectrum of care – with care concierge services available 24/7 – so people can access in-the-moment mental health care that’s tailored to them no matter where they are on their journey, or how acute their needs.”

The changes are presented visually in a way that stays true to the brand’s identity — an excellent example of how personal services can become more professional while remaining true to their essence. The idea that a brand can make solving real problems feel comfortable and approachable shines through; Headspace hopes this approach “can help destigmatise seeking care by making talking about mental health feel approachable and normalised.” As Headspace reimagines mental healthcare, the expanded offerings and a refreshed brand signal a new era of accessibility and empowerment in the quest for lifelong mental well-being.

Imagery courtesy of Headspace: Headspace rebrand, design support by Italic Studio, custom typeface by Colophon Type Foundry, brand guidelines by Order developed on Standards (Copyright © Headspace, 2024)

Look closely, now. . .

To the left of Kirk Douglas’ head is a handmade embroidered sampler—the vintage kind that was common for displaying a typographic motto like “Home Sweet Home.” This particular sampler is not as insignificant as it seems; there are three of them hanging around the office, and they underscore an important plot point.

These pieces are a venerable typographic medium. Per Wikipedia:

“A needlework sampler is a piece of embroidery or cross-stitching produced as a ‘specimen of achievement,’ demonstration or a test of skill in needlework. It often includes the alphabet, figures, motifs, decorative borders and sometimes the name of the person who embroidered it and the date.“

Seeing the pieces in the film triggered a few hours of digging through my digital and analog type specimen sheets to find more evidence of the origin of bitmap letterforms. This embroidery is made on a grid, and the letters conform to the size and shape of the grid in a form similar to early digital fonts. Whether this had any influence on bitmapping in the early digital days is supposition. However, I suppose it could have been an inspiring template for those designing ornate decorative wood and metal typefaces.

Just look at the sample pages from Au bon marché: Album de marques & de broderies (1900), which feature 40 plates of marks and embroidery. If this stuff did not influence the design of even a few fonts, I’ll eat my sampler.

With a body of work throughout the 1990s that enthusiastically and provocatively amalgamated dualities—word/image, real/virtual, hand/machine, past/future—American graphic, type, and multimedia designer P. Scott Makela established his reputation as a creator of postmodern visual languages outside normative graphic design. While designers of different generations, mindsets, and training disagreed acutely (and sometimes quite nastily) about what graphic design was and what, how, and to whom it should communicate, Makela was his own kind of designer. An enduring inspiration was weighty, machined stuff—the primordial analog output of industrial production, which he frequently rebuilt into dimensional letterforms, married to meaning, and presented in a succinct, unambiguous single punch. “Actually,” Makela said, “I find 2D type a backward transformation from 3D, a 2D way of describing 3D events.” Revisiting his work and philosophy is an opportunity to appreciate his prowess in reconstituting meaning and breathing life into language. I interviewed Makela in the spring of 1997 as part of my MFA Thesis at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Our exchange, below, is lightly edited and condensed. 

I think of 3D type as your signature style. 

Well, I think that it has been for the last three or four years. I’ve really never gotten tired of the mass it creates and the ability to create [the appearance of metal] alloys. I’ve always been interested in this idea of alloys. It wasn’t specifically “Oh, I want to look at 3D type because it was on a Metallica or heavy metal cover.” It really was more because of growing up in a household with manufacturing and aluminum extrusions. 

So it was about material?

Yeah. It was about material and the way it was formed and the way it was extruded out of machining tools. I grew up in a household where all these pieces were around, and I grew up with these pieces and these forms. By the other token, 3D type has become such a popular mode of trying to get people’s attention, even more so recently, that actually I’m struggling with trying another strategy because it has begun to lose meaning. Like Dead History loses meaning after it’s out.

What was the first piece you did using 3D typography?

The first piece I did officially, a printed piece using 3D typography, was the Mohawk piece, Rethinking Design, and it was the “Do Nothing” article I did with Tucker Viemeister. Before 3D programs were available, I started to use a program called Pixar RenderMan[1987], which was the old animation special effects engine for creating shapes. I tried to form typefaces using that. 

Mohawk Paper Mills promotion “Re-thinking Design,” copyright 1992, pages 14-23, Tucker Viemeister and P. Scott Makela’s collaboration “On Doing Nothing.” Scans of the original, courtesy the author.

So you and the software grew up together? 

Yeah, and then when certain fonts were available, I’d import them into that environment and create new possibilities. That was the advent of what was called Pixar Typestry[1990]. The software became a real basis for the way I would do things. Most of the stuff I’d do would actually be by default; when you moved the object, it became a cheap effect. I became interested in looking at things head-on. That style became a boilerplate.

While cruising around the grocery store, I noticed three genres of 3D type on products. It’s interesting; each medium has a different way of using it, connoting different things. 3D type is used on junk food for kids, household chemicals, and dog food. On television, I noticed that it’s used in sports, news, and toy commercials and often to imply technology, speed, or power. I found it cheesy. What’s your definition of cheesy when It comes to 3D type?

I think cheesy is newscasts. I’m so enamored of this thing, floating, hanging …

It’s slightly menacing, which I like.

I look at Stanley Kubrick films and realize what I really like about his direct use of models, like in 2001, was feeling that weight and that gravity. I’m interested in that gravity.

When you’re using 3D type, what do you feel it means?

When I think of how I use 3D type and how I used these floating planetoids, I think of them as giving me the opportunity to have XYZ coordinates. Instead of an implied depth of field, having the object appear as a real 3D object with some of the shadows it throws on the surfaces allows for a natural photographic depth. At the same time, it has the effect of being very modern. I like it when it’s not clear whether it’s a 3D rendering on the computer or a photograph. Some other designers have worked with a pixelated quality. I’m interested in how it feels when it’s burnished, really brushed and direct. It’s about implying depth. I’m interested in small, massive chunks. I don’t have a lot of language in my work. [I have] A simple language. I find it interesting to create dynamics within that equation.

So you think of type as having a back, a top, and sides?

Yeah. Absolutely. And what’s behind, because there’s a thickness and depth to the actual object, at least to me. I see it through my eyes, and that’s a problem.

Why?

I see language in the way that I’d like to read it, and it’s about reducing. When I was a student here years ago[1989-1991], Michael Hall, the head of Sculpture, had a really big effect on me during my reviews. He talked about reducing and isolating the work. I still had a lot of extraneous asteroids floating around, which didn’t solidify the message. So, for me, it became about (attaining) focus and isolation.

How influenced were you by Pop Art?

One of the biggest influences in my becoming a graphic designer was the work of Ed Ruscha. He was one of the California Pop artists, but he went beyond that because he wasn’t borrowing from commercial culture as much as from pedestrian strip mall culture—almost a lack of style. Ruscha brought language to life with his thick, floaty words. He and John Baldassari had the biggest impression on me. In the last five years, I’d say Lawrence Weiner. 

The Minneapolis College of Art and Design 1993-1995 catalog, designed by P. Scott Makela;
Courtesy the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Is there a message in the work?

The overall message in all my work is simply levitating directness in front of you. The language in the work is formed by the message or problem I’m solving at that time, but its delivery vehicle is about putting the message in front of someone and letting It levitate with a certain degree of weight. That’s the formal message. That’s the formal container.

Is the type hollow or solid?

I’d like to think the type is solid (laughter). It’s definitely die-cast solid without a hollow core. And remember, alloys contain mixtures of metals.

To me, [even] if it casts a shadow, it’s not necessarily 3D. It has to have substance as an object, and your work and Glaser’s stuff are there, even though they’re hand-rendered and funky. 

Peter Max, as well. 

And Ji Byol Lee in New York, whose stuff is done in Adobe Dimension. He rotated Univers. It has a top and a bottom and a front and a back. I look at the range of stuff, and they’re all different vernaculars. You said something about moving away from it or redeveloping it.

Here’s the thing. The way 3D type was used, was part of the 70s vernacular. The airbrushed type that was always the standard art house solution had a masculine quality. Now, with post-rave culture, 3D type has become everyday and accessible, just like how Photoshop has become, so it has become a convention now, a new vernacular. Part of my struggle now is to keep defining my work. First, when we’re designers, we can make our work about constantly jumping ahead as if that’s the only impetus for making it. You’re trying continually to refine something. That’s why it’s still interesting to me to go into those three-dimensional (programs) and try to create hybrids, which are a kind of shaving-off of skin. There are so many people doing the 3D type thing right out of the box with Pixar that I can’t help but feel that my own work is reduced if I don’t move onto a new plane of seeing how I can add more weight, more mass, even if it’s implied or more psychological rather than becoming structural or formal. 

I know people have talked about looking at the interior of typography, and I haven’t seen that exploration done successfully. It’s like the first time you saw a ceiling in a film was in Citizen Kane. So this is the thing to explore. Legibility on the outside of the word isn’t even an issue. I think it’s [3D type] supremely legible, but to go to the inside of the word, legibility is not going to be the same thing.

Yeah. We’re going to [learn to] recognize new shapes.

All you can do is look at the inversion, the concave part of a letter. If you look at the upper inside corner of the slab [serif] on an “I” it will look like the inside of a metal bird box or like you’re stuck inside a heating vent. So it’s really difficult formally to move forward. It’s why I’m now trying to concentrate on a psychological mass of something that’s implied. And that might be about a mysterious billowing like Freddy Krueger with the stretching face emerging from behind a very black surface. There are ways to interpret inflation. It’s interesting that you mention it because I’m not as interested in super-chiseled letters that feel like you’re not sure if they’re filled with liquid or if they’re solid. Pneumatics. Air. Fluid. Hydraulics. 

I was talking to Ji about this because when I look at his forms, I’m not sure what they’re made of. Plastic? Metal? They could be ceramic; it’s twirled around in that way. He said they can be made out of anything – even chocolate; he doesn’t care, it’s fine with him.

Let me say this: I think it’s a downer to be labeled as the 3D-type guy. When we went to London and visited Vaughan Oliver, he said, ooh, the 3D guy, 3D, 3D. It’s funny, but my work has never been about fine details; it’s been about the macro chunks. And that mechanism, up to now, has been successful for me. This is a strong communication of this idea; it is a strong way to present this text. But now, I feel that I’m at a crossroads in moving forward because I’d like to leave everything behind—but it’s easier said than done. I still find myself trying to refine some of those things that I barely started to scratch the surface of. And unfortunately, or fortunately, people are researching the same areas. Maybe that’s the reason to go on even stronger and continue to refine it. I don’t know.

On one hand, everybody makes work that really characterizes and showcases their interests and affinities. And to say, “I have to make a change,” if there’s still appeal, I’d say go with your interests. Because everyone’s identifiable. Vaughan’s work is identifiable, too.

But also, it [an investigation] takes 10-15-20 years, like with a painter. But as time becomes more modern and people move to the next. Do the enema paint on the wall … make little plastic dolls with penis noses … so, it’s also about the shock of the new, being able to relate to what the new is. When Ruscha’s work came out, peo­ple couldn’t figure out if it was commercial signage or an actual painting. The question is: is it a painting?

The other thing about making “new” is about making “uncomfortable.” Have you done things with this style of type that have made you uncomfortable? Have there been shocks?

The biggest shock is when something is incredibly ugly because, to get to something beautiful to my inner eye, I usually have to go through some ugly things—like I showed you some of the Sweater things. There’s a fine line between what I might do and what a 13-year-old might do in his bedroom or what Mondo 2000 looks like. It’s wanting to slum a little bit. So there’s definitely a wanting to enjoy part of that slumming. I don’t know if that’s a good answer.

What was that Pixar-generated form that was gray and dimensional?

That was Summer’s (Summer Powell, Cranbrook 1997) font pumped into 3D. It became this floating monolith that made me think of those young ravers looking up at this floating thing in front of the speakers. We talked about it. It reminded me of 70s Led Zeppelin covers when they had these monoliths, and we all sat around the table looking at these things. So that was our idea. A new god. A floating, again, a levitation. Whenever something’s floating above you, you’d better take notice. To bring 3D type to life, that industrial quality is attention­-getting because it sticks out into the atmosphere from the surface. And that’s another thing, formally, that I can’t resist.

A Walker Art Center Fall promotion circa 1992 -1996. Scans of the original, courtesy the author

For more, listen to Debbie Millman’s 2020 interview with Laurie Haycock Makela on Design Matters Live; they discuss her revolutionary typography days at Cranbrook with Scott Makela, surviving two brain hemorrhages, and arriving at “the project of a lifetime.”

My nieces had baby girls weeks apart two years ago. They are now expecting again (due this summer). One of them asked me to design an artwork with letters because her daughter was learning them. 

She had me at letters. The question was what to do: a poster, a set of cards, a book? If a book, what size, what colors, and how? Agonizing over the style of the letters ensued. I started pinning on a board examples of letters that looked like designs for children and another board to pin children’s books. Still, I felt lost for a couple of weeks. 

I started to research children’s books, went to the library, and started to read a bit about children, especially about two-year-olds. Then, I remembered some geometry and reading lessons from Wheaton Montessori School when we lived in Chicago. There are many similarities between design education and the Montessori method, but that is for another post. A particular aspect from my kid’s days at Montessori has always stuck with me: I remember my son tracing shapes with his index finger. He’d do this with words and objects he’d see. That memory helped me decide what to do next. 

The letters needed to be thick enough for a two-year-old to trace with their finger. This is not unlike some of the letters I have written in my daily practice. I thought I would add a simple graphic of an object—food or otherwise— that started with that letter. I also wanted the book to be small enough to fit in the hands of a two-year-old. Thankfully, Blurb offered a 5” x 5” book in softcover at a very reasonable price. Then, I got to work.

Looking back, I could have been more consistent in the type of letters I created. Same with the style of the objects. I also realized that designing for children was more intimidating than designing for adults. There are a plethora of questions floating around. For instance, is this stroke thick enough? Should the O be more like an oval or a circle? How much information is too much or too little? Ultimately, I decided to go through with it all and make edits later. One of my niece’s birthdays has passed, and the other is coming up. Deadlines always work, don’t they? 

The book has been uploaded to Blurb; however, it is not yet listed in their bookstore. Here is the link if you are interested in getting one.

Some photos of the project are below:

Alma Hoffmann is a freelance designer, design educator, author of Sketching as Design Thinking, and editor at Smashing Magazine. This is an edited version of an original post on Temperamental amusing shenanigans, Alma’s Substack dedicated to design, life, and everything in between.

All images © Alma Hoffmann.

The letterforms are organic, demonstrative, sculptural, and spacious. Pitanga is confident but flexible with eight weights and two styles. Its open aperture makes it legible in display and smaller text sizes. Charismatic diacritics bring personality to Pitanga’s Portuguese voice, but the typeface also supports more than 200 Latin script-based languages.

The Brazilian typographic studio describes Pitanga as a kid flying a kite on the beach in the Vidigal favela of Rio, a footballer’s twisted leg, or samba’s precise yet subtle footwork. You could say that Pitanga characterizes the Brazilian idea of “bossa” (talent, creativity, a new way of doing things).

Fabio Haag Type project credits: Creative Direction & Design – Sofia Mohr; Design Critiques – Fabio Haag, Henrique Beier, Ana Laydner & Eduilson Coan; Engineering – Henrique Beier; Graphic Design – Palp Studio; Illustration – Gabriel Diogo; Copywriting – Thiago Mattar

Ginny McReynolds is a 72-year-old lesbian, writer and longtime community college English, journalism and communications teacher. Retired now, she writes about how women are reinventing themselves and finding new meaning and purpose in retirement. Read her blog at: www.finallytimeforthis.com

What is the thing you like doing most in the world?

It’s been said many times before, but I love having written. I actually really enjoy writing when I have an idea and it’s working, but during the slogging portion of writing, I often feel tortured. I feel so happy when something I’m writing comes together as I imagined it might and then readers will comment that they see themselves in what I’ve written. That means more than anything. I also love spending time with my partner, when she is working on her creative pursuits and I am engaged in mine.

What is the first memory you have of being creative?

I was in 7th grade in 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated. At the time, it was such a profound event—the dramatic murder of this man who seemed to my 12-year-old self to be the best president we’d ever had (he was actually only the second president in my life). I was so shaken and disturbed by the event that I wrote a poem about it. I had never written anything like that before, and I’m sure it was more prose than poetry since I am not a poet at all. But the words just poured out of me. I showed it to my aunt, who liked it so much she sent it in to the local newspaper, which was publishing people’s responses and comments following the assassination. The paper finally published a book of many of them, including mine, and the book eventually made its way to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. The experience certainly didn’t change my life, but it planted a seed in me that has remained. It is always writing that I turn to when I want to understand what I feel and what’s happening in my life.

What is your biggest regret?

My biggest regret is that it took me so long to feel brave. For much of my life I valued not making waves or drawing attention to myself over exploration, vulnerability, and simply standing proudly in the world as I am. That lack of courage kept me from applying for certain jobs, living in new places, taking myself more seriously as a writer, and just enjoying who I was all of those years. I’m so much more confident now, and I have to remind myself that it’s not too late to believe this fully in myself.

How have you gotten over heartbreak?

In some ways, I think we don’t really get over heartbreak. For me, after days or weeks or months of feeling sorry for myself, or wallowing in loneliness, I realize that I just end up moving forward. But the sadness, the loss, and the what-ifs remain as part of who I am. I have been fortunate to have much more joy than heartbreak, but those very hard times helped me uncover other sides of me and to bring those out into the light.

What makes you cry?

I’ve never been a big crier, and Prozac has made me even less of one, so I know that when I do cry it is such a real feeling. These days, it is almost always something sentimental that makes me cry—an old song, reading my mother’s words in a journal I found of hers after she died, a movie that ends with a twist, something great happening to someone I love dearly.

How long does the pride and joy of accomplishing something last for you?

In its fullest form, maybe a good 36 hours. After that, I start picking it apart, determining I could have done better. Or, I wait for the other shoe to drop, to learn that what I thought I accomplished wasn’t that great after all. I’m working on being in the moment much more than when I was younger and reminding myself that everything is a kind of accomplishment—that it’s me being alive in the world and thriving. And for that, I’m trying to remember to pat myself on the back.

Do you believe in an afterlife, and if so, what does that look like to you?

I definitely believe there is something after this. Sometimes I think it’s just a whole new life experience—in a different place at a different time. Other times I think it doesn’t look anything like this and that we will have no sense of anything except being where we are. I don’t believe it’s good or bad, though, any more than this life is.

What do you hate most about yourself?

I hate it that I have spent a huge amount of time in my life trying to prevent something bad from happening. I grew up in an emotionally tenuous family and it made me watchful from an early age. Even with lots of therapy, it took me years to understand that I couldn’t control things outside myself, that focusing on what might happen is fruitless, and that I will actually be fine no matter what occurs. I still go there with some regularity, but I don’t travel nearly as far down that road as I used to. I practice equanimity now whenever I possibly can.

What do you love most about yourself?

I love that I feel hopeful. I haven’t always. In fact, it almost seems that I have felt the most hope when I gave up looking for it. But I truly believe that things will work out for us all and that means we will survive whatever happens. This seems like a crazy time in the world to hold on to hope, but on a personal level, I believe we are good and that we will find connection when we need it. We really aren’t alone.

What is your absolute favorite meal?

My absolute favorite meal is one prepared by me and my partner and any set of our close friends. I used to hate “potlucks” because they were such a lesbian cliché, but now I love a meal constructed by several of us, with attention to the way the foods connect to the occasion and to each of us. It’s such a symbol of how we have all grown together over the years.

Ward Schumaker, a veteran painter and illustrator, anticipates the 2024 election will be a war of words. So, as the campaign kicks into gear, he turned scores of Donald Trump’s most quotable bon mots into typographic broadsides—modern-day samplers—that measure 37″ x 25″, painted with acrylic + paste (along with some collage elements).

He’s been met with various responses, not all of them positive. For example, Schumaker told me that when he gave a talk about his Trump work at a museum, he was “harassed verbally” by a member of the board of directors: “These are all lies,” the board member barked. “Trump never said half these things!” And when showing them at Jack Fischer Gallery, a stranger threatened to pound him. These incidents happened in San Francisco, theoretically a safe place for such artworks. “Yet in Nashville, a pro–Trump stronghold, I was greeted with kindness, applause and appreciation.”

Schumaker is expressing himself in the media he knows best. I asked him what he hopes readers take away from it all.

I have a reasonable idea what triggered these broadsides, but can you put it in your own words?
I’d never been very political, but about seven years ago I asked my grandson what he’d been studying in school that day. “How not to be a bully,” he answered. Then added: “You know, like Donald Trump.” At the time I was making large, one-of-a-kind, hand-painted books, many using hand-cut stenciled words, and I decided to do one using Trump’s words. It was not the kind of subject I’d regularly use, and when I finished I didn’t know what to do with it. One night I woke thinking I should show it to my gallerist (at the time, Jack Fischer). I sent him jpgs, insisting he promise to show no one.

He promised. But the next day a woman came into the gallery and asked to see my work—she might buy a painting. Jack apologized, and said he’d only recently moved, and all my work was still at his old address. She sighed and started to leave. Jack stopped her: “But would you like to see an interesting project Ward’s been working on?”

Then he broke his promise. After seeing three of the spreads, the woman said, “Stop. Can I get my husband in here? He’s out in the hall.” The husband came in, looked at the work, then said, “I’m with Chronicle Books; do you think Ward would let us publish a facsimile of this?” In record time, Chronicle produced it as a trade book: Hate Is What We Need. The title is from one of Trump’s quotes.

And that might have been the end of it. But about the time I finished that first book, white supremacists marched through Charlottesville shouting “Jews will not replace us,” and Trump stated that there were “good people on both sides.” I felt compelled to make another book, this time including not only Trump’s incendiary words, but the words of others, both in support of Trump and those opposed. (That book is now in the collection of the Achenbach Foundation of Graphic Arts.)

However, my books are seen by few people, so I began making large broadsides in hopes of exhibiting them. I thought I might create 10, maybe even 15. I ended up creating 350. I am extremely grateful that the Letterform Archive has given each and every one of them a home in its collection. See their book Strikethrough. While I thought I’d quit a long time ago, I recently started doing more, which I mount on Instagram and Facebook.

Was it your intention to, shall we say, seduce the viewer into reading these?
My intentions vary, but first is always simply making certain others have seen and digested the latest vile words from Trump and/or his minions. If I have time, I might try to be clever, but most often it has been: What can I do quickly and still get my regular work done? And of course there is the fact that I’m a painter, not really a designer at all, so I have often embarrassed myself trying to be clever. I know some great designers and ask their forbearance.

You’ve succeeded at, in my view, what many “political artists” try and often fail to do, which is make intriguing art with a message that stands on its own. Was this your intent?
Thank you. I recognize that I don’t have the particular talent of esteemed illustrators (i.e. Edel Rodriguez) but I do value my paintings—and they’ve included words since I started painting, as a kid, back in the ’60s. So it has been a matter of simply doing what I do best: words-as-paintings.

How long did it take to make these broadsheets?
I started working on these in 2017 and I’m still making them. Each one is created using hand-cut stencils, so the longer the quotation, the longer it takes. The wordiest have taken three days to accomplish, others have been completed in one day. Often I start cutting words with no plan at all. I think of them as paintings, and my paintings have always followed that Rauschenberg rule: Do something, then do something else to it. It may not be the wisest way to work, but it’s what I know.

Is your work a kind of anti-DIY/DIY aesthetic?
As a kid I often raised my grade by doing what was termed as extra credit: making a book cover for biology class, for example, by pasting cut-paper words that said “Clothes don’t make the man, cells do.” As a 12 year old I was very proud of that. Of course I should have been embarrassed. Later, at the age of 35 I began illustrating, and my best work was definitely DIY because I didn’t know what I was doing.

Why haven’t I seen your Trump work on social media?
Early on I tried mounting the Trump Papers on Twitter. I was almost immediately thrown off. I wrote [to Twitter], asking for an explanation. Over and over I wrote. I got no response. Years later, a couple months after Biden was elected, I got a note from Twitter saying I could once again post on their site. Of course, I quit.

What do you feel is the most powerful piece among these?
Trump: “Women: You have to treat them like shit.”

Liz Cheney: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

And the most frightening—Trump: “This could very well be the last election this country ever has.”

How will you put these to use in the coming battle?
Truthfully, I don’t know.

What’s next for you in terms of where you’re feelings will drive your work?
Just before I hit 80, I started working in clay, and that’s been a joy. But Trump is running again and very possibly will win, so what can a person do?

That’s why when I came upon photos of the new RIXO location in the Marylebone neighborhood of London, I was instantly captivated and had to learn more about the unique design concept and those behind it.

RIXO is a contemporary clothing boutique specializing in bohemian sundresses and vibrant prints. Their new Marylebone location brings the whimsical energy of their clothing to life, with brightly colored architectural motifs organically illustrated all over its otherwise crisp white walls. The saturated color palette and hand-drawn line quality create a pop-art-like look, infusing the space with a playful take on classical design elements. Illustrator Sam Wood developed this aesthetic in partnership with the design studio Cúpla, helmed by Gemma McCloskey. I reached out to Wood and McCloskey to learn more about the process behind their design concept and what it was like bringing such a fresh take on retail space to fruition.

(This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

What was the development process like for this distinct store design concept?

Sam Wood: The initial process was driven by Gemma. She approached me after seeing some of my work with Claridge’s and other clients in the UK and asked me to devise something bold and colorful that told the story of RIXO in a distinctly new way.

GM: When I first stumbled across Sam’s Instagram page, his use of color felt really bright and fresh alongside his beautiful, fluid style. I knew instantly Sam would be perfect for the new Marylebone RIXO; his handwriting lent itself to enveloping the whole space while still allowing it to breathe.

SW: After I had taken a look at the other RIXO stores and got a feel for their story, it was a pleasure to bring something of Marylebone to the space and interpret that in my own line. I spend a lot of time in the area because a local gallery I work with is down the road, so I’m always roaming about looking at the mishmash of architecture from Gothic Revival (which was the basis of the alcoves) to Neoclassical (which was the basis for the floral details). I hope the eventual style reflects the multiplicity of the area and is a playful reference to how I see things existing alongside each other.

What was the rest of the collaboration process like?

GM: We had an initial meeting where I discussed the concept, design, and materials being used in the space. One of the threads from our concept for Marylebone was this nod to classical London architecture; therefore, creating illustrated paneling with a whiff of Jean Cocteau was the foundation of the design. Within this framework, it was important to give Sam the breathing space to be creative, and it was exciting seeing him embrace the concept and bring his own stamp to the design. 

Once we had reached the final internal designs, we decided we needed to use these on the external windows to fully embrace the concept. When Sam was actually onsite doing the mural, it was a very fluid process, and we would discuss colors and tweak a few things with the benefit of actually being in the space. We also added in some of the pendants which sit centrally in the space and look great.

Did you first map out the design digitally and then bring it to life on the store walls? What was it like free-handing the motifs? Nerve-wracking, exhilarating?  

SW: I am a stickler for being analogue early on; I work on full-scale drawings on paper, which gives me an idea of how the motifs will work at scale as well as the tones and quality of line. The client does not always see these, but they are an essential part of how I conceive of a design and have the confidence to execute it. After this, I can mark up the digital renders to hone the design so the client can get a full idea of the vision.

A great deal of forward planning and preparatory drawing goes into making sure that when I put the pen on the wall, it’s all where it should be. That’s an essential collaborative exercise, in this instance, with Gemma, who was fantastic to work with. Building sites are often chaotic places, which is a far cry from my day-to-day in the studio, so yes, it’s a heart-in-mouth moment every time with the first mark on the wall, but I do get a kick out of it!

Is this markers-on-walls technique a style you’ve done before? Or was it specially created and executed for this particular project?  

SW: I’ve used Posca markers for years in various contexts, they have such a nice uniformity of tone, which is ideal for bringing to life a design which needs to keep its clarity and “poppyness.” I used them for the first time in a mural context last year for Bryan O’Sullivan Studio, painting a celestial ceiling which is still on show in their gallery on Brook Street Mayfair.

Ordinarily I use a brush and acrylic when doing murals, so it was fun to what is possible with these works in the medium.

How did you feel at the end of the process after drawing your last line, stepping back, and seeing the completed store? 

SW: It’s always a moment of thinking, “Is it finished now?” There’s always the possibility of another line, filling out this corner, or changing that line. I habitually look for flaws in a work, and the “finished product” is always an opportunity to see how everything has worked together. It’s a strange feeling to hand the thing over— after a couple of days of the room being yours, it now belongs to the client and, of course, the public, who interprets it in their own way. That’s why I love working so spatially— the works sometimes divide people, but once I’m finished, that’s down to the viewers.

What sort of experience do you hope shoppers have when stepping into this RIXO store? What sensations do you hope they feel as they move about the space you all created? 

SW: So much of what I do is about storytelling and creating places where people can escape in some way. Here, the murals are front and center in the design and are a key part of the store’s identity. I hope anyone coming into the space gets a sense of the layers of detail that go into evoking the story that RIXO wants to tell, as well as how my own journey as an artist marries with that.

GM: We want the shoppers to feel invited like they’re stepping into someone’s living room at home. We didn’t want a sterile interior, which can sometimes be intimidating for a shopper. There is also a sense of escapism with the store, which we hope the customers find uplifting.

It was a very simple problem: I’d gotten a new phone a week or so ago, and during the information transfer, it killed my authenticator app, so I downloaded a new one and tried to link it to my Substack account, but I couldn’t sign into my Substack account because I didn’t have the original authenticator (which had been deleted) and couldn’t get a new Substack QR code for a new authenticator app because….I couldn’t log in. Because I didn’t have the authenticator codes. Because I couldn’t log in. Because I didn’t have the authenticator codes.

After hour seven, I found myself online with SUPPORT, which is an AI chatbot that kept trying to help me by asking me to log in. But I couldn’t log in. Because: no authenticator codes. And no way of getting them.

Okay Elissa, we can fix that! the chatbot said, and brought me back to the original chat screen telling me to log in. Which I couldn’t do because, no authenticator codes.

I typed in HUMAN HUMAN HUMAN I NEED TO SPEAK TO A HUMAN BECAUSE I AM A HUMAN.

This went on for most of the day until I was finally given an email address for SUPPORT. Of course, it was a TOS (terms of service) email address, and my case was CLOSED by them because it wasn’t a terms of service issue. And I had to start all over again. Finally, at the end of the chat with the bot, I did what I always do when I’m trying to get a human being to help me on a customer service call (where you punch in 0 repeatedly until you by-pass all of the other prompts): I typed in HUMAN HUMAN HUMAN I NEED TO SPEAK TO A HUMAN BECAUSE I AM A HUMAN.

The bot replied: I see that you want to speak with a human, Elissa. Click HERE, and I will help you. So I did, and it brought me back to the same chatbot box. And then it said WE HAVE DISCOVERED THE PROBLEM, ELISSA: YOU HAVE NO ACCOUNT WITH US, ELISSA, AND YOU DO NOT EXIST.

And then I had to plead with them and explain that I did, and do, exist. I really do. And that if they went into my settings for my newsletter, they would see that it was connected to the email address that I gave them. Only, they said they couldn’t BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO ACCOUNT WITH US ELISSA AND YOU DO NOT EXIST.

NO WAIT — I DO I REALLY DO EXIST PLEASE BELIEVE ME was the last thing I answered. And at two in the morning, I realized that I had been calmly told that I didn’t exist by artificial intelligence, in the same way that HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey tells Astronaut Dave who has been locked out of his spacecraft and needs HAL to open the hatch so he can get back in or he’ll die, I’M SORRY, DAVE, I CAN’T DO THAT.

It took fifteen hours, six emails to an anonymous support email that went unread, invaluable help from a highly visible Substack writer friend who talked me down off the ledge, and: here we are. Ultimately, the fix took less than five minutes with a live human. But I lost fifteen hours of work, and the knowledge that had I not been able to get back in, years of my work — essays, interviews, recipes, art — would likely have been scrubbed because a chatbot decided that I DO NOT EXIST.

An existential crisis:

No sixty-year-old woman wants to hear from anyone that she does not exist with such great and absolute certainty but especially by someone who actually does not exist. It’s not a matter of paranoia or unresolved mommy (or daddy) issues, or that tiny problem with the extra chin you started to grow in your late fifties. No mid-life writer who is sort of on the quiet side, who is definitely not loud enough or sexy enough or cool enough, or who does not read The Right Things or appear at The Right Parties wants to hear this. Remember the Evelyn Couch scene in the Winn-Dixie grocery store parking lot in Fried Green Tomatoes? The one where she’s patiently waiting for a spot and gets cut off by two mean girls in a red VW Bug? Why does this happen? Because Mrs. Couch is invisible; she doesn’t exist to these women, or even her husband for that matter. When she welcomes him home one night wrapped in Saran Wrap, he walks right past her to the television set, sits down, and watches the sports channel.

The question of existence is reductionist and unequivocal, and is meant to be: it’s easier that way. Whole nations, whole ethnicities and races and religions and socioeconomic groups are regularly told that they don’t exist and therefore are simply not viable. I’m sorry, the Master Bot says, you do not exist, so you will be removed. We will pretend that you’re not here, you never happened, you’re irrelevant.

Here is the question on which the actual chatbot model is based: what is the simplest answer to the most basic question? If we can’t figure out what to do with you, we’ll just say you’re not real. You don’t exist. You’re invisible. Problem solved.

The answer We can’t help you because you don’t exist is foundational to our modern model of dehumanization, from the top down and at every level in between. In geopolitics, one group screams at another YOU DON’T EXIST and the other one answers NO YOU DON’T EXIST! and around and around we go, and we wonder why nothing can be solved. A few weeks ago, I was attempting to fill an expensive prescription that, literally, no pharmacy is interested in filling and no insurance company is interested in covering. I called my insurance company and I heard the nice man on the other hand clacking away on his keyboard. He came back to me and said According to our records, you don’t exist. I told him I had just filled another prescription using the same insurance, and it was no problem. It must have been a mistake, he said, because you don’t exist: there is no record of you. According to our records.

There’s a great old MASH episode when Hawkeye is mistakenly listed as dead; he no longer exists. The Army — Hawkeye is told they never make mistakes — has taken him off its payroll and has let his father back in Maine know that his son has died. Hawkeye has to jump through hoops to get reinstated in Life, although he hates the war he’s found himself in, hates the bloodshed and the battles and the death and the hopelessness. He wants to call home to let his father know he’s okay and that it was just an error, but he can’t: dead men can’t make phone calls.

And then, of course, there’s George Bailey, in It’s A Wonderful Life, who whispers in the throes of horrific despair that he wishes he had never been born. About to commit suicide, he instead flings himself into a snowy, raging river to rescue a jumper whose hat miraculously never comes off. George is granted his wish by this mysterious jumper and is instantly rendered unknown by his community; he no longer has a wife or children, a mother, a business, people who know and love him, or even hate him. He is just un-humaned, and irrelevant. But in that jump to save this other soul instead of taking his own life, George experiences a baptism of sorts and, in the language of my friends in recovery, the very meaning of service; he wanders through the Bardo seeing what the universe would be like without him, until he is brought back to his real life with all its human perils and pitfalls, and is given a second birth, a second chance. He will never beg to be rendered non-existent again.

LISTEN TO ME: I DO EXIST is what I said to the chatbot last night, as though it could understand me, and as though it even cared. And I came to realize that even in the throes of fury, and despair, and fear, and rage, and exhaustion, and the invisibility of life as a sixty year old woman living in a world that has decided that I am irrelevant, I am hanging on for dear life with my bloody fingertips, and I will not — not — go away.

This post was originally published on Elissa Altman’s blog Poor Man’s Feast, The James Beard Award-winning journal about the intersection of food, spirit, and the families that drive you crazy. Read more on her Substack, or keep up with her archives here.

Header photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash.

Both were champions of lesser-known artists, and I was preparing to do a story on them for Graphis. I was excited to learn that they had recently moved to Lakeville, CT, near my own country home. That was 40 years ago. During those years they worked together producing beautifully designed and illustrated books for Creative Editions. Rita had a distinct classic-contemporary style that harmonized with Etienne’s uniquely fanciful artwork (as well as others she hired for the publisher). They were a fixture in the industry—Rita for her splendid art direction, and Etienne for his iconic conceptual illustration.

He was well-known and highly influential in the United States but was a high magnitude star in Europe, especially his native Switzerland, where exhibitions of his work were frequent and his books were constantly in print. All told, he illustrated more than 80 titles.

Etienne passed away on April 22at 83. He had been difficultly recovering at his home in Lakeville from a stroke two years earlier that had left him partially paralyzed. His death triggered a memory of a major moment in my own professional life.

Etienne produced the first printed color artwork to appear in The New York Times when I was working for the paper. The only direction I gave him was the title “The Sins of Summer” for our annual seasonal reading issue. I felt that running his image (seen below) was a personal triumph, since there was an unwritten rule that snakes were prohibited in the daily Times (a decree that annoyed me). This being the Sunday Book Review, it luckily passed under the radar. The publisher and editors were, in fact, more concerned with how our first attempt at a live color section (after months of faulty practice runs) would look and be received. Etienne successfully created the perfect image, using colors (the publisher had certain preferences) that passed muster. He also did a black-and-white version at the eleventh hour, just in case something went terribly wrong. Anticipation ran high. Yet nothing went awry. The color wall was breached. Most naysayers said yay. And over the ensuing years Etienne created around half a dozen more covers.

During the following decades he continued to illustrate and author books and exhibitions. He proudly mounted Les Maîtres de l’Imaginaire in Lausanne, Switzerland, to honor and archive Rita’s incomparable book and typographic design. (Which, he told me, being modest, she was reluctant to have done. He insisted.)

After learning of his death, I poured through the “Delessert” file I had been updating over the years. More than transcribing a list of his achievements, of which there are many, these funny, poignant, satiric, acerbic images speak volumes about his sense and nonsense—and do more justice to his legacy than I can do in words.

OpenAI had big dreams for the name GPT. It even published brand guidelines on the internet that refer to the acronym as a “trademark.” However, the company’s dream of owning the rights to GPT will fade on May 6, when its trademark application is slated for a “final action” denial from the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Although OpenAI has petitioned the USPTO for an extension of the deadline, the mark is all but dead. Anyone who needs to name something can learn from its demise.

OpenAI’s failure hinges on the fact that its acronym stands for the name “Generative Pre-trained Transformer.” According to the USPTO, the name “merely describes” the service’s capabilities. 

Adding insult to injury, the USPTO also states that the name “appears to be generic.” In other words, “Generative Pre-trained Transformer” is the equivalent of Hershey naming its newest treat “chocolate candy bar” or Nike calling its latest sneaker “high-performance running shoe.”

GPT is so generic that more than 200 related names have been submitted to the USPTO for trademark consideration, and most have not originated with OpenAI. Applications include “Cat GPT,” “BrainGPT,” and the crowd-pleaser “GPTJesus.”

All is not lost for OpenAI. The USPTO has already approved two of the company’s other trademark applications for “GPT-3” and “GPT-4.” But this is a second-rate solution. It’s as if Apple had been prohibited from trademarking the generic name “Smartphone,” so, instead, it named its products “Smartphone-3” and “Smartphone-4.”

If OpenAI had invested more thought into developing a proprietary name to match its revolutionary technology, it could’ve inaugurated the age of AI with a world-building asset on the level of the iPhone.

OpenAI botched its “iPhone” moment, but we can learn three naming lessons from their failure.

1. Avoid Acronyms


Everyone loves the allure of a short, rhythmic name like GPT, but acronyms always have baggage. Don’t force a name to lug a heavy load.

2. Get Uncomfortable

“Generative Pre-trained Transformer” probably felt like a plush old sofa to those inside OpenAI, but comfort can be a killer. Don’t fall for a familiar name.

3. Plan Ahead

OpenAI filed its trademark application in December 2022, but the service had already launched. Don’t expect too much from a behind-the-curve naming effort.

It’s hard to predict what’s next for GPT. If OpenAI had invested more thought into developing a proprietary name to match its revolutionary technology, it could’ve inaugurated the age of AI with a world-building asset on the level of the iPhone. Instead, it created a marketing 101 module: How NOT to brand a product.

There’s also a more significant lesson. Business history isn’t written with sales numbers, market share, advertisements, or logos—all of which change over time. The story is told through brand names that seldom, if ever, change. That’s why every naming project is an opportunity to write history. Don’t “GPT” your chance at immortality.

Header image by Josh Berta, Associate Partner and Executive Creative Director at VSA Partners.

Unbeknownst to Airbnb at the time, this concept was just the beginning of what would become the company’s newest category and most impressive endeavor yet: Icons.

After the success of the Blockbuster experience, Airbnb pushed this idea of world-building even further by making the Home Alone House bookable on the site and bringing the Barbie Malibu DreamHouse to life last summer. They’ve gone all-in on bringing imagined worlds into reality, launching the first 11 new Icons experiences this week.

“Airbnb’s DNA has always been about inviting people into other people’s worlds,” Global Head of Marketing for Airbnb, Hiroki Asai, told me. “In the beginning, it was sharing homes, and then it became submarines and tugboats and castles, and you really came to Airbnb because you had this world opened up to you. So it was natural for the Barbie house and the Home Alone house to be listed, and I think what struck a chord is people got to participate in these imaginary worlds. That was the impetus for all of this.”

At a celebratory affair in sunny Los Angeles on May 1, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky proudly presented each of the 11 Icons, which he said have been a decade in the making. And you can see why. Each concept is impressive enough, but the execution to bring the experiences to life reaches a new level of audaciousness. “Magic is not limited to our imagination,” Chesky said triumphantly to an awe-inspired crowd as he walked us through each Icon. “Icons take you inside worlds that only existed in your imagination until now.”

The Up! House

At the Icons launch event, it was clear that the Up! house was the room’s favorite—and not just because the house itself was on-site for us to tour. This recreation is an exact replica of the house from the movie, down to the most minuscule detail. “We even had to create our own rust!” Chesky said of the antiquing effect his team created for a zeppelin toy on the mantle.

“We built the house down to its specific Pantone colors and weathering of the shingles to make sure it looks exactly like what was in that film,” said Asai. “The whole house, down to the pill bottles inside and the photos in the hallway and the little chair that Carl rides up the stairs, it’s all reproduced exactly the same. The fireplace even has the ropes coming out of it that you can strum like a guitar, and it makes noise.” And what’s most impressive? This 40,000-pound structure, attached to 8,000 balloons, was built to float 50 feet above the ground in New Mexico. “If we’re going to create a world for Disney fans and Up! fans to come experience, we’re going to make that world as magical as possible,” said Asai.

The Musée d’Orsay

When I asked Asai if he had a favorite of these 11 Icons, he told me without hesitation that it was what the Airbnb team had created at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

This legendary art museum along the River Seine is one of the most historic buildings—a former train station—known for its two massive clocks. Airbnb worked with Mathieu Lehanneur, the designer of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games torch and cauldron, to create a luxurious bedroom in the clock room.

Guests will spend a night at the museum, with private access to the Musée d’Orsay collection, including four of Van Gogh’s most famous works. The stay will also coincide with the Paris 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony, to be held along the River Seine just below the clock tower terrace.

The X-Mansion

Airbnb recreated the X-Mansion to look and feel like you’re stepping into a cartoon. They achieved this by working with artists to painstakingly paint black outlines along the furniture and objects in the house to create a 2D-animated effect. According to Chesky, each prop took over an hour to paint. There are well over 100 objects in the house.

The Ferrari Museum

At the Ferrari Museum in Maranello, Italy, Airbnb built a sleeping experience for those with a need for speed. The bed is crafted from the same leather as Ferrari seats and is surrounded by—you guessed it—Ferraris.

Prince’s Purple Rain House

Until now, the house Prince purchased in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for the film Purple Rain has never been available to the public. Hosts Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman of Prince’s band The Revolution are opening the home’s doors for guests to spend the night in Prince’s restored bedroom from the movie and listen to unreleased Prince tracks.

Game with Khaby Lame

A handful of the Icons are less about the physical spaces and more about the incredible people with whom guests will interact. TikTok creator and gamer Khaby Lame is one such host who will spend the night with guests gaming and eating pizza at his home in Milan.

On Tour with Feid

Reggaeton sensation Feid is bringing guests along for the ride on his FERXXOCALIPSIS World Tour for an entire week. Guests will join the crew for rehearsals, ride along on the eye-catching tour bus that’s decked out with fuzzy green interiors, and get backstage access for every show.

Inside Out 2 Headquarters

To build excitement for the upcoming release of Pixar’s Inside Out 2, Airbnb has brought the famous headquarters of Riley’s emotions to life. Guests can sleep in what they’re calling a “dreamatorium.”

The Kapoor Family Home with Bollywood Star Janhvi Kapoor

Asai told me that the locales of the Icons were imperative, considering that cultural luminaries reside around the globe. “When you look at the icons of music and film and culture and art, they naturally sprout up from all over the globe and across all categories.” Janhvi Kapoor represents one of these cultures as a member of one of Bollywood’s most famous families. She is opening the Kapoor family home in Chennai, India, for the first time and will share her beauty secrets and favorite Southern Indian dishes.

“”From a business perspective, these icons allow us to talk to new audiences and stay relevant,” elaborated Asai. “In the case of someone like Jhanvi Kapoor or Feid, they allow us to talk to not only different generations of our guests but also totally different geographies.”

A Living Room Session with Doja Cat

This Icons experience is about getting intimate access to one of the music’s biggest names. Doja Cat will host a private living session for guests with songs from her latest album.

A Private Comedy Show with Kevin Hart

Superstar stand-up comic Kevin Hart typically performs for sell-out stadium crowds, but this Icons experience offers the opposite. Guests will have a private tequila tasting and comedy show with Hart at the Coramino Live Lounge, with the promise of some of his comedic friends stopping by for a set.

“What Airbnb stands for is human connection, and for us, that’s connection in the real world,” Asai said about the importance of creating physical spaces. “We don’t want to be a platform where people connect behind screens or in any other way except in real life. That’s what travel and sharing, and accommodation are all about: connecting in the real world. So, these experiences are about creating something in the real world, not virtual. But to do that, you have to build something amazing.”

When asked about the most rewarding part of working on a project of this magnitude, Asai told me it was seeing a decade of work from hundreds of people’s efforts finally come to fruition. “When you work on something this long with this many teams that are all working their hardest to do the right thing and the best quality thing that they can, it’s really rewarding to see it all come together,” he said. “Then when you show it to people that have never seen it before, and to be able to appreciate it for the first time through the eyes of someone new to it, it’s unbelievably rewarding.”

Schubert’s talents are new to me. She is, in fact, one of the industry’s best-kept secrets, having worked with Matthew Barney, Pope L., The New York City Ballet, Dev Hynes, Laurie Anderson, former president Bill Clinton, and SOPHIE.

Edited by Claire Marie Healy (who worked on A24’s dazzling look at cinematic dance), photographed by Jason Al-Taan, and designed by Wkshps, the book includes mini essays and photo tutorials on beauty makeup, special effects makeup and makeup for the screen—a unique talent that demands flawlessness. Ultimately, Beauty of the Beast redefines the stereotype of the gendered “powder puff girl” diminutive used against women makeup artists, and the masculine world of horror makeup by mixing the two approaches in a hybrid style.