From the intelligent and beautifully made monograph Abbott Miller: Design and Content, which I devoured in early January, here is the designer/writer talking about the firm Design Writing Research, which he co-founded with Ellen Lupton:  

During this time [perhaps mid-1990s], DWR moved from its basis in small print-based projects to exhibitions and publications. We elaborated our position as a hybrid of think thank, publisher, and design studio. The goal was to fuse our work as designers and writers, creating a studio that could generate content and use the unique skill set of designers to focus on projects about art, design, architecture, and ideas. In this notion of the content-based studio there were a number of inspirational precedents, from Charles and Ray Eames to Quentin Fiore and Bernard Rudofsky.

Our original emphasis on language and theory merged with work for clients who came to us not so much for the manifesto-like pronouncements of our mission, but for the thoughtful interplay of design and content in our projects. DWR was a self-consciously literary and conceptual hothouse version of a design studio, undertaking projects that experimented with literary theory and psychoanalysis, leaning heavily on what we saw as the vastly underdeveloped relationship between writing and graphic design. We borrowed from Jacques Derrida an expanded notion of "writing" (écriture), which included all elements of graphic communication, from symbols to spacing. Hence our predilection for mazes of glyphs, our attentiveness to the minutiae of punctuation and our maniacal focus on typography and textural systems.

I'm pleased to be speaking to the St. Louis chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators on February 23 about the refreshed messaging and identity platform my team introduced for Forest Park Forever in 2015.

I loved this book: a visually rich and smartly narrated collection of case studies exploring all parts of creative communications (logos, naming, typography, photography, illustration, messaging, client presentations…). 

Bierut is an intelligent thinker and a terrific, crisp writer (beyond his obvious world-class design chops). Yet he knows the readerly pleasure in having an accomplished instructor (recall the book’s title) chronicle his own missteps en route to delivering a gem. 

Here’s a passage I underlined and circled, a lead-in to a section on logotypes and symbols: 

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

A fascinating New York Magazine piece on an out-of-nowhere topic.

Floral scents, for their part, have been known to evoke strong feelings of maternal love and kinship. (Home visits by Saatchi researchers have found that very ardent Tide fans sometimes carry bottles as if cradling a baby.)