design on Stephen Schenkenberg

Fri, 19 Sep 2025 21:32:41 -0500

Maggie Gram, early on in her fascinating new book “The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History”:

People all over the world tried to ride these waves in ways that might preserve their own dignity and power. Our contemporary idea of design—that hopeful amalgam of a concept—was born in the process. Inventing design helped people imagine reversing some of the damage wrote by the Industrial Revolution. It helped people convince themselves that capitalism fundamentally served human interests; that positive social change could be achieved without politics and governmental action; that problem solving could be both generative and profitable. And it enabled people of substantial power and privilege to imagine themselves as benevolent actors. ‘Design,’ in short, made capitalism feel, both to its participants and to its subjects, less brutal and inhumane—less destructive, in Joseph Schumpeter’s terms, and more creative. It seems to give them a way to reclaim the things they’d made and to re-embed them in a human order.

Weeknotes 03: Rams, Asawa, Morris

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 18:54:00 -0500

Thought I’d pick back up the tradition of a batching up a week’s intake and/or happenings:

Enjoyed Sophie Lovell’s “Dieter Rams: As Little Design As Possible,” a chunky volume pairing photographs of sharply designed products with essays about the designer’s career and influence. (Gary Hustwit’s 2018 documentary about him is also very good.) Rams’s credo: “We are economical with form and color, prioritize simple forms, avoid unnecessary complexity, do without ornament, instead [there is] order and clarification. We measure every detail against the question of whether it serves function and facilitates handling.”
It was a treat to see the artist Ruth Asawa featured on the PBS NewsHour’s Friday evening program. My wife Tamara curated “Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work” for the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in 2018, and it’s been special to see recognition for Asawa’s remarkable work (and life) continue to grow in the years since.

I wrote recently about enjoying the NYT’s package on the 100 best movies of the 20th century. Highly recommend this episode of Wesley Morris’s Cannonball podcast, in which he and film curator Eric Hynes discuss the project and, toward the end, talk through their own picks with affection and humor. (Morris on one of his picks, “Magic Mike XXL”: “It’s basically ‘The Odyssey’ with g-strings.”)
This NYT piece made me smile “He Read (at Least) 3,599 Books in His Lifetime. Now Anyone Can See His List.” Like the subject, my own father‘s been doing this for at least 50 years. His habit inspired mine, which began in the late 1990s. While I’ve kept track digitally for the past few decades, I still have my notebook from the early days. Here’s one image below from 2001 and early 2022, a fantastic stretch for reading (including “White Teeth,” “Ulysses,” “Infinite Jest,” “Carpenter’s Gothic,” “For the Time Being,” “Revolutionary Road,” and “The Painted Bird").

Year in Review: 2024

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 16:41:00 -0500

As I’ve done for the past few decades, I’m ending the year with a look back at some cultural highlights I found most fulfilling during the past 12 months:

Hitting the road with the kids: 2024 was a special year for family travel — an early summer trip to stay with relatives in San Francisco (a moment from there above), then a late summer stay with my sister just outside of D.C. Muir Woods, Presidio Tunnel Tops, the de Young, the Glenstone, MLK Memorial, National Gallery, and so much more. Great ages for the kids to experience both. Fortunate to have been able to do it.
Nonfiction books: “The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight," by Andrew Leland; “The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983 – 1992” by Tina Brown; “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess” by Becca Rothfeld; “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” by David Graeber and David Wengrow; “The Message” by Ta-Nehisi Coates; “Kafka: Diaries” (translated by Ross Benjamin); “To Fall in Love, Drink This” by Alice Ferring; “Lovely One: A Memoir” by Ketanji Brown Jackson; and “The Contagion Next Time” by Sandro Galea.
Chunky, visual-heavy nonfiction books: “The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers, and Art at the Edges of Literature” by Peter Mendelsund and David J. Alworth; “The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing” by Adam Moss (an exceptional editorial mind); “I. M. Pei: Life Is Architecture” by Shirley Surya; “The Wes Anderson Collection” by Matt Zoller Seitz; “Branding: In Five and a Half Steps” by Michael Johnson; “How Design Makes Us Think and Feel and Do Things” by Sean Adams; and “Crossing the Line: Arthur Ashe at the 1968 US Open” (multiple editors/writers).
Novels: “The Fraud” by Zadie Smith; “Nonfiction” by Julie Myerson; “Intermezzo” by Sally Rooney; and “Catalina” by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio.
Books of poems: “Scattered Snows, to the North” by Carl Phillips and “A Film in Which I Play Everyone” by Mary Jo Bang, both STL-connected writers.
Books about what went wrong at Twitter: I should not have spent time reading two books on this subject, but they were interesting: “Battle for the Bird” by Kurt Wagner and “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter” by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac.
Rereading “Gilead”: Endures. Recommended for when you’ve just read two books about Twitter.
The William Gass Centenary: I spent many years writing about and promoting awareness and discussion of Bill’s work, and I had the great fortune of getting to know both Bill and Mary during the last decade of his long and productive life. In October, WashU organized a day-long event to mark what would have been Bill’s 100th birthday. While the Gass projects I launched over the years are set on a kind of permanent simmer, it was meaningful to re-immerse myself in the world of Bill’s writing. Videos and resources are available on the university’s centenary website.
Movies: I was deeply impressed and moved by “The Zone of Interest”; “The Taste of Things”; “Past Lives”; “Anatomy of a Fall”; “Petite Maman”; “Saint Omer”; “Aftersun”; and “His Three Daughters.” Also enjoyed “Killers of the Flower Moon”; “American Fiction”; “You Hurt My Feelings”; “Between the Temples”; “May December”; “Barbie”; “Oppenheimer”; “Maestro”; “Janet Planet”; “She Said”; “Showing Up”; “BlackBerry”; and “Dumb Money.” Temporarily engrossing: “Conclave.” Interesting docs: “Modernism, Inc.: The Eliot Noyes Design Story”; “Martha.”
Satisfying rewatches: “Marriage Story”; “Heat”; and “Kicking and Screaming” (prompted by The Rewatchables). Plus, with the kids, “Spellbound” and “The Princess Bride.”
Articles about the world: “Seventy Miles in the Darién Gap” by Caitlin Dickerson, The Atlantic; “Our Strange New Way of Witnessing Natural Disasters," by Brooke Jarvis, NYT Magazine; “The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers,” by Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker; and “Unsafe Passage: A Palestinian Poet’s Perilious Journey Out of Gaza,” by Mosab Abu Toha, The New Yorker.
Articles about America: “What Will Become of American Civilization?" by George Packer, The Atlantic; “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending,” by Franklin Foer, The Atlantic; “The Man Who Died for the Liberal Arts," by David M. Shribman, The Atlantic; and “Shibboleth” by Zadie Smith, The New Yorker.
Personal essays: “On Cancer and Desire," by Annie Ernaux, The New Yorker; “The Birth of My Daughter, the Death of My Marriage” by Leslie Jamison, The New Yorker; “If My Dying Daughter Could Face Her Mortality, Why Couldn’t the Rest of Us?" by Sarah Wildman, NYT; and “Variations on the Theme of Silence," by my friend Jeannette Cooperman, The Common Reader.
Great match of medium and story: “She Slept With a Violin on Her Pillow. Her Dreams Came True in Italy," by Valeriya Safronova, with photographs and video by Sasha Arutyunova, NYT; “How Taylor Tomlinson Nailed Her Closing Joke," by Jason Zinoman, NYT.
TV shows: The show that made me smile the most all year was “Girls5Eva” (all seasons are streaming on Netflix). Huge fan as well of “Beef”; “The Bear” seasons 1 and 2; “Ripley”; “My Brilliant Friend” season 1; and “Fargo” season 5. Enjoyed “Magpie Murders” and “Bad Monkey.”
New Music: “Oh Smokey” from Clem Snide; “Manning Fireworks” from MJ Lenderman; “Charm” from Clairo; “Patterns in Repeat” from Laura Marling; “Hit Me Hard and Soft” from Billie Eilish; and “Chromakopia” from Tyler, The Creator. Doechii’s Tiny Desk performance was fierce.
New podcasts: My favorite new-to-me podcast this year was Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso. The host is wise beyond is years, does superb research and prep, and seems to quietly relish his good fortune of gently steering weighty conversations. (You can’t go wrong choosing an episode, but Fragoso’s conversation with Ocean Vuong was especially memorable, particularly for the author’s insights about youth and masculinity in America.) Another new discovery I enjoyed, as a former magazine EIC, was Print is Dead (Long Live Print). I can’t remember if I discovered it last year or this year, but I enjoy Jarrett Fuller’s Scratching the Surface podcast (as well as his blog).
A few podcast episodes: Bonnie Prince Billy talks through “I See a Darkness” on Life of a Record; The Wolf of Wine decodes his single “Quintin Tarantino”; Zadie Smith talks through “The Fraud” on Fresh Air; and the Dissect hip-hop aficionados talk through the Best Bars of 2024.
Connecting with two living artists: Any year when my wife Tamara presents a new exhibition is a good one, and this year saw her open “Delcy Morelos: Interwoven," at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. Having our kids meet the Colombian artist, and hearing her talk astutely about her work, were highlights from the year. Grateful as well to meet Julie Blackmon, one of my favorite living photographers, and hear her discuss her distinctive Midwestern work at the Saint Louis Art Museum (thanks for the invite, JF).
Home tour with Laura Dewe Mathews: I have such admiration for Matt Gibberd and what he’s built with The Modern House — from the real estate listing website to the Homing In podcast to the publications, each one presented handsomely and with soul. In the summer, Matt shared a video interview and tour he did with architect Laura Dewe Mathews. I was thinking back to this one in particular, because Mathews' lovely home is known locally as “the gingerbread house” — and our kids are asking to begin nibbling away at theirs.

With that, sending best wishes to you in the new year.

“Studio Culture Now”

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 20:37:02 -0500

Paging back through the Kickstarter-backed “Studio Culture Now” from Unit Editions and realized I neglected to note it here. It’s an enjoyable volume featuring indie design studio heads talking shop. A few themes:

There’s freedom in staying small.
Having a nice workspace is a plus, but too much overhead’s a crusher.
Output matters, but so does process, leadership, and owning your POV.
Social posts and basic PDFs can aid business development more than a high-maintenance, glacially updated website.
You can find success based anywhere, but be engaged with the field and your community.

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 09:38:47 -0500

From How Design Makes Us Think, by Sean Adams:

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

Sun, 02 Jul 2023 18:21:50 -0500

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

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 18:14:07 -0500

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

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 17:08:44 -0500

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

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 20:33:54 -0500

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

Knoll: Our Work’s Worth Waiting For

Sun, 20 Nov 2022 13:09:50 -0500

Charming and savvy detail from Ana Araujo’s new book on the work of Florence Knoll, “No Compromise”: In 1964, the company Knoll released this letter it says it received from one of its textile suppliers, running it as a print ad (one assumes full-page):

Dear Sir, Thank you for your letter of the 6th of October which we have received today. Please be assured that we have not forgotten about you. We have only one weaver making this cloth. He is rather more of an artist than a practical man and he has an artist’s temperament. In other words he makes the colour that he wants to make and not necessarily the colours we want to have from him, and if it is a nice day he will go fishing or shooting leaving the weaving for another day. You will agree that this is not very business-like and from our point of view it is impossible, but the fact is that if we want this cloth, which we do very much, we just have to put up with it. From past experience we would say that it is no use asking him to submit patterns of his future colourings as he will be unable to tell us what these are to be. The sort of thing that happens is that we get a letter from him saying that yesterday he saw a piece of rock covered with Lichen in a most beautiful colour. Sure enough in a few weeks we will get a Brown/Green mixed tweed of this colouring and this is what we mean when we say that he is an artist rather more than a weaver. With the colder winter weather approaching perhaps this man will get down doing some work to keep himself warm, we can only hope.

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

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 10:15:00 -0500

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

Weeknotes #01

Sun, 19 Apr 2020 22:15:00 -0500

Borrowing the structure of a few other online writers whose websites I enjoy (Paul Robert Lloyd and Mark Boulton, among others), I thought I’d start weekly low-key look-backs on the week, bullet list-style. Perhaps weekly is aspirational. We’ll see.

Greatly enjoyed Emily Nussbaum’s long New Yorker profile of Fiona Apple, whose long-awaited record just hit my Spotify streaming today. After reading the piece, I’d been going back through Apple’s back catalogue, awaiting the new songs and relishing the old. That stellar start of “I Know”: “So be it / I’m your crowbar….”
Also in the New Yorker, I was moved by Alex Ross’s essay honoring his late mother, “Grieving With Brahms.” I admire Ross’s writing greatly.
Okay, one more New Yorker reference for the week: I was floored by Dan Chiasson’s review of Joyelle McSweeney’s new book of poetry that involves motherhood and tragedy.
I’ve been dabbling with Roam, which is getting a lot of indie attention as a networked-notes app. (See: #roamcult) At least for now, I’ve enjoyed reading in-depth use studies more than actually using it. Somewhat relatedly, it’s been a big few weeks for Notion, which I continue to use more as a work/life dashboard than a notes app. This general area of knowledge management is one I’m deeply interested in and will continue to be tracking.
Speaking of tech, I’m three episodes into “Devs” (Hulu) and plan on continuing. Intrigued. (I loved the look of Alex Garland’s “Ex Machina.”)
“Knives Out” was fun.
During quarantine, Pentagram’s Michael Bierut — one of my favorite voices on branding and communications — is offering a “Virtual Bookshelf Tour” on Instagram. Mouthwatering. Starts here.
On my family’s own isolation front, lack of options breeds ingenuity. Today Leo and I played driveway tennis over a rope tied between our basketball hoop and a locked stroller, followed by foam-ball lawn golf employing our Christmas tree stand as the hole. Worked surprisingly well.

Charles and Ray, Designers From the Near Future

Sat, 31 Aug 2019 07:38:46 -0500

Loved this passage from Sam Jacob’s essay “Context as Destiny: The Eameses from Californian Dreams to the Californiafication of Everywhere,” published in the satisfyingly chunky The World of Charles and Ray Eames (2016):

For architects and designers like [Peter and Alison Smithson, who were British], the Eameses’ Californian-ness opened a dazzlingly bright window into another world, a sun-kissed world far from the origins of European modernism weighed down by all that Old War baggage — by history, politics and war, by notions of an avant-garde, by post-war reconstruction and the serious politics of the welfare state.
To the Smithsons and their ilk, the Eameses appeared as if designers from the near future. They saw in the American couple a ‘light-hearted thinking in featherweight climate-bits-and-pieces seeming off-the-peg-architecture … [a] do-it-yourself out of gorgeous catalogues, the Sears-Roebuck thinking … [a] whole blow-up, plug-in, camp-out, dump-digging type of thinking and living.’ They saw in Charles and Ray the kind of design practice that they themselves were struggling to imagine — a form of design practice that combined the modernist legacy of social improvement with new sensibilities of popular, mass-produced modernity. They saw a lightness of touch, with a direct connection to lifestyle and an easy ability to reach out across the traditional boundaries of design and out into the wider world.

Michael Bierut on Honesty, Taste & Intelligence

Sat, 31 Dec 2016 18:45:00 -0500

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.

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

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 13:21:37 -0500

A gem by Marco Kaye at McSweeney’s:

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

"Which Cover Would You Choose?"

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 11:59:41 -0500

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