Design Writing
While not a focus of my practice, I’ve had several opportunities to write about design—from a handbook on creating letters to essays on design trends for regional and national periodicals.
Lettering & Type
Ellen Lupton tapped Bruce Willen and I to write a book for the Princeton Architectural Press Design Briefs series, which includes her own landmark volume, Thinking with Type.
We augmented knowledge gained from our own design practice with a year of research and connected with creatives from several disciplines around the world. Lettering & Type: Creating Letters & Designing Typefaces was the result, and it quickly became a standard in design programs at colleges around the country. This was fitting, since the book contains several exercises from Experimental Lettering & Type, a class Bruce and I co-taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art for many years.
Lettering & Type is a smart-but-not-dense guide to creating and bending letters to one’s will. More than just another pretty survey, it is a powerful how-to book full of relevant theory, history, explanatory diagrams, and exercises. While other type design books often get hung up on the technical and technological issues of type design and lettering, Lettering & Type features the context and creativity that shape letters and make them interesting.
The Design of Politics
Ranking File
The Post reached out for a few opinions on the logos of the headline grabbing candidates in the 2016 election. A breezy little piece balancing analysis with some light-hearted digs.
Groundbreaking
Published less than 72 hours after AOC’s historic win, this Washington Post essay was the first review of Tandem NYC’s now-influential campaign designs. Within a week there were countless others.
Primary Colors
Legendary magazine man Roger Black commissioned this piece for the third issue of TYPE where we searched for meaning in shifting type and design trends in campaign design.
Designers Reaching Across the Aisle
Branding Politics: Does Campaign Design Matter? was a conversation I co-hosted with Bruce Willen in Washington, D.C. featuring a panel of three political branding experts from across the political spectrum.
The sold out event drew in-house creative staff from both major political parties, local design and branding studios, and engaged citizens from as far away as New York. It was standing-room only at the popular pop-up design library Resource at Union Market.
City Lab had a nice write-up on it afterwards.
Sorry, the bumper stickers were a giveaway we made for attendees and are long gone.
Studio profile in Communication Arts
In 2019, CA sent writer Jude Stewart to visit Post Typography for a day. The resulting profile was one of the best ever written on the studio. She really got our perspective, compared us to hardcore punk legends Minor Threat, and several of our clients had nice things to say as well.
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (Beer Cans)
I was asked to share my insights on can design for Chesapeake Bay Magazine’s inaugural Food Issue. Paired with features on two regional breweries, I discussed trends that work or fall short and weighed in on cans from some of the Bay region’s top breweries.
