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Craig Byers

“Bans Off Our Books mug.

Knowledge is Power. Reading is fundamental to being an informed citizen.”

Check it out here.

Craig Byers is an award-winning designer and founder of Craig Byers Studio. Learn more on the studio website and on Instagram.

Many of this year’s participants are past New Visual Artists, PRINT Awards winners, and 2025 jurors. Learn more about the PRINT Awards, now open for early bird entries.

The post Craig Byers is Excited to Give (or Get!) … appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

I lick my finger and hold it up to see which way the wind is blowing. I do this metaphorically, of course. (I need dry fingers to type.)

But that’s the method. A radar game. What appears on my radar each week?

And this week, while there were some interesting currents on ageism and creative ways to set up creative departments, the biggest wind — a veritable hurricane — was Jaguar.

The teaser heard ’round the world fomented so many conversations on so many different media platforms, that I simply could not escape it.

All that said, I think the best way I can help this week is to provide a wee bit of context.

I call it, “A Brief History of Weird Ads.”

First things first, if you haven’t seen the Jaguar teaser called, “Copy Nothing,” watch it here.

Ok, it’s weird.

It reminded me of one of the first weird ads I recall seeing, Reeboks Let U.B.U. campaign.

A Chiat/Day classic, I remember this bursting on the scene with its weird casting, weird imagery, weird words for an ad (courtesy of poet Ralph Waldo Emerson), and weird spelling! This was a campaign for sneakers? Where were the athletes? Where were the courts and fields? Where were the close-up shots of the shoes?! This. Was. Weird.

That was followed up by another weird campaign for the carmaker, Infiniti. Made by Hill Holliday, this was a car campaign with no car. It was dubbed “Rocks and Trees” because that’s what it showed us: rocks and trees and rain and waves. It was a philosophical campaign that focused on the intent of Infiniti to create a new kind of luxury car brand — a Japanese luxury car brand. And while the world may have devoured the book, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” the world was somehow not ready for Zen car ads. It was too…weird.

Next up there was a weird campaign that tried to explain the internet (and the future of communications) without computers or screens or wires. It was for MCI, a telecommunications company, and it featured a then-six-year-old Anna Paquin and an epic and desolate New Zealand coastline. (All inspired by the wonderful film, “The Piano.”) And while the commercials do an incredible job of explaining the digital world we live in today, the audience had a hard time wrapping its head around the profound notion that, “…there will be no more there, there will only be here.”

(These ads are fantastic and truly hold-up, I think: ad number 1, ad number 2, and ad number 3. There are six in total and YouTube has the rest.)

Finally, there was the delicious weirdness of the Cadbury Gorilla. A chocolate bar ad sans chocolate, without morsels, and no cliche, beautiful 30-something woman enjoying a first bite. No, here we had a gorilla, a drum kit, and Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” Buda buh-duh buh-dum-dum boom!

Of course, there was outrage generated from all of these adverts when they first launched, just like there is outrage generated across the combined 160 million social media views of the Jaguar teaser.

So will all of this noise turn into sales for the Jags which won’t appear in showrooms until 2026?

Only time will tell.

For now, all we have is weirdness and outrage. Not often a recipe for success.

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.

Header image: Simone Hutsch for Unsplash+

The post When the World Zigs … Jag? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Like many of you, I was stunned by what happened on November 5th. It’s going to take me some time to reckon with what this all says about the values of a large portion of this country. As part of that reckoning—and for some much-needed relief—I’ve opted to spend less time with media in general for a bit. 

But on the morning after I couldn’t ignore an email I got from today’s guest, New York magazine editor-in-chief David Haskell.

What struck me most about his note—which was sent to the magazine’s million-and-a-half subscribers—was what it didn’t say. There were no recriminations. Nothing about how Kamala Harris had failed to “read the room.”  Not a word about Joe Biden’s unwillingness to step aside when he should have. No calls to “resist.” In fact, the hometown president-elect’s name went unspoken (as it is here).

What Haskell did say that left a mark on me was this:

I consider our jobs as magazine journalists a privilege at times like this. 

I was an editor at Clay Felker’s New York magazine, the editor-in-chief of Boston magazine, and I led the creative team at Inc. magazine. And it was there, at Inc., that I had a similar experience. It was 9/11.

I wrote my monthly column in the haze that immediately followed the attacks, though it wouldn’t appear in print until the December issue. It was titled, “Think Small. No, Smaller.” In it, I urged our community of company builders to focus their attention on the things we can control. This is how it ended:

What we can say for certain is that the arena over which any of us has control has, for now, grown smaller. In these smaller arenas, the challenge is to build, or rebuild, in ourselves and our organizations the quiet confidence that we still have the ability to get the right things done.

For all the attention that gets paid to EICs, most of the work you do is done through the members of your team: writers, and editors, and designers, and so many others.

My friend, Dan Okrent, the former Life magazine editor and Print Is Dead guest, once said, “Magazines bring us together into real communities.”

Moments like this demand something different—something direct and personal from an editor to that community. Something that offers a challenge, but also an opportunity, to answer the question in a clear and credible way: So what do we do now?

Read the full episode transcript here.

Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a podcast about magazines and the people who made (and make) them. Magazines that combined thought-provoking attitudes and values with a distinctive look and feel, and cast a long and powerful shadow on American culture and public discourse. Hear stories and learn lessons from legendary designers, editors, writers, publishers, photographers, illustrators, photo editors, and more—stories and lessons that capture a magical history of innovation and inspiration, and that point the way forward. We’ll go deep into the lives and careers of this astonishingly talented group of creators, and tease out what these giants—past and present—have to teach the next generation of creators.

If you’re in the magazine business—if you’re in any business focused on content creation—this podcast is for you.

This episode is a special collaboration with The Spread and is made possible by PIDLLP sponsors Commercial Type, Mountain Gazette, and Freeport Press.

The team behind Print is Dead (Long Live Print!) also produces The Full Bleed, a podcast about the future of magazines and the magazines of the future.

The post A Pretty Complicated Organism | David Haskell appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

The Northhampton, MA-based artist is set to release their third collection of poems this coming March, provocatively entitled Big Money Porno Mommy. With a title like that, one needs an equally compelling cover, which Weiss was able to not only envision but also bring to life.

“Big Money Porno Mommy is about power and desire. It’s about pornography and my choice to not become a mother. It’s about the male gaze and how it’s wielded. It’s about all of these things in the context of my body, which happens to be a fat body,” Weiss penned in a piece they wrote reflecting on the book and its cover. “The physical forms of those we love and lust after—even the bodies we idealize—they’re all kind of ridiculous when you get close enough.”

The cover of Big Money Porno Mommy encapsulates this playfulness, capturing both the grotesque and the organic beauty inherent to the human body. The ability to harmonize two ideas that might initially seem at odds with one another is central to Weiss’ practice as a poet and something they were keen on evoking in their book’s cover.

“I needed the flesh to be forefront. I wanted to evoke fatness and nudeness but without a silhouette—fatness as the text itself. Many people have instinctive reactions to the form of a fat body. I wanted this cover to elicit a reaction, but rather than othering the form, and projecting whatever preconceived notions about fatness they may have onto my book, I wanted to bring the audience in.”

After seeing the cover of Big Money Porno Mommy and reading Weiss’s initial thoughts on their process, I was eager to talk to the artist. My Q&A with Weiss, in which I dig even deeper into their process and their reconciliation of clashing concepts, is transcribed below.

(Edited lightly for clarity and length.)

The physical forms of those we love and lust after—even the bodies we idealize—they’re all kind of ridiculous when you get close enough.

Catherine Weiss

What’s your process typically like for writing your poems?

When I think about writing poems, I try to see if a poem can do more than one thing at a time. It’s hard to write a poem that’s just about one thing, I have found. When I sit down to write a poem, I have two ideas, and then maybe the third thing that comes out of it is the poem. So when I was thinking about designing this cover, I was similarly interested in having more than one idea. 

The cover is so striking. What was your thought process behind that design?

I was also interested in having the typography contain this fleshiness, so you get the information from what the words literally say, but I also wanted the typography to give information as well. Having the title literally embodied in flesh was one way to do that. Then layering the little details of specificity onto the letters, like, Is there a belly button? Is that a tuft of hair? Things that would both hopefully draw someone in to look, and also be a little bit like, Ooh, do I want to look at this? To have that push and pull. 

The typography definitely captures that two-things-at-once idea you’re going for. It’s pretty grotesque, but simultaneously warm and pillowy and even comforting which complicates that initial disgust. At what point in the writing process did you design the cover? 

Once I had about half of the poems, I said, Okay, well, this is a collection. This is going to be something. And I had the title, and I kept writing poems to keep adding, so that’s when I started brainstorming what the cover would possibly look like. I kept coming back to this idea of flesh letters and fat rolls. An early iteration looked more like Sharpie on my stomach, and I thought about having a photograph instead of doing it digitally. But at a certain point I realized I needed to learn the software to make my vision happen. 

One of the things about writing the poems and designing the cover is that I got to spend a lot of time with both of them. I got to spend a ton of time with this cover. I kept iterating and putting it in a drawer and then coming back to it as more poems got written.  

Can you speak about that technical side of things in terms of the cover? What software did you use? What was your design process like? 

This is created in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Illustrator has a very simple tool that allows you to blow up text or other shapes to inflate them in this faux 3D space. Once I realized that tool was pretty simple and I could play with it by adding skin texture, I spent a lot of time finding the right skin texture to make it look as gross as possible. 

I also spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the shape of the letters was going to be, because I wanted it to be legible. The first iteration was much more blocky and the letters were separated from each other, so it looked a little bit more like someone had been chopped up. That wasn’t quite right and that was also much harder to read. 

I didn’t really spend much time sketching but iterating in the software. How far can I distort this letter pattern to make it legible and also to get the effect that I’m looking for? 

What was your thought process behind the colors of the cover, particularly the magenta-to-orange gradient background behind the flesh-toned lettering? 

Until quite late in the process, I had a different background entirely. For a long time, it was a comforter, pillowcase sort of texture. Ultimately I didn’t stick with that because it was just a stock photo that didn’t really interact with the weight of the letters, and it was taking attention away from the letters themselves. 

I wanted the cover as a whole to pop, so I knew I wanted something bright and cheerful, and I just love pink and orange. It’s been a color combination that I’ve been drawn to. Also, this is my third full-length collection, so I kept in mind my previous collection which was sort of a green. So, I thought, What do I want these books lined up on a shelf to look like? 

Now that the poems and cover are all done and dusted, what would you say you’re proudest of with what you’ve created? 

I think letting myself sit with the uncomfortable. Even with the cover, being able to forefront the discomfort while not giving up the joy that is found in this collection. 

This collection has a series of poems called “The Phone Sex Poem,” and they tell a story about a bad relationship and a boyfriend who was addicted to phone sex. They’re about the ramifications that it had on my life, and the reverberations going forward in terms of my relationship to sex and desire. 

On the face of it, that was a really hard thing to write about. I’d been aware that I’d been choosing not to write about it for several books, and I think it was really important for me to find an entry point that was playful in order to talk about a difficult subject. I think I found a balance that not only isn’t a bummer to read, but I also feel comfortable putting out into the world and telling my story in a way that feels holistic and worthwhile.

Look for Big Money Porno Mommy by Catherine Weiss on shelves in March 2025.

The post Catherine Weiss Embraces Discomfort in their Book of Poems, ‘Big Money Porno Mommy’ appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Lehrer, co-proprietor of EarSay, has taken a long road of typographer as author and authorial enabler. Moreover, his work is often made for the stage, so the static page is not simply an object but a performative experience.

Lehrer and his wife/EarSay partner, Judith Sloan, are doing a performance/reading from selected books and theater works of theirs at 2:30 p.m. on December 8 at Art New York (520 8th Ave.) in Manhattan. Sloan will be joined by Palestinian American actor and comedian Grace Canahuati. Books will also be available for sale, including This Page is an Occupied Territory. For more info and tickets, click here. And regardless of whether or not you attend, read the Q&A below.

Warren, you’ve been on a publishing fast-track these past years since COVID. What has triggered this continuous vigor in making text and ideas come alive through typography?
About six years ago it dawned on me that I didn’t have to only work on seven- or eight-year long projects that I write (or co-write) and design myself. I started collaborating with poets whose work I adore and who trust my sensibility, visualizing their texts into books and animations. I also stumbled into the realization that not every book had to be 300 or 400 pages (duh!), and I could work on shorter projects while continuing to work on longform ones. Yes, COVID probably had something to do with finding more hours in the day. I lost some dear friends and relatives to COVID, which was heartbreaking. But frankly, like many writers and artists, the pandemic was a hugely productive time to submerge into studioland. Also, in 2020 I liberated myself (I don’t use the “R” word) from being a full-time professor. I still teach one class (at the SVA Designer as Entrepreneur MFA program that you started, Steve), but that’s a whole different amount of time and psyche commitment.

So, yeah, I’ve come out with four publications within a little more than a year. Three of them are timely works. One related to coming out of a worldwide pandemic, and two of them speak to the war/slaughters going on in the Middle East. Publishing can be awfully slow, and I very much like this process of creating works born out of a particular cultural or personal moment in time and getting them out there soon after they’re finished.

Lastly, I’d say, these newest publications are more spare, in almost every respect, than many older works of mine. I’ve been a maximalist for a long time, creating dense works—an illuminated novel with 101 books within it, a four-book portrait series of over 1,000 pages, a documentary project chronicling 79 new immigrants and refugees from all over the world that juxtaposes multiple perspectives often on a single page. And typographically, I have a reputation for using dozens of typefaces in a project, as I’ve attempted to portray character and voice through typographic casting, composition and expression. Two of the four new publications are based on short stories of mine where the writing is more pruned, and two are poetry, which almost by definition is a matter of distilling language. I only use one weight of one typeface for the text in this new piece, which is very new for me. And with all the recent poetry collaborations, the typographic compositions are less about voice and more about diagramming ideas, finding hidden meanings and visual metaphors that emerge from the texts and the very human experiences they represent.

Your most recent publishing “event” (I use this word because it is print, poetry, performance, typography and more) is This Page is an Occupied Territory, written by Adeena Karasick and “visualized” by you. Before we discuss what it means to be a “visualizer,” tell me what about the intention of this tabloid newspaper/magazine-style publication?
Adeena sent me several new poems with the idea of us doing another book together. (We came out with Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings in 2023.) I was already juggling a bunch of projects, but I had a gut reaction to the poem This Page is an Occupied Territory, and felt an urgency to work on it. The title alone calls for a graphic treatment, so I started visualizing the text, which didn’t want to be contained within a standard book dimension. It grew in size, like the expanding war, and the daily bombardment of devastating news felt so outsized and all-encompassing, I had the idea of doing it as a tabloid-sized, newspaper-like publication. Adeena liked the parallel to the news, too, and because handling newspapers can be overwhelming—managing your body in this oversized thing, figuring out how to fold it and store it. I had seen online promotions for newspaperclub.com, based in the U.K., and started working with them. The proofs took a while, but once we were ready to roll, the run was printed in Glasgow, Scotland, on a Monday, and amazingly, we had all 700 copies in Brooklyn, New York, the next day, well in time for a live event at Pratt Institute the following week. I love that turnaround time and being able to sell it for 10 bucks a copy. And the printed piece functions well as a large-format, unbound score for the performance. At that first live event I page-turned a copy that faced the audience while Adeena performed the very sonic poem in her inimitable, turbo-charged way. 

To get even deeper than intent, since this is partly supported by the Jewish Heritage Museum, what is the message here regarding the occupied territories and the war? Are you setting forth an argument for or against occupation, or is there another arc that you and Karasick are making into art?
Before I ever saw the poem, Adeena presented a live performance of This Page is an Occupied Territory in February 2024 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, as part of a “Poetry Reading in Response to Antisemitism.” Adeena and I are both Jewish. I think it’s fair to say Adeena embraces her Jewishness more than I do, in her life and her art, and feels a stronger connection to Israel. For as long as I can remember, I have been expressing my connection to Israel by protesting its overkill military operations and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. I’ve done this as a Jewish American who believes in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish homeland and a democratic state for all its inhabitants, alongside a Palestinian state.

I was horrified by the Oct 7th Hamas attacks/massacre of a music festival and several kibbutzim, which left 1,200 dead, hundreds taken hostage, many wounded, and all of Israel in a state of shock. One of my heroes, Vivian Silver, was killed that day at her home in Kibbutz Be’er. Ironically, Vivian was one of the founders of Women Wage Peace, perhaps the largest grassroots peace organization in Israel, founded by Palestinian and Israeli women dedicated to finding peaceful solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She was 74 years old.

Israel has a right to defend itself but, in my opinion, Netanyahu and his war cabinet’s response has been completely disproportionate, unrelenting and brutal. The war they’re waging is clearly not just a matter of going after Hamas. It’s a policy of destroying the entire infrastructure of Gaza and killing tens of thousands of civilians, mothers, children, doctors, teachers, journalists. It sure looks like ethnic cleansing to me, whatever term you want to use for mass slaughter and making it impossible for an entire group of people to live in their homeland.

In June of this year, I came out with Jericho’s Daughter, my anti-war, feminist retelling of the biblical tale of Rahab, which I discussed with you and Debbie Millman on the May 16th PRINT Book Club. Even though I was already in prepress for that book before the Oct. 7th attacks and the retaliatory war, the text of that book spoke to the moment and helped generate impassioned conversations. My version of Rahab features her in a dialogue with two Israelite soldiers, in which, among other things, she says, “…Another incomprehensible war will be waged in the name of Justice. And thousands of other children will be sacrificed in the name of Life. Who is going to stop this wheel of death? I’m asking you, who?”

Sadly, the wheel keeps turning.

So, This Page is an Occupied Territory is my second publication in six months that addresses this f’n war, albeit in rather different ways. I won’t speak for Adeena, but I can tell you I was drawn to her poem because it seems to come from a place that acknowledges the different worldviews that collide in that small piece of land. The text of the poem itself is geographically indeterminate and open to being applied to any number of situations. On the back page description of the project, Adeena analogizes the occupation and control of a region by force to the process of translation, which can sometimes be “a form of occupation, whereby one language layered onto the body of another, is an act of war.”

She continues, “For the word ‘war,’ as both an English noun and a verb meaning ‘conflict’ and a German adjective [wàhr] meaning what’s ‘true, real, genuine’ literally places ‘war’ at war with itself. To wit, ‘wà[h]r’ not only ‘occupies’ the homography between the ear and the eye; the babelism at play between speech and writing—but born in ‘differance,’ madness and effacement, the notion of ‘occupation’ points to how what’s ‘true’ is always in conflict.”

Hence, we end up with a deadly conflict born of misinterpretations/colliding realities, and of course power imbalances, and so much history one poem or answer to a question can’t answer. I appreciate Adeena’s scholarly, poly-lingual investigation of a subject, and her exploratory and exploded use of language. As much as This Page reveals empathy for the complex realities and narratives of both sides, in the end, this poem is not neutral. It comes down against occupation and the horrors of a grossly lopsided war.

Back to visualizing. Is visualizing different, the same, or similar to illustration? Or is there some other experiential intent?
I have great reverence for “design,” and design processes, but when it comes to the design of language, especially books, I think the word “design” equates more with book covers. When it comes to the insides of books, let’s say text-laden books, design usually denotes a kind of packaging of the text, so that it’s functional of course, easy to read, clean, transparent, even stylish (well-designed), current, professional-looking. Maybe in zines, the design of the innards can be funky, edgy, elegant, name an adjective or way to dress a text up or down. But for me, since I come to design as a writer, it’s always been about the fusion of meaning and form. So, when I work with a poet who asked me to interpret their work, I prefer to use the word visualize.

I equate it to a filmmaker or theater artist or composer of opera adapting a preexisting text into a film or work of theater or music theater. It’s a meeting of minds and souls and sensibilities and the transformation of one kind of thing (a text) into another medium. And for me, I’m not going to go near a project unless I love the writing. That’s the source, the wellspring of whatever I’m going do with the visualization.

When it comes to creating imagery, instead of illustrating a text, I prefer to think of what I do as “illuminate” (shed light on, or contradict, add to) a piece of writing with visuals. I used the term “illuminated novel” to describe A Life In Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley (2013), which contains 101 books within it. My author-protagonist’s books (book covers, catalog descriptions and excerpts that read like short stories) illuminate his life, and vice versa. I consider the images a part of the text. I also use the term “compose” to describe my writing and design process, as they often occur at the same time, and “composition” is the structural foundation of both writing and visual art, music too. With This Page is an Occupied Territory, I created a typographic landscape. The text and the image are one. There’s no separation as far as I’m concerned.

These terms may sound picky, but I can’t help but think about these descriptors before using readily available ones. In my first book, versations (1980), I wrote “realized by” before my name. I’m sure that was influenced by my early interest in contemporary music and “experimental” film and theater, where people used the word “realized” in a way that speaks to a kind of mysterious process that transcends the maker or makers, and speaks to interaction with materials, processes, intuition and god knows what else.

How do you go about visualizing? Is it intuitive, intellectual, aesthetic, symbolic—what is the process?
In the case of visualizing someone else’s poetry, I begin by reading and rereading the text. With Adeena Karasick’s poetry, that requires having encyclopedias and bilingual dictionaries at hand since she’s often sourcing many languages and plays with root words and etymologies, and is steeped in linguistics, philosophy, cultural criticism and history. As sonic and playful as her poems may seem at first, there’s a fair amount of study involved in reading her. Once I have a grasp of what the text is, for me, I do like to start the composition process with as blank a mind as possible. Put the first sentence or phrases on a page and see what starts to happen. The rhythms and pacing of the words are the most obvious starting point. But then, visual metaphors within the text start to suggest themselves. That involves making many iterations, and also mind mapping, which invariably leads to image research. In the case of This Page is an Occupied Territory, aerial photographs of occupied territories and war zones were helpful. Also, importantly, I try to feel what it might be like trapped inside an occupied territory, which in this case turns into an urban war zone.

This text, now publication, is also inherently meta or self-referential, as it speaks to occupied territories, not only throughout history (including open air ghettos in Poland and other Nazi-occupied countries), and of course in Gaza and the West Bank today, and other places around the globe, but also the occupied terrain of language itself, the very words on the page, which are occupied, by the writer, by me, by the reader, by typography, ink, paper, edges, intermingled vocabularies, the turning, stopping and starting of pages.

There is a build-up in the layouts and a rhythm that comes from the words and typographic composition. Can you describe what you’re trying to accomplish?
As much as I cherish that creative process of beginning with a blank slate and watching a work evolve through trial and error, sometimes you get a vision early on and you go with that. That’s what happened with This Page is an Occupied Territory. After reading the poem for the first time, I almost immediately had a vision for what it might look like, and that it would involve letterpress printing (a la Gutenberg) elements that could be used as blockades, barricades and border crossings. I made some sketches, working with the beginning of the poem, then I reached out to Roni Gross, a wonderful book artist and letterpress printer, and she ended up making prints for me of all sorts of wood-type characters, punctuation, dingbats, metal rules, borders and ornaments, Alpha Blox and wood “furniture” printed “type-high” on Vandercook letterpress proofing presses at the Center for Book Arts in New York City and the Center for Editions at SUNY Purchase.

I then made (digital) scans of the prints and visualized the poem in Adobe InDesign. The entire text—set in Knockout 71 Full Middleweight (a blocky, condensed weight of a large, muscular sans serif type family designed by Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones)—lives within and around these inky, textured, bordered environments. The poem begins somewhat open-aired, with some room to move and wander around in, but as the poem progresses, the text and occupied spaces within this tabloid-size, 28-page publication become more and more boxed in, askew, and rubbled to pieces.

I think I know the answer to this, but I’d like to hear it from you: Does the publication serve as a “hymnal” or libretto for the poem by Karasick, or should/can it be read without the performative element?
Yes, yes, and yes. You know my work began as performance scores and graphically notated plays. Over time, as I became more serious as a writer and developed more awareness of the different attributes of different mediums, I stopped putting stage directions and music notation in my books. But performance has continued to be an important part of my oeuvre. It’s one of the things that draws me to Adeena’s work. She’s a dynamic, force-of-nature performer, and it’s a kick watching her perform off of my rendering of her words, yes, as a kind of shaped-note hymnal for her incantations. But also, the publication serves as a score for the reader, either to be read silently to themselves, or out loud, or, as I mentioned before, reading along as they’re watching Adeena perform it live, with me or on her own.

We printed a QR code in the back of the Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings book, so after reading the book to themselves, the reader can read along to a recording of Adeena accompanied by Grammy Award–winning musician Frank London. I’ve also made books that came with audio CDs or were augmented by animations, and I recently came out with my first fully electronic book (Riveted in the Word), which has kinetic typography and an audio soundtrack. But the scale, immediacy and performative energy of This Page is an Occupied Territory I don’t think warranted any augmentation.

Finally, for anyone who knows Werkman’s The Next Call, there seems to be an homage here. Is this a conscious “remembrance”?
Yes, the ghost of Werkman (1882–1945) was hovering around this project from that initial vision I had of printing wood “furniture” normally used (but not seen) to lock up type and other printed elements to the bed of a press. Looking at reprints of The Next Call was definitely part of my visual research, appreciating the raw energy and improvisatory joie de vivre in his typographic, often hand-brayered compositions, many of which were composed during very trying times. I actually replicated a fragment of a 1934 “Komposition” of his made of interlocking parallel lines and rectangles that I use as a motif that appears here and there throughout This Page is an Occupied Territory. It’s really the only time I can remember ever using a visual quote like that from someone else’s work. Perhaps you picked up on it. You know, in those last years of his life, not only was he an outspoken partisan, but he also worked on “illustrating” a series of Hassidic stories from Baal Shem Tov, a bold act of resistance itself. Talk about chutzpah!

The post The Daily Heller: A New Visualized Poem Covers ‘Occupied Territory’ appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

The 2025 PRINT Awards jury is like a masterfully curated bouquet. Each juror a unique bloom, contributing to a vibrant tapestry of creativity and expertise. Presenting your work before this panel is like planting it in a fertile field, where ideas are nurtured and celebrated for their ingenuity and potential to flourish.

This year, we welcome jury members from across the creative spectrum in traditional PRINT Awards categories, such as handlettering and type design, to new categories, including social media content design, title sequence design, and graphic novels.

At the heart of these new categories is the power of storytelling. And, like you, our jurors are masters of that craft.

One of these storytellers is Mike Nicholls, who will be looking at work in the Advertising and Editorial categories. An award-winning creative director, brand strategist, editorial designer, and visual artist out of Oakland, Mike wields design for discovery, inspiration, and community building. Mike also founded Umber, a media and editorial platform featuring creative perspectives that matter, having been recognized by AfroTech (Blavity), San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, and Communication Arts.

What gets me most excited is storytelling through design. Design to me is not just conveying an idea, it is creating an experience to spark a conversation.

Mike Nicholls

We’re also excited to welcome Dora Drimalas, who, along with her fellow jurors Pablo Delcan and Alex Lin, will review Annual Reports, Books-Covers, Jackets, Books-Entire Package, and Brochures & Catalogs.

Drimalas is the co-founder and executive creative director of Hybrid Design and also the co-founder of Super7. Her extensive background in brand strategy and graphic design has allowed her to work intimately on projects with some of the largest brands in the world, such as Nike, Sonos, The North Face, Google, Apple, Samsung, Mohawk Fine Paper, TED Conferences, Lego, Verizon, and Starwood Hotels, to name a few. Drimalas’ creativity innovates at the intersections of design, content, and culture within multiple mediums, always looking for new answers.

I am the most excited about the evolution of design and experiences. Design solves business problems in a visual and functional way. When it’s done well, it looks like magic and creates an experience that stands out. Embracing change can be scary, but it’s also where innovation lives.

Dora Drimalas

In addition to Mike Nicholls and Dora Drimalas, we’re thrilled to welcome the leading voices in their fields. While we are still adding to our stellar list of jury members for 2025, you can see who will be considering your work here.

Great design communicates ideas, evokes emotions, and connects with audiences on a deeper level, whether through illustration, packaging design, data visualization, or social media, going beyond function to tell a story that sticks. If your work tells a story that sparks ideas and fuels innovation, the PRINT Awards jury awaits!

The post The 2025 PRINT Awards Jurors Have Stories to Tell appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

(*Click away! These are NOT affiliate links. The gifts on our list are shared as recommendations from our creative community.)

Shiqing Chen

“This crane copper grater from Cibone Brooklyn is so pretty.

If the crane one is sold out, they also have turtle and fish versions.”

Shiqing Chen is a Shanghai-born designer and new media artist based in Brooklyn. She was recognized as a PRINT New Visual Artist in 2024. Learn more on her website and Instagram.

Many of this year’s participants are past New Visual Artists, PRINT Awards winners, and 2025 jurors. Learn more about the PRINT Awards, now open for early bird entries.

The post Shiqing Chen is Excited to Give (or Get!) … appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Always curious about how color reflects culture, Pantone’s Color of the Year 2025 is PANTONE 17-1230 Mocha Mousse, which offers plenty to unpack. A rich, earthy brown, it’s positioned as a color that balances sophistication and comfort. But does it capture the mood of the moment?

This year, much of the design world has been focused on themes of sustainability, simplicity, and connection. Mocha Mousse seeks to tap into those ideas, evoking warmth and stability. It’s a grounded shade that nods to nature and the pleasures of everyday life—a safe choice, perhaps, but also a versatile one.

Pantone’s reveal, featuring a light show on the London Eye, certainly adds some drama to the announcement. The collaborations, too, are impressive: Motorola’s vegan leather phones and Joybird’s plush fabrics demonstrate how Mocha Mousse can be used across industries. Other product collaborations include Pura’s smart fragrance diffuser with custom scents, Wix Studio’s web design assets, Libratone’s UP headphones, Spoonflower’s print-on-demand home décor, IPSY’s limited-edition beauty products, Society6’s artist-driven designs, Ultrafabrics’ premium interior textiles, and Post-it® Brand’s special collection celebrating expressive color.

Still, the color feels understated, even subdued, compared to the bold selections of previous years. Perhaps this choice reflects a response to the chaotic and unpredictable events of 2024, offering a sense of calm and grounding in a time of upheaval. “The everlasting search for harmony filters through into every aspect of our lives, including our relationships, the work we do, our social connections, and the natural environment that surrounds us,” said Laurie Pressman, vice president of Pantone Color Institute. “Harmony brings feelings of contentment, inspiring a positive state of inner peace, calm, and balance as well as being tuned in with the world around us. Harmony embraces a culture of connection and unity as well as the synthesis of our mental, spiritual and physical well-being.”

…for Pantone Color of the Year 2025, we look to a color that reaches into our desire for comfort and wellness, and the indulgence of simple pleasures that we can gift and share with others.

Laurie Pressman, VP Pantone Color Institute

For designers, Mocha Mousse has potential. It’s a great neutral for grounding palettes, and its tactile qualities make it appealing in interior design and packaging. But it’s not the kind of shade that demands attention or inspires an immediate wow factor. Instead, it’s a quiet presence — more about being a harmonious complement than a leading show-stopper.

As we move into 2025, it will be interesting to see how this color plays out in real-world applications. Will it resonate with audiences craving simplicity and comfort, or will it fade into the background? Time will tell. For now, Mocha Mousse offers designers a tool for creating warmth and subtle elegance, even if it doesn’t quite steal the spotlight.

Imagery courtesy of The Pantone Color Institute.

The post Pantone 2025 Color of the Year is an Understated and Harmonious Hue appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Tattoos are popular aesthetic pleasures for many fashion-conscious wearers. But injecting indelible dyes below the top layers of one’s skin is not always meaningless decoration, and can carry with it a statement of some consequence. Tattoos can be brands that link like-minded people or covert groups together clearly or implicitly. Prison tattoos, of which there are many, suggest many commonly held experiences of beliefs.

There are also those who flirt with medievalist symbolism and garner aesthetic pride displaying it as body art with purpose. Hegseth has been very forthcoming about his allegiances, displaying four tattoos referencing his Christian faith. In fact, these tattoos have no direct connections to white supremacist ideologies, though at least one has been linked to Christian nationalism.

When it comes to Hegseth’s Jerusalem cross, with smaller Greek crosses in each of its four quadrants, the symbol represents the Kingdom of Jerusalem and was emblazoned on tunics and tabards of Christian Crusaders during the religious wars to conquer the Holy Land between the 11th and 13th centuries (1095–1291). Hegseth cites its prominence on his chest, in addition to other charged symbolic representations, as a sign of his Christian beliefs. Critics may not, however, be faulted for mistaking the Jerusalem cross with fascist variations in far-right and white supremacist ideology (the Nazi hakenkreuz, the German word for its hooked cross, has long been mistaken for the similar composition of the swastika, a Sanskrit word for auspiciousness). But Hegseth’s skin-deep body markings also have patriotic symbolism. They include: “We the People” from the U.S. Constitution; “1775” in Roman numerals (MDCCLXXV); a stylized American flag with a stripe replaced by an AR-15 rifle; a ring of stars around his elbow referencing the revolutionary American flag; “Join, or Die,” from Benjamin Franklin’s famous 1754 cartoon (recently a Tea Party icon); and the emblem of the 187th Infantry Regiment, in which Hegseth served.

Whether Hegseth is an appropriate candidate for Secretary of Defense is a crucial question that has already raised hackles. Probably you can tell the man by his tattoos (not to mention his rhetoric), but these tattoos will ultimately not prove anything more than he is proud of his service, country and faith—and, just one more thing: When his skin begins to age, wrinkle and sag, it would be advisable to wear a long-sleeve shirt.

The post The Daily Heller: This is Why T-Shirts Were Invented appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

(*Click away! These are not affiliate links. The gifts on our list are shared as recommendations from our creative community.)

Alexander Isley

“The Architect and Designer Birthday Book by James Biber, and not just because I’m November 16th!

It’s inspiring.”

Check out the book.

Alexander Isley is and AIGA medal recipient and principal at Alexander Isley, Inc., a design consultancy that collaborates with educational, cultural, and cause-related organizations. Learn more here and on Instagram.

P.S. At our August 2024 PRINT Book Club, we welcomed James Biber and Michael Beirut to talk about their collaboration on this book. Register to watch the recording here.

Many of this year’s participants are past New Visual Artists, PRINT Awards winners, and 2025 jurors. Learn more about the PRINT Awards, now open for early bird entries.

The post Alexander Isley is Excited to Give (or Get!) … appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design, and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.

William Bentley, quoted in Snowflake Bentley

Into December

It is time for the next postcard prompt, and, strangely, I can’t get past the snow of it. Winter is coming, but I don’t live somewhere where I will see snow. It has been many years since I’ve seen snow. For people who have never lived in an area that gets no snow, it may seem hard to comprehend going years and years without either the beauty or the inconvenience. I miss snow. I miss the idea of snow.

When my oldest was born, there was snow in surrounding areas. Snow is so unlikely here that even the hint of snow on that day more than twenty years ago was enough to create family lore. For years, we crafted, cradled, and repeated a story about a little boy who lived on a hill, and on the day he was born, there was snow in the mountains around the city. It is the kind of story that, as soon as you begin saying the words, feels imbued with the magic of a fairy tale.

I can’t remember the last time I saw snow.

I have grown into my appreciation of November as a gratitude-themed month and a month of intentionally looking for and tracking light, but December has a magic all its own.

My enjoyment of December is often rooted in light, sometimes catching the early sunset as the days shorten, but also artificial light. Some of my favorite things are related to Christmas lights. There are lights on the tree and on the bookcases. We used to have lights around the windows and across the shelves in the office.

Ornaments are my other favorite thing in December. Ornaments are often shiny and whimsical containers of memory, quiet little portals to the past. Drawing ornaments has often been a way to center myself and anchor creative habit in December. There are some ornaments I draw again and again, returning to them each year, using them as touchstones to the past.

Last year, I took a nutcracker diversion.

I think devising our own nutcrackers would be a lot of fun for illustrated postcards. I considered it, but I didn’t want to do a prompt for this month that is locked into Christmas. So I went to that thing which we don’t have, snow.

A Focus on Snow – Postcard No. 3

How do you do a postcard about snow?

How do you think about connecting the dots between years and people and memory and personal history and the passage of time…with snow?

You get really close.

You think about snowflakes. You think about individual snowflakes in their frozen latticework, in their fragility and beauty and singularity. You think about crystallization and symmetry.

You think back to when you were a kid, or to some point when you interacted with a child, or to when you were an adult and, on a lark, you grabbed paper and scissors and tried, once again, to make a snowflake. It really shouldn’t be so hard. It’s just the folding of paper and then cutting along the folded edge.

Making snowflakes…I don’t remember doing that as a kid. I’m sure I must have. I don’t specifically remember doing it with my children. I’m sure we must have. But I do remember doing it somewhere along the way, especially as an adult. I remember the anticipation of delicate, lacy, paper creations and the reality that they often come out large and clunky.

I remember that they came out more square than they should. I remember that my hand cut snowflakes don’t offer a lot in the way of whimsy. I remember paper snowflakes as a bit of a disappointment.

Maybe it’s been my technique. I think there’s a very good chance that I’ve never folded the paper correctly, that from the beginning, I had the wrong shape. In looking at directions today, because how hard can it be?, I see over and over again the foundation of a cone-shaped structure. I am fairly sure I’ve never used that kind of triangular base. Did we just fold the paper into rectangles and make block-shaped snowflakes? Surely not. Maybe we stopped one step short of the cone, cutting shapes from a larger, less refined triangle? No wonder they were disappointing. No wonder my memories of paper snowflakes are of something fairly square.)

I would say cutting a snowflake is worth a try again. I would say it’s probably worth using the scissors that shouldn’t be used to cut paper. I would say we should get past caring if we use our scissors to cut paper. I would say we should use smaller paper because we’re older and wiser, and we realize that the full sheet of printer paper is not going to yield a delicate snowflake. I would say we should be bold and use really sharp scissors that can make tiny cuts.

You may or may not be or aspire to be a delicate snowflake, and yet there is beauty in making a delicate snowflake. This is not Minecraft. We don’t need block-level snowflakes. We don’t need 8-bit images plotted out on graph paper. We can follow curves and dip in and out of spaces. We can play with the geometry of shape and form.

So what do you do on a postcard if a single snowflake is your objective? You think about symmetry. You think about branching and hexagonal designs. While it may be fun and intriguing to draw snowflakes with a large number of branches (or arms), the familiar snowflake has six branches that radiate from the center. It’s all about chemistry:

“The six-sided shape of a snowflake can be attributed to the molecular structure of water and the unique formation process of snow crystals. Snowflakes form when water vapour condenses on tiny ice nuclei in cold, supersaturated air. As the water vapour freezes, it arranges itself into a hexagonal lattice due to the hydrogen bonds between water molecules.” – IET

From each of the six arms, a unique symmetry evolves, each arm mirroring the others:

“…while different snow crystals follow different paths through the clouds, the six branches of a single crystal travel together. They all experience the same growth history, so they grow in synchrony. The end result is a snow crystal that is both complex and symmetrical… and often quite stunning.” – Kenneth Libbrecht, The Art of the Snowflake

It is often said that every snowflake is different, that no two are alike. The infinite scope of this singularity, the possibility of this lack of repetition in formation, is part of the magic of snowflakes. We may cling to this story of individuality, but there are actually a number of different types of snowflakes. The classification of snowflakes seems to be something on which scientists differ, but many use a system that includes 35 different types:

A Bit of Snowy History

Wilson A. Bentley, known as Snowflake Bentley, spent much of his life examining, documenting, and photographing snowflakes using a photomicrographic technique. (He succeeded in first photographing a single snow crystal in 1855.) Bentley photographed thousands of snowflakes and, famously, never found two that were alike.

In 1931, Snow Crystals, a collection of his photographs, was published. (Bentley died shortly after the publication.)

Snowflake photos taken by Wilson Bentley. Source: Jericho Historical Society.

And here comes the snow,
A language in which no word is ever repeated.

William Matthews, “Spring Snow”

Send a Postcard

On your postcard this month do something related to snow. Draw a snowflake or two. Play with tessellation. Look up snowflake photography and draw something based on real snowflake structures, or play with the simplification of the snowflake as a symbol.

Drawing a snowflake is similar to the process of drawing a mandala. It can be symmetrical and mindful. It can be geometric. It can be precise and structured and measured and calculated, or it can be freeform.

I encourage you to cut a snowflake first. You can then use it as a model to draw, a visual aid as you think about the shape of snow. You might even use it as a stencil and play with negative space, adding a splash of color to a postcard and creating a mosaic from the spaces between.

I tried again before writing today’s prompt, and I still didn’t have much luck. After laughing at one of my attempts, my son suggested that solving part of the problem (the fact that it didn’t have distinct branches and was circular) required cutting off parts of the top at opposite angles. I did that, and as I opened it back up, I was enchanted to find I had unwittingly created rabbits. (I couldn’t not see rabbits.)

The additional cuts helped, giving the snowflake some semblance of branches rather than the appearance of a circular doily, but it still wasn’t satisfying. The rest of the snowflake is still disappointing.

(I had to laugh to see Martha Stewart talk about kids happily occupying themselves cutting dozens of snowflakes.)

The Challenge

This month, I am suggesting you cut one, or, really, draw one.

You don’t have time because December is busy? Really? That might be exactly why you need to slow down and cut or draw a snowflake. It can be a mindful practice.

This month, consider drawing your own snowflake or snowflakes, one or many, on a postcard. Snowflakes embody individuality and singularity, and something crisp and fragile, something icy and prismatic. Snowflakes are often said to represent hope.

Snowflakes are very quiet.
Be like a snowflake.

Related Resources

Here are some directions you can use to cut a snowflake. (These directions also include instructions for how to make a vertical mobile or “curtain” out of paper snowflakes.)

Video inspiration for drawing snowflakes:

• How to draw snowflakes (LethalChris Drawing)
• How to draw a snowflake (Crafty Nica)

A Year of Postcard Connections

This is the third in a year-long series of monthly postcard art prompts, prompts that nudge you to write or make art on a postcard and send it out into the world, to connect with someone using a simple rectangle of paper that is let loose in the mail system. The first two prompts involved Halloween memories and spirals of gratitude.

Feel free to jump in. Even if you don’t literally make a postcard and apply a stamp, you might at least think through your response to the prompt and do it in your illustrated journal or sketchbook.

Amy Cowen is a San Francisco-based writer. A version of this was originally posted on her Substack, Illustrated Life, where she writes about illustrated journals, diary comics/graphic novels, memory, gratitude, loss, and the balancing force of creative habit.

Images courtesy of the author, except where otherwise noted.

The post Connecting Dots: Send a Snowflake appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Welcome to the DesignThinkers Podcast! Join host and RGD President Nicola Hamilton as she digs into the archives of the DesignThinkers conference, reconnecting with past speakers about their talks and ideas that have shaped Canada’s largest graphic design conference. Follow the RGD on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit them at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

The post DesignThinkers Podcast: Liza Enebeis appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

This post is in support of a new book by typographer and long-serving Type Archive volunteer Richard Ardagh, who has assumed responsibility for celebrating these extraordinary materials. The book is scheduled to be published in winter 2025 by Volume.

I recently reached out to Ardagh to learn more about it—and the fate of the archive. I got exactly what I wanted.

How did you become involved with the Type Archive?
After working on A23D, my project to create the first 3D-printed letterpress font, I was fascinated to understand the processes of traditional typefounding. I started volunteering at the Type Archive as an apprentice learning how to make Monotype matrices to fulfill orders. I ended up specializing in punch-cutting, having delved through most parts of the extensive collections.

What is the process of collecting and cataloging the overwhelming weighty objects of the archive?
At first I began bringing my camera to document artifacts that I found interesting and to help founder Susan Shaw with promotion. After she died in 2020 I tried to take more photos, as the future of the archive began to be questioned. The book is made up of these images, as well as some that I commissioned especially and others inherited from before I was involved. It’s arranged in sections by material: iron, steel, copper, brass, bronze, wood, paper. The history of typefounding spans 500 years and is quite complex, so this ordering is an attempt to make the content accessible at first glance and also to highlight how many different materials a letterform passed through before appearing on the printed page

Why did it close in 2023, and where have the holdings gone?
The Type Archive had to relinquish its premises in 2023. The Science Museum has moved the Monotype Collection to the National Collections Centre near Swindon, and the Stephenson Blake Collection is also being housed there, on behalf of the V&A. The DeLittle Collection is returning to York, the company’s city of origin. Its records are currently undergoing conservation and its objects are on display and in storage with York Centre for Print, which is associated with University of York.

How much material can you cram into the book? And more important, is your intent simply to preserve a memory—or something more ambitious?
The book contains photography and descriptions of around 150 artifacts. The intention is to share the highlights that I was able to document and increase understanding of their importance.

The post The Daily Heller: Saving Printing History’s Precious Metals (and Wood) appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

(*Click away! These are NOT affiliate links. The gifts on our list are shared as recommendations from our creative community.)

Alisa Wolfson

“Premium or interesting salt is a great gift to give and receive.

My family and I always exchange interesting pantry staples. This year, I’ll be ordering Frost Salt (look it up!) from Yun Hai shop. Their chili crisp is already a house favorite.”

Alisa Wolfson is the EVP head of design at Leo Burnett. Learn more on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Many of this year’s participants are past New Visual Artists, PRINT Awards winners, and 2025 jurors. Learn more about the PRINT Awards, now open for early bird entries.

The post Alisa Wolfson is Excited to Give (or Get!) … appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

We’re at this great nexus of being able to return focus to the book as an object, as a form of expression, and figuring out ways to do that so that it’s relevant to a contemporary audience.

Arion Press has been manually printing books on centuries-old equipment in San Francisco for 50 years, yet they are currently embarking upon a new beginning. The last vertically integrated bookmaker in the country, Arion Press was established in 1974 and has most recently been housed in San Francisco’s Presidio neighborhood. They officially opened their new doors in the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture in October—after moving over 49 tons of antique equipment—and will soon be releasing their second title of the year, Fables of Aesop.

Arion Press is composed of a production team of six people, split between three departments: the foundry, the press room, and the book bindery. They also work with local bookbinder John Demerritt, and have an additional seven employees on the administrative side of things who spearhead development and programming. Arion Press’s lead printer and creative director, Blake Riley, was hired back in 2001 originally as one of the imprint’s first apprentices. I recently spoke with Riley on the occasion of all of this excitement, to learn more about the history of Arion Press, Fables of Aesop, and keeping the art of bookmaking alive.

(Lightly edited for clarity and length.)

Take me back to the origin of Arion Press. How did it all begin? 

We trace our lineage back in San Francisco to the late teens when Edwin and Robert Grabhorn came out from Indiana. Curiously, Edwin had been primarily a printer of music scores, which is a very niche, phenomenal process that has fallen entirely by the wayside at this point. They set up shop in San Francisco in the late teens and established the Grabhorn Press, which became one of the premier American fine press operations for decades, through the 60s. After Edwin passed away, the younger brother, Robert, ultimately went into partnership with Andrew Hoyem. When Robert died, Andrew founded Arion as an imprint in 1974, which is why we’re claiming this year as our 50th anniversary celebration. 

I know you started out at Arion Press as an apprentice. Can you tell me a bit more about the apprenticeship program? 

With maybe only one exception, everyone who works in production here has come up through this apprenticeship program. It’s ongoing and is considered a fundamental part of the activity that happens here. 

This is one of those professions or trades that is especially unique because it relies very heavily on this oral transmission of skills. There is a certain amount of book learning you can do around this; you can learn technique by reading repair manuals and that kind of thing. But to really have a sense for the sounds of the presses and to be able to see how hands work in relation to bring it all together, there’s no way to simulate that experience. So the apprenticeships became really instrumental in that.

By now, we’ve easily had over three dozen apprentices. Obviously, not all of them have stayed, some of them have gone on to work in other areas of the book arts or for other book arts organizations, or to teach, some of them have moved on altogether, but it actually has proven to be a very successful, robust lifeline for the press and for letterpress printing as a whole. 

I think a lot of other old trades and handcrafts are similar. I’m a sign painter, and I took a two-year sign painting course at LA Trade Tech College that’s not an apprenticeship per se, but it does replicate certain aspects of what an apprenticeship would offer. I learned from two sign painters who’ve been doing it for decades and who took the course themselves. The knowledge that they have is invaluable, and so much of it is just in their heads, so you really have to be in the room with them for two years in order to even scrape the surface of understanding sign painting.

A lot of it, too, is that the people who have that knowledge aren’t natural-born teachers, so there’s a lot that they don’t have words for. Or until a certain problem arises, it wouldn’t occur to them to explain the fix, or how you go about creating a fix for a problem that’s never arisen, that kind of thing. There’s a lot of that kind of knowledge that gets transferred by osmosis. 

What’s your favorite aspect of what you and your team do at Arion Press? 

Writ large, what’s most exciting about the work is that it’s such a dynamic moment to be involved with the book because it’s going through these radical changes. There’s this interesting division that’s occurred between knowledge and information. When people say, the web is going to be the death knell of the book! it’s really the opposite. What the web has done quite brilliantly is wrangle information and remove all of that encyclopedic burden from the book, which frees it up to do all of these other things. Meanwhile, the technologies for construction and manufacturing are changing so quickly that they are offering these wild new opportunities for ways in which books can actually physically be constructed. So we’re at this great nexus of being able to return focus to the book as an object, as a form of expression, and figuring out ways to do that so that it’s relevant to a contemporary audience.

What the web has done, quite brilliantly, is wrangle information and remove all of that encyclopedic burden from the book, which frees it up to do all of these other things.

Part of that is incorporating new technologies, and figuring out how the book can embrace those. That’s the most exciting thing for us: this project of invention and discovery. What that means in the day-to-day that is especially motivating is that it requires this incredible collaboration between all of the creative people who are involved in a project. That’s the artists within the publishing program, then working with the book binders and the guys in the foundry, and being able to coordinate everyone’s expertise to bring them into alignment with the concept for the project, and hopefully ending up with something that surprises everybody. It’s almost always the case that we never know where we’re going to end up, because the process is so organic.

I’m mesmerized by the ancient printing equipment and techniques you all have preserved and use to create your books. What’s it like working with such special and historic machinery day in and day out? 

A significant portion of the type collection here, which is the largest standing collection of metal type outside of the Smithsonian Institution, goes back to San Francisco printers at the end of the 19th century. Plus, ours is still employed; it’s still making books and printing words; it’s not just a research collection. The collection began to be compiled by the Grabhorns, who were great collectors. All of that adds up to what has been described as this irreplaceable cultural treasure designation that we were bestowed.

When working with the historic type collection, we may have a certain design in mind or a certain look for the typography, but when we go to the case it may turn out that we only have a partial alphabet of that particular typeface. So there are instances like that that arise daily where we have to pivot and devise a new solution based on all of the physical realities and constraints of working with 100-year-old equipment. That really leads to this ongoing, continuous conversation and evolution of every project where one thing leads to the next so that by the time we end up with the book finished and bound, it’s something that no one really could have anticipated. There’s a real excitement, joy, and delight associated with that. 

What’s it like keeping an old press and these antique technologies thriving within the context of San Francisco, a place dominated by big tech and digital innovation? 

The most facile metaphor for it is the interplay and relationship between radio and television, and the ways in which television actually ended up leading to the renaissance of radio that we’ve seen in the last couple of decades. We are by no means tech-averse. The monotype casters, for example, which were invented at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution in the 1890s, were the first word processors; they were cutting-edge technology for their day. So when the foundry was set up here in the Bay Area in 1915, it was cutting-edge technology. 

We are by no means tech-averse.

Originally, the monotypes were a two-part system where there was a paper tape that was punched on a hydraulic keyboard, and then that tape was fed onto the typecaster. But then the paper tape became complicated for various reasons, and about 15 years ago this beautiful digital interface was engineered that replaced that whole process. So now what we have is this 21st-century digital interface connected to the 19th-century caster that allows us to download a text from anything that’s in the public domain, format it, and convert it to be cast. It was this beautiful way, much like television and radio, that the new technology has moved in and helped buoy the old one. 

Another example that came up recently was when we worked on the Edgar Allen Poe collection. In the process of building that project, we stumbled upon this pile of bricks that had been rescued when NYU demolished Poe’s house in lower Manhattan. Unbeknownst to anyone, they moved in and raised the house, but it seems as if perhaps a mea culpa, they preserved the bricks. So all of a sudden we had these bricks, and there was this question of how we could incorporate them somehow into the book and enliven the experience that much more. What we ended up doing with them was working with a colleague of ours here in the Bay, John Sullivan, who had gotten into paper making and 3D printing. He created 3D molds into which we could grind the bricks down like a mortar and pestle and use the brick dust as a pigmentation in the pulp paper, and then we packed the molds. We ended up creating these three-dimensional cameos of Poe’s visage, and those were then embedded in the covers of the books. The paper-making is relatively ancient, but being able to create these cameos was made possible by technology only available within the last ten years. 

We’re really invested in that exploring, in breaking down the barrier between those two things and helping ensure that it’s a two-way communication from the digital to the analog, and from the analog back to the digital. They all happily coexist. 

Can you tell me more about Arion Press’s 50th anniversary celebration this year, and the Fables of Aesop collection you’re releasing as part of the milestone? 

We wanted to create something that would appropriately commemorate the press at this inflection point, while also accommodating the move. A year and a half ago, we didn’t exactly know what the move would entail other than it would happen within a six-month period and be completely disruptive and unpredictable. So we had to design a project that could somehow be modular and flexible enough to absorb this unexpected future. 

Those two things came together in Aesop. It seemed appropriate not only for its longstanding role in the history of printing— I came across one comment that said, second to the Bible, Aesop’s fables is the most printed work in the Western world. This makes a lot of sense because, for various historical and technical reasons, the fables lent themselves to the capacities and technologies of the day once moveable type was created. This is in part because of their brevity, but especially because of how visual they’ve always been. That allowed for this incredibly rich body of work to be created around them, and constantly reinvented. 

As I began to dive into the history of Aesop’s fables primarily at the Huntington Library, one thing that rose to the surface was how these morals that we’ve all grown up with and maybe have even been used to affect our behavior one way or another, have evolved over time. Once we got a bead on that, the project became very interesting because there was an opportunity to approach this in a way that’s relevant to the 21st century; what do these morals look like now? 

Also, because the morals are each self-contained in their way structurally, that allowed us the freedom that we needed to treat them individually. We could be printing each individual folio, which is how we will be presenting them, so that if production was interrupted, we could finish that one folio, pack it aside, move the operation, and pick up with the next folio. It also separated the binding from the printing. Typically when we finish the printing of a book, we have another three months of hand book-binding before the book can be released. But issuing it in a box as a collection of individual folios gave us the elbow room we needed. 

So we had this splashy box and these morals, and both of those things were the anchors for the project. That’s what led us to invite Kiki Smith as the primary visual artist to create a sculptural multiple to define the experience of the box, and to invite Daniel Handler (whom you might know as Lemony Snicket) to reinterpret the morals. We then began to invite other artists that we had worked with in the past to each choose one fable to interpret and create one print that we would print here in the shop by traditional letterpress relief printing techniques. We ended up with 15 artists with Kiki being the 16th, and 41 fables. 

The project allowed us to celebrate our community, it gave us a way to make a statement relevant to a contemporary audience, it gave us the flexibility to dance around the move, and it promised to be a lot of fun in the process.

Featured image above: Nick Bruno/Courtesy of Arion Press

The post Arion Press Keeps the Art of Bookmaking Alive While Looking to the Future appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Hand-bound books, honest stories and photography as evidence – design and book-making studio Zone6 is putting narrative-driven documentary photography at the front of its print runs.

“Breaks are for wannabe writers. Time and time again, I hear the laments of the undisciplined crying out, ‘Oh, I need to clear my head.’ Ridiculous. You need to resist the siren song of temptation emanating from your bladder or the dog scratching at the backdoor or the pain radiating from your chronic carpal tunnel and get down to work.”

How to write 100,000 words per day, every day.

David Pearson has ‘grammed a fantastic selection of Spektrum books designed by Lothar Reher between 1968 and 1993 for the German publisher Volk und Welt. Never seen these before and now I want all of them.

“Rampant consumerism has consumed us” – how queuing for stuff became just as important as buying it.

Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker announces The Orchid synthesizer, a new songwriting tool, ideas machine and dust-gathering object of bleepy bloopy technolust.

Animauteur¹ Don Hertzfeldt on using Photoshop:

“You don’t know what you’re not allowed to do. I still don’t know, but I’ve felt better about myself because I have spoken to people who are in technical positions in cinema who are like, “Yeah, I don’t know what half this stuff does either.” I think it’s a sign of good software where you don’t need to. A sign of good software to me is it’s intuitive, and you can put your things in, and hopefully behave like an artist and make a mess and not break things. The downside is when you realize there’s something you could have done easier a long time ago.”

… from this excellent Slate interview

All the World’s a Stage, the new David Campany-curated retrospective of William Klein’s photography at Lisbon’s MAAT, looks wonderful.

If, like me, you’ve been given very clear instructions to not ask Santa for yet more books to arrange in neat piles around the house, Creative Boom’s annual gift guide is always a good place to look for alternative stocking fillers.

The Boom’s bluesky starter pack is also worth a click. Or you could just follow me.

That is all.

1. Yeah maybe don’t hold your breath waiting for that one to catch on, Daniel. ↩︎

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

Header image courtesy of the author.

The post Meanwhile No. 221 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Berger, an independent interactive designer specializing in immersive web experiences for clients in the arts and culture space, has always enjoyed exploring different disciplines to bring into his creative practice. When he discovered typography, he began conceptualizing typefaces as they might come to life across media.

Penelope is the result of two years of work “of trying to find the perfect fit,” and Berger says there’s more work to do and is already planning an update for 2025. Even so, the typeface comes with 11 stylistic sets, 25 ligatures, and 272 glyphs, giving it versatility across languages and different use cases.

Given all the controversy around the Paris Summer Olympics logo, I think Penelope would have been a delightful typeface alternative for the wordmark.

Learn more about Timothée Berger on his Instagram and give Penelope a try.

The post Penelope Channels Two Iconic 20th-Century Art Movements with Modern Flair appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Katherine Carver is the author of Abandoned: Chronicling the Journeys of Once-Forsaken Dogs, which has been featured on CBS Mornings, including features in the: Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, The Eye of Photography, Psychology Today, Animal Welfare Institute Quarterly Magazine, Modern Dog Magazine, AARP The Magazine, and podcasts and radio interviews.

What is the thing you like doing most in the world?
I love creating a body of photography work. A creative life is a more interesting life. There is nothing better than having an idea find you and then deciding to follow the inspiration and see where your curiosity leads you. I felt this way with creating my new book, Abandoned: Chronicling the Journeys of Once-Forsaken Dogs. The idea for Abandoned literally came to me on a summer day during 2012, roughly a year-and-a-half after we had adopted our first rescue dog named Biscuit, a Shetland Sheepdog. He forever changed my life in so many ways—he opened my heart in a way like no other; he brought me back to my love of photography. My curiosity and experience with Biscuit made me aware of the dog overpopulation crisis in our country, and this set me on a path to learn more about what happens to these abandoned dogs. I began documenting the fate of roughly 60 dogs of various breeds, who found themselves in shelters or rescues in the Mid-Atlantic region. I first photographed each dog prior to adoption, and I then photographed these same dogs again roughly a year later. Written narratives accompany the dogs’ photographs, providing to the extent possible, how, and why each dog was abandoned. I also explore the significant positive impact these dogs have had on their human companions’ lives, and vice versa.

What is the first memory you have of being creative?
The first memory I have of being creative is during my high school senior year. I needed an art credit, and I fortuitously was placed into a photography class. It was an instant love affair—I spent any spare time I had in the darkroom creating images. During my last year of college, I took a few photography classes, with fine art credits waived, and I loved every minute of it while being exposed to a wide array of photographic artists. After college, I attended law school, and I promised myself that I would keep photography in my life somehow. Once Biscuit entered my life, he was the catalyst that really brought me back to photography, and I then began working on Abandoned, which took me over a decade to complete. I owe such a great debt to Biscuit.

What is your biggest regret?
I always try my best to live a life of “oh well” versus “what ifs.” I never want to have regrets, and I want to continue to always take risks and pursue my curiosity and dreams. Otherwise, I would be living a life of regrets.

How have you gotten over heartbreak?
For me, I think any type of heartbreak is akin to experiencing a grieving process. For me, feeling all my feelings and working through this grieving process is the only way to get to the other side for me.

What makes you cry?
Goodbyes, especially permanent goodbyes, such as losing a loved one or a beloved animal, are extremely difficult and always lead to many tears for me. I love this quote by Suzanne Clothier, “There is a cycle of love and death that shapes the lives of those who choose to travel in the company of animals. It is a cycle unlike any other. To those who have never lived through its turnings or walked its rocky path, our willingness to give our hearts with full knowledge they will be broken seems incomprehensible. Only we know how small a price we pay for what we receive; our grief, no matter how powerful it may be, is an insufficient measure of the joy we have been given.” Also, on the opposite end of the spectrum, moments of pure, fleeting joy can bring me to my knees. For example, watching my daughter work diligently towards a goal and succeed makes me extremely proud leading to tears of joy.

How long does the pride and joy of accomplishing something last for you?
I believe the pride and joy of accomplishing a dream lasts forever, as nobody can take away one’s feeling of pride and joy when one accomplishes a big feat or dream. I can always transport myself back to my big accomplishments. However, I do my best to savor the present moment and present accomplishments, so that I truly enjoy the accomplishment. I am grateful for these journeys of self-discovery.

Do you believe in an afterlife, and if so, what does that look like to you?
I am not sure exactly what I believe regarding an “afterlife,” per se. I believe our souls, our essence, continue to live on in some manner after death. I also believe that our loved ones, including our beloved animals who have passed away, are always with us, providing us with guidance if we are willing to tune in, be present, and see the signs from the Universe.

What do you hate most about yourself?
I am not sure there is anything that I necessarily truly “hate” about myself. Something I am constantly working on is always being open to continually learning and growing in any way possible. I am continuously working on trusting the process and trusting that everything shows up right on time, but perhaps not on my timeframe. I also look for the lessons when things do not go the way or turn out the way that I had hoped.

What do you love most about yourself?
What I love most about myself is the ability to follow my curiosity, dream big, persevere, and never give up. Abandoned is a testament to these themes. I hope through my dedication and efforts that Abandoned reaches and touches as many people as possible, as it is timely and casts a light on the current dog overpopulation crisis in our country. In 2023, in the United States, 3.2 million dogs entered shelters/rescue organizations; 2.2 million of these dogs received homes; however, 1 million dogs did not. It is my great hope that Abandoned will help raise awareness of this crisis and encourage people to adopt a dog from a shelter or rescue organization. Additionally, I also hope people witness through this project that it is possible to follow your dream and bring it to fruition.

What is your absolute favorite meal?
My favorite meal is when our little family, including my husband, my daughter, and our rescue fur girl, Victory, goes out to dinner together—exhaling the day, being present with one another, spending time together outside, taking in the fresh air, while enjoying a delicious meal together at one of our favorite restaurants!

The post What Matters to Katherine Carver appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Lyuba Tomova was born in 1975 in Sofia, Bulgaria, where she lives and works as a partner at the studio Poster House. A graduate of the National Academy of Art with a master’s degree in poster design, she won the 2022 Grand Prize of Sofia and the Golden Poster Award from the X International Triennial of Stage Poster—Sofia.

Tomova works primarily in the realm of noncommercial poster design. “I believe this is the most dynamic and rapidly developing form of art,” she told me in a recent email exchange, “not just a means of mass communication and information distribution.” Tomova’s posters address social themes, often with drama as a foundation. “Theater is a socially engaged artform that poses critical questions to society,” she noted. Her posters in this realm relate not only to the themes of love and hate, “but also raise questions about tolerance and where our limits of patience lie (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee), and about corruption (The Government Inspector by Nikolay Gogol). Sometimes, I adopt a direct approach to share my opinions and to influence public attitudes and behavior.”

I asked her if she has a favorite poster among those shown here. “In the vast variety of techniques and means of expression, it is very difficult for anyone to pick a single poster.” So, pivoting, I asked her to list her inspirations: “I admire individual poster artists and various poster art schools. Also, I consider posters the strongest visual art and communication medium—an image seen and briefly viewed, yet it leaves us pondering long after.”

The post The Daily Heller: For Lyuba Tomova, ‘Posters Are the Strongest Visual Art’ appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

(*These are not affiliate links. The gifts on our list are shared as recommendations from our creative community.)

Yutong Hu

“I want a calendar for 2025 or a schedule plan notebook to help me organize my workload.”

Like this one designed by Marjolein Delhaas.

Yutong Hu is a freelance graphic designer at &Walsh. Learn more on her website and Instagram.

Many of this year’s participants are past New Visual Artists, PRINT Awards winners, and 2025 jurors. Learn more about the PRINT Awards, now open for early bird entries.

The post Yutong Hu is Excited to Give (or Get!) … appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

At the heart of this rebrand is the idea of inspiring brighter workdays for everyone. Workday has always been about people, whether it’s revolutionizing how organizations handle HR, finance, or business planning. And now, with a design system that blends optimism, rigor, and a little bit of joy, that philosophy shines through in every detail.

Take the logo, it’s an evolution of Workday’s ‘Horizon’—a nod to new beginnings—refined with custom letterforms that are both confident and approachable. There’s even a shorthand version called The Dub (yes, it’s as versatile and fun as it sounds). The color palette’s energizing yellows paired with calming blues, symbolize the rhythm of a workday, with vibrant gradients adding depth across digital and print.

A custom Workday Sans typeface is in the works to ensure clarity and sophistication across all communications. And the motion design? Seamless and intuitive, it mirrors the natural flow of time and reinforces Workday’s message of progress and transparency.

But what really ties it all together is the brand’s visual personality. The photography feels natural, aspirational, and authentic, with subtle movements that reflect progress—whether it’s a forward glance or a task in motion. It’s all about balancing big-picture vision with the everyday moments that make work meaningful.

Working with the Workday team was about more than just building a brand—it was about capturing the heart of their culture and sharing it with the world.”

Caroline Fox, Koto creative director

“Over the past year, we became a true extension of their team, collaborating across brand and digital to ensure every detail felt authentic and resonated with HR and Finance audiences,” Caroline Fox, Koto’s creative director said. “We’re proud of what we’ve created together and grateful for the trust they placed in us to bring this vision to life.”

For me, this rebrand is proof that even in the world of B2B software, design has the power to connect on a deeply personal level. Workday’s updated identity doesn’t just reflect a brighter future for work—it makes you believe it’s already here.

The post Koto’s Refresh for Workday Brings Optimism to Enterprise Software appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

I have a pronounced allergy to rage and, in particular, drama, which makes my throat close up and my body shut down as though I’m going into a sort of anaphylaxis of the mind and spirit.

This is how things have been going lately, pretty much everywhere. People are now enraged as a rule; we are ready to fight at the drop of a hat. The mundane tipping points: being cut off in traffic, getting the wrong order in a restaurant, having to wait on line for something for five minutes, discovering that someone you love and have known for years doesn’t vote the way you do, someone’s yoga mat accidentally touching yours. I grew up in a chronically angry household — my parents were at each other on a daily basis from the time the sun came up, searching for the best and most strategic ways to hurt each other, and I absorbed a lot of that toxic discontent like a sponge. So I have a pronounced allergy to rage and, in particular, drama, which makes my throat close up and my body shut down as though I’m going into a sort of anaphylaxis of the mind and spirit: I just can’t do it, I’m not wired for it, and when approached by it (which I often am, as a writer who is somewhat in the public eye), I flee. I have spent much of my life attracting people with a peculiar fondness for acrimony, who are somehow nurtured and sustained by backing their friends and family up against a wall, and putting them on the defense; I recently decided to examine this, to ask why — the short answer is because it is the language that my cells speak and recognize — and then to say No, it doesn’t have to be this way. And it doesn’t. I used to think that this attitude just had to do with my exposure to social media memes, but that’s not the case; the way we think and live in the world can change thanks to plasticity, as described by neuroscientist Richard Davidson, who I once saw speak quantitatively about neuroplasticity and meditation with Joseph Goldstein, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and Daniel Goleman.

When one’s surroundings, acquaintances, and culture are locked in this chronic and deep condition of fracture — Krista Tippett describes it as a metastases: the incredible toxicity and polarization is that it is pain and fear on the loose, pain and fear metastasizes —- one is then faced with this social fracture every day, in every conceivable situation from the drive-thru at Starbucks to the office cubicle to (certainly) social media to friendships. I am now on my fourth re-read of my friend Katherine May’s Wintering —- a life-changing book for me about the power and necessity of going inward during dark times —- and some of the takeaways are the questions that I now ask myself in virtually every situation: what is it that truly nurtures my heart? What is it that breaks it? And why am I prone to allowing in so much of the latter, or is it just part of an ongoing cycle?

What is it that truly nurtures my heart? What is it that breaks it? And why am I prone to allowing in so much of the latter, or is it just part of an ongoing cycle?

Having come to this realization -— the one that says that not accepting bad behavior and put-up-your-dukesism doesn’t make me an outlier (although it is often isolating) but instead engaged in a kind of late-onset tenderness for my own heart — I now find myself separated from much of what I know, or knew, to be the current universal human condition of bitterness; I’ve been canceled by it repeatedly at both the most public and private levels. I’m living now, to quote Ada Limon, between the ground and the feast: the life-giving, anchoring place of foundation and also where we are buried—where we begin and we end—and sustenance itself.

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 courtesy of the author.

The post Poor Man’s Feast: On Sustenance When the World Wants to Fight appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Check out the full series as it unfolds.

Go backstage on the Two Craigs website to see how the pair translate the prompt through photography and illustration.

Shatter

My wife and I were traveling in Japan when this word got assigned. I was seeing a lot of sake vessels and their silhouettes were always striking in simplicity—inspiration supplied. In order to know something is shattered, you have to know what it was whole.

Craig Frazier

Follow along with PRINT, at 2craigs.com, or on Instagram.

The post Two Craigs: 26/52 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

There are many familiar books on view, and rare discoveries as well. The overarching goal was to show through design and illustration how the industry has evolved from past and present.

Below, Fuchs tells us more about how the exhibition came about.

How long has the Die Neue Sammlung been collecting children’s books, and what was the motivation?
The motivation for this part of the collection lies in the founding idea of the museum. Die Neue Sammlung was founded as a museum dedicated to collecting industrial design with two main focuses: Firstly, contemporary design was to be collected and, secondly, internationally. The aim of this collection policy was, on the one hand, to be able to show designers of the time a collection of outstanding examples and, on the other hand, to give the public the opportunity to select good design for their own needs. It was an explicit aim to show affordable good design in particular. The 1927 exhibition, which showed picture books and toys from many different countries, combined both objectives of the newly founded museum.

How many books are in the show?
The exhibition shows around 180 books, a selection from the museum’s collection of around 750 children’s books.

The oldest children’s book in the collection is a volume of the Münchener Bilderbücher (Munich Picturebooks) from around 1870, one of a 23-volume series of picture books illustrated with hand-colored wood engravings, and thus one of the few books that were not produced by machine. The focus of the exhibition begins at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, i.e., at the time when the children’s book developed from an educational book into a medium dedicated to leisure.

What criteria did you use for inclusion in the exhibit?
For us as a design museum, the design of the picture books is at the center of our interest. How a book was illustrated, set and realized determined the selection, not the story it tells. Outstanding early examples of picture book design are, for example, the children’s books by Lothar Meggendorfer from the end of the 19th century. Although they are books on the outside, they contain entire worlds of play between the covers. With their ingenious folding and pulling mechanisms, they can be transformed into three-dimensional worlds that can be used as play backdrops. One example is the doll’s house from around 1889, which hides five different living rooms between the two book covers that can be placed next to each other.

The exhibit is organized in various ways: chronologically, thematically and technically. What was the thinking behind this process?
The exhibition aims to achieve two goals: On the one hand, it wants to show the museum’s own collection of picture books, which has not been exhibited since 1960. The chronological part of the exhibition, which shows the development of international children’s books from around 1900 to the present day, is primarily intended for this purpose. On the other hand, the show focuses specifically on the design of children’s books. To achieve this, the second part of the exhibition sorts the books according to four different design criteria that are characteristic features of them.

The first is color. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the majority of children’s books have been designed in color. The selection and limitation of colors is therefore in almost all cases not an economic but a design decision. The juxtaposition of black-and-white books and books that use only a few or special colors asks about the reasons and spaces of experience that result from the deliberate omission of colors or their special selection.

The second design category is perspective. Due to their height alone, children have a different view of the world to many adults. Changes of perspective are therefore celebrated in many picture books, whether the life of particularly small or particularly large creatures is the subject or we are shown the world in close up or from a bird’s-eye view.

The third category is dedicated to signs and shapes. The focus here is on characters and numbers, but also on shapes that can be used to tell a whole story. ABC books demonstrate the play with letter shapes and phonetic and semantic associations. Warja Lavater-Honegger tells the entire Little Red Riding Hood story using circles alone, while Sven Völker creates ever new animal worlds from the keys of a piano. Entire worlds can be created with a very limited range of visual vocabulary.

The fourth category brings together all kinds of picture books that open up into the third dimension, i.e., pop-up books, fold-out books and books whose pages have holes and allow you to see through them. Here, for example, Seymour Chwast’s Limerickricks can be seen, in which the art can be observed of how one form can be completely transformed into another through expansion, which is nevertheless convincing in terms of color and contour.

What did you learn from curating the material? And what do you hope visitors (old and young) will take away?
I hope that visitors will enjoy discovering the creative diversity of picture books and discover them as a medium of excellent design. Throughout the ages and across different countries, picture books have been a field of artistic innovation and creative experimentation. The vitality of this genre stems from its existence as a special branch of the book, in which imagination and the joy of experimentation are more important than in other areas of book production. It is no coincidence that famous graphic designers have repeatedly turned to children’s books in order to be able to work completely freely without a client. At the same time, there were already children’s book designers in the middle of the 20th century who have dedicated themselves entirely to this genre, and there are others now. They usually create both text and images themselves and have a great influence in their era. One realization that I was particularly delighted about when preparing the exhibition was the fact that in recent years there have been new startups of small publishing houses all over the world that have dedicated themselves entirely to the special picture book. They enable a current diversity and quality in picture books, in the diversity of the current digital range of media, to provide a bridge for a new golden age of children’s books.

If I may add some information on the exhibition design: The exhibition architecture is designed to allow people of all ages and abilities to be able to see the books. Exhibition architect Carina Deuschl designed houses for the books so that they can be presented vertically instead of horizontally. They replicate the joy of opening a book and finding new worlds between its covers. While the books in the museum collection have to be presented behind glass, 50 duplicates of the books exhibited were acquired secondhand. They allow visitors to explore the books haptically and in their entirety.

Christoph Niemann created the drawings in the exhibition space [specifically] for the show. He takes up the title of the exhibition (itself an allusion to Maurice Sendak’s famous children’s book) and presents fantastic creatures whose form is characterized by a playful juxtaposition of lines and color fields.

The catalog is a further treat:

All photos courtesy Die Neue Sammlung—The Design Museum.

The post The Daily Heller: Wild Lines on the Loose at the Design Museum in Munich appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

And if you’re still reeling from it, the holidays are a perfect time to get punch-drunk distracted on a bounty of brilliant book covers.

For as much insanity as the year held (and it was … a lot!), it was offset by a constant stream of cathartic tomes and jackets. To that end, in 2023 our annual December list featured 50 titles—and it has now doubled to 100. 

Some of my personal favorites: Thomas Colligans’ beautiful cover for Beautyland, which has been stuck in my head for the better part of a year. Janet Hansen’s work on Ask Me Again, is equal parts electrifying and haunting. Pablo Delcan’s genius VanderMeer covers the best encapsulations of the Southern Reach series since his Spanish editions. Arsh Raziuddin’s jacket for Knife. Alex Merto and Seymour Chwast’s Tom Wolfe reissues. Pete Adlington’s utterly perfect Not Waving But Drowning. Grace Han’s take on God of the Woods, which disproves the theory that great covers are only the stuff of niche imprints and genres and not mainstream bestsellers. And so many others, which you’ll see below.

Here’s to all the striking work in 2024, and all that we have to look forward to in 2025. There has truly never been a better time to get lost in a book—or a book cover.

The post 100 of the Best Book Covers of 2024 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

(*These are NOT affiliate links. The gifts on our list are shared as recommendations from our creative community.)

Jennifer Kinon

“Michelin-starred chefs, artists, galleries, and Grandmas contributed recipes to a community-style cookbook that will benefit Trinity Lower East Side’s Services and Food for the Homeless. Trinity welcomes all and serves over 200,000 meals each year, no questions asked.”

The East Village Cookbook

Jennifer Kinon is the co-founder of Champions Design. Learn more about the firm on Champions’ website and Instagram.

Many of this year’s participants are past New Visual Artists, PRINT Awards winners, and 2025 jurors. Learn more about the PRINT Awards, now open for early bird entries.

The post Jennifer Kinon is Excited to Give (or Get!) … appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

The post When Famous Artists Were Kids: Barbara Kruger appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Today a new Disney+ documentary debuts that captures that explosive, epic fusion of music and joy: Beatles ’64, produced by Martin Scorsese and directed by David Tedeschi. The trailer (below) sends pulsating shots of fountain-of-youth-like energy coursing through my body and soul, triggering forgotten, imagined and indelible recollections, like standing outside the Plaza (and the Warwick in 1965) engulfed by shrieking, sobbing “bridge and tunnel” fans trying to get the attention of George, John, Paul and Ringo.

The modest main and end title sequences and graphics throughout Beatles ’64 were created by Randy Balsmeyer’s Big Film Design. As founder and creative director, he has produced unforgettable 20th- and 21st-century film titles for Spike Lee, the Coen brothers and other directors. Since February he’s been working in Brooklyn as VFX Supervisor on Lee’s latest feature, Highest 2 Lowest, with Denzel Washington and Jeffrey Wright (a reimagining of the ’63 Kurosawa classic High and Low). For the past four years, Balsmeyer has called Thailand home, and plans to return there in February.

Wishing I were in his Beatles shoes, I plied him on what it was like to work on this document of such a pivotal era in pop history … and what he’s doing now.

The poster and title are so perfect for Beatles ’64.
Actually, the poster design is from Apple/Disney marketing. The actual film title is below. I pitched many wild and flamboyant ideas for the main title, several quite similar to the poster, but ultimately David and Marty opted for something simple and “period appropriate.”

How closely did you work with Tedeschi and Scorcese?
I worked pretty closely with David and the brilliant editor, Mariah Rehmet. I did not work directly with Marty on this one. Interestingly, even though I was in New York for most of post-production, we all worked remotely on this project. I finally met the post crew in person Sunday night at the premiere. Disney hosted an amazing screening and reception at their brand-new NY HQ downtown in Hudson Square. We were the first film to screen in their theater, and the first event to be held in the new space! Just as an indicator of how much Disney is behind the film, Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO, came to personally introduce the film. A Q&A after the screening with Marty and Dave was moderated by Ethan Hawke.

Have you done other concert film tiles before?
I previously worked with David and Marty on Rolling Thunder Revue (2019), the film about Bob Dylan’s 1976 concert tour. For that film Marty was director and David was the editor. 

Is there a secret sauce—a recipe—for making films like this one so tantalizing?
The only “secret sauce” is having a group of creative people guided by a central vision (Marty) who combine their talents in a way that is truly greater than the sum of the parts. It was a fascinating process to watch the film evolve over a fairly short period of time. Because it really is a snapshot in time: Just this two weeks in February ’64, the trick was to expand on the newly discovered Maysles footage, without straying too far from the essence of the Beatles’ first visit to America. This was an awesome group that really clicked!

The post The Daily Heller: It Was 60 Years Ago Today … appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

(*These are not affiliate links. The gifts on our list are shared as recommendations from our creative community.)

Max Hauler

“I know it’s lame to plug stuff you made, but I really am excited to give this to my design friends this holiday season.”

Design is My Passion hat on hat.

Max Hauler is a designer at Stout Collective. Find out more on their website and Instagram.

Many of this year’s participants are past New Visual Artists, PRINT Awards winners, and 2025 jurors. Learn more about the PRINT Awards, now open for early bird entries.

The post Max Hauler is Excited to Give (or Get!) … appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

This summer, I was taking a stroll through Barcelona with my 7-year-old daughter, Vega, and I decided to ask her a few questions about branding. This isn’t something we had ever really had a conversation about before. I was curious about what she would say and how aware she was of branding.

Vega’s answers surprised me, mostly because she was able to explain things I deeply believe with a whole lot of efficiency. Here’s the full interview transcript. Watch the video on the original post.

The Interview

What do you think a brand is?

A brand is like a company 🏭. If there was no brand then there wouldn’t be a company. So like a brand is like a brand of shoes 👟. So like Nike is a brand.

Why do you think there wouldn’t be a company if there was no brand?

The brand is what makes the company.

What do you think a logo is?

I think a logo is like something that like represents the company and the brand. I think it represents the brand.

What is the difference to you between a logo and a brand?

Well, a logo is maybe like a drawing or like a letter or a number.

A brand is like… I’m the boss right? It’s like my brand, so like I made the brand up. I made all these people to come together to make the things that we make.

So a brand is something that helps you bring people together to make the things that you make?

Mmhmm.

If we look at a clothing store 👗, and I’m the boss, I would be the one who’s bringing all the people together to like make the clothes or like buy the clothes.

Yep, and the brand helps you do that?

Yeah, like a whole community make a store and people earn money 💵 from gathering around.

Why do you think, if you’re the boss and you want to bring people together to make something, why do you think you need a brand to do that? Why can’t you just say, “Come together and let’s make something.”

Because, if we have a store, we can’t just do it all by ourselves 🙄. You know how, we’re not an octopus 🐙. So we can’t just do it all by ourselves 🤷‍♀️ We need a community to help us. We need more people to help us. It can’t just be like one or two, it has to be like 20 or 10.

So what you’re saying is that brands help you build a community?

Yeah.

If you were to make a brand, what would you want your brand to mean? What would you want people to think when they see your brand?

If I had a company 🙇‍♀️ and it sold like, medicine 💊, I would probably want people to like know, that like, I want them to be happy 😀, I want them to be well.

If it’s like a pharmacy 👩‍⚕️, then there would be a little sign thing that’s the pharmacy logo. So it would be that cross (pointing at a pharmacy sign on the street in Barcelona).

Why is it important that you know that the cross is a pharmacy?

I kinda think that the green 💚 represents you being well. Green means like happy 🙂.

So you’re saying colors mean things?

Yeah. If I see, look, a little logo (pointing at another green cross pharmacy sign) like that, then I’ll know it’s a pharmacy.

Right, so it just helps people to be able to identify things quickly.

Yeah.

It sounds like brands are good for helping people identify things, so knowing what a thing is, and it sounds like they’re good for helping people work together to make something, right?

Yeah. Mhmm.

Do you think that there’s any other good use for a brand?

I think also, that brands, they’re just all about friendship 👯, and being nice 😊.

Brands are about friendship and being nice? How?

So like, if you work with someone, with someone that you like know, it’s important to start like knowing the person that you work with. To like know who they are, to then, you can be like nice with them and ok with them. Brands are good for like umm, coming together and like knowing different people to work with.

Alright, I think we’re gonna stop there for now and we can continue later. Thank you, Vega.

OK

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 the newsletter, Insights by Hyperakt.

Illustration by Merit Myers.

The post Branding 101, Through the Eyes of a Seven-Year-Old appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

So, what am I thankful for in 2024? At least for now, I cautiously thank the tech companies for giving us soft- and hardware that can (and will) transport us to ever-increasing virtual utopias (and dystopias, too). We are going to need a few virtual worlds to inhabit if we’re going to stay artificially sane in this one.

Sanity, like normality, is relative, so I am thankful that we have desktop and head-top AR and AI devices we can use to make our reality a little bit easier to take.

My only message for today: Revel in the fact that the president pardoned a few turkeys (without thinking about the one the DOJ set free), watch the parade, take in some football and enjoy an augmented Ocular holiday. Somehow, we’ll all be happier in the end.

The post The Daily Heller: Happy Thanks.giving.AI appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

(*These are not affiliate links. The gifts on our list are shared as recommendations from our creative community.)

Ghazal Foroutan

“I’m thrilled to add Anna Dawson’s wall catchall to my office! Its perfect shade of red will bring a smile to my face every time I see it, and it’s ideal for keeping my essentials organized as soon as I arrive.

I’m passionate about all things design, finding creativity in the objects around me. By investing in myself and my happiness, I’m nurturing my creative spirit every day.”

Ghazal Foroutan is a graphic designer and educator based in Southern California. Learn more on her website and Instagram.

Many of this year’s participants are past New Visual Artists, PRINT Awards winners, and 2025 jurors. Learn more about the PRINT Awards, now open for early bird entries.

The post Ghazal Foroutan is Excited to Give (or Get!) … appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Left image: 404 Branding, Right image: Co-founders (left to right) Renan Monjon, Rafael Caldeira, Saulo Monjon

Their debut project, The Cruise Heist, is a masterclass in creative risk-taking. Tackling a Netflix campaign when the company was less than three weeks old, with just five people on the team, is the kind of audacity that defines 404. Co-founder Rafael Caldeira put it perfectly: “Our name ‘404’ celebrates the idea that mistakes and risk-taking are essential parts of the creative process.”

And it’s not just a nervy concept—they’ve proven it works. In its first year, 404’s design-first approach and lean, two-department structure have delivered results that rival even the most established agencies. From partnerships with global heavyweights like Google and Natura to snagging awards at Cannes Lions, Effies, and El Ojo de Iberoamérica, 404 is shaking up the industry. They fully embrace their tongue-in-cheek, “error-prone” ethos by leaning into the spirit of a 404 error — playfully owning the fact that they don’t even have a website (yet!?) to showcase their award-winning work. You can, however, find them on LinkedIn and Instagram.

What stands out about 404 isn’t just the awards or the high-profile clients. It’s their philosophy: innovation thrives in uncertainty. In a world increasingly dominated by AI, the team champions the power of human creativity and thoughtful design. By blending cutting-edge tech with a distinctly Brazilian flair for bold ideas, they’re redefining how creative problems are solved—not just in Brazil, but anywhere.

As they enter year two, 404 Design & Innovation is on a mission to grow even bigger. Their rapid rise is a testament to the idea that with the right mix of creativity, collaboration, and courage, even the newest player can make waves in a competitive industry. Keep an eye on this agency. PRINT is excited to see what’s in store for 404’s next chapter!

The post 404 Design & Innovation Celebrates a Year of Bold Moves and Big Wins appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

I used to make cards as a child. Birthdays, holidays, apologies, I would make cards for the occasion.

I loved going to the craft store and selecting fibrous, frayed paper and my parents kept me in a dizzying stock of scalloped pinking shears. My favorite type of card to make was one that involved pressing fresh flowers between the pages of Oxford dictionaries or Bibles that were stocked on my family’s bookshelves. After weeks, I would open the books and discover flowers that were crisp and fragile, their own kind of paper.

I would arrange the flowers on the thick cardstock from the store and then brush a glaze over the flowers that sealed them to the page, gave the flowers a cast and sheen that pleased me in such specific ways—the crags of the sealant, the flash-frozen color of the florals, the soft and rough-hewn edges of the paper that left a fuzzy feeling on my skin.

As I got older, after special occasions I would pin whole bouquets of flowers on my walls, some hanging for so long and getting so old they would disintegrate shard by shard until the realities of vacuuming became too much. Even now, I have flowers in all states from fresh and dying and dead in their vase on the living room table because I will not part with them because I love their pink and green and violet vibrance in the heart of the room.

I do not know where all the cards I made are anymore—I am sure my mother has some saved in her memory boxes—but I do have one particular card saved in memory.

It was a holiday card I made for a friend of mine who I found unbearably cool—cool in the way that I wanted to be: effortless, unfettered, wearer of cream turtlenecks (while I wore black). I labored over the card with particular care, choosing the best flowers, the heaviest book to press them in, the most thoughtful application of glaze. When I gave it to her she was kind: exclaimed over it in the type of way that I had hoped.

But an hour later, what did I find?

I was in the washroom across from my friend’s bedroom when I saw the card I spent so much time on tossed into the waste basket. This was years ago. I think I was likely eleven? or twelve? but I still remember the feeling of seeing the card as a discarded object. A thing that was given now thrown aside.

I pulled the card out of the bin and looked at the flowers I had preserved and carefully arranged before sealing for further longevity. There was the sharpness of rejection—unavoidable—but mostly, there was a sudden weight in my limbs, which I conflated with the feeling of being adult. It felt grown to me to understand that there is no real way for any of us to truly know what one thing really means to another, that even if we tell someone what it means, they might not feel it, that sometimes this gap between what something means and what someone else feels is a chasm that whole relationships fall into. When I left the washroom, I left the card in the bin, just as I had found it.

I love floral arrangements, I am sure that is clear by now. It is the pleasure of beauty, the insouciance of blooms whose very purpose is to allure more life. It is also simply the heartstrike of joy I feel when I walk into a room and the living brilliance of flowers greets me. It feels like a personal greeting, all warm and bright and lush.

I want to follow that kind of invitation anywhere; I want to offer it in as many forms as I can to the ones that I love. I think it is why I will keep flowers for as long as I can, for as long as their forms hold. And I think it is why I loved preserving the flowers and turning them into lovenotes as a child. This is not the same for others, of course. Others do not want fresh flowers in the house.

They’re dying, they say and I always think: well, yes, but they’re beautiful.

I know this is all a little sentimental. I know the flowers are always meant to be let go—I found the card I made where it was always going to be—it is just that I always want to hold on a little longer. Don’t we all in some way?

What we save is often so different from each other, but we all do it. One friend: playing cards found on kerbs; the other: old punk records; still another: miniatures of ordinary objects. One more: notes in her wallet that no one knows she’s kept. The earth moves to a pull that none of us can affect. Still, we tend to the flowers, hoping that they will last.

*

I’m Wondering is a monthly column where I ask and then answer a question. More than anything, I hope that as I continue to wonder, it will open all of us up to paths we can’t imagine now but feel called to by a question that won’t let us go.

Amy Lin lives in Calgary, Canada where there are two seasons: winter and road construction. She completed her MFA at Warren Wilson College and holds BAs in English Literature and Education. Her work has been published in places such as Ploughshares and she has been awarded residencies from Yaddo and Casa Comala. She writes the Substack At The Bottom Of Everything where she wonders: how do we live with anything? HERE AFTER is her first book.

Header image courtesy of the author.

The post I’m Wondering: Do You Display Dead Flowers? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Welcome to the DesignThinkers Podcast! Join host and RGD President Nicola Hamilton as she digs into the archives of the DesignThinkers conference, reconnecting with past speakers about their talks and ideas that have shaped Canada’s largest graphic design conference. Follow the RGD on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit them at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

The post DesignThinkers Podcast: Hans Thiessen RGD appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

From a fresh face (or lack thereof) on some Murakami, to Dante’s Inferno as you’ve never seen it, to a psychedelic Clockwork Orange experiment, the rest of our favorite finds from the month(s) follow!

Publisher’s description:
With his bestseller Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates established himself as a unique voice in his generation of American authors, a brilliant writer and thinker in the tradition of James Baldwin.

In his keenly anticipated new book, The Message, he explores the urgent question of how our stories—our reporting, imaginative narratives and mythmaking—both expose and distort our realities. Traveling to three resonant sites of conflict, he illuminates how the stories we tell—as well as the ones we don’t—work to shape us.

The first of the book’s three main parts finds Coates on his inaugural trip to Africa—a journey to Dakar, where he finds himself in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and the ghost-haunted country of his imagination. He then takes readers along with him to Columbia, SC, where he reports on the banning of his own work and the deep roots of a false and fiercely protected American mythology—visibly on display in this capital of the confederacy, with statues of segregationists still looming over its public squares. Finally, in Palestine, Coates sees with devastating clarity the tragedy that grows in the clash between the stories we tell and reality on the ground.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

What was the brief for this book? 
The brief was a very simple one: simplicity, strength, and a three-strand story. Then, a lot of discussion with the editor around really capturing the essence of the book. In terms of visuals, it was completely open.

Tell us about the blank space in the middle—how you arrived at it, and what it represents.
The blank space in the middle was almost not an intentional solution. I felt the overall package needed a timelessness to feel intriguing, and powerful but also elegant. The temptation with a book like this is to make a bold countercultural statement, to rely on protest graphics, etc., to give it an outsider attitude, which would be a completely valid approach and is certainly something I explored early on. But I also felt strongly that I wanted to play up to the alignment [of] Ta-Nehisi Coates in the lineage of socio-political [authors] such as Toni Morrison, Noam Chomsky, and James Baldwin. With that in mind, I wanted to convey clarity and authority. I felt the title and author name in themselves did a lot of that work for me.

How did you choose the type treatment?
The typeface I used was Grobek; this arose partly [because] it’s not a type aesthetic I have used previously (sometimes, there’s no better reason than that) but also this goes back to my decision to shy away from protest graphics in this design route. I decided to do the opposite, something elegant and light with a slightly unconventional serif. Somehow I found that through not being shouty, this stood out more, possibly due the sheer mass of negative space on the cover, which is echoed with a lighter typeface with huge counters.

How about the color bands?
The color bands frame the type elements, anchoring them to the top and bottom of the jacket. They are simply a reference to the three strands of the journey undertaken by the author, referencing Senegal, Palestine, and the U.S. But they also serve a purpose in harking back to Midcentury book cover design, further signaling the literary lineage I wanted to emphasize for Ta-Nehisi.

Is it difficult to make a cover this restrained yet effective?
I guess it can be sometimes difficult to get a cover this restraint approved. I think as long as it’s been well-designed, restraint is an admirable trait in designers (if appropriate!). But I had great supporters straight away for this cover in my art director, Richard Bravery, and the publisher for the title, Simon Prosser. It was one of those occasions where there was pretty much consensus straight away that was the strongest route—let’s just go with it!

Is there any added pressure when designing a book for such an important voice as Coates?
There is always some pressure for whoever you are designing for; you are trying to visually communicate the essence of another artist’s work in a different medium. But working for Penguin and Hamish Hamilton means that you get to work on covers for some of the most seminal figures in literature, so the excitement of that far outweighs the pressure. (Unless I’m on like round 80 and everything I’m doing still looks shit.)

Cover design by Matt Dorfman

The post 22 of the Best Book Covers of the Month: November 2024 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Are you a book lover short on shelf space? isolarii makes tiny books with big words—and they’re perfect for a holiday stocking.

isolarii take its name from the extinct genre of Venetian Renaissance “island books.” Month to month, they map the extremes of human knowledge and creative endeavor, assembling perennial legends and emerging icons—scientists and novelists, philosophers and activists, architects and technologists, from the counterculture to the avant-garde—pioneering new ways of understanding ourselves and the Earth.

isolarii is a subscription service, and subscribers receive their first book immediately after joining.

The most recent is a Philip K. Dick story that can be read in one sitting. Who needs ebooks when you have one as small and collectable as this?

The post The Daily Heller: A Handbook for People With Tiny Hands appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

(*These are not affiliate links. The gifts on our list are shared as recommendations from our creative community.)

Eager Zhang

“I want to recommend MiLLiSECOND, a keychain-sized metal tape measure designed by a Japanese manufacturer Takeda.

It’s so tiny to carry, so beautifully designed, and so useful for printmakers (Note: it is in centimeters).”

Where to buy.

Eager Zhang is a graphic designer for OmensOmens Lab and a design professor at Otis College of Art and Design. Learn more about Eager on their website and Instagram.

Many of this year’s participants are past New Visual Artists, PRINT Awards winners, and 2025 jurors. Learn more about the PRINT Awards, now open for early bird entries.

The post Eager Zhang is Excited to Give (or Get!) … appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

“Many of us didn’t fully know what that impact and influence looked like back then, and how it still carries forward,” Sykes told me. “But as we turned more pages and did more research and had more pre-interviews with experts, with curators, with museum owners, with founders of different types of companies, and with artists themselves, we learned more and more and more.” 

It’s through this extensive research process that Sykes and her team honed in on the creation of a two-part zine series entitled, “Legacy: A Modern Renaissance,” designed to shed light on diverse communities through the lens of Black excellence and achievement. These stories highlight the ways that passing wealth to the next generation is fueling community while celebrating the innovative period of Black art, music, poetry, and literature that launched in Harlem, New York, in the 1920s and ’30s. In partnership with U.S. Bank, the campaign is the first of its kind for The New York Times, paying homage to the lasting impact of the Harlem Renaissance and its 100th anniversary through the power of print.

T Brand Studio has commissioned work from Black writers, storytellers, artists, and designers for the two 12-page zines, highlighting the immense contributions of Black creatives to the arts and wider society. The zines feature work from typographer Tré Seals, poet Mahogany L. Browne, cultural critic and writer Michaela Angela Davis, collage artist Magdaline Davis, and photographer Ivan McClellan. The first zine, “Legacy: The Wealth Issue,” was released as a printed insert in The New York Times Sunday issue on August 18, with the second zine, “Legacy: The Culture Issue” set to be distributed with the December 29 print issue. Both zines are now available to view digitally through an innovative online hub unveiled by T Brand Studio last week. The online hub continues the theme and tradition of accessibility that the zine form is already emblematic of. 

To highlight this thoughtful and poignant campaign and continue to honor the lasting legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, I spoke in-depth with Sykes about the Legacy project, from development to distribution. Our conversation is below, lightly edited for clarity and length.  

Let’s rewind to the genesis of “Legacy: A Modern Renaissance” zine series. How did the idea first develop?

This time a year ago, U.S. Bank, who’s our partner for this program, came to us and said, “Hey, can you create a coffee table book?” They understood that The New York Times would be doing an editorial alignment with the 100th anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance. We said, “We could, but as a custom content studio, our lane really evolves around creating storytelling opportunities.” That’s when we started talking about maybe not a coffee table book, but what could be more realistic is a series of zines.

We wanted to bring the story forward. What does this idea of a Modern Renaissance look like? That’s when we came up with a “Legacy Fulfilled.” We wanted to spark this idea of a national dialog to really show and demonstrate that the Harlem Renaissance was this cultural phenomenon that continues today.

This is a first-of-its-kind program for T Brand Studio and U.S. Bank, where every single contributor on our platform and on this content is Black.

What was your T Brand Studio team hoping to accomplish with this project? 

This is a first-of-its-kind program for T Brand Studio and U.S. Bank, where every single contributor on our platform and on this content is Black. We wanted to remove barriers for Black creatives by not only giving them a platform to share new and untold stories but also to say to us, “These are the stories that I want to tell.” It’s a really huge deal.

The series leverages the talents of Black award-winning writers, poets, journalists, photographers, illustrators, and even a typographer, to specifically do a few things: We wanted to build awareness around the impact and influence of the Harlem Renaissance and grant access and opportunity to a new generation of Black cultural thinkers, which we’re really doing in our culture zine. We also wanted to shine a light on Black affluence because that was a specific, targeted area that U.S. Bank wanted us to speak to, and show people that wealth shows up in a myriad of ways. People are building wealth differently today. It’s not just the financial wealth, but it’s also the intellectual capital, and the historical value that brings to bear when we’re talking about inheritance.

We wanted to ask, across poetry and music and art and fashion and culture, What does the Black diaspora look like today, and how is the impact continuing globally? That’s where the zines come into play. 

People are building wealth differently today. It’s not just the financial wealth, but it’s also the intellectual capital, and the historical value that brings to bear when we’re talking about inheritance. 

Why did you decide on the zine form for this project?

The reason we chose zines is that during the Harlem Renaissance, zines were really designed (around 1918 through the 30s) to allow people without a voice to express themselves, to really communicate with others in the community, and lean into their artistry at the same time in a way that they hadn’t been allowed to do. So we said let’s use this idea of the zines as information for what we do today. 

The zines pay homage to the powerful underground press that existed during the Renaissance that became known for delivering prolific poetry and prose, delivering local news, and giving people cultural information. We wanted to create today’s zines to run as an insert inside The New York Times. It runs in a Sunday newspaper for all of our 600,000 home delivery subscribers. Each zine specifically amplifies how the Harlem Renaissance continues to inspire some of our most powerful cultural moments in America. 

Also with these zines, so much of it has been about giving access to people, but it’s also giving space and making space for new voices, for poetry, for prose, for local news, for cultural information. They’re inspired by that tradition that gave birth to this idea of old voices and new voices. So that’s what these zines do; they not only give access and opportunity, but they give space to people whose voices hadn’t been heard and were traditionally not heard in a mainstream environment.

What are some of the stories told within the pages of these zines? 

One is about a Black family of ranchers, The Bradfords— a fourth-generation family of Black ranchers in Oklahoma. I got to go out there and see them, and talk about what it means to really grow the foundation from the roots. What does that mean for family? What does it mean for legacy? What does it mean for the future? In my mind, that was a really important story to tell, and I knew we could do it through Black farmers, who represent less than 1% of all farmers in America today. 

We also spoke with Julian James, who shared a story about inheritance and the idea that money can mean a myriad of things. He had a Movado watch that was passed down to him by his stepfather. He was a man who thought about not the clothes making the man, but the man making the clothes, and how important it was for you to carry yourself as you went out the door. So that was something that Julian took from him, and now he says that every time he wears this watch, he thinks of his stepfather and his legacy. 

We had Mahogany L. Brown, the current poet-in-residence for the Lincoln Center, write a custom poem for the wealth zine, and she said that everything about this project just felt like home to her. Her marching orders were simple: I said, “If Langston Hughes talked about this idea of a “dream deferred,” how do we bring it forward and speak to what a dream fulfilled looks like?” So she took us to Harlem. She took us to education. She took us to inheritance. She took us to all of the places and spaces that Black folks lived in during the Harlem Renaissance and said this is where and how we’re succeeding today. I thought it was a beautiful nod to the Harlem Renaissance, and it really hit on all of the cylinders as it related to this storytelling.

Can you walk me through some of the editorial design decisions that were made when bringing these zines to life? I know you worked with typographer Tré Seals, for example, to create a custom typeface for the project.  

This is a project that is rooted in the research of the Harlem Renaissance. Many of us didn’t fully know what that impact and influence looked like back then, and how it still carries forward, but as we turned more pages and did more research and had more pre-interviews with experts, curators, museum owners, with founders of different types of companies, and artists themselves, we learned more and more and more. 

In that research process we learned that the original zines during the Harlem Renaissance were designed to allow people without a voice to express themselves, to communicate with others in the community, and lean into artistry. We did a handmade approach to texture and color, and used layered compositions as an intentional nod to those artists who had bootstrapped. 

We used custom typography called VTC Sarah, created by Tré Seals, the founder, designer, and typographer at Vocal Type. VTC Sarah was inspired by his great-grandparents. They were entrepreneurs and business owners, and their names were Sarah and Henry Johnson, and they were pillars of their community. They had provided financing and resources to their neighbors when banks wouldn’t, and that really helped facilitate hundreds of purchases and land sales to the Black community. Our art director, Bri Moran, literally held up Tré’s great grandparents’ marriage certificate at one point and said, “This is what is inspiring, the typeface throughout our zines.” So in working with Tré at every iteration, he made sure that the typeface spoke to those words and the stories that we were telling. 

With the zine’s digital hub launching last week and the physical culture zine mailing out in December, can you shed a bit more light on what’s depicted in that issue in particular? 

We’re celebrating what culture looks like through a lot of different Black creatives. It’s an homage to the arts, literature, dance, and music industries created by Black artisans during the Harlem Renaissance. 

Who are some of the creatives featured in the culture zine? 

We asked Emil Wilbekin, the former editor-in-chief of Vibe Magazine who now runs the platform Native Son, to take us back to having a parlor conversation. These were conversations that were happening in speakeasies and basements during the Harlem Renaissance, where people could really talk about the issues of the day. So we said, “What does that look like if we bring that 100 years forward?” Emil helped to not only moderate the conversation with other Black creatives from different fields, but he also was able to facilitate a Q&A at the Freehand Hotel in Manhattan. I loved this conversation. They talked about what the Harlem Renaissance means today, and the impact that the Harlem Renaissance is having on these particular creatives. 

We also talked to Naima J. Keith, an art curator and an educator at LACMA. She talked about paying tribute to the artisans that came before us, and this idea that because of those artisans in particular, now we can talk about skin tones. Now we can talk about Blackness and all of its authenticity, and how that comes to the table today in ways that it wasn’t before. 

Then there’s Shanari Freeman, who’s the executive chef of Cadence in Manhattan, and she talked about the idea of paying homage to the Harlem Renaissance through collaboration. She said that oftentimes we know what to do, but sometimes we don’t necessarily know how to do it, so let’s teach each other this idea of “each one, teach one.” 

Then we have Fredara M. Hadley, who’s an ethnomusicologist over at the Juilliard School. She talked about the idea of how dances from the Harlem Renaissance are being brought back today through troupes like THECouncil, a collective of five black women who are choreographers, producers, and directors who work with global brands and celebrities. 

What was the process like for developing the digital adaptation of the zine? What considerations went into that?

In addition to the print version of the culture issue, people across the globe will have access to a digital, flippable booklet of both zines, and those are going to be housed online, within a New York Times URL that encourages people to learn more about the resources and opportunities offered by U.S. Bank.

We had a long conversation early on about this idea of a digital hub, and I would always say, “Well, what would be the point of us creating something else if we already have our print zines?” And my team explained to me that it’s because not everybody has the same level of access, which is very important here. The one thing that we wanted to do with both of these zines is to give people opportunity and access, not only to the information but to the history. So that’s exactly what the hub is set out to do; now everyone—subscribers and non-subscribers of the New York Times—will be able to have access to it. 

It’s a great opportunity for us as a custom content studio to be able to take these zines and this content in its physical form and then allow it to live on digitally while also giving people this access. That was the lesson learned for us in our wealth zine— people were like, “This is amazing. How do we get it? How do I share it? How do I link to it?” But as opposed to thinking of it as a problem, we saw it as an opportunity in order for the zines to continue to live and give access to everyone.

The post T Brand Studio Celebrates the Centennial of the Harlem Renaissance with Zine Series & Digital Hub appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

As we’ve expanded our branding categories for the awards in recent years, it felt only natural this year to bring social media content design into the spotlight as its own highlighted category. We’re thrilled to see your most dynamic and innovative work.

Social media content design is the art and strategy of crafting visually engaging, impactful, and platform-specific materials that resonate with target audiences. It’s both strategic and creative, combining typography, imagery, color, and branding elements to deliver messages effectively while maintaining consistency with a brand’s identity.

Beyond aesthetics, successful social media design leverages storytelling, user experience principles, and data-driven insights to forge connections, inspire action, and amplify brand presence in the fast-paced digital landscape. Designers must also consider the unique dimensions, audience behaviors, and algorithms of each platform, from Instagram Reels and TikTok trends to LinkedIn thought leadership posts. This responsiveness ensures that the content is optimized for visibility and engagement while staying relevant to real-time conversations.

Social media content design is like creating a living, breathing extension of a brand—it evolves daily, responding to trends, emotions, and conversations in real time. In social media, design isn’t static; it’s a conversation starter. It’s about finding the perfect balance between aesthetics and purpose, creating content that captivates in seconds but stays memorable long after.

Amelia Nash, designer and digital storyteller

Our jury will be looking for content that deeply resonates with audiences through personal touchpoints. A standout example is Spotify’s annual “Wrapped” campaign. Released at the end of each year, this campaign offers users a recap of their listening habits, including statistics like their most-played songs, favorite genres, top artists, and total minutes streamed. Beyond its marketing brilliance, “Wrapped” becomes a viral phenomenon as users share their personalized results across Instagram Stories, X threads, and TikTok videos, amplifying Spotify’s reach organically.

Another quality we hope to see is campaigns that build loyalty by tapping into cultural relevance. Patagonia’s mission-led social content is a strong example. Dedicated to environmental activism, Patagonia’s channels frequently highlight initiatives such as recycling awareness, the impacts of climate change, and the importance of using your voice (vote) to drive change. For instance, Instagram posts and X threads from the brand this year focused on encouraging sustainable practices, sharing actionable tips, and showcasing the work of environmental advocates—all while fostering a loyal community aligned with its core values.

Humor is also a winning strategy for social media. Campaigns that entertain and engage often stand out in users’ feeds. One of our favorites this year, tied to the football season, is Holl and Artists’ “Football is for Food” campaign for Uber Eats. This playful campaign uses a faux conspiracy theory linking football to food to promote its delivery services. From TikTok skits to Instagram Reels, Uber Eats has brilliantly tapped into the current fascination with conspiracy-driven humor while remaining lighthearted and fun.

Social media thrives in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment where responsiveness is key. Designers and strategists must be nimble, adapting to emerging trends, breaking news, and audience feedback in real-time. This agility allows brands to stay relevant and deepen their connection with their audience.

“Social media content is not only about looking great in a feed; it’s about crafting moments that genuinely connect with people, whether through humor, storytelling, or bold visuals,” says designer and digital storyteller Amelia Nash. “The beauty of this work is its immediacy—every design has the chance to be part of something bigger happening right now.”

Whatever social media story you’ve created for your clients, we’d love to see it! Submit your best work today and take advantage of our Early Bird Rate before it ends on December 12.

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