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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

First a reminder of the weekly affliction.

“Sunday Scaries” is a term that refers to the anxiety or dread you feel on Sunday, typically as the weekend wraps up and you start anticipating the workweek ahead. This feeling can stem from a variety of sources, such as stress over workload, a busy week ahead, or simply the end of a relaxing weekend.

In other words, Sunday nights can suck.

But in Mexico City last week at our Master Gunners creative workshop, I heard a cure for these Sunday Scaries.

I’ll call it Bruno Regalo’s “Sunday School.”

Bruno Regalo is the brilliant Global Chief Design Officer of TBWA’s DXD (Design by Disruption) Group. He’s also one of the leaders of TBWA\Chiat\Day LA.

Bruno is a self-taught creative superstar. And now I can share a window into how he fuels his success.

“Sunday School.”

At 6 pm on Sunday evenings, when the “scaries” creep in and become acute, Bruno sets up shop for four hours of study.

In fact, he’s been doing this for 11 years! And he swears it makes his Sunday his true “funday.”

Here’s his routine in his own words.

“…1st hour is for analog study, books, and everything you can’t find online (for example, right now I’m studying everything that was printed and design editorials from the early 2000s). 

2nd hour is spent cataloging all the content from the first hour and then practicing it technically for an hour. 

The 3rd hour is dedicated to studying everything happening currently: inside and outside of advertising and everything visual (like movie opening credits, posters from new museum exhibits, visuals from campaigns launched that week, and everything I photographed or saved during the week — basically, everything that caught my attention). 

4th hour, I catalog all of this with specific captions and tags in an online system (some examples of tags and descriptions: film credits, oriental illustration, typographic animation, classical art, surrealism, etc.), and during this 4th hour, I execute and practice something specific from this final stage of study. This way, I always cover something from the past and something from the present/future.

The goal is simple: every week be better than my last week’s version [of what caught] my attention).“

Now, isn’t that a whole lot better use of time than worrying about that Monday morning meeting?

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

Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash.

The post An Antidote to the Sunday Scaries appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

The seven concurrent generations are:

Greatest Generation – born 1901 -1927

Silent Generation – 1928 – 1945

Baby Boomers – 1946 – 1964

Generation X – 1964 – 1980

Millennials – 1981 – 1996

Generation Z – 1996 – 2012

Generation Alpha – 2013 – Present

Think about the first 20 years of life for people born in each of these generations. Think about how those people developed attachments to objects and experiences during those first 20 years. Specifically, think about the music each generation listened to as we grew up, formed social identities, went to school, dated, partied, got jobs, maybe married, and had kids.

If I asked each of you the question: “What’s your favorite band?” I’m almost certain your answer would be one from the era in which you spent your first 20 years.

Imagine asking someone from Gen Z that question. What are the odds that they’d say, “The Carpenters?” Million to one? More? Ask the same questions of a Silent. Think they’d say, “The Ramones?”

My guess is that a very small percentage of us would cite a band that became popular in an era after we were 20.

Think about that. I’m a Baby Boomer. Thousands of bands have appeared and recorded songs…some of them great bands and great songs…after 1967. My favorite band is The Beatles. Not surprising. The Beatles first appeared on American radio in December 1963, right in the peak of my adolescence. Sixty years later, I’ll still listen to “I Saw Her Standing There” and just smile!

And, I love Steely Dan’s music. Their first record was released in 1972. I little outside my arbitrary 20-year window, but close enough for me to dive into the band’s great combination of melody, harmony, and….maybe most of all…enigmatic, ironic lyrics.

As music evolved into newer genres, I found myself less inclined to choose to listen to newer groups. The Police are still part of my rotation, but, not Nirvana. Or, Pearl Jam. Or, Radiohead. Nope.

I had also “aged out” of intentionally listening to a lot of bands by the time hip-hop arrived. Oh, the occasional Run DMC song, maybe. But, not Public Enemy or NWA.

Now, why this trip down memory lane? To remind myself, and all of you, that our preferences for many things in our lives are formed and solidified in those first 20 years of our lives. And, once formed, they are pretty difficult to change.

Psychologists have noticed this!

“Openness to Experience,” one of the Big Five Personality Traits, gives us a glimpse of how flexible each of us is in this regard. If you like music and score very high on Openness, chances are you’ve listened to some bands from outside your 20-year formative period. Not just once or twice, but chosen to explore their music. You check out the new music charts in search of creative artists who speak to you. You might even have recent favorites.

If you score very low on that dimension, chances are you don’t purposefully seek out new bands. You might see someone on a late-night TV show and think they’re interesting, but the odds are they won’t replace your early-life favorites on your playlists.

This might seem like a common sense reality, but if we think about it for a minute we’ll see that we are all missing out on a lot of great music! Our established preferences have created musical “no-fly zones”; whole genres of music that we never get a chance to experience because we’ve “disqualified” them as “not for me.” (Guilty as charged regarding “country.”)

Now, take these music insights and apply them to other areas of your life. Like food. When was the last time you tried a food item from an unfamiliar national or regional cuisine? It used to be hard to find authentic Asian fast food, but a trip to a local Asian supermarket (remember when they didn’t exist?) often also means discovering a food court with an amazing array of carry-out stalls serving unfamiliar items described in their native languages.

Will most of us try any of these odd-looking dishes made from ingredients we’re not used to? The chances of you doing so are very highly correlated with your score on the Openness to Experience trait.

Just as we might have discovered that we really do like some of Billie Eilish’s music, reluctant Silent Generation members might also find that they’d actually choose to eat sushi…if they pushed their Openness to Experience just a little outside their usual boundaries and actually tried some.

For me, the learning is, there’s a lot of joy out there if we give ourselves a chance to find it.

(Oh, and if you’d like to see where you fall on the various Big Five Personality traits, here’s a free version of the test.)

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

Header image: Unsplash+ with Getty Images.

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I have learned that what helps in moments of heartache or anxiety or fear is disconnecting from the thing that is making it worse (hey, breaking news alerts), focusing on my breath, slowing my heart rate, and finding a source of gratitude.

Gratitude is a balm. Scientifically-proven.

But it seems the things we give thanks for most are often outside ourselves — our family, our kids, a warm home, a beautiful meal.

Today, find one thing you love about yourself that you are grateful for:

Your softness. Your tenacity. Your empathy. Your creativity. Your heart. Your values. Your resourcefulness. Your openness. Your resilience. Your loyalty. Your faith. Your imagination. Your idealism. Your wisdom. Your fire.

Whatever it is, it is an essential part of what makes you, you. More than that, it is what makes you proud to be you. So name it.

Now make a promise to hold onto it. Celebrate it. Protect it. Write it down if it’s helpful and tuck it away somewhere.

We talk a lot about fighting for the people we love and the issues we care about.

Let this be a gentle reminder — for both of us — not to forget to fight for ourselves, too.

Liz Gumbinner is a Brooklyn-based writer, award-winning ad agency creative director, and OG mom blogger who was called “funny some of the time” by an enthusiastic anonymous commenter. This was originally posted on her Substack “I’m Walking Here!,” where she covers culture, media, politics, and parenting.

Header image courtesy of the author.

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Other recent chopping-abouts on IG.

Rachel Cabitt on the technicolor influence of Kayōkyoku Records, where 1960s Japanese and Western cultures collide.

Loving Fred Aldous’ photobooth collection of goodies.

Director Bryan Woods on putting a “no generative AI was used in the making of this film” statement at the end of Heretic:

“We are in a time where I feel like creatively we’re in one of the big ethical battles, and the race is already ahead of us. The importance is to have these conversations before they force things in, just because it makes sense from a corporate structure. It’s incredibly dangerous. If there’s not people to throttle it, we’re going to find ourselves in five to ten years in a very dangerous situation. … AI is an amazing technology. Beautiful things will come of it, and it’s jaw-dropping. What is being created with generative AI and video … it’s amazing we could create that technology. Now let’s bury it underground with nuclear warheads, ‘cause it might kill us all.”

Could this become standard practice, please? To be posted alongside the “no animals were harmed” and “no this story isn’t real, honest” notices.

Artist and photographer Yasmin Masri’s Near 2,143 McDonald’s, documenting over 2,000 McDonald’s locations through Google Street View. Seen a few books and projects over the years use Street View as a source, but I’m unclear about how fair usage/public-domainy it is.

“For some reason, in July 1985, the Daily Mirror’s pseudo-saucy comic strip Jane ran a series of comics centered on – oh yes – Jane and boyfriend Chris hanging out with Sir Clive Sinclair.”

Kurt Cobain’s Youth Culture Scream Time.

Chris Ware on Richard Scarry and the art of children’s literature:

“The thing is, “people” weren’t anywhere to be seen in Best Word Book Ever. Instead, the whole world was populated by animals: rabbits, bears, pigs, cats, foxes, dogs, raccoons, lions, mice, and more. Somehow, though, that made the book’s view of life feel more real and more welcoming. A dollhouse-like cutaway view of a rabbit family in their house getting ready for their day didn’t seem to just picture the things themselves—they were the things themselves, exuding a grounded warmth that said, “Yes, everywhere we live in houses and cook together and get dressed, just like you.”

One must never underestimate the power of anthropomorphism in normalising empathy and diversity for children. I grew up with countless Scarry titles (to this day Peasant Pig and the Terrible Dragon is one of my favourite books) and they definitely shaped my view of the world.

It’s November and therefore LEGO have thrown a massive chunk of dad-bait into the universe in time for Christmas. As if a 3000-brick model of Shackleton’s The Endurance wasn’t enough, you can also get an extra set with a minifig of expedition photographer Frank Hurley.

There’s absolutely no need for Suede’s Dog Man Star to be thirty. It’s just unseemly.

That is all.

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

Header image courtesy of the author.

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I actually burst out laughing when she said it, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. I turned to Susan, who was driving home.

Did I lose my sense of humor at some point?

Yes—she said.

When?

When your dad died, she answered, without missing a beat.

My father was a hilarious, complicated man; we were so close that the way I speak still mirrors the way he did, almost exactly. Sometimes when I cough, I can hear him and I find myself looking around to see if he’s behind me. Our storytelling styles and rhythms were the same. Our worldviews were the same. I learned The Funny from him. I also learned from him that humor and pathos are fueled by the same energy, and, therefore, inextricably bound to each other.

I learned from my father that humor and pathos are fueled by the same energy, and therefore inextricably bound to each other.

The only time my father lost his sense of humor was when he experienced a triptych of profound failure: he lost his business, he declared bankruptcy, and my mother asked him to leave, all within a year. He literally became a different person almost overnight, who carried his body like a burden. This began to manifest in the way he treated it. He began eating foul food at a greasy spoon on Forty-first Street; he drank too many Gibsons. He stopped his daily walks; he stopped looking at art, stopped listening to music, stopped reading. His health, both physical and spiritual, plummeted; his heart actually broke. It would be another four years until I heard him laugh again, which, for a man whose life was built upon a foundation of humor and humanity, was forever, and he very nearly didn’t survive it.

And then, Susan went on, when you lost the family—

I took a deep breath.

And when Harris died, she added.

I looked out the window. I started to hyperventilate.

And then, she said, turning to me, you started attracting people who just didn’t laugh, like ever—- she stopped for a moment—

It was your new normal, she said, like they spoke your new language, and you recognized each other.

Humor and laughter do not mitigate pain and anguish. They’re just the B side to it.

I had never considered it: that everything and every part of one’s life is touched by humor, and therefore, also its loss. That when someone who looks at the world in a manner imbued with a combination of the absurd and the ironic, with oddity, contrast, kindness, and humanity —- the things that together make up the seeds of humor —- and suddenly that changes, their world changes with it. I knew —- or I was told, anyway —- that even my writing had changed during that time; my narrative voice was suddenly different. (I explain narrative voice to my students as a piece’s DNA, its hair and eye color, its build, and the way it walks.) My editors told me that my voice had gotten chillier, clipped, terse. On some days, when my world was at its worst, I had trouble getting out of bed. I stopped playing music. And when I stepped into the kitchen — the place I went for quiet repair and (heaven help me for saying it) self-care —- everything I made, simple or complicated, was inedible. Eggs were cooked to the point of explosion. Roast chickens were incinerated. Toast was carbonized.

And I couldn’t even laugh at myself.

I remember back in 2001, for weeks after 9/11, it was generally accepted that we couldn’t laugh. How on earth could we. We were grief-stricken; we were devastated. We were a world utterly in shock. Thousands had died. People I knew had died. Two days later, I lost my editorial director job in Connecticut—the one that had enabled me to move here from New York. (What will you do now—pump gas? my mother asked.) My father, watching the attacks on television that morning, told me he wouldn’t live another year; he didn’t. Every day, I sat down with the New York Times and read the little thumbnail snapshots of the victims. This one had just gotten engaged to her college boyfriend; that one was about to retire the following week. This one made the very best meatballs. Another had come from a long legacy of firefighters dating back to the 1800s and had just become a grandfather.

It was weeks later when the hosts of late-night television, openly weeping, wondered aloud if it would ever be okay to laugh again. It had to be. It had to be. Because humor is sustenance with a caloric weight and density; it feeds our hearts and our minds in the same way that food does. Without it, we starve. As long as it is not at someone else’s expense, it feeds our spirits. It would be another three months before Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz’s New Yorkistan cover appeared in The New Yorker in December 2001. These were all tender social cues: it was okay to laugh again because it was understood that humor and laughter do not mitigate pain and anguish. They’re just the B side to it, and therefore, they must exist for reason and balance.

Humor is sustenance with a caloric weight and density, like food. Without it, we starve.

It was a confluence of events that siphoned the laughter and the humor out of me, like gas from a car. Much of it was loss—so much mind-spinning, stunning loss, all of which happened at the same time, that I could barely put one foot in front of the other. That much loss happening all at once changes a person at a cellular level. I could no longer feed myself or my family or my heart or my spirit. I lost the language of laughter and humor. And because like seeks like, I inadvertently attracted people who shared my new lexicon. They were mostly warm, lovely, and kind people, and also utterly dour. They spoke in a dialect that was now familiar to me. The language we shared felt like a mother tongue devoid of the warmly ironic and the absurd —- that marriage out of which one is able to see the world in all its hell and its beauty, and still schlep forward day after day, laughing and crying all at once.

I do not know exactly when humor returned to my life, but when it did, it was as though I’d somehow, finally, come home to a language I remembered once speaking, but hadn’t heard for a while. It was like someone took off my glasses, cleaned them, and handed them back to me. Everything changed: my teaching, my writing, my cooking, my outlook. I was able to feed myself and the people I love again. I stopped carbonizing the toast, and stopped boiling the eggs until they were little squash balls. I got out of bed and moved forward into the world.

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 (and get recipes!), or keep up with her archives on PRINT.

Header image: Unsplash+ with Kseniya Lapteva; all other images courtesy of the author.

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How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis—a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism—a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition? Do we value stability and control, or evolution and learning?

Here’s a talk I gave about the book at the Cato Institute in 1998, followed by a critique by David Frum and a discussion. Everyone is very young.

Because the book came out amid the exuberance of the dot-com boom, many people assumed it was inspired by that optimistic era. It was not.

To the contrary, the ideas arose from the turbulence of the early 1990s, a period of great promise and great disruption—much like ours today. Economic statistics looked generally good but there was tremendous anxiety about layoffs and restructuring, especially among white-collar middle managers. (Here’s a review I wrote of a book on that subject.) The “angry white man” became a political touchstone, exemplified by Michael Douglas’s character in Falling Down, whose trailer’s scenes resemble a Trump tirade. Trade and immigration policy, once the concern of policy wonks and special-interest groups, became hot-button issues. In California, an influx of newcomers, including me, fueled the anti-growth measures that would create today’s housing shortages—reversing one of the many things I’d loved about coming to L.A.

Although I’d written an early version of the stasis-versus-dynamism model for The Washington Post in 1990, my ideas really began to cohere around 1993, when my husband spent a term teaching at the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern. Although still living in L.A., I used to visit Steve as often as possible. That year marked the centennial of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the great world’s fair held in Chicago. It’s best known today from Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City and inspired the line “thine alabaster cities gleam” in “America the Beautiful.”¹

While visiting Steve and reading local media, I became interested in both the fair itself and how its optimistic vision contrasted with the populist resentment that was roiling much of the country in the late 19th century.² I wrote several things inspired by the Exposition, including a talk at Princeton (attended by a half dozen people, including my husband and his parents) and parts of the proposal for The Future and Its Enemies. Those no longer survive, but the following essay, originally published in the November 1993 issue of Reason, does.³

This year marks the centennial of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the great fair that brought the world to Chicago. In 1893, 28 million visitors wandered through its classically inspired buildings, sampling oranges at the California exhibit and iced cocoa at the Java Village, riding the first Ferris Wheel (which took 40-person cars 264 feet in the air), marveling at the moving pictures of Thomas Edison’s new kinetoscope.

The fair was a tribute to world cultures, technological progress, and material abundance. It captured the spirit of its age.

But history looks different when you’re living through it. Then, as now, progress was not uniformly benevolent. 1893 was a year not unlike 1993, a time of worldwide recession and long-term economic restructuring.

Farmers, in particular, resented the Columbian Exposition’s display of wealth and optimism. For them, abundance meant not oranges and kinetoscopes but falling crop prices and an uncertain future. The Farmer’s Alliance in Gillespie County, Texas, resolved to ask that the fair’s organizers “let the world of pleasure, leisure, and Style see the men and women in their jeans, faded callicoes, cotton-checks who by their labor and handicraft have made it possible for such an Exhibit. Let the Farmer’s cabin, the miner’s shanty, and the tenement of factory hands be beside those magnificent buildings which represent the State and the Nation.”

In 1893, the farmers’ request, and the resentment and anxiety behind it, went mostly unheeded. In 1993, similar sentiments have thrown the country—or at least the opinion makers who define the spirit of our age—into an anxiety attack over jobs.

We hear the voices of those 19th-century farmers in Ross Perot’s cry to “Save Your Job, Save Our Country” by rejecting free trade with Mexico. They echo in the letter to the editor of The Atlantic that declared, “WalMart is the embodiment of the excessive greed of the eighties and the horrendous devastation that has been its byproduct.” They murmur throughout Robert Reich’s The Work of Nations, whispering not of “the world of pleasure” versus “labor and handicraft” but of “symbolic analysts” versus “routine producers” and “in-person servers.”

The mass production revolution traded the independence of farming for the relative security of factory work. Our current “age of discontinuity,” in Peter Drucker’s prescient phrase, reverses that flow. Technological change, global competition, decentralized institutions, and knowledge-based economics have disrupted—and in some cases destroyed—the stable organizations and predictable careers born of the very changes that displaced the farmers of 1893.

We’ve moved from mainframes to laptops, from union members to entrepreneurs, from overtime to flextime, from Ma Bell to Friends and Family. Temporary work, that bane of social critics who long for assembly-line security, has become the safety net for independence-minded people with skills. It allows them to move across the country, to quit jobs with near-impunity, to break into new industries.

But today’s leaders suggest that economic dynamism is either a natural disaster like the Mississippi floods—an unstoppable force against which we are powerless—or a conspiracy of the elite against the masses. The former is the position of most Clintonites, the latter of self-styled populists. In 1993, we see only the faded jeans and calicoes, the tenements and shanties. It is not fashionable to talk about Ferris Wheels and cocoa.

The fashions that dictate a scared new world stem partly from the understandable desire for the products of dynamism without its costs. Politicians who promise utopia, who speak of “electronic superhighways” while pretending they can be built without upheaval, only feed resentment on the part of displaced workers who feel they’ve been conned. Yet talking only of the inevitability of economic change, without mentioning its benefits, drives the fearful into the arms of those who peddle the politics of stasis.

The question no one, least of all Perot, will ask is, What should your country sacrifice to save your job? Consider IBM. In late July, the company said it would eliminate 35,000 jobs by the end of 1994. Since 1986, it has slashed its payroll from more than 400,000 employees to about 250,000.

That’s quite a shock. For decades, IBM represented security. Although it required constant upheaval in the personal lives of its organization men—people joked that the initials stood for “I’ve Been Moved”—it promised lifetime employment and the prestige of association with a progressive big company.

It also offered a sense of purpose. In the old days (not coincidentally, Ross Perot’s formative business years), IBM was the future. It was moving America into the age of data processing, a future where “black boxes” with spinning tape drives manned by brainy guys in white shirts would make the world clean, efficient, and orderly. (To social critics, of course, the guys in white shirts represented conformist “mass man,” consigned to live a bland, unfulfilling existence in “little boxes made of ticky-tacky.”)

But that wasn’t the future we got. Instead, long-haired California misfits exploded the centralized mainframe and put a computer on everybody’s desk. Nowadays the biggest question facing computer users isn’t whether the data-processing department will accept their job order but whether to wait six months to buy an even better machine at an even lower price.

Despite its best efforts to keep up, and at times they were very good, the old IBM couldn’t adapt to a decentralized, often chaotic market in which desktop machines took on the power of mainframes and brand loyalty was nearly nonexistent. “Everything I learned at IBM is worthless,” a laid-off engineer told the Los Angeles Times. It remains to be seen whether IBM can reinvent itself or whether, like the Sears catalog, it belongs to the ages.

The anxiety peddlers never ask, Would you give up your laptop to preserve 150,000 jobs at IBM? Do you wish the Mac had never been invented? If you could, would you wipe out desktop publishing, saving not only all those IBMers but also untold numbers of typesetters and paste-up artists?

The personal-computer revolution, like the industrial revolution, is not a natural disaster, though it may feel like one to those whose jobs flooded out. It is, like the transportation revolution that made possible oranges in Chicago, a technological response to the desires of millions for a better life.

Those desires do not please our social critics. In an age of mass production, they railed about the alienation of the worker. Now they complain about the service economy and the shortage of high-paid, workingmen’s jobs even as they denounce frivolous consumption and planet-threatening growth. They long for dark, satanic mills.

It is easy to be nostalgic for the world we have lost, easier still when voters can be bought with nostalgia for the jobs they once held. But the age of discontinuity, too, recalls earlier ages. It asks a familiar-sounding question: Are we better off than we were 100 years ago? Who was right—the farmer or the fair?

The Atlantic recently published a series of 30 high-quality photos from the World’s Columbian Exposition. Highly recommended.

1. It gets a negative reference in The Fountainhead, echoing the modernist belief that the White City was a beaux arts abomination that set back architectural progress in America for a generation. Ayn Rand may have been unconventional in many ways, but her views of architecture reflected modernist orthodoxy. ↩︎
2. Given the role of inflation in this year’s election, it’s worth noting that the late 1900s were a period of serious deflation, which is equally annoying to people—including farmers—who need debt financing. The value of the dollars you pay your loans back in is greater than the value of the dollars you borrowed. It’s the reverse of what happened to homeowners with mortgages in the 1970s. ↩︎
3. That issue’s cover story, a feature by the great Glenn Garvin on immigrants in California’s informal economy, is well worth a read. ↩︎

Virginia Postrel is a writer with a particular interest in the intersection of commerce, culture, and technology. Author of “The Future and Its Enemies,” “The Substance of Style,” “The Power of Glamour,” and, most recently, “The Fabric of Civilization.” This essay was originally published in Virginia’s newsletter on Substack.

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The Power of Legacy in Law Firm Brands

Many of these law firms have built their reputations over generations. Their logos, colors, and visual identity have become synonymous with trust, authority, and dependability. These elements are not just design choices; they are symbols of the firm’s history, representing its core values and the relationships it has cultivated with clients. Tampering too much with these symbols risks alienating the clients who have come to associate the firm’s brand with excellence, consistency, and expertise.

However, in today’s digital-first world, relying solely on tradition can be a double-edged sword. As the legal industry becomes more competitive, clients increasingly seek firms that demonstrate both stability and forward-thinking innovation. This is where many firms struggle. The challenge lies in respecting the legacy while adapting the brand to resonate with new audiences and emerging digital platforms.

Why Modernization is Essential

Modernization is not just about aesthetics. It is about ensuring the firm’s brand resonates with the expectations of today’s clients, employees, and stakeholders. Younger clients and associates, in particular, are looking for signs that a firm is future-oriented, adaptable, and in tune with the digital age. Firms that resist change risk being perceived as outdated, even if their legal acumen remains unparalleled.

Furthermore, a law firm’s digital presence is often its first impression. Whether through a website, social media channels, or email communications, an up-and-coming generation of clients will judge a firm’s relevance and professionalism based on its online identity. A modern, cohesive brand that works seamlessly across digital and physical touchpoints signals that the firm is both competent and up-to-date.

Keys to Modernizing Without Losing Tradition

Audit Your Brand’s Core Identity. Before embarking on any redesign, it’s crucial to conduct a thorough audit of the existing brand. What elements of the firm’s identity are deeply tied to its legacy? This could be a logo, specific colors, or even the tone of the firm’s communications. Identifying these essential elements ensures that they remain central to the brand, providing continuity even as other aspects are updated.

Evolve, Don’t Overhaul. The goal of a brand update should be evolution, not revolution. A subtle refresh of the logo, typography, or color palette can often do the trick, modernizing the brand without alienating existing clients. Law firms can look to the corporate world for examples of successful evolutions: companies like Coca-Cola, IBM, and even the New York Times have modernized their identities multiple times without straying far from their core visual elements.

Incorporate Digital-First Thinking. A key part of modernizing any brand today is ensuring it functions well in digital environments. Established firms need to consider how their brand translates across devices, from websites and social media to mobile apps. This might require simplifying logos for smaller screens or adopting more flexible typography that looks equally professional on a smartphone as it does in print.

Embrace Storytelling. Modern branding is as much about narrative as it is about design. For law firms with rich histories, there’s an opportunity to leverage that legacy through storytelling. Use the firm’s long history as an asset in marketing materials, website copy, and even social media. While there is a value in stability and heritage, clients want to see how those qualities are being leveraged to solve contemporary legal challenges.

Maintain Professionalism with a Contemporary Edge. While it’s important to remain professional, modernizing a brand can bring a contemporary edge that appeals to a younger generation of clients and employees. This could be as simple as choosing modern fonts or incorporating more dynamic website features like animation, video, podcasts, or client testimonials in innovative formats.

Seek Client Feedback When modernizing a brand, it’s often beneficial to involve clients in the discovery process. What do they value most about the firm’s identity? What do they see as outdated? Gathering this feedback can help ensure that your brand update strikes the right balance between old and new. It also signals to clients that their opinions matter, which helps strengthen client relationships.

Redesigning the brand identity of a legacy law firm is no small feat, but it is essential in today’s rapidly changing landscape. By balancing tradition with innovation, law firms can create a brand that honors their history while positioning themselves for continued success in the digital age. The key is to evolve thoughtfully—preserving the core of the brand while embracing the opportunities that modern design and technology offer. In doing so, firms can continue to project trust, stability, and professionalism, while also appealing to the expectations of modern clients.

This post was originally published on Lynda’s LinkedIn newsletter, Marketing without Jargon. Lynda leads a team at Decker Design that focuses on helping law firms build differentiated brands.

Header image: Unsplash+ with Resource Database.

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The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. The book itself felt like a magical artifact, something special. For starters, it was longer. It was a grander story than the other books I was reading then, with bigger words, made-up languages, poetry, and songs. Reading it made me feel older in a way that made me proud, but it was still approachable enough to be exciting and digestible as a kid. I remember reading it back then and thinking, “Someday, I’m going to read this to my kids.” Which was a thought I didn’t have about nearly anything else at that age.

Well, about three decades and four kids later (baby Luka was born this past August!), I’m doing it; I’m reading The Hobbit to my kids. And to my delight, they love it. Almost every night as we wrap up family dinner, my daughter Rafi (our oldest) will say, “I can’t wait to read The Hobbit tonight!” I usually sit and read them about half a chapter per night, and then Rafi grabs the book and reads ahead (but she’s fine with me re-reading the same parts the next night for her brothers’ benefit). It’s family time together, and they’re also fully invested in the epic story of Bilbo Baggins and his adventures in Middle Earth.

Story is such a huge part of the human experience. Much like a beautiful building is the output of good architecture, a useful product is the output of good industrial design, and a compelling advertisement is the output of good graphic design: stories are the primary output of good business design.

The Power of Storytelling

Whether you’re a kid or an adult, stories are woven into almost every aspect of our lives — appearing in diverse forms and contexts. Perhaps the most prominent examples are the books, movies, shows, and video games we watch, listen to, and play — each with a structured story designed to captivate us. Over fifty-five million people watched the second season of The Rings of Power, a new show diving into Tolkien’s Middle Earth history, complete with elves, wizards, and yes, hobbits — and with themes like good versus evil (of course), hope and unity against darkness, identity and heritage, sacrifice and leadership, and more.

Journalism is stories. The word “news” is short for “new stories.” The media frequently uses storytelling to report on events, creating a narrative around facts to make information more relatable and easier to understand. As TV news entered the fray and had to compete with shows like The Rings of Power for viewership, news became increasingly more narratively compelling.

Then there’s social media — not only are we telling our own stories through our posts, but there’s a format called “Stories,” video snapshots of our lives in narrative form. Ads are stories. Political campaigns are stories about the candidates and the future they hope to create. Most religions are built on narratives — stories from sacred texts, myths, and parables that convey moral lessons, cultural values, and spiritual guidance. Music is stories — often, songs are structured narratively; think: Bob Dylan and Taylor Swift. And if the song isn’t a story, there’s always a story behind the music.

A story is a structured collection of information that conveys events, emotions, characters, and lessons, ultimately providing meaning. In The Science of Storytelling, author Will Storr shares research that suggests language evolved principally to connect with each other and share social information, also known as gossip, amongst Stone Age tribes. “We’d tell tales about the moral rights and wrongs of other people, punish the bad behavior, reward the good, and thereby keep everyone cooperating and the tribe in check.” In the book, he refers to the psychologist Professor Roy Baumeister’s writing: ‘Life is change that yearns for stability.’ Storr says, “Story is a form of play that allows us to feel we’ve lost control without actually placing us in danger.”

Similarly, in Wired for Story, author Lisa Cron explores how stories engage our brains at a biological level. She argues that the brain is “wired” to pay attention to stories because they help us understand how to survive and thrive in the world. Cron posits that stories evolved to help us practice for real life. They provide a mental simulation that helps us understand others, navigate social situations, and make decisions.

I love The Hobbit because Bilbo isn’t some sort of superhero; in fact, he’s the opposite, and often complains and thinks about how much he’d rather be at home eating in front of the fireplace than be on an adventure — he complains, but he sticks with it — he’s a hobbit, but he’s us, he’s human. I could simply tell my kids to be brave when they’re scared. Or I can read them The Hobbit and they can think about Bilbo Baggins and reflect on how they’d react if a colony of giant spiders had 12 of their friends tied up in webs, and it was up to them to save them. By reading my kids The Hobbit, I’m helping them understand courage, the power of friendship and collaboration, resilience in the face of adversity, and the importance of staying true to yourself.

Story Structure

Cron writes, “We think in story, which means we instinctively look for meaning in everything that happens to us.” At its core, a story has several essential elements that make it compelling and meaningful: a character (or characters), often with a specific desire or goal, encounters a conflict or obstacle and undergoes a journey that leads to a resolution or transformation. The journey is the narrative arc that keeps the audience engaged — through a build-up and release — and generates emotional responses, insights, and empathy.

The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy once said, “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” If you think about it, it is one type of story: when a person leaves home on a journey, they become a stranger somewhere else. And when a stranger comes to town, by definition, they’ve left home and traveled to the new town. Over time, natural story archetypes like Tolstoy’s evolved and became particularly powerful at driving meaning, and you can use them all in business design to great effect.

In The Hero’s Journey story archetype, a character (the hero) sets out on a journey to achieve a specific goal; they face trials and challenges, receive help, and undergo a transformation, returning home changed. Think Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, Neo in The Matrix, and Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games.

Author Donald Miller pulls out an intriguing element of The Hero’s Journey as it relates to business in his book Building a StoryBrand. He writes, “Your customer should be the hero of the story, not your brand.” He goes on to illuminate how many of our favorite stories feature a guide and — once you realize this — you see it in everything. Luke has Obi-Wan Kenobi, Neo has Morpheus, Katniss has Shamus, Harry has Hagrid, Dorthy has Glinda, Frodo has Gandalf, and on and on and on. Miller urges business leaders to make their brand “the guide” for the customer in their own story, helping them reach their personal goals.

Similarly, there’s The Quest story archetype, which focuses on collective objectives rather than one hero’s personal growth or transformation. In this archetype, the companions go on a journey to acquire something of great value, encountering many obstacles along the way. Examples of The Quest are plentiful, including The Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones, and The Wizard of Oz.

More archetypes: Rags-to-Riches is a classic — and useful in business because it often has a character rising from humble beginnings, overcoming adversity, and achieving success, wealth, or greatness (Cinderella, Harry Potter, Pretty Woman). Tragedy: the protagonist’s actions lead to negative outcomes, often because of a fatal flaw — these stories make great cautionary tales, think Macbeth or Requiem for a Dream. Conversely, the Comedy archetype centered around misunderstandings, mistaken identities, or social mishaps — think The Hangover, Bridge Jones’s Diary, etc.

Another classic is The Underdog archetype: the main character, who is weaker or disadvantaged, faces a powerful adversary or systemic challenge; despite the odds, they triumph due to resilience, cleverness, or sheer determination. There are so many to choose from: Rocky, Rudy, Karate Kid. There’s the Forbidden Love type — the characters fall in love, but external forces forbid their relationship, and the pair struggle against the constraints keeping them apart: Romeo and Juliet, Titanic, The Notebook.

There’s the Coming-of-Age Story: Stand by Me, Boyhood, and Lady Bird. Let’s not forget Mysteries, where the protagonist tries to solve a puzzle, uncover a secret, or discover the truth — the story follows them as they piece together clues, dodge red herrings, and solve the case.

Lastly (of the ones I’ll mention here — there are more), my absolute favorite: The Heist. A group of diverse individuals come together to execute a daring plan, often involving stealing something (but not always). Each member of the group typically brings a unique skill, and there are twists, setbacks, and betrayals along the way. Examples: Ocean’s Eleven, The Italian Job, and Inception.

These archetypes provide structures that storytellers adapt and innovate to create countless unique narratives across different genres and mediums. Each typology captures a different facet of human experience and, therefore, can be leveraged very effectively in business design: by understanding and framing the output of our work as stories, we can communicate effectively, drive change, and inspire both employees and customers.

Six Key Business Stories

Business designers create strategies, processes, services, and more, but at the heart of it all, every project, initiative, or transformation within a business starts as a story. In business design, stories come in various forms, each serving a different purpose. Some are about setting a direction, aligning people with a common vision, or defining how a company operates. Others are about challenges — identifying obstacles that need to be overcome, showing how solutions are reached, and highlighting the impact of those solutions on people’s lives.

Six key business stories, three Alignment Stories, and three Journey Stories cut across internal and external engagement and connect and shape.

First, Alignment Stories help individuals within an organization understand and rally around a shared purpose and objectives. They inspire and clarify the organization’s direction and operations and show how people can grow and succeed together.

1. Vision/Strategy Stories are narratives about the future state of the company, a product, or service that the company is working towards. They help people understand why a particular course of action is important and where they fit in it and inspire them to contribute toward that shared vision. A good example: when Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft, he didn’t just share new sales targets; he shared a new vision for the company that focused on cloud computing and digital transformation. By telling a story of transformation — in this case, he used The Quest story archetype — he emphasized innovation, customer-centricity, and a growth mindset to help rally the entire company around this new strategic direction.

2. Coaching Stories are narratives used to mentor, advise, and inspire team members or stakeholders. They often involve examples of personal growth, lessons learned, and overcoming challenges. I’ll share an example from my career as a people leader: recently, a colleague and I identified that they weren’t bringing their expert opinions into strategic conversations. They were holding back and going along with what the rest of the team said. I could have told them, “Insert yourself more.” Instead, I told a Coming-of-Age story; it went something like this:

When I was in design school, I had a professor, Stan — he’d go desk to desk as we were working on our design projects. When he got to my desk, I showed him what I was working on, and he’d nod and say, Sam, this is great, but you should do x,y,z (paraphrasing here) to improve it. That day and night, I’d do everything he said — to the letter — excited to show him my progress. The next day, he’d look at what I’d done and say, no, no, do this, this, and this, which I’d then do. This repeated a few times over the course of the week until finally, I somewhat angrily said, “I’ve done everything you’ve said to do, and you never like it! Here’s what I think: it should be like this! I then shared the direction I believe best solved the problem. Stan stepped back and smiled, and walked away, achieving his goal. The moral of the story: it’s our job to have a point of view and the courage to share it.

3. Culture Stories reinforce the shared values, traditions, and behaviors that define an organization’s culture — and they help set expectations for how people interact and approach work within the collective group. One of my absolute favorites comes from my employer, Edward Jones. Ted Jones, the son of company founder Edward Jones Sr., is lauded at the company for urging (some stories say ‘forcing’) his father to transform the wealth management firm from a family business to a partnership owned by the employees, where those who “share the work, share the profits.” Transforming the firm into a partnership meant Ted was leaving the chance behind of becoming a multi-billionaire if he had simply sold it to the highest bidder. As the story goes:

When Ted, then retired, was asked by a reporter why he never sold out and became as rich as say, his friend Sam Walton, Ted replied: “I am the richest man in America. I have a wife who loves me in spite of my faults. I have four dogs. Two love only me. One loves everybody. One loves no one but is still very loyal. I enjoy my business. I love my farm and my home. I have a few close friends, and money has never been my god.”

That quote is emblazoned on plaques, in documents, and in the minds of everyone who works at Edward Jones. Here you have a Rags-to-Riches story of a family starting a company working “to bring wealth management from Wall Street to Main Street” as a partnership — Ted’s reply goes further in communicating a rags-to-humble riches story that sets the tone for everyone at the firm — reinforcing how we all keep a sense of humility and gratitude for what we have, as we work together to grow prosperity for all.

Journey Stories focus on defining challenges, navigating the path and process to find solutions, and showcasing the impact of those solutions. These stories communicate the effort, iteration, and creativity involved in addressing problems or activating opportunities. Done well, they create connections and credibility inside and outside your business.

4. Challenge Stories focus on a specific problem that needs solving — helping everyone understand the core issue and why it’s important — these stories set the stage for action. Challenge stories are useful and nearly ubiquitous in the design process as we seek to identify and solve for user needs. A business challenge (stated in a very non-story way) might be something like this: Not enough people are using our healthcare app. As designers, we dig in, do user research, and discover that users are frustrated with the appointment scheduling feature — we can frame the challenge as a design challenge, perhaps for a statement of work: Our users (our main characters in this case) tell us they struggle to schedule appointments easily, leading to missed care opportunities and frustration. We must redesign the appointment flow to make it simple, intuitive, and efficient. The challenge is to reduce the number of steps and ensure users have a smooth, reliable experience booking appointments and ultimately meet their healthcare needs. In a similar fashion, we can frame this as a typical UX design user story, a story from the user’s point of view that can drive our design work: Simplify Appointment Scheduling: As a healthcare app user, I want to easily schedule a medical appointment without confusion, so that I can get the care I need without stress or missed bookings.

This is an excellent example of The Hero’s Journey because, as Donald Miller shares in Becoming a Storybrand, our users/customers are the heroes. Challenge Stories are the calls to adventure that inspire the hero’s journey and lead to our next business story type.

5. Journey to Solution Stories take the audience through the process of how a problem was addressed, showing the iterations, teamwork, and resilience involved. These stories are about walking the path, overcoming the challenges, and learning lessons along the way. Journey to Solution stories are great for design projects — I frame pretty much every project I lead as a quest that includes my core team and the broader team of subject matter experts — we all work together to travel from The Shire to The Lonely Mountain, I mean… from the challenge to the solution.

These stories are perfect for founding/origin tales — in fact, I wrote one; my book Adventures in Disruption was written as a Journey to Solution story about starting a new kind of design museum. I wrote the story as sort of a Heist, with various characters and our different skill sets: me with project management and business strategy, Derek with design and sales, Steve with tech and web development, Jenna with marketing and event production, and more. We came together to activate the opportunity and achieve our objective.

6. Solution and Impact Stories describe the solution and its tangible impact on customers and stakeholders. Here, you often see customer testimonials and real-world examples — sometimes even with data! — of the benefits experienced by interacting with your business, products, or services. Solution and Impact Stories are great for sales because you show what you’ve done, build credibility, and reinforce your value. Here’s a real example from productivity app Notion:

Toyota uses Notion to drive more efficient workflows with collaboration that comes standard. *Toyota’s Frontier Research Center is at the forefront of the future for the largest brand in one of the world’s largest industries. Their team is responsible for not only conducting a wide range of research but also sharing findings with the world. Since switching to Notion to consolidate and centrally manage all of this work, they’re more efficient and productive than ever before.

For the researchers at Toyota, sharing findings with the public is just as important as conducting the research itself. To do this, the research center promotes their work on social media for the world to engage with. But doing so requires a rigorous approval process to ensure accuracy and maintain the integrity of the Toyota brand. Before switching to Notion, this process was a tedious back-and-forth exchange of messages between various teams that was painfully inefficient.

With Notion, every post gets drafted and sent for approval in an easy-to-follow workflow that ends with a single click of the “approve” button that reduced approval timelines by 3x. Instead of the back and forth messages, the team can quickly check statuses and receive automated notifications of changes and updates.

“Not only do our streamlined workflows in Notion save us time, they also make it easier to stay up to date on task details and progress. This means our social media posts are more accurate, and we can publish them faster than before.” — Taku Wakasugi, Toyota Frontier Research Center

Here, we have a sort of Rags to Riches story. The protagonists are the researchers at Toyota. The “rags” are those pesky inefficient workflows, and the “riches” are their new streamlined processes—all possible because of the significant value provided by Notion.

Three Alignment and three Journey stories. These six types of business stories serve different but complementary purposes — use them together and build off each type. A Rags to Riches Journey to Solution story might bolster your culture. A Vision/Strategy Quest Story is a great way to tee up your ultimate triumph, your epic Solution, and your Impact Story.

How to Craft Business Stories

The organizational psychologist and author Adam Grant recently wrote: “The hallmark of expertise is no longer how much you know. It’s how well you synthesize.” As we explored above, the ultimate synthesis is storytelling. Writing compelling stories requires structure, emotional resonance, and relevance to your audience. To tell good stories, we start there:

1. Understand your audience and purpose: In The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr emphasizes that the best stories are all about change. Conflict drives change through tension and obstacles that help us reflect on the challenges we face ourselves. Determine what you want to achieve with your story, whether to inspire, educate, influence, or align — ask yourself what you want to change — then tailor your story to your audience’s interests, challenges, and needs.
2. Focus on specific characters and details: Every story needs a main character. The character could be a customer, employee, or the leadership team — choose someone relatable. In some instances, like Vision/Strategy stories, the whole company may collectively be the main character.
3. Incorporate emotional resonance: Connect on an emotional level by conveying how characters feel at key points in the story. And always connect to a deeper purpose. For example, a story about solving a customer problem should also convey why that solution was meaningful for the people involved and the audience listening.
4. Keep it simple and authentic: Avoid overly technical jargon or unnecessary complexity. Simple language makes it easier for your audience to understand and connect. As in all things, authenticity in your stories fosters trust and credibility.
5. Connect to broader themes: Tie your story back to your company’s core values or vision to help reinforce strategic priorities and make the story more impactful. Above all else, make sure your audience leaves knowing the main point.

Business Design Example

Good business design transforms noise into knowledge and, ultimately, to story. Here’s an example: Let’s say we’re a business designer for a large, national real estate firm focused on empowering agents to support home buyers and sellers, and our executive leaders are concerned. Our sales are plateauing, even down in some areas of the country. There is a flood of new opportunities and constraints acting on our business — where should we focus our efforts? What should we invest in? How should we better support our agents to make an impact and ultimately grow our business?

We begin by understanding the unstructured landscape — the Noise — and gradually shape it into a cohesive Story that aligns everyone toward the future of our real estate, all by design.

1. Learn: Making Sense of the Noise We start by gathering from the Noise to find Data: researching market signals and interviewing agents and clients. Agents have expressed challenges with digital engagement, increased competition from tech-driven competitors, and shifting client expectations. We categorize these insights to identify recurring themes. As we learn and identify patterns, we transform Data into Information; for example, we see a growing demand for digital tools and personalized customer interactions. A great way to synthesize user data is by creating personas, representations of our user groups — in the context of our story, personas are our characters (agents, clients, and colleagues). Let’s create a persona named Tracy — a realtor on our team with 15 years of experience.
2. Define: Turning Information into Clear Focus Areas We then synthesize this information further by analyzing what the patterns mean. Agents like Tracy need support to become more tech-savvy, and clients expect a seamless, tech-driven experience. We clearly define our core user problem (an excellent start to our story): Our agents need to be empowered with modern tools, skills, and a client-centric approach to regain market share and improve sales performance. This step turns the information into Knowledge by giving it context and clarity — helping us pinpoint areas where we need to act. The focus areas or need statements might be something like:
   • Investing in technology to enhance client experiences.
   • Upskilling agents in digital tools and personalized services.
   • Building community and support systems for agents to adapt to future challenges.
3. Ideate, Prototype, & Test with Story As needed, we can share drafts of our story for feedback and refinement. At this point, with our new knowledge and defined focus areas, we can concurrently ideate/prototype/test solutions and begin developing our story. Let’s say we ideate, prototype, and test a few initiatives — each idea represents an element of the broader narrative we’re building:
   • Pilot Programs for Digital Tools: We roll out virtual tour technology to a small group of agents to see how effectively it enhances client interactions.
   • Training Curriculum: Develop a foundational training program on digital engagement tools and test it with a subset of agents to refine the content and delivery.
   • Agent Community Forum: Create a virtual space for agents to share challenges and successes, fostering collaboration.

4. Refining the Final Story From the prototypes and testing, we learned that agents feel more confident and empowered when they have access to the right technology and training. Based on this feedback, we refine our story to ensure that it aligns with agents’ needs and customers’ expectations. We’re ready to write and deliver our story.

The Story: Tracy’s Evolution — Tracy is a realtor with over 15 years of experience. She’s seen the market change — sometimes dramatically. From the rollercoaster of the housing crisis to the surge in demand during the pandemic, Tracy helped families find their homes, navigating unpredictable shifts in the market. But now, as technology evolves and client expectations change, she knows that the future of the real estate industry will look very different from the past.

Recently, Tracy noticed that more of her clients expected an almost digital-first approach — asking for virtual tours, wanting deep data insights, and using online platforms to streamline their buying process. She started to see potential clients choosing tech-enabled competitors over traditional agents. Tracy understood that she needed to adapt to what the next 15 years might bring: smart technology integration, personalized client service through data insights, and deepened relationships in a hybrid digital world.

Tracy embarked on a journey to transform her approach to real estate. She began with professional development — taking courses on digital marketing, virtual property tours, and data analytics in real estate. She adopted new technology that allowed her to create virtual home tours, leveraging 3D scanning to give buyers an immersive experience without ever stepping foot in the property. She utilized new data-driven platforms to provide her clients with neighborhood analytics that offered insights into future growth potential, school ratings, and even sustainability features that mattered to a new generation of buyers.

Tracy also focused on personal branding, creating engaging online content that spoke directly to her clients’ needs. She shared videos about trends in home sustainability, insider tips for new buyers, and behind-the-scenes glimpses of her day-to-day work as a realtor adapting to a tech-driven world. She built trust with her audience and a pipeline of new clients by showing her willingness to evolve.

This journey helped Tracy grow her business and future-proof her career. She began attracting a tech-savvy clientele that valued her experience and new capabilities. Her clients appreciated the seamlessness of their buying experience, from virtual walkthroughs to data-backed decisions. Tracy also found that integrating technology allowed her to spend more quality time building relationships rather than managing manual processes, elevating her service to a new level.

Tracy’s story is one of evolution. She leverages technology not as a replacement for the human element but as an enhancer that allows her to do what she does best: helping people find a place to call home.

We are building the real estate firm of the future — one that combines the expertise of seasoned agents like Tracy with cutting-edge technology to deliver unmatched service. Tracy has seen the industry evolve dramatically. She knows that to thrive in the next decade, she must embrace change and adopt new tools to engage clients digitally and provide personalized, data-driven experiences. We are committed to empowering agents with the tools, training, and support they need to adapt and succeed. Together, we will create a seamless, personalized real estate experience that makes finding and selling a home as efficient and rewarding as possible.

How’d we do?

Our audience: executive leaders who need a strategic vision for what to do and where to invest. Check.

Specific characters and details: Tracy is a traditional realtor with 15 years of experience, but looking to evolve for the next decade and beyond. Check.

Emotional resonance: “the rollercoaster of the housing crisis,” “unpredictable shifts,” Tracy is worried about the future, which is a very human thing to be worried about; we can relate.

Keep it simple: we paint a simple picture of how and why Tracy needs to evolve and how we can support her — with three initiative ideas prototyped and tested.

Connect to broader themes: the main strategic theme: invest in our evolution as a company to support agents like Tracy. Check.

Stories Make Sense

Stories are central to how we make sense of the world, relate to one another, and inspire action. When used effectively, storytelling can align teams around a shared vision, build resilience through coaching, reinforce culture, and guide customers through challenges to solutions. For business designers, mastering storytelling allows us to synthesize meaningful narratives that resonate across teams and stakeholders. It helps us frame challenges, celebrate successes, and ensure that the human element always remains at the core of what we do.

I mentioned reading The Hobbit to my kids — well, now we’re taking the next step; my daughter Rafi and I are writing our own story: Rafi and the Lost Kingdom. Rafi, like most (all?) kids, is working hard to understand, feel, and react to her emotions — so in this story, Rafi finds a magic wand that works sort of like a mood ring; it senses her feelings, and various emotions give her certain powers — but if her emotions get the best of her, the wand can shut down, leaving her in tough situations. By writing this story, she’s learning to name her emotions, she’s understanding that her emotions are valid, and she’s seeing self-regulation in action — all through the power of story.

Think about the story you want to tell. Will it be a vision story that sets a direction for the future? A journey story that chronicles how challenges were overcome? Or perhaps a culture narrative that embodies the values you stand for? Whatever story you craft, remember: the power of a well-told story lies in its ability to drive understanding, alignment, and meaningful change.

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

Header image: Maxime Lebrun on Unsplash; article images & graphics courtesy of the author.

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“How do you know if you have a good idea?” This profound query came at the tail-end of a robust day.

My answer was true, but a bit pat.

I said a good idea should make you feel something. I bolstered my answer with the classic line often attributed to legendary creative director Phil Dusenberry that goes, “If you don’t feel it in the board room, the audience won’t feel it in the living room.”

The emphasis on ideas that make you feel something: a laugh, a cry, motivated to take some action.

It was a fine answer, but something about it was bugging me.

Today’s communication efforts are sprawling and complicated.

I didn’t feel I gave a good enough answer and wouldn’t you know it — it kept me up that night.

I got out of bed early the next day and wrote down some notes and came back with a better answer.

I re-confirmed that a good idea should indeed make you feel something.

I then went further and talked about how a good idea should reveal something.

Then I went deeper and talked about how a good idea should drive all the executions of the communications ecosystem.

The Sea Leggers appreciated this deeper answer.

I kept going with one more thing.

I told them that, ultimately, the best method for determining a good idea is the timeless framework from legendary designer Milton Glaser. His notion is that there are only three reactions you can have to a piece of work:

Yes, No, Wow.

Meaning…

Yes, I understand the idea. It’s on strategy. Fine.

No, I don’t get it. I don’t like it.

Or…

Wow.

Yep, Wow is in, you can’t control how you’re feeling. And your overwhelming reaction is to just go, “Wow.”

Sure enough, the next night, we were all together at an art studio creating masks for a Lucha Libre wrestling event we were about to attend.

We had tasked ourselves with taking existing wrestling masks and making them uniquely our own.

We were armed with glue guns, scissors, and various pieces of glittered craft foam.

I saw several fun improvements our Sea Leggers were making to the classic masks.

And then out of nowhere, one appeared that was completely amazing.

One of the rising stars from our Paris office emerged with an Art Deco masterpiece.

She crafted the foam pieces into magnificent gold and green feathers. The mask looked like a piece of art that belonged atop the head of some kind of mythical goddess. Or a piece of sculpture you’d find in an Art Deco masterpiece like the Chrysler Building or Rockefeller Center.

It was such an incredibly high-brow approach for something as populist as Lucha Libre.

But in the end, it worked magnificently.

I tell you all of this because each person who saw her mask had the exact same reaction: “Wow!”

So how do you tell if you have a good idea? Start with this. Is your first reaction Wow?

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: Getty Images for Unsplash+

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Our gratitude is individual. Like the lines and whorls on our fingers, our relationship with gratitude is unique.

Gratitude doesn’t have to be about big things. It doesn’t mean everything is perfect. Our gratitude can be most sustaining and most profound when things are falling apart. We can be grateful for things that are vast, things that are ineffable, but we can also be grateful for small things, for a favorite coffee cup, a soft pillow, the flash of a bird in the tree.

Finding gratitude in the quotidian can help center you, can help you find perspective, and can make a difference in how you experience the world around you.

Talking about gratitude is more commonplace now than it was a handful of years ago, or maybe it feels that way simply because I struggled with gratitude. I struggled to find my footing in gratitude as a mindset and a practice at a time when it seemed like things were falling apart.

I was a late-comer to the gratitude table, or, in my case, hilltop. I found my way there not as things got better but as things started to dissolve. When I first talked out loud about gratitude, I got emotional. I remember feeling like I was shedding my surface as I admitted that what I thought I needed was to focus on gratitude. It didn’t make sense to me, but my discomfort, and even my resistance, seemed important. I struggled with my sense that gratitude was a superficial practice, something that blurred or elided reality. I remember feeling silly. I might as well have been admitting I was going looking for unicorns in the park.

That was a beginning. I was struggling with fear and anxiety and worry over ongoing health issues in my house. I was feeling like there was no bottom to bottom, like I didn’t know where “bottom” was, but I recognized that something was increasingly hollow in me. Almost instinctively, I reached for something shiny, something I thought might be powerful. I reached for gratitude.

The next year, in November, I did 30 days of gratitude writing and recording. I found myself standing at the top of the hill, the literal hill on which I live, at sunset most days, and looking out, a point that lets me see the ocean and the bay, a point that puts the sky in motion overhead. I can turn in a circle and see the whole world. That’s how it feels, the moon over the bay, the sun dropping into the ocean, rose light warming the faces of the houses on the street. November has the best light.

That year, I gave myself over to the top of the hill, to my appreciation for all that was right then, for having that beauty within the distance of a short walk of our senior rescue. I noticed the colors of paint on houses after rain. I wrote about memory, about all that I don’t remember. I wrote about being present, being aware of things we take for granted, and appreciating things that are within reach.

I try to keep gratitude in mind all year long, but November is always a reset point, a month steeped in a gratitude mindset. I no longer cry when I talk about gratitude.3 Like most things, with practice, we get over our resistance, find our own patterns, move past the things that hurt, and find comfort in the routine.

I’ve done a number of November gratitude projects now, both written and drawn. I’ve tracked November light, the barest of diagrams showing the bands of the sky when I first walk into the kitchen and see the light over the bay in the distance. I’ve added gratitudes to daily planners and my Notion dashboard. There is really no wrong way to approach it. One year I did a series of portraits of people in one of my online communities. Two years in a row, I did large drawings to which I added a simple drawing each day of a concrete thing for which I was grateful. (Those projects are favorites.)

It may feel silly to focus on daily gratitude and on gratitude for small things, the favorite coffee cup, the favorite pencil, the familiar quilt, the cozy sweater from a loved one who has passed, but the practice is powerful. It is deceptively simple, but it can make a dramatic difference in how you feel. All that is wrong doesn’t go away. That remains the tension with gratitude. It isn’t an eraser. But something happens in the process of paying more attention, focusing, and looking around with intention and naming and recognizing our gratitude.

Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out.

John Greene, Turtles All The Way Down

Snail Mail – November Postcard Prompt

This month’s postcard prompt is gratitude-infused, but on the concrete level, the prompt is a spiral.

A spiral is a winding path, one that either moves in on itself or radiates from the center out. In walking, tracing, or drawing a spiral, literally or figuratively, there is mindfulness, the coiling or unfurling of thought, the chance to see what sits or stands or dances at other points of the spiral as you pass again and again.

Mathematically speaking, there are a number of different types of spirals, including: the Archimedean spiral, the hyperbolic spiral, Fermat’s spiral, the logarithmic spiral, the lituus spiral, the Cornu spiral, the spiral of Theodorus, the Fibonacci spiral (also called the golden spiral), conical spirals, whorls, and the involute of a circle.

These quick line drawings (not mathematically precise) show some of the spirals listed above.

This elongated spiral doesn’t show up in the list, but we know this model from the world around us:

To multiply the fun, consider the triskelion (or triskele):

We can think about spirals in terms of galaxies (look up “barred spiral”), snails, pinecones, succulents, pineapples, and the horn of a goat. The list goes on.

As a metaphor, we can use the spiral as a path for mindfulness. We can walk the spiral in or out. We can wind our way around and back like a labyrinth.

For this month’s postcard, integrate a spiral and, if you are bold, let gratitude be your guide.

You may want to simply play with the spiral as an image. You might think about cinnamon rolls or the Fibonacci sequence or snails. Or you may want to use the spiral as the form of the writing, starting from the center and writing your message in a spiral. Maybe you choose a special quote or poem. Maybe you express your gratitude to the recipient. Maybe you simply write a letter as a spiral, something the reader will have to slowly spin to read.

There is mindfulness in the reading, too.

Primary or secondary, either way, gratitude is part of the November prompt. If the spiral isn’t of interest, you might use your postcard to document daily gratitudes (one a day). You might draw a series of icons of things for which you are grateful.

Gratitude Quotes

Here are a few gratitude quotes to get you started thinking and appreciating in November:

“Wear gratitude like a cloak, and it will feed every corner of your life.” — Rumi

“Gratitude bestows reverence…changing forever how we experience life and the world.” — John Milton

“Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.” — A.A. Milne

“Happiness, not in another place but this place…not for another hour, but this hour.” — Walt Whitman

“Gratitude for the present moment and the fullness of life now is the true prosperity.” — Eckhart Tolle

We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

If you made and sent an October card, we would love to see what you did with the costume-themed prompt. If you share in social media, please tag me and use #PostcardPrompts.

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.

The post Connecting Dots: Tracking Gratitude in Snail Mail appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

“All of our surfaces, our skies, our trees are painted by human beings. There’s no geometry covered by rubber-stamping. With hand-painted backgrounds like these, we’ve come full circle to where this whole craft began. Miyazaki’s backgrounds, Bambi’s backgrounds, The Lion King’s backgrounds: they do the best job of creating a world that you can get. Our goal was to get the finished film looking as close to the initial exploratory development drawings as we could get: so abstract and colourful, loose and free and beautiful, and they reminded me a lot of some of the inspirational art by Tyrus Wong that guided Bambi.“

The Spider-Verse films, Klaus, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, The Mitchells Vs The Machines, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle: Mutant Mayhem – do we have a name for this new era of painterly animation? New Artistry? Craftcore?

Animation Obsessive Staff help me out here.

Ooh a colour Kindle is finally here. That sound you hear is a thousand cover designers gently weeping with joy! Curious that one of the promo shots has Ms Marvel on the display, but there’s no mention of Marvel Unlimited integration. I realise these things are essentially shop windows for Amazon and only Amazon, but MU plus a dedicated e-ink reader would be incredible.

Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Red Rocket, Anora) talks to MUBI’s Adrian Curry about his ongoing use of Aguafina Script Pro and how a simple design solution turned into a unique brand identity.

My current favourite jam¹ is LCD Soundsystem and Miles Davis playing in side-by-side browsers. Somehow this works.

Couch to 100k – John Grindrod’s tips for non-fiction writers:

“I’m firmly of the opinion that no subject is a bad subject for a book per se, it’s what you do with it. Perhaps you have the desire to write a book about frogspawn. Or gravel. Or ribbon. Sure, that one word might taunt you. Who is going to be interested in that? But nothing is innately boring. Not when you can communicate what is actually exciting you about the subject. Frogspawn contains the miraculous secret of life; gravel a doorway into the ancient formation of geology and stardust; ribbon the tale of industrial revolutions, global culture and the history of fashion. Actually, why am I writing this blog post, all of those books sound amazing.”

I used to get excited about boring subjects every month for my MacUser column² – “you write interestingly about any old crap” was basically my editor’s pitch. Not sure I have the stamina or attention to go beyond a two-page spread, but maybe one day I’ll give it a go.

In Hidden Portraits, Volker Hermes reimagines historical figures in overwhelming frippery. Great name for a band right there.

Revisiting the Horst P. Horst monograph Style and Glamour after seeing Jack Davison’s incredible Saoirse Ronan shoot for Vogue. He’s captured and modernised Horst’s already-ahead-of-its-time 1940s style³ impeccably.

Oh dear lord I’m trying Bluesky again. Basically just biding my time on this social network carousel until somebody revives mySpace.⁴

That is all.

1. Jams? Do we still talk about our jams? Or did we kick out the jams? ↩︎
2. They’re all pretty much lost to the sands of time now, unless anyone is hoarding old copies of MacUser in their basement … ? If anyone fancies a read, I’ll see if I can dig them out and upload them here in some manner. ↩︎
3. Running with Scissors’s Lisa McKenna put it perfectly in her reply to a recent note: “I’ve always appreciated how [Horst] kept his cover design behind the lens”. ↩︎
4. Seriously, it baffles me that something that still has so much brand recognition and clear purpose – social media based around music – is still up on the shelf, gathering dust. ↩︎

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. 217 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

I tried to imagine it: my father, not quite into his forties, an advertising executive during the Mad Men days, and my mother, still in her twenties, having recently given up her singing and modeling career, pushing a four-pound me in the English Balmoral pram my grandfather had given them. They took turns on sunny Saturday afternoons, pushing and walking, pushing and walking, against oncoming East Side crowds in the few months before Kennedy was shot, and the remnants of what had been another kind of America would suddenly be gone forever. When they turned around at Twenty-third Street and headed back uptown, they would stop at Mrs. Herbst Bakery on Third Avenue for a slice of strudel and a cup of coffee, and my mother says, even now, that because you had to go two steps up into the bakery, which was quite small, they’d ask for a table near the window and park the pram just outside so they could keep an eye on it while they ate.

My parents were not the type of people to hold three-month-old me on their laps while dining in public, or plopped over their shoulders like a sack of potatoes (I was apparently a big regurgitator and a loud crier who, according to my mother, sounded like Bert Lahr when I was fussing), which meant that they would have to leave me in the pram, parked on the street.

On the other side of the bakery window. In Manhattan.

It feels like such a New York-in-the-early-Sixties thing to do, and to this day, I don’t know whether my mother has the story right. Maybe they wheeled the carriage in and left it by the window on the inside of the bakery, sat down and drank their kaffee mit schlagg while I was cooed over by the older Hungarian strudel makers with the shadow of war still clouding their eyes. Maybe not. Maybe it’s a manifestation of my mother’s tentacular imagination which has grown fainter with age but is still veneered like the caramel on a Dobos Torte with a thin layer of chronic fibbing.

If you are a New Yorker of a certain age, you’re forced to accept that the concept of the weekend stroll followed by a slice of strudel — and of being a flâneur — is now about as alien as sock garters are to a middle schooler.

I’ll never know the answer; maybe it doesn’t matter. But I do know for certain that my parents were both flâneurs. The act of walking was an important part of their weekend ritual, and the stop at Mrs. Herbst their reward for a long afternoon stroll that might have taken them (and me) down Third from their apartment on East 79th Street to Twenty-third Street, all the way over to Fifth, back up Fifth past The Frick, The Guggenheim, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, back over to Third, and to Mrs. Herbst, where they had their coffee and strudel while I slept in my pram on one side or the other of the bakery window.

I acknowledge the frivolity of writing about Manhattan in the Sixties, and walking, and strudel. But I write about this now because my country as I know it may change radically in a few days, and it may become utterly unrecognizable except to those who are old enough to remember what the world was like the last time a fascist psychopath convinced millions to follow him. It’s impossibly hard for me to even believe that I’m saying these words. So I write about this now because I want to remember the sheer, glorious mundanity of a specific time and place that has been mythologized over the years in film, in music, and in books as a period when Scribner’s on Fifth was still a bookstore and not a Sephora, and Abercrombie and Fitch was the twelve-story sporting shop on East 45th Street and Madison Avenue that outfitted Lindbergh for his flight to Paris and not a place to buy your son pre-ripped jeans that hang far enough beneath his hipbones for the world to see what brand of underwear he’s got on; it was when my mother and I walked to Madame Romaine de Lyon almost every weekend for omelets, even while we weren’t speaking to each other (which was often). It was my normal, what I knew, and how and where I was raised. This is the part of New York that still lives in my viscera, and it will stay there until I take my last breath, no matter how the world changes.

When Nora Ephron wrote her New York Times piece about Mrs. Herbst right after Christmas in 2005, I actually cried. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, there was so much attached to and associated with the place. My father had died suddenly three years before the article appeared; my Grandma Clara, the eldest of five children born to a nineteenth-century cavalry officer from Budapest and who always requested that we buy her a whole strip of cabbage strudel and drive it home to her in Forest Hills, seven miles away from Manhattan, died in 1982. Many of the beautiful older buildings dotting my parents’ walking route were replaced by glass and steel monolithic erections that sit mostly empty. As for a slice of cabbage strudel and a cup of coffee after a long, languorous walk: if you are a New Yorker of a certain age (I’m 61), you’re forced to accept that the concept of the weekend stroll followed by a slice of strudel — and of being a flâneur — is now about as alien as sock garters are to a middle schooler.

In his wonderful book, The Flâneur, Edmund White writes Americans are particularly ill-suited to be flaneurs. They are always driven by the urge towards self-improvement. This is only partially true — think of Maira Kalman, Fran Lebowitz, and of course, Nora — and part of the reason why very few people seem to stroll anymore. No one takes what my mittel-Europan grandfather would call a shpatzir. Instead, we walk with intention: hitting our step count (mine is 10,000), getting to our next Pilates class, making it to a work meeting on time while listening to a podcast on productivity. Whenever I’m in the city, I hit my step count within two hours without even thinking about it because I’m marching from Grand Central over to Fifth, getting a taxi up to my mother’s apartment on the West Side, walking over to Broadway to get another cab back to the station, and then running for the train. (Fifteen thousand steps, easily.) When I’m home in Connecticut, I rarely make it to five thousand despite walking the dog, going grocery shopping, going to the gym, and working in the garden. In the days before step-counters and FitBits and Apple Watches, who even thought about such things?

True to my DNA, I went to college in a city ideal for the flâneur. It was my father — he had lived in Boston for three years before marrying my mother — who told me where to start (the west end of Commonwealth Avenue, near my dorm), where to walk (east on Commonwealth or Beacon, or along the Charles River; up to Arlington Street and into the Public Gardens; up to Charles Street on Beacon Hill to Louisburg Square at the top of the Hill; back down again to Beacon Street; back into the Gardens; past the George Washington statue onto Arlington; over to Newbury Street; west on Newbury to Mass Avenue; down Mass Avenue to Commonwealth; west on Commonwealth and back to my dorm), and where to stop for a coffee along the way. There was no intention, no plan; it was walking for the sake of walking, of looking at the world around me. It would have been nice if a slice of strudel had been involved, but alas, no.

When I moved back to New York after college, I would regularly walk from my apartment on East 57th Street up to 60th and Fifth, up Fifth to 72nd Street, across 72nd and through Central Park, over to my mother and stepfather’s apartment on Westend Avenue and 70th. I’d have lunch with my mother, and then I’d walk home the same way. Even my Grandma Clara would leave her apartment in Forest Hills every morning at ten, walk the few blocks to Queens Boulevard, down towards Rego Park and stop for lunch at Woolworth’s where her (as she put it) ladyfriend who worked behind the counter fed her a grilled cheese sandwich and a small cup of tomato soup. And then she’d walk home, even as she was beginning to suffer from congestive heart failure.

I’m a walker, my mother announced to the emergency room doctor one December Saturday night in 2016.

They thought that she, at eighty-one, was exaggerating and that she meant maybe a few city blocks a couple of times a week; they were wrong. Long widowed, she spent her days — literally, every day — walking from her Upper West Side apartment down to 57th Street, across to the East Side, down Fifth to Saks where she’d have lunch (tarragon chicken salad with walnuts), and then home again. Sometimes, if she wasn’t furious with me (and often if she was) she’d take a break on 57th and wait for me in my apartment building lobby, fight with me, and then walk home. So when she suffered a trimalleolar fracture of her right ankle — all three ankle bones snapped like dry kindling — it felt to all of us like the beginning of the last phase of her life because walking her beloved city was probably no longer going to be possible. Her life as a flâneur began before she married my father, and now it was likely over. But really: it wasn’t entirely because of the fall, or because all of those destinations — Mrs. Herbst, and Madame Romaine de Lyon, and even Soup Burg (where she had a bunless burger once a week) — had closed; it was because New York had changed right in front of her, and she had changed with it.

My mother turned eighty-nine this week. She walks very badly now (even with the cane that she would like to wrap around my neck when I remind her to use it), and, as happened with my grandmother, her universe has grown smaller. We only ever go out to eat at Cafe Luxembourg, one block from her apartment. We love it and always have; they always make a fuss over her, and she hastens to tell them that we were there when they opened, back when New York was still New York, she says, and I could walk it from one end to the other.

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 on PRINT.

Photo by Dominik Leiner on Unsplash.

The post Poor Man’s Feast: When They Walked the City appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

1. If you spill some M&Ms while you are riding in the car, and you happen to accidentally sit on one for several hours, and it stains your white pants, you can get the stain out with Spray and Wash.

2. If you are at a restaurant, and they give out those red peppermints in cellophane, and you put one in your pocket for later, and you forget about it, and you put your pants in the wash, you will find the wrapper at the bottom of your washer. You will not find the peppermint.

3. If you are driving home for several hours in the dark, and you stop at a gas station to “use the facilities,” and you feel like you ought to buy something since you are using all their nice facilities, and you notice a new kind of “3x Chocolate Snickers” featuring chocolate-ish nougat and chocolate-ish caramel along with the usual chocolate coating, and you buy it, and you break it into pieces in the car to share with your family, and your loving spouse drops some of the crumbs of chocolate onto his shirt, and they melt, you will need that Spray and Wash again. You will not, however, need to try another 3x Chocolate Snickers.

I did the following interview with Kawash in 2014.

In her book “Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure,” retired Rutgers University literature professor Samira Kawash investigates the surprisingly neglected story of how business and technological innovations turned the U.S. into what a 1907 visitor called “the great candy eating nation.” Candy, she argues, is essential to understanding the history of how Americans eat. It was, Kawash writes, the “first ready-to-eat processed food, the original ancestor of all our fast, convenient, fun, imperishable, tasty, highly advertised brand-name snacks and meals.” For more than a century, we’ve simultaneously gorged on the stuff and felt guilty about it. It’s an intensified version of our ambivalent and fickle attitudes toward abundant, convenient, mass-produced food in general.

“The candy that gives us some of our happiest experiences is the same candy that rots our teeth, ruins our appetite, and sucks tender innocents into a desperate life of sugar addiction,” she writes. “Candy joins the ideas of pleasure and poison, innocence and vice, in a way that’s unique and a bit puzzling.” Candy is, one might say, both trick and treat. With Halloween in mind, I interviewed Kawash by e-mail.

Question: When and how did candy become associated with Halloween? Was trick-or-treating just concocted to sell candy?

Answer: Would you believe the earliest trick-or-treaters didn’t even expect to get candy? Back in the 1930s, when kids first started chanting “trick or treat” at the doorbell, the treat could be just about anything: nuts, coins, a small toy, a cookie, or a popcorn ball. Sometimes candy too, maybe a few jelly beans or a licorice stick. But it wasn’t until well into the 1950s that Americans started buying treats instead of making them, and the easiest treat to buy was candy. The candy industry also advertised heavily and, by the 1960s, was offering innovative packaging and sizes like mini-bars to make it even easier to give out candy at Halloween. But if you look at candy trade discussions about holiday marketing in the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween doesn’t even get a mention.

Q: Candy corn is a sweet we only see at Halloween (and it isn’t particularly popular with kids who get it). What’s its story?

A: Actually I think candy corn is making a huge comeback. Maybe not as candy proper, but candy corn is emerging as an exciting new flavor for everything from marshmallows to Oreos to M&Ms. It’s funny, since the flavor of candy corn is mostly just a blast of sweet. And personally, much as I love candy corn, I have yet to taste a candy-corn flavor confection that was anything but dreadful. Taste aside, it’s obvious that candy corn as an idea is irresistible: Today, those bands of yellow, orange, and white just scream “Halloween.” Most people don’t know that candy corn was originally a year-round penny candy. Back in the 1880s, when that kind of “mellowcreme” was invented, there were all kinds of agriculturally inspired shapes, from pea pods and apples to walnuts and corn cobs. Since corn was harvested in the fall, candy corn became a popular treat for autumn-themed decorating and for Halloween parties. Now that candy is so closely identified with Halloween, candy corn has been crowned the unofficial mascot for the holiday.

Q: You write about what you call “Halloween sadist legends.” Do these perennial tales of poisoned candy and razor blades in apples have any basis in truth? How are they connected to the non-Halloween history of candy?

A: Every Halloween, some earnest civic group reminds parents to be alert for “tampering” that might reveal some poison or drug or sharp thing lurking in the innocent candy loot. And how many instances of such tampering have been documented? Almost none. When there is actual harm, it almost always turns out to be traced to one of three causes: either a malevolent adult meant to hurt a child under cover of the anonymous Halloween sadist, or a child was accidentally poisoned and adults tried to cover it up by pointing fingers at a murky murderous stranger, or someone (usually a kid) wanted to get attention by planting evidence and then “discovering” a tainted treat. It’s gruesome to say it, but the myth of the Halloween sadist turns out to be quite useful if you are hoping to get away with murder.

What fascinated me as I researched the history of candy was discovering how often candy has been blamed when something bad happens, even before the Halloween scares of the 1970s. It turns out that “poison candy” is an idea as old as mass-produced candy, going back to the 1880s. And as with the “Halloween sadist,” poison candy was mostly a myth. People found it easy to believe that candy was harmful, even when it wasn’t. It was a novel form of food, entirely artificial, entirely for pleasure. A lot of people looked at those bright colors and strange flavors and concluded that it couldn’t possibly be safe.

Q: What does Halloween candy tell us about the meaning and value of brands?

A: One of the biggest casualties of the poison treat scares of the 1970s was homemade sweets. In the 1960s and before, it was totally fine to give out something you’d made yourself. But once people got it in their heads that maniacs were out there trying to kill their children with Halloween treats, everything homemade was suspect. After all, you didn’t know whose hands had touched that cookie and what scary ingredients might be hidden under the chocolate chips. Same for unwrapped candies and off-brand candies: If it wasn’t sealed in a recognizable, major brand factory label, then it was guilty until proven innocent. Nationally advertised candy brands were familiar and trusted, unlike that spooky neighbor who just might be an axe murderer. It’s one of the huge successes of processed food marketing, to make us trust and feel good about the factory food, and to distrust and denigrate the homemade and the neighborly. I think this is starting to swing back in the other direction though, at least in urban areas. Today, consumers are pretty obsessed with the artisanal and the small batch and will pay a huge premium for candy that is nothing like Hershey or Mars. On the other hand, every year, the candy that’s wrapped for Halloween treating gets more and more homogeneous, and the national brands rule.

Q: Your book starts with a story in which another parent compares your child’s jelly beans to crack cocaine. How does Halloween candy survive in a culture where candy is seen as dangerous?

A: Well, number one is, kids love it! And I think our society really does have a very ambivalent relation to candy, which includes both extremely positive and extremely negative feelings. I do feel like the candy part of Halloween has gone overboard, though. There are so many fun things about the holiday, but all too often kids end up obsessed with just piling up as much candy as they can. When kids are just marching from house to house and holding out their bags, trick-or-treating seems kind of joyless, more like work. Hmm, I wonder where they learned that?

Virginia Postrel is a writer with a particular interest in the intersection of commerce, culture, and technology. Author of The Future and Its Enemies, The Substance of Style, The Power of Glamour, and, most recently, The Fabric of Civilization. This essay comes from her archives, originally published in Virginia’s newsletter on Substack.

Header image: Unsplash+ in collaboration with Hans Isaacson.

The post How Candy Conquered Halloween appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

*

Every morning for the last five or so years of my teaching practice, I have asked students a question that they answer as part of their attendance roll call. Ideally, the questions are generated by the students, but often, I pepper in questions of mine. It is a routine that has never ceased to be interesting to me, to see through the portals of these questions into the nooks and crannies of students’ lives. I have heard so many stories that stay with me…. a few most memorably include a pair of magical fish, a grilled roadside snake, and a phone that wouldn’t stop ringing in an attic.

This ritual is borne from my belief that questions, especially slant or searching or deep questions, connect us to each other in radiant and unexpected ways. 

The questions, as much as the answers, reveal us to one another.

*

Last year, at the beginning of May, on Instagram, my friend Shira (who writes a deeply beautiful Substack called Freer Form that you can read here) invited followers to join her in a month of questioning. The task was simply to notice the questions we ask and collect them in some way. I kept track of my wondering in a digital note called MAY I?

Some of my questions were mundane—Where did I put my phone? What time is my next scheduled ‘let’s hop on a call?’ How much cheese is too much?—but many of my other questions were surprising in the way that the world is when we stop to really look at it.

I discovered so many small mysteries littered in the track of my everyday life: What exactly is an email? (what is a byte??) Why does my toaster fling the bread a foot into the air after it’s finished? Is that failure or exuberance? Does it have to be one or the other? Why do I add the numbers of license plates together? How do I not know what 9 + 7 is without counting on my fingers? Why is a vase of fresh flowers something I delight in every time I see it? Is delight so SIMPLE?!

And there were so many bigger, deeper questions that began to stack up: What places does love make for you? What is your strangest encounter? What part of your body does sadness find first? What do you save? How does it feel to be you? Who is the last person you messaged? What is the most used emoji in your phone? What do you think about on an airplane during terrible turbulence? What is the earliest thing you can recall? What always makes you smile? What is your ugliest belief?

*

Of course, in the classroom, there’s never any sure way to predict how anything will go, and so I never know which morning attendance questions will generate a lot of conversation.

I, for one, did not think that asking What is the best bird? would create as much debate as it did. There were staunch supporters of penguins, of finches, of blue jays, of toucans. Others stood for birds I didn’t know, birds I had to look up and see for the first time: their dappled gray chests, their hard red eyes.

*

By the end of MAY I? I had so many questions written down that I would spend the rest of the year pairing the questions with photographs and sending them out to my corner of Instagram. As people answered, I realized the bounty of their responses—beautiful, heart-opening, often sad, often funny, often both at the same time.

Some answers, in particular, I wrote down and carried with me from the bed to the shower to the car to the highway and back again, carried them with me and showed them the parts of my life that they spoke to:

Here, here is the road he drove the wrong way down not once, but twice.

Here, here is the river freezing over.

Here, here is the corner store where the owner never makes anything quickly.

*

For myself, I believe the best bird is the demoiselle crane, so named by Marie Antoinette who was charmed by the crane’s small stature (the smallest of the crane species) and the graceful black feathers adorning its chest which stand in sharp contrast to the trailing ivory feather plumes that stretch from the eye over the head.

This crane, however, is only delicate in appearance. It is, in fact, the only bird whose long loop migration takes it over the Himalayas in the winter. Indeed, demoiselle cranes have been filmed flying far above the 8,848-meter peak of Mount Everest as they move from the steppes of Rajasthan in India to reach the softer grasslands of Mongolia to breed and raise their young.

It is an incredibly long and arduous migration and many cranes die of exhaustion. Yet, every year, those that survive begin to fly beyond the most towering peaks in the world in order to reach an unseen almost impossible land. I would tell you what this bird reveals to you about me but I already have.

*

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 photo: Demoiselle cranes in Khichan near Bikaner. CC 4.0

The post I’m Wondering: What’s The Best Bird? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Much like our students, though, we tend to have a transactional attitude toward our work, creative processes, and lives. We sometimes look like we have lost our spark and joy for learning, living, and thriving. We don’t want to figure things out; we want the blueprint. And while the blueprint is sometimes useful, if we don’t allow time for the process and failures, how will we engage in transformative lessons to foster our creative process and strengthen our tacit knowledge?

Sometimes, I think we have lost our way in our current capitalist economic system. It is like the balance has tipped completely, overshadowing the intrinsic value of living to learn because it is joyful or doing our job for the sheer sense of worth. Those in charge seem to be concerned with profit at the expense of their most valuable assets, the people they hire. Thus, they want more work for less money. Alongside, the dollar’s value decreases, and its acquisition power weakens. Things are overall more expensive.

Amid this context, we might feel we lack the choice to love our job and give it all because we are not valued. Loyalty does not seem to be significantly rewarded, chipping away little by little at our joy for our job.

This week, I had one of the hardest conversations of my career (with the administration). Compared to other instructors in my area, I make a third less while having the same degree and qualifications. Two factors would account for a percentage: one is time served, and the other is rank. However, the sum difference is hardly justified by those factors. I am scheduled to have a second conversation soon. Until then, I must wait.

My life’s value does not hinge on my job. I love what I do. No matter how bad a day I have, I soar when I enter the classroom. I love talking to the students about the process of being a designer, the ups and downs, the inevitable creative blocks, and the tips to unlock ideas. I rejoice with their progress and ideas.

I don’t work transactionally, though I have boundaries to protect my family time, creative time, and research. I had been aware of the pay discrepancy in the back of my head, but I had not woken up to it. When I did, it hit me hard.

A transactional attitude towards life and work is probably an easier, more efficient, and more effective way to go through life’s ups and downs. When you work with college students, however, who are looking to learn but also belong and feel that they matter, a transactional attitude helps no one. Relationships are symbiotic. Students change me as much as I change them as they progress in their pursuit of degrees. No one prepares you for the transformational and profound experience of being part of someone else’s growth. This is especially true in small cohorts and programs.

Why do I do what I do? Because there is nothing more meaningful to me than sharing what I have learned with others. When I see a spark of joy in their eyes because something clicked, it makes my day. Every time. Yes, it is hard sometimes. Dealing with people is frequently messy and not linear. And yes, as time goes by, their college experience and memories will be replaced by other life moments that are much more transformational. That’s as it should be. But, while we are together in that classroom, I am committed to transforming their minds as much as they transform mine.

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

Header image by Ikhsan Fauzi on Unsplash.

The post Transform, Not Transact appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

I’m creating no less than seven presentations and workshops and one that captured my attention over the last few days involves pizza.

The workshop is called, “Slice to Pie.” It’s a metaphor for the transition from leading a domain-specific discipline to full enterprise management. In human terms, it’s when you go from being a leader of, say, accounts to becoming President or CEO. (In my case I went from Chief Creative Officer to CEO.)

Essentially, you have your slice. And next thing you know, you’ve got the whole pie.

The workshop I’m leading will go into detail about this transition and how to approach it.

Here are a few things that might help you as you’re pondering trying to make a similar move happen.

Step one, before you get your head around the enterprise, get your mind around understanding finance. If you’re not coming from a finance background learn the basics and learn the terms.

Sure, every finance meeting is essentially the same plot: What’s the money coming in? (Revenue). What’s the money we’re using to run this thing? (Cost). What’s left over? (Profit).

Oh, you can go one step further and calculate the profit as a percentage. (Margin). That’ll show you how efficiently things are going. And trust me, the conversation will go deep and wide into ways to prune costs. But keeping this foundation will always ground you in the root of the conversation.

Best of all, once you know that every day your CFO and her team will be thinking about this (and every month you’ll be reporting it) you can turn your attention to the rest of the pie.

In my workshop, I break down the enterprise into my 3P framework. (Those of you who follow this blog will know this ol’ chestnut). The 3Ps: People, Process, Product.

When you approach the pie through this 3P lens you can really manage and lead.

For example:

People: Listening and motivating.

Process: Focus on how you create and make your ideas and products.

Product: The thing you are producing. How good is it? How are you pricing it? How are you selling it?

Do the first Ps right and it all leads to a fourth P: Profit.

Here’s another thing: Use the 3Ps as an assessment tool. You see, if any one of these elements is misaligned, you’ll have problems. Don’t have the right People? The Process will be irrelevant and the Product will suffer. Have the right People but no Process? You might get lucky on Product but it won’t be sustainable. Product is mediocre? Well, is it the People or the Process? No doubt, it’s all affecting your Profit.

Is this utterly reductive? You bet it is.

Coming into a CEO role as a trained copywriter, I found so many issues and conversations were complicated and loaded with confusing jargon.

I simplified everything.

That’s what I preach. That’s what I teach.

Simplify.

It all comes back to pizza. It’s a few simple ingredients all working together. Maybe that’s why you’re rarely satisfied with just one slice.

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 by Polina Kuzovkova for Unsplash+.

The post Slice to Pie appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Theseus was one of the greatest Greek mythological heroes. Often called “the father of Athens,” his role in Greek mythology is compared with that of Romulus, founder of Rome. Ancient Greeks had a saying: “Nothing without Theseus.”

According to myth, Theseus was abandoned as a child by his father, King Aegues, who left him a sword and a pair of shoes in a hole under a boulder. He told Aethra, the boy’s mother, that when the child was strong enough to move the rock he could seek Aegues out and claim the King as his father.

Isn’t Greek mythology great?

Anyway, Theseus grew up, moved the rock and went in search of Aegues. The boy had always admired Hercules, “the most magnificent of all the heroes of Greece,” according to Edith Hamilton’s essential book, Mythology. Knowing that travelers in the Greek countryside were constantly harassed by bandits, Theseus chose to make the journey to the still provincial Athens by land in the most dangerous, heroically Herculean manner he could. He did, killing all the bandits along the way. When he arrived in Athens, his father (who recognized him by the sword he carried) proclaimed Theseus his son and heir.

Theseus, now on a serious heroic roll, went on to challenge the greatest threat of all, the half-man/half-bull Minotaur, in the Labyrinth, from which no man had previously escaped. Spoiler alert: he won, and sailed away with his new bride Ariadne. Depending on which story you believe, he either immediately deserted Ariadne on the island of Naxos or was blown out to sea leaving her on the shore. He’d also rescued thirteen young Athenians who had been the Minotaur’s prisoners!

He returned to Athens, where his father had thrown himself off a rock cliff believing Theseus to be dead (!!), making him King. He went on to unite Attica (the ancient name for Greece) but, actually not wanting to be King, established democratic rule in the city. Hamilton tells us that this made Athens “the happiest and most prosperous, the only true home of liberty, the one place in the world where the people governed themselves.”

Whew!

Plutarch also tells the story, adding an element about the ship that has resounded through thousands of years:

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question as to things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

Plutarch’s Lives (Volumes I and II) by Arthur Hugh Clough, emphasis added.

Think about that. Plutarch wrote his biographies in roughly 100 CE, meaning that by then the question he raised in the quote was already a matter of philosophical debate about “things that grow.” Was the restored ship of Theseus “the same” as the one on which Theseus himself had sailed? Or not? In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes went further and asked if someone had collected all the parts that needed to be replaced and reassembled them, would that be “the ship of Theseus?” Would there then be two “ships of Theseus”?

This fable intrigues me because it poses a question about the entity that we all call “me.” You know, my “self.”

Now, we all know that my today “me” is different from my yesterday’s “me,” or last year’s “me,” or “me” when I was 15. Right? On a basic physics level, we are pretty sure our body replaces all of its cells over some period of time, although the replacement rates differ for different types of cells. On a psychological level, we are certain that some of the things my “me” thought, felt, believed, valued, and did when it was 15 are vastly different than they are now. So, what remains the same? What part of my “me,” my “self,” persists?

This is not just idle speculation. There are plenty of serious thinkers who contend that the whole idea of a persistent “self” is an illusion. They range from the Buddhist idea of anatta, which holds that there is no permanent entity underlying transient human experience, to philosopher David Hume’s contention that we are nothing but a bundle of individual perceptions, to neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio who see our perception of a unified self as the brain’s construction to unify millions of individual neural processes.

These thinkers are opposed by those who see the “self” as the core of human existence. Rene Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am,” meaning that there must be a persistent “I” that exists across time and space. Others, like Immanuel Kant, John Locke, William James, and Ayn Rand agreed that I know there’s a persistent, essential “me” by virtue of having a point of view from which I make choices about how to live in the world. Christian thinkers go further and argue that this “me,” or “soul,” persists after death.

For me, the point is that the existence of a persistent “me” is a fundamental aspect of our lived experiences. Whether or not there “really” is an essential defining entity that persists across our lives is a question that we only pose after first rejecting the “of course there’s a ‘me’” idea that we carry around with us on a daily basis. Whether we’re “right” or not, we all live “as if…” there is something consistent about ourselves and the people we interact with. To assume otherwise is to believe that we would have to somehow “re-certify” our beliefs about ourselves and others, including our loved ones, every day (every minute?). That leads to a conclusion that is almost too chaotic to imagine. Our world is built on the belief in the persistence of (relatively!) consistent selves.

So, on this question, count me on team “Yes, there is a ‘me’ in Theseus”!

How about “you”?

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

Header image: courtesy of the author (made in Midjourney).

The post My Favorite Things: There Is No “Me” in Theseus…Or Is There? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

One good thing about the current humans-vs-machines brouhaha is that a lot of very smart people are throwing very smart words at it. Just one of many noteworthy passages from Stephen Fry’s recent talk at King’s College, AI: The means to an end or a means to the end?:

“Just as the success of the automobile was enabled by enormous supplies of crude oil composed of microscopic bits of ancient life, rendered useful in the refineries of Rockefeller and others, so the success of Ai is enabled by enormous supplies of crude data — data composed of microscopic bits of human archive, interchange, writing, playing, communicating, broadcasting which we in our billions have freely dropped into the sediment, and which the eager Rockefellers of today’s big tech are only too happy to drill for, refine and sell on back to us.”

It’s incredible, terrifying, thought-provoking.¹ The gist of it (and a handy metaphor to help keep grasp of this nebulous, abstract thing): AI is a river that must be canalised, channeled, sluiced, dredged, dammed, and overseen.

Slight tangent (courtesy of A. R. Younce): engineers, fluvial geomorphologists, and the unintended consequences of trying to change the course of a river.

Anyway, fluviality aside, you really need to read Fry’s whole thing, but this postscript is particularly worth adopting:

“You may have noticed that I render Artificial Intelligence as “Ai” not “AI” throughout this piece – this my (fruitless no doubt) attempt to make life easier for people called Albert, Alfred, Alexander et al (ho ho). In sans serif fonts AI with a majuscule “i” is ambiguous. How does the great Pacino feel when he reads that “Al is a threat to humanity?” So let’s all write as Ai not AI.”

I’m sure Adobe wouldn’t be happy with that, but I much prefer it. I also like how it puts the emphasis on the artificial rather than the intelligence.

Another good read: Ted Chiang on why Ai isn’t going to make great art, for The New Yorker. I rather liked this analogy:

“As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.”

Okay now for some other hyperlinks.

Counting down the days until Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 is right here in my eyeballs. Definite elements of Moon in there, but mostly, it reminds me of the absurd cloney antics of the Paranoia RPG.

XKCD’s surprisingly useful guide to figuring out the age of an undated map. Finally, an opportunity to use the (NUMBER OF YEMENS) + (NUMBER OF GERMANYS) formula.

Companies paying freelancers. Shockingly accurate.

Very excited to discover that at some point, Rebellion bought the rights to the Bitmap Bros. back catalogue, and you can buy Speedball t-shirts. I’ve never smacked the buy now button so fast.²

McSweeney’s latest issue is a lunchbox. Because, of course it is. To celebrate 25 years of independent publishing, the tin-box magazine is filled with baseball-inspired author cards, poem pencils, and never-before-seen artwork from Art Spiegelman.

1. Although I did have to correct him on one point: he confuses Dartford for Dartmouth! What a blithering idiot! This officially makes me smarter than Stephen Fry. ↩︎
2. Please feel free to shout ICE CREEEAM at me if you see me wearing mine in public. This reference will make sense to about four of you. ↩︎

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

Image courtesy of the author.

The post Meanwhile: No. 213 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

ME: The writing is brilliant. THEM: SO WHAT.

It’s an incredibly important subject. SO WHAT.

The author is an expert. SO WHAT.

The author has won fifteen awards. SO WHAT.

The writer has at least 200k followers on Instagram. SO WHAT.

If we don’t acquire it, it’s going to go somewhere else and you’ll regret it. SO WHAT.

In twenty years of being an acquisitions editor, I saw it all: the swaggering, strutting publishing director who had absolutely no book experience but slipped into the role because of connections, was a great issuer of SO WHATs, and was more concerned with the author’s photo than whether or not her book would be reprinted for years to come. I saw the SO WHAT test be blithely thrown around when, for example, agents set a high floor for an auction, I attempted to enter the auction, was cleared to low five figures and the book went for mid-six figures (and is still in print today, two decades later). SO WHAT said the director when I told him the outcome while he filed his nails with his feet on his desk.

Cynicism is quicksand: once you step into it, it’s impossible to get out. Cynicism is a trap, a snare, a trip-wire, and while it purports to bump up against attempts at humor, it is entirely unfunny.

As an author, I’ve been on the receiving end of SO WHAT more times than I can count. My favorite SO WHAT happened when I had a Motherland event planned, and when I arrived at the store in my home state, I asked where to put my things. The manager said, as a line was forming outside, Oh we haven’t set up yet because the author isn’t too popular and I said Um, I’m the author, and the manager rolled her eyes and said SO WHAT.

I digress.

I want to talk about the problem of cynicism, which has its roots in SO WHAT. Cynicism is quicksand: once you step into it, it’s impossible to get out. Cynicism is a trap, a snare, a trip-wire, and while it purports to bump up against attempts at humor, it is entirely unfunny. Cynicism is shameless; cynicism is chilly and unyielding, and bears, in our modern days, a flimsy connection to the philosophy of ancient Greek cynicism. Cynicism means (according to one definition) a sneering disbelief in motive. Misanthropic. Mistrustful.

A sneering disbelief.

Eyerolling incredulity.

I’m a Cancerian, and Cancerians are not known for our cynicism. We’re dyed-in-the-wool empaths, drum majorettes in the co-dependent parade, camp counselors in the overwrought Olympics. It’s hard for us to extricate ourselves from the sticky swamp of over-compassion, and it’s hard for us to even know when it occurs until it’s too late. Some years ago, a close friend of mine made a discovery about themselves that was foundationally traumatizing; I sat on their couch and listened to them tell me their story, and when my eyes welled with tears, they stopped and said to me Oh for God’s sake, what in the HELL are you crying about. (Oh nothing, I said. Your life is no longer the same and everything you knew to be true isn’t. Is that enough?) When they said it, I second-guessed myself and thought Wait — is my response appropriate, or is it nuts? It was probably the former, but it’s hard for me to know.

The three places where SO WHAT and cynicism have cropped up repeatedly in my life are spirituality, health, and recovery. For many years, I moved slowly toward some semblance of a spiritual practice; you could hear my gears creaking and grinding toward the manifestation of a contemplative life, and when I finally got there, with a regular meditation practice and time every day dedicated to that practice, it was as though someone had lifted a yoke from my shoulders and took the mask from my face, and I was able to breathe again, and to see light. I began this journey when I was very young, growing up the secular child of a traumatized father who had been raised in a devout home that was both emotionally and physically violent. When I fled my home at eighteen — it had been the site of so much rancor and existential abuse that I could not wait to leave — I discovered that I was drawn to quiet spaces. This was in the very early 1980s when Boston (where I was going to college) and New York City were anything but quiet. A few years later, I found myself a regular visitor to the Woodstock, New York home of two longtime meditation teachers, and for a while, everything changed for me. Until the night that I was dragged by a friend to a meeting of chanting Buddhists in the East Village and was told by the exuberant leader You can chant for whatever you want! Need a new car? Chant for it! My friend and I burrowed through the packed apartment to the door, left, and went out for margaritas, which was a problem because it was also the very first time in my life that I was trying to stop drinking. But I was twenty-three, and I thought, you know, SO WHAT.

Cynicism and SO WHAT are problems of hope.

Of course, not all chanting experiences — or practices of any kind — are like this; we know that. Since that time, I’ve spent many mornings on my zafu, and many days at silent retreats. During the last one, a Zen retreat in the Hudson Valley, my mother called and when I told her from the parking lot where I was hiding behind a Volkswagen so no one would see me that I was on a silent retreat, she said SO WHAT. And I thought to myself Who the hell am I kidding? A deflation; my cynicism was instantly ignited like a fuse, and I left the retreat and came home, where I found my wife sitting on the couch with the dog, having a small Scotch.

Which is a smooth segue to the cynicism and SO WHAT of recovery. Back in 1986, around the time of the chanting evening, it had quietly occurred to me that I might have just the smallest abnormal crush on wine. It probably didn’t help that a few years later I was attending cooking school and immersing myself in the food (and wine) world, maybe by design and maybe not. I didn’t share this with anyone except for the woman I was living with, who was a health and wellness practitioner. She was completely nonplussed, probably because she had seen me fall in love with cool, crisp Burgundian whites over and over again, ostensibly matching them to the meals I was making us for dinner, as in Oh LOOK honey, I’m making seared scallops! A perfect time to open a bottle of Montrachet! She didn’t care whether I drank or not, but she herself came from a long line of beer lovers and Big-10 football fans, and neither of us thought it would be problematic for me to go out with her for margaritas and order myself sparking water until I discovered exactly how hard it was, and I said SO WHAT because I was by then twenty-four and believed that I had all the time in the world to sort myself out, assuming I had a problem at all. I was certain of this.

OH to be those women on social media who do yoga in the morning, who meditate, who begin their days with journaling, warm lemon water followed by green tea followed by a protein-enriched smoothie, and on occasion, I have been that woman.

I was certain of this in the same way that with every passing year since my health has changed, and every year, I am certain that I’m still in my twenties and have all the time in the world. I know full well what I’m supposed to do, and mostly, I do it. I’m a cynic about outlandish food and health trends because I know, for example, what gets sprayed on fruits and vegetables: I saw it with my own eyes while on a press trip to the Central Valley of California, where Mexican migrant workers, in 108-degree heat, wore bandanas wrapped around their faces, sweatshirt hoods underneath their straw hats, heavy boots and elbow-length rubber gloves while they hosed down acres and acres of Driscoll Berry fields with pesticides. I sat in a University of Tromsø conference room with Marion Nestle and Peter Hoffman, while the head of the Norwegian salmon council refused to tell us what they fed their farmed salmon (which is prohibited from being sold anywhere in the EU) until Marion and I actually volunteered to try the feed ourselves. We did (it looked like large-breed dog kibble) and all the salmon council people would admit to were by-products.

So I know way too much about food and food products in the way I know that The Valley of the Jolly Green Giant is and probably always was a fetid swamp. I know that eating well is almost always a crap-shoot: if you think that eating nothing but fruits and veg will keep you safe and alive into three digits, you’re mistaken, because the variables are far too variable. Also, two of the healthiest people I’ve ever met — both longtime vegetarians who did all the right things: healthy fats, etc etc — are now fighting for their lives with rare diseases. My father-in-law spread butter on his steak every night for years and dropped dead of a massive heart attack in his den while trying to move a sofa with my mother-in-law one day back in 1973. Conversely, The Queen Mother ate meat and drank gin every day of her adult life, and lived to be 101. My aunt, who was fond of spongy white bread packed with hydrogenated oils and high fructose corn syrup, died at 102.

All of this said, I know what I need to do to stay healthy; I know what works for me and what doesn’t, but when I am in the presence of a good (or even bad) batch of fried chicken, I’ll eat it, because SO WHAT. I have a wonky liver and a fluttering heart and I had a Covid stroke in 2020, and I should be walking at minimum two miles a day, but if I’m tired because I slept badly, I downshift into SO WHAT. OH to be those women on social media who do yoga in the morning, who meditate, who begin their days with journaling, warm lemon water, followed by green tea, followed by a protein-enriched smoothie, and on occasion, I have been that woman. And then, on any average day, the calls start coming in bright and early from my elderly mother’s aide service and her health manager and I discover that no one is communicating with anyone else and the vitally important thing that had to be done for my mother two weeks ago was never done because her health manager forgot and now her service may be on hold, leaving her alone for several days a week: fuck yoga, and fuck meditation, and fuck my warm lemon water, and fuck getting quiet, and fuck sobriety, and fuck journaling, and fuck daily walks and good sleep because, honestly, SO WHAT. At moments like that, and there are many of them, I want to lie on the couch watching The Great British Bakeoff while drinking a goblet of white wine and eating a bucket of deep-fried, dayglo sweet and sour shrimp.

A sneering disbelief.

Cynicism and SO WHAT are, at core, problems of hope. As we get closer and closer to the elections here in America, it’s easy to wonder What if? What if the unthinkable happens — again — and life as we know it in my country hangs by a thread? What if everything we do, read, watch, and say is watched? What if women, people of color, the LGBTQ community lose every one of our rights? I remember once saying to a friend in recovery If the world was turned upside down and you found yourself suddenly living in the modern-day version of, say, 1939 Poland, would you start drinking again because, you know, WHY NOT? Would the cynic in you take over? This particular friend said Yes, of course she would. I asked another friend the same question, and she laughed and said No, she’d never go back to drinking. She equated her sobriety with having hazel eyes and wavy hair, as though it had become a part of her DNA. I asked her You wouldn’t even drink if the world was coming to an end and you had nothing to lose? She rolled her eyes and said SO WHAT? This is my life. This is who I am.

There are those of us who throw in the towel as soon as we’re able because our hope muscle is wasting away from lack of use. Usually, people who fall into this category come from a long history of chronic disappointment, and it’s impossible for them to believe that good may come, unfettered or encumbered by bad. They haven’t seen the world work that way; they haven’t seen it in love, or family relations, or business. They haven’t seen it in health, or finances, or eldercare. Recently, I was listening to Mary Chapin Carpenter in conversation with Joan Baez, on the former’s podcast, Hope is a Muscle, and one of the things they talked about was how hope can be defined as wishing/wanting, and Chapin said that making art in the times we live in is an act of hope. And I agree with her, with every fiber of my being. I wrote in Permission about how we are the art-making species; it is what we do, however we do it. It allows us to put one foot in front of the other, and move forward in this life; think about the poetry that came out of the Holocaust, written while human ash floated above an unthinkable hellscape. Think about the poetry that has come out of Ukraine, and Gaza, and Rwanda. This is hope in action, disconnected from human interference: no one says, as their home is being blown to bits, Okay, so today I’m going to write a sonnet about this horror. It just happens; it just comes.

In her podcast, Carpenter quotes Nick Cave:

“Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, keeps the devil down in the hole.“

So maybe this is it. Maybe this is what it’s all about. Maybe cynicism and SO WHAT are just places where we hide because it’s easier, it’s familiar. It’s the simpler route because hope is exhausting work.

And yet, at the end of the day, it’s all there is.

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 on PRINT.

Header image by Daniel Farò via Death to Stock.

The post Poor Man’s Feast: So What? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

An incomplete or poorly written RFP can signal disorganization, lack of clarity, or a misunderstanding of your firm’s own goals and needs—putting both your credibility and the project’s success at risk. On the other hand, a thoughtful, comprehensive RFP demonstrates strategic thinking and positions your firm as one that values precision and expertise. This guide is designed to help you structure an RFP that not only captures your firm’s identity and goals but also anticipates the needs and constraints of your internal and external stakeholders. By setting clear expectations from the outset, you will streamline the selection process and ultimately achieve a brand and digital presence that reflects your firm’s strengths.

Project Overview and Strategic Alignment

Begin by providing a high-level summary of the project’s purpose and its strategic relevance to your firm. This section should articulate how the project supports long-term goals, such as expanding into new markets, improving client engagement, or positioning your firm as a thought leader in specific practice areas. Be clear about why this is the right time to initiate the project and highlight key drivers that make this initiative critical to your firm’s success.

Key points to include:

• The strategic importance of the project to your firm’s growth and positioning
• The specific objectives you aim to achieve, whether related to brand perception, website functionality, or client experience
• Any recent shifts in focus or new developments that have influenced the decision to pursue this work

Defining Scope and Deliverables

Set clear boundaries around what this project will encompass. Law firms often have complex needs that touch multiple areas, from brand strategy to digital assets. Define what you expect the creative partner to deliver, including brand strategy, visual identity, verbal identity, and technical website specifications. Additionally, outline any known constraints, such as internal resources, existing brand elements that must be retained, or specific legal compliance considerations.

Key elements to cover:

• Specific deliverables (e.g., brand strategy, verbal and visual identity, digital design, platform integration)
• Critical issues or challenges you anticipate
• Constraints (e.g., timeline, budget, or internal team limitations)

Current Brand and Digital Presence

Offer a candid assessment of your firm’s existing brand and digital presence. This analysis provides potential partners with insight into areas of improvement and challenges they’ll need to address. Does your current brand effectively differentiate your firm, or has it become outdated? Is your website user-friendly and reflective of your firm’s expertise, or does it struggle to engage key audiences?

Include the following:

• Strengths and weaknesses of your current brand and website
• How your brand compares to peer firms
• Any previous attempts at rebranding or significant website updates

Audience Insight and Stakeholder Involvement

It’s crucial to define the key audiences you want to reach through your rebranding and digital initiatives. Law firms often serve varied audiences, including corporate clients, potential recruits, and other stakeholders such as referral sources and industry peers. Understanding who these audiences are—and how they engage with your brand and website—will help ensure the project is tailored to resonate with their needs.

Additionally, identify internal stakeholders and decision-makers. Who needs to be consulted? Who has the final say? This will help agencies anticipate potential bottlenecks in the decision-making process.

Points to consider:

• Target audience groups (e.g., clients, recruits, industry peers)
• Internal stakeholders and decision-makers involved in the project
• Engagement metrics or data on audience behavior (if available)

Timeline and Critical Milestones

Set a realistic timeline that includes key milestones. Ensure that any internal reviews, considerations, or approval processes are factored in, and communicate any potential challenges that could affect timing—such as regulatory deadlines, trials, or major firm events. Clear milestones keep the project on track and allow all parties to manage expectations. The availability of key decision-makers often upends schedules.

Include:

• Desired kickoff and completion dates
• Milestones for key deliverables and review periods
• Any foreseen challenges that might impact the timeline

Technical Requirements and Preferences

The technical framework for your law firm’s website is foundational to its success. Whether you prefer an open-source platform like WordPress for its flexibility and lower long-term costs, or a closed-source system for heightened security, it’s important to outline any preferences at the start. Different platforms come with distinct advantages and trade-offs in terms of cost, functionality, and security.

Beyond platform preference, include technical requirements that might affect the project’s scope. For example, if your firm requires integration with a CRM, document management system, or secure client portal, these needs should be addressed upfront to avoid complications later.

Best practices to include:

• Preference for technology platforms (e.g., open-source like WordPress vs. closed-source proprietary products)
• Integration requirements (e.g., CRM, document management, secure client portals)
• Hosting and maintenance expectations (e.g., in-house vs. third-party)
• Accessibility compliance (e.g., WCAG standards)
• Security needs (e.g., encryption, multi-factor authentication)

Budget Transparency

Transparency around the budget ensures that the proposals you receive are aligned with your expectations. Provide a realistic budget range based on the scope of work, and outline any internal resources that will be available to assist with the project. Clarify whether the firm expects the creative partner to handle ongoing maintenance or if this will be managed in-house.

What to address:

• Budget range and any fiscal-year considerations
• Internal team involvement and roles
• Expectations for post-launch maintenance and support

The Ideal Creative Partner

Finally, articulate what kind of creative partner you are looking for. This section helps potential agencies understand the dynamics of your firm and the skills or attributes that are most important for success. Whether you prioritize deep legal industry knowledge, technical acumen, or a fresh creative perspective, stating this upfront will attract the right candidates.

Consider including:

• Top qualities you value in a creative partner (e.g., expertise in law firm marketing, innovative design thinking, strategic guidance)
• Expectations for communication and collaboration throughout the project

And finally…

Provide a clear roadmap for how the RFP process will proceed. Detail the next steps, including submission deadlines, how questions should be submitted, and key contact information for any clarifications. Include availability for follow-up discussions to ensure both parties can align on the project’s finer details before final decisions are made.

In closing, taking the time to craft a thoughtful and detailed RFP will not only attract the right creative partners but also reflect your firm’s professionalism and vision. By setting clear expectations and asking the right questions, you lay the groundwork for a successful rebranding and website initiative that will strengthen your firm’s position in the marketplace.

This post was originally published on Lynda’s LinkedIn newsletter, Marketing without Jargon. Lynda leads a team at Decker Design that focuses on helping law firms build differentiated brands.

Header image: Unsplash+ in collaboration with and machines.

The post The Art of the RFP appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

It might be considered a gimmick, except that I lived it: days of agony and mental confusion, endless sketches (sometimes in the hundreds), mornings of critique that, instead of feeling like a lifesaver, felt more like a heavy object keeping me down and even more confused.

The bitter joy of beginning, I called it. I had come back to school to do something. Graphic design was a remote idea. My neighbor was a commercial artist, but outside of that, the words “graphic design” were pretty unknown to me.

My itch for the arts started early. So did my penchant for filling notebook after notebook with drawings and even novels. I wish I had them today. Only their memory remains between so many moves and my mom’s cleaning sprees. I drew. If I was bored, I drew. If I was sad, I drew. If I was passing the time, I drew. The ping pong tables at my house and my aunt’s house were more like huge spaces to draw. Comments about my talent would always follow, but back then, being an artist was the realm of bohemians, and my dad would have none of it.

But, when I said I wanted to be an architect, ah! That was different. There was a tangible option for me. The problem? There was only one school of architecture. Admission was a separate process from university admission and was very competitive. To say that I was intimidated is an understatement.

Nonetheless, I took the admission exam. When the results came, I did the math, and 13 points kept me from the minimum required to enter. I was crushed, lost, and confused. And a decade-long journey to find my place ensued.

I craved and missed art making after working as a junior high school teacher for nearly five years. A relocation to Ames, Iowa, a visit to ISU, a conversation with an admission advisor, a poster on the wall, and I enrolled to get a second bachelor’s degree, but this time in graphic design. At least initially—my art education portfolio did not have the breadth of work needed to be accepted into the MFA in Graphic Design program.

Nothing prepared me for my first graphic design class. Typefaces, fonts, letters, compositions, abstractions … What do you mean when you say not to stretch the letters?? I felt like a fish out of water. Approximately ten years older than my classmates, with no computer knowledge and unmentionable names for the computer, my desire to study graphic design soon vanished.

Coming to critique to present a body of work that, by my current standard, was nothing outside of deplorable, and receiving comments that signaled the death of my graphic design career left me hopeless. But I wanted to fight. I wanted to understand, even if I left the program. So, I pestered my professors. I was relentless.

There was so much I did not know or understand. But, there was so much I already knew and understood. My process was second to none. I researched, researched, and researched. I sketched and sketched some more. The gap between the sketches and the computer was vast. My typographic skills were clunky, but while I worked on those, I banked on the skills I had: reading, writing, and sketching. Concepts and reasoning came easily to me; execution would take me much longer.

Some of my students are like I was: eager but confused or lost. Some are eager but unwilling to put in the work day and day out. Some students have a more or less stronger foundation than others in the class, and thus, a chip on their shoulder. Every one of my students reminds me of who I was when I came back to school at different stages. And yet, the work I have seen since I started teaching typography has been better than what I presented that one October morning in 1994.

I keep the process binders because they remind me that the path to mastery does not end. Each mastery of a skill is nothing but a semicolon, a colon, or an ampersand in the long sentences that come thereafter. That process is nothing but beautiful. It is one thing when someone tells you they were bad at something. It is quite another when they come out with the images and show you. I do not edit that out of my life. It is a sweet reminder that growth is always attainable.

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

Imagery © 2024, Alma Hoffmann.

The post The Bitter Joy of Beginning appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

In 2009 I attended the One Club for Creativity’s inaugural Digital for Creative Leaders Workshop in partnership with the premier digital school, Sweden’s Hyper Island.

The goal of the program was to get dinosaur creatives like me proficient or at least open to the ever-widening and dominating digital landscape.

Then, like the AI adoption happening now, there were three types of people: One, the “into it” types. Two, the skeptical but persuadable types. And three, the arms-folded, never-gonna-accept-it rejector types.

I was Type 2.

The curriculum was robust. It was a blend of theory, practice, and collaborative learning, drawing heavily on Hyper Island’s methodology of experiential learning.

Some of the main elements of the program included:

Creative Leadership. Which was all about understanding the role of a creative leader in fostering innovation and motivating teams. And learning techniques for leading creative projects and managing diverse teams.

Digital Transformation. This was the big lightning bolt that emphasized how the digital landscape was changing the creative industry. And there were strategies taught for integrating digital technology into creative work.

Practical Applications. Here we took to hands-on tasks and our real-world projects to apply what we were learning.

It was truly a transforming moment in my career.

I was reflecting on all of this over the last few weeks as I was learning more, experimenting more and inspiring folks about AI.

It got me thinking about one of the most powerful ideas I heard at this OneClub/Hyper Island program about how to approach the digital world. (And now you can apply it to this AI moment).

I call it the “Canoe Theory.”

It goes like this.

Think of technology like a river. Right now, we are seeing an AI river. Upstream things are happening. Downstream things are happening. Right in front of us things are happening. It’s all endlessly flowing.

Now, you can stand at the edge of this river and admire it. Or even fear it.

Or…you can grab an oar and push yourself and your canoe into the water. Once there, you can feel the flow. You can paddle fast or slow. The point is, you’re in.

The AI age is here.

It’s time to get your boat in the water.

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 photo by Adam Kring on Unsplash.

The post The Canoe Theory of Technology appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Visual effects magazine befores & afters looks at the impressive array of seamless VFX shots in Ripley.

More gorgeous photography – Richard Weston and family follow in the footsteps of Mr Ripley along the Amalfi Coast.

More Farrow-meets-Kubrick than the rest of Richard’s pics, that up there is Anish Kapoor’s Dark Brother at Museo Madre. No family holiday is complete without a big black hole in the ground filled with nothingness and despair.

Back in Blighty, The World of Tim Burton is opening this month at the Design Museum. I’m very much “love the early stuff, and then … ehh” on Burton², but heck, I’ll still lap this up. Can’t wait to see the range of gift shop merch. I love gift shop merch.

The Folio Society have continued their Dune series with a new edition of Children of Dune, illustrated by Hilary Clarcq. At some point I’m going to get all three of these books and make a little sandy shrine to them.

Pretty certain that Harold Fisk’s Meander Maps of the Mississippi River (1944) are some of the most beautiful images ever made. Do I need one of these on my wall? If so, which one? All of them, you say? Every wall? FINE.

A brief history of a graphic design icon: Chip Kidd/Sandy Collora/Tom Martin’s Jurassic Park logo. Features the greatest fax of all time.

Very pleasantly surprised to find myself alongside other fantastic newsletterists in this week’s Substack Reads digest, curated by Coleen Baik.³ Apparently I’m a “known quantity in design circles” and should be enjoyed with a dirty vodka martini. This is all I’ve ever wanted.

An LP a Day Keeps the Doctor Away – excellent guest post by Rachel Cabitt on Casual Archivist, delving into the world of educational record sleeve art.

“I have been told to stop stealing muffins from the bakery. Unfortunately, it’s the only way to keep my lucrative muffin stand in business. Everyone is fine with this.”

That is all.

1. If anyone needs me, I’m out here perishing on the “remakes and re-adaptations are distinct cultural entities that each deserve their own critical discourse” hillock. ↩︎
2. Slavishly copying Burton’s art occupied most of my time at school. Ideally, this show would have one room dedicated to nothing but nineties teenagers’ exercise book doodlings of stripy snakes and Edward Scissorhands. ↩︎
3. This has created quite a spike in subscribers, which will immediately correct itself the moment I hit Send on this thing. Nothing loses you newsletter subscribers quite as effectively as sending a newsletter to your subscribers. ↩︎

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

Header image by Osarugue Igbinoba for Unsplash+.

The post Meanwhile No. 212 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

In the work of creating sustainable systems-level change, obstacles come in many forms: poor physical infrastructure, lack of resources, imbalanced distribution of power, disinformation, and more. However, the most stubborn obstacle is often the deeply held beliefs and assumptions that shape how we perceive and interact with the world. These beliefs form our collective values. If society’s values do not align with the change we are trying to make, our efforts to improve infrastructure, shift resources, and redistribute power will never stick and will always be in vain.

Narrative change exists to tackle this—to remake our values so that the concrete work of gathering resources, corralling political willpower, and pushing through new policies becomes easier. According to Narrative Initiative, one of the organizations pioneering and building this practice, narrative change is about changing “our shared interpretation of how the world works.”

Organizations are embedded within larger conversations. Narratives affect how we perceive organizations as much as organizations affect how we perceive their related narratives. For example, the Ford Foundation influences the narrative of the role of philanthropies—as when, in 2015, Darren Walker started spearheading, what he called, “a new gospel of wealth”—while at the same time, the larger narrative influences our perception of the Ford Foundation. The prevailing narrative of abortion—as a women’s rights issue, with 63% of Americans believing abortion should be legal in all or most cases—affects how we perceive Planned Parenthood, but Planned Parenthood plays an influential role in how society perceives abortion.

Understanding this complex and two-way relationship is the first step towards harnessing branding to be a more effective tool in the work of social change.

The Relationship Between Branding and Narrative Change

A brand is a concentrated dose of narrative change—clear and distilled language, aimed at shifting how audiences perceive and understand the stakes of a certain issue or field, delivered through the powerful and specific container of brand language. Because of the nature of brand, it can be delivered across multiple channels, to various audiences, and consistently over time.

But in order for a brand to step up to the proverbial plate, we need to ask it to be more than just a logo and a mission statement. A brand can set the context and frame the conversation. It can zoom out and help us understand how the world works and why it needs to be different.

When the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), a leading health philanthropy, rebranded earlier this year, there was a notable shift in its language. Previously, they talked extensively about health equity and the social determinants of health, packaged in a concept they called “building a culture of health.” The new brand language we developed for RWJF strikes a different tone and frames up a different conversation. “We take bold leaps to transform health in our lifetime and pave the way, together, to a future where health is no longer a privilege, but a right.”

In American lore, rights are inalienable. We are born with them and die with them. The framing of health as a right is a sharp and compelling idea that sheds sunlight on the darkest crevices of our previous assumptions. When access to health becomes a right, our values shift. When values shift, policies change. When policies change, resources move. And when resources move, change happens. We helped RWJF leverage its brand to do more than talk about itself and challenge entrenched narratives about who is deserving of health and why.

Brand Your Organization, Brand Your Cause

Narrative change is grueling work. Progress is hard to measure and it can take generations for efforts to bear fruit. So it’s important to state that branding is not a shortcut. But if your organization is all about taking a systems approach to social issues, remember that branding can be a powerful tool to change the way we think about the world.

Next time you update your brand, don’t just ask what can be said about your organization; ask what can be said about the larger issues you participate in. Language, both visual and verbal, matters.

With the right words and images, branding can shake loose tired assumptions and clear the way for real progress.

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

Illustration by Merit Myers.

The post A Powerful Dose of Narrative Change appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

When was the last time you sent a postcard? When was the last time you carried up a stack of mail and found a small card, glossy photo on one side, handwritten note on the other, tucked in among the circulars and bills? Wish you were here!

There is something unique about a postcard. It is small and compact. It may be thin, bordering on flimsy, and yet with a corner stamp in place, it is designed to make it through the system.

How many words can you fit in the split panel on the back? Do you need words? What happens to the narrative if you send drawings? Portraits? A selfie? A sketch of your morning coffee, your pet, or from your favorite cafe? What happens if you swatch your palette (ink or paint or colored pencils) each month on a postcard and mail it to someone?

What if you record thumbnails of morning light every day for a week? What happens if you write how you really feel in that blank space and send it off?

If I look out my window and draw the shape of the tree and write the colors of the sky and, later, drop it in the mail, how will you reply? If I do it once a month for a year, what will I capture? What record will the postcards hold? What will it mean to the recipient?

Intimate and Exposed

A postcard feels intimate, a whisper in the wind, and yet its intimacy is undone by the fact that its contents are not hidden. It is not concealed. It is a message that is out there for anyone to read. Saying just enough is part of the allure, part of the puzzle, part of the dance. Maybe your words are cryptic or abbreviated or written in a shorthand that will only make sense to the recipient. Or, maybe you write plainly, hold nothing back. Maybe you have nothing to hide.

An Unassuming Substrate

As a surface, a postcard is a simple and beautiful container, a glorified index card, often with a photograph or art on one side, that we intentionally compose, address, stamp, and send on a journey to connect.

Other than the annual jury duty summons, very little real or important mail arrives as a postcard. Postcards, for the most part, are personal. They are from or to someone you know. They have been selected with specificity.

Maybe we are somewhere special, or on vacation, and are sending a note to someone to let them know that we are thinking of them. Maybe it’s a bit of a flex, a throwback to days before social media: “Look where I am.”

Maybe we simply have to share that bridge or that view of sunset or that hillside in the mist. Maybe we are enjoying ourselves so much that the desire to send someone evidence of our adventure is irresistible. We don’t really mean to brag, but we want someone to know, someone to witness our journey.

Or maybe our postcards are more humble. Maybe we are sending words from home, a note carefully tucked into the small space and a favorite art series on the other side. Maybe we have the Pantone postcards. Maybe we’ve selected a specific color. Does it reflect our mood? The sky? The color we think of when we think of the recipient?

Will you send national monuments or falling leaves, paint brushes or sunsets or roosters or cats or photos of chairs or bridges or lighthouses or quilts or children’s book illustrations? Will you send photos of works by favorite artists (like Hopper, Matisse, Van Gogh)? Will you send photos of hot sauces or birds or rainbows, stacks of books or spine art, Studio Ghibli scenes, New Yorker covers, national parks, or coffee cups?

The art is part of the equation, and then there is the flip side. You only have a small space in which to write (or illustrate) your note. What will you say?

Postcard Prompts

In a series of monthly prompts, we will create a set of postcards, each one responding to a simple nudge. You can use existing postcards, focusing on filling the blank side. This is the easiest approach. Or, you can use blank cards, your responses filling both sides.

Month by month, you will develop a set of postcards, a series of epistolary art. You might choose to work in the same medium or style or palette each month or work with repeated elements that help tie the cards together. Or you may view each postcard as a standalone piece, disconnected from others, and let the prompt guide your choices.

Simple and Mindful

The prompts will not be difficult. 

These are prompts you may have done before. But we will do them in this monthly format together as the world changes over the next year, as our lives change, and as we process whatever we are going through, highs and lows, celebrations and milestones, personal journeys, and the quest for meaning.

Who will you have in mind as you create your postcards? Will you mail them?

A Postcard from Your Journal

One of the projects that I run and that I encourage others to consider is the keeping of an illustrated journal that documents life with a combination of art and words. I use a weekly format because I particularly enjoy the ways in which taking things a week at a time allows for fluidity across a span of days. There is no pressure to finish pages or drawings every day. Instead, I work on spreads that can be built and shaped and filled in over the course of a week. It’s mindful. It’s flexible. Every Sunday, I start a new week.

Many of the postcard series prompts could easily be done in an illustrated journal or sketchbook or in the margins of a bullet journal or planner, but I hope you will consider the postcard as a format. The postcard presupposes a recipient, a reader, a viewer.

Postcard Logistics

To qualify for the postcard stamp, a postcard needs to be roughly 4×6 or smaller. The USPS lists the following specifications:

• Rectangular in shape (not square)
• At least 3-1/2 x 5 inches and at least 0.007 inch thick
• No more than 4-1/4 x 6 inches and no more than 0.016 inches thick

If using traditional, preprinted postcards, you will want to make sure the cards meet the size requirements (or plan to use a letter stamp for oversized postcards). If you are going to DIY your postcards, you can buy readymade blank postcards (plain or watercolor), use heavyweight index cards, or cut your cards from heavy cardstock, Bristol board, or watercolor paper.

Using preprinted cards minimizes the work. You’ll be sharing a photograph or piece of art you like and your own art and/or writing on the other. This is also a great way to use up postcards you may already have.

If it’s been a really long time since you saw a postcard in person, remember that on one side, you’ll need to put the address on the right and the stamp in the upper right corner. Also, be aware that the postal bar code will be added along the bottom edge. If you write or draw in that space, just know it will most likely be obscured during the mailing process.

Postcard stamps are slightly less expensive than letter stamps, but there aren’t a lot of options. Currently, postcard stamps feature sailboat art by illustrator Libby VanderPloeg. If you have old stamps floating around that aren’t enough for current first-class mail (and aren’t Forever stamps), using them on your postcards can be a good option. Just make sure they meet or exceed the postcard stamp in value.

Slowing Down

A postcard series almost sounds quaint, other than the fact that there are thousands of people writing postcards these days to encourage people to vote. Beyond that, sending almost anything with a stamp might feel just a bit old-fashioned.

As a creative project, thinking about a postcard series is exciting. I imagine postcards filled with lists, or data visualization (a la the Dear Data project), with drawings, portraits, quotes, poems, and more. I am hoping that we can push the envelope on this envelopeless space to create personal series that are unique, bold, quiet, honest, authentic, and visually awesome.

I hope we create postcards that, through their line and composition, through their art as much as their words, have something to say. I hope we send our postcards and reach someone.

An October Postcard

Not every postcard (or every piece of art) has to be deep or soul-baring or complicated. A lot of postcards just say something like “Wish you were here!” or “Wanted to let you know you’re on my mind.”

To kick off this postcard series, let’s focus on something that is relatively simple and can be tied to memory or not. It’s October, and Halloween will be coming around.

Your challenge for this month is to create a postcard (with a recipient in mind) and document a costume.

Maybe it is a costume that you remember from when you were a kid. Maybe it is a costume from your children’s Halloween years. Or maybe Halloween isn’t something that was ever a big deal for you, and you think about what kind of costume you might choose now or wish you had chosen then.

You don’t have to particularly like Halloween or be a dress-up person to do this prompt. I don’t, and I’m not. But I still find it interesting to think about my history with Halloween, most of which I don’t remember, and some of the characters that stand out for me from my parenting years, from comic books, and the world of cosplay.

You may want to separate the prompt from Halloween and think about the whole concept of dressing up (whether you do or don’t), the performative aspect of that, and even the ways in which dressing up can be used to flaunt or conceal. Maybe you are a fan of Chappell Roan and sometimes think about what it might be like to wear costumes like that. Maybe you loved Joaquin Phoenix’s version of the Joker. Maybe you love theater or anime. Or maybe you just have a soft spot for clever costumes, sewn at home or made from cardboard boxes.

So what will you put on a postcard?

I don’t dress up, but one of my favorite costumes that I’ve seen in the last few years, something that seems really “doable,” is Waldo (from Where’s Waldo), with his round glasses, red and white striped shirt, and striped hat with a red pompom. It’s an incredibly simple costume. It’s cute and clever. It looks like it would be fun. (The corresponding Wenda costume tends to involve a very short blue skirt. I would opt for Waldo. No question.)

I am also a fan of the Pantone color swatch costume. I love this idea even though it’s potentially an overthinker’s nightmare. What color would you choose?

Crayon. Alice. Rabbit. Harry Potter. Obi-Wan. Dorothy. The Tin Man. Banana. No. 2 Pencil.

Commemorate a costume on a postcard. You can draw your costume, or diagram it, or make a collage, or write it out in words. You might write the memory of a specific costume, a specific Halloween, or turn it into a poem. What does the costume say? Why this costume?

Have fun!

Notes: links to Amazon in this post are affiliate links. You can find postcards at your local souvenir stands, museums, and other shops. You can find postcard-making materials at your favorite art store or by scavenging paper products you already have.

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.

Header image: Assorted postcards. A. Cowen 2024

The post Connecting Dots: A Creative Postcard Challenge appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

When I saw the word it felt like it described me to perfection. I can spend hours doing something repeatedly until I feel tired or I’m reminded to eat, usually by my husband. In previous posts, I shared how obsessed I have been with a particular technique in watercolor painting. Recently, in a conversation with Ben Shamback, we discussed the illusion of perfection.

I take drawing tutorials from Ben because he is truly a master at it, and I, to put it simply, am not. I want to learn and better understand drawing because it improves my observational skills and lettering practice. In the tutorial sessions, we commonly engage in long conversations about the TV shows we are currently watching, the books we are reading, and the things I need to improve on in my drawings. He is a very kind and patient instructor, and I am very lucky to study under his tutelage.

This last week, I shared how obsessed I had become with watercolors during the summer. Something about watercolors holds my attention in a way that other paint mediums do not. Their transparency, lightness, and glow mesmerize me. Ink does the same thing. Works in ink, in the manner of De Kooning, speak to me.

Watercolors hold power over me, and I find myself searching for mastery and perfection. When I shared this fascination with Ben, I cited the work of a watercolor artist I have admired all this time. I mentioned how I wanted to attain such mastery that when I take up the brush, I can draw the shapes without pencil guides like the artist did with a particular flower.

In response, Ben shared his wisdom. I confess I felt I was being corrected. He said I saw someone who had painted that flower over a thousand times, and of course, her flower would look much more sophisticated than mine. Then he added, “It is, for example, my G’s compared to your G’s. Yours will be much better G’s than mine will be because you have done that G so many times.”

I have said the same thing to my students on many occasions. But I forgot that it also applies to me in whatever area I pursue. A student later commented on how good my letters looked on his practice sheet. Feeling his comment, I looked at him, smiled, and said, “You just need to practice patiently to attain a certain level of mastery.”

It is good for us to aspire to be like those we admire who have mastered a certain level of craft or skill. We all need a mark. But the truth is that these masters also have masters they aspire to be like. The road to mastery is palinoia: a relentless pursuit of mastery day in and day out.

The road to mastery is palinoia.

After sharing my obsession with the watercolor artist with Ben, I realized I had fallen prey to a common and familiar trap. I had suspended disbelief, and in my mesmerized state over her watercolor skills, I ignored how much time it must have taken her to do the flower that way—how I wanted to. Online videos flatten the process so you don’t see the bumps, the problem-solving, and the mistakes.

I often do a live vectorization of a sketch demo in my sophomore classes. There is no preparation beforehand. There are no prepped files to go from. I don’t even use my sketches. I ask them to give me a sketch they will not use, and I go through the process of vectorizing it live. Which means I have to look at their sketch and analyze it. The analysis is usually an assessment of the geometric shapes that are the foundation of said sketch. Their sketches are not done with geometry, though. The sketches could be a bat, a bird, a pot, an activity, or something else. The point is that these sketches do not reflect my visual understanding of a subject. I take out my tracing paper, do a simple geometric analysis, photograph the sketch, clean it up on the computer, place it in Illustrator, and start creating the symbol in front of the class live as I talk to them.

The students asked me why I didn’t record these and post them as videos in the online classroom. My answer was simple: the recordings would be too cleaned up because otherwise, they would be too long to watch. Then, they wouldn’t see me making mistakes to get to a version I am satisfied with. I want them to see me make mistakes, get a little frustrated, stumble on the tools to use, get lost in the interface, have my mouse not work, and so on.

The online tutorials must balance time and length because they differ from watching someone live doing it. It is easy to look the other way when a video like this takes too long. But it’s not that easy to look away when it is live.

Understandably, I am seeing a pristine recording of my artist’s watercolor flower. I must remember then that it takes a long time to do something with mastery and perfection. I need to be patient when engaging in palinoia.

Don’t we all?

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

Imagery © 2024, Alma Hoffmann.

The post Palinoia and Patient Mastery appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

You may recall Nike bringing in John Donahoe, a former Bain consultant and “Digital Guy” who replaced Mark Parker the “Creative Guy.”

And while the desire to modernize and streamline Nike was sound, the results were disastrous: destruction of the value of some $28 billion. And the loss of something, that’s arguably even more valuable: cool.

This week, Nike took care of business by exiting Mr. Donahue and luring back longtime Nike executive Elliot Hill, to the top post. Mr. Hill has held a variety of Nike roles in his three-decade career with the company all of which started in the Nike “Sports Graphics” department. A creative department.

All of this windup brings me to the real topic of this post: Product.

You see, as Nike turned its focus onto systems, supply chains, and digital experiences, it turned its eye away from its heart and soul: sneakers.

You could say, “It’s the sneakers, stupid.” Sneakers are the thing that Nike should never lose focus on. Streamline the enterprise? Sure. Challenge distribution models? Ok. But never ignore your bread and butter. And bread and butter are products.

Products are what drive companies. Look no further than the Apple revival of 1997. Steve Jobs came back to the ailing computer company and streamlined the product portfolio adjusting the focus to making core products like Mac and PowerBook, and then innovating with iPod.

At Nissan, at the dawn of the 21st century, then-CEO Carlos Ghosn famously proclaimed, “There is no problem at a car company that good products can’t solve.” And extremely popular and best-selling new Nissan models from Altima to Z proved this point.

Hollywood has forever been saved by a blockbuster product. Godfather for Paramount. Star Wars for 20th Century Fox. Batman for Warner Bros.

In my own personal experience, when I was CEO of TBWA\Chiat\Day NY, creative product truly changed the fortunes of the company as we pumped out incredible and award-winning work for the likes of adidas, H&M, Hilton, McDonald’s, Michelin and Nissan.

At the time, we changed a lot of systems and people — but we never lost sight and obsession with our creative product.

Product.

It’s the thing that will save Nike.

And it’s the thing that will help drive you.

What are you working on?

What’s your product?

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 photo: Allison Saeng for Unsplash+.

The post What’s Your Product? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Notably, Charlie Kauffman had just won Best First Screenplay for the film moments before, and I was watching live from home.

When Stern took the mic after director Spike Jones, he simply read the most snarky, arrogant, obnoxiously cruel studio rejection note about the script that he had received.

One of the nicer sentences:

It would probably be hailed as an aspiring piece of work on the planet on which it was written. Unfortunately, I did not have sufficient quantities of the medication necessary to allow this story to make sense to me.

The script reader went on to conclude that Kauffman’s script might do well as an Off-Broadway play, with an audience of no more than twenty people, before declaring PASS.

(I found the video! Start at 51.57)

The script not only found a studio, the film found an audience of more than twenty people.

It also went on to gross $23.1 million worldwide, earned a total of 76 nominations (including three Oscar noms), and launched Charlie Kauffman’s career as the screenwriter whose movies make it to a ton of My Favorite Films of All Time lists. Including this one.

I think about this speech a lot because it’s been a reminder to me that not everyone is going to like or appreciate your work — and that your work doesn’t have to be for everybody.

It’s a reminder to me that the most successful people have stories of soul-crushing failure and rejection.

It’s also a reminder to me that you should never ever allow others to take away your own belief in yourself.

This month, Brad Montague and Kristi Montague launched the book Fail-A-Bration, and I just had to share it because I believe it’s destined to become one of those children’s-books-that-make-great-gifts-for-adults-too books.

(Besides, so many of you have asked me to write about Things I Love more frequently, and this is one of them.)

The book is based on an actual party that Brad and Kristi threw in which people stood up to share things in their lives that didn’t go as planned, then received a standing ovation for their story so they felt loved, appreciated, and seen.

Wow, would I like to go to a fail-a-bration! Maybe we should hold a virtual one over Zoom sometime.

If you want to know more about the story behind Fail-A-Bration — the book, and the party — it was a privilege to interview Brad Montague recently, and you can listen here. I think it’s 30 minutes well-spent.

I’ll end with this:

I love reading success stories. I get real joy heart-ing all the posts from friends and colleagues about new jobs, new love, honors and awards, milestones reached, viral articles, best-selling novels, and businesses that went from startup to 100 gazillion in profit in three days flat.

I even think we — especially women — should feel more confident sharing those successes without self-deprecation or false modesty.

But I also know that when I’m not in a great place mentally, or my life/career/hopes/dreams are not heading in exactly the direction I want at the speed that I want, there’s more comfort in stories about struggle.

I know I’m not alone; some of my most popular posts on I’m Walking Here are about times that have been tough for me.

So why does it feel brave to tell those stories?

It shouldn’t.

It would be so amazing if we could start normalizing our frustrations, painful missteps and wrong turns as unavoidable and essential parts of the human experience. Failure creates growth. Failure creates resilience.

I guess now, failure can even create an excuse to throw a cool party.

Liz Gumbinner is a Brooklyn-based writer, award-winning ad agency creative director, and OG mom blogger who was called “funny some of the time” by an enthusiastic anonymous commenter. This was originally posted on her Substack “I’m Walking Here!,” where she covers culture, media, politics, and parenting.

Header photo by Monique Carrati on Unsplash.

The post The Failure Story That’s Stuck With Me appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

(Side note: I did not (NOT) name myself after Oliver Jeffers. Or at least, not consciously.)

Many years ago, when my children were but wee bairns, the hours between 6 am and 6 pm were lawless, uncontrolled, anarchistic mayhem. There were four of them and only one of me, and they were all very young at the same time having all been born within three and a half years of each other, and anyone who’s ever had kids will have some idea of what this was like. Anyone who hasn’t… well… may you forever remain in ignorant bliss.

At 6 pm every day I got all four kids upstairs and into the bath, and from then on it was all soap and bubbles and running up and down the hallway playing superheroes to get dry, and then finally the best time of day when my baby-anarchists turned into four exhausted, sweet-smelling lambs, curled up under the covers, waiting for their bedtime stories.

I say stories (plural) because we’d usually get through four or five books a night. In those days, kid’s picture books were pretty much almost all I read, so they needed to be good ones. This was how we found Oliver Jeffers.

Oliver’s first book, How to Catch a Star, came out a few months before my first son was born, so there was never a time in my children’s life when there wasn’t an Oliver Jeffers book lying somewhere around the house. Between 2005 and 2015, when I reluctantly had to admit my children had outgrown picture books, we bought every book he published.

Disappearing into the magical, whimsical dream world of his illustrations every evening was our escape. As a family, we were going through a lot of changes, and many of them were very painful for my kids. If I could have waved a magic wand and made it all go away I would have, but I couldn’t. We weren’t living in that sort of story.

Luckily, Oliver Jeffers didn’t write those kinds of stories either. The characters in his books experienced fear, loss, and hopelessness, but it was their sense of curiosity and adventure that drove them forward, and it was always through some sort of collaborative teamwork that they managed to make it through. Whether it was helping a lost penguin, rescuing a stranded martian, releasing a bottled-up heart, indulging a passion for paper airplanes, or learning to read books rather than eat them, each story was a subtle reminder that the best way forward was to ask for help, trust in the power of friendship, and accept the small acts of kindness offered by those around you.

Book illustrations by Oliver Jeffers; featured with the artist’s permission

When I was writing Frighten the Horses I occasionally daydreamed about what it would be like if someone actually published my story. Given that I had no formal education in creative writing, no MFA, and no contacts in the publishing industry, this seemed like an elaborate dream, but while I was elaborately dreaming, why not go all the way? Someone once told me it would help during the long years of writing and re-writing to have a picture of the final product in mind, and so my final product naturally had a cover illustrated by Oliver Jeffers.

Someone once told me it would help during the long years of writing and re-writing to have a picture of the final product in mind, and so my final product naturally had a cover illustrated by Oliver Jeffers.

After the first part of my dream had come true—when the book had been acquired by Grove, edited by Roxane Gay, and had moved into production—I got an email from Roxane asking me if I had any thoughts about the cover. I assumed this was a formality since I’d been told with good authority that the author usually doesn’t get much say in the matter, particularly if he’s an unknown writer and the book is a debut. But I figured since she’d asked, I might as well give her an honest answer, however embarrassingly self-indulgent it might seem. When I didn’t hear anything back, I assumed the art department was going to ignore my suggestion and just produce whatever they wanted, which was fine by me since I was pretty sure the team at Grove knew what they were doing.

About a month later, I got an email update from Roxane, in which she casually mentioned that she’d “contracted Oliver Jeffers” for the cover.

For a moment I couldn’t work out whether the “r” in that word was a typo. Had she contacted Oliver Jeffers, or contracted him? Tentatively I reached out and asked. When she told me it was the latter, I nearly fell off my chair.

It turned out that Roxane knew Oliver. When she asked him if he’d be interested in doing the cover, Oliver politely declined, saying he was too busy with his own work to take on anything for anybody else. Roxane suggested he at least read the book before making a decision. Oliver continued to resist, putting it off like it was “forgotten homework,” until on a delayed international flight he reluctantly pulled it out of his bag. “Before the seatbelt sign had been switched off,” he wrote to me afterward, “I was hooked.”

I’m not going to repeat the rest of what he said because I’m bashful and it’s private, but I will share that he finished by saying, “Many, many things may have changed for you, but one thing is clear: you’ve always been a writer.”

Reader, I wept.

If you had told me when I first started falling in love with Oliver’s illustrations twenty years ago that I would have ended up with a cover as gorgeous as this, I would never have believed you. The minute he sent it through I emailed it to my best friend, and when she called me back moments later, all we could do was laugh. Really, it seemed like the only sane response to how utterly, preposterously perfect it was: just to laugh and laugh and laugh. The horse hoofs, the motorbike, the trans colors, the Louboutin shoe! Who could pick up this book and not want to know what the hell was going on inside its pages? What other picture could so accurately and engagingly introduce the story of my life?

Which leads us to why I think this story has such an Oliver Jeffers ending. His books don’t have morals, but they do have messages, and if there’s anything I’ve learned while working towards the publication of Frighten the Horses, it’s to overcome my fear of asking people for favors. Creating a book is an intensely collaborative process, and I’ve been frankly astonished by how many people have been willing to get involved or offer help when asked.

It’s also the message of the memoir itself. My children and I would never have made it through without leaning on the people who were there for us when we needed them, and without accepting help from all the therapists, support centers, peer groups, and resources that queer people have worked so hard to build so that people like us would have somewhere to turn. We couldn’t have done it alone, and I’m very glad we didn’t have to.

What I’ve come to believe through it all is that the most valuable human trait is kindness, which is something I may have first started to learn all those years ago, tucked up under the covers with my children, reading Oliver Jeffers books.

Oliver Radclyffe is part of the new wave of transgender writers unafraid to address the complex nuances of transition, examining the places where gender identity, sexual orientation, feminist allegiance, social class, and family history overlap. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Gay & Lesbian Review, and Them. His monograph, Adult Human Male, was published by Unbound Edition in 2023. His memoir, Frighten the Horses is out now with Roxane Gay Books.

Listen to Debbie Millman’s conversation with Oliver Jeffers on Design Matters.

The post My Book Cover Has Its Own Story appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

“Don’t wish you could be a famous photographer. If you do, you will fail” – Martin Parr joins WePresent’s excellent pile of manifestos.

All Tomorrow’s Pencils – in which Spencer Tweedy reviews the stationery stores he visited on tour. My favourite bit is the comment from his dad (Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy):

“Remembering one of the only real complaints I ever heard from your teachers growing up, I’d say ‘drummers’ love writing utensils because pencils double as tappity tap tap tapping drum mallets and pens can clicky click click like maracas. In fact they’re probably the first ‘drum sticks’ a future drummer ever holds. Which comes first? The drummer or the innocent child with a maddening urge to tap out a paradiddle with a pencil on a trapper keeper?”

As a relentless desk-drummer and stationery fetishist myself, yep, this all adds up.

Thoroughly enjoying Michigan-based book designer Nathaniel Roy’s A Book Designer’s Notebook, a regular peek behind the curtain of the craft.

Recent Letterboxding, including scattered thoughts on Alien: Romulus and a slog through the Fantastic Beasts films, equal parts cheekbones, coats and gibberish.

Got a little bit lost in Kottke’s posts about maps. I particularly like Andrew DeGraff’s maps of cinematic paths, although the Fury Road one does remind me that the two recent Mad Max movies frustratingly reduced the endless expanse of the apocalypse to an area about the size of the Isle of Wight.

Weird little animations from photographer Jack Davison.

Nolen Royalty (great name) made a website that simply had one million checkboxes and unwittingly created a surprisingly complex canvas for hexadecimal-savvy teens. Love this sort of thing – the internet needs more purpose-less sandboxes like this cough cough cough bring back myspace.

If you’re going to be outed as a serial killer with a trophy wall of decapitated heads in your basement, it might as well be through the medium of LEGO.

The Belvédère du Rayon Vert, a 1920s hotel that teeters above the railway tracks in the southern French town of Cerbère. Stunning. Desperately needs to be covered in neon and rain and plonked into a cyberpunk movie of some sort

SPINNING NEWSPAPER INJURES PRINTER and other Simpsons headlines.

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

Header photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash.

The post Meanwhile No. 211 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Labor Day arrived in America ten days ago, and, as she has done for the last twenty or so years, our neighbor Sherry threw a party: hamburgers, hot dogs, kids, a water balloon toss, a Yankee swap that inevitably gets very bawdy, swimming. Years ago, when she first started doing this, it ended with a campfire, guitars, ghost stories, and the neighborhood kids setting up tents in the yard and sleeping over with an assigned parent. Breakfast the next morning: hangovers, eggs, bacon, a lot of coffee. And almost always, the morning after the party was chilly — the first chilly morning of the season, as though some great cosmic hand had planned the necessity of wearing hooded sweatshirts after a long, hot summer which was, suddenly and precipitously over, just like that.

Those neighborhood kids are now nearing twenty-five. Some have moved away (England, Charleston, Florida), married, and now have their own littles. Some have divorced; some have fought off and survived dreadful illnesses. Many no longer drink or drink far, far less. Our parents, if they are still with us, are getting a lot older. And yet, we still manage to come together with our weird camping chairs and platters of deviled eggs, lemon tarts and chocolate biscuits, and trays of macaroni and cheese ostensibly made for the children (sure). This time, I looked around at us in our aforementioned weird camping chairs and could finally see it: we all actually look older. This, it seems, is also what September does.

And yet: I love this month.

I love it more than any other month of the year. I love it although it has always been the month of profound change for me, and, like any good cancerian, I wouldn’t exactly say I like change: my parents married on September 9th, 1962, and separated on September 23rd, 1978. I love it because of the memories I have of my grandmother, Clara, setting our table with a starched white tablecloth and her mother’s silver candlesticks, and teaching me how to dip apples into honey, and it wasn’t about the prayers but about the ritual; it was almost always September. I love September even though I was in my car driving back to Connecticut from Manhattan where I’d stayed overnight with my mother, and heard an NPR story about a private plane flying into the North Tower, and twenty minutes later, life as we knew it had changed forever, and my creative director’s husband Kenny didn’t come home.

September is my father, with his beautiful tenor voice, singing this song, below, while driving somewhere in the car, and never being able to sing it again after the attacks. September is The September Issue; September is saying goodbye to the past season, and starting over. September is the academic calendar to which most of us subconsciously hew, out of ingrained habit. I live in New England, and September is hysterical color and leaf-clogged gutters and leaf mold and bears showing up on the deck because the weather is changing and they’re hungry.

A lot to say about September as we head into the last weekend of the month, and some things to share that I think/hope you might find interesting:

Recently, Susan had to have an incredibly unpleasant procedure done to relieve the back pain she’s been walking around with for years. (Think of the words harpoon and knitting pin and you’re on the right track.) She is, thank goodness, fine, still achy, but on the mend. I had no idea how long the procedure was going to take, so I brought along a book to read: Nigel Slater’s A Cook’s Book. When the nurse saw me, she rolled her eyes. You’re not going to be here THAT long, she said. Because this book that I decided to tote along with me is 512 pages of pure Nigel, and weighs a lot. But comfort comes from different places for different people, and I brought this gigantic hardcover book with me because it’s a touchstone in my fall kitchen. September also means that we’re on the precipice of new cookbook season, and I’m waiting with bated breath for Nigel’s next book, A Thousand Feasts, which is coming on October 1st.

In September of last year, the Sycamore Gap tree was vandalized in Northumberland where it stood for centuries in a dip near Hadrian’s Wall. I wrote about it here, and about how the subtle malevolence in the banal results in humans chopping down whatever they want to without giving it so much as a second thought. When woods and trees are destroyed — incidentally, deliberately — imagination and memory go with them, writes Robert Macfarlane in The Old Ways. To mark the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree, HarperCollins is publishing On Sycamore Gap, a stunning collection of poems inspired by the tree, by poet Kate Fox. Katherine May at The Clearing will be celebrating the launch of the book on September 26th, for National Poetry Day. For more information, go here.

This is the season for hearty breakfasts, and this massive mix of greens and eggs on toast stopped me in my tracks as a great dish to make for a brunch in which a hungry crowd has converged on your kitchen. Watch the amazing Jeremy Lee of Quo Vadis cook this here.

Is it strange to love one’s socks? I’m guessing that the answer to this question is Yes. This is a seasonal thing for me: I’m a sandal-wearer until the first frost, or at least I was back before my days of saying things like Is it cold in here or is it me. I used to think of socks the way I thought about supermarket white bread: as a vehicle for something else, or, to quote my dad, like the Garden State Parkway: a garden-free road that connects New York to Washington DC. (Please, before you yell at me: I love a lot of New Jersey, but my dad did like to poke fun.) Socks are the conduit between your pants and your shoes, and even when you can’t see them, it’s important to know that you love them. If you can see them — your pants are rolled up a little, for example — they’d better be good. Favorites for the cool but not freezing season: blue and white striped socks from J.Crew, cornea-burning orange socks from Finisterre, red cashmere socks from Garnet Hill (bougie I know). Is it odd to say that my mood lifts when I’m wearing cool socks? Probably. But then it REALLY lifts when the temperature drops even more and I get to wear these shoes, which my mother bought me in 1988 when I was working in food and on my feet all day, and I STILL HAVE THEM AND THEY ARE PERFECT with outrageous socks and dark jeans. My mother, however, says that when I wear them I look like Dame May Whitty walking on the moors. So: socks. It’s getting chilly: go buy some good socks that you love.

If you have not yet heard of Wyatt Ellis, let me introduce you to this young man. Back in the days before lockdown, Wyatt, then a wide-eyed ten-year-old kid living in Tennessee, took some mandolin lessons and fell in love with the instrument. Not rare for a kid from Tennessee. But watching this guy play is like watching a surgeon at work; a prodigy tapped by the mandolinist Sierra Hull in 2020 for a Tennessee Folklife Apprenticeship, he has appeared several times on the stage of the Opry. Wyatt’s work is not particularly seasonal; it’s just completely phenomenal and I want to make sure that you know about it, even if you don’t generally listen to bluegrass.

Visit the original post on Poor Man’s Feast for the recipe for an excellent September soup.

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

Header photo by Enzo Sartori on Unsplash.

The post Poor Man’s Feast: A List for the Changing Weather appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

At first, business was as sweet as her lemonade. Customers flocked to her stand, drawn by the refreshing drinks and her cheerful smile. But as the days went by, she noticed her lemon supply dwindling.

Worried about her business, Charlotte began to squeeze the lemons harder and harder. She squeezed until her arms ached, trying to extract every last drop of juice from the fruit. Soon, all that remained were dry, lifeless rinds, yet she continued to squeeze, desperate to keep her business afloat.

One night, as the entrepreneur sat surrounded by piles of exhausted lemons, a wise old gent passed by. Seeing her distress, he stopped and asked, “Why do you squeeze so hard, young lady?”

Charlotte explained her predicament, and the old gent stroked his grey beard and smiled knowingly. “Ah,” he said, “You are only seeing what is, not what could be. Let me tell you a secret: a lemon is more than just its juice.”

True success comes not from exhausting your resources, but from nurturing them and allowing them to grow in unexpected ways.

The next day, with renewed energy, Charlotte set about transforming her business.

First, she changed the name of her stand to “Lemon Stan,” declaring herself a true fan of the citrus fruit. She then took the seeds from the used lemons and planted them in pots along the street. Then, she boiled the rinds to create a refreshing “Lemon Water” and a delightful lemon-scented perfume.

With a grater in hand, she turned more rinds into fragrant lemon zest, packaging it in small, colorful sachets.

As curious customers approached, drawn by the new aromas and products, she shared the story of her lemon revelation.

People were charmed by her creativity and enthusiasm.

Soon, “Lemon Stan” became the talk of the town. And with her new revenue, Charlotte bought more lemons, but this time, she used them wisely. She baked lemon cakes that melted in the mouth and brewed crisp iced tea to complement her lemonade.

Before long, she introduced a drink called “Arnold Palmer,” a perfect blend of lemonade and iced tea.

The community’s love for “Lemon Stan” grew, and so did her business. Eventually, she opened another stand on a different street, spreading the joy of lemons throughout the town.

As the entrepreneur’s little lemon empire flourished, she often thought back to that pivotal moment when she stopped merely squeezing lemons and started seeing their full potential. She realized that true success comes not from exhausting your resources, but from nurturing them and allowing them to grow in unexpected ways.

And so the tale of the Lemon Stan became a beloved story in the town, reminding everyone that success is not about squeezing all you can out of your resources but being resourceful with them.

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 photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.

The post The Parable of The Lemon Stan appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

This weekend I asked, If you could do anything in the world right now (that’s realistic), who would you be? What would you do?

Wow, did I get answers!

Interestingly, the responses fell into three categories: Career, Impact, Life, and Health

Now, certainly, John Della Volpe will tell you that this is in no way accurate polling. My readers — or those most likely to have answered — demonstrate certain commonalities that inform their responses:

They’re all women (save for one or two), they are not independently wealthy, they are in their 30s and beyond, they have older children or no children, they are overall liberal in their beliefs, and they are creatively minded.

Here are some of the responses, lightly edited for clarity:

Career

• Be an elementary school librarian again
• Be a background singer on stage at Wembley stadium
• Write a screenplay.
• Be an investigative journalist
• Sportswriter
• Public health worker for UNICEF
• Personal shopper for fashion and gifts
• I would speak about mental health struggles to kids
• Afford to go part-time at my job to have a better work/life balance
• Quit my job and move to Europe. Or just move to Europe; I can still work
• Make a living that allows me to save for retirement and stop being sick with financial worry
• Have freelance work booked through April
• I would stop and write my book instead of just saying I’m going to write it.
• Write a bestselling novel. Anonymously, if possible.
• Work my current job but for sustainable pay

Impact

• Ban assault rifles
• Get Harris in office. Ban assault rifles.
• Feed all the hungry people
• Crush the patriarchy
• Stop children from experiencing violence. All of us, really, but they’re my priority.
• Gun reform in US, weapon reform worldwide
• Make sure we elect the right person for President. I’m a nervous wreck about it.
• Repeal the second amendment
• Find and destroy ALL the damn guns
• Make sure Trump loses

Life and Health

• Get a solid 9 hours of sleep without stressful and/or bizarre dreams and wake up well-rested
• Go on a vacation with a beach for snorkeling, a pool for floating and sipping
• Go to the beach at sunset and walk and look for shells and flotsam and breathe salty air.
• Check out for a day. See a movie in the theater. Eat a good meal. Alone.
• Live in Wales on the coast
• Sit on a beach and somehow also make a living
• Hang out with my daughter and granddaughters
• I would ease my parents’ suffering. They are both at the end of life and I really can’t help them.

Phew.

My non-statistically sound conclusions:

Women are tired.

Women are underpaid.

Women are living through times of inordinate stress due to factors we can’t entirely control.

Women are good people who want to do good for the world.

If women can fulfill many of our greatest dreams, others will benefit.

Soon after posting my question, I happened to come across this quote in my Instagram feed from Cleo Wade.

Sometimes the universe just hands you something you need to see, you know?

(Or maybe it’s the Instagram algorithm, fine. Bust my metaphysical bubble will you.)

While hers isn’t a brand new thought, something about the way she phrased it and presented it has stayed with me.

Not all of the things we imagine for ourselves are in our hands — healing sick family members, free plane tickets to Europe, a million in the bank.

But some things are in our hands, right?

I am at a time in my life when I also feel a lot of things are out of my control. This is Virgo kryptonite, by the way. It sucks feeling like you can’t bend the universe to your will. But it’s a far worse feeling to imagine that you missed an opportunity or that it’s too late for you to do something.

I have always said that doing something makes me feel better than doing nothing.

So…

Can we do something?

Try this exercise:

Write down one single thing you can do right now to get you closer to the thing you most want to do/be/achieve.

Start the first page of that novel?

Cut out one $5 expense each week and put it into a dedicated “beach vacation fund”?

Send postcards to voters?

Choose something from the Moms Demand “Take Action” page?

Allow yourself an entire 120 seconds to simply do nothing in the middle of the day?

If you are up for it, please share what you wish you could do — and maybe, one thing you can do (or are doing) to make it happen. I know it will motivate me. I bet it will motivate others too.

Liz Gumbinner is a Brooklyn-based writer, award-winning ad agency creative director, and OG mom blogger who was called “funny some of the time” by an enthusiastic anonymous commenter. This was originally posted on her Substack “I’m Walking Here!,” where she covers culture, media, politics, and parenting.

Header image by Daniel Farò, Death to Stock

The post What Would You Do If You Could Do Anything? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

In my first year working with the large-format camera I saw how it was too slow for street work. I thought if I had a subject against which I could pit street life, perhaps I could develop a strategy for working in the city. My goal was to have the Empire State Building ever-present, presiding over the scene like a Mount Fuji, while I would watch for the signs of daily life that would make a new kind of photographic sense when seen all together.

Joel Meyerowitz

Popped into Tate Modern for the first time in ages – particularly loved seeing Joel Meyerowitz’s Empire State. Tempted to try something similar in old York.

Coming soon from Unit Editions: 1,000 Marks, a collection of symbols and logotypes designed by the Pentagram since its founding in 1972. It’s BIG. Seriously, the girth of the thing. Crikey.

Winona Ryder visits Criterion’s closet, shares her profound connection to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life, recalls the deep impact Gena Rowlands had on her life and career, and selects favorites by Gordon Parks, Jim Jarmusch, Albert Brooks, and John Sayles. SEE ALSO: There is no love affair more enduring than Ryder and a black jacket and a Tom Waits t-shirt.

When a film doesn’t look like its concept art – another fantastic read from Animation Obsessive, looking at the influence and frustrations of Disney artist Mary Blair. 

A brief lesson explains the visual impact of an early cinematic favourite, the Sustained Two-Shot. 

Julia Schimautz on how to make a risograph animation. 

“Stålenhag’s most personal work yet, Swedish Machines explores masculinity, friendship, and sexuality in a queer science fiction tale about two young men stuck in the past – and in each other’s orbit.” – only a couple of days left to back Simon Stålenhag’s long-awaited new art book.

“Please roll the back window down and approach the White Zone at exactly 2.6 mph. Staff are standing by to launch your student into the window, Dukes of Hazzard style, with a trebuchet handmade by the LARP Club. If you cannot achieve this speed in the requisite time, simply CIRCLE THE BLOCK” — McSweeney’s new school year drop-off and pick-up rules.

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

Header image by Daniel Farò, Death to Stock

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