Scratching the Surface

Peter Bil'ak is a designer, writer, type designer, and publisher based in the Netherlands. My introduction to Peter's work was through Dot Dot Dot, the magazine he co-founded and published with Stuart Bailey in the early 2000s and in this episode, we talk about the origins of that magazine as well as his new publication, Works That Work. We also talk about how he started writing and how that influ...

Molly Heintz is the chair of SVA's MA Design Research program and co-founder of the editorial consultancy Superscript. Prior to this, she studied classics and archeology and has worked at the architecture firms Gensler and Rockwell Group. In this episode, Molly and I talk about her journey from archeology to design, how to get more designers interested in criticism, writing for a general audience,...

Randy Nakamura is a designer, researcher, and one of my favorite writers from Emigre. His writing has appeared in Design Observer, Emigre, Task, Modes of Criticism, and Idea Magazine and he's worked as a designer at Jon Sueda's studio, Stripe, and served as design director at The Grateful Palate. He's currently at PhD candidate in the Critical Studies program at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design....

Sara Hendren is a designer, artist, writer, and professor whose work centers around adaptive and assistive technologies, prosthetics, inclusive design, accessible architecture, and related ideas. She teaches inclusive design practices at Olin College in Massachusetts and writes and edits Abler, her site to collect and comment on art, adaptive technologies and prosthetics, and the future of human b...

Louise Sandhaus is a designer, educator, and writer based in Los Angeles. She teaches a variety of courses at CalArt and in 2013, published Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires, & Riots, a book of graphic design from California. In this episode, Louise and I talk about how she stumbled into a critical theory class that changed her approach to design and her entire life, as well as form as language, and h...

Francisco Laranjo is a graphic designer based in Portugal and publisher of Modes of Criticism, a journal and research platform interested in critical graphic design. His writing has also been published on Design Observer, Eye, Creative Review, Grafik. In this episode, Francisco and I talk about Modes of Criticism and his goals for the project, parsing terms like critical and speculative graphic de...

Helen Armstrong is a designer, educator, and writer. She's published two anthologies of design theory as well as a book on user-generated design and is currently associate professor of graphic design North Carolina State University. Prior to studying design, Helen's studies focused on literature, English, and critical theory and she's applied what she learned in her previous studies to graphic des...

In 2013, Jack Cheng self-published his first book, a novel called These Days, on Kickstarter. Before that, Jack was working as a designer in advertising in New York City while working on the book during his nights and weekends. Now based in Detroit, Jack just published his new book, See You in the Cosmos. In this episode, I talk with Jack about his transition from designing to writing, the similar...

Liz Danzico is part designer, part writer, and part educator. She's currently the creative director at NPR, where she oversees both the visual and user experience of NPR's digital platforms and content; chair and co-founder of SVA's MFA in Interaction Design program; and has written about design for publications like Eye, Fortune, and Interactions Magazine as well as her own site, Bobulate. In thi...

Andy Chen and Waqas Jawaid are the founders of Isometric Studio, a New York design studio that promotes inclusion, equality & progress. Andy and Waqas were thesis critics at MICA in December and I sat down with them while they were in Baltimore to talk about their backgrounds in sociology and architecture influence their design practice, the value of design criticism in the contemporary design pro...

Anne Quito is a designer and writer currently working as a design reporter at Quartz. Anne is the founder of the design studio Design Lab 360 and a recent graduate of SVA's Design Criticism program. In this episode, I talk with Anne about her design background and her journey into writing, how to write about design for a general audience, and how she wrote her own job description when she joined t...

Ruben Pater, working under the name Untold Stories, describes his work as creating "visual narratives about geopolitical issues" and creating "new relations between journalism and design". He most recently is the author of the book, The Politics of Design, where Pater explores the cultural and political context of the typography, colors, photography, symbols, and information graphics that we use e...

Rianne Petter and Mark Mulder are designers and researchers from the Netherlands. The couple operates independent practices that span graphic design, research, writing, and education. Last fall, the couple visited Baltimore to lead a weekend workshop on design research of Maryland Institute College of Art's graduate graphic design department and I sat down with them at the end of the weekend to ta...

Jon Sueda is a designer, curator, and educator. He is the founder of the Stripe, a graphic design studio based in San Francisco specializing in printed material, identity, and exhibition work and the Chair of the MFA Design program at California College of the Arts. He's also curated the exhibitions for the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, the 25th International Graphic Design Biennial...

Prem Krishnamurthy is a designer, curator, and writer. He is a founding principle, with Adam Michaels, of the New York design studio Project Projects and founder and curator of P!, an experimental exhibition space in New York's Chinatown. Additionally, Prem is an editor for the art journal Paper Monument and on the board of directors for Triple Canopy. In August, I visited Project Projects's offic...

On this week's episode, I talk with Bryn Smith, a designer, writer, and editor based in New York City. Bryn is a graduate of SVA's Design Criticism MFA and the co-author of the new book, Twenty Over Eighty. We talk about her experience in SVA's program, what a design critic could do at major publications, and how to use design artifacts to write about larger cultural issues. Links from this episod...

Khoi Vinh is currently Principle Designer at Adobe, Design Chair at Wildcard and co-founder of Kidpost and previously co-founded Mixel and was the design director of The New York Times online. Khoi's site, Subtraction.com, was one of the first blogs I started reading when I started designing over a decade ago and in this episode, I talk to him about how he started blogging, how writing has influen...

Armin Vit is the co-founder of Under Consideration with his wife Bryony Gomez-Palacio, the site behind popular blogs like Brand New, FPO, and SpeakUp. In this conversation, I talk to Armin about how he started writing, why he shut down SpeakUp in 2009, why everyone is critiquing logos now, and how social media is changing the design discourse. Links from this episode can be found at scratchingthes...

In my second conversation with Jessica Helfand — recorded earlier this month when Jessica was in Baltimore — we talk about Winterhouse (the studio she co-founded with William Drenttel), publishing, the role of design (and design criticism) in Trump's America, and what she's learned in her first semester teaching design at the Yale School of Management. Links from this episode can be found at scrat...

Jessica Helfand is a designer, writer, podcaster, and publisher. She cofounded Design Observer in 2002 with Rick Poynor, Michael Bierut, and William Drenttel and most recently wrote the book, Design: The Invention of Desire. In this episode, the first part of a two-part conversation, Jessica and I talk about the origins of Design Observer, how she started writing, writing about design in relations...

David Reinfurt is a design polymath operating at the intersection of design, publishing, curation, and exhibitions. His studio, O-R-G, is now a small software company "that programs, publishes, and sells apps, websites, screensavers, and other small chunks of code". With Stuart Bailey, he's the co-founder of Dexter Sinister and with Bailey and Angie Keefer, he publishes The Serving Library. In Jul...

Sara M. Watson is a technology critic and currently the writer in residence at Digital Asia Hub, a Research Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, and an affiliate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Last month, she published Toward a Constructive Technology Criticism, a meta-critique of technology criticism that's very sim...

Michael Bierut needs no introduction. As a partner at Pentagram since 1990, he's worked on projects ranging from logos and environmental signage systems, books and packaging for clients including Verizon, The New York Times, MIT Media Lab, and Hillary Clinton. Michael is also a prolific writer, having co-founded Design Observer in 2003 and co-editing the Looking Closer series and in this episode,...

On this week's episode, I talk with the designer and writer Michael Rock. Michael is the co-founder and creative director at 2x4, teaches at Yale and Columbia, and writes for The New York Times T Magazine. This summer, I visited Michael at 2x4's New York headquarters to talk about his own history, how he thinks about his roles as a designer and writer, the importance of theory in design practice,...

On this week's episode of Scratching the Surface, I'm joined by the design writer Steven Heller. Heller is the author or co-author of over one hundred books on design and visual culture, co-chair of the School of Visual Arts MFA Designer as Author program, and helped start SVA's Design Criticism and Interaction Design programs. Steven and I talk about his career, design writing, and why most publi...