Scratching the Surface

Joe Potts is a graphic designer, educator, artist, and writer working with found and synthesized images, sound, typography, and language. He teaches typography and graphic design at Otis College of Art and Design and the University of Southern California, and is the founding director of the Southland Institute (for critical, durational, and typographic post-studio practices). In this episode, Joe...

John L. Walters is the editor of Eye Magazine. Before becoming the editor in 1999, John worked as a writer and editor on a variety of publications and newspapers, including The Architectural Review and The Guardian, and previously was a musician, touring England with his band, Landscape. In this episode, John and I talk about the transition of music to writing, how he started writing about graphic...

Rob Walker is a writer and journalist covering design, technology, business, the arts, and other subjects. His writing on design has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Design Observer, and The Atlantic and was featured in Gary Hustwit's film Objectified. He currently writes the Workologist column for The New York Times and is writing a book about attention. In this episode, Rob and I...

Justin McGuirk is a writer, critic and curator. He is currently the chief curator at the Design Museum in London and a faculty member in the Design Curating & Writing program at Design Academy Eindhoven. Previously, he was director of Strelka Press, design critic for The Guardian, and the editor of Icon magazine. In 2014, he published Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Archite...

James Langdon is a designer, writer, and curator. He is one of six directors of Eastside Projects, an artist-run exhibition space in Birmingham, England, runs an independent design practice, and has written for publications like The Serving Library and Bricks from the Kiln. He's a professor in the communication design department at HfG Karlsruhe and in 2013, he founded the itinerant School for Des...

Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey is a designer, writer, editor, and publisher. He co-founded Dot Dot Dot with Peter Bil'ak in 2000 and began working with David Reinfurt, under the name Dexter Sinister, in 2006. Along with Reinfurt and Angie Keefer, he's the co-founder and publisher of The Serving Library. Late last year, he was appointed Head of Design at the ICA in London. In this conversation, Stuart an...

Paul Ford is a writer, programmer, educator, and technologist. He is currently the co-founder of Postlight, a digital product studio in New York and teaches at the School of Visual Arts. He's written for publications like Harper's, New York, Medium, and The Morning News and is a frequent commentator on technology and the internet. In 2015, he published "What is Code?" for Bloomberg Businessweek, a...

Dmitri Siegel is a creative director, designer, and writer. He's currently the Vice President of Global Brand for Sonos and was previously Executive Creative Director at Patagonia. He also was one of my favorite writers of the Emigre-era, where his writing appeared in Emigre, Design Observer, and Dot Dot Dot. In this episode, Dmitri and I talk about his interest in writing about design, going from...

Mitch Goldstein is a designer, artist, and educator based in Rochester, NY. He is an Assistant Professor the School of Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology, works in collaboration with his wife Anne Jordan on client projects, and maintains an ongoing art practice focusing on experimental darkroom photography. He also co-hosted the design podcast Though Process and has written and lectur...

Paul Soulellis is a designer, writer, and educator. After spending twenty years working as a designer, fifteen of those years under his own studio, Soulellis Studios, Paul recently has shifted his work into a more expanded and experimental practice. In 2014, while part of the New Museum's incubator, he started Counterpractice, his new design studio, and began publishing his now-ongoing project Lib...

Rory Hyde is an architect, curator and writer based in London. His work is focuses on new forms of design practice, and redefining the role of the designer today. Currently, he's Curator of Contemporary Architecture and Urbanism at the Victoria and Albert Museum and is the author of the book, Future Practice, a collection of interviews about the edge of architecture. In this wide-ranging conversat...

Sara De Bondt is a designer, educator, and publisher. She runs her own independent design practice working with cultural clients and is the co-founder of Occasional Papers, a small publishing company focusing on publishing affordable books devoted to the histories of architecture, art, design, film, and literature. The Walker Art Center called Sara "the epitome of a cultural designer, combining a...

Alice Twemlow is a design writer, critic, and educator. She was the co-founder and chair of SVA's Design Criticism program in New York City and is now the Head of the Design Curating and Writing Program at the Design Academy Eindhoven. She also recently published the book, Sifting the Trash, which is a fascinating history of design criticism. In this episode, Alice and I talk about her interest in...

Penelope Dean is an architectural theorist and critic whose research focuses on contemporary architectural culture with an emphasis on the exchanges between architecture and the allied design fields. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago's College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts and is the founding editor of Flat Out, a fascinating new independent m...

James Goggin is a designer, educator, and writer. He runs his own design studio with his partner, Shan James, under the name Practise and recently joined the faculty of RISD's graphic design department. He previously worked as Director of Design, Publishing and New Media at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and has taught at Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, The Netherlands, and at ECAL in Swi...

Anne Burdick is a graphic designer, writer, researcher, and educator. She's the chair of the Art Center College of Design's Media Design Program and has written for publications like Emigre and Eye. In this episode, Anne and I talk about her own background and journey through design — which we discovered had many parallels to my own design career. We also talk about new modes of practice, the rela...

Manuel Lima is a designer, author, and speaker specializing in information visualization as well as a design lead at Google New York. He's taught data visualization at Parsons School of Design and is the author of the books, The Books of Trees, The Book of Circles, and Visual Complexity. In this episode, Manuel and I talk about his journey into design and interest in interaction design and informa...

Sarah Rich is a writer, editor, and brand consultant based in Oakland, California. She's written about design and food for publications like Dwell, The Atlantic, Wired, and Fast Company. With Wendy MacNaughton, Debbie Millman, and Maria Popova, she recently edited Leave Me Alone with the Recipes, book about the art, life and cooking of graphic designer Cipe Pineles. I first came to Sarah's work wh...

Adrian Shaughnessy is a designer, writer, and publisher. Along with Tony Brook, he co-founded Unit Editions, an independent publishing company that specializes in design books and monographs for people like Paula Scher and Herb Lubalin. He's written for publications like Eye and Design Observer and his collected essays were published as a book, also called Scratching the Surface, in 2013. In this...

Elliott Earls is a graphic designer, performance artist, and the artist-in-residence in Cranbrook's 2D Design program. He also produces the YoutTube series Studio Practice, a "no bullshit resource for those things that animate the artist and designer's studio." In this episode, Elliott and I talk about experimental graphic design, Cranbrook's interesting critique format, and how he thinks about hi...

In a special one-year anniversary episode, Michael Bierut returns to the show and turn the tables to interview me. One year after I started the podcast and fifty interviews later, Michael and I talk about my own background and why I started the podcast, my graduate school experience, video essays, how the podcast has changed, and what I've learned about design writing over the last year. Links fro...

Doug Thomas is a designer, historian, writer, and teacher. He's the author of the new book, Never Use Futura, and an Assistant Professor in Brigham Young University's graphic design department. After graduating with a degree in graphic design, Doug continued his education by getting a masters degree in history at the University of Chicago where he began his research on typography history. Doug and...

Paola Antonelli is the senior curator of the Department of Architecture and Design and the Director of R&D at MoMA where she's expanded the traditional definition of design by acquiring pieces like the @ sign, the original emoji set, and Minecraft. Originally trained as an architect, Antonelli has written and edited for publications like Domus, Metropolis, ID, and Harper's Bazaar and was previousl...

Karrie Jacobs writes about cities, buildings, and design. She's written for publications like Metropolis, Travel and Leisure, The New York Times, ID, and Fortune. She was also the founding editor-in-chief of Dwell and the founding executive editor of Colors. In this episode, Karrie and I talk about working at her college paper with Matt Groening and Lynda Barry, how she started writing about desig...

Elizabeth Glickfeld is a design writer and lecturer currently based in London. She's the co-founder, along with Anna Bates, of Dirty Furniture, a new kind of design magazine that looks at "when design leaves the showroom" by focusing each issue on a specific piece of furniture. She's also written for various publications including Eye, Design Issues, Domus and Frieze magazine. Previously, she was...