ephemeral states | transient texts on temporary subjects

Welcome to the revised version of my site, now structured as a blog. As does every blog, I’ll be posting my news, comments, observations, and announcements on subjects in the various categories ranged elsewhere on this page. A particular feature will be a return to critical writing about graphic design, as I did for ten years in the pages of Emigre magazine. When that journal came to an end, I set aside the notebook that I kept of ideas for and fragments of a number of possible writings. I didn’t foresee any comparable interest in the writing I was doing. The subsequent years have affirmed that conclusion (with some gratifying exceptions). One article did make it out of the notebook and into the world—“The Resistance”—but I wasn’t feeling it. Most importantly, continued writing like this offered few—if any—tangible career benefits (something I’ll detail in a future post after my UCDA conference presentation).

I’d always said I could walk away from writing without regret and now I was doing it. But every so often I’d tell someone about the notebook and reconsider. It wasn’t as if I was thinking about my career when I wrote all the others. So, a blog. I always thought I was just talking to myself anyway. Expect future posts on: chaos as a strategy for design; correlating economic conditions and eras of graphic experimentation; an unpublished review of the book Emotion as Promotion; the ubiquitous graphics that are never ever discussed; design and class; segments of an essay collection in progress, tentatively titled Make Ready Romance; and other things that I hope will be of as much interest to someone else as they are to me.

But first up, in a few days, a review of Stefan Sagmeister’s Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far. He was generous enough to have a copy sent to me, with a note that said he hoped I liked it—or hated it less than Made You Look. As I can count the number of free new books I’ve been sent with the fingers on one hand (with enough left over to flip pages and someone the bird), I feel obligated to respond in the only way I know how….