Thanks for reading this week; feel free to forward to a friend or enemy.
“Rule 4: Consider everything an experiment.” — Corita Kent
My business in 2023 was a bit like the recipe for cooking good BBQ — slow and low. Amidst tech layoffs, shrinking budgets, and expanding artificial intelligences, I was less busy than I like to stay. But instead of marinating in ennui, I spent my client work downtime investing in the unsexy aspects of business infrastructure, articulating my design process, and thinking about the other processes we use to make things.
If I truly believe every system is optimized to get the results it’s getting (which I do!) for good or ill, it follows I should care deeply about understanding the underlying processes that got me to the end result. I’m becoming a collector of processes.
Secret weapon websites
Often I want to take an image I’ve found or created and… fuck with it. Just a little. Or maybe a lot. In the analog world sometimes I intentionally print things poorly, or spray still-wet graphics with water, or leave paper out in the sun and rain to wrinkle and warp. Everything an experiment. But I have a few all-digital tricks up my sleeve, too. In this short video I use PhotoMosh and Dither It and to take stock images from Unsplash and make quick glitchy graphics. May it be a balm upon you.
Choose the difficult thing
Director James Cameron had a great bit I saw in this tweet about the process of choosing what to work on — go straight to difficult. Difficult is a tactical edge because even the most talented people don’t want to do hard stuff.
Raiders of a lost art
John Mayer talks about learning the thing that’s the building block of the thing you just learned. As you become more enamored of processes, you can see how copying the bones, not the skin helps you understand the why and how underneath the what.
Film director Steven Soderbergh believes a movie should work with the sound off. In 2014 he put this to the test by stripping all the audio and color from 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark and adding a minimal, potentially-familiar soundtrack to it for the sole purpose of studying Spielberg’s filmmaking craft. Watch it here (the whole movie!) “and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are.”
The wisdom of our hands
This Tumblr post about spinning yarn resonated. “I've had a hard time articulating to people just how fundamental spinning used to be in people’s lives, and how eerie it is that it’s vanished so entirely.” This is a topic that comes up frequently in our house (digital husband / analog wife) — it only took a few generations for us to collectively lose fundamental knowledge about farming, food preparation, building things, etc. As this cider-making apple boi says, “Fidget spinners are an attempt to deal with the fact that we spent 500,000 years chipping stones & now we've stripped repetitive meditative fine motor work out of daily life.” / “We forget our fundamentally embodied nature at our peril.” 1
The foolishness of our diagrams
I typically scribble a few silly Venn diagrams in the margins of my conference talks. Last week I asked Twitter if I should do something with them and got resounding approval. Time for a zine or little book, maybe? I’ve got two poetry collections to finish up and publish before National Poetry Month in April, but what’s another side project? Everything’s an experiment, right?
Happy Friday! I hope your weekend is free of lead-lined Stanley cups.
If you’re up for some extracurricular reading on the topic of craft and our fundamentally embodied nature, I highly recommend woodworker and educator Doug Stowe’s The Wisdom of Our Hands.