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Two different groups of Americans are expected to march through the streets today. As thousands of troops march and dozens of tanks roll through Washington, D.C., for a military parade celebrating the Armys 250th anniversary on President Donald Trumps 79th birthday, millions of Americans nationwide are expected to protest against his administration, in what organizers believe will be the largest turnout yet since Trump took office in January for a second term. Here’s what to know about the No Kings Day protests: Why are people protesting? The No Kings Day protest movement builds on this spring’s massive May Day and Hands Off! rallies. They come after days of nationwide demonstrations against controversial federal immigration raids and deportations in Los Angeles and a number of other U.S. cities, which are part of the Trump administration’s ramped-up enforcement efforts. How big will the rallies be and where will they take place? Organizers expect 2,000 rallies to take place on Saturday in all 50 states and most major cities, from city blocks to small towns, from courthouse steps to community parks.” Protesters say they are “taking action to reject authoritarianismand show the world what democracy really looks like.” To avoid clashes with the Armys anniversary celebrations, protest gatherings will bypass the nation’s capital. (Trump has threatened to use “heavy force” against any protesters at the parade, comments the White House later attempted to clarify by asserting that the president supports “peaceful” protests.) The No Kings groups have created an extensive interactive map that includes the protest locations and times. The map is embedded on the No Kings website and is searchable by zip code. Who is behind the protest movement? Indivisible is the lead organizer of Saturday’s No Kings protests, along with a broad coalition of 180-plus partner organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Common Cause, Greenpeace, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Standing Up for Science. A number of labor unions, including the Communication Workers of America and teacher federations, are also involved in the effort. Who will be speaking? The group 50501, another organizer of the protests, told Fast Company that some of the major speakers planned nationwide include former Democratic VP candidate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, in St. Paul; Martin Luther King Jr.’s son, Martin Luther King III, and his wife, Arndrea Waters King, in Philadelphia; No Kings Indivisible’s Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, also in Philadelphia; Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib in Detroit; former Republican Representative Joe Walsh (who became a registered Democrat last week) in Charleston; and progressive political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen in downtown Los Angeles. What else is there to know? In addition to rallies around the U.S., protests are also expected in several other countries, including the U.K., Mexico, and Germany.
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E-Commerce
If youve ever flown through outer space, at least while watching a documentary or a science fiction film, youve seen how artists turn astronomical findings into stunning visuals. But in the process of visualizing data for their latest planetarium show, a production team at New Yorks American Museum of Natural History made a surprising discovery of their own: a trillion-and-a-half mile long spiral of material drifting along the edge of our solar system. So this is a really fun thing that happened, says Jackie Faherty, the museums senior scientist. Last winter, Faherty and her colleagues were beneath the dome of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium, fine-tuning a scene that featured the Oort cloud, the big, thick bubble surrounding our Sun and planets that’s filled with ice and rock and other remnants from the solar systems infancy. The Oort cloud begins far beyond Neptune, around one and a half light years from the Sun. It has never been directly observed; its existence is inferred from the behavior of long-period comets entering the inner solar system. The cloud is so expansive that the Voyager spacecraft, our most distant probes, would need another 250 years just to reach its inner boundary; to reach the other side, they would need about 30,000 years. The 30-minute show, Encounters in the Milky Way, narrated by Pedro Pascal, guides audiences on a trip through the galaxy across billions of years. For a section about our nascent solar system, the writing team decided theres going to be a fly-by of the Oort cloud, Faherty says. But what does our Oort cloud look like? To find out, the museum consulted astronomers and turned to David Nesvorný, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. He provided his model of the millions of particles believed to make up the Oort cloud, based on extensive observational data. Everybody said, go talk to Nesvorný. He’s got the best model, says Faherty. And everybody told us, There’s structure in the model, so we were kind of set up to look for stuff, she says. The museums technical team began using Nesvorný’s model to simulate how the cloud evolved over time. Later, as the team projected versions of the fly-by scene into the dome, with the camera looking back at the Oort cloud, they saw a familiar shape, one that appears in galaxies, Saturn’s rings, and disks around young stars. We’re flying away from the Oort cloud and out pops this spiral, a spiral shape to the outside of our solar system, Faherty marveled. A huge structure, millions and millions of particles. She emailed Nesvorný to ask for more particles, with a render of the scene attached. We noticed the spiral of course, she wrote. And then he writes me back: what are you talking about, a spiral? While fine-tuning a simulation of the Oort cloud, a vast expanse of ice material leftover from the birth of our Sun, the ‘Encounters in the Milky Way’ production team noticed a very clear shape: a structure made of billions of comets and shaped like a spiral-armed galaxy, seen here in a scene from the final Space Show (curving, dusty S-shape behind the Sun) [Image: AMNH] More simulations ensued, this time on Pleiades, a powerful NASA supercomputer. In high-performance computer simulations spanning 4.6 billion years, starting from the Solar Systems earliest days, the researchers visualized how the initial icy and rocky ingredients of the Oort cloud began circling the Sun, in the elliptical orbits that are thought to give the cloud its rough disc shape. The simulations also incorporated the physics of the Suns gravitational pull, the influences from our Milky Way galaxy, and the movements of the comets themselves. In each simulation, the spiral persisted. No one has ever seen the Oort structure like that before, says Faherty. Nesvorný “has a great quote about this: ‘The math was all there. We just needed the visuals. An illustration of the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud in relation to our solar system. [Image: NASA] As the Oort cloud grew with the early solar system, Nesvorný and his colleagues hypothesize that the galactic tide, or the gravitational force from the Milky Way, disrupted the orbits of some comets. Although the Sun pulls these objects inward, the galaxys gravity appears to have twisted part of the Oort cloud outward, forming a spiral tilted roughly 30 degrees from the plane of the solar system. As the galactic tide acts to decouple bodies from the scattered disk it creates a spiral structure in physical space that is roughly 15,000 astronomical units in length, or around 1.4 trillion miles from one end to the other, the researchers write in a paper that was published in March in the Astrophysical Journal. The spiral is long-lived and persists in the inner Oort Cloud to the present time. The physics makes sense, says Faherty. Scientists, we’re amazing at what we do, but it doesn’t mean we can see everything right away. It helped that the team behind the space show was primed to look for something, says Carter Emmart, the museums director of astrovisualization and director of Encounters. Astronomers had described Nesvorný’s model as having “a structur,” which intrigued the teams artists. We were also looking for structure so that it wouldn’t just be sort of like a big blob, he says. Other models were also revealing thisbut they just hadn’t been visualized. The museums attempts to simulate nature date back to its first habitat dioramas in the early 1900s, which brought visitors to places that hadnt yet been captured by color photos, TV, or the web. The planetarium, a night sky simulator for generations of would-be scientists and astronauts, got its start after financier Charles Hayden bought the museum its first Zeiss projector. The planetarium now boasts one of the world’s few Zeiss Mark IX systems. Still, these days the star projector is rarely used, Emmart says, now that fulldome laser projectors can turn the old static starfield into 3D video running at 60 frames per second. The Hayden boasts six custom-built Christie projectors, part of what the museum’s former president called the most advanced planetarium ever attempted. In about 1.3 million years, the star system Gliese 710 is set to pass directly through our Oort Cloud, an event visualized in a dramatic scene in ‘Encounters in the Milky Way.’ During its flyby, our systems will swap icy comets, flinging some out on new paths. [Image: AMNH] Emmart recalls how in 1998, when he and other museum leaders were imagining the future of space shows at the Haydennow with the help of digital projectors and computer graphicsthere were questions over how much space they could try to show. “We’re talking about these astronomical data sets we could plot to make the galaxy and the stars,” he says. “Of course, we knew that we would have this star projector, but we really wanted to emphasize astrophysics with this dome video system. I was drawing pictures of this just to get our heads around it and noting the tip of the solar system to the Milky Way is about 60 degrees. And I said, what are we gonna do when we get outside the Milky Way?’ “Then [planetarium’s director] Neil Degrasse Tyson “goes, ‘whoa, whoa, whoa, Carter, we have enough to do. And just plotting the Milky Way, that’s hard enough.’ And I said, ‘well, when we exit the Milky Way and we don’t see any other galaxies, that’s sort of like astronomy in 1920we thought maybe the entire universe is just a Milky Way.'” “And that kind of led to a chaotic discussion about, well, what other data sets are there for this?” Emmart adds. The museum worked with astronomer Brent Tully, who had mapped 3500 galaxies beyond the Milky Way, in collaboration with the National Center for Super Computing Applications. “That was it,” he says, “and that seemed fantastical.” By the time the first planetarium show opened at the museum’s new Rose Center for Earth and Space in 2000, Tully had broadened his survey “to an amazing” 30,000 galaxies. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey followedit’s now at data release 18with six million galaxies. To build the map of the universe that underlies Encounters, the team also relied on data from the European Space Agencys space observatory, Gaia. Launched in 2013 and powered down in March of this year, Gaia brought an unprecedented precision to our astronomical map, plotting the distance between 1.7 billion stars. To visualize and render the simulated data, Jon Parker, the museums lead technical director, relied on Houdini, a 3D animation tool by Toronto-based SideFX. The goal is immersion, whether it’s in front of the buffalo downstairs, and seeing what those herds were like before we decimated them, to coming in this room and being teleported to space, with an accurate foundation in the science, Emmart says. But the art is important, because the art is the way to the soul. The museum, he adds, is a testament to wonder. And I think wonder is a gateway to inspiration, and inspiration is a gateway to motivation. Three-D visuals aren’t just powerful tools for communicating science, but increasingly crucial for science itself. Software like OpenSpace, an open source simulation tool developed by the museum, along with the growing availability of high-performance computing, are making it easier to build highly detailed visuals of ever larger and more complex collections of data. Anytime we look, literally, from a different angle at catalogs of astronomical positions, simulations, or exploring the phase space of a complex data set, there is great potential to discover something new,” says Brian R. Kent, an astronomer and director of science communications at National Radio Astronomy Observatory. There is also a wealth of astronomics tatical data in archives that can be reanalyzed in new ways, leading to new discoveries. As the instruments grow in size and sophistication, so does the data, and the challenge of understanding it. Like all scientists, astronomers are facing a deluge of data, ranging from gamma rays and X-rays to ultraviolet, optical, infrared, and radio bands. Our Oort cloud (center), a shell of icy bodies that surrounds the solar system and extends one-and-a-half light years in every direction, is shown in this scene from ‘Encounters in the Milky Way’ along with the Oort clouds of neighboring stars. The more massive the star, the larger its Oort cloud [Image: AMNH ] New facilities like the Next Generation Very Large Array here atNRAO or the Vera Rubin Observatory and LSST survey project will generate large volumes of data, so astronomers have to get creative with how to analyze it, says Kent. More dataand new instrumentswill also be needed to prove the spiral itself is actually there: theres still no known way to even observe the Oort cloud. Instead, the paper notes, the structure will have to be measured from detection of a large number of objects in the radius of the inner Oort cloud or from thermal emission from small particles in the Oort spiral. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a powerful, U.S.-funded telescope that recently began operation in Chile, could possibly observe individual icy bodies within the cloud. But researchers expect the telescope will likely discover only dozens of these objects, maybe hundreds, not enough to meaningfully visualize any shapes in the Oort cloud. For us, here and now, the 1.4 trillion mile-long spiral will remain confined to the inside of a dark dome across the street from Central Park.
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E-Commerce
On a Tuesday afternoon in London, Doug Bierton, the unlikely cofounder and CEO of an even more unlikely $50 million classic soccer jersey company, arrives at 10 Downing Street, the U.K.’s equivalent of the White House. It’s St. George’s Day, a national day of celebration, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer is hosting a reception. Inside, it’s more Parliament sitting than party as some of the most important people in British politics, donning pressed suits and blouses, mingle. Then there’s Bierton, a regular bloke from Manchester, who’s wearing a screaming light-blue vintage England soccer jersey from the early 1990s. Who let that guy in? He’s here by invitation. Bierton cofounded Classic Football Shirts in 2006 alongside his brother, Gary, and college buddy Matt Dale. The prime minister’s team asked if they could bring some England shirts to the reception. “The prime minister’s really interested in football,” they said. “Maybe you could bring some Arsenal shirts, too?” “I’m talking to the prime minister about football shirts,” Bierton says. “This is the kind of crazy stuff that none of us could have ever imagined.” Going mainstream Classic soccer jerseys have exploded into mainstream fashion, with A-listers such as Dua Lipa, Hailey Bieber, Taylor Swift, and Rihanna all sporting vintage jerseys. Sabrina Carpenter even threw an England jersey over her Versace dress onstage at a major London music festival, the Capital Summertime Ball. High-end fashion houses like Balenciaga, Stella McCartney, and Armani have partnered with major football clubs, while the “blokecore” TikTok trend has transformed jerseys into streetwear that transcends sports fandom entirely. “We’ve seen a huge increase in 18- to 24-year-olds shopping for shirts,” Bierton says. “But I think Balenciaga making a kit isn’t as influential as Travis Scott wearing one onstage. With influencers and those types of creators wearing football shirts, it’s a lot more connected now than it used to be.” The connection is so strong that Classic Football Shirts is now a $50 million beast leading one of the hottest trends in global fashion, both in sports and beyond. And with the FIFA Club World Cup kicking off in the U.S. this weekend, and the FIFA World Cup coming stateside in 2026, the competition for American soccer fans is on, another charge that Bierton’s team is trying to lead. A 5 shirt and a near-death experience In the summer of 2006, Bierton and Dale were soccer-obsessed students at Manchester University. Bierton had been looking for a 1990 Germany World Cup kit to wear to a fancy dress party, but hed come up empty. He eventually found the kit on eBay, as well as an England shirt from the same tournament at a local charity shop that he bought for 5. Strapped for cash, he later put it on eBay, flipping it for a 45 profit. The scarcity issue was obvious. If they were struggling to find vintage shirts, so were others. But the 45 profit proved a real opportunity in flipping classic soccer jerseys. Co-Founders Doug Bierton & Matthew Dale in first Manchester warehouse space [Photo: Classic Football Shirts] Bierton and Dale went all-in. They maxed out their student loans, overdrafts, and credit cards; filled their student house with football shirts; and launched Classic Football Shirts in August 2006. The early days were brutal. Just months after starting, it looked like they were doomed to fail. “October 2006 was a very cold time,” Bierton says. “We’d put all our cash into this thing, and we went 12 days without selling a shirt. We couldn’t afford to eat. We lost loads of weight. It was really tough.” But persistence paid off, and by Easter, they were selling 100 worth of classic soccer jerseys a day. Then 200. Then 400. “We were taking home 50 a day,” Bierton says. “We’re talking a minimum-wage salary, but there was just enough there to pay the bills and to live off. And that’s all we needed, right? As long as we could pay the bills and we still saw the potential with this business, we wanted to keep going.” The biggest problem: sourcing classic shirts With the demand established, their biggest problem became clear: How do they find more classic soccer jerseys? The biggest breakthrough came in 2010. They had moved the business from their student house to a Manchester office, where a man who had just moved there from Italy kept showing up, asking to work for them. They didn’t have a job for him, but they finally said: “Look, if you’re going to keep coming around, call all the Italian football clubs for us. Call all the brands and call all the independent retail stores, and ask if they’ve got any dead stock.” Two weeks later, the man came back. “I’ve been speaking to AC Milan,” he told them. “They’ve got a full warehouse of inventory. You wanna go have a look at it?” Bierton and Dale flew to Italy, and when AC Milan opened those warehouse doors, “it was like Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Bierton says. [Photo: Classic Football Shirts] “They literally kept everything, even down to the underpants,” Dale told The Athletic. “They all had the numbers in. So you could tell there was, like, R9 [the Brazilian Ronaldo] who was wearing 99 when he played for Milan. And David Beckham’s underpants! It was just crazy what they had.” Bierton and Dale bought the whole warehouse20 years’ worth of inventory. “We didn’t have the storage space for it, and we didn’t have the cash for it,” Bierton says. “But we said, Let’s take a loan out, go find a warehouse, and make it work.” Take big risks, then figure it out The AC Milan deal established a blueprint that Classic Football Shirts has followed ever since: Take big risks, then figure it out. This pattern repeated when Nike was closing out all its player-issue inventory. “We needed to spend 1 million to get that inventory,” Bierton recalls. “Did we have 1 million to spend? No. But we went and did it anyway.” They even sponsored Burnley FC’s shirt in 2022 despite not having a marketing budget for it. Terms were not disclosed, but Burnley shirt sponsors in 2019 and 2023 paid upward of 7 million. Theyve also made big bets beyond inventory deals. A decade ago, Bierton would never have imagined opening physical retail stores. They’re expensive and difficult to service. But he realized that creating experiential spaces “where people can touch and feel the old shirts from the past” could unlock potential that online sales alone couldn’t match, and they opened their first physical retail store in London in 2018. A grassroots approach But the real secret sauce isn’t just big bets; it’s the grassroots approach of pounding the pavement and doing things most people dont want to do. “You’ve got to pick up the phone,” Bierton says. “You’ve got to knock doors. You’ve got to send random emails out to everybody who is trading football shirts. The ultimate thrill of the whole thing has always been that you never know what you’re going to get tomorrow.” Topps Chrome launch party in New York. [Photo: Classic Football Shirts] To date, Classic Football Shirts has worked with more than 500 former professional players to buy their personal collections. The sourcing operation has become so sophisticated that brands like Nike, Adidas, and Puma now come to them when they have excess inventory. “We’re working closely with those brands to help design future kits and inspire what they should bring back,” Bierton says. The company now houses over 30,000 individual items and over 500,000 units in stock, with 7,000 unique or match-worn shirts stored in a climate-controlled vault, the largest collection of its kind. The company represents over 1,000 clubs, stocks shirts from over 50 international teams and more than 200 club teams, and lists 30,000 vintage shirts monthly and thousands daily. As of May 2024, they were selling upward of 750,000 shirts annually and have sold more than 6 million classic soccer jerseys, shipping to over 130 countries, with their primary focus, like most in their space, shifting to the U.S. ahead of the World Cup. The power of an authentic brand Classic Football Shirts has been profitable since its initial October slump. The founders have poured profits back into the business, and its grown 30% year over year since 2019. They now have more than 200 employees. In 2024, for the first time, the company took outside investment, in the form of $38.5 million, from The Chernin Group, valuing the company somewhere north of $50 million. “I think there are a lot of businesses that can be manufactured to be authentic,” says Greg Bettinelli, TCG’s partner who led the investment. “This was legitimately two blokes selling Manchester United shirts to offset probably their beer or food budget when they were in university. They’ve cultivated a community and audience without spending any real money on customer acquisition. They tell stories and have created a culture around the business. Having authentic brands and being able to be a trusted source for people to buy shirts from is super important. And so it just all ties together.” Expanding into the U.S. [Photo: Classic Football Shirts] The company has since brought on additional strategic investors, including two-time World Cup and Olympic gold medal winner Alex Morgan, former U.S. men’s national team player Stu Holden, and Rob McElhenney, the actor and producer who famously co-owns Wrexham AFC alongside Ryan Reynolds. McElhenney is a customer turned investor, as he acquired his haul of vintage Wrexham shirts during his club’s takeover talks. Global sales of new soccer shirts reach beyond $6 billion annually, and Bettinelli sees massive potential in a market he estimates is growing at over 100% year over year. The U.S. already represents 15% of Classic Football Shirts’ salestheir fastest-growing marketwith over 100% year-over-year growth in North America. Recent capital infusions have already helped accelerate the companys footprint in the U.S. as they plan to take advantage of next years World Cup. Theyve already opened three retail stores in 12 monthsin New York, Los Angeles, and Miamiwith plans for a presence in all 11 World Cup host cities. After just three months, the NYC store alone was competing with the London flagship store in sales. “The World Cup becomes a really seminal moment, and a lot of people are behind on event planning,” Holden says. “That’s one area where I think Classic Football Shirts has been so smart and strategicopening shops in key cities and having a real plan for being a part of what will be the biggest sporting event the planet has ever seen.” The biggest sporting event in history Ahead of the Euros final last July, Google searches for “England jerseys” spiked by 623%, while London-based e-commerce company Depop saw a 294% increase in football shirt searches leading into the tournament. The 2026 World Cup’s impact will dwarf those numbers. The tournament will be the largest sporting event in history48 teams, 104 matches across 16 cities in three countries, 5.5 million attendees, billions of viewers globally, and over $5 billion in projected revenue. Classic Football Shirts has already proven theyre ready to capitalize on the event. Their U.S. business “virtually doubled” during summer 2024 alone from Euro 2024 and Copa América. With American football fandom up 60% in the past decade, the number of fans ripe for acquisition is higher than ever. But this isn’t just about tournament salesit’s about permanently establishing football shirts in American fashion culture. “This is going to be the biggest sporting event in the history of sport, Bettinelli says. And with 48 teams, it’s showcasing globally. So I think being the leading brand that’s selling football shirts is probably a good place to be.”
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E-Commerce
Designer, editor, and educator David Reinfurts 2019 book, A *New* Program for Graphic Design (Inventory Press) was a surprise success, selling out its initial print run in three weeks. Its now in its third edition with translations in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, and Spanish. The book was described as a do-it-yourself textbook, but a traditional design textbook it was not. Across its three chaptersTypography, Gestalt, and InterfaceReinfurt draws on designers, printers, artists, and publishers to show that graphic design is not a narrow area of study but rather a broad way of looking at how we understand the world. The creation of the book, too, was as unusual as its contents. The three chapters were based on three courses Reinfurt had been teaching at Princeton University. To produce the book, Reinfurt presented all his lectures from all three courses to an audience at Inventory Presss studio in Los Angeles. Transcripts were produced from the three days that were then edited to form the book, making for a casual, dialogue-driven text that is at once personal, meandering, and expansive. [Cover Image: Inventory Press] Now, Reinfurt and Inventory Press are releasing a follow-up book, A *Co-* Program for Graphic Design, that is based on three of Reinfurts new courses: Circulation, Multiplicity, and Research. Reinfurt taught these courses over Zoom, during the pandemic, and much like the first book, used the recordings from those sessions as the structure for the new book. Because of the limitations and opportunities of teaching over Zoom, A *Co-* Program introduces a series of new voices, guest lectures from each course, which further expand our understanding of what graphic design can be. In a moment where graphic design is undergoing profound change, I find this pair of books to help situate both what it means to be a graphic designer and what it means to teach graphic design. Reinfurt, I think, offers a timeless approach to graphic design that transcends technical skills, industry demands, and visual fads in favor of treating design as a serious area of study that blends disciplines and ways of thinking. I was curious to talk with him about the ideas in the books and why graphic design, as a term, is still a useful framing device. Much like the creation of the books themselves, this conversation was conducted over Zoom and edited for clarity. And like their content, this conversation meanders and moves, attempting to find new ways to teach graphic design. Fast Company: I want to begin by talking about the title of this book. You open A *Co-* Program for Graphic Design with a list of all the alternative titles you had come up with and a roundtable conversation with some former students about what Co-program means. I want to ask you about the other part. I want to ask you about graphic design. What is graphic design? You have to find a place to locate yourself. Over the years, I’ve worked between a lot of different areas, but my training was in graphic design and I hang on to that as a label. But you’re asking what graphic design is. That term has been around at least for enough time to gather some historical weight, and I like that, too. The first book was originally going to be titled A New Primer for Visual Literacy, as a play on Donis Dondiss Primer of Visual Literacy, but we decided to rename it because it didnt feel like a good idea to riff on a previous book. We landed on A *New* Program for Graphic Design, which I liked a lot. People know the term graphic design. People are often confused about it, but at least it’s familiar. I like this idea of graphic design being a way to locate yourself. You’ve called yourself a graphic designer for about 25 years now. Has your understanding of graphic design changed over your career? Does it mean something different to you now than it did when you started? I’m certain it does, but I don’t worry about that too much. It’s a way to identify where I’m coming from and probably where my work is the most legible. But I love the idea of a bait and switch. I dont mean that as a trick. I find it’s really useful to be able to give someone a way into the work and then have it become more complex than they’re expecting, because it’s so unsatisfying when it’s the reverse, right? The reason I asked you those first two questions is that I think thats exactly what you do in these books: you complicate our understanding of what graphic design can be. In the first book, you talk about graphic design as the most liberal of the liberal arts and offer an assortment of definitions throughout both books. I think it’s interesting that this term has all of these different definitions or approaches or ways into it or ways out of it. When you were first invited to teach a graphic design class at Princeton 15 years ago, how did that blurriness or elasticity shape how you thought about what that would mean to teach graphic design? First, I knew it needed to be an introductory class. What’s the basic skill that’s useful in graphic design? Where do you start? Typography seemed like it. Design has been taught that way for a long time. Theres a historical weight to it; there are a set of skills that come with it, and that seemed like a way to introduce graphic design to the campus that could open up other modes of thought. You write in the first book that graphic design is often taught just as a series of skills, and that you feel like that shortchanges what it means to teach graphic design. Can you tell me more about that? In my experience, design education should not be training for a job. If you want to learn practical skills, you can find them in many different ways. But I think in school, the point is to get disoriented, not to get oriented. I feel like in school, you should just have all these crazy ideas and facilitate those because the rest of your working career is going to try to limit that. We’re doing a disservice to train a student for a job. I don’t know what the jobs will be. I don’t just want to see more designers like what we already have. I want to see more designers who are surprising and crazy and can make a go of it for a whole career. If you think about typography, for example, you’re thinking about both what it says and how it says it. I don’t just mean rhetorically, but visually: a visual form conveys a lot of meaning. This is something every graphic designer knows. It’s pretty easy to understand how hello, written in sans serif, bold, condensed, means something very different than hello in a lowercase script. These lessons of how you can modulate a meaning with form, I think, are a good entryway into graphic design. It is a set of skills that could get you a job, but I also see it as a useful skill hats applicable across many different disciplines. It introduces a rigor in the way you thinkit’s a rigor that thinks about how a message is embodied. Building on that, there’s almost no mention of technology in these books. Where does technologythe computer, ways of production or makingcome into the classroom? I keep students off the computer as long as possible, because you realize how they loosen up when they’re working with their hands. Plus, it’s going to change, right? The technology will never be the same and everyone will use it slightly differently. When Im giving assignments, they are meant to be broad. I want to signal Hey, this is something different. You can loosen up. You can do it a different way. Im predisposed to leaving things open for the studentor readerto find their way through it, regardless of the technology. Lets get into some of the specific content in the book. I think of your first book as being about production and the second book as about distribution. The chapters in the first bookTypography, Gestalt, Interfaceare all about how you put ideas into the work and then the chapters in the second bookCirculation, Multiplicity, Researcherare all about how those ideas go out into the world. Does that sound right to you? That wasnt intentional, but it sounds right. At least since going to graduate school, Ive been interested in that second part. I would see design in the world and realize how multiplied the responses were: it can be torn in one situation or somebody writes on top of it or puts a sticker on it. Those things are fascinating to me. I realized the work is not done when you’re finished doing the work, the work is done when it’s done being used. I have always felt like that part of design was ignored because it’s not as tidy. I’m not very interested in the monic idea of what it’s supposed to be. Im endlessly interested in all the individual variations: if it’s been altered, or if it doesn’t land the right way. The first chapter in the book begins with the Black Lives Matter typography because I was interested in how you could write it in ways that rhyme visually, rhyme with each other, but weren’t exactly the same. In that way, it felt like a brand, but it wasnt organized from the top down. The book opens with the Black Lives Matter typography and ends with a chapter about research. I felt like Research could have been the title of every chapter because the argument you implicitly make here is that all design is a form of research. I was interested in doing a class on design research because I’d heard that term bandied about a bunch of different ways over time and wanted to look at how it was talked about at different points in time. To think about all design as research gives you more latitude as a designer to spend more time making things that might not satisfy what needs to be done. To get to the best work, you have to go through a bunch of hoops, and you should follow your intuition. I think that’s what you bring to a project as a designer. So when Im talking about research, I’m really talking about design process: how do you cultivate your own idiosyncratic, wasteful, digestive process? Both of these books are filled with design history: you jump back and forth through time, looking at different people, looking at different projects, looking at different ways design has been understood. What is the role of design history in your teaching? I want to find some exemplary practices that I can use as models. It can be powerful to pull examples from the pastfrom a time that is not right nowso you can inject a bit of critical distance. You can say, We dont really work like this anymore but here is one approach. Here is one way someone approached this problem. How does this resonate with what were doing? As a student, you can look at that and realize that you could also invent an equally novel way of approaching this work now. I instinctively think it’s useful to have heroes or role models that you can look to and think, Here’s somebody who approached their work in a way that really resonates with me. How am I the same or different? I keep hearing conversations about the death of graphic design. That its being replaced by product designers or brand strategists or creative technologists, or some other new term. History becomes another way to root contemporary work in a discourse. Yes. This goes back to our discussion of why identify it as graphic design rather than something else, and it just reinforces my opinion that it’s useful to connect what we’re doing now to a body of what people have done before. If we’re constantly changing what it’s called, it just goes poof, up in the air. A good and useful model that has a much richer discourse than graphic design is architecture. Architecture has shifted what the profession does so radically and architects are very good at claiming lots of territory that doesn’t always look like architecture as we narrowly define it. An obvious example is what OMA has done with AMO in making research a valid output of their studio. Lots of people do that kind of work, but doing it within the context of architecture gives it previous discourse in history to anchor it in. I think in graphic design, weve built that discourse in history, and it is useful to connect these expansive practices to that so students can see a range of opportunities. Architecture is a good example here because we often think of architecture narrowly as buildings, but AMO or any other architect working outside of that context often describes their work more broadly as a spatial practice. Architecture, then, isnt just about making a building but larger questions of how we relate to things in space. When you think about it that way, you could make a building, but you could also make a film or an exhibition or a temporary structure, and they all connect to these larger questions of space. Does graphic design have something like that to root itself? Is it too simple to say something like text and image? I do think there’s a core there and it’s close to text and image, but I’d define it as language and its form: how something is said, and the visual form that carries that. Text and image can seem like categories, where the language and the form or something feel like a rich place for discovery. How has teaching affected how you work on other projects? Has it changed how you think about design? Has it changed how you work? Surely it has. Teaching doesnt harden up how you think about your work, but instead gives you 85 different ways of talking about it. It gives you lots of perspectives. When I first started teaching, I would not talk about my own work. I wouldn’t even introduce who I was or where it’s coming from. But as I got into it, I realized it can be generous to acknowledge my viewpoint. Here are the things I like to do. Here’s something I was working on last week. I can speak about those things with lots of detail, and that’s more genuine than speaking about something I don’t know about. I have always thought about teaching and practice being one continuous thing. The only way teaching made sense to me was to make it similar to how I think about design. Im interested in how to make a continuous process and make kind of evrything Im doing speak to the other parts of it. Maybe this is a self-preservation device. Maybe that’s why I’ve been able to work independently for a long time. Tell me about your own design education. You have a BA in Visual Communication from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale. How did they shape your understanding of all of this? What I took from my undergraduate education was the freedom to just jump across departments. I was taking math and journalism and English and studio art. I found that liberating. There is a lot that I also took from Yale. I was totally disoriented. Not everyone could make sense of what I was doing, but it didn’t matter because they’re enthusiastically encouraging you to do it your own way. That sounds like it also speaks to the longevity of your independence and how you operate in the classroom. Its not about developing a specific set of skills to get you a job but developing a point of view to guide your work. Thats basically what these books are about, too. Hindsight makes it easier to make that connection, but Im sure that’s the case. I remember teaching myself Adobe Illustrator, but the tools were a way to get to something else. You have to find your way first, and then you figure out how you do it.
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Parking in a city can be a problem. Its not just about finding parkingits about finding the right parking. Sometimes, theres a $10 parking spot only a block away from a garage that charges $50! So how do you know the best place to parkespecially if youre new to an area, as I was a few years ago, or if youre traveling and arent familiar with a city? For me, the answer is a smart and completely free user-submitted database of parking spots and rates. Itll help you understand the best place to park. And Ive personally used it for years. Psst: If you love these types of tools as much as I do, check out my free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. You’ll be the first to find all sorts of simple tech treasures! Your inside eye on parking prices First things first, the elephant in the room: Yes, Google Maps can technically navigate you to a place to park. But, like most other mapping services, it often makes it hard to find all the available garages and lots in any given area. And even if you do manage to find them, it doesn’t show you any meaningful info about how much they charge. So rather than driving in circles and eyeing prices, look at a service called Parkopedia before you head into a city where parking might be a challenge. All you have to do is plug a city, address, or street name into the box on the Parkopedia home page. Then, tell it when youll be arriving and when youll be leaving. (Parking prices function by time of day, and day of the week, after all.) Youll get a convenient map with parking rates. Scroll around, and you can find the best parking options. When I tell Parkopedia that Ill arrive in Boston in the late afternoon, for example, I see that theres an underground parking lot I can park in for $9instead of the $42 spot a block away! Thats the secret. Like GasBuddy and so many other apps, Parkopedia depends on user-submitted data, so it may not always be perfectand it may be better in some cities than others. But Parkopedia is available all over the world and has data for many, many places. By the way, Parkopedia has a parking reservation featurebut Ive never used it! I use it solely as a database, and its a great way to get started when Im figuring out where to park for an event in an unfamiliar city. But if youre thinking of reserving parking online, you might also want to consider SpotHero. You can use Parkopedia on the web as well as via the service’s native Android and iPhone apps. (But I recommend the website, as it’s simpler and more polished and doesn’t require any downloads.) Parkopedia is free. (The company makes money by integrating its data into other systems and by selling parking reservations, if you’re interested in that.) The service promises never to sell your personal data. You dont even have to create an account or sign in to use it. Ready for even more Cool Tool goodness? Check out my free Cool Tools newsletter for an instant introduction to an incredible audio appand a new off-the-beaten-path gem every Wednesday!
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