January 2025: Brat Summer, Designer Coaches, and Tony Smith
Happy new year!
In December, we spoke with design researcher Noemi Biasetton about design and politics and National Academy of Design director Gregory Wessner about serving artists and architects.
EDITOR’S NOTE
Happy New Year! I ended the year with a handful of published stories. As always, Fast Company published a list of my favorite design books of 2024, some of which will surely be familiar to Scratching the Surface listeners. Looking over the books that I kept returning to this year, I was struck by the optimism in them all. “The books I couldn’t seem to get out of my head this year feel the opposite, in many ways, of how the year felt,” I wrote. “This list, then, is a list filled with color, with inspiration, with excitement, and with joy.”
Fast Company also published another story I’d been working on the last few months on the rise of coaching services for designers. This story is the classic example of writing to figure out what you think. I went in with curiosity, unsure what the story was going to be about. I had suspicions it might be about designer over reach — if you can design a product, why not design your life — and that is certainly part of it. But more than that, this story quickly became about the failings of the design industry to adapt to contemporary settings as it gets usurped by Silicon Valley. I’m proud of how it turned out and happy to tackle the big issues facing the industry in it. I hope you like it.
As a reminder, Scratching the Surface is made possible because of listeners. If you like what we do here and want to support us this year, please consider upgrading to our paid tier to help fund our work and get some bonus interviews each month. It truly lets us do this work. Thanks for listening.
See you next month,
Jarrett
SCRATCH
Recent essays, interviews, and stories published on our Scratch platform.
Vitamin Txt explores the use of words in contemporary art
James Dyer reviews the new Phaidon book, arguing it could be a valuable addition for expanded design histories.
Maisie Skidmore recommends 7 books about the relationship between women and their clothes
The author of a new book on the history of Nike’s apparel shares the books that have influenced her.
PAST GUESTS
Recent work, writing, and news from former guests of Scratching the Surface.
🥥 Noemi Biasetton expands on our conversation for an essay in Other Worlds about the 2024 election memes.
🔗 In the new issue of Future Observatory, James Bridle writes about Gaia, the unifying theory of the planet as a coherent entity.
🍄 Also in Future Observatory, Justin McGuirk interviews anthropologist Anna Tsing.
🎯 In It’s Nice That, Chappell Ellison writes about the rise of design-led board games.
⛪️ Michael Kimmelman reviews the rebuilt Notre-Dame for The New York Times.
😇 and Oliver Wainwright reviews it in The Guardian.
🐭 Justin Davidson reviews the new Disney offices in New York (and surveys the history of Disney architecture!).
BOOK ROUNDUP
Recent books that have arrived in the studio. All links are Bookshop.org affiliate links. If you order through Bookshop, we get some money to help support the show!
Fantasy by Bruno Munari (Inventory Press)
We’re big fans of both Bruno Munari and Inventory Press (episode 106) over here so we were excited they were reprinting his book Fantasy, translated in English for the first time by Jeffrey Schnapp (episode 109).
Manuals: Design and Identity Guidelines (Thames & Hudson)
In today's landscape, designers rely on digital templates to implement brand identities—fast, accurate, and easily updatable, these digital manuals are now obligatory. But we have lost something in the transition to digital style guides, and the great printed standards manuals from the predigital era deserve a better fate than to be junked. This comprehensive study of corporate design manuals from the golden era of identity design makes a compelling case for their survival and continued appreciation.
Disorder: Swiss Grit Vol. II (Thames & Hudson)
Beginning with his influential work for Ray Gun and covering a wide range of printed and published work from 1997 to the present day, the book on the work of designer and experimental typography Chris Ashworth is concerned with the human craft of creativity and analog design, the details, imperfections, and happy accidents.
Derek Jarman (JRP Ringier)
Gathering newly commissioned essays devoted to specific—and sometimes lesser-known—aspects of the artist's life and work, and extensive portfolios spanning his oeuvre, this volume offers an accessible overview of Derek Jarman (1942-94), one of the legendary cultural figures of the postwar era. Jarman was an artist, filmmaker, musician and gay activist who powerfully marked British culture, from his first feature film Sebastiane (1976) to his videos for the Pet Shop Boys and Marianne Faithfull in the 1980s, from his AIDS activism to his cult film Blue (1993).
READ/WATCHED/HEARD
Articles, books, videos, and other ephemera that caught our eye this month.
😱 Graphic Design for ISIS is his passion.
👏 The Metropolitan Museum of Art unveils design of new wing by Frida Escobedo.
JOB WATCH
New jobs, retirements, and promotions in and around design.
Nora Lawrence in the new director of New York’s Storm King.
POSTSCRIPT
I spent some time over my break look through the great new publications on architect, artist, and sculptor Tony Smith, edited by James Voorhies (episode 138) and designed by James Goggin (episode 56). I was only loosely familiar with Smith’s work but was completely captivated by his thinking and his formal experiments. The image above is of one of my favorites, Wandering Rocks, which he made with black painted in steel in 1967.