“If there’s ever a nuclear bomb that wipes out civilization, only two things would survive – cockroaches and advertising agencies.”

As for the bugs, they apparently can handle the blast and the high levels of radiation thanks to their hardy exoskeleton and cell makeup. They also don’t need much food or water to survive and can go weeks without eating.

As for ad agencies, well, those of us who have worked inside good ones know we can survive because we always find a way to be useful.

That said, these days I can’t venture to a website or an app without hearing about the demise of agencies.

Oh, sure, we do some dumb stuff like prioritizing real estate over talent (see the latest RTO mandates).

Or chasing trends instead of focusing on real ideas based on timeless human truths.

I could go on, but this piece is about the power of agencies.

One thing is that the best agencies provide a home for misfit talent. People who can be remarkably brilliant but can’t always be slotted neatly into a conventional org chart.

(By the way, as of today we have a generation of TikTok creator refugees on the street. Who’s going be smart enough to hire a bunch of these folks, train them and unleash them on brands?)

But I digress…

Agencies will also survive because they provide an evergreen, in-demand service to businesses.

Two, in fact. Perspective and Dreaming.

Perspective is both analytical and integrative. Agencies, being on the outside, can see things someone who’s running a business day-to-day on the inside cannot. And then agencies are quite good at connecting those things. “Connecting the dots,” as it were. And turning those dots into action.

Dreaming is the creative part. Good agencies use those misfit folks I mentioned above and focus them to combine truth, vision, and ambition to create something that isn’t obvious in the here and now.

This is the skill (and courage) to say “What if…” and then complete the sentence with an idea.

What if we helped Kraft sell more cheese by combining cheese and bread and grilling it? The Grilled Cheese Sandwich. (Agency: J Walter Thompson for Kraft, 1910)

What if we invited ourselves into every single romantic union and a couple’s life thereafter, by inspiring people to express their love and commitment to each other with a diamond? “A diamond is forever.” (NW Ayer for DeBeers, 1947

What if we got people to consider an efficient, economical, and quirky car instead of these giant gas guzzlers that prowl our streets and highways? Our philosophy could be: “Think Small.” (Agency: Doyle Dane Bernbach for VW, 1959)

What if we got people to drink more milk by highlighting a world without it? “Got Milk?” (Agency: Goodby, Silverstein for the CA Milk Processor Board, 1993)

What if we put a skincare brand on the map — for men? (Agency: Ogilvy for CeraVe, 2024)

I can go on and on with agency ideas like TBWA’s “Absolut” work, Fallon’s “BMW Films,” AMV’s The Economist, Chiat/Day’s multiple campaigns for Apple including “1984,” “Think Different,” and more recently TBWA\Media Arts Labs’ “Shot On iPhone,” as well as Ogilvy’s “Real Beauty” for Dove. And, of course, Wieden’s gold standard, “Just Do It” for Nike.

Agency notions that truly changed how we live. And created prodigious value for brands.

And yet, here we are in 2025, punishing agencies on fees. And on the agency side, we seem to be phoning it in. (Or maybe, more accurately, Zooming it in.)

Where is the ambition?

Where is the vision?

Where are the ideas?

The funny thing is, we’ve never had more tools that can help us, from AI to reams of consumer data at our fingertips to utterly efficient digital distribution.

And yet, we sit here as though a nuclear bomb has gone off and we don’t know what to do.

I know what I would do if I was leading a brand and had a product.

First, I’d step on that roach.

Then, I’d call the agency.

Rob Schwartz is the Chair of the TBWA New York Group and an executive coach who channels his creativity, experience and wisdom into helping others get where they want to be. This was originally posted on his Substack, RobSchwartzHelps, where he covers work, life, and creativity.

Header image courtesy of the author, created in Midjourney.

The post You Dropped a Bomb on Me appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

The totality of my possessions reflects the totality of my being. I am what I have.

Sartre wrote those words in Being and Nothingness in 1949. They are odd words for us to try to understand coming from one of the stalwarts of existential philosophy. How can my being…what I am…be reduced to the totality of the things I possess? Sartre must be signaling that the objects we curate, select, and gather in our lives must be more significant than we might expect from mere things.

What do we call the totality of our possessions? I mean, every single thing you own and have in your world. We don’t really have a simple term to capture that idea. George Carlin simply called this totality, “my stuff.”

I’m thinking about this idea in reference to both my forthcoming book, and to the recent tragic events we’ve watched unfolding in California. In the book, I try to understand the network of meaning about our lives that our objects collectively help us express.

What is the cohesive bond that holds these (hundreds? thousands?) of objects together and makes them “mine”? Are they all like the molecules in my body, coming together to form vital organs and functional components? Are some more critical than others to the “totality of my being?” Am I consciously aware of the role that each of the objects in my life plays in making up my being, or are some easily overlooked and underestimated while others are undeservedly elevated?

The force that holds my assemblage of objects together must be a powerful bond because the “mineness” of the objects is palpable; our species has evolved a wide range of ways for me to identify and protect my objects. We develop special relationships with many of them that infuses them with a power that we will risk our own lives to protect. Witness the stories of people who venture back into burning homes to “save” a treasured object from destruction, sometimes one with little or no extrinsic, or monetary value. On a small scale, we all know the protective feeling of seeing one of our objects even mistakenly picked up by another person… “No, no, wait: that’s my scarf…”

Now, imagine that whole collection of objects, Sartre’s totality of our possessions, disappearing in a moment.

The best estimates are that over 12,000 homes were totally destroyed since the California fires broke out on January 7. The latest census estimates are that 2.85 persons per household lived in those approximately 12,000 homes. That means that roughly 42,750 people were displaced by the fires. Conservatively, that means that probably 40,000 individuals experienced the disappearance of either a significant majority or the totality of their possessions.

How many objects disappeared? That’s an impossible number to estimate with any degree of confidence. How many objects would you have lost if you were one of those 40,000 people? How many books, shoes, shirts? How many kitchen utensils? Photographs? Sofas, lamps, TVs? Everything. The totality of your possessions…

Is it unrealistic to imagine that every one of those 40,000 people lost, on average, 500 objects? I know my tally would have been much higher. But let’s stick with 500. That’s a combined total of 20 million objects lost by these individuals…a staggering number, ranging from running shoes to Keith Haring paintings.

Does losing those objects signal the loss of “the totality of their being” for each of those 40,000 people?

In one sense, obviously not; each of them is still alive. So, something of their being persists.

We have heard a lot of people expressing an understandable sentiment: “we were lucky; no one was killed or injured in our household.” At least 25 people were not so lucky. And we all nod and find ways to contribute to the efforts to provide aid and comfort to the victims.

But, what has been lost?

I find myself in the odd position of thinking about those 20 million objects. Well, not the objects, exactly, but the effects of the losses on the thousands of individual identities that the objects bolstered. Because the objects we accrue over a lifetime are not randomly chosen bits of matter; they are selected to help us accomplish something in our lives. They meant something to us…sometimes something trivial, sometimes something poignant…and we enrolled them as allies, elements in our journey to fulfill the needs, wants, desires, wishes, and dreams that energize our lives.

The carefully curated curio cabinet that was the home for the results of a lifetime of searching for just the right figurine to complete an irreproducible collection…and which provided a special feeling of prideful accomplishment for the collector. What about the cherished family heirlooms passed along for generations in the hope that our inspiring, stalwart (sometimes hilarious or absurd!) predecessors would not be forgotten? The trivial bits of ephemera that meant nothing to anybody else but evoked choked-back tears in a youngster. All gone.

Is it sacrilegious to consider the “spirits” of those objects in moments like these? Our culture is notoriously pragmatic on this count. The objects were, after all, just inanimate things…collections of atoms. Some of them had great monetary value but others were simply trinkets picked up along the way.

But when we think of the shock (the trauma) of the loss of those 20 million things, it’s obvious that many of them had been infused with the stuff of life and can never be replaced. They were characters in the ongoing life stories of the 40,000 or so individuals who cherished them in widely varying degrees…some will never be thought of again; some will never be forgotten.

Those 40,000 people are already gathering new things. New objects will present opportunities for new “plot twists” in life stories. Many of those who have experienced these losses will attempt to reconstruct their lives in thematically similar ways, reconstructing their lives with the “assistance” of new objects that express the same needs, wants, desires, wishes, and dreams, the same lifestyles. Others will use this milestone to alter their life direction by eschewing old object-relationships and forming new ones that better express a new moment in their lives; a new style of life.

All who have been affected will experience some form of de-attachment from the lost objects. Some of these things, like an amputee’s phantom limb, will remain palpable and painful in their absence. Others will simply slip away, maybe swept up in a secret wave of being relieved of a responsibility that had become burdensome.

Each object will contribute some element to the ongoing drama that fire victims are constructing. Recovery from an event like this is a deeply creative challenge that will establish a “before/after” moment in each affected individual’s life. Given all that, we should expect to see a wide range of methods for people to re-establish “the totality of their being” and redefine themselves in terms of the possessions they now have and the ones they seek to acquire. Life stories that were settled into established patterns will be rewritten in unforeseeable ways.

Again, poet Muriel Rukeyser’s words ring true: “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.”

Tom Guarriello is a psychologist, consultant, and founding faculty member of the Masters in Branding program at New York’s School of Visual Arts. He’s spent over a decade teaching psychology-based courses like The Meaning of Branded Objects, as well as leading Honors and Thesis projects. He’s spearheaded two podcasts, BrandBox and RoboPsych, the accompanying podcast for his eponymous website on the psychology of human-robot interaction. This essay was originally posted on Guarriello’s Substack, My Favorite Things.

Header image by André Lopes, Unsplash+

The post My Favorite Things: Reflecting on Loss After the Devastation of Fire appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

How? It remains utterly unreal.

At night, we wrap our temporary throw blankets around our knees. We pull the small kidney-shaped coffee table toward us. We heat the temporary kettle to 165 degrees. The temporary kettle keeps the water warm for when we want it after dinner, scraping up off the temporary couch to go fill two mugs with orange pekoe. We sit back down and let the television go bright again, sipping liquid that’s just the right amount of: Oh that’s hot.

*

In the mornings, a woman walks by the front window of our temporary housing — I always look out, and she always looks in.

We have a flurry of plants in our windows, every green living thing saved from the fire now gathered in one place, trying to make it on new, less light. The woman has headphones sandwiched over her ears.

“Get a dog, am I right?” J intones and we both laugh because he knows that’s what I’m always looking for.

Once, I saw a puppy so fresh that I rushed out of the temporary front door and down the temporary front steps. The puppy was so excited it did a small backflip on its way to greet me.

The puppy makes me smile, a real one, not temporary.

*

More time.

More money.

More travel.

More sleep.

More space — in the house, calendar, mind.

I am listening to a friend list all of the reasons his girlfriend now has to not get another dog after hers passed away eight months ago. I don’t know the girlfriend but I do know she went through an awful breakup before she met my friend. I know the girlfriend’s breakup was the kind where you huddle alone at night in your bed and cry into the dog’s soft scruff while holding on for dear life.

The list of reasons against a dog is not untrue but I suspect it is not really the girlfriend’s list. It is my friend’s list that she has adopted instead of another dog because she hopes to hold onto him.

It all makes sense — but then again, does it?

*

Why?

Don’t you already have a dog?

Is this a good time?

Really?

Everyone scrolls through the litter of ten puppies I know by heart and says they all look the same while I couldn’t disagree more.

To everyone, we just laugh and shrug.

I do not explain that sometimes when life tells me something I don’t want to hear, I have to say something back. No one wants to hear it, but I’ll tell them anyway.

*

“Some people seemingly get married and buy a house, get a house plant or a puppy or a kitten or even a child and life is all these steps they take, one after another, on they go…”

I am talking to a friend in the park in the soft hold of a sweet autumn. I shrug.

“You’re meant for a different way,” she tells me and I feel so much weariness that it makes me laugh and shake my head.

I don’t think she’s wrong and I don’t even think that a different way means there won’t be a husband and a house and a plant and, and, and, it’s just — it’s exhausting. A wasp comes then and tangles at our hair and we move to another bench. A pack of three beagles walks by and one has eyes rimmed with dark exactly the way a teen on the train had it — kohl black and creased and thick as if pressed on with a fingertip.

*

The day we collect the puppy we have named Ukee we stop sleeping. Ukee is curly-coated and almost exactly eight pounds. He pounces on everything.

Now, it is very hard to get any work done. Everything is nipped at the edges. There’s a lot of urine. We toss the toy back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. We try to slip the teeth of the buttercomb through the mats of puppy hair. The bank account creaks with late-night orders made in a daze.

There are a lot of questions. How did we forget to order training treats? Why is this bag of kibble only available in the Jupiter size? How many rocks can one puppy eat? Did you brush his teeth? How should we clip his nails? Should his belly be this color? When will you be done with your emails? Can you help me with him? Did you see where he’s gone?

The routine of an impossible three months shreds beneath Ukee’s little puppy teeth. The tea we worked so hard to depend on sits cold in the mug that’s rattling on the table because Ukee’s paws are up on it.

I don’t take a sip of the tea for hours. When I finally do, the orange pekoe is over-steeped and icy. I drain the whole mug. There is the life that arrives unbidden but there is also the life you choose. And, oh, how good it is to choose your own way.

*

I’m Wondering is a monthly column where I ask and then answer a question. More than anything, I hope that as I continue to wonder, it will open all of us up to paths we can’t imagine now but feel called to by a question that won’t let us go.

Amy Lin lives in Calgary, Canada where there are two seasons: winter and road construction. She completed her MFA at Warren Wilson College and holds BAs in English Literature and Education. Her work has been published in places such as Ploughshares and she has been awarded residencies from Yaddo and Casa Comala. She writes the Substack At The Bottom Of Everything where she wonders: how do we live with anything? HERE AFTER is her first book.

Header image courtesy of the author.

The post I’m Wondering: Has Your Tea Gone Cold? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Clearly, we’re scrambling to understand the implications of a change so big and so fast we can barely wrap our heads around it.

Before we get into how we got here, and what the consequences of AI will be for branding and design, it’s important to start with one grounding idea:

The inherent value of creativity is that it is an expression of the human condition.

Branding and design are creative outputs. Creativity gives voice to the human experience, emotions, struggles, aspirations, stories. It helps us create connection and empathy. It helps us process life’s complexity and meaning. It helps us create cultures and a sense of belonging to them. It helps us solve problems and adapt to new challenges.

Creativity is one of the things that makes us human, and we should never forget that.

Now, how did we get here?

AI Shouldn’t Be a Total Surprise

Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—a creative masterpiece of a film released in 1968, based on a book released a few months earlier authored by Arthur C. Clarke—anticipated this moment. Spoiler alert, the film is Clarke and Kubrik’s way of processing the potential impacts of advanced technologies like AI on humanity. Set mostly in space, the film actually begins in prehistoric times to make its main point: that humans have always had the disturbing tendency to turn technological tools into weapons for self-defense, self-advancement, dominance, and destruction.

Fifty-two years later, it’s easy to see how ChatGPT’s release in 2022 puts us on a path where HAL 9000, the conversational AI with “emotional intelligence” trusted with literally keeping the movie’s astronaut protagonists alive, is not such a crazy idea. Add it to a growing list of predictions the movie made, which, ironically, mostly started materializing after the year 2001: space stations as habitats (2000), predictive algorithms (2000s), video calling (2003), tablet computers (2010), voice-controlled interfaces (2011), virtual assistants and multimodal communication (2011), smart homes and centralized systems (2014), artificial intelligence (2016), autonomous systems (2016), human-machine relationships (2016), reusable spacecraft (2015), augmented reality & advanced interfaces (2016), AI-powered diagnostics (2018), space tourism (2021). Yet to materialize: cryosleep, artificial gravity in rotating space habitats, fully autonomous spacecraft decision-making systems with advanced general AI and emotional intelligence (like HAL, the villain of the movie).

I won’t get into the philosophical, ethical, and existential considerations of a HAL 9000-like situation. I’m just hoping we can learn the fundamental lesson most sci-fi movies try to teach us: Yes, we’re brilliant at inventing technology and we’re great at seeing the upside. We’re less great at seeing or dealing with its potential harms.

But I will take a look at how all of this is affecting branding and design, a domain I’m much more comfortable grappling with than the survival of the human race as we know it.

Confronting Reality in An Increasingly Artificial World

First, a confession: I use AI regularly as a research assistant. It’s exciting. The access to information is intoxicating. The computing power is mindblowing. The research capabilities are astounding. It would have taken me forever to compile the list of technologies predicted by Clarke and Kubrik without ChatGPT to conveniently fetch that for me. AI tools are great at finding things that exist—much better than a simple Google search. They’re great at synthesizing them, organizing them, and adjusting to every request you throw at them. They’re great assistants. But my experience of them so far is that they aren’t great “creators.” As 2001 foreshadowed, they are also prone to errors in judgment and embedded with the same biases and flaws as the humans who created them.

So how is the broader creative sector experiencing these tools? Warning: These numbers are going to feel like a gut punch. According to recently published research in the Harvard Business Review: “After the introduction of ChatGPT, there was a 21% decrease in the weekly number of posts in automation-prone jobs compared to manual-intensive jobs. Writing jobs were affected the most (30.37% decrease), followed by software, app, and web development (20.62%) and engineering (10.42%). A similar magnitude of decline in demand was observed after the introduction of popular image-generating AI tools (including Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E 2) were introduced. Within a year of introducing image-generating AI tools, demand for graphic design and 3D modeling freelancers decreased by 17.01%. Additionally, we noticed that over time, there were no signs of demand rebounding, revealing a growing trend of job replacement.”

Uh Oh, Is Creativity Dead?

If you’re like me, your heart sank to the floor as you read those numbers. You probably had some feelings of guilt, too: “Oh shit, I use ChatGPT all the time. Am I digging my own grave?”

There’s no denying that the employment landscape in creative industries will continue changing as AI evolves. As the HBR article highlights, the shift has already begun and it will only accelerate. The changes ahead will be significant. Some roles will evolve, others may disappear, and new opportunities will emerge. It’s a realignment, much like the ones brought on by the advent of Photoshop or the rise of the internet—but bigger. Rejecting a technology that is becoming omnipresent around us is not a winning strategy. The key to thriving in this transition is in quickly identifying what parts of the creative process are replaceable or “automation-prone,” which are harder to replace, and which new roles can now emerge.

AI and Branding

As we integrate these technologies into branding and design, a critical question arises: Can AI ever replace the human strategy, creativity, and authenticity that make brands meaningful?

I’m no futurist, but based on my experience, the answer is a resounding no. While AI can help streamline tasks and amplify our abilities, it cannot replace the uniquely human elements of collaboration, instinct, unpredictability, empathy, and ethical responsibility. As one of our clients, Nick Fabiani, Creative Lead at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, puts it: “At the end of the day, my take on AI is anything that is worth time for someone to consume—any piece of written media, visual media that is worth someone engaging with and trying to get meaning from—is worth the time for a human to create it.”

Why the Human Element Matters

People want to feel ownership over the ideas they help shape. They want to be part of something bigger, and they want their values to shine through in the work. AI might assist in the execution, but it can’t replace the emotional intelligence, intuition, and cultural awareness that define truly impactful branding. Even if it was possible to create a facsimile of emotional intelligence, how would it be believable without real experience to back it up?

The process of collaboration and co-creation is central to building brands that resonate.

As Harvard Business Review points out, “AI is shifting the focus of work away from predictive tasks to those requiring human judgment and decision-making.” AI excels at speed and efficiency. It can crunch data, predict trends based on patterns, and attempt to generate (more like regurgitate) creative outputs. But the content it generates is only as interesting as the prompts that guide it and the human editing that makes it fresh, surprising, and authentic. Outputs aside, branding and design are not just about the deliverables—they’re about the journey of getting there. As Fabiani notes, “How we get there, how we arrive at it, is the important part, really. So that’s sort of where I draw the line on AI—how do you replace actual human experience?”

Preparing Creative Leaders for an AI-Augmented World

As AI takes on more technical and repetitive tasks, the next generation of creative leaders must be equipped with new skills. It’s no longer enough to just master design software or write compelling copy. Creative leaders need to know when to prioritize intentional, values-driven work over the speed and quantity enabled by AI. We must think critically and holistically about our work: who it’s for, why it matters, and how it brings people together. But beyond that, we have to focus on the thing that will never be replaceable: human-to-human relationships. Brands are ultimately about the humans behind them: humans who need to feel listened to, guided, validated, represented, dignified, motivated, inspired, driven by purpose and meaning.

AI as a Tool, Not a Replacement

AI has become an indispensable assistant in creative work. It can accelerate and enhance workflows. But it should always remain just that—an assistant. It is not a replacement for the creative processes that connect people to ideas and to each other. Humans must stay in the decision-making seat, driving the strategy and meaning behind the work.

The most successful brands are not built on efficiency alone but on meaning and resonance. AI can help us get there faster, but it’s the human experience that makes the destination worthwhile.

This essay is by Deroy Peraza, partner at Hyperakt, a purpose-driven design and innovation studio that elevates human dignity and ignites curiosity. Originally posted in the newsletter, Insights by Hyperakt.

Header iIllustration by Merit Myers.

The post AI Won’t (Completely) Replace Us appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

And there’s no question the former Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota did a magnificent job of creating the artist, Bob Dylan.

But there were some pieces to the “Dylan myth” that he found.

He found music on the radio when he was quite young. He discovered the guitar. He unearthed the poets from Rimbaud to Kerouac. He found Woody Guthrie, Suze Rotolo, and Joan Baez.

And all the while he was finding things, he was also creating.

It strikes me that “finding yourself” and “creating yourself” is not binary.

It’s not either/or.

I suggest it’s both. Indeed, I see it as a process.

First, you find some things you are drawn to. Pay attention, now. What do you like? What do you like to do?

You then start to store up these ideas and actions and they become encoded in your brain. And once you have these pieces, you start to put them together in the puzzle that becomes…you.

The process?

From hunting and gathering to making.

From searching to creating.

And from creating to being.

As Dylan sings: “May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung.”

Who are you?

It begins with what have you been finding.

Rob Schwartz is the Chair of the TBWA New York Group and an executive coach who channels his creativity, experience and wisdom into helping others get where they want to be. This was originally posted on his Substack, RobSchwartzHelps, where he covers work, life, and creativity.

Header image: Benoît Deschasaux for Unsplash+; photo of album cover courtesy of the author

The post Find Yourself or Create Yourself? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

As for me, I don’t make resolutions anymore, because if I “resolve” to do something and don’t, I’m breaking a promise to myself. I don’t want to start any new venture (or year) thinking about what I might screw up or neglect to do.

Instead, I’ve been thinking a lot about the things in 2024 that I enjoyed or feel proud of or learned to do, that I’d like to keep up in 2025.

So here I am, sharing them, not on December 31 and not January 1.

Do you know why? Because they’re not resolutions! Which means I didn’t already fail by not doing it on some prescribed date. (See how that works? Clever!)

Doing Small Things Now, Before They Become Big Things

This past year, I committed to doing more things when I thought of them, instead of nudging them off my to-do list another day (or month or six months).

I’m not perfect by any means, but it really eases my mental load to do things like paying a bill when it comes in. Adding an event to my calendar. Finally, creating a Letterboxd account like everyone else in my film-obsessed family and adding all the movies I want to my watchlist so I know where to find them. Updating to the newest OS. Making boiled eggs for the week ahead. Scheduling a mammogram.

To be clear, a mammogram is not a small thing whatsoever, but making the call to schedule it is; and choosing to look at it that way — “just a phone call” — makes it way easier for my procrastinating brain to manage something that otherwise seems big.

Regifting

I think we need to rethink regifting. Look around at things you have that have given you joy, and think about how they might give others joy.

I am a sentimental saver by nature, but I have started giving the kids a lot of my (vintage, in their words, sigh) jewelry, because why let those amazing 80s spider earrings and chunky Y2K-core rings sit in a box in my closet forever.

A book that was meaningful to me in college. A stunning NWT Halston dress I bought on The RealReal years ago that’s a size negative-12 labeled as a 6 and has never once come off the hanger. Even a mammoth bottle of CeraVe from the Costco double-pack that would otherwise sit in our bathroom for a good year before opening — all regifted to delighted new owners.

(P.S. Sage looked spectacular in the dress emceeing her Senior Drama Cabaret! Will she let me share a photo? Probably not!)

Lighting the Good Candles

I often think about Gretchen Rubin’s chapter in The Happiness Project about “Spending Out,” or using the things we own. It’s often described as “using the good china,” but for me, it’s lighting candles, because, fun fact, I have never been married and don’t own good china.

Do you know how many amazing candles I’ve amassed over the years? (Don’t make me answer, it’s a little embarrassing.) Well, now we light them. It not only makes me feel calm and happy, it makes me feel like I’m in a freshly cleaned home. So basically, someone else’s home.

Keeping Things in Perspective

When things are rough, I think of my mom’s wise question: Will this matter in five years? How about ten? It helps a lot.

Now I may try a new method to keep myself in check if I’m spiraling, thanks to my friend Christine Koh’s Edit Your Life Podcast. She re-ran an older episode about 8 simple ways to orient toward gratitude, including Asha Dornfest’s suggestion that when she feels “crammed,” she places a note on her calendar a month or so in the future, reminding herself to stop and think about what has transpired over the past 30 days since that feeling.

Even if things are still sucky, I bet there’s something positive you’ll be able to see that you accomplished, or some way that things have evolved for the better over that month.

Working on Internalized Ageism

This past summer, I wrote about how Karen Walrond helped me see all the ways that we internalize and regurgitate ageism, which continues to perpetuate it.

Oops, senior moment.

Wow, you were born after 9/11? You’re a baby!

You look great for your age!

Yes, I know all the lyrics to “Forever Young” because I’M OLD

So… turning 29 again? *wink wink*

Why won’t [older politician you don’t like regardless of capability and effectiveness] retire already?

I’m self-deprecating by nature, and this is a hard one to fully achieve; but being mindful about these quips has really helped me identify them, respond in a more positive way, and actually reclaim a little joy.

Aging and longevity expert Debra Whitman also taught me this past year that those who see aging as a time of wisdom and positivity are proven to live 7.5 years longer. Wow.

Related:
We’re All a Little Ageist Sometimes

Advocating Fiercely for My Own Health

I made the decision that if I have time for a pedicure, I have time to look out for all the other parts of me. I think that’s been a good one.

The Frozen Shoulder thing is still with me (yay) but I know recovery would take a lot longer if I hadn’t gotten my butt to PT at the first sign, hit the orthopedist when things got worse, and insisted on a second cortisone shot — even when the doctor told me the ultrasound machine was unexpectedly “in use” and would I mind rescheduling? (Yes I would, and no, I didn’t.)

I scheduled some overdue tests (all is well), and also found a new dentist who is closer to home and doesn’t constantly upsell me on procedures. As it turns out, I’m now less inclined to postpone cleanings.

Not Treating News as Entertainment

In 2025, I cannot allow myself to do what I did after 2016, losing myself in every insane breaking news story about every crazy thing the guy in the White House says or does. Every day is not THE MOST IMPORTANT ROSE CEREMONY EVER, as much as he wants us to see it that way.

I have not turned on live TV news since November 6, and you know? I’ve been okay with that. It drops my cortisol levels and helps me a lot with #3 up there.

I also find that I don’t have a drop of FOMO if I don’t know every last detail about the Tesla Cybertruck Terrorist the second other people do.

To be clear, I’m not tuning out the news, because a lot of things in 2025 will matter in five years. So I continue to follow the historians, read important stories and analyses from writers and reporters I respect, and follow breaking news via responsible accounts on Threads and Bluesky (feel free to follow who I follow). I still rely on Lawrence O’Donnell, if sometimes a day late. I am also hitting my Substack Home page more, as political writers are beginning to use Notes like a social feed.

If you need help unplugging, just remember: If we have a serious emergency or crisis, I guarantee a family member will text you.

Related:
Follow the Historians
The Great Anti-Doom Scrolling Therapy Guide

Supporting Independent Media

I made a holiday gift donation to Pro Publica on behalf of my mom, because we both know how essential independent journalism will be. That also means paying for the Substack subscriptions that give me value when I can.

Even if they’re not political per se, I find Laura Fenton’s Living Small as valuable as any series in NYT Styles, and Bess Kalb’s The Grudge Report as entertaining as any New Yorker column.

You know what else I’ve come to love, and not just because they syndicate my columns when I have one worth publishing and isn’t overtly political? PRINT Magazine. It’s also majority-women owned, which is rare.

By the way, I am not someone who will ever shame you for reading The Times or The Washington Post. The corporate-owned media also gives us access to outstanding reporters, researchers, and columnists.

(Tip: An Apple One subscription includes Apple News, which is a more affordable way to read a ton of publications with paywalls.)

Hopescrolling

Remember how good it felt to start Hopescrolling in 2024? Me too. I’m continuing to cut out the social feeds that rage-bait, rant incessantly, or stress me out. I’m also continuing to follow more accounts that just give me moments of delight in my day. @NewWaveSocialClub will never make you sad.

Finding Opportunities for Deliberate Acts of Kindness

Jaclyn Lindsay, CEO of kindness.org, researches the science of kindness and taught me so much this past year. Like acts of kindness must be deliberate, not random, to be impactful.

It’s made me much more mindful (that word again!) about my own acts of kindness — where I am doing pretty well, and where I can be better.

The good news is, acts of kindness don’t have to be big to be impactful at all; like being on time for a meeting, telling your kids you’re proud of them, giving a little extra attention to a younger person struggling at work, asking to reconnect with an old friend, or just reaching out and asking someone in your life how they’re doing.

I have a suspicion we’re all going to benefit from more “You doing okay?” calls in the coming year. I hope to be initiating more of them myself.

Which, I guess, is a resolution after all.

Liz Gumbinner is a Brooklyn-based writer, award-winning ad agency creative director, and OG mom blogger who was called “funny some of the time” by an enthusiastic anonymous commenter. This was originally posted on her Substack “I’m Walking Here!,” where she covers culture, media, politics, and parenting.

Header image: photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

The post Ten Habits I’m Bringing Into the New Year appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

It is not enough for a teacher of memoir to tell you that we are the art-making species; that it is our God-given right to create; that no child, having been given a pad and some crayons will ever say, to quote Elizabeth Gilbert, Nope, not feeling it today; that far more women than men withhold their storytelling until someone tells them it’s okay to do so (a broad generalization, but men usually just do it and apologize later); that you have every right to say whatever it is you need to say, damn the torpedoes. Some (not all) of these statements are accurate, and all require significant bravery. They all hold the potential for transcendence, and also danger. But not one of them unpacks the layers of what it is that makes us choose not to share our stories until the moment where we step through the scrim of worry/fear/concern/threat/self-loathing/panic that pushes us to the edge of the diving board, and off. Once we jump, we jump; there’s no turning back. Even if you tell your stories to your notebook and nowhere else — and sometimes this is appropriate because not everything is meant for publication — it can still be a terrifying prospect.

I came away with this understanding: that the act of writing one’s story is a spiritual exercise that all of us are called upon to do, whether we want to be published, or not.

In the writing sphere, we talk about it all the time: notebooks, process journals, residencies, the correct pen, the right desk facing the right way, the ritual of meditating or lighting a candle first or making a pot of tea. All lovely, and, for many of us, important and effective. But these foundational questions still exist as tripwires: who am I to tell my story? Is it mine to tell? Do I own it? What will happen if I write something when I’ve been warned not to? What happens if someone tells me that I’ve gotten the story all wrong?

In March 2025, my fourth book, Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create will be published. It is vastly different from my first three books in that it is a hybrid memoir— one part craft, and one part personal context. I had written an entire draft before I realized that I couldn’t possibly create something that might help other writers and creatives without also explaining what compelled me to write it in the first place.

Permission came out of a decade of my own silence born of paralyzing creative trauma: I told no one about it — not my students, not my editors or publishers, not my teachers or my friends or my mentors — or what had happened to me during that decade. Permission had its deepest roots in the dangers of secret-keeping. It emerged from the muck and mess of intergenerational trauma, and the writing of a century-old story that, unbeknownst to me, was meant to be hidden. It is the story of what happened — emotionally, physically, spiritually, professionally — when a writer’s world imploded as the result of telling a simple but dangerous tale about one young woman’s heart-rending decision to leave her family, and the decision’s aftermath. Would it have been better not to tell the story I did? Maybe. But I could no sooner hide it than change the color of my eyes, because it touched every part of my life and still does.

Along the way, I peeled the onion: how do we tell difficult stories that belong to us but to which others claim ownership? How do we handle issues of revenge writing? How do we resolve the problem of making time and space for actually doing the work? How do we decide to take the risk and write about what has been hidden? How do we remain creatively generous? How do we write with humility and compassion about impossibly difficult issues (and people) that might be devastating?

I came away with this understanding: that the act of writing one’s story is a spiritual exercise that all of us are called upon to do, whether we want to be published, or not. Storytelling is an endeavor reflective of the human condition, and handled with care, it will move us to a place of compassion, humility, self-knowledge, and transcendence. As Robert Macfarlane writes in Underland, when the earliest cave dwellers took a mouthful of ochre dust and blew it at their hand held up to a cave wall, they were telling a story. They were saying Remember me; I was here.

The permission we give ourselves to tell our stories is how we get there; it is the key that turns the creative ignition, that cracks open the hard shell of our humanity. When you read something written by a person to whom you have no connection — no ethnic, religious, geographical, political, spiritual familiarity — that link, which might otherwise not exist, is what results from permission to write.

Storytelling is an endeavor reflective of the human condition, and handled with care, it will move us to a place of compassion, humility, self-knowledge, and transcendence.

At the beginning of this new year, I ask you to do this: amidst all the gadgets that will promise to accurately measure your blood oxygen level, or the diets that will render you svelt and metabolically younger, the promises to yourself to run a 5k this year or to stop drinking, remember to tell your story. Write it. Paint it. Scribble it on a cocktail napkin. Start there. Understand that some people will not be happy about whatever it is you do or say, some people won’t care, and others won’t notice. Predicting whose feathers will be ruffled by your storytelling is a moving target. But do know this: if it happened to you, if it — whatever it is — changed you or touched you in some way, it is your story.

This post was originally published on Elissa Altman’s blog Poor Man’s Feast, The James Beard Award-winning journal about the intersection of food, spirit, and the families that drive you crazy. Read more on her Substack, or keep up with her archives here.

Images courtesy of the author.

The post Poor Man’s Feast: Give Yourself Permission appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Why Strategy Alone Is Not Enough

Yes, strategy builds the essential foundation for any brand or campaign. It charts objectives, pinpoints target audiences, and crystallizes key messages. But strategy itself remains abstract—it lacks the sensory richness and emotional resonance needed to forge genuine connections with audiences. Simply dropping a strategy deck on a designer’s desk and expecting magic to happen is a recipe for disappointment.

Design isn’t just execution—it’s an interpretive art that demands nuance and understanding. Without proper guidance, even brilliant design concepts can drift away from their strategic moorings, resulting in work that might look beautiful but feel hollow. This disconnect typically stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how to navigate the challenging territory between strategic thinking and design expression.

The Liminal Space: Where Strategy Meets Creativity

This transitional space demands that ideas evolve from analytical frameworks into compelling visual and experiential narratives. It’s a complex transformation that requires:

• Interpretive Expertise: Designers must dive deep beneath the surface of strategy documents to unearth the vital insights that will fuel powerful creative solutions—while keeping the brand’s core objectives firmly in focus.
• Collaborative Dialogue: The conversation between strategists and designers isn’t optional—it’s essential. This dialogue gives abstract concepts shape and form, and creative solutions emerge that honor strategic rigor and creative ambition.
• Iterative Exploration: Forget about linear processes. The path from strategy to design twists and turns, demanding continuous testing and refinement to ensure concepts remain strategically sound while pushing creative boundaries.
• Lessons from Industry Leaders: The agencies that excel at this transition don’t leave it to chance. They build robust processes prioritizing ongoing dialogue and alignment between strategic and creative teams. Many leverage workshops to break down silos between the word people—clients, marketers, strategists, and the visual people—the designers, creating environments where creative solutions emerge naturally from strategic foundations. These sessions—whether exploring brand personality, building visual identity collages, or mapping customer journeys—provide structured spaces for meaningful collaboration.

By keeping clients and creative teams engaged throughout the journey, these agencies ensure that the visual and verbal identity remains coherent and compelling. While specific methodologies vary, successful creative leadership shares a common thread: they recognize that excellence emerges from the intersection of strategic insight and creative exploration.

How to Bridge the Gap Effectively

• Keep Strategists in the Mix: The strategy team’s work doesn’t end when design begins. Their ongoing involvement, combined with client input, ensures design solutions remain tethered to core objectives while allowing for creative evolution.
• Design Powerful Workshops: Create structured opportunities for strategists and designers to collaborate meaningfully. Activities like brand personality exploration, competitive analysis, and scenario planning can transform abstract strategies into actionable creative direction, helping clients understand and visualize possible solutions.
• Craft Inspiring Briefs: The creative brief serves as your bridge between strategy and design. It should distill strategic insights into clear guidelines that inspire designers while providing the necessary guardrails for success.
• Embrace Rapid Prototyping: Early visualization and testing of concepts against strategic objectives creates valuable opportunities for refinement before final execution. This iterative approach helps ensure both strategic alignment and creative excellence.

Why This Matters

The liminal space between strategy and design isn’t just a phase to push through—it’s where true differentiation takes root. Here, a brand’s distinctive attributes transform into tangible elements that resonate deeply with audiences. Success in this space requires disciplined thinking, creative courage, and the wisdom to balance these seemingly opposing forces. And it requires active client engagement.

Organizations that master this transition understand that strategy and design must function as two parts of a unified whole. They invest in processes and talent that enable seamless collaboration, ensuring every design choice advances strategic goals and every strategic insight finds powerful creative expression.

Moving Forward

As markets become more complex and competitive, mastering this crucial transition becomes increasingly vital. The ability to navigate the space between strategy and design will separate exceptional brands from merely adequate ones. This is where brands don’t just establish their presence—they establish their significance. For organizations committed to excellence, this challenging but essential space is where the real work of brand building begins.

This post was originally published on Lynda’s LinkedIn newsletter, Marketing without Jargon. Lynda leads a team at Decker Design that focuses on helping law firms build differentiated brands.

Header photo by Mark Basarab on Unsplash.

The post Exploring the Liminal Space Between Strategy and Design appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Planning a Reading Year

I think most of us accumulate, curate, and tend a substantial, unruly “to be read” (TBR) list, whether we make a formal list that we keep in Notion or Goodreads or StoryGraph or just randomly notice covers and titles on the “new books” shelves at the library or brandished about by bookstagrammers and temporarily file them away as things we might “someday” read.

Thanks to her local library, my mom participates in an extensive yearly reading challenge with more than 100 prompts to help guide and shape a well-rounded year of reading.

As the new year approached, she spent time looking for books to fit some of the categories, prompts like “An alliterative title,” “An epistolary novel,” “A Rory Gilmore read,” “A locked room mystery,” and “A book with a pink cover.” Other prompts specify certain animals in the title, certain elements on the cover, certain locations, time periods, genres, or narrative structures. It’s fun to search for books that fit the categories and recommend books in areas she doesn’t typically read, like dystopian fiction (which I love).

I enjoy helping her craft her reading list for the challenge, but this kind of challenge isn’t for me. I do tend to like gamifying elements of my life, but maybe only when I make the rules. I don’t want to read a bunch of things I wouldn’t typically read just to fit someone else’s arbitrary list. Maybe I’m a bit of a book curmudgeon, but recognizing that life is short, I prefer my reading be self-directed. (I would still like to find a book club.)

The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Good Intentions and an Ever-Shifting Pile

There are so many things I want to read, books I keep hoping to circle back around to, books I check out over and over again and never crack, books I start and never finish. I always have a mix of things checked out (including lots of e-books). I have an assortment of creative nonfiction and writing-focused titles checked out right now, along with a number of art and illustration titles, but most of my reading is for pleasure, most often SF/fantasy (and lots of graphic novels).

I bailed on War and Peace last year (though I was really enjoying it), and I started, but didn’t finish, many books in the second half of the year. I’ve been waiting for a book to suck me in.

There were a few titles that I really wanted to get to last year, including the next book in the Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson. Maybe this is the year I’ll read Louise Penny. Maybe I’ll get hooked on a cozy mystery series. Maybe I’ll read something from my shelves, one of the many books I can’t remember if I’ve read or not. Needing to elevate my computer on the table yesterday, I randomly pulled two books from the shelves, the composite Black Jewels trilogy and Anne of Green Gables. Always attuned to moments of synchronicity, I had to wonder if the pulls were a sign, if maybe I should read or reread either of those.

I stood in front of the shelves later and pulled another small stack of titles that jump out as ones to read or reread. I am entering a year where I know I need to begin emptying my shelves. Reading from my shelves would be a step in the right direction, although anything I read might become harder to get rid of.

Left: Assorted books currently checked out from the library; Right: ssorted books from a set of shelves, some I might read again and some I can’t remember if I’ve read or not. They all show signs of age and time.

A Long Read

A new year offers an exciting and fresh slate for reading. I am hoping to sink into something good, and recapture the feeling of reading favorites like Station Eleven, The Starless Sea, the Realm of the Elderlings books, and Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.

I could just make a goal of reading the books in the stacks above, shifting titles along with the flow of the year, but something has caught my attention that I think will be the backbone of my reading for 2025.

It came out of nowhere, but a few months ago, I decided to read Proust.

This idea appeared in front of me, completely unbidden, and it took hold. For some reason, now is the time to read Proust. I don’t remember what the original thread was. Once I decided I should read Proust, I considered other long reads like Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow, too, in case something else might be a better pick.) I got some advice that suggested Ulysses would be a good pick for the puzzle and wordplay, and In Search of Lost Time would be a good pick for introspection about memory, love, and time.

I love wordplay, but at least two of the Proustian themes are fundamental tidal pools for me, philosophical spaces in which I wander.

So the idea of reading Proust, which had never come up before other than in rogue references in the Gilmore Girls (like when Max lends Swann’s Way to Lorelei), took hold and didn’t let go.

In November, I spent weeks pondering translations and pulling multiple copies from the library. I started the first book (Swann’s Way) to see what I thought about the narrative voice, to see if I want to wade through the famously long sentences. I couldn’t figure out what was pulling me in this direction. What I don’t need right now is a difficult read, and yet I was circling a notoriously difficult read.

I read some “how to read Proust” posts, most of which suggest only reading a few (no more than ten) pages a day. The whole endeavor of reading Proust, and it does feel like gearing up for a long journey rather than settling in on the couch for a cozy read, has an aura of anticipation, of mystery. There is the unshakable sense that this is something that could be life-changing, but I have no idea why. Maybe I just am looking for something that will be life-changing. I don’t know what is drawing me to Proust, proverbial moth to flame, what thread is pulling me, or whether I will fall in love with the prose or bail before we leave the table with the Madeleine cookie (in which case I will have made much ado about nothing). I’m not sure these days if I have it in me to stick with things. There is something in my quest for understanding that has wrapped around this self-challenge of reading In Search of Lost Time.

I spiraled a bit with the issue of translations. Proust is known for his language, and yet … won’t I be getting a translator’s language? (This issue of translation came up in War and Peace, but the draw there wasn’t the “beauty” of the prose itself, which is part of the potential with Proust.)

I got sidetracked considering translations. The translator I thought I was going with (Davis), unfortunately, only translated one book. (That series switches translators throughout the seven books, which seems odd in terms of the continuity of voice.) Posting in Reddit yielded lots of opinions and one strident suggestion for one of the newest translations (Carter), which includes extensive footnotes and an update on the language in one of the other most well-known translations.¹

I checked out a book that documents paintings mentioned in In Search of Lost Time. I checked out a reader’s guide. I contemplated how to track the reading, how to document it, and whether a buddy read or collaboration around the reading was possible.

I’m starting 2025 with a slow read of Proust. What about you? What will you be reading in the early part of 2025? If you are part of a book club, you may already have a list for the year. If you read independently, maybe you’ve selected a short list to get you started, or maybe you have a plan. Maybe you follow some kind of yearly challenge that gives you a map or bingo card of books to read.

Our reading habits say a lot about us.

The Art of the Book Stack — Postcard No. 4

There are many things you could do on a postcard in January, including documenting a word, intention, or affirmation, but let’s use this month to share the book or books we will be reading. You don’t have to have a full map of the year. You just need one title or what you have checked out or what’s on the nightstand.

On a postcard, draw the book you are reading first (or next) or the short stack you have lined up.

You might draw the cover of the book(s), the stack, or the spine(s), a la Jane Mount’s wonderful Bibliophile series. (Other artists do book stack art, too, but Mount was my introduction to this format, and her books offer enticing and comprehensive visual reading lists that are fun to ponder. There are postcards of her stacks, too.)

Maybe your postcard:

• Features a quote from the book
• Is an exercise in lettering and highlights the title and author
• Contains a comic-style rendering of the main character
• Contains a set of graphic novel panels showing a scene with dialogue
• Invites the recipient to read with you
• Documents something from a related movie (as my examples did after watching Little Miss Sunshine)
• Contains a sketchnote of the first chapter (or book jacket/back cover summary)
• Is a ready-made book tracker someone can use to read the books

There are many creative directions you might take. Sharing your reading year with someone can be powerful, plus, you’ll be tracking your reading year (at least the first month) at the same time. Making a postcard about your first book of the year will almost certainly make you more intentional about the reading.

Tip: Even if you don’t send your postcard, if you create a postcard for each book you read this year and tack it to a bulletin board, imagine what a wonderful visual record of the reading year you will have later!

As an alternative, but still in keeping with the book theme, you might:

• Draw the cover for a favorite book, either a life favorite or a childhood favorite. (This is something I frequently include as an illustrated journal prompt.)
• Draw your own favorite stack, either an all-star stack or a stack on a favorite theme or from a favorite genre. (If you were passing on a list of recommendations to your recipient, what would be on the list?)
• Draw the cover of your own “book of life” for 2025. (I love this idea as part of visualizing the year you want.)

Reading Lists

If you are looking for an annual challenge or books to use to fill in your own reading calendar, you might browse these:

• The Most Popular 2025 Reading Challenges on StoryGraph (So Far) (lots of challenge options with community-generated suggestions)
• The 52 Book Club
• Book Riot’s 2025 Read Harder Challenge

A Year of Postcard Connections

This is the fourth in a year-long series of monthly postcard art prompts, prompts that nudge you to write or make art on a postcard and send it out into the world, to connect with someone using a simple rectangle of paper that is let loose in the mail system. You can start this month! Feel free to jump in and make and send your own postcard art.

Thank you to the few people who sent postcards to me in response to my call for assorted postcards that I can weave into the images for the series.

Amy Cowen is a San Francisco-based writer. A version of this was originally posted on her Substack, Illustrated Life, where she writes about illustrated journals, diary comics/graphic novels, memory, gratitude, loss, and the balancing force of creative habit.

Images courtesy of the author.

1. Fair warning – because of the numerous translations, it can be hard to find the copy you want when checking out from the library or when looking at Amazon, or browsing a used bookstore online. Be careful when looking for a specific translation. ↩︎

The post Connecting Dots: A Book Stack Postcard Prompt appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Let’s review some of the classics:

Eat healthier.

Exercise more.

Get organized.

Sound familiar?

What may also be familiar to you is the vaporizing of your resolutions somewhere around February 6th. Seriously, have you ever been able to keep your resolutions into the month of March?

If I were a psychologist, I could offer up some reasons why. But as a coach, I’m less interested in why you give up on your resolutions, and way more focused on what you can do with the glorious potential of the year ahead.

I suggest you eschew resolutions in favor of what I call a “Theme Year.” Expressed as the “Year of ________.”

In a Theme Year, you spend the next 365 days guided by an idea.

Two years ago, I embarked on a “Year of Living Stoically.” It was truly transformative.

For you, maybe this year could be your “Year of Learning.” This would allow you to learn stuff. Maybe it’s a new language. Or a martial art. Or something culinary. Maybe you’ll traipse through some “open courses” on the internet and learn about financial markets or poetry.

Here’s another idea: The “Year of Water.” Sure, it starts with you drinking more water. And maybe replacing every third Diet Mountain Dew with an agua. But Year of Water can also be about spending more time in and near water. Swimming and cold plunges?Maybe a few lunch breaks near a fountain. A vacation near the ocean, river, or a lake. Perhaps you will go to a museum or two in search of water paintings by artists: Monet and Hockney are good folks to start your treasure hunt. You might also begin taking photos of water for your social media and watching water movies (WaterWorld notwithstanding.) The point is, instead of a resolution to “drink more water,” you make water a broader theme for the year.

Now, here are some other good themes to try: A “Year of Music,” a “Year of Sport,” a “Year of Art,” a “Year of Travel.” How about a “Year of Friends?”

A “Year of Mindfulness?” Why not?

Also, when you make it a “Year of____,” you needn’t get all worked up on January 1. After all, you have 364 other days to start living out your theme.

Oddly enough, I was inspired to do theme years by the late, great David Bowie.

In 1972, he committed to his “Year of Ziggy Stardust.” He literally spent over a year living as a “rockstar from Mars.” I know, cray. But…it was a “themed” year and then some. And when he was finished with Ziggy, he picked another theme for the next years to focus on that being the “Thin White Duke.”

Now, you needn’t go to the extremes of Bowie as Ziggy. All you need to do is simply pick a theme — and see how enriching your next 12 months can be.

What will your “Year of ______” be?

Rob Schwartz is the Chair of the TBWA New York Group and an executive coach who channels his creativity, experience and wisdom into helping others get where they want to be. This was originally posted on his Substack, RobSchwartzHelps, where he covers work, life, and creativity.

Header image by NASA on Unsplash.

The post Forget Resolutions, Think Themes appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Okay, first up, I’ve found myself on the New York Times’ 73 Best Illustrations of 2024 list, for my front page of Sunday Opinion back in April. I’ve done a few NYT things recently, but this one was a real joy, working alongside art director Akshita Chandra.

Second, a big thank you to The Casual Optimist (aka Dan Wagstaff) for including my cover for Antonia Hylton’s Madness in Notable Book Covers of 2024. I always look forward to this list – Dan has an amazing eye for what’s going on in the field – so it means a lot to find myself on there.

(Look, I know there’s a pattern forming, but just to clarify: I don’t only do American-politics-in-black-and-white. Other rectangles are available.)

Finally, my annual selection of the year’s best film posters is now up on Creative Review. It’s the usual mix of obvious frontrunners, bizarre omissions of your personal favourites and at least one film that you have never even heard of. This is my seventh year of doing this (find previous lists here), and I should probably see if there are any particular patterns forming. One that I’m certain of, and always a good starting point for a shortlist: what was Willem Dafoe in this year? The man is a magnet for great poster art.

That really is all, I swear.

This was originally posted on Meanwhile, a Substack dedicated to inspiration, fascination, and procrastination from the desk of designer Daniel Benneworth-Gray.

Header image: New York Times Sunday Opinion illustration, by the author

The post Meanwhile No. 225 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Once accepted methods of change are being questioned, values are shifting, and new ways of working are emerging. For many of these organizations, it’s harder than ever to know who they are and how to tell their story with confidence.

The tectonic shifts in politics and culture over the last few years have been big, but beyond this particular moment in history, change is a constant. Every 5-7 years, organizations undergo the natural evolution caused by staff turnover, new leaders, and new strategies that meet the moment.

This cycle of change means that it’s important for organizations to regularly reflect on how they present themselves and how they use their brand voice to make sure it authentically conveys who they are and where they’re headed.

Setting the Stage for a Rebrand

For organizations, it’s important to know when and why a rebrand is in order. The process must first be embraced by the people closest to the organization—those who represent the brand to the world every day. Bringing them into the process early will make them feel more invested in the brand in the long run. That means starting with shared language around what “branding” means and assessing the organization’s current brand so there is a basis for agreeing on the goals of a rebrand.

How it Works

Built from decades of experience working with social impact organizations, Hyperakt’s Nonprofit Brand Score benchmarks confidence in a brand’s effectiveness and offers insights for maximizing its potential. The free tool consists of just 16 questions that help teams take quick stock of the different dimensions of their brand. In just 5 minutes, the assessment will generate a report for each person who completes it with scores on a 1 to 100 scale across 4 measures:

Clarity: Is your brand clearly and consistently expressed?
Resonance: Do you understand and believe in your brand?
Distinction: Does your brand stand apart from competitors?
Influence: Do your peers and partners look up to your brand?

A Concrete Way to Measure Your Brand’s Impact

Having a quick, concrete visualization of your people’s scores across these measures and an overall score for your brand makes it much easier to have informed conversations around your brand’s strengths and weaknesses. The average nonprofit scores 65 on the test, so immediately, your overall score will give you a sense of how your brand compares to the field. Digging into the individual metrics and seeing which ones generate the greatest variance among your team members, you’ll be able to identify where you have the most misalignment on your brand.

Brands are hard to measure. The Nonprofit Brand Score removes that barrier and helps teams build the alignment they need to get to the heart of their brand challenges. An organization’s brand is one of its most valuable assets in creating meaningful impact. Do you have a sense of how much confidence your people have in your brand?

This essay is by Deroy Peraza, partner at Hyperakt, a purpose-driven design and innovation studio that elevates human dignity and ignites curiosity. Originally posted in the newsletter, Insights by Hyperakt.

Header iIllustration by Merit Myers.

The post How Much Confidence Does Your Team Have in Your Brand? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Lately, I’ve been having a number of conversations about how to lead and run a successful piece of creative business, and it always seems to come down to the “Golden Trio:” a creative, a business leader, and a strategist.

This is true for the advertising business. I’ve seen Golden Trios in action and have been lucky to be part of some throughout my entire career.

I’ve also seen this structure work in other creative endeavors.

Look no further than the music business.

The Beatles had a Golden Trio: John and Paul (creative). Brian Epstein (business). George Martin (music strategy).

How bout Def Jam? Rick Rubin (creative). Russell Simmons (business). Lyor Cohen (strategy).

Movies, too.

Disney: Walt (creative). Roy (business). Ub Iwerks (strategy).

Dreamworks: Spielberg (creative). Katzenberg (business). Geffen (strategy).

TV?

Sopranos: David Chase (creative). Chris Albrecht (business). Brad Grey (strategy).

Shondaland: Shonda Rhimes (creative). Betsy Beers (business/production). Krista Vernoff (strategy).

How are your creative endeavors going?

Are you working solo? Aa a duo? Or is it time for you to create a Golden Trio?

Rob Schwartz is the Chair of the TBWA New York Group and an executive coach who channels his creativity, experience and wisdom into helping others get where they want to be. This was originally posted on his Substack, RobSchwartzHelps, where he covers work, life, and creativity.

Header image by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash.

The post The Golden Trio appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

*

Sometimes, I sit in my car and weep. Sometimes, I ignore the sadness because I do not want to be sad. There is a lot to do and it is not particularly enticing to cry for long enough that I have to sleep more the next day to recover.

Where I live, we have emerged from a long and brutal winter only to encounter a Vancouver winter for a summer: rain, wind, and bare patches of sunlight that turn me mad with longing.

*

When I am really tired, I will stop myself from feeling everything. It’s an old and broken coping mechanism borne from a much younger version of myself. I used to think the only way to manage feeling so much was to try and feel as little as possible.

I had a short list of feelings that were good and a very long list of feelings that were not good. When I catch myself trying not to feel anything, I pull out my paper calendar and I make myself search for a day where I can let the feelings be big, be wild.

This is an under-represented aspect of self-care because it’s brutal to feel your feelings inflate like—a balloon is obvious—but I am actually thinking of a latex swim cap, the way if you take one and fill it with water it will expand impossibly, hold so much more than just the pinheads of our skulls.

*

At a sports bar, it is so loud I have to whisper my food order into the waiter’s ear with the hush of a secret because that’s what everyone always hears perfectly.

Later, a friend screams at my face: DO YOU FEEL LIKE YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE?

OF COURSE, I scream back. I ACTUALLY THINK THAT’S MY PROBLEM SOMETIMES.

The thing is, I want people to like me but above that, above everything else, I want to live in alignment with the values that I hold myself to, and I am realizing that for a lot of other people, the former actually almost always trumps the latter.

After a few hours, I have to go sit on the smoker’s bench outside the bar for five minutes because the bar is too loud. I do this at parties too, except I lock myself in the bathroom usually and sit with my back against the door, eyes closed. My favorite people are the ones who understand the need for a break.

*

Someone I love asks me what the best kind of knife is, and I am nowadays late in giving an answer because I have spent over six hours researching my response. I am not afraid of saying the wrong thing, I just love certain people so much that I want to give them the best advice that I can. This kind of love is not for everyone.

*

Often, people mistake me being serious about love as taking myself seriously or people criticize me for being too serious for their tastes. But mostly every person I’ve met who isn’t dead serious about at least something isn’t really sure day to day why they’re doing anything.

You can be for everyone, my therapist tells me. Or you can be yourself.

*

I do not think there is anything wrong with not really being sure day to day why you’re doing anything, which is why I never really understand how it bothers so many people that day to day I do know what I am doing and why I am still alive.

*

Two years ago, it is winter, literally but also spiritually. I am wearing a bright green cashmere sweater. I am making a new friend. We are both drinking Bee’s Knees in a bar that is now closed.

When I ask her—what does it feel like to be you?—the woman thinks thoughtfully and not for as long as other people do.

A hammer, she says. I can break things down or build you a house.

This is my favorite answer to this question that I have heard but there’s still time.

I’m Wondering is a monthly column where I ask and then answer a question. More than anything, I hope that as I continue to wonder, it will open all of us up to paths we can’t imagine now but feel called to by a question that won’t let us go.

Amy Lin lives in Calgary, Canada where there are two seasons: winter and road construction. She completed her MFA at Warren Wilson College and holds BAs in English Literature and Education. Her work has been published in places such as Ploughshares and she has been awarded residencies from Yaddo and Casa Comala. She writes the Substack At The Bottom Of Everything where she wonders: how do we live with anything? HERE AFTER is her first book.

Image courtesy of the author.

The post I’m Wondering: What Does It Feel Like To Be You? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Lovely short film of the recording of Nick Cave and the Bad Seed’s Wild God. Even if you’re not a fan, it’s worth watching just for the gorgeous seventies sci-fi setting of Miraval Studios.

Posteritati’s exclusive collection of 30 original posters from the official Jim Jarmusch archive, each signed by the director himself. I’ll take them all thank you very much. Will come in handy for my regular trip to the barber, where I hold up a picture of Tom Waits and say, “THIS, MAKE ME THIS”.

TWA 001–005 – a collaborative project between studio DR.ME and Oliver Wilson, son of Tony Wilson, aims to bring the largely unseen handmade posters and collected ephemera of the music legend into the public realm.

What is the smallest story? Not the shortest story, but the smallest? Toby Litt on narrative minimalism.

Lithub’s 167 best book covers of 2024. So much wonderful, wonderful work.

Since the late 1950s, David Hurn has been photographing people engrossed in whatever they’re reading, from books and broadsheets to laptops and phones. His new book, On Reading, is a homage to the power of a good page-turner.

It’s Nice That’s Jenny Brewer talks to the team at UsTwo Games about the anticipated threequel Monument Valley 3 and how they’ve integrated more nature into the architectural illusion puzzles. Had no idea this was coming, so this is a wonderful treat for the end of the year.

Why a 1915 reading of a Kipling poem is the cherry on top of the 28 Years Later trailer. I try to avoid trailers as much as possible these days, but couldn’t resist this one.

Always nice when Etsy throws your own forgotten origin story at you from out of the blue. I dread to think how many hours I spent set-squaring and stenciling and transferring with the Crayola Designer Kit – “a unique drafting system for designing your own cars, trucks, airplanes and spacecraft” – circa 1989, but I’m pretty sure it was my first real exposure to the D-word. Anyone else have this thing?

This was originally posted on Meanwhile, a Substack dedicated to inspiration, fascination, and procrastination from the desk of designer Daniel Benneworth-Gray.

Header image courtesy of the author.

The post Meanwhile No. 224 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

I’m like a bad actor, standing on stage, unsure of where to put my hands. It’s an old and engrained thing; although I love giving gifts, getting them makes me incredibly self-conscious, and while I’ve tried to unpack why over the years, I could never quite put my finger on it. Recently, I landed here:

As a young child, most of the gifts I received traveled along a certain continuum: the pair of formal white gloves that I would never wear, but that were given to me by an aunt convinced they’d make a little lady out of me. A box of incorrectly monogrammed hankies meant for someone else — linen, stitched in narrow lines of pale pink and yellow — sent to me by a distant relative I’d never met. A massive faux turquoise cocktail ring set in gold-toned plastic and surrounded by glass chips/diamonds, far too large for any of my four-year-old fingers, and a re-gift from a much older, icy family member who had very definitely rummaged around her circa 1967 jewelry box looking for something she didn’t so much like, that she could wrap up and thrust down at me in a display of feigned beneficence while everyone looked on. (HERE, she said. This is for YOU!)

Re-reading this last paragraph makes me sound and feel like a terrible and ungrateful lout, but the fact is, we are trained from our earliest days to beam widely and exclaim Oh my gosh THANK YOU this is so FABULOUS when, in the recesses of our four-year-old brains where gift trauma has taken up permanent residence, we’re wondering on exactly what occasion we might wear the cocktail ring given to us by (and meant for) someone else’s grandmother, or the white gloves meant for the first communion that we will never have because we’re not (even remotely) Catholic. It’s on these occasions when we first experience bouts of gift-related sheepishness borne of a mashup of capitalist covetousness and desire coupled with hope and disappointment. Young people know when something is not appropriate, and because we are told by our parents, clergy, and teachers that lying is bad, things are bound to get confusing; we instinctively bite our tongues when, at four years old, we are expected to do just that when someone hands us a re-gifted fake cocktail ring suitable for no one under the age of seventy. What we want to say is, Why on earth would you give this to me, but we’re taught to be gracious while simultaneously being kicked around the manners pitch like a soccer ball.

I was not a greedy child; the idea of making Christmas lists and asking Santa for specific things left me cold, even when I was very young. I’d gape in horror at my friends who spoke openly of their want; I was the child of Depression-era people who made no room for neediness. One just smiled and said thank you. I am reminded here of my wife who, as a young and very reserved child, summoned the nerve to ask Santa for a record player and The Beach Boys’ All Summer Long; Santa brought her a record player and The Beach Boys Song Book by The Hollyridge Strings. She thanked Santa very much, she tells me; it never would have occurred to her to say Hey, this isn’t The Beach Boys, even though her disappointment is as palpable now as it probably was sixty years ago.

(What she asked for…)

(What she got…)

At four years old, I didn’t want a pony, but I also didn’t want a fake turquoise cocktail ring. And yet, I had to pretend that I did and that I was completely overwhelmed with delight and amazement when it was given to me. Which I was not. Everyone knew I was not, except for the person who gave it to me, and she was so happy with my response that the following year, she gave me the matching brooch.

One of my distant, older cousins labeled me a weird child (not inaccurate) and therefore hard to gift — I wasn’t at all girly, go figure, and I didn’t much like dolls or other toys (beyond the usual 1960s games like Chutes & Ladders, and Lite-Brite and Operation), but I did love my EZ-Bake Oven, which maybe presaged my future work as a food writer. And when other cousins arrived at our apartment with a massive box of hundreds of powdered cake mixes made specifically for the EZ-Bake Oven, I was, according to my father, visibly and authentically thrilled. Somewhere around my tenth birthday, my father had begun to tell people, Oh, she loves to read — just get her a book, and my relatives were apparently relieved. Unfortunately, this coincided with my beginning to be horrible at math, so at Christmas, a family friend presented me with a gift of four beautifully wrapped and ribboned volumes that I was made to open at a big gathering while everyone watched; three of them were a series of soft-covered long division workbooks, and the fourth, a hardcover textbook called Fun With Geometry.

I’m so thrilled that you like them! the family friend said, clapping her hands. Your daddy told us you wanted them!

Actually, my daddy probably suggested something along the lines of The Complete A.A. Milne, or The Wind in the Willows, or Black Beauty, or Heidi. My daddy probably did not suggest four math workbooks.

But I learned — we all learn, don’t we — early on how to respond appropriately, whether we’re happy or not, and so, for the next seven years, until I left for college, I would receive math textbooks from this person, for which I wrote formal notes that said Thank you so much for the wonderful math textbooks. I love them! If gifting involves inappropriate wearable items — communion gloves for a little girl who is not Catholic, or a fake turquoise cocktail ring while the child is still in single digits — things will only get weirder because it will be expected that she will wear those things the next time the gifter comes to visit. (See Ralphie and his pink bunny suit, above.)

Peculiar gifting doesn’t seem to stop with the passage of time: at one family party early in our relationship, my wife was re-gifted a plastic cruet set with a long hairline crack running down the side of the oil bottle. We talk about it to this day, and about the fact that she effusively thanked the giver and promised she’d start using it just as soon as she got home. One of my oldest friends, who is a little over six foot tall, once received a yellow and white striped robe for Christmas from someone who was not present at her home on Christmas morning, where I was visiting for the holiday; the robe was a petite size, and when my friend’s husband and I begged her to put it on and she did, most of the bottom of her bottom was exposed (she was wearing pajamas).

If gifting involves inappropriate wearable items, things will only get weirder because it will be expected that she will wear those things the next time the gifter comes to visit.

So, gifting has left a bad, nervous taste in my mouth for a very long time. That changed briefly when I turned thirteen, and my best friend invited me to spend Christmas with her family a few blocks from where we lived. On Christmas morning, we exchanged gifts: I gave her a series of books that I knew she would love (she did), and my friend handed me a tiny, beautifully wrapped box, and when I opened it, I couldn’t believe my eyes: in it lay a small, gold Victorian reindeer charm that she and her mother found in an antique store in the city. My friend had been given an allowance with which to buy gifts for her little brother and me; she searched all over creation for the NC Wyeth-illustrated edition of Treasure Island, which she knew her brother would love (he did). And then she and her mother wandered into a little antique store on University Place in Greenwich Village (it’s still there) and discovered a small gold reindeer charm, waiting to be taken home.

It was, and remains, one of the most thoughtful gifts I’ve ever received, not because I was praying for a golden reindeer. But this person knew me well enough to know that I would love it, and lo these forty-eighty years, I still do. During the years when I didn’t wear it (for one reason or another), I slipped a wire through its loop and hung it on our Christmas tree. But now, at sixty-one, I am wearing it again, and I always think of that Christmas in 1976 when I opened it in front of their tree and had to blink back tears. My friend and I fell out of touch many years ago; our lives took very different turns in very different ways, and we both understood instinctively that we would likely not grow older together. But when I wear that little gold reindeer around my neck, we are still thirteen, frozen in the amber of memory.

The reindeer has informed the way I gift, which I try and do with some level of thought and sincerity; otherwise, what’s the point? Without the personal, gifting becomes transactional, disconnected, tit-for-tat, and more about the giver than the receiver, which seems backward to me.

At this point in my life, I don’t expect that I will suddenly love being on the receiving end; all those years ago, the die was cast, and receiving still makes me squirm. But I have come to understand the truth about gifting: done with affection — even if it’s re-gifting, which can often be wonderful — it can mark place, time, and memory like little else.

This post was originally published on Elissa Altman’s blog Poor Man’s Feast, The James Beard Award-winning journal about the intersection of food, spirit, and the families that drive you crazy. Read more on her Substack, or keep up with her archives here.

The post Poor Man’s Feast: The Things We Remember and Why appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Recently, I read a provocative piece by a veteran advertising executive that hit me like a thunderbolt. He argued that we’ve created a business culture that worships execution while dismissing the fundamental power of ideas. His words cut straight to the heart of what I’ve been seeing in legal marketing for years.

How many times have you heard someone confidently declare, “Ideas don’t matter, it’s all about execution,” or “Ideas are easy, execution is hard”? I hear it in every planning meeting, every strategy session, every annual review. We’ve swallowed this lie whole, and it’s time we spit it out.

Look around. We’ve become masters of implementation – our marketing technology stacks are impressive, our content calendars are meticulous, our social media schedules are precise, and our KPI dashboards are things of beauty. But let me ask you this: When was the last time you saw a law firm marketing initiative that truly took your breath away? That made you think, “Now that’s different”?

The truth? Our industry has optimized itself into oblivion. Law firm websites have become virtual carbon copies. Thought leadership pieces blur together in an indistinguishable mass. Our strategic plans could be mail-merged with different firm names, and nobody would notice the difference. We’re all following the same playbook, and we’re calling it “best practices.”

This obsession with process over substance isn’t unique to legal marketing. Just look at the recent controversy surrounding Pod Save America, where Democratic operatives discussed campaign strategy in such clinical, KPI-focused terms that it sparked widespread backlash. Listeners were stunned by how these seasoned political professionals reduced the passion of politics to what sounded like a routine quarterly performance review. The conversation was so focused on playbooks, data, and tactical frameworks that listeners sensed they lost touch with basic human connection. It revealed a world where every campaign follows a certain prescribed methodology – a “certain way” to handle media, a “certain way” to manage social media, a “certain way” to run everything. The result? A kind of antiseptic professionalism that might look good in status meetings but fails to move real people. Replace “campaign staffers” with “legal marketers” and “voters” with “clients” in that scenario, and you might see yourself in the mirror.

Let’s be brutally honest: to quote generations of advertising geniuses before me, perfect execution of a mediocre idea will always yield mediocre results. It doesn’t matter how flawlessly you implement a boring idea – it’s still boring. But, in today’s attention economy, boring is death.

Think about it: Firm A launches yet another “comprehensive client alert system” with perfect execution – beautiful design, flawless delivery, robust analytics. Firm B develops a genuinely innovative way to deliver legal insights that actually solves a unique client pain point. Which one will have a lasting impact? Which one will clients remember? Which one will actually move the needle?

The challenge we face isn’t a lack of execution capability. We have more tools, technologies, and frameworks than ever before. What we’re starving for are breakthrough ideas that capture imagination and drive meaningful differentiation.

Here’s what we need to do:

1. Stop hiding behind process. Yes, we need solid processes, but they should serve great ideas, not replace them. Your project management methodology won’t make a mediocre idea better.
2. Create real space for creativity. Our obsession with metrics and immediate ROI is strangling innovative ideas in their cradle. Give big ideas room to breathe.
3. Burn the “best practices” playbook. Best practices are just average practices that worked for someone else. Your firm isn’t average, so why should your marketing be?
4. Value originality over optimization. Would you rather have a perfectly optimized cookie-cutter approach or something truly distinctive that sets your firm apart?

The rise of AI makes this even more urgent. If human-created content is mediocre and AI-created content is equally mediocre but cheaper, guess which way firms will go? The only defense against AI commoditization is original thinking and creative ideas that machines can’t replicate.

The next time someone in your firm dismisses an innovative idea in favor of “proven” approaches, remember this: In a world where everyone can execute competently, ideas become the ultimate differentiator. Your firm’s future success might depend less on how well you can execute the same playbook as everyone else, and more on your courage to write a new one entirely.

Are we going to continue hiding behind process and “best practices,” or are we ready to fight for big, bold, distinctive ideas? The choice is yours, but the consequences of playing it safe are becoming clearer every day.

What’s your take? Has our industry become too focused on execution at the expense of creativity? Have you seen examples of truly breakthrough legal marketing that started with a bold idea? Let’s have this conversation.

This post was originally published on Lynda’s LinkedIn newsletter, Marketing without Jargon. Lynda leads a team at Decker Design that focuses on helping law firms build differentiated brands.

Header image: Unsplash+ with Allison Saeng.

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Sensitive.

It’s a delicate word that brings up a lot of feelings, memories, and possible fears.

As creatives, we may have heard this term a lot over the years, sometimes as a compliment and other times as a dig. Context may help us interpret that label’s tone as adults, reflecting back on our childhood and teenage years.

Being a highly sensitive person takes this label a step further. A highly sensitive person (HSP) has a sensitive nervous system that processes more information, reacting to the environment, emotions, and moods of those around them. This affects 15-20% of the general population, and I suspect within that pool are many creatives, maybe even you.

Curious? Here is a simple quiz by Dr. Elaine Aron to help identify if you have the trait of high sensitivity. I encourage you to pause here and take the short quiz.

If you answered yes to most of the questions, your depth of processing can be a creative superpower. By experiencing deeper levels of sensory information, HSPs can create more nuanced work that plays on different levels. You can take a holistic approach to how these elements weave together and are comfortable zooming in and out of a design problem, tackling both the details and the high-level vision.

As an HSP who manages clients and teams, you likely pick up on subtle cues in social interactions, helping you identify concerns, spot pitfalls, and address issues before they become obstacles. Your deep listening skills create a safe space for team members, allowing for psychological safety and more innovative collaboration. HSPs are excellent at building culture in their workplace and developing close bonds and trust within their teams. Creative HSPs often rise into management roles quickly.

Sounds amazing, right? It can be when you deploy strategies to stay balanced. Keep in mind that with a larger amount of sensory information, it can be very easy to become overstimulated as an HSP. Your energetic bandwidth is used differently than others without this trait. It’s important to be kind to yourself in self-discovery and extend grace around learning your sensory limits and what level of stimulation you can manage. Large music festivals or professional sports arenas might be a nightmare scenario, but a little league game could be just your speed. HSPs must define their boundaries and hold them firmly. Otherwise, you will find yourself depleted and exhausted.

In addition to boundaries, spaciousness is a key strategy to help support yourself. You will need more buffer space in your day to process the avalanche of information, so reconsider rolling calls or back-to-back meetings. Try adding 15-30 minute buffers between commitments and solo decompression time to download thoughts after large or important meetings. Rolling straight into a social event right after a demanding workday doesn’t help you bring your best self. Slowing down and creating breathing room in your calendar can make you both more effective and feel more balanced.

Be curious about your sensitivity, and take time to experiment and figure out what works for you. One key question worth considering is, what helps you hit the reset button? What helps you ground yourself? Is it quiet time reading, listening to music, walking in nature, or playing with your pets? Mindfulness meditation, gardening, or a running practice might offer you moments to recharge. Consider when you feel most calm – this may be when your attention is focused on a single element instead of lots of inputs. Turning down the volume in our busy lives can be the biggest game changer for highly sensitive creatives to thrive.

As a creative HSP and executive coach, I have delved deeply into the research of high sensitivity and personally investigated numerous strategies to stay balanced. I bring those resources to my coaching clients and am continually adding and learning from their experiences as well. Sharing our unique perspective with other HSPs is an affirming and supportive approach to reclaiming the sensitive label as a superpower.

My go-to resources for high sensitivity are Dr. Elaine Aron, Jenn Granneman, and Andre Sólo but there are many. Check out my bookshop.org shop for further reading.

Natalie Davis is a leadership coach and creative professional with 20+ years in the design industry and eight years as an executive coach. She’s driven by her values of curiosity, compassion, and kindness to listen deeply to coaching clients and help them make meaning of their world. Natalie works internationally with clients, including hosting retreats like the Maine Sensory Retreat this coming July.

Images courtesy of the author.

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I lick my finger and hold it up to see which way the wind is blowing. I do this metaphorically, of course. (I need dry fingers to type.)

But that’s the method. A radar game. What appears on my radar each week?

And this week, while there were some interesting currents on ageism and creative ways to set up creative departments, the biggest wind — a veritable hurricane — was Jaguar.

The teaser heard ’round the world fomented so many conversations on so many different media platforms, that I simply could not escape it.

All that said, I think the best way I can help this week is to provide a wee bit of context.

I call it, “A Brief History of Weird Ads.”

First things first, if you haven’t seen the Jaguar teaser called, “Copy Nothing,” watch it here.

Ok, it’s weird.

It reminded me of one of the first weird ads I recall seeing, Reeboks Let U.B.U. campaign.

A Chiat/Day classic, I remember this bursting on the scene with its weird casting, weird imagery, weird words for an ad (courtesy of poet Ralph Waldo Emerson), and weird spelling! This was a campaign for sneakers? Where were the athletes? Where were the courts and fields? Where were the close-up shots of the shoes?! This. Was. Weird.

That was followed up by another weird campaign for the carmaker, Infiniti. Made by Hill Holliday, this was a car campaign with no car. It was dubbed “Rocks and Trees” because that’s what it showed us: rocks and trees and rain and waves. It was a philosophical campaign that focused on the intent of Infiniti to create a new kind of luxury car brand — a Japanese luxury car brand. And while the world may have devoured the book, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” the world was somehow not ready for Zen car ads. It was too…weird.

Next up there was a weird campaign that tried to explain the internet (and the future of communications) without computers or screens or wires. It was for MCI, a telecommunications company, and it featured a then-six-year-old Anna Paquin and an epic and desolate New Zealand coastline. (All inspired by the wonderful film, “The Piano.”) And while the commercials do an incredible job of explaining the digital world we live in today, the audience had a hard time wrapping its head around the profound notion that, “…there will be no more there, there will only be here.”

(These ads are fantastic and truly hold-up, I think: ad number 1, ad number 2, and ad number 3. There are six in total and YouTube has the rest.)

Finally, there was the delicious weirdness of the Cadbury Gorilla. A chocolate bar ad sans chocolate, without morsels, and no cliche, beautiful 30-something woman enjoying a first bite. No, here we had a gorilla, a drum kit, and Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” Buda buh-duh buh-dum-dum boom!

Of course, there was outrage generated from all of these adverts when they first launched, just like there is outrage generated across the combined 160 million social media views of the Jaguar teaser.

So will all of this noise turn into sales for the Jags which won’t appear in showrooms until 2026?

Only time will tell.

For now, all we have is weirdness and outrage. Not often a recipe for success.

Rob Schwartz is the Chair of the TBWA New York Group and an executive coach who channels his creativity, experience and wisdom into helping others get where they want to be. This was originally posted on his Substack, RobSchwartzHelps, where he covers work, life, and creativity.

Header image: Simone Hutsch for Unsplash+

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Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design, and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.

William Bentley, quoted in Snowflake Bentley

Into December

It is time for the next postcard prompt, and, strangely, I can’t get past the snow of it. Winter is coming, but I don’t live somewhere where I will see snow. It has been many years since I’ve seen snow. For people who have never lived in an area that gets no snow, it may seem hard to comprehend going years and years without either the beauty or the inconvenience. I miss snow. I miss the idea of snow.

When my oldest was born, there was snow in surrounding areas. Snow is so unlikely here that even the hint of snow on that day more than twenty years ago was enough to create family lore. For years, we crafted, cradled, and repeated a story about a little boy who lived on a hill, and on the day he was born, there was snow in the mountains around the city. It is the kind of story that, as soon as you begin saying the words, feels imbued with the magic of a fairy tale.

I can’t remember the last time I saw snow.

I have grown into my appreciation of November as a gratitude-themed month and a month of intentionally looking for and tracking light, but December has a magic all its own.

My enjoyment of December is often rooted in light, sometimes catching the early sunset as the days shorten, but also artificial light. Some of my favorite things are related to Christmas lights. There are lights on the tree and on the bookcases. We used to have lights around the windows and across the shelves in the office.

Ornaments are my other favorite thing in December. Ornaments are often shiny and whimsical containers of memory, quiet little portals to the past. Drawing ornaments has often been a way to center myself and anchor creative habit in December. There are some ornaments I draw again and again, returning to them each year, using them as touchstones to the past.

Last year, I took a nutcracker diversion.

I think devising our own nutcrackers would be a lot of fun for illustrated postcards. I considered it, but I didn’t want to do a prompt for this month that is locked into Christmas. So I went to that thing which we don’t have, snow.

A Focus on Snow – Postcard No. 3

How do you do a postcard about snow?

How do you think about connecting the dots between years and people and memory and personal history and the passage of time…with snow?

You get really close.

You think about snowflakes. You think about individual snowflakes in their frozen latticework, in their fragility and beauty and singularity. You think about crystallization and symmetry.

You think back to when you were a kid, or to some point when you interacted with a child, or to when you were an adult and, on a lark, you grabbed paper and scissors and tried, once again, to make a snowflake. It really shouldn’t be so hard. It’s just the folding of paper and then cutting along the folded edge.

Making snowflakes…I don’t remember doing that as a kid. I’m sure I must have. I don’t specifically remember doing it with my children. I’m sure we must have. But I do remember doing it somewhere along the way, especially as an adult. I remember the anticipation of delicate, lacy, paper creations and the reality that they often come out large and clunky.

I remember that they came out more square than they should. I remember that my hand cut snowflakes don’t offer a lot in the way of whimsy. I remember paper snowflakes as a bit of a disappointment.

Maybe it’s been my technique. I think there’s a very good chance that I’ve never folded the paper correctly, that from the beginning, I had the wrong shape. In looking at directions today, because how hard can it be?, I see over and over again the foundation of a cone-shaped structure. I am fairly sure I’ve never used that kind of triangular base. Did we just fold the paper into rectangles and make block-shaped snowflakes? Surely not. Maybe we stopped one step short of the cone, cutting shapes from a larger, less refined triangle? No wonder they were disappointing. No wonder my memories of paper snowflakes are of something fairly square.)

I would say cutting a snowflake is worth a try again. I would say it’s probably worth using the scissors that shouldn’t be used to cut paper. I would say we should get past caring if we use our scissors to cut paper. I would say we should use smaller paper because we’re older and wiser, and we realize that the full sheet of printer paper is not going to yield a delicate snowflake. I would say we should be bold and use really sharp scissors that can make tiny cuts.

You may or may not be or aspire to be a delicate snowflake, and yet there is beauty in making a delicate snowflake. This is not Minecraft. We don’t need block-level snowflakes. We don’t need 8-bit images plotted out on graph paper. We can follow curves and dip in and out of spaces. We can play with the geometry of shape and form.

So what do you do on a postcard if a single snowflake is your objective? You think about symmetry. You think about branching and hexagonal designs. While it may be fun and intriguing to draw snowflakes with a large number of branches (or arms), the familiar snowflake has six branches that radiate from the center. It’s all about chemistry:

“The six-sided shape of a snowflake can be attributed to the molecular structure of water and the unique formation process of snow crystals. Snowflakes form when water vapour condenses on tiny ice nuclei in cold, supersaturated air. As the water vapour freezes, it arranges itself into a hexagonal lattice due to the hydrogen bonds between water molecules.” – IET

From each of the six arms, a unique symmetry evolves, each arm mirroring the others:

“…while different snow crystals follow different paths through the clouds, the six branches of a single crystal travel together. They all experience the same growth history, so they grow in synchrony. The end result is a snow crystal that is both complex and symmetrical… and often quite stunning.” – Kenneth Libbrecht, The Art of the Snowflake

It is often said that every snowflake is different, that no two are alike. The infinite scope of this singularity, the possibility of this lack of repetition in formation, is part of the magic of snowflakes. We may cling to this story of individuality, but there are actually a number of different types of snowflakes. The classification of snowflakes seems to be something on which scientists differ, but many use a system that includes 35 different types:

A Bit of Snowy History

Wilson A. Bentley, known as Snowflake Bentley, spent much of his life examining, documenting, and photographing snowflakes using a photomicrographic technique. (He succeeded in first photographing a single snow crystal in 1855.) Bentley photographed thousands of snowflakes and, famously, never found two that were alike.

In 1931, Snow Crystals, a collection of his photographs, was published. (Bentley died shortly after the publication.)

Snowflake photos taken by Wilson Bentley. Source: Jericho Historical Society.

And here comes the snow,
A language in which no word is ever repeated.

William Matthews, “Spring Snow”

Send a Postcard

On your postcard this month do something related to snow. Draw a snowflake or two. Play with tessellation. Look up snowflake photography and draw something based on real snowflake structures, or play with the simplification of the snowflake as a symbol.

Drawing a snowflake is similar to the process of drawing a mandala. It can be symmetrical and mindful. It can be geometric. It can be precise and structured and measured and calculated, or it can be freeform.

I encourage you to cut a snowflake first. You can then use it as a model to draw, a visual aid as you think about the shape of snow. You might even use it as a stencil and play with negative space, adding a splash of color to a postcard and creating a mosaic from the spaces between.

I tried again before writing today’s prompt, and I still didn’t have much luck. After laughing at one of my attempts, my son suggested that solving part of the problem (the fact that it didn’t have distinct branches and was circular) required cutting off parts of the top at opposite angles. I did that, and as I opened it back up, I was enchanted to find I had unwittingly created rabbits. (I couldn’t not see rabbits.)

The additional cuts helped, giving the snowflake some semblance of branches rather than the appearance of a circular doily, but it still wasn’t satisfying. The rest of the snowflake is still disappointing.

(I had to laugh to see Martha Stewart talk about kids happily occupying themselves cutting dozens of snowflakes.)

The Challenge

This month, I am suggesting you cut one, or, really, draw one.

You don’t have time because December is busy? Really? That might be exactly why you need to slow down and cut or draw a snowflake. It can be a mindful practice.

This month, consider drawing your own snowflake or snowflakes, one or many, on a postcard. Snowflakes embody individuality and singularity, and something crisp and fragile, something icy and prismatic. Snowflakes are often said to represent hope.

Snowflakes are very quiet.
Be like a snowflake.

Related Resources

Here are some directions you can use to cut a snowflake. (These directions also include instructions for how to make a vertical mobile or “curtain” out of paper snowflakes.)

Video inspiration for drawing snowflakes:

• How to draw snowflakes (LethalChris Drawing)
• How to draw a snowflake (Crafty Nica)

A Year of Postcard Connections

This is the third in a year-long series of monthly postcard art prompts, prompts that nudge you to write or make art on a postcard and send it out into the world, to connect with someone using a simple rectangle of paper that is let loose in the mail system. The first two prompts involved Halloween memories and spirals of gratitude.

Feel free to jump in. Even if you don’t literally make a postcard and apply a stamp, you might at least think through your response to the prompt and do it in your illustrated journal or sketchbook.

Amy Cowen is a San Francisco-based writer. A version of this was originally posted on her Substack, Illustrated Life, where she writes about illustrated journals, diary comics/graphic novels, memory, gratitude, loss, and the balancing force of creative habit.

Images courtesy of the author, except where otherwise noted.

The post Connecting Dots: Send a Snowflake appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Hand-bound books, honest stories and photography as evidence – design and book-making studio Zone6 is putting narrative-driven documentary photography at the front of its print runs.

“Breaks are for wannabe writers. Time and time again, I hear the laments of the undisciplined crying out, ‘Oh, I need to clear my head.’ Ridiculous. You need to resist the siren song of temptation emanating from your bladder or the dog scratching at the backdoor or the pain radiating from your chronic carpal tunnel and get down to work.”

How to write 100,000 words per day, every day.

David Pearson has ‘grammed a fantastic selection of Spektrum books designed by Lothar Reher between 1968 and 1993 for the German publisher Volk und Welt. Never seen these before and now I want all of them.

“Rampant consumerism has consumed us” – how queuing for stuff became just as important as buying it.

Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker announces The Orchid synthesizer, a new songwriting tool, ideas machine and dust-gathering object of bleepy bloopy technolust.

Animauteur¹ Don Hertzfeldt on using Photoshop:

“You don’t know what you’re not allowed to do. I still don’t know, but I’ve felt better about myself because I have spoken to people who are in technical positions in cinema who are like, “Yeah, I don’t know what half this stuff does either.” I think it’s a sign of good software where you don’t need to. A sign of good software to me is it’s intuitive, and you can put your things in, and hopefully behave like an artist and make a mess and not break things. The downside is when you realize there’s something you could have done easier a long time ago.”

… from this excellent Slate interview

All the World’s a Stage, the new David Campany-curated retrospective of William Klein’s photography at Lisbon’s MAAT, looks wonderful.

If, like me, you’ve been given very clear instructions to not ask Santa for yet more books to arrange in neat piles around the house, Creative Boom’s annual gift guide is always a good place to look for alternative stocking fillers.

The Boom’s bluesky starter pack is also worth a click. Or you could just follow me.

That is all.

1. Yeah maybe don’t hold your breath waiting for that one to catch on, Daniel. ↩︎

This was originally posted on Meanwhile, a Substack dedicated to inspiration, fascination, and procrastination from the desk of designer Daniel Benneworth-Gray.

Header image courtesy of the author.

The post Meanwhile No. 221 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

I have a pronounced allergy to rage and, in particular, drama, which makes my throat close up and my body shut down as though I’m going into a sort of anaphylaxis of the mind and spirit.

This is how things have been going lately, pretty much everywhere. People are now enraged as a rule; we are ready to fight at the drop of a hat. The mundane tipping points: being cut off in traffic, getting the wrong order in a restaurant, having to wait on line for something for five minutes, discovering that someone you love and have known for years doesn’t vote the way you do, someone’s yoga mat accidentally touching yours. I grew up in a chronically angry household — my parents were at each other on a daily basis from the time the sun came up, searching for the best and most strategic ways to hurt each other, and I absorbed a lot of that toxic discontent like a sponge. So I have a pronounced allergy to rage and, in particular, drama, which makes my throat close up and my body shut down as though I’m going into a sort of anaphylaxis of the mind and spirit: I just can’t do it, I’m not wired for it, and when approached by it (which I often am, as a writer who is somewhat in the public eye), I flee. I have spent much of my life attracting people with a peculiar fondness for acrimony, who are somehow nurtured and sustained by backing their friends and family up against a wall, and putting them on the defense; I recently decided to examine this, to ask why — the short answer is because it is the language that my cells speak and recognize — and then to say No, it doesn’t have to be this way. And it doesn’t. I used to think that this attitude just had to do with my exposure to social media memes, but that’s not the case; the way we think and live in the world can change thanks to plasticity, as described by neuroscientist Richard Davidson, who I once saw speak quantitatively about neuroplasticity and meditation with Joseph Goldstein, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and Daniel Goleman.

When one’s surroundings, acquaintances, and culture are locked in this chronic and deep condition of fracture — Krista Tippett describes it as a metastases: the incredible toxicity and polarization is that it is pain and fear on the loose, pain and fear metastasizes —- one is then faced with this social fracture every day, in every conceivable situation from the drive-thru at Starbucks to the office cubicle to (certainly) social media to friendships. I am now on my fourth re-read of my friend Katherine May’s Wintering —- a life-changing book for me about the power and necessity of going inward during dark times —- and some of the takeaways are the questions that I now ask myself in virtually every situation: what is it that truly nurtures my heart? What is it that breaks it? And why am I prone to allowing in so much of the latter, or is it just part of an ongoing cycle?

What is it that truly nurtures my heart? What is it that breaks it? And why am I prone to allowing in so much of the latter, or is it just part of an ongoing cycle?

Having come to this realization -— the one that says that not accepting bad behavior and put-up-your-dukesism doesn’t make me an outlier (although it is often isolating) but instead engaged in a kind of late-onset tenderness for my own heart — I now find myself separated from much of what I know, or knew, to be the current universal human condition of bitterness; I’ve been canceled by it repeatedly at both the most public and private levels. I’m living now, to quote Ada Limon, between the ground and the feast: the life-giving, anchoring place of foundation and also where we are buried—where we begin and we end—and sustenance itself.

This post was originally published on Elissa Altman’s blog Poor Man’s Feast, The James Beard Award-winning journal about the intersection of food, spirit, and the families that drive you crazy. Read more on her Substack, or keep up with her archives here.

Header photo courtesy of the author.

The post Poor Man’s Feast: On Sustenance When the World Wants to Fight appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

This summer, I was taking a stroll through Barcelona with my 7-year-old daughter, Vega, and I decided to ask her a few questions about branding. This isn’t something we had ever really had a conversation about before. I was curious about what she would say and how aware she was of branding.

Vega’s answers surprised me, mostly because she was able to explain things I deeply believe with a whole lot of efficiency. Here’s the full interview transcript. Watch the video on the original post.

The Interview

What do you think a brand is?

A brand is like a company 🏭. If there was no brand then there wouldn’t be a company. So like a brand is like a brand of shoes 👟. So like Nike is a brand.

Why do you think there wouldn’t be a company if there was no brand?

The brand is what makes the company.

What do you think a logo is?

I think a logo is like something that like represents the company and the brand. I think it represents the brand.

What is the difference to you between a logo and a brand?

Well, a logo is maybe like a drawing or like a letter or a number.

A brand is like… I’m the boss right? It’s like my brand, so like I made the brand up. I made all these people to come together to make the things that we make.

So a brand is something that helps you bring people together to make the things that you make?

Mmhmm.

If we look at a clothing store 👗, and I’m the boss, I would be the one who’s bringing all the people together to like make the clothes or like buy the clothes.

Yep, and the brand helps you do that?

Yeah, like a whole community make a store and people earn money 💵 from gathering around.

Why do you think, if you’re the boss and you want to bring people together to make something, why do you think you need a brand to do that? Why can’t you just say, “Come together and let’s make something.”

Because, if we have a store, we can’t just do it all by ourselves 🙄. You know how, we’re not an octopus 🐙. So we can’t just do it all by ourselves 🤷‍♀️ We need a community to help us. We need more people to help us. It can’t just be like one or two, it has to be like 20 or 10.

So what you’re saying is that brands help you build a community?

Yeah.

If you were to make a brand, what would you want your brand to mean? What would you want people to think when they see your brand?

If I had a company 🙇‍♀️ and it sold like, medicine 💊, I would probably want people to like know, that like, I want them to be happy 😀, I want them to be well.

If it’s like a pharmacy 👩‍⚕️, then there would be a little sign thing that’s the pharmacy logo. So it would be that cross (pointing at a pharmacy sign on the street in Barcelona).

Why is it important that you know that the cross is a pharmacy?

I kinda think that the green 💚 represents you being well. Green means like happy 🙂.

So you’re saying colors mean things?

Yeah. If I see, look, a little logo (pointing at another green cross pharmacy sign) like that, then I’ll know it’s a pharmacy.

Right, so it just helps people to be able to identify things quickly.

Yeah.

It sounds like brands are good for helping people identify things, so knowing what a thing is, and it sounds like they’re good for helping people work together to make something, right?

Yeah. Mhmm.

Do you think that there’s any other good use for a brand?

I think also, that brands, they’re just all about friendship 👯, and being nice 😊.

Brands are about friendship and being nice? How?

So like, if you work with someone, with someone that you like know, it’s important to start like knowing the person that you work with. To like know who they are, to then, you can be like nice with them and ok with them. Brands are good for like umm, coming together and like knowing different people to work with.

Alright, I think we’re gonna stop there for now and we can continue later. Thank you, Vega.

OK

This essay is by Deroy Peraza, partner at Hyperakt, a purpose-driven design and innovation studio that elevates human dignity and ignites curiosity. Originally posted in the newsletter, Insights by Hyperakt.

Illustration by Merit Myers.

The post Branding 101, Through the Eyes of a Seven-Year-Old appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

I used to make cards as a child. Birthdays, holidays, apologies, I would make cards for the occasion.

I loved going to the craft store and selecting fibrous, frayed paper and my parents kept me in a dizzying stock of scalloped pinking shears. My favorite type of card to make was one that involved pressing fresh flowers between the pages of Oxford dictionaries or Bibles that were stocked on my family’s bookshelves. After weeks, I would open the books and discover flowers that were crisp and fragile, their own kind of paper.

I would arrange the flowers on the thick cardstock from the store and then brush a glaze over the flowers that sealed them to the page, gave the flowers a cast and sheen that pleased me in such specific ways—the crags of the sealant, the flash-frozen color of the florals, the soft and rough-hewn edges of the paper that left a fuzzy feeling on my skin.

As I got older, after special occasions I would pin whole bouquets of flowers on my walls, some hanging for so long and getting so old they would disintegrate shard by shard until the realities of vacuuming became too much. Even now, I have flowers in all states from fresh and dying and dead in their vase on the living room table because I will not part with them because I love their pink and green and violet vibrance in the heart of the room.

I do not know where all the cards I made are anymore—I am sure my mother has some saved in her memory boxes—but I do have one particular card saved in memory.

It was a holiday card I made for a friend of mine who I found unbearably cool—cool in the way that I wanted to be: effortless, unfettered, wearer of cream turtlenecks (while I wore black). I labored over the card with particular care, choosing the best flowers, the heaviest book to press them in, the most thoughtful application of glaze. When I gave it to her she was kind: exclaimed over it in the type of way that I had hoped.

But an hour later, what did I find?

I was in the washroom across from my friend’s bedroom when I saw the card I spent so much time on tossed into the waste basket. This was years ago. I think I was likely eleven? or twelve? but I still remember the feeling of seeing the card as a discarded object. A thing that was given now thrown aside.

I pulled the card out of the bin and looked at the flowers I had preserved and carefully arranged before sealing for further longevity. There was the sharpness of rejection—unavoidable—but mostly, there was a sudden weight in my limbs, which I conflated with the feeling of being adult. It felt grown to me to understand that there is no real way for any of us to truly know what one thing really means to another, that even if we tell someone what it means, they might not feel it, that sometimes this gap between what something means and what someone else feels is a chasm that whole relationships fall into. When I left the washroom, I left the card in the bin, just as I had found it.

I love floral arrangements, I am sure that is clear by now. It is the pleasure of beauty, the insouciance of blooms whose very purpose is to allure more life. It is also simply the heartstrike of joy I feel when I walk into a room and the living brilliance of flowers greets me. It feels like a personal greeting, all warm and bright and lush.

I want to follow that kind of invitation anywhere; I want to offer it in as many forms as I can to the ones that I love. I think it is why I will keep flowers for as long as I can, for as long as their forms hold. And I think it is why I loved preserving the flowers and turning them into lovenotes as a child. This is not the same for others, of course. Others do not want fresh flowers in the house.

They’re dying, they say and I always think: well, yes, but they’re beautiful.

I know this is all a little sentimental. I know the flowers are always meant to be let go—I found the card I made where it was always going to be—it is just that I always want to hold on a little longer. Don’t we all in some way?

What we save is often so different from each other, but we all do it. One friend: playing cards found on kerbs; the other: old punk records; still another: miniatures of ordinary objects. One more: notes in her wallet that no one knows she’s kept. The earth moves to a pull that none of us can affect. Still, we tend to the flowers, hoping that they will last.

*

I’m Wondering is a monthly column where I ask and then answer a question. More than anything, I hope that as I continue to wonder, it will open all of us up to paths we can’t imagine now but feel called to by a question that won’t let us go.

Amy Lin lives in Calgary, Canada where there are two seasons: winter and road construction. She completed her MFA at Warren Wilson College and holds BAs in English Literature and Education. Her work has been published in places such as Ploughshares and she has been awarded residencies from Yaddo and Casa Comala. She writes the Substack At The Bottom Of Everything where she wonders: how do we live with anything? HERE AFTER is her first book.

Header image courtesy of the author.

The post I’m Wondering: Do You Display Dead Flowers? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

First a reminder of the weekly affliction.

“Sunday Scaries” is a term that refers to the anxiety or dread you feel on Sunday, typically as the weekend wraps up and you start anticipating the workweek ahead. This feeling can stem from a variety of sources, such as stress over workload, a busy week ahead, or simply the end of a relaxing weekend.

In other words, Sunday nights can suck.

But in Mexico City last week at our Master Gunners creative workshop, I heard a cure for these Sunday Scaries.

I’ll call it Bruno Regalo’s “Sunday School.”

Bruno Regalo is the brilliant Global Chief Design Officer of TBWA’s DXD (Design by Disruption) Group. He’s also one of the leaders of TBWA\Chiat\Day LA.

Bruno is a self-taught creative superstar. And now I can share a window into how he fuels his success.

“Sunday School.”

At 6 pm on Sunday evenings, when the “scaries” creep in and become acute, Bruno sets up shop for four hours of study.

In fact, he’s been doing this for 11 years! And he swears it makes his Sunday his true “funday.”

Here’s his routine in his own words.

“…1st hour is for analog study, books, and everything you can’t find online (for example, right now I’m studying everything that was printed and design editorials from the early 2000s). 

2nd hour is spent cataloging all the content from the first hour and then practicing it technically for an hour. 

The 3rd hour is dedicated to studying everything happening currently: inside and outside of advertising and everything visual (like movie opening credits, posters from new museum exhibits, visuals from campaigns launched that week, and everything I photographed or saved during the week — basically, everything that caught my attention). 

4th hour, I catalog all of this with specific captions and tags in an online system (some examples of tags and descriptions: film credits, oriental illustration, typographic animation, classical art, surrealism, etc.), and during this 4th hour, I execute and practice something specific from this final stage of study. This way, I always cover something from the past and something from the present/future.

The goal is simple: every week be better than my last week’s version [of what caught] my attention).“

Now, isn’t that a whole lot better use of time than worrying about that Monday morning meeting?

Rob Schwartz is the Chair of the TBWA New York Group and an executive coach who channels his creativity, experience, and wisdom into helping others get where they want to be. This was originally posted on his Substack, RobSchwartzHelps, where he covers work, life, and creativity.

Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash.

The post An Antidote to the Sunday Scaries appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

The seven concurrent generations are:

Greatest Generation – born 1901 -1927

Silent Generation – 1928 – 1945

Baby Boomers – 1946 – 1964

Generation X – 1964 – 1980

Millennials – 1981 – 1996

Generation Z – 1996 – 2012

Generation Alpha – 2013 – Present

Think about the first 20 years of life for people born in each of these generations. Think about how those people developed attachments to objects and experiences during those first 20 years. Specifically, think about the music each generation listened to as we grew up, formed social identities, went to school, dated, partied, got jobs, maybe married, and had kids.

If I asked each of you the question: “What’s your favorite band?” I’m almost certain your answer would be one from the era in which you spent your first 20 years.

Imagine asking someone from Gen Z that question. What are the odds that they’d say, “The Carpenters?” Million to one? More? Ask the same questions of a Silent. Think they’d say, “The Ramones?”

My guess is that a very small percentage of us would cite a band that became popular in an era after we were 20.

Think about that. I’m a Baby Boomer. Thousands of bands have appeared and recorded songs…some of them great bands and great songs…after 1967. My favorite band is The Beatles. Not surprising. The Beatles first appeared on American radio in December 1963, right in the peak of my adolescence. Sixty years later, I’ll still listen to “I Saw Her Standing There” and just smile!

And, I love Steely Dan’s music. Their first record was released in 1972. I little outside my arbitrary 20-year window, but close enough for me to dive into the band’s great combination of melody, harmony, and….maybe most of all…enigmatic, ironic lyrics.

As music evolved into newer genres, I found myself less inclined to choose to listen to newer groups. The Police are still part of my rotation, but, not Nirvana. Or, Pearl Jam. Or, Radiohead. Nope.

I had also “aged out” of intentionally listening to a lot of bands by the time hip-hop arrived. Oh, the occasional Run DMC song, maybe. But, not Public Enemy or NWA.

Now, why this trip down memory lane? To remind myself, and all of you, that our preferences for many things in our lives are formed and solidified in those first 20 years of our lives. And, once formed, they are pretty difficult to change.

Psychologists have noticed this!

“Openness to Experience,” one of the Big Five Personality Traits, gives us a glimpse of how flexible each of us is in this regard. If you like music and score very high on Openness, chances are you’ve listened to some bands from outside your 20-year formative period. Not just once or twice, but chosen to explore their music. You check out the new music charts in search of creative artists who speak to you. You might even have recent favorites.

If you score very low on that dimension, chances are you don’t purposefully seek out new bands. You might see someone on a late-night TV show and think they’re interesting, but the odds are they won’t replace your early-life favorites on your playlists.

This might seem like a common sense reality, but if we think about it for a minute we’ll see that we are all missing out on a lot of great music! Our established preferences have created musical “no-fly zones”; whole genres of music that we never get a chance to experience because we’ve “disqualified” them as “not for me.” (Guilty as charged regarding “country.”)

Now, take these music insights and apply them to other areas of your life. Like food. When was the last time you tried a food item from an unfamiliar national or regional cuisine? It used to be hard to find authentic Asian fast food, but a trip to a local Asian supermarket (remember when they didn’t exist?) often also means discovering a food court with an amazing array of carry-out stalls serving unfamiliar items described in their native languages.

Will most of us try any of these odd-looking dishes made from ingredients we’re not used to? The chances of you doing so are very highly correlated with your score on the Openness to Experience trait.

Just as we might have discovered that we really do like some of Billie Eilish’s music, reluctant Silent Generation members might also find that they’d actually choose to eat sushi…if they pushed their Openness to Experience just a little outside their usual boundaries and actually tried some.

For me, the learning is, there’s a lot of joy out there if we give ourselves a chance to find it.

(Oh, and if you’d like to see where you fall on the various Big Five Personality traits, here’s a free version of the test.)

Tom Guarriello is a psychologist, consultant, and founding faculty member of the Masters in Branding program at New York’s School of Visual Arts. He’s spent over a decade teaching psychology-based courses like The Meaning of Branded Objects, as well as leading Honors and Thesis projects. He’s spearheaded two podcasts, BrandBox and RoboPsych, the accompanying podcast for his eponymous website on the psychology of human-robot interaction. This essay was originally posted on Guarriello’s Substack, My Favorite Things.

Header image: Unsplash+ with Getty Images.

The post My Favorite Things: What’s Your Favorite Band? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

I have learned that what helps in moments of heartache or anxiety or fear is disconnecting from the thing that is making it worse (hey, breaking news alerts), focusing on my breath, slowing my heart rate, and finding a source of gratitude.

Gratitude is a balm. Scientifically-proven.

But it seems the things we give thanks for most are often outside ourselves — our family, our kids, a warm home, a beautiful meal.

Today, find one thing you love about yourself that you are grateful for:

Your softness. Your tenacity. Your empathy. Your creativity. Your heart. Your values. Your resourcefulness. Your openness. Your resilience. Your loyalty. Your faith. Your imagination. Your idealism. Your wisdom. Your fire.

Whatever it is, it is an essential part of what makes you, you. More than that, it is what makes you proud to be you. So name it.

Now make a promise to hold onto it. Celebrate it. Protect it. Write it down if it’s helpful and tuck it away somewhere.

We talk a lot about fighting for the people we love and the issues we care about.

Let this be a gentle reminder — for both of us — not to forget to fight for ourselves, too.

Liz Gumbinner is a Brooklyn-based writer, award-winning ad agency creative director, and OG mom blogger who was called “funny some of the time” by an enthusiastic anonymous commenter. This was originally posted on her Substack “I’m Walking Here!,” where she covers culture, media, politics, and parenting.

Header image courtesy of the author.

The post You’ve Got This appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Other recent chopping-abouts on IG.

Rachel Cabitt on the technicolor influence of Kayōkyoku Records, where 1960s Japanese and Western cultures collide.

Loving Fred Aldous’ photobooth collection of goodies.

Director Bryan Woods on putting a “no generative AI was used in the making of this film” statement at the end of Heretic:

“We are in a time where I feel like creatively we’re in one of the big ethical battles, and the race is already ahead of us. The importance is to have these conversations before they force things in, just because it makes sense from a corporate structure. It’s incredibly dangerous. If there’s not people to throttle it, we’re going to find ourselves in five to ten years in a very dangerous situation. … AI is an amazing technology. Beautiful things will come of it, and it’s jaw-dropping. What is being created with generative AI and video … it’s amazing we could create that technology. Now let’s bury it underground with nuclear warheads, ‘cause it might kill us all.”

Could this become standard practice, please? To be posted alongside the “no animals were harmed” and “no this story isn’t real, honest” notices.

Artist and photographer Yasmin Masri’s Near 2,143 McDonald’s, documenting over 2,000 McDonald’s locations through Google Street View. Seen a few books and projects over the years use Street View as a source, but I’m unclear about how fair usage/public-domainy it is.

“For some reason, in July 1985, the Daily Mirror’s pseudo-saucy comic strip Jane ran a series of comics centered on – oh yes – Jane and boyfriend Chris hanging out with Sir Clive Sinclair.”

Kurt Cobain’s Youth Culture Scream Time.

Chris Ware on Richard Scarry and the art of children’s literature:

“The thing is, “people” weren’t anywhere to be seen in Best Word Book Ever. Instead, the whole world was populated by animals: rabbits, bears, pigs, cats, foxes, dogs, raccoons, lions, mice, and more. Somehow, though, that made the book’s view of life feel more real and more welcoming. A dollhouse-like cutaway view of a rabbit family in their house getting ready for their day didn’t seem to just picture the things themselves—they were the things themselves, exuding a grounded warmth that said, “Yes, everywhere we live in houses and cook together and get dressed, just like you.”

One must never underestimate the power of anthropomorphism in normalising empathy and diversity for children. I grew up with countless Scarry titles (to this day Peasant Pig and the Terrible Dragon is one of my favourite books) and they definitely shaped my view of the world.

It’s November and therefore LEGO have thrown a massive chunk of dad-bait into the universe in time for Christmas. As if a 3000-brick model of Shackleton’s The Endurance wasn’t enough, you can also get an extra set with a minifig of expedition photographer Frank Hurley.

There’s absolutely no need for Suede’s Dog Man Star to be thirty. It’s just unseemly.

That is all.

This was originally posted on Meanwhile, a Substack dedicated to inspiration, fascination, and procrastination from the desk of designer Daniel Benneworth-Gray.

Header image courtesy of the author.

The post Meanwhile No. 219 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

I actually burst out laughing when she said it, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. I turned to Susan, who was driving home.

Did I lose my sense of humor at some point?

Yes—she said.

When?

When your dad died, she answered, without missing a beat.

My father was a hilarious, complicated man; we were so close that the way I speak still mirrors the way he did, almost exactly. Sometimes when I cough, I can hear him and I find myself looking around to see if he’s behind me. Our storytelling styles and rhythms were the same. Our worldviews were the same. I learned The Funny from him. I also learned from him that humor and pathos are fueled by the same energy, and, therefore, inextricably bound to each other.

I learned from my father that humor and pathos are fueled by the same energy, and therefore inextricably bound to each other.

The only time my father lost his sense of humor was when he experienced a triptych of profound failure: he lost his business, he declared bankruptcy, and my mother asked him to leave, all within a year. He literally became a different person almost overnight, who carried his body like a burden. This began to manifest in the way he treated it. He began eating foul food at a greasy spoon on Forty-first Street; he drank too many Gibsons. He stopped his daily walks; he stopped looking at art, stopped listening to music, stopped reading. His health, both physical and spiritual, plummeted; his heart actually broke. It would be another four years until I heard him laugh again, which, for a man whose life was built upon a foundation of humor and humanity, was forever, and he very nearly didn’t survive it.

And then, Susan went on, when you lost the family—

I took a deep breath.

And when Harris died, she added.

I looked out the window. I started to hyperventilate.

And then, she said, turning to me, you started attracting people who just didn’t laugh, like ever—- she stopped for a moment—

It was your new normal, she said, like they spoke your new language, and you recognized each other.

Humor and laughter do not mitigate pain and anguish. They’re just the B side to it.

I had never considered it: that everything and every part of one’s life is touched by humor, and therefore, also its loss. That when someone who looks at the world in a manner imbued with a combination of the absurd and the ironic, with oddity, contrast, kindness, and humanity —- the things that together make up the seeds of humor —- and suddenly that changes, their world changes with it. I knew —- or I was told, anyway —- that even my writing had changed during that time; my narrative voice was suddenly different. (I explain narrative voice to my students as a piece’s DNA, its hair and eye color, its build, and the way it walks.) My editors told me that my voice had gotten chillier, clipped, terse. On some days, when my world was at its worst, I had trouble getting out of bed. I stopped playing music. And when I stepped into the kitchen — the place I went for quiet repair and (heaven help me for saying it) self-care —- everything I made, simple or complicated, was inedible. Eggs were cooked to the point of explosion. Roast chickens were incinerated. Toast was carbonized.

And I couldn’t even laugh at myself.

I remember back in 2001, for weeks after 9/11, it was generally accepted that we couldn’t laugh. How on earth could we. We were grief-stricken; we were devastated. We were a world utterly in shock. Thousands had died. People I knew had died. Two days later, I lost my editorial director job in Connecticut—the one that had enabled me to move here from New York. (What will you do now—pump gas? my mother asked.) My father, watching the attacks on television that morning, told me he wouldn’t live another year; he didn’t. Every day, I sat down with the New York Times and read the little thumbnail snapshots of the victims. This one had just gotten engaged to her college boyfriend; that one was about to retire the following week. This one made the very best meatballs. Another had come from a long legacy of firefighters dating back to the 1800s and had just become a grandfather.

It was weeks later when the hosts of late-night television, openly weeping, wondered aloud if it would ever be okay to laugh again. It had to be. It had to be. Because humor is sustenance with a caloric weight and density; it feeds our hearts and our minds in the same way that food does. Without it, we starve. As long as it is not at someone else’s expense, it feeds our spirits. It would be another three months before Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz’s New Yorkistan cover appeared in The New Yorker in December 2001. These were all tender social cues: it was okay to laugh again because it was understood that humor and laughter do not mitigate pain and anguish. They’re just the B side to it, and therefore, they must exist for reason and balance.

Humor is sustenance with a caloric weight and density, like food. Without it, we starve.

It was a confluence of events that siphoned the laughter and the humor out of me, like gas from a car. Much of it was loss—so much mind-spinning, stunning loss, all of which happened at the same time, that I could barely put one foot in front of the other. That much loss happening all at once changes a person at a cellular level. I could no longer feed myself or my family or my heart or my spirit. I lost the language of laughter and humor. And because like seeks like, I inadvertently attracted people who shared my new lexicon. They were mostly warm, lovely, and kind people, and also utterly dour. They spoke in a dialect that was now familiar to me. The language we shared felt like a mother tongue devoid of the warmly ironic and the absurd —- that marriage out of which one is able to see the world in all its hell and its beauty, and still schlep forward day after day, laughing and crying all at once.

I do not know exactly when humor returned to my life, but when it did, it was as though I’d somehow, finally, come home to a language I remembered once speaking, but hadn’t heard for a while. It was like someone took off my glasses, cleaned them, and handed them back to me. Everything changed: my teaching, my writing, my cooking, my outlook. I was able to feed myself and the people I love again. I stopped carbonizing the toast, and stopped boiling the eggs until they were little squash balls. I got out of bed and moved forward into the world.

This post was originally published on Elissa Altman’s blog Poor Man’s Feast, The James Beard Award-winning journal about the intersection of food, spirit, and the families that drive you crazy. Read more on her Substack (and get recipes!), or keep up with her archives on PRINT.

Header image: Unsplash+ with Kseniya Lapteva; all other images courtesy of the author.

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How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis—a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism—a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition? Do we value stability and control, or evolution and learning?

Here’s a talk I gave about the book at the Cato Institute in 1998, followed by a critique by David Frum and a discussion. Everyone is very young.

Because the book came out amid the exuberance of the dot-com boom, many people assumed it was inspired by that optimistic era. It was not.

To the contrary, the ideas arose from the turbulence of the early 1990s, a period of great promise and great disruption—much like ours today. Economic statistics looked generally good but there was tremendous anxiety about layoffs and restructuring, especially among white-collar middle managers. (Here’s a review I wrote of a book on that subject.) The “angry white man” became a political touchstone, exemplified by Michael Douglas’s character in Falling Down, whose trailer’s scenes resemble a Trump tirade. Trade and immigration policy, once the concern of policy wonks and special-interest groups, became hot-button issues. In California, an influx of newcomers, including me, fueled the anti-growth measures that would create today’s housing shortages—reversing one of the many things I’d loved about coming to L.A.

Although I’d written an early version of the stasis-versus-dynamism model for The Washington Post in 1990, my ideas really began to cohere around 1993, when my husband spent a term teaching at the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern. Although still living in L.A., I used to visit Steve as often as possible. That year marked the centennial of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the great world’s fair held in Chicago. It’s best known today from Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City and inspired the line “thine alabaster cities gleam” in “America the Beautiful.”¹

While visiting Steve and reading local media, I became interested in both the fair itself and how its optimistic vision contrasted with the populist resentment that was roiling much of the country in the late 19th century.² I wrote several things inspired by the Exposition, including a talk at Princeton (attended by a half dozen people, including my husband and his parents) and parts of the proposal for The Future and Its Enemies. Those no longer survive, but the following essay, originally published in the November 1993 issue of Reason, does.³

This year marks the centennial of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the great fair that brought the world to Chicago. In 1893, 28 million visitors wandered through its classically inspired buildings, sampling oranges at the California exhibit and iced cocoa at the Java Village, riding the first Ferris Wheel (which took 40-person cars 264 feet in the air), marveling at the moving pictures of Thomas Edison’s new kinetoscope.

The fair was a tribute to world cultures, technological progress, and material abundance. It captured the spirit of its age.

But history looks different when you’re living through it. Then, as now, progress was not uniformly benevolent. 1893 was a year not unlike 1993, a time of worldwide recession and long-term economic restructuring.

Farmers, in particular, resented the Columbian Exposition’s display of wealth and optimism. For them, abundance meant not oranges and kinetoscopes but falling crop prices and an uncertain future. The Farmer’s Alliance in Gillespie County, Texas, resolved to ask that the fair’s organizers “let the world of pleasure, leisure, and Style see the men and women in their jeans, faded callicoes, cotton-checks who by their labor and handicraft have made it possible for such an Exhibit. Let the Farmer’s cabin, the miner’s shanty, and the tenement of factory hands be beside those magnificent buildings which represent the State and the Nation.”

In 1893, the farmers’ request, and the resentment and anxiety behind it, went mostly unheeded. In 1993, similar sentiments have thrown the country—or at least the opinion makers who define the spirit of our age—into an anxiety attack over jobs.

We hear the voices of those 19th-century farmers in Ross Perot’s cry to “Save Your Job, Save Our Country” by rejecting free trade with Mexico. They echo in the letter to the editor of The Atlantic that declared, “WalMart is the embodiment of the excessive greed of the eighties and the horrendous devastation that has been its byproduct.” They murmur throughout Robert Reich’s The Work of Nations, whispering not of “the world of pleasure” versus “labor and handicraft” but of “symbolic analysts” versus “routine producers” and “in-person servers.”

The mass production revolution traded the independence of farming for the relative security of factory work. Our current “age of discontinuity,” in Peter Drucker’s prescient phrase, reverses that flow. Technological change, global competition, decentralized institutions, and knowledge-based economics have disrupted—and in some cases destroyed—the stable organizations and predictable careers born of the very changes that displaced the farmers of 1893.

We’ve moved from mainframes to laptops, from union members to entrepreneurs, from overtime to flextime, from Ma Bell to Friends and Family. Temporary work, that bane of social critics who long for assembly-line security, has become the safety net for independence-minded people with skills. It allows them to move across the country, to quit jobs with near-impunity, to break into new industries.

But today’s leaders suggest that economic dynamism is either a natural disaster like the Mississippi floods—an unstoppable force against which we are powerless—or a conspiracy of the elite against the masses. The former is the position of most Clintonites, the latter of self-styled populists. In 1993, we see only the faded jeans and calicoes, the tenements and shanties. It is not fashionable to talk about Ferris Wheels and cocoa.

The fashions that dictate a scared new world stem partly from the understandable desire for the products of dynamism without its costs. Politicians who promise utopia, who speak of “electronic superhighways” while pretending they can be built without upheaval, only feed resentment on the part of displaced workers who feel they’ve been conned. Yet talking only of the inevitability of economic change, without mentioning its benefits, drives the fearful into the arms of those who peddle the politics of stasis.

The question no one, least of all Perot, will ask is, What should your country sacrifice to save your job? Consider IBM. In late July, the company said it would eliminate 35,000 jobs by the end of 1994. Since 1986, it has slashed its payroll from more than 400,000 employees to about 250,000.

That’s quite a shock. For decades, IBM represented security. Although it required constant upheaval in the personal lives of its organization men—people joked that the initials stood for “I’ve Been Moved”—it promised lifetime employment and the prestige of association with a progressive big company.

It also offered a sense of purpose. In the old days (not coincidentally, Ross Perot’s formative business years), IBM was the future. It was moving America into the age of data processing, a future where “black boxes” with spinning tape drives manned by brainy guys in white shirts would make the world clean, efficient, and orderly. (To social critics, of course, the guys in white shirts represented conformist “mass man,” consigned to live a bland, unfulfilling existence in “little boxes made of ticky-tacky.”)

But that wasn’t the future we got. Instead, long-haired California misfits exploded the centralized mainframe and put a computer on everybody’s desk. Nowadays the biggest question facing computer users isn’t whether the data-processing department will accept their job order but whether to wait six months to buy an even better machine at an even lower price.

Despite its best efforts to keep up, and at times they were very good, the old IBM couldn’t adapt to a decentralized, often chaotic market in which desktop machines took on the power of mainframes and brand loyalty was nearly nonexistent. “Everything I learned at IBM is worthless,” a laid-off engineer told the Los Angeles Times. It remains to be seen whether IBM can reinvent itself or whether, like the Sears catalog, it belongs to the ages.

The anxiety peddlers never ask, Would you give up your laptop to preserve 150,000 jobs at IBM? Do you wish the Mac had never been invented? If you could, would you wipe out desktop publishing, saving not only all those IBMers but also untold numbers of typesetters and paste-up artists?

The personal-computer revolution, like the industrial revolution, is not a natural disaster, though it may feel like one to those whose jobs flooded out. It is, like the transportation revolution that made possible oranges in Chicago, a technological response to the desires of millions for a better life.

Those desires do not please our social critics. In an age of mass production, they railed about the alienation of the worker. Now they complain about the service economy and the shortage of high-paid, workingmen’s jobs even as they denounce frivolous consumption and planet-threatening growth. They long for dark, satanic mills.

It is easy to be nostalgic for the world we have lost, easier still when voters can be bought with nostalgia for the jobs they once held. But the age of discontinuity, too, recalls earlier ages. It asks a familiar-sounding question: Are we better off than we were 100 years ago? Who was right—the farmer or the fair?

The Atlantic recently published a series of 30 high-quality photos from the World’s Columbian Exposition. Highly recommended.

1. It gets a negative reference in The Fountainhead, echoing the modernist belief that the White City was a beaux arts abomination that set back architectural progress in America for a generation. Ayn Rand may have been unconventional in many ways, but her views of architecture reflected modernist orthodoxy. ↩︎
2. Given the role of inflation in this year’s election, it’s worth noting that the late 1900s were a period of serious deflation, which is equally annoying to people—including farmers—who need debt financing. The value of the dollars you pay your loans back in is greater than the value of the dollars you borrowed. It’s the reverse of what happened to homeowners with mortgages in the 1970s. ↩︎
3. That issue’s cover story, a feature by the great Glenn Garvin on immigrants in California’s informal economy, is well worth a read. ↩︎

Virginia Postrel is a writer with a particular interest in the intersection of commerce, culture, and technology. Author of “The Future and Its Enemies,” “The Substance of Style,” “The Power of Glamour,” and, most recently, “The Fabric of Civilization.” This essay was originally published in Virginia’s newsletter on Substack.

The post The Farmer or the Fair? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

The Power of Legacy in Law Firm Brands

Many of these law firms have built their reputations over generations. Their logos, colors, and visual identity have become synonymous with trust, authority, and dependability. These elements are not just design choices; they are symbols of the firm’s history, representing its core values and the relationships it has cultivated with clients. Tampering too much with these symbols risks alienating the clients who have come to associate the firm’s brand with excellence, consistency, and expertise.

However, in today’s digital-first world, relying solely on tradition can be a double-edged sword. As the legal industry becomes more competitive, clients increasingly seek firms that demonstrate both stability and forward-thinking innovation. This is where many firms struggle. The challenge lies in respecting the legacy while adapting the brand to resonate with new audiences and emerging digital platforms.

Why Modernization is Essential

Modernization is not just about aesthetics. It is about ensuring the firm’s brand resonates with the expectations of today’s clients, employees, and stakeholders. Younger clients and associates, in particular, are looking for signs that a firm is future-oriented, adaptable, and in tune with the digital age. Firms that resist change risk being perceived as outdated, even if their legal acumen remains unparalleled.

Furthermore, a law firm’s digital presence is often its first impression. Whether through a website, social media channels, or email communications, an up-and-coming generation of clients will judge a firm’s relevance and professionalism based on its online identity. A modern, cohesive brand that works seamlessly across digital and physical touchpoints signals that the firm is both competent and up-to-date.

Keys to Modernizing Without Losing Tradition

Audit Your Brand’s Core Identity. Before embarking on any redesign, it’s crucial to conduct a thorough audit of the existing brand. What elements of the firm’s identity are deeply tied to its legacy? This could be a logo, specific colors, or even the tone of the firm’s communications. Identifying these essential elements ensures that they remain central to the brand, providing continuity even as other aspects are updated.

Evolve, Don’t Overhaul. The goal of a brand update should be evolution, not revolution. A subtle refresh of the logo, typography, or color palette can often do the trick, modernizing the brand without alienating existing clients. Law firms can look to the corporate world for examples of successful evolutions: companies like Coca-Cola, IBM, and even the New York Times have modernized their identities multiple times without straying far from their core visual elements.

Incorporate Digital-First Thinking. A key part of modernizing any brand today is ensuring it functions well in digital environments. Established firms need to consider how their brand translates across devices, from websites and social media to mobile apps. This might require simplifying logos for smaller screens or adopting more flexible typography that looks equally professional on a smartphone as it does in print.

Embrace Storytelling. Modern branding is as much about narrative as it is about design. For law firms with rich histories, there’s an opportunity to leverage that legacy through storytelling. Use the firm’s long history as an asset in marketing materials, website copy, and even social media. While there is a value in stability and heritage, clients want to see how those qualities are being leveraged to solve contemporary legal challenges.

Maintain Professionalism with a Contemporary Edge. While it’s important to remain professional, modernizing a brand can bring a contemporary edge that appeals to a younger generation of clients and employees. This could be as simple as choosing modern fonts or incorporating more dynamic website features like animation, video, podcasts, or client testimonials in innovative formats.

Seek Client Feedback When modernizing a brand, it’s often beneficial to involve clients in the discovery process. What do they value most about the firm’s identity? What do they see as outdated? Gathering this feedback can help ensure that your brand update strikes the right balance between old and new. It also signals to clients that their opinions matter, which helps strengthen client relationships.

Redesigning the brand identity of a legacy law firm is no small feat, but it is essential in today’s rapidly changing landscape. By balancing tradition with innovation, law firms can create a brand that honors their history while positioning themselves for continued success in the digital age. The key is to evolve thoughtfully—preserving the core of the brand while embracing the opportunities that modern design and technology offer. In doing so, firms can continue to project trust, stability, and professionalism, while also appealing to the expectations of modern clients.

This post was originally published on Lynda’s LinkedIn newsletter, Marketing without Jargon. Lynda leads a team at Decker Design that focuses on helping law firms build differentiated brands.

Header image: Unsplash+ with Resource Database.

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The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. The book itself felt like a magical artifact, something special. For starters, it was longer. It was a grander story than the other books I was reading then, with bigger words, made-up languages, poetry, and songs. Reading it made me feel older in a way that made me proud, but it was still approachable enough to be exciting and digestible as a kid. I remember reading it back then and thinking, “Someday, I’m going to read this to my kids.” Which was a thought I didn’t have about nearly anything else at that age.

Well, about three decades and four kids later (baby Luka was born this past August!), I’m doing it; I’m reading The Hobbit to my kids. And to my delight, they love it. Almost every night as we wrap up family dinner, my daughter Rafi (our oldest) will say, “I can’t wait to read The Hobbit tonight!” I usually sit and read them about half a chapter per night, and then Rafi grabs the book and reads ahead (but she’s fine with me re-reading the same parts the next night for her brothers’ benefit). It’s family time together, and they’re also fully invested in the epic story of Bilbo Baggins and his adventures in Middle Earth.

Story is such a huge part of the human experience. Much like a beautiful building is the output of good architecture, a useful product is the output of good industrial design, and a compelling advertisement is the output of good graphic design: stories are the primary output of good business design.

The Power of Storytelling

Whether you’re a kid or an adult, stories are woven into almost every aspect of our lives — appearing in diverse forms and contexts. Perhaps the most prominent examples are the books, movies, shows, and video games we watch, listen to, and play — each with a structured story designed to captivate us. Over fifty-five million people watched the second season of The Rings of Power, a new show diving into Tolkien’s Middle Earth history, complete with elves, wizards, and yes, hobbits — and with themes like good versus evil (of course), hope and unity against darkness, identity and heritage, sacrifice and leadership, and more.

Journalism is stories. The word “news” is short for “new stories.” The media frequently uses storytelling to report on events, creating a narrative around facts to make information more relatable and easier to understand. As TV news entered the fray and had to compete with shows like The Rings of Power for viewership, news became increasingly more narratively compelling.

Then there’s social media — not only are we telling our own stories through our posts, but there’s a format called “Stories,” video snapshots of our lives in narrative form. Ads are stories. Political campaigns are stories about the candidates and the future they hope to create. Most religions are built on narratives — stories from sacred texts, myths, and parables that convey moral lessons, cultural values, and spiritual guidance. Music is stories — often, songs are structured narratively; think: Bob Dylan and Taylor Swift. And if the song isn’t a story, there’s always a story behind the music.

A story is a structured collection of information that conveys events, emotions, characters, and lessons, ultimately providing meaning. In The Science of Storytelling, author Will Storr shares research that suggests language evolved principally to connect with each other and share social information, also known as gossip, amongst Stone Age tribes. “We’d tell tales about the moral rights and wrongs of other people, punish the bad behavior, reward the good, and thereby keep everyone cooperating and the tribe in check.” In the book, he refers to the psychologist Professor Roy Baumeister’s writing: ‘Life is change that yearns for stability.’ Storr says, “Story is a form of play that allows us to feel we’ve lost control without actually placing us in danger.”

Similarly, in Wired for Story, author Lisa Cron explores how stories engage our brains at a biological level. She argues that the brain is “wired” to pay attention to stories because they help us understand how to survive and thrive in the world. Cron posits that stories evolved to help us practice for real life. They provide a mental simulation that helps us understand others, navigate social situations, and make decisions.

I love The Hobbit because Bilbo isn’t some sort of superhero; in fact, he’s the opposite, and often complains and thinks about how much he’d rather be at home eating in front of the fireplace than be on an adventure — he complains, but he sticks with it — he’s a hobbit, but he’s us, he’s human. I could simply tell my kids to be brave when they’re scared. Or I can read them The Hobbit and they can think about Bilbo Baggins and reflect on how they’d react if a colony of giant spiders had 12 of their friends tied up in webs, and it was up to them to save them. By reading my kids The Hobbit, I’m helping them understand courage, the power of friendship and collaboration, resilience in the face of adversity, and the importance of staying true to yourself.

Story Structure

Cron writes, “We think in story, which means we instinctively look for meaning in everything that happens to us.” At its core, a story has several essential elements that make it compelling and meaningful: a character (or characters), often with a specific desire or goal, encounters a conflict or obstacle and undergoes a journey that leads to a resolution or transformation. The journey is the narrative arc that keeps the audience engaged — through a build-up and release — and generates emotional responses, insights, and empathy.

The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy once said, “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” If you think about it, it is one type of story: when a person leaves home on a journey, they become a stranger somewhere else. And when a stranger comes to town, by definition, they’ve left home and traveled to the new town. Over time, natural story archetypes like Tolstoy’s evolved and became particularly powerful at driving meaning, and you can use them all in business design to great effect.

In The Hero’s Journey story archetype, a character (the hero) sets out on a journey to achieve a specific goal; they face trials and challenges, receive help, and undergo a transformation, returning home changed. Think Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, Neo in The Matrix, and Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games.

Author Donald Miller pulls out an intriguing element of The Hero’s Journey as it relates to business in his book Building a StoryBrand. He writes, “Your customer should be the hero of the story, not your brand.” He goes on to illuminate how many of our favorite stories feature a guide and — once you realize this — you see it in everything. Luke has Obi-Wan Kenobi, Neo has Morpheus, Katniss has Shamus, Harry has Hagrid, Dorthy has Glinda, Frodo has Gandalf, and on and on and on. Miller urges business leaders to make their brand “the guide” for the customer in their own story, helping them reach their personal goals.

Similarly, there’s The Quest story archetype, which focuses on collective objectives rather than one hero’s personal growth or transformation. In this archetype, the companions go on a journey to acquire something of great value, encountering many obstacles along the way. Examples of The Quest are plentiful, including The Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones, and The Wizard of Oz.

More archetypes: Rags-to-Riches is a classic — and useful in business because it often has a character rising from humble beginnings, overcoming adversity, and achieving success, wealth, or greatness (Cinderella, Harry Potter, Pretty Woman). Tragedy: the protagonist’s actions lead to negative outcomes, often because of a fatal flaw — these stories make great cautionary tales, think Macbeth or Requiem for a Dream. Conversely, the Comedy archetype centered around misunderstandings, mistaken identities, or social mishaps — think The Hangover, Bridge Jones’s Diary, etc.

Another classic is The Underdog archetype: the main character, who is weaker or disadvantaged, faces a powerful adversary or systemic challenge; despite the odds, they triumph due to resilience, cleverness, or sheer determination. There are so many to choose from: Rocky, Rudy, Karate Kid. There’s the Forbidden Love type — the characters fall in love, but external forces forbid their relationship, and the pair struggle against the constraints keeping them apart: Romeo and Juliet, Titanic, The Notebook.

There’s the Coming-of-Age Story: Stand by Me, Boyhood, and Lady Bird. Let’s not forget Mysteries, where the protagonist tries to solve a puzzle, uncover a secret, or discover the truth — the story follows them as they piece together clues, dodge red herrings, and solve the case.

Lastly (of the ones I’ll mention here — there are more), my absolute favorite: The Heist. A group of diverse individuals come together to execute a daring plan, often involving stealing something (but not always). Each member of the group typically brings a unique skill, and there are twists, setbacks, and betrayals along the way. Examples: Ocean’s Eleven, The Italian Job, and Inception.

These archetypes provide structures that storytellers adapt and innovate to create countless unique narratives across different genres and mediums. Each typology captures a different facet of human experience and, therefore, can be leveraged very effectively in business design: by understanding and framing the output of our work as stories, we can communicate effectively, drive change, and inspire both employees and customers.

Six Key Business Stories

Business designers create strategies, processes, services, and more, but at the heart of it all, every project, initiative, or transformation within a business starts as a story. In business design, stories come in various forms, each serving a different purpose. Some are about setting a direction, aligning people with a common vision, or defining how a company operates. Others are about challenges — identifying obstacles that need to be overcome, showing how solutions are reached, and highlighting the impact of those solutions on people’s lives.

Six key business stories, three Alignment Stories, and three Journey Stories cut across internal and external engagement and connect and shape.

First, Alignment Stories help individuals within an organization understand and rally around a shared purpose and objectives. They inspire and clarify the organization’s direction and operations and show how people can grow and succeed together.

1. Vision/Strategy Stories are narratives about the future state of the company, a product, or service that the company is working towards. They help people understand why a particular course of action is important and where they fit in it and inspire them to contribute toward that shared vision. A good example: when Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft, he didn’t just share new sales targets; he shared a new vision for the company that focused on cloud computing and digital transformation. By telling a story of transformation — in this case, he used The Quest story archetype — he emphasized innovation, customer-centricity, and a growth mindset to help rally the entire company around this new strategic direction.

2. Coaching Stories are narratives used to mentor, advise, and inspire team members or stakeholders. They often involve examples of personal growth, lessons learned, and overcoming challenges. I’ll share an example from my career as a people leader: recently, a colleague and I identified that they weren’t bringing their expert opinions into strategic conversations. They were holding back and going along with what the rest of the team said. I could have told them, “Insert yourself more.” Instead, I told a Coming-of-Age story; it went something like this:

When I was in design school, I had a professor, Stan — he’d go desk to desk as we were working on our design projects. When he got to my desk, I showed him what I was working on, and he’d nod and say, Sam, this is great, but you should do x,y,z (paraphrasing here) to improve it. That day and night, I’d do everything he said — to the letter — excited to show him my progress. The next day, he’d look at what I’d done and say, no, no, do this, this, and this, which I’d then do. This repeated a few times over the course of the week until finally, I somewhat angrily said, “I’ve done everything you’ve said to do, and you never like it! Here’s what I think: it should be like this! I then shared the direction I believe best solved the problem. Stan stepped back and smiled, and walked away, achieving his goal. The moral of the story: it’s our job to have a point of view and the courage to share it.

3. Culture Stories reinforce the shared values, traditions, and behaviors that define an organization’s culture — and they help set expectations for how people interact and approach work within the collective group. One of my absolute favorites comes from my employer, Edward Jones. Ted Jones, the son of company founder Edward Jones Sr., is lauded at the company for urging (some stories say ‘forcing’) his father to transform the wealth management firm from a family business to a partnership owned by the employees, where those who “share the work, share the profits.” Transforming the firm into a partnership meant Ted was leaving the chance behind of becoming a multi-billionaire if he had simply sold it to the highest bidder. As the story goes:

When Ted, then retired, was asked by a reporter why he never sold out and became as rich as say, his friend Sam Walton, Ted replied: “I am the richest man in America. I have a wife who loves me in spite of my faults. I have four dogs. Two love only me. One loves everybody. One loves no one but is still very loyal. I enjoy my business. I love my farm and my home. I have a few close friends, and money has never been my god.”

That quote is emblazoned on plaques, in documents, and in the minds of everyone who works at Edward Jones. Here you have a Rags-to-Riches story of a family starting a company working “to bring wealth management from Wall Street to Main Street” as a partnership — Ted’s reply goes further in communicating a rags-to-humble riches story that sets the tone for everyone at the firm — reinforcing how we all keep a sense of humility and gratitude for what we have, as we work together to grow prosperity for all.

Journey Stories focus on defining challenges, navigating the path and process to find solutions, and showcasing the impact of those solutions. These stories communicate the effort, iteration, and creativity involved in addressing problems or activating opportunities. Done well, they create connections and credibility inside and outside your business.

4. Challenge Stories focus on a specific problem that needs solving — helping everyone understand the core issue and why it’s important — these stories set the stage for action. Challenge stories are useful and nearly ubiquitous in the design process as we seek to identify and solve for user needs. A business challenge (stated in a very non-story way) might be something like this: Not enough people are using our healthcare app. As designers, we dig in, do user research, and discover that users are frustrated with the appointment scheduling feature — we can frame the challenge as a design challenge, perhaps for a statement of work: Our users (our main characters in this case) tell us they struggle to schedule appointments easily, leading to missed care opportunities and frustration. We must redesign the appointment flow to make it simple, intuitive, and efficient. The challenge is to reduce the number of steps and ensure users have a smooth, reliable experience booking appointments and ultimately meet their healthcare needs. In a similar fashion, we can frame this as a typical UX design user story, a story from the user’s point of view that can drive our design work: Simplify Appointment Scheduling: As a healthcare app user, I want to easily schedule a medical appointment without confusion, so that I can get the care I need without stress or missed bookings.

This is an excellent example of The Hero’s Journey because, as Donald Miller shares in Becoming a Storybrand, our users/customers are the heroes. Challenge Stories are the calls to adventure that inspire the hero’s journey and lead to our next business story type.

5. Journey to Solution Stories take the audience through the process of how a problem was addressed, showing the iterations, teamwork, and resilience involved. These stories are about walking the path, overcoming the challenges, and learning lessons along the way. Journey to Solution stories are great for design projects — I frame pretty much every project I lead as a quest that includes my core team and the broader team of subject matter experts — we all work together to travel from The Shire to The Lonely Mountain, I mean… from the challenge to the solution.

These stories are perfect for founding/origin tales — in fact, I wrote one; my book Adventures in Disruption was written as a Journey to Solution story about starting a new kind of design museum. I wrote the story as sort of a Heist, with various characters and our different skill sets: me with project management and business strategy, Derek with design and sales, Steve with tech and web development, Jenna with marketing and event production, and more. We came together to activate the opportunity and achieve our objective.

6. Solution and Impact Stories describe the solution and its tangible impact on customers and stakeholders. Here, you often see customer testimonials and real-world examples — sometimes even with data! — of the benefits experienced by interacting with your business, products, or services. Solution and Impact Stories are great for sales because you show what you’ve done, build credibility, and reinforce your value. Here’s a real example from productivity app Notion:

Toyota uses Notion to drive more efficient workflows with collaboration that comes standard. *Toyota’s Frontier Research Center is at the forefront of the future for the largest brand in one of the world’s largest industries. Their team is responsible for not only conducting a wide range of research but also sharing findings with the world. Since switching to Notion to consolidate and centrally manage all of this work, they’re more efficient and productive than ever before.

For the researchers at Toyota, sharing findings with the public is just as important as conducting the research itself. To do this, the research center promotes their work on social media for the world to engage with. But doing so requires a rigorous approval process to ensure accuracy and maintain the integrity of the Toyota brand. Before switching to Notion, this process was a tedious back-and-forth exchange of messages between various teams that was painfully inefficient.

With Notion, every post gets drafted and sent for approval in an easy-to-follow workflow that ends with a single click of the “approve” button that reduced approval timelines by 3x. Instead of the back and forth messages, the team can quickly check statuses and receive automated notifications of changes and updates.

“Not only do our streamlined workflows in Notion save us time, they also make it easier to stay up to date on task details and progress. This means our social media posts are more accurate, and we can publish them faster than before.” — Taku Wakasugi, Toyota Frontier Research Center

Here, we have a sort of Rags to Riches story. The protagonists are the researchers at Toyota. The “rags” are those pesky inefficient workflows, and the “riches” are their new streamlined processes—all possible because of the significant value provided by Notion.

Three Alignment and three Journey stories. These six types of business stories serve different but complementary purposes — use them together and build off each type. A Rags to Riches Journey to Solution story might bolster your culture. A Vision/Strategy Quest Story is a great way to tee up your ultimate triumph, your epic Solution, and your Impact Story.

How to Craft Business Stories

The organizational psychologist and author Adam Grant recently wrote: “The hallmark of expertise is no longer how much you know. It’s how well you synthesize.” As we explored above, the ultimate synthesis is storytelling. Writing compelling stories requires structure, emotional resonance, and relevance to your audience. To tell good stories, we start there:

1. Understand your audience and purpose: In The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr emphasizes that the best stories are all about change. Conflict drives change through tension and obstacles that help us reflect on the challenges we face ourselves. Determine what you want to achieve with your story, whether to inspire, educate, influence, or align — ask yourself what you want to change — then tailor your story to your audience’s interests, challenges, and needs.
2. Focus on specific characters and details: Every story needs a main character. The character could be a customer, employee, or the leadership team — choose someone relatable. In some instances, like Vision/Strategy stories, the whole company may collectively be the main character.
3. Incorporate emotional resonance: Connect on an emotional level by conveying how characters feel at key points in the story. And always connect to a deeper purpose. For example, a story about solving a customer problem should also convey why that solution was meaningful for the people involved and the audience listening.
4. Keep it simple and authentic: Avoid overly technical jargon or unnecessary complexity. Simple language makes it easier for your audience to understand and connect. As in all things, authenticity in your stories fosters trust and credibility.
5. Connect to broader themes: Tie your story back to your company’s core values or vision to help reinforce strategic priorities and make the story more impactful. Above all else, make sure your audience leaves knowing the main point.

Business Design Example

Good business design transforms noise into knowledge and, ultimately, to story. Here’s an example: Let’s say we’re a business designer for a large, national real estate firm focused on empowering agents to support home buyers and sellers, and our executive leaders are concerned. Our sales are plateauing, even down in some areas of the country. There is a flood of new opportunities and constraints acting on our business — where should we focus our efforts? What should we invest in? How should we better support our agents to make an impact and ultimately grow our business?

We begin by understanding the unstructured landscape — the Noise — and gradually shape it into a cohesive Story that aligns everyone toward the future of our real estate, all by design.

1. Learn: Making Sense of the Noise We start by gathering from the Noise to find Data: researching market signals and interviewing agents and clients. Agents have expressed challenges with digital engagement, increased competition from tech-driven competitors, and shifting client expectations. We categorize these insights to identify recurring themes. As we learn and identify patterns, we transform Data into Information; for example, we see a growing demand for digital tools and personalized customer interactions. A great way to synthesize user data is by creating personas, representations of our user groups — in the context of our story, personas are our characters (agents, clients, and colleagues). Let’s create a persona named Tracy — a realtor on our team with 15 years of experience.
2. Define: Turning Information into Clear Focus Areas We then synthesize this information further by analyzing what the patterns mean. Agents like Tracy need support to become more tech-savvy, and clients expect a seamless, tech-driven experience. We clearly define our core user problem (an excellent start to our story): Our agents need to be empowered with modern tools, skills, and a client-centric approach to regain market share and improve sales performance. This step turns the information into Knowledge by giving it context and clarity — helping us pinpoint areas where we need to act. The focus areas or need statements might be something like:
   • Investing in technology to enhance client experiences.
   • Upskilling agents in digital tools and personalized services.
   • Building community and support systems for agents to adapt to future challenges.
3. Ideate, Prototype, & Test with Story As needed, we can share drafts of our story for feedback and refinement. At this point, with our new knowledge and defined focus areas, we can concurrently ideate/prototype/test solutions and begin developing our story. Let’s say we ideate, prototype, and test a few initiatives — each idea represents an element of the broader narrative we’re building:
   • Pilot Programs for Digital Tools: We roll out virtual tour technology to a small group of agents to see how effectively it enhances client interactions.
   • Training Curriculum: Develop a foundational training program on digital engagement tools and test it with a subset of agents to refine the content and delivery.
   • Agent Community Forum: Create a virtual space for agents to share challenges and successes, fostering collaboration.

4. Refining the Final Story From the prototypes and testing, we learned that agents feel more confident and empowered when they have access to the right technology and training. Based on this feedback, we refine our story to ensure that it aligns with agents’ needs and customers’ expectations. We’re ready to write and deliver our story.

The Story: Tracy’s Evolution — Tracy is a realtor with over 15 years of experience. She’s seen the market change — sometimes dramatically. From the rollercoaster of the housing crisis to the surge in demand during the pandemic, Tracy helped families find their homes, navigating unpredictable shifts in the market. But now, as technology evolves and client expectations change, she knows that the future of the real estate industry will look very different from the past.

Recently, Tracy noticed that more of her clients expected an almost digital-first approach — asking for virtual tours, wanting deep data insights, and using online platforms to streamline their buying process. She started to see potential clients choosing tech-enabled competitors over traditional agents. Tracy understood that she needed to adapt to what the next 15 years might bring: smart technology integration, personalized client service through data insights, and deepened relationships in a hybrid digital world.

Tracy embarked on a journey to transform her approach to real estate. She began with professional development — taking courses on digital marketing, virtual property tours, and data analytics in real estate. She adopted new technology that allowed her to create virtual home tours, leveraging 3D scanning to give buyers an immersive experience without ever stepping foot in the property. She utilized new data-driven platforms to provide her clients with neighborhood analytics that offered insights into future growth potential, school ratings, and even sustainability features that mattered to a new generation of buyers.

Tracy also focused on personal branding, creating engaging online content that spoke directly to her clients’ needs. She shared videos about trends in home sustainability, insider tips for new buyers, and behind-the-scenes glimpses of her day-to-day work as a realtor adapting to a tech-driven world. She built trust with her audience and a pipeline of new clients by showing her willingness to evolve.

This journey helped Tracy grow her business and future-proof her career. She began attracting a tech-savvy clientele that valued her experience and new capabilities. Her clients appreciated the seamlessness of their buying experience, from virtual walkthroughs to data-backed decisions. Tracy also found that integrating technology allowed her to spend more quality time building relationships rather than managing manual processes, elevating her service to a new level.

Tracy’s story is one of evolution. She leverages technology not as a replacement for the human element but as an enhancer that allows her to do what she does best: helping people find a place to call home.

We are building the real estate firm of the future — one that combines the expertise of seasoned agents like Tracy with cutting-edge technology to deliver unmatched service. Tracy has seen the industry evolve dramatically. She knows that to thrive in the next decade, she must embrace change and adopt new tools to engage clients digitally and provide personalized, data-driven experiences. We are committed to empowering agents with the tools, training, and support they need to adapt and succeed. Together, we will create a seamless, personalized real estate experience that makes finding and selling a home as efficient and rewarding as possible.

How’d we do?

Our audience: executive leaders who need a strategic vision for what to do and where to invest. Check.

Specific characters and details: Tracy is a traditional realtor with 15 years of experience, but looking to evolve for the next decade and beyond. Check.

Emotional resonance: “the rollercoaster of the housing crisis,” “unpredictable shifts,” Tracy is worried about the future, which is a very human thing to be worried about; we can relate.

Keep it simple: we paint a simple picture of how and why Tracy needs to evolve and how we can support her — with three initiative ideas prototyped and tested.

Connect to broader themes: the main strategic theme: invest in our evolution as a company to support agents like Tracy. Check.

Stories Make Sense

Stories are central to how we make sense of the world, relate to one another, and inspire action. When used effectively, storytelling can align teams around a shared vision, build resilience through coaching, reinforce culture, and guide customers through challenges to solutions. For business designers, mastering storytelling allows us to synthesize meaningful narratives that resonate across teams and stakeholders. It helps us frame challenges, celebrate successes, and ensure that the human element always remains at the core of what we do.

I mentioned reading The Hobbit to my kids — well, now we’re taking the next step; my daughter Rafi and I are writing our own story: Rafi and the Lost Kingdom. Rafi, like most (all?) kids, is working hard to understand, feel, and react to her emotions — so in this story, Rafi finds a magic wand that works sort of like a mood ring; it senses her feelings, and various emotions give her certain powers — but if her emotions get the best of her, the wand can shut down, leaving her in tough situations. By writing this story, she’s learning to name her emotions, she’s understanding that her emotions are valid, and she’s seeing self-regulation in action — all through the power of story.

Think about the story you want to tell. Will it be a vision story that sets a direction for the future? A journey story that chronicles how challenges were overcome? Or perhaps a culture narrative that embodies the values you stand for? Whatever story you craft, remember: the power of a well-told story lies in its ability to drive understanding, alignment, and meaningful change.

Sam Aquillano is an entrepreneur, design leader, writer, and founder of Design Museum Everywhere. This post was originally published in Sam’s twice-monthly newsletter for the creative-business-curious, Business Design School. Check out Sam’s book, Adventures in Disruption: How to Start, Survive, and Succeed as a Creative Entrepreneur.

Header image: Maxime Lebrun on Unsplash; article images & graphics courtesy of the author.

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“How do you know if you have a good idea?” This profound query came at the tail-end of a robust day.

My answer was true, but a bit pat.

I said a good idea should make you feel something. I bolstered my answer with the classic line often attributed to legendary creative director Phil Dusenberry that goes, “If you don’t feel it in the board room, the audience won’t feel it in the living room.”

The emphasis on ideas that make you feel something: a laugh, a cry, motivated to take some action.

It was a fine answer, but something about it was bugging me.

Today’s communication efforts are sprawling and complicated.

I didn’t feel I gave a good enough answer and wouldn’t you know it — it kept me up that night.

I got out of bed early the next day and wrote down some notes and came back with a better answer.

I re-confirmed that a good idea should indeed make you feel something.

I then went further and talked about how a good idea should reveal something.

Then I went deeper and talked about how a good idea should drive all the executions of the communications ecosystem.

The Sea Leggers appreciated this deeper answer.

I kept going with one more thing.

I told them that, ultimately, the best method for determining a good idea is the timeless framework from legendary designer Milton Glaser. His notion is that there are only three reactions you can have to a piece of work:

Yes, No, Wow.

Meaning…

Yes, I understand the idea. It’s on strategy. Fine.

No, I don’t get it. I don’t like it.

Or…

Wow.

Yep, Wow is in, you can’t control how you’re feeling. And your overwhelming reaction is to just go, “Wow.”

Sure enough, the next night, we were all together at an art studio creating masks for a Lucha Libre wrestling event we were about to attend.

We had tasked ourselves with taking existing wrestling masks and making them uniquely our own.

We were armed with glue guns, scissors, and various pieces of glittered craft foam.

I saw several fun improvements our Sea Leggers were making to the classic masks.

And then out of nowhere, one appeared that was completely amazing.

One of the rising stars from our Paris office emerged with an Art Deco masterpiece.

She crafted the foam pieces into magnificent gold and green feathers. The mask looked like a piece of art that belonged atop the head of some kind of mythical goddess. Or a piece of sculpture you’d find in an Art Deco masterpiece like the Chrysler Building or Rockefeller Center.

It was such an incredibly high-brow approach for something as populist as Lucha Libre.

But in the end, it worked magnificently.

I tell you all of this because each person who saw her mask had the exact same reaction: “Wow!”

So how do you tell if you have a good idea? Start with this. Is your first reaction Wow?

Rob Schwartz is the Chair of the TBWA New York Group and an executive coach who channels his creativity, experience and wisdom into helping others get where they want to be. This was originally posted on his Substack, RobSchwartzHelps, where he covers work, life, and creativity.

Header image: Getty Images for Unsplash+

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Our gratitude is individual. Like the lines and whorls on our fingers, our relationship with gratitude is unique.

Gratitude doesn’t have to be about big things. It doesn’t mean everything is perfect. Our gratitude can be most sustaining and most profound when things are falling apart. We can be grateful for things that are vast, things that are ineffable, but we can also be grateful for small things, for a favorite coffee cup, a soft pillow, the flash of a bird in the tree.

Finding gratitude in the quotidian can help center you, can help you find perspective, and can make a difference in how you experience the world around you.

Talking about gratitude is more commonplace now than it was a handful of years ago, or maybe it feels that way simply because I struggled with gratitude. I struggled to find my footing in gratitude as a mindset and a practice at a time when it seemed like things were falling apart.

I was a late-comer to the gratitude table, or, in my case, hilltop. I found my way there not as things got better but as things started to dissolve. When I first talked out loud about gratitude, I got emotional. I remember feeling like I was shedding my surface as I admitted that what I thought I needed was to focus on gratitude. It didn’t make sense to me, but my discomfort, and even my resistance, seemed important. I struggled with my sense that gratitude was a superficial practice, something that blurred or elided reality. I remember feeling silly. I might as well have been admitting I was going looking for unicorns in the park.

That was a beginning. I was struggling with fear and anxiety and worry over ongoing health issues in my house. I was feeling like there was no bottom to bottom, like I didn’t know where “bottom” was, but I recognized that something was increasingly hollow in me. Almost instinctively, I reached for something shiny, something I thought might be powerful. I reached for gratitude.

The next year, in November, I did 30 days of gratitude writing and recording. I found myself standing at the top of the hill, the literal hill on which I live, at sunset most days, and looking out, a point that lets me see the ocean and the bay, a point that puts the sky in motion overhead. I can turn in a circle and see the whole world. That’s how it feels, the moon over the bay, the sun dropping into the ocean, rose light warming the faces of the houses on the street. November has the best light.

That year, I gave myself over to the top of the hill, to my appreciation for all that was right then, for having that beauty within the distance of a short walk of our senior rescue. I noticed the colors of paint on houses after rain. I wrote about memory, about all that I don’t remember. I wrote about being present, being aware of things we take for granted, and appreciating things that are within reach.

I try to keep gratitude in mind all year long, but November is always a reset point, a month steeped in a gratitude mindset. I no longer cry when I talk about gratitude.3 Like most things, with practice, we get over our resistance, find our own patterns, move past the things that hurt, and find comfort in the routine.

I’ve done a number of November gratitude projects now, both written and drawn. I’ve tracked November light, the barest of diagrams showing the bands of the sky when I first walk into the kitchen and see the light over the bay in the distance. I’ve added gratitudes to daily planners and my Notion dashboard. There is really no wrong way to approach it. One year I did a series of portraits of people in one of my online communities. Two years in a row, I did large drawings to which I added a simple drawing each day of a concrete thing for which I was grateful. (Those projects are favorites.)

It may feel silly to focus on daily gratitude and on gratitude for small things, the favorite coffee cup, the favorite pencil, the familiar quilt, the cozy sweater from a loved one who has passed, but the practice is powerful. It is deceptively simple, but it can make a dramatic difference in how you feel. All that is wrong doesn’t go away. That remains the tension with gratitude. It isn’t an eraser. But something happens in the process of paying more attention, focusing, and looking around with intention and naming and recognizing our gratitude.

Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out.

John Greene, Turtles All The Way Down

Snail Mail – November Postcard Prompt

This month’s postcard prompt is gratitude-infused, but on the concrete level, the prompt is a spiral.

A spiral is a winding path, one that either moves in on itself or radiates from the center out. In walking, tracing, or drawing a spiral, literally or figuratively, there is mindfulness, the coiling or unfurling of thought, the chance to see what sits or stands or dances at other points of the spiral as you pass again and again.

Mathematically speaking, there are a number of different types of spirals, including: the Archimedean spiral, the hyperbolic spiral, Fermat’s spiral, the logarithmic spiral, the lituus spiral, the Cornu spiral, the spiral of Theodorus, the Fibonacci spiral (also called the golden spiral), conical spirals, whorls, and the involute of a circle.

These quick line drawings (not mathematically precise) show some of the spirals listed above.

This elongated spiral doesn’t show up in the list, but we know this model from the world around us:

To multiply the fun, consider the triskelion (or triskele):

We can think about spirals in terms of galaxies (look up “barred spiral”), snails, pinecones, succulents, pineapples, and the horn of a goat. The list goes on.

As a metaphor, we can use the spiral as a path for mindfulness. We can walk the spiral in or out. We can wind our way around and back like a labyrinth.

For this month’s postcard, integrate a spiral and, if you are bold, let gratitude be your guide.

You may want to simply play with the spiral as an image. You might think about cinnamon rolls or the Fibonacci sequence or snails. Or you may want to use the spiral as the form of the writing, starting from the center and writing your message in a spiral. Maybe you choose a special quote or poem. Maybe you express your gratitude to the recipient. Maybe you simply write a letter as a spiral, something the reader will have to slowly spin to read.

There is mindfulness in the reading, too.

Primary or secondary, either way, gratitude is part of the November prompt. If the spiral isn’t of interest, you might use your postcard to document daily gratitudes (one a day). You might draw a series of icons of things for which you are grateful.

Gratitude Quotes

Here are a few gratitude quotes to get you started thinking and appreciating in November:

“Wear gratitude like a cloak, and it will feed every corner of your life.” — Rumi

“Gratitude bestows reverence…changing forever how we experience life and the world.” — John Milton

“Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.” — A.A. Milne

“Happiness, not in another place but this place…not for another hour, but this hour.” — Walt Whitman

“Gratitude for the present moment and the fullness of life now is the true prosperity.” — Eckhart Tolle

We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

If you made and sent an October card, we would love to see what you did with the costume-themed prompt. If you share in social media, please tag me and use #PostcardPrompts.

Amy Cowen is a San Francisco-based writer. A version of this was originally posted on her Substack, Illustrated Life, where she writes about illustrated journals, diary comics/graphic novels, memory, gratitude, loss, and the balancing force of creative habit.

Images courtesy of the author.

The post Connecting Dots: Tracking Gratitude in Snail Mail appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

“All of our surfaces, our skies, our trees are painted by human beings. There’s no geometry covered by rubber-stamping. With hand-painted backgrounds like these, we’ve come full circle to where this whole craft began. Miyazaki’s backgrounds, Bambi’s backgrounds, The Lion King’s backgrounds: they do the best job of creating a world that you can get. Our goal was to get the finished film looking as close to the initial exploratory development drawings as we could get: so abstract and colourful, loose and free and beautiful, and they reminded me a lot of some of the inspirational art by Tyrus Wong that guided Bambi.“

The Spider-Verse films, Klaus, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, The Mitchells Vs The Machines, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle: Mutant Mayhem – do we have a name for this new era of painterly animation? New Artistry? Craftcore?

Animation Obsessive Staff help me out here.

Ooh a colour Kindle is finally here. That sound you hear is a thousand cover designers gently weeping with joy! Curious that one of the promo shots has Ms Marvel on the display, but there’s no mention of Marvel Unlimited integration. I realise these things are essentially shop windows for Amazon and only Amazon, but MU plus a dedicated e-ink reader would be incredible.

Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Red Rocket, Anora) talks to MUBI’s Adrian Curry about his ongoing use of Aguafina Script Pro and how a simple design solution turned into a unique brand identity.

My current favourite jam¹ is LCD Soundsystem and Miles Davis playing in side-by-side browsers. Somehow this works.

Couch to 100k – John Grindrod’s tips for non-fiction writers:

“I’m firmly of the opinion that no subject is a bad subject for a book per se, it’s what you do with it. Perhaps you have the desire to write a book about frogspawn. Or gravel. Or ribbon. Sure, that one word might taunt you. Who is going to be interested in that? But nothing is innately boring. Not when you can communicate what is actually exciting you about the subject. Frogspawn contains the miraculous secret of life; gravel a doorway into the ancient formation of geology and stardust; ribbon the tale of industrial revolutions, global culture and the history of fashion. Actually, why am I writing this blog post, all of those books sound amazing.”

I used to get excited about boring subjects every month for my MacUser column² – “you write interestingly about any old crap” was basically my editor’s pitch. Not sure I have the stamina or attention to go beyond a two-page spread, but maybe one day I’ll give it a go.

In Hidden Portraits, Volker Hermes reimagines historical figures in overwhelming frippery. Great name for a band right there.

Revisiting the Horst P. Horst monograph Style and Glamour after seeing Jack Davison’s incredible Saoirse Ronan shoot for Vogue. He’s captured and modernised Horst’s already-ahead-of-its-time 1940s style³ impeccably.

Oh dear lord I’m trying Bluesky again. Basically just biding my time on this social network carousel until somebody revives mySpace.⁴

That is all.

1. Jams? Do we still talk about our jams? Or did we kick out the jams? ↩︎
2. They’re all pretty much lost to the sands of time now, unless anyone is hoarding old copies of MacUser in their basement … ? If anyone fancies a read, I’ll see if I can dig them out and upload them here in some manner. ↩︎
3. Running with Scissors’s Lisa McKenna put it perfectly in her reply to a recent note: “I’ve always appreciated how [Horst] kept his cover design behind the lens”. ↩︎
4. Seriously, it baffles me that something that still has so much brand recognition and clear purpose – social media based around music – is still up on the shelf, gathering dust. ↩︎

This was originally posted on Meanwhile, a Substack dedicated to inspiration, fascination, and procrastination from the desk of designer Daniel Benneworth-Gray.

Header image courtesy of the author.

The post Meanwhile No. 217 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

I tried to imagine it: my father, not quite into his forties, an advertising executive during the Mad Men days, and my mother, still in her twenties, having recently given up her singing and modeling career, pushing a four-pound me in the English Balmoral pram my grandfather had given them. They took turns on sunny Saturday afternoons, pushing and walking, pushing and walking, against oncoming East Side crowds in the few months before Kennedy was shot, and the remnants of what had been another kind of America would suddenly be gone forever. When they turned around at Twenty-third Street and headed back uptown, they would stop at Mrs. Herbst Bakery on Third Avenue for a slice of strudel and a cup of coffee, and my mother says, even now, that because you had to go two steps up into the bakery, which was quite small, they’d ask for a table near the window and park the pram just outside so they could keep an eye on it while they ate.

My parents were not the type of people to hold three-month-old me on their laps while dining in public, or plopped over their shoulders like a sack of potatoes (I was apparently a big regurgitator and a loud crier who, according to my mother, sounded like Bert Lahr when I was fussing), which meant that they would have to leave me in the pram, parked on the street.

On the other side of the bakery window. In Manhattan.

It feels like such a New York-in-the-early-Sixties thing to do, and to this day, I don’t know whether my mother has the story right. Maybe they wheeled the carriage in and left it by the window on the inside of the bakery, sat down and drank their kaffee mit schlagg while I was cooed over by the older Hungarian strudel makers with the shadow of war still clouding their eyes. Maybe not. Maybe it’s a manifestation of my mother’s tentacular imagination which has grown fainter with age but is still veneered like the caramel on a Dobos Torte with a thin layer of chronic fibbing.

If you are a New Yorker of a certain age, you’re forced to accept that the concept of the weekend stroll followed by a slice of strudel — and of being a flâneur — is now about as alien as sock garters are to a middle schooler.

I’ll never know the answer; maybe it doesn’t matter. But I do know for certain that my parents were both flâneurs. The act of walking was an important part of their weekend ritual, and the stop at Mrs. Herbst their reward for a long afternoon stroll that might have taken them (and me) down Third from their apartment on East 79th Street to Twenty-third Street, all the way over to Fifth, back up Fifth past The Frick, The Guggenheim, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, back over to Third, and to Mrs. Herbst, where they had their coffee and strudel while I slept in my pram on one side or the other of the bakery window.

I acknowledge the frivolity of writing about Manhattan in the Sixties, and walking, and strudel. But I write about this now because my country as I know it may change radically in a few days, and it may become utterly unrecognizable except to those who are old enough to remember what the world was like the last time a fascist psychopath convinced millions to follow him. It’s impossibly hard for me to even believe that I’m saying these words. So I write about this now because I want to remember the sheer, glorious mundanity of a specific time and place that has been mythologized over the years in film, in music, and in books as a period when Scribner’s on Fifth was still a bookstore and not a Sephora, and Abercrombie and Fitch was the twelve-story sporting shop on East 45th Street and Madison Avenue that outfitted Lindbergh for his flight to Paris and not a place to buy your son pre-ripped jeans that hang far enough beneath his hipbones for the world to see what brand of underwear he’s got on; it was when my mother and I walked to Madame Romaine de Lyon almost every weekend for omelets, even while we weren’t speaking to each other (which was often). It was my normal, what I knew, and how and where I was raised. This is the part of New York that still lives in my viscera, and it will stay there until I take my last breath, no matter how the world changes.

When Nora Ephron wrote her New York Times piece about Mrs. Herbst right after Christmas in 2005, I actually cried. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, there was so much attached to and associated with the place. My father had died suddenly three years before the article appeared; my Grandma Clara, the eldest of five children born to a nineteenth-century cavalry officer from Budapest and who always requested that we buy her a whole strip of cabbage strudel and drive it home to her in Forest Hills, seven miles away from Manhattan, died in 1982. Many of the beautiful older buildings dotting my parents’ walking route were replaced by glass and steel monolithic erections that sit mostly empty. As for a slice of cabbage strudel and a cup of coffee after a long, languorous walk: if you are a New Yorker of a certain age (I’m 61), you’re forced to accept that the concept of the weekend stroll followed by a slice of strudel — and of being a flâneur — is now about as alien as sock garters are to a middle schooler.

In his wonderful book, The Flâneur, Edmund White writes Americans are particularly ill-suited to be flaneurs. They are always driven by the urge towards self-improvement. This is only partially true — think of Maira Kalman, Fran Lebowitz, and of course, Nora — and part of the reason why very few people seem to stroll anymore. No one takes what my mittel-Europan grandfather would call a shpatzir. Instead, we walk with intention: hitting our step count (mine is 10,000), getting to our next Pilates class, making it to a work meeting on time while listening to a podcast on productivity. Whenever I’m in the city, I hit my step count within two hours without even thinking about it because I’m marching from Grand Central over to Fifth, getting a taxi up to my mother’s apartment on the West Side, walking over to Broadway to get another cab back to the station, and then running for the train. (Fifteen thousand steps, easily.) When I’m home in Connecticut, I rarely make it to five thousand despite walking the dog, going grocery shopping, going to the gym, and working in the garden. In the days before step-counters and FitBits and Apple Watches, who even thought about such things?

True to my DNA, I went to college in a city ideal for the flâneur. It was my father — he had lived in Boston for three years before marrying my mother — who told me where to start (the west end of Commonwealth Avenue, near my dorm), where to walk (east on Commonwealth or Beacon, or along the Charles River; up to Arlington Street and into the Public Gardens; up to Charles Street on Beacon Hill to Louisburg Square at the top of the Hill; back down again to Beacon Street; back into the Gardens; past the George Washington statue onto Arlington; over to Newbury Street; west on Newbury to Mass Avenue; down Mass Avenue to Commonwealth; west on Commonwealth and back to my dorm), and where to stop for a coffee along the way. There was no intention, no plan; it was walking for the sake of walking, of looking at the world around me. It would have been nice if a slice of strudel had been involved, but alas, no.

When I moved back to New York after college, I would regularly walk from my apartment on East 57th Street up to 60th and Fifth, up Fifth to 72nd Street, across 72nd and through Central Park, over to my mother and stepfather’s apartment on Westend Avenue and 70th. I’d have lunch with my mother, and then I’d walk home the same way. Even my Grandma Clara would leave her apartment in Forest Hills every morning at ten, walk the few blocks to Queens Boulevard, down towards Rego Park and stop for lunch at Woolworth’s where her (as she put it) ladyfriend who worked behind the counter fed her a grilled cheese sandwich and a small cup of tomato soup. And then she’d walk home, even as she was beginning to suffer from congestive heart failure.

I’m a walker, my mother announced to the emergency room doctor one December Saturday night in 2016.

They thought that she, at eighty-one, was exaggerating and that she meant maybe a few city blocks a couple of times a week; they were wrong. Long widowed, she spent her days — literally, every day — walking from her Upper West Side apartment down to 57th Street, across to the East Side, down Fifth to Saks where she’d have lunch (tarragon chicken salad with walnuts), and then home again. Sometimes, if she wasn’t furious with me (and often if she was) she’d take a break on 57th and wait for me in my apartment building lobby, fight with me, and then walk home. So when she suffered a trimalleolar fracture of her right ankle — all three ankle bones snapped like dry kindling — it felt to all of us like the beginning of the last phase of her life because walking her beloved city was probably no longer going to be possible. Her life as a flâneur began before she married my father, and now it was likely over. But really: it wasn’t entirely because of the fall, or because all of those destinations — Mrs. Herbst, and Madame Romaine de Lyon, and even Soup Burg (where she had a bunless burger once a week) — had closed; it was because New York had changed right in front of her, and she had changed with it.

My mother turned eighty-nine this week. She walks very badly now (even with the cane that she would like to wrap around my neck when I remind her to use it), and, as happened with my grandmother, her universe has grown smaller. We only ever go out to eat at Cafe Luxembourg, one block from her apartment. We love it and always have; they always make a fuss over her, and she hastens to tell them that we were there when they opened, back when New York was still New York, she says, and I could walk it from one end to the other.

This post was originally published on Elissa Altman’s blog Poor Man’s Feast, The James Beard Award-winning journal about the intersection of food, spirit, and the families that drive you crazy. Read more on her Substack, or keep up with her archives on PRINT.

Photo by Dominik Leiner on Unsplash.

The post Poor Man’s Feast: When They Walked the City appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

1. If you spill some M&Ms while you are riding in the car, and you happen to accidentally sit on one for several hours, and it stains your white pants, you can get the stain out with Spray and Wash.

2. If you are at a restaurant, and they give out those red peppermints in cellophane, and you put one in your pocket for later, and you forget about it, and you put your pants in the wash, you will find the wrapper at the bottom of your washer. You will not find the peppermint.

3. If you are driving home for several hours in the dark, and you stop at a gas station to “use the facilities,” and you feel like you ought to buy something since you are using all their nice facilities, and you notice a new kind of “3x Chocolate Snickers” featuring chocolate-ish nougat and chocolate-ish caramel along with the usual chocolate coating, and you buy it, and you break it into pieces in the car to share with your family, and your loving spouse drops some of the crumbs of chocolate onto his shirt, and they melt, you will need that Spray and Wash again. You will not, however, need to try another 3x Chocolate Snickers.

I did the following interview with Kawash in 2014.

In her book “Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure,” retired Rutgers University literature professor Samira Kawash investigates the surprisingly neglected story of how business and technological innovations turned the U.S. into what a 1907 visitor called “the great candy eating nation.” Candy, she argues, is essential to understanding the history of how Americans eat. It was, Kawash writes, the “first ready-to-eat processed food, the original ancestor of all our fast, convenient, fun, imperishable, tasty, highly advertised brand-name snacks and meals.” For more than a century, we’ve simultaneously gorged on the stuff and felt guilty about it. It’s an intensified version of our ambivalent and fickle attitudes toward abundant, convenient, mass-produced food in general.

“The candy that gives us some of our happiest experiences is the same candy that rots our teeth, ruins our appetite, and sucks tender innocents into a desperate life of sugar addiction,” she writes. “Candy joins the ideas of pleasure and poison, innocence and vice, in a way that’s unique and a bit puzzling.” Candy is, one might say, both trick and treat. With Halloween in mind, I interviewed Kawash by e-mail.

Question: When and how did candy become associated with Halloween? Was trick-or-treating just concocted to sell candy?

Answer: Would you believe the earliest trick-or-treaters didn’t even expect to get candy? Back in the 1930s, when kids first started chanting “trick or treat” at the doorbell, the treat could be just about anything: nuts, coins, a small toy, a cookie, or a popcorn ball. Sometimes candy too, maybe a few jelly beans or a licorice stick. But it wasn’t until well into the 1950s that Americans started buying treats instead of making them, and the easiest treat to buy was candy. The candy industry also advertised heavily and, by the 1960s, was offering innovative packaging and sizes like mini-bars to make it even easier to give out candy at Halloween. But if you look at candy trade discussions about holiday marketing in the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween doesn’t even get a mention.

Q: Candy corn is a sweet we only see at Halloween (and it isn’t particularly popular with kids who get it). What’s its story?

A: Actually I think candy corn is making a huge comeback. Maybe not as candy proper, but candy corn is emerging as an exciting new flavor for everything from marshmallows to Oreos to M&Ms. It’s funny, since the flavor of candy corn is mostly just a blast of sweet. And personally, much as I love candy corn, I have yet to taste a candy-corn flavor confection that was anything but dreadful. Taste aside, it’s obvious that candy corn as an idea is irresistible: Today, those bands of yellow, orange, and white just scream “Halloween.” Most people don’t know that candy corn was originally a year-round penny candy. Back in the 1880s, when that kind of “mellowcreme” was invented, there were all kinds of agriculturally inspired shapes, from pea pods and apples to walnuts and corn cobs. Since corn was harvested in the fall, candy corn became a popular treat for autumn-themed decorating and for Halloween parties. Now that candy is so closely identified with Halloween, candy corn has been crowned the unofficial mascot for the holiday.

Q: You write about what you call “Halloween sadist legends.” Do these perennial tales of poisoned candy and razor blades in apples have any basis in truth? How are they connected to the non-Halloween history of candy?

A: Every Halloween, some earnest civic group reminds parents to be alert for “tampering” that might reveal some poison or drug or sharp thing lurking in the innocent candy loot. And how many instances of such tampering have been documented? Almost none. When there is actual harm, it almost always turns out to be traced to one of three causes: either a malevolent adult meant to hurt a child under cover of the anonymous Halloween sadist, or a child was accidentally poisoned and adults tried to cover it up by pointing fingers at a murky murderous stranger, or someone (usually a kid) wanted to get attention by planting evidence and then “discovering” a tainted treat. It’s gruesome to say it, but the myth of the Halloween sadist turns out to be quite useful if you are hoping to get away with murder.

What fascinated me as I researched the history of candy was discovering how often candy has been blamed when something bad happens, even before the Halloween scares of the 1970s. It turns out that “poison candy” is an idea as old as mass-produced candy, going back to the 1880s. And as with the “Halloween sadist,” poison candy was mostly a myth. People found it easy to believe that candy was harmful, even when it wasn’t. It was a novel form of food, entirely artificial, entirely for pleasure. A lot of people looked at those bright colors and strange flavors and concluded that it couldn’t possibly be safe.

Q: What does Halloween candy tell us about the meaning and value of brands?

A: One of the biggest casualties of the poison treat scares of the 1970s was homemade sweets. In the 1960s and before, it was totally fine to give out something you’d made yourself. But once people got it in their heads that maniacs were out there trying to kill their children with Halloween treats, everything homemade was suspect. After all, you didn’t know whose hands had touched that cookie and what scary ingredients might be hidden under the chocolate chips. Same for unwrapped candies and off-brand candies: If it wasn’t sealed in a recognizable, major brand factory label, then it was guilty until proven innocent. Nationally advertised candy brands were familiar and trusted, unlike that spooky neighbor who just might be an axe murderer. It’s one of the huge successes of processed food marketing, to make us trust and feel good about the factory food, and to distrust and denigrate the homemade and the neighborly. I think this is starting to swing back in the other direction though, at least in urban areas. Today, consumers are pretty obsessed with the artisanal and the small batch and will pay a huge premium for candy that is nothing like Hershey or Mars. On the other hand, every year, the candy that’s wrapped for Halloween treating gets more and more homogeneous, and the national brands rule.

Q: Your book starts with a story in which another parent compares your child’s jelly beans to crack cocaine. How does Halloween candy survive in a culture where candy is seen as dangerous?

A: Well, number one is, kids love it! And I think our society really does have a very ambivalent relation to candy, which includes both extremely positive and extremely negative feelings. I do feel like the candy part of Halloween has gone overboard, though. There are so many fun things about the holiday, but all too often kids end up obsessed with just piling up as much candy as they can. When kids are just marching from house to house and holding out their bags, trick-or-treating seems kind of joyless, more like work. Hmm, I wonder where they learned that?

Virginia Postrel is a writer with a particular interest in the intersection of commerce, culture, and technology. Author of The Future and Its Enemies, The Substance of Style, The Power of Glamour, and, most recently, The Fabric of Civilization. This essay comes from her archives, originally published in Virginia’s newsletter on Substack.

Header image: Unsplash+ in collaboration with Hans Isaacson.

The post How Candy Conquered Halloween appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

*

Every morning for the last five or so years of my teaching practice, I have asked students a question that they answer as part of their attendance roll call. Ideally, the questions are generated by the students, but often, I pepper in questions of mine. It is a routine that has never ceased to be interesting to me, to see through the portals of these questions into the nooks and crannies of students’ lives. I have heard so many stories that stay with me…. a few most memorably include a pair of magical fish, a grilled roadside snake, and a phone that wouldn’t stop ringing in an attic.

This ritual is borne from my belief that questions, especially slant or searching or deep questions, connect us to each other in radiant and unexpected ways. 

The questions, as much as the answers, reveal us to one another.

*

Last year, at the beginning of May, on Instagram, my friend Shira (who writes a deeply beautiful Substack called Freer Form that you can read here) invited followers to join her in a month of questioning. The task was simply to notice the questions we ask and collect them in some way. I kept track of my wondering in a digital note called MAY I?

Some of my questions were mundane—Where did I put my phone? What time is my next scheduled ‘let’s hop on a call?’ How much cheese is too much?—but many of my other questions were surprising in the way that the world is when we stop to really look at it.

I discovered so many small mysteries littered in the track of my everyday life: What exactly is an email? (what is a byte??) Why does my toaster fling the bread a foot into the air after it’s finished? Is that failure or exuberance? Does it have to be one or the other? Why do I add the numbers of license plates together? How do I not know what 9 + 7 is without counting on my fingers? Why is a vase of fresh flowers something I delight in every time I see it? Is delight so SIMPLE?!

And there were so many bigger, deeper questions that began to stack up: What places does love make for you? What is your strangest encounter? What part of your body does sadness find first? What do you save? How does it feel to be you? Who is the last person you messaged? What is the most used emoji in your phone? What do you think about on an airplane during terrible turbulence? What is the earliest thing you can recall? What always makes you smile? What is your ugliest belief?

*

Of course, in the classroom, there’s never any sure way to predict how anything will go, and so I never know which morning attendance questions will generate a lot of conversation.

I, for one, did not think that asking What is the best bird? would create as much debate as it did. There were staunch supporters of penguins, of finches, of blue jays, of toucans. Others stood for birds I didn’t know, birds I had to look up and see for the first time: their dappled gray chests, their hard red eyes.

*

By the end of MAY I? I had so many questions written down that I would spend the rest of the year pairing the questions with photographs and sending them out to my corner of Instagram. As people answered, I realized the bounty of their responses—beautiful, heart-opening, often sad, often funny, often both at the same time.

Some answers, in particular, I wrote down and carried with me from the bed to the shower to the car to the highway and back again, carried them with me and showed them the parts of my life that they spoke to:

Here, here is the road he drove the wrong way down not once, but twice.

Here, here is the river freezing over.

Here, here is the corner store where the owner never makes anything quickly.

*

For myself, I believe the best bird is the demoiselle crane, so named by Marie Antoinette who was charmed by the crane’s small stature (the smallest of the crane species) and the graceful black feathers adorning its chest which stand in sharp contrast to the trailing ivory feather plumes that stretch from the eye over the head.

This crane, however, is only delicate in appearance. It is, in fact, the only bird whose long loop migration takes it over the Himalayas in the winter. Indeed, demoiselle cranes have been filmed flying far above the 8,848-meter peak of Mount Everest as they move from the steppes of Rajasthan in India to reach the softer grasslands of Mongolia to breed and raise their young.

It is an incredibly long and arduous migration and many cranes die of exhaustion. Yet, every year, those that survive begin to fly beyond the most towering peaks in the world in order to reach an unseen almost impossible land. I would tell you what this bird reveals to you about me but I already have.

*

I’m Wondering is a monthly column where I ask and then answer a question. More than anything, I hope that as I continue to wonder, it will open all of us up to paths we can’t imagine now but feel called to by a question that won’t let us go.

Amy Lin lives in Calgary, Canada where there are two seasons: winter and road construction. She completed her MFA at Warren Wilson College and holds BAs in English Literature and Education. Her work has been published in places such as Ploughshares and she has been awarded residencies from Yaddo and Casa Comala. She writes the Substack At The Bottom Of Everything where she wonders: how do we live with anything? HERE AFTER is her first book.

Header photo: Demoiselle cranes in Khichan near Bikaner. CC 4.0

The post I’m Wondering: What’s The Best Bird? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Much like our students, though, we tend to have a transactional attitude toward our work, creative processes, and lives. We sometimes look like we have lost our spark and joy for learning, living, and thriving. We don’t want to figure things out; we want the blueprint. And while the blueprint is sometimes useful, if we don’t allow time for the process and failures, how will we engage in transformative lessons to foster our creative process and strengthen our tacit knowledge?

Sometimes, I think we have lost our way in our current capitalist economic system. It is like the balance has tipped completely, overshadowing the intrinsic value of living to learn because it is joyful or doing our job for the sheer sense of worth. Those in charge seem to be concerned with profit at the expense of their most valuable assets, the people they hire. Thus, they want more work for less money. Alongside, the dollar’s value decreases, and its acquisition power weakens. Things are overall more expensive.

Amid this context, we might feel we lack the choice to love our job and give it all because we are not valued. Loyalty does not seem to be significantly rewarded, chipping away little by little at our joy for our job.

This week, I had one of the hardest conversations of my career (with the administration). Compared to other instructors in my area, I make a third less while having the same degree and qualifications. Two factors would account for a percentage: one is time served, and the other is rank. However, the sum difference is hardly justified by those factors. I am scheduled to have a second conversation soon. Until then, I must wait.

My life’s value does not hinge on my job. I love what I do. No matter how bad a day I have, I soar when I enter the classroom. I love talking to the students about the process of being a designer, the ups and downs, the inevitable creative blocks, and the tips to unlock ideas. I rejoice with their progress and ideas.

I don’t work transactionally, though I have boundaries to protect my family time, creative time, and research. I had been aware of the pay discrepancy in the back of my head, but I had not woken up to it. When I did, it hit me hard.

A transactional attitude towards life and work is probably an easier, more efficient, and more effective way to go through life’s ups and downs. When you work with college students, however, who are looking to learn but also belong and feel that they matter, a transactional attitude helps no one. Relationships are symbiotic. Students change me as much as I change them as they progress in their pursuit of degrees. No one prepares you for the transformational and profound experience of being part of someone else’s growth. This is especially true in small cohorts and programs.

Why do I do what I do? Because there is nothing more meaningful to me than sharing what I have learned with others. When I see a spark of joy in their eyes because something clicked, it makes my day. Every time. Yes, it is hard sometimes. Dealing with people is frequently messy and not linear. And yes, as time goes by, their college experience and memories will be replaced by other life moments that are much more transformational. That’s as it should be. But, while we are together in that classroom, I am committed to transforming their minds as much as they transform mine.

Alma Hoffmann is a freelance designer, design educator, author of Sketching as Design Thinking, and editor at Smashing Magazine. This is an edited version of a post originally published on Temperamental amusing shenanigans, Alma’s Substack dedicated to design, life, and everything in between.

Header image by Ikhsan Fauzi on Unsplash.

The post Transform, Not Transact appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

I’m creating no less than seven presentations and workshops and one that captured my attention over the last few days involves pizza.

The workshop is called, “Slice to Pie.” It’s a metaphor for the transition from leading a domain-specific discipline to full enterprise management. In human terms, it’s when you go from being a leader of, say, accounts to becoming President or CEO. (In my case I went from Chief Creative Officer to CEO.)

Essentially, you have your slice. And next thing you know, you’ve got the whole pie.

The workshop I’m leading will go into detail about this transition and how to approach it.

Here are a few things that might help you as you’re pondering trying to make a similar move happen.

Step one, before you get your head around the enterprise, get your mind around understanding finance. If you’re not coming from a finance background learn the basics and learn the terms.

Sure, every finance meeting is essentially the same plot: What’s the money coming in? (Revenue). What’s the money we’re using to run this thing? (Cost). What’s left over? (Profit).

Oh, you can go one step further and calculate the profit as a percentage. (Margin). That’ll show you how efficiently things are going. And trust me, the conversation will go deep and wide into ways to prune costs. But keeping this foundation will always ground you in the root of the conversation.

Best of all, once you know that every day your CFO and her team will be thinking about this (and every month you’ll be reporting it) you can turn your attention to the rest of the pie.

In my workshop, I break down the enterprise into my 3P framework. (Those of you who follow this blog will know this ol’ chestnut). The 3Ps: People, Process, Product.

When you approach the pie through this 3P lens you can really manage and lead.

For example:

People: Listening and motivating.

Process: Focus on how you create and make your ideas and products.

Product: The thing you are producing. How good is it? How are you pricing it? How are you selling it?

Do the first Ps right and it all leads to a fourth P: Profit.

Here’s another thing: Use the 3Ps as an assessment tool. You see, if any one of these elements is misaligned, you’ll have problems. Don’t have the right People? The Process will be irrelevant and the Product will suffer. Have the right People but no Process? You might get lucky on Product but it won’t be sustainable. Product is mediocre? Well, is it the People or the Process? No doubt, it’s all affecting your Profit.

Is this utterly reductive? You bet it is.

Coming into a CEO role as a trained copywriter, I found so many issues and conversations were complicated and loaded with confusing jargon.

I simplified everything.

That’s what I preach. That’s what I teach.

Simplify.

It all comes back to pizza. It’s a few simple ingredients all working together. Maybe that’s why you’re rarely satisfied with just one slice.

Rob Schwartz is the Chair of the TBWA New York Group and an executive coach who channels his creativity, experience and wisdom into helping others get where they want to be. This was originally posted on his Substack, RobSchwartzHelps, where he covers work, life, and creativity.

Header image by Polina Kuzovkova for Unsplash+.

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