It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it […]

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I’ve been thinking for some time about a phenomenon I’ve called The Midwest Small Town Inferiority Complex. I’m in the market for a catchier name, but the complex can be summarized in the following axiomatic statements: As a person who lives and works in a small midwestern town, I would like to think that the […]

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The legacy of the cheap book There was a time when a printed book was a treasure. Costly materials and the laborious process of copying and binding a book by hand meant that only well-off members of society owned any books at all, and only the wealthy had more than a few books. Not only […]

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“Ladies and Gentlemen, behold: The Enemy:”He raised the blinds, and there was the street below. Townies going up and down upon the land. Greased, efficient gears in the Village engine. Harmless.“Relentless. Unstoppable. You cannot hope to defeat them. Nor, as a matter of fact, would you want to. Their defeat also means yours. When a […]

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Design is problem solving. Art may follow the muse, but design always has a goal. The work of the graphic designer is to exercise creativity in the service of some purpose. While the artist has the freedom to express and explore—in a sense, to ask questions and create “problems” for the audience—the designer is always […]

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Someone recently asked me for recommendations on books about typography and I was nerdishly delighted, because books and typography are two of my favorite subjects. The Elements of Typographic Style The first book that came to mind was of course Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style (first published in 1992). For one thing, both […]

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As she takes my temperature just inside the first set of doors, my eye wanders to her interrupted sudoku puzzle. She makes a point of conspicuously sterilizing the thermometer as she asks about my symptoms, or lack of symptoms in my case. Voices muffled by our masks, she asks about my health, the health of […]

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Christmas finds us unready. On the way to our Christmas Eve service tonight I found myself feeling, more than anything, unready. The book of daily advent readings we’ve been going through with our kids is open to day 17; there are presents yet to wrap, and some still being shipped, and some I forgot to […]

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Earlier this month I had the opportunity to participate in a group show created by AIGA South Dakota—the South Dakota Stamp Show. For this show AIGA asked 13 area designers to each create a set of five concept postage stamps around a topic related to our fair state. I chose I-90 as my topic. Interstate 90 […]

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Short story by Steve Allen, originally published in 1955 The weather was a little cloudy on that September 9, 1978, and here and there in the crowds that surged up the ramps into the stadium people were looking at the sky and then at their neighbors and squinting and saying, “Hope she doesn’t rain.” On […]

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