I appeared on Blood Satellite (perverse official orthography: Blood $atellite) in May 2025 talking about the plain, baldfaced – sometimes even boldfaced – fact that conservatives cannot design. Well, they can’t.
First of all: Episode homepage ☛
Or try playing right here:
I produced a reasonably narrow transcript. The notes you would otherwise have read in this paragraph have simply disappeared, which has never happened in 33 years online. In fact, the page you are presently reading completely disappeared, which also never had happened before. I am simply not that incompetent.
I smelled a rat, so I fact-checked my own ass by reading not one but four books by and about Shepard Fairey, who designed “Andre the Giant Had a Posse” and “Obey” and “Obey Giant” and the Obama “Hope” poster.
He’s a Democrat champagne socialist as a result. The only thing he wasn’t at the outset was a millionaire.
The Times regrets the error.
Here are a few books you can read if you’d like to begin to appreciate typography.
(I’m giving just a couple of suggestions here because the classic pitfall of right-wing literature autists is to inundate you with an entire syllabus.)
Additionally:
The basic books on typography that will be presented to you upon a simple Web search tend to be quite good (e.g., Thinking with Type; Just My Type).
An advanced but amazingly readable and understandable book about the entire psychological and perceptual process of reading is While You’re Reading. You will be shocked how comprehensible the late Gerard Unger makes a whole suite of topics that had heretofore been literally and figuratively invisible to you.
Natalia Ilyin invented the genre of design autobiography with Chasing the Perfect (coverage).
Charles Jencks’ books on postmodern architecture are best read by flipping through them, ignoring any and all masses of text, and doing nothing but looking at photos and reading their cutlines.
Do you like brutalist buildings? You should like some of them. Fuck yeah, you should (forgive the vulgarity).
House Industries in Delaware is a highly skilled design shop that got its start with grunge or garage fonts. Boy, have they moved up in the world. Their books are nothing less than stunning.
This is going to take me a little while, and may involve re-uploading a version of the podcast audio with chapter markers (and associated images), but in due course I will list all the design objets I mentioned (e.g., Æron chair, “Andre the Giant Had a Posse”/Obama “Hope”).
Yes, there are actual movies you can watch. (And one TV show.)
Helvetica is a single-minded tour de force covering the canonical typeface of the late 20th century. But it’s now hard to find or watch. (One streaming option. DVDs are still in print, though. [Coverage.])
Graphic Means does a kind-of-OK job of explaining the facts behind its subtitle, “A History of Graphic Design Production.” Just as young people think you really had to shake a Polaroid picture in order for it to develop (you didn’t), even members of Generation X have managed to forget just how manual, cumbersome, error-prone, and laborious were all aspects of typesetting and layout before today’s really good computers and printers.
This dramatic TV series from circa 1987–1990 was hugely influential, even “controversial,” in its time, but is forgotten now. It’s shot through with Jewish neuroticism, and spends too much time on unsympathetic peripheral characters (gals especially), but at core Thirtysomething treats a pair of admen and their fall and rise.
Fans of physiognomy will not fail to note the way Michael Steadman, the writer half of the duo, is presented while in an office setting. You have never seen more sumptuous, flowing, tactile business suits in your life; he looked like a million bucks. Steadman’s artist partner, Elliot Weston, is a redhead who dresses halfway like a clown. (Tautological?)
In cold light of day here in the current century, any swarthy/ginger pairing (think Pete Sampras and Boris Becker) has become halfway a fetish item, as depicted in that film by that homosexualist with the ravenous eye, Challengers by Guadagnino. But the contrast between Steadman and Weston is manifestly a component of this highly visual television series.
A writer/art-director partnership of that sort was new at the time, and, true to the use of the virgule, led to the creation and naming of Chiat/Day, itself mentioned on the show. (Indeed, Chiat/Day is a setting at one point.)
And speaking of office settings: The work environment of ad agency DAA is so echt-1980s you’ll want to move in and live there.
Full seasons at YouTube. (You can also buy DVDs. There are entire book compilations of Thirtysomething scripts.)
Apart from taking days and days, indeed separate tranches of days and days, to somehow teach Dimes to link directly to this page, nobody, at all, ever, has put this much effort into being a guest on Dimes’s show. Or on any other show.
For the first time in 33 years, the page you are currently reading simply disappeared from my server. My laborious backups almost completely failed, and it is borderline miraculous you are able to read this selfsame page.
Posted: 2025.05.30 2025.06.27