Jarrett Fuller

The Last Skeuomorph in iOS?

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The software design language Apple used for the first few years of the iPhone is what we now commonly refer to as skeuomorphic, which was essentially mimicking real world, physical objects. There were visual metaphors like a leather texture in Calendar, a handwriting font in Notes, a wooden bookshelf in Books that contrasted with the minimalist design of the hardware. It looked like this:

In 2013, Apple released iOS7 and replaced nearly all the skeuomorphs with what was then referred to as a “flat design” that looked like this:

This led, as you would expect, to much debate about the merits of one or the other, skeuomorphic or flat. Those feel like simpler times. In the years since, however, Apple has gradually added texture and depth back into the iPhone interface without ever fully returning to a skeuomorphic approach. (Liquid Glass, its latest design language, in other words, is neither flat nor skeuomorphic but is also filled with texture, depth, tone in a way iOS7 was not.)

The argument was that in those early years, visual software design should mimic their physical counterparts so users would understand how to interact with them on a glass screen. After we got comfortable with it, the metaphors were no longer necessary; the move from skeuomorphic to flat.

I’ve been thinking about this now-long-ago debate because I just got one of the new iPhone 18 Pros (I tend to keep my phones for as long as I can before upgrading) and every time I get a new phone, I like to poke around apps I know well just to see what new things it can do.

I opened up the Camera app — an app I’ve used probably every day since my first iPhone — and heard this sound:

Your browser does not support the audio element.

It’s 2026 and when I click the button on my glass phone, it makes a shutter sound! There are still skeuomorphs in iOS after all! The skeuomorphic designs of the early camera simulated a shutter closing and opening when you a took a photo but that’s long been replaced with just a subtle blink of the screen. And yet! The shutter sounds remains.

This is curious because it does not aid in usability. You get the visual cue on the screen a photo has been taken. What’s more, I wonder how many iPhone users today have taken photographs with a camera that has physical shutter? Do most iPhone users even know what a shutter is? (The irony is not lost on me that this new phone actually does have a physical shutter. That shutter, though, is silent. Apple is essentually simulating the shutter sound while a real shutter is actually firing.)

I always have my phone on silent so I don’t hear the sound design throughout iOS but I started poking around the sound settings to see if any other skeumorphs remain. The only other app that simulates a physical sound is the Phone app itself, where when one presses the number keys, it sounds like pressing numbers on a landline phone, noticbly different than the simple taps heard on the general keyboard interface. Interestingly, too, the keyboard taps do not sound like mechanical keys or even Apple’s own hardware keyboards: they are clearly digital. There are, of course, classic rings when you get a phone call, but they are not set to the default.

I started thinking about Brian Eno’s Windows95 startup sound — perhaps the first Eno “song” I ever heard, certainly a soundtrack to my childhood. Or how last year, Apple asked Phineas to compose a new sound design for Apple TV. I’m no sound designer so I have no answer but I’m curious what other sounds could simulate the taking of a photo? What new tones would sound appropriate? Could the shutter sound be, ironically, the perfect skeuomorph?

“This very fertile period of architecture discourse”

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Elizabeth Blasius, in a great essay for MAS Context, on the highs and lows of the Chicago-based architecture magazine Inland Architect:

In 1983, a hundred years to the month since the first issue of Inland Architect had been published, writer and critic Cynthia Davidson was hired as editor. To determine a path forward for this new position, Davidson went to Chicago’s Newberry Library, which had in its collections the bound 1883–1908 iteration of Inland Architect. “I started looking at them,” shares Davidson in a phone interview, “and I said, ‘look at this, it’s just the architects themselves who were writing.’”5 Hired by Harry Weese himself, who fired the previous editor to hire Davidson, Davidson gave Weese the last page of the magazine to write about whatever he wished. Davidson would encourage other architects, of firms both large and small, to write articles, to write about their colleague’s projects, and to collaborate with each other.

During the height of the Modern versus Postmodern debate, Inland Architect played off of the factions. “We had a real exchange going on in the magazine,” says Davidson. Differences of opinions were often printed within the same issue.

“We couldn’t have known it at the time, but Inland Architect occurred during this very fertile period of architectural discourse,” shares Philip Bess, a former contributor, now Professor of Architecture and Department Chair of the Architecture Program at Judson University, in a phone interview.6 Bess, then an architect early in his career, teamed up with fellow architect Howard Decker to write a column called the “Chicago Architecture Police.” Together, their column interrogated buildings, exhibits, and even the critique process at architecture schools. Howard Decker describes Inland Architect as providing an opportunity for younger professionals to engage with architects of an older generation, both in print and in person. Decker, who would later serve as Chief Curator of the National Building Museum in Washington D.C., elaborates in a phone interview, “there was not a lot of precedent for that before the 1980s, and Inland Architect was a part of the vehicle for that.”

It’s cliche to say that you want more thoughtful, longform design writing but is it also a cliche to say you want more thoughtful, longform design writing about design writing? I find stories like this so important for an inside look at how design is discussed — and ultimately, what gets remembered. I wish there was more writing and history about the publications that shaped the discourse. This is what I was trying to do with my piece on Dot Dot Dot that was published in Eye on Design back in 2021 (!).

My only knowledge of Inland Architect, admittedly, is through Davidson, who I had on Scratching the Surface two years ago so it was nice to read this full, hundred year history of the singular publication. Davidson left Inland to start and edit ANY, which she ran for a decade before then started Log. There’s a new book coming next year from Lars Muller Publishers by Zachariah Michielli, Cathelijne Nuijsink, Ashley Schafer, and Aaron Tobey on the history and influence of ANY. You know I’ll be preordering it as soon as it’s available!

New essay: Design is dead. Long live design!

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My latest essay for Fast Company was published at the beginning of the month while I was on vacation, so I’ve been remiss in posting about it here. It’s called Design is on its deathbed. Long Live Design! and is my attempt to make sense of what artificial intelligence — especially new tools like Claude Design — is doing to both design practice and the industry at large. The piece is pegged to the cheeky pop-up that Figma staged earlier in the year around the theme “design is dead.” That event, I thought, tapped into some deep-seeded thoughts I’ve seen in the design industry for as long as I’ve been practicing:

This feeling that design is dead, or at least dying, is a familiar one. I’ve worked across the design industry for nearly 20 years—from designer to writer to university professor—and for my entire career, death has seemingly been knocking at our door.

I have a vivid memory of a high school friend (someone far outside my design world) asking me as we graduated whether I was worried about studying graphic design because anyone could get a copy of Photoshop.

Then in the early 2010s, I remember conversations with designer friends about whether we should be worried about emerging platforms like Squarespace and Wix, which were making web design newly accessible to anyone with an internet connection, while a plethora of logo-making services were emerging, threatening the same for branding.

Last month, when the man installing my new air conditioner asked what I did, and I told him I’m a designer, his first response was to ask how I was dealing with “this AI thing.”

I’m sure we can go back even further. Before all of this, of course, there were designers who looked at the desktop computer with uncertainty. Some felt the same way about printing technology.

There’s a history of design that could be told through the lens of designers afraid that design is dying. Which is to say that this piece isn’t really about artificial intelligence or the impending death of design at all. It’s really about how design — in all forms, though I focus on my fields of graphic and interactive design — are always in a process of change, informed by technological innovation, cultural revolution, and more.

I was curious about how artificial intelligence was, perhaps, speeding up those fears so I spent the summer talking with the folks actually building these tools — the design lead at Anthropic, an insights manager at Figma, and a design VP at Amazon AWS — about how they use AI, how it’s changing their work, and what they see, from their roles, for the future of design.

I started working on this at the beginning of the summer as I was coming off another project that was informing much of my thinking. My day job is teaching the next generation of designers so part of my job also means not only that in some way, I have to believe design is not dead but that I also have to figure out what that future could look like.

One way I do that is running a sponsored studio project with SAS, an analytics software company based here in the Research Triangle, every Spring. I’ve led for the last five years and over the years, we’ve worked on projects around data ethics, new ways to visualize complexity, rethinking APIs, and new interaction models for generative AI. The outcome, because this is embedded in a design program, is usually framed as an interface: students research and think through big ideas and turn that into a coherent digital product. We write personas, develop user flows, create functioning prototypes, and film scenario videos. Having done the project for a few years now, both myself and my collaborators at SAS were interested in shaking up the project a bit. Some things we kept circling:

how could we get students to think more broadly about their work beyond product-focused goals?
were there other deliverables beyond the “interface” that could push students into areas of work and inquiry?
what are new potentials for agentic AI and how might that inform what a designer works on?
how do we build systemic thinking into the project from the start, considering various outcomes, stakeholders, and use cases?

The project we ran was called “Speculative Worlds: New Potentials in Democratic Practices”. Working in teams, students built fully-functioning AI agents using Github and VSCode and a combination of ChatGPT and Microsoft Co-Pilot to think through real, societal problems. They did research, built knowledge bases, iterated on policy design, and ultimately designed systems where people (citizens, public servants, etc) would interact with the agents.

The project shifted the focus of the students from immediately jumping to interfaces to spending more time on systems. For many of these students, too, it was their first time working — designing — in code. I think it’s fair to say it was a hard transition for the students: it they had to shift their mindset from “interface design” to “system design that happens to have some interfaces” (and those interfaces might take different forms: websites, apps, public signage, printed materials, etc.), they couldn’t jump right into Figma and start prototyping so the entire design process they were familiar with was flipped upside down.

I’ll have more to say and write about this project in the future but it clarified for me that the current design processes are too limited for the complexity of the problems, projects, and challenges designers are tasked with today. Code is, once again, a valuable design tool that students should have experience with. “User Experience”, the defacto design process and perspective of our time, already feels dated and quaint to me. One future of design, perhaps, is one moving upstream — away from the production of artifacts to the organization of systems. (This also speaks to another recurring research interest of mine: the rise of strategy as a separate field in design.)

I started writing this new essay with all this mind. I was thinking about the work my students did and how different it was from the work they’d done before but I was also thinking about the reception to that work in our final presentations which clarified new ways designers can and could work. I was also drawing on my previous Fast Company essays, on AI and aesthetics and on brand strategy.

This is, perhaps, a long-winded way of saying that I have no fear of AI killing design (spoiler alert!). To look back at history, is to see design — graphic, industrial, interactive — constantly adapting to increasingly democratizing tools. As I write:

In a paper presented at the very first Type Directors Club conference in 1958, British designer and writer Herbert Spencer said of the role of printing: “What I am trying to stress is that we must be constantly alert to the technical changes now taking place in printing and in methods of reproduction and mass communication generally.” Spencer’s urging feels just as relevant today, though the “technical changes” are quite different 70 years on.

The progression of technological advancements of the last, say, 30 years—from desktop publishing to Claude Design—has been a slow process of democratizing design tools by putting them in the hands of more and more people. The skills needed to produce design no longer require years of study as these tools become faster, cheaper, and easier to use.

What artificial intelligence does to design, then, is divorce conception from production (which, as I write elsewhere in the piece, is actually an old idea about design too!). It separates the process from the artifact. If an AI tool can make a decent layout, interface, logo, whatever that means more non-designers will start doing design BUT also that designers will start doing more “non-design” work. This is what my students did this past semester: research, policy writing, AI development, etc. AI doesn’t kill design but it does blur design and how designers work.

Alongside all this, I’ve continued my own mini-experiments in AI software design — building and coding little apps to fill gaps in my workflow — and it’s gotten me thinking about how, paradoxically, “user-centered design” is more important than ever before. AI is big: it thinks big, it likes big databases, it works well “at scale”. The designer, then, must bring this back to human-size. Design, then, perhaps can no longer be “universal” or “generic” or “standard”. Design can again be bespoke, personal, customizable.

This is what my students were doing in their project: they designed and built these big, complex systems but then they had to figure out how to make those legible for people. They had to figure out what interactions, tools, interfaces were needed for various people in various circumstances. In an era where it’s easier to produce design than ever before, the task before us is to figure out how to rise above the slop, to meet people where they are. As I close my essay:

This is the task before designers: How do we design large systems that work at a human scale, that truly put the human in human-centered design? That’s a task that’s as messy and unquantifiable as design itself. It’s a task that can’t be automated. It’s a task less about data and production and more about feeling. At the risk of correcting Jobs, design isn’t just what it looks like or how it works anymore: Design is how it feels.

You can read the whole piece over on Fast Company!

“Architecture is morphing into a pan-disciplinary practice”

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Tucked into her smart piece on “luxury scaffolding” in Curbed — featuring the recent Prada work done by 2x4 — Lauren Sinclair writes:

The Prada scaffolding is sophisticated architectural thinking; it just didn’t come from a traditional architecture firm. Architecture is morphing into a pan-disciplinary practice, where architects leave conventional practice to apply their thinking at the intersection of strategy, branding, graphic design, and spatial environments. 2x4 isn’t the exception; it’s an indicator of where architectural thinking is migrating toward and what it’s capable of when it gets there.

Putting aside the surprise to find discourse on pan-disciplinarity in Curbed, Sinclair, in two sentences, summarizes my project of the last decade. What’s been subconsciously interesting to me is why architecture — and architects — appear more comfortable in this form of expanded practice in a way graphic designers are not. Even here, Sinclair is writing about 2x4, a firm that emerges from graphic design not architecture, but it’s framed as architectural thinking.

My work is an attempt to show that graphic design, too, is a pan-disicplinary practice where graphic designers can leave traditional practice to apply their thinking at the intersection of strategy, branding, graphic design, and spatial (and digital) environments. Perhaps the reason I’ve had so many architects on the podcast over the last ten years is to figure out the comfort they have in leaving the discpline in a way graphic designers don’t.

Of course, this is also the theme of my new book, Graphic Designers After Graphic Design, coming next month!

Denver Art Museum

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On a family trip to Colorado earlier this month, I made a point to finally visit the Denver Art Museum. Consisting to two wings, the first designed by Italian architect, designer, writer, and editor Gio Ponti, with a newer addition by Daniel Libeskind. It’s an interesting architectural space for a variety of reasons; the first being simply that it’s Ponti’s only US building. Ponti has long been an interesting figure from design history to me and, frankly, a model for my own practice. He moved across design, architecture, teaching, writing, and editing, perhaps best known today as the founder of Domus magazine¹. Completed in 1971, the building is technically 28-sided and rises from the Denver skyline looking like a castle.

Then in 2006, the museum added a building designed by deconstuctivist architect Daniel Libeskind, fresh off his work for the World Trade Center master plan, though this became his first US completed building. Libeskind has few tricks that he returns to often and this building has all the trademarks. What makes it interesting to me, is its relation to the Ponti wing and the contrast it creates between texture vs smoothness, vertical vs horizontal, while mirroring some of the angles in new ways.

In a fun architectural corner, across the street is Michael Graves’s very post-modern city library design. The more I experience postmodernism in 2026, the more I love it. Here are a few photos I took of the buildings while in town.

I unfortunately missed a show they staged earlier this year on his polymathic pratcice but I highly recommend the book: More Than One: Gio Ponti from a few years ago. ↩

New Summer Playlist: Like a Spark

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I used to make playlists a lot. In college, back on an old blog, I posted a themed-mix every month. When life started to take over, those dropped to seasonal mixes. The last few years, I’ve been averaging a playlist a year. I spend too much time on these, thinking through structure, transitions, vibes but it’s still a fun activity for me and a way to sort through the always-too-much music available to me. My last few mixes have been ambient: a handful of Moog-centered mixes that I call “Garden Songs” and an guitar-driven instrumental playlist.

I’ve been wanting to make one that was louder, that captures the feeling of the long days of summer. When I heard the new Rostam album, I knew the first track, Like a Spark, was the opening of a new playlist and I knew I wanted to end with Bruce Hornsby’s “Take a Light Strain”, one of my favorite songs of this year so far. This mix, also called Like a Spark, is my attempt to find the songs that go in between, connecting one from the other. I hope you enjoy it!

Listen to the playlist on Spotify

And here’s the tracklisting:

Like a Spark - Rostam
Sunflower (feat. Steve Lacy) - Vampire Weekend
Scabs - Speedy Ortiz
Dirty Work - Steely Dan
Rain - Dando Shaft
These Days - Nico
Waters of March - Art Garfunkel
Bless the Telephone - Labi Siffre
The Deer in the Forest Part 1 - Arthur Russell
Stepping Out for Air - Bill Callahan
Seven Degrees - Friko
Anything You Want - Spoon
Hollywood Baby - 100 gecs
Identical - Phoenix
Take a Light Strain - Bruce Hornsby

As always, all my playlists are collected on my webiste, right here.

Back to Film

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I started making photographs at the same time I started graphic designing, which at this point is nearing twenty-five years ago, around my sophomore in high school. (This year continually proves pivotal in the direction of my life!) During those early years, design and photography were operating in the same way for me, I’m not sure I separated them as discrete practices as much as different outputs in the same creative practice. And now, all these years later, photography and design continue to be two parts of my creative practice that I haven’t given up, that keep drawing me back. Unlike design, however, I’ve never been formally trained in photography aside from a semester course in college and a course in high school.

That high school course, which if memory serves, was my senior year in 2006, was the only time I seriously made photos with film. We had a fairly robust art department in my high school and the photography courses immersed you in dark-room techniques. I can’t seem to find any of the prints from that class anymore but the romance of the development process stayed with me. Despite this, I haven’t shot with film since that course but have been itching to experiment with it again the last few years.

Until now.

At the beginning of the summer, I finally stopped into the camera shop near my home and picked up an old Ricoh Shotmaster point-and-shoot and a few rolls of film. For the last few months, I’ve been making photographs almost exclusively on film for the first time since I was in high school and it’s really been a blast. I just got my first rolls back from the developers.

Here are some unordered thoughts and observations on the last few months of this experiment, along with some of my favorite images (I’m posting a larger collection over on my photo blog):

I took with me to our family trip to the beach last month and then up to Pennsylvania for a quick trip to visit my parents and spend some time in Philadelphia.
I’ve been using Kodak’s Kodacolor 200 35mm film and am really happy with the colors I’m getting back. It really shines at golden hour in a way I’m enjoying:

It feels like an expensive hobby but it’s honestly not as bad as I was expecting: a roll of film is ~$10 and development (for these few first few rolls, I’m getting both prints and digital copies) is ~$30. With 36 photos on a roll, that comes out to basically $1 a photo.
I like the idea of offsetting this with cheap cameras. The Ricoh I picked up was $40. I have a collection of old cameras here, some are still functioning.
The Ricoh is a basic point-and-shoot with minimal manual adjustments. It looks like the kind of camera my parents had around when I was growing up. I wasn’t ready to jump right into manual settings considering the costs of film. I wanted to see what I could get with little control and then work my way back to fully manual (which is how I shoot digitally)
But! I’m feeling (over?)-confident and am thinking about moving to some of my other cameras: I have Holga medium format camera that I only shot with once, also in high school, with fairly depressing results. Maybe it’s time to try again? (That Holga was also a $40 camera.)

When I feel my photography is getting stuck, I’ll switch up my camera to force me out of old habits. Usually, this means picking up the Polaroid so I’m thinking in squares instead of rectanagles but still getting a result right away. With film, I can’t analyze those habits until much later, when the film comes back from the developers. I’m realizing, for example, how often I’ll shoot multiple photos of the same subject, ensuring I have the right angle or composition. Because of costs, I’m not doing that here and am forced to embrace the imperfections of my alignment. (I also realized how often I make little adjustments in Lightroom immediately after shooting, adjusting the horizon, slight edits to correct an angle.) This delay creates a forcing mechanism for me, between creating and editing, that I realized I’d lost over the years of shooting digital.
I guess I could do post production in Lightroom with these film photos but that defeats the experiment which is to see what I can get in-camera, fully analogue. Everything I’m sharing are directly from the camera, no digital edits.

I’m not interested in the film vs. digital debates. I’m still carrying my trusty Fuji x100f with me most places (and sometimes making the same photo on both cameras to compare). For me, I’m less interested in which is better and more in how each one forces me to make a different kind of image: what affordances do each offer, what gives me the type of image I want to make in a particular setting.
But aside from moving between cameras, I think my next step is trying different film. Anyone out there have favorites?
If anything else, it’s nice to have a new (old) hobby again. More on all this over the next months, I imagine.

Rewatching Gary Hustwit’s Design Trilogy in 2026

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Criterion Channel is currently hosting the streaming premier of Gary Hustwit’s 2025 documentary Eno. The conceit of Eno, a look at the musician, artist, and thinker-at-large Brian Eno, is that is not a traditional documentary but a “generative” documentary; Eno, Hustwit, and a team of developers created an AI algorithm that creates a new documentary upon every watch. On the Criterion Channel, they are releasing a “new” version of the documentary every month. I watched the June version, my first experience with the film, and found it to be mostly fine. I’m not sure I heard Eno say anything I hadn’t heard before. I was surprised to find, actually, at least in my version, that Eno was the only voice in the entire film. Structurally, it never really told a coherent story of Eno’s work or evolution. It’s always great to hear Brian Eno think out loud and I always leave an interview, talk, or film about him inspired and excited but I also felt largely unsatisfied at Eno’s conclusion; more interested in what I didn’t get to see than what was included. In what my cynical brain tells me is a type of attention-fracking, I’ll likely watch the new July version too to compare. I can never get enough Eno!

For designers, of course, Gary Hustwit is likely most know for his Design Trilogy, the three documentaries he made between 2007 and 2011 that focused on graphic design, industrial design, and urban planning, and in support of Eno, Criterion is streaming all three of them as well, along with his 2018 documentary on Dieter Rams. Helvetica, — the first of the trilogy, the one closest to my work, and the one I’ve watched the most — was released my first year of design school and felt like, at the time, an exciting introduction to the world I was about to enter. I loved it. But I hadn’t watched it in probably fifteen years and I wasn’t sure I’d seen his follow ups, Objectified on industrial design and Urbanized on urban planning, since they were released. I was curious to see how they held up and what my reaction to them would be, after all these years.

Hustwit immediately sets the tone — crisp cinematography by Luke Geissbuhler, an El Ten Eleven-driven soundtrack, and a collection of charismatic, passionate talking heads that can’t help but make you interested in an otherwise esoteric topic: the font Helvetica. Within the first few seconds, I had a moment where I thought I might be taken back to college, where I could be reminded of what got me excited about graphic design in the first place. Instead, the feeling I had as Helvetica progressed was of a design world that feels like it no longer exists. Michael Bierut wrote at the time on Design Observer, in a post called Our Little Secret, “I have high hopes that this will be the moment that our field finally breaks through to the general public.” Indeed, watching it in 2026, I was struck by how insular the film feels, how quaint it all sounds to be talking about the curves of letters and shapes of logos. In 2007, it felt like this world was big. In 2026, I couldn’t help feeling how inconsequential it all seemed.

To be clear, I think this says more about me than about Hustwit’s filmmaking, but this feeling carried over to the other films. In each successive film, Hustwit slightly opens his aperture to examine larger forms: from typeface to industrial design to cities. Objectified, his film focused on industrial design, I think might be the strongest of the trilogy: it’s a perfect balance between focus and expansion, an ample playground for Hustwit to explore how the objects we surround ourselves with influence our lives. Unlike Helvetica, he spends time thinking about the consequences these design decisions have on our daily lives, the last quarter of the film becomes a critique of consumerism and looks at sustainability and waste. Urbanized, the final film in the trilogy, is the weakest of the bunch. The scale, perhaps, was too big and the narrative felt uncertain of what it actually wanted to say about cities as it jumps from location to location and topic to topic.¹

Perhaps as a response to the expansiveness of Urbanized, Hustwit’s return to design in 2018 came in the form of a documentary on Dieter Rams. Rams, of all his films, is the tightest. There’s a clear narrative arc and it clearly and systematically lays out Rams’s philosophy, guided by aesthetics, ethics, and functionality, that has driven his career. What’s lacking in Rams, however, was some sort of contextualization. While there are other talking heads (unlike the version of Eno I saw), those voices were mostly repeating Rams’s idoms and explaining the in new ways, connecting them to his products. There were no counter-voices, no mention of contemporaries who might be moving in the opposite direction, little explanation of why his Ten Design Principles can feel so radical.

Watching them all back-to-back, ending with Rams, I started to have trouble figuring out what Hustwit wants to do with these films, what he wanted to say. They’re not clear celebrations nor are they pointed critiques. They’re neither overly-explanatory nor overly-insular. As I watched them all, the only message I could deduce was simply: everything around us has been designed.

In retrospect, It’s interesting to think that Helvetica was released the same year as the iPhone, a device that would kick-start the app market and largely shift design’s center of gravity from print and branding to apps and digital services. This is all missed in the film — there’s barely a mention of digital design — or any design that appears on screens — save for Rick Poyner’s example of Myspace as a tool to democratize design. Again, that’s not a fault of Hustwit, we’re not asking him to be, nor were his films presented as, a futurism, but a marker of the design discourse at the time. To watch them in 2026, then, is to see them strangely devoid of any politics. There is no questioning of the power structures that inform and influence design decisions. If everything around us is designed, as the films remind us over and over, what are we to do with that information?

In my 2020 review of Abstract, Netflix’s vapid and flat docu-series on design, I wrote:

“The entire globe has been encrusted with a geological layer of design” write Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley in their 2015 book Are We Human? Their thesis argues that there is no world outside of design anymore. From the phones that wake us up in the morning to the streets we get to work on; from the building I’m sitting inside at the keyboard I’m typing these words and the app in which they appear all the way to the satellites orbiting our planet, we can’t escape design. Everything was decided by people and many of those people were designers. So for those of us in the profession, this presents two opportunities: we can either educate those outside the design world about why things are the way they are, how design decisions influence our everyday life and illuminate the ideologies embedded in the built world or we can retreat, hiding behind jargon and shamanesque language to retain a type of power, and keep up an appearance of the creative genius conjuring new worlds out of nothing. Abstact, Netflix’s show about “the art of design”, that in October released its second season, and perhaps the biggest platform to talk about this work, unfortunately chose the latter.

Hustwit’s films are better than every episode of Abstract. He find a middle path, somewhere between demystifying and celebration. I’m still glad they exist, even if as markers of an era that no longer exists. They continue to be some of the strongest films on or about design. But it also makes me wonder what a film about design would look like today? How do you both celebrate it and critique it? How do you make this work legible without turning it into magic? That’s the tension for all of us designers today. Maybe Bierut was right: when I finished my binge, I too missed the days when it was just our little secret.

Hustwit talks about the evolution of these films and their structures in this great interview for The Criterion Channel. ↩

Calder Gardens

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, I spent my birthday at the recently opened Calder Gardens in Philadlpia, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, with gardens by Piet Oudolf. It really was the best way to see Calder’s sculptures and felt like a quiet escape from the surrounding city. The best comparison I could think of was the feeling of stepping into the Noguchi Museum in Queens: immediately transporting.

Self Portrait as a Coffee-Pot is a Brilliant Defense of Art-Making

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For many of us our worlds suddenly got smaller in March 2020, when the first COVID lockdowns were put in place. No more offices or schools or trains or grocery stores. Instead of venturing out, the world came to us, through video calls and Zoom meetings, news alerts and delivery services. For the South African artist William Kentridge, his world became the studio where he’s made drawings, prints, performances, and films since the 1970s. Confined to the studio, Kentridge did what he has always done: He drew. He painted. He made films. But he also checked in on family around the world — his 90 year old father, his newborn granddaughter — while compulsively following statistics of infections and deaths. He also wrote and directed Self Portrait as a Coffee Pot, a nine-part mini-series that is not just a brilliant record of those early months but also a profound meditation on the studio itself and why we make art. The entire series, which premiered at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in 2024, is now available to watch on the streaming platform MUBI. It’s one of the best defenses of creative practice I have ever seen.

“When I was three years old, I wanted to be an elephant. I failed at that. When I was fifteen, I wanted to become a conductor of orchestras. But then I was told that to be a conductor, you had to read music,” Kentridge says in the opening scene of the first episode. “So, I was reduced to being an artist.” This introduces the tensions of the series: what is the value of art in the face of imaginable tragedy and horrors? Attempting to “do a picture of the whole universe,” he every drawing seemed to result in an image of the Moka Pot he uses to hold his paints. “You start again on another sheet of paper and everything is possible again, and what emgerges but…another coffee pot,” he continues. “Possibility and inevitability. These are the two poles between which a drawing hovers and moves.”

For Kentridge, drawing, specifically, and art, more generally, is a form of thinking. A drawing can be anything; a drawing can make anything. Throughout the series, multiple Kentridges (doubles? companions? doppelgangers?) enter the studio, engaging in dialogues with each other. They debate the merits of his work, often one Kentridge plays the role of the artist, always making and moving, open to possibilities, while the other Kentridge assumes a more critical or editorial role, often appearing as a quasi-therapist, questioning his assumptions and preoccupations.

Still from Self Portrait as a Coffee-Pot

In between these dialogues, we a body of work slowly develop: charcoal drawings of landscapes and bodies, paintings of birds and trees, collages with lines from his favorites books cut out and pasted on top of drawings. He creates stop-motion interludes that turn sheets of paper into crumbled mice who move through the studio and, when he’s able to invite people back into the studio, he stages practice runs of new plays, creating masks and puppets.

For the last fifty years, Kentridge’s work has explored colonialism, the history of violence, apartheid, nostalgia and personal history, and landscape. But his work has also often been about, in my view, art itself. As with so many of the artists I admire, there’s a self-reflexivity to his work, an interrogation of art-making itself. When his charcoal drawings become animated films, we become aware of his lines and marks, he see the process of building up a composition. So much of his work, I’ve come to believe is about the work of making a drawing. (This was also explored in his earlier project, Six Drawing Lessons, a series of lectures delivered at Harvard and later turned into a great book.)

Considering reflexivity, I found myself thinking of the quiet power of the 2011 documentary Gerhard Richter Painting. In that film, we’re given insights into Richter’s process through long, quiet sequences of the artist building up a canvas. Here, too, we’re treated to what feels like an intimate look into Kentridge’s process, watching his hand work and rework the drawings as they get built in shades of greys and blacks with accents of red pencil. Another comparison I kept thinking of was designer and Cranbrook Graphic Design head Elliott Earls’s YouTube channel, Studio Practice. Filmed inside Earls’s studio at Cranbrook, the intimate look at process becomes a guide for artmaking. In both series, the editing and presentation reflect the artist’s work: Earls is a highly frenetic, highly edited series where Kentridge’s is more meditative, almost meandering at times.

These comparisons got me thinking about that phrase, “studio practice”. A studio practice is central to the artists’ process but can seem like a foreign concept for designers. The design fields are structured around “projects” and ideas emerge within the constraint of that project. An art practice doesn’t always have pre-defined projects so a studio practice where one is spending time creating in search of a project is critical. “The central tenet of the studio,” Kentridge writes in the introduction to the book version of Self Portrait, always published by Hauser & Wirth, “is to give the image the benefit of the doubt in the ope that the image is more intelligent than its maker.” Watching Self Portrait as a Coffee-Pot, I found myself thinking about the opportunties of a studio practice, and what that could look like, for the designer. Designers aren’t always encouraged to explore, to create, to make, for the sake of it. It happens, obviously, but it’s not central to how we think about work. I wonder what new ideas, new forms, new concepts of what design can be and what it is for could emerge.

Art from Self Portrait as a Coffee-Pot

Kentridge describes the studio as “an enlarged head” where ideas can emerge from the edges. The studio is not separate from the world, but a place where the world filters in. Everything that happens in the studio is an attempt to synthesize these inputs: the drawing, the writing, the making, the starting over, the procrastinating. In the studio, anything is possible: a crumbled piece of paper can become a mouse, ink on paper can become an image from childhood, a drawing can become a film, a collage turns into a play, a self-portrait can be, of course, a coffee pot. Everything one makes is a self-portrait of sorts, just as everything unmade is equally a portrait of the artist. This seems to be the argument Kentridge is making: the making is a record of a life lived, a positioning of one’s place in the world.

In the final episode, a marching band enters the studio, forcing Kentridge outside for the first time in the series. The episode closes with Kentridge walking down the road, disoriented, marching band surrounding him. The world enters the studio then the work made in the studio goes back into the world. That’s what art is for: it’s a way to make sense of the world, through a process that doesn’t make sense at all.