Jarrett Fuller

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.

My New Book: Graphic Designers After Graphic Design

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m very excited to announce that my new book, Graphic Designers After Graphic Design, is now available for preorder and will be out on September 29th from Princeton Architectural Press.

Here’s the official publisher blurb:

A fascinating exploration of contemporary designers who are redefining what it means to be a graphic designer, offering a vibrant celebration and an inspirational reimagining of the medium for students, professionals, and educators in the field.

Drawing from his popular podcast Scratching the Surface, Jarrett Fuller profiles more than 20 graphic designers who have taken the skills acquired through education and on-the-job experience to create new types of practices, working outside traditional commercial contexts. Reimagine what graphic design can mean when viewed through the lens of publisher, programmer, activist, artist, and more. Each chapter features a series of short profiles, an in-depth interview, and a visual exploration of one designer’s work.

Including both emerging and midcareer practitioners from around the world, Graphic Designers After Graphic Design showcases a wide variety of innovative creatives who have embraced graphic design’s blurry edges.

This book, in many ways, feels like the result of trying to figure out what graphic design is today. For most of my career, I feel like I’ve been hearing about the death of graphic design, yet, for some reason, it keeps coming back. It just doesn’t always look like what came before it. To try to make sense of it, this book became optimistic collection of profiles, interviews, and case studies about emerging designers from around the world who are redefining what it means to be a graphic designer. Organized around publishing, research, activism, performance, and art, it’s a richly illustrated but also thoughtful and criticial look at graphic design today. I’m honored my former professor and thesis advisor (and design star!) Ellen Lupton wrote the foreword.

This is not Scratching the Surface in book form but in some ways, it does feel like an expansion and focusing of the conversations I’ve had on the show for the last decade. On the podcast, I’ve had the honor of talking not only with graphic designers but also architects, writers, urbanists, industrial designers, and more. What’s struck me, in conversation after conversation, is the elasticity of these fields: architects who make films, industrial designers who program software, writers who curate shows, landscape architects who paint. There’s a permission in the other design fields to stretch and explore that has never been part of graphic design’s history.

Perhaps this is because of the ephemerality of graphic design, or maybe deep seeded insecurity or fear of a new technology that will take a way jobs; or maybe it’s the close ties to business and the perpetual need to “have a seat at the table”. There’s always been “experimental” graphic design, however, and alternative forms of practice but they have been considered just that: experiments.

What this book argues is that those experimental practices point to the future of design. It argues that if graphic design is dead, that doesn’t mean graphic designers are. It makes the case that graphic design, despite its preference for narrowing and specialization, is actually a wide, multidisciplinary, expansive field that can contain lots of different types of practices. For this book, I’ve brought together emerging designers, almost all under forty, who still call themselves graphic designers but are making work that doesn’t conform to our definitions.

I’m proud of the book and can’t wait for it to be out in the world. If you’d like me to speak at your school, event, or organization, do reach out. Until then, you can pre-order the book wherever you buy your books. I’m sure I’ll have more to write about the book — the process, the research, the ideas — over the next few months.

A Secret, Invisible Grid

Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From Larissa Pham’s delightful new novel, Discipline:

He told me he was a graphic designer. I didn’t know what that meant, so I asked him, and he said it was about seeing the understructure of how people saw the world. There was a secret, invisible grid that lay beneath everything, a rhyme scheme that encompassed plants and animals, cities and cars; his job was to align shapes to it, to make things look the way they should, and to do it so elegantly that no one noticed he had moved anything at all.

Building my own bookmarking software

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, Craig Mod wrote about the “bonkers” finance app he built for himself over the course of a week with Claude Code:

For the first time in my life, I have a dashboard that gives me a true, holistic view, of everything financial happening in my life and business. I’ve named my glorious contraption TaxBot2000. It is astounding. Let me repeat: I built this in five days.

It’s not perfect, and it’s not done, but it is already better than what I had been using for the last decade. Until now, I’ve leaned heavily on Quicken — closed-source subscription software that often fails to connect to accounts with two-factor-authentication, silently losing chunks of financial data. Previously, I’ve mixed Quicken with Google Sheets, using a stack of Google Scripts to move information back and forth between currencies and formats and countries. I’ve used Japanese accounting software to export Japanese bank accounts and credit cards, and then reconfigure and import them into Quicken as converted accounts. Anyway, complicated and weird and a bit quirky: my situation. For TaxBot2000? No problem. I don’t think I’ll open Quicken again.

My own experience with AI, admittedly, has been minimal: I use it to summarize the interviews I record for Scratching the Surface and it helped me pull out big themes from the conversations I had when working on my forthcoming book. When I got a new computer and had to migrate my decade-old Jekyll static website over, I used Claude to help me troubleshoot setting it up again fresh; then used it to help me build some simple photo galleries for my website. Perhaps naively, I feel little fear in it taking my job and as I’ve written before, I don’t think it fundamentally changes my industry as much as speeds up a trend a long time in the making. My partner has made copious use of AI agents in her work that has me intrigued with possibilities in new ways.

This, combined with Mod’s ambition, inspired me to spend some time on Sunday morning building a custom bookmarking app for myself. For the better part of twenty years, I’ve used bookmarking software as my second brain: to save links, articles, urls, and documents that I may want to refer back to. I started with del.icio.us in the early web 2.0 days before flirting with the shortlived Google Bookmarks. For the better part of a decade, I lived and died inside Evernote where I threw everything I may want to reference later. As Evernote got increasly bloated (and I continued to use it in a way it wasn’t really designed for), I left ten years ago, briefly for Are.na before settling on Pinboard. Pinboard is stupidly simple: I save links via a bookmarklet. I copy quotes or notes into a text field and assign it some tags. Done. (I pay extra for the web cache version that saves archives of the pages but have never actually used it.)

I’ve been happy with Pinboard overall and have nearly 5000 links saved in my account. But the service hasn’t been noticeably updated in years and feels dormant. I’m noticing increased errors in saves and I’ve never gotten it work quite right (with apis and partner apps) on iOS. I’d been on the lookout for something to migrate too but all seem overly complex for my simple needs. I realized I could build one for myself.

And so I did. Over the course of about an hour and half, I got up and running a super-simple bookmarking app. Here’s how it works:

In Safari, there’s a bookmarklet button (just like Pinboard) that opens a new window. In that window, the page title and url are pre-saved and there’s a text box for notes and a field for tags.
When I click save, a python server saves that data in a markdown file named YYMMDD_title-of-the-webpage.md, my preferred naming convention for all my files, into a folder on Dropbox.
That Dropbox folder is called Bookmarks and lives in my Obsidian vault so I can now open and search all my bookmarks in Obsidian.

And that’s it! Like I said, my needs are simple. I increasingly want all my documents as text files so I’m not bound to any app or format and now nothing lives on a server or in the cloud, it’s all saved locally and synced via Dropbox. All my writing happens in Obsidian already — from essays to quick notes to journaling — and having all my bookmarks in Obsidian turns it into a powerful archive of both reading and writing; a place to both research and produce.

Example of the Markdown file the server creates for me as it's seen in Obsidian.

After some back and forth on specific features and getting the local server running, most of my time was spent formatting the Markdown files the way I wanted them. Then, I gave Claude the json file of all 5000 bookmarks in Pinboard and asked it to turn those into .md files too, named and formatted the same way. I downloaded that zip file and threw it in my Bookmarks folder, essentially rebuilding my entire Pinboard archive locally. Inside Obsidian, it’s still searchable, linkable, and, most importantly for me, integrated into my writing environment.

Next steps are building the iOS bookmarklet so I can save links from my phone and iPad and then customizing the design for the popup windows to better match my aesthetic. Was this a complex project, not at all. It’s on the easy side of what these models can do. It’s no finance app, that’s for sure. But does it solve a simple problem for me, in the exact way I want? Yes. Does it divorce me from living inside someone else’s platform? Yes. Does it keep my bookmarks in an easily transferrable format in case my tastes change in the future? Yes. All these things are important to me and I love that I can roll my own solutions for these particular values. In this way, it feels less like something new and more like the decades long open-source software movement.

Paul Ford, in an essay for the New York Times recently wrote:

All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.

That’s how I feel, honestly. After building this little bookmarklet and saving my first files, I felt a pride like the one I remember feeling in high school, building my first websites. Then I felt stupid because I didn’t build anything at all this time, I just asked a Claude to do it for me. But that ability to ask, for someone like me with just enough programming experience, feels like it opens up a world of possiblities in the same way learning to code html did twenty years ago. Today, anyone can build a website with simple tools, drag and drop interfaces, and premade templates. Maybe that’s the future of software too?

Designed Films

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My first film education came in high school in the basement of my grandparents’s house. My grandmother, ever the early adopter (and perhaps pirate?), was early to the VCR and had recorded dozens of movies for her personal library. Each video had two or three movies recorded onto it and was labeled with a number on the spine. A printed index hung on the wall next to the floor-to-ceiling shelves where you could find, for example, that North by Northwest was the second movie on tape 47. We visited their house for a week every summer and each night, I’d pick a new movie to watch; the only criteria I created for myself was that it had to be a movie released before I was born. I watched my first Hitchcocks from those videos. I watched To Kill a Mockingbird and the original King Kong. Aunts and uncles started recommending movies, pulling videos off the shelf for me. My love of movies started in that basement.

My second education was the two years I spent working at a video store in college. As employees, we could check out three movies at once for free, and I often maxed out my rentals, going through filmographies of directors or taking recommendations from the regular customers, often watching 4 or 5 films a week. I got into documentaries here. Certain movies, just seeing their covers, reminds me of working the late shift putting DVDs back on the shelves. Later, when I first subscribed to the Criterion Channel, what I consider my third education, I was reminded of both my grandparent’s basement and my short tenure at Hollywood Video. Criterion was my third education with its curated collections and video commentary, my movie watching became strategic and considered again in a way it was when I was younger.

This is perhaps a long winded way of saying that I’ve been interested in movies for as long as I’ve been interested in design and though I chose one to study and work in, the two have always co-mingled in my mind. Cinema has remained a touchstone in my cultural development and an influential place for inspiration in my work. I continue to look for connections between them and seek out the overlap in the construction of a design and the construction of a film. After all, many of the movies that stick with me — the ones I often count as favorites — I tend to describe as movies that feel as if they have been “designed”. But lately I’ve been wondering what that means: what makes a film designed? What does it mean for a movie to feel designerly?

Sometimes I think I say a film has been designed if it’s formally innovative, playing with narrative or structure. But this doesn’t feel quite right: there’s nothing inherent to design that equates to formal experimentation and there are plenty of formally ambitious films that don’t, to me, feel like they’ve been “designed.” I’ve been rewatching the movies of Charlie Kaufman lately and am continually dazzled by his 2009 film, Synecdoche, NY, a daring, epic, formally audacious film that seemed to fit my above description. Is this designed?

Perhaps, instead, I mean movies that are reflexive in some way; they make you aware of the artifice of the filmmaking process. Again, Kaufman’s movies would fit the bill here: Synecdoche, NY or Adaptation, a movie that’s literally about the making of the movie you are watching. I’m reminded, too, of Wes Anderson’s films, a director I’ve probably thought more about than any other. While the exquisite detail and structure to his sets is a turn off for many viewers, I find the imposed artifice exciting, as if it’s somehow more honest. I recently watched Ramell Ross’s 2024 film, Nickel Boys, a beautifully cinematic film which uses a fascinating first-person camera angle, with characters looking directly at you, the viewer, as if you were in the movie. Here, the viewer is both inside and outside the film. Or consider Lars von Trier’s “documentary”, The Five Obstructions, a constructed documentary about filmmaking and the creative process. I’ve called all of these movies designed at various points.

I do think this starts to get closer: in each of these the formal conceits become a part of the story. One of my very favorite movies is Orson Wells’ F for Fake, a film essay about cinema, trickery, and storytelling. (I made a whole film, ten years ago, inspired by it!). Here Wells blends found footage, documentary reportage, and staged scenes to explore his ideas into a form that starts to feel like it’s been designed.

Perhaps its not just any formal conceit or experimentation but specific structural models. A movie that has always felt designed to me is Mike Mills’s film Beginners. Interspersed in the narrative is voice-over narration with slideshow like montages of still images, found footage, and typographic treatments. Mills began his career as a designer and I think that sensibility shows in his films: there is something almost literary or book-like to their construction. But maybe I think of his films as designed just because I know he’s also a designer? The Norwegian director Joachim Trier does similar things in his films but with no design background. His film The Worst Person in the World, another of my favorites, and another that feels “designed”, opens with the title card “A story in 12 chapters with a prologue and an epilogue”. Again, there is a literary-feel to this structure and each chapter is introduced with a title card.

Is this what makes a film designed? The use of the tools of design? Typography, image color, line, shape, rhythm, etc? Both Mills and Trier use typography heavily in their movies and play with still images, illustration, and staged photos. Anderson, too, employs typography in title cards, supplemental information, and structural orientation. Consider his film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, a story within a story within a story. Each layer is shot in a corresponding aspect ratio to delineate where in time you are; size, shape, and color used the way a graphic designer might. Is a designed film simply one that uses the elements of design?

Maybe that’s enough? I want to find a better language or framework for talking about filmmaking that feels designerly. I wonder if I’m just trying to apply my discipline’s language on another and it’ll never perfectly overlap. Or maybe I just want to claim the movies I love as something other than they are. Do I want them to be design or do I want design to contain filmmaking?

Movies Watched, 2025

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

1/1/25 All of Us Strangers (2023)
1/2/25 Wham! (2023)
1/4/25 Monsters, Inc. (2001)
1/2/25 The Childhood of a Leader (2015)
1/11/25 The Boss Baby (2017)
1/11/25 To Die For (1995)
1/18/25 The Secret Life of Pets (2016)
1/24/25 Hunger (2008)
1/28/25 Blitz (2024)
2/1/25 Lilo & Stitch (2002)
2/6/25 Here (2024)
2/8/25 The Lorax (2012)
2/15/25 The Secret Life of Pets 2 (2019)
2/16/25 You Hurt My Feelings (2023)
2/20/25 The Moustache (2005)
2/22/25 Saturday Night (2024)
2/22/25 The Cat In The Hat (2003)
2/28/25 Past Lives (2023)
3/1/25 The Wild Robot (2024)
3/3/25 Crossing Delancy (1988)
3/7/25 The Mystery of Picasso (1956)
3/7/25 A Real Pain (2024)
3/8/25 The Addams Family (2019)
3/12/25 Away We Go (2009)
3/15/25 Moana 2 (2024)
3/22/25 The Addams Family 2 (2021)
3/26/25 Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus (2023)
3/28/25 Challengers (2024)
3/29/25 Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs (2009)
4/6/25 Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2 (2013)
4/13/25 Zootopia (2016)
4/19/25 The Lorax (2012)
4/26/25 Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius) (2025)
4/26/25 Horton Hears a Who (2008)
5/3/25 Flow (2024)
5/6/25 Showing Up (2022)
5/8/25 Art College 1994 (2023)
5/10/25 Decision to Leave (2022)
5/10/25 Ponyo (2008)
5/13/25 The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
5/15/25 Conclave (2024)
5/17/25 My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
5/18/25 The Daytrippers (1996)
5/22/25 Sinners (2025)
5/23/25 Stopping the Steal (2024)
5/24/25 Hercules (1997)
5/31/25 Madagascar (2005)
5/31/25 Vanya on 42nd Street (1994)
5/31/25 Mountainhead (2025)
6/2/25 Camera Buff (1979)
6/7/25 Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008)
6/10/25 Napoleon (2023)
6/12/25 Babygirl (2024)
6/14/25 Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (2012)
6/17/25 Bergman Island (2021)
6/20/25 Presence (2024)
6/21/25 WALL-E (2008)
6/25/25 Still Walking (2008)
6/28/25 Cars (2006)
6/30/25 Volver (2006)
7/5/25 Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989)
7/5/25 The Good Dinosaur (2015)
7/6/25 Mike Birbiglia: The Good Life (2025)
7/10/25 Burn After Reading (2008)
7/12/25 Cars 2 (2011)
7/19/25 Cars 3 (2017)
7/26/25 Inside Out (2015)
7/29/25 Miami Vice (2006)
8/2/25 Inside Out 2 (2024)
8/3/25 Manhunter (1986)
8/3/25 Pee-wee as Himself (2025)
8/7/25 Godzilla (1954)
8/9/25 The Incredibles (2004)
8/12/25 Godzilla Raids Again (1955)
8/13/25 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (1992)
8/16/25 Marc Maron: Panicked (2025)
8/23/25 Toy Story (1995)
8/30/25 KPop Demon Hunters (2025)
9/6/25 Toy Story 2 (1999)
9/13/25 Toy Story 3 (2010)
9/14/25 Klute (1971)
9/18/25 The Parallax View (1974)
9/21/25 All The President’s Ment (1976)
9/21/25 Toy Story 4 (2019)
9/27/25 Shrek (2001)
10/4/25 Shrek 2 (2004)
10/8/25 Christine (1983)
10/12/25 Hotel Transylvania (2012)
10/13/25 Vampires (1998)
10/18/25 Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015)
10/24/25 Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
10/25/25 Prince of Darkness (1987)
10/26/25 Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (2018)
11/6/25 They Live (1988)
11/8/25 Hotel Transylvania 4: Transformania (2024)
11/9/25 The New Yorker at 100 (2025)
11/15/25 The Wizard of Oz (1939)
11/16/25 DEVO (2024)
11/22/25 Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)
11/25/25 After The Hunt (2025)
11/29/25 The Santa Clause (1994)
11/30/25 Rachel Getting Married (2008)
12/6/25 The Santa Clause 2 (2002)
12/12/25 Materialists (2025)
12/13/25 The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause (2006)
12/14/25 Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)
12/15/25 Thelma (2017)
12/19/25 Louder Than Bombs (2015)
12/20/25 That Christmas (2024)
12/21/25 One Battle After Another (2025)
12/23/25 Zootopia 2 (2025)
12/25/25 Oslo, August 31 (2011)
12/27/25 The Muppets Christmas Carol (1992)

Books Read, 2025

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Against Platforms – Mike Pepi
Class Trip and The Moustache – Emmanuel Carrere
A Visible Distance: Craft, Creativity, and the Business of Design – Matt Owens
Josef Albers: Life and Work – Charles Darwent
Stay True – Hua Hsu
Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov
Notes on Peter Eisenman: The Gradual Vanishing of Architecture – M. Murry Schlabs
An Octoroon – Branden Jacob-Jenkins
Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy – Tony Fry
The Late Americans – Brandon Taylor
The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory: American Evangelicals in the Age of Extremism – Tim Alberta
Lila – Marilynne Robinson
The Siren’s Call – Chris Hayes
Flourish: Design Paradigms for the Planetary Imaginary – Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlin
Abundance – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
The Extreme Self – Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Orbist
Sanding Down Gravestones – Lars Morch Finborud
House of X/Powers of X – Jonathan Hickman
Rental House – Weike Wang
The Making of the Atomic Bomb – Richard Rhodes
A *Co* Program for Graphic Design – David Reinfurt
A *New* Program for Graphic Design – David Reinfurt
Perfection – Vincenzo Latronico
The Novelist – Jordan Castro
Exhibitionist – Peter Mendelsund
Rejection – Tony Tulathimutti
Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening – Ben Ratliff
Audition – Katie Kitamura
Skyfaring – Mark Vanhoenacker
Weepers – Peter Mendelsund
Toyko These Days, Volume 1 – Taiyo Matusmoto
Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company – Patrick McGee
Stoner – John Williams
Should Could Might Don’t – Nick Foster
Tokyo These Days, Volume 2 – Taiyo Matusmoto
Tilt – Emma Patee
The Invention of Design – Maggie Gram
One Woman Show – Christine Coulson
Perspective(s) – Laurent Binet
_Design and Visual Communication _ – Bruno Munari
Enshittification – Cory Doctorow
The Emperor of Gladness – Ocean Voung
Above The Pavement—the Farm! Architecture and Agriculture at P.F. 1 – Amale Andraos and Dan Wood
The House of Doctor Koolaas – Francoise Fromonot
The Hearing Test – Eliza Barry Callahan
The Design Comedy – Otto von Busch
Communications – Raymond Williams
More Than One: Geo Ponti – Manfredo di Robilant & Manuel Orazi (eds.)
Dubliners – James Joyce
Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat – Hito Steyerl
Theory & Practice – Michelle de Kretser
Tokyo These Days, Volume 3 – Taiyo Matusmoto
Twist – Colum McCann