In this episode, designer, educator, and author David Reinfurt returns to the show to discuss his latest book, A *Co-* Program for Graphic Design. Born from a series of lectures delivered remotely, online, and together with collaborators and cooperators, the new book builds on his earlier “spoken” book, exploring some unexpected and intuitive overlaps between design and the rest of the world around us.
In conversation, Liam and David cover the power of hands-on learning, the importance of going against expectations as a designer, and the positionality of design—its closeness to everyday life, how it affects those that encounter it, and how it’s taught—and how individual perspective is the real driver of design as a practice.
Liam Spradlin: David, welcome back to Design Notes.
David Reinfurt: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
Liam: We recorded an episode, I think it was back in late 2019, early 2020, so it's been a while, both in terms of linear time and also psychologically I think. So for listeners who might not have been around for that episode or haven't listened to the back catalog yet, could you give us a brief intro on what your work is now and how you got there?
David: Of course. That has been a million years ago it feels like, and there is a palpable difference between real time and felt time in the last five years. In some ways, that's what this book deals with. Let me give some background.
So I'm an independent graphic designer based in New York. I've worked independently for 25 years. Quite a long time. I have worked in collaboration with many different people in different ways, but most substantially was Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, under the name Dexter Sinister, and with Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey and Angie Keefer and Francesca Bertolotti and Vincenzo Latronico as The Serving Library, a publishing project. And finally as O-R-G, which calls itself a small software company and is me with rotating cast of people assisting.
So I have taught at Princeton University now for 15 years. When we spoke in 2019, we were talking about in part my book, A New Program for Graphic Design, which came out of the teaching at Princeton University. And in fact, it's useful to understand the genesis of that book in order to place the new book.
So when I started teaching at Princeton University, there were no previous classes in graphic design. I was invited in by Joe Scanlon, who was director of the visual arts program at Princeton to develop a graphic design course. And that first one was typography and those grew and became several courses and a number of instructors. In 2017 Inventory Press approached me and said, "We think what you're teaching at Princeton might find a broader audience." And I had just finished co-writing a book about Muriel Cooper for MIT Press. I was exhausted by that process. It was involved and rigorous and it was a large book, so I wasn't up for writing a book at that time. But in conversation with Adam Michaels and Shannon Harvey at Inventory Press, we came up with an idea to instead of writing the book to speak the book.
And so we staged a three-day event in Los Angeles at their studio in Silver Lake where I delivered six 45 minute lectures a day over the course of three days for a conscripted audience of students in a carnival like atmosphere where I would each class constitute ... Each day, sorry, constituted one class that I had developed at Princeton. So the first day were six lectures around typography.
Those were all video recorded and then transcribed, and that became the new book. So that book launched in September 2019, and I proceeded to do a number of launch events and exhibitions around the book, which continued until the end of February 2020. At the end of February 2020, I was set to do an exhibition and a talk in Rome at the French Academy, and it was about February 20th, I think, when I was set to leave, and there was a novel coronavirus circulating widely in Italy. And I really wanted to go but in conversation with another inventory press author Jeffrey Schnapp, I decided it wasn't such a good idea, which of course in hindsight is very clear what to do.
So by March 11th, I had walked out of the classroom at Princeton expecting to come back, but I never returned until 2021. And of course classes moved online in the meantime.
So I walked out in March of 2020 and classes moved online. The world went into a lockdown situation, as we all well know. I found that my Princeton students responded really well to the online situation. They were up for it, and they logged in from wherever they were in the world and from their different time zones and different situations and classes proceeded but of course they were different. This situation was only amplified by the rise of the Black Lives Matter social movement in particular just later that spring with the murder of George Floyd and the global movement that multiplied. And so anyway, combined with these factors of realizing I needed to really rethink how to teach online just practically and logistically as well as reconsider the subject matter and the number of voices that were in the room. And teaching online in a Zoom classroom gave me the opportunity to invite lots of different people who I wanted to hear from and to step back from the front of the class, which I try to do anyway, but that just gave me a really easy way to do it.
Somewhere along, after teaching online for two semesters, I started to realize, oh, of course teaching this way all of the classes were being recorded and transcribed automatically. And I had these new classes, offered a lot of new material that was more in line with how I was thinking about teaching. And so an idea sparked in my head to make a book a bit like the first one where it was edited from transcripts and has the quality of the spoken voice, but where the speakers were mostly not me or as much as possible, not me, but were other people. And collaborators or more often I would call them co-operators who helped round out the material in these three classes. And in fact, it's important to say that even one of those classes, the middle class chapter two multiplicity was co-taught with Philip Ording. So all of those ideas were developed together and the voices were equivalent. Okay. I think that's a long background.
Liam: Sure, but necessary. There are a lot of things that stand out to me about that. One thing that I want to ask about front is this deriving the structure of the book from delivering courses, especially in the instance of the first book, you delivered them in this marathon of classes. I wonder if that changed your relationship to the ideas that you were presenting or changed your understanding of those topics, delivering them in such quick succession.
David: Well, it certainly made me think about the way that teaching is a performance. And I acknowledge that while I'm not comfortable with it. And so in that situation, teaching was explicitly a performance. It was 45 minutes each one, we had take 15 minutes so my voice could recover, and I drank juice and there was musical interludes, which were quite fun. And the whole thing was treated as ... It was lively generally. And I guess that looseness is something I want to have in the classroom, and so I try to mix things up as much as possible. And so performing those classes in that way, just I think it maps back onto how I think about the classroom and I guess makes me even more so embrace the performative aspects of it, because I think that's what loosens people up. And so in a class recently, at the beginning of this semester, I invited a class. When we did our introductions, we all stood on stools which is rather awkward, but it again just lets people loosen up. These are art classes after all.
Liam: The last time we spoke, you also mentioned putting your teaching into the form of a book and some tension there between the content that you were presenting and how the form of a book might make it more static or concrete. It's hard to achieve a carnivalesque environment within a book. And I wonder how your perspective on that has changed now, especially having gone through this whole transformation of teaching online and seeing how that works and also integrating these new class structures.
David: I think one thing I was anxious about with the first book was that my students would see the book, would read the book and bring baggage to the classroom. And I am happy to report that the book flies under the radar for the students, so this is great. I never mention it. I could, but I don't. I feel like it's would not help the situation. It would only hinder it. So that has been a nice surprise. This is one thing that was a nice fallout from recording the first book in this way is that the voice on the page has some measure of self-doubt. And I feel like that is 100% necessary in teaching because your position communicates the opposite of that. And the student-teacher relationship presumes that the teacher knows what she or he is talking about and it's only partially the case. We can share our perspective, which was what we learned with and what we have thought about. And that never aligns with individual students' perspective coming from where they come from. So anyway, I have something to offer, I have my experiences and that's it.
Liam: I think that's an important note, and I think something that really stands out to me with the new book is that it's building on this thesis that was developed in the first book of teaching design. I also noticed that you said that this is an art class, which I really appreciate. I want to hear more about your theory of teaching design, especially how it shows up in a co-program for graphic design where, yeah, as you said before, you really integrated other people into the lesson in a way that feels central to the whole idea of teaching design.
David: Well, I'm glad you appreciate the art reference. It's how I think about design neighbors. And it happens to be at Princeton, the design classes that I teach and that Laura Coombs and Laurel Schwulst currently also teach. They're in a visual arts program, and it's a small program with 16 students per year, and the classes are small. 12 students who come from different disciplines.
So anyway, I suppose to your second question, the cooperative makeup of the second book, that was really a consequence of just realizing as everybody else did, that I could invite people from all over. And there are people I wanted to hear from, people who I didn't necessarily know or didn't know well, and then lots of people I did know well but who coming to class previously would've been too difficult. And so I just loaded the classes with visits as much as possible and tried to let the visitors drive what was talked about. I feel like as long as they know what the rubric of the class is, then they're going to bring something interesting to it. So that was a practical response. And I think it was only afterwards that I thought, oh, okay, this is really a chorus of voices and that's what I'd love to communicate as a way of thinking about design. I often like to quote Bruno Manari who talked about design is always being a group activity, like designers work in groups. He was emphatic about that. And although I've practiced independently, it's never by myself. And I just think design is structured by the client designer relationship to begin with.
Designers often don't have all the expertise they need, and so they bring in other people to work. And that fluid and cooperative nature of doing any design project is something I really enjoy. I'd make a distinction between collaboration and cooperation. So I think collaboration, there is some idea that it is two or more people blending their ideas together to make something better that neither one would've made. And I've done that before and that can be wonderful. But I think much more often I work cooperatively where it's individuals who bring in what they know how to do or what they have good insights on, and they work doing that, and the sum total of those results adds up to something better. And so cooperators have a bit more agency, they're a bit more independent. There's not this presumption that ... Compromise is not really a part of it. The best design doesn't result from compromise, the best design results from cooperation. And so everybody's pointed towards the same goal, and you figure out how to get there by bringing your best stuff to the projects.
Liam: I want to also get at this note of your students are approaching these design lessons from different disciplines, which is something I hear a lot on the show that most of my guests, I would say, when I ask them about their journey and design, they say something like, "I took a very non-linear path," or, "I have an unusual story about how I got to design." And I wonder what role you think that might play in the practice of design ultimately?
David: Well, yeah, I think that's interesting that that's a common thread. I wonder if that's the people who you've asked on your podcast. So yeah, I would say I had a non-conventional approach into design, but it sounds like being non-conventional is actually the standard rather than-
Liam: —is the convention.
David: Exactly. Isn't that funny? Okay. So in the classes, I love the fact that students are studying different things, come from different disciplines. It might be like aerospace engineering or it might be neuroscience, or it might be English, or it might be physics or whatever else. Actually, lots of computer science students because of the adjacency and importance of design in there. Anyway, I guess I always am convinced that design thrives on being a generalist activity. People who design are inevitably interested in lots of different things. And I have previously attributed that to the fact that design doesn't really have a subject matter of its own. It only comes into being when it touches some other discipline. Well, for example, I'm designing an ADA accessible sign for an old castle, which is an art institution in Italy. That's what I was doing this morning as it would turn out. And it's fun because the criteria are different than I understand but I understood some things about that area previously. But they have experts who were experts in this signage and specifically for public institutions in Italy. And so that's a much more granular thing.And so it's interesting to hear. It's useful and eye-opening to hear what their insights are. And it gives you some additional criteria to which you would think is a successful design or not. I love that kind of thing. I think that's unique to or a characteristic of design and certainly graphic design. And so the students coming from their various areas of study just make it richer because they'll have insights. That being said, the classes angle a certain direction. I do get a lot of computer science students, like I mentioned. I think I get quite a few engineering students also, like general electrical engineering, whatever. But I'm always excited when I get humanities students because they really bring some different concerns into the classroom, which is great.
Liam: Yeah. I think one way of understanding design maybe that stands out to me, especially in the multiplicity section of the book, is an emphasis not just on being able to create a system or create an artifact, but knowing how to observe and decode the systems around us or to see how they emerge from the world around us. Yeah, I guess I'm interested in that concept of folks coming from different viewpoints. Design always has a positionality in the world, and I guess it's applying that lens to different eyes.
David: Well, in the case of multiplicity, the class was set up to bring together topology and graphic design and try to figure out where the two might meet. Philip Ording, professor of topology. He is currently at Pratt. He is a friend and somebody who we've had this ongoing conversation for quite a while. I think Philip had the idea originally that one area where the two disciplines meet is particularly in software-based design projects where there might be ... He called it a multiplicity of right answers or of viable candidates, which might be, for example, defined parametrically by parameters that that define a design space, a possibility space. And so these possibility spaces of equally equivalent answers are something that topology gives us very strong tools to evaluate.
So the class begins with an example of Snowflake Bentley who was a farmer in northern Vermont who took photomicrographs using a microscope and a camera to make pictures of snowflakes. He did this at the turn of the 20th century and made exhaustive records of snowflakes. They're absolutely gorgeous things. No two are alike as the story goes. And he published a book, which is a Dover Press book, which has many of the photographs in it. Here's a ... I guess we could say, a design, which is a symmetric ice crystal, which has lots of shapes which are related to each other. And you can put those in an order and you can put those in a linear order from most pointed to least pointed. Or you can put those in two dimensions of most pointed to least pointed and most detailed to least detailed. And there you've articulated a possibility space of lots of valid responses to what is a snowflake.And this is something that design increasingly does with software based approaches, of course. And something that topology ... Just that the way in which Philip talks about how those are related opens up lots of different ways to think about it. It's frankly exciting in that way. And also just to watch another approach to talking about this and to drawing it, I was so surprised and a revelation to watch him lead us through problems where his approaches weren't ... His approaches were so mechanical and you just draw it out. You take all the circumstances and you try to draw yourself a map, and then you refine that. Anyway.
Liam: Yeah. First of all, I found that fascinating. I find the concept of design space fascinating and woefully underused in my own industry, which is UX. But something I also noticed ... I went really deep on that lesson, and I noticed that so many of the exercises, not just in that class, but in all the classes in the book, rely on a really tactile component. It feels like you're always doing something with your hands, which is really interesting to me, not only from the perspective of pedagogy, but also because these classes were structured in a way that they could be performed remotely.
David: Right. Yeah, that's interesting. That's a great thing to pick up on and not something that had occurred to me before. I love that. Philip had a document camera for Zoom or for anything, and so you could see him writing on a piece of paper, and that was absolutely compelling to me. I love to watch that. It's so nice to see and just watch as his giant pencil on the screen work through this issue. I wonder if it was a compensation technique for us saying, "Oh, you got to use your hands because we're sick of looking at the screen and doing this." I expect it was. Yeah.Yeah. A lot of the assignments require physical artifacts. But I do that in the classroom too, always. Just because I find ... Just think about how your body moves when you cut a piece of paper versus when you move something with a mouse. And the more range we have, I think the more it loosens up ways of thinking and being in the classroom and etc. And so I've often had students who use paper and scissors or exacto knives and photocopiers in place of computers. And anyway, I just try to keep them off the screen as much as reasonable.
Liam: I hesitate to claim this as fact because I don't have a citation in front of me, but-
David: That’s fine.
Liam: I'm pretty sure I've heard that that handwriting is more effective than typing. And this feels intuitively true to me as well. It's more beneficial for learning and memory. And my intuition is that maybe doing physical exercises like this with your hands not only helps you get a sense of what you're doing better from the physicality of it, but also that it might change your relationship to what you're making. I think maybe if you're just sliding rectangles around in Figma, then you might not have as strong of a subjective connection to the result.
David: That rings completely true to me. I like the fact that it takes longer and it is slower, and so that immediately you build up more investment in it. It's so sad to see something made so quickly with very little investment. Like, oh, I can do it like this. Wow. No.
Liam: I am a believer that that shows up on the other side as well for the viewer.
David: Yeah. I think so.
Liam: Yeah. And I can't help but also think ... Because this is upfront in the book, and this is a quote that I go to often from Corita Kent, that we have no art. We do everything as well as we can. I was also so hyped to see that in the book as well, because I think it's really important, and I think we've talked a lot about how people bring different perspectives to the work, how people are coming from different places, how they're learning to identify these systems through their own eyes. I wonder what you think about the positionality of design as a concept. The quote would suggest that it's actually just part of everything else. It's part of life.
David: I think that's what draws those of us who want to work in design into it is that it's not separate from everything else. Art relies on a concerted disinterest. There's some space between you and the work. That's wonderful for art because it gives you a moment, a space in which to behold the thing that you're looking at, to think about it, to ruminate on it, to have new ideas. Design is much more imminent. It's like right there. It's like the door handle that you just pushed. And so there's less time for reflection, which may not be great, but there is a connection to everything else you do in the world. And so if you're somebody who thinks that how you set the table is as important as how you design the latest thing, then I think you may find yourself working and happy in design.I feel like it's almost an ethical disposition that you don't see a distinction between categories, I guess. That Corita Kent quote is amazing. And if I can recommend tracking down the Lucas Blalock film, which is about Corita Kent, which is the documentary, and you get to hear her say it. She says it many times. She says it so many times in those clips. But at one point she appends it with, you don't have art off in this little niche somewhere separate from everything else in the world. And that idea is just as compelling to me as it sounds like it is to you. I guess it's part of everything else.
Liam: Yeah. I think it's a beautiful way of framing art and design, but also framing life to affirm that it's just part of what we're doing. I'm really interested in this comparison between art and design. As I always am, but specifically how you put it that art leaves a space between the artifact and you, and I wonder ... This might be hard to answer as a designer yourself. But I wonder first if you have seen something designed that created that space or triggered the same reflection, or if that would no longer be design.
David: I think the former. I've seen so many things that do that. And maybe I'm willfully reading them into this situation, but I think any design work that stops me, it stops me because it includes some dissonance. It's not too smooth, it's not invisible. And it makes me think, oh, why is it like that? And what does that make me think about the world and this thing. So I think it still remains designed. That's the work I want to make where it gives you pause for a minute. It does what it needs to do, but maybe it doesn't do it exactly the way you thought it was going to do it, or it doesn't do it in the most invisible way, unless that's baked into the prompt and then great. But yeah. I would really say the works of design that I like almost always have that space or that thing that doesn't quite line up. Something is just a bit wrong.
Liam: Yeah. I think that's really important. I think often in UX design, we are so trying to close that space and run away from unexpected friction and space. So I think that's a really important lesson. It also strikes me that creating that tension on purpose can actually be ... It's not just gratifying for designers or designers who encounter the work, but also for the people who are ultimately using the work.
David: Mm-hmm. I would guess that the attempts to close that space also do a little bit to curtail imagination. And so sometimes the most wonderful things are the unexpected things, and they may work absolutely smoothly. They're just not what you thought it was going to be. So isn't that wonderful when something teaches you how to use it rather than conforms to the way to the majority experience of how things have existed before. And of course, I always think about how quickly conventions harden in interface design specifically because of the scale problem of so many people using these things from different places, etc, which are all very important issues. The jumps from one interface idea to another are acts of imagination and they don't conform to what existed before. And you have to cultivate room for those to happen, or it's useful to cultivate room for those things to happen, and it's often hard to justify at the same time, I'm sure, as I understand you deal with.
Liam: Completely. It makes me think about, again, the positionality of design not only socially and as part of the environment, but also temporarily that these ... At least speaking from UX design, so many of these conventions emerged from specific incentives at specific times in the development of technology. And now they're sticking around. But often I think these things mean something else when they have been around for 20 years, which I think is an important lesson for fellow UX designers to consider. But I'm also, yeah, I want to hear your perspective on how that shows up in other disciplines.
David: I think of typographic inventions, which are old. How we read English is in many ways a consequence of movable type and the printing press. And so many of the conventions that we know of as book typography are 500 years old. And we read by convention. The page number, we know what that little number is because of where it is and where we've seen it before, etc. Those things are incredibly useful. So I guess in say, interface design or user experience design, I can imagine that the technology moves so quickly, like the products change so radically in what they've been able to do in 20 years, that then those conventions need to evolve more quickly and they need to evolve with some imagination of how you do this next thing.
Liam: Yeah. I'm thinking now about book layout and all of the esoteric methods of drawing a star across the page to get the right dimensions that leave these big juicy margins for all the cool marginality that you could write in with your fountain pen.
David: Absolutely.
Liam: One last thing that I want to touch on surrounding the book is something really interesting that you said in our last conversation that I think ties into this discussion of teaching design, the relationship to the material, it's dynamism. You said that exterior form of the book can set the conditions for how someone engages with it. But then as you get into the material, it complicates itself in a way that keeps you going, but gives you a really nuanced idea. And it strikes me that that consideration not only of the book as an artifact, but also of the lessons themselves as a type of design as well.
David: Yeah. I guess I think I probably described it as bait and switch before, which is I think something as a technique I like a lot. Because you present something in a category that people already know what to expect. And so since we're dealing with conventions that makes it easier to register some change when those conventions are slightly altered. And it's not about wholesale rejection, I feel like it's much, much more effective when you bring somebody along. So they say, "Oh, it's a book. I know what a book is about. And it's a book about graphic design. Okay. Great. I'm expecting to learn how to do graphic design." Well, that's not what you're going to learn in A Co-Program for Graphic Design, but you'll hear from some other people who've either practiced graphic design or do things that are adjacent to it, and you'll hear how they think about design and hopefully that will open up your own ways of thinking around what it might mean to do design.
And so I don't think that would happen if it was presented as a revolutionary new approach to a chorus of people speaking about graphic design like that. You might come to it with expectations that aren't resolved. And so I think I'd much rather invite you to dinner and then talk to you about something that's more complicated than you were expecting after you've had a drink or two maybe.
Liam: Yeah. Obviously you've just put out this entire book of lessons about design, but what would you say is the most urgent thing that designers practicing today should be thinking about?
David: I guess what I try to foster is an individual response. And all I mean is I want students to develop their own approaches to how to do design, to how to think about it, and to really build those points of view and build those methods and ways of thinking. Build them solidly for themselves, because I think they're going to get eroded by the process of doing design where you're considering lots of factors. That's the great complication of it, but it's also, you can get lost. So I think I would've said the same thing a bunch of years ago. It's what I would still say is the most important thing today. But if you graduate and you're working in design, and there's been a fairly significant shift into working in-house in larger teams and there even moreso I feel like you might lose your individual perspective. And as a designer, what you bring is your individual perspective, your intuition, and I think intuition gets written out of design a bit more than it should. That's why I like invoking art and other practices that absolutely rely on you knowing what to do.
You trust your own motivations and you trust your own lateral leaps. And so anything I can do to encourage that in students. And so sometimes that's asking them to reflect on why they made choices and how that related to the last project and how that related to the previous project. And trying to emphasize that there's no method I can offer them that will be right for them. There's only a method they can develop for themselves that will be right for them. And yeah. I guess it's a position you might think, yeah, people have different relationships to how they think a design project should happen, and I'd love to see as many different ones as possible and just never just passively accepting the way you're told it should be done. Individuality. There's something I love from John Cage, American artist in the mid-20th century, when he was talking about teaching, he said, "The only thing I can teach a student is that you are utterly alone." I think it's true.
Liam: I'm curious how you hold onto that, how you keep from that individual perspective being eroded over time, over many different kinds of projects.
David: I think you got to set up some practices, some ways for yourself to do that. So for me, it's like reading, carving out time to read, thinking about that as part of my design practice. And also making lots of waste, making lots of work that never sees the light of day. And I don't mean three extra options for some design project I'm working on, but just following some path because not knowing where it's going to lead, and maybe it leads nowhere and you abandon it, but maybe it makes three beautiful drawings along the way, and you maybe keep those or use those somewhere else.
A strange thing ... I won't say a strange, but something I found that also talking about your own work, whether it's in slideshows or ... I think most often slideshows for me actually solidifies what I think about it, because inevitably there's some distance from when you did the work, and so you're talking about it. And so I always take invitations to show or talk about work very seriously. I spend a lot of time on them, whether it's serious time or not. And I think that's also useful to tell yourself, here's what I think, here's what I think. This is what I did, so I must've thought it, and oh my goodness, it connects to this other thing that I did before, and that's a sign of success for me. It's also people ... I just reject the idea that you got to be new every time. I think It's more important to be true than new. That sounds way too glib.
Liam: But that's a great succinct answer. I think that's a good note to close on, David.
David: Great. Excellent.
Liam: Congrats on the book.
David: Thank you.
Liam: As I told you before we started recording, I've already become fixated on it multiple times.
David: Excellent.
Liam: Yeah. Thank you for joining me again on the show.
David: Thank you for inviting me. I guess I just did something of what I was describing, which is by talking about what I do. Solidify ... The difficulty is not letting it ossify so it can always stay fluid.
Liam: Totally.
