Paul Ford is a writer, programmer, educator, and technologist. He is currently the co-founder of Postlight, a digital product studio in New York and teaches at the School of Visual Arts. He’s written for publications like Harper’s, New York, Medium, and The Morning News and is a frequent commentator on technology and the internet. In 2015, he published “What is Code?” for Bloomberg Businessweek, an issue-length essay explaining programming to a mass audience. In this episode, Paul and I talk about his childhood interest in computers and books, the early days of the web and building his own blogging software, as well as how the internet effects the form of content and the issues surrounding digital product design.
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Josh Owen is an industrial designer and educator. He runs his own design studio, Josh Owen LLC, and is a Full Professor and the Chair of the Industrial Design Department at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he also works with the Vignelli Center for Design Studies. In this episode, Jarrett and Josh talk about spending his summers on archeological digs with his father and how that influenced his interests in history and culture, how he started teaching, and how his work as a designer and teacher influence each other.
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Johanna Drucker is an author, book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic. She's currently a professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. Her research and writing has focused on visual language and letterforms, typography, visual poetry, the history of books and digital aesthetics. In this episode, Jarrett and Johanna talk about her interest in making books as objects, her work on design history, and the being both an artist and academic.
Lucinda Hitchcock is a book designer, typographer, and educator. She's on the faculty at RISD, where she's currently the head of the graphic design department and has designed books for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MFA Boston, and Tufts University Art Galleries. Her research involves narrative, place, and the shape of language. In this episode, Jarrett and Lucy talk about graphic designers as cultural curators, compassionate teaching, and what she learned during her recent sabbatical.
