A space dedicated to preserving public agencies use of graphic design throughout the 20th century.
I’m a total sucker for this kind of design ephemera. One, it’s deeply nostalgic for me. Secondly, this sort of digital preservation effort is pretty tough to come by these days. So, it deserves attention and gratitude. It’s brilliant seeing these catalogued and organized by country and department. I’m looking forward to seeing this collection grow!
In a tense meeting with White House officials on June 21, two days before the raids were scheduled to begin, Mr. McAleenan again outlined the challenges of the operation, including the separation of families and the logistics of housing them until they can be removed. If undocumented parents are found to have children who are United States citizens, for example, ICE agents will need to wait with the children in a hotel room until a relative in the United States can claim them.
Homeland security officials also worried that many of the families that the administration had hoped to detain might have left the addresses known to ICE after Mr. Trump tweeted the agency’s plans.
Anyone working in government who has contributed in any way to the organized raids of undocumented immigrants is despicable. It’s sickening, plainly morally bankrupt, and repugnant. These are people like you and I. It’s heartbreaking to see organized raids on undocumented families (these are non-threatening immigrant families seeking asylum here mind you).
He began working at 7, selling garden seeds door to door and later breaking horses (and his nose) for his father at a dollar a head. When he was 12, he began delivering The Texarkana Gazette on horseback in poor neighborhoods, soliciting subscriptions and building his route from scratch for extra commissions. He did so well his boss tried to cut his commissions, but he backed off when the boy went to the publisher.
He changed his name to Henry Ross Perot in honor of a brother, Gabriel Ross Perot Jr., who had died, just a toddler, in 1927. The family pronounced the surname PEE-roe, but in his 20s he changed that, too, making it puh-ROE because, he said, he got tired of correcting people. He called himself Ross; the media years later added the initial “H” at the beginning of his name, but he never liked it.
In his lifetime, he worked at IBM, served in the Navy as a Lieutenant, founded two computer-data companies (one of which powered paperwork for Medicaid and Medicare), and donated millions to schools, hospitals, scientific research and the arts. He was a self-made billionaire Texan who didn’t make his fortunes on oil and that is a remarkable achievement. A venerable businessman, and later became something of a pseudo-Republican (having run for president under the Reform Party).
Eagles don’t flock, you have to find them one at a time.
In a sense, Ross Perot set the mold for many post-oil Texan entrepreneurs. His legacy of philanthropy continued with his children, and later led to the founding of the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, my previous employer. While I disagreed with his personal politics, I retain a great deal of respect for the Perot family. Like many Texans I admire, he was really one of a kind.
No, not the video game. I wish we were talking about a space-invading alien crisis. Instead, we’re talking about financial crisis.
I won’t lie either, the video below is a bit of a bore. Nothing is more boring that two older white men talking about 200 years of financial dismay in a slow tempo. But here’s the video anyways:
At $4 per hour ($18 in 2019 dollars), the job paid many multiples of what [Richard] Montañez made in the fields. It represented a better life — insurance, benefits, social mobility.
Unable to read or write, the 18-year-old recruited his wife to help fill out an application. He journeyed down a dusty road, met with the hiring manager, and got the job. When he broke the news to his family, his grandfather imparted a piece of advice that would always stick with him: “Make sure that floor shines,” the man told his grandson. “And let them know that a Montañez mopped it.”
Montañez decided he was going to be the “best janitor Frito-Lay had ever seen” — and he quickly made his presence known.
Furthermore, I tip my hat to Roger Enrico (RIP). He was involved in leadership at PepsiCo for a very long time. Had Enrico not taken a risk on Montañez’s ingenuity, it’s possible we wouldn’t have Flamin’ Hot Cheetos today. As for Mr. Montañez, he’s currently VP of Multicultural Sales & Community Promotions at PepsiCo.
Kintsugi art dates back to the late 15th century. According to legend, the craft commenced when Japanese shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa sent a cracked chawan—or tea bowl—back to China to undergo repairs. Upon its return, Yoshimasa was displeased to find that it had been mended with unsightly metal staples. This motivated contemporary craftsmen to find an alternative, aesthetically pleasing method of repair, and Kintsugi was born.
There are three types of joinery available in Kintsugi:
Crack – using gold resin, lacquer or dust to fill
Piece method – there may be a missing ceramic altogether, and is replaced entirely with gold/lacquer
Joint call – ceramic piece replacement via a non-matching fragment and gold lacquer to achieve a patchwork effect
It’s weird to think that, in the years before the Walkman, there was no way to listen to music privately while out in public. There were ways to bring music with you — on transistor radios, on boom boxes, on car stereos — but they forced you to subject everyone around you to that music, as well. The Walkman freed us up. It allowed us to make music more a part of our lives, to build our own private soundworlds. It was a transformative invention, one of the few that utterly upended the way we listen to music. Soon enough, more and more portable cassette players would hit the market, and the price fortunately dropped. But no matter which company made them, we still used the word “Walkman” to describe them.
Only looking backward, can we appreciate how far we’ve come. It truly changed how we listened to music. We might not refer to our music players as Walkmans anymore, but in a sense — we still do. A simple progression of design thinking over the years reveals my favorite Bruno Munari’s maxim:
Since I.M. Pei’s upside-down cake of a modernist building first opened in 1978, people have complained about Dallas City Hall. Much of the decades-long jeremiad has centered on the vast, mostly useless—or, at least, underutilized—expanse in front of the building. The 6-acre plaza was part of Pei’s design, even though it’s more a shrug than an actual plan. To its credit, the city realized this early on and commissioned author and urban sociology professor William H. Whyte to study the plaza and recommend a fix. On June 15, 1983, Whyte delivered his presentation to the City Council. His idea: a pavilion with a food kiosk at its center and trees all around it, something that would provide sustenance and shade, somewhere to sit. He wanted to “bring down the scale of the plaza to the individual dimensions”—to make it “a place” (emphasis his). Apparently, the City Council was made up entirely of Alpha Betas from Revenge of the Nerds, because Whyte eloquently put forth all of these ideas, and all anyone heard was “BEACH PARTY!” A year later, in June 1984, the city trucked in tons of sand, and everyone put on their OP shorts. Lynn Lennon, who was working on a project about public spaces for the Dallas Public Library, captured the event for posterity. Lennon, whose work is in the permanent collection of SMU’s DeGolyer Library, was kind enough to dig up some of those photos for us.
Growing up in Fort Worth, I would never imagine something like this ever transpiring in the Cowtown. But in Dallas? Of course Dallas would throw a Beach Party at City Hall. The original photograph above was developed in 1984, which is apparently a part of the DMA’s permanent collection. According to this June 1987 issue of Texas Monthly, it appears to have been an annual event for some time:
I wonder when the Beach Party stopped being an annual thing. Here’s a couple of fun images from D Magazine (disclaimer, these were photographed by my friend, Kyle Pennington. An excellent food photographer, and musician):
In lieu of recent news of Karl Lagerfeld‘s passing, I thought I would pen a post about fashion — instead I thought I would share a post that’s a bit more important. A fascinating dissection on mending wears. Troubling, and equally eye-opening, it’s important to understand where we’ve been and where we’re going with fashion.
Out of this came a British “make-do and mend” ethos, whereby civilians were encouraged to patch up and repair old garments, rather than buy new and replace. When garments couldn’t be patched up any longer, they were “deconstructed” so that their raw materials could be recycled. Raggedy sweaters, for example, were sometimes “unknitted” so that the yarns could be used to darn old knits or makes new ones entirely. The Ministry of Supply even organized a fashion show to demonstrate how new clothes could be made from old garments.
Women weren’t the only people mending during this period; British soldiers and men back home were also encouraged to fix their clothes. In some of the “Make Do and Mend” ad campaigns, the government specifically targeted men. Pictured above are some of my favorite war-time tutorials on how to make buttonholes, reinforce areas for extra wear, darn holes, and patch shirts.
I have (too often) found myself frustrated, scared, and confused as to how to mend a rip, a hole, a tear, or the occasional missing button. It’s too bad that high-octane retailers like H&M, Zara, Forever 21 or even Target go to such great lengths to get the cheapest, fastest commodity into stores in forever increasingly divided shorter fashion seasons. We all end up with wardrobes that are too homogeneous, shitty, tattered and honestly of poor quality, and astoundingly, we spend more money on clothing. It’s only getting worse with the ease of subscription retailers and Amazon.
An excellent example of mending of cozy sweater worth mending.
A dear friend of mine has jeans that he can never part with, and have over the years fashioned a makeshift zipper garage (that is what it is called) out of a paperclip and sewing magic. I love a good Macgyver-approach to mending.
I am endlessly touched by men’s sentimental attachment to old clothes: Shetland jumpers that are more hole than whole, Panama hats missing half the crown, shirts with collars so frayed you can plait the edges. One barrister friend, who’s just turned 50, has been wearing the same leather jacket since his student days. No matter that, nowadays, he’s more Sid James than James Dean.
