WE AND THE COLOR

I’ve had my copy of Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color, the 50th Anniversary Edition, on my desk for quite a while now. Not on my bookshelf collecting dust, on the actual desk, because I keep pulling it back out. That alone should tell you something before we get into the details.

I sat down with all 208 pages, worked through the color plates the way Albers inte...

I put the Fjorden font duo on my desk for two weeks and used it the way a designer actually would. That meant real headlines, a fake product label, a poster draft, and one very annoying multilingual test with German umlauts, since some of my readers write to me in German. No...

Seriously, I’ve opened, tested, and quietly abandoned more magazine templates than I care to admit. Most collapse the second you swap a font or drop in a photo with the wrong aspect ratio. That’s why Tom Sarraipo’s Adobe InDesign magazine template caught my attention when I pulled it apart for this review. It’s a 24-page, US Letter layout built in CMYK, a...

It happens quite often that many supplies fail in predictable ways. A pen skips halfway through a lecture, a notebook’s spine cracks by week three, or a highlighter bleeds through to the next page and ruins your notes on both sides. I spent the last six weeks testing pens, notebooks, pencils, and a stack of organizational tools that promised to survive a real semester, no...

I first noticed the Theodore and Scarlett font through a Creative Market notification I almost swiped away. But happily, I didn’t. Something about the thumbnail—those thick, blocky letters wearing rounded corners like a leather jacket with soft lapels—made me stop scrolling. So I bought it, tested it against six real client briefs, and I’m going to walk you through exactl...