Charles M. Schulz, civil rights, and the previously unseen art of Peanuts.
“In creating Macbeth, William Shakespeare embodied a single character with a full and often contradictory range of human traits — ambition, weakness, gullibility, bravery, fearfulness, tyranny, kindness. A character as complex as Macbeth could only be created by someone with a complete understanding of what it means to be a human being, and suggests that Shakespeare himself shared many traits with his most famous literary character. In the same way, the characters in Peanuts reflect the multiple dimensions of their creator. Interviewers asked Schulz if he was really Charlie Brown, expecting, perhaps, an uncomplicated confirmation. But Schulz was all the characters in Peanuts — Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, Pig-Pen, Franklin, Peppermint Patty, Marcie, even Snoopy. Each character represented a different aspect of Schulz, making Peanuts perhaps the most richly layered autobiography of all time.”
The peculiar – and sometimes downright dishonest – origins of ten publishers' names.
“Faber and Faber began life as The Scientific Press, a publishing firm founded by the academic Sir Maurice Gwyer in the early 1900s. Its main source of income was originally a weekly magazine called The Nursing Mirror, but a zeal to expand the business into book publishing led Gwyer to join forces with fellow academic and poet Sir Geoffrey Faber, and The Scientific Press officially became Faber and Gwyer in 1925. After four years, the pair agreed to go their separate ways: Gwyer went on to become chief justice of India and vice-chancellor of Delhi University, while Faber continued the publishing business alone, under the new name Faber and Faber – despite there never being another ‘Faber’ involved.”
“While Britain modernised itself between the fifties and the seventies, our most conspicuous cinematic output was the Carry On series, lasting for 30 films between 1958 and 1978, with one further errant number in the nineties. It was inevitable, I suppose, that the films and their many eccentric, troubled and curious stars would end up straying into the parallel world of world of modernism on a number of occasions. … The finest moment in modernism for any of the Carry On stars was Fenella Fielding's casting in Cumbernauld Hit, the extraordinary Italian Job-style action thriller fimed to promote the new town in 1977.”
Mood boards and human emotion – the one thing the internet can't buy.
“If the goal of design is emotional coherence, how is that end achieved? Enter the mood board: the most quotidian, slightly embarrassing and now ubiquitous design tool. The mood board has long been associated with the softer design arts — fashion, interiors, styling — that trade in allusion and affect. Decorators used them, but serious architects didn’t. There’s no science to it, simply a collection of inspirations and influences: an array of Xeroxed pictures pinned to a foam-core panel or scattered on the studio floor, a cloud of references composed to evoke atmosphere. Its very vaporousness is the point. Pictures joined together don’t signify any one thing, but rather inchoate feelings. An image of a silky kitty, when juxtaposed with an Angora bunny, a desiccated dandelion and an Eskimo anorak, is freed from the bonds of the corporeal and becomes the essence of fluffiness.”
You can learn a lot from getting on the floor and designing with your kids.
“My five year old son has never been that into drawing, but he’s obsessed with how things work and how they’re made. So making physical stuff is how he gets his creative kicks. He’s always had an infatuation with trains and a few years ago we bought him a classic Brio style wooden train track. It was one morning at shit o’clock (Dads all know what time that is) when we were putting together one of our tracks for the 100th time, that I realised you could create type from the tracks. I mentioned it to my son Joschka and so we decided to try to spell out his name in track. Not having enough track to do it in one go, we had to do it one letter at a time and then photograph it. It was fun to do and a nice tight design brief to work with a limited set of shapes – plus it almost made being up at an ungodly hour quite bearable.”
That is all.