The Last Man for the Job, a photo set
In 2008 the political class of this country spent $5.3 billion on campaigns. One billion dollars of that went to the presidential contest alone. These are huge, industrial-scale investments, and at that level, the graphic design is as slick and corporate as the financing. The Obama campaign in particular was widely lauded for translating its campaign into a coherent and evocative exercise in national branding.1
But politics in America, and, therefore, American political design, are not defined by one man, one campaign, or one level of contest. When all of the big-money players are counted—candidates for the House and Senate, would-be governors—you come up with around 2,000 names. But there are half a million elected officials in the United States.2 If we are going to talk about political graphic design in a serious way, we have to include this massive group of politicians in the discussion.
Keep Reading: Ink on Plastic
I wrote an article for LSA MAGAZINE about the first governor of Michigan, the founding of the University of Michigan, and the financial Panic of 1837.
Steven T Mason, Boy Governor and Founder of the University of Michigan
The Believer - Micro-Interview with S. T. Joshi
This issue features a microinterview with S. T. Joshi, conducted by Fritz Swanson. Joshi began his career as an H. P. Lovecraft scholar at the age of seventeen, in 1975. The compilation of criticism, H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, that Joshi began as a young man led to a comprehensive bibliography of Lovecraft’s work released by Kent State University Press. He now acts as the unofficial curator of Lovecraft’s life and work, editing the definitive editions of Lovecraft’s fiction for Penguin Books, and working to release all of Lovecraft’s extensive correspondence. Joshi is also a scholar of H. L. Mencken and Ambrose Bierce, and has pursued his scholarship independently, without a PhD or the support of any academic institution.
My article about William Howard Taft's Desk in the Fall 2010 issue of LSA MAGAZINE
The article is called "A Piece of History", and it starts on page 60 of the Fall 2010 issue of LSA MAGAZINE. (pdf)
I just did three pieces for LSA Magazine.
Here are PDFs of my work:
A Sidebar on Great Monsters, which is at the end of this article.
An article about BiblioBouts which is an educational game I developed with a team in the School of Information that teaches academic library research.
And finally
Another article about Neil Greenberg this time focusing on his UMICH bus system AIRBUS.