022: Doing what you love, computer art, and Vietnamese design
Plus tips on becoming a graphic designer
Welcome to Asset Library, a graphic design newsletter where I share inspiring and interesting design, tools, articles, etc. on the first Monday of the month.
Hiiii!! I am sending this from the sky, leaving Spain. Isn’t that fun. Thanks for tuning in, let’s get into it.
🫵 This is a long one, so you may need to read it in your browser.
Prompt 002:
Choose a short quote and create a typographic poster.
Set a timer for 15 minutes.
This was humbling.
🌀 The distance between anything at all and the center via Reading Machines
Reading Machines is a publishing platform for non-teleological reading by Tiger Dingsun. It also taught me that non-teleological means focusing on how elements interact dynamically rather than progressing toward a goal.
This whole site is so fun and creative and deeply entertaining.
📹 A graphic design breakdown of Severance
I am fresh off the season 2 finale and still admiring all the incredible details that make this show special. I love how much time and attention has been given to the design in the Severance world and how it helps tell the whole story. Shout out to Apple for using their unlimited budget so well.
I have found that the way people talk about this show often sucks the fun and art out of it, but this video is good!! Matt Horne concisely breaks down all the satisfying choices like passive aggressive fonts and overlord logos.
🗞️ When to do what you love by Paul Graham
I appreciated this perspective on doing what you love, which can often skew toward extreme perspectives—either throwing caution to the wind and quitting your job to do what you love or being practical and waiting until you’re in a better financial position to do so, etc.
I found his opinion refreshing and balanced, offering a new take on the idea that pursuing what you love doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You can do what you love alongside what you don’t, at least for a while. You can do what you love in stages, first a little, then a lot. Or always a little. Or always a lot. The point being that you do it at all.
Don't wait. Don't wait till the end of college to figure out what to work on. Don't even wait for internships during college. You don't necessarily need a job doing x in order to work on x; often you can just start doing it in some form yourself. And since figuring out what to work on is a problem that could take years to solve, the sooner you start, the better.
🗄️ VIET GD
VIET GD is an index and celebration of Vietnamese graphic design work made by Lucy Pham as an MFA student at RISD.
🗞️ The Dazed cheat sheet for becoming a graphic designer by Ester Mejibovski
Tips from Dazed’s design director on a successful career as an illustrator.
I always applied and longed for the Dazed design internships and thought this was a cool feature. Nineteen-year-old me would gobble this up.
Having a unique style comes with time and it’s impossible to expect that from young designers or recent graduates, but what is important is understanding what type of work you’re interested in. Whether that is crazy digital animations or very clean beautiful editorial print-focused work or if you lean towards more fun advertising concepts. For me personally, my work has always been rooted in wit and humour. That’s what I wrote my final year thesis about and that is something I love doing the most.
🛠️ A designer’s unfiltered take on surviving a brutal market by
A sobering but helpful read about the job market as a designer. I think the interviewee is tough but offers up a lot of helpful advice. Some of it is pretty extra, but if you implement just a few of their tactics, I bet you’d notice a difference.
No one is coming to save you.
You can sit around blaming the market. You can say it’s unfair. You can say it’s exhausting.
But at the end of the day, you either figure it out, or you get left behind.
📹 Catalog (1961), a computer graphics film by John Whitney
A pioneer in computer animation, Whitney made a series of experimental films while working at IBM. It’s so hard to wrap my mind around the fact that this was made in 1961???? With a computer?????? !!!!!!!
If you’d like to read more about early computer graphics, read this by
.🗞️ Why everyone can and should be a good storyteller by
Carly brilliantly writes about writing as a learned skill vs. an innate talent. I have to hold myself back from sharing everything she writes, and this one is no exception. A great read.
“In the words of one of my favorite poets Mary Ruefle on Shakespeare: ‘Yet there is one hard cold clear fact about him, a fact that freezes the mind that dares to contemplate it: In the beginning William Shakespeare was a baby, and knew absolutely nothing. He couldn’t even speak.” (The same goes for you, too.)’”
🖼️ New and antique book covers in Mexico City
I forgot to share these last month! Too good not to. From Librería Anticuaria A Través del Espejo and Antonia Bookstore.
📖 The City is Ours: Manhole Covers
I love a book that elevates the mundane around us. This is a book about manhole covers.
Thanks for joining, hope you enjoyed.
See you next time. On the first Monday of the month, you can expect Asset Library and on the third Monday of the month you can expect In the Clouds in your inboxes.
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