Mike Schnaidt: Fast Company Creative Director on typography, creative endurance, and designing for the long haul

0:00It may sound counterintuitive, but the key for me to get over burnout was to do something completely different. I think that picking up another creative task, learning something new, is really the key to burnout. For some, typography is treated as just a detail. You know, the thing that you finalize after the real design decisions are made. But not for our guest Mike Schnaidt. It's closer to the foundation everything else rests on. He spent two decades in editorial design at some of the most iconic American magazines, including Men's Health, Esquire, Popular Science, Entertainment Weekly. And right now, he's the creative director of Fast Company, where he recently led a redesign that does something pretty unusual.

0:46The magazine gets a completely new typeface every single issue.

0:51Mike Schnaidt:Mike's also a professor, a runner, and the author of Creative Endurance, a book that maps the principles of physical and mental endurance onto the creative life. It's built around 56 rules for sustaining a career in design, drawn from interviews with ultramarathoners, astronauts, and designers who've pushed way past the limits most people set for themselves. And as you'll hear, he's already working on book two. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolard. And I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our premium subscriber feed.

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2:22We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

2:32And now, back to the show.

2:39Mike Schnaidt:Mike Schneidt, welcome to Design Better. Thank you for having me. We are excited to have you here. And we've got a bunch of topics we want to talk about. But I think one of the things that's a core part of your background and expertise is typography. And we're always trying to help our audience level up, whether they're just curious about typography or they're more advanced and they want to figure out where they can go to get even better at it. So maybe we start off and just talk about are there any kind of core principles, core typographic principles that guide your work? The way I like to teach type is you think about type in two very different categories.

3:13One category being just like very utilitarian typography, which is what many college students would be familiar with, which is we see it on your phone, we see it on a website, it needs to be very legible. And then there's the whole other school of typography, which is the Paul Scheer School of Typography, where type is very much a pliable, malleable thing. And I really try to teach and think of those two different modes when I'm designing. I come from the editorial space. Your page designs, whether it's in print, on screen, need to be incredibly legible and structured. But then, you know, you've got your cover, your magazine cover, you've got your feature opener.

3:49And those, in my opinion, should be blown out and as fun as possible. Those are the movie poster moments. And those are the moments where I really try to get off the computer and sketch out ideas, even if it's just like a 10 second little thumbnail to figure out ideas. That's pretty common for a guy like myself who has been designing for 20 something years because my teachers would teach us about woodcut typography and so on and so forth. But people with less experience in type and more familiarity with type on mobile devices aren't necessarily thinking about that fine art aspect of type. I really try to think about type in those two different modes.

4:26Let's maybe talk about philosophy or like the creative thinking behind typography. I like the idea that you're getting off the computer and you're drawing and sort of getting a feel for what the type could communicate. So your background, lots of editorial experience, Men's Health, Popular Science, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, and today Fast Company, which many of our listeners are big fans. We're certainly big fans of Fast Company. and when you joined Fast Company, there was some exploration of typography and you were leading this design team when there was a big redesign and you ended up with Centra, Grifo, Beckett and Simple.

5:05Is that right? Four big fonts? Yeah, that was eight years ago. We've stuck with Centra. Grifo is now just used in the logo and we use Tampos for body copy and I'm not getting paid by Klim, but it's one of the most legible body copy typefaces in the world, especially as I get older. I appreciate the hell out of a really legible body copy type piece. Yeah, me too. I have to carry around glasses all the time. I appreciate it. So what's the conversation like in the room when you're going through a big editorial redesign? You've got to find the right fonts that tell the stories and still be very functional.

5:44So there's like this creating creative possibilities while still remaining very functional. What's the conversation like in the design studio? A lot of conversations that revolve around food. So when we think, I just feel like food is always such a great metaphor for design. But, you know, when we're thinking about typography, let's start with we've got our centra and tempos. That's like we're building a dish that's our white rice. That's the foundation. And then all the other typefaces that we add on top of it are all the fun toppings. The scallions, the beef that's been marinating in soy sauce, the red pepper flakes.

6:16So when we're thinking about typefaces, and it's important to note also that you mentioned a redesign. We're on our fourth redesign, a fast company in my eight years of being there. This most recent redesign is the most exciting one to me because we have created this redesign where we find new typefaces for every single issue. our conversation is like okay when we did this initial redesign and created this foundation where we can plug in new typefaces every issue we thought okay we need that foundation we need centra and tempos those need to look great in the magazine they need to be the very functional typefaces they need to also be able to work great on our site tempos scans great on the screen centra looks great on the screen centra works really well for all of our podcasts and events that we do, that's the foundation right there.

7:06And then when it comes to the magazine, we're redesigning every single issue. We're introducing a brand new typeface for the issue. So Kyoto is our next typeface. It's for our most innovative companies issue. That is a typeface from Pangrum Pangrum. That's kind of like a Clarendon kind of style typeface. Very specific to that issue. We kind of went all in on this science textbook, old vintage science textbook kind of theme. three of the covers are ready. They're on our Instagram now, but they have this very math slash science formula design on the cover. The issues themselves, the magazines themselves, we are each very bespoke in terms of their typography.

7:45And we do that for two reasons. First off, the magazine itself is quarterly. So we want each issue to feel like super special. I believe that by assigning one typeface for each issue kind of just makes it feel like this great moment in time. You can pick a typeface like Kyoto that you love for that issue. I think it's a great typeface. I don't know if I would use it for every single issue, but I love the ability to be able to go all in on that typeface for just one issue. And the other reason we did this redesign was because I wanted to give my design team authorship. I oversee a team of eight, which includes a mix of photo editors and art directors.

8:23I have two very senior level art directors. And I'll assign each issue to one of those art directors to come up with the typeface, come up with just the overall look and the foundation of the issue. And then the other art director and our design fellow will jump in and work on it as well. Authorship is really important to designers. Coming up with this redesign where each art director can pick a typeface for that issue and really own the look of that issue gives them that feeling of authorship. And I think it just creates a more sustainable creative practice because what kind of creative doesn't love to own something.

8:57Type, yes, it's a very like tactile thing, but I also believe that it could be a window into really giving a designer more ownership over a project. And is there something that unifies, like elements that unify? I'm thinking about use cases here, like I'm at the airport and I see the magazine stand and I still recognize this is Fast Company, it's different, but it's still the familiar magazine that I love and I trust. The pages themselves, you think about it as that's your bowl of rice. You know, the page designs issue to issue have the same framework. We use the same body copy. We have the same grid structure.

9:34We use a little tab system because every story within the issue has a rubric or like a particular category for the story. So there's this tab system that unifies every issue. But then within that issue, your headline typefaces, they change. As you flip through the issue, it's not like a net new nose to tail redesign. There's still familiarity. There's still structure to it. The covers, the only thing that they all bear in resemblance is the logo and the fact that there's a person on the cover. It definitely would not be an easy sell to say, okay, we're creating a brand that purposely doesn't have continuity to it.

10:10My rationale for that is Fast Company, we cover design, we cover innovation. Innovation is a little buzzy these days, but it's important for us to innovate ourselves as well. So I believe that that gives us permission to continually change the way the magazine looks. You know, it was a big gamble for me in the beginning to try to do that, to pose this idea of we're going to redesign the magazine every time. I'm always going to come up with a new cover design. And it was kind of counter to how I operate as a designer as well, because you mentioned I worked at Men's Health. Every single cover of Men's Health was pretty much identical.

10:43It was a Snickers package. Your main cell had to be here. Your number had to be in the bottom right corner. You needed a cover line about abs.

10:50Mike Schnaidt:Seven minute abs. seven minute abs everybody knows about the seven minute abs in the beach body we were very limited on the amount of uppercase type that we could use because folks believe that that was tough to read and don't necessarily disagree but it was a very limiting way of working and then i go to fast company and i've stayed there for eight years because i have a lot of creative freedom which i really appreciate and it was kind of just like oh my god what do i do and i was like let's try to do something different every issue. And then with each redesign, kind of push that a little bit further and further and further to this fourth one where it was just like, well, we're quarterly, we've got the time.

11:28What if we redesign every single issue?

11:31Mike Schnaidt:I like the food metaphor. And it reminds me of we had a conversation with Jonathan Heffler, a typographer a few years ago. And he talked about how he kind of viewed his business and his work as having a lot to do with hospitality, like welcoming people in. And one example I can think of is on his website, he had all these great font pairings. It was almost like pair this food with this wine kind of thing. And they all made a lot of sense. Is that a kind of philosophy that you use at all in your work? When I worked at Men's Health, I fell in love with the idea of service journalism. The whole ethos of Men's Health was like every single tip, you should be able to put the book down and go out and be able to put into action right away.

12:06That really informed my methodology on how I design. When we're designing packages and pages or anything, we're thinking very much about the user experience. I think user experience is common language in UI, UX, digital, anything like that. I think a lot about it in print too, because you're building these packages and you've got a lot of components and the reading experience in print, it's so enjoyable. So working on a magazine that was primarily focused on service made me think a lot about utilitarian design and think about, okay, I want a nice mix of infographics and illustrations and photography and data visualization and just giving the reader the right balance of all of those.

12:48When I wrote Creative Endurance and I designed it, I did the two hand in hand. So I was writing as I was designing because it helps me think. And it kept me thinking about the reader experience as I was designing the book. I find that if you're just writing on your own without thinking about the design experience, you're writing into a Word document, you're going to end up with gigantic blocks of text that may be the most genius thing in the world, but design is the way in. Design is gonna get the person to read that. The idea of service design has helped me very much as a writer. It's helped me as a professor as well in just thinking about the experience of my students in the classroom and how I break up information down to like, okay, how much of this class should be lecture?

13:35How much of it should be Q &A? How much of it should be hands-on? Should this portion be visual? Do they need a voiceover? So design is very much informed how I operate and all the different professions that I do. We want to jump into your book here in a minute, but I want to keep pressing forward on how you operate within the Fast Company Design Studio. One of the key challenges that we just don't see too often is design and a system that has to work across media. So most folks in our audience are designing for some digital output or they're designing for a print output. But designing for both is a challenge.

14:20Talk to us about how you think about design as a system and how that system has to have some continuity across different channels, different media, and where it can just be totally broken. You can break the system. Legos. I loved Legos as a kid. I always think about that building block, that modular. With Legos, your one block is your modular. Every time we're coming up with a design system and we're looking at mood boards, when we're prototyping, we're in search of that one modular element. It could be as simple as for our most innovative companies package that we're releasing. The modular is just a circle that's acid green.

14:59We're using that acid green circle to death. You'll see it everywhere. That is the one thing that unifies all of our graphics because we've got the print edition. We've got special website. We've got video at our most innovative company, Summit. You'll see it across many different platforms. So we're thinking about that modular. Obviously, we've got our typeface that connects everything as well. And we've got our color palette. But I would say as long as you have that one branding element, that one modular, you're good. Because that then gives you permission to, if you've got to do something different with your type for social media, because we take our entire magazine and break it apart into a series of different social posts.

15:41We'll probably get about 30 social posts out of this one issue. We'll take sidebars and turn them into their own slideshows. Each cover will be a post with a pull quote attached to it. And on all of those graphics that you'll see on our Instagram over the next couple weeks, you'll see these circles. And you'll see this dark charcoal gray color. You'll see this tan color. You'll see the Kyoto typeface. So it really just boils down to a simple modular system. How soon is this redesign coming out? Well, it came out last year. We launched it in 2025. The fun part about it was I love design when non-designers get really excited about it as well.

16:19So at this design, like any kind of big redesign, I had to not only present to our editors, but I had to present to our C-suite. When I did the presentation of the redesign, my chief operating officer, when I presented this idea of, okay, new typeface every single issue, she was like, I feel like type designers don't get their moment in the sun. And is there a way to spotlight them some more? And my editor-in-chief has said, like, well, yeah, what if Mike writes a little 100-word blurb each issue about the typeface? And then our head of video was like, what if we do a video series where Mike talks about the typeface every single issue?

16:51So we launched this YouTube series last year where I've been talking about the typeface. We're going deep on the typeface. And it was honestly the kind of thing where I'm like, we love talking about type, but is this really going to pop off? Are people going to enjoy hearing about type? And there are some type nerds out there. And even people that don't quite understand type, they like learning about it because it's one of those things that we live with. Everybody knows a good body copy typeface when they see it. People that like reading and they're reading a book with a good body copy typeface.

17:18It feels like a cozy shirt. But not everybody understands why does that shirt feel cozy? I've learned that people just enjoy having a topic explained to them. And it's also helped me find this new skill or skill that I'm working on where being on video and talking about this thing that I love so much that I didn't think that other people would enjoy. And that's just a really good example of getting people that you wouldn't expect to be interested in design all connected. This redesign has grown into so much more than I ever would have expected.

17:51Mike Schnaidt:Reminds me a little bit of the movie Helvetica, which came out probably over a decade ago now. But I remember kind of forcing my wife, Courtney, to sit down and watch it with me because she's not a designer and doesn't have an inherent interest in typography. But after the first few minutes, she's like, wow, this is actually really interesting how this one typeface has kind of inserted itself, you know, love it or hate it into so many aspects of our lives. and then here are some designers who like really embrace it and here are some who hate it and nobody's really neutral about it. It's interesting to hear all these different perspectives.

18:21Yeah, it's nice to like slow down with a topic and I think that typography is one of those topics where you can slow down and talk about the nitty-gritty and I find that a lot of people are interested in it. Let's talk about your new book, Creative Endurance. Tell us why this book, why this was an important thing for you to write. I got the idea for it in 2022. I was teaching at Kean University in New Jersey. We're kind of just coming out of the pandemic era and students are back in the classroom. My workplace has completely changed. So at one point, my whole team was in office in New York. Now they're distributed.

18:54At that point, I'm still kind of navigating having a distributed team. And I was finding that designers at my most hands-on level were burnt out. I was feeling a little burnt out. That's where I started to think about this topic of endurance. I also thought a lot about it as a runner. I went for a six-mile run before the podcast. It's just my meditation time working in men's health. I was always interested in health and the science and the physiology of it. And I just thought it would be really cool to do a book where I can connect creativity to endurance on the physical level and also on the mental level.

19:30An early version of the book was called The Runner's Guide to Design. Rockport, who's the publisher, they said that was very niche as much as they liked it. So we kind of broadened it to creative endurance. And essentially, it was intended to be the answer to burnout, but written through very much of a magazining perspective. So the way I structured it was 56 rules. The idea of rules came from Esquire. And I always liked the idea of rules because it sounds very formal, but you can have some fun with it. Two of the rules in the book are like, end your day on time, and another one is don't end your day on time.

20:04Meaning if you love a project, pull an all-nighter, put all your energy into it. But then there's some things that honestly, we have to mail in because they're not as important to us. We'd be lying to ourselves if we said every single project was important to us. In the same way, every single run that I go for is not going to be a banger where I'm going to run my best time in the world. I really just wanted to come up with an answer to the problem of burnout. Around the same time, Rick Rubin put out his book on creativity. I'm like, well, I can't top that. I'm not going to try to top that. But I spoke to it from my perspective as a runner.

20:35I spoke to it from the perspective of 39 interview subjects that I had for the book. So I interviewed Dean Karnasas, the ultra marathon man, the guy who went for three days straight without sleeping. I interviewed Jeanette Epps, an astronaut who's been to space. I interviewed Sagi Haviv from Tremayi Geismore and Haviv. Athletes like Dean, people who are endurance minded like Jeanette Epps, and then just your straight up designers like Sagi.

21:02Mike Schnaidt:The quick Dean Karnasas story from a local thing here. We have the Big Sur Marathon here, which is a very famous marathon every year. And this is, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago or so. He came to run it, and most people, it starts kind of near where I live here in Carmel, and they take a bus down to the starting line. He decided to run down to the starting line first, and then went back. It's like, okay, man, you're crazy. He is bonkers. Really funny thing was I interviewed him three times. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at designbetterpodcast.com