Elizabeth Goodspeed On Finding New Ideas in Old Things

17:46Elizabeth Goodspeed:You once told me that walking into a Sainsbury, like the British supermarket chain, was like meeting a celebrity.

17:53unknown host:Yeah, I fell to my knees in a Sainsbury. Well, that's because I'm really obsessed with the Sainsbury grocery archive. They have an amazing, one of the earlier online archives I got pretty obsessed with, and specifically the first time I had found really the concept of a corporate archive, which is, you know, one company collecting their personal materials in some space. The other great one is by Avon, the beauty sort of makeup door-to-door company. But the Sainsbury's specifically, they had an in-house brand label that was called like Sainsbury's Own, and they produced all their own packaging.

18:29unknown host:And they just happened to have in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, like amazing in-house designers. It was super sort of classic mid-century modernism. But yeah, I think finding that stuff on their site was just so interesting. When I went in person, even though they didn't have as many of the old packaging, it was like, this is a real place? This, I thought, existed only on my computer as a weird little archive of hot sauce and lemon cream pie.

18:55Elizabeth Goodspeed:I feel like the archives of old ephemera, especially old ephemera that's been scanned in some way, because some of the stuff in the Sainsbury Archive is not in mint condition, right? They've sort of archived it from whatever they were able to access, and the imperfection of that makes it even more magical to me.

19:11unknown host:Absolutely. Well, I think what's nice about all this stuff is just the evidence of life, like separate from all the design side of all of this. I think I am a true extrovert at heart and I love people. I think people are just endlessly fascinating. And the narratives behind the ephemera, whether that's the person who bought this, who considered it worth saving and stored it for many years before it ended up at this antiques fair, or the person who made it in the first time around. and, you know, or the maquette for something that I later saw produced as a book cover. I really like the sort of narratives around the people.

19:45unknown host:And it makes it inspires me just as a creative human to think about other creative humans, but also just people generally. And oftentimes when you read these books about the artists and designers that you really admire, there's also a lot in there about their families and their love of nature and all the other stuff they were up to. And it I think also is a really sort of healing balm in a time where being a designer is so much part of your identity to remember that even these amazing designers from the past were also just regular, dagular people who either might have been critical of their own work or might have had plenty of other interests.

20:18unknown host:It just sort of, I don't know, it makes it more interesting. It makes me feel happy.

20:21Elizabeth Goodspeed:Yeah, totally. Okay. I think the other thing sort of as we circle around your archiving tendencies or interest in archives, one of the things you talk about often is like how important historical reference can be and how it could be like a super productive process. But I'm curious, like what, what is the line for you? Like, when does it become sort of like retro cosplay?

20:42unknown host:I mean, I kind of describe all of my work as graphic design fan art, which is to say I'm often making stuff that is an intentional homage. I think the difference is inherently by having made this stuff on a computer in 2026 with my own perspective and interests, it never ends up looking like the same thing in the same way that fan art, you know, fan art is someone's, someone else's reinterpretation of someone else's art. It's never, you know, exactly the same. I love, I'm not a huge, like, fanfic reader, but I have some friends who are who are always telling me things like, oh, you know, did you know that Fifty Shades of Grey is Twilight fan art?

21:20unknown host:I mean, Twilight fanfic that later became this own thing, you know, or Harry Styles fanfics that become, like, the idea of you with Anne Hathaway, you know, and I love how much things can change. And that connection is really only visible to people who know are in on the joke. And I think the same is true about graphic design. There are things where I know that this was an homage to an Art Deco poster I saw, but I've sort of, everything else about it has changed. So the only person who really is aware of that is me. And I think that is the best way to approach it, which is to say seriously and intensely and not trying to change it just for the sake of avoiding plagiarism, but genuinely remaking it.

21:56unknown host:And I forget who this quote is from, but there was a writer who had said once that the best way to sort of practice writing is to read a story or whether that's a novel or an article and then try and sit down and rewrite the whole thing from memory and how inherently your description of that even if you are doing it exactly as is is going to alter it you're going to write things in a different way with your own voice and I especially with things like fiction I think people people think about doing that for articles but not as much for fiction and I think it's something similar is true of design where part of why I looking at all this stuff all the time is that it's not then a one-to-one copy in the moment.

22:35unknown host:It's more this suffusing of many references into one thing. Like I kind of know what I think art deco type looks like. I think the difference is when you're earlier, you have to look a little more closely because you haven't had that osmosis of style and periods yet. And there, I think, finding that balance of really close looking and exact mimicry, a la sort of the master copy in a museum if you're painting all the way through to then the sort of like very distant slow copy that

23:05Elizabeth Goodspeed:happens just by developing your own style yeah no I think that makes so much sense and I think it's like such a nice reminder that all of those things we do outside of design also influence that process and like just you being you and having your unique perspective means you'll do it differently

23:20unknown host:and again the fact that I think I have such sort of perhaps freakish obsession with things having a conceptual bent to how I'm borrowing them makes me also less worried about copying because if someone said, oh, I recognize that border. You got it from this book. I'd say, hell yeah, I did. And here's why I used it. I think when people feel like they have to obscure the copying, it's usually because it is a little more nefarious. It's, oh, I stole something from a contemporary designer and I used it exactly as is with other, without really any solid reason besides not having an idea of my own or thinking this was cool.

24:00unknown host:Whereas I think if you copy effectively and thoughtfully, you actually have sort of an explanation ready to go that isn't, it doesn't lessen the work, it actually enhances it. And I love that with my clients. Like I was working on a brand a while ago that involved some art deco stuff and the client, you know partly they were using it was a like a hospitality space in a old sort of building and we specifically looked at art deco because that was the period where this building was from and they loved that I could say hey your mascot comes directly from an old art deco advertisement that's narrative that they use in their pitch deck now so it becomes like a way to add depth rather than something that fakes depth yes no that intention piece in the concept makes a big

24:45Elizabeth Goodspeed:difference. Okay, I want to shift gears and I want to talk a little bit about teaching. So I read somewhere that you believe design school should also teach the practical realities of working as a professional, the boring stuff like scopes and invoices and taxes, not just craft. But I want to know what you think design education is still like overvaluing. What is the thing that we're putting so much pressure on right now? Let's pause here so I can tell you about our next Design Thinkers event. It's happening May 26th and 27th, 2026. Join us in Vancouver or watch live online. At this year's event, we'll hear from a star-studded lineup of speakers, including designer and renowned visual culture critic, Elizabeth Goodspeed, sports branding expert and creative director at Major Soccer League, Roman King, studio founder and typography expert, Arian Spanier, and many more.

25:33Elizabeth Goodspeed:With a mixture of presentations, hands-on workshops, intimate roundtables and lots of opportunities to connect with 700 other designers, creative directors, art directors, managers, educators, and students, Design Thinkers Vancouver is a journey into the creative process and a celebration of strategic design thinking. This year's theme is out of office, so join us as we log off and celebrate unconstrained creativity, unburdened by pressure and performance. Tickets for Design Thinkers in Vancouver in person and live streaming online are on sale now at designthinkers.com.

26:09unknown host:I mean, it's funny. I think the pressure, it really depends from school to school, teacher to teacher, of course. I think the thing that is tricky is I want school to be an open, non-commercial space for students to find themselves. I don't want, quote, the real world to be impeding on them in a way where they think, I have to make work that's palatable. I have to make work that's on trend. I have to do things in a way that will get me a job. On the other hand, I also think it's naive to treat this as a space where it is fully an art practice because graphic design is not an art practice. It is a client-based practice.

26:47unknown host:And you need to have that ability to sit in both those worlds. And I think sometimes schools tend to over-index on one over the other. I don't think it's consistent, but I think people seem to have a very hard time doing both. So there are schools that are more pre-professional, their students come out being incredibly skilled, incredibly good form makers and productive designers, but maybe they don't have the sort of art practice and depth and concept thinking. And then there are other schools that are so concept oriented that you look at the work and it's unusable and illegible. And so I think that tension is where I struggle.

27:22unknown host:I also think giving students room to, I don't know how to phrase this in a way that It doesn't sound really hokey, but like discover themselves. A lot of it is somewhat therapeutic work that we're doing. And I think it's tricky again, because I have fellow co-teachers who are like, yeah, it's not really our job to do that. And in some ways it's true. Like it's not my job and I'm not trained to do a lot of that therapeutic work. But so much of what I think young designers deal with is what young people deal with, which is I'm not sure of myself. I'm not happy with myself. I don't know who I am yet.

27:57unknown host:and the work is just a manifestation of those same feelings. I don't know, just replace who I am with what kind of designer I am. You know, we're asking these students to be making big decisions. I'm teaching basically a thesis this year, which is for the first time. And that's an interesting one because yeah, they come in, it's like, okay, you're going to have, you know, six months to work on this project. What do you want to do it about? And the panic of people thinking, okay, this is this big project. I have this chance. What do I want to do? What kind of work am I going to put my portfolio?

28:25unknown host:I think that's incredibly intimidating.

28:28Elizabeth Goodspeed:And I'm also teaching thesis this semester and the like trying to strike that balance of like what is going to make sense to the people you're showing this to as a portfolio project and like what is the exploration you actually want to do? Like finding that sweet spot is the actual challenge of defining your thesis brief.

28:45unknown host:Yeah. And what I've often started doing with some students is describing like I have a really hard time starting stuff. So describing the process as doing a graphic design one-liner. So start with like something that is stupidly simple, whether that's like, oh, why don't you make a whole book? And instead of having images, the images are all going to be typed out descriptions of images. Great. If your project is like, you want to explore the value of photography, just do something really stupid, but actually make it. And typically I find that that tends to be a really helpful way to then sort of start a line of inquiry where the second project's a little less of a one-liner.

29:21unknown host:and eventually you have sort of a body of work that ranges in depth. I think some of those like quick scrappy projects can be really helpful for getting some of the pressure off, even if your ultimate thesis at the end is still one big beautiful book. But yeah, I don't know what I think graphic design school indexes on too much for your initial question. Like I think partly it's just like what it does is indexing on things that are just problems with the industry also at large, which is expecting everyone to be a generalist and also expecting everyone to be a specialist and too much adoption of technology without thoughtfulness around how to use technology or develop a point of view and just room.

29:58unknown host:I think so much of the industry is optimized for speed. It always has been, but it's only getting faster. And I think school is starting to do the same thing where there's just less marination time to screw around. Whether that's even in class or outside of class is just as important. So it's just, it's tricky.

30:15Elizabeth Goodspeed:It is tricky. And I think you're right that it is sort of the experience of design school is the same experience as being a young person and trying to sort of feel your way through the world. And I think like remembering that, cause you know, I still don't know what the heck I'm doing or who I am as a designer. Like it

30:34unknown host:changes every few years. All the time. And I, I guess I think too, it's tricky as well, where I want to be, I think some things I struggle with are, I'm definitely not a people pleaser, but But I'm not non-confrontational, but I'm sort of easygoing in certain ways. So even just figuring out how strict do I want to be with students has been one of my biggest challenges, where part of me, I'm teaching one class in their entire education, and their education is one part of who they are in the real world. I've had students who have medical crises. I have students who have family emergencies. And I try to be really flexible in many ways for that, because in the real world, if you have a medical emergency, you get time off work.

31:14unknown host:Why wouldn't you get time off school? On the other hand, I think sometimes I also realize that structure is helpful. Some students need a little more of that, like forced responsibility or consequences and trying to figure out how to adapt to each person to give enough structure, enough openness, you know, be forgiving and flexible and try to create a pedagogical environment that is friendly and human while also acknowledging that there is a particular relationship that exists between us. professor and student. And especially as I get older, I think I could get away with a little more of that friendly energy when I was teaching at 26 and my students were 22.

31:55unknown host:And now as I become, you know, 30s, it's a little more distance. And also something that's sort of weird to acknowledge, but now that more people are familiar with my work and my writing, I also think it creates an interesting sort of hierarchy in the classroom that I don't always love, because I I really want students to feel like they can make big mistakes in front of me and feel like I am here to help them and they can not have to be perfect. And I think maybe because, you know, people have read my writing or I've given talks, they sort of maybe see me a little more as they already have preconceived notions about like who I am and how I think about work.

32:31unknown host:So if a student comes in who hates graphic design history, I want them to be able to come in and say, I don't care about history at all. I really want my work to be forward facing. And I want them to know that I am so game for that. my way of making, it's just one way of making. And I'm also, I think, actually, despite being kind of a bitch in my articles, like, I'm not actually a bitch in real life. Like, I'm really not particularly critical. I think I'm very open to new ideas. I'm just critical in the sense that I like to analyze things deeply. So finding how to articulate to students that, you know, I want them to take me seriously.

33:02And I think some of my expertise and career trajectory is appealing to

33:07unknown host:them, but that I don't want them to have it change the way our relationship works. But I mean, that's naive. That probably won't happen. But that's something I've been figuring out in the last couple of years as having students who already have read a lot of things I've written and all of that. I mean, that takes us back to, again, like the way that we show up as a designer

33:26Elizabeth Goodspeed:in the world changes all the time. So your relationship to teaching has changed because your relationship to design has changed. Thank you for that perfect segue into your writing. so you've been writing for it's nice that for a few years now as their american editor at large your bylines are underneath headlines like elizabeth goodspeed on how many designers it takes to make a studio on the rise of the designer's influencer on why graphic designers can't stop joking about hating their jobs and you're right like some of those takes are critical they're critical of the industry and what i love about your writing is actually that criticism

33:59unknown host:that criticism on yeah I wrote an article that was literally critique on critique because I was not hearing about it which I love to reference that you picked a bad time to become a critic yeah yeah well I love that one because the title is just I'm a hater so I link back to that article in many new articles basically anytime I say something too mean I'll put like a footnote to the article about me being mean just to sort of like a hand wave away like oh if you need more context for me being an asshole. Here is that context in 1200 words.

34:30Elizabeth Goodspeed:I mean, but even the perception that it's you being an asshole and not just you looking critically at the industry is an interesting one, right? Like you're exploring the culture of design, which as we've sort of been talking, that is the culture of design and the things that we do outside of design matter as much as the work itself.

34:45unknown host:But well, it's tricky because I actually get a little salty about the fact that whenever I'm sort of colloquially talking to people, they'll say like, oh, yeah, articles are always really spicy. And in my mind, I'm like, you don't know the spicy articles I could be writing. I have so many articles that have been turned down because they were like too aggro against a particular, let's say, type conglomerate or other things of that nature. And I feel like I really try to be measured. I think I really spread my critique evenly across the industry and businesses. And I think I'm also quite focused on punching up.

35:22unknown host:I think almost every article I write, there's a somewhere in there I talk about like, what does this mean for everyday working class graphic designers? I'm really interested in like the economy and labor issues. I think very rarely is my critique from a place of like even taste or tone. It's usually very much looking at structural systems that exist. So even in the case of designer as an influencer, you know, I had a designer influencer I ran into at one of our New York Nicer Tuesdays events, and they sort of joke apologized about being an influencer. It's like, I think influencers are amazing.

35:57unknown host:I think graphic design influencers make amazing videos, are incredibly smart. They're doing the same kind of pedagogical thinking that I'm doing in my writing. The issue is never an individual. The issue is always the system of people who feel they are forced into being an influencer because algorithms reward showing their face. And who does that tend to harm? People who aren't comfortable showing their face, people who don't have good Wi-Fi at home, you know, any of these things. And that way, I think I sometimes feel like I get told my articles are a little more critical than I feel they are perceived to be, which is maybe why I joke about being an asshole.

36:33unknown host:I think hopefully it balances out is, again, people who know me in real life and I think who read closely hopefully can tell that I think I'm a huge champion of creative people. It's just the sort of industrialized mechanized labor that I have a problem with. I'm not shy about sharing my opinion. So that definitely comes through in the writing. Yeah.

36:57Elizabeth Goodspeed:And I think that your audiences have to give you space to change your mind. Yeah.

37:03unknown host:And I think I'm also pretty happy to reflect on, I always say I have strong opinions held loosely. So I'm very easily reconvinced against what I was thinking.

37:14Elizabeth Goodspeed:Yeah. Before we start to wrap up, I want to just ask you about some client work because you work with some... I know. I never get to talk about my design now that I talk about my writing all the time. We talk about writing. We talk about the archives. But you've done work for some big cultural names, the A24s, the Googles, the HBOs, the Whitney Museum, but also like lots of small and weird things, which are my favorite. What kind of client work are you doing these days? Like what is the balance and how do you balance all that client work against the writing and the teaching and the speaking and the stuff you're doing for yourself?

37:45unknown host:I mean, the good thing is designing is my first true love. And in some ways I will always make time for it more than anything else. It is the thing that I still brings me the most joy. It is also still the thing I struggle with the most. Like I think because design has always not been as intuitive for me it is the thing that takes the most brain power in certain ways um and i think i've been lucky that the writing the teaching the archiving has narrowed my client funnel to a fine point where i tend to get people who know sort of my shtick as a whole and are interested in that holistic approach so i find that i do a lot of kind of hybridized weird projects where I'm doing, you know, maybe internal research and mood boarding for another studio who's doing a project, or I'm writing a newsletter about diner menus, but then those diner menus start to inform the menu I make for a local restaurant.

38:40unknown host:And it does kind of, the client work becomes very enmeshed to those other things. So I can sort of broaden that labor out. What I do like about freelancing is I get to do tons of different stuff all the time. So I always like it's tricky where it's like, yeah, for one year I was working on a kid's magazine and a non-alcoholic beverage and a Mexican restaurant. And this year I'm doing a board game, a publication and like a bakery in Atlanta, you know? So I like keeping it diverse. I tend to really like things that are, I love food. I love packaging. I am so aggressively not a digital designer that I do tend to find things that are IRL or print is just where my heart goes.

39:21unknown host:I have been working with a board game company now for about a year and a half, two years. So that's become like a really nice, consistent client as someone who previously as a freelancer really was always doing totally different stuff all the time. So I've done three games with them so far, working on two more now. And that's really nice because it's so print oriented. It's like print orientation dialed up to 11 because, you know, I did a game where we had over like 2000 unique pieces and you have to make so many little fussy changes and, and, you know, you get the rule book, you get the pieces.

39:52unknown host:It's just fun to have tactility and they're, they're called CMYK and they're really design forward. So that's been a fun, consistent job. Yeah. I'm doing a publication, a couple of have like a few maybe books on the horizon that I'm designing for people. But yeah, it's, I find what has helped me is I saw Eric Hu say once that he works like a lion, which is to say he was like, I expend a ton of energy like at the hunt. And then I nap for maybe a week while I digest. And I think that has been something I've kept in mind in recent years, where when I first started writing or teaching, I thought of it as every week.

40:28unknown host:It's like, okay, Mondays, I'm doing design. Tuesdays, I'm teaching. Wednesdays, I'm writing. And then that became, okay, you know, first week of the month, I'm writing. Second week, I'm designing. And I've come to look at those as real seasons. Over the course of the year, there is a really interesting natural correction where, you know, it's nice that doesn't really publish much new writing in December because they find the traffic's really low. So that's a period where I have a little more room and I'm not teaching. So that's, I have room to sort of think about my design practice and maybe personal work or self-promotional work.

40:56unknown host:And then January, everyone has a new graphic design project. They have new budgets. They really want to hit the ground running. Whereas writing is sort of slowly ramping up as we make plans for the year. Teaching hasn't started, you know, summer design is slow. so I can get a hook on my writing. But yeah, in terms of graphic design, I still love doing it. I, you know, I think I'm always been very like type forward, very color forward. I'm not the most systems oriented. So I think I prefer things that are like repetitive, but not like sort of one-off, like the brand identities I tend to make are a little maybe like eclectic with probably too many typefaces.

41:31unknown host:Like I, when I used to work at Pentagram, I, you know, I did plenty of jobs for the horizons of the world. And I love a modernist sort of very refined system. I did work for the MoMA membership with Regrets Only. Same thing that was like, you have to use only the MoMA type base and it has to be on a really tight grid and that those projects, I can do them. And I think they're really good calisthenics for my design brain. But I like prefer to everything I make, I wish I could make like a weird little independent piece of ephemera and that then they all just kind of get added together in different ways.

42:04Elizabeth Goodspeed:Before we let you go, we're opening the mailbag. This is the segment where we ask for questions over Instagram. You can follow along at RGD Canada and truly anything goes. Specific questions, big picture questions, super, super niche questions. Let's see what came in. Submitted by Carl. How does your understanding of design history inform your view of the world in the present and generally? Amazingly, a lot.

42:32unknown host:I would say that I am just definitely a student of history where I think looking at history generally, people are so much more the same throughout time than they are different. This sounds like a weird side note in the context of a graphic design podcast, but I'm going to do it, which is I have like an ancestor who was in the Mexican-American War a very long time ago. And we have a bunch of letters that he wrote to his wife, my other ancestor, when he was there. And they are so funny because they sound like, yeah, if you were a 22-year-old guy sent to a war zone who had no experience, what would you write about?

43:09And what he writes about is like, our coffee pot broke.

43:12unknown host:So we're having to make coffee in a pan instead of using a coffee pot. And it tastes so burnt. and we have the worst bread right now. It's stale and most of it has bugs and the white bugs don't taste like anything, but the black bugs are really bitter. And that's what he's writing about. He's like, my feet are wet. And it's so mundane in the scheme of it all. Yeah, that is what it is. That's what history is over and over again. It's just people being normal people. And in that way, like seeing how somebody responded to rises in nationalism or mechanization or, you know, tools that changed how design worked are so, so helpful to understanding how we're going to look at that today.

43:54unknown host:And similarly, I think there's a reason people love looking at art history from, whether that's Egyptian all the way back to Mesopotamian, which is there really are certain forms that have balance. There are certain motifs that just recur over and over again. And I think the combination, the sort of Venn diagram of point A and point B, you get in the middle. It just helps me understand so much how the world is operating today and have a little bit of a sense of almost, I feel kind of magical where I can kind of guess where things are going a little bit. That gets to sort of my trend reporting, like arm of my business, because it, people are kind of predictable and the forms we make are kind of predictable.

44:35unknown host:The ways we think about things are kind of predictable while also surprising us all the time. So I do think it's really, I feel like I see everything with those glasses on whether I want to or not. I also can't, you know, open a menu without finding a typo. But other occupational hazards of this world. Do you feel like a little influx of joy when that happens?

44:54Elizabeth Goodspeed:Like, oh, I found it.

44:56unknown host:Oh, yeah. Well, I, as I said, as an obsessive pattern spotter, I'm really good at saying, I will see something and be like, oh, I know exactly where this was copied from. Or, you know, I know that not just the name of the typeface, but like, I could bet I know who designed this. And that's, that's always something you can't, you can't do that intentionally. You just do it long enough and you know it against your will.

45:16Elizabeth Goodspeed:This one submitted by Christian. Are there any Canadian specific design pieces that stand out from your archives? Yes.

45:23unknown host:I'm a really big fan of Canada Modern Archive, which is a great one. And specifically, they have a lot of really cool Canadian government produced documents, which I love. There's such a mid-century modernism to all of those from any country. There's another archive called Public Archive, which collates national parks ephemera from both Canada and the US. and that one's pretty cool too similar idea I also will say like I think the Canadian flag is quite amazing that's not quite ephemera but I think I'm so used to as an American I think like red white blue and the stars are like the trope that gets recycled in so much obviously like American ephemera and I love seeing interpretations on the maple leaf just because it's such a different shape to have to work with and the motifs are so different there's less to sort of function with, but it moves around.

46:16unknown host:I will say I like vintage Tom Hortons. Tim Hortons? Tim Hortons? Tim Hortons. Don't kill me. I'm sorry. Tim Hortons. I love Canada, but that stuff's great. There's a couple other things that I feel like I should. Oh, what is it? Canadian Tire. There's some good Canadian Tire ephemera. Also another one that has just like such a bold logo. I have not thought to look at the Canadian Tire archive. Oh, fun. Yeah. I also having to have Canadian Tire explained to me the first time I encountered it in person was really funny. I was like, what does this store sell? And they were like, everything. And I was like, oh, okay.

46:50unknown host:So it's like Walmart. No, not at all.

46:54Elizabeth Goodspeed:Okay. Our last no-bag question submitted by Ashley. Is there anything you're hyper fixated on right now?

46:59unknown host:everything um what am I hyper fixated on right now uh as I did say I have been weirdly obsessed with diner menus recently I bought some I go to this annual antique or like flea market called Brimfield which is in Massachusetts um I think it might be the largest at least on the east coast sometimes call it 10 miles of flea because of how big it is and I found a booth like a year and a half ago there that sold a couple diner menus and I bought them I bought you know maybe 10 and I I was sort of like, these are really cool. They have, you know, limited colors. They, I love food. They have interesting cultural resonance and just seeing the foods that were served.

47:36unknown host:Like, you know, there's like things like wet eggs and you're like, what the hell is that? But I started to get kind of into them and found that they weren't that expensive and you can buy them in like lots on eBay. So you can buy like, you know, 40 diner menus. They're all like folded and, you know, not great condition. Anyways, I somehow in the last year have managed to accumulate like about 160 of them and I finally finished scanning all of them um and I had me and my friend Natalie Shields had like a maybe a publication idea for them that we're marinating on so to be continuing on that but I just find them really fun and they they feel very aligned with the way that I like to make stuff which is you know limited palette bold but simple typography fun little like quirky illustrations um so that's been like a current hyper focus but part of my issue is that like I could list seven things I talked about my Le Corbusier marzipan I've also been collecting weird marzipan I have a tiny um Mr.

48:31unknown host:Potato Head marzipan here like novelty marzipan that then I let dry and I have like probably eight or nine of these so it really is just like whatever I see I'm obsessed with everything all the time I love it I love it I

48:44Elizabeth Goodspeed:at some point need to come visit I feel like your house is like a designer's dream yeah I

48:50unknown host:I am at the point where my partner and I are always talking about the fact that we like need to maybe open a bookstore and archive because I either need to stop buying books or start offloading books or showing them to someone because it's kind of a little embarrassing. But I do sometimes invite people over into my friends tease me because they're always like, yeah, I can't go to your house without having a show and tell. Like, OK, everybody sit down. I'm going to show you this book I bought about gravestone images in New England.

49:16Elizabeth Goodspeed:I love it. Thank you. Yeah, of course. Thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing all of this with us. I can't wait to spend some time with you in Vancouver for Design Thinkers. Yay, it'll be great. I'm so excited.

49:29unknown host:Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Design Thinkers is Canada's largest annual graphic design conference. Find out more by visiting designthinkers.com. Design Thinkers is produced by the Association of Registered Graphic Designers, also known as the RGD. The RGD is Canada's largest professional association for graphic designers. Our vision is for a graphic design profession that is broadly valued for its contribution to life, commerce, and society. To find out more, visit rgd.ca.