Perrin Drumm is the founder and director of Eye on Design, a site and magazine about the world’s most exciting graphic designers—and the issues they care about (published by AIGA). She’s a fiction writer from Los Angeles who lives in Brooklyn and dreams of Mexico City (and is hoping that is less cliche than it sound in her head).
1.
Reruns
I don’t like watching TV shows that everyone else is talking about, and so I frequently find myself watching reruns. Lame ones. The more uncool the better. Yes, you will cringe for many reasons. But the heartening thing about watching old episodes of shows like Cheers and The Office and Gossip Girl (I feel you judging, stop it) is that just when you don’t think we’ve come very far, these golden oldies will remind you of just how far we’ve really come, since the world thought “That’s what she said” was an acceptable workplace joke. Can you even imagine watching sketches like “It’s Pat” after reading this piece about gender by Jenna Wortham? Even dumbass Facebook has 50+ options for gender now! There is progress.
2.
THE CREATIVE INDEPENDENT NEWSLETTER
It’s hard to do inspirational service journalism in a smart, not-too-earnest way, and TCI’s interviews and the way they share them via their weekly newsletter is always helpful and uplifting, and usually introduces me to a great writer/artists/musician/filmmaker/technologist I’ve never heard of before.
3.
ADVOCACY GROWS UP
Madly thrusting posters in the air gets tiring, even if they are cool posters, and there have been some very cool ones. It’s hard for graphic designers (a.k.a. people who love making posters all day long) to get beyond the poster-making stage, so I’ve been really thrilled by some of the designer-led projects that are taking things to the next level, like Designers Available, which pairs graphic designers with nonprofits that need their skills; the social justice lawyers at Graphic Advocacy; and this recent fake news pop-up by the Columbia Journalism Review and agency TBWA/Chiat/Day. Look at designers being the change they want to see! Makes my heart go all gooey.
4.
“I WAS A WAREHOUSE WAGE SLAVE”
After women were reported miscarrying on the Amazon warehouse floor and workers resorted to peeing in bottles instead of taking bathroom breaks, which now looms large in Long Island City, Queens, I re-listened to the “Brown Box” episode of the Radiolab podcast, which is based on a brilliant piece of participatory journalism originally published on Mother Jones, chronicling the writer’s “brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine.” As Amazon’s next warehouse looms large on the Queens-Brooklyn border town of Long Island City, my fear is born anew.
5.
NEXT GEN PORN
This is a little 2017, but Jon Ronson’s The Butterfly Effect podcast and Rashida Jones’s Hot Girls Wanted (and everything it’s spawned) have put a human face to sex work, and the unimaginable ways it touches everyday lives, that have completely flipped my script. These aren’t the only two shows/docs/films that have done an excellent job in this regard, but Ronson’s podcast especially—because it’s a podcast and not a visual medium—has given a voice to people we don’t usually get to hear from, and their stories are deeply moving.
6.
LESBIAN INSTAGRAM
This is where the most fun on social media is happening right now, specifically: @dykeanotherday, @everylesbianandtheirfashion, @personals + @herstory
7.
THE SCHOOL FOR POETIC COMPUTATION
The School for Poetic Computation has been killing it lately, and their education model (all about the demystification of tools), approach (using code like any other artmaking material), and transparency around their operations is so right, right now. As a writer, I love that they describe writing code like creative writing.
8.
SOUNDPRINT
Apps won’t save the world, but the Soundprint app will definitely save your hearing. It uses crowdsourced sound recordings to log the loudest restaurants, which you can view on a map and then strategically avoid, so you only eat at places that don’t require you to shout through your meal. Especially helpful when dad’s in town but also just for my own personal sanity. It’s helped me pay more attention to everything I hear, not just what’s most immediate. My husband directed a film this year about how sound affects our lives, so maybe I’ve been more attuned to it than usual. But man, it really makes a difference. (Bonus points: listen to Twenty Thousand Hertz, an excellent podcast by a designer about how sounds are made, how we hear them, and how it impacts our lives.)
9.
THEY’LL LOVE ME WHEN I’M DEAD
Oh Orson, dearest Orson. I’ve loved you from Charles Foster Kane to Faust, but even you couldn’t heed your own advice: “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” Narrated by my other love Alan Cumming, this documentary on Orson Welles is a reminder of what can happen to the best of us if we don’t take our heads out of our asses every once and awhile. Feeding on our own personal mythologies doesn’t just happen to famous artists and celebrities; it happens to anyone with a “personal brand,” which is everyone.
10.
THE ART OF GATHERING
This is a great book that can come off as just another generic self-help-but-not book the minute someone tries to describe it, but this will change the way you approach any event of any scale, from casual hangs to conferences. I picked it up before I had to plan a bunch of work-related events, but have now applied it to basically every aspect of my life (even family texts and phone calls). It’s like the Zen and the Art of Deciding How to Spend Your Time for today’s busy-type-A-overscheduled person. Anything that keeps me out late on a school night gets the Art of Gathering treatment (and by late, I mean home after 9 pm). It starts by asking basic-but-deep questions about what interactions with people mean and what can you do to make them more meaningful. The more flippant our means of communication become, the more I think about how that impacts our relationships over time. How can we improve upon that on a personal level, within our own bubbles, and how we make sure those bubbles intersect in positive ways? Side note: one event that does this really well is The Long Conversation, a one-day event put on by the Smithsonian Arts and Industries. It’s like if TED talkers were to shut up about their own shit for a minute and listened to the other amazing people in the room.
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