Mike Renaud

Type specimens are time capsules of typographic history. There is no substitute for seeing them in person, but you can now use a web browser to track the evolution of type design through the pages of over two hundred manufacturer catalogs from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. For years, I accessed these books via an unwieldy pile of... See more

Even back in the command-and-control days of the production line, Henry Ford’s decision to manufacture automobiles was driven by intuition rather than market research. “If we had asked the public what they wanted,” he explained, “they would have said ‘faster horses.

Today’s most vital cultural forms are your identity, personality, and image. And in this new cultural paradigm, the artist’s performance of themself is often more important than the art they make. The persona is the message.

DISTINCTIVENESS is the quality that causes a brand expression to stand out from competing messages. If it doesn’t stand out, the game is over. Distinctiveness often requires boldness, innovation, surprise, and clarity, not to mention courage on the part of the company.