Transcribed with Otter.ai
Guest Ellen Lupton
Unknown Speaker 0:02
Hey. Hey everyone, welcome to unique ways with Thomas Girard in audio podcast. We have a design legend on today, and I’ll describe her briefly. She’s a graphic designer, curator, writer, critic and educator known for her love of typography, and she’s the Betty cook and William O Steinmetz design chair at Maryland Institute College of Art, please join me in welcoming Ellen Lipton, welcome,
Unknown Speaker 0:26
hi, thanks, Thomas. You ready for 20 questions? Sure. Okay. Question one, tell me a little bit more about yourself. What do you do?
Unknown Speaker 0:37
Well, I’m a graphic designer, writer and educator. I write books about design. I create educational reels on Instagram, which is a lot of fun, and I teach it. Micah here in Baltimore,
Unknown Speaker 0:54
my most famous book is called thinking with type, and an all new edition is coming out this spring. Edition number three,
Unknown Speaker 1:04
great. Yeah, just a note for our audience, Ellen and I don’t know each other until now, but I grew up, you know, in my design and education senior book. So this is super exciting for me.
Unknown Speaker 1:16
So question two, what’s a key piece of knowledge that makes you different?
Unknown Speaker 1:20
I’m an identical twin. My sister is a Shakespeare professor with a PhD in Renaissance studies, which sounds as far as you can get from graphic design. So I get to spend my life watching a person who is literally exactly like me live their life in a very different way. In fact, we’re super close, even though our lives have diverged. We do learn from each other all the time, every day,
Unknown Speaker 1:54
that’s wild, as you know that. Okay. Question three, why this of all things? Why do you do what you do?
Unknown Speaker 2:02
So when I was in high school, I wanted to be a painter, and I still love to paint, but I discovered graphic design as a college student at the Cooper Union in the early 1980s
Unknown Speaker 2:16
what I loved was the connection between word and image and language, this was something I couldn’t find in painting, which was strictly visual, but graphic design put together all the things that I loved and enjoyed, and the ability to write words and give them a visual form was like magic to me, and so I got really into that, and the rest is history. Wow,
Unknown Speaker 2:49
great. And just another note here, if you’re liking the typography angle, definitely check out the episode with Eric speakerman. It’s our most popular episode so far. So some people struggle with number four, but the question is, what does your future look like?
Unknown Speaker 3:04
That’s a great question. I’m 59 years old, so I’ve got less future ahead than past behind me, and that definitely makes you look at your time differently and treat it a bit more preciously. I expect to keep working for another 10 years, but I also want to be prepared for a future life where work looks different.
Unknown Speaker 3:30
So what would that be? I want to keep publishing. I want to keep being creative, but at some point I want less pressure to serve other people.
Unknown Speaker 3:43
Great. Great. Number five, we say, is unique to this podcast. The question is, let’s talk about location. How does the notion of place play into what you do?
Unknown Speaker 3:53
That’s a beautiful question. I live in a wooded area in Baltimore, Maryland. I’m surrounded by trees and birds and quiet, but I also love going to New York and to other busy, crowded places to absorb more of that urban energy. I find that changing my location now and then keeps me invigorated, much as I love my beautiful, quiet house in the woods.
Unknown Speaker 4:28
Awesome. And you guys, if you want to check out a new york episode, I definitely recommend the one with Timothy Goodman. He does such great work, being really centered in New York. So number six, if you had to start from the beginning, what advice would you give your former younger self?
Unknown Speaker 4:46
I think I’d give the same advice that I give to my older self, which is to please slow down, put more time into thinking at the beginning of a project, I tend.
Unknown Speaker 5:00
Get so excited and start projects really quickly, and then you spend a lot of time executing.
Unknown Speaker 5:09
You really spend most of your time making an idea come to fruition. So it’s not such a great idea to rush to get started. You really need to give your ideas, some room to breathe. I
Unknown Speaker 5:23
like that. And what’s the day in your life like?
Unknown Speaker 5:27
Well, I always get up early. This could be 5am 530
Unknown Speaker 5:33
or occasionally a lazy six, and I get up and I walk my two little dogs in the pre Dawn I’m out there with the foxes and the owls and the rustling leaves. It’s really a magic time of day. And then I settle down at my desk. And some days I work at home, and some that sometimes I leave the house to teach or to go on a trip. And evening, I get a few more hours to work and catch up on the day, and I always end with delicious food and some TV.
Unknown Speaker 6:10
Nice and lifelong learning is a popular topic. How do you stay up to date?
Unknown Speaker 6:17
I love podcasts, books. Zoom lectures. I love digital courses on domestic and Skillshare. And those are my dogs barking. I don’t know if you want to pause. Can you hear them? That’s great. I think it. Can hear it, okay.
Unknown Speaker 6:39
I’ll just say that again. I love podcasts. I love books. I love zoom talks. I take a lot of digital courses on domestica and Skillshare. There’s so many ways to learn today and also many ways to teach. So I like to teach on podcast, books, Zoom lectures and digital courses too. Recently, I taught myself how to create reels on Instagram. So there is just so much to learn anytime you take on a new medium, like if you’re making reels, it’s storytelling, editing, lighting, all kinds of stuff. So I like learning new things, especially in relation to something creative that I can produce
Unknown Speaker 7:29
great and nine is about tools. What tools do you use to use both digital and analog tools?
Unknown Speaker 7:36
Yeah, as a writer and a designer, I use the really standard tools like Creative Suite, Google Docs, 1000s and 1000s of fonts. I really like simple interfaces, so I’m not a fan of Microsoft Word, but I know how to use it. But I also love working with physical materials like paint and colored pencils and butter and sugar. I love to bake. I love to make things with with materials you can eat.
Unknown Speaker 8:11
I love it, and we’re halfway. Number 10. How do you deal with work life balance?
Unknown Speaker 8:18
You know, I find that to be such a binary term, I’m not real comfortable with it. I first heard this term maybe 15 years ago from a charming millennial in an interview like this one. And at the time, I had school age kids at home, and I craved more time to focus on work, like, like for me to have a day when I could just work was like the most beautiful, special, sacred thing I could imagine. But the fact is, you know, quote, life is actually work too. And so I think the whole work life binary really demeans the caregiving that so many people
Unknown Speaker 9:06
are involved in. You know, as grown ups, whether we’re caring for our kids or our older parents, this is unpaid work, so we tend to not call it work. We call it Life, but actually it is work. It has value, it matters, it’s hard, it’s not self care, and it certainly is not a walk in the woods, right? Number 11, if you weren’t doing what you do now, what would you be doing?
Unknown Speaker 9:38
I think if I hadn’t gone to art school, I might have gone into a more academic field, like my twin sister did. My mother was also an English professor, so I grew up seeing that lifestyle and seeing
Unknown Speaker 9:55
the schedule and the kind of intellectual excitement.
Unknown Speaker 10:00
And of teaching. And I do teach today, but I don’t teach in an academic field.
Unknown Speaker 10:07
I love the life I picked. I love the mix of visual and verbal making, and I feel super lucky to have so much creative work to do.
Unknown Speaker 10:20
What would you not like to do with your career?
Unknown Speaker 10:25
I get a lot of inquiries from headhunters about becoming a dean at an art school. I never, ever, ever want to be a dean. Deans do things like manage budgets and deal with personnel complaints and manage unhappy faculty members. I do not want to do that. I love the craft and social relationships of actual hands on teaching in a classroom. I really don’t want to be responsible for everyone else’s budgets and stuff, you know, their broken computers and,
Unknown Speaker 11:09
you know, personnel reviews and all that kind of stuff. That’s what Deans do. Don’t want to do it
Unknown Speaker 11:17
- What’s your favorite word, quote or sentence?
Unknown Speaker 11:22
Well, sense. Wow, that’s a tough one.
Unknown Speaker 11:27
I see some pretty good quotes on Instagram. I saw one recently by the comedian Wanda Sykes, who said quote until a drag queen walks into an elementary school and kills eight kids with a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. Y’all are worrying about the wrong stuff.
Unknown Speaker 11:49
You hear that. It might not be verbatim, but it’s kind of close. Another one I saw was a teacher kind of similar, and the teacher said, if I had time to indoctrinate your kids, they’d be wearing deodorant and putting their phones down.
Unknown Speaker 12:09
Nice, pretty good, huh?
Unknown Speaker 12:12
Awesome. Okay, number 14. What’s your least favorite word, quote or sentence?
Unknown Speaker 12:18
Um,
Unknown Speaker 12:21
that’s easy. So right wing extremists use manipulative words in a very deliberate way to sow hatred and brew conspiracies. So words like parents rights and grooming, these words really do have the power to turn people against each other. I recently heard
Unknown Speaker 12:46
a lecture by Jennifer White Johnson, an amazing designer, where she used the expression language justice to talk about how designers and writers and publishers really do have the power to use language in ways that that make people think differently about the world. So I think a lot of this language
Unknown Speaker 13:09
from the extreme right of our culture is super damaging.
Unknown Speaker 13:16
Great and 15 if you had to pick one word to describe yourself, what word would you choose?
Unknown Speaker 13:25
Clear? I am really proud of being able to write very clear, concise, understandable prose. So I’m not fancy basic, I’m direct. I keep it simple. I keep it short. You may already have that impression just from this podcast. Yeah, I like it. What keeps you up at night?
Unknown Speaker 13:52
Maybe the same things as everybody else. I have anxiety about my self worth, my ability to be there for my aging parents,
Unknown Speaker 14:05
the dangers that my kids face on a warming planet,
Unknown Speaker 14:12
these are kind of universal concerns, and I’m really trying to get better at turning off that internal Doom scroll and just go to sleep.
Unknown Speaker 14:25
- What’s your dream you’re chasing?
Unknown Speaker 14:30
Well, I mentioned earlier, I’ve recently started learning how to bake, and I’ve always been a good cook,
Unknown Speaker 14:37
but baking was off limits for me, until a few months ago, I thought baking was, you know, not healthy and not really about everyday food, but something celebratory. So I didn’t really see see the point. But now I’m just kind of really interested in it as an art form. I think Baking.
Unknown Speaker 15:00
Is really painting and sculpture with food in a way that
Unknown Speaker 15:07
cooking isn’t quite that. So I love learning about the tools, the techniques, the history.
Unknown Speaker 15:15
It’s multi sensory. It’s a hobby, but it also feeds back into everything else I do.
Unknown Speaker 15:25
Great and final stretch, what inspires you?
Unknown Speaker 15:31
I love seeing paintings in museums. When I was an art student in the 80s,
Unknown Speaker 15:39
many people said that painting was dead. That’s kind of hard to believe now, because clearly it’s not dead,
Unknown Speaker 15:46
and it kept growing and changing and getting more interesting. But at the time, people thought that minimalism and political art had killed painting, that painting was a kind of corrupt bourgeois commodity,
Unknown Speaker 16:04
but actually painting just keep keeps on moving. And as a designer, I feel really inspired to go see paintings and enjoy them and look at how they’re made and how they communicate, whether they’re abstract or figurative,
Unknown Speaker 16:22
greater, 19. 19. Any advice you’d like to share?
Unknown Speaker 16:29
I’d say, have fun.
Unknown Speaker 16:32
Find joy.
Unknown Speaker 16:35
I find that having
Unknown Speaker 16:39
creative hobbies, like for me, baking right now or or painting, since I don’t do that professionally, is really important, and as I get older, I wish I had spent more time in my life pursuing the things that are really joyful. There are times when you really do have to focus on the needs of other people or on surviving economically. So my advice is that when you do have an opening, when you can experience joy for yourself and do and make things that you want to do, try to take that opportunity and not feel guilty about it, those moments are yours.
Unknown Speaker 17:24
Great. And finally, number 20, how can our listeners keep tabs on you? Do you have maybe a note for people first discovering you, and maybe people who have known about your work for a while?
Unknown Speaker 17:35
Sure? Well, you can read my books. I’ve written over 30 books about design, again, the most popular one is called thinking with type, and a new edition is coming out in March. I’ve also have really fun reels on Instagram about typography. So you can follow me at Ellen Lupton, and it’s, it’s kind of
Unknown Speaker 17:59
a fun way to learn stuff about type in a really cute, quick medium. Lots of joy there. And if you want to learn more, you could also take my online courses on domestic and Skillshare.
Unknown Speaker 18:14
Awesome, awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. You know, it’s such a you call it basic, but I love the way you communicate. It’s a big inspiration for me and I bet for a lot of our listeners. So thank you so much for being on
Unknown Speaker 18:26
That’s great. Thank you for having me, Thomas. I really appreciate it. Thanks. Bye.
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