Practise

Object Book Fair is back in June celebrating an object of design – the book. Browse and buy design-forward books, and speak to the designers and publishers who made them. 11am – 4pm, Saturday 13 & Sunday 14 June Objectspace, 13 Rose Road, Ponsonby Save the date to visit us over this weekend and take in hundreds of local and international publications. Find contributors (and tickets to launch night) online now. Design: @practisetheory Audio: Fridge, Cut Up Piano & Xylophone

This year’s Salone del Mobile (@isaloniofficial ) in Milano is wrapping up this weekend and while I was wishing I was there, I also happened to be processing photography by Laura Ferrari of our 2010 exhibition signage system project designed in collaboration with David Kohn Architects (@officedka ). (I’ve been going through a lot of old projects lately for a long-planned Practise project archive website redesign…) “Tutti a Tavola” was the opening event for the 2010 Milan Furniture Fair, celebrating the importance of the kitchen in Italian family life. The exhibition approached the subject through the idea of conviviality, the rituals and pleasures of gathering around a table to eat in company, and was set in the 18th century neoclassical Villa Reale, an imposing nineteenth-century mansion commissioned by the Belgiojoso family and later occupied by Napoleon. The Villa houses the City of Milan’s nineteenth-century art collection, which was a key aspect of the design brief: the permanent collection was to be accessible at all times during the temporary exhibition and no substantial alterations to the galleries’ integrity was permitted. A system of signs, screens, tables, plinths, and small interiors (not to mention that giant table in the entrance courtyard) were created using an off-the-shelf small-scale scaffolding system produced in Milan by Fratelli Marinelli (@fratellimarinelli ). David Kohn Architects also collaborated with Milanese fashion designer Colomba Leddi (@colombaleddi ) on the design of printed silk installations and carpets. In this environment, our modular signage system added a deliberately anachronistic layer of materials, flexneon and light tape, set in a custom typeface derived from Joseph A. David’s late 19th century Plaque Decoupée Universelle (universal stencil).

Out now! Launched last night at the Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum (@athenaeumnieuwscentrum ) in Amsterdam, Dutch graphic design studio Experimental Jetset (@jetset_experimental )’s new monograph “Statement and Counter-Statement 2: Typologies/ Typographies/ Topologies/ Topographies (Notes on Experimental Jetset / Vol. 4),” published by @roma.publications . I was honoured (and admittedly intimidated) to be invited by EJ to edit a major section of the book. Over the course of almost a year, I received meticulous weekly archival dispatches from the group, ultimately comprising ten years’ worth of essays, lectures, presentations, proposals, and interviews. I tried my best to keep up with this volume, reading, highlighting, and selecting fragments that might represent the various theories, moods, contradictions, influences, provocations, and thought processes behind the studio’s work from the past decade. It was even more of an honour to be in the company of esteemed fellow book contributors Lieven Lahaye (@lievenlahaye ), Greil Marcus, and Lucy Sante (@luxxante ). Appropriately enough, given our studio name (the verb “Practise,” not the noun “Practice”), I decided to edit EJ’s vast volume of texts into a 200-page “Alphabetical Action Anthology,” with various verbs mentioned by the group functioning as an organising principle, an index of activity, demonstrating the kind of graphic design practise that I believe really happens in a graphic design practice. I expand on this belief in a short introductory essay titled “Design Seems to Be Verbs.” A big shout out to the only other person in the world who’s gone through this very specific kind of editorial experience, highly respected designer and friend Jon Sueda (@jsueda ). JS inspired me (and kept me going—Jon managed to get through all this, so can I!) with his excellent editing of the first edition predecessor to my section here, “An Index of Fragments” in “Statement and Counter-Statement (Notes on Experimental Jetset / Vol. 1)” from 2015 (also out now in a new edition).

Massive bedankt to Marieke, Erwin, and Danny for your generous trust in me, and for such a fun assignment.

“I’ve always loved this idea of utility not just being purely functional or robotic”. Last week we welcomed Range Rover clients and Club Yu Mei members to the Yu Mei Lounge in Newmarket for an evening unpacking design. Jessie was joined by James Goggin—one half of Practise Studio for a conversation about materials, process, systems, and what it really means to make something good. Here James speaks about whether there can be utility in pleasure - a topic tackled by Charles Eames in the short film Design Q&A (1972). An Evening Unpacking Design, in partnership with @rangerover

Posters around the city for “Martino Gamper: Endgrained” at Objectspace, opening tonight here in Tāmaki Makaurau. We’ve worked on the “Endgrained” exhibition identity, campaign, and on a collaborative research project together with Martino and Objectspace titled “Wood from the trees.” An accompanying publication is being edited (with Victoria McAdam and Kim Paton) and designed for release in May. @objectspace @martinogamper

Happy new year! There are still a lot of travels and projects for me to catch up on here from 2025, but, to quote the motto of @flat_out_mag (the sporadic architecture magazine for which I serve as art director and editorial board member, new website coming soon), I’m taking my time as fast as I can. We’re starting off 2026 right, though, with my Christmas present to Shan (@15kitchens ), a beautiful lunisolar calendar from our friends at @yunhaishop and @odotoo_com , which I managed to score just in time for the new year. The only one in the southern hemisphere, apparently! Many many thanks to Lisa and to Pip. We’re thankfully avoiding inauspicious activities like weddings, grand openings, planting, and burials, as per today’s cosmic condition recommendations. But it was such a busy year last year, and we have a significant number of projects to dive right into as January kicks off (burying a survey here: should we finally start a studio newsletter?), so we’re even going to avoid *auspicious* activities today like relocation, travel, construction, groundbreaking, repairing walls, and patching holes. Just a moment to catch our breath. Sincere wishes to you all for as happy a new year as possible given everything going on right now.

We'll Never Stop Living This Way: A Ghostly International Catalogue (GI-500) on our site (last days of sale) and at select shops. On our blog: An interview with designer James Goggin of @practisetheory about designing the book. "It’s a literal catalogue, as the subtitle suggests, with the cover of every single record that Ghostly has put out. This was the fan part of me, demanding that. But the notes, stories, artist voices, side projects, and even the tweets, hopefully bring the reader into this conversation too. That’s why the cover is a mirror: it emphasises that the readers, the fans, are already part of the dialogue."

Friday

If you’re at the @printedmatter_artbookfairs New York Art Book Fair at @momaps1 this weekend, look out for sneak advance copies of the new @ghostly project designed by Practise, edited together with @sv4 and @mrjcgabel for @hatandbeardpress . More on this exciting project soon!

Words are seldom broken on book covers. Some might call it design heresy. But James Goggin (@practisetheory ) and I did this with “Intelligence” on the front cover of my upcoming book, “What Is Intelligence?” In part 2 of our conversation, we explain the thinking behind this unconventional choice. The typeface mirrors the topics in the book, which traces how computation has driven major evolutionary transitions across billions of years on Earth: from eukaryotes and multicellular life to the rise of urban civilization and AI. Communicating ideas of this scale requires a font as big as the subject itself. For more on why AI resembles earlier major evolutionary transitions, pre-order “What Is Intelligence?” (out via @mitpress and @antikythera_xyz on September 23) at the link in bio.

British designer John Morgan tragically passed away last week at the age of 52 after a serious illness. He was a good friend from my days in London and his remarkable work and spirit remains a great inspiration to me. You can see some of this in the projects I’ve selected for the slides shown here. Both John and I shared the experience of starting families at a younger age than many peers, while being incredibly busy with our respective studios and projects. I regret not spending more time with John and keeping in better touch. I’ll never forget our 2006 trip from London to Warsaw, invited by the Polish Association of Applied Graphic Designers. We had a joint lecture scheduled in a beautiful wood-clad hall in the Palace of Culture and Science at noon on a Saturday. But our hosts were so generous in taking us out on the Friday night, plying us with more alcohol than I’ve ever drunk, that we woke up late Saturday morning with the worst hangovers. I remember John calling me from his room, croaking, “James… the talk is in an hour. How are we going to do this?” All I could utter was “…John. My head, oh my god…” I don’t recall my lecture at all, but John’s was effortlessly brilliant, of course. Our studios competed for the AA Files redesign and when the publisher ultimately called to say they’d chosen Morgan studio, I clearly remember agreeing: “yes, I’d have gone with them too.” We see the beautiful results of that long-running project in one of my slides. In 2006, John kindly invited me to collaborate on a Granta redesign proposal. I’ll always treasure those hours working with him in their Hackney studio. The project didn’t end up happening, but I learnt so much from that experience alone. I wrote to John last year: “Still Granta’s loss, would have been so great to work on that together. Well, any project together. I continue to learn from your work from afar anyway, often thinking What Would John Do? in various typographic, format, and material situations. I have the greatest respect for you and your work.” He’s gone far too soon. Rest in peace, John. To Claire, his children, and his amazing studio colleagues past and present, I send sincere condolences.

The cover of “What Is Intelligence?” may look like a simple, abstract image. But it’s actually a scatterplot showing the explosion in computation at the moment of abiogenesis—what likely happened billions of years ago, when chemistry first became life. John von Neumann’s work on self-reproducing automata shows us that in a universe whose physical laws don’t allow for computation, life cannot evolve. Luckily, the physics of our universe allow for computation, as proven by the computers we’ve built—and our very existence. This raises the question: In a universe capable of computation, how often will life arise? Clearly, it happened here. Was it a miracle, an inevitability, or somewhere in between? A few collaborators and I set out to explore these questions in late 2023. Our simulations suggest the conditions required for life to arise are minimal: little more than an environment capable of supporting computation, some randomness, and time. In a two-part conversation with James Goggin, the book’s designer and co-founder of @practisetheory , we discussed the creative challenges of distilling the big ideas inside into the cover’s visual story. Follow along for part 2 of our conversation, where we’ll discuss the thinking behind the unusual font. For a deeper look at the computational origins of life and intelligence, pre-order “What Is Intelligence?” (out via @mitpress and @antikythera_xyz on September 23) at the link in bio.