Christian Solorzano [00:06]

Hi there, it's Christian Solorzano, host of Underscore, a podcast by the Chicago Graphic Design Club. In this episode, I speak with Nathan Matteson, a professor that I had while I was a student at DePaul University here in Chicago. He was one of the professors that really laid the foundation for how I think about typography and web design today. He was somebody that always emphasized craft and encouraged his students to develop a unique point of view within design.

In this episode, we speak about typography, his transition from painting into graphic design, and we position design as not always being solutions-oriented. And we get a bit philosophical and critical while contemplating whether design is truly capable of making a positive impact in the world. He shares his perspective on design trends, templates, and plugins, and shares with us his views on why we should work towards understanding the materiality of what we work with and why we should also embrace failure within the design process.

I hope that you enjoy this episode. How's it going?

Nathan Matteson [01:20]

Good. It's good. I'm doing good. How are you doing?

Christian Solorzano [01:23]

I am doing well. It's nice to, it's nice to see you. It's been a long time.

Nathan Matteson [01:27]

It's embarrassing because we're both in Chicago, right? And I like, I'm pretty antisocial and don't reach out to people?

Christian Solorzano [01:34]

That's one of the things I've always appreciated about you is that you're very true to yourself.

Nathan Matteson [01:38]

Yeah, maybe to a fault sometimes.

Christian Solorzano [01:40]

I remember when I was your student, you were very honest and very transparent. I think a lot of students appreciated you for that transparency. Even to this day, like without, I don't want to shower you with compliments, but even to this day, like there, there's in my professional career, there's moments where I think back to what would Nate do in this situation?

Nathan Matteson [02:02]

I mean, I don't like to be showered with compliments because they make me uncomfortable, but that's one of the nicest things said about me as a teacher in a while. So thank you.

Christian Solorzano [02:12]

And you also, graphic design, you're very knowledgeable in typography, but then you also have this like superpower where you're also developer, you know code and you have your company as well of structures, which I remember like wallets and notebooks and I think guitars at some point, like you're sort of like an interdisciplinary person.

Nathan Matteson [02:39]

Yeah, we, we've walked away from all the widgets and all we do now is guitars.

Christian Solorzano [02:43]

So let's go back in time a little bit. I want to understand your upbringing and specifically your introduction into design. Have you always been fascinated by making and creating?

Nathan Matteson [03:00]

Yeah, I guess. I mean, I wouldn't say that I was always into design. I mean, I didn't really know what it was for most of my life. I grew up, I don't wanna say I grew up poor, but I mean, I made stuff in part because, I fixed stuff a lot growing up because we had to fix things, like working.

I learned how to work on cars when I was a kid and, we'd fix the— have to learn how to fix the water heater and, basic stuff like that. And I didn't grow up in Chicago. I grew up in— I was born outside of Los Angeles, which is where my mom Grew up, but my dad was from Florida, and we wound up moving when I was a kid to Kentucky, Southeast Kentucky, like Appalachian.

So I grew up mostly, in that part of the country and moved up here for graduate school. So, but yeah, I mean, we always, we always made stuff, either making toys or just making whatever and yeah, it was weird, but it wasn't, my dad, well, he was a jack of all trades too. I mean, I come by that pretty honestly and he did a lot of different stuff, when I was a kid.

So from, being a computer technician, field engineer in the 1980s on like mainframes to being a carpenter to being a minister. But he also, maybe this is, one of the early tastes of the design world. He ran a small print shop in our garage, Offset printing. He had an old AVTIX 360. So, I really, I suppose I got into graphic design, through the printing trades. I worked as a printer off and on when I was younger.

Christian Solorzano [04:51]

So. Yeah. And what kind of culture were you immersed in? What were you listening to or watching or what were your, what were your interests?

Nathan Matteson [04:58]

Well, I was, from a young age, like maybe in the 4th grade or 5th grade or something, I started playing trombone. I have one brother who's a year older than me. And so as a child, like, you sort of you know you went back and forth between worshipping, or at least I went back and forth between worshipping my older brother and absolutely hating him. Through you know some period of my life anyway.

But he played trumpet, and so I started playing trombone and played trombone, all through college. And so, that was really maybe the first kind of like formal creative enterprise that I was you know really engaged in, and still today is a great. I think the connection between music and graph design is, huge, just in terms of proportion and composition and whatnot. And I doodled a lot. I mean, I didn't study art through high school or college. I was like a— I was a math nerd.

I was really good at math. I had some pretty wicked math skills. But by the time I got to college, I was really bored with it. And so I wanted to study something really difficult. And so I studied studio art. I was a painting student in both undergrad and grad school. I never really studied graphic design per se formally.

So yeah, it was sort of, music was a, it was a, it was a constant, and of course it's still part of what I do because I, my company makes guitars.

But yeah, I would say that was a big part of my early creative life, culturally in terms of what we listened to, like growing up, my parents were, they were, they're not so much this now, but they were like sort of— I would— I guess people would describe it as fundamentalist Christians, like we didn't listen to rock and roll music really. The closest we, I think we had one rock and roll record in the house and it was, it was a Creedence record, Creedence Greatest Hits.

And I love Creedence to this day. But, we didn't really do that when I was in high school. I guess I started, listening to, I went into a rebellious phase and I, bought a Dead Kennedys cassette tape and, got into Minor Threat and like the better of the hard— the hardcore bands. Like, I still listen to a lot of the Minutemen and that sort of stuff, was really important to me. And I think still is.

The kind of— I have a very deep suspicion for the status quo and social mores and things like that. I just find them just not trustworthy. So, and I think that had a lot to do with, me growing up listening to punk rock music. And in high school, I found that the punk rock kids were the ones who were the most decent, treated you the best. They weren't the smartest, they weren't the best dressed, they weren't this or that or the other.

But on a human level, they were absolutely the best ones to hang out with. And so I did, I did that.

And I think maybe that's what caused me to want to go into painting, and just do something that was unexpected and different. And, my chemistry teacher, of course, wanted me to go into chemistry. And I thought, what am I gonna do with that? I'm gonna make a new Doritos flavoring or, and little did I know that now, every time I go into a store, there's a new potato chip flavoring. And that could have been my life.

How do you make a potato chip taste like fried chicken and waffles? I could have been the one to figure that out. But that seems so bleak to me that you know I didn't want to do it. So anyway, it was a weird. It was a weird. I mean, maybe it wasn't weird. I guess everybody's life is weird to everybody else. But yeah, I just it was a bunch of twists and turns, and I never I never planned anything out.

And I think part of that came from how I was raised. Like I feel like you know every day my parents just tried to make. The best decisions they could. And sometimes those decisions, caused us to move and pursue other stuff. It wasn't a straight path from— that was predictable. And so I think for a long time I thought that's how everybody's life was.

Yeah, it was like an unpredictable path, and you just every day you try to figure out what's the best thing to do today.

Christian Solorzano [09:23]

And so you went to the University of Tennessee for painting, and I am interested in what kind of— in the themes that you were perhaps exploring through some of your work?

Nathan Matteson [09:34]

Yeah, I mean, originally I wanted, I thought I'd go for sculpture, because, growing up we did a lot of hands-on making physical stuff, whether that was just putting a car back together or I made some really dumb stuff, like I made a lamp for my room out of an old muffler I found on the side of the road and, dumb stuff like that.

So I thought sculpture, but when I got to University of Tennessee, it occurred to me that, the work that I really kind of liked and that I thought was kind of the smartest work, at the time was happening in the painting department. Maybe it wasn't the smartest work, but it was maybe the most challenging work. And so, I switched gears and became a painting major. And for a long time I wasn't making paintings.

Down south, we have a saying that you can fall into a pile of shit and come out smelling like a rose. And that's what happened to me with school. I went to the University of Tennessee, which is not where most people look to go to art school. But when I was there, they had an absolutely fantastic studio art program and some really incredible painting faculty.

So I got really lucky and they were only interested in you making, really challenging work, like the best work that you could make. And so I didn't, I wasn't interested in moving paint around, on a canvas. I was interested in other stuff. And so I made just an enormous amount of garbage that was like really not aesthetic at all. I, one of my wife's favorite pieces that I made is this paint-by-number of a pirate, burying treasure.

And there's probably some metaphor in there about the art-making process, but stuff like that. I mean, it was literally a paint-by-number that I got at a thrift store, and I just painted it with acrylics. And at the end, probably, my, the summer after my junior year, I went to a painting program in Connecticut for the summer. And they made me paint. I actually used that paint-by-number to get into this program.

And I got there thinking I was going to still be making stuff out of garbage and whatnot. But they were like, no, this is a painting program. We brought you here to paint. And I was like so pissed. I was like, why did you fucking bring me here at all then? But I learned like such a huge amount, about just about process.

Like the painting faculty there, this guy named John Hull, he was like way into— before you ever put, a brush to canvas, you have to make drawings, like copious amounts of drawings. You really have to understand the thing that you're gonna make before you make it. And so it wasn't the sort of design process people talk about now, but, it was, it was probably the first time I really ever got, way into an understanding of, look, there's a, there's a process behind what you're doing.

Not that they didn't talk about that in my studio program, they did, but I don't think I ever really understood it. It really—I don't think it was till last summer that I really truly understood it. But then I came back my senior year. I made a bunch of paintings. Like that program actually made me, I think, really kind of understand why painting was so interesting. And there's this whole context to it throughout history.

And so, every brushstroke you make is like happening at the end of this like hundreds of years of historical painting context. And so. That made it seem— before it just seemed like, oh, you're just talking about your feelings and whatever, in art school. And I wasn't really interested in that. But developing a sort of deeper understanding of what was going on the canvas, made a big difference. And so when I went to grad school eventually here in Chicago, I like— I'm still fascinated by painting.

I never really want to make a painting ever again. But I'm still, as a cultural practice, as a historical artifact. I think it's one of the most fascinating things in the world to me.

Christian Solorzano [13:37]

And what was that transition from painting into graphic design?

Nathan Matteson [13:42]

Oh, I mean, it was messy and sloppy and scary. So, when I moved here, I moved here in 1997. Several friends of mine moved up here shortly thereafter, and most of them have moved on to other things. But one good friend of mine, a fellow named Chris Leather. He's also an adjunct at DePaul, but he runs a sort of design print shop at the University of Chicago in the physical sciences division down there right now. And he is a phenomenal designer.

And we went to college together and he was a double major in painting and graphic design. But he basically convinced me to apply for a teaching job, part-time teaching job when I got out of grad school. He was teaching at this school. It was one of these for-profits that were in the city. For a long time and they needed a drawing, a drawing class covered. And so I really didn't know what I was doing.

I didn't know what I was going to do when I got out of grad school. So I applied for that job and got it and started teaching. But it was this for-profit school. It was not a great school. It was great faculty. There were a lot of great faculty there, but they ran the place kind of bizarrely. And they convinced me to teach this class in like page layout. And I'm like, I don't really— that's not what I learned. I didn't go to school for that.

But they were like, well, but we've seen your work and, we know that you worked in the printing trades and all this, and really they just needed somebody to teach it, and they figured I could figure it out. And so I did. Probably, I mean, I shouldn't have been teaching at all. I must have been like 26 years old or something. I mean, I really probably wasn't old enough to be teaching college kids, but that was kind of a sloppy, messy intro.

And Chris, gave me a ton of stuff to read and, really, helped me stay, half a step ahead, of what I was doing. And I began to love it. And then at some point they needed a typography class covered, and I was like, there's no way I know, how to teach this. And somebody there was like, you've actually worked on printing presses and nobody else here has. And I had set metal type.

I didn't think it was a— I didn't think it was anything cultural, or important or whatever. It was just a trade. It was just something to do for a paycheck. But it turns out I had learned, a fair amount about type. And so, that became something I really loved. I was living with some Thai people at the time and, I started designing typefaces just because it never occurred to me that was a job that somebody did.

I just thought like on the 8th day, Jesus gave us Times New Roman, like it never occurred to me that somebody sat down and drew it. And so really it was typeface design that kind of like everything gelled for me. It was like drawing, and there was like a math, mathy component to it because it's so technical and engineering kind of. And then when I was in graduate school, I also, I spent a fair amount of time in the linguistics program at my university.

And so the history and theory and whatnot in typeface design I found really appealing as well. And the connection to culture, other cultures around the world. And I mean, it's just that that's a fascinating field. So it was a, it was a messy intro. I really had no business, teaching design. I had no business practicing design. It took me a long time to figure out, what I was doing.

And really, I owe it to, a handful of designers around me who really did an enormous amount to help me figure it out.

Christian Solorzano [17:12]

And historically, who have been some of your biggest typography influences? Because I know you're very well— I think I consider you like very well read in the field of just Typography in general? I mean, I think my—

Nathan Matteson [17:29]

Probably the name that people would know who I absolutely love. I don't know that he influences the work that I actually create so much as I don't know how he influences me, but it's H.N. Werkman. He was a Dutch typographer in the first part of the 20th century. He was killed by the Nazis, near the end of World War II. But I think his work is absolutely incredible. Maybe I like his work because he was also self-taught.

He was a printer, he didn't go to graphic design school. He was a sort of autodidact. But he was working with next to nothing, during the war, like a lot of the type, they had melted down to make bullets and whatnot. So he's printing with stuff like not even type, building stuff up on a press bed and making stuff happen. And also an incredible illustrator. So I really like him. There was a gentleman in who worked in Minneapolis.

He passed away, oh, maybe 10 years ago or so. His name was Will Powers, and I met him at a conference in Minneapolis, TypeCon. This must have been in like around 2003 or '04 or something, and he was a book designer. He worked, I think, for the Minnesota Historical Society, but he was a He was like a proper working typographer, like designed books for people to read. And it was like really unsexy work, but it was really serious work too.

And he gave this presentation the first time I ever saw him talk, first time I ever met him. He gave this presentation about typefaces and how important it was to buy new type, for new projects. Because of course there's this like cultural thing that you're— if you're working on a new book with new ideas, then a new typeface, a contemporary typeface made by somebody living today was more appropriate than, some relic of 200 years ago.

But there was also this like sort of like Marxist labor-centric component to his argument that like it was our responsibility to each other as designers to support, one another's work. And so every license we buy of a living typeface designer is supporting their, supporting them. Anyway, he was a, he was an incredible, he was an incredible person and designed some incredible books. And he was big influence on me.

And then there was another fella, older fella Jim Rimmer, a Canadian printer, again a typeface designer typeface founder. Literally, he would cast metal type, in his shop. And he, before he passed away, he had started doing this thing where he would, he would invite people, for a week to come to his shop and work for a week and he would teach you how to make metal type. So I did that when I was younger. I think I was in my late 20s maybe.

I spent a week with him and he was, he was incredible. He had never finished high school, like he dropped out of high school to work as a printer as an apprentice, in a shop. His print work was just outstanding, like the level of craft and quality and what he did, you just don't see, very often. And his work, like his typeface design, was just like I don't use his typefaces in my, in my own work. I don't think I ever have because they're beautiful.

They're like, it's like Hermann Zapf. I don't use Hermann Zapf typefaces either because I think they're too beautiful. And like my approach to things, I don't know how to use them, I can't do it. It's like, it's like avant-garde, the ligatures. I mean, nobody knows how to use those goddamn things except Herb. So anyway but it's— it was incredible work, and unique. He had this unique vision, working up outside of Vancouver in a shop sort of underneath his home.

And he would do— I mean, he would actually typeset entire books with this monotype. He had a— he had a monotype setup, so he'd like create the punched paper roll, throw it into his composition caster, and I mean I want to say he would make the monotype dies from his own typefaces. I mean, it was incredible. It was an incredible thing to see. But he also— there's a— there's actually a DVD about him. There's like a documentary about him and his life and his process.

I forget the name of it, but he's worth looking up.

Christian Solorzano [22:04]

It's funny that you say DVD. I haven't heard that word in a really long time. DVD. I remember when Blu-ray was new and now DVD feels like so ancient, but—

Nathan Matteson [22:16]

Totally. Yeah. God, I remember I was a kid going to rent a VCR still. We used to have to go rent them because we couldn't afford one, right? I'm gonna go rent one. And they were like, they were like the size of— they were huge. I mean, yeah, I remember. Yeah, totally nuts? And you'd still get Betamax tapes to put in them. I mean, anyway.

Christian Solorzano [22:37]

So today, is there anything exciting about the world of typography that just really draws you in? I find for myself almost overwhelmed by just how much, just how many typefaces are out there today and just how many, how much developments have been made in the, in the world of typeface making.

Nathan Matteson [22:59]

Yeah, I think there's, I mean, I think there's a, yeah, there's some, there's some things that I find depressing, in today's typography, and there's some things I find really amazing. I think the amount of like, is it bad good type or is it good bad type? Like the amount of work that just like ignores all the, all the so-called rules and whatnot, I think is awesome. It's like the '90s maybe all over again, but I like that.

I like that there's that there's young designers, coming up and figuring out their own path through the world rather than sort of rote learning, this sort of like, oh, here's the 30 Commandments of typography. I mean, that stuff always turned my stomach. That said, my work is like really straightforward. I find basing what I do in like the physiology of how we read and whatnot and taking a very functional approach is how I like to work.

I don't make a lot of like crazy off-the-wall typography, but I like to see it. I like that sort of end of the spectrum is healthy and thriving and, whatever. So, I think that's cool. I do think it's maybe over the years, I think it's gotten a little bit derivative. You see the same sort of like kinetic typography, quote unquote, the same garbage filters. And, the thing that's annoying to me is it seems like so few people are actually programming their own filters.

Like Plugins and, oh, I've seen this thing, and it looks good and I'll just do that again. I think maybe it's because I went to art school instead of design school. I really like to get into the material of what I'm working with. So if I'm setting type, I mean, I like to set metal type. I haven't in a long time, but, we still, we have a letterpress in the basement. We still have cases of type to play with in the house.

And to me, that's, it's important to think about it like material. Like it's paint, that's the, that's the stuff that you're working with. And so earlier on, you had mentioned that I do development work too and code, and I do and I love it. And, I'm not great at it. I'm no software engineer, but I can do some interesting stuff with code. But to me, the code is, the material.

And so ignoring the material that you're working with, I think that's easy to do today because of how much stuff has already been written for us, and there's templates and there's plugins and there's all this stuff. And you don't really need to get into the materiality of what you work on as much as maybe you once did. Most of the design programs in the country, probably maybe all of them now, have ripped the printing presses out of the workshops.

And so how are you supposed to know what the materiality of your practice is? I feel like we graduate students nowadays who don't even really understand what a halftone is. And how to work with one and what possibilities you have on press if you really understand, what a 5-color press, why we use a 5-color press instead of a 4-color, and what you can do with that. I mean, we're not really teaching that anymore.

And so it's probably too much to ask for people to be way into the materiality of their craft. But I miss that. I love that people swing for the fences. And I kind of love that probably the fact that we don't have to think so much about materiality brings breaks down barriers of access to the discipline of design. But there's still something, that I miss about that.

I like that, I think young, younger designers, I think, demand a lot more ethically out of people's practices, or maybe they don't demand it, but that's what they want. They want to be, they want to have that sort of engagement with things. I don't know that that's necessarily anything new. But I think it's probably affecting a larger distribution of designers in the world than it used to.

I mean, it wasn't uncommon when I was a kid for people to be like, look, I really don't want to work on this cigarette campaign. So it's not like people weren't interested in the ethics of what they were doing. But I think that the, now all of a sudden we see the ethics of every single thing that we're doing. Before, it was just like the big totems on the landscape, like cigarettes and alcohol and things like that you might turn down.

And now it's like, you're really, you're really getting deep into the weeds of how culture is affected by, representations that for decades we just took for granted. So I think that's a good thing in the industry. I still like the fact that there's a ton of print in the world. I grew up in the era when, everybody was declaring the death of print, but I haven't seen it come. Digital is a big footprint, bigger footprint than it was 10 years ago. But, print's still there.

And I think the crossover between them is kind of, I think, both good and bad. I see a lot of print books now that use like really big type. To me, it's humongous. I always feel like that's like digital kind of influencing how we approach print nowadays. The page sometimes looks like the mobile device, and it's not my favorite look, but I think it's interesting to see the cross-pollination of more and more substrates, that we look at every day.

Christian Solorzano [28:21]

And how do you bring some of that, ethos into the classroom today? And what sort of, perhaps, what do you notice about, let's say, the new generation of designers? I know you spoke a little bit about, their desires or their needs to be a little bit more mindful as to, the consequences of their work.

But for example, for us, for the club, one of the things that we really like to provoke in people is to ask big questions and to be a little bit more critical of the work that they're creating. But in the classroom, how do you— yeah, just what are your overall sentiments around students that are born in the year like 2003?

And which is shocking to think about because that's yeah, my brother, my brother was born in 2002 and I still consider him, a baby, but he's gonna be 21 soon.

Nathan Matteson [29:17]

Yeah, God, it's crazy that you can be born in 2002 and you're old enough to drink. In my class, I feel like I get a good response to this attitude but maybe my students are just too afraid to tell me they hate it. But I lately, I hardly ever grade anything. I mean, I hope my dean's not listening to this, but, I tell my students that week one, like they're just not gonna get grades.

So to back up a little bit, I think the thing that bugs me the most about students who are born in the year 2003 are that they're just so afraid of failing at things. And I'm sure that's not their fault. They went through K through 12, and I think K through 12 is probably absolutely broken, and I don't think that's the teacher's fault. Either. Probably just really a series, decades of bad policy.

Christian Solorzano [30:11]

I'm here. But Siri got triggered.

Nathan Matteson [30:14]

Oh, Siri needs a safe space. So when I was in school, and I went to a public university that didn't cost nearly as much as university does now, school was— it cost a lot less money. Maybe the economy was stronger, although I think I graduated twice into recessions, so it wasn't super strong when I graduated from college, but I just don't know if there was that much worry. We worried about dying in a nuclear holocaust when I was a kid.

Now you have to still worry about that, and you have to worry about, not having the air to breathe by the time you're 40. And I mean, there's just more stuff to worry about. And so I think that— I think my students are way too scared of failing at stuff, and that induces in some students a sort of inability to do much.

It's almost like— I hate to talk about the Bible, but I was— I mean, I'm a horrible heathen now, but I was raised in, various Protestant churches. But there's this weird parable about these people who get like money, 3 brothers or something, and like one of them buries it in the ground and one of them, they do all this different shit with them. But I feel like students are often like the person who buries the money in the ground they're afraid to do anything with it.

Like they might be wrong in their decision-making. They just don't make one. And I think that that's, I think that's terrible for them. And I also think it's terrible for the future. So I have a tendency not to grade because I feel like students want to micromanage their way to an a. And I would rather for them just to be like, if you do all the work and you put the time in, you're gonna get an a or a B. Don't worry, the grade doesn't matter.

Like when you go get a job, who's actually looking at grades? Nobody really. And I think the only way to get to a high quality of work is to really try a bunch of stuff, and don't engage with some grade on a piece of paper, but engage in crit, put the work up on the wall. And if the only feedback you're getting is feedback from your faculty and your peers in crit, then you'll focus more on that.

Like you'll ask for more, you'll demand more out of that experience because you're not getting it in this sort of fake, oh, you've got an a, you've got a B+, you've got this, that, and the other. Because I think that, having students that really are, that are fully engaged in their work and trying to make the best stuff they can make and trying to learn new things and trying to do things that they don't really know how to do.

I think creating that foundation in like the second year of design school, which is generally where I teach nowadays, I think that prepares them for making good decisions when they get out, making decisions that actually make them, give them agency in the workplace where they feel like they can say, oh, I don't, I'd rather do this. I don't want to do that. They're not afraid. But I think conquering that fear is horrible.

And I think probably the only way to conquer it is to kind of embrace it a little bit. So trying to create an environment in the classroom where they feel like they can be a little afraid. I think that's pretty important.

Christian Solorzano [33:20]

Yeah.

And can you expand a little bit about on the idea, because I noticed that craft, the craft of graphic design, at least in the last couple of years now, has to an extent become so diluted thanks to templates and to what you were talking about, plugins, and just this like nonstop feed of trends and like inspiration boards and just so much that how do you actually instill in, let's say, a student or in someone that you're working with, that agency to look within for that inspiration as opposed to like looking out at all of these quick one-stop solutions?

Because that's something that I notice a lot is that the design processes in a way become, yeah, just become so diluted and like so sped up and like quick in the name of like productivity and like efficiency. That it almost seems counterintuitive to like actually sit down and like really think through, is this typeface appropriate for this project? Or should I just default to something that I know is gonna work because it works everywhere else? So what are your thoughts there?

Nathan Matteson [34:33]

Man, I mean, that is, that's a whole mountain to unpack right there. I think that there's a sort of wonderful, terrible tension in the design world between the fact that, it is a job, it's a job and you've got clients and you have to, you have to serve those clients. But it's also, you're also creating a culture and you're creating stuff that other generations coming up are gonna have to suffer through.

So doing it, there's ethical responsibility to the clients that are paying you, but then there's also ethical responsibility to future generations of humans. And I think that we're stuck in the middle of that. And I think very often we have gotten to a point in the industry where we spend more time serving our clients. I've always had like a weird problem with like the whole double diamond thing, right? Approaches to design like that because I feel like it's a template. I don't like templates.

When I was still programming for a living, I always hated using frameworks, programming frameworks. I love them now because I'm less, ornery and a little bit older and lazier and whatever. But I never liked that and I never liked the double diamond because it seems like who's to say that's the best process for whatever job you have at hand.

It's a great process for the client because, it's almost guaranteed to get you pointed in the right direction, not the right direction, but a useful, efficient direction, right?

In fact, to me, it's almost guaranteed to never point you in the best direction, but it'll get you ROI, it'll make sure that they're not losing money. And that's its power. And that's a great power, if you care about the things you just mentioned, productivity and efficiency. But I don't care about those things, like my favorite designers didn't care about those things. Will Powers talking about buying new type not for productivity and efficiency, but because we have a Marxist responsibility to our colleagues.

Or one another. I mean, it's not about the acquisition of capital and wealth. It's about something completely different. I think that is hard. I think it's an intractable problem to try to solve. I think the kind of reaction against capitalism that you see in the design industry today is another really good development that I don't know that was really there so much, when I was younger. But I also think that there's like kind of a— I don't think anybody really knows what to do with that.

I think most younger folks in a graphic design program, have this sort of low-grade distrust of capitalism, but then, where do we all go from there? What does the industry look like? And I think that a lot of not to pick on young people, because I love, my students. I think they're great. They're so much better than, we were when I was in school.

But I think that oftentimes people feel like it's up to somebody else, like somebody else who's somehow in power, is supposed to solve this stuff. When to me, we're all in power. And I think that that's, back to how do you address it in a graphic design program? It's, you have to, you have to make people feel like they're actually empowered and like they're the ones who can do something. Graph-wise, I think, I think people understanding type, like really understanding type is important.

I think we could demand a lot more out of our software. And I've— this is where I fail. I don't send nasty grams to Adobe anymore about features that they haven't implemented that I really want.

But they're, their drop cap composer is just such a shambolic piece of garbage. If you're, if you're working on a printing press, you can do almost anything with an initial cap. It can be standing or dropped or hanging or inset or whatever, and you can put it on a saw and mortise it, and there's all these things you can do to it. And then, InDesign, you can just pick how many lines you want to fuck up, with your, Jesus Christ, that's all we have?

That's all they're giving us? This— I know it's difficult to build software, but, the software we have, because there is essentially a monopoly still, I mean, Thank God there's other, vendors out there, trying to get into the market. But really in the industry, it's still mostly Adobe. I think it's shambolic. And yeah, anyway, yeah, I think hand skills have gone away. I know most of my students, they don't wanna sketch.

I think they're afraid to sketch because they're afraid to do stuff wrong, but they're probably also not really taught how to sketch in K through 12. They're not taking notes by hand. They're recording stuff on devices. And so like the hand-eye connection, like just the confidence you have in your hand to move a pen on a piece of paper and make something intentional, it's shocking, how that's gone away.

So I think, even that, even that, like even if you're gonna use, some sort of, you're gonna use Figma, to design this stuff and you're gonna use templates and whatever, even sitting there and figuring out on paper with a pen, what do I want to have happen, on this screen? How big do I want things to be doing design? To me, that's the design. It's not making something look corporate in Figma. It's actually planning out space.

And I think very often we just skip over that part and we say, oh, somebody's got this template for, a corporate website.

Christian Solorzano [40:28]

I'll just like plug content into I remember, so you're one of the reasons why on principle I refuse to use a template for my website. And despite me wanting to rip my hair out because I can't figure something out in code, I much prefer being limited by my own skill, coding skills, as opposed to having something do it for me.

To this day, like my, I would say like my website is like relatively basic because of my limited coding understanding, but I think there's a lot of value within that limitation of things you could produce. And I just really appreciate that. And that, and that came from you. And I remember, I don't know if you remember this, but I remember going into your office and yeah, you would always just sketch things on a piece of paper before even like touching the computer.

So yeah, that's something that has stuck with me. So I just wanted to let.

Nathan Matteson [41:22]

That's awesome. Yeah, I have one website still that doesn't use a template. It's really Spartan, and then the Obstructions website, I hate to say we're like in the midst of making it into a Shopify site, which is like, it makes me die a little bit inside every time I work on that, to get it up and running.

But it needs to happen because, all we do is sell guitars and it's like, it takes so much time for my partner Matt to deal with everything, by hand, annoying. And so we really need to do that. But it's, we've had like our website's been turned off for, it might be a year now. I mean, it's, that's how much I hate doing it. Yeah, the website that I like is the one that's just like nothing. It's just a list of stuff that I've No picture.

Christian Solorzano [42:16]

Yeah, I really love that. So a question that we like to ask our guests is related to hope, and I want to ask you, what are you hopeful for? What— why do you, why do you get out of bed in the morning?

Nathan Matteson [42:33]

That is a good question. I tend to, I tend to not be very hopeful, honestly. I mean, I tend to think yeah, I have a pretty bleak outlook. Honestly, I don't have much hope for the future. I mean, just climate-wise, like I think we've fucked it. We've absolutely fucked it. This place is not gonna last much longer. So why do I get out of bed? Well, I think I'm more appreciative of small things now than I used to be.

This morning I was, outside in the backyard and we have a flower garden in the back, because Barbara runs a stationery business and she draws a lot of flowers, for greeting cards and whatnot. And so, we grow a lot of flowers and I, 10 years ago, the idea of having a flower garden in my backyard would have been like, what are you talking about? Give a fuck about a bunch of flowers, let's grow tomatoes or something we can eat.

But now, you go out there and it's dumb, but like I notice the smell of flowers now, which I think that I never once did growing up. I blocked it out. They just seemed like, why would I care what a flower smells like? But there's tiny little things like that in the world that, I kind of look forward to in the day. I mean, I guess there is some, I don't know.

I mean, maybe one of these idiot rich white guys will find a fucking way to suck up all the carbon, and save us. I suppose one could hope for that. Yeah, I don't— this depressing. It's depressing to me that I can't think of something to hope for. I don't have kids, and I'm never going to have them. So, I don't need to hope for a better future for them. I hope my brother doesn't die. That's what I hope for now.

I hope that you know his subarachnoid brain hemorrhage doesn't kill him. Yeah, I don't know. It's that's bad. It's bad that I'm not hopeful, but I really I'm really not. I you know honestly. What I always say to people when I'm— when we're talking about this sort of thing is I actually hope that humanity dies off. And part of that's just a provocation, but part of it's like, oh, that's almost certainly what has to happen for like the Earth to reset itself, right?

Like the dinosaurs went extinct for whatever reason. And there've been mass extinctions before, and ostensibly things needed a reset. And so that's what we're looking at. And, hopefully it happens before we fuck up the planet so badly that it just turns into a dead that's not much to hope for. That's a pretty bleak hope, but you hope that things manage to survive somehow. I think designers tend to be really arrogant.

I think there's an arrogance inherent in designing stuff that's probably necessary because of how we formulated how design works. But, this— most people, I think, talk about design as though it's solutions-oriented, which I fundamentally disagree with. I think that we the horrible arrogance to think that we can come up with solutions to things—it's just it's so ridiculous to me. It makes me laugh.

And I think this idea that you know we can come up with a solution to the problems, to the to the really the catastrophic problems that we've created is ridiculous. Like we're the ones that have created the problems. It's unlikely that we're going to be the ones to find the solutions to the things that we've created.

Christian Solorzano [46:03]

Yeah, because sometimes I do notice that designers, we tend to have a savior complex where we think that we could solve everything. And I think it's a good ambition to have, or like, I don't know, it's good to be— well, it's nice to have that sort of altruism to want to solve problems. But I think sometimes we tend to trip over ourselves in doing so and just create like a bigger mess.

I was reading a book, you ago, and it was talking a lot about, as designers, how could we make the biggest positive influence in the world? And the solution was to just not design at all. And that just that was a, that just did something for me. And yeah, there's a lot of truth in that.

Nathan Matteson [46:50]

Yeah, absolutely, 100%. You really think, design has, probably caused a net amount of harm, not good. I mean, there's no, there's probably no way to measure that. But, and I'm obviously, I'm a glass half empty kind of person. And so, of course, a glass half full kind of person is probably gonna say, well, marginally, there's a, there's a net positive.

And fair enough, but I really do think, I think one of the reasons I went into teaching, I went into teaching full time, on a tenure line position when I was 40. Years old. And I think part of that was that I was older suddenly. I felt older suddenly. And you look at the design industry and you think, man, once I hit 50, which I will next year, I'll be so irrelevant, so out of touch with culture, and so overpaid and whatever.

And so you think, well, what do you do? Well, you go into teaching, you've learned enough at that point, you give back, to the to people who are trying to get a leg up. And I do really think that, for me personally, design was like a— the hard, arduous, non-traditional, stupid, autodidactic route that I took to becoming a designer, was like a transformative— it was transformative to me.

I mean, it allowed me to— it gave me a career, a trade, and I could open up my own office and make as much money as I wanted to make doing whatever I wanted to do. I went and got my own jobs and whatever, and I made my own life whatever I wanted my life to be.

And so, I want to give that ability to younger people today, because like I really do think if you enjoy doing design, if you don't enjoy it, then there's other ways to make money. But if you enjoy it, it's like this really magical, it can be this magical transformative thing. But, and so at the same time, I think, really I'm contributing to this like long-term problem of like I'm just teaching people to make more designed objects, that's a huge, that's a huge problem.

Christian Solorzano [48:56]

But you're also, you're also involved in other like personal projects. Like I'm noticing, I remember you posted this, I think maybe it was on your Instagram, maybe a year ago or so, your, the project that you have with your wife, your photo project, I Love you the More because you Flee from Me. And I really, I really, I think that was the first time that I've that I've really seen, like a collection of photographs by you.

So can you speak to a— can you speak a little bit to that project and perhaps other creative pursuits?

Nathan Matteson [49:30]

Yeah. So it's funny, when I was in, when I was in painting school and I went to this, summer program, it was in Connecticut, and you live with people in the, in the area while you're there. There for like 6 weeks, I think, or 8 weeks or something. And the— I lived in this woman's home, and there was another fella from the program who lived there too from— and he was from Los Angeles and his name's Nick— Nicholas Koursoulis.

And, we were really good friends, like we got on really well, you know and it was a fantastic summer. And then we left and we didn't really, as I said at the beginning of this, I'm super antisocial and do not keep up with people. And I didn't keep up with Nick, but he reached out through the magic of, the inner web years, like 2 decades later and got in touch and came to Chicago.

And so eventually we started this project called Good for Nothing, and we were doing, he wanted, he's an amazing fine artist. He's stuck with fine arts and, he teaches part-time in Los Angeles, and he still makes his work, and he has an incredible sense of craft, and he makes, he's not nearly as well known as he should be.

His work's absolutely amazing, and I'm talking him up, and you should leave part of this in the thing because he deserves a hell of a lot more recognition than he gets. I also designed his website, cursulis.com. Anyway, me, he wanted to— his work is really physical. It's painting still and like material stuff. And so we were talking about the internet, like the internet as a medium. And so we started this thing where— so that, this work is like, it's like really dumb machine learning stuff.

But, we were interested in thinking about the screen as like a substrate, like a canvas. So what is the materiality of the screen assume? Like what constraint does it you? And then how do you— what's the— it's both material and immaterial at the same time, kind of. We were— I was doing the programming of this stuff. It's like they're really simple JavaScript programs that make these abstract things. We're also interested in the fact that most new media work that we see is very representational.

Like there's very little sort of serious abstraction in the vein of like the mid-century abstraction in the painting world, where you're, where you're really trying to break everything down to the nubbins of just the material you have to work with. So anyway, the reason that project's important is, well, for one, I love it, and I think some of it's really good work. But that was like the first time I'd gone back to making fine art in like decades, after I had left grad school.

And so, and I think that all of a sudden it was like I didn't have a network of people to make art with, when I graduated for a variety of reasons. But, then Nick and I, were sort of developing this practice together. And then so Barbara and I, were in Scandinavia this one winter back in like 2019 before pandemic at the end of a study abroad that I had done with students from DePaul.

And so we had started working on this one project that we still haven't finished, but it had to do with this church there. And the spaces between the bricks in this church, right? And so we sort of became obsessed with this, it's a simple notion. And it's a notion that, has been important in art and design forever, but the space between stuff, right?

And so I don't remember the first time, we took a photo, or when we first thought about like, this would be a great series of photos to take. But that whole I Love you the More because you Flee from Me project really came out of that, like wanting to take a photograph of the space between like this, the earth and the sky, like the horizon. And so we actually just took some more of those when we were in Boston.

Boston's really where we took the first of that series of photos quite some time back. At Revere Beach. And so we went back there this past week to take another few shots at Revere. I don't know what they— I think, when I was studying fine art, it annoyed me that like you're just making paintings of whatever you wanna make paintings about. And I like the idea of designing stuff, especially typefaces, because they were like tools, for somebody else to use. To make other stuff with.

And that's why I like making guitars, like I still play guitar badly, but the idea that you're making an instrument for somebody else to use to make whatever music they wanna make with it is, I think, really— I like that. I think it's a really powerful, model.

But then, these photographs and the work with Nick, all of a sudden it's like, and maybe it's just 'cause I'm older, I'm like, oh, I think maybe there actually is something there is a kind of image that I wanna make, like finally, after half a century almost of being alive, there's like the notion of the horizon, I think, is a really beautiful— it's a beautiful metaphor. That's mostly what that project's about.

It's just a big series of metaphors about how far away things seem and how close they are. And, the difference between what, what's possible and what's imminent.

Christian Solorzano [55:17]

Well, we're almost at time but I just want to thank you so much for this conversation. It's always not— even though it's been, yeah, it's been a really long time since the last— since the two of us spoke, even though it's virtual face-to-face it feels like not much time has gone by.

Nathan Matteson [55:35]

Totally agree. Yeah, totally agree. Well, thank you so much for asking me to do this. It was a, it was a huge yeah, we should, we should see each other in real life more often. Yeah. Especially each at the same bloody university. Yeah, shameful that I don't communicate more often with people.

Christian Solorzano [55:53]

It's all good. So if anyone wants to learn more about you, I will put some of the links in the notes for this episode. But with that said, is there, are there any upcoming projects or anything that you'd like to share with our audience before we drop?

Nathan Matteson [56:13]

Sure. I mean, there's always a bunch of stuff going on, but, well, those 2 projects, Good for Nothing and the photo series, are both going on. But I'm working with my friend Matt, who's one of the partners in Obstructures and also an architecture professor at Auburn University. We're working on a couple different books about a Swedish architect named Berndt Nyberg, who he was, he lived in the 20th century.

So there's a— we're working on a book right now with a Swedish filmmaker, a fellow named Sven Blom, that'll probably come out on an Italian press called 2G either late this year or early next. It's like about these short films that Nyberg made. And then we're working on a much bigger, volume about his work. I don't know when that'll come out. Yeah, that's a longer-term thing. So.

Christian Solorzano [57:12]

And what's the best way for people to be up to date with all of your endeavors? Is it your website, social media? I see you're, you tend to be pretty inactive on your, on your Instagram.

Nathan Matteson [57:27]

I'm wickedly inactive. If you, if people who wanna keep up with the structures, that Instagram is fairly active, mostly because of Matt. I do post some things I'm doing to the Skepticist, which I won't bother to spell, but maybe that'll just be in the links. Yeah, for sure. There's another site called Brutist that's more of a visual portfolio of selected stuff. I may post something there once in a while. But yeah, it's actually a little bit difficult because, well, mostly I hate myself.

I think my work's garbage. I don't think there's anything of value in anything that I do. And so I tend to not talk about it or post it anywhere. That's really the problem.

Christian Solorzano [58:14]

I disagree with you on that one.

Nathan Matteson [58:16]

I like a healthy disagreement. So it's me fine.

Christian Solorzano [58:22]

Excellent. Well, yeah, thank you so much. This was a joy. And yeah, I hope we get together soon.

Nathan Matteson [58:28]

I would love it. Thank you so much.

Christian Solorzano [58:31]

Thank you so much for listening to this full episode. If you want to learn more about the Chicago Graphic Design Club, please visit our website at www.chicagographicdesignclub.com. Graphicdesign.club. And if there is someone that you'd like us to interview, or if perhaps you're interested in being a guest on our podcast, please let us know by sending us an email at info@chicagographicdesign.club or send us a message on our Instagram. Thank you so much.