Bob Wertz

I mentioned earlier this week that the Edward Tufte workshop in Atlanta eight years ago was a driving factor in returning to graduate school, but that’s actually a partial truth. There were actually five lectures that sparked an interest in design research and grad school. All of them held in vast hotel meeting rooms with hundreds of attendees, but each of them connecting with me on a deeper level.

Jonah Lehrer, AIGA Gain Conference, October 2008, New York City

Gain was AIGA’s “Business of Design” conference¹ and there was a roster of big wig, influential speakers. Jonah Lehrer was there to talk about his best-selling book, Proust was a Neuroscientist. Lehrer connected creativity with neuroscience advancements, arguing that artists often figured out how the brain worked before scientists did. This concept that neuroscience and creativity could be linked was fascinating to me. A few years after this talk, Lehrer was found to have plagiarized and fabricated quotes in his later works, making this a strange choice to start my list, but after his talk, I started to think about design work a little differently. There is a recording of the talk, but sadly, no audio for some reason.

Malcolm Gladwell, AIGA Gain Conference, October 2008, New York City

Same conference as Jonah Lehrer, but one day later. Malcolm Gladwell spoke about his forthcoming book, Outliers. People often criticize Gladwell for oversimplifying the research he builds on, but in that moment — combined with the Lehrer speech the day before — I could see connections between social sciences and design. I read Outliers afterwards and really enjoyed it, but could honestly never really get into Gladwell’s other work. Hidden somewhere on the AIGA servers is a complete recording of the lecture.

Kevin Larson, Typecon, July 2009, Atlanta

I loved Typecon Atlanta. Looking back at my notes and blog posts, I wrote about the inspiring speakers, the networking and the creative exploration of letterpress and hand lettering. I did not specifically note a lecture by Kevin Larson, which is really funny, because that’s the one that ended up being most influential for me. Larson is research scientist working for Microsoft and I remember his talk about the science of readability. How does the human brain process letterforms? And then form words and meaning? His general idea was that designers think they understand how readability works, but research shows that other factors are involved and room for improvement. There isn’t a recording around that I’m aware of, but I did find a 2013 talk with Larson and legendary designer Matthew Carter discussing collaborating on the design of a typeface using letter recognition testing. Like the Lehrer and Gladwell talks, the idea of using science to better understand type design was exciting to me.

Edward Tufte, Presenting Data and Information, February 2017, Atlanta

In 2017², I was becoming interested in how information is structured and I’d read a little bit about Edward Tufte’s work. I drove down to Atlanta for a one-day workshop, expecting to learn how to design better presentations. In actuality, I left pondering the difference between designing to persuade and designing to inform. Too often, we don’t try to communicate information and let viewers come to their own conclusions. Instead, when we make presentations, we’ve already drawn conclusions and are trying to persuade people that those conclusions are correct. After the lecture wrapped up, I hopped on I-20 for the normally a 3.5 hour drive. That night, however, it was a 6 hour drive because of an accident on a bridge on the interstate. I had plenty of time to think about what I wanted out of my career.

Khoi Vinh, AIGA Leadership Retreat, June 2017, Dallas

The AIGA Leadership Retreat is a strange event. Part conference, part pep-rally, part-training… chapter board members from all over the United States converge on a conference hotel in a random AIGA city. The 2017 confab was in Dallas and seemed almost entirely focused on IBM’s push into design thinking.³ So I was really surprised when Khoi Vinh showed up to talk about the importance of criticism in the design industry. I’d been a fan of Khoi Vinh for a long time since his days at The NY Times and I’d even used his short-lived app, Mixel. For me, this brief talk contrasted with the heavy design thinking push and made me question many of the assumptions I’d made about the design industry on a macro scale. I found a longer 2018 talk that covers many of the same themes.

At the end of that summer, I started to talk to people around campus trying to figure out which Master’s program I wanted to apply to. As an employee benefit, the University of South Carolina allows staff to take up to four classes a year. In January 2018, I connected with Camea, the graduate school coordinator in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications and learned about their research-focused MA program. I crammed for the math section of the GRE, applied and was accepted. I started the program in Fall 2018 and I fell in love with process of research. When I finished my MA in 2021, I rolled right into the Ph.D. program (which I’m still trying working on).

I’ve been to a bunch of talks, lectures and conferences over the years. Years later, I still think about these five and credit them with laying the groundwork for interest in MA and Ph.D. level research.

Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.