To kick off 2025, Did I Do That? is turning back the clock back to the waning days of Brat Summer for Fontroversy, live at the AIGA Design Conference! Lena and Sean talk through type’s best known knock-off(?), Arial. Is it a grotesque Frankensteining or merely a case of typeface carcinisation? Is Arial hate the design blogosphere’s first hot take? Is Lena the only person ever to have actually watched the Minecraft: Story Mode show?
ABOUT THE SHOW: Fontroversy is a limited series podcast created by Portland State University Graphic Design students in 2023. You can learn more about PSU’s Schnitzer School of Art, Art History, and Design at pdx.edu/art-design. This edition was presented as part of the AIGA Design Conference in October 2024. Special thanks to Lee-Sean Huang and the team at AIGA for selecting us to be a part of the conference. We <3 AIGA!
WANT TO HEAR MORE? For more episodes of Fontroversy and our parent show Did I Do That?, visit dididothat.design or wherever you find podcasts: Apple Podcasts / Spotify / YouTube / Pocket Casts / Overcast / Castro
CREDITS:
Host: Lena Hall
Crew: Tom Cheevers, Tori Mize, Toni Morales, Donovan Wilson-Carr
Production Assistance (and playing Schumacher’s Monster): Orion Cortez
Show Art: Robert Ditty
Theme: “How Can Things Be” by Holizna
Producer: Sean Schumacher
NOTE: This episode differs slightly from the live version due to technical issues on the stream. Apologies for the less-than-ideal audio quality, particularly in the first ten minutes.
Did I Do That? is a podcast about graphic designers—the ups and downs they face in creative practice, because making design means making lots (and lots) of mistakes.
Every other Thursday, host Sean Schumacher (Ass’t Professor of Graphic Design at Portland State University) is joined by a designer guest with a story about their own mistakes starting out and how they ended up where they did. It’s very weird, pretty silly, and definitely not serious—but neither are designers.