Did I Do That?

Lena Hall of Fontroversy is on Did I Do That?! Or Sean Schumacher is on Fontroversy!? We’re all mixed up because it’s a Did I Do That?-Fontroversy acoustic universe crossover spectacular to kick off one of those shows’ fourth season!

The two hosts sit down to talk about the process behind getting Fontroversy off the ground, as well as Lena’s Fallout Boy audition outfit, the meltiest car, and the Wizarding World of Woody Harrelson.

You can find more about Lena ’s work on their Instagram, @ps.its.lena. They are indeed graduating soon and you should absolutely hire them! You can view Lena's font horoscopes for the both of us here!

This episode was recorded Saturday, February 3, 2024 in the Rat’s Nest.

Special thanks to the entire team that made Fontroversy possible: Lea Thompson, Lena Hall, Malia Masterson, Whitney McPhie, Ashley Heeke, Sophia Stoker, Anna Stanton, Hannah Joseph, Sophia Mick, Mette Voldengen, Milos Dugas, Freya Kargard, Robert Ditty, Izzy Gavaza, Dana Ives, Kaitlyn Casey, Aline Chercover, and Orion Cortez.

Closing Music/The Fontroversy Theme: “How Can Things Be” by Holizna

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To close out our season break, I wanted to share one last feed drop! The creators of Two Designers Walk Into A Bar reached out a few weeks back to connect as fellow creators of media about design that doesn't take design too seriously. They make a really fun show, and this episode comes from the end of their third season covering a subject my students have heard me talk about many times: one of the most financially catastrophic packaging redesigns in history. It's a really wonderful show—give it a listen and then give them a follow! You can find them on whatever podcasting platform you like, as well as Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn!

Pepsi announced it’s moving forward by moving backwards (sort of), returning to more of a traditional look for their logo and cans. (Think black. It's a slimming color.) But as they kick their last logo to the curb, we go back in time to discuss how they became saddled with this burdensome brand look in the first place. We talk ovals, smiles, globes, magnetic fields and cosmic forces of the universe in this special breathtaking and scientifically-tangential episode.

Images, articles and links mentioned in this episode can be found on their episode page: https://www.twodesignerswalkintoabar.com/episodes/episode-50-pepsi-logo-story

This episode was originally published June 7, 2023.

Two Designers Walk Into a Bar is a podcast about iconic design and popular culture.

Hosted by graphic designers and collectors Todd Coats and Elliot Strunk, the podcast is constantly looking at pop culture and thinking about how it influences us and what we do for a living. Starting with a theme, we choose iconic work that we find meaningful and use humor and insight to break it down, turn it inside out and try to understand why it has stood the test of time.

Two Designers Walk Into a Bar encourages listeners to dive into their libraries, mini storage units or memories with us.

Discover more at their website: https://www.twodesignerswalkintoabar.com

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Need to thaw yourself out from this winter freeze? Why not let a reheated episode of Fontroversy—our last of the season break—from last summer warm you back up!

When Lena and Sean start fuming about the most famous (and infamous) font there is, guest expert Freya Kargard steps in to modernize their thinking about Helvetica. This might well mark our limited series' finale, but stay tuned as we might have one or two surprises in store as well!

Segment Producer: Freya Kargard

Researcher: Robert Ditty

Story Editor: Izzy Gavaza

Sound Editing and Mix/Mastering: Orion Cortez

This episode was recorded Tuesday, May 30, 2023 and originally published on Thursday, August 31, 2023.

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Fontroversy was created by the students of DES 399 Public Design Communication in the Spring of 2019 as part of Portland State University’s Graphic Design program in Portland, Oregon. You can learn more about PSUGD at psu.gd. You can learn more about the PSU School of Art+Design at pdx.edu/art-design.

Host: Lena Hall

Show Art: Robert Ditty

Social Media Coordinator: Ashley Heeke

Producer: Sean Schumacher

Editorial Assistance by: Orion Cortez

Music: “How Can Things Be” by Holizna

For more about Fontroversy, visit fontroversy.com or follow @fontroversy.psugd on Instagram.

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When frustration around the meme-iest of meme fonts starts to go viral around the studio, guest expert Sophia Mick bursts in to help set Lena and Sean straight on Impact’s… impact.

Segment Producer: Sophia Mick

Researcher: Mette Voldengen

Story Editor: Milos Dugas

"Candy Paper Wrap Crinkling" Sound Effect by Emile99, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License.

This episode was recorded Tuesday, June 6, 2023 and originally published on Thursday, August 17, 2023.

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PRODUCTION CREDITS

Fontroversy was created by the students of DES 399 Public Design Communication in the Spring of 2019 as part of Portland State University’s Graphic Design program in Portland, Oregon. You can learn more about PSUGD at psu.gd. You can learn more about the PSU School of Art+Design at pdx.edu/art-design.

Host: Lena Hall

Show Art: Robert Ditty

Social Media Coordinator: Ashley Heeke

Producer: Sean Schumacher

Editorial Assistance by: Orion Cortez

Music: “How Can Things Be” by Holizna

For more about Fontroversy, visit fontroversy.com or follow @fontroversy.psugd on Instagram.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Graphic design may be our passion, but everybody needs a break too! While Did I Do That? is off for a few weeks between seasons, enjoy a few episodes of our sister podcast Fontroversy, produced by one of Sean's classes in Spring 2023. If you missed episode 1, no worries—unlike the glut of superhero cinematic universe movies out there, there's nothing there you need to know to enjoy to this one! If you want to revisit it, though, you can find it here!

When a typeface ripped from the funny pages starts to get contentious, surprise guest expert Whitney McPhie (currently serving as Interim Creative Director at Willamette Week) intervenes to school Lena and Sean on what Comic Sans can really do.

IMPORTANT EDITORIAL CORRECTION: Gentle Giants Dog Food does NOT, in fact, use Comic Sans on its packaging—it instead uses a DaFont-style Disney-inspired sans paired with, of all things, Bank Gothic Sean apologies for this truly shameful oversight, although in their defense, attempting to look at any one specific type block on the package without being immediately distracted is basically impossible.

Segment Producer: Whitney McPhie

Researchers: Ashley Heeke, Sophia Stoker

Story Editors: Anna Stanton, Hannah Joseph

Sound Editing & Mix: Orion Cortez

This episode was recorded Tuesday, May 30, 2023, and originally published Thursday, August 3, 2023.

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PRODUCTION CREDITS

Fontroversy was created by the students of DES 399 Public Design Communication in the Spring of 2019 as part of Portland State University’s Graphic Design program in Portland, Oregon. You can learn more about PSUGD at psu.gd. You can learn more about the PSU School of Art+Design at pdx.edu/art-design.

Host: Lena Hall

Show Logo: Robert Ditty

Social Media Coordinator: Ashley Heeke

Producer: Sean Schumacher

Editorial Assistance by: Orion Cortez

Music: “How Can Things Be” by Holizna

For more about Fontroversy, visit fontroversy.com or follow @fontroversy.psugd on Instagram.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As both Season 3 and 2023 draw to a close, the time to seek forgiveness is at hand! Earlier this year, Did I Do That? set up a confessional booth—with Sean playing the role as part priest, part Frasier Crane—to collect true stories of design disasters, missteps, failures, and more from anonymous guests who sought to clear their guilty consciences.

How can you find peace when faced with cross crossworders, ghost(ed) cookbooks, and duck pornography? There’s only one way to find out!

(To be clear: the way is listening; you must listen to find out.)

WANT A DESIGN CONFESSIONAL AT YOUR EVENT?

If you have a live event and want me to set up another design confessional for it, either in Portland or beyond, let’s talk! I’d love to do more events like this in the future.

SPECIAL THANKS

The clips used in this episode were collected as part of “Future Fonts and Friends,” a party held for TypeCon 2023 at Outlet in Portland, Oregon, on Thursday, August 17, 2023. All guests were indeed anonymous, and so if you hear any familiar voices, I guess just ignore that? Come to think of it, what do real priests do about that problem?!

Huge thanks to past guest Lizy Gershenzhon and Travis Kochel of Future Fonts for inviting me to be a part of the event, to the organizers of TypeCon for putting up with me, and to my 2023 MVP Orion Cortez for building the confessional booths based solely on two terrible sketches I made.

Additional thanks to past guest Kate Bingaman-Burt of Outlet for her eternal support of / patience with me just in general, but especially the white-hot ball of stress that is me when faced with a live event. Thanks, too, to the kind folks at Jolby—who didn’t even have anything to do with the party and had no reason to help me!—for letting me steal power from them for a couple of hours just because I happened to set up next to their studio.

YOU’VE MADE IT THIS FAR…

I want to all of you listeners out there for keeping this show going and growing. This marks the end of both our third season and second year, and I don’t think I ever would have imagined there would be as many folks out there following it as there are around the world. If you’ve enjoyed the first two years of this show, please tell a friend! I want to keep this project growing, and the community around it growing as well.

• If you have some nice things to say about what this project means to you, please send me an email! If you have mean things to say about me, please relay them to your dentist while they have their hands in your mouth—they’ll understand and relay them directly back to me, I’m sure.
• I don’t ordinarily plug the tip jar, but if you have some change between your couch cushions you want to throw my way, I would really appreciate it.

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Creative Director and Design TikToker Zachary Winterton joins Sean to talk about the people in your (Geocities) neighborhood, bad leadership advice from cheerleaders, and Charlie the Cactus: the supermarket mascot of our dreams?

Zachary is probably best found these days on TikTok (tiktok.com/@zacharywinterton), Instagram (instagram.com/zacharywinterton), and YouTube (youtube.com/@ZacharyWinterton) where you can find his latest short form design-centric videos. You can sign up for The Creative Brief, Zachary’s weekly newsletter, on his website at zacharywinterton.com/newsletter. That same website, zacharywinterton.com, is where you can see some of his past work.

This episode was recorded Sunday, November 12, 2023.

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Emily Tate (Senior Digital Art Director for Studio A at Adidas) joins Sean to talk about America’s most frightening college mascot, disinterested dogs, and William Shatner's Pandora surprise.

You can find Emily’s work on her portfolio work, emilytatedesign.com. You can see more of her design work and giver her a follow on Instagram at instagram.com/emilytatedesign.  In addition to Adidas.com, you can also still see Emily’s work on the Burgerville small dip packages—go get some with your next burger!

This episode was recorded on Saturday, November 11, 2023. As I mention towards the end of this episode, this is our first recording in a new studio space, which does have some electrical interference, echo, and outside sound bleed issues long since solved in our other space. I’ve done my best to mitigate all of these in post-production, but apologies if you do pick up on any buzz, reverb, or street noise!

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Freelance designer, paper crafter extraordinaire, and former student Celestia Caredio joins Sean for a very special not-quite-Halloween-anymore episode to talk about The Haunting of Full House, bookbinding in a hostel, and jewel cases. Plus, is a tech startup possibly planning on sending Sean to the great beyond? There’s only one way to find out—to listen in! (well, okay, or you could just wait and see if it happens, but listening would be better for my stats)

• You can find Celestia’s current site at celestiagrace.com, or very occasionally on social media at @celestiagrace on Instagram! If you’re looking for an excellent freelance senior designer who can throw a killer Halloween party, you can also connect with her on LinkedIn too at linkedin.com/in/celestia-caredio-06457439
• Celestia did indeed turn her early mix CD design project “My Room” into a Spotify playlist, and was gracious enough to share it here: open.spotify.com/playlist/5G4vfVoBHx8m7PD051eVmq! It’s chock full of lesser known tracks from some of the coolest bands of the mid-to-late aughts, so give it a listen! Fair warning, though: as Celestia puts it, there is a lot of angst in this album.

This episode was recorded Saturday, October 21, 2023 in downtown Portland, Oregon, and marks the last episode in our dank and dark PSU Art Building studio! May it get to live out its final days in peace, being filled with random junk for events that we’ll forget we have until after the event we might need it for is over.

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Ashod Simonian (co-owner of Imaginary Authors perfume and co-author of both the “Portland Book of Dates” and the brand new “Seattle Book of Dates”) joins Sean to talk roadside attractions, band photo cliches, and the classic dilemma of adulthood: do I get a job at the IRS or work on Scooby Doo?

• You can find more about Ashod on Instagram @ashod, or on his website, ashodsimonian.com!
• The Portland Book of Dates is out just about everywhere you can find beautiful books, and has just recently been joined by The Seattle Book of Dates! Both are gorgeous—filled with tons of Ashod’s beautiful RISO-esque illustrations. You can order The Portland Book of Dates at Powell’s, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and many other fine retailers! The Seattle Book of Dates will drop November 14th, but you can pre-orderit at Powell’s, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and many others near you as well!
• You can find more about Imaginary Authors, the beautifully packaged non-gendered perfume line Ashod co-owns and designs for, at imaginaryauthors.com. Ashod was kind enough to share a few samples with me and I can confirm that they smell fantastic and look really good on a shelf to boot!

This episode was recorded on Friday, September 22, 2023 in downtown Portland, Oregon.

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