Personal site of designer Frank Chimero
Every talk leaves a lot of scraps, and Beyond the Machine is no exception. I read a couple books , watched about 20 hours of interviews with Brian Eno, listened to 10 hours of podcasts with Rick Rubin to make sure I wasn’t being uncharitable. (One podcast was a discussion between Rubin and Eno . A really nice listen!) I clocked some serious headphone time with Holly Herndon’s discography , which…
This talk was given on October 14, 2025 at Kinference in Brooklyn, New York. Spoiler alert: the last part of the talk covers plot points of the movie Spirited Away. Another warning is included right before the spoilers with a jump forward link to the spoiler-free conclusion. I am so tired of hearing about AI. Unfortunately, this is a talk about AI. I’m trying to figure out how to use generative AI…
I’ve been researching a new talk the last few weeks and along the way stumbled across a concept that’s been rattling around in my head. I am writing to share, because I find it a satisfying description for the tech flop era. The idea is called “a market for lemons.” The phrase comes from a 1970 paper by George Akerlof that explains how information asymmetry between buyers and sellers can undermine…
Today, I learned that eels are fish. This was a disappointment. I knew of fish, I knew of snakes, yet I always assumed eels were some secret third thing. But, nope, they’re just fish. Or are they? A little digging revealed that eels are deeply weird fish, and to my great satisfaction, the secrets I sensed in them run stranger and deeper than their “fish” label suggests. Since you’ve made it this…
Ah, summer, my worst season. Summer and I do not get along. Too much heat, too much light, too much noise, too much cultural baggage. I burn, I sweat, I fester, I sulk. Which is why it came as a surprise that I took the summer for myself. I quit my job at an opportune moment and called it a sabbatical. My intentions were simple enough: step away from Zoom, Slack, quarterly planning, performance…
Last week, early morning, the sky flushed that fuzzy summer cirrus peach: I wake up inspired to send a brief newsletter with one nice idea. An admirable goal—let’s finally get to writing! But of what? I walk to get coffee, and before stepping in to the coffee shop, a maintenance guy asks for help. He is painting over bad graffiti and needs assistance picking a paint swatch that will match the…
When is tricky these days, but it’s the only question my expectant monkey mind can ask. Time feels especially squishy this year, as my daily schedule drifts further and further away from the traditional 9-5 work window and months slip by and weeks drag on. It’s been hard to get my arms around time, but my best estimate is that I do this thing every other week or so, and I want to tell you about…
Last week, I shared some thoughts on creative dispositions. I personified two attitudes, architects and gardeners , to show how a writer’s inclinations produce a certain kind of text, thus affecting the design. But the gardener and the architect are ripe metaphors that can be carried other places. Jeremy Keith picked them up and applied the scheme to design systems : It’s not just me, right? […] I…
Every once in a while you come across a fact that is so sumptuous it begs to be considered a metaphor. And then, there are other facts that are so perfectly just-so that they need to be viewed as apocryphal. I have read about the monkey trap in multiple places, from Tolstoy to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to your run-of-the-mill self-help books. Some say it’s from South India, others…
A few weeks ago, the folks at Milanote asked to interview me and brought along an unexpected brief: “let’s sit down and talk through the process of one of your projects.” As someone who is consistently banging the drum about the importance of a diligent process, it was a good chance to step back from the day-to-day workings of the studio and get a better perspective on what’s changed in my…