Stories

Maureen Towey, an artist working across many mediums, is the on-set director for the beloved Pop-Up Magazine. With their most recent iteration, "At Home," Towey and her team was faced with new challenges. She spoke with us about how they pivoted.

Neon has a following. And Kate Widdows is a loyalist. She’s an independent letterer and typographer who designs everything from typefaces and record covers to GIFs and, you guessed it, neon signs. She’s also found a way to merge the two, having pioneered animated neon lettering for the web, work which has been exhibited internationally at design festivals and art galleries. We asked Kate a few questions about reaching peak neon fan status, and how that appreciation transitioned into her own bright work.

Design thinking is bullshit. It’s an opinion and a talk notable designer Natasha Jen is well-known for. And, sure, it’s a phrase that entices, piques curiosity. But it’s the experience behind the opinion—the years of exploring cultural intersections and divergence, design systems, philosophies, failures—that has made Natasha Jen a Name in the design world. Or rather, she has earned that reputation for herself.

Mexican-born and Portland-based Fabi Reyna is a guitarist and the magazine’s founder and editor-in-chief—the result of being fed up with women’s roles in music magazines (you know the types: wearing clothes as thin as the guitar strings they’re not playing). She Shreds was started in 2012 as the world’s only print publication dedicated to women guitarists and bassists, a platform where “people can listen, see and experience what it means to be a woman who shreds.”