Aaron Draplin

Esquire. Ford Motors. The Obama Administration. Burton Snowboards. While all of these brands are vastly different, they share at least one thing in common: Aaron Draplin. The man behind developing the aesthetic and identity of these brands, Aaron Draplin is one of the new school of influential graphic designers who combines the power of design, social media, entrepreneurship, and DIY aesthetic to create a successful business and way of life. Draplin Design Co. is a mid-career survey of work, case studies, inspiration, road stories, lists, maps, how-tos, and advice. It includes examples of his work--posters, record covers, logos--and presents the process behind his design with projects like Field Notes and the Things We Love "State" Posters. Draplin also offers valuable advice and hilarious commentary that illustrates how much more goes into design than just what appears on the page. With Draplin's humour and pointed observations on the contemporary design scene, Draplin Design Co. is the complete package for the new generation of designers.

From the bestselling author of Assholes: A Theory, a book that--in the tradition of Shopclass as Soulcraft, Barbarian Days and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance--uses the experience and the ethos of surfing to explore key concepts in philosophy. The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once declared "the ideal limit of aquatic sports . . . is waterskiing." The avid surfer and lavishly credentialed academic philosopher Aaron James vigorously disagrees, and in Surfing with Sartre he intends to expound the thinking surfer's view of the matter, in the process elucidating such philosophical categories as freedom, being, phenomenology, morality, epistemology, and even the emerging values of what he terms "leisure capitalism." In developing his unique surfer-philosophical worldview, he draws from his own experience of surfing and from surf culture and lingo, and includes many relevant details from the lives of the philosophers, from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, with whose thought he engages. In the process, he'll speak to readers in search of personal and social meaning in our current anxious moment, by way of doing real, authentic philosophy.