Mike Schnaidt: Fast Company Creative Director on typography, creative endurance, and designing for the long haul

Typography is often treated as a detail — the thing you finalize after the real design decisions are made. But for our next guest, it’s closer to the foundation everything else rests on. He’s spent two decades in editorial design at some of the most iconic American magazines — Men’s Health, Esquire, Popular Science, Entertainment Weekly — and he’s now the Creative Director of Fast Company, where he recently led a redesign that does something pretty unusual: the magazine gets a completely new typeface every single issue. His name is Mike Schnaidt.

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Mike’s also a professor, a runner, and the author of Creative Endurance — a book that maps the principles of physical and mental endurance onto the creative life. It’s built around 56 rules for sustaining a career in design, drawn from interviews with ultra-marathoners, astronauts, and designers who’ve pushed way past the limits most people set for themselves. And as you’ll hear, he’s already working on book two.

We chat about the nuts and bolts of typography (utilitarian vs. expressive, food metaphors, Fast Company's per-issue typeface system) to the philosophy underneath it all (design as service, authorship, hospitality). We dig into his book Creative Endurance — 56 rules for sustaining a creative career drawn from athletes, astronauts, and designers — and his counterintuitive take on burnout: the cure isn't rest, it's picking up something creatively different.

Bio

Mike Schnaidt is the creative director of Fast Company. He’s also the host of the Webby-awarded video series It’s All in the Typeface, a professor of illustration at the School of Visual Arts, and the former president of the Society of Publication Designers. One of the coolest moments in his life was when Paula Scher said his first book, Creative Endurance, was “beautifully designed.” His second book arrives in 2028.

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