Two Designers Walk Into a Bar · Evergreen Podcasts

Good Movies and Old Books - A Conversation with Matt Stevens (Part 1)

·36 min·3 clips

A pro football player found Matt on Behance, sparking the idea for his vintage movie book covers.

Pebble ice opens the room. The cold open hangs onto the water break, Chick-fil-A ice talk, and fake editing notes before the interview finally gets to Matt. Elliot and Todd introduce Stevens as a designer and illustrator with clients ranging from a hot dog shop to Airbnb and Facebook, which of course sends everyone briefly toward hot dogs. Then the conversation settles where it wants to be: design, pop culture, and Stevens' personal project The Gap of Pop Culture. Stevens talks through the reference pool behind the work. He gathers material from Pinterest, websites, old bookstores, photos, and books he buys or studies. He does not treat it like a museum shelf. He packs it into his head and trusts that some of it will come back later, usually sideways. Stepping away is part of the method too. The material needs time to loosen up before it turns into anything useful. Next to that reference pile is a movie list. Some titles are gaps he wants to fill. Some are older movies he wants another pass at. The covers grow in the mess between those buckets. Sometimes a style leads, especially when he finds a look he has not really tried. Sometimes the movie leads, and sketching tells him what design language belongs there. His bingo balls comparison makes sense: the ideas keep knocking into each other in ways he could not fully schedule. Todd catches it nicely, calling the archive a kind of curio cabinet in the brain, full of styles, movies, books, and strange little scraps waiting for contact. The tab joke stays alive at the end. Before parting for the next part, Stevens says his favorite covers are usually the ones that felt best to make, not always the ones other people pick.

As heard by us

A loose, thoughtful look at how reference feeds design.

Matt Stevens describes the habit of building a private visual cache: old books, movie lists, Pinterest, and a personal reference library that can come back later in ways that are hard to predict.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you like design talk with movie gaps, old books, and a little bar-top banter.

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