After sitting alone for a long time sipping his first coffee of the day, Rick Griffith emerges from the shadows ready as he’ll ever be to engage anyone in the Matter bookshop who is seeking the answer. If you’ve listened to Debbie Millman’s podcast, you know he’s a highly intelligent, articulate sentient life form who uses books as tools to sow community among his regular customers. “We develop strategies and projects for co-existence,” he wrote in his most recent broadsheet filled with a slew of alluring workshops, pop-ups, book clubs and more.
Under the banner Matter Projects, Griffith and partner Debra Johnson’s mission for the past 25 years has been to enable thinking designers to have the tools to grow. “What began as a design studio,” he writes, “has garnered national and international awards and recognition.” They have “assembled a collection of letterpress printing presses, tools and style for the continued collective liberation of our community, and words as our raw materials.”
Griffith is living my version of the design entrepreneur’s dream. He has the Matter store, press, studio. He is an activist when it comes to raising the level of intellectual rigor among his designer peers in Denver. Griffith lives and works by the mantra “Make things. Be. Relevant, Matter.”
He and Debra have organized a number of engaging seminars including “Liberalism-NeoLiberalism: Identity and the Path Forward,” “Beyond Left-Right Binaries” and one that I’ve been thinking about lately, “What is Human.”
Matter certainly matters to the audience it’s serving, and it is proving that reading and discussion definitely matter. “In a slightly more obvious way, we are happy to remind [people] that we are graphic designers, typographers, letterpress printers, writers, activists, creators, change-making-system-aware intellectuals,” he details. And currently, we need all that and more.
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