James Blue is an independent designer and researcher.

Right now he is living in Cambridge, Massachusetts and pursuing a masters degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He most recently was working at The Eames Institute.¹ Before that, he was in Los Angeles working at IN-FO.CO / Inventory Press.² Before that, he was in Brooklyn working in print at The New York Times.³

He graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a BFA in Design.⁴ Since then, his engagement in design research has only grown.⁵

A selected list of clients:

The New York Times
Inventory Press
The Eames Institute
National Public Radio (NPR)
Concordia University Press
The University of Texas Design Institute for Health
The University of California Humanities Research Institute
Istituto Europeo di Design Venezia
Blum Gallery
The Bass Museum

1. What he enjoyed about working there was the opportunity to engage with a historically-rich archive of ~40,000 objects from the lives of Ray and Charles Eames. The work allowed him to engage with the critical and humanist thought imbued in a design practice spanning decades of American Industiral production.

2. What he enjoyed about working there was the impassioned and unique editorial focus, the sincere dedication to the materiality of books, and the approach to typography as craft.

3. What he enjoyed about working there was the designer-as-editor structure, the unique medium, the massive print circulation, and the dialectic formed between the role as ‘the paper of record’ and the ephemerality produced through an unending daily print schedule.

4. His graduating thesis was a book he edited and designed aiming to engage critically with the landscape of creative education and pedagogy. It contained original writing, original interviews, and reprinted writings from external contributors.

5. Areas of special interest include the materialism of design-as-a-profession, the contemporary validity and historical precedents of ‘radical’ education, and design as an actor within the cultural-academic industrial complex.

Website updated 04/19/25
Typeset in Monument Grotesk and Times