@craigmod

About

Simply: an independent writer, designer and publisher based in Palo Alto, California.

It's, of course, a bit more complicated than that.

Startups

I love the culture of startups: the optimism, the naiveté, the confusion, the chaos, the compression. I regularly mentor and consult with "publishing related" (a vast and growing category if there ever was one) startups and try to nurture connections where connections should be.

For a little over a year, I was privileged to work at Flipboard as a product designer. My main focus was Flipboard for iPhone. I am indebted to the great opportunity Mike, Evan, Marcos and the rest of the company extended to me. So much so, I made them a love letter (book?).

Tokyo

Tokyo was my base for nearly a decade and I return frequently. My experiences there are so deeply layered that I consider the city a hometown. All that time in Japan pushed my cultural expectations into strange territories; something I enjoy. Much of my design work is inspired by time spent there.

Publishing

PRE/POST is a publishing umbrella I founded in 2010. It kicked off when we republished Art Space Tokyo via Kickstarter. Recently, we published Japanese poet Bin Sugawara. He's brilliant, but you need to understand Japanese to get it. Forthcoming is the Designer Founders book from The Designer Fund.

PRE/POST is there to help get made books that should be made, and made well. No excuses. We average a book a year, which feels just about right.

Myths

I'm adopted. So, naturally, I'm fascinated by provenance. Provenance and mythologies. Particularly the myths we create around ourselves and the boundaries which define 'family.'

Perspective

Travel is my drug. Usually prescription based, although, at times, it can feel illicit.

I bounce between Palo Alto, New York and Tokyo. Sometimes, people have a hard time understanding why. They tilt their heads. To me, it's simple: stay sharp. Each time the plane lands I can hear the crisp scrape of my senses pushed across a whetstone.

Silicon Valley gets foolish dreaming and technology.
New York gets content and process.
Tokyo gets objects and procession.

Simple, right?

Optimism

I strive to be a technology optimist. Optimism is a meditation requiring constant application. I believe technological change is like a freight train of a certain unstoppable momentum, and we have two broad choices:

• Stubbornly stand in front of the train and try to push it back
• Accept the train and be a force laying railroad ties which place it on a nourishing course

I choose the second option, and that choice informs the way I look at how digital infrastructure is affecting books, publishing and education. I like that we're irrationally emotional about the loss of physicality in books. We're explorers, and the first rule of the Explorer's Club is: always choose a disrupted space filled with intense emotion.

Sea Change

I believe there is presently a unique confluence of simple technologies around books, publishing, networks and education that can be leveraged to change the way we think about learning and information accessibility. If you're working in this space, I'd love to chat.

I think of the liminal space publishing now occupies as the pre/post era of publishing. We're post- the formality, complexity and physicality that so defined publishing following Gutenberg (and Aldus Manutius and Walter Benjamin and …). But yet we're still pre- substantive alternatives.

The old guard is crumbling. A new guard is awkwardly emerging. Together, we can affect the shape of the new guard. Isn't that exciting?

Follow me on Twitter or say hello.