I am a book designer, graphic designer, and infrequent type designer. I teach graphic design, book design, and typography, and I spent a chunk of time creating classes, organizing instructors, and structuring curriculum at Parsons School of Design. I’m now a partner in a small publishing firm called Scott & Nix, Inc., specializing in nature-related books and products.

I have had several creative ideas over the years, but by and large, I do not consider myself a terribly creative person. I consider myself more analytical. I enjoy breaking down complex things and looking for clues and patterns for how they can be better reconstructed and I enjoy observing the very clever and creative work of others and teaching students the tricks I know for unlocking creativity.

In 2003, I started developing new idea for teaching graphic design. It started as a small idea—born from a conversation with my friend and classmate from the Cooper Union—Ian Schoenherr. He mentioned advice from an instructor of his—Scott Richter. Simply put: take something small and make it bigger. To that, another instructor—Stuart Diamond—elaborated: Take something small and make it gigantic. Such an easy trick—and so effective.

I thought about the opposite—take something big and make it tiny. I thought about cropping, multiplying, rotating, radiating, and a about a dozen others—and quickly realized that these tricks were all gerunds (the noun form of a verb), and thought that perhaps a careful analysis of a complete list of verbs could yield a nearly complete list of design tricks and perhaps new methods of constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing design.

A fellow obsessive and friend to fools errands, Andrew Saulter, has collected 11,460 english language verbs–in groups of “simple”, “idiomatic” & “prepositional” (though my friend, lexicographer Ben Zimmer, has warned me, “you’ll never get a ‘definitive’ list of ‘all’ English verbs, just as there can never be a useful number assigned to the number of words in the lexicon overall.”).

By my reckoning, of Andrew Saulters list of 11,460, about 3,627 are “design-able”. This blog is about those verbs.

—Charles Nix