Jude Stewart
Nonfiction
Chicago, IL
I have written about culture for The Atlantic, Slate, The Believer, Cabinet, Design Observer, Gastronomica and The Art of Eating among others. I’m a contributing editor to PRINT, America’s longest-running graphic design magazine. I’m also a contributor to AIGA Eye on Design and Fast Company’s Co.Design.
My first book, ROY G. BIV: An Exceedingly Surprising Book About Color (Bloomsbury, 2013), is available in seven languages. Hailed by the Chicago Tribune as “a rabbit hole of a good read”, Publishers Weekly praised ROY as “visually stimulating and surprising, reminding readers that colors are still as fascinating and fun as they were in grade school.” My second book, Patternalia: An Unconventional History of Polka Dots, Stripes, Plaid, Camouflage, & Other Graphic Patterns (Bloomsbury, 2015) is available in three languages. Quartz found Patternalia “plainly fascinating”; Publishers Weekly called it “a delightful romp...[and] a true treasure”. AIGA Eye on Design praised my “exceptional authorial ability” and found Patternalia “both cohesive and wildly exciting”.
I also run Stewart + Company, a creative agency specializing in content strategy, marketing and development. Current and previous clients include AARP, Battery Ventures, Chubb Insurance, Clover POS, E*TRADE, Gagen MacDonald, M13, Mirador Financial, and TradeKing, among others.
I divide my time between Chicago and Berlin, Germany. Read more at www.judestewart.com or follow my tweets @joodstew.
At Ragdale I intend to finalize edits to my third book, a work of creative nonfiction titled Revelations in Air: A Guidebook to Smell. Revelations in Air will activate readers’ curiosity about a terra incognita that surrounds us daily. Fitting for a field guide, the book opens with a section titled “The Noses”, which acquaints readers with their equipment for smelling—equipment that’s surprisingly non-standard from person to person and still barely understood by scientists.
The second section, “The Smells”, contains 20+ chapters of variable length, each focused on a single smell. The chapters are grouped by smell affinity: flowery, funky, resinous, tingling, smoky and otherworldly. The smells will be complex, specific, and eccentric—cannon fire, freshly sharpened pencils, petrichor, an extinct flower captured via “headspace” technology and re-engineered in the lab. Each smell tells a tale about itself, while also cracking smell’s broader mysteries open. Interspersed throughout the book are one-page exercises to help readers become better smellers.
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