Ask for: a rich visual research report

October 13, 2026

Today’s “ask for what you want”: a rich visual research report on “box logics” in print media, from the beginning of time until today. I’ll put my full prompt in a details element below. The short version is: I am interested in a broad family of graphic design ideas, and I wanted an AI agent to fetch me examples.

No particular sense of “best practices” here — I share the prompt only because it can be interesting to see how other people approach this. As usual, I put mine in its own little file, RESEARCH-IDEA.md, and I spent 5-10 minutes writing it. I find this more effective and frankly tolerable than plunging directly into a back-and-forth with an AI agent.

Here it is.

We’re working on some refreshed design concepts for use across both print and web, for a series of books AND stationery items that are accompanied by a ton of web content.

Here are some threads of inspiration, in no particular order.

One is the book cover system used decades ago by Faber & Faber, with example PNG files in this dir. Note the simple stacked boxes, the way they become the visual anchor placed over rich, full-bleed images.

Another is TV guide grid layouts — the interesting sort of information design that emerges from the need to show all these different channels, streams, of information.

A third is “nerdy data displays” on things like baseball cards, comic book character guides, the backs of toy boxes, collectible trading card games … anything that wants to show you “the stats”, whether real or fictional.

Yet another one is 1980s and 1990s computer GUI designs, especially those with hard corners and edges. NeXTSTEP is an example.

Here’s what appeals to us about these “box logics”:

They go against the grain of modern “round, friendly” digital design. The right angle! The hard corner!
They offer an extensible system for different needs and contexts.
They can easily “float above” richer graphical content – as seen in the Faber & Faber book covers. Our materials WILL be highly graphic, so having a design scheme that’s more sober, minimal, even severe, makes for a nice mix.

I should stipulate, we’ll be using these grid systems essentially in the context of “covers”, both in print and on the web … putting the key data about a content item into these boxes: title, author, publication date, other little fun bits of metadata, taglines, summary lines, etc. AT THE SAME TIME, it should “scale” to handle other forms of information … metadata at the bottom of a web page, the content on a book’s copyright page, etc. The point however is that these materials aren’t going to wall-to-wall grids. This will be a tool used sparingly, but always in the spotlight.

Okay that’s are starting point. We’re interested in doing a few things. The outputs here will be standalone web page reports with a focus on visual examples.

Here’s what we want:

A comprehensive survey of “box logics” across print media, going back as far in time as we can. We are looking for hi-res, useful visual examples of things including baseball scores, stock market reports, TV guide listings (as mentioned) … anything and everything that “puts text and data in a neat little box”. Tabular data, too. Let’s dig up a TON of good/interesting examples. This survey should be global — be aggressive about searching beyond English!
A survey of flexible grid-based graphic design in digital systems specifically — various UIs, GUIs, OSes, tiling window managers, etc. So, this is the “digital / screen-based” analog to the print research run above.
Finally, a “what if?” exercise, one that combines our starting impulses with the results of #1 and #2 above and synthesizes them into some weird/wacky ideas about potential box logics, grid systems, etc. Creative formulations and applications. Notions that take my assignment here and sort of twist it through another dimension. These should be live HTML/CSS as appropriate. Expect the unexpected! You get it.

Okay, that’s a good bundle of work. Please research very widely and take your time. Ask me any questions needed, then proceed with the project.

I recommend setting these kinds of queries to run overnight, so you can enjoy the results over coffee in the morning. (My overnight computer grind, years ago, was language model training runs. In the morning, I’d see how low the loss had dropped, generate some sample output. We’ve come full circle.)

You’ll find it’s like reading a little magazine, just for you. Is it the world’s best magazine? No. Is it weirder and more specific than any magazine could ever be? Yes! I prefer local web pages, HTML files on my laptop, to Claude’s “artifacts” or any other proprietary format.

I’m now reviewing mine, and already I’ve discovered something new to me, that I’m sure I wouldn’t have found on my own: the banzuke, a graphic grid used to display sumo rankings, widely adapted (and parodied) in Japanese graphic design.

Here’s a cleaner riff:

Disciples of Takemoto Tsunatayū IV as a sumo banzuke

And here’s a kabuki version with a fabulous crowd of figures “jostling inside” the box at the bottom:

Is this a world-shaking discovery? No. Yet my view towards research in books has always been that one single, gleaming, new idea — or scrap of language — or salient image — justifies a book’s entire purchase, and the time it took to read it. That’s clearly a writer’s calculus; we build new work from those scraps. In that view, I’ve already gotten my salient image from this report, and there’s still more to digest, so we’ll call it a smash success.

The “creative” part of the report fits a familiar pattern: there’s nothing I’d ever actually use, but considering the agent’s work is still productive, the way any combinatorial, even quasi-random, exploration can be productive. In your assessments — “That’s so dopey … ”—you discover your own opinions and ideas.

Goes without saying, any of these reports should be treated as definitionally incomplete — plenty of the really good stuff isn’t available online. Even so: what a cool magazine!

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