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Design Notes is a podcast about creative work and what it teaches us. Hosted by Liam Spradlin, a Senior UX Designer at Google focused on the philosophy of the user interface, the show features conversations with people from unique creative fields, uncovering what inspires and unites us in our practice. Tune in to learn how UX design connects to creative work across disciplines and around the world.
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Design Notes is a show about creative work and what it teaches us. I'm your host,. Each episode, I talk with people from different creative fields to discover what inspires and unites us in our work. Today, I have a really great interview for you with Jarrett Fuller. Besides being a close collaborator of mine, Jarrett is an assistant professor and director of undergraduate programs in graphic design at North Carolina State University.
Liam:He's the host of the Scratching the Surface Podcast, and most relevant for our conversation today, he's the author of Graphic Designers After Graphic Design. In our conversation, Jarrett and I dug into some of the most fundamental questions in design. What is it? How do we do it? Why does it matter?
Liam:And why does it always feel like we're on the verge of extinction? Jarrett's book explores all of this and much more by looking at the journeys of graphic designers who have given the discipline a more expansive and richer horizon. It was a really great conversation, and I think if you're a practicing designer today, you'll get a lot out of it. Let's get started. Jarrett, welcome to Design Notes.
Jarrett Fuller:Thank you for having me. I'm so excited.
Liam:This is... I'm I'm really excited too. Listeners don't know this yet, but we are working together on a project of our own, not what we're to talk about today. But we've been working really closely, yeah, over the past year or so. And so it's just great to, like, get you on the show and externalize some of the conversations that I feel like we're always having.
Jarrett:And also, can I say, it also feels weird for me because we're working on a thing? The thing we are working on is sort of your thing and I'm helping you. And so a lot of our conversations revolve around your ideas. And so I'm slightly nervous that we're now having a conversation where we have to... We're like...
Jarrett:Like, it's sort of opposite of how we normally talk, which I think is really exciting and slightly nerve wracking.
Liam:Yeah. I mean, we're we're working on my project. You are on my podcast to talk about your project. You you also have a podcast.
Jarrett:You will be on to talk about your project at some point in the Yeah.
Liam:So there's there's a really interesting kind of symmetry here.
Jarrett:Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point.
Liam:But for listeners who aren't familiar with you, what are you up to? Like, what do you do in design? What is the work that excites you? And how did you end up there?
Jarrett:Oh, that's a lot. That's a lot of questions. So my my my stock answer is that I'm a graphic designer and then we can probably get into why I use that term perhaps You will. In the in the future of this conversation. What that looks like primarily is I I teach design.
Jarrett:I'm the director of the undergraduate Graphic and Experience Design program and I teach undergraduates at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. That's sort of the day job. That's like the real thing and then there's a bunch of kind of ancillary things around that. And so you mentioned the the podcast. So I do this podcast called Scratching the Surface which is about ten years worth of conversations at this point which are long form conversations trying to find new ways of talking and thinking about design really and kind of interdisciplinary ways of thinking about design.
Jarrett:And then I do a bunch of writing and editing projects that are all sort of related to that and kind of projects that are... I'm trying... A lot of the writing that I do is trying to figure out what design as a discipline or what design as a profession means today and how we practice it and how we talk about it and how we think about it. And then a lot of the the sort of editorial work is also working with people like yourself who are trying to kind of put a stake in the ground about new ways of thinking about about all of this work. So that's that's what I'm doing today.
Jarrett:That's sort of everything I'm doing today. And then just really briefly for the second part of your question about how I got here, I studied graphic design in undergraduate school and really that was like what I wanted to do for a long time was I wanted to to sort of do design work and to make a a very long story very short. After I graduated, I started working as a graphic designer and like did not like it and felt like I was sort of pushing up against a lot of things that were really frustrating to me. And through a series of circumstances and experiments and tests, I decided to go back to school to study graphic design again for some reason, even though I was sort of like in it and like not happy. But that time in grad school was to try to shift my work from graphic design as a, what I would call like a commercial practice to graphic design as a cultural practice.
Jarrett:And so moving out of client based, project based work into more writing, teaching, criticism, history, theory, etcetera. And so thinking much more about the culture of design as opposed to sort of the practice of design and so that's sort of where academia and the writing kind of all all started to kind of make sense for me.
Liam:We're gonna get into this more later but I mean, there's so much there. But one thing that stands out to me is the separation between graphic design as a commercial process where you're like working on things for specific clients or companies versus like the cultural aspect. And in my practice of design, I feel... I I think I feel some of the stuff that you're identifying in that as a as a designer who's doing like commercial work, you're aware that what you're doing is a cultural practice. Yeah.
Liam:But it isn't quite like... You're never quite sure like exactly how you're interacting with that and there's not exactly room to figure that out. Yeah. So so I wonder like how you look at that now.
Jarrett:Yeah. That's a great question. And I think that was that was sort of what my... Where a lot of the frustrations that I had were coming from is that, you know, we would sort of talk around these cultural ideas when working on a project, but then they never really felt like they were directly influencing the work or informing the work in a kind of clear or deep way. And then I'll I'll just sort of like add two other kind of quick like stories or maybe anecdotes to explain kind of how I think about it now.
Jarrett:The the... One of the things that was always really frustrating to me when I was working in a much more kind of traditional design context was also just like the speed of the projects that there was no there was no time to do all of that. What I thought was really interesting work and like as soon as a project or a project was done or a website was shipped or whatever, it was like you move on to the next thing. And, you know, this is this is like ten years ago now at this point. And so I assume there's much more...
Jarrett:It's much more common to do things like testing and usability after the fact. But at at that time, that was much less common. But even even from like a kind of cultural perspective, what is the meaning of this? How does this sort of sit within groups of people or subcultures or like how does this make people feel as opposed to just like how do we get them to do something? Always felt really disconnected.
Jarrett:And then for me to to make sense of that, I was starting to do writing and kind of publishing outside of work and that stuff felt disconnected from the stuff I was doing in the day job. And so a lot of my reason to go back to grad school was like, oh, this writing about design. There's like a lot of really interesting ideas when I write about design, but why can I not find some way to bridge this into what I'm doing when I like go into the office every day? Why is this why is everything in the the office context just about speed and efficiency and problem solving and getting something done as opposed to thinking about like, you know, the cultural signifiers of something or the history of this or how we're sort of adding this project as part of some longer lineage? And the way I've thought...
Jarrett:The way I've started to really think about it is that we can kind of think about, I think, all forms of design but especially something like graphic design that that like really clearly has a cultural component, is is a form of cultural production in many ways, is that you can think about design as a discipline and you can think about design as a profession. And there's some overlap there, but there's also different needs and constraints with both of those. And so when you think about design as a discipline, a discipline signifies that there's a set of sort of internal rules, internal guidelines, internal structures and histories and theories that make it sort of like all those things go together to formulate that This is a specific sort of area of study. And I think the discipline is much more comfortable with design as cultural production because it's thinking about imagery. It's thinking about text and typography and layout and all the visual stuff is not just there for decoration.
Jarrett:It's there because of, you know, whatever, all of these these lineages. And then Design as a Profession has some of those internal kind of guidelines, but is also very profoundly shaped by everything external. What are the business needs? What's the budget? Who is the audience that this is for?
Jarrett:How does this fit with our brand guidelines or style guides? How does this map to our competitors? And and, you know, all of that kind of stuff. Where where does design sit on the org chart? All of that stuff is like this external stuff that is informing the design.
Jarrett:And so that disciplinary kind of knowledge becomes secondary to the kind of professional demands. And so, design as a profession is much more about problem solving. It's much more about business needs and use cases. And I think that idea of design as a form of creating culture, of creating community, of putting ideas into form that can go out in the world butts up against all the immediate business needs that one has to solve. And I think Right.
Jarrett:That tension is like really underexplored and I think that's sort of like very deeply interesting to me right now. Like how do we reconcile those two things?
Liam:Yeah. It's very like... I forget who made this distinction, but I I feel like Adrian Forty said something like this about industry versus business or like Mhmm. Work versus labor.
Jarrett:Yeah. Yeah.
Liam:Basically, like, how how something... How a process changes when it has to be economically viable
Jarrett:Mhmm.
Liam:Essentially. Mhmm. Mhmm. And I kind of wonder... I mean, I I should say now before we get further into the interview.
Liam:We're here to talk about your new book, Graphic Designers After Graphic Design, and I wanna ask questions about the title and about many other things. But you kind of talk about in the introduction this, like, this thing in graphic design, which which I think is at the heart of all design. That's kind of a constant anxiety or like Yeah. Deeply rooted Yeah. A deeply rooted insecurity in our practice.
Liam:And I wonder if that distinction between work and labor is really at the core of that. Like, as designers, I think because we're concerned with helping people understand things, we know that we're having like a social and a cultural impact through our work. Mhmm. But then the kind of frustration of our exploring that kind of makes it feel like if you're working in a commercial setting, that those impacts are like pretty much incidental. Like they're kind of like things that you don't really have the time to plan for or to be really careful about.
Liam:So we kind of see that the result of our work is not necessarily like completely in line with what we believe as individuals.
Jarrett:Yeah. That's really interesting. That's a good way to put that. And I think I would I would add a couple things to that. I think there's also a a sense that, you know, I think some of that insecurity comes from a sometimes misunderstanding that what we do is decoration, is finishing, is superficial in some way.
Jarrett:And I think probably every designer feels that the work that they do is deeper than that in some way. That all of these decisions being made, whether those are sort of like gut decisions or or even like sort of decisions that come from research are there to serve some sort of purpose. And Mhmm. That misperception that that kind of critical thinking is not there, think makes it feel like the the thing that we are valued for in a job is not actually all that behind the scenes labor, it's the output. And how do we communicate all the the behind the scenes labor that gets to that output?
Jarrett:And that that never happens. And there's all sorts of reasons for that. We don't have to get into that now. But I think, you know, at a very like basic level that so much design is anonymous and invisible and team driven, you know, that it that it is always in service of something else, I think probably plays a part to that too, you know?
Liam:Yeah, for sure.
Jarrett:You know, the other thing with the the anxiety that I've been thinking about recently is a lot of design disciplines or design professions are... Have perpetually been getting squeezed on both sides. And so there is the sort of technological innovations that are in many ways democratizing tools of design that there's a set of skills and laborious practices that one would... You know, there was a sort of tradesperson quality that is basically gone now. And so I think that leads to some of that anxiety.
Jarrett:And then also the fact that in like a digital context for example, you have product managers on one side who can do mock ups really quickly and then developers on the other side who can build something and put sort of an interface on it. You know, that sort of like what is the role of design there if both sides are sort of squeezing that? Or in a branding context where you have like strategists and marketing people who are, you know, kind of doing that work and then there's like the production. And so design in many ways is always this sort of discipline between things and there there's like a lot of, you know, crossing of borders into into us that that is sort of like, what what specifically are we bringing to this that Right. No one else can bring to this?
Jarrett:And sometimes that can be really hard to define and really hard to actually articulate in in clear And something you and I have talked about is is this idea, like the problems of design getting a seat at the table and designers getting power the downside of that. And I think this actually speaks to that, you know, that that when design fully buys into the the the corporate mindset, that means that that cultural side falls away very very quickly.
Liam:Right. And and I mean, not to get spiritual about it, but like the insecurity is still
Jarrett:Let's let's get spiritual. Doesn't it
Liam:doesn't matter if you're at the head of the table, like the nature of design is in some way that like the work is immaterial. And that means that in a context where you have to tangibly prove things, you're you're... You, like, come up empty kind of. Mhmm. And and I think, like, we've seen we've seen historically, like, a lot of attempts to address this.
Liam:Like I know, for example, graphic designers of the past would often branch out into kind of other practices of design. And and you you talk about several contemporary examples of that in the book. And then there's been another approach also which is like to continually try to like formalize design in these ways that like makes it very systematic. But I think that there's this is like part of the same tension I think where where we are like fighting with the feeling that we have that we can't prove the importance of the invisible parts of our work. Yeah.
Liam:But the solution to that is, like, not to return to the culture or the discipline of design, but it's rather to, like, externalize what we're doing into a system that, like, we believe more scientific practices will understand. Yeah.
Jarrett:Yeah. Which then sort of, you know, in in a weird way does take out the... To to keep the the the spiritual metaphors, part of the soul gets lost when design starts to become more like engineering or a science where there are a set of processes that you go through. You know, you think about the design thinking diagram or the double... All these things that then become these sort of guidelines.
Jarrett:That in some way sort of like takes away this really fuzzy, blurry aspect of what actually makes design interesting or what makes design valuable. And I think making design designers function more like engineers is actually just a recipe to be replaced. It's not a recipe for sort of like saving yourself in some way. You know what I mean? Like as soon as it is legible to everyone else, then it is legible to everyone else and, you know, it it it's it's not a a...
Jarrett:And I'm not saying that design should not be legible to everyone else or that the process shouldn't. But as soon as you systematize it, then it's a thing that can be taught and replicated, etcetera etcetera, and then
Liam:Right.
Jarrett:You're you're AI.
Liam:I I would argue that that systematization is exactly what... Like, at the same time that it makes it legible to other people, it also removes the kind of unknowable quality that will actually never be legible to everyone. Because design is, as you said, cultural production and that necessarily means that like a part of yourself is showing up there. Yeah. I...
Liam:Like this conversation also because because you also discussed kind of like design as a critical practice and like where where is the critical capacity within the design community. And I think this is another place where we're kind of like squeezing ourselves because I Yeah. I I know since like the twenty tens or something. On on the one hand, we've been saying like we gotta get more critical about our work. Like we're having such a big impact on people blah blah blah.
Liam:On the other hand, there are lot of designers who are at the table and they're saying like, stop the navel gazing. Like, you have to stop like like thinking design is so special. We're just, you know,
Jarrett:we Yeah.
Liam:We're we're like another business function. How how do you kind of reconcile that? Or like what's what's the kind of synthesis that you are offering?
Jarrett:I mean, I think I don't know if I have a a synthesis, but I think that tension also speaks to... It weirdly speaks to the anxieties of both design as a discipline and design as a profession and and how those arrive at different solutions. And so to want a more critical practice, to want criticality around the work, to want to have a robust publishing discourse and media infrastructure to talk about these things is a way to say, we are a discipline worthy of study. We, you know, we we have these internal ideas, these disciplinary theories and to be able to publish those is a way to give those legitimacy in some way. Right.
Jarrett:That is not how you give something legitimacy in the industry. You do that by systematizing it, by giving it a business function, by falling in line, by, you know, by by Yeah. All of these and to to then somehow take it out of that system and to say it's this area of study, that now complicates that in the business context. And so I think both of these are saying, we want legitimacy, but they're saying that either through the lens of discipline or or profession or like cultural practice and like, you know, problem solving is sort of how I how I map those. Right.
Jarrett:You know what does that make sense?
Liam:Yeah. And not not to throw too hot of a take out there, but I do think there would be people listening who who would say like, of course, design is recognized as a field of study. Like, have a book about the Eames' furniture on my coffee table. Like
Jarrett:Right. Right.
Liam:Where where, like, even what we think of as, like, really successful analysis and execution of design is actually, like, taking advantage in a very specific way of, like, economic and social conditions to kind of create something like that.
Jarrett:Yeah. And a lot of that... And I'm I'm I'm thinking about your Eames book example and and and maybe the the the, like, devil's advocate position is, you know, I think in some way that discourse is wanted internally, you know, so for designers talking to other designers creating a shared body of knowledge, a shared history instead of theories. But I also think there's an out... Yeah.
Jarrett:Yeah. A a canon, you know, yeah, history, lineage. I think in some ways my book is sort of actually adding into a a very particular lineage. But then on the other hand, I I think those calls for critical discourse are also external. Where are the design critics writing for newspapers and and magazines?
Jarrett:And obviously, criticism is also an industry in peril and is probably just as anxious as designers are. But, you know, there's theater critics. There's film critics. There's architecture critics. Like, what would it look like for a New York Times or an economist or something to have a design critic who is not just looking at, like, is this logo better or let's talk about the new Instagram icon, but was actually looking at, you know, how are the...
Jarrett:How is the design of the Instagram interface making us addicted to, you know, actually kind of creating that rich dialogue, which would be a way to sort of start to connect those two things then also.
Liam:Right. Kind of kind of looking openly at the the goals and relative success of Yeah. Design artifacts. Yeah. So...
Liam:Okay. Another piece of this another piece of this tension between like we need a more critical practice coming from the inside like intercommunity discussion versus like coming from the outside like, what... And nobody's talking about design except designers. I I feel like we are also continually witnessing the death of design. Like, people people in the design community have, like, this weird fixation on the end of the discipline or, like, even...
Liam:I I know that that the title of your book, you know, is is kind of a play on words in that regard. But like, it is something that we see cropping up constantly. And in fact, I I came across a blog that catalogs all of the instances of people posting Design Is Dead. Interesting. And it happens a lot.
Jarrett:Yeah. I mean, I think it's that anxiety. I think that that is like the manifestation of that that anxiety and that sense that, you know, the the the things that we think we value in design are being increasingly democratized. And, you know, I I... In in the book, I quote Michael Rock who I interviewed a couple years ago who kind of pegged the end of graphic design as a discipline to 2008, which was the year that the App Store came out.
Jarrett:And that put a bunch of really kind of high powered image editing software in anyone who had a smartphone's pocket. And that that that made things like Instagram ex... Possible, frankly. And the fact that anybody now can put text and image into a composition very, very easily and then put that online that could literally be seen by millions of people really fast. In many ways, that's what design was for a really long time and that's now a thing that literally anybody can can do.
Jarrett:And so I think we have to... I think I think there's sort of two ways to respond to that. We can sort of say, well, this is it. It's done. You know, it's over.
Jarrett:Or you can kind of think about, well, what what else can design be now if those things that used to be really core to what we do are actually now really easy and anyone can do it and frankly, like, you can put in a prompt now and AI can do it and it's passable. We can throw in the towel or we can say, well, there's all this other stuff that's a part of the design process that is also really interesting and really important and there's still value there. And so how do we reframe what it is that we actually do? And I think that's that's what this book is trying to do in a lot of ways and it's it's trying to do that and also crossing that kind of professional and and cultural divide that I was talking about earlier. But it's trying to say like, the outputs are not actually the thing that matters.
Jarrett:The the thing that you are making is just the outcome of some larger theoretical, intellectual, cultural, political ideas that you are just giving form to in Yeah. Any sort of context.
Liam:And and if if the practitioner doesn't realize that, that's a skill issue. Yeah.
Jarrett:Like if you're if you're just if you're just like about like making some things that look good and sort of like putting some things together, that's just like frankly not interesting. You know you know? Yeah. And like...
Liam:Yeah. And on the other hand, I would also say like something that I heard on another podcast recently is is like, it's actually kind of narcissistic to imagine that you are living at the end of the world. Yeah. And I think I think the same goes for this. Like to be the person who's like, design is over, and it just happens to be over at the exact time that I'm tired of it.
Liam:So I don't have to deal with it anymore because now it's dead.
Jarrett:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. That's a great point.
Jarrett:And... But but as you say, there's a long history of this and Yeah. We are not the first generation to think that we are the last designers. One of the other things... Sorry to keep like quoting passages of the book to you.
Jarrett:Sure. But I have this this whole kind of passage of designers, of graphic designers trying to come up with other names for graphic design because they thought that it had run its course and so they wanted to be communication designers or information architects or brand strategists and like, it's all the same thing. And I think some of this like trying to find a new term is this like, the thing we were doing before is no longer working. We have to find some new way to do it. Yeah.
Jarrett:But instead of actually finding a new way to do it, we're just giving we're giving the old thing a new name, which is also like a kind of design y thing to do. But
Liam:Yeah. Yeah. I mean part of that is also the the impulse to be constantly grasping and like expanding and reinterpreting that is like core to the identity of a designer. Yeah. Yeah.
Liam:Yeah. Returning to something we talked about earlier in the conversation in... Throughout the book, you... As you said, you talk about designers kind of kind of figuring out what to do with design now, like Mhmm. And and as part of that, they're kind of like several other like alternative or maybe simultaneous roles including being a change maker.
Liam:I've been thinking about this a lot recently. I... Most recently, I published this essay on Aon a couple weeks ago, and I got a lot of replies, especially on LinkedIn for some reason. Shout out to the business divas over there. But I got one message in particular that was like, hey, I saw your essay, and I really liked it.
Liam:But then I looked you up on LinkedIn, and I was really surprised to find out that you work for Google. And I was kinda like, you know, I see where you're coming from. Like, that is... That does feel like a contradiction after a piece where I'm arguing for like, yeah, the deeper engagement with the social functions of the discipline and like the things that I wish would happen in the industry. Yeah.
Liam:But again, yeah, like you said, I'm positioned in this commercial role where there's not often that much time to really land those things. So like, can you... Without like spoiling the book, can you offer ideas for how like designers engage with the kind of systems in which they're embedded without without becoming a professor.
Jarrett:Yeah. I mean, I think that's like a tension in the book that frankly is unresolved still. But... So maybe just to kind of frame the structure of the book that... And maybe that'll be a way for me to answer your question because it's a good question and I don't have a good answer.
Jarrett:So I'm just gonna talk for a second. Sure. So so the the book is a... To to to sort of frame the structure of the book, it is a series of long form interviews, kind of written profiles, and then project specific case studies from around the world, all of what I kind of define as mid career and emerging designers, specifically people who call themselves graphic designers who come from a graphic design background, who studied graphic design in some form when they were when they were in in school. And yet, they are practicing graphic design in ways that maybe don't look necessarily like the things we would call graphic design historically.
Jarrett:Some of those are like really kind of far out. They're showing paintings in galleries. They are staging performances in front of audiences. They are starting nonprofits. They are publishing...
Jarrett:They're opening publishing houses and publishing companies. And so the reason for that, the reason that this is a book of profiles is I think when we have these types of conversations like we're having now, it can get really theoretical really fast and it can get really academic sounding. And I wanted to do something that was grounded in real people and it was grounded in real people who are young and still trying to figure it out. This is not some celebrity designer that everyone has heard of who can afford to go off and show their paintings in galleries, you know, because they're not Right. They they've already had their successful branding career or something something like that.
Jarrett:And so with that said, this is not a how to book. You know, it's not a book of practical advice about how to make money off your paintings or your performances. But all that is sort of embedded in there sort of like beneath the surface. And so, you know, I talk to people about like, hey, you have this publishing company. How do you fund publishing these things?
Jarrett:And they have all sorts of complicated things where it's like, I sell this many and then this amount of money goes back into this that then allows me to pay this artist so then I can publish their their book or, you know, I teach in this context and then I do this in this context or I work as an art director at this company, but then I'm doing this illustration work on this side. And so there are there... I guess I guess the long answer to what your very specific question was is that one of the big messages of the book is that there is no one way to practice any of this. That there's actually a really wide variety of models that you can you can sort of follow or or kind of build a diverse intellectually stimulating practice with. And so, I I mean, I can get into specifics of any of those if you want, but the the reason that it is...
Jarrett:The profile is to show different ways to make that work without explicitly saying, here are the different models. You know you know what I mean? Like, I didn't I didn't want it to be like a a like tactical like step by step, here's how to build your design as a cultural practice. But then you can look at these people and say like, oh, they're doing this thing. They have this job here and then they're sort of doing this or like they, you know, this money then goes into like this thing, you know, or or whatever.
Jarrett:And so I guess that's my my my answer to you is sort of a cop out answer to say, there's there's 24 different ways that that we could talk about in the book of ways you could build that practice.
Liam:Yeah. I mean, I think I think that synthesis kind of complicates the question of design as a discipline in a really interesting way
Jarrett:Mhmm.
Liam:Because it makes me think like these people's work does define the discipline and the things that they are doing that we might not call traditionally graphic design. Certainly nonetheless have an impact Mhmm. On graphic design. So I'm left kind of wondering like, how do we talk about that?
Jarrett:Yeah. So I How
Liam:do we... What's the nomenclature? Like, do we even need one? Should we let go of that?
Jarrett:I have a couple... There's a couple layers to that. That is a a very good question that there are I think a couple ways that you can answer that. And I think the first one is to go back to our earlier... The earlier part of the conversation we were talking that like, you know, when you have these moments of anxiety, the impulse is to put borders around it, to to to give it a clear structure to say this is this is what it is.
Jarrett:And what those borders do is they also then say this this is not that other thing. I think that's that's really good for consolidating power. That's really good for clarity. It's not actually good for creativity or for kind of intellectual thought or for pushing boundaries in some way. And I think that is also a very kind of market driven idea to to stay in your lane and to to kind of Right.
Jarrett:Follow a sort of specific path. And so one of the arguments that I'm making in the book is that design is inherently blurry and instead of shying away from that and trying to put borders around it, we need to lean into that blurriness and actually kind of argue for the edges of these practices are all blurring into each other. And that's actually the thing that makes them really exciting and really powerful when they're out in the world is that they they can't easily be slotted into any any one discipline. And so that's the that's the first thing that I would say is that that impulse to define, to put edges, to put a frame, to put a border, while very real and can be very helpful, is also sort of severely limiting. And this is...
Jarrett:This goes back to the like, let's change our name. Let's have some different Sure. Like framing to sort of talk about it. And then the the the way I've sort of ended up in the closing chapter in the book kind of reveals some of this. And and this goes back to my very first answer about why I call myself a graphic designer is I feel like that term graphic design doesn't actually get enough credit for being a really strong idea in a really Yeah.
Jarrett:Strong term. And the reason for that is it has this historical baggage that we can, you know, and so now when you think of graphic design, you maybe think of like, oh, this is books or posters or something like that. Often when we say graphic design, we use that term graphic to mean visual, as a synonym for visual. A thing that you see, text, image, color, shape, hierarchy, composition. But graphic doesn't just mean visual.
Jarrett:Graphic, if you go back sort of in the the the etymology of that word comes from this word, graphis, which means like to write, to draw, to make legible in some way, to give shape to an idea. And that doesn't necessarily need to be visual. That doesn't necessarily need to be clear communication. That doesn't necessarily need to be a set of forms that we have said this is what graphic designers do. That's actually a really expansive term.
Jarrett:So if you think about graphic design being the design of legibility, the design of Yeah. Giving shape to the world or ideas, that's actually really kind of... That's a that's a really broad big tent definition of design. But I think that broad big tent definition is what actually sort of like makes it really interesting. And I and I find that to be a really beautiful way to kind of think about it, is that this work is not just about solving problems, selling something, getting you to buy more, getting you to go to a thing.
Jarrett:It's not just about showing beautiful images or creating sort of lovely compositions or whatever. It's actually about taking big ideas and giving them a shape so other people can then participate in those. Right. And so, I mean, here... Maybe here's my hot take just to to like wrap up this thought is like, you kind of think of like, is every design, every form of design a form of graphic design if we use this sort of broad big tent definition?
Jarrett:I don't know. But I'm also like, okay, if maybe that is like Yeah. A a nice
Liam:Like, why not?
Jarrett:Way to encompass all of this. Yeah.
Liam:And and I I love that point. I especially love the point that, like, there is a kind of market incentive to have a name for the activity that you're doing within graphic design. Yeah. I noticed that like in tech, we have like visual designers and interaction designers. And if you're an interaction designer, you're not a visual designer.
Liam:And I've always been like, what do you mean? Like, it's the whole thing. I did... You can't... You cannot only design visuals.
Liam:Sorry to everyone in the world, but you can't do that. So so there is also like a labor angle to this. I think, like, the way that you make these overlapping practices work, and part of this is is undoubtedly supported by having this kind of critical discourse and these kind of books, is to have solidarity with all of the other creative practitioners in our environment to to say like, our work is economically valuable whether or not Yeah. We are like convincing someone to do something.
Jarrett:Yeah. And that that visual designer versus interface designer and the solidarity between the creative practices, that's that's the like Fordist assembly line model. It is separate out all the labor. So everyone Mhmm. Only does their one piece over and over that can be repeatable.
Jarrett:Only the person at the top has a full view of everything that is happening. And so if if one piece falls out of line, you replace that piece. And this segmentation of design is that for like the creative industries.
Liam:Right. And
Jarrett:we've seen how that works in the past and it doesn't end up well.
Liam:Not well. Yeah. Okay. We've covered a lot. But...
Liam:Yeah. As you said throughout the book, there are profiles of folks who are kind of like charting a new course through this blurry, like overlapping, very, like, pleasantly ambiguous if you open your mind kind of field.
Jarrett:I want that to be the blurb on the back of the book. Pleasantly ambiguous. You
Liam:can quote me on that. I I mean, something something that I've explored on this show is that the journey to design for many people is very nonlinear. Mhmm. A lot of people that I've talked to here don't have a background in graphic design. They didn't go to school for that.
Liam:And I feel like the book shows examples of people who do have that background, but have taken like a complicated route through design Mhmm. To find something new. I I wonder like what is a closing piece of advice that you would give to designers in that kind of target audience that you mentioned who are listening, who are also thinking about these things, also kind of looking to make a change in their practice, but but but really not sure what to do. And and buy my book is a good is a good answer, but I would like more Yeah.
Jarrett:Upfront. Should definitely buy you should definitely buy the book. You should listen to my podcast. You should follow my work.
Liam:The answers will all be revealed. Yeah.
Jarrett:Look, I... I'm a... Like, at my core, I'm like a pluralist. Like, think there are many ways of being in the world at one time. And I think, you know, this is maybe not exactly immediately actionable advice, but I think kind of understanding that design at its core is also pluralistic and that there are there are a variety of ways to practice and there are a variety of ways yet to be practiced.
Jarrett:And that these skills and these sets of ideas that you have learned studying design, working in design are broadly applicable in a wide range of context outside of design, outside of what we traditionally think of as design. And I'm really interested in more designers exploring that. And I think my advice is and this, you know, I I used to get this with students all the time is I would give a a big project and students would have this like really interesting idea and they're like, oh, I wanna like... I I wanna explore this thing and I wanna like make it into like a film or like a video or or you're like Mhmm. This seems like this should be like three-dimensional shape Like, there's like actually like a piece of furniture and then it'd be like, but I feel like that's not graphic designed or that's not what we do in this program.
Jarrett:And I'm like, who cares? Like, if if that's the if that's the form that this idea needs to take, then you need to explore that and you need to to find that. And so I think thinking about these as binaries, thinking about what is and is not design is not helpful most of the time. And so my advice is to to follow that curiosity and to explore those things and to explore mediums and forms and ideas outside of that kind of core design experience that you've had and see where those connect to the stuff that that you already do. I opened the book with this quote this quote from the design historian Richard Hollis who he...
Jarrett:In an interview, he said something to the effect of graphic design is anything made by a graphic designer. And I love I love the reduction of that and I also love how true it is. It's like yeah. Yeah. If you're a graphic designer and you wanna like make paintings or sculptures or films, then that too Yeah.
Jarrett:Can be graphic Yeah. And I think we should I think we should embrace that.
Liam:You know, here in Switzerland, we just call it cheese. You know? Yeah. I I really like that. And it it reminds me like I think I think successful art is the stuff that you can't help making.
Liam:And I think similarly, that good design is like the realization of how an idea demands to be born into the world. Mhmm. And I think if you pay attention to that in design, you you do have a head start on understanding systems of sociality and politics economy if you just look for it.
Jarrett:Yeah. I mean, that that is like the the more optimistic lens through which we talked about it earlier where it's like design is constantly being attacked from the outside. You know, there's all these other disciplines, professions, practitioners outside of design who are sort of encroaching in on design. But designers are also gathering a bunch of skills and knowledge and ideas from outside of design. And so we can return that.
Jarrett:We can, like, you know, like, why are we sort of just, like, letting everyone else... Like, like, why are we not then also then going back out and using the lessons politics and economics and society and cultural development and the way people interact with things and live together and communicate with each other? All of that is knowledge that is really broadly applicable across all of society whether we call it design or not. Right. I think we sort of should embrace that that really like wide lens of skills that you just sort of have to pick up as you're doing this kind of work.
Jarrett:I think that's a Absolutely. I think that's a a great way to say that. Is... I guess it was a long way for me to just say that I agree with you.
Liam:Well, after this call, I am going to pitch a design criticism column to The New York Times.
Jarrett:Okay. Great.
Liam:Jarrett, where can people find you?
Jarrett:You can find me on my website, jarrettfuller.com, which is something that's actually, like, updated. Like, I... It's like a classic personal site with a blog and and updates. You can also buy the book there, if you want, directly from me, but you can also buy the book wherever you wanna get books. I'm on Instagram at Jarrett Fuller.
Jarrett:And then the podcast is scratchingthesurface.fm or at surface podcast across social media.
Liam:Nice. Thank you so much for joining me, Jarrett. This was great.
Jarrett:This was so fun. Thank you so much.
Liam:You can subscribe to Design Notes on YouTube Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening right now. If you like the episode, pass it on to a friend and leave us a rating. Stay tuned for more conversations with creative practitioners across disciplines that will help us learn piece by piece what inspires and unites us in our work. And as always, thank you so much for listening.