Graphic Designers After Graphic Design—Jarrett Fuller

In this episode , I sit down with Jarrett Fuller—a multidisciplinary designer, educator, writer, and host of the Scratching the Surface podcast. We dig into some of the most fundamental questions surrounding the field today: What is design, how do we do it, and why does it matter?

Drawing from his latest book, Graphic Designers After Graphic Design: Designer as Publisher / Researcher / Change Maker / Performer / Artist, Jarrett looks at the evolving journeys of contemporary practitioners who have given the discipline a richer, more expansive horizon. The conversation explores how modern designers are stepping outside traditional commercial silos to operate as cultural producers, authors, and instigators.

Jarrett's Website: jarrettfuller.com

Podcast: Scratching the Surface

01:06 Welcome & collaborating across projects

Liam: Jarrett, welcome to Design Notes.

Jarrett: Thank you for having me. I'm so excited.

Liam: 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 here to talk about today.
But we've been working together 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: 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 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 working on my project, you are on my podcast to talk about your project. You also have a podcast... which you will be on to talk about your project at some point in the future. Yeah. So there's a really interesting kind of symmetry here.

02:20 Jarrett’s background: From commercial practice to cultural practice

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 stock answer is that I'm a graphic designer. And we can probably get into why I use that term perhaps in the future of this conversation.

What that looks like primarily is I teach design, 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 podcast so I do this podcast called Scratching the Surface, which is about 10 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.

And then I do a bunch of writing and editing projects that are all sort of related to that. 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 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 all of this work. So that's what I'm doing today. 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 sort of do design work and to make 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. And so moving out of client-based project-based work into more writing, teaching, criticism, history, theory, etc.

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 started to kind of make sense for me.

05:21 Design as a discipline vs. design as a profession

Liam: We're going to 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 think I feel some of the stuff that you're identifying in that as a designer who's doing like commercial work, you're aware that what you're doing is a cultural practice.

But you're never quite sure like exactly how you're interacting with that and there's not exactly room to figure that out. So, I wonder like how you look at that now?

Jarrett: Yeah, that's a great question. And I think that was 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 mean 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. 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 time to do all of that what I thought was really interesting work and like as soon as 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 like 10 years ago now at this point and so I assume it's much more common to do things like testing and usability after the fact but at that time that was much less common.

But 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.

And then for me to try 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 everything in 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 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 like really clearly has a cultural component as 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 sort of all those things go together to formulate that this is a discipline. 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, it's there because of you know whatever all of 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? How does this fit with our brand guidelines or style guides? How does this map to our competitors? And you know all of that kind of stuff.

Where does design sit on the org chart? All of that stuff is like this external stuff that is informing the design 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 that tension is like really under explored and I think that's sort of like very deeply interesting to me right now is like how do we reconcile those two things.

10:55 The root of design's existential anxiety and invisibility

Liam: I kind of wonder, I mean I should say now before we get further into the interview, we're here to talk about your new book Graphic Designers After Graphic Design. And I want to ask questions about the title and about many other things, but you kind of talk about in the introduction this like thing in graphic design which I think is at the heart of all design that's kind of a constant anxiety or like a deeply rooted insecurity in our practice 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, but then the kind of frustration of 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 to be really careful about and 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: That yeah, that's really interesting. That's a good way to put that. And I think I would add a couple things to that.

I think there's also 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. 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 even like sort of decisions that come from research are there to serve some sort of purpose and that misperception that that kind of critical thinking is not there I think makes it feel like 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 behind the scenes labor that gets to that output, and 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, just at a very like basic level that so much design is anonymous and invisible and team driven, you know, that it is always in service of something else. I think probably plays a part to that too, you know?

16:07 The trap of systematizing design into engineering

Jarrett: You know, the other thing with the anxiety that I've been thinking about recently is a lot of design disciplines or design professions 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 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.

And then also the fact that in like a digital context for example, you have product managers on one side who can do mockups 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 so you know kind of doing that work and then there's the like production.

And so design in many ways is always this sort of discipline between things and there's like a lot of, you know crossing of borders into us that is sort of like what specifically are we bringing to this that no one else can bring to this. And sometimes that can be really hard to define and really hard to actually articulate in clear ways.

And something you and I have talked about 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 when design fully buys into the corporate mindset that means that that cultural side falls away very very quickly.

Liam: Yeah. I mean, I think 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.

18:22 Where is the critical discourse in design?

Liam: ...because you also discussed kind of like design as a critical practice and like 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 know since like the 2010s or something on one hand we've been saying like we got to get more critical about our work like we're having such a big impact on people blah blah blah.

On the other hand there are a lot of designers who are at the table and they're saying like stop the navel gazing, like you have to stop thinking design is so special. We're just you know we're another business function. How do you kind of reconcile that or like what's the kind of synthesis that you are offering?

Jarrett: I mean, I think I don't know if I have a synthesis, but I think that tension also speaks to the anxieties of both design as a discipline and design as a profession 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 have these internal ideas, these disciplinary theories and to be able to publish those is a way to give those legitimacy in some way.

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 all of these.

And 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 profession or like cultural practice and like problem solving is sort of how I map those. Right.

23:01 Why is graphic design always "dying"?

Liam: Okay, another piece of this tension between like we need a more critical practice coming from the inside like inter-community discussion versus coming from the outside like nobody's talking about design except designers.

I feel like we are also continually witnessing the death of design. Like people in the design community have like this weird fixation on the end of the discipline or even I know that the title of your book you know 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 came across a blog that catalogs all of the instances of people posting design is dead. And it happens a lot.

Jarrett: Yeah. I think it's that anxiety. I think that is like the manifestation of that anxiety and that sense that you know the things that we think we value in design are being increasingly democratized.

And you know I 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. And that put a bunch of really kind of high-powered image editing software in anyone who had a smartphone's pocket.

And that made things like Instagram 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 do.

And so I think we have to 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, or you can kind of think well 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 what this book is trying to do in a lot of ways and it's trying to do that and also crossing that kind of professional and cultural divide that I was talking about earlier.

28:04 Graphic Designers After Graphic Design and pluralistic models of practice

Liam: Returning to something we talked about earlier in the conversation, throughout the book you talk about designers kind of figuring out what to do with design now. Like and as a part of that there are kind of several other like alternative or maybe simultaneous roles including being a changemaker.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently. I most recently published this essay on Aeon 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 but then I looked you up on LinkedIn and I was really surprised to find out that you work for Google. And I was kind of like you know I see where you're coming from. Like 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. 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 spoiling the book, can you offer ideas for how designers engage with the kind of systems in which they're embedded 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 will be a way for me to answer your question because it's a good question and I don't have a good answer so I'm just going to talk for a second.
So the book is a 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 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. Some of those are like really kind of far out there showing paintings in galleries. They are staging performances in front of audiences. They are starting nonprofits. They are 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've already had their successful branding career or something like that.

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 talked to people about like hey you have this publishing company, how do you fund publishing these things. 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 to then I can publish 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 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 sort of follow or kind of build a diverse intellectually stimulating practice with.

33:29 Leaning into the blurriness and the true meaning of "graphic"

Liam: I mean, I think that synthesis kind of complicates the question of design as a discipline in a really interesting way 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 on graphic design. So I'm left kind of wondering like how do we talk about that?

Jarrett: I have a couple there's a couple layers to that. That is 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 the earlier part of the conversation where we were talking about that like you know when you have these moments of anxiety the impulse is to put borders around it to give it a clear structure to say this is what it is and what those borders do is they also then say this is not that other thing.
And I think 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 stay in your lane and to kind of 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 can't easily be slotted into any one discipline.

And so 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 goes back to the like let's change our name, let's have some different framing to sort of talk about it.

And then the way I've sort of ended up and the closing chapter in the book kind of reveals some of this. 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 and a really 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. Graphic if you go back sort of in 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. So if you think about graphic design being the design of legibility, the design of giving shape to the world or ideas, that's actually really kind of 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 what makes design valuable.

38:34 Labor, specialization, and creative solidarity

Liam: I love that point, especially the point that like there is a market incentive to have a name for the activity that you're doing within graphic design. 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. And I've always been like what do you mean? Like it's the whole thing. You cannot only design visuals. Sorry to everyone in the world, but you can't do that.
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 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 say like our work is economically valuable whether or not we are like convincing someone to do something.

Jarrett: Yeah, and that visual designer versus interface designer and the solidarity between the creative practices, that's the like Fordist assembly line model.

It is separate out all the labor, so everyone only does their one piece over and over and that can be repeatable. Only the person at the top has a full view of everything that is happening, and so if one piece falls out of line you replace that piece and this segmentation of design is that for like the creative industries. And we've seen how that works in the past and it doesn't end up well.

41:04 Advice for designers looking to expand their practice

Liam: Throughout the book, there are profiles of folks who are kind of charting a new course through this blurry like overlapping very like pleasantly ambiguous if you open your mind kind of field.

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 really not sure what to do?

Jarrett: Look, I am at my core I'm a pluralist. Like I 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 a variety of ways to practice and there are a variety of ways yet to be practiced.

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 contexts 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 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 you already do.

I open the book with this quote from the design historian Richard Hollis who in an interview he said something to the effect of graphic design is anything made by a graphic designer. And I love the reduction of that and I also love how true it is.

It's like yeah, if you're a graphic designer and you want to make paintings or sculptures or films, then that too can be graphic design. Yeah. And I think we should embrace that.

47:00 Where to find Jarrett online & Outro

Liam: Well after this call I am going to pitch a design criticism column to the New York Times. Jarrett, where can people find you?

Jarrett: You can find me on my website JarrettFuller.com which is something that's actually updated. Like it's a classic personal site with a blog and updates.
You can also buy the book there if you want, directly from me, but you can also buy the book wherever you want to get books. I'm on Instagram at JarrettFuller, and then the podcast is ScratchingTheSurface.fm or at SurfacePodcast 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.