Christian Solorzano [00:00]

Hello, you are listening to Underscore, a show by the Chicago Graphic Design Club. I am your host, Christian Solorzano, and today I am very pleased to share a very special conversation with Jarrett Fuller, designer, writer, educator, and host of the long-running podcast Scratching the Surface. Jarrett started his show in 2016 as part of his MFA thesis, and what began as a focused inquiry into design criticism has grown over 10 years and nearly 300 episodes into one of the most thoughtful platforms for design conversation anywhere.

And I'll be honest, I listened to Scratching the Surface in college, and Jarrett is one of the voices that inspired me to begin this show myself. So this one is personal. And while Jarrett is based out of North Carolina, he's no stranger to Chicago. In 2022, he hosted a podcast at the Institute of Design here in Chicago, where he hosted his own series with the school's faculty.

In our conversation today, we talk about where his relationship to conversation began, a journalist grandfather who taught him how to ask an open-ended question, and a lifetime of curiosity about why things look the way they do. We get into how he still claims the title of graphic design, even as the work has shifted towards writing, teaching, and podcasting, what language fails to capture about design, and how his photography connects to the same questions he brings to everything else he makes.

And he shares a preview of his forthcoming book, Graphic Designers After Graphic Design: A Portrait of Designers Around the World Redefining the Field from the Inside Out. As usual, if you enjoy shows like these and conversations like these, we really appreciate your support when you leave us a rating wherever you listen. Thank you so much and enjoy the conversation. Welcome, Jarrett, to Underscore.

We typically don't speak with people that are not in Chicago on this podcast, but I know that you have some relationship to Chicago because you hosted a podcast here not too long ago.

Jarrett Fuller [02:09]

Yeah. Well, thank you for having me. I love Chicago. I'm honored to be a non-Chicagoan. I don't really have that close of a connection to Chicago, but I'll take my ID connection if that gets me on the show.

Christian Solorzano [02:22]

Yeah. So how are you doing today?

Jarrett Fuller [02:24]

I'm good. It's muggy, it's hot. I'm in Raleigh, North Carolina, and so we're sort of height of summer, but stuff's happening, so I can't, I can't complain.

Christian Solorzano [02:34]

When I was in college, I used to listen to your podcast, and subconsciously I feel like you're one of the voices that inspired me to get into podcasting. It's you and you and Krista Tippett, and both really great voices and just really introspective dialogue. So thank you.

Jarrett Fuller [02:56]

I will take being in being in company with Krista Tippett. She's one of the great interviewers. I feel like there were a handful of people that I listened to a lot when I started my show to just sort of understand how to ask questions, and she was one of them. And what she was doing with On Being, I thought, was really interesting. So I, I'll take the compliment. That's very nice.

Christian Solorzano [03:16]

Yeah. So I want to spend the beginning of our conversation talking a little bit about conversations, and I'd love to maybe hear from you, what were some of your earliest memories of conversations that stuck with you?

Jarrett Fuller [03:29]

That's a really interesting question. And you're asking conversations generally, right? Yeah, just generally. You're not asking conversations that I listened to, conversations I was in? So a couple of things immediately. Come to mind to me. I grew up in a big extended family, a lot of cousins on both sides, both my mom and dad's side. And so holidays and get-togethers were always very energetic and rambunctious, and there was always a lot of talking and a lot of cross-talking.

And so the first thing that came to my mind when you asked that question was being at Thanksgiving dinner or being at a Christmas dinner or an Easter dinner or a 4th of July party or something like that. And just everybody always talking and multiple conversations happening at once and being involved in multiple conversations at once when you're like talking to somebody on this side of you, but you're also listening to the conversation on the other side of you and you jump between them.

And that's kind of how I grew up. It was just sort of surrounded by people that were— Talking all the time. There was there was always talking. There was always conversation. The second piece of this is that my grandfather was a journalist and a writer and a historian, and I remember being very young. I want to say maybe elementary school is probably when probably the earliest memories of this, and him talking. To me about how to ask questions.

And this is not something that I was conscious of at the time. This is a memory that has sort of come back to me as I've started having conversations with people on microphones about how to ask an open-ended question, how to get somebody to talk to you. Because that's what he would do. He would go out into the field and ask about this new building that was going up or this road.

And he's like, if you ask a question like this, then all they have to say is yes, and now you have to think of another question. But if you ask a question like this, well, now they're going to have to say a bunch of things, and that's going to start to generate an open conversation. I remember, I have a very vivid memory of sitting in the back of a car with him while he is telling me this. I'm what, 9, 10? I didn't care.

I didn't know. But I think that was very formative, actually, in retrospect, in a lot of how I do a lot of my work, and very especially the podcasting work and the interviewing work.

Christian Solorzano [05:56]

What were some of the questions that you found yourself asking as you were a kid growing up?

Jarrett Fuller [06:01]

Oh, I— yeah, that's also a really great question. I was a child who was very— this is going to sound really funny after the last answer that I just gave you, but I was actually a very quiet and very introverted kid. Child. And so in that family situation that I talked about, it was— that was fine. I could talk to people. But outside of that, I was very quiet and very much an observer.

And so I spent a lot of my time, when I was at home, sort of by myself in my room, kind of thinking about things and making things and building things. And so I was very curious out in the world about why things were the way they were. A very formative memory that I've Told many times, and so you may know this story depending on— you said you've listened to the show since you were in college.

But I remember being 4 or 5 years old, being in a grocery store with my mom, and seeing 2 signs that both had the number 2 on them. And one was written with a straight tail at the bottom. It was sort of like a standard Helvetica 2. And then the other one was a handwritten 2 that had a loop at the bottom where the spine of the 2. And I had never seen a 2 like this before.

I have a very vivid memory of asking my mom, how, why does that 2 look like that? Why? I've never seen a 2 like that before. And so there were a lot of the typical kind of child questions about why things are the way they are, why things look the way they do, how things came to be. And this is going to sound like a really pat answer, but in many ways it's the same questions that I'm asking people today.

I think, I think a lot of what I do now is really rooted in All the stuff that I was interested in from a very early age.

Christian Solorzano [07:58]

As you've been having your conversations, do you find yourself stumbling into answers or more questions? Do you feel like anything has really been answered for you?

Jarrett Fuller [08:09]

No. I often describe— I'll answer this 2 ways. I would not still be doing scratching the surface if I did not still have questions. If I felt like I had arrived at some sort of answer, solution point that made sense. And there are times where I've thought, this is a lot of work. I'm doing other stuff. I want to do other stuff. Does it make sense to still do this? And the questions keep coming up and I kind of can't stop.

The show started when I was in graduate school and my thesis project was around design writing and design criticism. I was interviewing people for that when I realized that the interviews actually could be the project. And I was asking designers who were writers about how that work influenced each other. What did it mean to be a designer who also put their head up and wrote about the field around them?

Or what did it mean to be writing about the field when you went back to the studio and you were working with clients? Did all that writing work actually have some sort of material impact on the work you were doing with clients? And so I turned that thesis in and I realized that I actually didn't have any answers. I wasn't any clearer on any of that.

And to complicate it even more, I actually realized that I had more questions, that those questions that I was asking were actually really specific questions. They were really focused questions, and those were leading to other questions. And that's 10 years of my life now. Every interview leads to another interview. I'm sure you're very familiar with this. Every conversation you have raises more questions, and you have to go then find somebody to answer those questions.

I've said many times, I'm curious if you have this experience or if you feel this way, if somebody listens to Scratching the Surface from episode 1 to the present, and they only were listening to the questions that I was asking, you would actually have a really good biography about what I was thinking about and interested in at any given moment. It's like my Eras Tour. You can get that from my questions.

It all comes from things that I'm thinking about, which I'm sure you have a series of questions you return to or a series of themes that you're interested in that then lead to these other things. You know what I mean?

Christian Solorzano [10:27]

Yeah, it's really fascinating. What I've noticed about your podcast throughout the years is that you began by interviewing— a lot of your conversations were centered around graphic design, and I feel like the last couple of years, they've sort of— the door has widened.

And now you're interviewing urban planners and architects and educators and so on. And I've always been a little bit— when Debbie Millman started to interview musicians and other people, I'm like, all right, it's no longer Design Matters. It's something else now. And I used to be a little bit critical of that, but I'm noticing that I'm getting to a point where sort of—

I've seen kind of the limits of what a graphic design conversation can be, and I'm starting to think about like, all right, what happens if I talk with an architect or other people that are also in creative disciplines? So for you, what were some of your— how has the term graphic design shifted and evolved for you?

Jarrett Fuller [11:33]

Yeah, let me say one thing first, if that's okay, and then I'll answer your question because I totally get that feeling that you describe and this sort of expansion. And I did not— I know that was not a critique of the show or a critique of the expansion, but if I can— what's interesting to me is I'm still me. Maybe this is another way of answering the previous question, and I'm still a graphic designer.

And so what does it— what's interesting to me is what does it mean for a graphic designer to be talking to an architect, or a graphic designer to be talking to a music industry executive, like I did on the show last time, and to talk to them about design, to talk to them about the questions that I'm interested in. One of the interesting challenges for the show for me is how far can I push those borders of what a Scratching the Surface interview is?

It is rooted in graphic design. It comes from somebody who still identifies as a graphic designer. And how can I talk to people who are not graphic designers, but it still feel like it's part of the show? And I don't have that resolved, but that's something— you saying that, that's something that's on my mind a lot, especially I'm on a hiatus for the summer and I'm always thinking about who I want to talk to next.

And I'm always trying to find like, where, what are those borders there? And I say all that to say that's also the way that my understanding of graphic design has changed, to actually answer your question specifically. Because I think— how do I say this?

What's interesting to me about the term graphic design is that if you look at the history of graphic design, you look at the history of graphic designers and the work graphic designers have done, there is also a history of graphic designers being uncomfortable with that term graphic design. There is a history of design designers looking for other terms. It comes out of this title of commercial artist or commercial art. Their early graphic design programs were often called like advertising design.

There's people who call themselves visual designers. I went to an undergraduate program that was called communication design. And there's always this sort of search for these other terms. And I really like the term graphic design, and I will, I will plant my flag in the ground to retain that term as a term and a title in a field that is really expansive.

I think often when we think about graphic design, we think about text and image probably as the core tools that we use, and I think that's fine. But when we think about this term graphic, we often use that term to mean visual. And I'm really interested in the wider definition of the word graphic. It comes from the Latin word graphis, this idea of writing, of inscribing, of giving shape to something. You can think about graphic as the prefix or the suffix of words: photographic, bibliographic, biographic.

It is a way of giving shape to something. It is a way of making something legible. And I love Thinking about graphic design that way. Graphic design— what graphic design is doing is it's actually making things legible to other people. It is describing the world in some way. And I think that's been my biggest shift in how I think about graphic design, is opening it up to contain all of these other things that are maybe not very specifically visual work, working with text and image.

I could go— I could use the rest of our conversation talking about this, so I'll stop in case you have other questions.

Christian Solorzano [15:24]

No, I— there is there's a, in Chicago we have the Chicago Graphic Design Club, and I specifically defend that term so dearly because sometimes people will ask if UX is welcome or packaging design. And to me, I find graphic design to be such an elastic term that basically means anything that is graphic and is designed is graphic design.

But I think what I've observed with some of what you do is that I remember I would always look forward to your annual infographics. And I, and I think the last one that you did, it was it like 2019 or like— was it— was— yeah, 2020, right?

Jarrett Fuller [16:08]

Yeah, it was, it was 2019 because it was 10 years, because I started in 2009 and I did it for 10 years. Yeah, so it would have been '19.

Christian Solorzano [16:15]

Will you ever bring that back?

Jarrett Fuller [16:18]

I don't know. It's so funny. This has come up. This is a project that was really a shameless ripoff of Nicholas Felton's big annual report books that I turned into mini posters for myself. And this has come up in conversation. I've not thought about this or talked about that project in years, and it's now come up multiple times in the last couple months. Most recently, I did a series of interviews with data visualization designers. I don't know. I'll tell you this.

I still track a lot of things for myself, and so I still have a lot of that data. And it was a really interesting visual problem, visual experiment, visual— it was a way to play with typefaces. It was a way to play with organization and hierarchy every year. And I really enjoyed that. And it was a place to just test ideas.

But I felt like I had done all that I can with it. Maybe that's a long way of saying I don't imagine that I will unless I could find a way to make it new, a way to do it in a different way, or a way to do it in a way that felt like it was pushing the project in some new way. I felt like it had become repetitive. I knew how to do it those last couple years.

I don't know. Probably not, but you never know.

Christian Solorzano [17:40]

Yeah, maybe there's an opportunity to do one for your podcast, like kind of like what Spotify does with their end-of-year wrap.

Jarrett Fuller [17:46]

That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, I'm coming up on 10 years of the show. It'll be 10 years in October, and so maybe that's a— maybe that's a way to celebrate it.

Christian Solorzano [17:54]

Yeah. So my— the question that I wanted to ask is, with everything that you're doing, which is researching, recording conversations, also teaching, how much of graphic designing are you doing? And when I say graphic designing, I'm speaking about playing with color, playing with typography, because I know for myself sometimes I— it's easy to stop doing the thing that got me into these kind of conversations because I'm spending more time talking about the work than doing the work. So maybe talk about that relationship.

Jarrett Fuller [18:32]

Yeah, this is a complicated question because if you— if I answer that question the way you just said, am I playing with colors and typefaces? The answer is not that much.

But I also will make the argument that my teaching is a form of graphic design. I will make the argument that the podcast is a form of graphic design. I will make the argument that the writing that I do are graphic design projects. There's this great Richard Hollis quote that I sort of butcher a little bit, it and summarize, but he has this great line in an interview where he says, graphic design is anything made by a graphic designer.

And I've really adopted that anything I produce, I can kind of hang the graphic design tag on it. So is that graphic design as in type and image and color and hierarchy and shape? Not always, but I do all the branding for the show. I refresh that every couple of years. I'm working on a book project right now that's a that's a design project, or it has a design— I'm designing the book itself also.

So there's a design component, like a traditional graphic design component to that. And I try to take on 1 or 2 very classic traditional design projects a year just so I can flex those muscles. I've been itching to do more of it, and then every time I do it, I'm like, oh, I'll just stick to—

Talking about it instead of doing it. So I don't know if that answers your question. I have this joke I always say where it's like, I like— I've realized that I like writing about design better than designing, and I actually like talking about writing about design better than writing about design. So I keep getting farther and farther removed from the thing itself.

Christian Solorzano [20:16]

Yeah, I asked because recently I've been working on a publication that I put out once a year, and with this last issue in particular, there was like this buzz and this thrill that came out of laying out a spread and getting things to be just right. And my question for you is, what gives you a buzz, or what sort of gives you that goosebump feeling in design itself?

Jarrett Fuller [20:45]

Like in like in the process of making them?

Christian Solorzano [20:47]

Yeah, something. Yeah.

Jarrett Fuller [20:48]

There's a couple, there's a couple things. You talking about your publication, I work with students here at NC State every year to do our alumni magazine for the College of Design, and we did a big redesign of that last year. And that had that exact feeling that you're talking about. And I was in a sort of creative director role. We were doing mockups and directions and presenting them to the dean and to faculty and watching students work together and finding things.

And you see that thing that clicks and you're like, oh, this is good. We've hit something here that's really interesting. That never fails to excite me. And that's the same whether that's a project that I'm involved in or whether that's working with students and it's just like a project to students and all of a sudden you see them kind of iterating, and then all of a sudden there's like a breakthrough.

Whether that's a breakthrough because of me, whether that's like something in my own work where I have that breakthrough, or it's, I'm working with a student, that's always so cool and like so exciting.

I often will have a buzz after a good conversation like this where I interview somebody who I've looked up to or admire, and— or they did a— they wrote a book or they did a project that is interesting to me, and maybe I don't quite understand it, or I want to know more, and I'll have this conversation with them and it feels like we got somewhere new together. I'll ride that high for a while after a conversation like that.

And yeah, and then sometimes like little things, I'm writing, I'm writing an essay and all of a sudden like a great sentence emerges and it's like, okay, I know how this essay is supposed to go now. All of that stuff excites me. If you were to ask me that question 20 years ago when I was starting design, like 15 years ago, I would have said something about picking typefaces. And that's so much less interesting to me now, interestingly, than it was when I was starting out.

Christian Solorzano [22:42]

And as you've been— so you've been doing this show now for 10 years, and what have been some of your from— I guess this is a question that I'm asking because I want to know, but what have been some of your growing pains? Or looking at the first like 50 episodes, how do you find that your style or your way of conversing has evolved over time?

Jarrett Fuller [23:08]

Oh Christian, there's so much to talk about here. I am I don't listen to the first 100 episodes. I've not listened to the first 100 episodes probably since they came out. I'm embarrassed to.

Christian Solorzano [23:20]

Let's play one right now. Just kidding.

Jarrett Fuller [23:22]

Please don't do that. Over the summer, I release old episodes and I'm like, I remember liking this. I'm not going to listen to it again to see if it holds up. And then I'll hear my voice. I can't do it. So I had never interviewed anybody before when I started the show. Sort of said at the beginning, I listened to a bunch of podcasts. I was really interested in podcasting as a form.

I was interested in people who were asking good questions, but I had no idea how to do that. And so when I think about those early years, some things that I think about were— are things like asking really basic questions that I That anybody could find an answer to if they read the Wikipedia page or they looked at their about page. Very kind of biographical, about me kind of questions.

And I did that because I didn't really know how else to start an interview other than to ask like how somebody got started doing something. And so if you listen to the early episodes, a lot of them followed a very similar format about asking kind of how you got to this point. Take me back and, you did this and then you did this and then what happened here?

And I've I really tried to move away from the biographical interview into an interview that's much more about ideas and engagement and trying to hear about how people actually think about their work as opposed to the practicality of how they do the work. What is their larger project that connects all of their work? So that's one, sort of just not understanding how to ask questions. And so asking really basic questions to find my way into the questions that I was actually interested in.

I feel like I've gotten a lot better at that, hopefully, if I can say that. And then the other thing, which is really ironic to answer now being the person who's being interviewed, is I just talked too much. I gave a lot of what I was thinking. I talked about more of the stuff that was on my mind in my work. It took me a while to ask a question.

I would have to kind of talk out the question in real time, or I would have to— I felt like I had to make a transition from their answer to what my next question was, and I'd try to come up with something clever. And I feel like I talk less. I don't have the data to this.

I should really look at the transcripts, but I feel like if you look at the percentage of my voice to the guest's voice, I feel like it's— I'm actually getting smaller.

While at the same time, I'm actually more in more control of the conversation because of, hopefully, I don't know if listeners notice this and there might be listeners who disagree with this because I kind of, I feel like I have a better sense of how to ask the questions, how to get somebody to talk about the stuff that I'm curious about. I can actually kind of step back a little bit and really let the guest kind of be the star of the show, if you will.

Christian Solorzano [26:24]

Yeah. And I think the fact that you've been doing it for how many episodes are you at now? You're, it's well over 200.

Jarrett Fuller [26:29]

290.

Christian Solorzano [26:32]

290. Okay.

Jarrett Fuller [26:33]

Yeah, almost 300.

Christian Solorzano [26:34]

That's insane. That is so many. Have you ever done a have you ever summed up the amount of time that it would take you to listen to episode 1 to present episode? If you were to just listen?

Jarrett Fuller [26:51]

No, and I have no interest in doing that. That is for somebody else to do.

Christian Solorzano [26:58]

So when it comes to— so I've been working in consulting for about 9 years. And one of my observations is that when it comes to selling design, so much about it is how the words package the idea. And I find that sometimes words, or just language in general, fails to answer or to question the things that are worth of being, the focus.

So in your experience having so many conversations and teaching and writing, do you feel like there's still something that you're trying to find words to? What feels like language just fails to capture, something nonverbal?

Jarrett Fuller [27:42]

Yeah, I think I have a couple things immediately spring to mind when you pose that really thoughtful question. I gave you a definition of graphic design and my understanding of how it's changed. I still have a lot of doubts about that. I don't think that's quite right yet. I still feel like— A clear definition of graphic design is still elusive, to be honest, and they all fall short in some way.

And so, and I, again, I think this is sort of the history of graphic design, is that we don't really actually know how to talk about it. And one of the things that I've been thinking through and writing about a lot lately, maybe in an attempt to try to find some words for it, is this split, this chasm in some sense between design as an industry and design as a practice, or design as a discipline.

Discipline. I think there is a gap there between the industry of graphic design, where you put that on your tax returns that you are a graphic designer and you do consulting, you work in a studio, you work in-house, and then the way we talk about graphic design in academia or in cultural spaces or in conversations like mine or like the conversation we're having. There is a continual desire to make graphic design feel autonomous. And yet graphic design is not autonomous.

It is entirely dependent on the context in which it finds itself, whether that be a business context or an academic context. I think there's a tension there in wanting to talk about it as a clear, clean discipline, as a thing that can internally generate its own meaning, yet often finds meaning outside of itself that is then projected back onto it.

I don't think we have a good way to talk about that yet, a good way to wrestle with these two sides of graphic design specifically, but I would argue all forms of design have a version of this, of the very real-world expectations and implications of it with the insular, inward-looking, self-definitions of it. I think those are often in conflict, and I've been— I've personally, through a lot of stuff I'm working on right now, trying to find ways to reconcile that.

And I think maybe even that you can hear the questioning in my voice that I'm not even sure if these words are the right words for that tension that I'm interested in. Does that make any sense at all?

Christian Solorzano [30:33]

Yeah, that makes sense. And I ask this because sometimes when I'm teaching, I try to instill in my students that a lot of design critique can tend to be entirely subjective, and that it's sometimes quite difficult to really assess why it is that we intuitively respond to things. And to me, that embodied appreciation or response to design I find to be so interesting.

And I find that with my peers sometimes the moments where we try to understand it or define it, we realize that there's just no— unless, our vocabulary maybe is too limited, but it just feels like we can't quite answer why some graphic design we respond to more than others?

Jarrett Fuller [31:24]

Yeah, I mean, and I think, I think so much of that is cultural and contextual and personal. And this is why I always sort of have problems with talking about whether things are good graphic design or not, is because what is that metric for good? And I think for a long time that metric has been like, does it do the thing that it was supposed to do? Does it sell the product? Does it get people to come to the event?

Does it get people to click the buy button? There's like a monetary piece to it. But then there's a lot of good graphic design that at the time was not considered— or again, I'm using words that I don't want to use— graphic design that we hold up as really successful or good or canonical in some way that was not that at the time and did not do those things, but it opened up some new avenue of aesthetics or thinking.

Or there are things that we just personally respond to. You're just I like that. I like how that looks. I like how that feels. And so much of that is based on gut. It's based on feeling. It's not based on any metric or whether it was a 12-point grid or a 10-point grid or whether the kerning was right. None of that stuff actually has an effect on the feeling of encountering a piece of design.

And I think about this, and sorry, this is getting a little bit away from your question, but I'm increasingly interested in, and I'm curious what you think about this, or if this is maybe another way to respond to what you feel in the critique situation, is increasingly, and I think especially with the rise of AI and AI tools and automation and the speed of which you can produce mockups, yeah.

I'm looking for work of all types that make me feel something, that conjure a memory, that make me feel happy, that make me feel sad, that make me feel angry. And I think there's not a lot of design work that's actually aiming for feeling right now.

And I think if we could do that, then it becomes a lot easier to talk about the personal and the cultural and the contextual, because it's actually igniting a reaction as opposed to just getting us to do something, buy something, go somewhere, click a button, complain about the kerning, whatever. All that stuff, we know how to do that stuff. How do we move somebody? How do we make them feel something? How do we conjure a memory? Again, a lot of the stuff we've been talking about.

And I think the stakes are higher than ever because it's so easy and it's so easy and quick to produce competent design that to make design that rises above that and does more is both more important than ever, and I think carries with it higher stakes.

Christian Solorzano [34:29]

Yeah. That my so one of my former boss of mine, this summer we're planning on putting a course together that focuses on As designers, how do we use the tools to create as things— how do we, how do we use the tools and turn them back on ourselves to create work where the KPI is our own sense of joy?

Jarrett Fuller [34:56]

Yeah.

Christian Solorzano [34:57]

And I feel like that tends to be a metric of success that really doesn't— I mean, if you were to bring that up in a, in a business meeting, you'd probably— people would probably look at you weird if you were to say, let's measure the success of this by how much we're smiling or how much we're laughing.

And I and I just find that with, I, I've been— every time I see an AI ad on my phone, I've been taking screenshots and just documenting them on my website. Because you get to a point where everything kind of starts to follow the same format where there's like, here's these big numbers and here's the headline always at the top, and so on. So I think through my conversations, I've been noticing that there's a deep yearning for work that just makes you feel.

And I feel like the younger generation, like Gen Z, I think that they've done a good job at eliciting those core memories in people. Every now and then, I'll see one of those— Instagram Reels where it's like, this is what Christmas felt like. This is what waking up on Christmas morning felt like in 2004. And it just feels so visceral. And sometimes I feel kind of teary-eyed. And it's just it's not the prettiest design, but it has these emotional ingredients that just pull the right strings.

Jarrett Fuller [36:26]

I wrote about this a little bit last year for Fast Company in a piece called AI Isn't Design's Biggest Problem, which was about this idea that these AI ads that you're seeing that all look the same, the reason they can do that is because I feel like designers have lost the plot a little bit.

That there was this sense that design was meant to be expressive. You use design to differentiate yourself. To create something new, to say you are not your competitors. This is a very kind of classic branding thing. And over the last 10 years, that's flipped where it's now like design all has to look the same. If you're a direct-to-consumer brand, you have to use your humanist sans-serifs and your shades of blue and your line drawing perfect corporate Memphis illustrations or your very simple one-color illustrations.

And then because there's been this homogenization of aesthetics, that then allows these AI tools, which are just using existing forms, to recreate that because there isn't this kind of visual or aesthetic innovation. And if you think about the desktop computer and you think about those designers who were really kind of saying, well, what can I do with this new tool? How can I make something new? How do we do that today?

We actually need that now too, instead of saying like, well, let's just make everything else look the same. Let's be expressive. Let's try to figure out how can we— again, this is, I guess, what your class is about. How do we use these tools to do something new to kind of make us feel something in some new way?

I feel like not a lot of people are doing that and maybe they are and I don't know who they are and they're not falling into my algorithms, but I want more of that.

Christian Solorzano [38:09]

Yeah, I do feel like AI is a kind of reflection of Here's what you've created, and we're just spitting it right back at you. And I think that, to me, it seems like it's our call to action to try to do something a little bit differently. And my next question for you was, so my understanding is that you grew up spending a lot of time on the computer reading design blogs.

And I had the same upbringing as well. I got my first computer when I was about 10 years old, like in 2001, I believe. And for me, it was music. Music to me felt like it was the epicenter of culture. And I want to know, for you, what were some of your— what do you consider to be design that left an impression on you? Many years later, what do you find yourself going back to?

Jarrett Fuller [39:16]

Also music. I think the way I found design blogs was seeing in album covers inside the packaging or seeing art direction by so-and-so and realizing that somebody made that. Am I going back to specific album covers as being like, oh, this is still great graphic design? No, not necessarily. But that also is very clearly my origin story. It was from music into design blogs and then into that kind of design culture.

This is a really bad answer, but I still go back to— I still really love just clean, almost undesigned, work, and this is coming from a person who wrote an essay deriding minimalism and our obsession with minimalism, but give me a white piece of paper with just simple black Helvetica, all 12-point and everything, set that in one typeface. I still love that sort of simplicity. And so when I see stuff like that, I always love that kind of stuff.

I spend a lot of time thinking about collage, and I go back to collage and work that is noticeably collaged often. I'm really interested in 2×4's continual use of collage in different contexts. And so I go back to their collage-like work, stuff that they did for Prada, the American Academy in Rome, I think is really interesting. I've been wanting to do some more thinking about collage as a form.

This is not maybe an answer to your question, or maybe I'm starting to answer a different question, but I remember in 2011, I had just graduated and I had just moved to New York, and the Graphic Design now in Production show curated by Ellen Lupton and Andrew Blauvelt was staged in New York shortly after I moved there. I remember seeing that and that feeling very revelatory to me about what design could be. That started, I think, this expansive definition of design was that show.

That led me to the work of, at the time, Project Projects, which is a studio that no longer exists, and their early work from the early 2000s, 2010s is still some stuff that I like. I still love. I wish there was a monograph of Project Projects' body of work because I think that would— I think there'd be a lot of like Jarrett origin design stories embedded in those, in those projects.

Christian Solorzano [41:48]

Yeah. And then I know that on your website you also describe yourself as a photographer, and your photography is something that I've been From time to time, I'll visit your website and I'll just see what you've been shooting. And I notice that there tends to be a lot of landscape photography and you're sort of documenting your environments. And to me, I'm curious to hear a little bit about how your graphic design sensibilities influence what draws your attention and what you choose to document and archive.

Jarrett Fuller [42:24]

Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. I've been thinking more seriously about photography, especially again over the last couple years. I've been interested in and making photos for as long as I've been a designer. For me, those have always been very connected. I think my very early photos from 20 years ago, a lot of it was actually very explicitly graphic design.

Photographs of signage and typography and kind of layout-y type things. I think, very tangibly thinking about composition is something that informs both of them— how to frame a photograph and how to lay out things on a page. I think those are very much kind of influencing each other.

And I think what a lot of my photography is really about and what I'm really drawn to is a tension between— and it's interesting actually thinking about this in the context of this conversation where we're talking a lot about feeling and memories— is a lot of what I'm interested in my photographic work, there's usually— there's very little people in it. I'm not shooting portraits. It's not like fashion photography. It's not portrait photography, but it is the effects of people.

It is the things people have made, and I'm really interested in that tension between the sort of pure, unadulterated, wide-open landscape, the natural world versus the artificial world, and where those start to blur together. It is a structure that somebody's made that has a weed growing, nature prevailing again. It's what looks to be a pure uninhabited landscape, and then you notice a fence or a sign, the marker that a person has been there.

I find that tension is something that I'm really interested in outside of my design work. I think a lot of the painting work that I do is also exploring this tension, but it comes out most clearly in the photography. I think that's also a design tension. That goes back to my definition of design as a way of making sense of the world, of giving— making the world legible in some way.

In some sense, the photography is the documentation of how we have redesigned the world or co-designed the world or how the world is designing upon us. I think all of those things are in the photographic work for sure.

Christian Solorzano [45:11]

Yeah, there's something very rudimentary about the subject matter. I can easily see that there's these grids that you're naturally being drawn to, or these horizon lines, or these just basic forms.

And what I find extremely fascinating is that for a lot of your photography, there really is no sense of when the photo was taken. Sometimes there's a marker of time, that looks like an AC that might have been constructed around, it might be a modern place because there's an AC there. But I love photography that is sort of able to strip away any sense of time and just here's this thing, here's this structure.

Jarrett Fuller [45:59]

That's really nice. Yeah. I think that's right. I think that was— is maybe unintentional or maybe subconscious, but I think, yeah, I think that's always a nice a nice goal or a way to even sort of show time. I go back to the same places over and over and we'll photograph them again and again. If you put those together, you see a passing of time in some way. I think time is a big component of that too. You're right.

There's often not a lot of depth of field. I like really flat photos that have that horizon line. They have that grid. There's not a lot of foreground/background. I tend to avoid a lot. I think all that's a very sort of designy way of thinking about composing an image.

Christian Solorzano [46:41]

Yeah. Today, what's some of the work that you find yourself being the most moved by today in 2026? Work that you're seeing that is really pulling you in?

Jarrett Fuller [46:52]

I don't have a good answer for that for design, if you're asking specifically about design, if I'm being honest. I think the work that is exciting me, the creative practices that I'm drawn to are maybe outside of what we think of as design. Going off of the photography conversation, I spend a lot of time with photo books. I spend a lot of time thinking about and reading about photographers and photography and thinking about photography. I think that's something I return to.

I just read this really beautiful book called Love in the Time of Allegory by a photographer and writer named Nicholas Molnar. That's sort of this photo essay that mixes text and image. That's a kind of interesting— Graphic design artifact, but is actually kind of mixing literature and photography. And so things that kind of break genres or feel genreless are always interesting to me. The essay as a form of writing is something that I always return to.

It's the form that I write in the most, but also I love reading essays that meander and move. And so I've been rereading a bunch of John Berger essays this summer and, I always find those, incredibly moving. I read a lot of fiction. The new Dave Eggers novel, I'm about halfway through and I'm incredibly moved by that book and find it incredibly powerful. Yeah, I mean, I could go on. I could start just listing things and then I'd feel weird doing that.

But yeah, a lot of books, a lot of photography, a lot of art. I've been interested in craft and the opposite of design in some way, not something mass-produced, but something, made singular, like a singular object. Thinking about all that stuff is— Incredibly fascinating to me.

Christian Solorzano [48:36]

Yeah. And one of the questions that I always like to ask our guests is what are the things that you love to be surrounded by in your workspace, on your desk? What do you keep with you at all times? What do you travel with? What can't you live without?

Jarrett Fuller [48:49]

Yeah, books is the first one. I'm a very avid book collector. You can see, I guess this won't be video, but, there's books behind me, there's books over there, there's books downstairs. I always have a book with me basically wherever I go, usually a printed book, but not necessarily. And so books is very clearly number one, and I think sort of shapes everything else. Over the last year or so, I've gotten really into fountain pens.

And so now I always have a handful of fountain pens and ink around. I got one here. Oh yeah, great. We won't bore listeners. But yeah, there's always Fountain pens, and I'm doing a bunch of writing by hand again for the first time in a long time.

So fountain pens and notebooks is a thing there. Then obviously, I always have a camera with me or multiple cameras with me also. So that's sort of my workspace. There's a camera right there. There's a notebook. There's a fountain pen there. There's books behind me. There's things to write down. There's books stacked over here that you can't see that I'm reading through for projects. And that's sort of it. I'm simple.

Give me some books, give me some paper, give me some pens, give me a camera, and I'm happy.

Christian Solorzano [49:58]

Cool. So as we reach the conclusion of our conversation here, I know that you have a book that's going to be released soon, Graphic Designers After Graphic Design, and that's coming out September 29th. Can you just like briefly maybe share with us a little bit about that book and what we can expect?

Jarrett Fuller [50:20]

Yeah, I love that we're ending with this because this book in some ways feels like maybe my answer or my response to a lot of the questions that I've been asking over the last 10 years, or at least the first part of a response. And so this is a book that is not from the podcast, but I think feels podcast adjacent or feels related to the podcast. It's a series of interviews, a series of profiles, and a series of case studies of graphic designers.

From around the world who are all mid-career or early career, who proudly call themselves graphic designers. They studied graphic design. They come from the graphic design world, but they are making work that is maybe not what we think of as graphic design. They're showing work in galleries. They're producing their own publications. They're doing research projects. They are creating illustrations or zines. They're doing performances. They're making music.

Stuff that maybe, we don't think of as graphic design, yet they still call it graphic design, and they still identify as graphic design. And it's my attempt to counter this notion that graphic design is an old thing, that graphic design is dead, that graphic design is no longer relevant or important, that it's being replaced by UX or branding or strategy. And it's like, no, actually graphic design is alive and well all around the world.

And look at all of these young designers who are redefining graphic design through their work. And so it's a celebration of what I hope is like the next generation of designers. It's a celebration of the flexibility and blurriness of what graphic design has always been. And it's a critique of the often very narrow ways that we talk about and think about graphic design.

And so I think anybody who's sort of followed my work for the last couple years, I think a lot of it will seem very much about the things that I've written about and talked about.

And it's a way to sort of condense and organize all of that, and then to actually show people who are doing it that this isn't just theoretical, that this isn't just hypothetical, that there are actually real graphic designers all around the world who are doing really interesting, unusual work that they think Beautiful.

Christian Solorzano [52:52]

Well, Jarrett, it was such a joy to finally get a chance to speak with you and see your face animated in real time.

Jarrett Fuller [53:02]

Yeah, I have a body also. I'm not just a disembodied voice. Christian, this was great. These were such great, really thoughtful questions. I really appreciate the work you did to have this conversation.

Christian Solorzano [53:12]

Beautiful. So I will include all the links to everything about you in the description for this episode. And next time you're in Chicago, we'll get together.

Jarrett Fuller [53:23]

Yeah, let's do it. I have no plans, but hopefully soon. And I really mean it. This was so fun and so interesting and really good, tough questions. So I appreciate it. Yeah, you're good at this. All right.

Christian Solorzano [53:35]

Take care.

Jarrett Fuller [53:35]

Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.

Christian Solorzano [53:37]

Thank you so much for tuning in. As always, if you enjoy conversations like these, I really appreciate your support when you leave us a rating wherever you listen. Thank you.