2025 Year in Review
I think we will look back on 2025 as a year when things changed. Politically, socially, technologically, culturally, it feels like 2025 was a transition year; an old thing is ending and some new thing is beginning. This is why Vinson Cunningham’s essay in the New Yorker, published on Christmas day, resonated with me so much. You should read it. Globally, 2025 feels like a transition but personally, it did too. I couldn’t shake the sense all year that my work was changing. That it needed to change. I felt, and continue to feel, like the work I’ve been doing the last decade or so is wrapping up in some sense and some new thing is emerging. I don’t know what that new thing is yet; if it’s big or small, a slight adjustment or a radical shift. But I sense change.
A big reason for this is because I spent a large part of 2025 wrapping up my new book. It’ll come out in the Fall of this year and feels, in many ways, like a summation of what I’ve been working on and working towards for the last ten years. It’s about graphic design and trying to figure out what that term means today. It’s a book of history and hopefully a possible path for the future. It has essays and interviews and case studies. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever worked on and I’m curious to see how it’ll be received. I’ll have much more to say about it in the coming months.
That book, I think, is in dialogue (ha) with the conversations I continue to have on Scratching the Surface. My podcast will, somehow, turn ten this year. It started when I was in graduate school, trying to figure out what kind of designer I wanted to be and this book is some kind of answer. In 2025, I released seventeen episodes of Scratching the Surface and I’m continually amazed at how this platform is able to grow and shift and change with my interests. A decade in, it still feels central to everything I do. This year, I talked to editors and university presidents, garden designers and cultural historians. We talk about the past and the future, the land and the city. I’m honored to publish other writers, too, like a series of book reviews from James Dyer, excerpts from new books by James Voorhies, Archigram, and Anja Lutz, and other original content. And then over on our Substack, we continue to round up design stories and try to find new, deeper ways of talking about design. Paying members (subscribe! support my work!) get bonus interviews with previous guests like Michael Bierut, Nat Pyper, Mitch Goldstein, and Julia Watson.
Much of my own writing is published by Fast Company and Untapped these days. In August, I wrote about AI — a topic I’ve tried to resist and avoid — for Fast Company. Especially in graphic design, I think conversations around AI are masking larger issues with out industry and I wanted to shift the conversation a bit. I rarely write zeitgeist-y things and this is as close to going viral as anything I’ve written. The response was largely positive and feels like it hit on something in a new way. Also on Fast Company, I did two book roundups, one for back-to-school and one for my favorite books of 2025, and interviewed David Reinfurt about his new book, A Co-Program for Graphic Design. For Untapped, I published two essays, the first was a personal essay about growing up on a summer camp and the second was a review of the new English translation of Design and Visual Communcation. I’m especially proud of that essay about summer camp and am itching to do more memoir-esque essays like that. Finally, in my first piece for The Architect’s Newspaper, I reviewed Glenn Adamson’s book on the future, a Century of Tomorrows.
I continue to post other writing here on my blog, an activity I always wish I had more time for. I wrote about the late films of Steven Soderberg, the books of Craig Mod, the music of Alexander Biggs, and the difference between conversations and interviews. I also posted two photo sets, one of my mini, impromptu Cincinnati architecture tour and another of ten years of photographing a car in Baltimore. I continue to post semi-regularly on jarrettfuller.photo, my old-school photo blog.
I traveled more this year and gave more talks — including my first academic presentations — this year. I gave a short presentation at UNC-Chapel Hill to their design students about my career and practice and was part of a panel for AIGA about publishing, where I spoke about Scratching the Surface. As I do every December, it was a joy to return to my alma mater to serve as a visiting critic for the MFA thesis students at MICA. I presented at two peer-reviewed conferences, AIGA Design Education Conference in Normal, IL and SECAC in Cincinnati. At AIGA, I presented two papers: one on shearing layers as a framework for developing design curriculums and another based on the publishing course I’ve developed and continue to teach here at NC State. At SECAC, I presented on the sponsored projects I’ve been running with undergraduate seniors at NC State for the last four years.
Speaking at NC State, I’ve buried the big news of the year which is my semi-new job, taking over as director of the undergraduate graphic and experience design program in September. It’s hard to believe I’ve been teaching here for almost five years already and it’s an honor to step into this new role and hopefully build on all the great work that continues to happen here. A highlight for me this year was leading a small student group to redesign our alumni magazine, DesignLife.
I’m always honored when people want to talk to me so it was nice to be featured in Oculus Magazine as part of a story on design podcasts and to be quoted by The Observer in a story about Spotify. I was also interviewed on the Near Future Laboratory Podcast, the Type Speaks Podcast, and in Soft Labor.
On the personal side, I started painting in earnest again and even got back into a regular sketchbook drawing habit, thanks to my child who also loves to draw and my newfound fountain pen hobby. My garden was the worst it’s been in years from the extreme heat this year. I’m itching to try again this year. I continue to read books and watch films widely and even dipped into following the NBA, though that’s proven harder to keep up with than I realized.
As I think about where I want my work to go next, I have some new things I want to write about and at least two books I want to try to get started on. As I mentioned above, I want to write more personally, more vulnerably, more expansively.
I have two other big editorial projects I’m excited to be working on this year. Since I left Eye on Design in 2023, I’ve missed the editorial process and have been looking for ways to get back to it. These two projects somehow feel very related to what I’ve done and completely new (and with new collaborators!). I’m very excited to share more about them over this year.
I’m itching to do some design work again too for the first time in a long time. Do you have a project you think I could help out on? Send me an email!
Thank you for your sustained interest and support of my work over the last year. It means so much. Wishing you a fruitful 2026.