Jarrett Fuller

I’m very excited to announce that my new book, Graphic Designers After Graphic Design, is now available for preorder and will be out on September 29th from Princeton Architectural Press.

Here’s the official publisher blurb:

A fascinating exploration of contemporary designers who are redefining what it means to be a graphic designer, offering a vibrant celebration and an inspirational reimagining of the medium for students, professionals, and educators in the field.

Drawing from his popular podcast Scratching the Surface, Jarrett Fuller profiles more than 20 graphic designers who have taken the skills acquired through education and on-the-job experience to create new types of practices, working outside traditional commercial contexts. Reimagine what graphic design can mean when viewed through the lens of publisher, programmer, activist, artist, and more. Each chapter features a series of short profiles, an in-depth interview, and a visual exploration of one designer’s work.

Including both emerging and midcareer practitioners from around the world, Graphic Designers After Graphic Design showcases a wide variety of innovative creatives who have embraced graphic design’s blurry edges.

This book, in many ways, feels like the result of trying to figure out what graphic design is today. For most of my career, I feel like I’ve been hearing about the death of graphic design, yet, for some reason, it keeps coming back. It just doesn’t always look like what came before it. To try to make sense of it, this book became optimistic collection of profiles, interviews, and case studies about emerging designers from around the world who are redefining what it means to be a graphic designer. Organized around publishing, research, activism, performance, and art, it’s a richly illustrated but also thoughtful and criticial look at graphic design today. I’m honored my former professor and thesis advisor (and design star!) Ellen Lupton wrote the foreword.

This is not Scratching the Surface in book form but in some ways, it does feel like an expansion and focusing of the conversations I’ve had on the show for the last decade. On the podcast, I’ve had the honor of talking not only with graphic designers but also architects, writers, urbanists, industrial designers, and more. What’s struck me, in conversation after conversation, is the elasticity of these fields: architects who make films, industrial designers who program software, writers who curate shows, landscape architects who paint. There’s a permission in the other design fields to stretch and explore that has never been part of graphic design’s history.

Perhaps this is because of the ephemerality of graphic design, or maybe deep seeded insecurity or fear of a new technology that will take a way jobs; or maybe it’s the close ties to business and the perpetual need to “have a seat at the table”. There’s always been “experimental” graphic design, however, and alternative forms of practice but they have been considered just that: experiments.

What this book argues is that those experimental practices point to the future of design. It argues that if graphic design is dead, that doesn’t mean graphic designers are. It makes the case that graphic design, despite its preference for narrowing and specialization, is actually a wide, multidisciplinary, expansive field that can contain lots of different types of practices. For this book, I’ve brought together emerging designers, almost all under forty, who still call themselves graphic designers but are making work that doesn’t conform to our definitions.

I’m proud of the book and can’t wait for it to be out in the world. If you’d like me to speak at your school, event, or organization, do reach out. Until then, you can pre-order the book wherever you buy your books. I’m sure I’ll have more to write about the book — the process, the research, the ideas — over the next few months.