Blog | The Work of Jarrett Fuller
“I don’t believe in this “gifted few” concept, just in people doing things they are really interested in doing. They have a way of getting good at whatever it is.”
—Happy birthday Charles Eames!
June 2013
13 posts
“To hear is to let the sound wander all the way through the labyrinth of your ear; to listen is to travel the other way to meet it. It’s not passive but active, this listening. It’s as though you retell each story, translate it into the language particular to you, fit it into your cosmology so you can understand and respond, and thereby it becomes part of you. The word empathy originally meant feeling into, and to empathize is to reach out to meet the data that comes through the labyrinths of the senses. To enter into, we say, as though another person’s life was also a place you could travel to.”
—Rebecca Solnit, In Praise of Darkness
On what matters →
armchairnews.com
Dave Eggers, from a 2000 interview in The Harvard Advocate:
There is a point in one’s life when one cares about selling out and not selling out. One worries whether or not wearing a certain shirt means that they are behind the curve or ahead of it, or that having certain music in one’s collection means that they are impressive, or unimpressive.
Thankfully, for some, this all passes. I am here to tell you that I have, a few years ago, found my way out of that thicket of comparison and relentless suspicion and judgment. And it is a nice feeling. Because, in the end, no one will ever give a shit who has kept shit ‘real’ except the two or three people, sitting in their apartments, bitter and self-devouring, who take it upon themselves to wonder about such things. The keeping real of shit matters to some people, but it does not matter to me. It’s fashion, and I don’t like fashion, because fashion does not matter.
What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips’s new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say. Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.
“I’ve come to understand that the mind is an incredibly organised, cross-indexed mechanism essentially structured by language; if one trusts oneself, art and writing (and comics especially) is simply a way of making structure visible.”
—Chris Ware, from the first issue of Printed Pages
The New Sway
In November 2011, my friend and fellow designer Rory King and I started an experimental zine called Sway. Sway was birthed out of a shared desire the two of us had to return to the experimental, exploratory work we did while we were in college. Realizing since we graduated, we had not engaged in the type of work we did there, we wanted an outlet to use graphic design as a platform to explore our various interests as well as grow as designers.
Each issue followed the same format we created at the beginning: each issue had a theme and both of us had six spreads to respond to that theme. Each issue had predetermined typefaces and a set paper size but the rest was open to whatever we wanted to do. Over the following year, we produced nine issues, all of which I’m proud of for various reasons. In the middle of completing the ninth issue, we had a sense that this format had run its course and put Sway on a temporary hiatus while we figured out what to do with it next.
invisibleOS
“Good design is invisible.” —Dieter Rams
Today Apple announced a brand new visual overhaul to iOS led by Senior Vice President of Design Sir Jonathan Ive. Ive, forever inspired by industrial designer Dieter Rams, has spent the last decade perfecting Apple’s hardware. From the iMac to the iPod, iPhone to iPad, Ive and his team have worked to religiously follow Rams’s famous maxim of designing hardware that is “invisible”, hardware that recedes, void of decoration to allow the functions of the device to be its centerpiece.
Since Ive took over software design in October, debates about skeumorphism versus flat design and the future aesthetic of iOS have run rampant, each side proclaiming to be the better of two. The new design, eskewing fake textures and buttons for translucency and typographic navigation, shows that the skeumorphism versus flat debate was the wrong one. Though the design may no longer be classified as skeumorphic, it surely isn’t flat either. The change in Apple’s iOS is about going from stylized interfaces to invisible interfaces. And it turns out we’ve been headed this direction for years.1
A book is a book is a book
A book is words. But is it just words? No, it can’t be. It has to be more than words. If it’s just words then I’m making a book right now, with each word I sit here typing. Clickity clackety, type letter, type word, type letter, type word, book!
So a book has to be more than just words. Sometimes it’s pictures, I think. Sometimes, if you want to get really crazy, maybe it can have words AND pictures together! Woah. So can I put a video in my book? NO! Definitely not. Get videos out of our books, amiright? Sound? God, stop! That’s not even possible, silly. You can’t put videos and sounds on paper! And books are made of paper. With a spine and cover and pages you turn. Right?
Like a magazine! Pages. Spine. Words. Pictures. It has all the ingredients of what makes a book. Magazine, book. Book, magazine. A magazine must be a book. Huh? No! What are we saying, a magazine is most definitely not a book. Books don’t come in issues! What do you think we’re talking about comic..uhh…books? Wait. And what about Charles Dickens? His first books were published in monthly installments. Surely Charles Dickens wasn’t writing a book!
I read Alice and Wonderland on Project Gutenberg a few summers ago. A book, words, pages…made of HTML. Is that still a book? Can we get some HTML in our books? Is a website a book? The website I’ll publish this to has pages and words and pictures. Book?
And what about these e-books? Is an e-Pub file a book? E-pub can have video and sound. Is that still a book? Or is that an “e-book”? E-book is a silly term. We don’t call MP3s “e-music”; it’s just music. We don’t differentiate between formats. So what makes an e-book different from a book book? Why separate the formats? Is a book defined by its format or its content? The container or the substance? My head hurts.
Is a book a story? Does that exclude non-fiction? What if the story is five lines? Not-quite. Two pages? Too short? One hundred pages? Infinite Jest? How long does a story have to be to be a book? Is an essay a book? No, of course not. A collection of essays? Sure! Or is that a blog? Ugh. I don’t know what a book is anymore.
What is a book?
“That night, I realized there are no warmups, no practice rounds, no reset buttons. Every day we’re writing a few more words of a story. And when you die, it’s not like “here lies Drew, he came in 174th place.” So from then on, I stopped trying to make my life perfect, and instead tried to make it interesting. I wanted my story to be an adventure — and that’s made all the difference.”
—Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox, from his Commencement address at MIT
Bird's gotta fly
I keep a folder of images of birds in Evernote. I’m not sure why; I don’t even know how it started but I like it. Bird’s gotta fly has become a motto of sorts—a constant reminder to spread your wings, to do that thing you are born to do.
When it finds you
Sometimes you seek out particular works of art and sometimes the art seeks you out. You come in contact with it and then can’t seem to shake it. Everywhere you look, it seems to be there, popping up in unexpected places as if it’s saying, “Hey Jarrett, have you noticed me yet?”
A few Saturdays ago I visited SFMOMA to see the exhibits before it closes for a few years for renovations. Somewhere in between the Jackson Pollocks and the Matisses, sits Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. Famously exhibited at the 1917 Society of Independent Artist’s exhibit, Duchamp submitted a porcelain urinal that he signed as “R. Mutt 1917”. The submission was controversial, questioning the definition of art. Fountain is arguable Duchamp’s most famous in his series of readymades, works of art created from ordinary manufactured products.
I very clearly remember studying Fountain in a college art history course; spending time discussing its role in the avant garde movement, whether could even be called art, and the works it later inspired. But to be honest, it never did much for me. I don’t really have an opinion on it and it’s not a piece that has served as inspiration in my own work, which makes its recent resurgence in my life even more interesting.
A few days ago I opened a design history book in search of a logo I was thinking about. I opened to a random page and a photo of Fountain caught my eye, reminding me of seeing it just a few weeks before. And then up late one night, reading some of Frank O’Hara’s poetry, only to discover one of the poems is about Duchamp. Two nights ago, in research for another project, I reread Rob Giampietro and Frank Chimero’s discussion on Augemented Identity from The Mavenist. And there it was again, halfway down the page, another image of that urinal.
Is one prone to discover hidden connections? Are we subconsciously on the lookout for repetition? Once it’s in our minds, do we start looking for it. I remember hearing once that you can’t go a day without seeing the UPS logo. For a few days after that I saw one everyday before I realized I was looking for the logo now. What you look for, you will find. Am I looking for Duchamp’s Fountain? And if I am, what do I want from it? Or perhaps more importantly, what does it want from me?
This happened before. I had just read Craig Mod’s lovely reflection on Chip’s Kidd cover design for Haruki Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. I had never read Murakami, but he’d been on my list for a while. I mentioned this to a co-worker the next morning who pulled a well worn copy from his bag, “I just started rereading it!”
There’s a little bookstore around the corner from my apartment that was one of the first places I visited after I moved. They had a display of Employee Picks set up right inside and there sat The Wind Up Bird Chronicle right in the middle. In a conversation with a friend about our favorite books, she mentions Murakami as all-time favorite. And then, while reading Jack Cheng’s These Days, I stumble across the sentence: “I don’t want to be that hipster girl that lives off the L train, listens to Arcade Fire, and reads Murakami books, you know?”
Sometimes you seek out works of art and sometimes art seeks out you, popping up in unexpected places as if saying, “Hey Jarrett, have you noticed me yet?”
I started reading Murakami last night.
On Responsive Identity Design
Every so often, a new innovation comes along that completely changes the way you approach your craft. For many of us working on the web, responsive web design has been one of those innovations. As more and more people are using screens of various sizes to access our websites, we’re tasked with designing an experience that works across platforms and sizes. Ethan Marcotte, in his seminal A List Apart essay on responsive design, writes:
Rather than tailoring disconnected designs to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can treat them as facets of the same experience. We can design for an optimal viewing experience, but embed standards-based technologies into our designs to make them not only more flexible, but more adaptive to the media that renders them. In short, we need to practice responsive web design.
Using architecture and exhibition design as a reference point, Marcotte paints a vision of the web that is no longer fixed in context but responds to it. We no longer design for one context and we no longer have to design separate sites for each. One code base can serve the same site adapted to work across any platform. We can have it all.
“Wabi-sabi acknowledges that just as it is important to know when to make choices, it is also important to know when not to make choices: to let things be.”
—Wabi-sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers
May 2013
16 posts
“When you start to think of the arts as not this thing that is going to get you somewhere in terms of becoming an artist or becoming famous or whatever it is that people do, but rather a way of making being in the world not just bearable, but fascinating, then it starts to get interesting again.”
—
I had seen Lynda’s work around but never paid too much attention to it. After listening to this NPR interview, I’m going to start.
Falling back in love
Something interesting happened this week. I feel like I fell back in love with graphic design.
Somewhere along the way got disenchanted, I got interested in other things, I got burnt-out. Looking at typefaces didn’t excite me the way it used to. Suddenly conversations about design styles and possibilities—conversations I used to live for—didn’t interest me anymore. I’d find myself thinking, “Is it even worth anymore?”
But this week, my passion seemed to return. I think there are a few things I can attribute this to:
Jason Santa Maria’s great interview on the Happy Monday Podcast energized me in a way I hadn’t felt in a while. Pair that with his other interview on The Gently Mad where he waxes poetic on typefaces for a while and I realized what I had been missing.
I’d been reading Mike Monteiro’s Design is a Job this week and though the book isn’t really about designing it is about caring for your craft. I wanted to care again.
Experimental Jetset released their new identity for the Whitney Museum. I’ve done very little work in identity design so it always seems to impress me the most, especially when it’s so thoughtfully executed. This is one of those projects that makes me sit back and go, “Man, I want to design something like that.”
The Newsweek.com redesign completely knocked me on the floor. In school, I thought I’d head towards a career in editorial design. Somewhere I got turned around and have made a career on the web. Seeing a site that blends these two paths so wonderfully gets me excited about the possibilities.
I firmly believe that what you look for, you will find. Maybe I was looking for something to help me fall back in love with design. I’m not really sure, but I know I found it. It was a good week for design. It was the kind of week I needed, one full of reminders why I’ve always loved this gig, sometimes I just get distracted. Thanks for helping me find my way back.
The 1° Difference →
youtube.com
Rainn Wilson, from The Office Farewell:
Greg Daniels said in our first meeting, ‘You know, American comedy is like this big ship, this big cruise liner, and if you can just point it 1° in the right direction, you can make a big difference. You can’t turn comedy that sharply.’ And I feel like that is what The Office did, it took American comedy and it turned it 1° in the right direction.
I watched this video last week after the finale, but I can’t stop thinking about the above quote. I love this analogy; I feel like you can replace comedy here with so many things. Sometimes to make a difference, to be innovative, to change course, you don’t have to run the opposite way—sometimes you can’t run the opposite way—sometimes change is slower.
Sometimes all it takes is that 1° difference.
