Blog | The Work of Jarrett Fuller

Khoi Vinh on the disconnect between talented editorial designers and interactive designers:

[W]e’re leaving an era where design operates in the narrative mode, in which its fundamental purpose is to create canonical, highly controlled visual stories. We’re now in an era — the digital era — where the new paradigm is designing for behavior: creating stateful systems that are responsive to user inputs and environmental inputs, where presentation is not just separated from content, but where presentation is volatile and continually changing by nature.

There are many talented designers working in interactive and there are many talented designers working in editorial but their are few designers who can successfully work in both simultaneous and Vinh posits this is why we have yet to see quality editorial work on the web. He coins a new term “editorial experience designers”, or “ed-ex” and suggests design education start funneling in this type of work to raise a new breed of designer.

I remember hearing Bertrand Russell’s well-known Barber paradox for the first time about a year ago but have found it popping up in various podcasts and articles again recently, so I thought I’d share:

In a village, there is a male barber who shaves all and only those men who do not shave themselves. Who shaves the barber?

Russell’s conclusion was that in this town, this barber could not exist. This is one of my favorite puzzles and I love thinking about the contradiction each time this paradox is brought to my attention.

Frank Chimero:

[T]he value of design is less established by the quality of the work, but rather the presence of the audience. They’re the ones that imbue value to what we do and determine whether or not we are successful. Design is meant to be seen, to be considered, to be interacted with and used. Each one of those things creates an experience, so in its essence, it’s the job of design to make meaningful, memorable experiences for people.

See also: The Value of Design