Jarrett Fuller

The pace of 2024 felt different. A big reason I took a full-time teaching job a few years ago was to try to level-up my work. I felt comfortable in the space I was in and wanted to work on bigger projects. An academic job, I thought, might give me the space for that. Now in my fourth year at NC State, I finally accomplished some of that. My output this year was less because one, large project seemed to consume my time.

At the beginning of the year, I sold a book proposal I’d been thinking about for a few years and then spent most of this year working on it. I submitted my completed first draft at the beginning December. I’m not ready to talk about it yet but I know 2025 will be spent editing, designing, and getting the book ready for publishing. This was, by far, the hardest thing I ever worked on: it took longer, was more intellectually challenging, and was generally so much more work than I expected. Like I said, it’s a subject I’ve been thinking about for years and can’t wait to share more about it soon.

Speaking of book, it was gratifying to release another book out into the world in April: What It Means To Be a Designer Today, a collection of new and previously published essay from AIGA Eye on Design was published by Princeton Architectural Press. I co-edited this volume with Liz Stinson and thought of it was lost new edition of the classic Looking Closer series. We wanted it to be relevant to graphic designers working today but also to capture the interests and preoccupations of the contemporary designer. I have two essays in the volume too, my previously published essay on minimalism and an expanded version of my essay on design criticism.

Because so much of my time was spent on these books, my published writing elsewhere was not as frequent as it usually is. Despite this, I was able to write a few essays, all of which I’m really proud of. For Fast Company, I wrote about the rise of designer-coaches and the relationship between strategy and design, interviewed Scott Doorley and Carissa Carter about their new book Assembling Tomorrow, and put together a roundup of my favorite design books of the year. For Untapped, I wrote a personal essay about building websites in HTML and CSS for twenty years that became a meditation on simple tools. That essay was then published in Untapped’s annual print edition.

I continue to try to speak at various design programs about both my own work and the profession at large. In April, I spoke to Liz Chen’s Design Ethics and Justice class here at NC State about designers as luddites. In October, I gave an artist’s talk about my work o the University of Canterbury’s graphic design students, spoke about Scratching the Surface to Julia Gamolina’s Architecture Media class at Pratt, and moderated a panel on design history featuring Louise Sandhaus, Elizabeth Goodspeed, Caspar Lam, and YuJune Park at the AIGA Design Conference. In December, I returned to my alma mater, MICA, as a visiting critic for the MFA thesis students.

Over on Scratching the Surface, I released nineteen new episodes with conversations ranging from non-profit directors to university presidents, garden designers to typographers, critics to essayists. This show, somehow, even after almost nine years, continues to nourish me. The biggest news around the podcast was launching our Substack. We now publish a free monthly newsletter featuring updates from previous guests, book roundups, design news, and more. For paying subscribers, we publish bonus interviews with previous guests like Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Todd Oldham, Louise Sandhaus, Jessica Helfand, and more. This newsletter, hopefully, can help financially sustain the show so if you like what I’m doing with Scratching the Surface and want to see more of it in the world, please consider supporting our Substack!

I’ve been blogging for twenty years but feel more uncertain about how to blog today. The posts that seem to do well are the ones I fire off quickly, trying to just get an idea in to the world. This year, I wrote about design monographs and literary design criticism, Lawrence Halprin’s RSVP Cycles and Emilio Ambasz’s Universitas Project, our family trip to Disney World, and my renewed interest in the formal qualities of graphic design. I keep saying I want to publish more on this blog but never follow-up. Maybe 2025 will be the year I return to blogging.

At the beginning of the year, I had the pleasure of working on the branding and design system for J-Card Press, a new independent publisher focusing on books on alternative, indie rock, and hip-hop bands. They released three books this year and I designed the logo and cover template. J-Card is founded by a former colleague of mine and this was a dream project: fun, generative, and collaborative. It made me want to do more graphic design projects against. If you want to work together, let me know!

In an effort to get back into photography — and get my photos off Instagram — I finally built a little website/photoblog where I can post new photography work. I’ll admit to not making as many photographs this year as I wanted, but I love the site and hope to post more this year.

At the beginning of the year, journalist Caitlin Dewey interviewed me for a piece she was writing about corporate typography. That piece never happened but our conversation was so wide-ranging she published an expanded version of it on her Substack. Kyle Chayka also interviewed me for a piece he wrote in the New Yorker on Spotify and what I describe as “corporation-centered design.” If anything comes from it, I can now say I’ve been described as “a philosopher of all things design” by The New Yorker!

On the personal side, the kids are getting older and developing their own interests. The garden was plentiful this summer and I’m itching to get back to it once the weather warms. I’ve been painting again and even spent some time drawing for the first time in years.

I wrote at the beginning of this review that working on my new book was the hardest project I’ve ever worked on. That is true but I also can’t wait to do it again. Working on it, I couldn’t help but feel like books are the ideal format for me. They are what I want to make. I think I have some thoughts on my next two. Perhaps I can spend some time in 2025 getting my thoughts organized.

In the first half of 2025, I’ll be leading a student group here at NC State to redesign our alumni magazine. It’s a way to get back to my roots in editorial design but also to work on a big design project within a big institution again. I’m very excited to get started. After coming out of a year of writing, I’m eager to shift gears and do some design work again in 2025. (Here’s another shameless call for collaborators, clients, or projects!)

Despite this, I continue to want to push myself and my writing. I’d like to write some longer essays this years and publish in new venues. I’m curious about stretching the type of writing I do too beyond graphic design.

Thank you for your sustained interest and support of my work. It means the world. Wishing you a fruitful and peaceful 2025.