Graphic design isn’t dying. It’s expanding

It’s a liberating time to be a graphic designer. You would think so, anyway, after reading Jarrett Fuller’s new book, Graphic Designers After Graphic Design, published this fall by Princeton Architectural Press. Fuller, a designer, writer, podcaster, and professor at North Carolina State University, makes an optimistic case for an expansive definition of graphic design. Through conversations with practitioners working across publishing, research, changemaking, performance, and artistic practice, he argues that graphic design is much more than the production of posters, logos, and websites. Coinciding with the 10th anniversary of his podcast, Scratching the Surface, which highlights practitioners overlapping with graphic design, the book turns its attention specifically to graphic designers with expansive, blurry, and very public practices. [Image: Courtesy Princeton Architectural Press] As fellow design educators, Fuller and I caught up about what this broader understanding of design means for the current generation of graphic designers. As he puts it, graphic designers are inherently insecure about their discipline’s identity and relevance. But rather than trying to resolve that …