Christian Solorzano, founder of the Chicago Graphic Design Club and host of Underscore, recently spoke with Jarrett Fuller — a designer, writer, educator, and host of the long-running podcast Scratching the Surface, based in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The conversation traces how talking shaped the way Fuller works: an upbringing in a talkative family, and a journalist grandfather who taught him how to ask a question properly. Across nearly three hundred episodes and ten years of making his own show, what he has learned most about is listening.
They talk about his shifting relationship to graphic design as his practice has moved toward writing, teaching, and podcasting — and about the tension between design as a commercial discipline and design as a cultural practice. They get into what AI is doing to aesthetic homogenization, and into Fuller’s photography, which he describes as a search for the friction between the natural world and the built environment.
His book, Graphic Designers After Graphic Design, arrives September 29th. It celebrates designers around the world who are expanding what the field is allowed to be.
Episode 111. Fifty-four minutes. Original music by Eighties Slang.