A collection of canonical, recommended, and the personal favorite texts about and around graphic design of Jarrett Fuller.
I believe that to be a good designer, one must be a reader. My earliest design education came from the blogs, books, and magazines I discovered as a high school student, before I ever took a design class. Many of the readings included on this site shaped my own understanding and interests in design. One of my goals as a teacher is to shorten the length between practice and theory so I'm constantly recommending readings to my students to help them put their work in a professional and theoretical context. Additionally, my podcast attempts to make design critcism more accessible and my guests are always suggesting their favorite writers. This site serves to bring all of these recommendations together under one roof. It's for students looking to broaden their understanding of design, it's for researchers to find writings on particular subjects, and it's for practicioners looking for obscure and historical texts.
This site serves as a free library of introductory essays, books, and texts on graphic design theory, criticism, and practice as well as related fields like cultural criticism, photography, and architecture. While the goal of is to provide a collection of canonical and important texts on graphic design and related fields, it inevitably contains blindspots and gaps — the selections included here skew to my own personal interests in design and my own education and practice. However, this is not a static archive but will continually be updated in an attempt to both stay current and fill in the gaps. When possible, essays link to their original source and PDFs hosted here are freely assessible elsewhere on the web. To the best of my knowledge, I am not publishing anything new or copyrighted.
Jarrett Fuller is a designer, writer, podcaster, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. He currently teaches in the graduate Communication Design program at Pratt Institute, the undergraduate graphic design program at The New School Parsons School of Design, and is a Senior Lecturer at The University of the Arts. He previously was on the adjunct faculty in the undergraduate graphic design department at Maryland Institute College of Art. He hosts the weekly podcast, Scratching the Surface, where he interviews designers, writers, critics, and researchers about the intersection of design criticism and practice. Previously, he was a designer at Facebook, Warby Parker and The Whitney Museum of American Art. Jarrett received his MFA in graphic design, with a critical studies concentration, in 2017 from the Maryland Institute College of Art and his BFA in graphic design in 2011 from Kutztown University.