Before Gutenberg, there was this really very strong oral storytelling culture where being able to relay stories from person to person was sufficient. And then, with the introduction of printing and mass communication, suddenly somebody had a lot of authority invested in the idea of a single canonical expression of a document or a piece of communication.

I think we are in this era right now where every element in a webpage is rendered to within an inch of its life. I think if it's a button, it looks like a physical button, you know, if it's a mailbox that's meant to signal a messaging functionality then the whole mailbox right down to the rivets on the hypothetical metallic housing is rendered.

I think if you took away all the designers and automated the process tomorrow, the end result would be really, really dissatisfying and disturbing to a lot of people. So, I think there's a lot of value that print designers have.

Designers from start to finish now in digital media have to think in a much more sort of thoughtful serious and humble way about how design audiences will receive their products.

Things have a behavior online, whereas in print, there is a single canonical expression for them, but online everything responds to different criteria or has inherent states to it based on that criteria. So, you have to design that in a different way. It's a completely different dynamic even though it may look similar.

The way I look at my job, I spend a lot of time trying to create the conditions for good design to happen and I don't get an opportunity to do a lot of hands on work.

I think a lot more people are able to take on a design challenge than ever before. And this was true 20 years ago when the desktop publishing revolution came about that allowed people with Macintosh's at home to produce professional-looking newsletters or publications for the first time. So, there's a long march toward more democratization for design.