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 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.

You have to have a balance and understand that as much as you would like to have absolute control over everything, it's just not realistic.

Unsolicited redesigns are terrific and fun and useful, and I hope designers never stop doing them. But as they do so, I also hope they remember it helps no one - least of all the author of the redesign - to assume the worst about the original source and the people who work hard to maintain and improve it, even though those efforts may seem imperfect from the outside.

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.

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 as technology and expertise makes possible these sort of amazing levels of fidelity to the real world, a lot of people sort of get sort of - what's the word I'm looking for - seduced into that. And after a time, they get tired of it and they become a little bit more interested, I think at a certain level of subtraction and a new level of sophistication.