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 the thing about the Internet is that it has so many characteristics that can be easily construed to be similar or almost identical to print that it can be misleading.

Even though more people can build websites today than even 10 years ago, I think there's probably even less really deep understand of how a good website gets built than there was even then.

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.

I think there's always something about design that is going to be very difficult for more than a small fraction of people to really get.

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.