You have this really powerful technological infrastructure that can do really tremendous things. At the same time, it's never going to be as flexible as we'd like it to be. Just by nature of web technology.

You have to design a story that might appear on the front page of the newspaper for the website. You don't have to design it in such a way that it can be self contained, that it makes sense if you never hit the front page of it.

I think design does evolve in a meaningful sense. I think if you look at design as a part of the continuum of communication, since even before Guttenberg.

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.

I think the way design was practiced for most of the 20th century was very declarative. A designer came up with a solution for a project and put it in place and shipped the solution and it landed in a reader or a customer's hands as a brochure. They would see it as a poster, or as a piece of signage. And that was sort of it. That was the end of it. I think Internet technology has really upended that whole equation because in some ways a designer's work is never really done online.

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.

I think now we're seeing the pendulum switch back to this idea where conversations are more important, if not more important than documents.